any time, any place; you open your eyes and the dark is there,
right up against you, pressing. You can’t see anything and you
don’t know any names, not who they are or the names for
what they do; the dark is all you know, familiar, old, from
long ago, is it Nino or Joe or Ken or Curt, curly hair or
straight, hard hips, tight, driven, familiar with strange words
whispered in your ear, like wind lashing it. Do they see you,
do they know your name? I’m Andrea you whisper in the dark
and the dark whispers back, okay babe; shut up babe; that’s
cool babe; that’s a pretty name babe; and pulls out all the w ay
and drives back in, harder, more. Nino is rough and bad, him
and his friend, and he says what’s w rong with making love
here, right now, on this lunch counter. We are in Lits. I’m
alone, a grown-up teenage girl; at the lunch counter, myself.
They come up to me. I don’t know the name o f the other one. I
have never heard anyone say “ making love” before. Nino
takes the salt shaker and the pepper shaker from the counter
and he rubs them against each other, slow , and he talks staring
at me so I can’t m ove m y head aw ay from his eyes and he says
w hat’s w rong with it, here, now , in the daytime, on this lunch
counter, you and me, now, and I don’t know w hat’s w rong
with it; is N ino one o f them, in the dark? Stuart is m y age from
school before he stopped coming and went bad and started
running with gangs and he warned me to stay aw ay from him
and Nino who is older and bad and where they go. N ino has a
knife. I write m y first poem for Nino; I want it to be N ino; I’d
touch him back. I ran away lots o f times. I was on the bus to
N ew Y o rk lots o f times. I necked with old men I found on the
bus lots o f times. I necked with Vincent and Charles different
times, adults, Vincent had gray hair and a thick foreign accent,
Italian, and Charles had a hard, bronze face and an accent you
could barely hear from someplace far, far away, and they liked
fifteen-year-old girls; and they whispered deep, horsey,
choked words and had wet mouths; and you crunched down
in the seats and they kissed you all over, then with their hands
they took your head and forced it into their laps. One became a
famous m ovie star and I went to watch him in cow boy films.
He was the baddie but he was real nice to me. I said I wanted to
be a writer, a real writer, a great writer like Rimbaud or
D ostoevsky. He didn’t laugh. He said we were both artists and
it was hard. He said, Andrea, that’s a pretty name. He said
follow your dream, never give up, it takes a long time, years
even, and we slouched down in the seats. I knew the highw ay
to N ew Y o rk and the streets when I got there. I knew the back
alleys in Philadelphia too but I didn’t like Philadelphia. It was
fake, pretend folksingers and pretend guitar players and
pretend drug dealers, all attitude, some pot, nothing hard,
