I was single for the first time in two years and dead set on fucking whoever I wanted with no regard for anyone's feelings. That particular night, I had my eyes on Tony Tornado, who was playing with The Flaming Eagles at the Satyricon.

After his set was over, we sat across from each other at a graffiti-scrawled table. 

“Where is that tall Irish fella I saw you with last time you were here?” Tony asked.

“You mean Dean? We broke up.”

A hardcore band was playing at the other end of the bar, and we had to yell into each other's ears through cupped hands.

“And now the man is knocking at the door to your heart,” Tony said.

"What, man?"

            “He’s coming to collect. Don’t try to fight it. You know, eventually, you'll have to surrender, or the knocking will keep growing louder.”

            Tony was a Mexican American Republican mystic. He worshipped Bruce Springsteen and had the same tattoo that Richie Valens got days before he died in that famous plane crash that the song American Pie was written about. He was a walking contradiction. Or so I thought. I had only known him for a total of two hours, not counting his thirty-minute set in which I battled with a gaggle of leather-clad groupies for a look, just one look from those soft brown eyes in which I could cast my spell over this man drenched in sweat and armored with the sexual twang of a sunburst guitar.

Later that night, giddy on whiskey sodas, I took Tony to the Pirate Cove, an enclave of rock that the sewage-filled river had carved into a shallow cave. His Navajo rings glistened under streetlamps shining down from the bridge above us. The smell of his pawn store leather jacket made me feel safe as he wrapped it around my bare shoulders. He cupped my breasts as if they were delicate flowers. I thought I had unlocked the door to my heart with him. His body turned into a snake—a boa constrictor, beautiful and muscular, pressing soft and hard against me. I wanted to tell him, I love you. I know that sounds crazy. But I’ve done crazier things. I’ve sat outside of windows for love. I’ve left cryptic messages hidden in the yellowed pages of books and placed them on doorsteps and in mailboxes. I’ve broken into houses. I’d gone naked with the hunger, giving myself to any man that would take me. There was a hole, a bottomless pit inside me. I had lovers, more than I could count, but none of them could fill me. Not even, Tony. Even though I knew this, I could not stop.

                                                            *

When I got home that night, I found Dean sitting outside the front entrance to my apartment building, petting a stray cat. I’d screwed up a few days before and called him on a whim. Hungover and feeling sorry for myself, I asked him to bring me some nachos from the mini mart he worked at. We had rebound sex on my futon. But he got rough like he sometimes did, and I threw him out.

That night, as I rolled up on my bike, I thought he looked like death, like the banshee he told me he saw when his father died. His freckled face was pasty and gray in the moonlight.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

"Can I come in?"

“No, I told you never again.”

"But can't you hear me out?”

I ignored him, digging around in my backpack for the key to the front entrance. As I pushed the key in the door, he grabbed my arm.

“Don’t you touch me,” I ripped away from him, “I’m warning you.”

“Delia, I’m dying.”

“There’s a bar across the street. I’m sure there is someone in there who will pity fuck you.”

“I’m not kidding. I’m shitting blood. The doctor says if I don’t stop drinking, I’ll die.”

Dean was only twenty-five, and he had already eaten away the lining of his intestines with Old Number 7. I didn't know what to do. Some part of me felt guilty, as if I was responsible for his demise. I caved in and let him inside.

All night I lay awake in bed, feeling the warm dampness of his tears soak through my nightgown. I felt like Atlas, like I was bearing the weight of someone else’s world on my shoulders.

                                                                        *

            And that weight was still there the next night as I came to tuck in my favorite patient, Doris, into bed.

“Please don’t leave.” Doris cried out to me.

“What is it, Doris? What’s wrong?”

Her hand was a vice grip, holding onto me for dear life as I tried to turn out the light. That big black nothingness of death was staring up at me through her milky gray eyes into the heaviest chambers of my heart. On nights like that, I wished I were in another line of work. I was just twenty-three, and there I was, wondering if I would end up like Doris, unable to get around without a walker, a daughter who never visited, and worst of all, a mind that only found clarity in sharp, fractured moments, cutting through the unknowns into a hundred shades of fear on her orthopedic bed.

“Momma thought that when she died, there would be people up there in white robes waiting for her. What a silly woman.”

“What do you think will happen when you die?” I sat down on the bed beside her.

“I don’t know. I’m scared. What if nothing happens? What if it’s just this horrible loneliness forever?”

 And what could I say? What if she was right? What if there was no escape from this liminal space?

 "Goodnight, Doris."

“Why don’t you ever call me momma anymore?” I had triggered one of her memories.

"I love you, momma."

“I love you too, sweetheart."

I knelt down, letting her press her lips firmly to my cheek, and for one eternal moment, the noise in my head settled, and the giddy up, giddy up go, go, go, so I don’t ever have to feel what’s underneath, drifted down under her bed. I watched her close her eyes and drift off to sleep, leaving me with the word love rolling around my head. I kept thinking about how Dean had never told me he loved me, always just said, me too.

                                                            *

Afraid of going home and finding Dean at my doorstep, I went to see a Ramones cover band and ran into Randy.  I hadn't seen him since the night his girlfriend, whom he swore he had broken up with, tried to break my head open with a beer bottle.

            “Do you wanna dance? Come on, baby, give me a chance?"

            Randy was grinning at me, his smooth upper lip curling up around those glorious canines. He held his hands out to me, and I took them.

He was the strongest drug I'd ever taken. I'd never been around someone who wanted me that badly. He was driven purely by instincts. All he learned he got from the streets. Randy ran away from home at fifteen with his brother Brady. It was the same story—the tragedy of the street kid. The deadbeat dad knocked the shit out of him, the mother was never around, and the kids at school treated him like a leper because he was poor and dirty. He felt safer outside, and so he and Brady busked up and down the west coast, playing songs about drinking and fucking and fighting. Because to Randy, there wasn't much else to life besides those three things.

                                                            *

"You're a cool chick. You like good music. You have good tattoos. You look like a sixties Bond girl. Will you marry me?"

“Fuck you.” I was grinning ear to ear.

It was sometime past five, and Randy and I were lying naked on the roof, drinking Sailor Jerry's right out of the bottle. We had been drinking and fucking and talking and eating eggs and potatoes in bed till noon. It was an all-night stand, and maybe that's why we thought it would be a good idea to break into his half-brother Paul's house and sunbathe naked on his roof.

But then Paul, being the uptight drug and alcohol counselor that he was, came home from work. “Are you nuts? Get the hell down from there!”

"Come on up here, Paulie boy. Have a drink with us," Randy yelled down to his brother, who was standing with his arms crossed in the driveway. 

“Get dressed, or I'm calling the cops.”

"You're no fun anymore, pretty Paulie, with your little white button-up and your big blue book.”

“You need help. Don’t you come back here until you get yourself checked into detox.”

So, we took Paul's advice, and we left, headed down the Willamette on an inflatable raft with an eight-ball of stolen cocaine and a half-gallon of headache red wine. Here, we thought we could be free. But we only had one oar for the raft, and when a tugboat came tooting down the river, the current capsized us into the liquid midnight of our cluttered minds. 

Wet and cold, I awoke at Beaulahland a Rumpelstiltskin sinking into the long hairs of lost time. The people drinking, smoking, mouths moving, were just out of reach, like a blackened memory pushing my head down into another century of sleep. And I just wanted to disappear into someone else’s life, but the bartender came up to me and said, “You can’t sleep here.”

I got up to leave, and that is when I saw Brady holding a pool stick over Randy’s head, screaming, "There are two things you don't do: put a hat on the bed and steal another man's cocaine."

Randy punched his brother in the mouth. Blood dripped onto my hands.

Moments later, I awoke on the ground a few miles from the bar, lying tangled under my bike in the middle of the street.

“Are you okay?” The couple stared down at me like I was a freak in a carnival show.

“Am I okay?” I echoed back to the padded walls of their minds, “Yes, I'm fine," I said, pushing the bike off me, watching them walk away from me, hand in hand, toward the safety of streetlamps and stop signs.

                                                            *                                                         

Randy was sitting on my doorstep when I got home.

"You're a shitty girlfriend, Delia, leaving me like that."

His nose was swollen. Drops of blood dripped onto the pavement between us.

            “I never said I was your girlfriend.” 

            Inside my apartment, the sun was coming up, and it was horrible. I closed the blinds and lay down on the bed beside him. I pulled a pillow over my eyes, but I could not stop the jackhammering in my head.

“I’m no good for you. We should end this. Whatever it is we’re doing here,” Randy turned onto his back, sucking dried blood from his lower lip.

"That is the best idea I've heard all year," I said.

Relieved to be rid of him so easily, I pulled back the covers and limped into the other room to draw myself a bath.

Lying there with the lights out in that windowless bathroom, the hot water soothed my aching body. I drifted below the surface, unaware of the bathroom door creaking open. At first, his rough construction worker hands came down around my neck so softly I thought he was going to massage me, but his grip kept getting tighter and tighter and tighter, till the whole weight of his body was upon me and my skull went clink, clink, clink into the porcelain surface below me.

Maybe it was the sledgehammer clarity of the cocaine hangover banging round my skull or the lack of oxygen going to my brain. Whatever it was, I could finally see the bars on the cage. I could see the past, the present, and the future all rolled into one. I could see little Delia watching her stepfather scream at her mother. I could see my grandfather sneaking into my mother's childhood room after midnight. I could see every guy before Randy and every guy who was sure to come after. Maybe he would be a punk, or a greaser, or he would love Buddha, or Hashem, maybe he would be rich, or he would be poor, yet the feeling would remain the same. The hunger would only grow stronger. And that's when I stopped fighting, relaxed, and let go completely.

In the wet primordial blackness, I saw a flicker of light. And in that moment, for the first time in years, I wanted to live, I really FUCKING did!

I kicked Randy so hard in the chest that he flew against the wall, his flesh flopped and smacked onto the floor, reverberating against spilled bath water and tile.

He was laughing on the ground. “You bitch! I knew you loved me.”

"Get the fuck out," I said, turning on the light.

I was standing above him, water dripping from the tips of my hair onto his grinning, horror show face. My whole body was shaking violently. I had been shot out into the world. I had been born again.

                                                            *

That morning, I was late for work. But Diane didn't notice my bruises because Doris was missing. She sent me with my heart racing down the cul-de-sac in front of the nursing home to find her.

Outside, walking across the cracked pavement in the ever-present now, I could hear every car drive by, each sound cataloging itself into the endless storerooms of my mind. Amid all that noise was the sweetest sound I had ever heard. It was the morning call of a robin. I ran towards her divinely mechanical chirping, and I would have kept running; I was really that cracked open, dripping and slipping like an egg that had fallen from its shell. But then, as I turned a corner, I saw Doris standing next to a parked minivan, looking out of place in a bathrobe and a pair of pink slippers.

"Doris!" I ran to her, but she couldn't hear me; she was too busy talking to someone in the van.

“Do you know my Pa? He works on Old Valencia at the paper mill. He never came home last night.”

As I got closer, I saw that the driver’s side window was rolled up. She was talking to no one.

“Come on. Let’s go back to the house and wait for your dad there.”

 She slapped my hand away. "Why aren't you in school? You children, never mind."

"But Doris, it's me."

The way she wrinkled up her face when she finally looked at me, you would have thought it was her who was bruised and beaten. "Oh, my. You don't look so good."

"I'm fine," I said, catching my reflection in the van's side-view mirror. There were deep bruises, a broken necklace of half-moons smiling devilishly around my neck. 

“Who did that to you?”

"No one." The way she looked at me was the way people looked at battered women, as if they were infants in grown-up bodies. I was so tired of that kind of pity. 

But then she took my hand, and I knew she understood. I could tell in the way she dug her nails into the fleshy part of my palm. For a second, I relaxed; I thought it would be okay.

“Robert would get angry sometimes. He could be a regular Mr. Hyde. I never knew which one I was going to get."

“Did you leave him?”

“No, of course not. I'm a Catholic."

 But Doris didn’t know what to do either. Doris, who loved me like her own daughter, even she couldn’t save me.

                                                            *

Sometimes, Dean could be kind. I mean, he really was an asshole. None of my friends liked him because he thought every conversation was a debate he had to win. But he wasn't all bad.

“Oh, babe, this doesn't look very good.” Dean was rubbing Neosporin on my elbows and knees and gently placing gauze and medical tape over the worst parts of me.

I looked like a doll some kid had played with too hard. I had let Dean pull my tangled black hair into uneven pigtails, and I was wearing a stained baby doll dress, cut right below my thighs, exposing what I thought was my best feature, my legs, covered in scrapes and bruises, tinted black from the asphalt that Dean was unable to wash away.

                                                                        *

Dean held my hand all the way to the AA clubhouse. And I cried when the old biker, smoking cigarettes on the folding metal chair next to us, proclaimed how grateful he was, even though he had cirrhosis of the liver and was living in the Salvation Army shelter. Cause he got to live the rest of his life sober. And everyone in there had found God. And shit, I didn't understand at all what that had to do with my problems with drugs, sex, and alcohol. But maybe Dean did, and he could be the man I had wanted him to be when I first found him looking sexy, smoking cigarettes at the Chunkathalon.

I just wasn’t ready to look at myself in the mirror, so I shut my eyes instead and lay my head on Dean’s shoulder, and listened to the soft hum of the ceiling fan pushing plumes of cigarette smoke around the room as we professed our alcoholism and all the glad you’re heres and keep coming backs echoed through that beautiful spring day of desperation and half-hearted redemption.