Jessica Willis – on wanting to breed.

Pittsfield, Massachusetts
November 22, 2000

Sarah:

I was in New York last week. Getting my shit, to use the vernacular. You didn’t know I was there. Naturally, I didn’t tell anyone I would be in town. I rolled in with Melinda in her suburban insult vehicle, we loaded it up with a lot of garbage bags filled with my old clothes, walked to a place in Little Italy to get contraband salami and cheeses, plus my favorite boullion cubes – oh and passed by Bliss and dropped a wad on skin cream – and then we rolled out. We were back in Pittsfield by 10 p.m.

When I unpacked, or rather, when I peeled my balled-up stinking junkie clothes out of the garbage bags, I was surprised and appalled to see so much evidence, in full color, of the condition of my endocrine system when I was out there in the land of nod. One shirt had – well, you know how underarm sweat stains are often described as “half moons”? Well, these sweat stains were planets. Planets of ochre and grey and brown, ugly and reeking as Io herself.

Some of my clothes still smelled of vodka and dope sweat. One nice frock had creamy puke crusted right down the front. I threw most everything out. Actually I brought it to the Christian Center, where the others can have at it. If I see a God-fearing matron, poor as dirt, squeezed into my “She’s With Me Cause She Appreciates Perfection” shirt, galactic sweat stains and all, I’ll look away. I won’t tell.

It’s different now. I’m getting cocky and starting to toy with the notion that I might live. I am prettier, too, since I ditched the three squares and lost some of that halfway-house fat. I might be the prettiest I’ve ever been. And all I can think about is getting laid.

My old roommate in New York said that most of the men she comes in contact with simply don’t register as men. I think I know what she means – many cosmopolitan men don’t seem like Man, in the Adam sense. They have tan ankles. One guy she knows is so rich that when he gets out of his car to go into a store he doesn’t bother to close his car door. He just pulls over and walks away. He goes sockless inside his Belgian loafers. I mean really. I know you know these men.

Going to a livestock fair with Mum last week gave me the idea that I have forgotten to breed. Here, where the men are Man and go to bed wearing their work boots, I have started to regard them in the manner that I appraised the bulls and swine at the fair: hmm. Nice coat. Healthy girth. Bright eyes. Good bloodline. This kind of thinking is not unusual for people who have recently made it out of death. I know the men in my little low-bottom sober community are looking at me the same way. Because they also liked to party till they lost their pulse. They also have died and come back. Grief has made us want to breed.

At the end of the summer I went out with Perez, and we sat in his pickup in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot for about five hours. We listened to REM. We fought for the airspace to talk about ourselves. He usually won. Perez is physically perfect and completely self-centered. He reminded me of the models I used to have to deal with at work. Ceaselessly yammering on about his own little hell. I got a few kisses out of him and he let me put my head in his lap and he stroked my face and hair. That was what I had been waiting for.

He hasn’t called me for months, but to have my head petted by a calloused hand was enough. It was my first kiss since Mink in the cruiser, no lie. You should have seen me fall into his mouth. I practically went in tongue first. Now he is just a myth, for his name is so wonderful to say, to think about: Johnny Perez. Proud to be a Sox fan, a Bostonian, a minority. He sang to me and held my gaze. For a little while.

That was this summer though, and now Johnny don’t look so proud. He has been drinking, he has a stalker – he is still beautiful but there is an empty, spooked look in his eyes. When I think about him my heart knocks in my chest. I saw him at a Halloween sober dance and we slow-danced – I know! I know! – to “Purple Rain,” which was so perfect. He let me lecture him, for once, but I didn’t have the piss and/or vinegar to do it. He stroked my back. I was very dressed up, over-glamorous with my hair up in rhinestones and my ranch mink. Can you believe I didn’t sell it when I was out there getting loaded and going broke?

I don’t know where John Perez is now. He can’t go home and his brother kicked him out. It pains me to see a prideful man get a taste of reality. I told Johnny that his body is hot, he could be brutally handsome, but it’s his joy that is most attractive. And when an alkie drinks after a few years of going without, joy is the first thing to evaporate as soon as the juice hits the palate.

Another dark guy entered the picture, this one just as interested in family crafting as I seem to be. He wants to find a female with athletic genes to guarantee a good throwing arm and full scholarships. This dark guy, well, he just cleaned up about 50 days ago. A very sick junkie. We kissed behind the Dumpster (!) the other night and he told me “easy, easy” because, again, I was trying to climb into his mouth. This man hasn’t had a girlfriend (besides heroin) for years, and was in jail for a long time because of this criminal junk hunger, and he’s telling me easy easy. I love it.

We kissed at the Halloween dance too, in the handicapped bathroom. With the lights out. This time he nearly took my head off with his mouth. Then I started to get a little manic and considered faking a seizure on the dance floor, or roaming around pie-eyed in my fur, asking men randomly to make out with me. But that didn’t happen. Now, don’t go thinking I’m desperate because I’m cruising new guys at the halfway house. I am so keeping the focus on getting well. Ha ha.

I’ve moved across the street into graduate housing. I live with Debbie A., and it’s okay – we both get up for work around the same time and sit silently in the living room, awash in a pale lake of cigarette smoke, coughing our two-note coughs. Then she goes to work and I light incense, put it out, drink a glass of milk, take my meds, and go to my new telemarketing job, where I (and fifty other women) sit like brood sows in stalls, hunched over our phones. And we make money for the man, baby.

Okay, Sarah. Don’t tell me I’m slumming. Don’t tell me I’m being cool again. Tell me I’m on the right track. I know I am. I’m so relieved not to be there.

Jessica