The alley behind the building, running along the El tracks, was not a fruitful place to troll for toys. Black plastic trash bins with menacing faces stood in a line behind a big apartment building. A garage door, originally brown, that had a big splotch of white paint on it to cover up the tags. Old Latin Kings tags, new Latin Kings tags, with crowns. It was a short walk up the alley to the street with the copy shop, where I bought graph paper on which to draw hands. At the register I stood and listened while the girls from the café next door discussed the poster for their yard sale. The other clerk, Tony, was giving helpful suggestions. “Are you using this copier,” somebody said behind me. “‘Cause I was going to reload the paper.” There was a pause. The voice sounded familiar. “The 11 x 17.” I turned around and it was Frances. I remembered her saying she worked in the copy shop in the morning, from time to time, to make rent at the end of the month.

“Hey Samantha,” she said. “Wanna work for me Tuesday night?” I said sure. “I’m going to an art opening.”

When I started working at Eggs I thought the red-haired girl looked familiar and we played the name game and figured out we’d gone to high school together, in the suburbs. And then I remembered her, more than she remembered me: remembered our mothers conferring in hushed tones about some mysterious moral failing of Frances once when mine picked me up from her house. Mrs. Festenreck taught me violin. She was an all-around music teacher: she did piano and voice and those hippie relaxation exercises. She was divorced too, like my mom, but she just eked out a living, it seemed, whereas mine had made a great career in real estate. I sucked at violin, after years of not practicing; my mother was the one who wanted me to play.

I didn’t really know Frances then, though. We went to different middle schools, she was a year younger, and we would hardly have crossed paths even if we’d been the same year. By the time high school rolled around the groups were all set. Except for the people who’d been top dogs in their respective middle schools, to whom it seemed important to jockey for position in the empyrean realms of high school social life. It didn’t to me and it didn’t to Frances, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway if it had.

Frances was seething sex by age twelve. I was doing other things. Hanging out at the hair salon and the record store that were the local havens of the “alternative.” Ricky the thirty-year-old stylist seemed not to really know if he was gay or not, but he had a dangling earring and met up after work, when he didn’t have other plans, with the fifteen-year-old goth chicks -- I mean, neo-goth chicks, because that’s what they liked to call themselves -- who worked at Bakers Square, imparting gossip and wisdom. On Saturdays, sans Ricky, who had other things to do, the goth chicks would take the Metra in to Chicago and on the way to Clark and Belmont would rub mascara around their eyes and say it was Egyptian kohl and spend their Bakers Square paychecks on Doctor Martens with which they would tramp the streets and the late-night cafes, their fake IDs having failed them, but their pride, and their trumped-up story of a slumber party at a fat girl’s house, not permitting a pre-dawn retreat to Elmwood Glen. I, who saw through the goth chicks’ tales of clubbing but admired their imagination, meanwhile smoked on the back porch, gazing out at layers of craggy clouds and occasional light aircraft, with the fat girl, Vivian Squilley, and the odd Squilley sibling. If I’d wanted, I knew well, I could have gone to Chicago with the goth chicks, but I felt some small loyalty to Vivian, and besides, Vivian knew where her dad kept his pot, and though he didn’t always have any, this sometimes meant they could smoke some of the hard stuff.

None of what I did was interesting. This was a determination that I made reading Rolling Stone in seventh grade, and eighth wasn’t any better. There were school plays and the school literary magazine for which I, when I’d despaired of getting enough submissions, filled in the blank spaces with doodles. Boys who drew knew what to draw: elaborate weapons and spaceships, anatomized in exquisite detail. What did girls draw but dubious landscapes, houses, endless princesses with golden plaits and slim bodies anachronistically sheathed in the latest Limited fashions. I compromised with creatures produced from mythology books and with surreptitious reference to Vivian’s Monster Manual. Because Vivian was fat it was okay if she was also kind of a nerd, who played Dungeons and Dragons and acted like one of the boys, and in return for my tolerance she gave me bits of purloined slang and facts of life and musical tastes to which I added the fruits of my own devoted reading of Rolling Stone and Interview. This is how I came to buy LPs I hid and only listened to when my mother wasn’t home and how I came to worship Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and the Velvet Underground and Nico.

I wasn’t seething sex, or if I was I didn’t know it. When I was twelve and complained of a secret itching, I’d been hauled off to my Aunt’s gynecologist, a nice old man who said “you have a very small vagina, too small for a grown man’s penis,” and gave me a cream I didn’t use. I remember faded mint green faux-leather and disinfectant and somewhat flabby hands. Later in some childtime dreamway what he’d said got confused with a joke whose punch line somehow involved a lesbian and a nun. What I understood was that I couldn’t get married, or have sex.

The strange thing, the thing I only remembered later, was that it was not too small for a wee finger. Which was OK, I guess I’d reasoned at the time, because he was a doctor and had to check things out in there.

Eventually that itching went away. Eventually the doctor retired. But you’d think that in my strange case, other wee fingers would have soon crossed paths with some sort of feeling there and I’d have discovered, in turn, some form of sex. But somehow the feeling there was pain, and pleasure wasn’t where it was supposed to be, it was everywhere, and because it was everywhere it couldn’t have been sex.

And so it went into dreams, and paint, and marijuana. It sometimes rose and fell with every breath and stretched out past my sides. A tingling on the left side of my left breast harmonized with one on my right collarbone, or a frisson on my forearm. Or it would be a little ache on my right eyelid that would grow into my brow and blossom into a headache that I could feel in my shoulder and behind my ear. Pleasure, pain, the difference was uncertain. Sublimation is not the word for this thing. It is a thing, a concrete thing, my companion. It was a desperate growing thing. It curled up from below like strands of creeper vine until it wrapped around my lungs.

And while Vivian Squilley and I were smoking pot on her parents’ back porch, Frances was making her mother crazy and her creamy skin and copper locks and sullen pout were beguiling the married man with whom she lost her virginity, and I know that because within days the whole school was abuzz with it in its cruel and fascinated way.

Drunk at the Rainbo after hours Frances told me all about how he was her Sunday school teacher and that she thought she’d used him more than he used her. He couldn’t help himself, she said, “and I knew exactly what I was doing.”

I think she was probably right, though I’m not sure she always knew quite what she was doing. She drank too much. Frances had a crush on the artist whose posters she’d been copying, and after I worked for her she asked me if I’d go with her to a party that turned out to be the after-party of the opening. “Not that thing,” I said. “Yuck. I don’t like art.”

“Oh, come on. It won’t be in the gallery. He said it will have moved to his house by the time we’d get there.”

“Yeah, and his house has no art in it. Don’t you understand, I am, like, allergic to art and artists. I hate them. I want nothing to do with them.” (She doth protest too much.)

“Can’t you just do this for me, Sam, I don’t know anyone there.” She had her hand on her hip and curled a lock of hair around her finger.

Sam could not refuse. “What do I do?”

Frances squealed. “Oh... well, just talk to me and... just be there. So I don’t have to look silly.”

Sam could act the prop part. Maybe she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone if she affected some sort of soulful, artistic autism.

Frances finished early and disappeared to the ladies’ room to change her clothes, wash, buff, primp, paint, deodorize, and emerge metamorphosed. This was strictly disallowed by management — whether because it tied up the facilities, or because customers were not supposed to watch someone transform almost under their eyes from servility to personhood -- no one really knew. But it was late at night and anyway the managers loved Frances and she knew they’d turn a blind eye, despite the fact, though how could they know, that behind their backs she schemed ways to rip them off.

She had a way with the customers. She didn’t think too much, which was not to say she wasn’t smart, but in her better moments she didn’t wind herself up in circles with thinking about things that were better left alone. She was firm and just a little bit fleshy, and sewed her own clothes, deftly, and acted in plays and wrote songs and sang them with her band.

I hadn’t brought a change of clothes so I undid the striped tie, slipped a cotton sweater over the uniform shirt, and hoped no one would notice the way the black polyester trousers caused my thighs to bulge in unflattering directions. My hair was pinned up for work and I left it that way, sweaty and disarrayed as it was, and glanced in the mirror for just a moment, enough time to jab a bright bit of color across my lips. Frances, fully prepared, had slipped into a tight and strappy black dress and a vintage faux fur and looked ready for anything, and I sort of loved her, and sort of hated her.

“What kind of artist is he?” I said.

“Oh, Serge, well, he’s a painter, but he doesn’t paint. I mean he gave it up because painting is dead. He’s post-postmodern. Makes these things with flashing lights and lots of... quotes from famous people and stuff.”

I wondered what that might be.

The apartment wasn’t far from the restaurant, so they walked; I let Frances lead the way, sauntering, singing snatches of Motown hits, and I could tell from the smell that Frances had had a flask or something in the bathroom with her all that time. “What are you drinking,” I said, and Frances handed over the flask, which was scotch, or something, which made me gag, but I couldn’t face this scene without something. There wasn’t much left, and I downed it quickly. “Hey,” Frances protested, and I said, “Look honey, I’m only doing this for you.”

I had this fear that this would be some genteel, sedate affair, with elegant people in cocktail dresses who’d stare silently at them as they stumbled in off the street, shabby, Sam in those awful pants and Frances, well, whatever Frances’s good points, she was not sedate.

The apartment was a fourth-floor walkup, which is what mine was too, a building that ran long and narrow back from the avenue, and the stairs just went up and up and up. The peeling fragments of floral wallpaper in the stairwell and the smell reassured me that this couldn’t be so genteel. If there were elegant people there they were slumming, or pretending to, and the party itself was loud, smoky, crowded and dark, anonymous. The artist, or what appeared to be the artist from the facial hair and the way Frances said hello to him, was at the door and whisked them out of their coats with his meaty arms — no aesthete, this, but a macho Jackson Pollock type — hustled them over to the corner where the liquor was, and left them to stand there as he went off to entertain other guests. A man behind the bar asked what they wanted to drink, and I looked nervously around, still fearing the worst, trying to shake the feeling that somehow things would turn bad. I was always looking to furniture to help me out and comfort me – furniture was a think I should paint. There was an old-fashioned kitchen, with peeling linoleum and cracked plaster and ancient appliances; nice, with flowers on the windowsill, and it occurred to me that her feeling of fear was something like a ravenous appetite to belong here, or maybe anywhere. It was wrong of me to be thinking that, I said to myself, because I had PJ and he was family of a sort. Then again, PJ was gone. “Can I have a Sam Adams,” I said automatically.

Then a tall happy guy with long hair came over and asked them if they wanted to join him out on the porch for some air. He said his name was Marcel. There were a few other people on the porch, sitting, smoking, making out. Marcel got out some pot and rolled a joint and passed it around. Frances flirted, touching his shirt, cocking her chin. She didn’t mind that he wasn’t the artist. I didn’t really want to have those moves, but I wished I had the energy to do the work to fit in. Frances really just needed to arrive with me; she didn’t need me to talk to once there. I sat and watched the people at the other end of the porch.

Down the alley was a long vista of falling-apart porches ending in the rusting El tracks. The city was gorgeous in the night, decrepit as the view from here was, and the sky was this most beautiful polluted reddish brown. I loved the decay. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to, like was it very politically correct to find industrial waste, you know, romantic? But it was something that seemed real. It was better than furniture; it let the conversation skim past; it let me think about nothing at all.

“Hi,” a man’s voice said huskily in my ear. I whirled around and saw this guy Joseph sitting down next to me.

“You’re Sam,” he said.

“Yeah, Sam,” I said.

“Well, my dear, I was going to go inside and get something to drink, do you want anything?”
I hesitated. Frances was fully engaged. “I’ll come with you.”

In the next room people were playing what sounded like their own folk songs on guitars; then someone was making Thai food on what looked to be a camp stove; then there was a DJ playing, no, blasting, techno music. Several small blond children who seemed to belong to the apartment chased around the crowds, oblivious -- it seemed -- to the sweet smell of marijuana everywhere.

A guy in a corner was doing harder drugs. The kids were wearing funny hats that seemed to be homemade and yelled alternately “We are aliens” and “we are senators” in robotic monotones edged with happy hysteria. Joseph and I stood on either side of a doorway where a thin, yellow-flowered sheet had been hung with electrical tape in lieu of a door. As the kids came careening through we held up the sheet to keep it from getting torn off or from tripping up the young aliens and senators. Joe stopped one by grabbing its shoulder and said, “Are you senators or aliens?” “Both!” the little girl shouted and pointed her watergun at Joe. “Go talk to your girlfriend,” she said. “But I don’t have a girlfriend,” Joe said, lifting his palms in a shrug of denial. Like playing pattycake, I thought absurdly and almost laughed out loud.

Back in the kitchen people were saying the liquor had run out. The host of the party was nowhere to be found. “Did anyone go out to get anything?” Joseph asked, and no one seemed to know. “Should we get something?” I said.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

Now what you have to understand about Joseph is that the last time I’d seen him he had his mouth on my roommate’s cock.