Cynthia Cruz
STEADY DIET OF NOTHING
I have fought the good fight to the end;
I have run the race to the finish;
I have kept the faith.
—The Book of Timothy
Did you love this world
And this world not love you?
—Granddaddy
Everywhere I went I brought Pinkie, my pink-and-white stuffed bunny rabbit, with me. I knew people made fun of me, but I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t go anywhere without that rabbit.
One day I was in Chinatown with my sister, Skylar. She was on a secret mission, so she left me in the street, leaning against a wall. After she’d been gone for a while, a man walked up to me like he knew me. He was wearing a brown suit, carrying a briefcase.
He said, “You and the rabbit, twenty dollars.”
I didn't say anything. I never do. I just stared at his white face, his soft girl hands. I think I stopped breathing. I was scared he was going to keep moving closer, that he would touch me.
But luckily out of nowhere my sister appeared. “Fuck off, you pervert,” she yelled, laughing. Pushing him, she threw a bag of stuff at him and grabbed my hand.
We ran down the narrow alley laughing hysterically. But after a while I realized I wasn’t laughing anymore: I was just crying.
She bought me some donuts around the corner at an all-night donut-shop-slash-kiosk. We bought packs of cigarettes and small paper cups of coffee. On the way out, I stole a handful of penny candy: my favorites, pink and yellow Laffy Taffys and Halloween-sized Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
After we left, my sister drove us back down Highway One in her red Karmann Ghia. The convertible down, we smoked cigarettes, one after another, blasting the same Joy Division song over and over all the way back to Santa Cruz. Sometimes she’d steer too near the edge of a cliff and I knew for sure we were about to veer off into the ocean.
*
I showed up at the Blue House with Pinkie in one hand and a plastic bag in the other.
The night before, Darby saw me standing outside a 7-Eleven. She said when she first saw me, she thought I was a ghost, a white apparition in the middle of the night. She walked right up to me and touched my bare arm.
“Let’s go,” she said. “I’m bringing you home.”
Before she brought me to the Blue House, she brought me to see Toby.
Toby was a skater. He had short-long brown hair and dark eyes and his arms and neck were riddled in tattoos: words in gothic text and elaborate green, red, and orange Chinese dragons, beautiful laces of ink ribboning up and down his arms. He was sitting outside a dilapidated building, looking bored, smoking.
Darby told me she wanted to give me something, that I seemed so defeated standing there in the 7-Eleven parking lot, so destroyed, that as a farewell to my old life, she asked Toby to give me a tattoo.
When the two of us walked up, Toby nodded his head at Darby and reached out his hand for mine. I found out later he was straight edge, that he had been clean for years. He seemed really serious and sad. He just looked at me, he didn't smile.
He shook my hand, said, “My name’s Toby, what’s yours?”
Darby and I followed him into the building. His makeshift studio was an abandoned warehouse he’d been using for cutting hair and tattoo work, but the police had been by a bunch of times, and now there were warrants pasted on the doors of the building. Starting the next day, they’d be locking everything up, so he’d packed two small cardboard boxes already, taped them shut. But he still had two chairs set out. I sat in one, he sat in the other, and Darby left the room to smoke.
He wanted to draw a small blue star inside my right arm. He walked up to me, took my hand, and drew a star on my skin with his finger.
But I didn’t want that. I never spoke. Like an animal, I’d just nod or shake my head. In response to Toby, I shook my head no.
He gave me a slip of paper, and I quickly drew an image of a Rita Ackermann painting I saw once on the front of an album of a girl warrior in the apocalypse, holding a machine gun.
Toby didn’t say anything.
It took five hours and by the middle of it, my arm was throbbing. It was bruised and red. Toby suggested we finish the rest of the work the next day, but I really wanted to get it done. You never know what is going to happen. People disappear and never come back. I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know what was going to happen to me or if I would ever see Toby again. And I wanted that picture on my arm.
I made him fill in all the colors, the blue in her T-shirt, the red in her running shorts, the bright yellow of her hair. When he was done, the tattoo took up my entire arm.
Toby rubbed a cotton ball with cream on my arm and bandaged my arm up with plastic wrap. I looked injured. Toby smiled.
“Welcome home,” he said.
We stayed the night in Toby’s studio. Darby was up all night sitting in one of Toby’s chairs she’d wheeled outside the door, drinking cheap beer, smoking and listening to music on her Walkman.
Toby kept trying to take care of me: offering me food, cigarettes, more cream for my arm.
But I just sat in the dark, not talking, staring off. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to Toby, just that I couldn’t. I liked him too much.
After we sat in silence together for a long time, Toby took my hand and led me to a small pile of blankets and pillows, a makeshift bed, where we slept together.
The next morning before we left, Toby cut my hair. It was my idea. I told him I wanted to start over.
My hair was really long, past my shoulders. He didn’t want to do it, and he said so. But I kept asking. By the time he was finished, my hair was as short as a boy’s.
In the morning, after Toby cut all my hair off, I thanked him, and then I just stood there, looking at him, then looking at my hands.
He only had two boxes packed. Everything else, he was leaving behind. He told us he was going away for a while.
As he was talking, I kept looking at his hands. They kept moving as he was talking. I couldn’t say it, but I was hoping I would see him again.
*
I was scared when Darby first brought me to the Blue House.
The house was stucco and painted pale blue. Inside, there was graffiti on the walls and stools and couches that had been drug in, some old rugs, milk crates and piles of old engines and car parts. Even though there was no electricity. There was an old unplugged phone and some lamps in a corner. The story was that the house had been abandoned and now it belonged to the state, but no one wanted it.
There was no glass in the windows, just cardboard duct-taped where the windows should have been. But it was California, so it never got that cold. The floors were concrete, and we’d sleep in a heap of blankets. Girls in one pile, huddled together like mice.
That first night I stayed at the house, I knew it was home.
*
When I first started hanging out at the Blue House I could tell the other girls didn't like
me. I never wore makeup or girls’ clothes, and when I showed up, I’d cut all my hair off. I think they thought I was a snob because I never talked and only hung out with the boys.
Later on I found out there were rumors about me: that I came from a rich family in Marin, and that I wore my dead brother’s clothes.
*
Everyone at the Blue House had had terrible childhoods. But according to Darby, I was pretty severely “damaged goods.”
During the summer when I was eleven, my mom and my dad went on vacation with my little sister. They only had enough money for the three of them to go. They left me and my brother behind with two friends of theirs.
I don’t remember much. I don’t know where my brother was or what was happening to him. What I do remember is being raped and not leaving my room for the entire two weeks. And that Duke, the man who raped me, had a gun. He told me that if I told anyone what had happened, he would kill me.
He told me he liked me because I was chubby like his daughter who was also my age.
I stopped eating. And I never told anyone what happened.
*
No one knew Napalm’s real name or where he came from.
He wore fatigues, combat boots, and an fluorescent orange armband.
“For the coming Armageddon,” he’d say.
Sometimes he wore plastic desert goggles, the kind the military wore.
He’d build paper bombs, beautiful bombs, red, like Chinese paper lanterns. He made them with paper, powder, batteries, and flame. Love bombs, word bombs, he blew things up just to watch them explode.
He had big hair—wild, like an animal. He’d sit on the front steps of the Blue House talking to himself or to anyone who would stop and listen. Like a soldier in his washed-out fatigues and a bag of his fire stuff, he’d sit outside the Blue House to keep all of us safe.
He made this gigantic box, this thing he called The Shed, of old wood and metal. Inside were stacks and stacks of old books and manuals: classics and the Bible, military handbooks and how-to-bomb books. Gas masks and breathing tubes, flak jackets and mace, everything in piles.
He had notebooks in his Shed: on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Nevada test site, the firebombing of Dresden, the carpet bombing of Cambodia, depleted uranium. And he had notebooks on what to do when the end comes. Saline treatment for chemical burns, things to mix up for nuclear sickness, nerve agents, what to do—he had it all figured out.
His notebooks were so thick they wouldn’t close: he had so much stuff crammed in there. Xeroxed copies of what to look for: in the eyes, on the skin, in the behavior of animals. Before things go crazy, and then for afterwards. It was like a secret library, and he wouldn't let anyone near it.
While all of us were inside the Blue House drinking, smoking, and laughing, Napalm was outside, busy preparing for the end of the world.
*
Rumor had it Napalm had been living on the streets since he was ten. That his dad had died of a heroin overdose when he was a baby and that his mom was a junkie and prostitute, that she lived on the streets in Portland.
Under highway overpasses, in buildings long abandoned for asbestos or rat infestations, Napalm cooked up his own MREs on his homemade foil and coat-hanger grill.
*
Napalm would go on these rants and couldn’t come back down. Reading more and more, listening to secret frequencies on his broken radio.
Knowing what he knew messed with his mind: endless war, Thatcher and Reagan, the US coup in Chile. We’d find him one morning, downtown, blowing things up or ranting madly from a plastic crate. So the police would come and cart him off to another psych ward.
“You’d better be ready,” he’d say frantically, his hair pulled back in a woman’s scarf.
A rat hiding in his crapmobile, bookworm freak. I’m like that too. But it gets you nowhere, knowing all of that, what’s actually happening in the world, the systems undergirding everything and the ways these systems make us sick.
Knowing all that only makes you sick, and if you’re sick, you can’t do anything.
*
Darby told me Toby dropped out of school after his dad shot himself. That he spent his days in the skatepark riding out his fury. Sometimes he’d be out all night, sleeping on park benches, living on beer and donuts. I imagined him, alone someplace, cold and quiet, and I sent him private messages through my mind. Toby, you’re going to be okay, I’d tell him, secretly, though. Toby, I am going to see you, again.
*
Toby had burn marks on his arms, but he would never say why. And small white lightning scars on his face you could only see if you got really close. Tiny freckles on his nose like he was still a little kid.
When he slept, I’d lean over him, watch his face while he was dreaming.
He talked in broken utterance, in fragments. I couldn't always completely understand what he was saying. But I understood him anyway. I knew the world he was living in, the world he came from. We were both formed by the same elements.
He bought me a necklace with a charm of Jude the Apostle, the saint of lost causes. I told him to keep it, that I didn’t deserve it, but he insisted, putting the chain around my neck, shutting the tiny clasp. “It’s yours,” he said.
After he disappeared I wore the necklace every day. Every day until I found him.
*
Someone told me when Darby was little, the state came and took her from her sisters. The neighbors called Child Protection and they came that same day. Each of the girls was separated and sent to a different foster-home hell.
The first home Darby was sent to was a mobile home in the desert where she was basically a babysitter for her foster sisters and brothers, watching them while the foster mom had sex with the neighbor. Each foster home was worse than the one before.
The last one, the one she escaped from, the dad would buy her lingerie and make her wear them and have sex with him. He beat her when she wouldn't go along with him.
When she arrived at the Blue House, she had marks on her body she wouldn't talk about, scars on her face. She was wearing a long blonde wig with horse bangs, a black leather miniskirt.
*
Darby said she woke up in the middle of the night one time, and her mother wasn't in the house. So she and her sisters went looking for her.
They found her outside in her nightgown, wandering through the weeds. She had a flashlight in her hand, and she was calling out their names.
*
Darby was hilarious with a sharp tongue tonight. It was funny because she acted so tough even though she was tiny. She had brown hair and huge brown eyes like starving kids do. Her father, whom she’d never met, was Mexican. She grew up with her mom outside Reno, in Sparks, Nevada.
She was tough. She carried knives with her and wore a black leather jacket. But inside she was just a little kid. Like all of us.
*
Darby and her sisters and her mom were living inside a car garage her mother was renting. With no heat or electricity. They all slept in a mess of blankets and sleeping bags on the floor in a pile: all three girls in two Star Wars sleeping bags.
But then the case worker came on an unannounced visit. Saw the way they were living and took the girls away.
Darby hadn’t seen her mom or her sister since.
*
In the Blue House there were beer bottles stashed around. If you wanted one, you just took it. The house was like any other house, except that it was abandoned and emptied out, and of course there was no electricity.
We girls hung out on the stools and old chairs in the front room. The boys stayed mostly in the back room, where music was always playing. It was Guy, Jeremy who we called Germ, and Toby who appeared suddenly after three months out of nowhere.
The boys were older than us: seventeen and eighteen, and most of them had started to dabble in heroin. No one ever said anything about it. But I knew. And even though they were older than us and boys, I never felt afraid of them. They felt like older brothers to me—they tried to take care of us, of each other. It makes sense when you think of it—we’d all escaped near-death and had finally found a home. Of course we would risk our lives for each other. We didn’t have anyone or anything else.
We, the girls, smoked cigarettes and drank beer. Hard drugs were out of the question. We panhandled downtown to make enough money to pay for cigarettes and beer, telling tourists our car was out of gas, that we needed money to drive back home to Los Gatos.
I was still young and I looked it: childlike, with my full cheeks and baby fat. Soon though my face would become angled like the boys’, my thin arms covered in scars.
CYNTHIA CRUZ is the author of five collections of poems: How the End Begins, Wunderkammer, The Glimmering Room, Ruin, and, most recently, Dregs. She is also the editor of the contemporary Latina poetry anthology Other Musics: New Latina Poetry and the author of Disquieting: Essays on Silence.
