There is something wrong with me. When I say that, I mean there is nothing wrong with me, nothing wrong, nothing really, not for the most part.
I’ve published a book, have a boyfriend, and carry twenty extra pounds that don’t look too bad on me. I have found the perfect pair of cowboy boots, and in my closet hangs a little black dress suitable for any occasion, although I do not have many occasions. I have seen the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I can change a tire, oil, and spark plugs; I can hold my liquor. I have always been able to get straight A’s, keep myself fed, keep a roof over my head. I have been able to lie, cheat, and steal, not too often and without getting caught. There is nothing wrong. There is no reason to cry. And I never did. Not until Allison.
I knew Allison before I met her. I saw her everywhere. I read the ’zine she published in high school that was later compiled into a limited-edition hardbound anthology published by a short-lived downtown punk press. I read about her on web pages and message boards, about her in places where they write about people like her, ingénues in the convergence between underground and couture, where everything can ultimately be sourced to David Bowie, the very New York intersection of punk and success, where cutting edge and marketable meet and are written about in places like NYLON and Interview, worshipped by self-conscious hipsters, emulated by Japanese teenagers, and collected by early-thirties cultural studies professors in black boatneck sweaters and flared twills. She attended hardcore shows and alternative comicons, art openings and fetish balls, skateboard meets and benefit fashion shows, independent movie premieres and tattoo conventions, riot girl festivals and guerilla theatre, and I read about each of them. I read about her and later read her, when she wrote a column for the New York Press and then later for the Village Voice. I saw her everywhere – twenty extra pounds that didn’t look too bad draped on her chest and hips, pink bob, fake fur jackets, vintage wrap dresses, and fishnets – and photographs of her in the background of photos taken of her friends, the painters and vaudeville performers in their press packets. I listened to her sing in Betty Rage, and even saw them, when they were on tour, as I stood in the back of Redoubt crushing my eight-dollar bottled water, against the wall, not that she could see me on stage, or was looking for me, like I was looking for her. I learned everything I could. I researched Allison casually at first, then with the fervor of one tracing her genealogy. When she put up an online blog, I spent nights in the glow of my monitor, throwing off my biological clock, reading and rereading her journal entries.
I read about when she had her wisdom teeth removed, when she spent a week at a Krishna temple, when she joined a German-style artist collective until she learned it was a front for an anarcho-socialist terrorist group. And so when I met her, I worked to act surprised. And I was surprised, I am surprised. I am surprised that there is something wrong with me. That there is nothing wrong with me, nothing wrong, nothing for the most part. But that doesn’t mean things are right.
But I tell this wrong. I knew Allison, I followed her, but I am not a stalker. I don’t want to kill her or be her. I wish her no ill will. I’m neither the talented Mr Ripley nor the single white female. I never tried to hide; I am unnoticeable. And many people know Allison, and followed her news. She’s a bit famous, her friends a bit famous, to people like me, the many people like me. The ones no one writes about. We don’t have glamorous drug problems or anorexia or a collection of plaster casts of rock stars’ cocks or memories of a childhood spent hustling truck drivers that we turn into in a best-selling novel turned celebrated independent film. We aren’t involved in the sideshow revival, we don’t write manifestos. We don’t drink absinthe, we don’t like acid jazz. I was just fascinated by Allison, at first for seemingly no reason, and then for the ease with which she moved through her life, the facility under which she accomplished everything. In a world where no one ever gets what they want, she was untouchable, unusual. Whatever she wanted, whatever I wanted, seemed to find her, with the same providence I later learned Elizabeth Barrett Browning was privileged. Browning herself was a similar miracle of fate, an unassailable champion in the lottery of charm and temperament. Browning slighted the entire nineteenth century, as she studied, wrote, and composed the poetry that Robert later found irresistible, and everything, fame and ardor, attention and deed found her, came to her, to her very own drawing room. This is not to say that I am unlucky. Everything is what it is. My blessings are blessings, although they are countable. I’ve done all right. My teeth are all mine, my legs are the same length. If I am unhappy, I usually know why, and if I don’t, if there is misery whose source remains mysterious, it is that maybe I was born unhappy, born under a moody star.
I knew Allison because I had to. I couldn’t avoid her. We led analogous lives, paced one another in parallel paths. We moved in the same circles, but I was several concentric orbits from her sun. I attended the same clubs, parties, shows, standing on the long lines, paying to get in while she slid through on the guest list. If her name wasn’t on it, she was someone’s plus one, or she was friends with the doormen, the same ones who made me empty my purse, patted me down for knives, chains, or socks full of quarters. If I feel anything, really, it’s that shows must look different from the second row than I saw from the rear left row in the balcony.
I knew Allison because I had to. I saw her everywhere, and had, for a long time. We worked at the same nightclub, Bump, where I was a bar back, in dirty jeans and a ponytail. I picked up napkins, beer bottles filled with semen, while she sold cigarettes from a tray, in a corset and biker boots. But really, I knew her even before that. In high school, she was captain of the debate club, while I was an alternate at each one of mine, always an alternate at every school. And one school I attended for half my junior year competed against hers, and I saw her then. She wore a huge black T-shirt and filthy Converse All-Stars. I noticed her, watched her roll her index cards into horns between her fingers. I could watch no one else. And I had no idea why. Even after Bill Delaney saw me watch her and whispered down the row that I was a lesbian, I still couldn’t take my eyes from her. I wasn’t brave because I knew I’d simply change schools again soon, before the lesbian rumor spread too far. She had me mesmerized.