—for Samantha Aper and Sherree Broughton
1.
These are things that happened before we were together. The kinds of things you’d keep after, pressing me in that roundabout, hat-in-my-hand way of yours. Doesn’t it feel, I don’t know, unnatural to me? You projected such indifference I knew our whole relationship was like that: a projection. An act. Like the first night I followed you into your apartment, and you were so nervous you dropped your keys in the hallway. You smiled like Aw Shucks before bending down to scoop them up, spinning them on your fingers like some sort of cowboy. American boy. Gunslinger. I bet you really thought you shot me down, like your bullet had my name on it.
2.
No one ever says I want to be a cockroach. It’s an LA thing. You just wake up one morning a cockroach.
It went like this: little girl, big dream, bus ticket. I liked the window seat. I pressed my face against the glass, giving testimony to every long shadow on the landscape. I kept a ragged map in my pocket. I wrote my name in the bathroom of each truck stop between home and California, my fingers smelling like felt markers.
You told me that was poetic. You daisy-chained metaphors, odes to what you called my lovely nuances, and read them aloud to friends. You the poet, me the budding actress. But only a background actor, really: a cockroach.
You held me close then and I felt your breath. You stroked the tattoo on my shoulder. The cockroaches will outlast us all, you said. As if poetry could fix anything.
3.
I stayed in an apartment above a bar. I had no car, no phone—only a canvas bag of slugs for the payphone downstairs, a few loose singles to bum rides to casting calls. My roommate called herself Valentine, said it was her for real real name, but she was a cockroach, too, so she was probably lying. Her story was similar to mine: girl, dream, ticket. Except she’d landed a couple of speaking parts, some line work to rehearse while the rest of us pretended to eat our Cobb salads and hoped for a SAG card.
Valentine had a muscle car, an old Mustang the color of mayonnaise, eggshell interior. We rode around together—picnics in Culver City, bottles of burgundy in the trunk. She wore poom poom shorts and cat eye frames. I wore an ascot and made faces in the rear view: sultry lips, pouty lips, all the lips in my bag. I pretended I was Holly Golightly, or Audrey Hepburn, really, and if not Audrey herself, someone who looked okay standing behind her. Just another pretty roach on 57th and 5th, the Tiffany’s storefront window.
We drove fast and made believe the world was smaller than it was. Like we could fit it all behind us. We were fueled by something, an ancient thing that charged our angst.
Valentine said it was the red wine. She said it was poverty.
She had other friends, too: women who smoked Newports to the filter and stuffed their ankles into pale blue Crocs; dancers squirreling money away and never making any pretense about night school, finals week; women whose indifference was earned, worn like a second skin, and not just a projection.
And this was the essence of us: we were poor and we knew it.
4.
One morning, Valentine smashed the ceramic cookie jar we kept over the fridge. Mostly copper coins, some silver. I was at the kitchen table, harvesting marshmallows from my cereal.
Alright friend, she said. Tough love time. We’re out of cash and favies and parties to ask them from. But we’re young and we’re beautiful in the youngest, most beautiful town in the world.
Valentine called it our silver lining, the fact we were born women.
It does more than move velvet ropes, she said. Our silver lining makes magic happen. Valentine lit a cigarette and spread our bills out on the table. Past due. Remit soon. She said: Want to make these disappear?
Every day for ten days Valentine taught me her disappearing act. We shoved her box spring into the corner to make space for the brass pole. Her room was a makeshift stage. Bottles of bronzer on her vanity, bottles of dye.
She taught me how to climb the pole, how to invert myself. There were names for the things she taught me, animals mostly: the Firefly Spin, the Bee’s Knees. Remember, she said, the pole is a prop, not a dance partner. It’s like one big dildo all the little dildos fuck you with by proxy.
The little dildos? I said.
All the guys in the room, silly, she said. Just keep your snatch on the brass and you’ll be fine.
So everyday for ten days I kept my snatch on the brass.
I told myself I was fine.
5.
I told you about my first night. The club was full—peopled with silhouettes in trucker hats, mustachioed men—a hither and thither scatter of bravado and loose bills. It felt like hell would feel. Like some wobble bass purgatory, every lost soul waiting for deliverance—or really just a blowjob, a mound of hair to lock their teeth onto. I locked myself in the bathroom stall and lifted my feet up, thinking: I want to make these disappear.
Valentine found me in the stall, but I doubt she had to look hard. She came prepared. I held the martini glass while she crushed two pills into powder and sprinkled it over the drink like some kind of garnish. Abracadabra, she said, whisking me away. I want you to meet someone.
He was a regular. An old man. Pockmarks on his face, dreadlocks like a portion of spaghetti on his head. He had gold fronts and every dollar he pressed against me put my skin into quarantine—or maybe something less tangible, even, like my soul.
He smelled like lavender tonic.
He smelled like pomade.
He smelled like wildness distilled into tiny bottles and sold in all those ethnic storefronts you see out the transit bus window. Did you never see them, poet? Those times you stared out the glass like there was something only you could see. Weren’t you ever really looking? The wild things all around us.
We found a private booth.
I wore the man’s money on my hips.
I traced his pockmarks with my fingers and when he climbed on top of me it seemed like Mother Nature herself were vindicated.
My second skin earned.
I told you these things and you cried in that way people cry when other people are watching.
6.
There are times people ask me about me. I smile and tell them about cockroaches. I tell them they cannot be drowned, frozen or starved. That they sense danger. I tell them they weren’t put here to outlast everything—god didn’t make apples just to drop them on your head, after all—but they will.
It’s like that time we signed you up for that open mic downtown. And you were mad because you had to follow the feminist poet—a pixie-cut barista, her notebook dense with girl power. (Sapphic ballbusters, you called them.) There was a tattered couch in the corner, Turkish grounds on the floor. I sat next to a guy with a hobo bag and a lapdog. While you were reading, he leaned in and whispered in my ear. He’s talking about you, right?
Not me, I said, taking his Papillion into my arms. Just my nuances.
Your nuances?
Only the lovely ones.
We pet his lapdog together while you compared my loveliness to a summer’s day, a springtime shrub. Her loveliness is a springtime shrub, you said.
The Papillion licked my fingers. Its owner asked me who my favorite president was.
All the dead ones, I said.
We locked ourselves in a bathroom stall. His dog, perched on the toilet tank, watched us. The man didn’t speak. He tore at my skirt. He hanged my panties on the coat hook.
When it was over I watched him zip up, hawk phlegm onto the tile.
Did you know some roaches mate for life? I told him, lighting a cigarette. They just stay pregnant forever. Did you know that?
If the man knew, he didn’t say, just gathered the Papillion in his arms, pressed a bill into my hand, and left.
I sat on the toilet bowl and held my feet in the air.
I heard the sound of snapping fingers and knew you were waiting for me.
I closed my eyes and imagined I could wait there forever. I would sit and molt until my dead skin formed piles around me, until the piles grew so large the world would be tiny in comparison, infinitesimal. I would take the world then and leash it, and it would put up such little resistance it could hardly be said to have resisted at all. The world would finally know who owned it. It would know all about it.
I opened my eyes and flushed the cigarette down the toilet.
I put my panties in my purse and went back out to you.
I was fine.
“Cockroach” originally appeared in Fourteen Hills and has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
More About Fourteen Hills
