Liberation--November 1994

We have been apart too long, JP and I.

After our long summer of sneaking trysts, rage and poetry, it has been two months since we had seen each other; it was either that or homelessness for me. My mother had laid down her "one condition" for me to live at home during my separation from Dave: I was not to see JP, period. I have violated that rule exactly once--I drove to Palatine to pay a bill, then stopped at JP's mom's apartment on the way home; we stood in the door just holding each other in perfect silence for thirty minutes, and then I left. But I have told her in no uncertain terms that her one condition is ridiculous and unfair, and that I will go against it the first chance I got.

Finally, I tell her that I am going out the next night, to a concert, and that I am going with JP, and will accept whatever consequences were involved. All she says was "Fine, I can't stop you," and so I pick up JP, hours before the concert, and we kill time in Barnes and Noble, eat dinner at Gulliver's.

Later we walk up Sheffield, to the Metro, hand in hand. It is one of the first times we'd been able to go out without fear of being seen; in fact, we want to be seen, do anything we can to draw attention. But it is Sheffield, near the Metro; no one finds us odd, or even noteworthy. That is fine too.

Mazzy Star...how many nights that summer had I stood in the kitchen at Dave's mother's house, washing dishes and listening to "Fade Into You"? How many nights had I been lulled to sleep, finally, by _So Tonight That I May See_? And of course, Jesus and Mary Chain, the punk gods--and the combination made even more alluring by the alleged romantic link between the two lead singers...oh, it fits perfectly into our little rock-myth universe.

And of course, the stories say that both bands do heroin.

Junk is never far from our minds, even from the first. JP had done it, of course; I am still an innocent, but all that summer I had read every junk story, listened to every junk song, studied the priests of dope culture, pored over Burroughs. We pick over the texts the way scholars pick apart the Dead Sea Scrolls; we quote _Naked Lunch_ and _Junky_ the way evangelists quote the Bible. We have planned our path, and we are only waiting for the chance to take it.

Consensus is that we are crazy. Even my best friend, my closest confidante--even Celia, the girl who'd acted as my alibi all summer, the eternal answer to Dave's eternal "Where were you?"--even Celia thinks we were insane. From JP she expects it, of course, but not from me.

And maybe I am a little crazy--but it is a good kind of crazy. There had been one night that summer when I'd taken Dave's car and picked JP up at the Maplewood apartment, and we'd put _Siamese Dream_ on the car stereo and blazed up Lake Shore Drive, me and my lover in my husband's little blue Hyundai.

We came to a stop light and pulled up next to this big boat of a car--a Lincoln, a Caddy, whatever--with two very scandalized-looking elderly white folks looking at us from the front seat. JP looked at me for just a moment with a wicked little gleam, and then he grabbed my hair and YANKED me towards him and gave me a tongue-kiss deep enough that he could have licked my spleen. And of course Granny and Gramps in the next car went all saucer-eyed on us, and finally he broke the kiss and the light went instantly green and I SLAMMED the gas, my head thrown back, laughing like mad.

That was JP. That was me. That was us, back in the summer of 94, and now it is November and we are going to be together, and damn the torpedoes.

We stand by the speakers at the Mazzy Star concert, his arms around me, and I can feel life opening up around me, swallowing me whole, warm like water.