Swell Zine: Art, 1977

"Got anything?" Adrianne had wandered into the bathroom after first period English where they had been discussing Shakespeare. Diane was leaning against the bathroom wall, staring straight ahead, exhaling. Got anything?

Adrianne stared back, the lines from Macbeth echoing in her mind— "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/"—

Adrianne could recite Shakespeare but she had no answer to the desperation lurking in Diane's clenched shoulders and in her angular arms padlocked across her ribs. Adrianne stared into Diane's sea green eyes. She could fall into those eyes and swim in them— she felt herself floating on salty waves. Then Adrianne remembered the question, looked away and shrugged, uttering one syllable, "Nope."

"I wish Art would hurry up and get here." As Diane spoke, she looked away from Adrianne as if the fact that she didn't have anything to smoke, pop, snort— anything to alter the reality of her life into something tolerable— made her not worth looking at. Diane leaned back further— as far as she could— into the bathroom wall, as if she was trying to escape something monstrous coming toward her. Her next class. A morning without getting high. The rest of her short life.

Diane exhaled— a sigh pushed out a stream of smoke, from her lungs, past her pale gums and pink lips. The force of it came from the bottom of her life. Adrianne took a step back and studied the wall. The building had just been built a few years ago and the tile was still new, but some of the tiles were already cracked and a permanent film, the residue of smoke, dampness, stifled dreams, had settled in.

"Art will come." Adrianne felt the presence of Art, somewhere nearby, revving her engine, straddling the black leather seat of her motorcycle. When she arrived, she would lead them away from everything, even themselves.

Everyone waited for Art.

Five minutes later, she strode in— taking them, almost, by surprise. While the others were standing in front of the bathroom mirrors examining their flaws, Art planted her feet with the certainty of a boy. She came toward them and opened her hands to reveal pockets of tinfoil— everything glittered. Art bent reality into something they could live with. They felt the wind on their faces as she took them down endless country roads. They followed her to the large bathroom stall on the end and crammed themselves inside. Every cell in Adrianne's body crawled toward the square of tinfoil filled with THC, meth, anything. Adrianne, and the others, didn't ask.

Adrianne took out a dollar bill, rolling it up from end to end until it was a short thick straw, a mode of transport for the white powder to enter her bloodstream. She inserted this into her left nostril, leaned down to the white powder on tin foil and sucked it in. A cold numbness spread from her nostril to her mind. She was climbing an ice covered mountain peak and then spiraling through the sky. Her fingers gripped a cloud. Art leaned against the closed stall door behind her. Dana snorted more than her share and then said she had to leave. The girls pressed themselves away from the stall door as it opened and closed, Dana's laughter trailing behind her.

There was a little more space, but the four of them— Helen, Diane, Art, Adrianne— were still crammed in the stall. Adrianne felt trapped. She looked up to where a metal bar ran above the top of the bathroom doors. Stepping onto the toilet seat, she put a hand on the top of the door, a foot on the inside wall and shimmied up until she was perched atop one of the stall walls. She thrust her long slim legs in the small opening between the stall door and the square metal bar on top of it, pulling herself up to a sitting position. She was as high in her universe as she could go.

"Yeah. Don't fall on me." Diane tilted her head, looked up, and scowled. Then she looked down again, licked her finger, and ran it across the emptied tin foil for the last traces of white powder. Diane was getting high. She should be happy but nothing was ever good enough for her. Adrianne sat on her perch wishing that she could give Diane something that would make it all better. Flight, perhaps. Together they could take wing.

Art bent over and pulled up the right pant leg of her jeans. She stood up, holding a miniature bong. She filled it with water from the sink that was inside the large stall. She filched a pot filled baggie from her back pocket so fast that it appeared to come from nowhere, pinched some clumps between her thumb and forefinger and deftly placed them in the small metal bowl attached to the mini bong. Pssst...a struck match... and then the hot bubbly sound of smoke sucked through water. Small clouds of pungent smoke drifted up to Adrianne. The air became hazy with smoke. Adrianne looked through the haze and the tiles on the wall across from her began to ripple into waves. The smoke was a kind of writing in the air, telling the story of four teenage girls. Adrianne looked down into the stall. Art was looking up at her, holding the bong aloft as if it were a chalice.

Art stood apart from everything. She was a girl and not a girl. She held herself back from the world and at the same time tore through it. She rode her motorcycle everywhere she could and refused to wear a helmet. The wind carved wings into her hair. The art teacher— the one who took notice of their clever comments, their spontaneous drawings— pleaded with Art. "Sweetie,"— that what she always called her— "you're going to kill yourself on that bike if you don't wear a helmet." Art just grinned and did what she wanted.

Adrianne was raucous and often a ringleader. But— even as she grinned back at Art and slowly climbed down to take the bong— she felt shy in the immensity of Art. Adrianne did not dare imagine herself wrapping her arms around Art or straddling her legs on the leather seat behind her. It was unthinkable to imagine lying down next to her and immersing herself in Art. Instead, Adrianne wanted to become her. She wanted to become Art. She did for a while become Art. She dealt in nickels and dimes.

Adrianne always had some left over for herself and her friends and she began to feel powerful. Until one day when she got caught, and then she never dealt again. Even if she wanted to, she couldn't have. Her supply was cut off. Helen had been her supplier— passing along the nickel and dime bags from her older boyfriends. Now Helen no longer trusted her.

Art had moved on and now mostly hung out with a tougher, more adult looking crowd of girls who did harder drugs. Every risk she took led to another. The art teacher was still on her case about wearing a helmet when she rode her motorcycle. Art's new answer to everything was, You have to die of something. The lines of her smile flattened into the horizon behind her. Her eyes glittered. She came to school less and less. One day she showed up with a helmet under her arm. "I knew you could do it." The art teacher beamed at her, her teeth white in a perpetually tan face.

Art was wearing that jacket the last day that Adrianne saw her in school. They took her away several hours after a girl flipped out in English class. She was one of the girls in Art's new crowd and she had overdosed on horse tranquilizers. She was a girl, not a horse, and the tranquilizers caused her to go blind temporarily. The narc came to get her and she was led, screaming, from the room.

They were studying Chaucer and the teacher wanted to get back to it. This was one of the same teachers who made derisive remarks about the vo— tech students who were enrolled in "Reading for Enjoyment" and were graded based on their oral reports on pulp novels. The teacher didn't see what was in front of her. She didn't understand that literature had come to life. Last semester, she had taught Euripedes. Now, the Maenads had come back. They were shrieking. They were screaming. They needed her help.

The teacher had The Canterbury Tales open in front of her. She was making mental translation from the Middle English, words that she would never teach. Frere, feere: companion. Dey: die. Fay, fey: faith.

She was underage and her sentence was short compared to what it would be in the future.

After Adrianne graduated from high school, she saw Art one last time. Art was standing on the footbridge that arched over the narrow creek that divided one housing section from another. Adrianne had caught crayfish in that creek when she was a child. She had dug clay from its banks and turned it into winged creatures and coiled snakes. Reeds grew near the bank and children still played there. The bridge attracted groups of teenagers who lounged against its metal railings as Art did now— alone. The creek— that thin flashing trickle cutting through mud and rock— was a magnet. In another time, Art could have been a deer drawn to water. But now she was simply a girl who had been let out of jail.

When Adrianne walked down the hill that led from the drive to the creek and saw Art, her heart thudded. She thought she had forgotten all about her, but she recognized Art immediately. Her hair was windswept. Her right hand was thrust into the hip pocket of her jeans as she leaned back against the railing and stared off into thin air.

Adrianne had bought a moped by then, a mini motorcycle. It didn't occur to her that when she bought it she was trying to be Art. She drove it on back roads and on the shoulder of interstate highways, not bothering to wear a helmet. Once she had driven it drunk, weaving in and out of traffic. She was sexually involved with a few guys— dating, she would call it later— who drove bigger motorcycles. She sat behind them, gripping their waists, swallowing terror and spewing laughter, gulping a beer in traffic.

Art was haggard, a shadow of her former self. Her grin was a tilted flat line across her face. Still, Adrianne knew she would always feel awed in the presence of Art. Both nodded. Neither said hello. They couldn't acknowledge that time had passed and that Art had spent that time behind bars. Art pulled her hand out of her pocket, uncoiled her fingers, and revealed a tinfoil packet, glittering in sunlight.

Adrianne said she was broke. She was lying and Art knew it. The truth was that she had stopped snorting things up her nose. That much she had managed to do. Art's grin shrunk into a short frown. Her eyes were glass marbles. She was eighteen years old and she had seen too much. Adrianne walked on. Art stood there leaning against the metal railing of the footbridge, waiting for someone who would pay. Soon she would return to the place from which she had just been released.

Adrianne walked away. She crossed the bridge and wandered up the grassy incline on her way to the section of houses where Diane lived. She remembered Art when the two of them were girls— when she was handsome and nimble, the prince who visited every girl's childhood. Art was magic. She was a fleet footed deer stamping her hooves at the edge of wilderness. She could have been a clear spring, the source of everything. But Art was just a girl with an arrow pointed at her heart. As for Adrianne, a piece of her pierced heart would always be riding the wind. Art.

Janet Mason's literary commentary is regularly featured on This Way Out, an international gay and lesbian radio syndicate aired on more than 400 radio stations in the U.S. and also in Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe. She is an award winning poet and prose writer whose work has been widely published and anthologized in such places as the Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, the Brooklyn Review, American Writing, Chiron Review, and Drive: Women's True Stories of the Open Road from Avalon Books. She is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, two from Insight To Riot Press. "Art, 1977" is an excerpt from her novel Hitching to Nirvana, which has been excerpted and favorably mentioned in The Kirkus Review. She teaches novel writing at Temple University and more of her work can be found at www.amusejanetmason.com