11/11/98

i used to sleep on the roof of the local convenience store, Quick Stop. Quick Stop had a sloping brown roof with wooden slats leaning in from twenty feet stretching towards the sidewalks on pratt avenue like teeth, listening for the playground at boone school. i used to sleep there, sometimes under boxtops on damp days, and outstretched in a t-shirt with my hands under my head during summer's warm sticky months. i didn't know about david bowie, didn't know about music except early 80s heavy metal which was the only choice for any kind of rebellion.

i used to hang out during the day on the black playground at boone school. i was a fixture, a constant. if you wanted me you could find me there. i was like a girl waiting for a phone call. i sat on the black tar, in front of the old steel basketball rims, waiting for someone to stop by, waiting for the days to pass, waiting for night to come and with it everything the night brings.

i used to sit on the rail in front of the Quick Stop with a couple of ugly strung out friends asking people for quarters, soliciting pints of vodka. we drank cheap, and with purpose. we drank to get drunk and we drank what we could afford. we disappeared into the overgrown brown river wilderness of the chicago canal. we had our spot, we dug a pit, we threw old cans and rocks at the rats darting along the water's periphery.

i used to sleep on the roof at Quick Stop drunken and stomach hurting, lost and weathered at fourteen. every year since then people tell me i look a little younger. now, at 26, people tell me i look my age. i used to sleep on the roof at Quick Stop before i discovered music, before i knew what i liked. before i met people like chrissy who i asked this year to buy me a single cup coffee maker. before i met people like her, before i had a use for forty dollar household items like a single cup conical filter coffee maker, before i had two bicycles, two tables, a couch that folds out into a bed, three lamps, a computer, a tiny radio answering machine with caller id. before i had any of these things i hung out on the playground at boone school rubbing my stomach waiting for someone to come walking by like a phone ringing, i slept on the roof of Quick Stop, climbing to the top, climbing the rungs of my society in torn canvas gym shoes that reeked of too many homeless nights and placing my feet one after another on the gutters and the garbage bins and crawling onto the roof of the Quick Stop, the neighborhood convenience store.

people encourage me to forget my past. i have been told now that i am older but look younger, i have been told by people i love, and who love me back, told to forget my past. they wonder when i will get over it. they don't realize that i am over it, and now it is my story. but stories evolve, change through time, they alternate and alienate and small details become lost and mired in lie and invention. i used to be afraid to lie, i used to drink down by the river, i used to think lieing was wrong and now i know that lieing changes the future's past. i used to sleep on the roof of Quick Stop and that was real because i didn't lie then. but now, i have to work, i have a job to do, i have to invent a palatable persona and i think that ten years from now, when i am 36, i will not be able to write about being 26, i will not know the truth from the fiction, who i was from who i had become. i got a letter the other day from my ex girlfriend, she is my past. she has encouraged me to get over my past. she said nobody knows her anymore because nobody knows who she was. i wanted to point out to her that the person people know now, who her new friends see, is she. i've been told to forget the past, i used to sit on the steel divider in front of the Quick Stop. when the past is true, it becomes the present.

last night, i was driving on the 580 past oakland's sleeping factories, many miles away from chicago's lost ruins, from the rats darting in and out of chicago's drunken canal. chicago's drunken green and brown canal where everyone always lost. where the neighborhood boys and the neighborhood girls lost thoroughly and without a chance. where the police came and rousted us from our drunken past with blood thirsty billy clubs, where we crucified pete brown in effigy and dug a grave for him, his lady in waiting. last night the darkness beyond oakland swallowed my tiny car in hues of midnight blue and funeral black. occasionally the wet street glistened under a headlight or misplaced street lamp. it was late. i used to sleep on the roof of the Quick Stop, i don't forget my past, i don't get over things. i evolve and i adjust. last night i was going to meet someone, someone i had met in a club. i have a tendency not to question, to go where i shouldn't, to open doors without knocking, to follow people when they give me a nod, to push the limits of distance, to look inside, to take chances. i was going to meet a woman, the night got darker, the streets wetter, the busy well lit streets and rolling hills of san francisco were miles away.

i came off the highway at dutton, already fifteen minutes late. in front of me the dull orange neon glow of the Quick Stop. i remember once, eleven years ago, thirteen years ago, i asked the guy behind the counter what had happened to the owner of the Quick Stop. i was told the owner, the man who started the original Quick Stop in my north side neighborhood in chicago, the Quick Stop i used to sleep on top of like a real life jack kerouac hobo except that i hadn't read jack kerouac yet and i was fourteen and in grammar school and my school was only half a block away from my roof top so it wasn't much of a walk. i was told the original owner had gone to california to open more stores. i came off the highway at dutton, i was greeted with the dull orange neon glow of the Quick Stop.

when i got to the girl's house i was twenty minutes late. it was cold and wet. i was greeted at the door by an over anxious pit bull, i was let in and told to sit down on the couch. the house was dark but i could see it was spotless, immaculate. i was wearing black pants, a black athletic shirt and a necklace. i had just showered. she was wearing sweat pants, her face was pock marked, she had large ears and a small mousy nose. she sat far away from me near the warm glow of her fire. her dog climbed all over me, i told the dog to sit, the dog did not sit, the dog bit at my arm until finally she got up and took her dog into the next room.

she told me a story about a guy she had tied up in a club, had blindfolded, and then had another man suck his dick. she asked me what i thought of that. i told her i wasn't into that at all. we talked for an hour, midnight passed. she told me some stories, asked me some questions. mostly shocking. i was relieved when she said she was going to go to sleep and walked me to the door. she said she had something planned for me. she said she was going to call me soon. she said she had something planned.

i climbed back into my small car and headed towards the orange glow of the san leandro Quick Stop. is this california i asked myself. san leandro is lonely at night. san leandro is a po dunk town where nothing much can happen, half an hour outside of the city. i parked at an angle and went inside. the store was not clean. not like the store i used to sleep on top of, where john and i had slept under box tops, where kevin and i had drank until my stomach suddenly went wrong and burned and i thought i was going to die, my insides eating my outside. i used to be visited by runaways, kids would leave home for two or three weeks at a time and stay with me on my rooftop, but when they went back i stayed. the Quick Stop in san leandro is not clean. i grabbed a suzy q and a bottle of orange juice from concentrate. i had gotten thirsty, my mouth had felt tight when i sat in the dark house talking to that strange woman. i wanted to say to the guy behind the counter, who looked vaguely familiar, i wanted to tell him, "do you know, before i went to graduate school, before i made good and became THIS, became who you see now, a man with a 1983 beaten down six hundred dollar honda, before all of this, i knew the original owner of the Quick Stop. before they even opened the second store on howard. way before they came out here and gave a job to your sorry ass. and the original owner himself had chased me out of his store at the end of a broomstick when a friend and myself wrecked havoc on his store and knocked all the cans of chef boy r' dee ravioli off the shelves. yes," i wanted to say, "i am that man."

i took my suzy q and orange juice back to my car and drove that old highway back into san francisco, thousands of miles away from a past i do not forget.