Otis Street

The beginning of a new performance piece. I'll be doing this one at The Marsh on Aug. 11:

Otis Street yawns for two blocks. It exhales gray. Its bad breath whips the trash like tumbleweeds. Breathe in and it’s like taking a giant cocaine snort of piss. The scent burns up your nostrils and percolates in your septum. You can’t do this drug too often, not unless you want a urinal for your brain cavity.

We're first-time addicts. We’ve taken his car over the bridge and past high-rises, newsstands, people snoring on the street. I’m wearing a skirt and a smile that blinks on and off, like a light bulb burning through the last bits of filament. His hand lies warm on my knee. I ask: “Are you nervous?”

“Are you kidding?”

Boy, does that piss me off. He’s tragically well-adjusted. I run my finger over his palm, looking for a hint of clamminess, but it’s as dry as the Sahara, the Kalahari, Southern California. I need him to share my insanity. I wish he could relate to the spikes that pierce the soft parts of my skull. But he just smiles and brushes my knee again and says: “We’re going to remember this night.”

That's what worries me.

We started in secret. You should know that. We started on a stool at a taco shop, amongst cubicles under flourescent lights, at a bar where he dipped a finger in cider and told me to suck it. I did. From there I fell. I tumbled down a dark rabbit hole and bumped my knee. Now he’s running his fingers along the wound, brushing it all better.