John
Vine Street
Kalamazoo, MI
August 2009
John could have been one of the young men in Binghamton, except this wasn’t a place like my hometown; this was my hometown. He told me he was an unemployed construction worker, and he patiently let me photograph him against a blue wall without saying much of anything else or asking questions.
I found him in the Vine Street neighborhood, where I spent nights during my teenage years communing with my friends in our hideout spots. We used our fake ID’s to buy Mickey’s forty ounces and Tijuana small cigars from the Oak Street Market and sat by the edge of woods bearing our hearts and ready to ditch our brown paper bags should a cop car roll by.
I had two best friends in high school and one of them was C. A few years ago, C moved back to Kalamazoo with her husband and three kids, and we’re still as close as ever when I come home.
Back then, C had short dyed black hair and black fingernails and was crazy in love with R, who lived in Chicago. R took the bus from Chicago to Kalamazoo on weekends and brought little bags of white powder, and to us, he was exotic and urban and unlike anyone we had met before.
R was from Argentina and he told all kinds of stories, most of which we realized eventually were not true. It took a long time to figure that out, and it was a sickening feeling when things just weren’t adding up. The one story I recall the most was about how his mother, who despised him, cooked his beloved pet goose, Bobo, and fed it to him for dinner. He was the victim of a lot of his stories, as perhaps many of us are.
But a born storyteller has charisma, and C and I were both enamored of R in our own ways. For a while, I imagined what it would be like to be him and to tell his elaborate stories and to live inside his small, tight, dark body that reminded me of a boxer or a matador. I didn’t understand until much later that he hated himself as much as I did.
Things were stormy with C and R, and I witnessed C’s first heartbreak that sent her driving off to Chicago in the middle of the night in her parents’ car and coming home to a lot of trouble.
The summer before I left for college, C and R and I went to a party and got drunk as usual. R pulled me outside the house and told me he had something important to tell me, and that could only mean one thing. He was forceful when he told me he loved me - and I could let almost anything happen to me - and we had sex on the grass of someone’s yard and went back to the party.
The next morning, C walked into my parents' house and yanked me out of bed. She forgave me in time, mostly I think because she knew by then that I liked girls.
I spent my last two years of high school in love with L. L moved to Kalamazoo from Salt Lake City as a freshman. She had long blonde hair and cat-like blue eyes, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her from the moment she walked into choir class. L’s family was Mormon and they lived my neighborhood, and I drove in circles around her house religiously.
L and I wrote letters almost every night and passed them to each other in the hallway in the morning before our first class. The letter writing continued for months or years, and one day L revealed that she had a crush on my other best friend’s little brother, and I was stunned and humiliated.
During the summer, we drove to the lake at night and I told her I made out with my friend, A, on Venice Beach during my trip to California in the spring. I told her how we were caught on the sand by the LA cops and spent a night in jail as “runaways,” and how they put us in separate cells and gave us a hard time about being two girls. L and I might have kissed that night except something inside me died suddenly when I told her all of that, and after I dropped her off at her house, I didn’t want to see her again for a long time.
I thought my last summer in Kalamazoo would never end and I couldn’t leave for college fast enough. My parents encouraged me to audit an English class at the school where my dad taught so I would have something to focus on, and I focused on E, a writer with a funny bowl haircut and an acute intelligence.
E asked me if I wanted to get a drink, and we met at a bar near Vine Street. We walked back to my house in an intoxicated blur and had sex on the couch in my parents’ living room and thank god she left in the morning before they woke up.
When I came back to visit from college, E and I sat in the kitchen of her house near the cemetery, and I took pictures of her and told her about my first real girlfriend and my first real heartbreak. She was reading Carlos Castenada and imagining spiritual journeys, and she seemed to find my earthly intensity and romanticism both touching and amusing. We slept on a mattress on the floor of her empty bedroom and understood we weren’t wired the same way but we talked through the night and shared our stories and our dreams.
