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MY GIRLFRIEND Was very modern. She wore plastic jump suits and red Fiorucci boots, she went dancing every night till two A.M., she read i-D Magazine and listened to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. When she began, through no fault of her own, to systematically smash my heart to bits last spring, I began hanging out every night at a place called On the Air. It was a little New Wave bar we used to go to together, full of sleek, heavily moussed modern girls who were becoming more and more of a mystery to me. They were all very Eighties, cooler than Madonna, hipper than hip. I'd lean against a wooden rail and watch comforting U2 videos splash against the screen, drinking screwdrivers and trying to figure things out. Like, what do women want? How can we understand them? Is this my fourth or fifth screwdriver?
Luckily, I could always count on Justine and Suzi. They were roommates and waitresses at On the Air, and they took care of me, bringing me drinks and waving off my money and being careful not to ask me how things were going with my girlfriend. Justine and Suzi were 19 and 24 and as ultrahip as girls can get. They were mini-New Wave celebrities in the Dallas scene, and sometimes they tried to explain to me what modern girls were all about. One evening, I asked them if they'd let me follow them around on a long Saturday night and write about what they said and did and danced to. I told them it might be helpful to many people and would place a grave responsibility on them, and they were both eager to do what they could.
"We'll take you to the Twilite Room and the Starck Club," Justine said. "We'll buy some ecstasy and go shopping for toys at four A.M. We'll even tell you about orgasms!"
I said I couldn't wait.
Our Saturday night was balmy. Late April breezes were rustling up from the Gulf and swirling around in the curve of the U-shaped apartment building where Justine and Suzi lived. I knocked on their door. Loud music was coming from inside. I knocked harder.
The door flew open and Justine stood there, panting, in a camisole and a pair of French designer jeans. "Come on up!" she said, already running back up the stairs. "I'm on the phone, and Suzi's in the shower." I had to pause a minute, though, from the sheer spectacle of their apartment. Apparently, a burglary had taken place. There was almost no furniture, and the carpet was covered with an amazing layer of tossed-aside things: clothes, newspapers, records, glasses with drops of wine in them, candy wrappers, Sweet 'N Low packets, lipsticks and a plastic armadillo with a bikini bottom draped on its face. The kitchen appliances were covered with fabric-paint graffiti, and there were Magic Marker messages on the walls (FOR JENNIFER'S SHOWER MARCH 14-LINGERIE).
"Up here," Justine called. I bolted up the steps to her room, where the theme from downstairs continued on a grander scale. She had transformed her boudoir into a walk-in closet, with all her clothes scattered in mounds on the floor. She was sitting on a sort of precipice in the northeast corner, twisting a camouflage-colored bra in her finger tips, talking dramatically to some guy on the phone. ("Well, honey, I swear ah just don't know.")
Justine and Suzi were in a transition period. just a few days before, On the Air had been closed by its landlord for nonpayment of six months' rent. Accusations were flying-people were blaming the club's demise on everything from cocaine to comped drinks. But the saddest thing was that Justine and Suzi had lost their forum, their stage. In the dark, skintight recesses of On the Air, they had maneuvered nightly through cool crowds, with trays of drinks perched on their finger tips and sleek new dresses hugging their hips. On the Air had been their element, and it was gone.
"I'm trying not to think about it," Justine said as she hung up and lit one of her trademark English cigarettes. "I'm trying to decide what to wear." She kicked at a pile of blouses and opened a door to reveal a stuffed closet. "I don't know if I should be innocent in white or deadly in black," she said. She picked up something from the floor of the closet, and as she did so, her breasts swelled against her camisole. "Hmmm . . . what do men like women to wear?"
As nonchalantly as possible, l suggested that what she had on looked just fine.
Justine just put her hands on her hips and laughed. "You child," she said. "You
poor, sweet child!"
Suzi called out hello from her bedroom. She and Justine are nearly inseparable, but they're very different. Justine is wild, suggestive, nearly six feet tall, and she has the careless, outrageous aggressiveness that comes with being both cool and 19. Suzi is soft-spoken, fragile; strikingly beautiful but in a calm, gentle way. It's as if her face were sculpted and the artist had put something sad into her blue eyes.
"Suzi just got back from Oklahoma," Justine said. "She was visiting her parents. Don't I look like a queen in my room?" She sank back down onto the thronelike mound of clothes, running her hand through skirts and lingerie as if she were testing the waters of a pool. "Dirty underwear. It's my life."
Justine!" Suzi called from her room. "Could you open my door a second, please?" Justine went out into the hall, and I heard Suzi say, "Is this too sleazy without a slip?"
"No, you look beautiful. You make me sick."
"It's not too sleazy?"
"No. You look like an angel."
Justine came back in, dialed the phone. She had directed me to a safe spot on her bed where I could sit without messing up anything "Hi, Mom, how are you?" she said. "Remember how I told you I was going out with David and Suzi tonight? Well, what do you think I should wear?" She took a drag of her cigarette, listened and waved her hand impatiently. "Well, that's you. You went to Smith. You're sensible. What color should I wear, white or black? Yes, Mother, I'll wear something flattering."
She hung up, decided to wear something deadly in black and fished a bottle of Soave Bolla out of a corner. It had been propped against the wall, and a cork was bobbing around inside it. Justine had taken a few swigs when she noticed me watching the cork. "You want some? Suzi! Do you want some wine?"
She found three plastic cups on the edge of the bathtub and rinsed them out in the bathroom sink, but by the time she measured the wine into the bottoms of the cups, it hardly seemed worth the effort. "I know," she said, brightening. "Go buy us some champagne. We'll be all ready to go when you get back."
When I returned with two cold bottles, the girls were putting on make-up. Justine, in a scooped-out black dress, was painting her nails with pink Wet & Wild, her stereo blasting out Seventeen Seconds, by the Cure. Ten feet away, in Suzi's room, a stereo was playing, less loudly, Love Song, by Simple Minds. Suzi was in a lotus position on the floor, facing a big round mirror leaning against the wall. She closed her eyes, brushed make-up across her face in delicate strokes, surveyed the results.
"It's so weird to be back from my parents'," she said. "It was so quiet there, in a clean house." Her prim, angelic outfit turned out to be a long white-cotton Twenties dress. Suzi's room was neater than Justine's but not by much. Fashion magazines were spread out all over, imported British monthlies that, when you opened them and turned a few pages, had photographs of girls who looked just like Suzi. The only orderly thing in the entire apartment was Suzi's suitcase, which lay open on her bed. Inside it, her clothes were neatly folded, her socks carefully rolled into identically sized balls.
"I hate that mushy song, "Justine said, walking in and scowling at the Simple Minds album. "It's so stupid, like, 'I want to trust you, / I want to be close to you."'
"It's nice," Suzi protested. "It's romantic. You don't like it because it's not sleazy enough for you."
"I'm sorry, but romance is dead in the Eighties," Justine said, gulping some champagne. "That's why men suck now, because they forgot what roses mean. It's just 'Hey, baby, wanna fuck?"'
"You'll like this song by Depeche Mode," Suzi said to me. "It's called Somebody, and a cute guy with blond hair sings it. It's pretty."
Justine made a face. "It's sappy, it's mushy, it sounds like shit! It's too desperate, too gross. It's like Norman Rockwell." Then she ran into her room and turned her Cure tape full blast.
While Suzi painted her eyelids with a tiny brush, Justine showed me a list of contenders for her "royal throne." On a wall between the bathroom and the bedrooms, in purple and red Magic Marker, were lists of dozens of names of men Justine and Suzi wanted to sleep with and/or marry. Most were celebrities, such as Mike Peters of The Alarm and Mick MacNeil of Simple Minds. Others were famous only around Lower Greenville, the funky Dallas neighborhood the girls lived in. All the names had little boxes beside them, and some of the boxes were notched with check marks. A scoreboard by Justine's door awarded 50 points for celebrities, five points for "gay boys."
"I'll tell you about modern girls," Justine said, twirling her empty cup around so I'd pour more champagne into it. "The only thing they want to have in life is fun. They live in dives, work yucky jobs, nothing glamorous, but it pays bills, and they have money for drugs, money for clothes, money to buy the pill each month, 'cause naturally fun equals sex, sex, sex. Modern girls are liberated; that's the key. I mean, we shave our armpits, but that's about it. No more of this tradition. And modern girls are good in bed; right, Suzi? And they're not hung up about anything. They get bummed with men occasionally, but their over-all attitude is 'Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke."'
"I think they're more open during sex," Suzi said, sitting on the carpet in her doorway, taking little sips of champagne. "It's more mutual fulfillment. Before, the guys were like, errrrrr"- she jerked her hands up in the air and scrunched up her face. "They were just all out for what they wanted, and you could lie there like a dead dog and they probably wouldn't care."
"But now we gotta get something out of it, too," said Justine. "Like, we'll get on top, we'll do positions we like, we'll find out ways-I don't care if it's in the shower or on a rug with cat fur, we do what we wanna do. Also, girls will buy guys flowers, too."
"What about modern guys?" I asked. "What are they like?"
"Usually, they're artistically inclined," said Suzi. "They run a wild art shop or a wild clothing store or a video bar, or they're video jocks or they work for the arts, and their hair is like . . . it's never parted in the middle or to the side, it's kind of disheveled. And I love baggy boxer shorts on guys. I like baggy pants and suspenders and rolled-up T-shirts, or else the James Dean kind of rebel look." She slipped a single black O ring onto her right wrist, then twisted a string of tiny fake pearls around it.
"So what if you met this perfect guy . . . what would you do?"
"For me, the ideal date would be sitting outside at a French restaurant," said Justine, "wearing my Korean Ray-Bans, drinking wine and having a cigarette in my left hand, talking to an ideal guy. He's got a suntan and disheveled hair and a cigarette and a goofy leather jacket, with nice Italian shoes with nice white socks. He'll talk about Camus or some great artist and talk about silly things, like what your roommate did to you when you were asleep. Then he'll take the half-wilted carnation out of the vase and give it to you."
"In a way, I'm so traditional," Suzi said. "To me, an ideal date would be to go on a picnic and have a basket with fruit and cheese and a bottle of wine. just sit around and talk and relax and enjoy each other's company. just to be with somebody."
The champagne was all gone. "Do you think we should go out somewhere?" Justine said. "It's only 11."
I'd borrowed my best friend's 1966 turquoise Tempest. It moves around corners like the Love Boat and roars like a Greyhound bus, but it has nice lines and a tape deck. We drove it to the Inwood Lounge, a sleek, high-tech bar with soundproof windows through which you can see foreign films playing at the moviehouse next door. There was running water along the walls, a revolving hologram of Marcello Mastroianni smoking a cigarette and a center table where Justine and Suzi sat drinking Bailey's on the rocks. They had said their hellos to half a dozen people on the way in, including a razor-thin bartender with a curly spit of black hair dangling down his forehead.
"That's Tony," Justine said. "He programs all the music they play here." Above the hum of the crowd and the rush of nearby water, a song by Bronski Beat was playing. Modern music.
Justine was running our table, switching topics of conversation every 90 seconds. ("David, did you know I've had three Greek guys in a row? It's incredible. . . . Suzi's been a vegetarian for six years. Me, six months. . . . I'm moving to England and getting married this year. just wait.") Then she froze, looked sideways and made a face.
"A guy just walked by who always bothered me," she said. "He always came into On the Air and tried some line on me. He's the kind of guy who wears skinny ties and goes, 'I'm New Wave!' All I could do was laugh at him." She took a drag of her cigarette and glanced at her roommate. "You're talking a lot, Suzi."
"I'm sorry." Suzi sipped at her Bailey's, looking over toward Justine's inept suitor. She'd been staring for a long time in the direction of Mastroianni's holographic image, seemingly in another world.
When she got up to go to the bathroom, Justine leaned over and whispered, "Suzi's depressed."
"What about?"
"I don't know. Probably this guy Bud. You know, that blond-haired guy who looks sorta like a British rock star? She's been going out with him for a few months, and he's a real jerk. I don't like him. You can't joke with him, and Suzi and I joke so much. And besides, he's fucking around."
We decided that just wouldn't do. We were getting drunk, and we wanted to be happily drunk. We wanted Suzi to be happily drunk. Justine stabbed her straw into her drink. "Our mission: Cheer up Suzi."
The lounge was fully stocked with upscale New Wavers. Models with electrified hair stood under neon lights and posed like friezes, clutching napkinwrapped drinks. As Suzi maneuvered her way back to our table, the neon seemed to spotlight her face and her long white dress, which swayed gently with each step.
"Doesn't Suzi look pretty tonight?" Justine asked.
"Yes," I said. "Hey, Suzi, tell David which one of us is sexier."
Suzi sat down and smiled, rolling her eyes. 'Justine will tell you she's ten points sexier and I'm four points bitchier."
"It's true! The Cosmo quiz told us! I'd used every position, so I'm 10 points over you."
"But you're five years younger than Suzi. How could you be so far ahead?"
"I've learned enough between 18 and 19 to last a lifetime," Justine At 14, I learned that men sucked; at 15, men sucked; at 16, men sucked dicks; at 17, I found out all men were gay; at 18, men sucked - and at 19, men are all getting married."
"I'm going to make a call," Suzi said. "This is too depressing."
"Depressing? Everybody falls in love with you! It's always 'Where's Suzi?' I can't even have a boyfriend without him falling in love with Suzi!"
We watched Suzi walk off toward the phone. "She's probably going to call Bud," Justine said, shrugging her shoulders. Then she pouted and looked provocatively toward the bar, so our waiter would come ask what she wanted.
By 12:30, we'd gravitated downtown to the Twilite Room, the only hard-corepunk club in Dallas. It shared a block with a bail-bond place and a porno moviehouse, and it was crowded with a mix of scuzzed-out young punks with violent haircuts and crucifix jewelry, drunken, aging punks left over from 1978 and SMU frat rats shooting pool. Justine introduced me to a blonde in her late 20s. "This is Terri," she She used to run that vintage clothing store Shady Lady. Now she's teaching me to be one."
We decided we were getting too buzzed; we needed something refreshing, like a few bottles of cold Mexican beer. A sexy bartender in a black prom dress pulled the tops off a few Coronas, and I took them back to where the girls stood lounging by the jukebox. Justine asked for a quarter to play The Day the World turned Day-Glo, by X-Ray-Specs, and we leaned against the wall, sipping our beers. Our attempt to cheer up Suzi had backfired, and now all three of us were feeling pretty bummed. Maybe it was from drinking wine and champagne so carly. It was stuffy and loud, so we retreated to a quiet spot, a fire escape that looked down on the grimy eastern edge of downtown. We sat down, clinking our bottles on the wrought iron, and Justine and Suzi talked about men. It wasn't like earlier in the night, though, when they had seemed like Eighties versions of Ann-Margret in Kitten with a Whip. Now they weren't joking around.
"It's weird how I met Bud," Suzi said. "We were giving away albums at On the Air, and I was throwing them down from the v.j.'s window, and I hit Bud on the head." She looked tired. She pulled her knees up to her chin and looked down at some Mexicans pulling up to the bailbond "I told myself when I started dating him, 'Don't fall in love with him, because that's the only way you can have a happy relationship with him.' I mean, he's a nice guy, but he has a lot of problems, and until he works them out, he won't be a good boyfriend-you know, someone who's able to give in a relationship. But noooo, what do I do?"
"Does he know you love him?" "No, I've never told him that. See, what's so stupid is I have a hard time admitting my feelings, because I don't trust men. Because I've been hurt so much."
"Why do we get stuck with all these bum guys?" Justine yelled. "We deserve so much better. I think that Suzi and I are two of the nicest, most ideal people to go out with, 'cause we're honest when we want to be. And we respect guys more than anyone I know."
"Like, with Bud," Suzi said"it's how he treats me . . . a lot of the time, it isn't the way you'd treat somebody you really cared about. It's like I have a really bad self-image at times, or else why would I put up with that?"
I was astonished. "But there must be millions of guys asking you out all the time! Nice guys, great guys."
"It seems like nobody ever asks me out," she said. "I've been stood up more than any girl I know."
"I don't understand why you'd go out with someone who makes you feel that way."
"It's because," Justine said, "there's no one else special to go out with who makes her feel important, and she's too good a person to feel lonely all the time."
The problem, the girls agreed, was just what Justine had figured out at 14: Men suck. They chanted it together, like a mantra, so loud that a couple of punks looked up at us from the sidewalk below.
"That says it right there," Suzi said. "I really respect men who are intelligent, who aren't into themselves or how they look. But every guy I've gone out with who was smart has been dry and boring, and then the ones I'm attracted to who are rebellious and fun, like Bud, are always promiscuous and not willing to have a relationship. It's, like, I give up, I really do. If somebody were to come along who was really caring, it would be 'Bye, Bud.' But right now, I'm just kind of waiting in there."
We talked a long time, about how Suzi didn't meet her first boyfriend until she was a shy sorority girl at Oklahoma State, and then, after two years, when they'd made plans to get married, she found out he was gay. And how none of the guys took Justine seriously, since she was only 19. And how they both loved to buy Brides magazine so they could look at the bridal gowns, and how they sometimes stayed up late at night talking about what they wanted to name their kids.
"I want to get married within a year," Justine said. "Preferably to Mick MacNeil of Simple Minds."
"I don't think I'm ever going to get married," Suzi said, touching her Corona bottle with her finger tips. "I've always wanted to, but I don't think I ever will."
It was approaching two when we climbed into the Tempest and drove across downtown to the Starck Club, the chicest, coolest club in Dallas. Created by the French designer Philippe Starck, it's the kind of place where Grace Jones gets flown in to perform for the city's slumming cafe elite and the top crop of New Wavers who used to go to On the Air. A line of BMWs and Porsches ringed the place; we had to wait awhile before a valet took the keys to the Tempest, and then the girls strode quickly up the Starck steps, slipped past three dozen people teeming against a velvet rope and swept inside with me in their wake, never slowing down as an alert doorman recognized them and whipped up the last rope between us and Starck's pulsing interior.
It was all smooth gray cement and cloudlike couches and curtains, packed with a writhing ant farm of night people.
"You know what we need?" Justine said.
"Ecstasy."
We'd discussed this on the drive over from the Twilite Room. Since itwas too late to get a drink, taking ecstasy was our only hope of slipping out of our gloomy moods into something more, um, comfortable. This was April, back in the good old days, when 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine wasn't yet illegal. We knew it was supposed to mess up your blood pressure and destroy brain cells, but this was Saturday and that was a price we were willing to pay.
Justine went off into the crowd, looking for some, while Suzi and I made our way to the bar. Amazingly, there were still a few seconds left to get a drink. We got four kamikazes for the girls, a double screwdriver for me.
Justine reappeared with two tanned, smiling guys who could have walked out of an episode of Miami Vice." These guys will go get us some X, but they want to see your money," she whispered to me.
I slipped some 20s out of my jacket pocket and one of them said, "A-OK!"
Justine's trip alone through Starck seemed to have revitalized her. She shot down her kamikazes and waved at people and kissed an enormous but infinitely graceful black guy who was wearing a tux and waiting tables. His name was Michael. He bussed Suzi, too, and gripped my elbow with his free hand as we were introduced, then went back into the breach to pick up glasses. It was nice meeting someone friendly there-sometimes, places like Starck can be just too cool to take. The Miami Vice guys came back with the X, three flat white tablets wrapped in a single piece of toilet tissue. I gave them three 20s and we took the X as casually as if it were aspirin.
Justine had barely swallowed hers when she yelled, "Yoo-hoo! Bart!" and ran over to retrieve Bart Weiss, the former videoprogram director at On the Air. She gripped the arm of his black-leather jacket and said, "You've got to dance with me. But wait here a minute." Suzi and Bart and I stood around talking for a while. A song by the Thompson Twins pumped from the dance floor, which was in a big pit in the middle of the place, and I found myself thinking about my girlfriend.
"It's really great being around people in such very good moods," Bart said. He had his own reasons to be bummed-On the Air was closed, and he was going through some rocky times with a woman he'd been dating for years. He was at Starck to have fun, to drink and dance with someone like Justine, but the sight of him made Suzi and me mope even more.
Justine came back, stripped off Bart's jacket, draped it on Suzi's narrow shoulders and turned him out toward the dance pit. "Well," she said, turning back to me, "I've conquered one man tonight."
Suzi and I leaned over a rail and watched them dance in the throbbing recesses beneath us. Justine swirled around so her black skirt would revolve, and her cigarette orbited around her, like a tracer bullet in the dark. After a while, we wandered back to the spotlighted stage and sat down on the steps, our chins in our hands. Every now and then, someone would come up and say to Suzi, "Excuse me, but I just wanted to tell you you look absolutely beautiful," and she'd smile politely and say, "Thank you."
I found a napkin and wrote Suzi a note: "So . . . is your life going the way you want it to?"
She read it, gestured for my pen above the noise of a New Order song and wrote back, "No-not at all." When I wrote back asking her to tell me her troubles, she wrote, "I can't-I wish that I could, but I'm sworn to secrecy."
Time passed. The X was kicking in big time. But instead of brightening our nights to the 120th power, it just seemed to make things more bleak. "I don't think we're in party mode," I wrote to Suzi, "and we're certainly not in Depeche Mode."
"I think," she wrote back, "we're in bummed mode."
Suddenly, with a calm, romantic detachment, I wondered whether or not I was in love with Suzi. I knew the X was part of it-you can fall in love with bright, shiny objects when you're on X-but I'd wondered about this before, without it, during those long, late nights at On the Air. I'd always dismissed it in the bright, sober light of the mornings after-I knew I was too straight, and maybe too plain, for her. The guys I always saw her with wore complicated leather jackets, tied bandannas around the calves of their boots and never seemed to smile. Their jaws were always dusted by a three-day growth of beard, and they regarded the world around them-or at least On the Airwith boredom and purposelessness. They made me feel too grounded, too true to life, almost like Ward Cleaver.
And yet . . . I'd always sensed in Suzi something deeper, more yearning, than the cool posings of the people she hung out with. She sometimes seemed bored by the whole scene, or at least resigned to it. Sitting on those steps, I remembered another explanation Justine had offered one night. "Sometimes," she'd said, "Suzi just doesn't like herself very much. It's something that happens with people who are perfect. They're real hard on themselves, and then they can't be happy. And that makes them not be perfect anymore."
I was in the middle of writing Suzi a long, important note when she suddenly stood up, dropped Bart's leather jacket to the floor beside me and walked away without a word. I watched as she stepped through clouds of cigarette smoke lit by bright spots of light, between people who had already paid tribute to her and up to a guy with disheveled blond hair, a guy who looked like a British rock star. Oh, yeah, Bud. I looked down at my napkin-the ink from my long, complicated note had seeped through it. She couldn't have read it, anyway.
When I caught up with Justine, it was after four and she was still dancing, this time with three gay guys. One of her partners was wearing an ascot and a blacklinen suit; he held out his white hands like fans in the air while he danced. Justine was a little drunk. She fell down once while I watched them slink around to Tears for Fears, and later she knocked over a chair on her way to the bar. "That guy's name is travis," she said, dabbing her forehead with ice water and pointing to a guy who'd said hello to her. "I met him at some frat party at SMU. I had a whole bottle of champagne to myself and he wanted some."
Justine waved to someone else, showing all her teeth as she smiled. She seemed to have limitless energy, but I was fading fast. I'd been foraging through Starck, looking for Suzi, for what seemed like forever, and I'd promised myself once again that this was the last time I'd ever do X.
"Have you seen Suzi?" I said. "She went off to have breakfast with Bud," Justine said, making a face.
"Oh." She led me back to the bathroom marked FEMMES, a needless distinction, since half the people inside were hommes. It was a huge room, all mirrors and stainless steel, with a cloudlike couch in the middle and stalls behind swinging doors. A refugee from El Salvador handed cotton towels to people who barely acknowledged her-they were too busy gaping at their frightful four-A.M. reflections in the fluorescent light.
"I'm so bored," Justine said, pursing her lips before the mirror, "and my hair looks like rat fuck." Then she straightened and put her long gold necklace between her teeth, like a bit.
I had dreamed of walking out of Starck and having the Tempest brought up so I could stroll outside with these two incredible modem girls on either arm, climbing into that turquoise cavern to the oohs and aahs of an adoring crowd. But when Justine and I got outside and stood together on the steps, waiting in line for a valet, I just felt like I'd been in a war or something. I saw someone I knew, and he asked me how things were going. Instead of saying, "I may feel worse than I've ever felt in my life," I shook his hand and said, "Oh, I can't complain."
Justine decided she wanted to go to Denny's for an egg and some hot tea. When we got there, the hostess and waiter did a Hello, Dolly! routine with her and gave her her usual comer table. On a whim, I ordered a Grand Slam Breakfast-I thought it might be what I needed. While we picked at our food, Justine talked about how Heroes, by David Bowie, was the most important song in the world. She talked about her plans to write a book called Justalonia's Guide to sex. She talked about how she wanted to be "Andy Warhol famous" and how she thought men should wear skirts to night clubs."It's the newest thing,"she said. "It's the androgynous look of the Eighties."
By the time I drove her home and saw her to the door, it was getting dose to dawn. A train was going by a long way away, a pickup loaded with Sunday papers pulled up to the curb and Justine kissed me good night on the cheek. I went back to the Tempest and stecred it west. I was in something my grandmother used to call a state. As far as I knew, I hadn't learned anything that could help me understand my girlfriend, that could help me understand women or anything at all. All I knew for sure was that I wanted to get home, fall onto my bed and go to sleep for a long, long time.
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