Today, I was reminded, in a roundabout way, of the 1980s. The pea green pleather chairs, the tawny brown sofas, tumblers etched with sunflowers—leftovers from the 70s where free love and psychedelics reigned supreme. Glittery beaded curtains that would tangle themselves into a kaleidoscope of color; I still remember one hand cleaving through the air, parting the glass. A man with suckers and sweets in his wet lap.
I see a woman on the stoop sipping her Bacardi real slow. She points to the blood in the street still fresh from the boys swinging baseball bats. Flashing their switchblades. She says, the dead don’t want nothing from us, but the living, shit, motherfucker will take and take until there’s nothing left. My mother lights a cigarette and it plumes over her eyes. One summer, a news anchor describes a a massacre in a place called Wonderland so depraved, so grizzly, it reminds them of the Sharon Tate murders. The camera pans to an apartment in California with blood on the walls. I am six.
We are children hopscotching over junk-sick bodies in the park. We are children who joke that the garbage gets picked up faster than the bodies. I am a child when I step into an apartment and a woman lays sprawled out on the floor, lights blaring overhead. Her mouth gaped wide. I lean down and her skin is cold and soft, like cashmere. I am a child leaning over a body and feel nothing.
The 1980s was Brooklyn and the summers so hot you needed to wade your way through. We’d swim through the streets and shouted up at apartment windows because we were screamers. Forget ringing doorbells and climbing stairs, forget the local phone calls that cost 25 cents, it was more like, Felicia, girl, are you home? Can you come out? The set of lungs on us. And the window would fly open and the curtains would part, cotton this time, and you’d shout down your reply. You remember jumping down the stairs, taking two at a time, and the how the cool the hallways felt. It was a dark that cradled you until you winced from the daylight.
And we’d sit on the sidewalks in our jelly shoes and grape juices and rainbow icy pops, making our plans. We were bored back then, and maybe we had a dollar split between us if we were flush, if we were lucky, but we’d make a day of it. Sneaking into Sunset Park and splashing our way through a sixteen-foot pool that stained your eyes red from all the chlorine and sweat and muck we brought in from the street. Sneaking into PG-13 movies to feel the air conditioning on our backs. We’d feast on one hot dog, four bites between us, and we’d poke and prod at our bodies and the strange shapes that began to take form. Shapes that made the boys linger.
At the pool, I walk by boys and grown men who whisper their wants—it wasn’t even noon and already I have to navigate the goings-on underneath a man’s shorts. Most days all I want to do was stretch a wall over my skin. Come winter, I wear complicated sweaters. One is blue and studded with silver stars. Another is tie-dyed and it looks as if I’m covered in bruises. But I can’t hide from the heat. I’d use my friends and their slim bodies for cover until night fell and we’d race home before the news inquired of our parents: It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?
The 80s was turning on the television in the middle of August and seeing snow. When my mother and her husband jetted off to Atlantic City to hit the big time, to play cards and slot machines and cut neat lines of powder in hotel rooms, I slip a tape into the VCR and press play. New York City Woman. Starring John Holmes. I am ten. I sit on the floor, confused. Everyone seems to be in so much pain, and the pain is violent, constant, and unrelenting.
The 80s was pressing play and maybe my mother would be home smoking a Kent 100 down to the filter playing Sade on the record player while I turn the volume on the TV down low, or maybe she wouldn’t be there at all. But it’s the playing I remember. The need to fill the empty spaces. Wanting to turn the volume up.
When I was twenty, I sat across my mother in a restaurant. It would be one of the last times we occupied the same space. I remember laying down my credit card to pay the bill and I watched the heat rise to her face. We walked in silence to the train station. Her with her cigarette, me and my gabardine suit and leather pumps. We were the image of one another but I could feel the chasm between us widening. The cracks became fissures became our parting. I didn’t need her anymore and she knew it. I no longer feared her and she knew it.
Months later, over a telephone line, she says, you know, John Holmes died of AIDS.
I told a lover this story and he gifted me the film as a gag for my birthday. I held the tape in my hands. The cover was white and discrete and I set it down on my bed. It’s meant to be a joke, he said realizing the gag didn’t come off. How do I explain finding porn in your house as a child wasn’t funny? Why do I have to explain it at all?
The 80s was Slick Rick on a boombox on the R train. It was Whodini’s “Big Mouth” on my record player. Lift needle, repeat. It was my mother blasting “Gimme Shelter” and swaying to the beat. It was my first boyfriend dancing to Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It To My Heart,” years before he thought he might be gay. He would type the words and rescind them just as quickly. Maybe for him the admission was a note that warbled, held for too long. He has a son. I don’t care if you’re gay, I type while on a conference call. I care, he types back.
The 80s were the horrible, cruel jokes that would make us sick with laughter and maybe we found it funny because horror rose up around us. Our parents with belts in their hands. The thumping on the floorboards and agains the walls because everyone was catching the beats. Watching our neighbors’ skin pale to yellow, smelling the crack that would make grown men run naked in the street screaming ants were gnawing through their skin.
During lunch, my first boyfriend would turn to me, face bone-white, eyes wide and unblinking. Felicia, I have AIDS. We would laugh and laugh until we had no laugh left in us. Decades later, I would spend a Christmas with a man who had HIV. I remember he cut his hand opening a bottle of wine and I wrapped it with a towel and pressed down hard to make the blood stop. We stood like that in his kitchen until he laughed and said although I wasn’t a man it was still nice to be held. I remember the cold I felt in that lunchroom in 1987 and the warmth of a man’s wounded hand in 2019 and considered the woman I’d become in the space between the two.