Sometimes my mouth is so dry and my skin so sensitive that I have to do math in my head just to prolong it.  Your hand is in my hair and I’m reciting the fibonacci sequence to myself, trying not to think about the juncture of our bodies, heat transfer, liquid between my thighs.

I’m so dirty inside.  I’m reading your track marks like a star map.  I’m not ready to come up to the surface yet.

Then everyone kept dying, and I decided I wasn’t going to miss people that much anymore.

That night we fought about his wife.  We were drunk.  He had to buy the beers because I was only eighteen.

“Why are you even here with me if you aren’t sure you want to get a divorce?”

“Because I love you.”

“Fuck off,” and I probably threw something.

One night in Bel Air at Anna’s house:  she was having some kind of movie party.  There were a lot of us, drunk.  I was mad.  I never got mad like that when I was sober.  I was mad and wanted to leave.  I started swerving around the living room.  Daniel got up and helped me to the car. He blocked the driver’s side.

“I’m fine to drive,” I said, giving him an evil look.

“You’re not driving.”

Then, and I still don’t know where this anger came from, where it was hiding inside of me, because I don’t think I’ve ever felt it since and am not sure I felt it before, I reached back and slapped him across the face.  I tried to punch him but he caught my arms.  I was loud, it was late on Linda Flora.  Porch lights set well back from the street behind manicured gardens full of succulents and marble paving stones turned on.  No one came out.  They don’t do that in Bel Air I don’t think.  They just put on their lights and call the cops.

I don’t know the progression, but I ended up driving.  I drove down those twisted streets slowly, trying to prove that I was capable of driving in my state.  Daniel wasn’t talking.  When we got to the stop sign at Bellagio and Moraga, I shifted into park and got out of the car and walked to the passenger side.  He slid over and got behind the wheel.

Those days I wanted to feel everything, so if I wasn’t driving I would sit on the windowsill, my upper body outside of the car, hanging on to the roof, telling the driver to go faster so the wind would hit me harder.

“Podemos hablar en español,” I said, but he ignored me.  After a while I stopped listening and just watched the way his stomach moved on his inhalations, and the drops of sweat snaking their way down his chest onto the mattress, bisecting him at his rib cage.

I wanted to be back on that dirty mattress with him, drunk and dizzy, not caring.

His friend dropped us off in front of a yard with a rusty chain link fence.

“Talk,” Fernando said and gestured toward a woman sitting at the far end of the yard, “entre mujeres.”

I walked back, threading my way through old car parts and metal barrels filled with newspaper and rags.  The ground was muddy with green weeds pushing up everywhere.  There were a few children running around and a couple of skinny old dogs.  The girl stood as I approached and asked if I wanted a coke.  She addressed me using the formal “you,” and I felt uncomfortable. I wiped the back of my hand over my mouth, hard, trying to get rid of the stain of last night’s lipstick.

The toucans began croaking in the banyan trees.  Dark clouds were moving in and the air was thick and heavy.  The air tasted like salt.  I felt my skin, nostrils, lungs, throat being hydrated.

She sliced white crescents from a coconut, squeezed lime and sprinkled chile, and then handed the pieces to her children.  When she bent down her braid fell forward.  I wanted to grab that braid and hold on.  It was black and shiny except at the tips where it had lightened and dried out, bleached by the jungle sun.  I thought it would probably feel warm and real in my hand.

“You don’t have to stay,” Fernando had said when we woke up that morning, still half drunk.

“Yes I do,” I said.  ”Now I do.”

“Why are you here?” the girl asked.

“Vacation,” I lied. Her eyes shone.

“Have you traveled?” I asked.  She shook her head.

“I want to move to your country,” she said.  Her kids were gathering under the tin roof and sitting on boxes, getting ready for the rain.

“This is paradise,” I said, and gestured to the palms hanging low, the reddish gray sky.  She looked at the children, the rotting wooden floorboards, her husband and Fernando smoking cigarettes by the road.  “No, this is not paradise,” she said.

We took a taxi back to my hotel.  Fernando couldn’t hustle me for anything else, I was broke, so he kissed me and walked across the street to the lagoon.  I waited on the beach for a while, watching the sun set in slivers where the clouds separated.  When I went inside the chill of the room shocked me.  I turned off the ac and opened the sliding glass door to the balcony.  I opened the screen and turned off the lights.  I didn’t care about mosquitoes or other bugs right then.  I kind of wanted someone  to drink my blood.

Malibu.  I can feel my bones and muscles inside me, breaking, stretching.  My skin is hot and bumpy, my hair hurts where it is attached to my scalp.  There is a growing fire in my chest and I feel like it’s burning me from the inside out.

My brain is hyper-alert, receptors suddenly stripped, shallow reserves of dopamine depleted by the last orgasm.   My body seizes and jerks.

The pain was visceral and fulfilling, terrifying.  Pain seems like such an inadequate word.

But I knew I was alive.  The kick was in every cell, violent, and I felt it.

It was December and freezing and we would huddle on the balcony smoking and trying to feel better.  We could hear the ocean at night.  I was always trying to smell it.   I didn’t sleep for a long time and I couldn’t stay still. So I watched vh1 all night on the flat screen TV and tried to read a Kurt Cobain biography and tossed and jerked and froze and ached in that luxury room: high thread count sheets, plush carpeting, walk-in closet, ocean view.  I remember the curtains were dark blue and very heavy. I took a bath when I could, because hot water was the only thing that could make my body stay still. I could rest there, and would fall asleep until I slipped too low and water in my nose woke me up. Then add some more hot water and try it again. It was the only sleep I got those nights. As soon as I got out of the water it was horrible again.

It felt lonely. Once I went upstairs and lay on the white couch next to the night RA while he watched a martial arts movie and dozed. “Have you ever kicked heroin?” I asked. “No,” he said, “but I’ve been with someone who has.” Later I found out it was his girlfriend, a dope addict who had relapsed once since they had been together. I was jealous of that girl and later tried to find out all about her. Someone told me that she was an artist, really cool, had a kind of seventies style, “like Charlies Angels.”

One night we ordered pepperoni pizza and then Daddy bought me ten dollars worth of tokens for the games.  While we were waiting for our food we played skeeball.  Daddy made trick shots, banking the wooden ball against the side of the alley to get it in the forty or fifty point hole every time.  I was okay but I usually only got it in the ten point hole.  Daddy played so well that by the time our pizza was ready he had already won enough tickets for me to trade in for something good like a small stuffed animal.  I only ever won enough to get an 8oz chuck e cheese drinking glass or glow in the dark vampire teeth.  The little metal slot under Daddy’s skeeball lane had already spit out a strip of red tickets long enough to make some little kids stop and stare.  I grabbed those tickets and tore them off at the base, folded them and put them in my jeans pocket to save for later.  We decided to keep our tickets until we had enough to trade in for a really big stuffed animal.  I had my eye on a sitting white lion with clear blue plastic eyes and a black nose whose head almost reached my chest.

After we ate I went back into the arcade and Daddy went into the room with the big screen TV to drink red wine and watch sports.  That room had the biggest TV I had ever seen.  In my memory it takes up the entire rear wall of the restaurant and the football players are life-size.

First I played Centipede.  I kept the shooting button pressed down continuously so as the fluorescent yellow or green or red centipede made its way back and forth and down the screen I just had to manipulate the trackball.  I liked the sharp little sound the bullets made as they hit the insect and separated its body into segments.  There were different electronic tunes that would signal an occasional spider, flea or scorpion.  All the insects would kill you if you didn’t kill or evade them first.  Sometimes you could trap a centipede between two mushrooms and destroy all of its segments in a matter of a few satisfying seconds of rapid firing.  Centipede was like a warm-up for Zaxxon, a newer game which I played like an expert.  Zaxxon was one of the first 3D arcade video games and the object was to shoot everything in sight from your plane as you flew forward in a floating fortress, rising up and swooping down in order to avoid walls and laser barriers.  When you reached the end of the fortress you were in open space and you had to destroy a fleet of enemy fighters.  Then you were back to flying through a different, trickier fortress.  After making several passes you fought a final boss – a giant robot who fired missiles.  I was a natural at Zaxxon and I had learned to finish the whole game.  I knew one of the secrets: shoot at every transparent laser barrier—your bullet’s impact will show you exactly where the barrier begins and ends.

I played Zaxxon for another hour.  I got one of the high scores and put my initials in.  I watched the other moms and dads come and tell their kids it was getting late, time to go home.  I could stay as long as I wanted.  Daddy would keep on drinking and sitting in that TV room until I told him I wanted to go home.  When I was tired of the game I went back into the dark room and stood next to his table.

“Hey ali pali,” he said.

“We should go home,” I said, “they’re going to close soon.”

“Let’s just rest here for a little while,” he said.

I waited.  He was watching highlights of a football game and finishing a glass of wine.  As the clip changed to a commercial he turned to me.

“You can never be a cheerleader, Allison,” he said.  His gaze was unfocused.

“Why not?” I asked.  I had no intentions of becoming a cheerleader and I kind of knew this answer already but I didn’t like to be told what to do.

“Cheerleaders are sexual objects,” he said flatly.

“They are like dancers or gymnasts,” I argued.

“No,” he said, “they are just for sex.  Men look at them and want them.  They are wearing short skirts.  It’s dangerous.”

I wouldn’t win this argument; my father had ten years’ worth of playboys under his bed.

“We should get going,” I said.

He got up, a little unsteady on his feet.  He complained he had a stomachache.  I thought it was probably the red wine.  Usually at Chuck E Cheese he got a pitcher of beer.  At home he drank vodka and told me it was water.

As we pulled out of the strip mall parking lot Daddy started talking again.  His voice sounded low and crackly, like he was straining his throat muscles to speak.  We turned right onto Laurel Canyon.  The car was moving very slowly.

“Someday I might have someone, a woman in my life, Alli,” he said.  “I’m an adult and your mother is not here.  Your mother was interested in other men.  You have to understand if I go out with another woman.”

He waited.  I didn’t say anything.

“Alli?”

“Okay,” I said and stared out the window.  I studied the signs we passed:  Liquor, Wine, Beer; $1 Chinese Food; Chevron; Rocky’s Raquetball; Bob’s Big Boy.

“Because I am a man and I still need some things from a woman.  I might go out to dinner with someone.  A lady.  I’ll still love you more than anyone else.”  He paused again and I felt like he was waiting for some response from me.

“Mm hmm,” I said.

“No one will ever replace you Alli, you know that.  I couldn’t live without you.  You are everything to me.”  He stopped talking for a couple of minutes.  I was watching the light bulbs around the sign for Al’s Alibi.  They were timed so that it looked like one light was racing around the perimeter of the sign.  But one bulb was broken, right above the apostrophe.  This had the effect of making the racing bulb pause for a second, like it needed a rest.

“You need to be careful, Allison.”

I finally looked at him.  His eyes were on the road, his head was tilted a little to the side.

“Okay,” I said.

“You need to be careful, Allison,” he said again, “there are bad guys, boys, they will want things from you and they will try to persuade you.  You should not ever be with boys.  It’s not safe for you.”

I felt a familiar nausea rising up inside me and a lump forming in my throat.

We pulled into the driveway and as soon as he put on the parking brake I opened my door and got out of the car.

“Hold on Allison,” he said while he got out of his side, slowly.  I waited.

“You know I love you Alli?”

“Yes.”

“You know you are everything?  I love you more than anyone.  I can’t live without you.”

“I know, Daddy.”  I didn’t want him to see that I was upset.  I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye because I didn’t know what would happen if he saw me crying.  He would either sink into self-hatred so horrifying it would make me guilty for weeks or he would become so attentive I would become desperate for escape.

Daddy opened all the locks on the front door and we went into the darkened house.

“What do you want to do? Watch TV? Play Atari?”  We had a new big screen TV and a smaller TV that was used only for Atari.

“Watch TV.”

He turned on the TV and reached into the console and changed the channels until I found something I liked.  It was “Love Boat.”  I knew after “Love Boat” there was “Fantasy Island.”  “Love Boat” was funny but the show I really liked was “Fantasy Island.”  When Daddy stayed up to watch with me he would imitate Tattoo saying “The plane, boss, the plane!”  I would say “Smiles everyone, smiles,” just like Mr. Roarke.  I desperately wanted to spend a vacation on a tropical island with Mr. Roarke and Tattoo.  I heeded the barely-hidden message in every fantasy – be careful what you wish for – and I didn’t want to be one of the regular guests.  I wanted to be a host.  I wanted the satisfaction of showing people that appearances can be deceiving.  I thought I would be a kind and gentle host and when I wasn’t helping my guests realize the true value of their lives I could just run around in the bamboo and swim in the ocean.  I wasn’t allowed to change the channels myself because the set was new and tricky and Daddy thought I might reach in and get an electric shock.  I would be fine if he fell asleep.  I had programming for two hours.

The next morning it was difficult for me to wake Daddy up.  When he finally sat up in his bed, clearing his throat and rubbing his forehead, he said he wanted to go out for breakfast.  We went into the bathroom to get ready and I started crying while we were brushing our teeth.  He brought me back into the living room.  Sitting down next to me, he put his arms around me.

“What is it, Alli?”

I leaned into his white tee-shirt and took some deep breaths.

“You were different last night,” I said.  I sniffed, swallowed, rubbed my knuckles in my eyes.

“What do you mean?”  Daddy looked down at me.  His eyes looked sad and old.

“Daddy please don’t drink red wine,” I said.  “You acted funny and I didn’t understand what you were talking about on the way home.”  I started crying again but I kept it under control, swallowing air whenever I felt a sob rising up.

“Okay Alli, okay.”  I knew he didn’t know why he was agreeing to this.  I knew he probably didn’t remember our conversation.  But he hated it when I was sad.  It tore him apart.

“Allison, please stop crying.  I won’t drink red wine anymore.  I’m sorry.”

“Promise,” I said.  I knew he couldn’t keep a promise not to drink anymore.  But he didn’t get the same way when he was drinking beer or vodka.  He hugged me and held me close to him for a long time.  He still smelled like wine but now it was mixed with sweat and sleep and toothpaste.

“I promise, Alli,” he said.  “I don’t want to make you cry.”

There was a dive bar where we drank Bohemia and tequila shots and played on a pool table with ripped felt.  It was impossible to make a straight shot.  It was freezing outside.  I didn’t know that kind of cold.  I still don’t.

“How’s your spiritual fitness?”  She asks.  And, “Go to a meeting.  Help someone.”  I will.  I trust her.  I will go tomorrow.

Right now I need to curl up around my child, let the heat of his skin sink into me, feel his heart beating so fast and close to the surface like a little bird.  When I wake up I will walk the dog, go to the gym, have breakfast with my mom.

I’m not sure why it’s always worse at night and in the morning.  Maybe the sunlight burns it up like mold.  Maybe I just need to sit in the sun for a while.