Baker drives us through the city, into its center and outward from there, up Wayne, and Wyoming, and into the state streets from there.
Everything looks familiar, but wrong. Living but dead. Apartments above triangle-shaped buildings at the intersection of Wayne and Wyoming, where we turn left. I imagine myself living in one of those apartments, working at Mead Research, living here again, and it’s an immediate no show. Dayton has some great apartments, but no good jobs. If I had stayed at Mead Research I would have been one of the highest-paid people in Dayton, and I would have had great weekend times: an art studio and an Oregon District house, with fading blue brick and that kind of porch I like: no columns, just a slab of concrete covering the basement ceiling and the front door was there and no no no this would never work. A man cannot live just to make a house, just to pay for one. Not in a city of black on white crime, a city with white on black laws, you can’t live that way or I wouldn’t! I would not. Not to sit in a cubicle and explain Legos to the CEO. And that is all it would ever be.
Some people make their soul a weekend project. I think that’s for fools. You can’t usurp soul growth for a solid house. Even one in your favorite neighborhood: Oakwood, for one, where the greatest crime committed is driving while black. Where even your closest friends will pull you aside where it’s only whites and they’ll tell you how this hotel is whites/rich only and that it’s better for it.
Baker pulls a hard left onto Wyoming and we’re traveling up past the Sunoco where I once paid my bill in change—for a fraction of a gallon of gas. The attendant took my payment and gave me a knowing smile. But I wasn’t smiling.
Up the state streets: Illinois, Indiana. I had an ex-girlfriend on every one. A story for every day of the week. One involved me going over Tuesday Welder’s house, then her taking us into the basement and allowing us to be ready to have sex and she took off her bra and she had huge nipples with bumpy areola—they were like my mom’s, not small like some women I had met since then, seen in porn. I associate large nipples and correspondingly large areola with “real” women: mothers, women who use their breasts for feeding the up and coming generation..as opposed to porn stars who shave their puss and have nipples not much larger than my own. Tuesday gave me the chance to lick her breasts and I can still feel the bumps on my tongue. I wasn’t ready to have sex, though (I was sad that day) and soon her mother came home and yelled downstairs for us to come out of the basement. I stayed at Tuesday’s house long into the evening, waiting for my dad to pick me up. He never came, though, which left Tuesday and I swinging on the porch swing and her dad talking on the phone to my dad, who assured him that if they called me a cab my dad would pay them back and I guess Tuesday’s dad wasn’t too keen on the fact that Tuesday and I had been in his basement together for some time before his wife called us up—and I guess he was scared and angry that Tuesday might have fucked me. That’s just one of the stories that happened on a state street (this one Indiana Ave).
“A lot happened up there,” Baker says, putting her hand on my leg.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean him,” she says.
“Between you and me, between everyone and you, between me and everyone. That’s the street where Zochae died. I mean that’s the house he lived in. Do you ever see Martha?”
Baker said: “I don’t see her because I’m not friends with her. When’s the last time you two talked?”
“Who me and Zochae? It’s just another memory. Zochae and I used to trip on mushrooms and paint.”
“In your warehouse?”
“In my living room! I threw away all my paintings since then. Well, I gave the best ones to my friends.”
“Do you remember the painting you gave me?” Baker says.
“Yes. Of course.”
“It’s blue and purple, with the canvas borders torn off and stapled back onto the front of the canvas.”
“I remember,” I said. “I should have given you a better one.”
“Oh I don’t—I never wish that. I knew you would give me a lesser one. That it would be one you wouldn’t care if I lost it in one of many moves from apartment to apartment.”
“Actually, I painted that one specifically for you.”
“But it was still one of the lesser ones,” she said.
“You know, Baker, I could sit here and blow smoke up your ass on why that painting isn’t one of the lesser ones. Who am I to judge it? It wasn’t meant as a slap in the face. I was doing the best I could do at the time. I’m sorry if you feel it was lesser.”
“I don’t, though. I don’t think that! Do you remember the plates my grandfather painted on? I showed you his pile in the basement.”
“Yeah, I remember those.”
“What was painted on them?”
“Uh..ships?”
“They were country houses. That’s what I want to live in someday. A country house 🏡 in Xenia somewhere with a cat—no, two cats—a dog—did you know my dog died?”
“Picasso?”
“Get the fuck out of here. Picasso! Rembrandt was my old dog’s name!”
“Chuck. Seymour. Picasso. Rembrandt. You have too many names for dogs!”
“Chuck and Seymour are my new dogs! You don’t remember anything, do you? Remember that black lab I had—”
“Oh yeah chained up in the basement next to your apartment.”
“He wasn’t chained.”
“Baker that dog had a chain around his neck and he was tied to the toilet oh what was that dog’s name?”
“His name was Rembrandt. He was dark brown and he was a lab of some sort and he took a special liking to you. Do you remember?”
“What I remember is that you would take me into your downstairs apartment whose walls were like chiffon and you had bookcases and a television outside the walls and you would drape cloth to the side to reveal it and the whole room practically was filled with your bed and it was high off the ground and the floor was concrete—unfinished—and the first time you took me there or some time you took me there you sat me on the bed and held my hand and you told me stories about your military boyfriends and then we kissed and laid on the bed and kissed some more and we didn’t do anything else but by the next time I came over you had moved the television and we were sitting on the dark concrete and I laid you back and touched your bra and I could feel your nipples under there and they were big! like my mom’s and I touched them so gently and felt them both excited and repressed underneath that bra of yours.”
“What color was my bra?”
I look over at Baker. We’re still driving. She doesn’t turn to look at me.
“Red?”
“Nope.”
“You remember what color bra you were wearing from that far back?”
“I wore it especially for you.”
“Motherfucker. Pink?”
“No.”
“Gray. A gray sports bra.”
Baker hits me on my shoulder.
“I said I picked it out for you! Why would I wear a sports bra if I wanted you to touch it? It was black. With red lace sewn around the edges. With white thread. Wide threads. Do you remember now?”
Baker looks at me.
“I think you should like to see the road!” I say. “I am remembering it now.”
“No you’re not. You’re doing what children do: remembering something that your family just now reminded you of. You’re taking what I’m saying and building an entire world.”
“Ok. You had a black bra. I don’t remember.”
“It’s ok,” Baker says. “If I hadn’t stitched together that lace myself, I wouldn’t remember. But I was planning something. Something for us. Something special.”
“But I wasn’t ready, was I.”
“Don’t worry, brew. You’ve made up for it since. If we had fucked back then, we would have had a baby. I know that for a fact.”
“Speaking of babies—”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s taken care of.”
“Ok but like—”
“Hush, man. It’s taken care of. Don’t you love it in the movies where the lady says it’s taken care of and after that the characters don’t even revisit the subject for the entire rest of the movie? Do they talk about it in Gatsby?”
“I don’t think they talk about it at all.”
“Did you want to fuck me when we watched Gatsby?”
“It’s kind of an old movie.”
“Right. But did you kind of want to fuck me?”
“They never show the sex! It’s like looking at Playboy, 1963.”
“I know, I know. I should have spent more time picking out the movie. It was between that and a raunchy porn but I didn’t think that would do for you—much less us. Did you fuck to a movie 🎬 the first time you fucked? Please tell me what the scene was. Or the song.”
“I was in college, ok? I didn’t fuck you. I didn’t fuck Tuesday. Not in high school. Not ever.”
“What about Jessica?”
“I would have fucked Jessica. That was a year after you and I fooled around. I was ready to fuck with Jessica but she wouldn’t fuck with me! Said she knew it would just be sex with us and she sent me home.”
“Damn. I was triple sure you fucked that girl.”
I raise my left arm—but like a Boy Scout.
“I would have fucked that girl for sure. You know what she did? Wicked my dick on the couch then we made out watching Fox and the Hound then she takes me to her bedroom, lies me on the bed, then changes panties for me, right in front of my face. I mean she’s bent over with her tight little sex kitten goth girl pussy in my face whatever. It’s given me years of masturbatory fantasies.”
“Hold it there,” Baker says.
She pulls across traffic into an alley, stops the car.
“This,” she says, looking over a backyard filled with car parts, string, a torn hammock, and basically a whole lot of junk. “This is the house.”