As far as romance went, Lincoln, Nebraska wasn't exactly Paris, but for an Omaha teenager with a wild streak, it possessed a certain charm.
Lincoln was a college town, full of dorms and student apartments and bars with lenient ID policies. In Lincoln, there were no parents. In Lincoln, you could drink as much as you wanted, then vomit all over yourself without fear of repercussion. Vomit, and not be dropped off at curfew with a plastic bag full of soiled clothing and a lie about a carsick dog on your lips. In Lincoln, you could vomit and be free.
I would do anything I could to reach this Valhalla, and nothing was going to stop me.
Sean wasn't officially my boyfriend, but about four times a week I would drive over to the rental house he shared with a few other recent high-school graduates to drink beer and make out in his room. Recently, Sean had begun to swing a proprietary arm over my shoulders when we were in public, so when I overheard him in the park one day discussing a kegger taking place in Lincoln that weekend, I felt justified in inviting myself along.
"We're not going to drive back for your curfew," he said, disentangling his fingers from my bra strap as he reached for his Camels. "We'd have to spend the night. I don't want to get in trouble.""Why would you get in trouble?"
"Because your parents are crazy." With this, I could not argue. Still, I pointed out they didn't have much recourse, legally. I was sixteen, the legal age of consent in the state of Nebraska, and as we wouldn't be crossing state lines, there would be no pesky Mann Act indictments to worry about.
Eventually, he agreed, and I immediately called my friend Olivia, a loyal, malleable girl whose parents were just neglectful enough to make her an ideal cover. We concocted a fictional band we would pretend to see that night, and explained to my parents that it made sense for me to spend the night at her house. I would leave my car there in case my father was "unable to sleep" and decided to circle her home at two o'clock in the morning.
"It's kind of romantic," Olivia said wistfully, as I emptied my knapsack of quotidian items — the physics textbook, the filthy gym suit, the box of tampons — and replaced them with perfume, lacy underpants and a sports bottle of foul-smelling vodka pilfered from my grandparent's antediluvian liquor cabinet. "Going away with a boy to another city. Like the two of you are eloping."
"We're just going to a party," I said, secretly thrilled. "It's no big deal."
"Don't pack that underwear," she said. "Why don't you just wear it?"
"I don't want to fuck it up. What if I puke?"
"Start out wearing it. Then, if you puke on yourself and he has to take your clothes off, it'll be sexy."
I agreed.
Things took a decidedly less-sexy turn when I arrived at Sean's house and learned we would not be traveling alone. His friend Ralph would be accompanying us.
Ralph was the kind of violent, mercurial alcoholic some young men find awe-inspiring, until they reach a certain age and realize that Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski were essentially sociopaths who would probably have gotten him killed. Usually festooned with a collection of black eyes, stab wounds and other colorful injuries sustained in pointless altercations with Native American vagrants outside the liquor stores of south Omaha, Ralph also had the notorious propensity of treating the world as though it were his own giant toilet. Houseplants, closets, the crisper in the refrigerator — nothing was safe from his steaming, pungent spray. One might settle beside him on the sofa and immediately recoil from the warm, spreading dampness, an ominous sign that Ralph, without bothering remove his pants, had made himself a little too comfortable on the cushion. One roommate had even once lifted the lid of the washing machine to retrieve his clean clothes, only to be greeted by a tell-tale odor and a basin half-filled with yellow liquid.
"It's okay," I said, before Sean could ask. "I don't mind if he comes."
"See, man, I told you," Ralph slurred. "She's a classy lady." I felt proud. Ralph thought I was classy.
Truthfully, I was more perturbed by the sullen presence in the backseat of Spud, an acquaintance of Ralph's who Sean didn't know very well. I had had only one previous conversation with Spud, during which he described to me his anxiety over the HIV test he had been forced to take in prison.
Ralph lurched towards me, placing his unsteady hands on my shoulders. "And when you get sick of the partying, you can go back to my place! Two of you can have a little love nest. A classy place for a classy lady."
"Didn't you get evicted?" Sean asked.
Ralph guffawed. "Shit, dude, I still got the key!"
I was pleased. The prospect of being alone with Sean was exhilarating. At least my fancy underpants wouldn't go to waste.
In less than an hour, Lincoln's state capitol building was looming over the cornfields, an enormous marble phallus topped with the famous statue of the Golden Sower, scattering his seed to the fertile earth below.
"The Penis of the Prairie!" exclaimed Ralph, and we stopped at a drive-thru liquor store to pick up some more booze before traveling on to the party. Upon arrival, Sean and the others disappeared; I wended my way forlornly through the crush of groping couples, feeling young and invisible as I got drunker. Eventually, I found Sean upstairs, huddled around a TV set with several others. On the screen, a naked young woman lay motionless on a patch of grass as a pair of mustachioed twins smeared her with feces. I spun around and vomited behind the couch.
Well, I thought as I retched, I guess people travel to see things they've never seen before.
Several hours later, Sean was sober enough to drive and shook me awake, dangling before my bleary eyes a set of keys attached to a small rubber penis, complete with molded pubic hair. We made our way to Ralph's, the promised lovenest for my paramour and me, the classy lady.
Remember the overwhelming smell of piss, puke and beer that hit you every time you walked into a bar after the smoking ban went into effect? And how you thought, Gee, I never noticed it before, but bars stink? Multiply that stench by ten, add the aroma of semen, and you'll understand the odor in Ralph's apartment. Walled with splintered wood paneling, it was empty of furniture apart from a bare mattress shoved against a wall and stained a telltale yellow.
The room was carpeted. It was, however, carpeted in porn.
Not just porn, but shredded porn, as though somebody had stripped the content from hundreds of obscene publications in a masturbatory frenzy. The pages were everywhere, covering the counters, filling the sink — the floor was hardly visible. In some places, the creased and crumpled stacks of tits and balls and assholes nearly reached my knees. Sean tugged the dangling cord of the ceiling fan, and several scraps of paper fluttered to the ground. I bent to pick one up. A disembodied hand pried apart a set of hairless labial folds with scarlet fingernails, revealing a small brown clitoris adorned with a silver ring. Sean kicked off his shoes and gingery laid himself on the bed.
"Do you want to fool around or something?" I said weakly.
"Do you want to take your clothes off in this room?"
I did not. Sean seemed to fall asleep easily. I stretched out along the far end of the mattress, avoiding the almond-shaped ochre patch that stretched from top to bottom, like an enormous, putrid eye, and tried to nod off myself, until I was awakened by a sudden, insistent urgency in my bladder.
Oh, God.
I had two options. I could wet myself, adding to the stains of centuries, and pray that Sean would assume that the fresh stain was there already. Or I could see what the bathroom was like.
No, I thought. I will not sink to this level. I am toilet trained, and as God as my witness, I shall remain so.
The bathroom looked like the rest of the apartment — small, filthy, thickly strewn with photographs of genitals — but I scarcely noticed as I dropped my lacy underpants and squatted above the crusty toilet, nearly crying with relief. The moment of truth arrived when it came time to clean myself up. Naturally, there was no toilet paper, but what was I to do?
A t-shirt was draped over the towel rack. It looked clean, almost prim. I reached for it, and once it was in hand, found that the entire front was smeared with shit, obscuring the Dinosaur Jr. logo. Screaming as though I'd been burnt, I flung it into the filthy tub and lunged for the faucet.
There was no water.
Wildly, I wiped my hands on the wall, then grabbed one of the glossy sheets of paper that blanketed the floor. In the photograph, a woman crouched on all fours, dressed in a studded leather harness. At the edges of the picture were two enormous black cocks: one dribbling ejaculate onto her outstretched tongue, the other thrust decisively up her ass. I felt tears prick my eyes.
Carefully, I folded the page until only her bent legs were visible. Then, wincing, weeping, I wiped.
Gentle Reader! If only this were the lowest point of this sordid account of travel and woe! But no, that came when I called Olivia that morning from a convenience-store pay phone downtown. She was hysterical. It seemed my clever parents had seen through our feeble ruse. My mother had gotten on the phone and harassed Olivia until, tearfully, she confessed all, and my crazed father had driven to Sean's house in a state of full-blown psychosis. He would later claim the front door was unlocked, but for all intents and purposes, he broke into my boyfriend's house and stood in the vestibule screaming my name until Sean's roommate, Holly, appeared at the top of the steps with a baseball bat in one hand and an air rifle in the other. Chastened, my father explained himself, and she agreed not to call the police; however, Olivia was grounded from me, I was grounded forever, and Sean and I were through.
What is the moral of this cautionary tale?
They say that when you travel, it takes your soul a few days to catch up with you, and when you return, your soul takes a while to find its way back. And sometimes, on dark days, I feel like my soul is still there in Lincoln, wiping itself with a soiled sheet of hard-core pornography, as its tears fall quietly into the toilet bowl. n°