The Wave and Other Stories: Tenth Anniversary Edition

By Caren Gussoff

The stories in The Wave and Other Stories map out the tangled webs of love, dependency and identity among a cast of fragile, bruised characters. This tenth anniversary edition contains an introduction by the author as well as additional stories not included in the original volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990393719

Book preview

Waves

Part One

There is something wrong with me.

When I say that, I mean there is nothing wrong with me, nothing wrong, nothing really, not for the most part. I've published a book, have a boyfriend, and carry twenty extra pounds that don't look too bad on me. I have found the perfect pair of cowboy boots and in my closet hangs a little black dress suitable for any occasion, although I do not have many occasions. I have seen the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I can change a tire, oil, and spark plugs; I can hold my liquor. I have always been able to get straight As, keep myself fed, keep a roof over my head. I have been able to lie, cheat, and steal, not too often and without getting caught.

There is nothing wrong. There is no reason to cry. And I never did. Not until Allison.

I knew Allison before I met her. I saw her everywhere. I read the 'zine she published in high school that was later compiled into a limited-edition hardbound anthology published by a short-lived downtown punk press. I read about her on web pages and message boards, about her in places where they write about people like her, ingénues in the convergence between underground and couture, where everything can ultimately be sourced to David Bowie, the very New York intersection of punk and success, where cutting edge and marketable meet and are written about in places like NYLON and Interview, worshiped by self-conscious hipsters, emulated by Japanese teenagers, and collected by early-thirties cultural studies professors in black boat neck sweaters and flared twills.

She attended hardcore shows and alternative comi-cons, art openings and fetish balls, skateboard meets and benefit fashion shows, independent movie premieres and tattoo conventions, riot grrl festivals and guerilla theatre, and I read about each of them. I read about her and later read her, when she wrote a column for the New York Press and then later for the Village Voice.

I saw her everywhere -- twenty extra pounds that didn't look too bad draped on her chest and hips, pink bob, fake fur jackets, vintage wrap dresses, and fishnets -- and photographs of her in the background of photos taken of her friends, the painters and vaudeville performers in their press packets. I listened to her sing in Betty Rage, and even saw them, when they were on tour, as I stood in the back of Redoubt crushing my eight-dollar bottled water, against the wall, not that she could see me on stage, or was looking for me, like I was looking for her.

I learned everything I could.

I researched Allison casually at first, then with the fervor of one tracing her genealogy. When she put up an online blog, I spent nights in the glow of my monitor, throwing off my biological clock, reading and rereading her journal entries. I read about when she had her wisdom teeth removed, when she spent a week at a Krishna temple, when she joined a German-style artist collective until she learned it was a front for an anarcho-socialist terrorist group.

And so when I met her, I worked to act surprised. And I was surprised, I am surprised.

I am surprised that there is something wrong with me.

That there is nothing wrong with me, nothing wrong, nothing for the most part. But that doesn't mean things are right.

But I tell this wrong. I knew Allison, I followed her, but I am not a stalker. I don't want to kill her or be her. I wish her no ill will. I'm neither the talented Mr. Ripley nor the single white female. I never tried to hide; I am unnoticeable.

And many people know Allison, and followed her news. She's a bit famous, her friends a bit famous, to people like me, the many people like me. The ones no one writes about. We don't have glamorous drug problems or anorexia or a collection of plaster casts of rock stars' cocks or memories of a childhood spent hustling truck drivers that we turn into in a best-selling novel turned celebrated independent film, riding it until revealed for a hoax. We aren't involved in the sideshow revival, we don't write manifestos. We don't drink absinthe, we don't like acid jazz.

I was just fascinated by Allison, at first for seemingly no reason, and then for the ease with which she moved through her life, the facility under which she accomplished everything. In a world where no one ever gets what they want, she was untouchable, unusual.

Whatever she wanted, whatever I wanted, seemed to find her, with the same providence I later learned Elizabeth Barrett Browning was privileged. Browning herself was a similar miracle of fate, an unassailable champion in the lottery of charm and temperament. Browning slighted the entire nineteenth century, as she studied, wrote, and composed the poetry that Robert later found irresistible, and everything, fame and ardor, attention and deed found her, came to her, to her very own drawing room.

This is not to say that I am unlucky. Everything is what it is. My blessings are blessings, although they are countable. I've done all right. My teeth are all mine, my legs are both the same length. If I am unhappy, I usually know why, and if I don't, if there is misery whose source remains mysterious, it is that maybe I was born unhappy, born under a moody star.

I knew Allison because I had to.

I couldn't avoid her.

We led analogous lives, paced one another in parallel paths. We moved in the same circles, but I was several concentric orbits from her sun. I attended the same clubs, parties, shows, standing on the long lines, paying to get in while she slid through on the guest list. If her name wasn't on it, she was someone's plus one, or she was friends with the doormen, the same ones who made me empty my purse, patted me down for knives, chains, or socks full of quarters. If I feel anything, really, it's that shows must look different from the second row than I saw from the rear left row in the balcony.

I knew Allison because I had to. I saw her everywhere, and had, for a long time. I worked at the same nightclub, Bump, where I was a bar back, in dirty jeans and a ponytail. I picked up napkins, beer bottles filled with semen, while she sold cigarettes from a tray, in a corset and biker boots.

But really, I knew her even before that. In high school, she was captain of the debate club, while I was an alternate at each one of mine, always an alternate at every school. And one school I attended for half my junior year competed against hers, and I saw her then. She wore a huge black t-shirt and filthy Converse All-Stars. I noticed her, watched her roll her index cards into horns between her fingers.

I could watch no one else. And I had no idea why.

Even after Bill Delaney saw me watch her and whispered down the row that I was a lesbian, I still couldn't take my eyes from her. I wasn't brave because I knew I'd simply change schools again soon, before the lesbian rumor spread too far. She had me mesmerized.

But then, I couldn't, didn't get why. I couldn't comprehend the connection, the connection that went deeper than I could have known.

My father moved from job to job, while my mother taught toddlers, noble and underpaid. I understand now that it was simply their brilliance that kept us alive.

There is a sense of brilliance you develop when you are poor, to be good at it, to survive. We ate pancakes of every kind, baking soda and flour with peanut butter; stale bread, mashed potato; crepes of eggs and flour. I remember apartments, but cannot tell them apart, one a sea of teal shag carpet, one with a balcony fourteen inches from a wall. I would drift afloat my mattress on the wavy rug, my father standing, smoking in cut-off sweatpants, the smoke bouncing off the brick and flooding his face.

One apartment had a washer and dryer, one a washer and a clothesline 500 feet above the world. A long courtyard of dogwood trees. A downstairs neighbor with a cat.

More than once, I'd return to the wrong apartment, the key on the ball chain around my neck useless. I'd wait with my back against the cold door until I could remember where I lived.

I eventually learned to write this down.

By thirteen I'd had twenty library cards, fifteen new schools. At eighteen, I learned the phone bill had been listed in every variation of our name, including three variations of mine, to the tune of $3,000 including penalties.

This is how it went. Just after midnight, my father would shake my shoulder and I would sit up in the dark. His shadow and voice saying, Get up and pack your things. I always knew but he'd say it anyway, We leave in fifteen minutes, get up now, I'm timing you. My mother would already be awake, standing in the kitchen with her vanity case, wiping at stains on the countertop with her shirtsleeves. My parents filled the trunk and the backseat, one lamp tied to the roof. I got the floor behind the driver's side for my bags, sitting up front on my mother's lap long after I was too big to do so.

Allison also knew despair; this was what I couldn't know. She was born in a van behind the weekly motel her parents managed, grew up prone to ear infections from swimming until she turned purple in the opaque pool out front. She'd help her parents clean the motel, crawling under the beds until she was too big to do so, gathering the Slim-Jim wrappers, schnapps bottles, and shotgun shells that rolled under there.

We were bound together in the sorority of poor childhoods, mild neglect, when promises are but puffs of air that carry us off with the power of tornadoes.

We understood the general impermanence of things, and were more receptive than others to snap decisions, the winds of chance, to ill-thought-out opportunities and schemes of escape that kept us moving, moving forward, if not always in a straight line.

There was no way I could know any of this when I first came upon Allison, couldn't know the nature of what pulled me to her, why she entered my consciousness as she did, standing in the high school auditorium in ripped jeans and sneakers, reciting her arguments from cards, the pros of capital punishment.

Or when I saw her the second time a month later, riding the crowd at a 7 Seconds show, traveling over our heads, supported by our hands. I couldn't know that it wasn't just jealousy or a teenaged sense of the tenuous synchrony between the mind and the phenomenal world of perception.

But I didn't actively follow her until later. I really didn't.

We must have been twenty-two when this began, really began.

At twenty-two, I dated a guy way out of my league. It lasted a total of two weeks, the last ten days out of courtesy. He was nice, and even nicer looking, although I can't even remember his name. He was a photography assistant at Elite, and I still don't know why we hooked up, how we hooked up, except that I had low self-esteem masquerading as fuck-me feminism, and my withdrawn exterior worked this well.

I let him take me home from the party we were at -- a party that I don't know how I got into in the first place. Allison was there that night, in a vintage shirtdress embroidered with strawberries, smoking Gauloises in the corner, and I imagined that she saw me take the photography assistant home.

When I woke up, the photography assistant was still there, much to my surprise. He had gone to the Korean deli, and brought up pecan rolls and butter and bitter black coffee. He was from Kentucky or Tennessee or someplace like that, and I chalked up breakfast to good manners. He was flipping through my CDs, and I could tell he had already looked through most of my belongings.

"Black Sabbath. The Runaways. The Sandman. Camus. He waved at my windowsill. All those poodles. Little ceramic poodles. He joined me at the salvaged cable spool I used as a table. No wonder you and Allison are friends."

I opened my mouth to tell him that it was that I had no choice, just that I saw her everywhere, that we had analogous lives, parallel paths. That we moved in the same circles, but I was several concentric orbits from her sun, that it was chance, chance only, that I knew Allison, the two of us moving forward, but never meeting.

But he looked so pleased, shaking his head at me, so satisfied that he had fucked what he obviously considered to be the next best thing, that I stayed silent, swallowed half my pecan roll whole.

Then after he left, I finished the rolls and threw the best game of darts, with no one to see it.

That was when I did more than just notice her, when I moved from casual observer to a student of sorts. I changed my shifts at Bump to match hers', and worked the front bar, watching her from the corners.

I wore nicer clothes and styled my hair on those nights, though by dawn, I would be soaked with beer and sweat and smoke that wouldn't wash clean. I watched her move. I saw her twist her face, and lean over, her back straight. She'd hold this pose to hustle non-smokers, to pull tips out of the others. I saw her close her eyes to rest between customers, leaning prettily against the sticky back wall, rotating each sore ankle. I sat in the harsh fluorescent of the house lights, the ribbon welt the tray of cigarettes would leave on her neck after six hours as she bent over to count her take.

I didn't see any of this as glamorous. I didn't see any of this as tragic. I didn't want to be her.

I saw the eyes of minor celebrities and artists travel her body. I saw the emerging rock stars and filmmakers that were her friends come in to the club, and she would take her breaks shouting in their ears. I listened carefully for details about parties, openings, and sample sales.

I watched her wait for something better.

After six months, she quit Bump, and I only lasted a few weeks after that. She began writing a column for the New York Press. She had a short-lived career as a punk rock promoter and leg model, but left those when she was given the column.

Given the column. That's how it seemed. In a world where no one ever gets what they want, she was untouchable. Whatever she wanted, whatever I wanted, seemed to find her. She was a miracle of fate, an unassailable champion in the lottery of charm and temperament.

And her column materialized one Tuesday and continued to appear for eleven months. She wrote her column, and I started NYU on a three-quarter merit scholarship and made up the difference working as a phone psychic and sex actress out of a minimally furnished office on West 85th. It was twice the money barbacking had been, even after Allison had left and I got desperate and flashed my tits at Tommy and Phil, the only two straight bartenders, for a higher cut of their tips.

At the phone jobs, I was simply lying for a living, telling callers in either context exactly what they wanted to hear, what we all fear as much as we crave -- that there is a design to this life, a plan. And that we are not alone.

But I didn't believe any of the things that I was saying. I was getting paid twelve dollars an hour. I didn't believe. I was twenty-three. I didn't think along these lines, only knew to say what caller wanted to hear, that they were blameless, innocent, even the men breathing on the phone while I pretended to be a stripper, the babysitter, their mother's best friend, that they were blameless.

The woman calling to find out about her grown son, last seen leaving his office on a Thursday evening; the