2 a.m., you walk home. You’ve been drinking but try to maintain that upright bearing, try to maintain that I-will-kick-your-assedness-if-you-so-much-as-come-near-me, potential attacker/whatever person. You hold your car keys like so.

Tonight was too soon to have four beers. You were just getting over a cold, but damn, that country singer was so good, you couldn’t help it and when she sang that sad, sad song, you needed something to pour down that space inside you it opened up.
((Which sounds maudlin. I’m aware.))
So, two a.m., you walk home and you stop by the pizza joint and order and eat a slice alone at their bar. The place is packed, but you have that aura of Don’t Mess and no one bothers you; you think, this is medicinal. This grease: to not feel like shite in the morning. You think: this could be my life, now. Ordering medicinal slices of pizza at two a.m., alone, while drunk. Walking everywhere alone, as you have been, anyway. Which is a thought neither positively- nor negatively-loaded. Only thoughtful, as you watch the antics of Brittney Spears on the Fox News above everyone’s head and scarf that cheese slice down. Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, some part of your brain goes, back to that song your voice teacher had you sing way back when, in high school.
You finish your slice in five minutes and finish the walk home, sticking to the un-streetlit spots because they feel somehow safer, somehow hidden. You are not the spotlighted solo drunk chick, you are not the caricature of yourself you’d never care to see; you are stealth. You are the watcher. And in another minute, you are home. To shower. To bed. To another night gone.

How Lloyd Dobler Ruined My College Lovelife
Ah, John Cusack. Or, to be more specific: Lloyd Dobler. Some young male dude I know was carrying on one morning in the office at school about how the mere worldly existence of Say Anything has destroyed the prospect of any real guy ever being, I think the words were, “respected by a woman.” That, darn that Lloyd Dobler; he’s set the bar too high! I laughed off the guy’s assertion as simplistic blabbermouthiness.
Sure, no high school guy’s ever gonna meet that precise balance of articulate sensitivity mixed with charming funniness, right? Hell, and really, few 20-40 year olds are gonna make that grade, either.

But. It's. A. Movie.

In real life, if some fella you’d just broken up with snuck onto your property in the wee hours and blasted freaking Peter Gabriel, might you be just a tad spooked? Instead of tossing and turning in bed while looking all lovely and pained like Ione Skye, you might call the damn authorities.

So, pah on that. I’m a smart human being, I thought. I can distinguish reality from the damn movies, I thought. And I would never choose some fiction over a real live boy, I thought, and then-

And then I remembered: Once, long ago, Lloyd Dobler already messed with my lovelife. Or my opportunity for one, and yes, it was almost in the exact manner that my colleague was complaining about. Almost.

Flashback to a 19-year-old Alice. It is fall. She is in college. She is young; she still thinks herself gawky. She is a good student; she considers herself to be an introvert. She is a bloomer of the late variety.

She has moved into this International House sort of dorm. It is here that she meets this older lad. This Canadian. Now, she’s had a few romantic interactions here and there, but the emphasis, dear Henshaw, belongs firmly, at this point in her life, on “few.” But she arrives at the dorm, and almost immediately, this young man begins flirting with her. He jokes. He is witty. He is really cute. He is quite possibly an alcoholic. But, he flirts. And she, why, she doesn’t know what to do! She is flustered. She runs and hides. What should she do?? Then she decides. She will like him back. Why, she does like him back!

There’s a party and they’re both there. They drink champagne. They dance together a lot. Henshaw? They slow dance, and although she can’t remember the song now, in her recollections, it is always, always “Forever Young,” by Alphaville.
She’s totally swooning and all her friends are smirking at her out of the corners of their eyes. “Young Alice,” they call her, and they shake their heads.
Alice and Canada Lad go back to the dorm. They’re holding hands. Her mind is racing, filled with Fight or Flight freakoutedness. She wants to kiss him! Augh! What if he kisses her? She is sure she will die.

When they reach their hall, they drop hands and just then, a fellow hallmate, a girl named Jenny or Tiffany or something, rushes up.
“Hey, you two! We’re all watching Say Anything in Kara’s room! Wanna come?” Lad says nothing. He looks up at the ceiling. And Young Alice, in whom Fight or Flight is still raring hard, hears these words come out of her mouth,
“Sure! Yes! I love that movie! Wanna come watch it?” She turns to Canada Lad. He shakes his head. Naw. He’s just gonna go back to his room.
And so that’s what happened.
And Young Alice never kissed him. Instead, she chose the comfort of watching Lloyd Dobler get, lose, then get back Diane Court, for the dozenth time.
Damn you, Lloyd Dobler. Damn you to hell.

Girls’ Code

“Better listen to me, ‘Cause I wanna tell you, son.
Don’t give away your love; don’t give away your sweat.
‘Cause a girl can’t know you, and a boss can’t forget.”
-Minutemen

To discuss: Is there a Girls’ Code of Ethics?
I was talking to a very old friend on the phone today and she invoked that even-older set of laws regarding situations of ladies perpetrating what is supposed to be the very worst type of betrayal: against their own lady-friends. With men who are or were at some point, tied to said friends. In a romantic manner.
That story.

(“Ooh, catfight!”)

As long as I can remember, the whole idea’s only made me cringe, this notion that it’s up to women *only*, to uphold some sort of loyalty toward one another. Because the automatic flipside of that conviction can only be this: that men can’t be counted on. That Boys will be Boys. Which is just one giant pile of stinking biznullshit, far as I’m concerned, letting half our population off the hook as it does. I refuse and I refuse.

You Can’t Trust Guys.
And yet now that I find myself in this rather intensely crappy situation in which I do feel betrayed (and my sisters my old friends, their jaws drop when I elaborate “Oh Alice,” they say, “you have been betrayed; it’s not you it’s not your fault oh poor poor Alice” and I fall into this stinking archetype, this role so old and so worn and so tired.)

“You better back down before you get smacked down/
You better chill.”-Jill Scott

And yet now—I find myself *so much* angrier at, *so much* more hurt by, this girl/(friend) than by the guy involved. My reaction to this particular punch-in-the-gut feels particularly hardwired. It’s doesn’t feel like a cultural construct, so is it one?

But cultural mores run deep. To me, invoking some Girls’ Code still feels supremely fucked up. I’d rather believe in some simpler code, some basic decency that we’re all supposed to have. For me, believing in people—not half the people, but people—has always been something I’ve held as my principle article of faith in the world. Not stupid, blind faith, just human trust. We’re all we’ve got. Right? I’ve become closest to people I’ve let in with a great, big, open heart and I want to say that damn it, I refuse to give that up, now. I’m not a naïve fucking fool; I refuse to see my lack of guardedness as a sign of some immaturity on my part. Still, this has shaken me. This has worked to mess with that particular faith. I don’t feel trusting, now. And that makes me angry, too.

In the past couple days, I’ve heard a feast of Betrayal-By-Supposed-Girlfriends Stories; I’ve eaten them up like junkfood. Tasty while I’m hearing them and I beg for more, more, more to prove I’m not alone right when I feel Really. Fucking. Alone.

You Can’t Trust Women.
I ask for these stories and I’m given this veritable All You Can Eat Buffet: There’s the girl who walked in on her roommate/best friend and her boyfriend, the one whose friend made a habit on hitting on and sleeping with *all* her exes the moment they became exes, the one who’s given up on having female friends At All. (“With guys, it’s all on the table. You know you can trust them.”) All these stories fill me up and leave me with a big stomachache later.

I hate the moral: When the shit hits, you can’t trust your girlfriends. Because the Girls’ Code thing, besides saddling gals with all the responsibility and giving men a free pass to act like assholes, does something else. The truth is that women can’t be perfect all the time. We screw up, just as men screw up. But the message when women screw up is always the same: While boys get to “be boys,” women: you’re not allowed to make mistakes. And the ones who slip even slightly become slippery snakes.


“Well, who said life was easy/
and who said a man was fair/
Well I wish you well/
but keep your paws off mine.”
-Magnetic Fields

I didn’t want to join this pantheon. I never wanted to inhabit any of these roles. I never wanted to become a woman with one of Those Stories. I guess that yeah, I did want to believe that maybe, yeah, if I believe in people and treat those I come to love, Golden Rule style, that I’ll get the same treatment back. And maybe yeah I also wanted to believe that there is, on some level, such a thing as sisterhood. Because with all these double standards, with all this sexist bullshit, you’ve gotta have something, right?

Chebbles’s Mama tells me that it’s because I grew up in a houseful of girls that I don’t acknowledge the Girls’ Code of Ethics. “You just grew up with it being there, naturally,” she tells me. “The fact that you *don’t* treat your girlfriends this way is something that’s just ingrained in you.”
That’s one angle. Maybe if I’d grown up in a houseful of boys I’d just shrug this development off as kinda shitty, rather than feel so powerfully betrayed.

I could spend even more hours analyzing all this to death. Maybe it’s birth order. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s experience. Maybe it’s relative amounts of self-absorption. But none of this helps, when it comes down to it. All I’m left with is a head full of useless theories and a mounting number of sleepless nights. And all alone at three a.m., no amount of analysis will solve anything for you. There’s just no sense.

The Fairest Books of All
Well, I’m back in Atalanta for a few days, and el great big writing conference is over.
Best part was wandering around meeting folks at what they called the “book fair:” tables and tables (something like 250—Crackergal, lemme know if I’m way off) where folks from literary journals and small presses sat.

I scored a number of really cool free or cheap literary journals. Beautiful writing, beautiful design. Also a book of matches from some lit mag in New York.
(Had this interaction with guy at that table or another:
Alice: So, where are you published?
Guy: Brooklyn.
Alice: Oh, New York. Cool.
Guy: Well, Brooklyn, actually. There’s a difference.

If I’d gone around in opposite order, I could’ve smacked him with the flyswatter I got from Crazyhorse, but I didn’t have it yet.
(When the nice gal at that table handed it to me, the woman the next table over immediately began making bondage jokes in a loud, “Hah, hah. I am so very naughty,” voice. Hm. Maybe I wouldn’t have swatted Mr. Brooklyn, after all.)

So exciting. There was this giddiness in the air at getting to say hello, hello, hello to everyone. Really, lots of nice people. (None of them attractive menfolk, Henshaw. Geez. What do you take me for? I’ve told you; we’re all pale, homely, garret-y, scholarly sorts. [Ahem.])

Anyway.

So there was the book fair—which, by the way, did your elementary school ever have those? That’s all I could think about whenever anyone mentioned it. Like, in 4th grade? Where you’d get a glossy folded thing advertising Garfield books and Mad Libs and Bunnicula and all those pre-teen books that were popular when I was ten about girls diagnosed with terminal illnesses? I swear there was one called I Want to Live, and another called Six Months to Live. Girls would pass them around like Playboys in homeroom. That’s what I think of when I think, “book fair.”

(I just did an internet search and apparently the Dying Girl books were written by this woman named Lurlene McDaniel. Her webcopy says, “Everyone loves a good cry, and no one delivers heartwrenching stories better than Lurlene McDaniel.”
Though it says she also does lots of psychological research for each book and her site also has volunteer organizations for kids wanting to make a difference. Well.)
Still.
This was a step up from that.


Found in Atlanta
One journal at the writers’ convention was having a contest whose deadline was sometime this week. The topic was “Found,” and we were to frame it around our experience here in Atlanta.

What have I found. Well.
I’ve found that this town, which I spent so many years hating with such venom, always half-plotting escape, now feels more like home than any other place.
Mostly, it’s rather unlovely here. Still, it’s such comfort. I drive the streets without thinking. The sidewalks feel like some private part of a house that belongs to me. I check the skyline at night for my favorite building—the Bank of America tower—and I can exhale. That belongs to me, too.

Mostly what I see behind my eyelids when someone mentions “Atlanta,” is a map of the city’s layout of freeways: 75/85 slithering through the center, like some two-headed, two-tailed serpent. Like some version of a river in a city that’s pretty much riverless (unlike the one I grew up in.) (No. Not counting the Chattahoochee.) 400 poking its head up there, too. I-20 belting the center and 285 circling it all. It looks like some primitive child’s drawing of a present.

It’s what my older sister first drew for me on the back of a Creative Loafing, the second or third day after I’d moved here.
“This. Is…Atlanta,” she said, scrawling it out and labeling each road, scrawling and then scratching out and re-drawing 400 to get it right. I was looking for an apartment. I was intimidated beyond belief.

In the time since then, that drawing has become my one blueprint for life in the past six years or so. The layout on top of which I superimpose nearly every change that’s taken place in my 20s. That one, I think, recalling. And then, again. Addresses lived at, worked at, roles played:

Cheery nonprofit worker fresh from college, dead-broke backpacker, blissed-out girlfriend, disgruntled punkrock coffeeshop chick biking down Moreland Avenue, PR writer for hire, shop clerk, younger sister, roommate, pained girlfriend, freelancer, reporter, aunt, award-winner, “area personality,” depressed girl at 2:00 a.m. grocery store visit, dog-owner, single girl dancing wildly at Lenny’s with friends, singer in short-lived rock band, new neighbor, old neighbor, ex-girlfriend, then ex-girlfriend again and then, gone.

And every cheap, delicious restaurant. And every closed rock-and-roll venue (Echolounge, RIP). And every friend. I drive down rusted out Dekalb. The Krog Street tunnel. I see us all like shadows. Only vivid.