Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
and say, “Boy, your girlfriend doesn’t take very good care of you,
does she? What a mess this place is,” and I’d stand beside her at the
sink and feel good that Marisa was being good to me; and
meanwhile I’d be drinking whiskey out of the bottle because I was
hungry, and the sun swam through the fog and I felt dizzy and Marisa
shook her pretty bald head at me and buttered my toast. Whenever I
asked her to, she’d tell me stories, such as how the Pretty Boys who
peddled ass on Polk Street moved into the Pink Palace and then the
Sleazy Attic and became the Bootboys so that they could die early
because the Bootboys were such severe skinheads (“Almost all the
skinheads are already dead,” sighed Marisa, “all the good ones”);
and while Marisa went back into the kitchen to finish doing my
dishes, her bootsister Thorn told me about how when she was in
London her boyfriend Luigi got his eye popped out by the Italian
Fascists, and then Marisa came back and told me about how when
she was a thirteen-year-old girl in Chicago she started going with a
skinhead named Sean, who was eighteen or twenty, and Marisa
loved to hang out in Sean’s apartment, which must have resembled
the workshop of a medieval armorer because scattered through its
dark dirty chambers was a Camaro in pieces - hubcaps under the bed
(so I imagined it), bucket seats emplaced against the living room
walls for conveniently screwing Marisa and other girls, the shiny
silver exhaust pipe by the door to hit enemies with, the carburetor
serving to deploy old socks and dirty underwear and a black leather
flight jacket to best advantage, while the gas tank was actively
poised beside the window, still full of gasoline and ready to be
hurled down onto the dirty icy street like a flying bomb; and
presumably Marisa and Sean must have always been stepping over
screws, and the windshield was in the cold dark moldy bathroom,
covered with grime; and buckler-plates of chassis hung overhead in
Sean’s bedroom, and the battery slowly leaked its acids through the
floor; and now I have come to the end of all the auto parts that I know
(except for the fan belt) - and Sean also possessed a stolen stop sign
still in its cement base; possibly this was his hatstand. Although
Marisa had not become Bootwoman Marisa yet, she loved and
admired Skinhead Sean, so she tattooed Sean’s name on her body
and started unrolling her secret capabilities by piercing her ears half
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