Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
through the garage and up a passageway that took you into a barren
courtyard of stamped-down dirt with rickety apartment buildings
towering around you, and skinheads and bootwomen permeated this
snakepit, some ascending the fire escape to the first-storey terrace,
the second-storey terrace, the third-storey terrace where things were
dark and rotten, and at any point a skinhead might block your way
and you’d have to be awfully polite to get past him and keep
climbing to the fourth-storey terrace where Bootwoman Dan-L
yawned and scratched her new-shaven head, and Marisa sat on the
stairs with other skinhead girls in a pool of beer, which trickled
slowly down the stairs in a nice uncaring way, like Ice’s piss, losing
itself in Marisa’s jacket and under Marisa’s leg and behind
Bootwoman Kim’s shoulder and so on to the ocean. For the most
part Marisa said nothing, because she was already very stoned. * She
stared out across the world; you could see clouds here, and dirty
windows, and laundry hanging from distant fire escapes, and at any
time you could look down on the yard as if from a low- budget
watchtower, to see the Skinz lined up at the beer keg to pump Bud
into plastic cups for themselves, their buddies, their girls; and in the
middle of that grey sad space there was a grey sad tree that rose three
storeys; and the Skinz tied a rope around a cupful of beer and threw
the rope up around a branch of that tree and caught the free end and
started raising the cup very slowly and carefully until it was about
thirty feet high and then they began to swing the rope back and forth,
back and forth as they raised it, the beery pendulum whizzing
merrily over everyone’s faces, and then the Skinz got excited and
started really yanking with their big tattooed arms and the cup
upended at about fifty feet and rained beer on everybody and some
girls in black frowned and said, “Fuck you,” and some Skinz
laughed, and some individuals were not noticeably affected.
Everybody was getting a little drunker and louder now. Some guy
* This was not too long after Marisa lost her job at the bakery on Castro Street
because the owner read an official government report that skinheads were racist
and sexist. - What a surprise! - “I don’t have anything to say about that,” said
Marisa defiantly. - “Well, I can’t have someone working here with those opinions,”
said the owner, whose boyfriend was Jewish. Marisa told her to fuck off.
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