Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
drawings (she has since been accepted by a fine art school), and
Marisa told me about the time she had belonged to a ballet troupe in
Australia (which I have never visited and therefore enjoy
imagining), getting picked up on wherever she went, not that she
cared since she knew she’d never see those men again; and at the
Hotel King’s Cross in Sydney she played strip poker in the boys’
room until the Director came back, so freckled Marisa had to get her
clothes back on real fast and crawl out on the window-ledge to get
back into her room, and the Director saw her, so she bitched Marisa
out for that and then Marisa had to be watched for days and days,
until finally there was a free day when members of the troupe could
go out in groups, but Marisa said fuck this shit; she was going to
hitchhike, so she set out for a fleamarket to buy her San Francisco
friends some stupid Australian T-shirts and the Director saw her
sneaking back and wrote up a report on her for that, too, but Marisa,
who at that time had greenish-red hair which was short in some
places and long in other places (and in other places still it just went
tiiing!), didn’t care because at the fleamarket she’d gotten picked up
by some guy who was really good looking; meanwhile everywhere
they traveled around the circumference of this reddish-brown
continent, a more faithful admirer still followed Marisa in a
chocolate-brown Rolls Royce, and she would always get mixed up
and try to get in on the driver’s side instead of the passenger side
because the roads and cars were opposite from the ones in America,
but Marisa’s admirer just laughed; he was about forty, and the
Director, who was seventy-two, had a big crush on him, not that it
did the Director any good; and then the troupe danced at the Sydney
Opera House and another man fell in love with Marisa and took her
out to dinner, but the Director caught her sneaking back into the
hotel late at night, totally fucked-up, so Marisa was barred from
dancing for the next two performances, and in the next city the guy
in the chocolate-brown Rolls Royce gave Marisa enough pot to get
the whole company completely stoned, which she did, so they had to
call off the next performance, and Marisa got expelled from the
company, although they couldn’t send her home early because that
would have cost too much, so she got to stay on and get into as much
trouble as she wanted. Finally the company had to stop boarding her
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