Issue 22 - 1992

Coe Review • Issue 22
of solid ground back so much that you will keep to the thing that is
not right, willing it to be right for another day’s journey a few
thousand more steps, because you want to not think about the dark
hole waiting for you, and if you can delay the collapse of the ground
you will certainly do it. I had felt this way toward my relationship
with Jenny on many occasions, and I felt it now regarding distrusting
my friends. I could not believe that Marisa had taken anything, and
I could not believe that anyone else had taken anything.
Jenny hardly slept for two nights. - “These skinheads, these
Boot women,” she said, “I wonder if they disapprove of me. I
wonder if they hate me ‘cause I’m Asian girl. Maybe they want to
hurt me. I mean, they’re Nazis!” - I had not told her what the
skinheads said about her, but even so she knew that one night a
month or two from now, when we had forgotten the incident, Marisa
would come sneaking up to the door and unlock it with the stolen
keys, and then Dickie and Mark Dagger and Chuckles and Blue and
Yama and Hunter and Dee and Spike and Nazi Joe and Ice and Dan-
L would then come charging up the stairs and Dagger would shatter
the banister with one kick of his Nazi boots and Yama would smash
in the curtained glass door of Margaret’s room and start hitting
Margaret over the head with a chair and the rest of them would come
back into Jenny’s room and find Jenny and me sleeping on her
waterbed and Dickie would slit the waterbed with a sharpened tin
can and the skinheads would yell at us, “All right, where’s the
money? Where’s the money?” - and Marisa would tell me I had one
minute to get out and leave Jenny to her fate, and then Yama would
hit her in the face and say, “Shut up, bitch! We’re gonna carve ‘em
all!”, and Chuckles and Blue would piss into our faces and Ice would
begin to dismantle the living room stereo with tender care.
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After two weeks, Jenny became resigned. We took to
locking her door and my door with the deadbolts, which had not
been used before, and which Jenny had not had keys for. Her face
was still puffy with tears. For Jenny, who loved clean things and neat
things and organized things despite her own carelessness, the loss of
the wallet was an aesthetic disaster as well as a security risk. “I wish
I misplaced it,” she said mournfully, “though it really doesn’t make
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