'50 Chevy

After I gave Heidi away, I came back to a new home and a new high school.
While I was gone, Olman and Ruth bought into the geographical cure and moved down cape to Falmouth.
I wrapped up the last 3 months of my senior year like a refugee.
I felt like Aly Sheedy with the dandruff in 'The Breakfast Club'.
I didn't go to the prom.

I drove a 50 Chevy named Black Beauty.
I rip out her back seat and make a quilt and feather bed.
I paint bold colors on her fuzzy grey wall.
Alters with incense and daisys.
I camp at the Newport Jazz Festival.

The thing I loved most about Black Beauty was her malfunctioning clutch.
Every time we stopped at a red light, I had to pop the hood and fix the clutch. I wore an oil rag in the back pocket of my jeans.
In the late 60's, I looked like a girl who knew what she was doing.
And those college boys would check out my ass.
I picked one up who was hitching a ride to Yarmouth.
I always felt nervous around rich academic types.
I saw the red light coming and I was geeked about showin' off the popped clutch Chinese fire drill.
Jim Morrison wanted everyone to light his fire.
I bent down to turn it up and crashed into the car in front of me.
College boy hopped out, said 'thanks for the ride' while I wiped the blood from my head.
Olman brought out the Poloroid, ranting about money for my college education, snapping flashbulbs on my black eyes and stitched head.
He got some kinda money out of it and gave me the green light to go to art school.

After my third semester, they asked me when I will pay the bill.

Pedagogy

We used to call it “Swain School of Distain.”
A vending machine art school in New Bedford,
Massachusetts, the arm pit of Cape Cod.
My first assignment was to paint 100 grey values
between black and white.
My Philosophy Prof looked like Kurt Vonnegut.
I wrote an essay about giving Heidi away.
He made love to my 18 year old body in the guesthouse
of his 16th century farmhouse in Barnstable.
He took black and white photos of my youth as
his wife watched from a window,
backlit by the fire of a wood stove.

He gave me an "A" that semester.

My brother helped me cop my first crib. The landlady
had an eggplant nose and warts with hair.
She paid no mind to the cockroach circus that illuminated
the dark corners of the one room studio apartment.
She would open the old wooden window to my room
like a gargoyle confessional.
But it was cheap and my black eyes would pay for it.

I walk to school digging through matted confetti leaves of fall,
finding remnants of rusted pop culture and old bicycle parts.
I weld them together in sculpture class.

Artistgirl and I moved in with two rich brothers, Charles and Richard,
renting the servants quarters of a bedraggled seafarer’s mansion in
Fall River. A ghost paced the widow’s peak, searching the Atlantic Ocean,
probing the gasping water like a searchlight.
They fed us amphetamines and drove us to parties in their red
BMW convertible.
I saw Charles a year later. I’m a waitress at a fried clam shack and
20 lbs overweight.
I overheard him mutter to his bro, “Bub got chubby!”

Girls. Never do Uppers.