Firmani - Times a Thief

Kendrick Lwenstein.

Id heard her name for almost a whole semester before I ever saw her. I was taking a philosophy class, a terrible class actually, with a student-hating, prehistoric professor who never gave lectures or unpacked anything but instead read aloud to us for the entire hour, as if wed gathered there for a bedtime story. To eat up some time before turning to his disintegrating notebook and intoning his notes on Epictetusnotes unchanged, was the word on the street, since the time of the 68 student protests, when a few subversive asides crept in, among them an oblique reference to the world actually having ended in 1908 due to the Tunguska Meteor Eventhe would call the roll. There were certain people who never showed up, and on these he would hang, repeating their names over and over again, a dull needle stuck in a bad groove.

Kendrick Lwenstein, he would read. Getting no response, he would repeat: Kendrick Lwenstein. Hed look up, squinting his eyes under caterpillar eyebrows. Kendrick Lwenstein! he would demand, warning her that she risked giving offense and commanding her to appear. Kendrick Lwenstein? he would say finally, wistfully, lingering over the name as if he were a lover and she the one who got away.

I remember very clearly the first time I finally saw her.

It was about four in the morning, just after bar time, and I was trucking up Broadway with my motorcycle jacket stuffed with packs of Marlboros and a six of $2.99 Knickerbocker beer under my arm. Im not even sure where I was going. Probably Id been hanging out with Trina, Audrey, and Fang-Hua and Id volunteered to do the beer-and-cigarette run, or Id been at a bar and I was out looking to prolong the mischief, but who can remember so many years down the line? Anyway, right there on the corner of Broadway and 116th was this girl. And she looked so dramatic, so absurdly exaggerated, that I almost laughed out loud. It was freezing cold, but the top of her coat was pulled down, swathed around her freakishly pale, almost alien-white shoulders, and held closed over her breastbone with one long-fingered hand. Worn like this it took on the aspect of an opera cape, or some last shred of grandeur clung to, literally, by deposed royalty. With her other hand she held by the corner an enormous clutch purse, which was covered in some kind of ancient linsey-woolsey needlepoint fabric and which sagged with (Id learn only later) masses and masses of stolen dexies. I remember thinking she had a kind of arrogant, indolent lower lip, and I got the feeling she had just left some louche company. She was like a tragic heroine, worse for the wearglamorous, haggard, in extremisand she was made up like a silent movie star. Except that she had electric-blue hair.

There was something to this. The thing of it was, she was a mess, standing there with her lips parted, smudge-lidded and surprised at herself, with her sulky and offended face. But I knew from experience how much discipline it took to have blue hair. Green hair, we all knew, was easy. It was what you got when you tried to dye your hair blue. Youd bleach and bleach your brains out, but it was never enough, so your hair would go a crazy straw yellow. Then youd slather on the Manic Panic blue dye and getgreen hair. You had to have real patience, real technique, to have blue hair.

And so, looking at this girl standing on the corner of 116th and Broadway at 4:12 a.m. on a cold winter night in the late 1980s, I thought, Heres a girl who, all evidence to the contrary, has a backup plan.

Got a light? was the first thing she said to me.

Of course I had a light. I was born with a Zippo in my hand.

I lit her cigarette for herit was almost the same blue as her hair, with a long gold filter, a Nat Sherman Fantasia, I would learnand when it was clear she was going nowhere, I put down the six-pack, took out my own cigarettes, and lit one. It felt wrong to leave her standing there on the corner. I was still holding the lighter when she took it out of my hand.

Cool, she said, turning it over and over and looking at it. Whyd you paint it black?

They made them like that during World War Two. To save the brass. And you could light up in the trenches and the metal wouldnt reflect the light.

She flicked it open, lit the flame, snapped it shut.

Can I have it? she said.

I laughed.

Um, no? I said.

Oh, come on, cant I have it? she said. She was holding it up in front of her face, clicking it open, flicking the flame, snapping it shut again and again. I realized with this that she was a rich kid. Because middle-class people, let alone working-class, dont go around expecting stuff for free. I grabbed the lighter back on the last snap.

It was my dads, I said, putting it in my pocket.

Your dad was in World War Two? she said.

I said yeah.

My dads way old too, she said. How olds your dad?

Hes dead, I said.

I wish my dad were dead, she said. She inhaled deeply on her cigarette, threw her head back, and exhaled. She tilted her head down and looked at me fiercely. Actually, I wish my fucking mother were dead. I could chuck her down a well.

She wastheatrical. But there was also something strangely languid about her, distracted. She threw me off. I would later learn that her parted-lip, surprised look was what her face settled into at rest. I would go on to wonder if this might have had something to do with her having done lots of drugs since the age of eleven.