Wright - Darling Days

If it doesnt hurt like hell,

it aint worth a jack shit.

MY MA

January 8, 2016

Dear Ma,

Since my first conscious moments, you have been a gladiator to methe fiercest example of a womans power I could ever know.

We are some kind of twins, able to see each other in a room of closed eyes, able to hear each other in a world of silence, despite the trauma layered into our story. You are the priestess at the head of my tiny tribe of one.

Since I learned to use a phone and to this day, when our family wants to reach you, they do it through me. I am the whisperer, the only one who can ever locate you in the jungle of New York, because you will always call me back.

When no one could find you to break the news, it fell to me to tell you that your mother had died. The noise that came from you then was an animal pain. The realization that I would also one day lose you was so unbearable that I had to hang up.

For years, we were best friends. Long before the fights and the screaming and the law got involved.

Which is why I feel like I need to say a few things to you before you read this collection of stories intended to capture my life.

People often marvel at my having turned out so normal. They ask how Im not angry, how Im not a fuck-up, why I dont turn around and abuse people.

They say its extraordinary that Ive forgiven you.

I am hardly without effects. I am a vortex of damage. In my brief three decades, I have hurt people, betrayed trust, caused confusion and disappointment. I have sauntered around the shores of an ocean of rage, avoiding what would eventually become a crippling anxiety.

Its taken thirty years for me to melt the sandstorm of emotions within myself into glass, but now that I have found acceptance, now that I have forged an understanding of happiness and built my own world, I finally grasp the beautiful gift that is the lens I possess. Through it, I can see that instead of a mom, I have been given a moral compass.

Your solitude, your rigorous discipline in your body, the brilliant originality of your vision, as if your eyesight were replaced with a loop from another planet, these things are all gifts to me.

Your demonsthe visitor that would seep into your eyeballs on so many nights, clouding the kindness, turning your spit to poisonI do not begrudge you.

I bow in humbled respect at the feet of your loss, Ma.

Since I was a small child, you have recounted the story of Billy, your epic love, and his murder. Nothing has ever touched me or provoked as much empathy in my heart as that; the violence of your loss, so shortly before my arrival in this world. How could I have hated you?

I think, even as a tiny tot, I understood; Billy was taken from you, a tragedy without which I would never have existed, and thus, you were to be protected.

People call me brave, for getting up on stages and being open about who I am, but I know no other way than to be proud, because of you.

I was given the most important gift two parents can give to their child: Your respect. My dignity.

So, whether or not you understood that I wanted a clean house, regular meals, and to know which version of you would come home at night; whether you grasped the inappropriate level of professional expectation you put on me as a child who just wanted to play; although your addictions ravaged our relationship for so many yearsI understand.

I hope, now that we finally know where Billy was put to rest, that we can find a way to his remains, and close the gash that has defined you for three decades.

I will do everything I can to help you find peace, so you no longer have to medicate with flavored solvents and pharmaceutical hammers, so you are no longer the loneliest wolf.

Because of you, I know forgiveness.

Because of you, I know love.

Forever,

Your Bud

Contents

Her

13 Third Avenue, New York City, 1982

S HE SAID HE GAVE HER THE LITTLE GUN BECAUSE IT WAS classy and elegant, like her. A feminine twist of metal and pearl. Lethal, like her. She kept it under her pillow just in case.

Her bed was, is, and always will be under an open window, this one looking out onto Third Avenue. In 1981, her pillow filled a head-pistol sandwich, but she doesnt use a pillow now.

Then, she pulled her bleached blond, bombshell locks into a ponytail when she slept, always with her man, Billy. Under a pile of blankets in the winter or sweating naked in the summer, but always with her man.

The window gaped like a loyal simpleton, beaten by the sun or drooling raindrops, but its mouth never closed. The window stayed open.

My mothers world was a riot of improvisations, everything in flux and nothing predictable except the open window and the radio on. Rhythm in the air. Life! In the air, shed say. It stays on. She would tape over the switch. Nobody fucks with Babygirls radio.

Later, she would say that there was never a gun in the house. She would swear to this, like a Mafia wife, blinded by passion or loyalty. Either way it wasnt completely true. There was a gun under her pillow. Whether or not he pulled it out before they shot him, nobody knows.

Them

Third Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery, late summer 1985

I T WAS A FULL MOON, THE LAST NIGHT OF AUGUST 1985. MY mother told my father to turn the video camera on because the baby was coming.

It was sticky hot outside, the kind of air you can feel. She waded uptown through warm pudding, to a swimming pool in Hells Kitchen. Two weeks before, belly the size of a basketball, she had posed in a bikini at the Russian baths for a young photographer who told her that swimming was the best thing to loosen up her hips for birth. My mother had been swimming every day since.

Sounds travel differently in the summer. Horns are sharper, screams pierce, and catcalls work double time, trailing swinging booty shorts for blocks. In the mid-eighties, streetlights on Ninth Avenue winked on and off over sidewalks cluttered with garbage, the carts of fruit vendors, and the splayed bodies of crackheads, hugging the cement, sharp ribs laid bare in the heat.

Three lanes of headlights cut through the darkness, making Dick Tracy comic books out of countless shady instances of deals in doorways, pupils dilated from a thousand synthetic euphorias, uptown kids in Brooks Brothers and pearl earrings who thought coming to Hells Kitchen was coming downtown to cop. The beams backlit a fleet of muscle-bound tranny hookers, teetering back and forth on six-inch heels between twenty-dollar tricks. They carried box cutters in their garters in case tonight was the night some dumb motherfucker decided to let his Jesus guilt get the better of him after cumming on their miniskirt. At nearly six feet tall and broad in the shoulders, her eyes raw from the chlorine, Rhonna was perfectly camouflaged within the local wildlife.