Suicide Blonde by Darcey Steinke

place seemed less exotic than last time. I drank fast and scanned the black-light murals. The nearest one was of an alligator leering at a nude woman. I ordered another shot, watched a drunken couple make out at the end of the bar. The man squeezed his fingers between her legs, then smiled like an idiot. The woman's hair was dirty, strains separated in shiny red cords down her back. Each time they pulled apart, they drank quickly and seemed ridiculously shy.
    For a while, staring at my paper bag of clothes, my freaked-out eyes in the mirror behind the bar, I convinced myself I would go back to Bell. He was the only man that ever made me feel in life instead of just a spectator, and if he did that by fear and pain, it was still better than when I looked numbly at some man on the couch thinking, I will leave you soon. I got another beer and thought of Bell and me in a big apartment on Nob Hill, how we would have dark paintings and beautiful wooden bowls. Bell would have a job producing movies and I'd be a photographer and we'd eat tabouli and make our own Christmas cards and name our baby India. Our bed would be thick with patterned blankets, quilts and cranberry satin pillows. But the dream place bled into a starker room, Bell asleep on the futon, me awake at the window—our life as raw and painful as a bloody bone.
    I was still angry about Bell's reference to my biological clock. To think of it was ridiculous—an old-fashioned alarm, that seemed a cartoon of the real angst . . . a vague sense that it was time to change. It began with noticing babies on the street, their funky sweaters and adorable little shoes. I noticed pregnant women too, how they seemed so positively preoccupied. And after so many lovers, the purity of the mother-child relationship became so appealing; there was no doubt your baby loved you. There was embarrassment too, at still being a maiden, because there were women in the beginning of that stage, fresher, more energetic and better at it than me. This sometimes made me feel ridiculously jealous. The biological clock was a feeling that it was time to move from one phase to the next, more advanced one. It was a positive and mature thing really, though men made it sound like a nervous disease.
    But what had I done to stabilize myself? I had begun a relationship with a bisexual man, and as far as economics I hadn't done much in the last year except take some photos, sew the occasional hat or vest. Instead, I hung out in the cafés on 16th Street, pretending to read Flowers of Evil. The Mission seemed like the last bohemia in America, moved in the sixties from North Beach to Haight-Ashbury, both of which were overrun now with tourists looking for Kerouac and Cassady in City Lights and the Grateful Dead and the Drug Store in the Haight. The Mission was dirty, you could still get a two-dollar burrito, sit in the Albion or the Uptown, watch leftist documentaries at the Roxie. Used-clothing stores were not vintage and there was a host of prophetic street people who drank coffee and wrote manifestos in the cafés. One, a thin man named Spoons, sat in the Piccaro Café, distributing to everyone xeroxes that demanded life-time driver's permits, converting all the storefronts to squats and allowing girls to marry as early as ten. He also insisted that every light bulb had a tiny camera inside and that it was a CIA plot that he never got any mail. The Piccaro with its headless-Barbie-doll art, people in oversized sweaters scribbling into notebooks, reading, playing chess. It seemed authentic, but I couldn't decide whether they were posing or if I was. This scene and every other seemed hopelessly self-conscious to me. I felt as suspicious about bohemians as I did about professionals in upscale restaurants or suburbanites who catatonically roamed the malls of Palo Alto. I had come here to be different with all the others, but it wasn't working. Maybe it had to do with sheer numbers. It was easy to convince myself in