PUNK PROSE: Your Bedroom, Which Wasn't a Bedroom by Neal Auch

We waited out the daylight in your bedroom, which wasn’t a bedroom. Really, it was a storage nook—someplace a wealthier family might have kept off-season sports equipment, boxes of Christmas tree decorations, extra leaves for the dining room table. And there wasn’t a bed either, just your couch made up with a child’s blankets, your clothes in garbage bags, your small CD player with its anguished screaming, paper thin guitars, inaudible drums. And beyond this there was nothing in that room except us—some 10 or maybe 15 people—and the warm murmurs of our voices slurring innuendoes and inside jokes that had been said and re-said so many times that their meaning, if any, had long since drained away, so that all that remained was the vowel sounds, the ritual, the insistence there was something that belonged to us.

So much is blurry now, between the years and the drink, but I remember the bodies—our bodies—pressed against one another in that confined space, sweating against one another in that confined space, tattoos not yet faded, piercings not yet scars. And I remember the way you straddled my lap, helping me with my nail polish and eye liner—those pretty little adornments I hadn’t yet learned to do on my own and still haven’t, after all these years. I remember the way the deep scoop of your black chiffon dress spilled open, saggy and ill-fitting over the nothingness of your chest, and the coarse black stubble coming in around your nipples and jawline. And my own hands, unsteady, that might have reached for you, but didn’t, and the things I might have whispered to you over din of the party, but didn’t.

We waited out the daylight and shared what we had to share, passing the peanut butter jar, the whiskey bottle, and the joint from person to person, hand to hand, mouth to eager mouth. We travelled in packs back then, like feral dogs; we showed our teeth when some stranger at the coffee shop muttered “faggots” under his breath or when the old woman on her porch scowled in our direction. We kept our bodies pressed against each other even when we didn’t need to—in the cafeteria, on the bus, at that spot beneath the overpass where we went drinking some nights—always touching, moving together as a consolidated front.

Dusk came and we cast ourselves out into the streets. And we lashed out at every inanimate thing we could see—tossed beer bottles against concrete embankments, toppled newspaper boxes and trash bins, smashed bus shelter windows down to a fine shimmering gravel—eager to remake the world in our likeness.

--Neal Auch