PUNK PROSE: A Biter, a Fighter, & a Fox (or, Why Vita Left L.A.) by Vita Tate

A Biter, a Fighter, & a Fox (or, Why Vita Left L.A.)

by Vita Tate 

i. 

2009 and sixteen-year-old Vita poses too-cool-for-school against a kitchen counter of a trashed Laurel Canyon cottage rented by three twenty-something wannabe actors. The men are throwing yet another young Hollywood party to seduce underage models with trust funds and belly button rings, hoping that the girls’ll convince their producer daddies to put the guys on TV. Since Vita is absolutely no one, she shows up to drink their booze and smoke their cigarettes and bolt when the men get too stoned to follow. For months they’ve been playing cat-and-mouse in a game where there’s no mice, only predators, just ’cause she’s homeschooled and bored and thrives on the rush of unrealized desire.  

Shot after shot after shot and the alcohol’s getting to her lil baby brain so Vita pours tequila number four on their sneakers while they blabber about some big-budget blah blah blah. Dax is led away by a prettier younger blonde looking for a fix, leaving just two, Carter and Luca, to square off in a chicken competition with lolita Vita jailbait. Carter is all swinging limbs and big gums and bad manners, but Luca is commercially attractive and who really likes that? 

“Going to stay past your bedtime tonight or you going to disappear on us again?” Carter says. 

“You never know,” she teases. He leans forward to brush her arm, but she stumbles back. Carter steps forward again, Vita slinks back. Forward, back, together, forward, back, together—she’s stuck in some sick synchronic tango with the fucker. Vita unwittingly reverses into Luca, who stares at Carter in turn. The trio pauses. The men’s eyes meet and their locked gazes turn all soft and dewy and maybe they get hard for each other and maybe their bodies throb too. Oh no no no. She’s cast as object in some steamy homosocial standoff. She wants to shout, just tongue each other already!, but Luca grabs her waist and pulls her in close still watching Carter. He leans into her, Vita pokes his ribs and turns away, but Luca shifts the play, plunging his teeth into her chin. Vita groans and wiggles herself free. Her face is too numb to register the impact, so she doesn’t realize he penetrated her flesh until Carter grunts, “Yo, V, you’re bleeding.” 

“Luca,” Vita shouts, rushing to the bathroom. “Idiot, you ruined the game!” 

In the mirror, she studies the oozing puncture in between tissue dabs. The blood refuses to coagulate, trickling with Luca’s swampy saliva down her jaw. Carter enters the bathroom without knocking and hovers over her. He’s more jaundice and gangly than usual under the overhead fluorescent light. He massages her shoulders and pants, “You ok?” 

Vita thinks, get a clue, and then realizes he’s blocking her exit. Wide-eyed and feeling extra stupid, she finally understands what her mom meant by “teenage hubris.” Luckily Carter’s gumby body leaves enough space for her to dart, leaving a trace of her fear in a reddish-brown thumbprint on the edge of the porcelain sink.  

 

ii. 

Monday, Joe comes home from Louisville all sourpuss from losing his second professional bout. Vita’s only been seeing him a few months but since he likes it when she plays doting lover so she brings over pad thai and oreos and kung fu dvds to coddle his deflated ego. She’s been draining pus from the chin wound for two days but it’s still an open sore, discolored and raw. Joe spots it the moment she walks in the door.  

Sweet Joey, good Southern man, who has never demanded anything but love and gentleness and unwavering obedience from the girl. He grabs her chin and holds it to his eye. “That doesn’t look like a pimple. It’s, like, blue-purple. It looks like a bite mark. Who the fuck bit you?” 

“Ok, Agatha Christie. You some expert in bruising now?” 

“It is a bruise, then? Tell me who you were with,” he demands, subduing her chin with his grip. She explains, it was just Luca being an idiot, just a joke, it didn’t mean anything, they’d been drinking, it was a riot. Sweet Joey sits still still still still for a minute, then pacing pacing, until the atmosphere is so thick and silent that Vita’s choking, pleading for him to SAY SOMETHING FUCKING HELL WOULD YOU JUST SAY ANYTHING, but he hurls himself at the fridge where he drinks one two three four beers and since he’s a fighter and has no body fat and hasn’t touched the pad thai, it all hits him at once. A blink and he’s fetal on the floor, weeping, “Vita, why?” and “why me?” and “don’t leave, I know you’re gonna leave.” Then, he’s up again pacing, inhale exhale inhale exhale inhale exhale. He flaps his arms at first indiscriminately, then winds up and strikes the wall with his full weight. Plaster crumbles around a fist-shape hole and Joe is reduced to a lump on the carpet. He wails, she aches. He sobs, she resents. He blubbers and babbles, and she reminds herself that he’s never beat her or bit her or cornered her or drugged her or grabbed her by the cunt. Like, so what if he punches walls, so what if he gets in drunken fights, so what if he cries and breaks dishes and bleeds when she says she needs space. She wonders, can he really be the best of them?  

--Vita Tate