I found myself at a club in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.  Danielle and I flashed the bouncer our fake IDs.  He stamped our hands, and waved us through. 

Hundreds of skinheads, punks—all of New York’s strange and romantically tough gathered to see the killer lineup of hardcore bands. We entered into the cavernous space while the first band finished up their last set.  The dark room looked like a packed auditorium with blue and green neon to light up the stage and walls.  Huge speakers faced the crowd.

I followed Danielle around.  She knew everybody.   She greeted all these people I didn’t really believe existed. I watched her flirt with a tall dude in a purple and black Mohawk. The next thing I knew, they disappeared.

I should have known. Back at school, everyone listened to Danielle tell stories of her adventures in the city at night.  While she transported the rest of the group to an exotic environment that their parents would never let them see – I felt my best friend slipping further and further away.

Danielle concocted a scheme to sneak us out of the house.  Her mother didn’t care if she stayed out late, but my mother would eat me alive.  If we got caught, my parents would ground me and I’d never hear the end of it. 

The opener—some no-name group from Flushing— thanked everyone and left.  Murphy’s Law came up next and the crowd packed in.  The music blared.  Jimmy G. screamed into the microphone.  I listened to the scratching of an electric guitar with the distortion pedal on and the amps turned up.  The sound vibrated through my bones.  I felt a little sick from the smell of sweat and cigarette smoke filling the room.  I tried to squeeze past the sea of shirtless tattooed bodies, but they shoved, pushed, and banged me from every direction.

Danielle’s makeup weighed down my face.  She applied it before we left her house.  “This will make you look older,” she insisted.  “Then, we’ll, have a better chance of getting in.” 

I had to get out of the middle.  The bar!  If only I could reach the bar!  With a hard whack, someone’s elbow jabbed my ribs.  Ugh.  I pushed and shoved my way through the crowd, but no matter how hard I fought, people pushed me back, leaving me stuck in the same spot.

My only chance for escape presented itself from a break in the crowd on the left.  I slunk behind a large half-naked, sweaty guy and pushed my way toward the wall.  Jimmy began to sing Who’s got the Bong and the crowd rushed the stage.  That’s when I ran to the back of the room—as far away from the stage as possible.

The bar stools glowed from the long blue tube lights running along their sides—not that anyone could sit on them with this many people in the place.  Rather, they served as more of an illuminated buffer between the pit and the bar.  I wedged myself onto the furthest stool, next to a huge concrete column.  My feet dangled six inches off the ground.  They felt more like cement blocks in Danielle’s borrowed, steel-toed combat boots.  I told my mother I was sleeping over Danielle’s house and Danielle had told her mother she was sleeping over mine.  I tried to get the bartender’s attention.  One phone call from either parent and they'd totally bust us.  . . . That witch would never let me out of the house again.  The bartender ignored me.  I guess I really didn’t expect him to serve me.  At that moment, I really felt underage.

            I looked into the crowd for Danielle.  She ditched me to hook-up with Mohawk dude in the back stairwell.  Another guy—this really big skinhead that looked a lot older—maybe even in his 20s—walked up to me.  He had no hair, no shirt, and muscles bulging out from every part of his torso.  I could barely make eye contact with him.  Instead, I studied the details of the tribal tattoo banding around his right bicep.

“Nice, huh?” He turned his head in an awkward movement to look at it.  “Dude in Red Hook did it for me.  He kicks ass with tribal.”

I looked up and forced a smile.

“My name is Frank.  Your friend Danielle asked me to get you.”

I could not stop thinking about how I would get stuck taking the train home, alone, at three o’clock in the morning because Danielle got busy with some dude.

“I’m Diane,” I said, although I doubt he heard me.

“Where is she?”  I asked.  

He motioned for me to follow him outside.  I hesitated for a moment, but the idea of some fresh air felt good.  We walked out the front door and the night hit us in the face.

 The music echoed around the club, spilling onto the street to mix with the occasional honking taxi. Frank told me that he lived in Williamsburg. 

“How do you know Danielle?”  I asked.

“We met at Pyramid,” He tried to come off as both friendly and macho at the same time.  “She hangs out there a lot.”

            I nodded. 

Maybe if I don’t say much, he won’t think I am a total loser. I wondered if Danielle hooked up with Frank before.  She said something about it at lunch a while back.  I never knew when she lied to impress me or when she told the truth.  With Danielle, it could go either way.

            Frank opened up an empty box of Marlboros.

            “You wanna take a walk? I need to pick up some smokes.”

            We ambled up the street toward the yellow flashing lights of the Bodega on the corner.  Frank lit up a joint.  The rest of the block had nothing but burnt out buildings on it.  The lights in a little convenience store flashed on and off like a lonely beacon in the middle of a concrete wilderness.  He passed me the joint.

Danielle taught me how to smoke pot a few months ago.  I took a deep toke and held it in. A phoenix took flight in my lungs.  I stifled a cough with my exhale.  By the time we reached the store, I couldn’t feel my throat at all.  Everything moved in slow motion.

            I did not remember Frank paying for the cigarettes, just the rows of Lifesavers, Chicklets, Doublemint Gum, Bazooka Joe, EZ Riders and a bunch of other colorful stuff crammed into the tiny space.  The old, wrinkled Pakistani man behind the counter handed Frank a fresh box of Marlboro Reds. 

I listened to him rip off the plastic from the package.  He flipped the box lid back and pulled out a smoke with his teeth.  I smelled the sulfur ignite as he struck a match.  He tossed both the plastic wrapper and the used matchstick on the ground outside as we left the store.

Frank pulled out another cigarette and handed it to me.  I felt a lot more comfortable smoking these.  Danielle and I practiced a lot.  Frank said something about Danielle telling him to bring me in the alley behind the club to meet her, but I was afraid to go back there.  I knew what she did there and why she wanted Frank to take me.

            We returned to the club.  The noise hit hard again.  The smell of sweat seemed stronger than before.

            “Why don’t you go ahead,” I shouted.  “I’ll meet you there.”  He headed toward the stage, to the back alley behind it.

I watched Frank disappear into the crowd.  Alone again, I fought my way through the bodies to the other side of the dance floor, where I thought I saw the bathrooms earlier.  The next band— Agnostic Front— started singing the national anthem.  The entire place transformed into one huge mosh pit.  I stopped for a second and stepped back toward the door.  I wanted to go home, but I’d settle for navigating my way into the bathroom alive.

            Keeping to the crowd’s periphery, I put my forearm in front of me and pushed my way forward until I completed the semi-circle. 

Just then, a thin girl in a cut-sleeve  Metallica tee-shirt, shorts, and knee-high Doc Martens walked up.  I didn’t know her, but she seemed intent on confronting me.  She shoved her wrists in my face, saying something I couldn’t hear.

            “Hey!”  I yelled.  “What’s your problem?”

            Before I could react further, she pulled out a razor blade from between her fingers.  I thought she planned to cut me. Not recognizing her, I stepped back, and raised my arms up to protect my face. Before I knew it, she sliced the inside of her right forearm.  She started at the wrist and pulled the blade down to her elbow, making a deep incision that ran at least six inches long. The flesh spread apart, exposing white cell tissue, red blood, and even a hint of bone.  I stood there, stunned.  It took me a second or two to figure out what she was doing.  She took the blade into her wounded hand and then slit the other wrist. 

            “No, don’t do that!” I shouted, but she ignored me.  I reached for the blade, but she dropped it on the floor. 

I stood there, staring.  I could not see past her arms. Blood squirted out of her body, spewing everywhere—spraying me with splotches of the viscous liquid. It felt like an eternity before I moved.  I grabbed them and tried to stretch my hands over her wounds.  I tried to stop the blood from pouring out—everywhere.

            The color drained from her face.  Tears escaped the corners of her eyes.  She looked pained, like a mixture of the face in that painting, The Scream and the one with the melting clocks. Somehow, beyond the pain I saw a smug satisfaction, as though she said “Fuck You” to the world and everyone in it.

            “Help!”  I screamed.  “Help!  Someone call 911.”  I took the red flannel from around my waist and wrapped it tightly around her bleeding wrists in an attempt to bind them together and stop some of the blood. She let me.

            “It’s too late,” she laughed.

            I looked up.  People just stood there, watching.

            “Call 911!”  The music drowned me out.  “Someone call 911!”

            I pressed her arms together in my flannel.  Her body fell limp beneath them.  I struggled to keep the now unconscious girl standing up.  Nothing worked.  Helplessness washed though me in waves of blood.  The room spun and I felt very small.  I rose up from my body and took in the whole scene from somewhere on the ceiling.

            People pushed and shoved, this time with intent.  A tall, fat, middle-aged man with a scruffy beard, a blue flight jacket that had a patch for Cabrini Hospital sewn onto the sleeve, and balding blond head, took the girl from my arms and put her onto a yellow stretcher.  Other emergency workers moved about but I didn’t see them.  I didn’t see anything except the warm, sticky, blood.  It covered my hands, staining the crevices underneath my fingernails.  It covered my jeans, my denim jacket, my shirt.

“Miss, please come with me,” said the uniformed officer.  His badge attached to the center of his hat.

“Do you know this girl?”

I shook my head.  “I never saw her before,” I explained, still stunned.  “I was on my way to the bathroom when she came up to me . . . “

Whether it was the pot we smoked outside or the trauma of the dead girl, the rest of the evening just blurred in my mind.  I kept seeing the blood—feeling the hot liquid spray across my face. I looked down at my red, stained cuticles.  Blood marked the line that separated my fingernails from my skin.

“Do you mind if I wash my hands?”  I asked the officer after spending almost an hour answering questions. He motioned his permission for me to go.

The bathroom smelled of piss.  Dirty paper towels littered the floor.  Toilet tissue and human waste clogged the toilets.  I plunged my soapy hands into the once-white porcelain sinks that now donned caked-in layers of black grime.  I squeezed some of the pink soapy liquid into my palms and started scrubbing—and scrubbing.  I looked in the cracked mirror.  Red splotches dotted my cheeks and forehead.  I rinsed off my hands, squirted more of the pink liquid into my palms, and washed away the blood and my makeup from my face.  I pulled paper towels from the dispenser and dug out the red stains from underneath my nails.

I took my jacket off, squirted soap on the stains and rubbed it together, rinsing it out in the cold, rusty water.  Then, I scrubbed the blood from Danielle’s boots.  By the time I came out, I looked a little bit more human and a lot more like a kid.  The club owners turned the overhead lights on.  Only a handful of witnesses and a whole lot of cops remained.

“How old are you?” asked the officer, studying my Junior High School I.D.  “Hey Jose,” he called to one of the other cops.  “She’s only thirteen.” 

After taking my statement, the officers prepared to call my parents.

“Please officer,” I pleaded.  “Please, not that!  You can’t call them, they will kill me!  I’ll never be allowed out again!”

At first, he ignored me, but I insisted.  “Please!  I beg you!  Don’t call them!!  You don’t know my mom.”  Tears streamed down the sides of my cheeks.  “You don’t know what she’s like.”

            “This aint no place for a kid,” said the hardened, middle-aged cop. “If I was your dad, I’d whip your ass for bein’ here.”

            Meanwhile, I could not find Danielle, Frank, or anyone—anywhere.  I imagined her laughing about the whole thing in front of everyone at school.  She would keep the charming allure of fun and danger—the one that all the boys wanted— while I looked like the sucker that got stuck talking to the cops. The tears came down harder and faster.

The tall, young cop—whom could not be more than 22 years old— took pity on me.  His nametag said Mendez.  “Give her a break, Charlie,” he said to his partner.  “She’s had a rough time.”  He turned around to me. “Talk about yer bad luck.  Come on kid, I’ll take you home.”

“Thank you!”  I murmured between sobs.  I followed him to one of the three police cars now parked in front of the building, grateful for avoiding the long and frightening train-ride home alone.  We rode silently across the Brooklyn Bridge.  I watched the pink and golden sunrise through the back of the police car as we drove along the Belt Parkway and through Coney Island’s 37 blocks of housing projects.  The Sea Gate guard lifted the gate for the officer.  We pulled up in front of my house—the moment I dreaded most.

Officer Mendez offered to walk me to the door, but I refused. All I needed— a cop standing at the door with me.  I stopped for a moment and stared at the house, terrified of whatever lay on the other side of that door.  Oh my god, what if she is awake?  Then, I’m totally fucked.

            I sat on the stoop, took off Danielle’s clunky shoes, and wrapped them in my wet, bloody jacket.  I smell like cigarette smoke!  I thought.  She’s totally going to notice that!  I swallowed hard and quietly turned the lock, opening the door just enough to slip through it before it squeaked.  I inched my way past the closed door to their bedroom.  Thank god!  They’re asleep!

            I made it to my room, stripped off all my clothes, and shoved them onto the floor in my closet.  Ahhh.  The pressure lifted from my shoulders like a radiator valve releasing steam.  At least now, I am home.  I just need a good story for coming back from Danielle’s in the middle of the night.  She doesn’t know when I got here, so, technically, I could have been here for hours. . . I considered this dilemma while filling a bath with hot water.

 I’ll just tell her we had a fight and I wanted to come home.  I did not want to see Danielle or her friends for a long time anyway.  I climbed into the hot bath, washed off the blood, smoke, and sweat from my body, and tried to pretend the night had never happened.

            I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but even in my dreams, I saw nothing but blood. 

* * *