Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [55]
So, at the end of the evening of the day I met Brad and his intentionally bad paintings, I climbed onto a mattress on top of a loft he’d built behind his Nighthawks diner and made out with him. Up to this point, I had made out with only two people in my life, total. It had taken my high school senior year boyfriend a full year of earnest love letters to get to second base.
“I’m still a virgin,” I said to Brad.
“Really?” he said, oddly indignant. “Then you better go to Planned Parenthood and get on the pill.” He rolled off me, grabbed a pad of paper and a pen, and scribbled detailed instructions on transferring from one bus line to another to get to the clinic in Oakland. His message was clear: if I expected to spend more time with him, everything about me had to change.
As I rode the bus back to my dorm, I ruminated on the events of the day, attempting to reinterpret them so they were more to my liking. Was Brad letting me know, in his terse impatient way, that he liked me so much he couldn’t bear to wait? Was it possible that once I gave in and played along, we would be magically transformed into one of those great artist couples, like whoever that lady was and Picasso?
I didn’t see or hear from Brad again until a few nights later, when we decided to get together for what amounted to our first date. When we spoke on the phone, that trip to Planned Parenthood remained the number one topic. So even though I had a lot of schoolwork to do, I resigned myself to making the cross-town trip. Because, come on: my schedule needed to be flexible enough to accommodate important life-changing events. Same way I had managed to make room for that day-long Black Power conference, where I was the only representative of my gender and race; I went because I knew that it was culturally important for me to attend. And in a different way, so was this. Anyway, I didn’t feel like I had a choice. Even though if, just a few months before, my parents had given me a bunch of orders involving bus trips and pills, I would have stormed out of the room, now I was behaving like someone who’d been abducted and imprisoned in a basement for a decade and had developed Stockholm syndrome.
In the indie film version of this story, it would probably be time for a “love montage.” This one would begin with a tracking shot of a small art-house revival theater, where we would find my character standing behind Brad in a movie line, waiting to pay for her own ticket. Then it would follow her as she followed him up to the snack bar, where we would watch her digging around in her big leather purse, hoping to find enough loose change to buy herself a popcorn. Cut to the inside of the theater itself, where, on the smallish screen, W. C. Fields would be shaving a man in a barber chair before the camera panned over to the audience. There, with the movie light flickering gently on their faces, my character and her date would be sitting side by side, not even acknowledging each other. Next would come a series of quick shots of the two of them driving away in his truck, still not touching or saying a word. Then, from a camera angle at the bottom of a stairwell, we would bear silent witness as they quietly marched up to his flat at the back of the house, hearing only the sound of their shoes scuffling on the rotted wood as they climbed.
The montage would end with one of those uncomfortably clear overhead shots of my character lying