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But back to my ninth summer, the summer I had nothing to do. I’ve always liked walking. That summer I walked all over the place, aimlessly and deliberately, knowing always where and when to turn and walk in another direction. I didn’t purposefully walk to my Aunt Debbie’s, but once I got to her dead end street there was nothing else for me to do but knock on her door. She was watching General Hospital from her chair and seemed only mildly curious when an unexpected visitor came to her door. She had a whole house to herself that she inherited after her grandfather died. Cigars and whiskey. She invited me in and offered me candy from jars that were always full. Aunt Debbie hugged and kissed as a greeting. She would put her wet lips on my cheek, always making me feel a little uneasy. I don’t recall the conversations we had because I don’t think we had many then. Whatever strange wisdom she offered didn’t seem nearly as alluring as the conventions of the snowglobe she lived inside. From her snowglobe came Christmas and birthday cards and bi-monthly phone calls.
The summer I had nothing to do, the prison of not having walls overwhelmed me. I no longer felt free and wild. A perpetual, sweaty boredom led me to strange and twisted heat dreams, gas-pedaling my body in a huff-huffing wounded throttle that could only bring me as far as the arcade. On those silent and turbulent afternoons, I was absorbed by repetitive motions. I’d just recently realized that the constellations in the sky didn’t change, that they stayed the same from night to night. I awoke my mother to show her one that I’d been staring at for a few weeks, but it was three in the morning and it didn’t seem worth her while. I imagined I used the constellations to talk to people across the country-- a girl somewhere in California who looked exactly like me, that I would never meet, became an obsession. When I was young the world was not round or flat, but planar in a Euclidean way-- infinite, and therefore not a plane at all. These were the days of Quantum Leap, thought provoking television programming that raised questions in me about time space and identity. Could a middle-aged man from the future be possessing my body to change the past? Where would that leave me? Could two people share one body? Could two bodies share one person? The answer is of course, yes... and no.
Aunt Debbie offered me a twizzler from one of her candy bowls and I took a seat at the dining-room table. I stared at the twizzler while Aunt Debbie asked me questions that I answered with shoulder shrugs and sounds that meant something but weren’t quite words. When the conversation went dead, I asked if I could swim in her pool and she said of course. I swam with my clothes on and had been floating for a while before I opened my eyes to see her standing over me. If you get hungry I can make you a sandwich. Ham. The saltiness of her eyes is so rich in my memory. It was like she’d been filled up with all the feel-good things life had to offer and been cured. I shrugged a ‘no thank you,’ got out of the pool, and wrung out my clothes while they were still on me. My clothes were a sad sign of the eighties mixed with my poverty, and I knew it. I wore a neon green T-shirt with a bright orange ‘thumbs up’ sign and black cut-off sweat pants that had belonged to my sister. Saturated and uncomfortable, I went into Aunt Debbie’s basement to play Nintendo. Uncle Jackie, her brother, had turned the basement into a bar where all the men could go during holidays. There were couches and a dartboard and on the wall a picture I’d drawn of a giant fire breathing rabbit sitting on a telephone line. I remember drawing it that spring right before Easter. I started with a single dot that became a line that became an eyelash. My fuzzy, angry bunny sat on that telephone line all alone. She breathed fire to let everyone know not to fuck with her. I’d memorized the Nintendo game so that it was just a matter of keeping sequences to win.
Aunt Debbie’s basement had a cold monotony that was different from everywhere else, and I was struck by the liberation I felt in its windowless, enclosed space. It was nice to be trapped under the earth with nowhere to go. I sat on the linoleum floor knowing I could be alone for as long as I wanted and Aunt Debbie wouldn’t mind. I felt daring. I took my wet shorts off and sat Indian-style on top of them. The basement air was dust-swarming, making the place seem smoky and romantic. My curiosity, perhaps encouraged by the air and the dampness of clothes, turned to non-specific, self-encapsulated lust. I fiddled with myself, not knowing what was going to happen, until it did. And wow, what a feeling. A friend of mine asked me recently why lesbians and black women write about masturbation so often. It’s something to think about.
Sitting in Aunt Debbie’s basement filled me with an erotic detachment that still makes me jealous of my first orgasm. An orgasm is perhaps the only way we can truly feel the difference between being dead and being alive. Or maybe that rule applies only to people like me. I put my shorts back on just before Aunt Debbie knocked on the door to see if I was hungry again. This year I learned that when crazy people are asked to draw pictures of things they start with the details and work their way outward. They don’t pay attention to the bigger shapes of things. It’s nearly impossible to finish anything because there are so many details. My self-portrait starts on the summer I had nothing to do, and then I work my way inward. I’m that picture of a sad and fuzzy rabbit, sitting on a line, breathing fire, and waiting for someone to pet her fur. No one would know it by looking at her. As I said before, I am a crazy person, and may have trouble making the lines connect right away. Not to worry though, as long as nobody expects me to finish anytime soon.
Aunt Debbie stopped having visitors after her last friend died because she was too drunk all the time and she had lost her mind. Her last friend happened also to be her mother, my grandmother, who’d died a slow and painful death. I went to see her on her deathbed. She was quivering and thin, unable to breath without a machine. Emphysema. Em-pha-seema. M-Fa-See-Ma. The last time I saw Aunt Debbie, she had nothing to talk about but death and money. They seemed to go hand and hand, one being a means to acquire the other, though I couldn’t be sure which was which. I had limited knowledge of either and wish this was still true today.
The summer I had nothing to do, I found something to do. But the vulgarity of female masturbation had not escaped me, and I think that’s why I set my hand on fire. The boy next door had showed me how to do it one afternoon. Pauly sprayed his hand with Aqua-Net and put it over the stove. He let the hairspray burn off before he shook the flames out. He said it didn’t hurt. Rumors had been circulating around the neighborhood that Pauly might be a little retarded. The kids called him blockhead. I found him comforting because he was quieter than me. We played Ninja Turtles together and when the other boys weren’t around I didn’t have to play the part of April O’Neil and he didn’t have to be one of the evil foot soldiers.
I decided to set my hand on fire when no one was home. I’d been lying in a fort I made with sheets behind my couch, reading Black Beauty and getting myself off for hours. I was bad. I had to set my hand on fire. I called Cheryl immediately afterward. I said, Mom, I set my hand on fire. Cheryl was at work and she started hyperventilating over the phone. She thought I had no hand. The blisters along the tops of my fingers weren’t the deterrent I was looking for. My mother made me tell everybody I dropped an iron on my hand by accident. She made it very clear that I was not to use the stove when she wasn’t home and gave me money to order food. I got fat very quickly.