Read Online If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir by Jessica Hendry Nelson - Free Book Online Page A

and me, but find only the metallic ends of a winter drive. Or else, the rusted edges of those endless nights in that basement, where we drank wine and snorted a friend’s Ritalin until we felt our teenaged, suburban angst change to a tentative self-assurance. While I wait, another day turns into night and I am that much further away from the girl and the boy who loved each other once, for a few painful years, and now do not know each other at all. And this, too, I know, is just typical, and yet we never thought we were typical at all. I would like to write a letter to that boy, to tell him that I am no longer a young girl and all is forgiven—if not, as they say, forgotten. I do not trust my memories and so I wait, and in that time the memories continue to swell and change shape.
    The last time I see Jordan he is tending bar at a club called Woody’s, which is tucked into an alleyway near the Delaware River, the gayborhood , we called it, south of the Avenue of the Arts. If we stayed within a six-block radius, we could pretend the whole world was a carnival, and love and sex and rainbows were free and in abundance, an edible candy land like Willy Wonka’s factory. We used to come here when we were young and bored. We liked to watch the boys float around the dance floor. Bisexual angels, all glitter and pomp. There were moments of transcendence here, too, when the neon light struck a silver crescent on the cheekbone of some man-boy, his face upturned and his arms thrown back and slick with sweat. One night we met a man who dressed in tunics and spoke in pastels. “He speaks in pastels!” we told each other, on account of the drugs, but also because of the way the strobe lights reflectedoff his tongue. He wore his hair in two long black braids that slid over his shoulders like ribbons.
    We loved him instantly, though for different reasons, and followed him everywhere that night, hiding behind the felt partitions and whispering fantasies that again involved desert fires and a guitar, this modern-day Indian chief our own personal deity now, some munificent daddy sent to show us the way. If Jordan’s fantasy involved the lure of sexual tutelage, mine was just the opposite. I was after the press of the paternal, some utterly chaste discipline I sought out everywhere, anywhere. The truth is, we were vulnerable in those days, our minds all sweet and custardy from too many drugs, overwhelmed by the theater of the senses. We made a good show of normalcy when we needed to, but most of the time we retreated into our own basement novella and held on for dear life.
    IT IS LATE June when I enter the dark tunnel that leads into Woody’s Bar, and I am a woman on a mission. It has been three years since I’ve seen my friend. My mother and I have come from a restaurant down the street. I’ve just graduated from college and returned to Philadelphia for a few weeks. We are celebrating my impending move to New York and also the sale of a big property my mother had listed for months. Real estate has been painfully slow, but business is starting to pick up and she is hopeful for the first time in a long time. I know this not because she tells me, but because she is laughing at my jokes and her eyes flutter girlishly in the candlelight.
    When I first see Woody’s familiar red sign, I am startled. I almost forgot about it. I’d heard rumors that Jordan recently started bartending here and we decide to stop in. We are not—we agree to this on penalty of death—out to save him again.
    We find him at the upstairs bar and watch for a while before he sees us. He moves quickly and confidently, no longer a boy agog. I see that he feels more secure, rooted and blossomed, but with the same nervous energy shuddering just below the surface. My mother holds my hand and I know we look like lesbians, given the context. There is a man watching Jordan make drinks. He leans on the bar, discreetly running a gaze down Jordan’s white neck, flat chest, and