Sister Slam and Twig, the chicks in the
news.”
“That would be us,” said Twig.
“I’m here to invite you
to our slam tonight,” said
the man. He moved his hand,
and a little jingle bell
ring tinkled on his finger.
I looked at Twig,
and she looked at me.
“Cool,” said Twig.
“Go for it,” said Jake.
“Well,” I said, “I need to visit
a thrift shop first.
Get some new
threads. If my
hair was long
enough, I’d
even get dreads!”
“Girl,” said the dude,
“you’re perfect
just as you are:
a rising star
in the slam galaxy.”
“Yes,” I said.
“We’ll be there.”
“Don’t be square,”
said the guy
with the dreadlocked hair.
“Eight o’clock sharp.”
“I’ll ride in the cab
with you two,” said Jake.
“That way, I’ll know
you’re safe.”
Hearing the
heavenlike
strum of a harp
in my head, I spread
my arms like wings
and began to sing
inside, because
I knew that tonight
would change my life.
Lesson 19
Never Expect a Marshmallow Fluff Kind of Life to Last Forever
That’s where it all began:
with the slam that whammed
the boho poetry community.
We started
at the Nuyorican
Poets Cafe,
which was jammed
with people
much cooler than me.
“I am so nervous,”
I whispered to Twig,
fidgeting, jittery,
biting my nails
as we waited to perform.
“Do you have
butterflies in your gut?”
muttered Twig,
chewing on a strand of hair.
“I’ve got more than
butterflies,” I replied.
“I’ve got flocks of birds
in there.”
I was wearing a lavender-purple
furry shirt and a gauze skirt
from a thrift store called Zorro’s Digs.
Twig wore camouflage
from the Army/Navy store.
Jake had insisted on paying
for the clothes.
“Your new slam wardrobes!”
he said. “A gift of good luck.”
“How do I look?” I asked,
and Jake touched my hand.
“Perfect,” he said.
“You’re the hottest
chick here.”
He cast a glance
at Twig, who wasn’t
even listening.
“You and Twig,” Jake said.
“You’re the two coolest
girls in the room.”
Too soon, my name was called,
and Jake looked straight
into my eyes.
“Pretend it’s only you
in the room,” he said.
“You and your mom.
Just do the poems for her.
“That purple fur
on your shirt,” he added,
“makes your eyes
look almost black.
Way attractive.”
I almost had a heart
attack when Jake
leaned closer and
pecked my cheek.
“Go slam, Sister,” he whispered.
Shaking, I made my
way to the microphone,
combat boots clopping.
Taking a deep breath,
I started to slam.
That’s where it all began.
The next night
we went to Jimmy’s Uptown.
I wore blue boots and a shimmery
silver prom gown
(from a used-clothes store
called Second Time Around).
Twig dressed in a clown
outfit, and we did slam poems
that made the people laugh.
“Encore! More!” somebody yelled.
It was a girl … no, it was a man,
wearing a yellow dress with pearls.
He had long blond hair,
and I stared.
“Girlfriend,” he
shouted, “you rock! You’re a jammin’
rammer of a slam poet woman!”
“Yellow is your color,” I said
when he came up to the stage
and asked for my autograph.
“It’s a small world,”
he said. “Karma brought us
together again.”
The Bowery Poetry
Club was next,
and when the judges
held up their cards,
Twig and I had both
scored all 10s.
“Let’s get a Mercedes
Benz,” Twig joked,
counting the
five-hundred-dollar
cash prize
we’d divide.
A dude named Scarecrow,
with hair of indigo blue,
made our dreams
come true that night
by inviting us to join
him in forming
a new slam team.
“Let’s go on the circuit
and work it,” he said.
I felt like this
was my birth.
“We need day
jobs, though,” said
Twig. “We’re running
out of money.”
“No prob,” said Scarecrow.
“I’ll employ both of you
in my shop, The Joy of Soy.”
“We’ll take it,” I said.
Curled on the
sofa in the Waldorf
later that night,
tired but wired,
I was so hyped
that I couldn’t sleep.
“Try counting sheep,”
Jake suggested,
and then he made
microwave hot chocolate to
help me relax.
Vince and Misty
were sacked out,
and Twig was actually
slamming in her sleep,
grinding her teeth,
dreaming of poetry.
The moon
was full and gleaming,
its sheen streaming
beams through the
windows of the suite.
“Only two more days
of vacation,”
Jake said.
“It’ll suck to go back
to work in Jersey.”
“You don’t like your job?”
I asked, and he shrugged.
“It’s okay,” Jake said.
“I just don’t know if I
want to spend the rest of
my life in Doozy’s Music Store,
helping losers choose amps and
microphone stands.”
“So what do you want to do,
for forever?” I asked.
“Make music,” Jake said.
“And make money doing it.”
“That’s cool,” I said.
“The number one rule
of life is doing what you like.”
I sipped the hot cocoa,
and Jake picked up
his guitar, softly strumming
chords, humming.
“It’s bumming me out
to think of you not being
around,” I said.
“It’s not that far,” Jake said,
caressing his guitar.
“I’ll come for every weekend slam
that I can. I’m your number one
fan. A Sister Slam groupie!”
I smiled, and filed the
moment in my memory.
“Drive defensively,” I said.
“You never know what kind of
maniac’s going to smash into you.”
Twig and I
started our day jobs
the next morning.
“Is that a Twinkie?” asked Twig,
and I hid the cupcake behind my
back.
“Ssh,” I said. “Twinkie is a curse
word here in the health food world.”
After work, Twig and I entered a frenzied
night world of swirled words,
on the brink of something big.
The gig was packed,
with hackers selling tickets
at hiked prices outside.
By Friday, when it was time
to tell Jake and
his parents good-bye,
Twig and I had made enough money
to rent a miniature persimmon—
walled room with no furniture.
“We need a sofa and a chair,”
said Twig, combing her hair.
Her voice echoed in the empty room.
“No, first we need beds and
food,” I said.
“I’d say that your first priority
is a good bolt for the door,”
said Jake. “You’ve got to be safe.”
Jake checked the window, making
sure that it was locked.
It was a full moon.
“See you soon,”
Jake said to Twig, and
we went outside.
Jake intertwined his fingers
with mine, and my skin tingled.
“See you next week,” he said,
and he kissed my cheek.
I said okay, and
my head ached as I
watched him walk away.
In the morning, I called Pops
from Scarecrow’s shop, filling him in
on everything that had happened in one
short, important week.
“You’re not getting
married or anything?”
Pops joked.
“I’m a wide-load
bride,” I replied.
“I’m married to poems;
carried across the threshold
of a whole new life!”
“Just be careful,”
Pops said. “The city
is so big.”
It was time for the whirlwind
to begin. The gigs were a blur,
a haze of faces and words.
Sometimes, hearing my
own husky voice slicing spicy through
the microphone in a dusky, musky room,
I thought of how nobody would
believe this back home.
With elastic disco clothes and
purple plastic bows, I was spastic.
“We are Sister Slam,
Twig, and the Poetic
Motormouth Road Trip!”
I screamed night after
night, spazzed by success.
I jolted the groupies
with tick-tocking
bolts of shock, kicking
butt when the tickets
sold out and the doors
were locked. It
rocked when a fan-man
named Brock asked
for my socks as a souvenir.
“Here,” I said, and I tossed my
stinky socks into the crowd,
where there was a loud scuffle
as three guys tried to grab them.
It was surreal: a crazy-hazy
daisy petal of a heavy metal
dream made real by just
stealing words from
the dictionary and mixing them up.
“We’re missionaries,”
Twig said one night.
“We preach the letters of
the alphabet, and how they
can save you, if you
combine them just right.”
I stopped having stage fright,
and wore lots of white leather
and feathery boas, with psycho
go-go boots from The BoBo Shop.
“You look hot,” Jake said,
on the weekend.
“Not,” I said.
“Hot,”
he said. “I should stay
here all week
to protect you from the freaks.”
That night,
in the violet
spotlights, a strange shining
knight in silver armor
invited me to a toxic waste site.
“Red spider mites bite
you until you turn blue,”
said Mister Cuckoo.
“No, thank you,” I replied.
“But I love you,”
said the man, and it
was the sock fan Brock, screaming
heebie-jeebie-like.
“Jake!” I yelled,
and he came
from backstage
and stood by my side.
“I’m her bodyguard,”
he said. “Protector
of the Sister. Don’t
mess with her.”
The cops came and shoved Brock
from the club, and Jake looked buff
with his Sister-protecting biceps flexed.
“See,” Jake said.
“You need me
to protect you from the freaks.”
“Right now,” I said, “I need sleep.”
“Me too,” said Jake. “And my
parents will kill me if I don’t
get home.”
Twig and I were hip, our lips slicked
watermelon pink and our hair
streaked with the color of
the week. We reeked
of rhyme and wrote poems
all the time. Twig and I also
bickered like sisters over stuff like whose
turn it was to wash the dishes.
“I wish I had my own place,” Twig
complained after telling me what
a pain I was. “You’re hard to live
with,” she said. “Kind of a diva.”
I got a slim Creamsicle-colored cell phone
with a ding-a-ling ring, making sure that
the call zone included Jake’s home.
On weekdays, I missed Jake like crazy,
and I wrote a boatload of woeful
wicked Jake-sick poems.
We spoke every day
on Jake’s lunch break
at Doozy’s Music Store.
“What’s up?” Jake would say.
“Everything’s okay,” I’d say.
One day, Jake sounded
blue. “I’m really missing
you,” he said.
“You have no clue.”
“Oh, yes, I do. I miss you, too.”
It was a flurry of busy stuff:
a Marshmallow Fluff cream-puff existence.
But the phone rang late
one starless
September night when
the sky was crying
and black, and it
was Twig’s dad, Jack.
“Laura,” he said,
out of breath,
“your father had a heart attack.”
Lesson 20
Always Go Home When There’s Trouble
I crumpled
to the floor.
“I can’t handle it
if I lose my only
parent,” I said out loud.
“There’s no way I can
be an orphan. A girl
needs a parent on this
scary planet.”
I needed to ditch
this city, quick,
and make my way
to the Banesville Hospital,
but I had no car of my
own. Twig and I
sometimes borrowed
an old gold
Ford, but it was a loan
from Scarecrow.
Home. I want to go home.
I ripped a comb through my hair
and stepped into a pair of sweatpants
and boots. I was still wearing my Misfits
nightshirt.
Home. There’s no place like home.
I was Dorothy in The Wizard
of Oz, but Sister in the City,
clicking together the heels
of my glittery red Doc Martens.
“Twig,” I said, and she sat up,
rumpled and bleary, mascara
smeary, weary from a late-night slam.
“Pops had a heart attack.
I need to go home.
Are you with me,
or are you staying here?”
“I’m with you, come hell
or no hair gel,” Twig said.
“But what about
how you jumped out
of the car on the
way here?” I asked.
“Temporary
carsick-chick insanity,”
said Twig. “You know
we’re superglued at the hips,
and at the hearts, too.”
I tried to smile.
“Should we take a bus
to Banesville?”
Twig suggested.
“Or maybe it’d be best
to take the train.”
Shaky, quaking, scared awake,
I called Jake, even though it was late,
to get his advice.
“Sit tight,” he said.
“I’ll be right there.”
Jake must have raced, and his
face was pasty white when
he squealed and peeled
to the curb, then leaped up
the steps six at a time.
“Oh, my God.
You have hives!” he said,
touching my neck.
I was a wreck,
stressed breathless.
“I’m glad you’re here,”
I blubbered, then collapsed
into Jake’s strong embrace.
He stroked my face.
“It’ll be okay.
We’ll pray, okay?
No way that it won’t be
okay,” Jake said.
“Yeah,” Twig agreed.
“Pops is strong.
Nothing will go wrong.”
“Let’s roll,” Jake said, taking
control, which was my goal.
We piled into Jake’s
car and started
on the far drive home,
leaving the neon
lights and taxi traffic
of the city behind.
In the dismal darkness
of the Lincoln Tunnel,
I blew my nose
on a paper napkin
I’d found on the floor
of Jake’s car.
“Thanks for coming
with me, you two,” I said.
“We’d be maggots
not to go with you,”
Jake said,
and he reached
over and squeezed
my hand.
“This is what friends
are for: to stick with