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I’m reading a novel where William T. Vollmann talks about getting frostbite and it reminded me of a story my friend Gina told me about getting frostbite in her freshman year of college, at Buffalo, cuz she walked to a bar, danced while tipsy, broke a heel and decided to walk home barefoot through the slush.
Gina hosted get-togethers at her house back in high school and I was there pretty often. Then after college she and I were the only ones who moved back to Miami and crashed with our parents.
Once again I was there pretty often.
Eventually out of boredom and grief we started dating but first we just hung out a lot. She was living with her mom in a big house and her parents got divorced pretty late and her mom would hole up in the bedroom all day so it was basically just the two of us drinking Yuengling1 at 2 p.m. Futurama on the couch like it was high school again.
That’s where she told me the frostbite story. I asked if they were scarred or discolored and she said no, “Thank God,” then hustled to the kitchen and when she came back she put her feet in my lap (this was that window where the “friend” thing was blurring) and demonstrated with a needle how the soles of her feet had no feeling. Then she offered me the needle real earnest, “Go ‘head try,” and I declined gently this invitation to stab her but began to suspect this was that thing “flirtation.”
She could have just told me her feet were numb but I remember thinking it was like playground days, the way she had to bust out a needle and “HEY LOOK.”
The protagonist in Vollmann’s novel falls in love with a sex worker and they go walking in the street together.
She thinks he’s walking fast, ahead of her, because he’s ashamed of her company.
He thinks she’s walking slow, and falling behind, because she’s ashamed of him.
Not wanting to be rude they sorta let each other drift in different directions and then they’re sad about it.
On the rare occasion they even have a translator they’re not that great at talking.
This was the same sofa where, five years prior, I’d hung out with Gina and some of our high school friends when her father came home and crossed the kitchen and stepped into the huge windowless TV room, a thin bald guy with a mustache, a strange hat—and froze.
We said hello.
He hadn’t known we were there.
He looked around like he was disarmed but then grinned and asked the six or seven of us if we all wanted to see something kewl.
We told him yes.
Gina rolled her eyes and said deadpan things as he approached a seamless part of the wall and caressed it or something — there was a loud click.
A secret door opened.
We were agog.
He ushered us inside and we stood in the dark a few seconds before he hit the lightswitch with ceremony to reveal:
a windowless 10x10 room devoted to an enormous model trainset, the product of a decade’s curation, squarish and waist-high like that table where movies always show Hitler looking at maps. There was a row of hooks on the wall with his various conducting caps except the last hook which held a lint roller.
He pointed around the table at various figurines and structures. The grass looked real. He asked if we’d like to see a “test drive.”
I stood there sipping a soda and pretended to watch the train as it wriggled over the table but really I was watching Gina’s father. His crouching wool-hatted godhood. I was visited by one of the clearest sentences that has ever crossed my mind and it was this:
I bet if I destroy this man’s trainset he will abandon his family.
Gina was the youngest of five kids and almost the same month that she went to college a year later her father moved out.
Years later when we were dating I would think sometimes while drunk that I should tell her about that premonition I had when her dad showed us his trainset but again I’d have a vision and it would tell me, Alexander: do not.
Another time in college I took a shuttle to visit my then-girlfriend Laura in Gainesville. It was St. Patrick’s Day and she had shaved one half of her head as the Irish demand. That night while getting ready for a party she stood at a full-length mirror in the living room with her nose almost touching the glass, pinching at her face, I thought she was squeezing a pimple and kept reading.
We were getting up to leave when I noticed her ear was reddish-purple and freshly skewered with a sewing needle.
“Did you fall down?”
She wore it that way through the party. The beer and the liquor were green but people talked more about her piercing. They ogled it and sucked air through their teeth. They asked if it had hurt and she said no. Shrugged. Bent it back and forth to anybody who wanted to see the wounds.
Later that night we were in bed and I bumped the piercing and she let out such a shriek that when I stepped out of her room the next morning I found two of her three roommates grinning at me over their coffees while the other one (Catholic) made a show of not only standing up real fast and clattersome from the breakfast table but picking up her ferret and vanishing into her bedroom.
Everything in the book seems to veer back toward sex. The protagonist sleeps with a sex worker. He falls in love with her. He gets gonorrhea and his testicles get large and colorful and his feet begin sticking to his shoes. When he goes back to the bar where she works hoping to see her again he tells her he got sick from what they did. She gets a playful smile and looks down. Then she goes to his room with him and they cuddle in bed watching Thai TV and it seems to get so uncomfortably tender they end up having sex and pretending to climax so that when they settle back down into the TV and the vulnerability there’s a context, and they can bear it.
A couple years prior I was at a divebar in Connecticut and asked for a Yuengling and the bartender told me po-faced that Yuengling was illegal and we just looked at each other for a while and I said, “Why?” Something about taxes between Pennsylvania, where it’s brewed, and Connecticut.
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