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Jayne County, New York Dolls, and the teeming life inside Max’s Kansas City, a punk haven in Gramercy
“I left a bloodstain on that booth over there. I kissed that bartender. That one slept on my couch last week. Anybody who says punk isn’t queer doesn’t know what punk is.”
—Jane Su
“Okay, now!”
Jane jumps, and—
She’s gone, again.
August sighs and steps onto the train before the doors close, making a note on the miniature steno she’s started keeping in her jacket pocket. Bergen Ave.: nope.
“This is getting repetitive,” says Jane’s voice, her chin suddenly on August’s shoulder. August yelps and stumbles back into her.
“I know,” August says, letting Jane right her, “but what if one of these stops is the one you can get off at? We have to know what we’re dealing with.”
They try it at every stop, starting at the shiny Ninety-sixth Street Station on the Manhattan end. Every time the door opens, August steps out and says, “Now!” And Jane tries to get off.
It’s not like she sees Jane physically disappear or reappear. Jane will take a step or a hop or—once in a moment of delirious frustration—a running leap through the open doors, and nothing happens. She doesn’t smack into an invisible barrier or vanish with a pop. She’s just there, and then she’s not.
Sometimes she resets to the place where she was standing when she started. Sometimes August blinks and Jane’s on the other end of the same car. Sometimes she’s gone completely, and August has to wait for the next train to find her waiting against a pole. Not a single passenger notices her sudden presence; they continue their audiobooks and mascara applications like she was there all along. Like reality bends around her.
“So, you really can’t get off the train,” August finally admits under the glass and steel arches of Coney Island, the very last stop on the line. Jane can’t get off there either.
That’s the first step, figuring out how trapped Jane is. The answer is: very completely trapped. The next question is, how?
August has absolutely no fucking clue.
She’s only ever dealt with hard facts. Concrete and quantifiable evidence. She can reason her way through this right up to the point of understanding how it is happening, and then: dead end. A wall made of things that aren’t supposed to be possible.
Jane, ultimately, is a good sport. She’s adjusting remarkably well to being forty-five years from home and doomed to take the same subway ride every minute of every day—she grins and says, “Honestly, it’s nicer than my first apartment, according to the 0.5 seconds I remember of it.” She eyes August with some unreadable significance. “Better company too.”
But Jane still doesn’t know who she is, or why she is, or what happened to get her stuck.
August looks at her as the train reverses past Gravesend rooftops, this girl out of time, the same face and body and hair and smile that took August’s life by the shoulders in January and shook. And she can’t believe Jane had the nerve, the audacity, to become the one thing August can’t resist: a mystery.
“Okay,” August says. “Time to figure out who you are.”
The afternoon sun falls in Jane’s brown eyes, and August thinks she’s going to need more notebooks. It’ll take a million to hold this girl.
When August was eight, her mom took her to the levee.
It was right after the Fourth of July. She was turning nine soon and really into her age that year. She’d tell everyone that she wasn’t eight but eight and a half, eight and three-quarters. Going to the levee was one of the few things they ever did without a case file between them—just a gallon-size bag of watermelon slices and a beach towel and a perfect spot to sit.
She remembers her mother’s hair, how the coppery brown would glow under the summer sun like the wet planks of the docks. She always liked how it was the same as hers, how they shared so many things. It was in those moments that August sometimes pictured how her mom looked when she was younger, before she had August, and at the same time, she couldn’t begin to imagine a time when they didn’t have each other. August had her and she had August, and they had secret codes they spoke in, and that was it. That was enough.
She remembers her mom explaining what levees were for. They weren’t made for beach towel picnics, she said—they were made to protect them. To keep water out when storms came.
It wasn’t long afterward that a storm too big for the levees came. 2005. Their apartment in Belle Chasse, the Idlewild place, got eight feet of water. All the files, maps, photos, all the years of handwritten notes, a wet pulp shoveled out the window of a condemned building. August’s mom saved one tupperware tub of files on her brother and not a single one of August’s baby pictures. August lost everything and thought that maybe, if she could become someone who didn’t have anything to lose, she’d never have to feel that way again.
She turned nine in a Red Cross shelter, and something started to sour in her heart, and she couldn’t stop it.
August sits on the edge of an air mattress in Brooklyn and tries to imagine how it would feel if she didn’t have any of those memories to understand what made her who she is. If she woke up one day and just was and didn’t know why.
Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory—levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought they would stand out, singular and crystallized, in your memory forever—they aren’t really anything. They’re everything, and they’re nothing. They make you who you are, and they happen at the same time a twenty-three-year-old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers, turning in early, switching off the lamp. They’re so easy to lose.
You don’t learn until you’re older how to zoom out of that extreme proximity and make it fit into the bigger picture of your life. August didn’t learn until she sat knee-to-knee with a girl who couldn’t remember who she was, and tried to help her piece everything back together.
