by Nathan Alling Long

We dyed our hair bright, defiant colors, or shaved it raw.  We wore trench coats and army jackets bought in Berlin and eyeliner bought in Manhattan, where no one cared if a boy bought makeup.  We listened to the Jam and Joy Division and the Violent Femmes, which were not as violent as the name suggested. We took ecstasy and crashed parties in abandoned factories where keg beer spilled on concrete and punk bands thrashed out a wall of sound.  We took mushrooms and walked through live train tunnels and cemeteries, huddled together in tight alcoves as the train passed, scattering like mice when the police searchlight scanned the graves.  We stayed up all night watching foreign films on VHS, reading Edward Gory books aloud.  At dawn, we’d pull out an old guitar and sing Leonard Cohen alone with a hungry nostalgia for an era we’d unjustly missed. 

We passed books to each other—Celine, Rimbaud, Barthes—listened to late night radio shows playing local bands.  Herzog’s Tentative Dog, The Alternatives, Night of the Iguana.  We passed practice tapes at poetry readings where the wine made lines of words into necklaces we draped over our minds then discarded like breath.  

We stole: food from restaurants where we worked; condoms from the People’s Drug; toilet paper from university bathrooms; road signs and pylons from highways.  We stole cigarettes from vending machines, wine from catered events, joints from friends.  We snuck into shows, slipping past bouncers, jumping fences, or copying the ink stamped on the back of our hands. 

At shows, we mash-pitted against the ones we wanted to touch, where a sweaty shaved head or a leather boot on our shin felt electric in the darkness.  We woke up at noon, reeking of cigarette smoke in a curtainless room heat by the sun.  We’d find ourselves on unfamiliar mattresses, under sweaty sheets, alone, and stare at the blank, off-white ceiling, unsure who we’d be when we rose.

When we could, we kissed each other, roughly, defiantly, drunkenly, and at times with a tenderness that resembled a romance we’d never admit wanting.  Straight kids kissing queer kids, to show they weren’t afraid and to feel revolutionary, and queer kids kissing straight kids, because they were lonely, and who knew if they might not come around to it?

Stripping each other down to our underwear, we felt our pale young bodies quivering beside the heat and gravity of another body, felt the lurk, the whisper, of hiv, that black ink spilt all around us that might, in an instance, saturate our lives, reduce us to legions and pneumonia.

We were naked, trying to burn through the era, get past it, or stay afloat in it, trying not to catch fire though it soaked our clothes and our lungs and our minds.  We were treading so hard, we didn’t see what was in front of us.  We didn’t recognize how longing for something else so strongly made us miss what we had. 

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Nathan Alling Long‘s work has appeared on NPR, and in journals such as Tin House, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, and Story Quarterly.  His collection of fifty short fictions, The Origin of Doubt, was a 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist.  He grew up in a log cabin in rural Appalachia, worked for several years on a queer commune in Tennessee, and now lives in Philadelphia.