A Slow Drip (Waldorf, Maryland)
Written by Mandy Brownholtz
The following chapter is excerpted from Rotten, a book dealing with issues of consent & millennial sexual politics in the context of DIY music and arts communities, written by Mandy Brownholtz.
He liked to bring up the fact that he taught her how to smoke weed. She thought about it now, sitting in the tub and surmising her life as it stood: the problems that already existed and the ones that she anticipated, all of them six degrees separated from one another and from that house in Fort Totten, problems that happened to her and ones that flourished of her own volition. She turned the hot water on with her foot.
Her life’s characters weaved in and out of each others’ lives like an indelible tapestry, when people all know each other and talk shit about each other and give advice and fuck each other’s girls. She thought she had left them behind but she couldn’t really, because they were seared into her memory and imprinted on her history. They lurked in the house like ghosts in the stories she would recount with Lulu and Xeroxed house show flyers stuffed in the backs of desk drawers. That particular night, they sat out on the back patio at Fort Rotten, lawn chairs in a circle. She met Zeke that night, Nolan’s friend from Waldorf, who had just handed her a spliff.
“Look at you, all grown up!” Nolan joked. She looked at him if only to acknowledge his words in the slightest. She wondered now if this kind of patronization could be construed as “negging,” such that it put her on the spot in front of this unfamiliar group of people. Nolan had just moved in in May, when Chris, who already lived there, told him a room opened up. He hadn’t paid much attention to her that evening, until this new, unfamiliar boy handed her the spliff.
Viv tried not to be bothered and focus on Zeke, his cropped hair and the cut-off sleeves that exposed his musky pheromones, for Nolan’s new female counterpart Tori was inside using the bathroom. She had descended upon their world that summer, a scene-y army brat from a military base in New Mexico. She had swooping bangs and eyeliner so thick it looked like she drew it on with a fat permanent marker. When she showed up at Fort Rotten and sidled up to Nolan as though they had planned to meet there, Viv conceded that she’d have to place her attention elsewhere that evening. She did this mutually so that she would be distracted from her feelings and so that maybe, just maybe, Nolan would be jealous. Zeke was cute and a bit rough looking, like she couldn’t tell where he had been but wanted to know. Either way, it was as simple as the conservation of mass, that the universe would instruct that her feelings could not be totally eradicated, but left on the back burner and partially repurposed for something else.
It began with a slow drip that hot day in July, black cotton sticking to skin and the smell of ripe bodies packed into a filthy basement. Zeke worked the graveyard shift at an office supply warehouse out past Branch Avenue. His loneliness in those hours created a vacuum he grew desperate to fill, such that his phone calls at all hours would feign romance where there was none.
She would seek him out that first summer in the weeks after that initial meeting, one that had been punctuated by digital interactions that filled the absence of physical ones. She saw him again at Nolan’s birthday party, ironically, weeks later at Fort Rotten. It was one of two times that summer she’d sit in the passenger seat of his Bronco while he drove drunk, one of numerous ill-fated instances where she’d hungrily consume the ether of malt liquor on his breath. They slept entwined on the floor before the unused fireplace, which held the refuse of empty beer cans and cigarette butts. Nolan found them there the following morning and even then, with the irrepressible naivete of eighteen, Viv could read the disappointment in his body language.
She left with the others that morning, but days later Nolan would take her aside in the late afternoon hours while they waited for the show to begin, sitting in those faded lawn chairs out back, whose shadows grew longer with each subsequent minute.
“I don’t like this, Viv. You ought to stay away from him.”
“I don’t remember asking, but thanks, I’ll take it under consideration.”
Truthfully he was right but she loved the drama of it too much, this tense cord of jealousy that tethered Nolan to her in spite of Tori and in spite of Zeke. Nolan was right then and he was right now. Zeke disappointed Viv that summer, and she would let him disappoint her again this year too.
As the weeks wore on his phone calls would lessen in frequency, and she’d cling to his online presence to glean some hint of what went wrong. Some moon-faced girl with platinum hair that she pinned to one side like an undead babydoll began to appear in his photos, and eventually his phone calls stopped altogether. She ran into him at Fort Rotten sometime that late July or early August. She turned the corner past the green vinyl sofa to the bathroom, from which he emerged. Nervously she stammered:
“Oh! Wow, Zeke, hi…”
“Viv, hey, what’s up?” he returned. He backed away slowly, so awkward it was to confront his bad behavior.
“Nothing really, just chilling,” she got out painfully. “Haven’t heard from you in a minute.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry…”
“What’s up? Is everything okay?” She hadn’t yet learned that it could be better to leave these things alone.”
“Yeah, no, it’s nothing you did...I just...if I’m being real with you, I think you’re a little too young for me.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, it’s nothing personal dude, like we can still be friends. If you want.”
“Yeah...sure, we can be friends...” she replied.
“Good, I’m glad. I’ll see ya down there,” he finished, letting his fingers graze her upper arm and then making his way back towards the basement. She closed the bathroom door and wilted. She looked in the mirror and bemoaned her perceived ugliness, the ash of eye make-up that rimmed the crease below her eyes, her greasy teenage skin that shone in the humidity.
She felt it was kind of bullshit, because all in, she had just turned eighteen and he dwelled somewhere in his early-mid twenties. He grasped at straws, a reason to cover up the way he had left her hanging. And it turned out she was right, because as soon as the moon-faced girl disappeared from his photos, his texts began to roll back in during those wee hours at the office supply factory. One night she playfully confronted him about it:
So...are you just gonna keep texting me or are we ever gonna chill irl?
He sent back a smile, semi-colon parentheses.
Well, my homie’s parents are out of town this weekend so he’s gonna have a show, but it’s all the way down here. Could you get out for a night?
When she thought back on it from her own early-mid twenties, she could almost laugh at how cool she thought these boys were, gunning for thirty and waiting for their parents to go out of town so they could have a wild night. But back then she found it exciting, and she considered it in the context of these last few weeks before she’d move into her dorm in College Park, where it wouldn’t matter. Right now she still lived at home, but didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t go to Waldorf for just a night. She’d just tell her mom she was sleeping at Lulu’s.
I’ll be there
Later that week he picked her up from the Branch Avenue Metro station in his Bronco. Her mother had acquiesced to a sleepover at Lulu’s on the condition that she be back at noon the following day, as her great aunt Ruth had died days before and they needed to shop for a funeral that Monday. They drove away from the station and she realized how far from home she was, Branch Avenue being the last stop on the Green Line and disappearing in the distance as they drove twenty or thirty minutes away. Waldorf was a part of southern Maryland to the southeast of the District, tucked between the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay, suburban but bordered on country; fast food restaurants and strip malls lined the freeway as they sped forward. They listened to some heavy, screaming music she hadn’t heard before, distorted enough that it could have been a demo.
He reached over and took a Marlboro Red from the pack of cigarettes sitting in the cup holder. They were cheaper all the way out here than in the city. They made eye contact briefly, his eyes off the road, and he smiled at her.
“Can I ask you something kind of personal?” he asked, the cigarette hanging from his lips.
“Shoot.”
“Are you...okay, I’m just gonna say it,” he sounded almost sheepish. “Are you still a virgin?”
“What? Me? Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know, you just...you came all the way out here and I’m kind of trying to put together what you want from me.”
Years later she would wonder what his power move was here; did he mean to put her on the spot? That by pointing out this sore spot he would make her all the more vulnerable, more willing to give it up? She wondered if it would have gone down the way it had if he had never asked, as though she had something to prove to him. But in that instance she wondered merely if her face was red, as truthfully she was, and it was a status that hung around her neck like a self-imposed albatross, if only because she placed so much outside pressure on something that on its own meant very little. No one else cared as much as she did. It made her feel outside of everything, somehow weird and stunted. Lulu had lost hers two years before with an apathy Viv envied, and she wondered why she cared so much. Consciously she didn’t care, but unconsciously she did, that she had internalized such a particular code of ethics to the point of indoctrination. Despite her protestations, she worried that her relationship to the bag of meat and bones to which she had been assigned would be forever fraught with a negative morality and eternal implications. He spoke up again before she had a chance to respond:
“I can tell you are because you didn’t say you weren’t. It’s okay dude, just, I want to be real with you. I don’t know if it’s gonna be me. If it should be me. I don’t know if I’m up for all that. It’s a whole thing.”
“I’m eighteen, you know,” she turned to look at him. They held eye contact for a moment. She could understand his hesitation; she hadn’t even done it yet and still she caught feelings like venereal disease. He could smell it on her.
“Well, how about that,” he said, changing the song on the iPod to something more upbeat. It was the Talking Heads: I’m just an animal looking for a home and share the space for a minute or two. “Still, either way, I don’t want you to have any expectations about it. I’m not a good guy, straight up. I’m not gonna be your boyfriend.”
True to his words he would remain for the rest of the time she knew him, but that night she would compartmentalize reality and place her thoughts elsewhere. She followed him around the party where she didn’t know anyone, in a nice-ish house that looked like all the others on the cul-de-sac, with a foyer and cushioned dining room chairs. But it was full of smelly bodies wrapped in ragged black cotton and ratty canvas shoes.
Out back she kept sipping the red jungle juice and taking drags of his cigarettes until she began to waver with the alcohol.
“Ah fuck. That was the last one. Care to take a ride?” he asked.
The second drunken joyride in the Bronco. She couldn’t remember anything they talked about, just the way she wobbled on her perch in the passenger seat, watching the yellow lines disappear beneath them as he drove from side to side of the street.
“All right, be right back,” he said, putting the truck in park. When he returned they looked at each other for a moment, and he grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her face to his. They kissed sloppily in the parking lot of some gas station in Eastern Maryland, in this twenty-year-old truck with empty fast food cups and cigarette packs, demo CDs and loose articles of clothing.
When it came down to it, he didn’t care that she was a virgin. Later that night they found themselves on a sofa, surrounded by crashed bodies on the floor, contorted into shapes on arm chairs. He came at her ravenously, biting her neck and reaching up her shirt to grab aggressively. She didn’t expect to like it as much as she did, his rough touch. She bucked into him as she tasted his breath, hot and like the cheap whiskey that had made its way around the party, changing hands but never being poured into cups, just straight down the throats of these sweaty, hormonal boys. They were both drunk and he didn’t offer much in the way of foreplay, instead pulling down his own pants and immediately striking for gold. The sharpness of him when he entered her made her gasp and inhale acutely as she settled into it, letting the gravity of it settle over her and make her stay present. It would be better in a couple years when they met again, but the raw energy of it flared. She liked the clutch of his hand wrapping around her neck and squeezing, the sharp sting of his teeth as they sank into her earlobe. She lost track of the time but finally he shuddered and melted on top of her, finished. He rolled off her and buttoned his pants, immediately passing out.
She lay awake for a while under the weight of his arm, dead as it hung over her chest. He lay beside her snoring. Years later, after it was all said and done, she understood that she hadn’t been too young for him, they almost never were, just too inexperienced. He had blown her off because the moon-faced girl would let him fuck her without all the extra emotional pressure of being the first. In the end it hadn’t mattered, though: she was legal and ripe, and he could not resist but to pick her from the vine and eat her alive.
The following morning the doorbell woke her up. Her head felt shrunken. In the crude daylight she realized no one else was answering the door, so she got up to do it herself, stepping over prostrate bodies sleeping in various positions and states of undress. There were red cups and empty beer cans strewn everywhere, one of the cups full of an inch of water and a handful of cigarette butts. The air smelled stale and sticky.
She answered the door to find a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses standing there. Unrestrained she laughed, standing there in a house that wasn’t hers among a garden of dirty sleeping bodies. Before they could speak, she said: “I don’t live here, but I don’t think anyone here wants to buy what you’re selling. Take it easy.” She closed the door and returned to the sofa where she nestled back into that space next to Zeke’s body and went back to sleep. What could have been minutes or hours later she awoke to her phone buzzing frantically. It was 12:30pm. She was supposed to have been home thirty minutes ago. Her mom was calling. Fuck.
“Hello?”
“Vivian? Where are you? You were supposed to have been home at noon!”
“Um…” she stammered.
“I just called Lulu’s mom and she said you weren’t there.”
“Look, mom…”
“No, I don’t have time for any excuses today. Where are you?”
She gave up. “I’m in Waldorf…”
Her mom sighed excessively. “We’ll have to discuss this later, I have enough on my plate today already. You need to come home immediately. I’ll pick you up at the Metro and then we’re heading straight to Wheaton Plaza.” She hung up.
Viv pressed her fingers into her eyes, massaging them until patterns began to appear on the backs of her eyelids. She nudged Zeke, still asleep with his mouth hanging open. His sweat smelled like cheap beer. He groaned.
“Zeke, get up! I need to go like two hours ago.”
He wouldn’t budge. This would serve as a precursor to what she would learn later, through his outbursts in bars and at parties: when alcohol was concerned, Zeke did not like to be nagged. When she continued to coax him awake, he eventually sat up and snapped at her:
“Okay Viv, fuck off already!”
She recoiled at this and soaked in the way sex can change things. Surely it would have bothered her to have him speak to her like this either way, but the added intimacy made it sting more. Still, she apologized.
“I’m sorry Zeke, but I was supposed to be home at noon. I know I mentioned it to you.”
“Yeah well I just woke up, we’ll go in a bit.”
“No, like I need to go. My mom is super pissed at me.”
“Well, if she’s already mad, you might as well make the most of it. You’ll get there when you get there.”
“I don’t think you understand…”
“Just chill Viv, for fuck’s sake. It’s gonna be fine.”
She felt guilty and embarrassed for pushing him, for her mother haranguing her over the phone like she was a child, so she stopped. She watched the hours change on her phone. Her mom kept calling but she didn’t pick up, helpless to affect the situation other than to wait. At some point she drifted off again, and by the time she woke up most everyone else was gone, and his friend who lived there was still upstairs with whatever girl he had won the night before. Zeke slept a while longer but eventually woke up, walked to the fridge, and cracked open a fresh can of beer.
By the time they finally left it was nearing three. She had about twenty unreturned texts from her mom and ten missed calls. She could have answered but had no new information to share. She would be in trouble regardless. There was nothing she could do about it now. She finally replied to the texts to say she was on her way and would be at the Wheaton Metro stop in an hour or so.
When they made it to Branch Avenue she was far too frazzled to offer much in the way of a meaningful goodbye, one that the night before deserved, but what did that mean, really? Who cared? It wasn’t until she sat on the train back to the city that she realized he had not stopped her to seek out anything more, to tell her he’d call. He wouldn’t ever call. She would run into him a handful of times over the course of the next few months, but he’d never text first, only offering perfunctory answers if anything when she reached out first. She wouldn’t know until later how far he fell, how deeply into his addiction he succumbed. Instead, she chastised herself for being bad in bed or too inexperienced or any number of personal faults to explain why he didn’t want to see her again. It was like she forgot that he had warned her, that Nolan had too.
Her mother sat in her compact SUV in the parking garage looking enraged when Viv finally emerged above ground ninety minutes later. She could just see it beneath the glare of the windshield as she wordlessly slid into the passenger seat of the car. For a moment they sat in silence until her mother spoke first:
“So what do you have to say for yourself?”
“Mom, I’m really sorry, I know I fu---messed up. It was really hard to get a ride to the Metro so I was kind of stuck out there.”
“You shouldn’t have been out there to begin with. Where were you?”
“Me and Lulu just went out there for this house show and I was too afraid to ask you if it was okay. I thought you’d say no. I know it was wrong.”
“Every time you lie like that you’re digging yourself even deeper. I know you weren’t with Lulu. Her mother said she was home with her last night. Now, where were you? Who were you with?”
“I wasn’t lying about the house show bit…just some friends that you don’t know.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter, you don’t know them. Their names won’t mean anything to you.”
“Fine. You don’t have to tell me because I can already tell. You smell awful, like smoke and booze and B.O. It’s shameful, to be honest. I’m not even going to tell your father because he would be so ashamed of you.”
“Okay. Thanks Mom.”
“Don’t thank me. If you weren’t off to college in a few weeks you’d be grounded for the rest of the summer. You just sit there and think about what kind of boy is going to want you once you’ve let yourself be passed around the whole metropolitan area.”
Back then she told herself these words slid right off, this was a worldview she rejected, but they stung all the same. It’s not so easy to scrub the insidious influence of your childhood from your psyche, somber as a church choir and reeking of incense. She dunked her head beneath the tepid bathwater ritualistically and tried to pretend she wasn’t horrified at the thought of her parents reading this article. For months, she had wanted to tell her mother what was wrong. She wanted her mother to say it was all okay, but she didn’t think she had a mother who would think that. She worried she would really say something like What were you thinking? She’d already been avoiding them and their probing questions for months anyway.
When are you going back to school?
Why are you acting so strange?
It wouldn’t be until the second time, this time, three years later, that Zeke would really fuck her up. He found her in an untenable space that lacked both a love for herself or that from anyone else in the months that followed that night at Fort Rotten, dispirited and alone, desperate to concoct a connection from whatever material she could source. And the sex was much better.
It was cold at this point, early December. She spotted him through the crowd at the Pygmy Lush show at The Pinch, where he was already looking at her and smirking. She weaved through the bodies until she stood before him.
“Hello,” he had said, to which she responded “hello,” in a mutually unbearable way, their mouths curling into grins. She could remember nothing else that they talked about, just the way he plucked the hat off her head from where he sat elevated above her, how they shamelessly came together in the booth at the bar later that night.
In those years apart much had happened to lay the landmines that would later burst with a delicious impunity, as if to say You asked for this. Standing there at The Pinch, she had been so desperate for his affection that her recollection gaped at the parts where their little circle had grown apart years ago, less because of their age difference and more because of the creeping addiction that sought to take them all down. Zeke succumbed. He moved to Baltimore, he got arrested a few times. He totaled his Bronco. Eventually he alienated everyone in that scene so egregiously that they sent him back to his parents in Waldorf with his tail between his legs, which was why he was hanging out in DC again and how he ended up at the Pygmy Lush show that would present the opportunity to implode Viv with great invitingness, like a cheap marketing scheme.
He was precariously clean, he assured her. Precarious being the operative word, and not the one that he would use, but the one her mind filled in later. To him, he was merely clean, or so that's how he presented himself. Clean from heroin, as far as she could tell: he still drank until he’d fall asleep at the bar and lose his temper when Viv woke him up to take him home. He still smoked weed, which they did hungrily in the folds of Viv’s sheets those two cold months on North Capitol Street, doing whatever they were doing with inimitable passion and carelessness.
While it would dissolve as quickly as it inflamed, this affair carried the weight of Viv’s expectations, the ones that were colored by numerous disappointments. It was a weight that proved too heavy to carry. It was beautiful in a way that only ugly things can be, where their ugliness lies more in their proximity to beauty that just barely missed the mark, almost right but hopelessly wrong.
It grew apparent about six weeks in. They were going to a party at the house their friend Romano was squatting in with his girlfriend Alice. They caught the M4 bus in Tenleytown, which Viv thought was strange. The M4 went from Tenleytown to Georgetown through the Palisades, a green and rolling pasture of massive houses that were stoic despite their excess, the Washingtonian version of wealth that hid in classic lines and subdued hues.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way? I don’t think Romano is squatting in the Palisades.”
“No, for sure it’s the M4. The house they’re in is like some abandoned embassy or some shit.”
It was. They came to an imposing brick facade that sat at the corner of Macomb and MacArthur Boulevard NW, which had once been the ambassadorial residence for one of the iterations of Congo. She couldn’t remember what the sign out front said, just that it once was something far more magnificent than what it was now, a shell of its former self. She thought of Kurtz staring into the abyss and the abyss staring back. They pushed through doors that gave more easily than it would appear, to be faced with this grotesque dwelling. There was trash everywhere but Viv noted its odorlessness, surmising that the frigid air had frozen the stench in midair.
Bundled in coats, various hues of black and gray and olive green, bodies huddled together around the perimeter of the room and planted into place like sea urchins. There were bottles of what looked like urine. There was no electricity, only a faint glow emanating from a handful of battery-powered lanterns. Romano appeared like a ghost of himself, gaunt and subdued in his demeanor. He spoke so softly.
“What’s good dudes? Thanks for coming by. We got some beers and there’s a bottle floating around too.”
Viv and Zeke walked to the cardboard beer case that sat in the corner to find it empty.
“I thought this was a party Zeke. What the fuck’s going on here?”
“Would you just chill?”
Eventually they sat on the floor in a circle with Romano and Alice. The other bodies remained huddled together sleeping. They passed around the bottle of Evan Williams that burned when it went down but kept them warm without heat, and passed around a spliff Viv had rolled. She released some of the tension she brought to the Palisades but only because she was adequately crossfaded. Something still seemed off about this whole scenario. She couldn’t remember the things they said, only her feelings of intense reservation when she watched Romano begin to prepare the rig.
Eventually it came around to Zeke. Viv had never seen anyone shoot up before, but even in her haze she was disturbed by Romano and Alice’s slumping ecstasy. She hoped Zeke would say no but he didn’t. She hoped that she would have been the type to leave, but she didn’t, and gravity or her own self-misperception or some other intangible force kept her glued to the filthy ground. In retrospect she knew that that meant he had probably been using for the entirety of their relationship, seeing her as a homebase between here and his parents’ place in Waldorf. But in that moment she sat motionless, drunk and frozen with distress. He took the kit and began to prepare his own dose like he knew what he was doing, eventually rolling up his shirt sleeve to tie the hose taut around his arm. He plunged the syringe and his face melted, lazy and slack-jawed in the throes of a dismal pleasure. Viv felt simultaneously intrigued and disturbed.
“Here, Viv, kiss me,” he slurred. “I’ve never kissed anyone when I was this high.” Bullshit. He grabbed her face and pulled it to his, his mouth open and soft against hers. Instinctually she tried to pull away but quickly acquiesced, allowing her body to meld into his. He ran his hands over her in a way she wouldn’t have let him in front of other people, but everything else about this situation disconcerted her so much that she allowed it to unfold as it might. He offered to cook some for her if she wanted and she said no.
Their relationship fell apart in the following weeks. He’d disappear without explanation, and she latched onto him, imagining that if she could keep him with her he wouldn’t be able to use. But still he disappeared. Finally he was gone for days at a time and she devolved more and more into her own anxiety, becoming a frazzled and frayed caricature of herself. Snow was falling and she felt uneasy at the notion of being stuck at home without him, so used to his presence she had grown through every snowfall that winter. She texted him; he had better show up at her house or she was going to put all his band gear out on the street in the snow.
He showed up, carrying the gear out to some unnamed friend’s car out on the street. She begged him to stay. They just needed to talk, they could work it out.
“Look, Viv, I just need space for a few days to think. It’s all gonna be fine. I love you.”
She never saw him again.
She had said that she loved him too, but in hindsight, she wondered if she ever did -- if she had chosen him or if the universe had chosen him for her through a series of sorrows and missteps. Considering it now she began to recognize the difference between love and the desperate attachment to good dick, the blessed angles he had taught her hips. The explanation lay somewhere in there, between the void that ached in its emptiness and preened when he filled it and the oxytocin that distorted her vision. The relationship had feigned mental health for her in that Zeke’s temporarily fervent attention and the steady stream of orgasms had made her seem happy, but their sudden cessation made her fall further than the baseline melancholia she had become accustomed to. She was inconsolable in her surety that no one would ever love her.
That left her here, in the bathtub. Absent Lulu and Nolan, Viv was left on her own to fill this gaping absence that needled at her, these friendships oftentimes an adequate distraction to cope with their mutual inability to spend time alone. Lulu had been matter of fact, seeming as dependable as the world was round. Nolan had served as a placeholder, and to him, Viv a benchwarmer. It was that inappropriate depth to their friendship that set everything into motion, and then later to a crashing halt, as she lay here suspended in the tepid bathwater. She got up and reached for a towel.
Mandy Brownholtz is a writer living in Queens, NY. She is from the D.C.-Metro area. Her features appear on the NYC-based music & culture blog Audiofemme. Her work has been published in The New York Times. Rotten is her first novel.