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I started every day with KFRC getting ready
for school. Sixteen years old, jailbait, hanging out down at the
river with my best friend Julie, cadging tallboys from passing
strangers, walking to her house barefoot with the heat coming up
through the concrete, the air burning, sweat running down inside my
tee-shirt, wishing I was brave enough not to wear a bra.

At every party, there was the boy who played guitar, the same
licks over and over. Sitting in someone’s living room
listening to “Goat’s Head Soup” on the crappy stereo,

seeing the devil right there on the album cover. Come to
me, he said, you know you want to. Meanwhile, Julie would be
asking everybody if they were playing later, and we
would show up in our halter tops, two scarves tied together. I
made a skirt by splitting an old pair of jeans along the
inseam and inserting patches. I wore it like armor,

twirling like a hippy princess. Listening to the same
records over and over. Joni Mitchell singing about
being free in Paris. Seeing myself in “Blue.” Walking the
streets of the Latin Quarter, searching for enlightenment in
Shakespeare and Co., reading Flaubert and Henry Miller,

buying a shawl at Pringtemps, purple with gold threads running through
it. I put it on and was a different person. Taking the
train down to Nice, singing songs in my head. I was free then,

writing in my notebook, looking out the window of the
old-fashioned compartment, checking for
devils under the empty seats. Looking up, there it was—the
Mediterranean. It startled me, the real blue. I was
on the beach all day, surreptitiously watching the shop
ladies coming down to bathe topless on their lunch hours. When
they were done, they would walk away from the sea, droplets running
down their legs, nonchalantly rubbing their towels over their bare
breasts, throwing on their clothes. I carried the songs I knew all
over Europe, hearing David Bowie over and over
in the Barcelona shops. In Italy devils were
everywhere, leering from every church facade. We danced
together for a few days, the one from Lucca, until I
was tired, and he saw someone prettier. Buying my plane
ticket home in Venice, searching for the student travel
agency, seeing it from the vaporetto, hopping off,

trying to make my way back. I’ve never been so lost.