So, I have to tell you about the magenta-haired art student, Nancy—although that’s not her real name, turns out.

My summer class hadn’t started yet, but I was settled into my garret apartment, such as it was; I just had my bed and a side table, and a few milk crates, as I mentioned. I had a big empty space in the corner of the small studio next to my bed, directly when you walked in the door. It was too small for a sofa, and I was going to need a desk or something to set my portable typewriter on and do homework—the fifties kitchen table wasn’t going to cut it. I’d left my desk in Ann Arbor—but there was time to find something else. First, I needed to find a job.

One early afternoon, I walked a few blocks down Woodward Avenue, closer to the medical center than to the museum or campuses, to a restaurant Avie and I both knew, the Union Stripe Tavern. It had an Art Deco bar and interior, modified with some kitschy San Francisco-style Victorian half-walls, and lots of framed vintage posters and other bric-a-brac. It had a lunchtime clientele mostly of cheapskate doctors from the hospitals and people who worked down at Orchestra Hall and so on. Their menu consisted of burgers and soups and salads and whatnot—pretty simple—and drinks, of course. I figured it would be easy to learn the routine after so many months waitressing at the Li’l Drown’d Mug Café in Ann Arbor.

The manager, a dorky white guy with a mustache and short-sleeve shirt and tie named Rick, gave me an application to fill out. “We might not need anybody until closer to when school starts,” he said, meaning September. I counted on my fingers; it was only June. “But we’ll keep you on file,” he said. He added that Tom, the owner, a bald guy in a suit I had seen briefly before he disappear down the stairs to what I presumed was an office, would also want to interview me at some point.

I told him that was okay and sat down at the bar to fill out the application. The lunch rush was more or less over and the restaurant was emptying out when someone in the back of the dining room screamed, “Thirty cents?!” I turned around to see a magenta blur streak past my eyes; it was one of the waitresses, in the Union Stripe uniform of navy-blue slacks, blue cotton dress shirt, and apron—and a shock of magenta hair—racing toward the front door after a group of patrons who were just leaving. She shouted after them, “A table of five, and you leave me a thirty-cent tip?!” But they were already out the front door and on the sidewalk of Woodward Avenue; she ran through the vestibule after them.

I looked around the restaurant at what were now mostly empty; none of the other wait staff—which numbered two or three, it was a small dining room—seemed to be paying any attention. I went to the front window—there was a bench half-filled with stacks of free alternative newspapers—and leaned over to look out, trying to get a glimpse what was happening on the sidewalk. The diners in question had gotten into a parked car, and the magenta-haired waitress was throwing a handful of pennies and nickels into their front grill. Loud words were exchanged, as were middle fingers; a moment later, fuming, the waitress stormed back into the restaurant.

Rick, who was behind the bar calmly checking numbers off a clipboard, sighed. “Nancy, can I speak with you for a moment?” He corralled her through a doorway without a door next to bar leading to an adjacent, seldom-used dining room reserved for banquets and large groups, I later learned. I sat back down on my stool at the bar and finished filling out my application. But with my acute hearing—which I didn’t even need because they were shouting—I could hear Rick and the magenta-haired waitress in the next room arguing about her temper. Apparently, this issue had cropped up before; if it had been six people, a fifteen-percent gratuity would have been added automatically, but because it had been only five—and five cheapskate medical professionals at that—she was stuck with whatever tip they wanted to leave at their discretion. That was just the restaurant policy.

The conversation ended and the two of them returned to the main dining room. I was about to chime in—completely on her side—but magenta-haired Nancy was too quick. Before I could utter a word, she took of her apron, turned, and threw it toward Rick’s face, hitting him in the tie. “That’s it! I quit!” she said, and marched directly out the front door.

Rick folded the apron and set it before me. “Well, I guess we can use you,” he said. “Keep in mind that during the lunch rush we get a lot of doctors from the medical center, and sometimes they’re not the most generous tippers. Happy hour and evenings are where you’ll make your tips.”

“You want me to start right now?” I asked. I wasn’t wearing the requisite navy slacks and blue shirt.

“No, the lunch rush is over for today,” said Rick, looking at his watch. I could see the other wait staff was bussing tables and straightening up the dining room as the last lunch guests were finishing up. “We’re covered for the rest of the afternoon. How about tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I said. I handed him my application and picked up the apron.

“You’re going to want to launder that,” he said. “There’s some clam chowder on it.”

I got the routine of the Union Stripe pretty quickly. It was a simple menu. The kitchen staff was mostly black—the main daytime chef, Ron, had been a cook in the army; now he was an urban poet. The waiters and waitresses were mostly white suburbanites who lived downtown; they were students at Warren Woodward University for the most part. I began with a part-time schedule but had more than twenty hours my first week; by the time my summer class started, I felt like I’d been working there for months.

My class was on urban labor relations in the twentieth century—Detroit, legacy home of the auto industry, was a big union town of course, or had been before they started closing factories and getting their asses whipped by Japanese imports in recent years. What was nice about the Arbor State Extension—it was housed in a stripped-down classical monumental building it shared with the Society of Engineers called the Arthur Rackham Memorial —was that it was right next door to the Beaux-Arts style Fine Arts Museum of Greater Detroit—I bought a membership there and one for Avie so we’d be able to visit whenever we wanted for free.

One afternoon, to unwind after my two-hour class, I strolled through the galleries, and who do I run into but Nancy, the magenta-haired waitress who’d quit. She was clutching a ring-bound sketchbook and was using a pencil—the only drawing tool they allowed in the galleries—and was making a study of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781), a strange painting of a woman lying supine in a white gown with a troll or gremlin or something sitting on her chest as a ghostly horse-head peers into her bedroom.

“Hey, thanks for quitting,” I said. “I got your job at the Union Stripe.” She looked up at me, puzzled, trying to figure out if she recognized me. “I don’t think you noticed me,” I continued. “I was sitting at the bar while you were busy returning that thirty-cent tip to your customers.”

“Oh,” she said, scowling. “Those M.D.s really burn me up.”

I looked over her shoulder. “Say, that’s pretty good,” I said. “My sister Avie draws. I can’t draw a straight line. Are you a student at that snobby art school?”

She scowled at me again. “Yes, I am,” she said. “Why, does she go there? You’re sister?”

“No, she’ll be a freshman at Warren Woodward this fall,” I said. “I’m taking a class at the Arbor State Extension.”

We weren’t really connecting until I started asking her questions about Union Stripe and sharing gossip about her former co-workers. Like, what’s up with this regular customer or that gay waiter? “Has Rick tried to grab your ass yet?” She asked. “He likes black chicks, but only after he’s had a few.” I told her not yet, but thanked her for the warning.

She finished up her sketch as we talked, then we strolled through some of the other galleries. Turns out Nancy had gotten a job right away at a great little restaurant nearby where they served an awesome Sunday brunch; otherwise, she was just kicking around Midtown for the summer waiting for art classes to start up again—she hated her affluent, materialistic parents who lived in the northern suburbs. After the museum, we walked through the art school campus, which was right across the street on Kirby and had a Minoru Yamasaki building, and a couple blocks beyond, to her apartment. She was eager to show me her spooky oil paintings and pastels. She was a commercial art major but she did really great abstracts Avie would have liked.

Her apartment was the upstairs of a duplex she shared with two other girls who were also students downtown but not art students; they weren’t home. She had a big room all to herself, which served as both her bedroom and studio, which looked out over a small park across the street from the art school. Their apartment was nice, much nicer than my cramped, crappy little garret, and was filled with Ikea kinds of furniture and weird pieces of driftwood and other girly stuff. We spent the afternoon going through all the work in her big, black portfolio, which was matted very nicely—she spread them all over her bed. She explained that she had three years under her belt, by which time most talented students got hired away to work in an ad agency doing automotive accounts. Nancy had a contrarian streak and was just misfit enough, she said, that she looked like she was going to make it to graduation, which in the culture of the school was considered highly eccentric.

After we had looked at all her works of art and she had put them away and zipped up her portfolio, Nancy put on a kettle of water brewed some tea. While we waited for it to boil, she put on some Joan Armatrading on the turntable in the living room. Later, as we waited for our tea to steep, we went to her room and stretched out on her bed, leaving the door open. It was almost poignant, how clichéd it all was, and I could barely keep from laughing. I knew she was going to put the moves on me—after all, no one listened to Women’s Music for the music. we started kissing and stroking each other’s hair. Nothing too heavy—we kept our clothes on; we’d only taken off our shoes.

The turntable had a record changer. A Peter Gabriel album—the one with either Shock the Monkey or Intruder on it—followed Joan. It was pretty loud, so at first we didn’t hear her roommates return. Then, someone turned down the stereo and called “Aggie!” from the next room. “We’re home,” they said.

“Who’s Aggie?” I whispered.

Nancy had frozen. “Agatha,” she whispered back. “That’s my real name.” Believe it or not, there had been two Agathas working at the Union Stripe at the same time, once upon a time. So, Aggie—or Agatha—had adopted the name Nancy to avoid confusion.

Mortified, she leapt up from the bed to close the door, but not before an Asian girl had stuck her head inside.

“Sorry—I didn’t know you were with somebody,” said the Asian girl. Then she caught sight of me and said, “Oh!” I gathered from her expression she hadn’t expected to see her roommate entertaining another girl—a black one, at that—on her bed.

The other roommate, a willowy blond, stuck her head in the door too. She was equally taken aback.

“Audrey, Hadleigh,” said Agatha. “I’d like you to meet…”

“Clarissa,” I said, “but you can call me Joan.” I bounced up from the bed and grabbed my shoes off the floor. “I was just leaving.”

A few days later, Agatha stopped by the Union Stripe to pick up her last paycheck. She spotted me at the end of the bar, waiting for the bartender to serve my drink order. She overcame her obvious reluctance and walked over to me and said hello. “Hi,” I said. She was very apologetic; she explained her roommates were very liberal, only they hadn’t known her to date anyone other than guys.

I thought to myself, They didn’t know she was into girls? She must hide Joan Armatrading under her mattress.

“Look, it’s no biggie,” I said.

“And Audrey,” she said, by which she meant the Asian girl, “she isn’t racist or anything—she even dates a black guy.”

“That’s consoling,” I said.

The bartender finished my order, so I told Agatha to wait at the bar while I took my tray of drinks to a table full of people up in the section by the kitchen. Agatha was still there when I returned.

“Look, here’s my number,” she said, handing me a folded slip of paper. “Call me, okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

Well, I was bored reading Megamusings for the fifth time, and I had just gotten my rotary phone—it sat alone in the empty corner of my garret. So, I unfolded the slip of paper Nancy had given me—that’s the name she wrote along with her number—and dialed her up. It was a drizzly Saturday morning, and she had nothing to do, she said; so she came over. About twenty minutes later, my buzzer sounded, but since the control was broke, I had to go downstairs and let her in the front door.

Once she was in the apartment, she took off her leather jacket and draped it over one of the chairs I had dragged in from the kitchenette. She wore a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off that left her midriff bare and hip-hugger jeans that revealed a black heart tattoo by her right iliac crest. The effect was a late punk, proto-Goth look. “You need a piece of furniture over there,” she said, pointing to the empty corner where the phone sat on the floor. “I know just the thing—there are these great antique drawing tables at this place where I used to work downtown; they’re just throwing them out. You could level it out and use it as a desk, if you wanted.”

Avie would love an angled drawing board, I thought to myself. “I’ll take it,” I said.

I wrapped my arms around her waist and started kissing her. She responded immediately; she was a great French kisser. She kicked off her shoes—she wasn’t wearing socks. “Ew—you need a rug, too, to throw over this grungy linoleum.”

I wriggled her out of her clothes and we fell back on my bed. Her body was lithe; her skin was soft and smooth. I still had on my Abyssinian Wolves sweat pants and hoodie, but I was starting to sweat as we went at it; the sun had come out and the day was warming up.

“Aren’t you going to show me around your apartment?” said Agatha, as I unzipped my hoodie and threw it over by her jacket on the chair.

“What’s to see?” I replied. “Studio, kitchenette, bath—you can see from one end of the garret to the other. At least there aren’t any uptight roommates to barge in on us.” I wasn’t wearing an undershirt, so when we embraced again, my little boobies rubbed against hers, which weren’t all that much bigger.

She moaned like a whimpering little puppy as I fingered her—she clearly wasn’t all that experienced. Afterwards, I fingered myself under my sweat pants, and she sucked my nipples as I came. After we had both come a few more times, we lay there silently, just listening to the Saturday morning traffic pass by on the street below.

“You don’t mind that I date guys?” she asked.

“No, I date guys too.”

“I haven’t really made up my mind what I am,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I haven’t decided if I like guys or girls,” said Agatha.

“You don’t have to decide,” I said. “You can like both, or just the ones you like. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“But I want babies someday,” she said.

“Agatha, you can still have babies even if you like girls,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t know what I am either, sometimes. I’ve decided it’s okay if I don’t know what I am. I don’t have to be one thing or the other.”

“You mean you don’t know whether you like guys or girls more?” she asked. “Or do you mean whether you’re black or white?”

I hadn’t mentioned that I was biracial, and her remark took me aback; that wasn’t what I had had in mind, necessarily. I was thinking more about whether I was a megahero or a civilian, but I didn’t say that.

“That, and other things,” I said. “All of the above, I guess, Agatha.”

“Call me Aggie,” she said. “That’s what all my friends call me.”

“No, I think I’ll call you Agatha,” I said. “Aggie’s too close to Avie, my sister’s name, and that would be too weird. But I think I’ll introduce you as Nancy, in case you two ever meet. As you’ll no doubt discover one of these days, I’m into secret identities.”

So that’s how I met my magenta-haired art student.

One afternoon, as I was coming home from the Arthur Rackham Memorial, I rounded to the back stairs of my apartment building; I was still hoping I would spot the mysterious Gum-Band Man whom I’d seen before around the grounds of the church next door. But no such luck. As I was about to scale the stairs, I heard the familiar sound of a huge semi pulling to a stop in front of the house. This wasn’t unusual to hear the sounds of vehicular traffic along West Forest Avenue during the day, but it was strange to hear semi coming to a stop. I walked around the front of the house to get look, and sure enough, the lettering on the side of the van read “Body by Nuke.”

The bald, black head of Samson McSampson looked out of the passenger side of the cab. “Need help moving?” he called to me.

“All moved in, Nuke,” I said. “Weeks ago. Daddy has a pickup, and sister Avie drove it. Not all that much stuff.”

“Preston told me you’d left Ann Arbor, and I’d gotten to wondering how you were doing,” he said. He turned off the ignition and climbed down from the cabin. His hugely muscular physique, almost as developed as Megaton Man’s, rippled under his too-tight T-shirt, which also read “Body by Nuke.” His tight biker pants showed the contours of crotch that bulged quite explicitly. “I got a daughter going to Central myself,” he said, although he didn’t elaborate as to which Central he was referring to. He started talking a mile a minute about his fitness TV show—how it was doing in syndication, how he’d become a regular guest on a big daytime talk show out of Chicago, how he was too busy now to have training clients in Detroit, and how he’d probably be moving his production company either to Chicago or Los Angeles before the year was out—all of this while we were standing there on the sidewalk in front of my apartment.

It seemed pretty clear he wanted me to invite him up to my garret, but I wasn’t about to go there. “You can tell me all about it over coffee,” I said. “There’s a place around the corner.”

We walked around the block and down Third Avenue to the Grub Street Grill. Being that is was afternoon, it wasn’t too busy yet; we had coffee and dessert. He hadn’t stop talking the whole time—about himself, mostly, although I got the clear idea that he was interested in me. I kept looking at my watch—I had only a few hours before I had to go into work, and I had homework I had to get done before class tomorrow.

“Nuke, why are you here?” I asked.

“To be honest, I can’t stop thinking about you,” he confessed. “That little body, that cute little Miss Megaton uniform, throwing all those weights around…”

“That’s Ms. Megaton Man,” I said. “And that was months ago, and for only ten minutes. Besides, I thought you hated me.”

“You made an impression on me,” he said. “And I obviously made an impression on you.” Of course, he was right—how could I forget my roommate at the time, in his old Megaton Man costume, being nearly worked to death by an overly-ambitious weight trainer?

He explained he had been on the road, and that all this excitement about his pending cable career had brought stress to his marriage, and that he was undergoing a divorce. “I just got to thinking about you, and wanted to see you again,” he said. “You’re so pretty.”

That last remark hit me with all the force of a ton of bricks; after that, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I couldn’t remember anyone—except Mama, Daddy, or Avie, and that was seldom—ever calling me pretty. In fact, on quite a few occasions I’d been called ugly, and after the scene with Agatha’s roommates, I thought I must now exert a permanent butchness. Even Trent hadn’t called me pretty.

“What did you say?” I said.

Samson reached across the table and stroked my hair. “I know I’m a bit older than you,” he said. “But I try to keep in shape, and…”

“What did you just call me? What’s the precise word you used?”

“You’re beautiful, Clarissa. You’re a strong, handsome, desirable woman.”

“You had me at ‘pretty,’” I said. “Don’t push it with ‘handsome.’”

“But you’re very pretty,” said Samson. “You’re so very, very pretty.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go back to my place.”

“What for?” he asked.

“I’ve decided to give you a tumble,” I replied.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” I said. I had already figured it might be the only way to get rid of him, but when he started throwing around adjectives like ‘pretty,’ that sealed the deal. “Come on, I don’t have all day.”

He really was the sweetest lover I could imagine. I didn’t have to lift a finger, or move a muscle. I had taken him up to my little La Bohème garret apartment—notwithstanding my fears that the floors would buckle under his overly-muscled weight. He knelt down on the rug I had gotten since Agatha’s visit, and slowly and reverently removed every article of my clothing—I wasn’t wearing much because it was a hot summer in the city—as if he were unwrapping some delicate artifact from an archeological dig. His tongue moved slowly all over my torso; his hands moved even slower all over my backside and legs. Next thing I knew I was on the bed, listening to the fan whirring in the window, and the sounds of him lapping at me. I just closed my eyes and enjoyed the greatest cunnilingus of my life. Then, his cock was all over me, rubbing all over my skin. I wondered if he used it to massage his patients. I must have said it out loud, because he replied, “Of course not,” rather indignantly. He must have slipped on a condom he’d brought, because I didn’t have any, and he slipped it into me. After some maneuvering, I was on top of him, all the while remaining connected, as it were. He kept saying, “You are so beautiful, so pretty,” over and over. In particular, he effusively praised my flat top and robust bottom. I didn’t stop him.

Finally, I was little more than a puddle of perspiration lying atop my sheets, his protein all over my torso. He had pulled out and taken off his condom. “I hate those damn things,” he explained, after he’d finished himself off with a few masturbatory strokes. “Do you want a tissue or something?” he asked, looking around for a box.

“No,” I said, sitting up on my elbows. “Rub it into my skin.” He did, using his softening prick.

As Nuke climbed off the bed, the floorboards creaked under his weight. For a moment, I thought I heard somebody outside my apartment door, setting down some furniture or moving something. “Sounds like you have some new neighbors moving in,” Nuke whispered as he put on his clothes. “Hope they didn’t hear us.” He chuckled.

I was too sticky to put on my clothes, so I just sat on my bed and watched him put on his light grey T-shirt and biker pants over his dark-brown skin. “Not bad for a black guy, eh?” he said. “You probably haven’t had a real man for quite a while.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I guessed Preston must have told him a thing or two about my preferences, because he said, “It’s just that I hate to see a good, black woman prostitute herself to white men, or worse, women.”

I leapt to the door, fully nude, and opened it.

“Get out,” I demanded.

He hadn’t noticed he had suddenly pissed me off. Instead, he went on: “Why don’t you come with me to Los Angeles?” he asked. “My divorce will be finalized soon, and…”

“Get out, Nuke, before I kick your ass out and down the block—and your big rig with it.”

He looked at me for a moment, perplexed. Then he must have remembered Ms. Megaton Man tossing two-ton weights around the back yard on Ann Street as if they were lawn chairs, and got a terrified look. “Oh…okay,” he said. “Keep in touch.” He left promptly, striding past me and down the stairs.

That’s when I noticed the disassembled pieces of an old drawing table in the hallway, leaning against the wall next to my door. There was a hastily-scrawled note taped to it: “It’s okay if you don’t know who you are.”

It was signed, “Love, Nancy.”