Cue the Chemistry
By Jennifer Lewis
"It was lovely to have a night alone with you," Azeem said.
"Alone?" I replied, glancing around the crowded upstairs of a London club. Women in sleek dresses and stiletto heels. Bare sculpted legs, lace over nipples, and peekaboo cutouts. So many double kisses. Some triple. As an American, I could never keep track.
"How do you know everyone here?" I said.
"It's nice not having our castmates around," Azeem clarified. The top three buttons of his white shirt were undone. "Curious eyes are always upon us."
"And they’re not tonight?" I asked, feeling the weight of passing glances at our blue booth.
"None that I care about," he said.
That was when I heard our director’s voice in my head: “Trust me. If you ever want to make it off the fringe and onto the West End — let alone Broadway — don’t sleep with your castmates. Before you know it, your offstage drama will be upstaging your actual performance. For the next eight-weeks, keep your head in the script, not down someone’s pants. Deal?”
Deal. I shifted my gaze past Azeem’s unbuttoned shirt into the crowd, who were going crazy for some DJ in a baggy suit and an oversized hat with a fishnet veil. His bloated face looked unwell, especially against this VIP crowd, who seemed as if they had been sleeping in oxygen coffins. Yet, something about him felt familiar — the way he pursed his lips and twisted the knobs with his smudged eyeliner.
"Is that — ?"
Azeem turned around. "It is."
Boy. Fucking. George. My body buzzed like after a trip to the loo, minus the nasal drip. I had worshiped him on MTV. Is everyone a DJ? What would I say if I got to meet him?
"Let’s see what he plays next," Azeem said.
The pulsing synth bassline hit, and before I knew it, I was grabbing Azeem’s hand. We rushed to the dance floor as Giorgio Moroder’s disco beat took over. That futuristic tension cord pulled everyone to their feet. Empty blue velvet booths. Bodies knitting together, swaying as the repetitive notes built like a wave — holding us there — just before crashing into Donna’s dreamy soprano. My arm lifted, wrist twirling, as I looked at Azeem, mouthing, I Feel Love.
Our arms stretched toward the vaulted ceiling, torsos lengthening, hips moving intuitively — maybe a little too intuitively. Our hearts pressed together, his hand rested on the small of my back. As a kid, my mom and I had watched Donna on Solid Gold, dressed in a black sequin gown, eyes closed, hips circling, feeling it all. My brain could barely compute this — Boy George playing Donna Summer. It was like dancing in a nesting doll of pop culture.
Azeem pressed his inner thighs between mine. We weren’t soulmates. We were players who pushed boundaries. Two instruments plucking the same chords, possibilities phasing in and out, all warm tones. There was one version of us as friends, and another, slightly sped-up version of us as lovers.
"Come," Azeem said, throwing his sweaty arm around me. Curious eyes followed us to a back room. Folks leaned against the walls, smoking. The drugs were no longer in the loo but out on a mirrored table.
Eventually, Boy George walked in, and the only thing I could muster was, "I felt your remix of I Feel Love so hard."
"It’s like machines having sex," he said.
"Exactly," I replied.
Eric Zeigler, Wall Clouds, 2021, Archival Pigment Print, 15" x 20".
DEAD HAIR
Jess and I had been sleeping together for three months, and I’d have done anything to make it to four. Dating Jess felt like waiting in the stocks of a guillotine. Most nights, I wished she’d drop the blade. In 1999, we lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Capp Street in the Mission with five roommates from a punk rock marching band.
“I want to shave my head,” Jess said, jumping off the couch.
We had just finished Godard’s Breathless. The movie where Jean Seberg’s pixie-cut Patricia turned her fedora-wearing boyfriend, Michel, over to the police, and POP POP POP! They shot him in the back. Jazz trumpets played. Blood bloomed on the back of Michel’s white shirt as he stumbled through the streets of Paris and belly-flopped onto the cobblestones. Jump-cut to Patricia and the policemen standing over his body. She ran her thumb thoughtfully over her lips and said, “I want people to let me be. I’m independent. That’s why I gave you away.”
“Get the electric razor,” Jess said.
“Did you know Godard didn’t have a script?” I replied. “He fed the lines to his actors, and they repeated them back.”
“I’ll get it,” she said.
“He couldn’t afford a dolly,” I yelled down the hallway. “So he pushed his cinematographer in a wheelchair.”
“Plug it in.” Jess handed me the razor.
“Let’s just go to bed,” I said.
“We’re doing it now.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “I want you to do it.”
I didn’t want to do it.
“Come on!” she said, winking like Michel did to Patricia. “Don’t be a coward.”
I envisioned blood on the floor. Black stitches woven into her skull. I had never cut anyone’s hair before.
“As long as I don’t have to wear a fedora.”
I found an outlet.
I held the guard flat against her head and buzzed the front and back in even rows. Waves of red hair fell to the floor. Sections of her skull emerged like a clear-cut forest. She looked like a terrifying clown — not sexy at all. I feared she’d see her reflection in the microwave and scream, Look what you’ve done to me! But she didn’t get up. She sat there, straight-backed. Her trust steadied my hand. I shaved the right side, then the left. My face was so close I felt the warmth of her ear through the tip of my nose.
She beamed. With what? Contentment? Freedom? A manic episode? Whatever she felt, I felt it too.
Red hair covered my black shirt and littered the floor. Jess looked more like Sinead O’Connor than Godard’s Patricia — a nice egg-shaped head on a long stem of a neck. I placed my hands on her shoulders to let her know it was done. She opened her eyes to mine.
“Thank you,” she said. “I feel lighter.”
I angled the microwave so she could see her reflection. She stuck out her tongue and rubbed her hand over her buzzed skull.
Outside, our roommates marched up the steps and busted in the front door. The topless flag girls with black Xs over their nipples trampled through Jess’s dead hair. They gyrated and danced. Max’s swinging trombone nearly hit my nose. He leaned back and jammed the slide into the ceiling. Plaster powdered his face. Bryan’s snare cracked like a gunshot. POP POP POP! Sébastien yelled into the megaphone, “Impossible n’est pas français,” while Jess spun in the center of it all.
The sun split through the blinds. The band had passed out, a few still clutching their instruments. I slunk off to the bedroom and waited for Jess. Most people don’t realize that death by guillotine is swift — a clean, painless end. The real agony comes from the waiting. I heard Sébastien and Jess laughing. The front door slammed. They were walking up Bernal Hill to watch the sunrise.
My neck ached in the stocks. I want you to do it. Anger buzzed through me like the razor between us. The hum filled the room. I closed my eyes. Jess blew smoke into my face. But it wasn’t my face. It was the lens of Godard’s camera. I sat in Godard’s wheelchair as she pushed me up Bernal Hill. Slowly, the city came to life.
“You're the one I trust,” I said, looking down at the sharp Victorian rooftops.
“You’re the one I trust,” she replied, flatly.
“I’m always thinking of you,” I said.
“I’m always thinking of you,” she replied.
She leaned down, kissed me, and whispered, “But I need to be independent.” Then she shoved my wheelchair over the edge. I screamed into an empty room. The sheets bled. The bed bled. The walls bled. A blizzard of red hair floated down, sticking to the floor. When I woke, Jess was under the covers, just out of reach. I stared at her perfectly shorn head and said, “But I didn’t fuck it up. I didn’t fuck it up.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of "Dead Hair" was published in a print edition of The Los Angeles Press.
Eric Zeigler, Bandaged Cardboard Hand, 2017, Archival Pigment Print, 20"x 15".
Jennifer Lewis is a writer, editor, and publisher of Red Light Lit. Her debut short story collection, The New Low (Black Lawrence Press), was an SPD Bestseller. She is the winner of the Nomadic Press Bindle Award and The Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as Cosmonauts Avenue, Midnight Breakfast, The Los Angeles Press, and CRAFT, among others. Additionally, her most recent nonfiction work has been featured in The Rumpus, The Creative Independent, and Alta Journal, where her piece “The High Desert’s Funkiest Art Gallery” won the Los Angeles Press Club’s 17th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. She received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Jennifer teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco.
Eric Zeigler is an artist, designer, and researcher whose current work involves photography and the unconventional transformation of images. He received an MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and exhibits his work nationally and internationally. He also writes about human tool use and its connection to contemporary design and non-Anthropocentric ecological viewpoints. Eric is an Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art at the University of Toledo.