Addendum

We're in my car and driving to New Jersey. I think it's 1981. She is in the passenger seat wearing her B-52's tee shirt, her long blonde hair blowing slightly in the breeze coming from open window. It seems okay. I am saying things and she's smiling. "Could you put a tape in," I say.

She does. Little cassette deck bought at pawn shop. Mix tape. She puts the deck on the back seat and it plays. I don't tell her this story. It's good to have my car back. It had been parked at my parent's house for a year? Something. Poor. Couldn't afford to fix it. Walking to work for a year. Three miles. Sometimes the bus.

All that back there now. The rooming house we crawled out of. Junkies and drug dealers and some gunfire, then this little apartment, then we're driving. I tell her it will be good. That she'll like it. But I get lost somewhere in south Jersey. We have a big chunk of hashish and I'm very high.

"That's a 1970 Mustang," the gas station attendant says. I say yeah. I pop the hood and show him. "Balls," he says. I ask him for directions. She gets out and goes to the soda machine. He looks at her. Some fluffy clouds blow overhead. We get back in and go. Thanks.

We get to Cape May and I'm talking to a man who owns the motel at the southern tip. Everything out of my price range. The man's wife comes out. We chat. They decide they like us and set us up in cottage out back. No TV or air conditioning, but cheap. The wife an artist, oils and some watercolors.

As the weekend rolls out, we see all her paintings and hear their stories. Wendy has been playing with painting again too. We tell a little, but not much; it seems okay. It's usually early. Coffee and talk. We get sickly high in the cottage, play on the beach all day.

Wendy on the beach and me body surfing. She gets tanned and I get hell sunburn, like really bad. Fever. What was I thinking. I tell her the story that night. How an old high school friend first took me to Cape May. This was 1977. I'd just punked out of college, but he was still there. In college. He knew my situation and said you need to get away.

"My parent's said it's okay, they'd be glad to have you come along," he said. I went. Looking back, it was quite weird. They accepted me, put me up, paid for everything. It seemed it was not just his family, but his uncle's family as well who met at Cape May every summer.

I didn't say much that weekend. And when they dropped me off at home, there was more yelling. And a couple weeks later, my old high school friend said his father was sending a bill. "You're parent's will pay it, right?" No.

Thus the mutation. I tell Wendy this as blisters form. She's from similar situation. Some find new family in college, some in ghetto. "It doesn't matter," I tell her. We drive on out of there saying we'll keep in touch with the friendly motel owners. We don't.

I'm still peeling sheets of skin by winter and she's stuck on one painting. I'm not sure she ever finishes. Maybe she does. Maybe she comes knocking on my rooming house door some years later wearing the leather skirt I bought her and I turn her away.

And one day browsing books in the thrift store and this woman sleeping on a couch there, in the thrift store, and then she's calling my name. And then we're in my car (not the Mustang), and then we're in a bar and she's just out of jail, and knew her from jr high, like some jr high goddess I couldn't believe would even speak to me, and she's saying how she's off dope now, but all these tracks on her arms.

And when I hear that song, Tiny Dancer, I always think of her, but don't say, and she says she was working with Wendy for a time, that Wendy would bring in cans of tuna for lunch, "Like a cat; eating like a cat," she says, then I don't see her no more either.