Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest Read Free Book Online Page B

put it on. And then I cried, because things weren’t any better.
    I have tried to find happiness through hair color. Election 2000, I have hair that is supposed to be blond but has turnedout an ash-y orange. SB says it is the exact same shade as the toupee worn by a
Sopranos
villain called Ralph Cifaretto, who beat a teenage mistress to death. “That isn’t how I want to look,” I explain to my mother in our daily call.
    “Oh!” she says, “but his hair’s nice!”
    So, I look like Ralph Cifaretto, Florida is in the balance, and I’m determined that Mike, being corn-fed and Midwestern, would make me feel stable if I had him. If I had someone like him, it would prove that I’m stable, and then I wouldn’t have to do the work to get there. Mike is just a nice boy from Ohio. Ohio Mike. When I am sent to interview Brad Pitt for the cover of
Esquire
, the first words out of my mouth when he walks into the room are: “
Oh
. You aren’t as good-looking as Ohio Mike.”
    “Who’s Ohio Mike?” asks Pitt, good-naturedly, for he is nothing if not good-natured.
    I have long sleeves with special holes so I can hook them over my thumbs, not a smidge of skin viewable, so covered is it in cuts.
    “This guy I like, who’s better-looking than you.”
    There are two stories I remember (intertwined by the hypermania), one story of love and one of art, and both of a kind of revolution that I like very much. I dwell on the tale of Che Guevara picking up Aleida, who would become his wife, by telling her he was off to overthrow the Bolivian government and did she want to come with him?
    The other I obsess over is Bob Dylan seeing the violinist Scarlet Rivera walking along the road with her violin case and spontaneously asking her to come to the studio with him.
Desire
comes out of it the year I am born. Violins at arevolution. Icons trying to get their wives to stay, others seducing them for the first time. Sometimes Bob Dylan is the one who, in my head, ends up dead and posed, Christ-like, at the hands of the CIA. Che, meanwhile, briefly converts to Christianity and writes an ill-received screenplay.
    Maybe it’s because I’m manic, but I can conjure people. A week after nonstop listening to
Desire
, I see Bob Dylan on the streets of downtown New York.
    To my Soho Grand election suite, SB and I have corralled: Ohio Mike, his friends Ohio Bob and Ohio Joe. They are enormous men, shaped like beer cans with legs. They work with their hands and own their own power tools. I haven’t known men like them. I’m used to London boys with their skinny ties and bodies. Or pear-shaped Jewish men from the family tree. They haven’t known girls like me. SB can tell that things are not going to work out well in this election and she is in the corner, reading Philip Roth.
    None of these boys needs or wants his soul to be fought for. God, I’ve got so much fight in me and no one to throw it at (a game of dodgeball, because at least if I could save someone through love, I would be dodging myself).
    To that end, I am an appalling show-off.
    “If Bush gets in I’m chucking my shoes out the window,” I announce, because not enough people are looking at me.
    The result is indecisive because of Florida, so I throw one shoe out the window. I immediately regret it, as I do with so many of my manic decisions. TiVo hasn’t been invented and yet my life is already littered with TiVo moments: just let me rewind that. Just let me skip that part. That didn’t happen!
    I can see it, my high-top Nike in the snow beyond someone’s fence, so near and yet so far. I walk home in my one sneaker, the snow the same gray mush as a hung parliament. On the corner of Bleecker and Sixth Avenue I see Susan Sarandon zooming toward me on a scooter. I have never met her, but she’s part of my father’s nonsense world. If you eat one of my dad’s French fries he snaps, “Oh! I was saving that for Susan Sarandon’s séance!” On his website,