The Itchy Glowbo Blues

I shouldn’t be writing to someone I barely know,” Rachel’s postcard read, “when I’m this depressed + faithless. The smoke from my cigarette is even stinging my eyes.”

I’d met Rachel a few years earlier, at my friend Ben’s house, during the brief time they were going out. She’d brought a VHS copy of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, then two years old, and the three of us, with Ben’s younger brother, had gathered around the small television in his mother’s sewing room to watch it. During the infamous scene where Kyle MacLachlan’s character peeps from the closet while Dennis Hopper’s character inhales nitrous oxide, then beats and dry-humps Isabella Rossellini’s character, Ben’s father walked into the room. A stern, quiet bookseller, Ben’s father watched the movie for a minute, too, then shut off the television, ejected the videotape, and told us to go do something else.

When she sent me the postcard, in June 1990, Rachel and Ben had long since broken up, but I’d asked her to submit some writing to a one-off ’zine I planned to make. Rachel had given us some poems for an earlier ’zine Ben and I had compiled, Sketch Fifty-Three, and now she took creative writing courses in college. I was nineteen, and wanted to produce a more serious, more literary ’zine than Sketch, filled with serious, literary stories—like the ones I’d just encountered by Carson McCullers, or like those my new girlfriend, Jen, told me she’d read in a literary journal called Conjunctions.

Rachel was a smart, glib, classically trained musician, and the first person I knew whose moods needed to be adjusted by psychoactive drugs. She wrote dark poems inspired by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. But my planned literary ’zine did not impress her. “I’m apprehensive about sending you the completed ‘sex piece’ because of personal feelings + my changing attitudes about the person it’s about,” Rachel’s postcard concluded. She’d addressed it only to “Josh,” and a large, deliberate inkblot partially obscured the name of my street. Her handwriting looked like melted candle wax: the second “t” in “cigarette” descended two full lines. On the front of the postcard, Dylan Thomas cups a lit match to the tip of a cigarette in his lips. The postmark has faded almost to invisibility—I’d discovered Dylan Thomas’s earliest stories, such as “The Tree,” that same year, and loved them, so tacked this postcard above my writing desk for years—but I can still, just barely, read the date.

A month or so after I received Rachel’s postcard, I moved into an illegal attic apartment up on Boston’s Mission Hill, and that fall I began taking classes at UMass Boston, though I knew I’d transfer out: I hadn’t submitted my financial aid forms, and now I could only afford state tuition. My coursework was light. Home computers then still existed mostly in the homes of the wealthy, and our professors allowed us to handwrite our essays on lined pages if we owned no typewriter: I submitted my papers in neat block capitals. The other students sometimes groaned when our professors announced a reading assignment or reminded us of a due date. I rode the T forty-five minutes each way to and from campus, and worked twenty-five hours a week, but managed to squander a lot of afternoons looking through my apartment’s skylights over rooftops, smokestacks, and church spires. My roommate, a Mass Art student, spent entire days and a lot of late nights in the glassblowing studio. Otherwise, she was usually out with either an older guy who sometimes gave her money, or a longhaired artist boyfriend from school who said he’d tattoo my unimposing bicep with an ironic reproduction of one of Garth Williams’s or E. H. Shepard’s line drawings, though he never did. We had no lease on the apartment, which technically didn’t exist. Every so often, home at the same time, we’d crank up...