We had to leave so many things behind. We were traveling light, one suitcase apiece. Apart from those, all that we were carrying were Isobel’s drum set, my guitar, the amp and the microphones.

“I can’t go three weeks without playing,” said Isobel. “Besides, what am I supposed to do all night, fuck?”

“That’s what I was hoping,” I said.

“Dream on,” she said. “That’s over. I’m married now.”

It was a warm Sunday evening. We had been married six hours. Isobel looked insane with the mass of multi-colored ribbons in her hair, her tee shirt and her blood-soaked dress. She was driving. Even though it was only early May, it was so muggy that she had put the top down. Suddenly she pulled over.

“You drive,” she said.

We switched seats. I started up, pulling off the shoulder and back onto I-71 South. In the passenger seat, Isobel started to cry in hiccups. She laid her head down in my lap, and cried harder and harder. She cried so hard and so long that she scared me. I was afraid that she would break something.

“Should I pull over?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“Keep going,” she said. “We’ve got to get away from Cleveland.”

She quieted down and rested, drawing in deep, nervous breaths. Around Mansfield, Isobel asked me to stop. She opened the trunk, and returned with a fifth of Canadian Club. As we got back on the road, she offered the bottle around. Her baby sister Alyssa took a token sip. Isobel and I, crashing from speed and ragged on acid, really wanted the liquor. We drank almost the whole bottle. Our spirits picked up.

We were driving my mom’s Impala, a fast, clean, sporty, powerful young convertible. My family had lent it to me for our honeymoon, but they would never see it again. We had no urge to come back. We were sick of Cleveland and its citizens. We were ready to meet different people and to make new friends. Isobel would never forget her Cleveland pals, Jennifer and Nikki. I would never forget my Cleveland buddies, Hart, Maple and Mercy. And we had brought along our most prized possession, Isobel’s younger sister, Alyssa. We’d had enough of Cleveland’s roast beef, white bread, and steel mills. We wanted catfish and tamales and pecan rolls and tortillas and oil wells and electronics.

We were driving down the country toward Mobile, Isobel and Alyssa’s birthplace. With the top down, Isobel’s hair up, and her cat’s eyes hidden behind Jackie Kennedy sunglasses, we drove the length of Ohio’s diagonal, crossed the river at Cincinnati, and entered the South.

We stopped for a drink at a roadhouse near Louisville. Several drinks, in fact. Gin and tonics, lots of them. Isobel looked at me levelly.

“Do we have to go back?” she asked.

She was bringing up the unspoken fantasy which neither of us had voiced before we left Ohio. The fantasy was to not come back to Cleveland and our families. The fantasy was to start lives which we could call our own.

“Baby,” I said, “I don’t think we CAN go back. Too much will be expected of you after that wedding.”

She giggled.

“That was the best wedding that I’ve ever been to,” she said. “And it was mine.”

Six members of the wedding party’s inner circle had dropped acid before the ceremony. Stoned, we had made cuts on our breasts, and licked up each other’s blood. Now we were all blood sisters and brothers. The acid was pure, and promised a golden trip, but Isobel and I wanted the wedding day to be unique for us. After the wedding ceremony, but before the reception at a country club, we shot crank. Wide-eyed and aroused, we descended on the reception like predators. Especially Isobel. At the party, with scary urgency, the bride kissed all the boys and all the girls. The guests were used to unpredictable behavior from Isobel, and most of them just chuckled over the nymphomaniac bride. A few of the women, startled by her ultra-frank kisses, questioned Isobel’s sexual orientation. Stoned, I wondered myself. In the short time that I had known her, she had been full of surprises and contradictions.

“Come inside with me, baby, and you’ll see which way I swing,” she said.

Isobel and I sneaked into a private room at the club, and achingly consummated our marriage. We were rough with each other. The cuts on our chests opened up. Rather than staying laid out on a sofa, we scrambled after each other all around the room. We got bloody, and so did the walls and the furniture. The bride refused to take off her wedding dress, leaving it bunched around her waist. It turned crimson. When we had finally slaked our lust, we hit on one of the club attendants for tee-shirts. We would look less blood-soaked in tidy white clothes. The cuts bled through the tee-shirts, but only a little.

Outside in the Saturday afternoon sun, the reception guests were dancing and getting drunk. It was too cold to use the pool-everyone thought-until Isobel emerged from the clubhouse and dove into the water, trying to wash her dress. Clothed or naked, many of our friends joined her.

In the midst of the fun, we extricated sister Alyssa, got her dressed, and drove off on our honeymoon. Now, in the Louisville tavern, I agreed with my bride that we didn’t have to go back to Cleveland.

“This can be an opportunity,” I said. “We’ll go somewhere different, make a start.”

“California?” she asked.

Isobel yearned for the West Coast.

“I would like to go to California,” I said. “My best friend lives in California. He would help us get started. He’s always asking me to come out.”

Just saying those words gave us an exhilarating sense of freedom. We’d brought all the money that we had, but Isobel and I didn’t have much money. We debated how to finance an expedition to the West.

“We can write checks,” Isobel said.

Not having a cent in her account didn’t bother her.

“It will work better if I cash them,” she said. “I can look innocent. YOU cannot.”

“I’m sure that you can do a great job,” I said. “Just be cool, and be ready to run like hell if something goes wrong.”

The rest of the way to Mobile, we stayed in good hotels. In the mornings, Isobel paid the bills with checks written on her zero-balance account. She would tell the clerks that she was on her honeymoon, and she’d had auto trouble which had drained her cash. She would ask if she could make the check out for an extra hundred dollars. She looked so young and sweet and earnest and virginal that the managers fell over themselves approving the pay-out. We would retrieve our car from the garage, and drive off laughing.

“All girls are good crooks,” my baby said. “From an early age, we have to lie about everything.”

On the second day, Alyssa mentioned that hotels might note our license plates.

“Lift plates off cars at supermarkets,” Little Sister suggested.

One of our morning chores became unscrewing a new set of plates from a car, and tossing yesterday’s plates in a Dumpster.

Then we were on US 43, running along the twisting course of the Mobile River. We reached Mobile Bay, and we had arrived at the sisters’ birthplace. Even though it was early May, summer was in full force. Every growing thing was lush. We had come to Mobile to stay with the girls’ Uncle Robert. He and his family had been at the wedding, but Isobel had been so blitzed that she’d scarcely spent time with them.

Isobel wished that she’d grown up with Uncle Robert for a father, instead of his brother, the one that she’d gotten. She loved her uncle as much as she hated her father. Robert was everything that Fred was not–tall and aristocratic, not whisky-blotched and wizened; prosperous and established, not dependent on the family and exiled to the north; the parent of successful children, not of insecure misfits.

Robert had inherited the family mansion in the Oakleigh District, a big porticoed house off Virginia Street. Robert’s wife, Lydia, was slender, gracious, and well-mannered like Isobel’s mom. Unlike Eulalia, though, she had not been beaten down by weirdness in her household. Lydia and Robert had reared four children. Two boys and a girl were already through college and living on their own. Still at home was Trent, the fifteen-year-old girl who was out of her mind with excitement at having her cousins staying with her.

Holding glasses of whiskey, Isobel and Alyssa settled in the library with their aunt and uncle, to get re-acquainted. Isobel had big news. We had planned to stay a week in Mobile and then head back north. But instead, we would head west to New Orleans and Texas. Robert’s main astonishment was that we were taking Alyssa along. What was she doing on OUR honeymoon? Didn’t she have to finish her school term? Weren’t we young to career around the country? I, the oldest, was nineteen, Isobel had just turned eighteen, and Alyssa was barely sixteen. Was what we were doing even legal? Isobel was relaxed, and as an answer to her uncle, just smiled. A maid came to the door and told us that dinner was on the table. Uncle said that he had something important to tell us. He would talk to us later. He didn’t want to heavy out the dinner.

As we went into the dining room, Isobel muttered to me, “I think that I’ve been fantasizing about Uncle Robert. He’s acting like an ordinary parent. He’s treating us like babies.”

Robert wasn’t a drinker, compared to his brother in Cleveland. Nevertheless, we had a baroque meal on the night of our arrival. About the only kind of food Isobel liked was shellfish, so we ate a meal of crabs and oysters, washed down with five kinds of wine. Trent, who ordinarily was limited to beer, was allowed to drink with the grownups. Shorter than Isobel, Trent had a pretty face, and a plump body. She would be a stunner when she lost her baby fat. After the meal, we stayed at the table and passed around the decanter. Robert’s family took their bourbon neat.

I needed the liquor badly. I’d been getting more manic over the last few weeks. After coming out of my depression, I had enjoyed almost no time in that mid-ground between being down and getting high. I rarely got to spend long in the comfort zone. I was almost always depressed or manic. While eating dinner, I was listening to “my girls”-young female voices who gave a private performance in my brain. They were incessantly pouring sex songs into my ears. Like a python’s pattern, shapes were rolling and shifting in front of my eyes.

That night, before I had a drop to drink, I was already euphoric, so the whisky made me wildly drunk. I was talking loudly and interrupting everybody. Isobel gave me a look, and I was able to understand it. I excused myself to smoke a cigarette on the porch.

Sounds and colors were roaring in my head. On the porch, there was less stimulation, and my voices and visions subsided. I vowed to stay outside, and try to calm down. After the whisky’s initial rapture, a mellowing depression had followed, the stage of drinking that helped me with the mania.

Trent came out. She was wearing a pretty black dress, with an overlaid pattern of stenciled flowers. It looked expensive and antique. She asked me for a cigarette, and stood beside me, quietly smoking.

“They don’t let me smoke yet,” she said. “Drink, but not smoke. Can you beat that?”

Nervously, I lit another one myself. I was feeling shaky and sick. Although I was high, I was unsteady. My mood was so flip-flop that I felt that I might cry.

“Are you okay?” she asked, concerned.

“I just needed a little air,” I told her. “Maybe the drive from Ohio wore me out more than I thought.”

“Isobel told me you sometimes have to take drugs for your brain,” she said.

“When did she tell you that?” I asked.

“On the phone,” Trent said, “months ago. She and I talk on the phone a lot. All she wanted to talk about was you. She’s crazy about you.”

Trent was cheering me up.

“I wish that we’d hung out with you more at the wedding,” I said.

“You guys were demolished,” said Trent. “Were you guys on something?”

“Didn’t Isobel tell you?” I asked.

“Uh-uh,” she said.

“She should tell you,” I said.

“She’d better. It’s bad when she keeps secrets. It’s like ‘You’re not old enough to know.’ I love her so much. When I get married, I’m going to have a wedding just like hers,” said Trent.

“Don’t tell your dad beforehand. He won’t let you,” I said.

“Could I see your arm?” she asked.

I looked at her questioningly.

“Please,” she said. “I saw some stuff on it at the wedding. Isobel told me that it would be all right to ask.”

I took off my jacket. Under it was nothing but a tee-shirt. Both arms were bruised and tracked up. The elbow crooks were abscessed. On my left arm, there were wide hairless welts, shaped in loops, filigrees and obscure symbols. From wrist to shoulder, the arm was covered with this scar tracery.

“What are those?” she asked.

“Jailhouse tattoos,” I said. “I was a convict for a little while. In the jail, everybody made tattoos with ink and a pin. I wanted to do something cooler. I branded myself until I’d made these designs.”

“They give me the creeps,” said Trent. “Is that a trident?”

“Very good,” I said. “No one inside even knew what a trident was. They thought that I had fucked up trying to make a fork.”

Trent held my arm as if she was a nurse. She turned it over to examine the underside.

“This looks like ivy,” she said, tracing a long pattern of staggered ovals that stretched from my wrist to my elbow. She shuddered.

“You had to burn yourself a lot to make all this,” she said. “These must have hurt like hell.”

“They did,” I laughed. “The guys in the jailhouse called me ‘No Proof.’ Like-’No scars, no proof.’ No one fucked with me in there. They thought that I was too crazy.”

“Isobel said you guys cut each other at the wedding,” Trent said. “Why did you do that?” she asked.

“Because it was it was heavy and it was sexy,” I said. “Now shared life flows in six of us.”

“I want to do blood with you and Isobel,” Trent said.

“I’d love it,” I said. “What did Isobel say?”

“She said that you’d want to do it because it would make me take off my shirt,” said Trent. “You ARE crazy, aren’t you?”

“Do you think Isobel’s crazy?” I asked.

“Hell, yes!” Trent said. “She’s the craziest girl that I’ve ever met! She doesn’t care about anything. That’s why I love her so!….Except you,” she added. “She would die for you. You’re so lucky that she loves you.”

I thanked Trent for coming out to see how I was doing. She wanted to go back inside. She asked if I was all right. I said that I was. I just would stay out a little longer, getting myself more together.

I didn’t have a sense of time. I was alone on the porch for what I thought were only a few minutes, but when I went back in the house, everybody was plastered sloppy. They were laughing hysterically. They were out of control. Whenever anyone said anything, it set everyone off. Isobel’s aunt was as high as anyone. Her head was tilted back and she was laughing at the ceiling. Alyssa and Trent were leaning against each other, gasping for breath. Isobel, dressed in plain white, had her head on the table, which she was pounding with her fist. She brought up her head, turned to say something to me, slid down between two chairs and hit the floor with a thump. Something else for everybody to laugh about. From the floor, she waved a napkin, telegraphing that she was all right.

---

Later on that night, Alyssa, Isobel and I were back in the library with Uncle Robert. He told us that, while Isobel’s wedding and party were going on, her father had fallen down the stairs in his house and had broken his hip. The injury had really fucked him over. Isobel didn’t feign regret.

“For years, he beat me and Alyssa” she said.

This was a tender issue. Like Isobel’s mother, her uncle didn’t like admitting that her father was such a bad ass. It looked like a fight was going to start.

“Youth Services had the records,” Alyssa chimed in. “And they never did shit!”

Robert didn’t want to fight. He tried to divert the talk.

“Your wedding day was your birthday, wasn’t it, Isobel?” he asked.

“That’s right,” said Isobel. “May fifth. God sent me a birthday present when he pushed my father down the stairs.”

“Maybe it was a wedding present,” I added.

Robert looked at me sharply.

“I don’t know you well, young man, and what I do know about you scares me. You youngsters aren’t thinking right,” he added to us all.

Our baby sister was standing with her arms clenched at her sides, fists knotted, tears in her eyes.

“He was so bad to us,” she said. “Isobel knows that he was even worse to me than he was to her….But I still feel funny when I hear that he really got hurt.”

“He’s your father!” Robert said unctuously. “Even if he hasn’t been fair to you, you owe him respect.”

“Some people would argue that the girls owe him a one-way ticket to Hell,” I said bitterly.

“God dammit, I’m trying to cut you youngsters some slack,” said Robert. “Your father has been my brother almost fifty years! You say that he’s a bad father. I say that you’re bad children when you talk like that.”

I realized that he was still drunk. Tears were welling up in my wife’s eyes. Nobody’s judgment mattered to her more than her uncle’s.

“We’re not bad-we’re good!” she cried.

“Come here,” her uncle said, holding out his arms. Isobel curled up on his lap and he hugged her. Robert was so big that Isobel looked like a child, pressed against him. He stroked her hair.

“Sweetheart,” he said, “I love you like I love my own children. When I say that you’re bad, I just mean that you have bad thoughts about my brother. I know that you’re having them because you care about Alyssa, and you care about yourself. You can be bad and still be one of the family. Most of this family’s crazy, and you’re just a little crazier. Like him, I’ll warrant”-pointing at me.

Isobel sniffled, smiled a little and nodded her head at me.

“He’s as crazy as you can get and still be on the streets, Uncle Robert,” she said proudly.

Isobel was still held snug against her uncle. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.

“And sometimes,” she said, “they think he’s so crazy that they lock him up. I don’t want my baby to ever get locked up again,” she said.

“I didn’t know that he had been,” Uncle Robert said slowly.

“We both have been,” my wife replied. “I guess that you didn’t know that, Uncle.”

---

That was the end of the big family pow-wow. Uncle Robert was a gracious host. He wasn’t going to pollute our visit with a running argument. But he stayed interested and disturbed about our plan to head west instead of return north. And though he laughed while he was doing it, he couldn’t stop calling the three of us crazy, because of our intentions.

Our honeymoon was more and more turning into a goodbye. We had shed all the people that we grew up with in Cleveland. Now, Isobel’s connection to her treasured uncle was feeling shaky. Except for Trent, it seemed like no one could accept us but ourselves.

Three days later, we were clipping along the Gulf coast. Isobel was wearing a gauzy scarf tied around her throat, and it was snapping in the breeze. As young and unprepared as we were, after the three days in Mobile. we were stronger in our resolve to IMMEDIATELY hack out new lives of our own. We felt brave and solitary. All of our support had been stripped away. If we were all alone in the world, at least we could party. All three of us were strongly party-enabled. And we were heading for New Orleans. If New Orleans was anything, it was a party town.