I often sat out on the front porch in the late August evenings, when being in my room was too much hell and I didn’t have enough cash to go out. Being in my room was often too much hell. It was a tiny room, and I shared it with my boyfriend - a grumpy, controlling, emotionally abusive shithead. I hadn’t yet labeled it as abuse, but I knew something was wrong. If I went out without him, he grilled me about who I’d hung out with, what I’d done, where I’d gone. He told me my friends were bad influences. If the two of us went out together, he gave outright death glares to anyone I spoke to, and anytime I so much as said hello to someone he’d whisper to me: “You want to sleep with them, don’t you? You’re going to leave me for them, aren’t you?” He even got upset if I seemed to be getting along too well with his friends, which was super fucking weird to me - don’t most people want their significant other to be friends with their friends? And when we stayed in together, things were just as bad. We’d drink, I’d try to get him interested in something I was interested in, or share with him a song I recorded or a story I wrote. At best he’d roll his eyes. At worst, he’d get angry; say, if the story was about a former lover of mine. We couldn’t even fuck to pass the time - we’d only been together for a month, and our sex life was already effectively dead.

I went out as much as I could, despite the fact that he didn’t want me to, but there were a lot of nights I was too broke. And I couldn’t hang out elsewhere in the apartment - the living room was usually occupied by our housemate and her boyfriend, playing video games and screaming at each other; also, everything was covered in a thick layer of cat hair, and I’m hella allergic to cats. So I’d mix up my summertime drink - three-buck red wine + cream soda, served over ice - and take it with me out to the porch. It was more like a stoop than a porch - a slab of concrete outside the door, with a couple broken concrete steps leading down to the sidewalk - but it was big enough for a pity party of one. I sat on the stoop, drank my bitter-sweet cocktails, smoked cigarettes until I felt sick. I waved at neighbors as they passed by - the drug dealer who lived around the corner (he’d been cool to me ever since he realized I wasn’t a narc), the Riverwest wingnuts on their tall bikes. Cars drove by, thumping bass beats rattling windows; occasionally I heard a pop! in the not-so-distance and had to play the ‘firecracker or gunshot?’ game. Either way, sitting out there was better than being in the room I’d begun to think of as a prison cell (and my boyfriend was the warden). I sipped and smoked. I hummed blues tunes to myself. It was the dog days and I had the doggone blues, something about the moist heat of August and the way I was living made that the music that made the most sense.  I hummed the blues while the Milwaukee sky slowly darkened above the punkhouses and crackhouses of my neighborhood, I watched Sirius rise in the nightblue sky, and I wondered if somewhere there was someone who would make me down a pallet, soft and low. Cos I was broke and I had no place to go.