Miss Inga Person
A noveloid by Clark Humphrey
9/16/96
This story begins like many others by many other people, with a 16 and a half year old runaway. And like many other runaways, she’s certain she’s got a plan that will keep her from (a) getting caught and returned to her degrading and abusive home life, (b) getting caught and imprisoned, (c) turning into a junkie, street whore, petty criminal or something else as pathetic as the life she’s running away from, or (d) dead, of starvation, street crime, OD, AIDS, or something else just as fatal.
First of all, she had the foresight to swipe a blank check or a Social Security number from the checkbooks of several high school “friends,” adult female relatives living in other states, customers at the stupid mall jewelry store where she worked last summer, etc. She also knew a fake ID maker who could make her a quasi-convincing New Jersey driver’s license (the hologram part was only detectable if you took it out of a billfold window). Between that and her friends in the punk scene, she figured she had at least a starting plan for what, she figured, would have to be 19 months of life, if not fully underground, at least at “ground level.”
At first she stayed on couches or floors in a series of punk houses, each a little further from her parents than the last.
She figured she couldn’t stay in one place, or even in one state, very long. She’d hated the Grateful Dead when they were around but now wished that opportunity to travel and live unofficially was still around. She way she figured it, if she’d played her cards right she could have offered to watch Deadheads’ belongings for them back in the parking lots; that way she wouldn’t even have to see the shows.
The plan she did use worked just about as well, and was accompanied by music she sort of liked. She persuaded a guy in a band she sort of knew (she decided it wasn’t whoring if she had sex with somebody she was at least partly attracted to and if no cash was exchanged) to let her ride with them on their next tour. She even agreed to do her share of the work–fixing the van, setting up and taking down the equipment from the stage, finding a place for the band and herself to sleep every night, procuring groupies for the lesbian bass player. She found a particularly nice household when the band stayed in Wilkes-Barre, and stayed behind the next day. The three women in this household were into performance art; they taught her all they knew (not much) about stage make-up, including prosthetics.
Two weeks later another touring indie band came through town. Since there was no guarantee another would play Wilkes-Barre for a long time, she took off with them as far as Ann Arbor. She stayed there a little over a month, until the housemates demanded she get a job (she was still nervous about an employer researching her fabricated identity). An opportunity came to become a glorified janitor at a women’s retreat center in a small town, but she figured she would be more anonymous blending in with a city population.
So she arranged on a university Ride-Share bulletin board to head out with a woman going to Chicago. This woman turned out to be almost creepily similar, from the hair to the cackling giggle to the preference for sappy soft rock love songs, to the older sister who never protected our heroine from the shit at home. But the trip was soon enough over, and our heroine was deposited in front of the WaxTrax! record store. Her only contact in Chicago turned out to have moved with no forwarding address. Lacking a backup plan, she hung out in a punk club (her fake ID worked), sipping the same beer slowly, very slowly. It was getting flat by the time she found a guy she thought she could seduce. He turned out to have a girlfriend in the bathroom. She then hit on the girlfriend, telling (staying this short, she believed, of begging) her about her need for a simple place to stay just one night. The girlfriend was reticent at first but after additional plodding agreed to let her sleep on the sofa. The next morning she left, then snuck back in after the girlfriend went to work and fucked the boyfriend, out of spite as much as anything. She found she was rapidly gaining confidence and assertiveness about obtaining sex, compared to the hopeless situation back in her town, where she and seemingly everybody else was always too afraid or too self-conscious or too something else. She hoped this would soon lead to the ability to assert herself in more immediately important areas, like money.
The boyfriend referred her to a cofeehouse that sometimes paid employees under the table. Sure enough, she got a job there. And sure enough, it quickly revealed itself to be the sort of dysfunctional working environment she had to get out of as soon as she could, which unfortunately wouldn’t be right away. She slept in the back room the first three nights, until a friend of the manager’s came back from vacation; he had a spare bedroom in his apartment after his last roommate left suddenly. As with work, it didn’t take her too long to see why his roommate would have left suddenly. The guy played loud music all night, or rather starting at 3 a.m. and continuing until late morning. He also dealt in light drugs, had hardcore-porn strewn about the place, and left kitchen messes she could almost throw up over. Did our heroine cry or bemoan her fate? No; she figured it was about what she should have expected, and she had still never slept outdoors involuntarily nor had sex for money. She even made a point of remaining drug-free throughout her stay in this guy’s apartment. (He never hit on her, being usually too stoned to notice her presence. He seemed more comfortable around porn than around women, anyway.)
The one good thing about working at the coffeehouse, the thing that almost made up for the rancid conditions, the miserable pay, and the dictatorial couple who owned the joint, was that the very nature of the place as a “scene” hangout meant people were always coming in, people whom she could befriend and who might provide her next opportunity. It took amost until her 17th birthday, but one day he showed up. He turned out to have been somebody who’d met her briefly during her Ann Arbor stay, and seemed to be sincerely interested in her cause. He had a jewelry concession traveling the Renaissance Faire and street-fair circuits in the spring and summer, and agreed to take her along when he left. Until then, she moved in with him and learned the craft of New Age body ornamentation (something she personally found as disinviting as mall-look body ornamentation). Before long she was helping him, designing pieces with more of a gritty, “industrial” look.
She prepared herself for the inevitability of falling in love with him, but that inevitability never came about. Either she’d quickly become too jaded to fall in love, or he was just too normal and businesslike to excite her. During the two months at his house and the five months on the road, they experienced, at best, the kind of unresolvable sexual tension you’d see in some old Code-era movie. She was certain he was falling in love with her, even though she repeatedly told him she was only going to be on the run until she was 18 and her parents couldn’t get to her to drag her into some reform school.
But 30 weeks before that emandication date, fate intervened in the form of a local TV news crew doing a typical scandal piece on the traveling costume-jewelry and moccasin sellers at some local “modern rock” radio station’s fake Lollapalooza-type outdoor festival, taking business away from hard-working local mall stores and not even paying all the right state and local taxes in the process. The story was picked up by the network, which aired it on its 6 a.m. news broadcast, where our heroine’s mother caught a two-second glimpse of what was undoubtedly her daughter, albeit in a wig and shown from a profile on her “bad side.”
By the time she and her partner reached the Oregon Country Fair, they quickly heard gossip that a guy with a short grey beard and a suit who claimed to be a private detective was snooping around looking for her. In his report to the parents later that week, the detective concluded that she’d indeed been there but had been tipped off and left for parts unknown.
They made it as far as Seattle. There, in a moderately priced motel that didn’t find anything wrong with her fake ID, she told him she wouldn’t return to Chicago with him. It wasn’t the winter weather there but the fact that she was now officially being trailed, and didn’t want to risk being seen anywhere she’d already been. That night she gave him a goodbye fuck, as appreciative of one as she knew how to give.
He continued on the late-summer, early-fall stages of the circuit in Texas and Florida, managing to convince other private detectives along the way that he’d never seen that runaway teenager since that one weekend she helped him sell stuff. He traveled with a broken heart, but at least without the threat of transporting-a-minor-across-state-lines charges. He sold out of the remaining stocks of the navel and nipple rings she’d designed for him, then once he was back in Chicago he got a letter from her offering to make more for him. For the rest of that winter, he consigned pieces to indie-rocker boutiques around the upper midwest, never claiming them to be his creations. He insisted to the store owners that he was merely the sales rep for a designer he named Inga (short for Miss Inga Person).
