A couple few years back, I was on this flight. I was headed from Minneapolis to San Francisco and I had with me a backpack with a couple of books, some paper, a pen or two, and personal CD player. This was before the iPod and $500 laptop computers. Like I said, it was a few years back.
Anyway, so I'm on this flight and about an hour in, the flight attendant rolls her little stainless-steel cart down the aisle between me and the guy with the ear-wax across the way. She's offering free sodas. Liquor is a few bucks extra. You want something to eat? A few bucks more even.
The lady next to me, she's in the middle seat. She's been munching on some kind of organic, freeze-dried fruit or vegetable or leek, I don't know, but she's been eating it the whole way. Since we sat down, an hour before we even got airborne, she's been eating this shit. And it smells. It smells like you wouldn't expect freeze-dried anything to smell. It's like a spicy bacon and thyme smell, but fruity, like pineapple. But even though she's putting away handfuls of this shit, she's still hungry, so she hands over her ten bucks and the flight attendant hands over a white cardboard box.
As she tears in to it, I get a glimpse of what's inside. A couple of saltines, one of those little butter patties, but it's stinky cheese. There's a cookie that looks like it might have been part of an in-flight snack on the Kittyhawk. And wouldn't you know it, a bag of that freeze-dried spicy bacon pineapple shit.
The flight attendant, she catches me eyeing the meal and asks me if I'd like one as well. I shake my head and ask her for a Coke. They've got Pepsi. I tell her, don't bother with the plastic cup or ice. I'll just drink it from the can.
The book I'm reading I just grabbed off the shelf at home. It's about some murders in Sweden. Dry stuff. All very by the numbers, but written so poorly that I've just been staring at the cover for the last 15 minutes. There's a metallic seal on the front. It says, Winner of Swedish Crime Award for Best Crime Novel. It's really the most interesting group of words throughout the whole thing. Who knew Sweden had national crime awards? And what are the other categories? Either way, it's trash. There's no clear main character to be found and it runs off on tangental shit for chapters. There's a glimmer of hope for the length of a paragraph when the writer starts telling the story from a dog's point of view, but that ends pretty quickly. I'm thinking something got lost in translation.
I'm reaching for my CD player when the whole plane starts feeling a lot less like an aircraft and a lot more like a 120-ton hunk of steel.
The woman next to me, she flinches when we drop a few feet closer to sea-level and I think she choked on a saltine. Either way, she'd be dead in a few minutes anyway so whether it was the saltine or the salt flats of Nevada that did her in, it's really anyone's guess.
Captain Ear-Wax across the aisle, he's woken up now and looking even more startled than the rest of us. For a second I wonder if he was having that dream where you're falling, but you never hit the ground. Boy, is he ever going to be surprised pretty quick here.
I plug in the headphones and skip to track 3 on this really bad-ass mix cd I put together the night before. It's a work of art really, this cd. 14 tracks of the best music you could ask for if you're going to be dropping 30,000 feet in to a barren stretch of desert. If you've never heard Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" while hurtling towards your death in a marvel of human engineering, well, I can't recommend it, but there are worse ways to go, for sure.
Thom Yorke is wailing out "she looks like the real thing,
she tastes like the real thing" when the seat-belt light starts flashing and I see the flight attendant strapping herself in to a five-point harness next to the bathroom door. I tug at my belt and it feels snug enough. If this thing explodes on impact, they'll find me melted in to this seat.
The next few minutes are pure bliss. I never liked amusement parks. I've always had a pretty weak stomach for anything that spins or flips upside down, but a couple summers ago, I tried a roller coaster for the first time and found it comfortable enough. There's nothing else in the world that feels quite the same as a free-fall. Except for maybe touching her hand for the first time. When you feel her skin on yours and it's cold, but warm at the same time and your spine relaxes down from your neck to the top of your ass. Maybe that.
When we hit the ground, I'd opened my eyes just in time to see the horizon at a strange angle. There was a quick jolt and my cd skipped. Then there was just friction. Just hot, grinding friction everywhere. I saw a lot of light coming from everywhere. Not white, heavenly light, but warm and yellow and everywhere around me. And it was hot and dry and there was shit everywhere. Sand and saltine crackers and hydraulic fluid just mixing with the air everywhere so you couldn't see anything, but warm, yellow light and this shit just flying around.
The ear-wax guy vomited in his lap and I thought, it serves you right. Buy a box of q-tips, asshole.
I almost threw up myself when we stopped moving. It was the sudden feeling of stillness that got my guts turning around inside me.
And it was quiet for a good long while. One of my headphones had fallen out and I could still hear music, just faintly, in one ear, but everything else was quiet.
When my stomach came back, I opened my eyes and tried to free myself from the belt around my waist. The fucking thing was stuck though. I tried to pry at the metal clasp, but somewhere along the way it got jammed and I ended up wiggling out with a good bit of struggling.
Standing on my seat there, I saw everything scattered around us. Behind the plane, there was a trail of smoke and dust in the air for what looked like miles. The plane carved a trench in the desert and I could see that we'd been sliding across smooth earth for a good, long while.
I already mentioned that the lady next to me was dead. I was more than a little thankful that I'd opted out of the in-flight snack box and chuckled a little thinking back on those lame airline food jokes that made Seinfeld the star he is today. If he only knew.
From what I could see, there were quite a few of us who managed to survive the crash. Ear-wax guy was cleaning himself off. The flight attendant looked like maybe she'd broken a leg or two, but she'd make it out alive. A couple rows back, there's this lady with big, gaudy black earrings that look like fat, black pearls. She's unclipping them from her ears and stuffing them in to her purse.
I hear another woman behind me, she's calling out a name. Pat, I think. Just moaning it and carrying on. I never found out if Pat was on that plane or if she was crying out to someone back home, but she wasn't giving up on Pat. That much was certain.
I grabbed my backpack, stuffed the cd player inside and threw it over my shoulder. I'd been crammed in my seat for going on 3 hours now, if you count the hour on the tarmac, and I needed to stretch my legs.
Outside the plane, the world was a little more familiar, if hotter and drier than I was used to. At least the horizon was at its usual angle and sky was right side up.
I do remember there being luggage scattered all over the place. The cargo section of the plane must have been shredded as the bottom of the fuselage dragged across the ground and there were socks and travel tooth-brushes and capri pants scattered all over the desert.
I found an empty, black suitcase with a telescoping handle and wheels, so I grabbed it and went about collecting anything I could find that might have some use. Someone hd the foresight to bring along a nice collection of nudey mags. Someone else packed a goose down pillow. I shook off the sand and gave it a cursory sniff before tossing it in my rolling suitcase. There would be an argument a few nights later between myself and larger gentleman with a pretty severe head injury and I'd end up relinquishing the pillow to his female companion, but for now, it was mine.
I grabbed a free section of desert and set up camp. A child's playpen folded out in to a neat structure that I dug in to the dirt. I hung an obese man's hawaian shirt over the posts and made a nice shade to keep the sun off my neck.
When the sun fell an hour later, I set fire to one of the airplane seats and stayed warm for most of the night.
I woke up the next morning feeling refreshed. The desert floor does wonders for your back after spending most of the previous afternoon stuffed in an uncomfortable seat or waiting at the gate for your plane to board.
A group of survivors had gathered near the crushed cockpit. They were discussing rescue plans. We'd be rescued shortly, was the opinion of middle-aged man wearing a military dress uniform. Another man, older, contended that something must be wrong if they hadn't picked us up yet. A woman with a crying toddler suggested the delay was due to the fact that they'd surely be sending buses and, depending how far in to the desert we are, it could take some time. Everyone liked that idea and went about scavenging food from carry-on bags and what was left of the in-flight snack boxes.
I was getting hungry myself, so I joined the effort. All I could manage was a half-empty bag of Twizzlers and two cans of Pepsi that survived the depressurization.
There were some scattered arguments about sharing and rationing, but everyone was convinced that the buses were on their way, so by the end of the second night all the food was gone. You stick enough people in a barren desert without television and they'll eat just about anything. The Military Man caught a shovel-nosed snake, he called it, and made quick work of sucking it down. I don't have to tell you that Ear-Wax Guy emptied his belly again watching that.
A day or two after the snack-boxes and snakes had run out, everyone was suddenly on their best behavior. I think each of us had considered the inevitable at one point or another, but no one wanted to be the first to bring it up.
There would be a silent discussion between us. No one spoke, but we were communicating all the same. The conversation centered around how soon was too soon to begin eating the dead. We were all going to be rescued, that much had been decided, but when the buses finally came and they saw us there with our fat bellies around a campfire, picking our teeth with the plastic silverware we found in one of the snack carts, would they condemn us? Surely to survive we had to eat, but what does Miss Manners say about cannibalism in survival situations? What's the polite amount of time to refrain from feasting on the less-fortunate? Is three days long enough? In the desert, dead meat rots pretty quickly.
To be perfectly honest, I'd had my eye on the Saltine Lady the first night. When I get hungry, I get all kinds of irritable. I'm just a pain to be around, really. As soon as those first pangs of hunger start bubbling in my guts, I need to eat or my mood just goes all to hell.
And of course, no one wanted to be the first to dive in. We were all hungry, but no one wanted that kind of pressure. Remember when you were a kid and all the kids lined up at the edge of the pool and you were all going to jump in together, but while you were staring in to that cold water, the other kids were sharing secret hand signals behind your back. So, they count down, 1 - 2 - 3 and you jump and right before you hit the water, you realize your peripheral vision is empty and you've jumped in all alone. When you surface and turn around, you see all the other kids standing still at the edge of the pool and their laughing and you feel like a sucker. They all jump in eventually, but the embarrassment remains and suddenly you don't feel like swimming anymore.
Plus, you add to that the pressure of being the first to taste human meat. Your job as The First is to make it look good, but not too good. If you grimace, you might turn them all off from the idea and pretty soon you're the only kid in the pool and everyone else has left you there by yourself. But, you make it look too good and everyone thinks you're a sick fuck.
We held out for another night before the rational among us conquered the debate with the spoiled meat issue. Any longer and the meat would be no good. We'd wrapped the bodies in plastic lining from the airplane's hull and sunk them a few feet to keep them cool during the day, but all the same.
The next discussion centered on who would be eaten. We all agreed, easily enough, not to eat anyone with a surviving family member. Then, we decided no women or children, naturally. That left 15 men of varying backgrounds. Someone thought it would be racist to eat minorities, so we skipped the pair of black gentlemen and a Mexican who had been impaled on a twisted piece of seat metal. There was another small argument that followed concerning whether or not Asians are minorities, but we still had 11 white men left, so the issue was dropped quickly.
In the end, the winner was a clean-cut, average-looking man in his late-thirties. The very picture of anonymity. You couldn't pick the guy out of a crowd for anything. I'd be willing to bet it was that way his whole life. He dated average girls, finished in the middle of the pack in GPA from a good-not-great university somewhere in middle America. When they lined up to pick teams for dodgeball in grade-school, he was always somewhere in the middle. He wasn't even the first we buried in our make-shift, desert refridgerator. He just happened to be the least decomposed, the least bloated, the most unremarkable of the bunch. The only thing he ever got picked first for in his entire life and he's not even alive to enjoy it.
It was decided that the only fair way to proceed was to spread the sin amongst each of us. No one person should pegged with evil deed, so we drew straws. Military Man would do the butchering after Headwound Harry selected the cut of meat. Ear-Wax Guy built the fire because he couldn't stomach anything else. Janet, the lady with the crying toddler, would do the cooking. Someone else thought that was masogynist, but she'd been a hotel cook before the plane went down, so it just made sense. And I, with my play-pen shade and nudey-mags, I was selected for the first bite. The short straw.
To be perfectly honest, the idea bothered me less and less with every minute and by the time Ear-Wax Guy's barbeque pit was roaring with flame, I'll have to admit my mouth was watering a bit.
It'd been three full days and a night on top of that since Saltine Lady had choked on her cracker and I'd promised myself that the next bite of food I took would slide down like butter.
Janet cooked up a nice, thick cut of what I think was an upper thigh. I couldn't be sure because we'd agreed that Military Man would do the butchering alone, but it looked hearty enough to be the thigh.
When the meat was cooked well-done, everyone backed away a few yards, then a few more. They gathered, huddled by the plane's carcass, still smoking a bit near what was left of the tail. I held the meat on a piece of splintered wood. I held it up to my face and let the savory aroma drift around between my nostrils for a minute.
I reminded myself, make it look good, but not too good. Don't make a face. Just small bites. Look somber. I tried to remember what I looked like at my great-grandmother's wake. I was 8 years old and I barely knew the woman. She'd suffered from Alzheimer's Disease since before I was born and I'm sure she didn't know me either. But I remember my mom giving me a dirty look when reached out to touch her face. It was flat. The skin had fallen and formed a kind of pool around her ears. Her lips were stretched in to a thin sort of smile and it all looked so unnatural that I felt like I needed to touch her, if only to make sure that she was real.
I tried to remember how I stood there at the burial with my hands at my sides, fiddling with the seam on my new khaki slacks. I had tried to look sad, but I couldn't force the emotion, so I settled on an expressionless statue. I'd imagined myself as one of the great, stone figures that stood a few rows down. Head bowed ever so slightly, eyes open, but staring at the ground so if you'd have looked at me straight on, it would look like my eyes were closed. If I'd pulled off the performance convincingly enough, anyone would think the old, senile woman had meant the world to me and I was hiding my tears. Really I was wondering who dug the holes and if they used shovels or a big crane thing like they have at the park back home.
So, with all eyes on me, I moved the meat to my lips and felt it hot and sweet. Too hot, to be honest. If I put this thing in my mouth, I'm going to burn my lips, my tongue, the roof of my mouth. I'll have to spit it out, I thought. You can't spit out a hunk of human thigh with a group of hungry on-lookers staring you down. It's bad form. I think Miss Manners would agree.
So I took my time. If I could pull off the performance convincingly enough, my audience would think I was struggling with this moral dilemma. It would make them feel better about following after. Really, I was just wondering if this would taste anything like venison.
My step-dad hunted deer and made everything out of venison. Steaks, jerky, stew. Anything and I hated it. It looked like beef, but every bite was chewy and gamey and it was a struggle to get it down. I spent an entire evening at the kitchen table once, staring at a hunk of venison on the plate in front of me. I could leave the table as soon as I ate that one bite. I took three hours and I missed the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown special on tv, but I finally ate the horrible hunk of brown meat and was ushered straight off to bed, still tasting it despite a thorough teeth-brushing.
I put the meat to my lips again and blew on it a little. It was cooling and I thought it was time enough. Any longer and they'd think I'd chickened out. Any longer and my performance would be exposed for the ruse it was. So, I opened my mouth and slid the tip of the meat between my front teeth. As I bit down, the hot juices flooded my mouth, mixing with tangy saliva. I nearly lost my stomach at the sensation. The flavor was fine. I can't be sure if it was the meat itself or the starvation, but it was as savory as any rib-eye or prime rib I'd eaten before.
I bit the tip off and rolled it around in my mouth, flicking it back and forth with my tongue and sucking the juice down the back of my throat. I'd closed my eyes when it passed my lips and feared opening them, but knew the time had come to produce the expression everyone was waiting for. They were expecting something. I had to look satisfied, but not too satisfied. Like eating funeral cake.
I swallowed and felt the bit of meat in every inch of my throat as it passed. Here was my big moment. Here's where I complete the performance. If I pull this off, I won't be the only kid in the pool.
I opened my eyes slowly, tweaking my expression as I went, fixing it for tiny errors that might betray the act.
With my eyes opened fully, my stomach lurched. My head grew hot and full. My heart beat fast and wild. I cursed aloud when I saw the survivors, my companions, standing by the plane hugging and jumping up and down. Some of them were crying, but smiling all the same. Big, toothy, ecstatic grins as they hopped in place and hugged each other.
A man in a white and blue uniform stepped out of a charter bus with a silver suitcase in his hand. On the suitcase, a big red cross told me we'd been saved. We'd been saved and there I was, sitting under a baby's playpen, covered with hawaiian shirts, surrounded by nudey-mags and holding a hunk of human meat to my lips. There I was, in the pool again. Alone. And this time, no one was jumping in after me.
Son of a bitch.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Snack Box.
Queen Frostine Can Go Fuck Herself.
There's the right thing to do and the wrong thing. Or so they'll lead you to believe.
You score a 26 on the ACTs and you move up two spaces.
You register for classes and sign your life away to Sallie Mae, take two turns.
You blow off college at the last second and go to work overnights in a string of warehouses, take two steps back.
You sublet a two-bedroom apartment in North Minneapolis, invite your girlfriend to move in, buy a deranged cat with a nervous disorder, and move out a year later when the only guy with his name on the lease falls in to a deep depression, quits his job, takes up a serious drinking habit, and gets evicted, well, let's just say the Candy Castle is getting further away by the second.
So, you crash at her parent's house for awhile, start to hate each other and you're back to the house you grew up in, sleeping in the basement on a matress on the floor. You're not out of the game yet, though. You might be hanging out around the Plum Forest a bit longer than you'd like, but you're young.
In between third-shifts stocking shelves at the Home Depot, you find time to have a little unprotected sex with your ex-girlfriend and here's where the game starts to get tricky.
A couple weeks later, you wake up to the call. "I'm pregnant," she says. Lose next turn.
At least you've got a partner in the game now. At least now you're grabbing cards two at a time. There's still a chance you land on the Rainbow Bridge and you get to jump ahead. You can just jump right over everyone else and get back on the right path.
You ask anyone, they'll tell ya, the right thing to do here is pretty clear.
So you get accepted for a job doing something you enjoy. No more 9pm - 5am shifts stacking paint cans on the high-shelves. Instead, you've got the opportunity of a lifetime. Someone says, "You're good enough for this. It doesn't pay, but this time next year, you'll be buying a house off your god-given talents and some hard work."
But still, you're supposed to be doing the right thing here. So, you say, sorry. I'm gonna be a daddy soon. I gotta do the right thing. Thanks, but no thanks.
They say, "Don't be an idiot. Plenty of guys raise children while they're doing this. It's hard work, but you're a smart guy. You can handle it."
So, you accept, but you're starting to lose direction and you're not sure whether the card you pulled is leading you closer or further from that castle with the caramel moat and gum-drop battlements.
Turns out everyone's got their opinions about where you're headed, but damned if you can tell which team they're playing for.
So, you move 3 spaces, but in which direction is up for debate.
When the baby is born a few months later, you realize all that "hard work" wasn't semantics. You realize that this so-called "real world" is a lot realer than anyone let on.
So, one night you grab your key, sneak in after hours and grab the few personal effects you can throw in the back seat and you kiss that dream goodbye. Take two steps in either direction. At this point, it really doesn't matter. You're just floating around the middle of the board anyway.
It's time though. Now's the time to figure out which way is forward and which path leads to the Molasses Swamp.
Now, it's time to get that degree you punked out of a few years back. So, you call up Sallie Mae again and get your shit in order. 18 months and the cash will be rolling in. This time, for sure. Take 10 steps forward. Fuck the Rainbow Bridge. Just sprint ahead because this time you're definitely headed in the right direction. Right?
You crack open the books and Mom's grinning ear-to-ear. Her little boy is finally on the right track again.
A real job follows and that Candy Castle is so close you can damn near taste the licorice holding up the graham cracker draw bridge. It's not a perfect job. The boss is a real ball-buster and you're putting a few more miles on your 10-year old car than you'd probably like, but hey, you're a daddy now and that's what a real man does. Right?
Right. And you can tell because everyone's grinning ear-to-ear now. Mom, Dad, sis, Uncle Terry. Uncle Terry, he tells you how proud he is. How you had some bad luck, but you stepped up and you're moving in the right direction and even though you never were all that close to the guy, it's got you grinning too.
Every card you turn over, every turn you take, you're just getting closer and closer and nothing's in your way now. You passed that sticky swamp ages ago.
We should remember, you've got a partner in this game. Turns out there are some discrepencies in the game-plan though. Conflicting strategies, if you will. Turns out maybe you and your partner started down different paths a few ten, twenty turns back, but you didn't notice cause you were just looking straight ahead.
In fact, you were so focused on taking the right path, you forgot about all the other players who shoved you in the right direction when the game was just getting started. You haven't seen them in months. Some, years.
Pretty soon, though, pretty soon you find another player who's path is crossing yours. And you're not sure which direction she's headed, but you know you'd like to follow for awhile. The path you're on is nice and all, but it's starting to get stale like last year's Halloween candy, sitting in the back of cupboard underneath the sink.
So, your next few turns have you walking hand-in-hand with a new partner and for the first time in a long time, just playing the game is more fun than the destination.
Here's the part where all those toothy grins start flipping upside down. From their side of the board, you're taking steps back with every turn. From where they're sitting, you've lost direction.
It's not long before paths cross again and your old partner, the one you forgot about, she shows up and all hell breaks loose. Here's the part where someone gets pissed and upends the whole board. Cards scatter. Little, colored plastic boys and girls are airborne.
When the dust clears and the game resumes, you've got your compass back. Right? I mean, you can see the castle on the horizon and it's never looked closer. The only problem is, you look around and none of the other little plastic boys and girls are anywhere to be found.
All the partners you had along the way, well, they've all found their own paths. They're flipping card after card and you can't tell for sure if they're ahead or behind, but you're starting to feel like maybe your compass isn't pointing north. Like maybe in all the chaos, while the board was upside down, maybe one of those gumdrops started sticking up the works.
So, now you're alone in Candy Cane Cemetary or a Peanut Brittle Tundra or a Marzipan Desert. Wherever you are, you're gonna have to figure this one out on your own.
You start flipping cards again. The game must go on, after all. Now, all you know, is that calling it quits isn't an option.
Along the way, some of those other partners from before the board got flipped, they start showing up here and there. Thing is, their strategies are all in place. They've all got new partners. You'd like to tag along a bit, see if they can't lead you the right way. See if maybe you can't sneak a little peek at their compass.
Someone, somewhere grabs the rules. They're printed in ten languages, but you translate any of them and they all say the same thing in big, bold letters. NO CHEATING, ASSHOLE!
So, now you're alone. You can follow the others a little bit, but from a safe distance. They catch you tagging along and it won't be long before the board gets flipped, but good and this time, you might end up with worse than a gummed-up compass.
Here's where we get back to the right way and the wrong way. While you're following from a safe distance, a new strategy starts forming in your mind. Maybe, you think, maybe you've never really been on the right path anyway.
Maybe the Rainbow Bridge is just a trick of light.
Maybe the Molasses Swamp, for all its stickiness, maybe it's still kinda sweet.
Maybe the Candy Castle is just a big, colorful mirage. It's that glimmering patch of highway that just keeps moving away at 55 miles per hour. The harder you hit the gas, the faster it sprints ahead. Always out of reach. And you wonder why you're trying to get to it anyway. After all, it's just a glimmering patch of highway. Just because you can't grab it doesn't mean it's worth grabbing.
So, here's your new strategy. Your new scheme. Your new gameplan. Here's where you realize that your gummed-up compass might as well be a mirage too. Here's where you realize that peeking at someone else's map isn't going to take you to your destination. It'll just take you to theirs. And well, you don't belong there anyhow.
Now it's your turn to flip the board. It's your turn to rip up the rule book and start playing the game your way. Now Uncle Terry and Mom and sis, now they're grins can be rightside up or upside down for all it matters.
Here's where you decide that maybe the wrong path and the right path aren't mutually exclusive. Here's where you decide that Queen Frosting can go fuck herself for all it matters.
At least now you know which way the path is leading. Only now, you couldn't care less. Because either way, it's all leading somewhere. The real trick of the game is, even if you do get a good close-up look at that big Candy Castle, everyone's gonna end up in the Candy Cane Cemetary eventually.
Someone says, "You forgot your last turn."
You say, "I'll let you know when I've taken my last turn."
Accomodations.
I try to dress according to my mood.
Today, I'm wearing a brown and blue horizontally striped sweater with a crew neck. Form-fitting, but the sleeves aren't quite long enough. I'll pull them over my hands, curl my fingers up like a fist, and stretch. I'll do this maybe 50 times today. I'd have better luck trying to make my arms shorter.
Today, I'm wearing my hopeful sweater. Brown and blue stripes.
I'll look in the mirror and try to see if there's anything there, more or less, than yesterday. Whether or not my hair finds a place to lay flat is out of my control. I like it when I look up from a book and there are a few strands brushing against my eyelid. It lets me know they're still there. My nerve endings, I mean.
In case my mood changes, I keep an extra sweater or jacket in my car. I can strip off the horizontal stripes, push my hair out of my eyes, and pop a couple of aspirin. In case the weather changes, the hopeful sweater can be replaced with a livid cardigan or yanked over my head to reveal the forlorn t-shirt underneath. I'm not quite a chameleon, but I try to keep up.
Shoes are important. It's a good sign if they match, but some days it makes more sense when they don't.
Left foot, a pensive black canvas sneaker with a white sole and laces tied in a sloppy knot. Take one step.
Right foot, an ambitious brown leather dress-shoe with arch support, tied tight and stiff. Take another step.
Left foot, "I wonder if squirrels like rock and roll."
Right foot, "Watch out world! Here I come!"
People get tattooed to fit their moods. There are lustful skulls, broken hearts engulfed in somber flames, depressed pin-up girls with perfect round asses that fade and sag in the sun. The reasons are always the same. You're always covering yourself up. You're fixing something.
I wear a few fading black letters on my back. A star on my chest. My forearm shows a snarl of vines crushing a stone slab with a Japanese kanji that translates to either "zen" or "robot caramel patient light-bulb." They don't mean anything, but they're doing their job all the same.
I read an article in a magazine about people who undergo elective amputations. A perfectly good foot gets lopped off at the ankle. A fully functioning middle finger, severed at the second knuckle. A middle-aged mother of two in Kentucky had both legs removed at the knee. She got tired of covering up her legs with happy socks, angry shoes, mournful pants.
When people ask me why I stretched out my ear lobes, or why I punched out two discs of cartilage from my ears, or why I'm slowly covering up every last bit of skin with ink, when they ask me, I say, "I still have both my arms, don't I?"
A baby in Pennsylvania was born with both male and female sex organs. At the hospital, the new mother confided in her doctor that she'd always wanted a girl. When the girl was 19, she got tired of wearing frightened bras and melancholy patent-leather shoes with 1/2" heels, so she went back to the hospital and confided in another doctor that she'd always wanted a nice set of testicles. The hospital turned her away when the insurance company refused to pay for the operation. A year later, she tried to kiss her best girl-friend after a dorm party. This time she went to the hospital with a shattered cheekbone, fractured skull, and signs of forced penetration. The insurance company made the check out to her mother.
I was barely a day old when I was circumcised. Five years later I got rid of the tonsils. Almost 18 years later, on a Christmas morning, I woke up to find that the last of my wisdom teeth had finally rotted out. I never liked dentists, but Camel Lights and Coca-Cola will do the trick with enough time.
I wear hooded sweatshirts to feel safe, a baseball cap when I feel like hiding. Leather mittens keep my fingers warm and tell the world I'm feeling confused and a little betrayed.
My father dyes his graying hair a youthful shade of black and feels 20 years younger. My mom pastes acrylic fingernails over the ones god gave her and feels secure. My grandmother wears supportive under-garments and shoulder-pads under her blue pant-suit. My sister wears a goose down vest in the fall and she's feeling exhausted.
I saw an old woman on a ten-speed bike pedaling up a hill in the summer. She wore a crash helmet, swimming goggles, and cobalt blue dress with fat, white polka-dots. If I had to guess, she was feeling confident.
When the day is over, when I've tugged at my sleeves and switched out my pensive sneakers for a pair of curious steel-toed boots. After I've cycled through manic white t-shirts and sullen windbreakers and sad tube socks, I strip it all off for just a minute before I cover myself up again with a thick, lonely comforter and bury my head in a guilty pillow. And I wonder, before I fall asleep, I wonder if I remembered to throw my self-conscious boxer shorts in the dryer. I'm going to need them tomorrow.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Saturday Mornings.
It was an emergency, so I made an appointment. My whole world was collapsing down around me, right? You with me? I was breaking down and this was the end. This was my last shot. So I made an appointment.
I called the insurance company, made sure she was an approved physician or whatever they call it. I made sure I wasn't going to get a bill in the mail, a bill I'd never bother to open, but I made sure it wasn't coming to me all the same. I'd worked for this company for 2 years, so the least they could do is pick up the check. I mean, it's either that or instead of hauling my ass in to work on Monday, I'm drawing flies. You with me?
So, I got it all checked out in advance and I made an appointment. It was an emergency, after all.
So, I climb two flights of stairs, damning that last cigarette I sucked down in the parking lot. And I walk down the hall, mustering up the kind of courage a guy needs before bearing his soul. Before looking at a complete stranger and saying, "Look, I'm here on account of a big emergency. Here's the sitch..."
And at the end of the hall, I find a pretty unimpressive office space. Sad, really. There's a good selection of National Geographics from the past year and a collection of sanitized children's toys on a folding table in the corner. There's some plastic racks half-filled with unfriendly little tri-fold pamphlets that say shit like, "Domestic Abuse: You Are Not Alone," and "Living with Depression." And there's a couple of old chairs with tweed upholstery. Is it tweed? That's that rough, crosshatch style of fabric, right? No?
Either way, the office is empty as far as I can tell, except for the restrained weeping coming from one of the two closed doors. I can't tell which, but whoever it is, she's cutting in to my appointment.
So, I take a seat on one of those probably-not-tweed chairs and help myself to an issue of National Geographic. While I'm here, waiting for my emergency to resume, I might as well find out where the Aztecs went all those years ago. Turns out it's just more dead-ends and speculation. Disease, famine, genocide. Really, what's the difference anymore?
I'm annoyed when one of those doors opens and the crybaby comes shuffling out with a balled-up kleenex covering one of her eyes like she's trying to keep it from falling out of her head. I'm annoyed because I've got another three paragraphs to go and maybe, just maybe, the Aztecs were wiped out by an aggressive neighboring tribe. Now, I'll never know.
Behind the one-eyed crybaby is the woman I came here to see so early on a Saturday morning. Fuck! She's a midget. I think. How short do you have to be before they call you a midget? I'm sure my insurance company knows. Still, fuck. I mean, I came here to deal with my shit. Now, I gotta pretend like I don't notice that my approved physician, or whatever you call it, is a fucking midget. She's got the cane and everything. And there's a dog too. An Irish wolfhound or something. I forget. I'm not sure if it's a helper-dog, so I don't dare touch it. You're not supposed to touch helper dogs, right?
Anyway, we do the quick greetings. "Nice to meet you," and all that. We don't shake hands, but I nod and force a smile, but I keep it brief lest she take me for a heightist. Are you supposed to smile at midgets? I always smiled at the ones with lollipops and plastic hair and funny little sneers, but they were on tv and couldn't see me smiling, so I figured no harm, no foul, right?
She invites me to come in to the midget-sized office behind the closed door. I take a seat on another probably-not-tweed chair and find it to be somehow less roomy than its cousin in the lobby. She, the doctor I mean, wrestles herself in to another chair across from mine and I'm thinking she looks like she's got room to spare over there.
While she's thumbing through some papers, I take a quick survey of the office. Framed diploma? Check. Textbooks with copperplate titles embossed on the spines? Check. Plastic trash bin overflowing with the cyclops' spent tissues? Check and check. Hemp mat on the floor? Zen garden on the window sill? Holistic candles? Che- wait a damned minute. So my approved physician is a hippie as well as a midget. Fuck!
She states my name, for the record I guess, and slides a piece of paper on to a clipboard which she struggles to pass along the three foot gap between our knees.
"It's a release form," she says in a lower voice than I'd expected. I'm supposed to read the thing over, sign my name, and hand it back. All very official, but I couldn't care less what all that small print says, so I make like I'm giving it a good once-over, but really I'm too busy taking it all in to put together a good performance. I sign on the bottom line, add a date and that's that.
We stare at each other for a good long minute or two in that cramped office that's starting to smell more and more like Irish wolfhound and organic something or other. I'm not sure who's supposed to speak first. Am I supposed to come in here with some sort of gameplan? An itinerary? Is that how this kinda thing works? I don't know. This is all new to me. I saw a psychiatrist once, but that was a whole different deal altogether. He was old and stuffy. And tall. Man, was he ever tall. Must've been at least seven feet tall if she's four. It was all business with that giant. "What's the problem? Mhm. Okay. Mhm. Here's your script. Co-pay at the door."
But this a whole different deal altogether. She's strangely patient and quiet. She just stares at me from that huge chair she's sitting in.
So, I say, "I think I'm a sociopath." I've seen on tv, where people go to the doctor and say, "It's strep throat, doc," and the doctor gets all cranky and territorial like they do. Doctors, I guess, get annoyed when people come in with their job already done for them. The diagnosis, I guess, is half the fun. But, fuck it. While I was researching Central American genocide in the lobby, that weepy bitch was butting in on my hour, so I figure we might as well just cut to the chase and get this thing moving along. It's an emergency, after all.
She consults one of her stacks of paper and says, "It says here you're concerned about anxiety and anger management."
Yeah. That's what it says, because that's what I've been told. That giant, old pyschiatrist, he's the one who pegged me with anxiety and fear of abandonment and wrote the script for a month's worth of Wellbutrin.
Someone else said I have anger issues on account of a few busted walls, a cracked windshield, and a bunch of gnarly scars on my knuckles.
So, yeah. That's what it says on the paper, but I came here this early on a Saturday morning for me. For the real deal. I'm here to get my shit figured out once and for all and everyone else can eat their fucking opinions and diagnoses for all I care. So, I say, "I think I'm a sociopath."
And I say this in the tone of voice of a sociopath. Not someone riddled with anxiety or prone to violent outbursts. No, I say this like I'm ordering a value meal with no pickles and a large Coke. "I think I'm a sociopath," I say.
And looking back at me with that you-want-fries-with-that? look, she says, "What makes you think you're a sociopath?"
And here's where the doctors usually get all cranky and territorial like they do. Here's where they quietly damn the internet and the information age, because while they were sitting through lecture after lecture on Early Childhood Disorders and Blood Borne Pathogens, young punks like me were self-diagnosing in ten-minutes-or-less on Wikipedia.
Yeah, I'll take a number three with no abandonment issues. And instead of anxiety, can I substitute a serious emotional disorder?
I say, "Sociopaths don't connect with people on an emotional level. They don't empathize. They don't form deep bonds with anyone. They're narcissists, right?"
She looks me over a bit and says, "Those are qualities of someone with Antisocial Personality Disorder, yes." As if I didn't know the clinical term. As if I've never heard of Wikipedia.
She says, "You don't seem like an angry person."
Jesus, is this stunted flower-child listening to anything I say? I already told her, I don't have anger issues, didn't I?
She says, "You're articulate and soft-spoken. Thoughtful."
"Okay," I say. "I guess," I say.
"Do you think you have anger issues?," she asks.
"I punch stuff sometimes," I say. "Never people," I add so she won't think I'm abusive as well as heightist. "I just get frustrated sometimes and it's gotta come out somehow."
"What do you punch?," she asks me this and scribbles on her paper as she speaks.
"Walls, mostly," I say. Sheetrock, paneling, every once in awhile I hit a stud by accident. The floor when it gets really bad or a coffee table. The worst was the windshield. Jesus, I really didn't think it would break. I was sitting in the driver's seat of my old red, Toyota truck and just reached out and it cracked in to a big supernova of laminated glass. It looked like someone dropped a cinder block on it. That brought me back quick, seeing all that shattered glass and bright, red blood. No one punches a windshield thinking it's gonna break. Those things are supposed to protect you from rocks and deer and head-on collisions. I guess they're not tempered for failed relationships or heartbreak.
"Have you tried any breathing exercises?," she asks like I've never read a book on anger management. Like I've never heard of Amazon.com.
"I've read two," I fill her in. "I read about breathing exercises and image replacement and all-or-nothing thoughts."
"It doesn't help much in the moment," I say.
"It takes practice," she says and offers to super-size it for just thirty cents more. "Tell me about your family," she says when I reject the upsell.
"What about them?" That Irish wolfhound is staring at me. Is this what a helper dog does? For a midget psychologist, I mean. It just sits there on its spot at the far end of the hemp mat and stares? How is that helping anyone?
"My mom and dad divorced when I was...four, I think. My dad came to see us on Wednesdays and we'd spend every other weekend at his trailer," I say. "My mom remarried when I was ten...or maybe eleven. We moved here and that's pretty much that."
"My deaf aunt is a paranoid schizophrenic," I offer, but I'm getting a little outside of my expertise here. I didn't diagnose her, so I can't be sure, but that's the story around the Thanksgiving table, anyway.
"My great-grandmother had Alzheimer's disease," I add. That one's a lock. No doubt about it. Every Christmas, she'd ask my name and give me a frail hug and I'd scurry off to play with the Rambo action-figure that my grandma kept in a low drawer in the kitchen. I'd come back an hour later and it's the same story. She'd ask my name, frail hug, nice to meet you Great-Grandma, Rambo stabs a ninja turtle in the face with a Bowie knife.
"Do you get along well with your family?," she asks. Now we're getting somewhere.
"See, that's why I think I'm a sociopath," I say, "I get along fine with my family, but I've never felt a real strong connection to any of them."
She's scribbling again and nodding. The dog is still giving me the stink-eye. He can smell a sociopath for sure. Maybe that's his role here. He sniffs out the real psychos. Keeps an eye on 'em.
"When I was a kid, my other friends would give their moms big hugs and kisses. Freely," I say as if I've just described an exotic trait from an extinct culture in Central America.
"I just don't feel anything all that strongly," I say.
"I wonder if my dad died, I wonder if it'd affect me at all," I confess. And I'm making my case and she's got to be seeing the symptoms now.
I'm sure she's writing something definitive about my Antisocial Personality Disorder on that secret paper of hers. She's writing, "Class A Sociopath. Handle with extreme caution."
"You have a daughter," she says and looks up from the paper.
"Yeah," I tell her. "That's mostly why I'm here," I say. "I can't play with her anymore," I confess and between that admission and the one about my dear, old, not-yet-dead dad, I'm starting to feel like "sociopath" isn't gonna quite cover it.
"I want to play with her. I do. But, I just don't have the energy," I'm justifying or at least explaining. "I want to have fun. I want to play outside or play house or school or dolls, but I just can't seem to find that energy. And it makes me feel terrible. Like I'm a bad father."
"Do you think you're depressed?," she's asking my opinion now. She's asking for me to self-diagnose and I take a harder look at the diploma on the wall to make sure it's legit.
"I don't think that's it," I say with all the authority of an approved physician. "I don't spend weeks at a time in bed or contemplate suicide with any real conviction. I've cut up my arms pretty good," I say, "but it was never intended to do any damage. I just liked the feeling. That's a control thing, I've read. Control the pain and you've at least got control over something."
She's scribbling again, for fuck's sake. I'm thinking all that shit she smoked in the '60s must have severely damaged her short-term memory.
"And how about mom? Where is she at?"
I turn my head a little, looking for some help from the dog, but it curled up on the mat and dozed off a few minutes ago.
"We still live together, but we haven't slept together for...two years? Maybe three? Pretty much since the baby was born, maybe before. And I'm not talking about sex, like 'sleeping together', I mean we haven't slept in the same bed for that long." We haven't had sex either though, if that matters.
She asks me where I've been sleeping. I tell her I've got a pretty big couch in the basement. Big enough to stretch out on and still have room to point your toes like you're trying to reach the bottom of the pool in the way deep end.
There's a big, long story that follows that. It's a tragedy of sorts that starts with a couple dumb kids and ends with me sucking down a cigarette in the parking lot.
I tell her how you can't really call a pregnancy "unexpected" when you've been fucking for two years straight without birth control. I tell her how two people who have a baby at 21 years old and stick together for that sole purpose end up hurting each other a lot along the way. I tell her how when you do all your growing up, that fast, with one person, I tell her you're bound to make mistakes. You're destined to hurt each other pretty badly. I tell her I'm trying to make things right.
What I don't tell her is that's why I'm here. I don't tell her that I'm only here because it's a last-ditch attempt to save a relationship that was lost for good a long time ago. I don't tell her that that's why I made the appointment, but now that I'm here, it actually feels kind of good to have someone listen.
It feels good to have someone listen to what you have to say and you know that person isn't thinking about how it will affect them personally. How you could tell them anything and when the appointment is over in fifteen minutes, they won't be walking out the door because they hate you, but because you only paid for the hour.
It feels good to know you can say anything, even though there's still some stuff you're gonna keep to yourself. Stuff you still can't bear to admit to anyone, no matter how professional or impartial their role. It feels good to talk to someone who just scribbles it all down without a pained expression or a breaking heart.
If you had the balls, you could tell her that you fell out of love a long time ago. You could tell her that your heart had moved on and you're just sticking around because you're too fucking scared to go to sleep alone at night in a house by yourself. That even sleeping alone on a couch is bearable as long as there's someone else in the house. As long as you're not one-hundred percent alone.
If you had the balls, you could tell her that you're not a sociopath. You do have feelings, just not for her. Not anymore. You could tell her that those feelings went away a long time ago, with the relationship you're selfishly trying to keep on life-support just a little while longer, hoping that one day you'll wake up and you won't be scared of going to sleep in an empty house.
You could tell her that you miss the friends that you gave up for her. You could tell her that you miss the girl who stole your heart last summer when all this shit blew up in the first place.
You could come clean about it all, if you just had the courage. You could say that the feelings you had for her faded and they found a someone new and if you really had the balls, you could tell her that you fell in love again, just not with her.
You could tell her all that if you weren't such a scared little boy who still doesn't understand where it all went wrong in the first place and forgot that he was trying to figure it out before he got sidetracked with everything else.
And maybe eventually you'd get there, but you look at the clock and your hour is up. The appointment is over. The emergency will have to wait until next week.
Until then, you promise to practice the breathing exercises and keep taking the Wellbutrin twice a day.
And you're feeling good, or at least better, until you shuffle out the door, down two flights of stairs, and you light a cigarette and you realize that there's still a lot of Saturday left this morning and you've got to go back home. Back to the place where no one's impartial. Where feelings are hurt every second. Where everything's a lie. Where you don't have the balls to say one honest thing.
And all of a sudden, you've got a new emergency.
Hemophiliac Rounds.
I've seen bifurcated tongues, sub-fascial implants, and flesh separated from flesh with a cauterizing scalpel.
I've seen hearts broken with a single phone call.
I've seen cranial hemhorraging in the middle of Main Street.
I've seen a pine-branch jutting out of a 5-year old girl's eye-socket on the kitchen counter of my childhood home.
I've seen a woman bite her tongue off and swallow a gallon of her own blood in the lobby of a salon.
I've seen carpet bombing in Dresden and broken homes in Minnesota.
I've seen politicians smiling on the deck of a battleship, waving flags and cheering.
I've seen trepanation in grainy photographs and the Disney Channel on a color tv in my living room.
I've seen Jeffery Dahmer's apartment...from the outside.
I've seen lacerations, hematomas, compound fractures, and bad hair days.
I've seen empty libraries and Snakes on a Plane in a crowded movie theater.
I've seen anorexia in elementary schools.
I've seen picket fences and suicide bombers and homophobia.
I've seen Michael Jackson's first face.
I've seen steam rising from the spilled intestines of a disemboweled deer and the sun rising over the horizon in the distance.
I've seen decapitations, lethal injection, firing squads, and the electric chair.
I've seen tendons spring free from bone with all the energy of an atomic bomb.
I've seen the atomic bomb.
I've seen starvation and deforestation and global warming and subsidized farming and Cadillacs and the world's largest chocolate chip cookie.
I've seen slaughterhouses and factory farms and the electoral process.
I've seen Google Maps.
I've seen rotten teeth in my bathroom mirror.
I've seen rape and pornography and Coca-Cola 12-packs, 4 for $11.00.
I've seen liver spots and Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia and alcoholism and narcissism and fascism and impressionism and television at Thanksgiving dinner.
I've seen pity.
I've seen hate delivered with a shit-eating grin.
I've seen hopelessness.
I've seen trees of green and red roses too.
I've seen the way the world will end and it looks a lot like the way it began.
Saturday, November 3, 2007
H.G. Wells and a Cold Basement
Here's the thing about Vicodin. About Captain Morgan and Camel Lights and stale Kit-Kats. About Wendy's quarter-pound double-stacks with cheese for $0.99 and denial and mourning the loss of something you never really had, but could've. Maybe.
Here's the thing about regret.
The thing is, you've got two options. Two viable options, anyway.
Option 1: You dive in. You wallow. You focus. You remember. You imagine. You imagine a best case scenario. You struggle to convince yourself of a daydream in full-color, surround-sound, smell-o-vision. You commit to it fully. You let it become you for as long as you can hold on and there, with your eyes closed and your heart slowing and the furnace kicking on in the background, you commit to living in denial. You rationalize and justify. You're enabling.
And it occurs to you that H.G. Wells was probably sitting in a cold basement, mourning and regretting, when the inspiration for The Time Machine hit him in the face like a fucking brick.
Because, really, the only people imagining a world where the past is a destination in a glossy, four-color travel brochure are people living with a shit-load of regret. Old H. to the G. had a severe fucking case of denial.
And it only takes one bad day before you're sitting right there with him, blowing hot air on cold fingers and trying to find the right words, the right story to bring you back there to that one wrong move. One bad choice.
You want to talk about the Butterfly Effect? Chaos theory?
Let's talk about action and reaction. Let's talk about choice and consequence.
For every action, there is a reaction. In grade-school, they talked about equal and opposite. Well, school's out kids and we're talking about something different. And let me tell ya, there's nothing equal here. This is a whole new textbook and you'll be lucky to get a passing grade.
You see, you pop three vicodin and wash it down with a couple rum-and-cokes and maybe it makes the cold a little easier to take. Maybe that kind of immediate control makes regret a little more palatable. And maybe tomorrow you wake up with a headache and a case of the shits.
But pretty soon the borrowed prescription has run out and the bottles are empty and there you are again. One more night in a cold basement, looking for some tiny bit of warmth. Some illusion of control. Some way to make the headaches stop and fuck if a quarter-pound double stack doesn't sound like it just might do the trick. And maybe tomorrow you just wake up with a case of the shits.
You pack in all the pills, alcohol, nicotine, and processed fast-food you can stomach. You pack all that in to an empty soul and you fill it up one night at a time. 3 Vicodin, 4 rum-and-cokes, 15 cigarettes, 2 double-stacks. You want to talk about un-equal reactions?
But sooner or later, and here's the real problem with Option 1, sooner or later someone comes along and brings a new drug to the equation. And this shit is like Vicodin on crack. Like crack on heroin on amphetamines. And all the other shit, all the stuff you've been packing in every night, that's child's play. And this new stuff, it doesn't hurt. You want to talk about un-equal reactions? Let's talk about the kinda warmth you feel when someone like her, when she looks at you and smiles. That's what we're talking about, really.
And that's the problem with Option 1. Because that kind of feeling, you can't forge a prescription for. You can't buy it in a paper bag or light it up with a novelty Bic or choke it down with a side of fries. That's the kind of feeling that you just gotta wait for. And once you've felt it and then it's gone? When it's not there the next night in your cold basement? You want to talk about hangovers?
Then there's Option 2.