I dust KISS figurines for a living. Assorted bobbleheads. Erotic photography. I dust every flat or fuzzy or rotund surface in a store full of items no one needs. The place reeks of stale sage or ylang-ylang, and my job description includes knowing the difference. I don’t.
I can see myself doing this for the rest of my life.
As in: “If I’m not careful, I could be doing this for the rest of my life.”
But I had plans for things. Great things. Vague, wonderful things. Nothing has fallen into my lap just yet. It probably won’t work out.
In five short weeks of post-collegiate gainful employment, I’ve already learned valuable on-the-job skills such as how to hand people what’s left of their money and how to sort rubber duckies into their designated buckets, based on size and any optional clever attributes (demonic or dead or pink). I’m still working on how to win friends and influence people while avoiding retail’s temptations toward the occasional murderous rampage. An additional learning curve applies.
The manager loves me already. Today she sits me down in the back room (full of mounted fantastical creatures built with the taxidermied parts of regular creatures, cartoonish so-called low-brow fine art and the smell things get when they’ve been dusty for decades too long) and she tells me she loves me already.
If we wore nametags, hers would say Tammi, probably with a doodle of a heart with spikes through it dotting the letter “i.”
“I love you already,” she says. “We all do.” Her pregnant stomach looks like it’s about to pop the latches on her overalls and send a button flying into my eye.
“Thanks” is all it seems safe to say since I’m not sure where this is going. I’m perched on the fingertip of a giant orange hand cupped to form a chair.
“It’s a big step, but I think you can do this.” The deep breath and enthusiasm of someone about to deliver a happy surprise. “We want you to be our new assistant manager.” She pauses with her eyebrows up for my reaction, which I haven’t had yet. “I’d train you before I go on maternity leave. It’s a dollar more an hour.” I must blink at her at least twice before she finally puts her eyebrows down and says, “How’s that sound?”
“Thanks,” I say again, same hesitation. It should sound good, but does it?
It’s an awesome place to work while your band is getting off the ground. One of my coworkers told me this when I started, and now I’m in charge of eight other people, some who were hired the same day I was, some who have worked here for years.
“You’re going to love it. After your lunch break I’ll walk you through the procedure I use for closing out the register. Each manager does it their own way, but I think you’ll like mine best — I do.”
She gives me a hug before she leaves. She is this tiny woman reaching over her big rubber ball of a belly to get to me, because she has made tchotchkes her world, and because she sincerely thinks I have what it takes to do the same.
1
Maybe I do have What It Takes:
• a fear of real jobs, commitments, the unknown, the known
• a lease with payments bigger than my parents’ mortgage
• a four-year degree, honors with an emphasis in uselessness
“And don’t forget to punch out.” As she leaves, her words trail off the way ominous double entendres often do.
So I punch out and I walk out the glass front door that last week I got to clean after someone threw raw eggs against it. I walk past the collapsible gate I pull closed after every night shift, past the flyers for gigs and art shows and boob jobs that it’s my sworn task to straighten before we open each morning. I turn the corner and lean against the big painted eyes of rough cement covering the side of the building.
1
“Welcome to the Real World” is the number-one piece of advice I hear this summer. It’s fake advice. Useless.
After I eat I have ten minutes left before I can punch back in, so I sit in the inventory closet, finding a corner where the danger of falling pornographic ceramics seems statistically less probable. I read sections of a book I got from my friend James who has just quit his job at the vegan café to Exist and be poor.
Anyway, I’m flipping through it — the book was a gift, but not a surprise since I had to show him how to order it on the Internet and he insisted upon using a false name so he wouldn’t “get on any government lists.” The book arrived with politically provocative bumper stickers and is essentially a hardbound rant about futurist anti-futurism and resurrecting anarchy from the clutches of misinformation.
I have tried to stay literate since college. I pick up books every day. I’m inspired and engaged, moved to change the world, until I have to put them down again and go back to work. Somewhere in the eight hours of wishing eight hours would go by, I lose interest and can’t pick up the same book again. I am haunted by read pages pressed up against unread pages on my bookshelf of two hundred different half-read books.
I try again to read a sentence: Escaping the brainwashing control of the mainstream capitalist conspiracy...
Quit wasting those time-card minutes and sunny days trying to work enough to make enough to survive enough to put my head down each night worn out from my unmarked day.
But, at the end of these remaining post-lunch idle minutes, I pull myself out of the closet by a tiny thread tied to my work ethic — a small, sickly little parasitic creature squished deep into the conflicting recesses of my brain.
That flight impulse never completely leaves my mind. I think it grows stronger after lunch, maybe because I’ve tasted freedom for a few moments, or maybe because we’ve just been corralled for a staff meeting.
Tammi asks me to come to the front of the room. She’s standing under the display for tribal tattoo art and holding a plush toy with three eyes and matted fur.
“Everyone,” she takes another of her patented deep breaths and she smiles at a dozen impatient faces, “please congratulate our newest assistant manager!”
She motions for me to make a speech.
“Thanks,” I say.
And it’s official. Assistant manager of bobbleheads and rubber duckies, little plastic Gene Simmonses and poseable Ace Frehleys.
“She has shown tremendous growth during her short time with us. Let’s continue to work together in harmonious... harmony.” Fourteen eyes are simultaneously rolled. “Now, I need somebody in the back to sort out the plush toys. An unidentified something sticky got into one of the bins and I want to salvage all we can. You’ll need these.” She waves a pair of rubber gloves.
With my new executive status, I evade rubber-glove duty this time, but that doesn’t mean the day gets better. Instead I’m at the cash register, where every frightening customer eventually ends up. A man purchases 35 bobbleheads. I wrap them up and I don’t ask if they are gifts or if he is a bobblehead aficionado or if there is a special reason there are three extra Bob Dole bobbleheads. I know better than to ask.
Then an old man two commercial transactions later puts a voodoo curse on me, replete with waving arms and incantatory babble.
I ask him to leave. As I’ve been instructed to do in these situations, I threaten to call the police.
“911? No one’s home,” he yells, waving his cell phone. He gets in my face again. “I am the police!”
When he leaves the owner tells me how he used to make films for Charles Manson. I go back to work. You’d be surprised how quickly someone yelling, “Fuck you, bitch. I’m gonna kill you,” can start to seem not so abnormal. These people buy a lot of incense.
Tammi is a babbling brook of advice about making notes about employees for their evaluations as I go along, about the importance of dusting from top to bottom (gravitational reasons, of course) and why she likes to put the bobbleheads in alphabetical order first by vocation and only then by last name.
I’ve been working here long enough that in my mind I start to picture the store backwards; I am a figurine on a shelf looking out the row of windows at the overexposed day, no longer a customer who can just browse, who can leave.
When we’re about to close, Tammi shows me again how to count down the cash register. I wear a Whitesnake pin (we sell these) and I count the quarters, nickels and pennies. For some reason I cannot seem to count dimes. I learned that whole counting-by-tens thing in primary school, but I have to recount the dimes three times. Practice. I count the ones and the twenties, some fifties, and I tally up the credit card purchases and I pull the gate closed (noticing I still smell like incense). I swing the big lock around and finally I walk into the almost uncovered night, down Hollywood Boulevard toward home.
It’s still a little bit light and I like the feeling of my legs moving after standing behind a counter all day. I walk past boutiques with only one rack of clothes inside, where shoppers’ tiny dogs take tiny shits on the floor. I pass the woman who is always watering her lawn when I turn the corner to go up my street.
I don’t turn tonight. I go straight and keep walking up into the hills.
1
And I keep craning my neck as I go, trying to find the spot that I always see from my window when I look across to the hillside, always inspecting each of the dusky pink sunlight-bathed houses at approximately 7:48 PM Pacific Daylight Savings Time of Your Life It’s All Downhill From Here.
Higher than I’ve ever been up into the mishmash of hills, I find the house where I have started to imagine I could live one day — an A-frame triangle house with shimmering solar panels on its roof. I pause in the middle of the street to try to find my own window below. I listen to the pink light hitting me, feel the rushing windblown silence of a thousand far away sounds — traffic, the sun setting. And, before I’ve even noticed what I see, I find a concrete stairway, tucked into the breezeway between two houses, carved out of the hillside. The stairs tumble down and down, crossing all the narrow roads I took to tangle my way up the hill in switchbacks.
I stand at the top of the stairs and look down over the tiny line of the street that was familiar from below. Hollywood Boulevard stretches through red lights and blinking liquor store signs to Pantages, the Egyptian, the Chinese and the tourists, and the tourists. There’s the last few letters — “OOD” — of that infamous sign hanging in one corner, watching everything like the painted eyes on the side of the store.
A strange wind blows from all the way across town, collecting the loud sprawl and funneling it up through this corridor of stairs directly to the top and straight through me, enough to almost knock me over. I want to fall down the flights in large steps filled with gravity and make my arms into parachutes against the wind. But start and I might never stop descending. So I stand above the edge of Los Angeles, looking down on a real map, which turns out to be surprisingly accurate to the one in my head. But my house is not on the map. I cannot find it among the neon of landmarks and liquor stores.
Finally my right foot slips down one step and the map is broken. I count the stairs as I go. The view disappears square by square, the A through F and 1 through 28 of the Thomas Guide, and the trees and the houses rise up to fill the space. Two hundred ninety-five steps.
1
The trip down is a miracle compared to the days I forget how to walk, when my legs move but don’t propel me. Reverse momentum. On the days when I just cannot seem to synchronize with the ground, the city buckles up its sidewalks and I end up acting out the always-present possibility that my foot won’t be in front of me when my body moves forward. I have already tripped four times this summer. Once while standing still. Three bruised knees and a sprained ankle; trip, heal, trip again. I’ve been waiting all summer for something to mean something, for something to do.
“You can do anything, but you can’t do everything,” my father says through the phone when I walk back home and I call him to tell him that it turns out I’m quite good at this job I hate.
He used to tell me to study computer science instead of liberal arts or writing. He said to make a lot of money and then — underline then — do what you want.
Maybe I ask his advice too much. My problems change, but his advice almost never does: “Move back home.”
And occasionally I’ll get a phone call from him instead of the other way around, and he’ll be calling to say: “I saw that Hollywood sign on TV.”
All of my friends have a parent who is recently dead or clinically “on the way out.” He’s been hovering in the latter category for years now.
1
That sick parent rite o’ passage always seems to begin with blood in shit. This begs the question, “Do you look before you flush?” I try to avoid the bathroom entirely. My teeth are probably falling out and there will be blood in my shit; I just know it. Paralysis.
We don’t talk about that, not in this phone call and not in most. Tonight we just talk about how good my new responsibilities will look on my resume when I apply for a real job and break out of my pattern of waitressing and retail, these so-called day jobs that imply I do something brilliant with my nights. Something inspiring.
On this night, as on so many others, I watch bad television and it keeps me up most of the night.
But the daily lawnmowers and trash trucks are a 7:15 AM alarm clock with no regard for my habitual insomnia. I am up too early, not up but just lying there, listening to the neighbor kids and their mother throw tantrums at each other as she tries to leave for work.
Eventually, I do get up enough to check my email. No messages, no job-offer salvations. That is, unless you count spam that says I just won the Nigerian lottery and I need to wire five grand to collect my winnings.
I shut off every day at work, and today it’s even easier. Nothing makes me feel awake. I may be “in cahoots with the man” now, as my coworkers imply when I post a work schedule they don’t like (which is any schedule where they have to work or any schedule where they don’t get to work). But the large majority of the remedial crap belonging to my job description remains the same. I spend a chunk of my shift on “shoplifter duty,” which means I just stare at people.
I begin to forget what I look like. I become the red-haired girl in a green top that falls off her freckled shoulder. I watch her talk. My voice is hers, my eyes and my breasts and my cute shoes and my tiny frame. Then I walk past a mirror and surprise myself by looking like myself again. I think about Four Hours From Now and Ten Years From Now and how far away they seem, but how soon I’ll be saying, “It’s already now?” And I already say it. It’s already now.
Twenty cases each of fake dog shit and two-headed nickels arrive on a pallet. Tammi asks me to set up a “gag gift” display, but ends up doing most of it herself because she says she needs to show me how to stack the fake dog shit by rotating the pile slightly so that each piece nests inside the one behind it and takes up less space on the rack. Then I sit on the steps outside the store and eat my lunch.
A tiny bird has been flattened on the sidewalk right in front of me. Feathers and a wing and beak are discernable; the rest of the gray blends into the concrete — feathers and sparkling pavement. A dirt-coated man walks past with his dog. The dog sniffs at the bird; the man looks too, with no discernable expression, and then turns the corner. I stare at the concrete next to the bird. Moments later, the man is back with a stiff piece of paper, gently scraping up the bird. He carries it over to the trashcan by the mailbox and lays it to rest on top of the garbage.
I tell Tammi I don’t feel well and she offers me the rest of the day off. The late afternoon smells like a charcoal grill and the haze looks like 12 million Angelenos are smoking cigarettes and barbecuing on back porches at the same time, each sending personal fumes up into the air to mix and settle on life in a fine black dust. Every surface in my apartment turns gray with soot if it isn’t wiped down daily.
My father calls to say they mentioned the smog on the news and he is concerned about my lungs and thinks I should move home. He doesn’t say he wants me to; he says he thinks I should. I take thick, deep breaths to feel the city burrowing its way into my lungs.
I lay spread out in all directions in the heat, matching my spine to the warped floor of the apartment, but even it is radiating warmth. The fan shakes its head in a slow negation of productivity — don’t move, it’s too hot, don’t move, it’s too hot. Library books on the floor quietly curl their pages.
James calls me. We hibernate from the heat in the air-conditioned movie theater, watching a film about infidelity. I tell James I can’t believe I ever wore a sweater.
1
But we will remember the sweater days soon enough. The air will suddenly turn to autumn in its own strange California fake-autumn way.
We’ll pull out our asymmetrical cropped sweaters and dark blazers, the boots, the colorful scarves, the heavy jeans that this year are the dark-rinse height of fashion. We will look ridiculous, of course, because there has been only the slightest dip in temperature. But our Mediterraneanized internal thermometers know the difference.
And when we trek back to the East or at least the Midwest, you will know us by our thinned blood and our penchant for complaining about everything: the weather, the conservative politics and the fact that nothing stays open past midnight.
And when we return, the city will welcome us back with a brilliant spread of lights as the plane descends, and then before we know it we will be pleading for escape again.
After the movie we go into the bar across the street. The jukebox plays three songs for a dollar and we each put in a dollar. I play Bjork’s “Bachelorette,” Whitesnake’s “Here I Am Again (On My Own)” in honor of the pin that is still on my shirt, and Roy Orbison’s “Crying.” I like the pathetic stuff. He plays “Tainted Love” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and something from the Garden State soundtrack. We pay no attention to accidental Themes.
We drink. We talk about people who have been sick for some time now. I give him more of the backstory about my dad.
“You’re right. That really sucks,” he says.
It’s all I need to hear now and then. What else could anyone say on the subject that would amount to more?
1
We talk about people covering up who they are.
“I hate people who care about things they pretend they don’t and who pretend to care about things they don’t and who act like they understand when they don’t,” I say.
James chimes in with statistics on crime and poverty and something about the affluent poor, kids living on trust funds but pretending to slum it. I wobble and nod my head and decide not to ask him if he qualifies.
Then I throw up all night and can’t move when I finally wake up, plastic trash pail of vomit at bedside, staring at the ceiling, convinced it’s the end of November — that the weather has turned wintry and fall has passed without any recognition.
I try to glance outside without turning my head. The sun pounds the sidewalk at 88 degrees Fahrenheit, but I can’t help but imagine it is November 28. The calendar hangs on the opposite wall, claiming August, and I have no choice other than to believe it because I can’t tell.
We go to an end of summer someone’s birthday friends of friends’ dinner party off Franklin Avenue in the back yard of a bungalow. The back yard could be somewhere in New England, except that everyone is talking about Writing for Television.
The host of the party is the creator of such-and-such and his wife is a makeup artist for you-know-who, except I don’t. They mill around among the 22-year-olds and the 17-year-olds, friends of their kids — convulsive creative types impatiently trying to make something of themselves without putting in any effort, trying to strike out in originality from a comfortable upbringing. They are more jaded by all this because it’s what they know, but I’m vaguely sort of impressed by the craftsman house and the industry talk and the whole thing even if I don’t want to be. Don’t show it.
A friend of said friend-of-friend pauses when I am introduced and asks me, saccharinely, What I Do.
“I have a trust fund,” I say, because why do I have to be what I do? Can’t I just live?
My trust fund is so far removed from the truth that she has no problem accepting it as a plausible career option. She just smiles, eyebrows up with a quick nod, and offers Trader Joe’s brie and a Pims refill to the nearest person who isn’t me.
Everyone I meet that night hears of my imaginary trust fund, because I don’t want to talk about Satanist rubber duckies or the nuanced differences between Hank Williams and Hank Williams Jr. bobbleheads. Anyway, beyond a certain point — about five seconds after bringing it up — I wouldn’t know what else to say.
I change the subject by telling people that I am named after an office plant. Then I ask them to guess which one.
Ficus is the most popular guess, though rather unflattering as names go. I guess people just really like pronouncing “ficus.” James tries to convince people my name is Bonsai. He makes jokes about reproducing by spores.
I leave the party, because I’m still bored even after refills. My sunburn makes my face feel on-fire even in the cooled-off night and I keep thinking of my dad’s voice on the answering machine, saying, “I’m… talking… sloooooooowly… so that… you… have… tiiiiiiiime… to get… to… the… phone… but… I guess... you’re… not… there… Are you… there? …Sooooooooooo call me when you get this. No rush.” His voice sounds pained as it pushes through the electrical apparatus of my answering machine.
The sunburn is from two days ago at the beach — stereo on the sand, All-Eighties Weekend on generic FM station, jumping through waves in the refreshingly cold Pacific under a no-cloud sky — with airplane billboard advertisements for the new fall television line-up sweeping by again and again.
Same friends-of-friends and James, and we’ve emigrated temporarily from the East Side to see how The Other Half lives. Even our beach clothes are black, and we know we don’t belong here, so we yell in mock horror when a medium-sized wave approaches and James yells, “Oh My GOD! FISH!” when something touches his leg.
I watch kites hover over our tiny patchwork of towels and plastic pails and shovels. They soar over the pier and the sewage treatment plant on the horizon, over the sailboats I long to swim toward.
“Why do people ever go inside?” James says. “What could anyone possibly be doing anywhere else but here?”
1
Then, in almost no time, we are driving back on the freeway with music as momentum, hands through the sunroof, driving fast away from the sunset in our return to holier-than-thou pop-culture scrutiny in bars with catchy names on our side of the 101 freeway.
Back home again, this year again, sunburn itching hot under even the thinnest shirt, I put myself to bed and I pull myself out of bed, yanked awake by lawn mower fits and starts, the gurgle and chug of motor oil and the smell of imported, implanted, irrigated, prayed-over fresh-cut grass. It’s Monday August Fucking First so I walk to work and I set off the burglary alarm. I hate work all day long. I screw up the credit card receipts and overcharge someone.
“I only bought two blow-up dolls and some other girl charged me for three yesterday. Plus, this one was marked with a different price. I assume you’ll be giving me the lowest price?”
I hear my dad talking in slow-motion to my answering machine again and I haven’t called him back yet and I feel my mind swimming in circles around my life, held in this awkward place by some giant invisible hand, not sure if it’s my own. Everyone is sick and deteriorating and dying and so am I and shit, shit, shit, don’t we even notice? Not this guy. This guy wants a price-check on blow-up dolls.
1
I talk myself into ignoring it all, over and over. I just continue to dust bobbleheads. Or when I am not dusting bobbleheads, I am exerting my new authority over those who have been employed far longer than I have by very, very politely asking them to dust bobbleheads.
On my 15-minute break, I smell the soap. There is a bar of soap in the store — one bar of soap in the vast collection of soaps in bars and gels and other soap formations on the wall of soaps in what Tammi calls “The Soap Corner.” I pick up this bar of soap, attracted by its detailed, delicate packaging, which stands out against other, flashier brands like “Dirrrty Girl” and “Mullet Wash.”
1
I slide the box open, place my nose against its waxy orange surface and inhale. I breathe in sixth grade, the halls of my elementary school, the wet, unairconditioned Indian summer rooms with sweaty pencil scrawling in new notebooks. The soap’s packaging says, “Light Persimmon Scent,” but I can’t remember ever smelling a persimmon.
1
I make excuses to be in the soap corner, to smell the soap every day. It bothers me that I cannot place the exact memory of the scent. We sell out of the soap before I make it make sense. I planned to set a bar aside, but I can’t find it on the employees’ holds shelf — and anyway I can’t justify spending $18 on a bar of soap — especially just to smell it.
The days have shortened enough that on the walk home from work all the color is draining from the air, 7:38 PM this time. A cloud of radioactive space ash has settled over the earth and we are paused, awaiting slow and certain demise. The pink cloud puffs turn purple and separate like Pangaea, and the houses shift from dusky orange to gray. Lights turn on three at a time as the blue deepens to the dark brown of the neoned night.
The woman on the corner fans water over her lawn when I walk by — each day, simultaneously, she is watering her lawn and I am walking home. I am about to make my usual, wide, out-of-hose-range, hesitating arc to walk up my street without getting wet, but this time I look at her and she smiles and points the hose down, covering it with her other hand.
I nod and walk past, examining the tiny houses on the hillside. Through the circles of sleep and work, sidewalks and sunsets, the hillside is always there. Has always been there. When this land was bare and beautiful, before asphalt, before subway tunnels running underneath artificial lakes, before traffic kept us in one place, before Mulholland’s water and Getty’s oil, before “Hollywood” lost its “-land” and before it had a sign to mark it at all. Before the palm trees, before we lost the desert, before everything was 20 minutes away.
I stretch my arms out and close my eyes and I imagine the land this way, everything gone. We all walk backwards, past the Mississippi to the East Coast in reverse Manifest Destiny. I flatten buildings and drain cities. Reverse-engineer emptiness. We shrink back to Plymouth and backwards walk the plank to a boat and across the Atlantic, to Plymouth. And the Mayans deconstruct temples and the rest of us trickle back through the Bering Strait and finally there is silence on this infant continent.
But then I must open my eyes, shake off history so I can try to function. When I get home I call my dad back. He says he had just called to say, “Hi,” to see how everything was, so I ask him about my mom and my brother, and about our dog.
“Actually…” he says, as though he is still just making conversation, “she wasn’t doing too well last week. We took her in to the vet twice and he, we, decided it was best she be put to sleep. She was an old dog.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” My parents tell me everything this way. My grandfather once had a heart attack on a Tuesday and on Friday my mom called me and said, “Has anyone told you yet that your grandfather is in the hospital?”
My dad clears his throat, twice. “You already seemed depressed about life in general.” Nothing new.
I stay up all night and watch the sunrise arrive suddenly. I sit under my sheets and cry in short bursts that I reign in and let slip out again. I retrace my paces across the hardwood floor in the crepuscular corners of my brain and when I speak out loud to myself I lose all reference of tomorrow, today, yesterday.
The too-early air smells like one year ago today, one year, or six, or a hospital waiting room all over again — the thick, burned-coffee smog of not quite grasping onto things. The morning is gray and damp and humming louder, growing brighter by the minute.
I don’t fall asleep until 9:30 AM, and wake up again at 10:45 and again at 11:20. The sleeplessness feels natural at first, but soon forms a knot of shooting pain behind my left eye. I’m already late so I call in sick to work again.
1
I bite my lip and it bleeds and I pick at my peeling sunburn. I spend an hour with an old hairbrush, holding it close to my face and looking at the buildup of hair and oil and cells and listening to the ripping sound of lost hair being torn from its cheap plastic bristles. My thumbnail scrapes grime off the bristles, one at a time. It’s really disgusting, fascinating — anything that flakes or sloughs, the accumulated density, the detritus — too visceral.
I need get dressed, check the weather report, make sure nothing’s changed. The details are paralyzing.
It’s all I can do to get coffee up the street, so I settle on a couch to read, but am too easily distracted by the clientele. A hipster redneck with a drawing of a DJ’s turntable on his trucker hat (a look popularized by Ashton Kutcher but even more poorly executed here) hits on two girls across the aisle by feigning interest in their annotated copies of Homer’s Odyssey. To no one else’s surprise, he has nothing to say on the subject, and the girls quickly return to ignoring him.
Instead, maybe more fucked up and shallow — that’s why they are able to sit there, her hand on his leg, looking in love, because they don’t know what that really means. They just have sex a lot and get jealous and call each other to talk about — they don’t even talk about anything. I look at people and I am baffled, wondering how their relationships work.
I speculate that they only work when people aren’t actually in them, don’t actually care about the other person, aren’t actually thinking or feeling except on a cursory level. Either that, or maybe no relationship works. Maybe eventually we will all end up reading He’s Just Not That Into You and dying alone. Or perhaps I’m projecting my fate onto everybody else.
He shaves his head because he is going bald. She wears shoes so cute they make her feet bleed. I rub my joints and wait for arthritis.
“I got two guns,” he yells. “Give me all your money.”
He throws open his jacket — I half expect to see two guns inside — and he stumbles to the counter. “There are some bea-u-tiful ladies up here in heaven. Who’s gonna walk the plank?”
The barista remains jovial with him, asking if he’ll take the insanity outside. They laugh together. There is nothing either one can do but laugh.
By the time I head back to my apartment, it’s dark and James is sitting on my front steps.
“I came to ask you out on a grocery store snack run.”
The happy-to-see-him sits a little uncomfortably in my stomach and I mistake it for hunger. We drive to the grocery store, even though it’s a block away, and pick a space in the empty parking lot farthest from the door. One of us thinks this is funny. The other is slightly annoyed, but she comes around when he puts his arm around her and they walk across the dark asphalt and through the double bright sliding doors.
The lights are particularly fluorescent in this grocery store, and the music is always great — by great I mean so awful that we do exaggerated dances down the aisles, around the pallets of canned goods waiting to be shelved. Our shared cart contains the basic food groups: cereal, soymilk, high fructose corn syrup snack food of choice and whichever fancy imported water is en vogue. I flip radio stations on the half-minute drive home, but nothing is on.
1
We sit on my floor after we put the groceries away and drink German mineral water. The stereo EQ flickers orange in the dark to the long instrumental intro to the Smiths’ “Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me.”
He’s quiet and I ask him if anything is wrong. He is so close to me when he turns and says, “Nope,” that I could just tilt my head and kiss him — and I can’t make sense of anything right now, I’m running on caffeine and no sleep and reckless stupidity — so I do.
I always just assumed that if I tried to kiss him it would screw up everything between us, all that unspoken connection, so I never tried. The kiss is like any first kiss, confusing and wonderful and seems to go on forever. Almost.
I suppose he doesn’t mean metaphysically, like “What are any of us doing really, here in this crazy mixed up thing we call ‘life’?” He means stop.
I could have trusted my assumptions, gone on denying I had no chance; but no, I had to forge ahead and verify the facts. Great work. Way to use scientific method to test out a theory.
Or maybe he just means, “You’re sitting on my hand.”
I wait for him to kiss me again. Just lean in. That simple.
“We’re such good friends,” he says. “We should probably just — I’m leaving in two days, you know.” I didn’t. “I’m not ready for anyone to be all in love with me or whatever,” he says.
I can’t argue with his illogic and there is nothing I could do differently — he isn’t saying I’m not good enough or smart or pretty enough or not blonde or not into techno music or that I have strange habits he can’t deal with or any of the reasons people give to excuse away relationships. I open my mouth to protest, but what would I say — we’re not that close?
He puts his hand on my shoulder the way people comfort each other at a wake. “You cool?”
I can’t lie and I don’t know the truth; I start to cry, but he can’t hear me and finally he moves across the bare floor and leaves. He leaves the door fucking half-open behind him, and that — that is the thing that really gets to me.
Now I can’t even cry and I’m searching for shapes in traffic lights that slowly move across the ceiling, thinking how just this afternoon the sky was fluorescent pink and orange when I sat by myself at the coffee shop and watched dust fall over everything.
But I blinked and now it’s night, just like other restless middle-of-the-nights and 5:30 AM wide-awakes, the pressure of encroaching light. Again, more, not again.
It’s been dark so long now that it’s hard to imagine the sky ever was pink. I look out the window. I can’t tell the triangle house from the other dots of lights. I stare, wondering which lights are happy, which are not, but from here there’s no way to tell.
I could go all the way over, lift up each face, examine it under each light, but even then I’d only be guessing. I move to the bathroom and try it in the mirror, my face under this dot of light, but freckles and eyebrows won’t give me away.
1
The bathroom window opens to a stucco wall. A chute travels up the center of the building — a tiny courtyard with no entrance.
I can hear my downstairs neighbor speaking Spanish to her son, giving him a bath. Someone else is watching old sound bites of the Republican National Convention on TV. She towels him off and sends him to get dressed for bed. The speeches end or the TV is muted.
I listen to the quiet, and it still isn’t quiet — just that same, low, far-off rumble of traffic, a rising wind. And I turn the lever that tilts the slats in the window so that I can see the moon, newly waning, dim against the brown morning.
I think about the things we’ve accumulated — cosmic and emotional residues of questioned motives, words said or not said. How much better, easier, if we had done small things differently, had known each other better, were stronger, different people. Of course, without all this blame we would just turn around and make more blame, fresh and intricate.
3
And I would still be here, and rubber duckies and bobbleheads would still be here. Whoever said the only constant is change forgot about rubber duckies and bobbleheads.
James comes back the next day as though he didn’t walk out the night before, as though nothing is different. I try not to ask him what I’m wondering, but I do.
“I haven’t ruined everything?” I ask him.
“ ’Course not. What are you talking about?”
“The last time I saw you? The what-is-it-called? The kissing?”
“Jesus, Fern. People kiss people all the time. It was just one of those things.”
“Right.” I’m not sure how to feel about it being reduced to “just one of those things,” still it’s better than being just one of those things that ruins us.
He runs down the list of all the places he might travel and when he starts describing Thailand, he makes it sound like the most beautiful, spiritual place. I had never really thought about traveling to Asia before — always figured Europe was at the top of my list and the rest was sort of a blur of wanting to be everywhere at once — but I hear myself telling him how much I would love to go to Thailand.
“We should go.” That’s his response, nonchalant, blasé, as though picking up and leaving were a viable option.
“We should.” If only.
Then: “Let’s.”
“It isn’t that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple. We’ll go.”
We pull up a map on the Internet and start talking about cities, logistics. We check airfare. For a while it seems really real, an escape, a carrot dangling over my hopeful head, a chance to do something. I find a bargain airfare that matches the balance of my savings account. I really could go. I could quit my job, or I could ask for time off and if they said no then I could quit my job, because it’s not worth sacrificing opportunities in life for a stupid job in retail — I could actually go.
1
I tell all of this to James.
He smiles. “Buy your ticket. Christmas.”
“Christmas?” Christmas isn’t now.
“I’m trying to get hooked up with this monastery in India, so I’ll probably be there for a few months, after Bali, then I’ll meet you in Bangkok. It will be brilliant.”
“Yeah. Brilliant.” Christmas is light years away and I forget to think about the fact that I have gone home for Christmas every year of my entire life so far. I’m so used to pretending to buy plane tickets on the Internet — window shopping for a better life, new gadgets, old gadgets’ replacement parts, replacement friends, the perfect shoes to finally cure my social awkwardness; take it as far as possible, book vacations without putting in the last four digits of my debit card number; my finger hesitates over the word CONFIRM; choose the color for a car too expensive to drive — that I actually do before it occurs to me what I’ve actually done. James hugs me and I take a deep breath: Thailand.
At work I doodle about it. I sit at my post, watching for shoplifters, and I make a list of things to bring to Thailand and things to do to get ready for Thailand on the stack of scratch paper behind the counter. I hide my lists, along with my long division and imagined job prospects, in the crack between two display cases. Even thoughts of Hepatitis shots and the 20-hour flight are exciting compared to the monotony of work and the necessity of saying goodbye.
The day James leaves he gives me his bed.
“I’m getting rid of everything that doesn’t fit into his backpack,” he says. “I’m practicing non-attachment.”
I’d been sleeping on an inflatable mattress that required daily re-inflating and that squeaked every time I’d roll over.
We borrow a pickup truck, haul his bed from his empty house to mine, up the stairs, navigating the landing by tilting and bending the mattress and box springs to fit through the doorway.
For a few minutes, the pink brocade of my new bed sags against a wall in the living room and the air mattress still sits on my bedroom floor. We end up lying on our backs on the air mattress to make parallel lines. Staring at the ceiling’s white pock marks, we sink into the floor as the air leaks out — first torsos and thighs, then heads, legs and arms — in a long, uninterrupted hiss.
Finally he does a roll that puts him onto the floor, where he’s piled what remains of all his CDs, the ones he couldn’t sell and I didn’t take. He asks me to help him line them up end to end on the sidewalk.
Starting at my house, the row of albums stretches down the block and around the corner, past the house where the lady hoses down her lawn, almost to the movie theater with the green neon sign.
Then, driving back down Santa Monica Boulevard to return the truck, James points and I hang a sharp impromptu left. We pull into Hollywood Forever. It’s a really fucked up name for a cemetery, even in this town. We idle past immodest monuments.
“Unnatural preservation is a strictly Western concept,” he says. “It’s worst out here. It’s all one-upmanship. What matters is not your soul, but your plot’s visibility from the main drag.”
“I still think it’s beautiful here.” Not a real cemetery, but a celluloid one. I imagine Technicolor funerals.
He yells out the window at the corpses. “This isn’t a strip mall; it’s a cemetery. You’re dead!”
Then he looks at me. “How do you stand it here?”
1
Then, when he is gone for who knows how long, I am lying on the bright white sheets of my new bed. I trace scars on my skin and follow veins like highways on maps that pile up and tumble out of the glove compartment. The latch is broken.
Here is one: a pale yellow mark on the top of my wrist, the size of a cigarette burn though it isn’t one — this small thing is failed romance, the moment and spot of surgical separation.
Another: my Achilles heel is the swimming pool of my teenage years, sliced up the back of my left leg with the sharp metal of the deep-end step ladder. I once sat next to a stranger who had the same scar — a Morse code dash and a dot in the exact same spot. I wondered how she got hers, if she’d been swimming in that pool.
The 7:30 pink accelerates and takes over the days. Soon it will be winter and I won’t be able to see the pink through the pounds of snow that will weigh down implanted palm trees. The snow plows will drown out the helicopters, which already drown out the television, which drowns out my thoughts more easily each day. Am I having fewer thoughts or are they simply less resistant? The snow is already falling.
1
Breaks have begun to appear in the line of music. People have taken records they might like to own but would be too embarrassed to purchase. They have carried him off, dismantling the litter turned yard sale turned conceptual art piece. After a few more days, the only albums left are Air Supply and an MC Hammer single, bought ironically of course — though no one else found them ironic enough to be seen carrying them in the neighborhood, I suppose. Some things just shouldn’t be funny. But the best things are anyway.
The trash trucks come rumbling down the street and back again, and they collect the last of James’ music acquisitions to transport them to the landfill. I ask customers at work if they know where the trash ends up, in what landfill, where. No one knows. Is that irresponsible not to know where our own garbage goes?
By this time James has already been in Bali for four days, five if you count crossing the International Date Line. It’s the time of year when everyone goes somewhere else. I just go to work. I wait for a meteor shower that doesn’t come. I look for postcards on the spot on the floor where the mail lands when it comes through the slot in the door. The regular mailman’s name is Ben. Ben is on vacation.
The fill-in mailman gives me the neighbor’s mail. It’s sympathy mail. But getting other people’s mail is worse than not having any of your own.
James is out in the world actualizing his dreams — of being a well-travelled vagrant, sure, but it’s a dream — and what am I doing?
Dusting.
Pricing.
Managing.
I should be doing something I dream about. I should be writing again. I’ve inadvertently given up both reading and writing, the two things I used to do every day in college, back when creativity was sanctioned by classes with syllabi covering form and structure, plot and character and setting.
1
I tape manifestos and pictures of Thailand to the walls of my closet office and mark off the days on the calendar. I take fine-point pens in six colors and line them up next to a notepad with the thinnest blue lines on it and I breathe out and in again and I boot up my computer, because maybe, I say to myself, I will write something today. I create a new blank word-processor document and set the margins at 1-inch on all sides. I set the tabs and indents and find a font I like and I line up the cursor so that it blinks at the first blank line. I stare at it.
Sure, I studied writing and graduated with a piece of paper to prove I can perform a task that fits that description, but writing has never been considered an actual career option. Especially when my thoughts are just snippets that go nowhere, collecting like dust in the corners of the room until my roommate starts to give me the evil eye. But the Internet is there and so tempting, reminding me of various loose ends of threads I meant to follow, things I need to shop for, things I have always wondered about, things I would rather dream about than face the truth of badly written lines that will never cover a page. How would I even begin to put one word after another?
2
I can imagine covers of books. I can typeset title pages and find the copyright symbol shortcut key in my word processor. I can write an ostentatious acknowledgments page.
When I can’t write, I go to the bookstore. I am at the bookstore almost every day. I lose hours and entire days on the beautiful covers of books I haven’t read.
I wander over to the writing section, because it’s easier to read books about something than to actually do it. Two copies of Screenwriting for Dummies hit me on the head. Literally. They fling themselves from the shelf and hit me on the head. I try not to take this as a sign. The books on writing are next to the self-help books and the books on death. I try not to take this as a sign either.
I apply for a credit card, trying to establish credit that I don’t need, except to get a credit card. I can’t establish credit because I don’t have any. Even the credit I do have is not on file with the credit reporting agencies. I call to inform them of this error. They say they can only fix errors on my report, not errors not on my report.
I add up all the money I spend and divide it by the time I spend just existing — seven cents each minute of being alive, driving, sleeping, dreaming. Seven cents no matter what.
Each breath is made of pennies that stack up in the corners of my room, dusty piles of change that catch the gunk in the air on their copper edges. I can feel the food in my refrigerator rotting from all the way across the apartment. I can feel the change in the bottom of my purse swelling to fill it and schloshing around against itself and stray pieces of chewing gum to rub off decades of sweaty pockets and grime. Puree the mixture. The liquefied dollars stream out of my bank account like a pet store bag with a leak in it. I am the goldfish inside, the shifting plastic-bag walls distorting the world outside.
1
The nights and days get colder, come sooner, faster, but nothing happens. I can count dimes now. I don’t set off alarms. I don’t confuse myself over simple things, not quite as often.
Inventory takes over a month. Thirty pages at a time, because the old dot matrix printer has to take a breather between each slow exertion. Every rude and ridiculous item has a code, printed next to its suspected quantity. My clipboard has my name on it in Sharpie, and it has printout sheets of lotions and soaps and rubber duckies and iron-on patches and pirate flags and political action figures and tiki shot glasses and cookie jars and Maoist statuettes. I run my finger down the column of quantities and feel the numbers raised like Braille. Always something to restock, always something misplaced.
There are no more evenings. The pink light from the ocean is gone before work ends. For all intents and purposes, it never was at all. The walk home is a full and noisy urban dark. I almost mistake the old theater’s green neon sign for the moon when I can’t see the real one. The sidewalk is wet, but the woman who waters her lawn isn’t watering her lawn anymore, and she isn’t there to tell me that I’m not invisible.
I leave my house in yoga pants, grimy record store t-shirt, cotton bra, for the first time since the days started to get shorter instead of longer. I don’t decide where I’m going but I find myself at the foot of the stairs on the hill, so I start to climb. It’s more difficult than before. After a few flights I am gasping against a swelling ache deep in the back of my throat.
And everything drops away except the details, a color aerial glimpse of the tiny things before me. I spot the grocery store, then the red theater with the green sign. My eyes continue to scan for a new glimpse of things I’ve seen a thousand times before, but I don’t know what I’m trying to find.
Instead I absorb the details of where I stand, the houses that shoulder the stairs on either side, one white, one dark green, and a particularly tall palm tree next to a lop-sided conifer. Memorize. Hope that I can mirror my discovery, find myself on the stairs and understand the tangled hillside from home.
But, when I look again, there it is. My own house. Instantly, finally. Just the top emerging from the civilized mess: mint-green stucco, burnt-red Spanish-tiled awning, and my window. My window.
Posted by fern on January 18, 2008
Tags: Uncategorized
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