Night in the Life--4/6/99

How I got here is something of a mystery. Here being prone across my bed, head uncomfortably tucked between mattress and headboard, hungry, tired, lonely, bored, and, though sober, incapable of operating either simple or heavy machinery.

I can barely remember the cause. Only the effect.

K arrives at my apartment unannounced. At one point, we were close friends. He moved to the coast. I never returned his phone calls. I am surprised when he appears and finds me on the bed illuminated by the blue computer screen. I have done little for days. No work. No class. No justification for the expense. No money to pay the bills.

K leans against the doorframe, and smokes one of my cigarettes.

“I hear you’re getting married,” I say. “To the heiress.”

He shrugs. “She has plenty of money.”

“You’re a gigolo,” I say.

I remember turning to face him, and the challenge of shifting my body to face him. I remember the high-pitched whine of the electronics, and sound of the freeway breathing in the distance.

“So,” he said. “Rumor has it you’re having a lesbian affair with Sara.”

“I’m heterosexual,” I said. “And even if I weren’t, I’d never sleep with her. She’s desperate and needy and crazy and pathetic.”

“She says she loves you.”

I shudder.

Barely a month ago, I spent the Ides of March in Baltimore, standing with my face against the airtight windows on the 33^rd story of a hotel tower, peering out over flickering alleyways and empty streets to a great black void on the horizon, which was the bay I assumed, though we arrived too late for me to orient myself by daylight.

The next figure reflected beside me was Sara, who jiggled and jumped in my clothes and a purple fright wig in some bizarre attempt to seduce me.

The mating habits of the certifiably insane.

If I were any more indifferent, I'd be stone.

"Why aren't you dancing?" she asked breathless, breasts bouncing, ass audibly slapping against the top of her thighs under my black miniskirt. She wore pink cotton panties printed with caricatures of William Shakespeare. She wanted me to notice, and perhaps if I were a reasonable facsimile of her--the embodiment of desperation, the tricked out circus sideshow attraction with advanced degrees and a twelve drug cocktail of anti-psychotic drugs fueling her lust for life-I would have cared.

And when I turned to face her, I was two steps closer to the door and my car and the cold rainy drive back to DC seize where I could have drunk too much and conjured up some combination of bitterness and condescension to remove me from the taint of THIS SHIT.

"Why aren't you dancing?" She nuzzled my neck as I walked past her.

I pushed her away.

"I don't understand your personal space issues," she said.

"Save the clinical terminology," I said. "Just because I don't want you touching me doesn't mean I have issues."

She sniffled. "But we're having fun?"

We were having a manic episode. The week prior, Sara's shrink told me to keep an eye on her. We changed her medication again. Trying to prevent those unfortunate attacks.

"Sure, sure," I said. "We're having big fun."

As we speak, Sara is checked into the hospital up the street for the third time this month for an obscure and likely invented malady. The doctor called me today to tell me they would have to release her because they couldn’t find anything wrong with her. And I told the doctor whatever, she has parents and a boyfriend, why are you calling me? I shake my head to remove the thought of her. She has become some measure of how pathetic my life has become.

That I associate with these people.

I hate her insanity, because it makes me feel like I’m insane.

I am insane.

“She’s insane,” I say.

“She’s a very talented poet,” says K.

“That’s what they said about Sylvia Plath.”

“And you look like a junkie,” says K. “Are you on drugs?”

Drugs would be rational. A reason for this behavior. “I wish I were a heroin addict,” I say.

“Would you tell me where you’ve been for the past two weeks?”

“Richmond,” I say.

“Why?”

I shrug. No reason. Nothing in particular. Took off driving north on 85 and landed on 95 and turned off before I got to DC. Called on an old friend and spent ten days wandering through circles of shallow lamplight on the cracked sidewalks. The resurrected historical streetlights are only good for ambiance, that kind of old world incandescence that strains your eyes and if anything casts shadows even more forbidding. Sort of a Jack the Ripper set—overcast December night, the sky bleeding red at the city lights. My hosts had a flashlight on their spare keychain—a two-dollar, check out line job, and I strobed the switch. I have anxious fingers, and pointed the bulb at the shedding Christmas tinsel still wrapped around the columns of the house to the right, even though I was April. My friend and I walked past the mansions around the traffic circles on Monument Avenue. He bemoaned the state of things—the crumbled facades, rusted grillwork, and leporsied friezes—Richmond’s unique brand of architectural degeneration—while I composed odes to urban decay, the way we let things become such magnificent rot. I’d been craving that kind of decay—it was almost pornographic. Made me feel better by comparison.

“Richmond is a slum,” I say. “Did you know you can get free coffee and cookies in the courtyard of the Poe house?”

“I hate Poe,” he says.

“You’re a snob.” I turn to face the wall, but I can still hear K. wheezing. “I’m thinking about killing myself tonight, did I mention that?”

K. taps his foot on more floor and I think—he’s just trying to show off his rhythm.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asks.

I sigh, and shift in the bed so I can see the reflection of my shadow in the mirror across the room.

In the bathroom of the bar two blocks down the street from my house, I sit on the toilet and stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I wonder how it is I have had so little to eat and look so fat and ugly. I have not showered in a week. My hair hangs lank to my chin. The dark roots have spread across my scalp, and the bleached parts—blondes have more fun—appear almost green in the fluorescent light.

I cannot piss and find this hilarious.

K sits at the bar. I slump into the chair and ignore the mirror.

He slides a shotglass into my fingers.

“I ordered you a drink.”

I wrinkle my nose. “I don’t like the brown stuff.”

He raises his eyebrows when he looks at me. There was a time I felt self-conscious about this sort of scrutiny. I would have been sure he noticed the fat rolls of my stomach and the thickness of my neck and the crust of pus around the zit on my shoulder. And I would have tugged at my shirt to hide the gaps between the button holes and faked a confident smile to make him believe I was not the owner of the single hair on my overlarge breasts and yellow crooked teeth and a ripe, though undersexed cunt concealed beneath faded cotton panties and secondhand men’s pants. But, tonight I slouch with abandon, enjoying the scent of my unwashed self as totem of my suffering.

“If you’re going to perpetuate this wretched, chronically depressed, impoverished, alcoholic writer bullshit, you ought to step up to the plate and develop a preference for whiskey. It’s much more literary.”

“I want to go home,” I say. But I drink it anyway, and relish the burning in my throat.

“Atta girl,” he says.

I do not call him a patronizing son of a bitch; he seems disappointed.

K plays Hank Williams on the jukebox. I scowl at the bartender when he asks to see my ID.

“I am so old,” I say.

The bartender scratches his head and reads my birthdate with the assistance of his sliding index finger. “You’re twenty-three,” he says.

I might as well be fifty. I wish I could disassociate from my body.

“I’ve fucked up the last five years,” I say. “I have no excuse. I have nothing but regret.”

“I’m thirty,” says K. “I’ve fucked up the last ten.”

“This is not a contest,” I say, though secretly I suspect I’m winning. At least K is attractive. That must count for something.

K orders me a double.

I light the wrong end of two cigarettes and stare dumbly at a yuppie couple at the booth in the far corner. The woman is drinking a martini. She looks like my mother. The man notices me staring and glares.

“Ha,” I say. “That man thinks I’m trying to pick up his stupid wife.”

“Were you?”

“No. I told you before I’m not a lesbian.”

K nods to the bartender. “Methinks the lady protests too much.”

K snorts.

I walk to the jukebox, play David Bowie “Five Years,” and sniffle.

Two hours later, K and I are asked to leave the bar following an unfortunate incident involving our respective forearms and a substantial quantity of lit cigarettes

I’m enjoying the polka dot blister effect, and walk back to my house, thankful that the warm weather enables me to wear short sleeves.

“These will show off your track marks,” says K. “Provided you’re still planning on becoming a heroin addict.”

I stop and pull him to the side of the park. “If you find someone who deals heroin, do you promise you’ll let me know?”

“No,” he says.

“You’re not a good friend,” I say.

“You’re ridiculous, and self pitying, and dangerously romantic about that shit,” he says. “I’ve been to rehab.”

“Show off,” I say.

“I’m not fucking around,” he says. “What’s wrong with you anyway?”

We’re quiet. I start walking at his pace, figuring he shouldn’t be privy to my plight.

I stop.

“Maybe I already am,” I say.

“What?” he asks.

“A drug addict,” I say. “You haven’t seen me in a couple months.”

I imagine the stories I could tell. The created squalor of my invented life as destitute whore, skulking around in the midnight hour in flophouse hotels, and begging to support my habit.

He yanks my wrist. “It’s not cute. Stop it.”

I pout, and take off running.

At my apartment, I knock paper trash off of my sofa and huddle at the far end.

When K comes in, I hate myself for showing him the trick on the back door.

“Why don’t you go home?” I ask.

He turns on the kitchen light and I hear him open the cabinets. “Do you have any food?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

I find the TV remote. On. Off. On. Off. On.

“You have some crackers,” he says.

Off.

K rounds the corner into the living room. “And an amazing mold collection in your sink. Do you clean?”

On.

“Turn it off,” he says. “Put on some music.”

I can maneuver the arm on the turntable without rising off the sofa. I have learned this special skill. I punch the on button. David Bowie. “Five Years.” I sniff.

“For Christ sake.” K tosses the box of crackers on the floor, and stomps to the stereo.

“Don’t scratch the record,” I say.

“I’d like to burn the record,” he says. “You’ve played it six times already.”

I didn’t realize. I close my eyes and try to recall by counting on my fingers.

“I only remember four,” I say.

He sits, crosslegged on the floor. “Are these alphabetized?”

“By genre,” I say. “How many girls have you slept with?”

The speakers crackle when the needle hits the groove. K tosses a sleeve in my lap. “This can’t possibly depress you.”

“I hate this song,” I say. “I hate this record.”

“You own it.”

I stand. “That doesn’t mean anything. I stole it from the radio station after they wouldn’t let me DJ because I wasn’t cute enough.”

K leans back on his hands, and crosses his ankles. “We wouldn’t let you DJ because you stole a crate of records.”

“You were with me,” I say. “You stole them too.”

He shrugs. “I was program director. Life isn’t always fair.”

I play a Gang of Four record because it is hard edged and angular and that is the way I’d like to reinvent myself. Tough, hardedged, and angular. Invulnerable. No regrets.

“If you’re not going to answer my question, you should go home,” I say.

K sighs and lights a cigarette. “Fifty five.”

I am appalled.

“Shut your mouth,” he says. “Remember I’m thirty.”

I sink back against the pillows. “In order for me to catch up with you, I’d have to sleep with fifty two more people in the next seven years.”

“This is not a contest.” My line, repeated back. But I know it is, and he’s winning.

Fifty two in seven years. That’s 84 months. And I’d have to average 1.6 fucks per month. “I haven’t had sex in two years,” I say.

“Tragic,” he says.

“Why have you never slept with me?” I ask. “You’ve slept with everyone else we know.”

“I’m a gigolo,” he says. “You said so yourself.”

All of my friends here are boys, except for Sara. I consider the possibility that their influence has unhinged me. When the men I know break up with their vapid pretty things with perfect bodies and perfect hair, they call me up for solace and I go with them to drink beer, while they wax poetic on their collective inability to find the attributes in a girl that really count at the end of the day. You know, things like sense of humor—funny, I’m funny when I’m depressed, even funnier when I’m pissed off-- and intelligence—Mensa candidate, right here-- and overall low maintenance—did I mention it only takes me five minutes for hair and make-up. They say they want girls to know what the hell they're talking about. Girls who don't mind drinking cheap beer and hanging out with they guys. Girls who don't come out of the gate into an emotional trainwreck.

I am an emotional trainwreck, but I can fake it.

Usually.

A relationship could make the rest easier to swallow.

“Why are you here?”

“I’m not in love. I thought you might talk me out of marrying.”

“Don’t marry her,” I say. “Anything else?”

“I dunno, whatever’s wrong with you, I thought I might be able to help.”

“Help?”

“Sure,” he says.

“I’m out of cigarettes,” I say. “If you want to help, go buy some more.”

K walks down the block to the Quickie Mart for cigarettes. I don’t care what brand. No Menthols. No lights. I want to feel the lung damage. I watch his back from the second story and note that he takes my shortcut through the park.

I stare at defeat on the bookshelves, the dusty volumes of five years of higher education, which undid me. I hated college from my first day, because I was never allowed to matriculate at the right school—too much money; your father and I both lost our jobs; recession. Because I was compromised in never being able to show off my supposed great intelligence to past and future Nobel Laureates—and I was supposed to be the smart one; when I was ten, they always talked about how I’d go to Harvard. Because I’d fucked off and fucked around out of anger and fear of quitting. I hated myself and sabotaged myself and stopped going to classes months ago—they should have fucking kicked me out; evidence of what a shitty school this is that they didn’t kick me out—and I lied and stole and alienated my two best friends in the whole world and still persisted in telling everyone I was graduating—I even with through the rigmarole of filling out grad school applications, denial. Justification being—if I’m not pretty and not particularly nice and hardly interesting, I’m nothing without smart. Smart is the only thing I have.

I’m too good for this place, too smart for these people, and certainly too sophisticated for this sad town. It’s no wonder I’m depressed. You would be too if you had to spend your days being condescended to by self-important inferiors. Like that miserable twat in the English Department who told me citing Derrida was too advanced for an undergraduate. Like the effeminate redneck in Academic Advising who told me—me—they would put me on Academic Probation if I skipped another class. Like my half-wit peers who have the nerve to give me snooty sidelong glances in the hallways. I clearly deserve respect,

And yet.

I am inferior to all of them. I am the bottom of the barrel. A retrograde somnambulist, a chronic underachiever, a spoiled fat white girl with a country club pedigree, a bad lay, a social drunk, a fashion mistake, a poser (both with and without the “u”), a liar, a thief, a laughable writer, a stuttering idiot, a (by ancestral extension) perpetrator of crimes against humanity. I deserve nothing at all. Even punishment is too good for me.

I wish I were poor. I wish I were a poor orphan prostitute drug addict. I hate that I fucked up my own life for no good reasons and my only way out is to feign insanity. I hate insane people. I hate being weak and pitied and predictable. I hate not having a legitimate reason for feeling as awful as I do. I hate that it’s my fault. And I hate myself for hating it.

I observe the red eye on the portable phone, wondering if I should call my mother—it’s twelve-thirty, she’s probably awake—but I’m struck by what I should say. After all my lies—she has no idea. I have a scene replaying in my head. The bench outside the headmaster’s office at high school where the troublemakers sat waiting for their punishment, the decisions of the conduct counsel, the choice of appropriate disciplinary action.

I wish I were Catholic.

I fall to my knees in the hallway and recite a Hail Mary. I only know it in Latin. I hope the comparative archaism will charm the divine.

In the bathroom, I finger the edge of the aspirin bottle, figuring upon the appropriate overdose to knock me unconscious, yet revivable upon K’s return. Barely surviving a suicide attempt might curb the projected wrath of my parents, and more importantly, clear my head a bit.

I feel guilty for thinking this and hastily make my way into the living room when I rub cigarette ash across my forehead as mark of my penitence.

I return to the bathroom and sink to the floor.

By the time I hear K’s footsteps on the fire escape, I have peeled the labels off all the toiletry bottles and cunningly reapplied them to the side of the tub, where they spell “I Hate Myself.”

“Nice art.” K drops the cigarettes on the table in the hallway, and looks down his nose at me. He is breathless from his walk—in as bad a shape as I am.

“Is there a tattoo parlor open?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“Are you sure?”

“In the state you’re in, I’m not inclined to call and find out,” he says. “Ashes. If you’d told me, I could have picked up a hair shirt while I was out.”

“I’m into symbolic gestures.” I point to the nosering to remind him of my favorite story of self-mutilation, wherein my former best friend and I, reaching a point of seemingly insurmountable boredom and anxiety four years ago, retreated to our respective bedrooms to mull over possible solutions. After about fifteen minutes, she appeared in my doorway with a safety pin through her lip.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why not?” she asked.

Not to be outdone, within five, I’d followed suit with my right nostril.

“And it never even got infected,” I tell K.

He busies himself with the receiver. “Do you want me to call and order a pizza or something? Maybe you should call your mother.”

“You know,” I say. “She thinks it’s my last semester of college. Everybody thinks it’s my last semester of college. Two professors wrote me recommendations for graduate school.”

“When was the last time you went to class?”

I hang my head. “January.”

“It’s April,” he says.

“I know.”

“Did you drop the classes?”

I shake my head.

“But you registered.”

I nod.

“Jesus,” he says. “And you’re just now upset about this.”

I shrug. “I’m a procrastinator.”

K hands me the phone.

“Not tonight,” I say. “Not in the middle of the night.”

He replaces the receiver and I stare at the sink. My eyes catch on the silver handles on the scissors behind the cold water tap.

“K,” I say, “would you light me a cigarette?”

I stand, slowly, and peer at myself in the mirror.

K’s arm snakes over my shoulder with a lit cigarette just as my fingers find the blades.

I pick them up, stretch the piece of hair at closest proximity to my face at its full length and sever it.

“Give those to me,” he says.

I deliver my best shrill, attic-worthy cackle. “Don’t threaten me or I’ll shave my head.”

“You wouldn’t,” he says.

I say something lame, like, “try and stop me.” K backs away and walks off toward the living room.

I hear him flipping through the records.

I cut off another hank of hair and try to visualize myself bald.

He returns to the bathroom at the first drumbeat on the record. “I’m playing this because it’s sappy and juvenile, because you’re acting sappy and juvenile.”

I tell him to fuck off, drop the scissors in the sink, and cry at my preposterous reflection.

“Jesus,” he says.

“I really don’t want to shave my head. I have this giant mole.” I gesture at a point about a third of the way up the back of my head.

K rolls his eyes. “You’re worse than Sara. Give me the scissors.”

I surrender my grip and sit under the pressure of his arm on my shoulder.

Under normal circumstances, this situation would appeal to me. I can imagine this seeming sweet and sort of sexy and risky.

As opposed to the current adjectives—psychotic and humiliating.

And the worst part is I have done this to myself.

I laugh.

“What?” asks K.

“I complicate everything,” I say. “Unnecessarily.”

K tugs at pieces of hair. “Your hair will grow out. It wasn’t that long to begin with.”

“You know the only other time I ever cut my hair this short was when I was fifteen, when I ran away from my dad’s house.”

“Why did you run away?”

“I was pissed off because my father was capricious and weird and refused to pay my high school tuition. So I cut off all my hair, dyed it brilliant red, stole Dad’s wallet, and took off for San Francisco.”

It was a simple plan, really, and might have worked in retrospect. Could work now.

He stops to light a cigarette. The ashes spill into the porcelain sink and mingle with the strands of my hair clogging the drain.

“How far did you get?” he asks.

“The bus station. Three miles from Dad’s house.” I grab his cigarette and take a drag. “And the worst part is: Things were much more complicated and awful and embarrassing after I got back. I had to see this awful therapist. My mother thought I was certifiable.”

“Were you?”

“No,” I say. “I think I was just bored and lonely.”

I close my eyes and breathe deeply, and hear him drop the scissors in the sink.

He runs his fingers through the hair on the back of my neck so that I feel its absence.

“Do you want to lie down for a moment?” he asks.

My stomach tightens. I blush.

I am number fifty-six.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” he says. “I’m engaged.”

I blow my nose into a wasted tissue and stare at my feet beneath the blanket. I am sure he felt sorry for me. I am sure he regrets it. I am sure my name in conjunction with his will be an embarrassment.

“And I’m the lowest of the low,” I say. “The dregs. Bottom of the barrel. I’m not even rich enough to be interesting to you.”

“You wouldn’t give it to me if you had it,” he says. “And even then I might not let you.”

I stand slowly and thump across the floor to the bedroom mirror. My hair is too short, uneven, unflattering, and its natural mousy brown. I hate it.

“I think you gave me your haircut,” I say.

K shrugs and lights a cigarette. “Consider it a Bon Voyage. All of it.”

“Better you than Sara, I guess.” My clothes have collected on the floor for so long I cannot remember when I wore them. I suddenly fear spiders and flee to the bed. “I didn’t know I was leaving.”

He smiles. “You’ll be going home, I imagine.”

“Is it weak to admit I want to go home?” Home is enduring my mother’s nagging. Home is admitting defeat. “I feel like Dorothy. “ But what I wouldn’t give for Dorothy’s sepia toned Kansas in lieu of pastel suburban sprawl and tract mansions and guilt.

“Do you know where I grew up?” asks K.

In a shack on the side of a mountain in rural Kentucky with no indoor plumbing. In a central Florida trailer park with an abusive father and an alcoholic mother. In the projects. On the wrong side of the tracks. In a Dickensian workhouse. I shake my head, and imagine the callouses on the inside of K’s hands came from years of hard labor.

“Do you promise you won’t tell?” he asks.

I nod.

“I grew up in a very pretty historic home in a little town about forty-five miles east of here. You’ve been there before.” He mutters the name of a prestigious university. “When I was a kid, my mother was an attourney and my father was chair of the doctoral commission.”

“I thought you told me you were the first person in your family to ever receive an education.”

“I lied,” he says. “I did, however, fail out of three different universities, much to the consternation of my parents, and spent five years working construction and trying to make myself more real.”

“Why do you lie?”

“I dunno, Alison,” he says. “I guess for the same reason you want to be a heroin addict.”

“It’s one of the reasons girls like you, you know,” I say. “Girls like you because they think you’re this self-taught blue collar autodidact who could smash through all of their illusions and call them on their shit.”

“Is that why you liked me?”

I liked K because he never minded my complaining, and because he always played the right songs on the jukebox, and because he knew more about Faulkner than I did, and because he was handsome and made me look better by association, sort of.

“No,” I say.

We sit silently, staring at the streetlamps through the windows. I count seconds. On thirty-two, K stirs and searches the floor for his blue jeans.

“I promise I won’t tell,” I say.

“Good,” he says. “M. would call off the wedding, and I’d lose my benefactor. Do you promise you won’t kill yourself?”

I light a cigarette and stare at the water stains on the ceiling. “I’m not suicidal. Just bored and lonely.”

He fastens his belt and buttons his shirt.

I don’t begrudge his silence; I want him to leave.

“Take care,” he says.

I mutter a farewell.

He slams the door behind him.

I do not rise to lock the door.