Monday, January 31, 2005
Worked a night shift Friday, lit bright and dimly dull at once. The new Directorate of Nursing was my partner, and she didn't do squat, aside from the paperwork she inherited. I was on my toes, not knowing much about the patients, about how she worked, about what--and where--was expected of me. Like, should I sit and rererereread Selby in the nurses' station, where there's a spare chair, or should I take my library book out to where the patients hang out while they are awake, leaking urine and fecal matter and stench of poorly healing 'decubes' (short for decubitis ulcers). I don't care to sit in the backwash of decay. So I chose the nursing station, where the capillary action couldn't get me, but the hillbilly accents could. I shatter easy. Then I walked out into this region's second ice storm. Bought some beer. Took a hard way to go home, nearly falling several times. Walked into half-darkness, unable to intuit if the roommate V. was in the house. I shed my awkward clothing--sofa of a coat and ancient scrubs--and crawled into the first t-shirt I saw. Popped two beers, five trazadone, and began to fade out. Came to about five hours later, needing a piss badly, and showed my flabby hanging arse to Vanessa's kid, seated in the--"her", to be more precise--living room. I had my white noise on. How was I to know his arse was there? Back in the bedroom, I found my nightgown, one of those oversized nombres, and slung it on over the t-shirt. Knocked out; came to--and started reeling. I do not know why I did this--to some effect for sure, but in the end, which one(s)? I guess I wanted some embarrassment, this to be doled out pretty much fairly: seemingly drunk roommate, taped-up frown line (I got that one from a snippet in the "National Enquirer", of all things, and you know, it works--not as well as the Botox I'm gonna arrange for come payday), Moe bangs sticking straight up and shoulder to the wall. Crash bang. I wasn't drunk. But I was inchoately pissed off, wanting the kid, who I actually like, and the two hill jack ad-ults that were with him, gone. Y'know, I play that machine for a reason. It means this: your noise disturbs me, your insipid pseudo-country commercial crap, the blaring Journey and REO horrid as angel-dusted flashbacks to where the older stoner boys stood under bridges and smoked that shit in joints, thinking it was funny to get their geeky admirers flucked up. (Afterwards, I'd go home and get lost in my rowhome. Try to masturbate, not knowing why, just doing as I assumed others did, and it felt as though I were melting into cold sheets, wet, almost as arctic water. Then I had to get up. I had proven nothing.) I play that machine to dull your saw-toothed humming. Hey Vanessa, you move like a steamer headed out to sea, but you don't really get anywhere, do you? You get the phluck on my one last fragment of a nerve, and it's "Gaslight" again, just like this past summer. You erase messages from the friend who couldn't rouse me to go to church yesterday, and it's only your son left to wish you the Mother's day that's as cramped and dry as your heart. You and your machine have their tricks. One of your tricks is the "throw-away mail" game. I got you on that one and let you know it. And all of this is all so childish, and may have to do with that inspection for Section 8 tomorrow. You've wanted me out as long as I've been there. Turns out I can't stand living around you, anywhere near you and your bloated bull shite. I wanna go off with a CAT someplace, even though I'm dog 'n' horse (an ex-psychiatrist with a so-called 'magick' shop under the Frankford El called that one right off when I walked in in my black leather damage). I want two, three cats, to knock things over and sleep on my head. You don't want me, nor do I want you, really. We have both made our muddied points; I've disposed of my beer cans, and am almost ready for tomorrow's inspection. You go girl. You're not as credible as you seem to think. And then there's this dopey caseworker bitch from Boston. Big-city woman, I'd think I could relate, but not to this individual. She rides this once-a-week visit thing into the ground. The other two weren't nearly as pushy. Wanting me to sign something that would communicate my living situation to my employers. Nup, nope, I think not. nnNNNNUUUUUNNNNnnnnnnncca. These visits fuck up my days off. There is something about this woman and her pale blue blanket of pity. She would wrap me in it like a burqa, then stare hard to find my eyes. I'd told her last time that'd I'd make a 'problem list', similar to what licensed medical professionals do with their patients--most pressing issue first. MEET that Hierarchy of Needs, bitch. (I just misspelled that last word, but damn, it looked RIGHT for a minute.) I could do your job. It's not a narcissistic thing. I can leave my saddlebags full of shite at the door, but I don't know about the driving part--that's what would get me. (I've driven vans of up to eight MR adults in a central city setting. I know bedlam, but that kind of bedlam has been a long time.) So, yeah....although I hate ellipses, a problem list would be the ticket--to eliminate the ongoing harrassment, which is a problem in need and deed. C.H, duly warned again
Thursday, January 27, 2005
The Library of the Loud is starting to fill up with people from the Land of Loud Garbage--you should see thejunk hanging in the little trees that overlook the west side of the dead mallard shopping card creek (the east side is curiously less fouled). Yeah, okay, I get that your sidewalks were sewers, and that respect for the planet is just about as alien to you as not looking at that place on women's chests where breasts usually are. How do I keep any kind of objectivity toward, let alone love for, my neighbors when they do crap like this? Every time I read about a resident of the American west who maintained a bottle tree, or, in the instance of Georgia O'Keeffe, a bottle roof, I get a glad spasm. I don't know a thing about the origins of this practise, but in my mind's eye it is a lovely one regardless. Here, the locals throw plastic in the little creek, and when precipitation falls, as it has been doing lately, the little creek swells, and all the garbage that has been dumped in it--the plastic pop bottles, the beer cans, bicycle wheels and shopping carts, the waxed cups from the fast-food eminences--this makes me want to get down there in the cold weather and water and free at least a stretch of that poor poor creek from those who would make it a landfill. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Kid is here. White kid, greasy pointy hair, one of those Dollar Central sweat jackets with a fraying dragon emblem on the back and in pants that could hold three of him, easy. He likes staring contests with adults. He likes to play games on the computer. "Monster"--pretty descriptive, wouldn'tja say? Hate on the kid for his mother's sins, or maybe he just got lucky. (I just supersized a sigh, held the eye contact. These kids are of a generation that accepts if not pushes noise in libraries, and I simply cannot roll with this, so I have a part in it. What puzzles me further, and perhaps makes a statement about my own lack of success, is how fifty-year-old folks with multiple advanced degrees can walk into a setting like this one and proceed, unfazed, by anything the children might be doing. And here comes yet another little bastid. Can't work the 'puter, needs showing how. I get this, but in two minutes he will be looking at/chatting with oversexed teenage girls who wear colored bracelets to signify sex acts worth doing, with whoever wants to do them. I've known about this practise for a little while, and its ramifications are chilling: a popular boy rips an...okay, for the sake of devilry, a bracelet the color of anal sex from the wrist of a plump, weak-chinned little wannabe girl, and then brags about how he was so big he made her cry. Hell, I'd cry too. That's real freaking rape, not the sanitized version that ppl everywhere seem to be wanting to commit. The world is ending, and ppl are still thinking about sex when they are awake. I have taken refuge in intentional plainness, sort of let my overweening preoccupation with not appearing old, or in public with a stupid haircut, fall aside. I think about what I might do to appear younger, but have no money to do these things; they're moot. But I have this respect thing I wield like a club: I respect the land, respect minds that can handle what this world has become (mine is damaged, braced, always a little slow, but quick to judge anyway), and most saliently, at this wee moment, respect silence. It is platinum, the pink kind, reigning soft, strong, serene, where the chaos always seems to be. And that's a (w)rap, and I'm getting mad, and cannot help myself, so must carry on--- one day left, just one day, I tell myself--have to be humble, or die trying chjd
Sometimes this place does have a feel of outer Brooklyn, or the Northeast district of Philadelphia--spooled warrens of low-rent apartment complexes, few trees, motley ethnic crews, and once in a big intersection, a mass deposit of fast food stores, video places, a place on every corner where a person can practise their stick-up skills AND be seen on the evening news. That's about all that is good today. Yesterday, they stuck me with these two jaw-droppingly mismanaged escorts--yeah, ebrybody de critic, but in each case, there was no paperwork on either patient, and nothing confirming what was to be done to either poor soul once they made their destination. I thought I'd score points with the hire/fire people by draping my escortees with my sofa, this monstrous coat I've had for about six years, burnt orange and filled with down. See me coming into the place bare-armed--well, narcissists are known for thinking that they are doing something that is going to get them something good when it all shakes out, and then coming up short, disappointed or worse. My motives weren't wholly impure, but no one looked twice at me, and the one little woman came back with the sniffles, which I have now. It's been a week and I am wholly exhausted from having to drag it out of a warm, if single, bed at about five, labor from seven to three, maybe do a little shopping at this strip mall or that one, and find myself so utterly spent as to be unable to locate a computer when at least one is very much nearby--I simply want to slipslide through these nasty little trees with no hold to them at all, step down, head up a steep asphalt drive and cut back to my cell. I've been w/o Prozac for about ten days now, and entirely deserted by that wee but busty despot Vanessa (which, in turn, has ME worried about what I've done to set her off this time, and more to the point, what might be said about me in return--she's like that), and it feels like whatever ails me has simply shifted proportions: today I'm more depressed than anything. Having a cold drives it further inward. While taking out the garbage, I noted something with the return address of the Food Stamps Office on it. V does not get food stamps. I didn't recall opening that piece of mail, and it had been opened, so I fetched it and started to wonder. The information I read wasn't surprising-- I'll probably get cut off, and it would be in my best interests to show up in another Brooklynesque and very hard to reach from a public transportation point of view on 3 February and straighten things out, paper trail in tow. So I have to ask the obvious: since I don't recall openening the mailing--one that could have dire results for me in terms of welfare fraud if not addressed--who opened it, who read it, and who threw it away, and why? Maybe I did--as I passed gas in my brain. Maybe I need my own, keyed mailbox. I didn't think it was a great idea to launch into paranoid accusations at some poor underpaid secretary somewhere--nevertheless, it's not impossible that V has resumed her gaslighting game. She had that two-BR "dump", which only an elitist or several million would describe that way, to herself for awhile, and was free to bring liquor and men in and out of the place, whose decor is "cheap dentist's office, ca: 1993"--and all on her. It's crap like this that I have to try to stay on top of. Again, I brought up the possibility of having a one-room dwelling, under the auspices of wanting to have a cat or two, even though I've been a dog person since the age of two (I was chastised often for trying to ride the family collie, not knowing that I was going at this in a backasswards fashion: I mean 'ride', the way one rides horses, and that poor animal was wound too tight to take advantage). There was a huge, furry Keeshond on today's free animal segment on the news--oh, that face, that hair, and that nobody to take him outside at the right hours, which means that I can't have a dog right now. I've done dogs right and done one wrong, and that's on my conscience: he became a tiny terror when I couldn't make it back from school on time to take him out, so he pooped on my futon one day. That was one deed that had to go unpunished--what's a gal to do? Anyway, I'm feeling the need for some unconditional love. Even if it sleeps upon my head, if it occasionally expresses displeasure with mama by pooping places it should not. I have a sense of humor. This Vanessa finds the idea of animals in a two BR dwelling absurd. Sometimes I find Vanessa absurd, but then that ugly old confro thing rears its head, and Vanessa does not have this problem: she is used to throwing her teats around. She also thinks she is smarter than I am. She is not, not on paper, but I'm gonna go right on letting her think that. Being thought stupid or without sense (and I don't have much of the common kind, and no I am not bragging, because every day brings new lessons in its application, albeit always by others and sometimes in the face of the absence of my own), gives a person a lot of room to get over. It's a pity, yeah, that I have to resort to this, but no one is paying me to be bright, or even pretty. My bangs got mangled, my whole head is due to be dyed. Who can keep up with those greys any longer? I wish Susan Sontag's anima would reach out and take over mine--maybe I'd acquire that Bonnie-ish white streak in the process. Bonnie is once, twice removed from Godhead. I could handle that. Okay, it's taken me longer to get to this than usual, but I do recall mentioning that Vanessa stays out of the Dwelling most of her nights. She is doing a physically abusive 29-YO drunk. She says he headbutted her, causing her to bite her lip and bleed; I saw the finger-bruises on her upper arms, and do not doubt that he shoved her to the floor of the apartment his mommy pays for. There is sex, something she seems to have been holding over my head--sista, PLEASE! I don't want any of that. (Okay--if cosmetic surgery of my choosing is part of the package, I suppose I could make certain concessions, and then split, but any work I might get any time soon is coming out of my pocket: Botox, mini-face/neck lift, which costs only 1,800 bucks, and something to the lips. By then, my bangs should have healed. But Vanessa--mail thief or not--was some kind of company. Didn't dig the humming, which had a nasty edge to it, nor the country music she seems to have adopted "because Jay likes it", and the food issues seem entirely resolved by her and her cadre of therapists (who have doubtlessly told her to keep it at Jay's). Last night I called my mother. I have lately been trying to stop, to impose some kind of rigorous exoskeleton of adult behavior upon our relations. She knows this. But I was wanting my stripperella wig, from the last time I shaved my head. It has bangs, is long and red, and to hell with anyone who might laugh at it. It takes time to make money to get Botox, and the only ppl who should wear short bangs, IMO, are those with minimal foreheads and large expressive eyes. one more day, tomorrow, and then I'm free range in bad weather ch/julie
Saturday, January 22, 2005
Practise skills, not deficits, which I spelled wrong. Got some tenses wrong--really wrong, ferule to the knuckles, Sister, please. These things happen when I cannot think.
At the Library of the Loud, far enough south of the Ohio Valley, which today is supposed to get hit with a shitstorm of snow. The farts of the angels, this white gritty stuff, or the devil's version of microdermabrasion. Whatever its origin, snow was blowing yesterday morning, which still looked a lot like night. The easiest way to get to my first day of work wasn't much of a walk, but moving slowly into the windchill and seeing an inkblot of people grey on black against the wind, I figured I'd ask one what time the bus got there. Long story shorter, the bus would, by the calculations of one guy, have me there quicker, and warmer, than would walking, so I got on the bus minutes later and basically rode it around the corner. When I got to the nursing home, I saw that the sidewalk leading to the main doors bore no footprints. No one had left that way, or come in. As it turns out, everyone who'd seemed to have it in for me was on the other side of the place. (There are only two wings, neither of those long.) There were no words exchanged between us all, but a nurse, whom I'd never laid eyes on, told me that I'd worked at XY hospital, which was true. I asked her, what floor, and she said that she herself had never worked there, but "Sue", one of the aides on her side, remembered me. Which is strange, because "Sue", with whom I'd worked nights on the geriatric unit there, and I both looked really different than we did in 1997. I sort of got along her--she was quiet, "to herself" as some around here would say, didn't go in for gossip. This time, she had short dreads and glasses, and me, well, I was fat, my hair a greying mess, and I was wearing glasses as well. Enough ppl there knew of me, and this led to extreme discomfort. I didn't feel that it was a good idea to drug myself silly, so I took but 0.5 migs on Klonopin and one Mini-Thin. I didn't do these things: ask which patients were pains in the ass; what nurses weren't cool; say squat about my own nursing background, or about the terms of my employment, which are unusual. Didn't do these things either: bitch about my weight, the workload, or the depressing ratio of fat, immobile clients. But I did keep mentioning school. Said that I was doing Voc. Rehab, and that eventually I'd like to work with horses in a professional capacity. This is not untrue. But the truest route to that end, from my admittedly emotionally defined point of vantage, would be to obtain my LPN (easy coursework, heavy clinical load, a friend who will help me practise skills, and a practically biologically driven need to tell the instructors about my perceived psychomotor defecits and my equally deep need to practise those until they become close to natural). Working as a nurse aide, and doing it well, I could get recommendations from my superiors. I could also write to places where I am presently not-for-rehire, and apologise for my conduct (do an "amend", as the 12-steppers say), ask if there were anything I could do to make things right (someone there would see what I was doing, some closet alkie in a management position), so that I might perhaps revise my references without actually saying a thing. And the alcohol intoxes. I have two attorney acquaintences (AA, again), and they might know of some arcane approach I could take to remove the first and the last of four. I slept seventeen hours between yesterday afternoon and this morning--I hadn't slept at all Thursday night. Despite the gravelly snow outside, I felt the need to do something on waking, something, anything, to keep myself pure from drink and binge. I need at least a trim as well, a practical v. emotional concern, but really do lack the desire to take the bus across town to one of those five dollar places: experience has taught me that that would be a really bad idea--get butchered, get a twelve-pack, blow off church and shave my head again. I am too old to shave my head (although one of the patients at the nursing home, this feisty-looking woman, has a crew cut to die for--a little longer than the usual man's version and tending to quiff at the front, but it looked really cool on her, all white). Historically, hair has been a woman's "crowning glory", and if not exactly that today, a valid avenue of self-expression. Today, mine says things like, "My owner is a slob", and "She hates herself--can't you tell?", and "Pssssttt...she's older than she thinks she looks. And she's nervous--keeps running her hands through that mess, and next time she does, watch her, you'll see all the grey underneath the Brillo, or whatever color that's supposed to be." ("Egyptian Plum, actually. Or that's what it said on the box.") When I woke up today, just prior to the urge to start doing things, even if these things would be meaningless excursions in driven snow, I knew I'd had one of those dreams in which I didn't know how old I was. Something about a bunch of ex-high school classmates putting up a wall of who had married and who had not ("failed to" is more like it). It looked like the wall of the missing in Bande Aceh. Also, something about my parents and me seeming closer in age these days. Last night, before I formally took to bed, I'd looked around my tiny room, seen a bunch of discordant items crammed into a bleak, narrow, nearly institutional space, and recognised within me--again--the depth of the dearth of my lack of living skills. Evidence of procrastination in the unopened envelopes and scattered papers, the yawning closet that I haven't really tried to get fixed, the single bed and all of its symbols. I thought of Michael, the man who had refused to let me stay in his guest room when I was facing the street again, and almost thought of calling him. No, one can't "almost think" of anything--it was a subthought, more like a feeling that was trying to make it into words. The feeling itself was a pretty unpleasant one, dirty, icy, a slush on the heart and pox of brain. I had it and let it go, and soon the trazadone took over and sleep was there. c h--I gotta leave here. Despite my earplugs, the noise, and this fetal-alcohol-looking kid in the corner with the mouth, are making me have bad thoughts. No DBT can save these moments. I have contributed interplanetary discontent with my anger. Something only God can take away right now. Peace. The minis are inside now. I feel them.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
woops--that was "unforgiven", not two "unforgiving"s.
Today at DBT there were two new group members. I was asked by the lead therapist to introduce myself. This is something that makes me shudder, inside and out. What should I say? "Hi. I hate to introduce myself, but since these lovely people insist, I am J. Wormshit Dicksucker, son-of-a-dick and all-around failure." Introducing myself is like show and tell, first grade: "I had a horse, really I did, but all I could bring back here is this fetching lump of shit." (And where are the italics when you need them?) Or: "Damn. If I'd know yiz was gonna do this, I'da brung my paper bag. (Therapist inquires if I mean my lunch.) NO, for my HEAD, dummy." Or: "Hi. My name is J. and I'm a narcissist with borderline features. Or a borderline with narcissistic features. Anyway, I'm the biggest, most profound loser you're ever going to meet. WORD." I so hate introducing myself, leading a grim parade of faults, directing my own cortege'. Introduction--of myself, of others--is something I actively shrink from, like breathing smoke or kissing cold sores. I am bringing illness into the room. Back when I could drink and drug with abandon, and get something pleasant from it, I'd have a few--say, six or seven drinks and a couple of hits of whatever else was available--and slowly, it seems in memory, though this might not be correct, slide into a group of interesting-looking people, picking up names and accessory data as I went along. I used to be pretty good with names/faces, even when pukefaced. I used to be a good-looking goth chick. Since nobody but Howard reads this thing any longer, this fact should be news to the not-so-gentle reader. As I lost my looks, and my lumberjack's tolerance for booze, these sorts of situations got a little rockier: I remember this redneck (actually, he was pretty cute, but for the mullet) leaning into my lap, exhaling smoke, and hollering, "What's YER name?" I told him Carly, Kelly, some such early-thirties thing, and turned back to my drink (it was cranberry and vodka, and there was someone talking in my other ear about getting some blow). The next thing MulletMan said was this: "Are yew a LIZbian?" About two years after that incident, I was cut down so low--Wormshit, remember?--that I gave him a blowjob. I remember he had a knobby dick and wasn't a bad guitarist, and although he smoked, I would have bought two sixes of Guinness just to keep him around for the day and into night. By this time, he knew my real name, and used it when he rejected me the next time he saw me at the bar where we first met. I stopped going to that bar shortly thereafter. If you're from the North, a female and a drunk, you're basically unacceptable. There's a smoking ban in this tobacco-rich town, and the place--Maxwell's, it was called, one of two in the vicinity--lost its license because it wouldn't enforce the ban. I hate cigarettes, yes, but that doesn't mean that I'd go back there. It's now called something like "The Off-Campus Bar", perhaps because the campus itself is two blocks away. Gee. Ya think? Really, though, if I were slim, if I couldn't feel my fat at my sides while typing, if I hadn't had to squeeze myself into a pair of size 13 jeans, I'd be up for a pitcher of Guinness sitting warm between myself and some fascinating other person, neither of us willing to cop to thinking about getting some drugs, but both of us wanting to badly. "A wasted mind is a terrible thing." And it is, when you can't keep your tenses straight, and fall into telling v. showing because some fool with a cell phone has decided to make his calls--apparently all to women--in the computer lab of the local cultural playground, and when you don't have the cojones to tell him, thank you for asking, but yeah, I'm kind of ADD, could you take it outside, because you missed that module at some point between eighth grade and age 33. I'm not 33, and that sucks. That will continue to be a point of grievance with me until I publish something worthwhile, or die. I sometimes wonder why newspaper reporters always include their subject's ages, regardless of who they are, or what tragedy befell them, or what they did. Unless the person happens to be named, say, 'John Smith', or 'Juan Gonzalez', or 'Mary Combs' (there are many Combses around here), why is his or her age relevant? That's one reason I don't off myself: my detractors would learn how old I really was (again, italics, I need you), and then go about their business, saying, "I *knew* the bitch was crazy." Maybe I should go to AA tonight, tell 'em hello and I'm Julie and I'm 39 years old. I don't go there any more. It was keeping me out at night, or rather the meetings were, but it was also causing me to want to go places it is not wise to walk at night, to spend money I do not have, to buy alcohol and drink it alone, JUST BECAUSE I CAN. There's no real desire for the stuff; it doesn't taste that good; it makes me fat; it facilitates no social interaction whatsoever; and if I drank any tonight, I'd be good and fucked tomorrow morning. That's when I have to be at the new job at the beastly, unforgiving, and unforgivING hour of 7 a.m. (This fat kid, a male, I think, is mouth-breathing at the computer across from mine. He wears a key on a lanyard about his neck. Makes me wonder--seriously: someday, will I?) Lord, what have I wrought? I had all these good thoughts, man. I don't WANT to get up at four-thirty and go someplace where half the employees already hate me. DBT didn't do much toward resolving that particular item of anxiety. I'm still lulled on Klonopin--took four last night, plus some Benadryl and 1800 mgs Neurontin just to get a litte bit of sleep. And then there was light, and all was not well, because I had to go to the med management group at nine a.m., when what I desired most at that point was to resume sleeping. I have my trazadone now. Two hundred migs and some Neurontin should suffice. I don't know if that will put me out, though, because my nerves are so damn bad. Eliot said that; so have I. First I was all twisted about not getting that job, and now I don't want it, at least not at the hours the administrator wants me to work. She said I needed "structure", to be around people (you don't know how wrong you are, lady), and to get back into the "swing", or "flow", or some other word that suggests I'd be doing neurosurgery instead of kissing wrinkly ass and changing poopy diapers and remaining almost monkly mute around all the tall-tale-tellers who can surely tell me better than I can tell myself where I've been. I've got my warning, so I can't print out that sketch of the boy who was supposed to be my dad, nor can i work on a contemplation of the glass of amber on grandpa's desk. over and out, c h
This is the cellar of John D.'s first house. It is built into steep coal outside of Pittsburgh, a stagnant suburb of crumbly brick streets, back alleys, alcoholic fathers, negroes where there should have been none, and a wealth of stand-up railroad bars downtown. The cellar--somehow, 'basement' is too friendly a word for the place--had walls of wet coal. In the summers they seemed to weep, and in the winter months fell cold and sweaty as if diseased. There was a furnace in one corner, a great rumbling yawning thing with a mouth of fire. Though it was John's job to stoke the thing, he shrunk from the task: he had two choices--the furnace or the belt. Drunk or sober, John's father knew his way around a whipping, and if the boy somehow failed at the job, had overfed the monster, or neglected to feed it well, his father took off his belt with its fierce military buckle and beat him until his buttocks and thighs bruised ripe plum. Te boy had a fear of the furnace. His mother, a lovely but weak woman with a finger of Cherokee in her, was as churched as John's father was not, and insisted that that John and his two sisters, named Joan and Johnette, go with her. So the boy knew about hell, and the furnace in the cellar was one way to get there. If he was not careful, if he stoked its innard with a long iron pole unwieldly for a boy his size, if his actions sent heat throughout the two-story frame house and smoke, more smoke outside the smoky city, into the sky. The sisters teased him, although without much energy or malice. They were two and four years older, respectively, and shared with the child their father's wrath. They had their mother's rich jet hair and black eyes, whereas John had emerged with blond curls and a preternaturally resigned, somewhat sad, expression. Many things, especially those that pleased their father, came easily to Joanie, whereas Johnette, distant, dreamy as her brother, had to work a little harder to bring home the 'A's the man demanded of all three. Both girls liked to tousle the odd blonde curls. "Devil's gonna getcha if you don't feed the furnace," the younger sister giggled. "Which devil," muttered Johnette, hunched over the dinner table. "The general or the fire?" It sounded like a line from a story, and might have been. Joan went breezily about her long division while Johnette tried to fix herself on Hawthorne. Their mother bustled in the adjacent kitchen, bustling as mothers did at that time, and when she was sure the children were not looking, swallowed large, gelatinous capsules. For her nerves, she said, something her beauty and bearing--when the man was not around--could not reject or deny. So young John, nine or ten, went about the business of the furnace. The steps to the cellar had been carved from coal as well, and he palmed the slimy wall as he descended them. He could hear its rumblings, a beast, making plans to eat or otherwise end scared little boys. He wrested open the furnace and instinctively stepped back from its concussive heat. Recovering, he dared step forward to peek at its red contents. They needed stirring, so he took up the pole and moved them about, watching for the presence of flame. There was none. John D., still not sure that the monsters in the furnace would not reach out for him when his back was turned, grabbed the shovel and began the process of feeding it. One--two--three. Enough, he thought, stirring the mix of anthracite and dying fire. With some measure of relief, he closed its mean iron mouth and again wrestled its lock shut. He felt a cold empty gap in his gut, which meant that he was hungry. It was about dinnertime, anyway. And his father would be getting home from the downtown bars. Replacing the long heavy pole and the shovel, the boy moved through the shadow to the stairs. Through the door to the cellar, he heard the cadences of argument--threat and bellow, puling submission, the lull before flesh on flesh. Nine, ten, no growth spurt yet, he knew better than to try to intervene. He entered the kitchen and slunk past his parents, not noticing the object in his father's left hand. "But John, " he heard her say, weakly, "It's so pretty. He doesn't look like a girl. He gets it from your side of the--" "Shut up," the man replied. He spun away from his wife, young John's mother, and went for the boy, catching an arm with his free hand. Somehow he had acquired a sheet bfore commencing all of this, and he slammed the child down on a dining room chair, hard, and draped the sheet about the boy's shoulders. The girls looked on, open-mouthed, their schoolbooks and papers on the floor. Jonh D. himself gaped as well. Don't say anything don't say anything don't say anything, he said inside his head, where he went when his father got like this, or worse. He could see the man stumble a bit as he plugged an electric cord into the first socket he could find. He was holding clippers, and with a minute movement of the father's hand, they whirred to life. "No boy of mine's going around looking like a girl," John Sr. muttered, low in his throat, the breath of whiskey on him. "Put your head down, boy," he said to his son, and John D. did. The clippers first pulled at his blonding curls, and then relaxed some, a sonic rhythm taking over the moment. John D. fell into the whir, not noticing his curls falling to the sheet draped around them, falling onto the grimly carpeted floor. Then his mother was in the dining room, familiar pule rising to a breaking wail. "Oh, John," was what the boy heard. He didn't know which John--his father, or himself. "His curls--they're so beautiful. What are you doing?" He could tell by the catch in his mother's voice that she was going to start crying. "At least let me save them," she said as if to herself, kneeling to collect the shaven ringlets. "Whatever you want to do," John Sr. repiled, working the remaining stubble down to skin. Finished, he stood back to check his handiwork. The boy had no hair. He seemed to understand this, a numb fact, that the hair would grow back again, and that he might have curls, or he might not. As it emerges, he grew a thick thatch of jet black, like that of both of his parents. His fear of the furnace dimmed down to air, but the expression in his eyes, grim, resigned to something he would never articulate but instead feel deeply for the rest of his years. His eyes, though--at nine, ten years old and looking like a little man in his suit and suspenders, had somehow changed. sketching, again
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
is tethered, cuffed, bound writing better than no writing at all? until his method succumbed to his eventual loss of sight, Stephen King, a well-known American author with at least three or four writer's writer's books to his name, relied on the picturesque yellow legal pad and number #2 lead pencil. what happens here, at a public computer bank (or worse, one of those places where one must pay a certain sum to use a computer in a loud place that actually does serve beverages, although not of the sort one might imagine), is one of several things: you'll get going. somehow all that loathesome background will coalesce into industrial carpet, and the various mechanisms of the writer's--or author's, if one has an agent--apparatus will begin to assume movement like a gyroscope let loose. one's internal spell-checque, if one has one, will be forgotten, as will the lessons of mavis beacon, and one will roll, perfectly, in out up over and possibly, if one's luck and intuition are feeling fresh spunk in their loins, inside the matter at hand. at its seat in the precincts of one's left prefrontal cortex, the indefatiguable editor will close its eyes and let right brain filterage drift across. unless something like gum-slopping, an RPG, or a grey-colored man bearing Lysol for his own personal use heedlessly violates one's limitations, one might produce something edit-worthy later. much later, that is, after one has had time to print out the passage truncated at fifty minutes in, via a pale bilish square: one's ten-minute warning, after which not much counts for diddly. the Lysol thing happened. i had been reading, something on asperger's syndrome, by someone who had it, which was interesting, and then, this ssssssttttttttttt sound like a crackhead hissing from a stoop--there is a grey man with long lardy grey hair and a jacket of some kind of grey color, spraying himself, with Lysol, in the library. ought to get a job at a perfume counter, him. there are rules against that sort of thing, such as asthma. i won't have the time today. i am hiding in here like about 3/4 of the people on the upper floors. though it could be much much worse and doubtlessly will be, the weather has zipped me in. how on earth am i going to tell vanessa? she carries more padding than i . plus, she will try to eat my head, fast and without the interventions of conscience, like the contestants on 'fear factor' do. she would freeze me to bone, except that i still have some ass on, and two handsful of belly. but those are not for the worrying now. i can just see myself, arms straitjacketed about myself in deep cringe, waiting outside my putative new boss's door. "Oh, boss," i say, despite having signed a paper that seemed to suggest that this was out of the question, "please let me work on the other side, or let me go to three to eleven, because that mean woman that everyone loves, we used to work in a different place together and she hates me and tells lies and makes me feel like a worm. oh boss," i continue, "i would love to work three to eleven, even though there are murderous hispanics on the street who would BEEEEEET me and burn me with their crack pipes. they would mistake me for one of their puTANa," i would spit, "and i am no one's 'ho. i mean, 'whore'. i fack for no one, you get it?" if i had a nickle for every person i ever said was 'nice'. 'nice' is practically an insult anyway, that is if it is employed correctly, just as 'sick' means 'dangerous cool' and 'sweet', 'triflingly easy'. next, a sunommy will upend the missississsissippi and we will all have nothing to worry about any more. end of story, but i just cannot stop worrying. this kind of thing makes me want to shave my head.
I've only been in on four overnights. Might as well head across the street and see about an expungement.
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rant of career screw-up, social retardate and bad references walking, all grown old
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