American Sampler
Fredric Sinclair
Published by Fredric Sinclair at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Fredric Sinclair
Discover other works by Fredric Sinclair at www.fredricsinclair.com
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For my parents
1.
I cannot console you. I’m not sure if you’ve come to read that kind of thing. The uplifting type. Or the fanciful. I tried at various times to take on those guises, but frankly, I’m just not convincing at it. No. I tried to get the bile out and thought I could tell a story of hope. For the children, I thought. Think of the children! Well, the children had best know that hope only comes after great pain. It’s true. Don’t you swagger. First the crucifixion; then, the resurrection. No twixt ways with that. But children should be children for a while. I agree wholeheartedly. Let them run amuck, terrorizing blindly blinking adults who just want to remember when they had an original thought pass through their mind and a full night’s sleep and maybe a spot of completely reckless behavior with their private parts. Oh, but the children are darlings and some of them are blessed and some of them are abused without their knowing and some of them are abused and they know it and all of them are abusing me by being so frightfully earnest these days. I am abused.
So, I know not what to write for the children. I'm generally hurting too much to be of any use to them, except as a warning, someone for their parents to say: Oh, stay away from him and his ways…his ways lead to lonely nights at bars! So listen, then – so you can tell your children true the bastard ways of a bastard man and perhaps the ways to avoid them, although I have a secret suspicion that you really wish deep down inside that you could be a complete and utter prick like me. Yes, deep down inside, aren’t we all yearning to just cast off that inane façade once and for all, the pleasantly helpless look of kindness, the cracked smile, those utterances (Oh! Those utterances!) made at the beginning and end of meeting someone for the first time:
Pleasure! Ah. Oh! I see. That’s wonderful! Uh-huh. Well, well. Really? No. Wow! OK. Nice to meet you too!
And then, when we slyly remove ourselves from the establishment or wave goodbye and close the office door or turn to busy ourselves with a baby carrot and French onion dip – doesn’t it all just fall away, completely and utterly? Don’t you feel it inside just go crashing down from your face into the pit of your stomach? Can’t you just feel your facial muscles go lank?
What is all this muscle tension? Why does my face hurt?
For the children!
No! No one gives a fuck about the children.
For ourselves!
Hell, no. We’re adults in the modern world. We must be doing things for a greater cause, even if it's just making money, why then we’re invigorating the economy, making the world a better place, or we’re off humping trees. We have to be practical, conscientious, applicable, conservationist. It’s no good anymore doddering about writing poetry. If it isn’t saving the world – burn it. And if it is – save it from being burned. (The book you’re reading now cannot claim to be anything as remotely beautiful as poetry so you’re essentially wasting your time…or rather the world’s time, some of which is yours. No, it’s mostly the world’s.)
Charity, then?
For the children!
No. For the second time, no! No one is doing a damned thing for the children.
Freud! Sigmund Freud!
We’re doing it all for sex. We couldn’t bag mommy but daddy could so we hate him and want to kill him, but we can’t (patricide is very, very naughty) and the secret yearning carries over into our adult lives which makes us nervous and twitchy and forces us to pretend we give a shit about things we don’t give a shit about.
For the children!
No! No! Three times, no! The whole Freudian process of sex anxiety is said and done with in the first three years of development. Not for the children, then, but…
For…childhood?
We pretend to be oddly fascinated with dipping baby carrots in French Onion dip at parties in order to avoid having to LIFT up those cheek muscles, BRIGHTEN up the eyes, RAISE our voice to an unnatural pitch and…
Pleasure! Ah. Oh! I see. That’s wonderful! Uh-huh. Well, well. Really? No. Wow! OK. Nice to meet you too!
…because we want to fuck mommy and kill daddy.
I’m personally having a hard time believing one bit of it. But as a total prick, I do have to be in favor of doing it all for sex.
2.
I stare into a wall of abject adolescence.
I don’t remember being this miserable as a teenager. I was probably worse. I think they all hate me. I hate them. They don’t know how good they’ve got it. When was I told the big lie, the biggest lie of all, bigger than Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny combined? Somehow they drummed it in to my puny little brain over the years:
It’ll get easier.
It doesn’t get easier, kids. It gets worse. A lot worse.
I stare into the wall.
For the children!
I’ve taken a dramatic pause before reading a passage to the class. All of these thoughts can pass through your mind in a matter of seconds. That’s all it takes. The mind is a pretty scary place.
I read.
“Viens sur mon coeur, âme cruelle et sourde…Tigre adoré, monstre aux airs indolents…Je veux longtemps plonger mes doigts tremblants…Dans l’épaisseur de ta crinière lourde.”
I pause and place the book on the podium. I take my glasses off and rub the lenses with a tissue. This is a nice, nuanced move that I've learned from watching teachers in movies.
“What do you think Baudelaire is trying to invoke here?” I ask.
There’s no response. I put my glasses back on. A few students look puzzled. I search the room.
“You. You, there. What’s your name?”
“Laura.”
“Laura, what do you think Baudelaire is trying to invoke here?”
I pick Laura because she is a gentle, fragile looking creature sitting at the far end of the front row and I think that of all the students in this class she might actually give a shit.
She twists herself about in her seat and scrunches up her pretty little face.
“Well, it’s kind of hard to say,” she replies in her soft-as-petals voice. She pauses and then whispers, “It’s in French.”
She has a point.
“Ah, right. Well, if you turn to the front of the book to page – er – page twelve…” (There’s a laborious scuffling around) “…you’ll find the English translation. You’ll notice that the title is basically the same in French as it is in English. Le Lethe or Lethe. Does anyone know the significance of the title?”
These questions are as perfunctory and programmed as a student’s response to a teacher’s directive to Please take out your books or Make note of this date of your next exam or Don’t fuck in class. I remember how pointless and deafeningly uninspiring they sounded to me when I was in high school. The students' blank faces almost scream my memory: Significance? Significance? What’s the significance of significance? And there’s a student near the windows in the back who has learned that as long as he keeps his hand out the window and sits very low in his seat, he can smoke in class. I’m pretty sure it isn’t tobacco either. I wouldn’t deny myself such pleasures at their age, if I could be their age again.
Perhaps that’s why I hate them. Not because they don’t give a fuck. But because they can. They still have time.
“Isn’t it some sort of tool?”
“Hmm?”
“A lethe?”
“No. That’s a lathe.”
“Oh.”
“Yes…well…Lethe is a river in Greek mythology that runs through the underworld where souls are washed clean of their former lives, after which they can return to earthly existence.” Silence. “It thus connotes complete forgetfulness." Silence. "Oblivion.”
Oblivion. Ah, yes. There’s something they can get their arms around.
“Like a drug?”
There's some snickering.
This comes from a boy in a chair pulled apart from his row in the far right of the room. He’s a huge boy for his age. Not fat. Tall, big boned, football player. All muscle and bronze skin. He’s got a buzz cut and wears a crisp button down shirt. The chairs are way too small for him. He looks like he’s trying to fit into a first-grader’s desk.
“Well, that’s an interesting observation. And, your name is…?”
“Tom.”
“Tom. Yes, Tom, there’s very much a drug-like connotation to this poem. Very much so. Would you like to read the translation?”
Tom consults his book.
“Come to my arms, cruel and sullen thing…in-dol…in-do-lent beast…come to my arms again…for I would plunge my fingers in your mane…and be a long time un-remembering.”
His reading is flat and stilted, his voice impossibly deep and monotonous. It’s perfect! Oblivion never sounded better! And for a moment, I am heartened. So I continue:
“To drown my sorrow there is no abyss, however deep, that can compare with your bed…forgetfulness has made its country your red mouth and the flowing of Lethe is in your kiss.”
I look up at the class.
“You see…this man…the voice in this poem…he finds a kind of personal oblivion in this woman…and yet, if your read on…he calls their love a ruined flower…and claims that she has defiled their love. What are we to make of his response to this woman?”
Silence. Then:
“She's the drug,” says Tom.
Again, I’m caught off guard. I reel around on my heels.
“In what way?” I shoot back.
Tom looks blankly at the book in front of him and says nothing.
Well, that did it. The well’s dried up. He had two sentences of brilliance to utter and that far exceeded his quota for the rest of his life.
I begin, tediously, to offer my explanation.
“A drug can make you forget things…” Tom interjects.
“Yes?”
He stares blankly ahead again, blinking.
“But what if your drug is a cold, beautiful woman,” I ask, “a woman ‘wherein no heart has ever been confined?’”
“She’s a bad trip,” says Tom.
I laugh out loud.
“Yeah!” I yelp. “She’s a really bad trip!” I laugh again.
This is the most fun I’ve had teaching these ingrates in the several years I’ve been at it. And finally, Tom – this obvious back burner, this stoner who’s lost one brain cell short of a lobotomy – has proven his intimate knowledge of mind-altering substances currency enough to gain entrance to the genius of Charles Baudelaire!
“That’s it, Tom,” I say, nearly beaming now, “She’s a really bad trip. It’s like he’s saying… ‘I want to forget how cruel you are…but wait! Being with you is how I forget. So I’m fucked!’”
There is a deafening silence. It mostly comes from me. Unbeknownst to the students, swearing is a right reserved for professors at colleges and universities. They know it intuitively.
“Mr. Ellis?”
“Yes, Laura.”
“It doesn’t say anything about a river in this poem.”
I don’t really have the heart to break it to myself that this is a rather liberal translation of the poem and, having read probably seven or eight separate translations of it, I still don’t honestly know what the hell the poem really means. In French. That is, after all, the language in which the poem was written. And this is a freshman English class.
Comprehensible incomprehensibility. That’s what I have to offer the children. Tom – who I have just met today and will never meet again – has given me some hope of it.
3.
Three months ago, this girl down the hall left this Christmas fruit basket outside my door. It wasn't anything crazy. Just an assortment of pears and kumquats and other unidentifiable, exotic fruit with a nice wax shine on them, wrapped in tissue paper with stickers. With it was a small card with a Currier and Ives-like illustration on it of busy looking New England people doing Christmas-ey things on a snowy, late 40’s-era Main Street. It’s actually the only thing that put me remotely in the Christmas spirit. I’m a sucker for nostalgia.
On the inside, the card stated the obvious – “Merry Christmas” in bold, cursive typeface – and below it, she wrote: “Hope your Christmas brings you lots of Nor'easters!” and below that, “Regards, Suzy.”
The “Nor'easters” comment is a clear reference to a conversation we had had at the holiday party of our upstairs neighbors, Ralph and Kitty. I reluctantly, if not begrudgingly, pulled myself together for that one – dragging myself off the couch an hour after the invite time, morosely lathering up in the shower, smearing my face with Barbasol’s finest foam, brushing my teeth with baking soda. I wear jeans and a button down polo shirt, which is a dark, wine red, to try and approximate a sense of Christmas cheer. I do what I can with my thinning hair. Mostly I just try and disperse it as evenly across the top of my head as possible so that it doesn’t clump up at the expense of other, less abundantly covered areas, like when you run out of cream cheese for a bagel and have to make the best of it.
The party is mercifully well attended. It’s always a good thing if no one notices you arrive at a party (save whoever is lingering nearest the door, those bastards). People can always assume you’re with someone else, with that “someone else” mingling “somewhere else” in the milieu. Or at least that’s what you tell yourself.
I have a few drinks and make some obligatory idle chatter with people I vaguely know as living within close proximity to me. Ralph and Kitty make a dual hand-waving-and-silent-mouthed-“hello”-greeting from across the room. Oh, the idiots. I nod and smile and am about to initiate my stealthy escape plan when I eye a cookie platter looking much neglected in a particularly unpopulated corner of the living room and I think of my bare cupboards and moldering refrigerator downstairs and figure I might as well fill up on some of these morsels while I have the chance.
I munch on some Russian teacakes under maniacally blinking colored Christmas lights strung around the frame of a window. I’ve reached a state of inebriation via several abandoned Cosmopolitans, which I dutifully chug, putting me comfortably in the “I don’t give a shit” category. The party is unremarkable, the crowd typically obnoxious and roaring (why do people talk so damned loud at these parties?), I’m fattening myself with sugary concoctions uniformly emulsified with Crisco and eggs. I shrug – things could be worse. I proceed to select a jellyroll.
That’s when Jason comes out of nowhere and surprises me with a jolly and boisterous, “How’re you doing, mate?” I have my fingers on the jellyroll and my mouth is still working on two Russian teacakes. I pick up the pace of my chewing, nod slightly, turn my hand around in circles to signify Give me a moment and then I swallow and greet him.
Jason’s my neighbor downstairs. He’s an Aussie, finishing up a post-doc at Yale in geo-something. He’s a likeable guy and we hang out occasionally, usually drinking beer and playing pool at his place. He has a great set up, with the pool table and all. But I stopped playing with him once it became clear that I would always loose miserably to him. He had a rule that if you didn’t sink a single ball, you had to drop your pants and run around the table singing We Are The Champions. I’m pretty sure I abandoned playing pool with him after the second or third time this happened. A rule was a rule with these Aussies. No joke.
Jason’s with a girl, who he introduces to me as such: “You know Suzy, right? From down the hall?”
I don’t know her in the least.
“Yes, yes,” I say with my most earnest, buttery intonation possible.
“Yeah,” she chimes in cheerfully, “You held open the elevator door for me when I was moving in.”
“Exactly!”
I vaguely remember it as one remembers one’s flight number on a trip or a parent’s birth date.
“I was carrying, like, this ridiculous box stacked with all sorts of books and papers and stuff – and the bottom was falling out…”
“Oh, that’s brutal,” says Jason.
“That’s right,” I say, shaking my head in all my gee-wizzness.
It’s a rather good move, shaking your head in social situations. It can mean just about anything.
“I don’t really remember your name, though,” she says, “I’m sorry…”
“Oh, no problem at all – Joe – Joseph.”
We shake.
“That’s right,” she says. “I’m terrible at names.”
“So am I. Terrible…terrible…”
“Joe’s a weatherman, incidentally,” says Jason.
“Another man of science,” says Suzy, with earnest enthusiasm sparkling through.
“Oh yeah, New Haven’s full of ‘em,” says Jason.
Suzy has this perma-smile on her face. She’s chipper. She reminds me a bit of Cameron Diaz. Her mouth is about as big. But she isn’t nearly as hot. Not that she’s ugly. Far from it. She just isn’t flashy. She’s pale. She isn’t wearing make up. Her hair is a chestnut brown, but a bit on the dull side. Not much sheen. I don’t tend to bother myself with hair sheen, but everyone subconsciously notes certain details about people upon first meeting and it all has a lot to do with what kind of mood you happen to be in at the time or what substances you’ve put in your body or if you really have to take a shit or something. These are the particulars you dredge up much later to inform the collective image of a person and it’s always struck me as a bit frightening how unfair and superficial this image can be, seeing as the parts of the collective may have passed through a mental filter that was predominately preoccupied with something as mundane, unrelated or off-putting as the exertions of an overactive digestive system.
“Well, I’m not really a weatherman,” I confess. “I’m a meteorologist. I mean, I suppose you could call me a weatherman, but not like the kind on television…that’s what most people think of when they think of weathermen.”
Someone snags Jason.
Both Suzy and I nod as he goes off.
“So, a meteorologist,” says Suzy, nodding amiably, “I don’t think I’ve ever known a meteorologist. That’s so exciting.”
“Yeah?” I say.
“Yeah,” she says.
Typical awkward silence, during which I become aware I’m still holding the jellyroll in my hand.
“Good cookies,” I say, referring to the jellyroll. I pop it in my mouth.
“Yeah, this looks like a really great party.”
“Yeah, it’s, uh – Ralph and Kitty throw great parties.”
“Do you know them well?”
“Ralph and Kitty? Oh yeah, we go way back…they’re great…they’re really great…”
“That’s great,” says Suzy, and we both gaze off across the living room in the general direction of Ralph and Kitty the Great.
Baby carrots and French Onion dip, where art thou?
“So, what do you do?” I ask.
This is more or less a mandatory question.
“Well, I moved in about two months ago in…October? Yeah, it was late October…I just got a new job as a teacher.”
I almost choke on a bit of jellyroll.
For the children!
“Oh – that’s noble work.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“I have a friend who does that.”
“Not quite as exciting as meteorology, I’m sure, but, you know, it pays the bills.”
“No, it’s – it’s very noble, teaching…”
For some reason “noble” is the only word that comes to mind when I’m confronted with teachers.
“Yeah, I guess,” she says, shrugging, “I kind of got into it by default. History and English major here,” she says pointing her finger on top of her head like a pirouetting ballerina. “You know, the catch-all degree. I guess I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.”
“Oh, well, none of us do, really, I suppose. Life would be pretty dull if we always knew exactly what we wanted to do. Meteorology has always been sort of a hobby, really. I never thought of it as work—”
“Oh that’s funny.”
“Funny?”
“Do you hear what’s on?”
She lifts her eyes upwards. For some reason music is always somewhere up above our heads, floating like an invisible stream.
I haven’t really been paying attention to the music, but Bing Crosby’s version of White Christmas is clearly going right into “Uuuuuuuuh-yum…dreaming…ova…waaaayt …Chriss-mus…”
“I always hope it snows for Christmas," says Suzy. "I hate it when it’s fifty degrees and raining out.”
“Actually, there’s a pretty good chance this year.”
“Yeah? I guess you would know!”
“Actually, I do know.”
“Oh, do you! Well tell me then, Mr. Weatherman.”
“There’s quite a ridge that’s built in the West…all up over the plains states…they’re getting really warm weather out there…fifty’s and sixties in places like Colorado and Nebraska…I’m sure you’ve heard about it in the news…that’s what happens when a ridge builds like that…the jet stream buckles upward and over a big high pressure and then dives down south over the middle of the country…we call it amplification of the jet stream when this happens…”
Imagine a clock in time lapse, the hour hand twirling round and round…like in the movies…
“…you have an arctic high to the north in Canada as this low comes up the coast…sometimes if the high is too strong it acts like a wall and blocks the low and this is when a storm goes out to sea…but sometimes the high is weak enough or the low strong enough that northern and southern jet streams phase and the low begins to take a northeasterly track just off the Carolinas and this is when things get really interesting…”
Mountains form, streams dig riverbeds, seasons pass…
“…and by now this low is really cranking out a lot of moisture because pressure is falling at perhaps point one millibar per hour and it starts to bomb out…that’s what we call a very rapid pressure drop in a developing coastal storm…bombing out…when a low pressure does this it can actually turn into what’s called a cut off low…”
Eyes glaze over, Jell-O sets, hairlines recede…
“…and so there you have it…the two basic ingredients of a classic New England blizzard…tons of moisture getting thrown by tons of wind into tons of cold air…which makes for, well…in this case…at least a good two to three feet of snow, especially if banding sets up and…well…banding starts to get pretty technical…”
I stand there and nod, munching away at a cookie.
Suzy stares at me, mouth agape.
I stop chewing. Swallow. I feel a bit ill.
That’s when I realize that she isn’t staring at me so much as staring slightly to the right of me. Slightly to the right of me is the platter of cookies. Or just the platter, I should say. There used to be cookies on it.
“How many did I eat?”
“All of them.”
I nod.
“Excuse me,” I say.
“Where are you going?”
“To puke.”
4.
“You seem to be doing very well these days,” says Ray.
We're sitting at the Anchor Bar, a slim, inviting respite of modern day weariness where people can still buy a good drink for under five dollars while listening to the crooning of Patsy Cline or Frank Sinatra off a beat up juke box. I look at Ray over my gin martini with extra olives. We’re sitting in one of those blue vinyl, semi-circular booths they have there. I always like sitting in the semi-circular booths at Anchor. No matter where you sit you’re always uncomfortably brushing legs with someone. It makes people squirm.
“Yes,” I say, twirling my olives, “I’m feeling quite optimistic.”
I’ve just told him that my third volume of poetry would be published in the spring. I had given him a signed copy of my first volume. He must have read some of it, because I remember he stopped me at a party of his and said: “Object was a lovely poem…even though I’m not sure I understood it…” Then he paused and said, “I find it’s the things I understand least that interest me most.”
I wasn’t sure if I was to presume that he was uninterested in the rest of the volume a posteriori, because he understood the rest of the poems, or a priori, because he had only read that one poem he didn’t understand but found “most interested” him. There are many things I do not understand about people’s thoughts.
Ray glares at me over his Cosmopolitan.
I stumbled over to his seat moments ago, uninvited. I had been drinking dejectedly and alone when I noticed him sitting by himself. Seems his friend had wandered off to another part of the bar to speak with a girl. That’s when I made my strike. I’m contemplating saying something inappropriate to the tune of what a prick I think he is, but I’m interfered by a waiter who delivers two plates of cheeseburgers to the table.
“So what’s up?” asks Ray with a smirk and whatever the hell that knowing pitch in his voice indicates.
YOU’RE A FUCKING WHORE!
Deep inside, I sigh. The whole incident at Ralph and Kitty’s party has fazed me, but I can’t say this (not that Ray would care). I confess: I’m not a natural confessor. If I had continued attending Catholic masses, I may have saved hundreds in psychiatric bills and medications. Alternately, I may have ended up bitch slapping Mr. Holy Cloaks with a missal. As it stands, my psychiatrist listens patiently to my sins and absolves them with a prescription and a pat on the back. In social situations, however, it usually takes a few drinks to loosen my tongue. There’s a certain etiquette in speaking about one’s feelings. I’ve found this to be true almost exclusively amongst men, especially old prep school buddies (I love it we still call them buddies, like I always had my arm over his shoulder or something.) The etiquette is this: Don’t speak about your feelings!! But, barring that, if you absolutely must, diminish the true weight of the matter as much as possible – preferably after several drinks – through a nice anecdote.
“Do you remember a girl in school named Eleanor Mae?”
Ray shakes his head as he munches on a fry.
Well, well, well…
THE STORY OF ELEANOR MAE (briefly)
“She was this real bookish girl,” I begin, “Had those really stylish glasses with the fancy frames – you know, the kind that kind of turn up on the sides – a little pointy-like. We were in the same English class together and I sat next to her. I remember the first day of class, arriving late and there she is sitting in the front row, and a seat open right next to her. I couldn’t believe it. Why hadn’t anyone sat next to this beautiful girl? Were people blind? So of course I sit next to her and wouldn’t you know it she immediately says hello – just as plain as that. I sit down and she looks at me all bright and cheery and says ‘Hi!’ (You don’t mind if I taste a fry do you…?)”
“So, she was all friendly like that, like being friendly was just the most natural thing in the world. And it was, for her. She was one of those girls who wore jeans and fluffy sweaters and sat cross-legged in her chair. God, those girls drove me crazy. And she had those glasses. Those crazy glasses.”
“Well we hit it off right away. There was just that instant chemistry, right? So we started heading off after class to go sit in the commons and stuff like that. When an exam came up, we’d get together and study and as it turned out she didn’t live that far across campus from me. So one night towards the end of the semester I end up at this party in her dorm and I totally don’t even realize I’m in her dorm most of the time until I suddenly see her across the room and I go over to her and when she sees me she yells out and gives me this great big hug. She was pretty loaded. I don’t know exactly all the intricacies, but one thing led to another…friends of mine knew friends of hers, everyone intermingled and the party moved out of one room and into another and then the crowd started thinning out and I’m sitting on a bed in a room at one point feeling a bit woozy and Eleanor Mae…she’s sitting next to me doing her cross-legged thing. There was music playing and everything was a bit dimmed and hazy…and somehow we had gotten on the topic of sex. No, I think I had said something to her. Yes, now I remember…I said that I thought her glasses were kind of naughty…and we both laughed…and she pushed me and said that I was being the naughty one…and it was about this time that I became really aware of where I was…that everyone had left the room and it had suddenly become just the two of us…and I ask her Is this your room? Like I didn’t know it was already…and then I was like…holy shit…I’m sitting on this girl’s bed in her room and we’re both drunk off our asses and we’re calling each other naughty! (Mmm-mmm…good burger, really juicy…)”
“So all of a sudden it’s a little more than I can take, because – I remember now – get this! I had taken some E earlier in the evening. Fucking Lord, I was rolling – I was drunk and rolling and I was sitting on this hot girl’s bed. I mean, Jesus Christ! So the minute I sit back a little…you know, back on my elbows, that’s enough movement at this point so my jeans tighten up a bit and then, you know, we’re both just kind of staring at it. I can see it in the light now, the lighting was perfect, like there was a spotlight on it and it was totally unintentional. But I didn’t sit up or try to conceal it or anything…how could I? I kind of looked up helplessly at her…like Hey I can’t control this shit! And she was kind of smirking and biting her lip…and then she leans down and whispers to me I’ll do it if you tell me when you’re gonna cum. I nod really rapidly and she unbuttons my fly and I pop right out and she starts going to town! I mean, Ok, I’ll tell you this, I think this was like the second time I’d ever gotten a blow job and the first time I ever got one while rolling and even though I was drunk off my ass it felt amazing…I mean unbelievable…mind-blowing! Like I was seeing visions. So I finally laid down completely and put my hand on her head and she seemed to really like this because she started going up and down as I guided her with my hands. (Damn, this is a good burger, good meat, fresh!…)”
“So then, well, I sort of blacked out. I was so fucked up that I totally went into this trance or something. I felt like I was floating up on her ceiling looking down on us. What do they call that? A near-death experience? An out-of-body experience? Fucking shit! I’m getting blown and having an out-of-body experience at the same time! But what comes next is like a comet smashing through her window right into the room and colliding with my head because a sound…and at this point I feel like I’ve reached this whole new plane of existence…really spiritual…shaman-like…but there’s this sound…it’s sort of like those air locks in sci-fi movies. That SHOOSH! I look up and she seems to be doing some kind of tribal dance, like a possessed Indian, and she’s spitting – PTEW! PTEW! PTEW! I’m thinking for some reason she’s sucked the venom out of a rattlesnake bite and I see feathers on her head and rattles in her hand. Then I start shaking my fists 'cause I’ve got rattles too! This is really fun and unexpected. I have no idea why I’m at an Indian pow-wow, but it’s cool. Then it seems like the dance is over and she’s got the Webster’s dictionary in her hand and I think that’s odd for an Indian to have, but it’s coming right at me and BAM! She decks me. I mean, she totally Webster’s the side of my head! And she’s screaming YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE…WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT? I TOLD YOU TO TELL ME WHEN YOU’RE GONNA CUM!
"Next thing I know all sorts of shit's flying through space. Books, lamps, CDs, small appliances. And there’s this screaming, I mean, blood curdling screaming and I’m stumbling around pulling up my pants just trying to avoid all this shit that’s being hurled at me and I don’t know where I’m going but I’m getting pummeled. As it turns out I stumbled in the wrong direction so I’m nowhere near the door…I’m like at the far end of her room near the windows and I’m still just getting wrecked with all this stuff she’s throwing at me. An iron! Jesus, what the hell happened to the rattles? And she’s still screaming. So what do I do? I don’t have a choice. I punch out the screen in the window and fling myself out. I didn’t even know what floor I was on! I could have been ten stories up! I just fling myself out. That’s how fucking zonked I was. As it turns out we were on the second floor. I landed on my shoulder. Broke my right arm…and had about 15 stitches from all the shit she threw at me.”
I pause and lick the ketchup off my fingers.
“So, it was a little awkward going to English class after that.”
Ray looks positively aghast.
“Dude, you gonna pay for those burgers?” he asks.
“What?”
It appears that in the course of my story I’ve managed to eat both burgers, all the fries, two pickles and two servings of coleslaw.
“Oh yeah, yeah, of course,” I say. “Hold on.”
I get up and walk out of the bar.
Then I run really, really fast.
5..
I crouch in the shrubs in front of my apartment building. I’ve been here for about five minutes. I’m not really sure what I’m doing here, what point it’s serving. If I run into her, I run into her. No amount of crouching in the shrubs is going to prevent that. But somehow I feel that if I hide in the shrubs and watch the entrance before going inside I’ll minimize the chances that we’ll cross paths. I see some people come and go, but all in all, it’s pretty quiet. I know. It makes no sense.
The apartment building I live in isn’t huge. There are three floors and six apartments on each floor. I live on the second floor, with Jason two doors down from me, and Suzy at the end of the hall. Jason’s been away for the past six weeks doing field work in Syria. He’s counting shrubs and other small plants there. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of what he’s doing there. I wonder if he would ever guess in his wildest dreams how well acquainted I’ve become with the shrubbery in front of our very own apartment complex.
When I’ve satisfied my daily requirement of earthy, woodchip, Pine-Sol freshness, I rise from my hiding place, adjust the backpack hanging from my shoulder, brush the twigs and leaves from my pants and walk straight to the door – face-forward and undeterred – like a man deep in thought with my eyes fixed not on any actual thing in front of me, but on some sort of mind-bending and hopelessly unobtainable existential goal. My vision pierces through reality like x-ray vision through doors and carpets and flooring and basements and rock and layers of stratification and crust and magma and back out again into space. I breeze through the lobby (lobbies are really just necessary formalities, entirely utilitarian spaces for mailboxes, janitor’s closets, elevator entrances, stairwell doors; why anyone tries to fool us by decorating them with wooden benches and large, leafy, potted plants and paintings with paint applied by back hoes, I’ll never know).
I pass steadily through the door to the stairwell, up the stairs a flight to the second landing door – and this is where I cease trying to reach the hopelessly unobtainable existential goal and my vision loses its Superman powers and I’m just me again, standing at the stairwell door, rocking back and forth slightly on my heels, while listening, keenly listening, for any hint of a sound on the other side. There isn’t any. I pull the door open a crack and poke an eye out (Boing!) down the hall, first one way, then the other. Nobody. I slip through and do a little tiptoe walk to my door, produce my keys (which I already have my hands in my pocket to be ready), do a quick insert, turn, open, withdraw and close – and exhale on the other side, letting my bag slip off my shoulder and fall to the floor as I lean, exhausted, on my closed door.
I repeat: it makes no sense.
I should have just thanked her for the fruit basket the day I found it at my door. I should have just gone down the hall and knocked on her door or at the very least left a thank you note, or called her – something!
But the fact is, I hate fresh fruit. In fact, I have an uncommon aversion to all fresh, naturally grown produce. I only like the little cut up cubes of peaches and pears and pineapple in corn syrup with the one or two desiccated cherry-like bits at the bottoms of cans. That’s all I ate as a kid. My parents had stockpiles of the stuff in our pantry, a bomb shelter supply of it. That and pork chops with a sauce made of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup was my favorite meal – and mushrooms aren’t vegetables, they’re a fungus. Damn grade-school teachers to hell for pounding that one home!
So I threw the fruit away immediately and having absolutely no known use for baskets, I stuffed it in my hallway closet, along with everything else I don’t have a use for but don’t quite have the courage to throw away. So naturally, I felt a bit guilty about the whole thing from the get go, but then there was this added element that I also don’t particularly like having to thank people for things that I neither asked for nor wanted in the first place. It’s all a bit of an imposition. It really burdens the innocent receiver with the obligation of thanking the giver. I really hate that kind of thing. If I don’t like fruit and have no use for baskets, should I really have to thank someone for giving me a fruit basket? For what? Isn’t that a bit of a put on?
ANTITHESIS:
I should be able to thank her for thinking of me, for the thought, the gesture.
ANTI-ANTITHEIS:
I shouldn’t be forced to feel obligated to be gracious.
ANTI-ANTI-ANTITHEISIS:
For fuck’s sake, thank the chick, she’s hot for you, she could give you a blow job!
ANTI-ANTI-ANTI-ANTITHEIS:
No rebuttal, you have a point.
And so days became weeks, and weeks became a month. And all the time I kept thinking: oh, we’re bound to bump into each other any time now and I can just get this whole messy business said and done with. But that didn’t happen. We never crossed paths. As hard as I tried, loitering about the lobby entrance for chunks of time after work, pretending to check my mail, standing outside for the occasional smoke. What the hell kind of crazy schedule did she lead anyhow? I never saw her! Was there some sort of back door entrance to the building I didn’t know about? With Jason away, I couldn’t hope to bump into her through him.
Eventually, the scales tipped somewhere around week six. Christmas trees were long gone, abandoned on curbs, Valentine’s candy was being stocked in the drugstores – and I realized that I had failed miserably, and that now, no matter what, it was truly impossible to thank her because now, I had become truly embarrassed by my whole reaction to the gift and any form of thanks would actually be an apology.
What’s worse than thanking someone for an unwanted gift?
An apology!
This is how I have come to hiding out in shrubbery.
6.
ESSAY
By the Author of the Book
Not to be confused with an
ESSAY
by the Author of the Book
The stupidity of people never ceases to amaze me. There's a presidential candidate in the news who is defending a statement he made in the early 90s that people with AIDS should be quarantined. Given all we know now about how this disease is spread – still, he shrugs. “Ya never know. Can’t be too careful.” And people are lining up for this guy? People are actually saying, “What a great guy…clearly a sound thinker…let’s make him our president!”
Damn brainwashed, oversaturated, obese America. It really is a case of too much of a good thing if I ever saw one. What this country needs is a good old-fashioned Biblical tragedy to shake some real God-fear in people who line up behind guys who run for president and may not shake your hand for fear of contracting AIDS. And damned if this world isn’t poised for it, well and truly.
Not sure which scares me more, the fact that such a shaking up feels so imminently near that I’m not really afraid, or the fact that I’m no better than most of the world at idiocy. True, I don’t get electorally excited about germaphobe presidential candidates, but I have my lapses in judgment, probably one of the most inexcusable forms of lapses in judgment, which is the long-term lapse, meaning it isn’t a lapse at all, it’s just a general judgment loss.
Ah! Shamefaced. It’s a true, chronic, non-electoral issue, non-presidential, un-debate-worthy, worse-than-quarantining-AIDS-patients issue. It’s this damned machine I’m typing on! Damn it to hell! It has this plug in it that connects to all sorts of venues from the cyber-dimension and displays them willy-nilly on my screen at my beck and call. Too easy, I tell you. Too easy. I try and think back to days of huts and log cabins and burly men with axes and suspenders and oil lamps. Surly they had their own butter-churning brain drains. (It takes quite a while to churn butter. I know this because once when I was young, for no known reason other than that I was possibly tipped off on it, I shook a carton of cream until it turned into a thudding lump and was most proud of myself and showed it to my mother.)
Was that it, then? How exactly did old-fashioned folks wank off a good few hours? We have plenty of evidence of tortured looking stitchings in burlap. Lots of letters and square-house approximations and humanlike figures and borders. These are called samplers. You can go out a buy a box of Whitman’s Samplers, the makers of which have a grand time with the double-play on the meaning of “sampler,” as in 1.) a selection of chocolates and 2.) the cover of their box, which is a SAMPLER. Ha! These stitchings are called samplers because they’re evidently merely samples of some larger, more aggressive folk artwork project from which they’ve all become detached. But their origins are entirely attributed to women and, thus, by definition, cannot truly be the products of a good wank off.
Men worked. And mighty hard, too. Plowing fields. Building barns. Feeding animals. Making furniture. Firing metal. Making money. Keeping the books. Providing food. Fishing. Hunting. Loading guns. Going to war. Weathering storms. Terrible storms! Wearing holes in their shoes. Getting one hell of a foot blister. Maybe walking around without shoes for a while. (Kills that foot blister.) Killing. Killing men. Maybe women, too (it wasn’t gentlemanly, but there must have been collateral damage). Maiming. Chopping limbs off. Getting killed. Going to heaven or hell. Mostly hell.
Well damn! It might have been nice for a guy to have a moment to work on a blasted sampler! Not sure I see so much time for men to wank off for a few hours, even for a few minutes, in its most literal sense. And what were all those women getting up in arms about getting an equal part of the manly world anyhow? Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, stitching burlap pictures and all the while men were out there bloody and battered in the storm! Wouldn’t mind stitching a sampler myself just about now. Have a right mind to start a club!
Well so much for letting history be my guide. Granted that wasn’t exactly the most sweeping review of history, but it convinced me all right. There is no precedence for the amount of wanking off we can do these days. I doubt a pioneer man could spare a blessed minute to fart let alone check his email. Once! I think we all know secretly, furtively, just how many times we check our email in a given day (a back-of-the-mind mental tally). And I'm talking a normal, dull-as-white-and-vanilla day, mind you. Not a holiday. And I think we all know just how much time we spend on the Internet. Surfing. Ha! We give it such a sporty name. “What did you do this weekend?” “Oh, I was surfing the Internet!” Ho! Ho! Cheerio!
Now, you have no presidential candidates debating the amount of time Americans are spending surfing those Internet waves, but if it’s anywhere near the amount of time I spend online then in approximately 8.2 seconds you will die because the entire world economy is going collapse (in case you’re wondering, people cannot live without an economy…there are some who theorize that people once existed without one, but they’re possessed by Satan). I might as well be Darth Vader for all the time I spend on the Internet. It should be implanted in my brain so I can see it out of the corner of my eye. And, really, all I need is access to three sites: my email account, AIM chat and the porn site I discovered half a year ago that’s totally free and totally wrong. I need a cursor too. I can’t just mentally open pages. I have to point and click. There’s no other way.
There. So the world should surly have ended by now if everyone was as pathetic as me. But I'm still here writing this and you're still reading this, so I have some threshing out to do with just about everything I just said. I have some issues to deal with.
How is this going? Better than I thought. I'm really beginning to work some of this stuff out. Writing, they said. Write it out. Get it out. I. Me. Joseph Michael Ellis.
I am an Internet addict.
Ok. Ok. That was a big one. Whoa. I even underlined it. My hand is shaking. Ok. Keep writing. They said to just keep writing whatever came to mind. Like a stream-of-consciousness. So I have to say I'm really feeling pretty positive about this and feel that I’ve gotten a lot off my chest and even delved into some frontier history Americana and talked about samplers and women’s rights and presidential debate issues. I mean the opener was way out in the left field. But now I don’t think there’s much more territory to cover here
Except…well…now, here, I have to make a confession. This is really a pretty big one. Feeling pretty low now about it. But back there when I was listing all the things men did back in the olden days my Internet service came back up. It’s actually been down for most of the day. And today is a Sunday. And it’s about 7:30 pm now. So that was a pretty hefty time for me. So when the little Windows balloon popped up to tell me I was back online I clicked off to backdoorwhoremongers.com. So I thought everyone should know I wasn’t typing this for about ten minutes there. I think, though, that you could say this is more of a moment of strength for me than a moment of weakness. And I am going to read this entire piece from beginning to end to my Internet Addicts Group as I feel this is a testament to my honesty and a way to move forward, through the good times and the bad, through thick and thin, and to finally have some true openness and reconciliation with all of my fellow Internet addicts.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
7.
My Internet Addicts Group didn’t exactly take a shine to my stream-of-consciousness piece. Actually, they threw me out. Conflict of interest with one of the addicts. Turns out she’s a niece of an aunt of a half-sister of a Daughter of the Revolution and felt my comments on samplers and women and men of olden times were “totally insensitive to the origins of my people.” And I said “Your people!” and sure enough I felt a swelling of Irish pride that came out of nowhere, thinking of her patrician daughter/mother ancestors’ dour looks and before I knew it I was frothing like a Guinness and ruddier than a red potato going off on my rant about how HER people weren’t exactly too kindly to MY people over the Irish Sea for most of past few centuries and that she could well and take a few errant words about samplers and American history. This all got a bit overboard as I laid into the famine – well, what Irish rant is truly a rant without the famine? So try and wear your poor, wounded Revolutionary heart over the graves of the untold starved men, women and children of Ireland, why donchya? Which made no sense, mind you, because I can’t make any sound connection between the Daughters of the Revolution and the Irish famine, my mother’s Irish but my father’s British and I’m adopted anyhow – but it made her cry nonetheless.
Really, I think she was just put out about backdoorwhoremongers.com, probably because it reminded her of some such similar site she missed just as dearly. Regardless, in the end, the administrator of the group asked if I wouldn’t mind leaving, maybe go off and find another Internet Addicts Group. Well, where the hell am I supposed to find another Internet Addicts Group? On the Internet?
By now, Jason had returned from Afghanistan and I could retreat to his loft to sample some of his “sticky weed.” He called it “sticky weed," but the only weed I ever seemed to be able to conjure up from anyone looked like it had grown in some desert scrub, tiny brown turds that nearly disintegrate when touched and, once fired up, incinerate faster than knuckle hair. Not to mention it rakes your throat and tastes like you've licked a rug in a frat house. That’s essentially what Jason had and, honestly, that’s essentially what anyone had who professed to have “sticky bud." Worse, being an Australian, Jason had to bastardize the batch in a most Australian way by rolling the contents of a cigarette into a small bowl with the little brown turd and proceed to cut it all together with a pair of nose hair trimmers. He produced his bong (affectionately named the Green Lantern, because it was green and, perhaps, gave superpowers), which was, alas, a filthy little tube that looked like it had about a decade’s worth of resin built up in it. Another little trick of Jason’s: a few ice cubes in the water chamber. He was quite proud of that one. It did kind of “mentholate” the draw.
I seemed to always burn my fingers trying to work the Green Lantern, and this night was no different. Again, these peculiarities of Jason. His bong had a cone that you could entirely pull out of the chamber by means of a tweezer-like apparatus, so as you sucked, you pulled the cone up and down, like a trombone, and somehow this regulated the dose. I’ve always been somewhat of a failure at regulating dosages of just about anything, so it’s no surprise that I completely failed to master the tromboning cone and simply burned my fingers while lighting it. Unable to regulate my dose, I usually got a fairly hefty one and by the second hit would already be losing track of Jason’s conversation, which always veered to the entirely too coherent and logical variety for me to comfortably follow and guarantee any logical response, which put me in an unfortunately heightened state, he being a PhD in one of the geo-somethings at Yale and me being me.
This did sometimes present its difficulties, especially since Jason was under the distinct impression that I was a meteorologist. I’m fairly sure I told him that the first time we got stoned and mere seconds before I learned that he was a geo-something at Yale, since telling him I was a meteorologist in fact prompted a lengthy and seat-shifting discussion about his profession and the shrub counting he was conducting in Afghanistan. Apparently, detailed analysis of the shrubs in a certain part of Afghanistan can lead to vaguely important theses regarding the climate of a certain sub-region of Afghanistan, which, once proven and defended in written form, can end up as an article in a journal read and (possibly) understood solely by other geo-somethings for the benefit of…
That’s about where I get lost.
Perhaps being so inquisitive about shrubs in Afghanistan led one to be not so inquisitive about people, since Jason rarely questioned me about the details of my profession and I had enough working knowledge of meteorology from watching The Weather Channel to be able to speak convincingly of the weather with him or anyone who brought the matter up, which is, in case you’re not from America, on a daily basis.
Tonight, however, exhausted from my ordeal at my Internet Addicts Group, I don’t talk much, eye the pool table nervously, and enjoy a good yarn Jason is telling about being caught in a sandstorm in Afghanistan. Jason was traversing the Afghan desert in a Humvee-type vehicle with another researcher – a particularly appealing British-Pakistani woman who also took a fancy to Afghan shrubs and – when a sandstorm stopped the caravan in its tracks for several hours – Jason’s cock.
“You got a blow job in the middle of a sandstorm?” The injustice is too great. “My God, you get a blow job in the middle of a sandstorm on a shrub-counting in Afghanistan and I can’t get one anytime of the day or in any weather in New Haven, Connecticut?”
“It’s been a while for you, eh?”
“Thirty years and counting.”
Jason’s eyes widen and then he laughs and slaps me on the back.
“Hell, Joe, you never told me you were a virgin, mate!”
Virgin! No! Three times No! This is actually what I exclaim in a pip-squeak voice and then cough up a ball of resin.
“No, not a virgin,” I manage to vociferate.
Clearly, the idea of a man having sexual relations with a woman and yet never having received a blow job is incalculable to Jason, who spends much time calculating many things with little points on graphs. This point is nowhere on his graph and he demands a sound explanation.
“Well, listen, Jason…it goes something like this…it goes…well…you see…” (The pot is not helping my train of thought at all.) “…many girls, you see…at least the girls I’ve been with…I guess they don’t like the taste of it or something. I don’t know.”
That was a terrible explanation. I grab the bong and make several futile attempts at relighting it.
“Kicked,” says Jason and he readily begins to cut another cigarette into a turd.
“I mean…I’ve done sex…fine. But it’s…you know…it’s so active. For once, I just want to sit back, relax, spread my legs, close my eyes, and that’s it. Bang!”
“OK, I hear ‘ya, mate. Not all girls are into it.”
He’s packed the bowl and fires it up again. He lets the smoke out with the kind of relieved laxity of one having a good dump, then hands over the Green Lantern.
“Any potentials, then?” he asks in that stoned, Australian drawl of his.
My mind races through baskets, fruit, Christmas, vomiting (cookies), hiding out in shrubbery, Superman’s x-ray vision and, strangely, Baudelaire (the mind is a frightening place).
“No,” I reply.
I put the Green Lantern down without taking a hit.
“Ray says gay guys give great head. Maybe I’ll become gay for a night.”
“Why don’t you just call up a hooker? I mean if all you want is just a blow job…that’s what they’re paid for.”
No-can-do. I explain my need for a connection. Inability to get a rise from a quickie. Tried it in college a few times. Disastrous results. Once had what was later described to me as a retrograde orgasm, basically an orgasm that gets all confused and goes backwards instead of forwards. A kind of orgasmic implosion. It’s a clear indication that your boys have reconsidered the deal and have retreated en masse from the front lines leaving not a single cannon manned, sans-revolution-like.
“Sounds awful,” Jason says, rather amazed.
“It kind of feels like a little snap-bang has gone off in your prostate.”
“A snap-bang?”
“Yeah, they’re these little things you can buy for children…these little bits of gunpowder rolled up in a bit of paper and you throw them or crush them in your fingers…”
INTERMISSION