Drugs

14 yrs: I wait backstage for my turn to go on in Meet Me In St. Louis. I used to wander around the venue while waiting, eating beef jerky, because I could hear the line echoes from anywhere. But my Catholic high school didn’t give a shit about the arts and we performed all of our plays in the VA hospital auditorium–that is, if I got too far from the stage, sad, smoking veterans would drift up to me and start coughing and asking me really personal questions, like, “You wear that uniform every day?”and “Do you have a best friend?”

So I wait backstage as a young girl called Ida Boothby, whose time in the spotlight centers on her suggestion that all the girls eat chicken hearts. Why, don’t you know? When you swallow a chicken heart, the next fella you shake hands with is the fella you’re going to marry! Since most bourgeois comedies end in marriage, this was actually a very crucial role.

Danielle, who played the Irish maid, lounges languidly on some stacked up tables while Kelly, a boy with a girl’s name, dances around her asking her about bra sizes. Danielle was the coolest. She had thick eyeliner and flaming red hair and never wore tennis shoes.

I hear, “Yeah, and then we hot-boxed my dad’s hot-tub room.”  I had no idea what that meant, but I knew it has to do with drugs.

 

Things Held Deer

I used to think it was unfair that men never got periods, but look at this way, I told myself this morning. Unless they’re dying, most men never get to pull something out of their insides that is saturated with their own warm blood. [If you're cringing at this thought, you should probably get over it. Periods are not about blooming skirt flowers or animated martinis like Kotex would have you believe.] Imagine pulling a nosebleed tissue out of your nostrils from which you can feel, entire inches from your fingertips, 98.6 degrees radiating. There’s a reason they call pregnancy “a bun in the oven”–when the kid comes out he has been floating in pure liquid heat. Same with a tampon. It’s like a little nugget of magma.

My younger brother, if he’s reading this, is probably outwardly disgusted at his computer screen. Well, Dylan, you’re only seventeen years from being a warm nugget, so I understand your discomfort. But hey, you got your braces off last year. You wore a suit from Men’s Wearhouse to Grandpa’s funeral. For you, my dear boy, I don’t talk about periods inside some grand feminist dogma–rather, I see the tender hooligan glint you get when you text that girl from Silver Lake, and I’m telling you. Warm blood will be a part of your life some day (a day, probably in January).

Over the ginger snaps, on the opposite side of the room in one of Grandma’s good chairs, my 6′4″ brother sat with his elbows resting on his knees and called to me, “Lara, I can see your leg hairs through your tights. That’s gross.”

I said, “What?”

“Fucking shave your legs,” he said.

I said–and this is true, my brother– “Oh. I didn’t not shave them on purpose. I’m just lazy.”

“Yeah, right,” he said, because he had just heard one of the more popular excerpts from On Women and Comedy, the book I’m writing in my head.

“Why do you get so upset when I try to empower women?” I asked him.

“I’m not mad about…em–…powering women, I just, you didn’t used to be like this. You never used to talk about these things when you were at home.”

“Well, I’ve changed,” I said.”I live in an environment where these things are all we talk about.”

“I can see that,” he said quickly, with his eyebrows raised. “See, like, I just try not to say misogynist stuff. I admit it’s hard to resist in jokes, but I just try…”

“It’s totally okay that you’re not a feminist, Dylan,” I said, and now I want to smack myself.

“But you want to know my problem with feminism?” he asked.

“Yeah, what,” I said.

“A woman, or like, a girl, who’s living in…the projects, or somewhere, with a low income, is raising kids on her own, working two jobs, or whatever, and I bet she doesn’t call herself a feminist. She’s empowering herself but she doesn’t have to call herself that.”

I sputtered something vacant and liberalarts, like yeah, that’s one of the main historical critiques of the movement, yeah, but damn. I carry myself this way and correct the word “bitch” and write about periods openly, with fondness, even, but how much did I have to pay to read an article and put a label on what a woman lives every day? My seventeen year old brother has got it figured out, and I made my parents pay to affirm the same instincts in fancier language. So now I have to get a second job again to pay for what I never used to care about at home, and along with periods, the woman and I have one more thing in common.

Avoid cliches about death

I don’t know, I don’t think I can. Death is the biggest, stupidest cliche there is. It is the dumb jock at a cliche party. I can make fun of it all I want behind its back, but when I try to beat it at beer pong, it’s going to kick my ass and put my face in its armpit. True-love and first-thing-in-the-morning will cry for me in the corner, but that’s what I get.

All the grandpas in my head are in a tiny room with two bunk beds–I would say there are about five or six of them, one with a party hat at the birthday in our living room, one almost blind in his shorts and undershirt, two in full black-tied suits reminiscent of the 1960s federal government, one in August about to go to a parade, and the happiest, most comfortable grandpa: in a scotch-stained cotton Hanes who just got finished picking pasture thistles. I gave them a TV, they’re big Redskins fans, but everything else in my brain was complaining that they had it turned up too loud. They’re old men, I should have said, get over it. No, not even that. I should have said, they’re my fucking grandpa. Get over it.

It was a hassle when the grandpa in the hospital bed had to be wheeled in there, even without the TV, and only two of them could fit on it at a time. After a while they just used it as a dining table. Grandpas hum as they eat, no recognizable tune, just a few contented notes put on loop and muffled by chews until the meal is over. (Their older sister Margaret did the same thing except she rarely ate, except for chocolate malts we brought to the nursing home, and she was always humming. She made rugs out of everyone’s discarded blue jeans. When I was eight she told me she met Stephen King.) Food time is best to visit Grandpas. When they’re not eating they sit on the bed and tell the story of 1932, the year their father gave them the family’s Model T and they were elected Delta Upsilon president, seven times. Seven flawless times. Each sputter, each aside, seven times and not a discernible difference between them. It was fascinating at first, but then I couldn’t tell who was losing their memory, me or them.

Well, it was definitely them. I don’t think they knew my name. They called me “doll.”

 

You would think the 1960s grandpas would leave first, but Internet photos change all that, so they both stayed. Grandpa who went to birthday parties in my living room stood up while the rest of them were clearing their throats before a long trip to 1932. Can’t recall if I got there in time and wrapped up a piece of angel food cake for him in a napkin, or if I came later and had to ask around.

The last full visit. It was a cold day. It was quick. I didn’t smell anything, there were no colors. They had not yet unwrapped the aftershave I gave them for Christmas, still working on last year’s bottle. They offered me graham crackers, I said no thank you. We sat until dinner time. Well it’s getting dark, I said.  It was good to see you. Okay, doll, good to see you, too. Come here, they said. I came closer.  Ah, there was something to smell. Aftershave, and scotch on grandpa with the Hanes t-shirt.

I leaned down to each in turn, only six now that birthday grandpa was gone. Bye, doll. Bye, doll. Bye, doll. Bye, doll. Bye, doll. Bye, doll.

 

 

 

I hope that girl doesn’t Google her name

Another day of giving out information at the Information Desk. By “giving out information” I mean giving out tears, I hope.

I bet the name “Margaretha Blignaut” has a beautiful pronunciation in French or whatever, but in English, well, ha. Mar-gerr-eetha Blig-not. Poor, mild-mannered Marg-urethra. She has a friend in a plaid coat and they laugh together, but probably about Margaretha’s guilt in watching Grey’s Anatomy this weekend instead of knitting her Christmas gifts, like she told herself she would.

Just because I have a huge sign over my head that says information doesn’t mean I’m going to be friendly about it. The sign doesn’t say “friendly information.” I hate that eye-flicker to the sign and the automatic smile that follows. Anybody who smiles at me first, I will not smile back. Give me the chance to make you smile before you reduce me into the happy product of a signifier, motherfucker. I generally like people, but not people whose mental processes I can predict. You are smiling because you are conditioned to smile when you want things.

Yeah, nor am I the cynical-but-witty secretary who puts on a bitchy show but will reluctantly help you in any way and admit someday that you are best friends. You know, with the glasses. I very much do not want to help you. I don’t know you, and I don’t care that you’re stupid about where things are.

It’s all about the approach. I suggest you act like you have just seen me in some public place and you are intrigued by my appearance. Do a double take or something. Look around and clear your throat like my smoldering sexuality makes you nervous. I know I look like a sad sea creature, but suck it up. Want me. But Lara, you say, I’m not attracted to you and this is your job. You’re getting paid to be nice about what people don’t know and to sell them bus passes. Don’t treat me like an inconvenience, Lara.

I’m just going to ignore that and offer you some more advice. Don’t phrase things like you’re more confused about it than you really are. Like, always in a question? People skew their face like a physics class and point every which way to ask, “Bathrooms?” Are you really that confused? Or are you just performing so I’ll be more sympathetic to your cause? If you are going to perform confusion or desire about the bathrooms, don’t imitate Robin Williams in one of his classroom movies asking a rhetorical question. The most powerful performances are about subtlety. Walk stiffly to the threshold, grip the counter, and swallow before you start. Then I will truly know your desperation for this knowledge, and I will stand up and cradle your face accordingly.

I’m really broke. I bet that girl owns horses.

 

 

Scrublands

It’s starting to get colder, but I’m trying to keep wearing as little as possible. I’d rather be cold than look physically comfortable on this North Face. That would be such a huge lie.

John Lennon started being entranced by Yoko Ono when he visited her exhibition, particularly the piece that was a blank white room with a ladder in the middle of it and a magnifying glass hanging from the ceiling. John entered the room and climbed the ladder and looked through the magnifying glass and written on the ceiling was the word “YES” in tiny letters.

I’m going pour a whole bunch of sand on top of my bed until it is completely covered, like an island. Then I will make the entire floor of my room into a small pool of water. All my possessions, if they happen to touch the floor, will be soaked in water. The only viable place anybody could hang out in my room is my bed. Especially if I have sun lamp that will warm the sand. Maybe I could get some shiny, green cutouts of palm trees. Then anybody who comes in there will be forced to fall in love with me in this romantic, tropical setting.

I used to be cool. I had my moments of being cool. I got into breakfast today because I was supposed to eat and talk with a prospective first-year on the basketball team. She was from San Francisco; she told me it was going to be difficult for her to take biology classes in English because she’s so used to being taught science in French. I couldn’t help it, I laughed in her face and spilled eggspit all over myself. Then she said she was grateful to be sitting on this side of the cafeteria because she was told the other side had a bad vibe. I looked over to where she was referring–the side in which I had sat every day for two years. That’s right we had bad vibes. We were one big bad vibe over there. It was always a little bit more humid over on the South side, always a little louder, and smelled a little more like boozesweat. I used to make sure to face the turnstile wherever I sat, because I liked seeing everyone walk through the dark vortex of smoke from the grille, their trays filled with incoherent combinations of cheese and rice and chocolate milk. You don’t bring too much chicken salad over here.