“When I look back upon my life, it’s always with a sense of shame.”
-Pet Shop Boys
Preface
Chapter 1: Educated: Check, White: Check, Male: My Achilles’ Heel
Chapter 2: The Realization that Working is Bull Shit
Chapter 3: Every Childhood is Fucked
Chapter 4: Duran
Chapter 5: Duran Discourages the Time-Honored Tradition of Fucking
Chapter 6: When Pregnancy Gets in the Way of Careless Fucking
Chapter 7: Finals, Abortions and Heroin, Oh My!
Chapter 8: Wizened
Chapter 9: Paul Zebra
Chapter 10: A Summer Spent in Limbo
Chapter 11: Embracing Your Vileness
Chapter 12: College Contempt
Chapter 13: Robert and the Renegades
Chapter 14: Chase, Manhattan
Chapter 15: Close Encounter of the Matronly Kind
Chapter 16: Fleeing to France
Chapter 17: When Thinking Is the Last Thing You Want to Do, Go to Los Angeles
Chapter 18: Bed, Bath and Belittlement
Chapter 19: Riddle Me This
Chapter 20: Expectation Assassination
Chapter 21: What You Feel Like After You’ve Killed Three Men
Chapter 22: Everything Comes to My Head
Epilogue
I am mourning the loss of a person I used to know. That person is me. Who I am now or, more correctly, what I am now is a vacancy, a thing that exists only for the purpose of continuing to exist. I do only what I have to, leave the house only when I don’t run into a mirror and then talk myself out of displaying my ugliness to the outside world. Basically, I’m the female version of The Beast in, what else, Beauty and the Beast. How I came to this state is both simple and convoluted. The simple rendition is: I gave up on life when it didn’t give me exactly what I wanted. That’s right, I said life was supposed to give me something. Not just because I wanted it, but because I worked diligently and adhered to every stupid rule and convention that was thrown at me from day one. I always assumed there would be a payoff, a result that would tangibly prove I had taken all the right steps and that those alleged right steps led me to the illusory happiness that every coherent person dreams of. No such result has been provided and I now spend my days turning increasingly inward, to a place in my mind where I don’t have to acknowledge that, in the life I’m leading, dreams have been dashed, money is a constant issue, and love is an impossibility. And yes, this is merely the simple rendition. The convoluted one goes slightly further in terms of illuminating the heights of frustration and pointless endeavors.
ISBN: 9781304119315
Okay, so I know that, in these allegedly modern times, it is considered a copout for a girl to use not being a man as an excuse for not getting ahead, but it really isn’t an excuse. It continues to be the dividing force, the one unmalleable characteristic that will always fuck a woman over when she goes through great pains to be taken seriously and not regarded as a pair of tits with a magical orifice that can grant orgasms at its will, and often times against its will.
I think it will always be impossible for a man to look at a woman in his age range and somehow keep his thoughts from becoming salacious. Sure, it can be written off as the biological blunder of having a Y chromosome, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. You can be talking about something as sexless as quantum theory and it will still be quite obvious that the man in front of you is undressing you with his eyes and it’s just like, “Hey asshole, could you put my clothes back on? That’d be great, thanks.”
Anyway, the irreversible truth is that being a woman will always—always—be considered somehow inferior to being a man. It might become more latent as time drags on, but the view of females as secondhand objets d’art designed for fucking and fighting has been so intensely ingrained in the entire world culture for too many centuries to ever truly vanish. The unspoken discrimination will persist.
This is something I was unable to fully grasp until I graduated from college (Ivy League, of course, and the most misappropriated use of funds ever allotted on a student besides George W. Bush). I attempted to step into my desired profession, which was, at that time, a French translator for the UN (that stands for United Nations for those who have rightly forgotten about such an irrelevant organization). I was mildly successful for a time I guess, but it wasn’t without certain compromises. To be blunt, I cornered one of the male interviewers and gave him what was probably his first blow job. He had that naïve look about him that so few people seem to possess anymore. He could have been getting much more sexual experience with the position he held, but it never occurred to him. Or maybe no one really wants to be in the UN that badly. Regardless, I figured that as long as that subconscious discrimination against women as pretty little twits was going to persist, I might as well use sexuality to get what I wanted. Why fight the etiology of a man? It’s like trying to tell a Christian there is no Jesus: You’ll only be met with a sharp wallop to the head.
Applying to be a member of any government related institution is a larger mistake than you might think. The advantages are never quite as magnificent as the sacrifices. And the pay is much less than satisfactory. But then, it always seems that way, doesn’t it? For as obvious as my misanthropy was, I advanced rapidly within the UN, starting out with the translation of boring as fuck meetings about the economy in various African countries, which, across the board, usually translates to: Shit. I mean, Christ, I didn’t even have to speak more than five words of French to write a report on those nominal get-togethers.
Eventually though, I escaped that overt squandering of my bilingual tendencies and got a job as a political aide/private interpreter for an upper level French government official. We’re talking friends with the prime minister high up. This, unfortunately, also meant that he was inexcusably old. Because people with power and stature are always old and always lording it over you. It is more vexatious than a shopping excursion at Wal-Mart. At least with Wal-Mart league discomfiture, you take something tangible away for your trouble, like a bath mat. With the Frenchman, who was named Emile Devereaux, I walked away with nothing but a gap in my brain from the mental decay. I’m not proud that I fucked him many different times in many different positions, but I’m American and I thought sexual favors would get me somewhere. Turns out, the French view sex as pleasurable, not as a system of bartering. So naturally, in my anger over the wasted efforts, I poisoned him. For a brief time, other emissaries suspected me of foul play. He was so goddamned well-liked, they had to pin it on me, the only person who ever said an unkind word about the old bastard. But I actually felt better afterward. Like I was liberating France from political cronyism.
Criticism has often been thrown my way for touting the damaging psychological effects of working for a check that is pillaged and extracted from before its receipt. “What other alternative is there?” they ask. Don’t make this fucking monkey dance. That’s my alternative. It’s not that I mind taxes. It’s that there’s so fucking many of them. And in America, there aren’t enough sick days and vacation time to make amends for our financial raping. So it really was an insane move for me to leave my life of cigarettes and cafés au lait to return to the immensely overwhelming land mass that is the United States. But the ennui set it. The restlessness that comes with being cemented in any permanent situation for too long: You start to wonder what you’re missing. And you figure if you leave, you’ll find out. So I left. To the immensely overwhelming land mass that is California.
Of all the fifty eclectic states that compose the United States, California is the strongest contender for most fucked up. It’s not its fault really. It’s just so goddamn massive that no one can tame it. So you have a mix of conservatives running rampant in places like Orange County and pretty much any county north of San Francisco and a mix of extremist liberals not showering in places like Berkeley and Venice Beach. But I chose it anyway. I’m just not the sort of person who can endure cold weather. Sing all the praise you want about New York—it’s too fucking freezing. And no, the snow isn’t beautiful enough to compensate for the gradual amputation of my foot.
Getting a job in California, particularly Los Angeles, is not all that dissimilar to immaculate conception. It’s extremely rare and no one really knows how it happens. It’s all luck and chance, with the occasional help of old-fashioned ass kissing. This is why I ended up working at Bed, Bath, and Beyond during the day and giving French lessons in the evenings and on weekends. All of this hard work got me a studio with no kitchen in the posh section of Koreatown, meaning the area where Koreatown is just about to end.
I accepted the mundanity for awhile, too long maybe (like six months), before the traces of a breakdown began to surface. I was reading in most of the free time I had, which could very well have been the catalyst. And I was often forgetting what language I was supposed to speak, bidding farewell to Bed, Bath, and Beyond customers with, “Merci, retournez bientôt.” I’m surprised that’s not what ultimately got me fired, but I think my manager actually liked it. She thought it gave the corporate feel of the store a certain unique charm that Target just doesn’t have. Even though I didn’t really have that much spare time to contemplate how unsatisfied I was, it was always there, dormant in the back of my mind. “What are you doing? What are you accomplishing? How is this going to help in any way with what you’re working toward?” the voice would chant incessantly.
But I no longer knew what I was working toward. The French interpreter career just wasn’t what I expected and I knew of no other skill I could fall back on. It seemed to me you either had to be technologically-minded or army-minded to have a career anymore. And that only satiated the panic I felt. What had the world become? How had it turned into a place where combat warfare and computers reigned supreme and would reign supreme for the foreseeable future?
The answers to my questions plagued me every minute of every day: While I inaccurately labeled prices on the merchandise at Bed, Bath, and Beyond, while I stole bus passes from UCLA students when they took out their wallet to pay for a drink at some Hollywood bar that would never measure up to its review, while I taught the incorrect form of the subjunctive of “avoir” to one of my better paying clients (it’s fine, rich people don’t need to know anything. They’re rich. That’s about 96% of their personality). It was everywhere, all around me. The irrepressible notion that I was not ever going to find fulfillment in any object, person, or profession. That’s when I started having the nightmarish flashbacks. I gave up on reading and would just sit in my room, Duckie style in Pretty in Pink when he’s listening to The Smiths and throwing cards into a hat. That’s when the flashes of my past would bombard me. These are memories I thought I had learned how to control long ago. The memories of my “formative years,” however, would not let me sit in silence without them.
My fascination with French most likely began because I was embarrassed of how unsophisticated my family was. It’s not that they had the excuse of abject poverty to fall back on. They were simply okay with basing their education on whatever CNN told them. The first eighteen years of my life were lived in Roxbury, a city just outside of Boston. My dad worked for the MBTA (a.k.a. he was a bus driver) and my mom taught the lowest level of algebra at the community college. It doesn’t get more “Let’s do the minimal amount for survival” than that. I had a brother too. He was three years older than me. The only subject he ever wanted to discuss with me was a book called London Fields. He wouldn’t talk to my parents about anything unless it involved him crashing the car for the umpteenth time.
I was sitting in my room listening to one of those useless fucking teach yourself French tapes when I heard footsteps running toward my door. The hairs on my neck stood up and my spine stiffened. I knew that whoever was about to enter that door was going to reveal something shockingly unspeakable. My brother then ripped the door open, leaving the blood on his hands all over the handle. “I didn’t think I could do it,” he said. I rose unwillingly from my bed and approached him. “Didn’t think you could do what?” He would not answer as he was momentarily transfixed by the blood on his hands. I moved closer to him and grabbed him by his left hand. “Didn’t think you could do what?” I screamed.
He gazed straight through me. “I was riding on dad’s bus. He didn’t even notice I was on it. I thought I could just read London Fields, like always. I thought I could ignore him ignoring me. But I couldn’t.” I let go of his hand. He kept it suspended in the air anyway. “I walked right past that bastard and he still couldn’t separate me from the crowd.” I cringed in anticipation of what was coming. “I waited for the bus to go through a light. And then I ran down the aisle and threw the book at his fucking empty head. He crashed. Went right through the fucking window.”
I thought I would be more upset after hearing this, but I couldn’t react. All I could think to say was, “You have to get out of here.” He let his hand fall to his side. “I know. I just wanted to say goodbye.” He then did something he had never done before. He wrapped his arms around me, heedless of the blood that was ever-spreading from his hands to all other entities in my room. “I wanted to go my whole life. I guess killing our father was the push I needed.” I couldn’t help laughing through my tears. “You’re right. Lizzie Borden would be 50% pleased with you.” He kissed me on the forehead and climbed out the window. I haven’t seen him since. But I know he must be somewhere in London. I always meant to make my way there when I was living in Paris, but I could, for some reason, never bring myself to find him. I don’t think he wants to be found. In a way, I couldn’t see him even if I forced myself to. He doesn’t technically exist anymore. He was reborn the moment my father died. Freed from the walls of apathy my father had put up, my brother could finally live without every decision being about gaining our pertinacious patriarch’s attention.
I also don’t believe I ever forgave my brother for leaving me alone with our mother, who blamed me for the murder by default. When she came home that night, she saw me sitting alone in the kitchen. She didn’t say anything to me. She just stood there, glaring at me, rechanneling the culpability. She had been at the hospital all afternoon, waiting for them to tell her the inevitable conclusion. “Did your brother come here?” she solemnly inquired. “No.” I didn’t know what else to add. I mistakenly felt the need to say, “Is dad…?” I don’t even know why I started the question. But people are innately inclined to ask questions they already know the answer to. It’s part of our species’ inability to keep its goddamned collective mouth shut for longer than five minutes. She slammed her fist into the refrigerator without flinching. “Yes! He’s dead!”
Something within me stirred; not sympathy, or even remorse. It was just an unbridled desire to get the fuck out of my house and never come back. Why couldn’t my impulsive brother have waited until I was eighteen to off our father? Now I had to endure another two years alone with my mother, who quickly became obsessed with developing a new algebraic equation that would make its way into future textbooks. She didn’t want to see that, like human cruelty, math is immoveable. It will never change.
Since my mother was so terribly preoccupied with throwing herself into work, I would usually come home to an empty house, turn on “La Isla Bonita,” and mull over the ruin of my life. If I wasn’t so consumed by the possibility of leaving once and for all, I might never have gone to school and instead started shooting up some of that fine heroin William S. Burroughs is always going on about. But I studied instead. Even after I met Duran.
He never would tell me his real name in spite of my “So what’s your last name then? Duran?” joke. I think he knew about me long before I ever knew about him. I had to ride the city bus to school because I lived in the undesirable district on the fringes that the school bus wouldn’t deign to enter. Luckily, the MBTA felt so guilty about my father’s death, I was granted unlimited free rides for the rest of my life. They probably assumed I wouldn’t take them up on the offer because I wouldn’t want to be reminded of my father’s untimely demise. Anyway, it took me a month to realize that Duran and I were always riding the bus at the same time of day. I looked up one day, and there he was, looking back at me. I hate the awkwardness of pretending not to look at someone on the bus, so I just stared back. He smiled and went back to reading The Stranger.
After I got off the bus and walked about a block, I heard someone shout, “You dropped this!” I turned around to find Duran running toward me with my Movement CD (I will never listen to the magic beats of New Order in some piece of shit digital format) in his hand. He stopped inches in front of me. I took the CD from him. “Thank you,” I said dumbly. “I’m not sure you’re aware of how much effort I went through to get this to you.” He bent down to tie his shoe and then bounced up again. “I hope you cherish that album as much as I do.” Ignoring his statement, I shoved the CD into my backpack. “Um, I’m sure walking less than a block wasn’t that much of an effort for someone as reasonably young as you.” He smirked. “Gratitude isn’t valued in your family, is it?” “I’m sure it would be if anything was ever given to invoke gratefulness.” I noticed the crosswalk change to green again. “Listen, I really do appreciate that you gave this back to me, but I have to go.” “Late for something?” “Yeah, school,” I said with a mild tone of condescension. I started to back away. “Shouldn’t you be there too?” He shrugged. “I shouldn’t be anywhere I don’t want to be.” He turned in the other direction, but not before assuring, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Later that night as I tried to sleep, I couldn’t stop repeating his words to myself: “I shouldn’t be anywhere I don’t want to be.” It made sense to me and yet, it didn’t. If his statement was true, then why are we perpetually somewhere we don’t want to be, obeying the invisible hand that forces us to do things we hate?