Category Archives: Me
What are you reading?
I lifted my eyes to meet hers.
I could tell by the way she deliberately leaned over the bar to place my glass of designer vodka Just So that she wanted a large tip. You learn quite early on in life not to look down a stranger’s shirt when she entices you to do so. You learn later on that there’s no practical reason to do that anyway.
Nothing. See? I showed her, because even I didn’t really believe me. For the past two weeks, I had been coming here every Tuesday after work to sip expensive vodka and sit and stare at one particular blank page in a book of blank pages.
She smiled awkwardly and sorta went away (because why would she not?). I went back to my blank page.
………………..
She returned to my side of the bar.
Here, she said. Write something meaningful and important.
I lifted my eyes to take the pen from her hand. She smiled in a meaningful and important way this time, maybe, and then went away again. I thought for a moment before pressing pen to blank page.
The ink was blue. Like her eyes.
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She came over to give me a rose that wept Ambien tears because, she said, it would help me sleep. Which I hadn’t been able to do for quite some time. It was blue like her eyes and thorny like her soul and smelled good like her body during the winter.
She hadn’t been sleeping either. I knew because neither countless layers of make-up nor looming “cosmetic procedure” could hide the tired in her eyes. It was always the same nightmare that woke her up: acid thrown on her face by a bitter lover, and a lifetime under a burqa and sex with blind men.
The person that throws acid on my face is you, K. Her therapist apparently helped her figure that out, because last I had heard his identity was still a mystery. But I always had my suspicions.
(I didn’t tell her that the same dream was preventing me from sleeping. But in my version she throws acid on her own face and demands that her lover gouge his eyes out as “a testament of [his] love for [her].”)
She left and I ate her blue rose.
Then I went into the kitchen to find an icepick.
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I woke up in a bag of cocaine.
Endless white dunes of addictive sand–coarse against my skin, but also soothing in the way that cocaine is. Like swimming in money–unpleasant, probably, but the idea feels good.
I propped myself up on my elbows. There was a woman sitting cross-legged at my feet, a woman whose blue eyes were bluer because we were imprisoned in white and whose body seemed to be an unsustainable fantasy masking a grotesque reality, I thought.
Where am I?
In a bag of cocaine.
I was worried, and she could tell–as though she had been my lover for many years and knew my expressions and silences and gestures from countless moments of trial and error. Her eyes were familiar, maybe.
Relax. Other than the occasional nosebleed, it’s not that bad here. Just don’t get the cocaine wet. You know what happens when cocaine gets wet, right? It gets angry, sticky, and inhospitable. It’s also really expensive.
The woman uncoiled her legs and climbed on top of me. Pressing her lips to my ear, she whispered something in a voice used to whispering enticing things to men.
I began to sweat, and the ground began to quake.
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As I tossed the smoldering Hallmark card into my kitchen sink, I thought back to that crazy girl K told me about.
Does this make me crazy, I wondered, as I watched the flames eat away at the image of Sleeping Beauty that adorned the front of the card. Certainly not. K’s crazy girlfriend set things on fire to prove a point to K, I rationalized, while I am burning this card to prove one to myself.
The card curled and crumbled into an unseemly mess and I found myself wondering what would happen to Sleeping Beauty now that her beauty was gone. Would the prince still want to kiss her? Would she sink into obscurity because, to paraphrase some feminist scholar, every woman knows that she is an unspeakable failure if she is not beautiful?
I doused the remaining flames.
……….
The next morning there was no trace of the Hallmark card. Does this make me crazy?
(Several years later I would hear the story of a burn victim who walked into a plastic surgeon’s office and fell in love with the doctor, who worked painstakingly on making her beautiful. Once he succeeded, he, too, fell in love.)
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She was my favorite client. She wasn’t very pretty and her body was grey with age, and what she asked for was creepy. But she never tried to touch me or to get me to fuck her in weird ways.
K and I would compare stories once in a while. He would go on about So-and-So demanding him to do Such-and-Such. I had rival stories, and I shared them with enthusiasm, but I always kept her and her request to myself.
The first time she asked me to drink her urine I thought she was joking. Then she pulled a jar out of her Bottega and handed me $800, double my hourly rate.
She came every Wednesday. And every Wednesday she pulled the same jar out of the same Bottega. And every Wednesday I drank her urine for $800.
She came yesterday. I drank her urine.
I’m going to die tomorrow, she said, after I was done.
I know, I replied.
She wanted to know how I knew. So I told her I could taste it in her urine.
She wanted to know what death tastes like. So I told her death tastes like many things, but her death tastes like tears.
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K showed up wearing a new Alexander McQueen belt. (Everything else he had on was dumpy, but his belt was nice.) He refused to look at me or even talk to me. He smelled good, but he was in pain.
K liked pain. He devoted himself to it. The things he did to his body, the things he did to mine–pain was his “affective medium,” as he put it once in that way he puts things. But this pain was different. There was no pleasure here–aesthetic, sexual, whatever. What he was now experiencing was the dull, throbbing pain of heartache, the kind of pain that has no purpose, the selfish kind of pain that is only of and for itself.
He might later tell himself that he will learn from this pain, that it has taught him to never get involved with someone like me again, or that it has taught him things about himself because if he wasn’t how he is none of this would have happened. So it is not pain without purpose, after all, he might tell himself.
But that would require him to speak.
And I need to leave soon. I have things to do.
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I sent a glass of vodka over to the woman like they do in the movies, primarily because she didn’t have a drink in front of her but also because men do those things hoping for sex. She was sitting at the bar in an expensive dress probably purchased by a guy no longer around. The bartender set the glass down in front of her and gingerly gestured my way while saying something appropriate. The woman said nothing and neither did she raise her gaze from where it was–down. The bartender shrugged her shoulders and went about her business.
The woman took the glass in one well-maintained hand and with eyes still downcast poured it [the glass of vodka] out all over the bar top. She then set it [the glass empty of vodka] back down in front of her. What she did next was odd: she rose from her bar stool, unzipped her dress, and let it fall from her shoulders. She was wearing Agent Provocateur; I could tell because I once bought the same matching underwear set for a girl no longer around.
She turned and walked away from the dress at her feet and also, from me.
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23:26……….
I didn’t know what to do until midnight. So I began making shapes out of the sleeping pills I had dumped out all over my table. I made a heart. I made a pig. I made an OM symbol. I made a beautiful woman. Why I chose midnight, I didn’t really remember. Probably to prove some sort of postmortem point to myself.
I waited. And I closed my eyes.
23:31……….
Hey. What are you doing? I opened my eyes kinda.
It was the woman. I told her I was waiting till midnight. She asked why, and I tried to explain that I really didn’t know anymore.
You’re going to change your mind if you wait. Just do it now.
Her voice was feminine, but also measured and mildly coercive. She seemed upset, though because she was made out of oblong sleeping pills it was hard to read her expression.
I told her I wanted to wait till midnight.
Just do it now. (I refused.)
23:35……….
If you do it now I’ll give you a blowjob. (………….)
I gobbled her body, washed it down with vodka, and unzipped my pants. I’m not sure if she ever followed through.
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The same four people continue to come to my funeral no matter how many times I die.
The man with the elk tattoo on one of his arms. The woman who’s prettier than your wildest dreams. The other two who aren’t really worth mentioning.
At my first funeral the man with the elk tattoo on one of his arms sat in the back of the church and the woman who’s prettier than your wildest dreams sat in the front. But with each subsequent funeral the man with the elk tattoo moves a little closer to the woman who’s prettier than your wildest dreams as though he isn’t doing it on purpose. He likes her because she’s prettier than your wildest dreams–which is a weird way to describe her beauty but whatever–and that’s really all men care about. She could be a wicked individual; she may have killed me for all he knows.
I don’t want him to go near her because I don’t like him and it bugs me that he’s doing that (it also bugs me that he keeps coming to my funeral). But if I keep dying because she keeps killing me, maybe I do after all.
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Which one am I, again?
I couldn’t remember without a glance at the date on my watch: the twenty-first.
I typically didn’t tell them what I was doing because even to me it seemed both overdetermined and creepy if I thought about it for too long. But for whatever reason I decided to tell this one and, even more startling, she still followed me back to my room after I did. It was probably the bedroom psychoanalyst in her–the same one that spoke (confidently if incorrectly) of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection at the hotel lounge, the same one that would probably tell her friends about me and my twisted mission, the same one that probably had her own hang-ups about sex (they say that people who fuck around tend to fuck people who have fucked around and that’s all kinds of gross when you think about it) and was trying to understand something about herself vis-a-vis her encounter with me; that’s probably why she came back with me.
She didn’t say anything else. And neither did I. We had sex and she left.
Nine more days in June.
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I just loved her in that dress, she said, referring to the little black number that Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She seemed so sure of herself as she sat there on my bed, wrapped in my comforter, explaining why she began calling herself Chanel.
I never did find out her real name, for she hurled herself from my veranda shortly after the conversation in question, leaving my comforter piled on the floor and her earrings on my headboard.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was a Givenchy dress.
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Where to begin? I love you.
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You said you were going out to make a snow angel.
You asked if I wanted to join you. I wanted to, of course, because you look so cute in winter wear and because I love you. I refused, however, because I was mad at you.
I lost track of time.
When I looked out the window, I saw your snow angel under the willow tree where you had refused to marry me. I didn’t see you, however, in your snow angel.
I went downstairs and out the back door. My love? There were no footprints in the snow. Only your snow angel under our tree.
I walked out to your snow angel and prostrated myself inside it. It was warm and smelled of your perfume. I closed my eyes and let the cold eat at my body.
I walked out to your snow angel the following day and took up residence inside it. It was still warm and still smelled of your perfume.
Again the next day.
…
Your angel has begun to decay. It is dirty, unshapely. But still it is warm and possesses your scent.
When it is gone, will I have lost you?
Spring is coming.
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Dearest:
A girl was wearing your perfume today. I wanted to punch her in the face and kiss her on the mouth, though in what order I don’t know. Then I wanted SuperMan to spin the world in the wrong direction (he can do that) so that we would have one more chance to do things right, because when he spins the world in the wrong direction we can do things like that.
When I turned to look at the girl, she was gone. How appropriate.
(Generic Valediction),
K.
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My shadow turned red today. Well, I noticed today that my shadow was red, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it turned red today. You know?
I wonder why. Maybe I’m dying, or maybe I’ve got super powers now, or maybe I’ve finally gone mad. Nobody else has noticed, but nobody ever notices the shadows of others; they only care about their own shadows.
There was that girl I knew whose shadow has horns and a forked tail. I wonder why…
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When I was small I wanted to study viruses. I was intrigued by the ways virus reproduction results in the death of the infected cell. A virus typically uses the DNA of its host to replicate, essentially feeding–indeed living–off of the host until it is dead. Fascinating.
Then I met her. And suddenly I didn’t want to study viruses anymore.
Viruses often look sorta like Bloopers from the original Super Mario Bros., but more angular and mechanical and with a head shaped like an icosahedron rather than an arrow.
She was much prettier than that.
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That dog on that side of the fence wants nothing more than to be on this side of the fence, for on this side of the fence my dog and I play happily while on that side of the fence that dog watches enviously. That dog has thus begun digging a hole under the fence so that he can come to this side of the fence. Sometimes that dog digs for hours on end, fixated as though on drugs. Other times that dog does not care about the hole he is digging, and so I dig it for him. I hope that dog finishes his hole soon so that he will join my dog and me on this side of the fence. I hope, too, that that dog’s pretty, waify owner will come looking for him.
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Asked what I fear most, I responded, People on stilts. Asked why, I responded, Because they do not get stuck in the mud.
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I see her when I dream–standing over me, whispering sand into my ear. There are pictures–always the same pictures–in the sand she whispers: a frowny face, a ballerina, a boxer, a wilted flower, torn lingerie, a cup of coffee, a novel, a photograph, tea leaves. They mean something, though I pretend not to know. Then the wind comes in through my window, exsanguinating the pictures and their unacknowledged significance. I wake to find sand in my ear and a ruined castle on my windowsill.
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We sat in Starbucks and stared out the window at it (Starbucks is always across from grand things and grand places). I know what’s wrong with the Japanese, she said. That. She gestured with an icy nod to the menacing fortress outside. That’s the imperial palace, I said, finally satisfied that my PhD in Japanese studies was coming in handy, the emperor lives somewhere inside. She smiled. Exactly. It’s the absent center. I glanced at her Chanel bag, and then at the Gucci one held by a woman sitting nearby who was pretending not be to listening to our conversation. I then nodded deeply in understanding. It started to rain and the imperial palace began to dissolve. She frowned. Can we stay until the rain stops? I don’t want my bag to get wet.
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K told me over wine and pasta and dim lighting that he no longer met people on the internet for sex because, he said, it was just too easy that way. What he was doing with me, then, was baffling. We ate, drank, made empty eyes at one another before going back to “[his] place” to, I thought, have sex despite his declaration that he no longer did such things. Instead, he sat me down on his couch and told me the difference between rich and poor people. Rich people, he said, and I mean real rich–the people with the word foundation after their names, the people who are not seen–they care only about dynasty. He then led me by the hand out to his garage, where I found one of the royals bound and gagged and naked and cold. I recalled the reporters who solemnly spoke of abduction.
Then K and I had sex.
In a practiced manner I gathered my things and said Thanks and made toward the exit. In a soft voice, he called from his bedroom, You can’t leave.
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I wore a jacket on that cold day rather than a coat. It had a Chicago Bulls emblem on it and I just so happened to like professional sports back then. The tall, blonde fellow who signed up to take kids like me out, to show them how to do guy things like pick up girls and shoot guns and punch hard, asked if I wouldn’t rather wear a coat. I refused in childish insolence.
The rich woman standing in the corner of the record store would notice immediately–the tall, blonde fellow and I were obviously not related; it was cold out and I wasn’t wearing a proper coat. When I was looking for a CD she would approach the blonde fellow. Was I poor? Did I need money for a coat? Before he would be able offer a satisfactory answer, she would hand him a fifty-dollar bill, instruct him to buy me a coat, and then exit the record store.
He bought me a silly stocking cap that I just had to have instead of a coat. A few weeks later he disappeared from my life.
I can still punch hard, though.
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She told me private things as she sat on my floor, this woman who came to my door unannounced, things–significant and troubling–that seemed as though they had been plucked from my own life rather than/in addition to this stranger’s. So when she stood and went silently out to my veranda and jumped off I became fearful that I might eventually do the same.
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I once had a friend who, convinced his internal organs were conspiring against him, went to the hospital to have them all removed and executed for lèse majesté. The doctor on duty ignored this now dead friend’s request and had him committed to a psychiatric evaluation where it was found that while he was not insane, he was, in fact, dying–and he had been for some time. I visited him obligatorily and he gave me the following instructions: I was to bide my time until he had been autopsied and all of his organs extracted, at which point I was to raid the hospital–wielding a sharp knife all the while–and demand access to his dismembered body, whence I was to stick my knife vengefully into his stomach, his spleen, his liver, his duodenum, his pancreas, his kidneys, and for good measure his testicles, which were not necessarily internal organs but deserved a good butchering nonetheless. I failed to do as he asked, and I wonder if he no longer deigns to be friends.
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Seven inches at least, with a two inch platform. Sparkles. Straps. Very expensive. I stared. The tubby saleman came over and asked if I wanted to try them on. I looked at him quizzically and replied I am imagining them on a woman, or a woman on them, rather. He then dutifully directed me to a pair of black high-topped Converse, which I then dutifully purchased. My dog later chewed them up because she is bored and lonely. Maybe I’ll begin gnawing on them tomorrow.
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