Toiletries

You should never go into the first stall! Jamie wipes her brow, as if letting me in on this top secret knowledge has taken everything out of her. I am in awe of how much this woman perspires.  

They did a study and most people use the first stall... she eyes me proudly.

Ok but wouldn't everyone presume that and use the second? I mean, I would think that most people avoid direct contact to the general public and there is only ONE tiny unfinished wall between you and the rest of the bathroom goers!

I exhale deeply, shocked at how consumed I am about a subject I never thought about before. I like germs. I'm from New York. I believe that a healthy amount of immunity dosing keeps the plague away. I sit back pleased with my self and steal one of her smokes without asking. She buys non menthol just so I can bum one or two a night. She's the nicest person on the other side that I have ever met.  Jamie sits back and stares at the lightning over the Florida Keys. It's the only thing I like about this place.  We have settled into the "Florida Room"- which makes me giggle every time I enter the door frame. I can hear my grandpa saying it in his Brooklyn accent,  the Fla red dah room.  

I'm thinking this while staring at a baby scorpion on the other side of the screened window when Jamie yells excitedly:

You're right, which is why I always use the third! 

Jamie throws her cards down that she's been mindlessly shuffling. She waddles over to the kitchen and pulls out a giant pack of frozen tater tots from the fridge. That's the healthiest thing I've seen her eat in 3 weeks. At 5'3" she weighs about 300 lbs. She is as tanned as a Naugahyde purse and always matches her eye shadow to her shoelaces.

Allow me to rock-n-roll backwards. Three weeks earlier.  It was raining like g-d was angry.  I'm in the drivers seat with the engine still rolling. The Prius (privileged bitch) is shaking like an old man after having let out an angry rant. I just drove for 15 hours straight from Cleveland.  I'd never been to Ohio before, this was my first time on my last stop before hitting home.  Two months earlier I had sold almost everything I owned, including my Gran's tiled brass table. We had that table in our lives since I was born. My sister yelled at me for weeks as if I had given away our dowry. I took the table to LA along with a whole list of costly unnecessary items. That table surpassed memory's virtue: heavy in it's brass and plaster hardiness - it took great skill and aid to move it about. When we were little we would stand on top of it and dance around in the dark to the Bee Gees and Asia. It had a black, white, and gold tiled top. It was glorious to run your fingers on. It felt so real and tangible. It went to college with me. I think it had been in every one of my grandmother's children's houses. It was the closest thing I guess to a family heirloom. In it's crevices were weed, tobacco, sparkles, barley, staples, dust, blush, glue...endless crumbs of digestibles and decorations.  Sometimes Sister and I would shut the lights out in the basement. We'd put on all white. We looked like Branch Davidians. We'd turn on the record player.  One of us would run around and dance while the other watched.  Completely substance free, we marveled at how the white clothed figure flashed about like a dash of light, even in the dark. Perhaps this was the first time I fell in love with light.  I always picked the ladies: Blondie, Joan Jett, Nina, Heart. I would bounce atop that table like I was trying to break through. It held me, immutable, stable, it was always there.

As I counted up the wad of cash I made on my sale - I felt giddy with freedom. I was heading back home, everyone would know. I failed. But I was going to go on an adventure before moving back to my childhood bedroom and starting once again. I felt winded every time I thought of it. So when the antiques store dealer (unbeknownst to me) rolled up with $500, I held out my hand and smiled.  Moments later as she expertly rolled it into the back of her old Jetta, my pal elbowed me in the rib:  That lady owns that old furniture store on Silverlake Road. She is going to sell that for thousands. Swindled.  Good thing Grandma died 4 years ago.

Selling from the front yard of my landlord's house, I managed to make a killing.  I fit the rest of my stuff into my car and took off for Joshua tree with my best and oldest friend Ri. We traveled all over the southwest until we got to Colorado where my next childhood friend would take the baton and drive me through the mid-west with me. Then he would leave me in Chicago where I hung out for a while bouncing around some couches until I ran out of cash. I would save the gas money and charge home to my parent's house in Staten Island and that would be the final punctuation to my journey across country, leaving my failed attempt to leave my life behind me...well -behind me.

In the driveway- I could barely breath. I could smell the mothballs in the closets that were once mine but now were stuffed with my Dad's sweaters. I could hear the staccato'd yelps of their names as they called across floors to bother each-other with nonsense. Old age had turned my folks into cliches. They seemed squeezed of any original personality or vibrancy. They threw in the towel and surrendered to their crotchety fears and now I had to sleep under the mothball smelling blankets and cover my ears with the pillows as they screamed above the TV to hear each other.  There was also never any food.  There were condiments, hot chocolate mix, Pelligrino, frozen meats, and dried pasta boxes. Rotting onions and garlic littered the baskets above the sink. Stinky cheeses resided in a box on the bottom of the fridge and strange processed frozen deserts piled up aplenty in the freezer. Their entire diet was laced with corn syrup solids, red dye no9, and aspartame.  The middle of the kitchen table housed a lazy Susan covered in aspirin, senior vitamins, Lipitor, insulin injectors... Everything was processed and preserved. The air was stale. And it was, after all, Staten Island.  My heart sunk as I heard my head say those two little words: Staten Island- the land where your dreams die before they ever form.

I was never meant to sit still. I have never ever been able to be still. I am always a bird in motion.

Leni was a friend from film school. She still believed in me. She checked in regularly.  She was slotted to lead a film program in a geeky band camp in the middle of the Florida Keys when her cancer came back.  She wouldn't tell me anything.  She insisted I take over for her. She hung up so smoothly and magically I barely believed she called. I turned the car off. I walked towards the surname engraved door and entered.
Days later I was on a flight to Miami with a cool-aid grin and the false sense that everything would always come with an escape hatch.

TO BE CONTINUED.

Dear ___, I'm sorry. Notes from the rim of the Bell Jar.

Rejection is G-d's protection. That's what the putrid smelling homeless guy uttered to my disconsolate face as I walked, ever quickening, past him to the theater. Oh fuck you asshole, I say, ignoring the 'pearl clutching' strangers nearby. I don't need your stupid adages. Is G-d protecting you now? I am a jerk.  He grins a toothless grin.  He has a special power most do not. He knows that he is my worst fear.  He has the unfortunate luck of being a universal horrible outcome, and I am shame spiraling down the slide, feet first towards his life.  I throw a dollar at him hoping the wind doesn't carry it off to some undeserving lucky mother fucker. I am so very unemployed.

As soon as Nikia sees me, she jumps with excitement.  She's wearing a fake fur and dozens of shiny dangly chains and bangles. Every little instance of her shakes and jangles as she reaches out for a hug. Nikia tells me that I am a "brilliant girl" as we push past the eye rolling 'beautiful people' couple in the seats next to ours.  Popcorn spills on his skinny jeans, and she plucks the kernels off like a mamma lynx eyeing us the whole time. I stare down the beautiful people for a moment and then I tell Nikia that this is what they all say, right before they tell me that it's not my fault. There is someone else.  Another applicant, another candidate, an ex girlfriend, a better writer... but for some eye gauging reason- they always tell me I am "brilliant." Brilliant is shiny and extraordinary. I feel dulled and mediocre.  I slump down and beg for the lights to go down so that Nikia will stop pep talking me, and I can pretend for a moment in the dark that we are all the same.

And then by the time the night is over I am drunk.  Whiskey, neat.  Me- explaining once again what has been a perpetual nightmare of falling short of what I need and bending into the awkward position of being pitiable- no one really enjoys that- ever.  I cry as my train gets to my stop. Its ok- there is no-one on the train by the time it gets to Church Ave.  And even if there were- I won't care- I have a right to shed tears on these trains. I have lived here my whole life.  I try to suck it back because now I am walking and I can just imagine the men on the corner assuming the opportunity to "comfort" me. So I pull my hat down, blow my nose and cross the street to take the long way home. My head is a diving bell teetering upside down on my neck holding little trite aphorisms like linguistic fish fighting to stay alive in my poisoned head.

You should keep perspective. You lost someone who didn't give a fuck about you. He lost someone who actually was starting to care about him.  

You probably did not get that job because it would have been bad for you to take on that big of a commitment. Maybe there are places you need to go. 

That volunteer opportunity is the most coveted spot. (BUT I CAN"T EVEN GET A JOB FOR FREE!) You can't work for free now anyway...

On and on and on they go.  Teaching me to ingest that which I can not have.  But with each rejection I start to turn back and pour over my own personal history with a researcher's eye.  Each page filled with nuances and messages that I missed before. Each moment that I could not react to swiftly enough because I was processing. Because I was hurt. Because I was insecure. Because I have never had a boyfriend. Because I have never had a great job. Because I have never been proud. Because even though this is all true - nothing pleases me like the feeling of the keys under my hands, as if magically I can figure this all out like a big mystery. If I could just stop being THAT me- it'll work out.  My memory turns to regret.  Rejection is the inseam of the jacket. Regret is the thread that starts to fray the coat. I begin to revise recent history. I'm bored. So bored. What else can I do but look for the places I messed up.

I dipped into the hometown well for love, something I never do, ever.  I'm from a petulant little island where everyone knows everyone and we are somewhat arrested in development and traumatized on some level, with the exception of those who've gotten far far far away.  I'm just over a bridge.  In any case, it was a harmless failure. On the richter scale of soul crushing- it was a 4 in facts alone.  It ended peaceably enough. But then "the others" spoke up.   I wish you had consulted me before you went down that route, he has the worst possible reputation ever... Oh that guy? Oh yeah that's what he does...he seems like a narcissistic douche bag...Oh yeah - everyone knows- stay clear of that one.  He's on a complicated journey. 

He is. We all are.  And that's not even the worst of it.  Hometown boy was on trial without even knowing it and all of these character witnesses were testifying for the prosecution. I felt awful. Suddenly a curly cue mustache was forming of the memory of his face. He was becoming the arch villain of my boring fairy tale.  I un-followed, I unfriended, I forced myself to go on dates with any harmless idiot who asked.  I blocked him so that I could not look. I felt duped.  How could I have misread someone so horribly.

I hadn't.  No one is a villain. Well maybe Cheney is, but I digress. People just make mistakes. People are on their own journey and they may make the same mistakes over and over and over again, but that doesn't mean they are driving purposely on a course of hurt.   Good people make mistakes. Heartfelt, well intended people make terrible mistakes because they can't even entertain the idea that their precious hearts could ever commit such an oversight.  So they keep repeating the same errors, hearing the same criticism and it all seems so unreal to them.   But emotionally stunted people show you their selves the minute you meet them. Emotionally stunted people can't see past their own discomfort and pain. Emotionally stunted people can't empathize with your position.  Maybe you are their type: you listen, you validate, you're patient, you try to provide insight and support...fuck- you put up with them! But there is another word for this: Therapist. Unless you are getting payed $200 an hour, you are the one who orchestrated this whole set up. You enabled this to turn into a neutered, one sided relationship until eventually it fizzled. So does this mean I am the emotionally stunted one? Perhaps.

I too committed the same mistake that I have been committing for years. He wasn't available AT ALL. He said he was practicing "being alone." He spoke so much about his ex the first night that I felt like I knew more about her than him.  He ran away from me on our second date (literally- freaked out and got his coat on and ran like he had discovered I had a third nipple) I can give you dozens of these examples that would make the hair on your arm stand up in horror over my obvious disregard for my emotional safety. I ran headfirst into another closed door and then scowled at the bruise.
But he made my brain crackle. Not many can. How is it possible that other people can possess so much ownership over who we are? So I became a revisionist historian.  I negated all positive aspects of my recent parable and steeped myself in the onslaught of well meaning friends' hateful commentary.

But YOU write your history. And only you know your own tale. Do I miss him? I miss all of them. I miss little drummer boy's jokes, and cooking and the way he grunted when I touched him.  I miss hummingbird's constant attention and overt positivity.  I miss DJ's unbelievable good taste and how much fun we had seeing shows. I miss Texas's records. I miss Florida's snuggling skills.  I miss Hometown's brain.  Which is to say- I miss their humanity, and I miss the humanity that they brought out in me. They were all so very good at what they did. They were all so very tunneled and focused.  They were all so fucking talented and devoted to their art. They had respect for their goals,  they didn't give a fuck about anything else, including me. They were teachers.  I didn't listen.  I wish I hadn't loaned out my old poloroid camera, or my signed Charles Burns book... or my projector... I wonder if those precious materials serve as faint vestiges of me. I hope so. And I refuse to vilify or dehumanize any of them for disappointing me- heart breaking as it is.  I adored them all.  I hope they remember me well.