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.
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.
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