do you think you might come to california?

(1997-2000)

There was a time when I was really into the Teletubbies. I used to get off a ten-hour shift of stripping wax around six, go out and scrape the frost off my windshield and take the old highway back to the trailer, and couln't get to sleep even then, so I'd drink and watch Teletubbies for an hour and fall asleep on the couch, sucking up cheap heater warmth. This was ideal, as I didn't dream, and when I did dream, it was all blurred primary colors, which is fairly inoffensive as dreams go. I was tired, and I had just torn muscles in my right ankle, but I was jazzed, as this shit-ass job was my ticket to austin, and if I could just keep my head down, and my mouth shut, I'd be fine. The people I worked with considered me a theif, and the manager would check my backpack (which I stopped bringing) and my pockets each morning before I left, and would not let me bring in a walkman, as he was convinced I stole a pair of headphones, but none of that mattered, as it was just a matter of months at that time. I had sold off a good chunk of cds, and given away boxes of books (I've never made more than five dollars selling books, and have basically given up on the idea, as it feels wrong somehow), and had put most of my other stuff in storage.

My family didn't want me to go, and my friends didn't want me to go, but it was fairly obvious by that time that this was something I had to do, even as it started to seem like an increasingly brittle and fragile plan. I had even cut up my library cards, to make sure I didn't have any overdue library books before I left. This is all public knowledge. What you may not know, however, is that for a very short time I almost moved to California. There's a very obvious reason I would move to California, but suprisingly enough (even though you won't believe this, as I'm fairly certain that I've lost your trust forever by this point) she was not my main reason, as it was obvious to me that I had to have more there then being some other girl's imaginary friend. The premise, ultimately, rested on years of promises to move out there, on cheap goads by a friend of mine that I'd "never make it out there", and primarily on the notion that if I was gonna move, I should seriously move, I shouldn't fuck around. I used to pad my pre-sleep teletubbied thoughts with this notion, just cutting myself from the whole sinking ship of my life and spinning out to some short-lived freak-out in Berkeley, after which I could have headed up the coast to Seattle, or Portland, or even backtracked to Austin, having come clean from all the annoying shit that was collecting around my hard-thought exodus plan.

One morning, after being yelled at by the manager again for missing a napkin, I asked him what his fucking problem was, and was immediately fired. I drove up to Iowa City, refunded my correspondence courses (my only way of ever being accepted to U of I, and thus get my BA), and stopped thinking about California entirely.

Maybe it's different for her now, but back when I was still living in Hudson she had these tremors in her hands, when she tried to hold things, like a fork or a pencil. Because of this, she had trouble signing her name, and thus did all these little things to avoid doing so that you'd only notice if you spent a lot of time with her, which I never did, or if you watched her very, very, closely, which I did as often as possible. She didn't have a credit card, and typed her letters, and signed yearbooks when we graduated with her thumbprint.

I used to see her on ads for a local restaurant, where she walked with practiced poise among tables and staged patrons, smiling. I saw her at Dick's one night, hanging out with some older friends, and I walked up to her and talked to her for the first time in years, during which I asked her for her autograph, as a lark, without even thinking about it. She actually tried, until finally I told her I was only kidding, at which point her friends were pointedly not looking at me, and I left, and didn't go back into Dick's for months.

I've got a videotape of a My Waterloo Days parade my folks made, as my little sister was doing marching band that year, though we've scoured the tape a few times and none of us can see her, can even see her clarinet section, as they must have been talking to Annabeth Gish while her class passed the grandstand, but I saw her, Ana and I saw her, and as we were both really horribly drunk we cheered incredibly loudly, which she heard, but didn't know it was us until later, when we were watching the tape, as you can see us, her and I, standing by where that one restaurant was until it burned down a couple years ago, though you can see the camera pan hard left really fast, as Ana flashed her tits at the cameraman, and we ran off to the riverbank, where we sat on the thin cement walkway that runs along the floodwall, and she laughed, and I laughed, but I was distracted.

I got a postcard from Seth about a week ago. Ana sent him all the ISC stuff that Josef mailed off before he killed himself, as she had no use for it, didn't want anything to do with it, so Seth's been sorting through it all, all emptied out now that he can't get back into school and what with the circus disbanded after they found Lawrence, so he's got a lot of time, and needs a rock to tie his string around, so to speak. He varies between thinking it's some kinda story, and thinking it's just garbage, one last dump. Next week he starts work at some hotel down by the river, where apparently it's still all flooded down there, and I guess he's getting evicted. It's kinda blurred at the bottom, and I can't quite make it out, and I'm done trying to guess at what other people mean.

In HEB, just now, I went up to the first checkout lane and stood behind this stunning punk-rock asian girl with blue streaks in her hair who was buying nothing but gummi-worms and beer, and I thought to myself, I could make that woman happy for the rest of my life.

tranquilized

Man-traps, like the discarded jawbones of iron sharks, covered the floor and the walls and the ceiling, the crooked and corkscrewed spikes glimmering a thick veridian in what little light snuck into the hall from the vegetal neurotoxins smeared across every surface by the soldiers who took this place in order to build a fortress against the tide of time, a place to keep safe an endless investigation of a single now pulled out and exploded so that every hidden crevice of that one isolated moment could be investigated, sifted, weighed in the hand and the eye and the mind.

fuckery

we were drunk. you were going to teach me how to walk on glass. i was afraid, i didn't want to do it, but we had an agreement; you could break this fear in me if i gave myself over to you, and later, i'd be able to taste it in the back of my throat when i broke you down, taste it like cottonmouth, taste it like coke drip. i was still afraid. my life seemed perfectly normal, if dull, until that point. we had been skirting this issue for years. you used to dare me, staring out over blank slates of corn and soybeans, to cut my palms open, to leave bloody handprints on your body. i was afraid of you. my teenage histrionics left me open to infection and pre-fabricated role playing, left me set for thrown fists and pre-dawn phone calls. i realize now that i was never smarter, that i was always this stupid, and it is the cold center of my ignorance that i choose to make the past and not the future my forum for change. you were pushing me with word and hand, you forced the situation. i pulled my shoes and socks off, sick through my body for doing the thing i knew not to ever do. the information of the glass entering the soles of my feet meant as little as musak at the mall, crossing the threshold, violating boundaries. in the center of the glass was a hole. the night being moonless, the lights of my car shining away into the trees and milkweeds, i could see nothing but the blank space. i knew if i did this that this would be all i would ever do. i remember, after you left, searching my sheets for stains so as to have something to remember, to file away, and finding none. the blood vessels in my eyes pounded from gravel-dust and too little sleep and too much cheap speed. i couldn't, and still cannot, remember the last time i dreamt. my knees bent, after fighting me for what seemed like days, finally giving, and i was over the hole. the only thing i could taste was vomit. you lied to me. you lied to me. i will never forgive myself. i held out my hand. there was a pain in my lungs from holding back sobs and heaves. you knew. you always knew. that i was too much the coward to turn against myself. i knew this was real. i put my hand into the hole. my pulling back my fingers into a fist was as much defiance as i could muster. and i reached deeper into that hole. and deeper. and deeper, until
i heard something click.

essential

It had allofasudden gotten all summery, the night getting shorter, the stars blurred by the humidity in the air, drifting up off the tarpaper and the asphalt. We were sitting around the kitchen table at her apartment, drinking some local beer and staring at everything but each other through sixty watts of yellow electric light. It must have been around two, because I could hear the train creeping along beside the river, here to Saint Louis, coming in through the windowscreen above the television. I was making Rorschach shapes from the stains on the floor and she was watching the flightpath of a moth, tracing a jangled flittery line across the perimeter of the room. The refridgerator hummed and the Kamikaze Brothers, one floor down and to the left, were shooting cockroaches into clumped brown paste along the baseboards of the living room with pellet guns they stole the night that truck overturned down the street, by the empty Hy-Vee. The fan had broken at some point and had its head taped back onto its body, quietly buzzing and feebly pushing air around. She kept putting the ends of her hair into her mouth. I was wondering how much longer it would be before Star Trek was on. Finally, she said "I guess you know what time it is." I had no idea what time it was, and looked up at her broken cat-clock out of habit, and guessed at two-fifteen. "No," she said, "it's time you and I switched skins."
She went over to the drawers just beneath the toaster oven and got out a foot-long carving knife, which she set on the table before getting herself another beer from the case on the floor. "I guess I should start, then, if you don't know how to do it. You wanna get a couple towels out of the laundry basket?"
I was getting nervous, but for some reason I can't remember now I wanted to wait this out, see where it went before I did anything. I got the towels, took a leak, and came back to the kitchen table to find her out of her clothes, all heaped on the couch, trying to figure out where on her body to start cutting. "It's best to do it in one cut, otherwise you get seperate pieces and something gets lost and its just a mess."
"Well now, wait a minute. How is it I'm gonna be able to, like, fit in your skin? I mean, I'm a big fat load and you could probably squeeze yourself in the icebox if you wanted. I mean, there's this size thing. Y'know?"
"Well yeah but skin's super-flexible, I could so easily fit over you but you, hmm. No, I think it'll work out fine. I mean, it's not forever or anything. Bring the towels over here."
"Isn't it time for Star Trek, though?"
"We can do this and watch Star Trek at the same time."
"You sure?"
"Hell yes I'm sure. Now hop to, get me another beer and put those towels down there on the floor."
Which is exactly what I did.