From the Archives of a Very Dead Brother

Internal debate: One of many warning signs?

My Heart's Just Not In It

September makes a good case for reincarnation—tired-but-crisp panoramic, silent-but-rustling demeanor. I feel old tracing the contours of new objects. This is supposed to be makeout weather, but it's making me wither.

For the purposes of this blog, I'm on extended book leave. You might see me in a coffee shop, slouching, backspacing, contrabanding my banishment. I haven't been stringing sentences to my liking. Memories are in danger of being corroded by revisionists. Five weeks ago, my mom apologized for letting my brother abuse me as a child. I can't be so sure that he did.

Simply: I'm getting to a point where I will have known my brother dead as long as he was alive. I'm nearing a limit of minor authority and major storytelling; I'll turn the option to audience to determine relevancy. When People in Bars ask how many siblings, I might just cut him from the list. It will pain me, in the beginning.

Superficially: this is the third straight week my morning commute has involved fantasies of hurling myself before an oncoming train or being carried away by red balloons or being kidnapped by a schemer who mistakes my family for having savings. Something is off. I'm her anxious kid, and sometimes her grisly one, but never more than that. Never requiring disinfectant, reprimand, tourniquet. She’s overheard me eulogize, “Life is beautiful, even when it isn’t.”

It seems as if I want to jettison baggage, but I keep boarding passengers. Zealots with charisma—always unemployed—accusing me of sacrificing dreams to day jobs while accepting my handouts. Rasputins who drink my beer, make my clothes smell like cigarettes, eat ribeye steaks in my bed. Amazed at how easily I bruise. This is where I could use, at least, the disinfectant and the reprimand.

But tourniquet, I turn to quit. I wither in this weather, when I should know better. We all know better. I could afford to sit up straight.

Mass Romantic at Critical Mass

When everyone had viciously paired off—girl with boy, in bathroom, in coat closet—my crush had left because his crush disappeared—I left. I went to find my shoes, I waded through vomit on the stairwell to find my shoes, and I left. It was the 54,864th time I had wished the story ended differently, and the 54,864th time I had done nothing to protest.

..

Geoff thought he owed it to me to wipe the slate clean. “Every time she saw you in here, she told me, she wanted to win,” his confession, on New Year’s. I have this terrible habit of returning to the scene of the crime at critical points of absolution.

“How do you mean?” I ask. I’m naïve, but maybe not.

“Courtney. She would ask me, ‘Is that Bobby’s girl?’ And then she would tell me that, the times when you would leave, she would go home and sleep with him and consider it a victory, considering your popularity here.”

I just assumed that Bobby, a fuck-up at so many things in life, was at least faithful to me. I indulged most of him—jail time, drug addiction, eviction, forgery, unpaid tabs, onions from a previous tenant rotting in the refrigerator, pathologies, fisticuffs, fetishes. I shrugged bemusedly when I started getting phone calls asking for him by birth name (the calls bore a welcomed semblance to the Popcorn & Movies Video calls that would plead for me to return Dead Brother’s porno rentals on behalf of his soul). I turned my head when he ruined his best friend’s credit. But now I knew there was a Courtney and another girl named Terror, who spelled it differently. Now I knew that I would spend January 1 drinking until blackout and January 2 getting tested for everything.

“Kay, it shouldn’t bother me like it does, but it does. I thought I was the one unsociopathic and unselfish thing he had.”

“Terror, stay there. We’re coming to get you and we’re bringing you to Little Vietnam and we’re not coming back to Lakeview for a really long time.”

My head drooped in my bowl and my hair entwined with pho noodles and I meditated on the positives of coming up negative.

..

I only went home with you because you looked like Charlie Day—he’s the likeable one on that show—except in the morning, you didn’t. Your boss had announced last call and I knew I had, maybe, 45 seconds to convey my best and worst intentions; which, I swear, I only needed five of those seconds, wallflower I’m not. Even though I had sworn off bartenders, swore I was cured, I told you my name and why I was staring, and you said, “I work here, you don’t have to go.” You were an actor (once) and I indulged this, until I couldn’t, and so I suggested a 4 a.m. tour. You took me to inspect the lines, showed me the inventory, told me the names of ghosts haunting the bar. We caught a cab on Armitage, and before you told the driver where we were going, turned to me and started, “I don’t mean to be forward, but…”

You didn’t ask me any questions and your radiator made it too noisy to sleep. Your apartment was messy; you owned trunks and instruments and chairs without knowing their histories, a personal vexation; you owned books whose plots and characters you didn’t understand. You thought we were kindreds because we cried at the same two Eels shows. The only thought that stalled my morning beeline for the door, my half-sweater still half-off, was that maybe I should steal your pot. But Logan Square is far too incestuous for souvenirs.

..

Because, the rule is, Sir, that in those 45 minutes, I am not an abstract. In those 45 minutes, because my night could have wound any which way, and I chose you, I must insist that you care about the one you’re with. Even if you must lie. I can only live regretless when I know the present is accounted for.

..

“I want to make pretentious mix CDs for you.” – m4w, 23, Logan Square

I didn’t go in trying to prove that I could, connect with a peer, that is, maybe. That I could have sex that didn’t make me sad or dizzy or prompt me to count plaster cracks or ceiling tiles. I found you in Strictly Platonic. And you were good on your promises, and I on mine—e-mails, B-sides, bourbon pecan truffles, apple pear pie. It took an adorably long time for you to undo my belt—“It’s a military issue”—and you fake-snored and I thought you could be enough for a Chicago winter. But we watched a movie with subtitles and at the credits you pulled away. “I might be moving to Los Angeles this weekend.”

That is, maybe. This town is selfish.

..

I will tell you swiftly: you are not my soulmate so stop texting me. I don’t know what that word means. “It was so good meeting you. I would like to take you out to dinner sometime.” *Meeting* you. I am wary of gerunds. Regretful that I know stories about your mom, the school teacher who remarried your dad’s best friend; and your lesbian stepsister—you two are inseparable; and the intricacies of Minnesota, sleepier than I had guessed. Buddy, you have no idea who you’re dealing with. You interrupted when I tried to count off ghosts who matter to me.

..

For my birthday I wanted nothing more than to serve guests drinks while wearing roller skates for eight hours in my party dress. This domestic subservience fetish may be the salient (rather, lone) anti-archetypal trait a Type A mother passed on to her Type A daughter. I find it endearing, and maybe you do too?

A guest texts me while I’m blow-drying, eyelining, blushing.

“Is ur 80yo boyfriend gonna be there?”

I don’t know which boyfriend he’s talking about, 80 years old or otherwise. Shrug.

I text back. “He has his kids this weekend.”

..

“How many guys did you date this week?” I hang up. I hang up on Dad. I’ve never hung up on a parent—I am (typically) that mature—but I’ve never heard him drip so snidely, judgmentally, at this distance. He calls two minutes later. “I’m sorry. I know there are a lot of losers out there. I wouldn’t want you to rush into making a mistake.” I don’t rush; I painstake. “Eff you, lemme talk to Mom,” I demand.

My dad is in the business of odds, it seems. He likes to tell me when the Mega Millions jackpot is running above $100 million, and what recent karma (I think Catholics call it something else) is sectioning off his prize share. I should have leveled. “See, Dad. The odds of you winning the lottery are one in 175,711,536, whereas as the odds of getting someone to come home with me is about one in two.” Or. The sad part is that I think I’m leveling.

I don’t hunt for sport. I am guilty of peacocking, chasing boys who make me cringe, over-committing time to casualties. You are not trophies, but aversions averred. We don’t have much time! But never sport.

At the end of Raising Arizona. “But I saw an old couple being visited by their children, and all their grandchildren too. The old couple weren't screwed up. And neither were their kids or their grandkids.” I cry because I want that.

..

“How come your room looks like a hotel?” Kay quizzes me from home.

“I don’t… know?” I inflect, uncertain. “How does it look like a hotel?”

“Your bed is made. Who is this guy?”

“Oh, that’s Sean. We met at InnJoy. Total Captain America. He’s from Oregon and teaches physics to minority students in Garfield Park and bikes everywhere and lived in Guatemala and speaks better Spanish than I do and he gave me a book to read on government-assisted coups, it’s weird.”

“Sounds weird.”

“Yeah, also, he’s really aerodynamic. He has a shaved head and the rest of him is kind of hairless. I guess it helps out with his superhero speed and costume.”

“So are you going to get a date out of this?”

“I dunno. I can’t date a Captain America. I mean, how long until he finds out that I’m a complete asshole?”

“You’re not an asshole!”

Which counts, if only a little bit, coming from the roommate who punched a friend in the head while vomiting over a balcony.

“But I'm not Wonder Woman, unless we're going by my FICO score.”

..

Back to odds. I try so hard 100 percent of the time, I leap so fast for love, that it’s only natural to believe (in a vacuum) that someone would try for me.

And that’s how I found myself flailing and screaming and crying at a party (unprecedented) and kicked out of three cabs in one night at a windchill of 25-below-zero, wearing only one mitten and lugging a fifth of whiskey, dripping on and over and inside my messenger bag.

I kicked myself out of three cabs to vomit in the snow. I’m scrupulous.

The first cab let me go. The second cab didn’t want to. “Miss, stay here. I can’t let you freeze to death.” The driver clutched my palm with his right, stroked the back of my hand with his left, the engine idling. This was the human contact I had been waiting for all week. Most girls would have freaked. “Miss, I can’t let you go. I’m not saying this as your cab driver,” he intoned. “I’m saying this as your friend.”

Always was a flight risk, Friend. The third cab didn’t want to let me go, either. “I’m new in town.” Breaks off, reaches for the glove compartment. “Here, I have some napkins. I’m new in town and I’m looking for friends. Will you be my friend?”

I exit. Still immaculate, but I feel like irrefutable trash. How, I wonder as I stumble up sickly fluorescent stairs, did they see the goodness in me?

..

Captain America calls and I’m not sure if I want to answer. I pick up; I don’t bother to disguise my surprise.

“This is really awkward for me,” he begins. “The doctor said I should tell everyone I’ve been in close contact with…”

This is it. This is the end. The death of my sex life. People are never who they seem to be and there is no such thing as a liquor-logged 3 a.m. lesson learned and I need to cloister myself and, of course we were protected, but stop it, don’t look at me. Holy fuck. Bobby didn’t give me anything communicable—not after cheating on me with two girls or getting evicted or the cat with fleas or those onions that would probably still be in the crisper had I been able to go back to bed that morning without the mold haunting my dreams. Captain America, you ruined my life.

“The doctor said I have bed bugs.”

I exhale and then I pause and then I repeat his last words, alternating pitch on the syllables: relief on “bed”, levity on “bugs”...

“Bed bugs? Bed bugs?”

“It’s not really that funny,” he insists. “It’s pretty painful.”

“Oh, no. I’m a writer—this is hilarious.” I catch my breath. “It could have been something so much worse.”

“Well, I suppose that’s one way to look at it. Let me know when you read that book. Maybe we can do lunch and talk about it.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I hang up and I laugh. Just a little bit, and then a lot. Buddy, that’s the only way to look at it. Trademark guffaw, head thrown back, I can’t contain myself; I roll off the bed. “FUCK.” The floor hits hard and doesn’t care that my life has gone back to normal. Pause. Raucous laughter resumes! I continue laughing under my bed, knees tucked at my chest, feet hitting the radiator. It sounded like he had a lot of calls to make.

..

I haven’t burnt out, and despite your fears, I don’t expect to. Sad and beautiful are inextricable adjectives. I believe that, and so long as the two words remain appendages to these nighttime ambiguities, I don’t worry about me. You don’t worry about me, and I don’t worry about me either.

..

“Free Asobi Seksu ticket for victim of ennui.” I posted that Craigslist ad because I needed someone who needed to believe (again). Know that the audition was an invitation to distraction, because I can’t take myself too seriously.

The Winner, tattooed all over, in only black ink—brackets and prime numbers and summation signs. His ennui extended to writing unsettling letters to his ex-girlfriend on Craigslist and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that his muted serial killer tendencies—unemployed and roommateless and lifeless art hanging as a reminder that he didn’t matriculate; immaculately clean apartment that he insisted was dirty; not wanting to ask me to take my shoes off at the door, but twitching when I pretended I wouldn’t; a dog, Harvey, named after the Jimmy Stewart film—turned me way, way on. Loneliness packaged in pleasantry—“we’re the hottest people here”; “you’re wise beyond your years”; “I can’t thank you enough.” We ended on a “see you soon,” a beautifully sad see-you-soon, him in boxer shorts and me bounding to Casual Friday in a recycled, off-the-shoulder, ripe with Empty Bottle beer-and-hipster stench, and me being the one of us two who actually believed it.

I thought I learned my lesson, but I drank half a bottle of Bushmill’s just to make sure.

..

I spend my days alternately wanting greatness and praying I am swallowed by the jaws of dark matter. It will take a special person to understand my desires to be both famous and infamous. I am self-aware; I know how to read for comprehension, how to write for an audience. But these are compromises, not avenues.

It was the 54,865th time the cab driver had no idea where I lived, and maybe the first time I wasn’t sure I could help him out.

..

“Do you want to come over?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. I don’t want to be like that guy in your blog. That’s Not the Kind of Love I’m Used To.”

“There were different elements at play,” I insist. “There was another girl there that I didn’t write about in case she read this, it was complicated.”

I have more damaging first impressions than anything I could possibly hide here, but I am forced to consider that I might have never been the underdog that I think I am.

..

Her husband is dead by the first week of May and my Bartender regards me, not differently, not peripherally, but not quite directly, as if I’m either in the foreground or background of objects: short (whiskey) or tall (Pabst Blue Ribbon), edible (bereavement casseroles) or legible (sympathy cards); tangible and memorable (photographs) or untouchable and inconsequential (“I’m going to have to ask you to leave”). But with this foreshortening, she is strongest for me, in a way I didn’t ask of her.

“I loved him so much, Terror. I had to prepare for this day. He’s 15 years older, oh, but I loved him so much. I didn’t want to have to leave him. I would stay for 12 hours and drink coffee and rest in that uncomfortable chair until I could see him smile. That’s how he would repay me, because that’s all I needed to see. And I told him. Whenever you’re ready to go.”

I take a sip from the short, a gulp from the tall. “It would be my great fortune to have a fraction of those feelings.”

“Niña. It will take you time. You see things nobody else sees.”

Getting back to ghosts. I don’t see them, but I feel their urgency. We’re going to die soon. We don’t have much time! With love, you’re supposed to be fundamental and rapture-ready. And you can scratch your head—why now, Terror?—but this has always been me, matchmaking and leaning against walls at parties and scoffing at mortals, knowing that the world will see me as a cynic, but acquiescing to the notion because it’s somewhat cynical to believe that you’re the last living romantic.

..

Interlude: This Isn’t the Kind of Love That I’m Used To.

..

I practically gave you the lead for your story: Air Sex Championships lead to real sex. I hope this works out, if only to tell everybody how we met.

Everything else I said last night? Let’s not over-think it.

Requiem For a Backyard

What I Remember About Summer (not Last Summer, but Two Summers Ago): Nightswimming before the lightning came, Me and Five Guys, drinking with an unusual two-piece confidence. Subscribing to simplicity, swaddled in towel, not thinking my feet were ugly. Watching others cannonball; hating our jobs, caring for jokes. The dog licked my hand and I did not blink. Dean let me drive his car home. I don't have a driver's license and I had a three-beer buzz. This town used to tie me down but now I do the tying.

I was the Only Girl in the War Room. Seamus and Eric were as passionate as the night before, scribbling questions for the lawyer, poring over maps. Developers wanted to build so that they wouldn't have access to the top of their hill. "This is your birthright, Dean. If you don't fight now, there won't be another fight." I was stoned on the sofa, lying on my back, legs imaginary-cycling in the air, moved by rhetoric, evermore in love with the David versus Goliath. But I couldn't get angry. I left this town and I changed my name and in my mind there was no way I thought they'd lose. Seamus trusted the lawyer. "His name is Bennett and that's Latin for 'blessed' and I'm glad I looked it up." I'm glad he looked it up.

They said they would have accepted $600,000 for two acres (and, knowing what you know about how my people live, know that this would have changed lives), but they were only offered $100,000. You don't take money for land purchased in the Hamptons in the 1970s. The mother was working three jobs and land was what they had. I had my prom night on that hill. This was what was left of their father. Seamus and Eric fumed and their cigarettes crept inward. "Fuck, I'll just give it to the Shinnecocks and make 'em call it Crowley's Last Stand. No one builds on native land." I sat up. I am a native son.

We welcomed the downpour. "You can sleep over if you want." That was the line Seamus used all week. It had become our punch line, but we didn't laugh, even though I don't think we were hiding it from anyone. "I wish I could, but my flight's tomorrow." The shuddering of shutters and throes of thunder and shaking of sheets could have forced us to show a little depth. Like the hole. Seamus said a couple of things when he was naked, but I remember the bit about the hole. "Today we filled the hole in the backyard." His father had dug it 25 years ago for a foundation that never came. Nobody knowing what it was for, what grandiose plans he had for the earth, steered us from talking about my brother or his divorce or me convincing him that 34 was going to be better than 33. It tampered the dirt, packed it tight, over the things I would have said, so I said nothing and stayed completely still as the wind whipped through my four-man tent and grazed at the tiny hairs on my back. I thought of mankind in a quest to secure life's metaphorical tent flaps, like me fucking your friend to osmosize the good parts I tricked myself into not remembering. I wish I could, but this time I walk away.

Paid Furlough, Vernal Guilt

The sun is reflecting, transmuting, bouncing from abandoned storefront to dented car hood to sinewy bicycle spoke; the air is ripe with lust, mulch. I spend the morning heaving and dry heaving and taking names in vain and I don’t leave my bed until someone tells me it’s 81 degrees outside, start your weekend, yayfuckingyes. I exhume flip-flops, willing to expose chipped nail polish at the expense of painfully severing winter webbed feet. Neighbors take notice. “I love me some white girls!” he yells from his station in the semi-circle, onlookers in the arc tittering, my belly's contents rebubbling. He means me, though I’m not girls plural. I can never bring myself to check WHITE (NOT HISPANIC) on a form and the flip-flops are a minute feature of the composite. I waddle to the wireless café, so I can osmosize weather via customer joviality, a door propped open with a tub of wall putty, while I reply to Dad’s e-mail, which begins, “Honey Child, I cannot begin to say how sorry I am.” He really has no reason to be sorry, to begin with Honey Child, to begin calling me Honey Child. The professors lean against the red wall (not the burnt orange or taupe walls) and talk of peace marches and social movements, but add buoyant words to the discourse—“gleeful.” I will work toward glee. The inescapability of ultraviolet waves brings me back to a dysfunctional relationship two summers ago—he was older than the usual elders, had an awful proclivity for daytime drunk dials that shared the state of his dividends, the temperature of lake water, the disdain for my day job. We only started dating because my jankyass phone dialed his number when my bag pushed against the partition on a rush hour train. After the initial palpitation (it went to voicemail), I decided: girl, you’re in it now. Usually Kay is the Ernie and I am the Bert. “You called before?” “I only called because I was returning your call. Is everything alright?” “I called you? Oh, I must have accidentally dialed when I was looking up your phone number to get the discount on toilet paper at Dominick’s.” “Do you realize how many tard clauses there are in that sentence—you forgot your card, you use my number, you’re buying toilet paper, you accidentally dial? This is good TV.” I want a summer of reflection, transmutation—I want to bounce, short of encouraging my parents to feel embarrassed for me, which has been the custom between April and September (and sometimes the clowning bleeds into October, if the right teams reach the playoffs). They don’t need to know I killed the last of my sick days.

I'd Prefer the Corporate Ladder if it Were Shaped More Like an Escalator

Terraism #148, as provided by Mace: The best way to celebrate a promotion, and to really show management they made a solid choice, is by calling in sick the day after its announcement.

I'm such an asshole.

A Device to Buoy Vessels Over Shoals

I've been putting off real work by making collages for Mr. Lincoln's birthday. Like this one.


Gosh, I have too much emancipation on my hands.