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by Megan Boyle

  lost track of mira and sam after gian drug-turnover. remember sam saying a person was ‘guarding’ the alcohol and seeing the person standing on an upper level, deciding we’d all go up there to steal it, then suddenly being presented with nicholas and hugging him and introducing him to mira and sam, saying ‘we worked at ukazoo together,’ aware of mira and sam maybe not knowing i worked at a bookstore called ‘ukazoo,’ then they disappeared. talked with nicholas about how long we’d been at powerhouse. he said ‘they just ran out of alcohol.’ he said something i’m not sure he’s comfortable with me writing about, but he seemed happy, and i was glad he was happy about it. he said something about an event next week or the week after, which i said i’d like to go to, and it was good seeing him the other night. he was walking away as this happened.

  after nicholas left i started feeling what i’d feel for most of the night, until maybe 2 or 3AM—like i was in an episode of ‘rocko’s modern life’ where rocko is falling down a tunnel and faces of supporting characters keep popping up to say nightmarish catch phrases to him. the bermuda triangle episode. i didn’t feel like this in a negative way, or that the people that were ‘popping up in my tunnel’ were actually nightmarish…just…it was this feeling of out-of-control popping up. a feeling of looking around a lot. kind of like i was just tagged in ‘tag,’ like i was ‘it’ and it seemed like i would probably be outnumbered/swallowed and wouldn’t be able to find another person to tag to make ‘it.’

  remember standing in line with marie calloway and rachel white to get my book signed by tao. had sort of ‘sidled in’ to the line. rachel said ‘they’re taking pictures for new york magazine, we’ll have to get your picture’ or something and disappeared for a moment. marie seemed happier than normal…talked about where she lives now and how powerhouse had just run out of alcohol and text messages and where i live now and jobs. think i asked if she was on drugs and she wasn’t. rachel came back with kat sto[not going to look up on facebook how to spell], who i didn’t know worked for new york magazine, approached me/marie in line. i think a guy behind me said ‘are you marie’ to marie, who looked at him, as this was happening. remember turning around a second time and seeing a man’s face who said ‘and you must be megan’ or something like that to me and i said ‘i’m megan,’ and kat was there already…i think…shit. memory is deteriorating at this point. big time rocko’s modern life. kat asked me for a quote about ‘taipei’ and i didn’t know what to say. i said ‘i liked it, great, really great.’ she seemed to be asking marie or rachel for quotes. i interrupted her to say, ‘no i have a better one, my quote is: ‘he spelled my name wrong.” she said ‘that’s funny. that’s really funny.’ there was a time where it felt like it was just me and kat and i was looking at her and thinking ‘i know you from somewhere, what should i say’ and maybe said ‘facebook’ or tried to pronounce her last name. marie and kat took pictures of the four of us in groups of three with their phones. kat said she wanted a picture of tao signing my book for the story, then gestured to a tall photographer who seemed to pop out of nowhere. she said he would be standing on a platform to get the shot of tao and i. i’m laughing thinking about this, like…remembering his face, happy non-sequitur friendly face and camera popping out of nowhere. the sensation of people popping up everywhere, out of nowhere.

  approached tao. he asked a question about [omitted]. remember pausing and thinking ‘the picture the photographer takes will be of this moment, where tao said that and i’m about to say whatever i’m going to say, i have a choice to lie right now’ and mostly feeling nervous. i thought complicated things about tao asking the question right away. asked him how he knew and he said ‘it just makes sense’ in a dismissive way, like he had considered our interaction about this in advance, maybe. i answered his question. he said ‘that’s good, i’m happy for you.’ i said ‘i wasn’t sure, but i thought you’d be okay with it’ and he confirmed being okay again. he was writing something in my book while we talked. he seemed confident or ‘present’ in a way that i didn’t feel like it was hard to look at him. i asked if he was on drugs and he said he was coming down from xanax and molly and other things, maybe. he asked what drugs i had on me. i said ‘heroin, xanax, adderall, molly,’ and that i’d given them to gian. at some point i said a photographer was taking our picture for new york magazine, pointing to the area to the upper level area where he stood. distracted by people behind me in line and trying to see what tao was writing in my book. wanted to talk more. i think i said ‘good job’ a few times. tao said ‘why didn’t you try to convince [omitted] that i’d be fine with it?’ and i said ‘i wasn’t sure all the way’ and he nodded like ‘affirmative: i have received information.’ walked away.

  IT’S 9:47PM I’M LATE TO MEET MY DAD FOR DINNER, RESUMING THIS AFTER DINNER…SHIT…SHOULD’VE WAITED TO EAT THE ADDERALL SHIT.

  10:16pm: I DON’T APPROVE OF MY PHONE/GOODWILL UPDATE FROM EARLIER UPON READING IT AND OTHER THIBGS FROM TODAY SOUBDS LIKE IM JUST INDIRECTLY TALKING ABOUT THIS THING IM ABOUT TO SAY DIRECTLY NOW: I FEEL GOOD ABOUT MY RECENT WEIGHT LOSS AND I THINK I LOOK BETTER

  DRIVIBG TO DADS NOW

  ANXIOUS ABOUT HOW MUCH I SAID ABOUT [OMITTED] I MIGHT DELETE

  MULLING THIS OVWR AT DINNER

  RHE ANOUNT OF ANXIETY RIGNT NOW IS HIGH

  ITS A LUTTLE BETTER NOW THAT I SAID THAT THIG DIRECTLY

  11:17pm: dad gave me tour of entire office building. He offered me a beer and said ‘slainte.’ Driving to double t diner in separate cars now. Not looking forward to eye contact at dinner, always seems difficult, like even just now on office tour. The talking part is fine, just eye contact is hard.

  11:32pm: have been seated. A man asked me if I wanted a drink ‘or wait for company.’ I said ‘a Stella? Artois? Beer?’ he said ‘Stella?’ I said ‘yes please.’ he said ‘okay one minute.’ a woman approached. She said ‘can I get you something from the bar or are you waiting for company?’ I said ‘oh I think he got it already.’ she said he didn’t. I said ‘oh okay, can I have a Stella?’ she said ‘Stella Artois?’ I said ‘yes please. The beer.’ surprised she didn’t ask for id, they usually ask when I seem anxious. She came back and said ‘the beer, right?’ I said ‘yeah, thank you’ and nodded my head.

  JUNE 14, 2013

  12:45am: heart is pounding like it wants to escape from under skin. Bathroom thing. I said ‘Jesus Christ.’ The pee on the seat. Could not even pretend to pee. How could they leave it on the seat like that. Both stalls. And they saw me coming in, neither of them had finished yet. Horrible dinner talking bad bad bad shit. Now dad is taking forever in bathroom. 12:47. 12:48. Walked to waiting/sitting area. Outrageous…reverse psychology…lying…it’s like a Richard Yates novel or story where you see them be this way and it’s…you can just so clearly see why it’s not working and how neither of them can stop. Then sometimes someone will want to stop, it seems like…and you identify with that person but you can see how the other person just wants to continue hiding in this dynamic, they don’t know how to act another way.

  Richard Yates would be able to either write down key points of dialogue or at dinner things that happened that made things bad, or maybe he just lived/experienced those things enough so he was able to totally invent new dialogue or scenarios or whatever but I feel too deep into it that I don’t…I’m not able to detach enough to write about it right now, it feels too bad. It’s like an actual mental block, like a white wall or something. In one of the ‘children of the corn’ sequels the main guy prevents the kids from reading his mind by picturing a wall or the ocean. That’s what I feel like I’m doing right now. This is the most I can say about anything. I’m not saying anything. Currently feel instinctive ‘I want to flee, I want alcohol or drugs’ overtaking thing. Wave of ‘I want drugs’ against a wall. It feels protective or something, to want that. Like computer will overheat if you don’t turn it off. It might be interesting to read the dinner conversation, I’m interested in reading things like that, wish I was a
person who could push themself to not do the wall thing. It felt helpful to write this/‘least I can do,’ for now.

  1:10am: parked at mom’s. Am now at the level where I feel like I shouldn’t have let things get out of control and me…just, I shouldn’t say anything negative or argue at all with dad ever, I haven’t earned that privilege, it’s spoiled/entitled of me to argue.

  Goddamnit but the thing I was saying was just…honest…I said ‘it feels like you’re telling me a parable’ about this guy…then he wanted to argue and deny that there was anything similar about the guy and me. Just seemed fake. I said ‘methinks the lady doth protest too much’ and he said ‘that means you think I’m lying.’ I said ‘I just didn’t expect you to react with this grandiose denial of it.’ after I said the parable thing he like…I don’t know, it felt calculated. He was saying like ‘oh no no. No. Never. I would never ever think you were like Ted, ever, I swear on my mother’s grave [he didn’t like his mother] and the bible and if I could I would slit my wrist right now to show you that in no way, that I’m aware of, do I think those things—or any similarity at all, really, between you two—I see him as this terribly self-centered person who’ll take everyone down with him if he’s going down, not like you at all—not about you at all.’

  I don’t know. Maybe I’m just imagining it and he’s telling the truth. Really does not feel like it. I’m not exaggerating what he said, he said the mom’s grave and bible and wrist thing and all the never ever’s with this rehearsed-looking face and sarcastic tone.

  1:21am: headache. Shit one more thing: what preceded what I just typed was a long monologue about how Ted had betrayed him and was hopeless and had ‘zero interest in psychotherapy, zero insight, on the surface all the time’ (dad repeated those phrases maybe three times each during monologue, all context points from previous recurring arguments we’ve had re: me not wanting to do therapy and not liking it, after having tried therapy and it not seeming to work). He said Ted was depressed and wouldn’t leave bed for six months and his son who was three or four years old would walk by his room and say ‘mom, is daddy seeping?’ I said ‘Ted sounds sad.’ dad said something about how Ted was depressed but didn’t have feelings. I said ‘it feels bad to feel depressed, to have no feelings, I think depression is a feeling.’ then dad said the ‘zero insight’ things. He and Ted were childhood friends and dad won’t talk to him anymore because Ted got dad and his friends to invest in real estate before shit hit the fan around 2008. Dad thinks Ted is hoarding all their money because he won’t return phone calls. I don’t return phone calls either. That was another thing dad kept repeating, to emphasize Ted’s shittiness: ‘he never returns my calls.’

  I said ‘it just feels familiar, I can understand you wanting to talk about problems with me in this way, by telling a story instead of saying directly.’ Dad did ‘methinks the lady doth protest too much’ things again. He said ‘I would never do that, I’m not up to anything, I don’t see any similarities between you and Ted at all and I’m truly shocked you would think that about me, I think it’s bad when people don’t say what they mean and I want to only say what I mean and not go around saying parables, I am not up to anything at all. I am really just so shocked you would ever think I thought anything was similar about you and Ted.’ I said ‘but there are similarities. I don’t think it’s bad, you’re the one giving it bad connotations like ‘up to something.’ It makes sense to me that you or anyone would want to talk about something indirectly at first, I relate to that. There are similarities about Ted and me: I don’t always return phone calls, I’m depressed and don’t like therapy, you keep saying about the thing about him not feeling loved and that was an argument we had this spring that seemed to impact you. I understand why you’d think there are similarities, you’re repeating all the similar things in a way like you want me to notice and it feels fake that you’re denying all of this to the extent you are.’

  3:05AM: it turned into another thing with mom. the thing with mom ended with me saying ‘please can i just go away, i can’t talk like this anymore’ and crying. at some point i said ‘when people tell me how much i mean to them i don’t feel anything, there is just something wrong with me, i don’t feel things when people say stuff like that, i feel like i’m in an empty room all the time but the room is me and i don’t know how to get out.’

  sounds crazy now.

  mom said ‘i just read this book [‘taipei’] where you’re doing a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a LOT of drugs and i worry that a person i liked is gone and not coming back.’

  i said ‘it’s too late, i already did everything, i’m already different and i can tell, i’m sorry to be disappointing.’

  the thing i was trying to ‘drive home’ was that i didn’t want to say everything was okay about dinner because it didn’t feel okay and mom was (she does this a lot/i understand/it’s a nice thing to do) trying to comfort me and get me to say how it could be better.

  the first thing she said when i walked inside was ‘i talked to dad and i want you to know that everything. is. ohhh-kay’ in overly calm voice, but i hadn’t even said anything.

  at some point when things felt heated i said ‘i didn’t even ask to be here, you guys are the ones who made me and all you want to do is fix me or hear me say ‘everything is okay, i’m fine, i’m sorry, soon i’ll stop being so messed up and you don’t have to worry about me and i won’t bother you anymore,’ that’s like operating behind every conversation like this or any time anything goes wrong, i don’t get it, you just made me so you could fix me and i could say ‘everything is okay, you did a good job, please don’t worry.”

  shitty person, me.

  i feel like the problem is me and not my parents.

  the desire to not keep my mouth shut comes from a ‘reaching’/stretching sensation combined with an ‘about to jump off a cliff’ sensation.

  can see opportunities to keep my mouth shut.

  near the end in relationships when i get discouraged i take those opportunities more and more and my ideas about the person become rigid/hopeless and i return to being alone.

  so.

  guess i have this to look forward to forever.

  how do you be different, does anyone know.

  people go to therapy for this.

  maybe it will help to write this down.

  does anyone know how to stop being the way you are.

  is it always going to involve some kind of compromise, like, ‘i wish i could do the other thing where i just act like how i am naturally but it doesn’t work so i’ll intentionally do something i would never do now?’

  that would be okay.

  does anyone want to be paid to tell me what to do…

  follow me around and say ‘do this differently, you do this other thing too much’ (i’m unable to say what those things are because i don’t know because i just act how i naturally act)…

  4:21AM: ate 1mg xanax.

  6AM, 9AM, 12PM: woke all these times and ate small pieces of carbs. hard to fall asleep again. felt UTI pain and took medicine.

  1:55PM: woke and peed. mom said she wanted to go to the hotel resale furniture store to buy me a mirror and so i could see the place. she told me this while standing over me and patting my head while i was in bed.

  2:02PM: attorney’s office called. i said i’d be over there by 3PM.

  2:28PM: texted matthew donahoo video of mom’s apartment.

  3:35pm: signed release forms for accident settlement at attorney’s office. A girl named Elise came to the door. The doorbell was broken so I knocked. She said she went to ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ in NYC. I said ‘broadway? The broadway play?’ she said it was a restaurant where people in costumes approach your table. She guided me through signing papers. I got $6000 total but my hospital bills and attorney fees made it $3901. I said ‘hell yeah.’ she said ‘you can’t sue them again.’ I said ‘I don’t want to, thank you though.’ my mom got more money than me I think, because she went to therapy after the a
ccident and had knee replacement surgery.

  Stopped at a Carroll fuel minimart and bought monster ‘lemonade rehab 20 calorie’ energy drink and 16oz sugar-free red bull. Made video for Matthew donahoo. Mom called to say she’d be late to the hotel furniture resale store. Going to storage unit after store then dads office. Then back to NYC.

  3:53pm: pulled into parking spot at ‘solo furniture installer & liquidator hotel furniture installation and liquidation services.’ waiting for mom. Listening to new pornographers.

  5:11pm: texting with [omitted]. Meeting mom for lunch. I want an EKG or something to see if my brain is messed up. Mom bought me a sweet huge ass mirror and lamp. They look hotel style. Wish my entire apartment looked like a hotel. Feeling extremely lethargic/fatigued. Chugging sf red bull before lunch.

  6:28pm: ate at la Madeline, a vaguely chain French restaurant amidst a confusing sprawling strip mall of ethnic food franchises. Talked more about ‘Taipei.’ I told mom about [omitted]. Ate salad and cup of soup and strawberries and iced tea and coffee. Still feel extreme mental lethargy. Something feels wrong with me.

  7:59pm: back in car from starbucks. Before that, in reverse chronological order:

  Walked in ‘lilting, dust mote carried by the breeze’ manner into Starbucks and greeted employee with sleepy confidence. Ordered large iced red eye for me and medium mocha frappuccino for dad. Pretty music was playing and the sun was coming through windows emotionally. Sat in a chair and waited for drinks. Felt like I couldn’t stand when drinks were called.

  Read my account of powerhouse launch party muumuu house tweeted, sitting in car.