Tacky Goblin

by T. Sean Steele

  “I’m five!”

  Rick opened another beer. Luckily he’d brought out the bottle opener. I was pretty sure I’d locked us out of the apartment and I didn’t want to deal with it just yet.

  “I feel a lot better,” Rick said. “What I’m realizing is the solution to so many emotional problems is to simply ride them out.”

  “Sounds like you don’t really have emotional problems.”

  “Even better.”

  KEYSHAWN? DIJON?

  September 10, 2014

  I picked up Kim from LAX. She had pink hair.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” She threw her luggage into the back seat and climbed in after it.

  “This isn’t a taxi service,” I said. “You have to sit up front.”

  “I’ll sit where I want. Come on, drive. They’re honking at you. You hate being honked at.”

  But I didn’t move. Neither did Kim. She straightened in her seat, recognizing a standoff. Her eyes said, ‘I live for this,’ but I was ready.

  We would go on sitting there for the next five minutes, until airport security tapped on my window.

  During those five minutes, I could feel the situation ballooning into something unfamiliar, and I had a vague sense I would be manhandled at the end of it, but I had been in Los Angeles for nearly a year and I needed to take a stand on something.

  The honking continued. A bus nearly sideswiped us. I looked at Kim in the rearview.

  “None of my clothes fit anymore,” I said. “I’m shrinking.”

  “They’re going to put you in a small, windowless room,” she said. “They’re going to ask you so many questions you won’t even remember your own name.”

  “I like Bob Hope Airport more,” I said. “It’s small and quiet and yellowing, like a retirement home. Most people hate retirement homes, but it’s a mistake to follow your gut instinct. You have to dig deeper. Like, nobody honks at you at retirement homes.”

  “That was fun,” she said, as a knuckle rapped against the glass.

  HOLD STEADY

  October 7, 2014

  Kim’s car was in the shop getting a new radiator so I had to pick her up from work. I was nervous because they’d cut up my license at the airport but she told me not to be a baby. Her license went missing years ago and she was doing fine. “A driver’s license is one of those things people say you need but really you don’t. Like bedsheets, or protein.” I asked how she bought alcohol.

  “Who buys alcohol? I’ve never paid for a drink in my life.”

  And so at midnight I met her at the curb along the Silver Lake Reservoir, at the bottom of the long, winding driveway of the house where she worked as a nanny.

  “What’s wrong with the roof of your car?” she asked as she got in. “It’s all scraped up.”

  “High schoolers,” was all I said. It was enough. She nodded knowingly. High schoolers were Kim’s least favorite thing and I tossed the blame at them whenever possible.

  “Did they try to talk to you?” she asked.

  “No. I kept away until they left.”

  “Good. Never let them talk to you. They’re skinny and they tell a lot of inside jokes and make you feel bad for not understanding even though you don’t really care anyway. I don’t like to generalize, but in this case it’s true for all of them. Plus, sometimes they sneak into college parties and trick you into kissing them. Not that it’s happened to me, but you hear things.”

  I put the car in drive. Actually, I’d spent the evening carrying all of our furniture out of the apartment, holding it steady on the roof of the car with one hand, and dropping off our tables, desks, chairs, and bookshelves at street corners around the neighborhood. We were moving back to Chicago at the end of the month, and Kim had tasked me with selling everything on Craigslist. But I’d never made an account on the Internet for anything and I wasn’t going to start now.

  Kim leaned her head against the window and looked out at the reservoir. Our kitchen table was coming up at the next corner but she didn’t notice it.

  “What a goddamned day,” she said. “Do you ever feel like you’ve lost sight of what it’s all about?”

  “Oh, all the time. I’m not sure I ever knew in the first place.”

  “I just wish I knew how to fix the misery. Maybe it’s you. Maybe you’re the problem.”

  This didn’t offend me. This was standard postwork behavior. I drove past our couch, which I’d put in the same spot I’d found it six months ago.

  *

  At the apartment she was surprised to see I’d gotten rid of all our stuff so fast. I made up a story about a guy with a dust fetish who bought it all in one fell swoop. She asked how much I charged for everything and I realized where I’d gone wrong.

  “Uh, thirty bucks. I discounted him for taking it all.”

  “You idiot. We basically got robbed and you just watched it happen.”

  She held out her hand for the money. I opened my wallet.

  “Whoops,” I said. “Looks like he short-changed me a bit.”

  RETCON: I HAVE FRIENDS

  October 19, 2014

  We were playing Twenty Questions in the car on the way home from San Francisco. I hated games but I was trying to be a more open-hearted person during these, my last days in California.

  “Is it a human being?” Alec asked, half-asleep in the backseat.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Is it you?” Jeannette asked. She was driving.

  “…Yes.”

  We entered the city limits. The sky was pink with pollution to the west, but for a moment the sun broke through the haze, glaring off the windshield, a blinding white. After it passed, I turned in my seat and studied Alec, who by now had fallen asleep. Generally speaking, Alec was always asleep. I was too high-strung to ever sleep in public and almost admired him for it. His glasses slipped down his nose and I pushed them back up. I pressed two fingers against his lips.

  “Thanks for inviting me to come with this weekend,” I told Jeannette.

  “We had to fight to get you to go. After you said no, we spent a week strategizing to get you to change your mind.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I said. “I’m my own man.”

  She patted my shoulder. “You’re our little marionette.”

  “You sound like my sister.”

  “Maybe because we both understand there’s a default way to talk to mopes like you. Anyway, remember all your suicide jokes? And how uncomfortable they made everybody? Who put an end to those?”

  “People loved those jokes,” I said.

  “Sure they did,” she said. “That’s why we’re your only friends.”

  A half-truth. Certainly there were other people who considered themselves my friends, even if I didn’t reciprocate. Garth, for example. For guys like that, a half-friendship was as good as it was ever going to get. I wondered if he knew it, and my heart thumped with sadness for him and the rest of his long, long life. It was truly the least I could do.

  “If I’m your puppet,” I said, “then how come I’m choosing to move across the country?”

  “Exactly,” Jeannette said.

  We rolled along in silence in the carpool lane, then crossed three lanes of traffic to exit the 101. As we turned left onto Hollywood, Alec began to snore in staccato gasps. I turned around and knuckled him in the sternum until he stopped.

  SMOTHER BROTHER

  October 23, 2014

  We were picking the last bits of double-sided tape off the walls, and it was this that finally broke us.

  “Insane asylums have the right idea,” Kim said.

  “Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely.”

  “Clean lines, white walls. No decorations, no distractions. Pure life of the mind. What were we thinking, putting things on the walls? Do either of us even like Fargo that much? How did that poster get up there? And who used twenty pieces of tape to hang it? We were reckless. No thought for the future.”

  I scratched my thumbnail at the
corner of some tape, and though it felt like scraping a chalkboard, I kept doing it over and over until my spine stopped convulsing in protest, until I accepted the irritation as part of my being. It no longer grated me because I had become the nails on the chalkboard, the knife against the plate. I was on all your goddamned walls.

  “And frankly, I don’t see a future where these get cleaned,” Kim said. She slumped to the floor. “Maybe if we leave some hangers in the closet and a couple of pairs of shoes by the door, they’ll consider it a fair swap and we’ll still get our security deposit back. Dibs on the hangers. You give the shoes.”

  I kept scratching. It was shockingly easy to be something hated. You rode the tide of the hate—no, “rode” implies effort. It swept you up and kept you going. The wall went soft like wet putty against my thumbnail, and maybe I was about to be absorbed into the plaster, to become one of those arms that reach out of the wall at night and torment the tenant à la Repulsion, but then I realized I had only burst a blister. I slumped down the wall next to Kim, exhausted.

  “Let’s maintain a severe aesthetic at our next apartment,” she said. “No posters, nothing. Maybe some nice rugs. That could be our thing. Rugs. Except then we’d need a vacuum.”

  I thought about our next apartment, about Chicago, and how I’d like to become part of a trio of friends with the silent understanding that if, say, we were all walking home late one night in a dark alley and a villain with a gun stepped out of the shadows and made the first friend chose between me and the other regarding who was going to get a bullet to the head, the first friend could choose me and I would hold no resentment. I wanted to be that guy to somebody, the one who gets betrayed out of necessity. I could take it.

  Kim held out her own fingers, also swollen red. “Listen to this,” she said. “I was talking to Mom on the phone today and she called me neurotic. My own mother. It’s like no one can see the reason I’m neurotic is because I’m trying really, really hard not to be evil. You can see that, can’t you? Can’t you?”

  “I don’t think you’re evil,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t. You worship me. It’s disgusting.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Bullshit. I wake up every morning with a mug and a fresh pot of coffee steaming on my end table.”

  “I refuse to feel defensive about that.”

  She stood up to continue picking at tape. I hoped this meant she forgot about giving away my shoes.

  MAN TO MAN

  November 10, 2014

  I was back in Chicago, but Kim was still in Los Angeles for another month. Alec was letting her stay in his basement room at a house in Echo Park while he crashed at his girlfriend Jeannette’s. Friends crashing at friends’ places, building communities, hustling apartments and jobs, everyone working together to get their shit together. Meanwhile I was prostrate on the couch at my parents’ house doing none of those things.

  “Who drank all my Rumchata?” Dad asked from the kitchen. “I bought it yesterday.”

  “’Twas your son.”

  “Don’t lie to me. Kim’s in LA.” He sat down on the sofa across from me and began to describe, play-by-play, his lunch hour basketball game. I breathed into the cushion until my face began to sweat.

  “Remember all those blood smears we saw along the interstate, from Flagstaff all the way to Quincy?” I said. “Sprays of gore, like an animal had been hit and dragged under a car for twenty feet until it released and thumped down the shoulder, a hundred times over? I was wondering, does the state have someone rinse that shit away, or do they let the rain take care of it?”

  “I didn’t see any of that. You were hallucinating.”

  “But there were so many of them. To hallucinate that much carnage, you’d have to have something really wrong with you.” I sat up. I ought to have been used to hallucinations by now, but a small, tired, innocent part of me had hoped a cross-country road trip might somehow shift my life into a different genre. “I mean, isn’t it equally possible you hallucinated there weren’t any blood smears? Isn’t it?”

  My dad settled back in his seat.

  “Man,” he said, “if you weren’t here right now, I’d be in my silks, drinking a nice holiday liqueur. Instead I have to talk about roadkill. No, I don’t think you can hallucinate the absence of something. But I’m certainly trying really hard at the moment.”

  MISERABILISM

  December 19, 2014

  I went store-to-store, restaurant-to-restaurant around Logan Square, foisting my resume upon business owners that wanted nothing to do with me. I told myself not to act so glum, but the last time I went job hunting I had disappeared for a month with no memory of the lost time. I couldn’t afford another mental lapse, having just blown two months at home justifying to my parents every life decision that had returned me to their doorstep.

  Soon I was out of resumes and walking north on Albany to our new apartment, which was much larger than our place in Los Angeles. I still lived with Kim. I finally had my own bedroom, but after over a year spent sleeping in the living room I found the privacy intimidating.

  Feeling grumpy, I ducked across the street into the neighborhood dive bar. Inside it was dark, cramped, and empty except for Kim, who was wiping down tables. I was surprised to see her. I asked what she was doing here.

  “I needed a job so I got a job.”

  “How? You don’t know anything about bartending.”

  “I didn’t know anything about nannying either, but I did that for a year. This is significantly less pressure.”

  “Maybe I could be a nanny.”

  “Maybe you could sleep with your door closed.”

  “I’m working up to it.”

  She went behind the bar and poured me a beer. “You think because I’m the strongest physically that I’m the strongest emotionally,” she said. “But really I just internalize my fears, which to the outside world is the same as not having any.”

  “I don’t know if that’s healthy,” I said.

  “You don’t know much so I’m not worried. Anyway, it’s a hell of a lot better than whatever life philosophy you’re using. For instance, I can pay my rent.”

  BOOR(ED)

  December 22, 2014

  I was at a Christmas party in Lakeview and people were asking what I did for a living.

  “I’m independently wealthy.”

  “And how do you fill your time?”

  “Some philanthropy, but mostly I’m into bodybuilding. It’s actually an affliction. I have horrible body dysmorphia. Probably you don’t know what that’s like unless there’s a version where you think you’re better-looking than you are.”

  Eventually they left me alone and I locked myself in the bathroom for a breather. My demon reflection leered back at me so I whited-out the mirror with a bar of soap. I sat at the edge of the tub and hoped my behavior was the demon’s fault.

  My phone rang. It was Alec, home for the week in New York.

  “How’s the party?”

  “Not good. I’m holed up in the john.”

  “Me too,” he said, but I already knew that. It was the only place he ever called me from. He asked about my holidays and I told him about my trip to the Upper Peninsula with my dad, recounting our afternoon-long walks in the woods, peppering my descriptions with words like grotto, inlet, gully, juniper, words I thought were evocative even if I didn’t know what they meant: “The snow-caked grotto gave way to a shining inlet over which draped a translucent gully, the sweet smell of frosted juniper tickling my nose.”

  “Beautiful. I can picture it exactly. Meanwhile I mistimed a burrito in the city and now I’m in the toilet on the train back to Westchester. Anyway, you sound upset. Lay it on me.”

  “The truth is, I’m in a bad way. I tried mingling but I couldn’t stop insulting people. Everyone got mad, so I ducked in here. I’m trying not to be a weasel anymore but I think I’ve gone too far in the other direction.”

  He grunted. “I’ll tell you wha
t. It feels like I’ve got a weasel tearing its way out my asshole.”

  We talked for a while longer and then said goodbye and I went back to the party. I kept to the hallways and guzzled three beers, planning to get blind drunk before walking home in the cold as I didn’t have any money for the bus.

  I opened a fourth or fifth beer and wondered if any of these people were French. I was twenty-three years old and had never in my life talked to a French person. I was at the edge of a cliff with thoughts like these.

  ON THE PHONE

  January 13, 2015

  I was in bed writing suggestive texts to my friends’ girlfriends.

  ‘One day,’ I wrote Meredith, ‘everyone will be dead and it’ll finally just be you and me.’

  ‘And almost immediately after that,’ she wrote back, ‘it’ll just be me.’

  ‘All I ever wanted in life,’ I wrote Jeannette, ‘is for someone to shave my neck hair.’

  ‘And all I ever wanted in life,’ she wrote back, ‘is to be alone in a room with you and a razor.’

  *

  Mom called.

  “Are you sure my Christmas gift is in the mail?” She was referring to the cell phone case I had yet to order for her.

  “Yes. But now is not a great time, Mom. I’m busy.”

  “It’s the middle of January. I’m beginning to think you’re a liar. Plus my birthday is coming up in a week. You’re going to be two gifts in the hole.”

  “Come on. You don’t care about gifts. You’re better than that.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m a real monster. Which explains how I could have raised such a disappointment.”

  “Who, Kim?” I looked out my window. From my mattress on the floor all I could see was the sky, dense with snow clouds, filling my room with gray, stale light. I rolled away from the wall, where a thin line of frost had gathered on the molding, where the duct tape I had used to block the cold air coming in from the electrical outlet had begun to peel away. My cup of coffee had gone frigid; that is to say, room temperature.