by Joey Comeau
Our apartment flooded last month. The water heater burst. Water came seeping out from under the door of the furnace room. This was late at night. It was like a Japanese horror movie. I thought, at first, that Susan had spilled a glass of water on the floor by the desk. Then it kept coming, then more. We moved the desks, the computers, everything. It kept pouring into the room. The water came pouring out from under the door, and then from the wall beside it. Soon the carpet there was black.
“Don’t open that door,” Susan said. She could tell we were in a horror movie, too. She sounded terrified and irritated at the same time. When I opened the door it all flooded in. Whoosh. It was deep inside. It looked like it went down forever, but maybe that was just the light.
I was half-naked and bewildered. Susan was so angry. Her pants and socks were soaked. I remember I made a joke about skinny-dipping. I’ve never actually been skinny-dipping. They do it in books.
The problem with skinny-dipping is you pretty much have to go at night. The problem with night swimming is the darkness. The dark water and the dark all around, where you can hear the bugs but can’t see them. I hate swimming at night. I always think of hands underneath me. I always think of Jason Voorhees, a thick dead man in a hockey mask chained to the bottom of the lake, hands reaching up.
I am glad that our water heater broke. It was an adventure and now it’s a weird and haunted memory. Black water and anger. The industrial fan made awful noises all night. My dreams were messed up. I remember Susan was banging dishes around in the kitchen when I woke. She always said she didn’t do that on purpose, but I don’t know. She wanted me to know when she was angry. I should have paid more attention. I can’t seem to hold on to anyone.
Joey Comeau
part three.
Dear Samsonite,
I found an old suitcase in my grandmother’s basement two weeks ago. I was downstairs, to get away from our awkward conversation. I try to speak French and she answers me in English. She tells me, “No, you don’t want to learn Acadian. It’s not even real French.” This isn’t how I imagined it would be. She wants to help, I think. But I’m having a hard time here. So I’ve been going through the stored boxes in the basement, and I found an old suitcase. It was grey and dusty, and it had my grandfather’s initials. My initials. JC. I pulled it out into the centre of the room and set it down. I pulled hard at the old zipper, which went all the way around, and when I flipped open the top there was a ladder leading down into the floor. Something near the bottom was flickering.
I climbed down slowly, not really believing what was going on, scared of what I might find, but unable to resist. I climbed down and down into the dark. The walls were warm and soft and I tried not to touch them.
My grandfather was sitting alone in a room down there, watching wrestling on the television. The iron lung sat unused in the corner of the room. I stood there and watched with him while men lifted one another into the air and bounced off the blue mat together. During the commercial, he looked up and smiled at me. He held his glass out, and I took it to the kitchen and filled it with wine. He tousled my hair and then turned back to the TV. There were tunnels leading off into other rooms.
My great aunt, sewing me costumes. Her budgie, under the floor, in a shoe box, singing along to the machine. I tried on the big billowing pumpkin costume she offered, and it fit.
“I have another one here for your little brother,” she told me. “Go fetch him, will you?”
In the next room, Adrian sat on the floor, Nintendo controller in hand. I picked up the other controller. The thing about playing Mortal Kombat with Adrian was how cheap he was. He would get you into a corner and just sweep kick you again and again, and your character had no time to react. There was no window of opportunity. He kicked and kicked and I mashed the buttons and cursed and Adrian just laughed and laughed. When my character was dead, I said, “Fuck, I died.” Adrian turned to me and smiled.
I wandered more. My first dog, Sarah, who really did go to live on a farm — but died there anyway. My great grandmother and her silver dollars. You can get lost down there in those tunnels. It took a long time for me to find my way back to the ladder. I started climbing. A few rungs back up toward the basement, I felt my grandfather’s hand on my ankle. He was out of his chair, looking up. He held out his wine glass for me. Upstairs, two weeks had gone by. Memories are like everything else. They’re a trap.
Joey Comeau
Dear American Express,
I got a letter by registered mail today, threatening me about money. I owe more than forty thousand dollars for student loans. I also owe for credit cards, the power bill, the telephone. When my brother got hurt, I let everything slide. Now when I read these threats I feel like I am underwater, and going deeper and deeper and then — POP! — everything is fine again. The important thing is living. My stepfather says my debt will double in ten years. And then in ten years it will double again. Maybe. And maybe in ten years that will double. That sounds frightening, I guess, except that I’m not going to live forever, am I? There’s a flaw in their math. Forty thousand times two is eighty thousand times two is one hundred and sixty thousand times two is nothing.
Anyway, have you got any jobs?
Joey Comeau
Dear Spherion,
I am writing to apply for a position as corporate collections representative. Corporations have been collecting from me for years. So I have started calling them. I’m tired of being afraid. It’s time they were afraid of me.
8 a.m.
“Hi, is MasterCard there?”
“This is MasterCard, who is this?”
“Good morning. This is Joey calling. If you don’t make your minimum payment . . .”
They hang up on me.
But I’m a motivated worker. I’ve devised a campaign of terror. I want to wake MasterCard up at three in the morning and make veiled little threats about their credit rating. Every day they’ll find themselves interrupted in the middle of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’ll make McDonald’s get up from its veggie stir-fry and come to the phone.
And I won’t take any shit.
“Don’t you people have any respect?” Sony will say. “We’re trying to eat. We will pay when we pay.” They’ll hang up. I’ll call right back.
“That’s a pretty little dog you have out in the yard, Sony,” I’ll say. “I bet a dog like that is expensive to feed. If you’re having trouble making your payments, maybe there’s something we can do to help.”
And when the woman on the other end of the phone tells me, “MasterCard doesn’t live here anymore. I think she died.” I’ll smile.
“She looked pretty healthy for a dead woman this morning,” I’ll say, “when she was climbing out of bed with VISA’s husband. At least, I think she did. It’s so hard to tell with photographs.”
This is a field in which I can distinguish myself. I would be an asset to your company and I look forward to hearing from you about this position.
Joey Comeau
Dear NYPD,
I’d like to be a police officer, please. I could be a police officer from the Great White North. An Aboriginal cop! I found my Aboriginal status card today. It was hidden in a drawer. Joseph Mitchell Comeau, Eastern Woodland Métis Nation of Nova Scotia! Le pays boisé de l’est Nouvelle-Écosse! My status card makes me happy, but is pretty much just a piece of paper. It’s one of those small items that just cheer you up. It looks like it was printed out on a crappy dot matrix printer and home-laminated, which it probably was. Whenever anyone makes a crack about how homemade it looks, I say, “Oh I’m sorry. My people don’t use the white man’s technology effectively enough for you?”
My grandmother had Adrian and me apply for the cards a couple years ago, in the hopes that we would be able to get financial assistance going through university for being First Nations. The only information I could find, though, said that the Canadian Government didn’t recognize Métis as being real in’jun!
Maybe I’m not even allowed to say
in’jun, being only Métis.
I have Adrian’s status card in a box under my bed. I have his motorcycle licence and his Métis card and a half-full bottle of painkillers and his birth certificate. He used to love Indian jokes. What do you want to do tonight, Adrian? Well, let’s get a garbage bag full of gasoline to huff, Joey. Let’s tie some feathers to our heads. Gotta stay true to our roots.
At night it’s too warm, so I turn the heat down and when I wake up in the morning I am waking up from nightmares. I am freezing cold. My mom told me, once, that the temperature of your feet has everything to do with what your dreams are like. Maybe I’m having these awful nightmares because my feet are too cold? They stick out from under the blankets and they let in the bugs and vomit and chewing gum that sticks to my teeth. All the nightmare things.
I’ve been thinking about getting a dream catcher. I don’t even know if that’s a different band of Indians or what. I don’t know a goddamned thing about Indians except that my brother and I both look darker and we used to sit on his porch and drink beer and we used to make each other laugh.
Yours,
Joey Comeau
Dear University of Victoria,
I am applying to the position for university linguistics professor with your university, because while my love is language, it is also worth noting that language’s love is me, for real, and it isn’t as strange as it sounds because I think you will agree that while the verb love requires an agent of a living nature, language fills that requirement nicely — living as it does in the hearts and souls of every man, woman, child, and seeing eye dog that wanders this earth with a song in masculine, feminine, or neuter’s possessive pronoun’s heart and mind, and I feel that working in your university program, teaching undergrads and graduate students would not be the hell that your job description evokes, but instead an opportunity to teach a love of language to a world that has decided to hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate, and language is how we hold on to our family and how we figure out our place and how we order in a French restaurant to impress our date and hey, have you ever stopped to think that explicity is a much nicer word than explicitness on all fronts, at every border, in every way I feel this is true, and because I sat down to write them out, about a dozen times each, I feel I can speak with authority, using definiteness, definity, and seriously — it’s just nicer I think, spiritually, though I’m still working on this study to try and prove it through polling of students at my current university, even though they just sort of stare at me all slack-jawed, drool making the mad dash for a pavement that couldn’t help but offer more in the way of intellectual stimulation than the chasm that is the modern undergraduate mind, that couldn’t help but challenge the drool in a way that no English composition course could hope to, not in a world where universities are too willing to hire professors who prescribe standard grammars as truer languages and to grant doctorates to such nincompoops with nonsense in their heads, no hearts in their chests, making me wonder about, well, don’t think I haven’t noticed that explicity has that little red underline in my word processor, my computer’s way of endorsing those effers and their effing prescriptions, their nasal voices preaching “no prepositions at the ends of sentences, unless you have to, no split infinitives, no run on whatever, no this, no that,” and I sincerely believe that they’ve cheated on their significant others, and I bet they’ve heard someone say something hateful toward the speech patterns of foreigners just learning English, and laughed, and I bet they’ve used the word “ebonics” knowing full well the condescending, racist nature of the word itself, relishing that root, “ebony,” smiling at their coworkers from the African studies department in the hall, all the while having to consciously refrain from asking, “What is it that be the up?” in perfect imitation of the phonetic transcripts they’ve been reading about in little journals, hate rags, and maybe they’ve picked up on the careful lexical selections in my anonymous letters, in the casual threats I leave on their answering machines, and no I can’t promise that I won’t physically attack these people if you hire me, but I can promise you this: I will be the best linguistics professor you’ve ever had, the professor that students recommend to one another, the new hotness, the rad, and in dark corners my colleagues over in the department of “Standard English is the one true lord” will fear the truth I bring to their students, my anger, my explicity.
Joey Comeau
Dear IBM,
Perverts are everywhere, and I’m no exception. I used to joke that I should never get a webcam. I reasoned that if I did, I would be on the Internet disgracing myself within hours. That timeline, it appears, was optimistic. A webcam came with my new keyboard, and within ten minutes of installing it, my pants were pulled down and my shirt was pulled up and I honestly couldn’t choose between being mortified at myself and thinking, “If dignity means I can’t do this, then fuck dignity!”
There’s a weird magic to your image, though. I don’t care if that sounds crazy. I’ve started believing in magic. Magic and ghosts and family.
I brought a Polaroid JoyCam to bed with a friend and we took photographs in the dark. It’s weird to pose for yourself, your future self. How do you cater to your own tastes if your taste is the unexpected? Flash. Flash. Flash. And afterward, we sat on my bed and we looked through the pictures with the lights on, all wrapped in blankets and sweatshirts. The pictures were harshly lit and terrifying and sort of perfect in their ugliness. Our skin looked too white from the flash. We were always squinting. Our bodies didn’t look natural. They looked the way nighttime photos of moles and bats always look.
We decided that we had to get rid of them. But of course we couldn’t just put them in the garbage, because what if someone found them? No, we had to destroy them. I was afraid to burn them because of chemicals, so we cut them open, pushing my pocket knife between the layers and scraping away the image. I don’t think that was the best idea. The chemical powder stuck to the blade. It scratched down onto my sheets.
And there’s a sick feeling you get when you’re scratching away your own face. We agreed we would scratch ourselves. I don’t think I could have handled scratching away someone else’s face. I could hardly handle mine. I woke up the next morning feeling quiet. Feeling cursed. I still have one of the photos that we missed, and I’m afraid to throw it away. I get a sick feeling in my stomach when I think about those scratched out pictures and I wish I had all of the pictures still. I would put them up on my wall, all ugly and broken and perverted and squinty-eyed and alive.
I feel weird writing this, I guess, but what if we die and nobody remembers those parts of us? What if all that’s left is the censored version?
Joey Comeau
Dear General Electric,
When I was a kid, my brother and I used to sneak past the locked front doors of apartment buildings. There were four apartment buildings in my neighbourhood. One of them was harder than the others to get into, until we figured out that there was an exit in the back of the building and we could just wait out there until someone left and then catch the door. Once we were inside we just wandered the halls the same way we wandered our neighbourhood. We climbed the stairs to the very top, and there was a public balcony on this floor, just like on the others. You could stand and look out over everything.
We bought parachute men to throw from the balcony. They rocked and drifted and we took the elevator down to try and beat them to the ground, only to find them caught in bushes and trees. We bought those styrofoam planes that you have to punch out of the sheet and build, that are printed with designs on one side and are blank white on the other. They flew in spirals down to the ground, or around the side of the building. Once, my plane flew to the building across the street and down the road. It flew straight and slowly. We loved to take the elevator down and walk out the front, coming from behind the locked door, like we lived there, like we had every right.
And then, climbing the back stairs one day, we stopped to unscrew one of the light bu
lbs. Adrian took the next one, and then I took the next. There was a light bulb on each of the little landings on the way up the stairs. We climbed to the top, stealing light bulbs the whole way. We climbed and the stairs went dark behind us, as though there was something back there, following us up. We stole bulbs until we were on the balcony in the sun with a shirtful each.
I want to say that we looked first, but maybe not. All I remember for certain is that there were two kinds of bulbs. They weren’t all the same. Some were made of white glass and some were clear. We threw bulb after bulb, as fast as we could. There were a half dozen in the air before the explosions started below. We never worried whether it was safe. We lived for the danger. We lived for that crazy sound a light bulb makes when it bursts against pavement. And then we were running as fast as we could down the dark concrete stairs.
I love the feeling of running down stairs. It’s an activity the body was made for, something that feels perfect and correct.
Joey Comeau
Dear Danny Carey, of Danny Carey Insurance,
I am writing to apply for the position of life insurance sales agent, and I have included my resume, which details my years of experience, as well as my years of schooling in insurance law.
But my resume doesn’t explain what I have to offer the agency on a personal level. What will your customers deal with on a face-to-face basis? Well, I’m someone that they can relate to. I used to be them. I put every cent of my money into investments, into insurance. I devoted my life to planning for the future. I obsessed over what might happen. I needed contingencies. I needed plans B, C, and D.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s good for you in the short term is often less than acceptable in the long term. Going home with the girl who has been making eyes at you across the bar is fine right now, but in two weeks you might be standing in line at the pharmacy, embarrassed.