Head Case

by Cole Cohen

  I’m at an early graduation party when I get a text from my friend Jackie that someone in her cozy little building in downtown Oakland is looking for a new roommate. When she tells me that the building is just a few blocks from the Twelfth Street BART station and in walking distance to Chinatown, I jump at it.

  I read in a guidebook that the weather in Oakland, California, is most similar to that of the Mediterranean, sunny and balmy beach weather. I’ve never been to the Mediterranean, but I feel safe in assuming that weather is the only condition that they have in common.

  One month after graduating from CalArts, I’m in Oakland, three hundred miles away from Santa Barbara and Charlie, trying to make it work with my new roommate. I resolve to be optimistic about my living situation.

  When I head up from Southern California with Peter, my friend from Johnston, to check the place out, I’m greeted coolly at the door by my would-be roommate, a blonde with a ragged pixie cut poking out from under some sort of straw lounge hat with a dark ribbon band; it’s the kind of hat that makes me think of old Latin men chomping on cigars in Miami but seems to have been claimed by young white people. The hat is perched sideways on her head, complementing a vest covered with several gold chains. The pixie, Stacey, gives me a quick tour of the estate.

  “If you flush the toilet, you need to wait ten minutes. So no courtesy flushes if you go number two, OK?” The place is immaculate, with wooden floors and a claw-foot bathtub. It looks like paradise compared to the six-person graduate housing apartment I recently fled.

  “When my boyfriend lived here, this was our living room.” She points to the empty room that I am here to stake a claim to. I nod empathetically. “Oh, he left these.” She wanders to a small storage nook behind the kitchen. Two sets of beady, begging eyes look up at me from inside their cage. Rats. Rats and I have a complicated relationship. I am not disgusted or disturbed by them, but if I handle them I break into hives. It should be fine as long as I don’t touch them, I think to myself. She says, “I kind of hate them. I bought them for him for his birthday, and he wouldn’t take them when he left. I guess that’s what you get for buying someone an animal for their birthday.” She shrugs, cueing another empathetic nod from me.

  “So how do you want to do this?” I ask tentatively.

  “Just make the check out to me. It’s month to month, so you can leave with a month’s notice. Or I can kick you out.”

  I laugh nervously and hand her a check for more money than I’ve ever handed a stranger who didn’t work at a bank.

  The apartment is precisely decorated, if cramped. I try to think of the dominant colors in her decorating scheme, light blue and brown, as our team colors. The blue and brown towels, carpeting, curtains, living room table are all cheerleading us on as a team! I try to reconsider the owl as our mascot, to make peace with the owl pillows, the owl candlesticks, the small porcelain owl and the stone owl, the owl dishes, the owl potholder. When she reorganizes my groceries and my toiletries, I try to think of her as a spatial savant, rather than OCD. I can handle this, I think.

  The night that I moved in, Stacey left a key under the doormat for me. She’s been away from the apartment for several days. Alone in the apartment, I try to find space for my stuff. No luck—the cupboards and hall closets are all filled to the brim with her things. I leave most of my stuff in boxes until she turns up. Finally, one afternoon she comes home and heads straight for the bath. I’m in my room with my college friend and former Portland roommate, Kristy, who now lives a couple of hours away from me in Sonora.

  “This is ridiculous. You get in there and say hello to your new roommate, Cole.”

  “What? Get in the bath?”

  “Once she comes out and goes to her room, count five minutes on your cell phone, and then go knock on her door.”

  “Ugh.”

  I gently knock on her door.

  “What?”

  I seem to have come to call at a bad time, but now there’s nothing left to do but soldier on.

  “Hi!” I say brightly. “I’m here, and I just wanted to say hi.”

  “Hold. On,” she says firmly, then slowly answers the door.

  I wave my hand frantically, more of a drowning, out-to-sea look than a felicitous gesture. Smiling broadly, I look as if I’m about to enter an incredibly gracious seizure.

  She is holding a makeup compact and standing in front of a mirror.

  “Well, I’m getting ready to go to class.”

  “Oh, OK. Sorry. We’ll talk later then.”

  I retreat to my room, my heart pounding.

  The next night, she apologizes and welcomes me with a big hug. She smells like burning plastic.

  July 2009

  Tucson, Arizona

  Charlie and I are staying at a Motel 6 in the desert. CalArts granted me a stipend for the trip before I graduated, to be recouped in receipts once I return. For now, though, everything has to be paid for up front. This is why we don’t have a rental car and we’re staying in the cheapest hotel we could find. Tomorrow, our plan is to take the bus together to the ornate hotel hosting the annual Society for Disability Studies conference, where I’m speaking as part of a panel on disability studies and the arts. This is my first academic conference.

  Charlie’s presence is the insurance I have taken out against myself. He translates the maps for alien bus routes. To me, reading this picture of tangled loops in order to get where I need to go is akin to looking deep into a plate of spaghetti to find my fortune. He also enters into lengthy negotiations with the motel for towels. I’ve already been rebuffed twice by housekeeping.

  Since we couldn’t afford to rent a car after all of my stipend allowance went to lodging and plane tickets, we walk across the motel parking lot in the blazing heat to the closest food source—a Carl’s Jr. The Internet at the motel is down, leaving me unable to access my paper, which I had, of course, emailed to myself at the last minute. The night before the conference, we take a couple of buses to the hotel where it will be held.

  Each of the conference rooms is named after a different species of cactus. My panel will be in the Agave Room. Charlie walks with me through the hotel to the room where I’m assigned to speak, pointing out visual landmarks—a water fountain, a plaque, the bathrooms—so that I won’t get lost on my way to the room where I’m going to present.

  “OK, now, do you want to try it yourself?” he asks.

  I nod. My independence is won by careful preplanning. I walk the route from the hotel lobby, noting the water fountain, the bathrooms, the plaque for the Agave Room, then walk back.

  “OK?”

  “OK.” I feel brittle, overwhelmed and nervous, but I’m doing my best to keep it to myself.

  “Look!” On the walk back to the bus stop, Charlie points out tiny birds living in holes in the cacti. He can tell by my silence that I’m anxious, and he’s wisely attempting to divert my anxiety by drawing my attention to tiny, cute animals. But tiny birds cannot save us now. As soon as we get back to the motel, I exhale in a torrent of tears, “This is like living in a fucking Sam Shepard play!” and then retreat to the bathroom, where the floor is cool, still slick in spots with moisture from our showers. He waits, betting correctly that I will feel embarrassed shortly after. I come out of the bathroom to crouch tentatively on the corner of the bed. He sits on a Formica chair by the window. We’ve kept the shades drawn ever since a van pulled up next door and a man began unloading a series of large plastic vats into the room next door.

  “What do you want? Do you want to move to another hotel?”

  “No,” I sob. “We can’t afford the difference.”

  Neither of us says anything for several minutes until Charlie breaks the silence in his measured, quiet tone. I have to stop sobbing in order to hear him.

  “Right now. All. I. Want. To. Do. Is whatever. It. Takes. For you. To stop. Crying.”

  I pick up my head from my hands and smile, sheepishly.

  He has begun scribbling
on our receipt from Carl’s Jr.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Hold on.”

  He continues scribbling, then opens the phone book.

  “I am going to get us a rental car.”

  “A car?”

  “A car.” He is all business now. “OK, if I’m going to catch the bus to the rental place in time, I have to leave now. I’ll use my credit card, and we’ll split the cost when we get back.”

  “Here.” Lacking a credit card, I give him all the cash in my wallet. “In case you need to take a cab.”

  He returns with a red SUV. The next morning, I swallow a handful of herbal antianxiety medication with a swig of bottled water, and we peel out of the parking lot and head for the hotel.

  Academic conferences infer expertise, exclusivity, a conferring of like minds. They’re another respite from the body, a meeting about ideas. At the disability studies conference, this difference feels uniquely pressurized.

  I’m the last to speak on my panel. My video clips of Orlan, the performance artist I’m speaking about, won’t load, and I struggle with the mouse on the unfamiliar computer. I scroll up instead of down, losing my place multiple times as I’m reading my paper aloud. I’ve almost run out the clock on my allotted time attending to these issues. “Just go on to the slides, then,” the moderator says gruffly, but my PowerPoint refuses to load.

  During the Q&A, I take a question from a woman in the front row whose skin looks as if it’s melting off her face. She’s boney with thin blond hair. A pale pink pillbox hat is perched on her head. My first thought is that I wish that I could pull off a hat like that. My next thought is that I can see her tongue and that it reminds me of the dry pebbly tongues of my dad’s cockatiels.

  “I’m just curious about what you were going to say about Orlan’s use of body modification as plastic surgery … because I’ve had several surgeries and each time the surgeons would tell me ‘You know, we could change your nose. We could work on your face.’ And I just thought … No thanks.” She tightens her lips into a small, wry smile.

  I look down at my notes about the French performance artist.

  In Orlan’s surgery series, her own face became her mask, a highly personal canvas portraying the malleability of identity. However, this is only the first level of her masking. Her greater masking is what draws your attention to her work: the inherent female carnival grotesque involved in plastic surgery as body modification art. Through this mask, Orlan is able to draw your attention to the face and subvert our attachment to physical identity.

  What the hell do I know about “subverting our attachment to physical identity” that the woman in front of me doesn’t know already? My head swimming, I look up at her and back down at my notes.

  My mask is not just in the hiding of my disability; it is also inherent in how I choose to reveal it. My body, my head, is a physical container for my brain—the site of my neurological disability. It is also a mask of normality, carrying in my physicality the outward assurance that I am just like everyone else. This is only one mask that I wear. The other I put on when I choose to reveal my condition in writing. In articulating my difference, I make textual choices in tone, style, and construct that reveal as they hide.

  Nothing, there is nothing here that I can tell her. I nod and smile and say, “Well … it was about the face and the soul, and if, if we change our faces, do we change, do we change who we are? But that’s obviously a very essentialist—”

  The moderator interrupts me. “OK, so a feminist rescue read of Orlan. Great. That’s all the time we have.”

  Charlie drives the SUV back to the Motel 6, where we eat chocolate chip ice cream out of the container with a shared plastic spoon, unwrap the plastic cups from their sanitizing cellophane sheaths, fill them with whiskey, and toast to my inaugural academic flameout.

  When Charlie and I open the door to my apartment back in Oakland, Stacey is standing in the middle of the kitchen in a T-shirt and her panties, cutting the hair of some skinny tattooed guy who’s sitting on a stool. She has a giant scrape on her chin, which she scratches at before taking the guy’s hair between her fingers to measure her next cut.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” The guy smiles at me, clearly pleased with the situation.

  I muster a cold “Hey” and head to my room to place my bags on my bed and take a moment to myself to assess what I’ve witnessed. Charlie follows me quietly to my room and then, sensing that I could use some breathing space, cracks open the door just as my pantsless roommate is exiting the bathroom.

  “Hey—what happened to your face?” he says, with a look of concern.

  “Oh, I fell. Isn’t it sexy?” She strikes a model pose.

  Never great with sarcasm, he responds plainly, “No. It looks upsetting.”

  I suggest to Charlie that we go grab lunch at an Indian restaurant down the street.

  On the way, I try to explain, calmly, “It’s never a good idea to call a woman’s face upsetting. Even if she has a bruise. It doesn’t make her feel good about it.”

  “Oh, OK.” He pauses to think this over. “I agree. Well. What should I have said instead?”

  “How about: ‘That looks painful, I’m sorry that happened to you’?”

  “Oh. Right. OK.”

  The next morning, Charlie drives back from Oakland to Santa Barbara. Charlie and I have made this trip together many times. The last time that we did it, we stopped in Sacramento and spent the night at his mom’s house.

  “She’s doing so much better. She has a job and her own place and it’s … A few years ago it would have been impossible to stay with her. Out of the question. You don’t understand what a big deal this is, that it’s actually clean enough for us to stay there.” He was looking at the road before us, but I could hear in his voice that he was tearing up.

  Minerva was meeting us there the next day, but that night, it was just us. Charlie’s mom was a square-shaped woman who smiled a lot. Her apartment was dark but clean. Before we got into the car to pick up Minerva from the train station, she said, “Wait, hold on, I need your help cleaning out the car.”

  “Mom, we’re taking my car.”

  “I know, I know, I just … while you’re here.”

  She handed each of us a garbage bag and took one herself. We headed to the parking lot. It was obvious which car was hers.

  When Charlie and I got into his car, after cleaning out his mom’s car, I said nothing. I acted as if it had never happened. I didn’t know what to say. We were both silent for most of the drive. Finally, he said quietly, “She really is doing so much better.”

  I put my hand on his thigh. “I know.”

  * * *

  A few days after Charlie left, I’m in the small living room area of the Oakland apartment checking my email and drinking coffee around ten in the morning when Stacey walks in. We exchange morning acknowledgments as she’s dialing a number into her phone and then begins speaking sharply to whoever picked up.

  “Hey. Thank you. No, I don’t have any plans. I was supposed to have lunch with my sister, but she bailed on me. No. I don’t want it to be my birthday. Oh, OK, fine. Maybe we’ll meet up later.”

  She hangs up the phone.

  “Happy un-birthday,” I say warmly, trying to make a joke.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “Do you have any plans?”

  “No. Well, tomorrow night I’m renting out a bar. But I don’t have any plans tonight.”

  She comes home at 3:00 a.m., opens the door to my bedroom to wake me up. “Daaaaaarling, daaaaaarling … can I have some whiskey? It’s my birthday!”

  “Happy birthday.”

  I press the half-empty bottle of whiskey left over from Charlie’s last visit in her hands and close the door to my room. She heads to her room with a guy and blasts heavy metal.

  The next morning, I see her as I’m walking up the street. Her little Yorkie puppy runs toward me, looking like a little burrito with bangs. When I practi
ced the following words in my head, they somehow sounded like the perfect act of self-assertion, with a dash of wry humor to deflect anger. “Hey, so I know it was your birthday last night, but in the future, maybe not power ballads at five-thirty in the morning?” I smile nervously. Yeah. Great. Way to go, me. Her silence confirms my dread, but it’s too late; I must press on.

  “So, are we good?”

  She says nothing.

  “OK?”

  She nods.

  “OK.” I bend down to pet her little burrito. “See you in a bit.”

  I head into the apartment, make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and sit down at the dining room table. This moment is crucial; I must appear relaxed and chat about little things to defuse the tension of our confrontation and to show her that I harbor no resentment toward her and the moment is fully behind us. She enters with the dog, both of them skittering into the kitchen.

  “So,” I begin tentatively, “I hear that they want to make a speakeasy out of the basement?” Nice, building chatter, safe ground. She stiffens.

  “I haven’t heard anything about that. And even if it were true, I doubt that anyone would tell me because I’m technically the building manager. Look. So now I can’t have a party in my own room? On my birthday? I can’t have a party in my own room on my birthday.” She’s boxed herself into a little pouty blond rectangle of limbs on the couch, her arms crossed over her legs, which are pressed against her chest.