by Cole Cohen
What I should have said in response: “No, of course you can do whatever you like in your room. You can fete yourself into a coma just because it’s Wednesday—a nice, quiet coma. I really don’t care as long as you don’t wake me up.”
What she said: “I just don’t know why you’re always in your room and you never sit and watch TV with me. It’s just so weird, you’re just, I don’t know, you’re just being so weird. You’re not acting comfortable. I’m just not sure that this is going to work.”
I am being thrown out for not being comfortable. This does little to ease my comfort level.
“You have your own silverware,” she continues. “Who has their own silverware? Why don’t you just use mine?”
“I owned silverware before I lived here, and I brought it with me?”
I’m furrowing my brow and waiting for a break in her tirade of my offenses when her cell phone breaks out into Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.” She pounces on it.
“Yeah? OK, you want to get some food or something? No, hey, meet me at the BART station on Twelfth, and we’ll get some food.”
I just sit there and wait for her to finish her call so that we can resume arguing.
“I don’t know, we’ll figure it out when we get there. Just meet me there, and we’ll figure it out. Look, I’ve got someone on the other line; just meet me there, and we’ll figure it out.”
She switches over to the other line.
“Hello? Oh, I’m OK.” She shoots me an accusatory look. “Hold on.”
She switches over again.
“BART! Twelfth Street!” She mumbles, “He’s still on drugs,” and switches back.
“Can I call you in like an hour?” Again with the look in my direction. “OK. Great.” Click.
I grab hold of the pause in conversation to begin my defense.
“Look, we obviously didn’t get off on the best foot,” I say. “When I first introduced myself, it was obviously not the best time—”
“I just got out of the shower! Obviously! Who does that? Who trails someone out of the shower?”
But I had waited! I had intentionally waited! I don’t want to derail the conversation by defending myself to her. At this point, however, I’m no longer sure what the point is or what my intended outcome was. Am I fighting to stay here? Am I throwing down the gauntlet and moving out? Am I being thrown out? Can she even do that?
While I was trying to quickly consider my strategy, she had continued her rant, and now I’m confused. Goddamn it—I’m toast. But, what’s this? She seems to have meandered into a personal anecdote.
“I just got out of rehab,” she tells me, “and my boyfriend broke up with me, and then I got mugged…”
“Wow. I’m really sorry that all of that happened to you; is there anything I can do to help?” I sound like an empathetically programmed robot.
“I just don’t want there to be any animosity between us!” she screams.
When I stare at her blankly, she slaps both hands on the collaged coffee table for emphasis; this apparently signals the endgame because she stands up as if something has been settled.
“OK, so, no hard feelings, bitches,” she says.
Then she juts her fist out, as if to punch me. I wrap my arms around her; she is so much smaller than me. This is self-defense disguised as affection.
“Um,” she says. “I was trying to bump you. Like, fist-bump you?”
She then gestures toward her phone, which is silent for now.
“He’s a famous graffiti artist. Flake.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what he goes by; his handle is Flake.”
“Oh yeah, I know Flake.”
Flake is best known for tagging album covers of 1980s hair-metal bands with his handle, in bright neon bubble letters.
“Yeah, everyone always says, I mean, said, ‘Ohmygod, your boyfriend’s Flake?’” She shakes her head in a mixture of mockery and evident pride.
I obviously need to get the hell out of here. Charlie’s not ready for me to move in with him in Santa Barbara. He’s started making noises about wanting to see other people “but not break up. I’d still come to the Bay Area once a month.” I am too afraid to address his proposal directly, and eventually he stops bringing it up. At this point, we’ve continued to date through a variety of geographic inconveniences, but although the physical distance is less than it was when he lived in Seattle and I was in school in Valencia, the difference between his busy grad student life and my lonely unemployed one is a wider chasm than the literal distance. I’m not sure where this leaves us. With no job in sight and a relationship at loose ends, I see no other choice but to move back to the same city as my parents.
August 2009
Portland, Oregon
Ditzy.
Definition: impulsive, silly.
Synonyms: bemused, brainless, bubbleheaded, capricious, careless, changeable, changeful, dizzy, empty-headed, erratic, fickle, flighty, flustered, frivolous, gaga, heedless, inconstant, irresolute, irresponsible, light-headed, punchy, reckless, reeling, scatterbrained, skittish, slaphappy, thoughtless, unbalanced, unsettled, unstable, unsteady, vacillating, volatile, whimsical, whirling, wild, woozy.
Antonyms: calm, careful, level-headed, sensible, serious.
I am a young woman. That’s why I bring my mother with me when I sign my rental agreement for my new apartment in Portland and consult her about the math. This is my first studio apartment, my first attempt at living independently. The representative from the rental company arrives in a dark suit and opens the door with a flourish. He is about my age, and once I tell him I am on Social Security, he stops making eye contact with me and speaks mainly to my mother. The apartment broker and I have entered into a silent understanding that is still new to me. He cannot ask why I, a perfectly healthy and able-bodied twenty-eight-year-old, am on Social Security. In exchange for my privacy, he can assume whatever he wants. This is the latest calculation I’ve learned to make—bargaining for my privacy with my dignity. I just wish he would return to looking me in the eyes when he speaks to me. Still, I’m very lucky; being a young woman is a wonderful disguise. Being a young man would have been a much worse disguise. Men are expected to know and to lead; there’s less cultural space for men to just be ditzy. I would have had a much harder time hiding out as a man.
A week after I move in, Charlie and I have a fight on the phone about how I failed to call him back when he called to say that his aunt was ill. He breaks up with me; I send daisies to his cottage in Santa Barbara. The note attached is a quote from one of our favorite movies, The Big Lebowski. “Nothing is fucked here, Dude.” It’s not quite as true as we’d both like it to be, but the gesture acts as a tourniquet, not healing everything but stopping the relationship from bleeding out until we can tend to it properly together in person. He calls me to say, “I like what we’ve built, what we’ve built together. I’ll come to Portland in a couple of weeks, I’ll see your new place, and we’ll work this all out.”
I’m naked in his arms in my new bed when he says to the ceiling, “My therapist said that I shouldn’t bring this up unless I’m serious. I’ve been attracted to other people, and that’s something I’d like to explore. But I don’t want us to break up.”
“We’ve been through this. If you want to see other people I get that, but I don’t think that I could be one of those people.” He says nothing for a long time. My mind starts to race.
“Is there … someone specific?”
He opens his mouth to speak, shuts it again, opens and shuts it again, then finally and unconvincingly settles on “No.”
I wordlessly get out of bed and into the bathroom, closing the door with an embarrassing amount of force. This was a new twist on the same old argument. I take some deep breaths, splash water on my face, and walk back out. He’s made a nest for himself out of blankets in the corner where the bed meets the wall.
“I’ve changed my mind. That was inappropriate. I m
ean not inappropriate. I should say what I feel. I want you. I want to do this. Not … that.”
We go round and round like this all weekend. In the pit of my stomach I know that I have to be the one to put an end to it, but I don’t know how to. I feel as if I have nothing left without him. Without a job, school, friends, a boyfriend, I don’t know how to build my identity on my own. Again, I’m learning how to become who I already am.
In my first semester of grad school I took a class called Autobiography, for which I read a book called Sylvia, about a turbulent relationship set in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. The professor referred to the book as “an example of heterosexual bathos.” I asked my dad what she meant by this phrase. He cackled, “I don’t think you heard her right. I think she must have meant pathos. Heterosexual pathos. But bathos, pathos, what’s the difference?” Pathos is a sentiment of compassion or pity; bathos is an anticlimax, a sense of disillusionment. Through these circular fights with Charlie, I was learning the difference.
* * *
Living in this town is like living beneath a mossy rock. It’s moist and dark and a good place to grow drugs or write a book. Kick over the rock, and you find a population of almost six hundred thousand people, loping away from the light. Many will be plugged into headphones; a surprising number will be clutching a cigarette between their lips; some will be holding a paper cup of coffee. If you’re in the southern part of the city, many people will be white. If you are in the north, many people will be black (although this is becoming less true as the tendrils of gentrification creep up Mississippi Avenue). The north is already unrecognizable from when I lived in the key lime green house a couple of years ago. Back then the closest restaurant was a strip club with paint peeling off the walls, and our house was broken into regularly; when we called the cops or the local pawn shops to try to track down our stuff, we were met with amused disinterest. Now there’s a strip of stores with cruelty-free clothing and a sushi place.
If you’re in downtown Portland from nine to five, a variety of races will be wearing suits or blazers or barista smocks. After five (it gets dark at 4:30 p.m. in the winter), a ghost army will be pushing shopping carts containing their life’s possessions through the streets. Portland has a fairly large homeless population given how difficult it is to find a dry bench. Portland is nowhere anyone goes looking for trouble. It’s a place where trouble grows slowly, in dark crevices, if you stay still for too long.
There is no hard alcohol on grocery store shelves in Oregon, a fact that I alternately curse and raise up as my salvation. In 1846, William Johnson, the former “high sheriff” of Portland, was indicted for the “retailing of ardent spirits.” According to the indictment, Johnson, “being moved or reduced by an evil heart, did sell, barter, give or trade ardent spirits.” Though I haven’t been able to prove it, I like to think that my street, Northwest Johnson Street, around the corner from several bars, is named for this man.
Portland is home to a variety of migratory tribes, the most well known being the twentysomethings who drift into and out of town. It’s late April when I move back, and the swifts, tiny sparrows that make up Portland’s other migratory flock, are swooping in and out of the chimney of the elementary school by my apartment. The dark swarms remind me of video I’ve seen of the bats living under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, another home to migratory twentysomethings.
I refer to my new upstairs neighbor, whom I’ve yet to encounter in person, as Hooker Boots. When she isn’t clomping around upstairs in what sound like leaden stilettos, she’s hammering away at building what can only be some sort of depraved Rube Goldberg device. Her other hobby is to loudly practice her gymnastic exploits. I can see her now, in her patent leather tool belt and little else, like the beginning of a bad porno. “All of this hammering just makes me so horny…”
Parallel play, a developmental psychology term used to describe two- to three-year-olds who play side-by-side with other children without interaction, perfectly describes my Portland life. Because my parents moved here when I was already out of school and I’ve shifted living in and out of town, I don’t know anyone here very well, and every time I come back I’m of course older and it feels harder to meet people than the last time I was here.
My friend Allison suggests that we meet at the Burnside Skatepark, the concrete bowl under the Burnside Bridge. Neither of us is a skateboarder, but she told me that she comes down to watch the regulars skate whenever she’s feeling down and finds that it helps.
We stand to the side of the park and watch the skaters, mostly men in their early twenties and late thirties and a couple of women, swoop and occasionally tumble. Allison tells me about her friend Grant, who lives in one of the industrial-looking brick apartment buildings overlooking the park and comes to watch the skaters with her sometimes, comparing watching the skaters to watching the migration of the swallows of Capistrano. Grant is in a wheelchair, due to a degenerative disease.
I have been thinking a lot about home, how for some people it is a fixed point, a North Star in the astrology making up their personal narrative. For others, like me, it’s a destination that I chart and rechart, less any brick-and-mortar place than a sensation that I chase after and then find or misplace or let go of and then chase again.
I meet up with my friend Delores after her shift at Vowel. Delores was my next-door neighbor when I first moved to Portland. We catch up about the graphic design work she’s been doing more seriously lately, about her boyfriend whom she now lives with. She’s been helping him learn to cope with his mental illness, which has begun to shake her faith. “The only thing that would make me not believe in God is schizophrenia. To have no control over your own mind. How could you do that to someone?”
Schizophrenics use stories to make sense of feeling paranoid, will internalize narratives to explain to themselves the overwhelmingly inexplicable. We all crave context. I’ve become increasingly obsessed with narration, story, how we organize and contain an overwhelming life.
Writing about my world feels both like willing my truest myself into being while inevitably obliterating that same self. Writing is the connective network between my body and my brain; it tells my body what to do. It’s also a preemptive defensive strike. The only way that I know to try to keep my poise is through my vulnerability, but in the process of explaining I risk losing that which I’m striving to keep. I write to connect with a disorienting and sometimes indifferent universe.
On bad days, I’m too overwhelmed by navigating the outside world to leave my apartment, which I refer to as the Fortress of Ineptitude. I read, I clean, I write, I mess around on the Internet, I test out new recipes.
On these rough days, I think about how it will happen: I will not see the car coming around the corner, from my left side. I’ll be lost in my own thoughts, and then, suddenly, the air will be knocked out of me. I am tumbling over the hood, thinking, Well, here it is, or maybe if I’m having a really bad day I will think, Finally. In my head I am always frozen midtumble, over the roof of the car like a detective chasing down a perp in the opening credits to some cop show from the 1970s.
It won’t be a surprise. Crossing the street, I often think, Well, this could go one of two ways. One day I will miscalculate how far, how fast, enough time, not enough time, and the car won’t have time to screech to a halt and lay on the horn like the other times. The driver won’t have time to be angry, and, ideally, I won’t have time to be scared.
This is how it will happen: I will fall off the map. I will get lost again in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time. I am panicked but determined to get back on track. I run a groove in the pavement with my sneakers. My cell phone runs out of batteries. I stop at newsstands, where I attempt to translate wild pointing; I grip maps written on scraps of newsprint or cocktail napkins, follow the cul-de-sac of a stranger’s handwriting down an alley and then across a bridge. I will sleep on a bench and then in a storefront when it rains. Undeterred, I will continue my ques
t. Eventually, concrete gives way to earth, the city to the countryside, and as I cross fields of corn and cabbage and disentangle myself from archaic, winding sprinkler systems, I begin to lose my mind. I solicit scarecrows, sleep in henhouses, until one morning I bleed into the horizon.
This is how it will happen: Slowly, gradually, they will erode me—kerfuffles, little misunderstandings, raised eyebrows. These are the little microbes of embarrassment that infect my dignity, the germs that attack and invade my sense of self. They ride in on the Trojan horse of other people’s harmless assumptions and the pressure that I put on myself, as if when I miscalculate change or don’t understand my own bills I am breaking an unspoken code about what it means to be an adult.
The most immediate form of relief is to put on an album, close my eyes, and allow my body to melt into nowhere and no one. With my eyes closed and the right album, I can sneak out of the rind of my body to become shapeless pulp.
There’s a big brick hospital a few blocks down from my new studio apartment. On one especially rotten day, unemployed and watching my long-distance relationship crumble like a bad movie starring someone else, I realize that I could just walk into the hospital and ask for a stay in the psych ward. Nobody could stop me; I wouldn’t need a ride there, unlike other times when I begged my parents to take me. It’s still tempting to shake the temptation to walk into a hospital and say, “Hey, I’m exhausted. Why don’t you take the wheel for a while?” I still want to believe in the authority of a hospital to heal me. I’m still afraid that I don’t have the tools myself.
It’s still difficult for me to shake the notion that anyone can walk into a hospital with enough urgency and be righted. Back here in Portland I am only starting to understand that learning how to be good to yourself for yourself is a painstakingly gradual one. It is a process that I don’t yet have the patience or compassion for. I just want to be loved.