Having None of It

by Myriam Gurba

  I shut my eyes again, too, pretending to nap. Really, I was panicking. I wasn’t neurotic. I wasn’t touched by God. Or the devil. I was insane. True insane. Snake sounding nuts. Hissss. With an ‘s.’ Pssssychosis. Sssschizophrenia. P and ssss. Ssss and p. Ssssal y pimienta. Ssssalt and pepper. Pepper. Pass the pepper. Please pass the pepper.

  Quick and quiet and imperceptibly, I mouthed, “Pass the pepper.” I had to. There was the proof. S and P.

  The plane landed. We were given the go ahead to disembark.

  Following the rest of the lemmings, me and Mom trailed behind the carry-on toting masses, back up the center aisle. Salt and pepper, salt and pepper, salt and pepper…

  Mom and Tia Fe stood in the kitchen, chatting. I was helping them get dinner ready and was aware that Mom had been making comments directed at me and Tia had winked at me at least once but if some ski-masked guy held a gun to my head and said, “Tell me what they were talking about or I’ll shoot you,” I’d have lost my life.

  The entire time I’d been with them, I’d been obsessing on acting like a Saint Bernard. I wanted to lick Mom. I wanted to lick Tia. I wanted to stick my tongue out and press it to everyone and everything.

  Lick.

  Was I regressing to an oral phase? Oh, fuck it. Who knew? What I did know was that every muscle and joint in my body was tensed and ready to rip apart or snap. I was on the rack, fully taut, and some part of my brain thought this was funny. Lick. It yanked the ropes tighter.

  “This is the last straw,” I thought. The thought felt wrong. I’d thought it incorrectly. I re-thought the words to get their rhythm right.

  “This is the last straw.”

  “This is the last straw.”

  “This is the last straw.”

  I could now move on to my next thought.

  Licking people was abominable. But I wanted to do it so bad. Had to. I had to get rid of this feeling.

  “I’m going to go change my clothes,” I mumbled.

  I got up from the table and hiked up the cramped spiral staircase that connected the kitchen to the second story. Hurrying into the room me and Mom were sharing, I shut the door behind me and locked it and took off my t-shirt and jeans. In my bra and cotton underwear, I sat on Chata’s bed. Squeak. I lifted my wrist about four inches from my eyes, looked at it. My favorite bone, I wasn’t sure what it was called, maybe it was just a shapely part of my radius, curved sexy. At the top of it, there was a tiny mole.

  I licked the spot. Then, I bit it, as hard as I could. I hadn’t been expecting the bite. The chomp. I unclamped me teeth and held my wrist in front of my eyes to behold the impression. A dentist could have used the marks to fit me with dentures. I sniffed the spit. It stank. Disgusting.

  I changed into a skirt and blouse and clogs and walked back to the first floor using the main staircase. My legs wobbled. I heard the doorbell ring.

  Maybe if I did a good deed, a kind deed, a normal deed, like answering the rings, it’d cancel out the bizarro thing I’d just done. I headed to the foyer to let in whoever was buzzing. Stepping through the archway, I saw Nito standing by the fountain, by the ferns, holding a dozen red roses ready to but not quite bursting into full bloom. He saw me and held the bouquet out.

  “Para ti63,” he said.

  I clenched my teeth. “Gracias.”

  I walked over to him, ripped the bouquet out of his hand, and stomped to the kitchen. The swinging door swished behind as I entered and Mom and Tia looked up, teary-eyed from onion dicing. I pointed towards the foyer.

  “Did you know he was coming?” I asked Tia.

  She smiled. “I told you we were going to have a special visitor,” she answered.

  Mom picked up the flowers I’d dropped on the table. “Very pretty,” she said.

  “Hmph.”

  I tried to take refuge in the kitchen till it was time to eat, but Mom expelled me.

  “Go talk to Nito!” she ordered.

  I pouted and left the kitchen and wandered into the living room. Nito was sitting on the love seat.

  “I need to talk to you,” he said.

  I nodded and let him lead me to a weather worn equipal out in the backyard. Nito sat. I remained standing.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “You love me?” I echoed. “People who love other people don’t cast spells on them!”

  Nito acted aghast. “That wasn’t a spell!”

  “Yes it was! You sent that weird package with that poem and that wheel! You sent that voodoo, you liar. I’m offended. I’m offended that anyone would think that they could just cast a spell on me and they could make me into a zombie.”

  “You don’t love me?”

  I folded my arms. “No. I hate you.”

  A dark curtain fell over Nito’s face.

  “Very well,” he said. “Very well, Desiree.”

  Nito rose, limped across the tiled patio, through the open glass door, and, knock on wood, out of this girl’s life for good.

  (2)

  Carnie

  Four years later, during my last year of college, Rae, my girlfriend, crouched beside me on our bedroom floor. Mortified and helpless, she stared at me, all crumpled against the wall. She’d been trying hard to comfort me, but her magic wasn’t working this time.

  “There’re no lice in your hair,” she said. “I promise. I’ve already checked it twice… It’s just your OCD.”

  I huddled, wedged into the tight space between my nightstand and the corner, a drop of clear snot dangling from the tip of my nose.

  “I know,” I bawled, “but could you just check it one more time? Please? The lady on the bus next to me kept scratching her head and then mine started to itch.”

  Rae sighed and reached back into my hair and she began the long process of combing through it, strand by strand, the third time around. Only someone who loves you no matter what would do that, be your chimp. Getting my head checked for bugs means somebody loves me, and I met my somebody, Rae, when I was going to school at Berkeley. That’s where I went after St. Mike’s. Now I know Berkeley’s got a fancy reputation but I don’t fool myself. I got in because of affirmative action. Let in the Mexicans! Fill the quotas. They’ll give the crackers a run for their money!

  I didn’t. I couldn’t even tell you what it was like going there; I don’t recollect much. I spent four years staggering around that leviathan campus, dizzy, purple from holding so much in. On bad days, I forgot to breathe. Junior year, I bit a page out of Machiavelli’s The Prince and instead of jumping out of my sixth story window, I made an appointment to see someone. A psychiatrist. Dr. Rose. On her leather office couch, I let the deluge come pouring out of me.

  “I think about killing people…I think about stabbing people…I think about raping people…I think about such sick things,” I confessed, sobbing into a tattered Kleenex that was five seconds from disintegrating.

  Dr. Rose stood, and I genuinely thought she was coming over to me to hug me. Instead, she waddled her fat ass over to a metal file cabinet, opened a drawer, and rooted around. She pulled out a pamphlet, brought it back to me, and foisted it onto my lap.

  I glanced at the cover. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

  “Read it,” she commanded.

  I flipped through the first several pages. The pamphlet’s “Typical OCD” vignettes seemed benign, cake compared with what I was suffering. A businessman whose hands bled from a little too much washing. A third grade girl who was late to school cause of excessive light-switch checking. A housewife who had to count all the electrical outlets in a room before she could sit down comfortably.

  There weren’t any descriptions of Chicana dykes worrying they might become serial killers.

  “This isn’t me,” I thought and turned to the last page. A neo-impressionist rendering of Howard Hughes accompanied the section entitled, “Severe Cases.” I stared at the famous aviator now depicted as a googly-eyed fruitcake. A long scraggly beard and unkempt hair tumbled past his chin and shoul
ders and his claws curved into talons, like the Asian guy with the longest nails in history from the Guinness Book of World Records. Track marks dotted Hughes’ skinny arms. Okay. That was enough.

  I slammed the pamphlet shut and looked up at Dr. Rose.

  “What do you think?” she’d asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, hesitating. I started playing with my hair. “There’s more. Can I tell you more?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Sometimes… I move.”

  “You move?”

  “Yeah. I move. Like, let’s say, my leg will kick out.”

  “Show me.”

  “I can’t. It just happens. A certain way.”

  Dr. Rose stared at me. It made me very uncomfortable.

  “What else?”

  “I want to cuss,” I admitted.

  “Everybody cusses.”

  “I know. But this is different. The other day, I almost screamed ‘Cunt!’ at the top of my lungs. I was just waiting in line for a bagel.”

  “Were you mad about something?”

  “No! It just came out of nowhere.”

  “Did you say it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The word kept repeating in my head and it finally stopped when I whispered the ‘cu’ sound to myself.”

  Dr. Rose leaned back in her chair. She wore a blank expression. “Desiree, that’s not OCD,” she explained. “You have two disorders. The second one…”

  I listened but then OCD rang the doorbell. I let it in.

  “Never trust doctors,” it advised. “They make mistakes. Leave the field of diagnosis open. Do it yourself.” OCD turned and left.

  I nodded at everything Dr. Rose explained about my illnesses and at the end, I assured her, “I’ll call you for another appointment.” Lies.

  Walking home, I’d thought to myself, “I have schizophrenia, I have schizophrenia, I have schizophrenia,” in multiples of three.

  I confided in no one about my dual diagnoses and since I basically become a hermit, there was no one to tell anyways. The only person I eventually mentioned anything to was Rae. We’d done, like, the whole lesbian cliché thing, met in a bar, and then, you know the punch line:

  What do two lesbians do on a second date?

  Rent a U-Haul!.

  Me and my boi shacked up lickety-split, and in the beginning, it was great because we scored a cheap apartment in North Oakland, on Telegraph Avenue, right across the street from the Lady of Shalott feminist bookstore, and we had kinky sex all the time with huge dildos but as to be expected, the honeymoon ended.

  I let Rae catch me sitting on the toilet, my index finger pressed to my wrist, my eyes glued to the minute hand on my watch, when she came home from work one night.

  “What’re you doing?” she asked. She started unbuttoning the shirt part of her security guard uniform.

  “Taking my pulse.”

  She laughed, “Are you a hypochondriac?”

  “No. But a shrink once told me I have OCD.”

  “Do you?”

  “Prob’ly.”

  Rae could’ve run away when I broke the news to her so nonchalant. But she stayed. I believe she did because of how she was raised, by her grandpa in his traveling carnival, Pooler’s Amusements. The man was a talented, one-armed electrician who got her used to the sideshow climate, midways, the ballyhoo. My odd behavior was normal compared with the real-live circuses she’d grown up in, and Rae’s been so understanding she’s even allowed me to teach her to accommodate my illness. At one point, I had my baby trained so good Rae could sense if I was in an odd or even mood and repeat a wrong phrase just right till it pleased me. She gave me oodles of reassurance and did lots of checking for me, but, recently, she’s begun cutting back.

  It’s ’cause Rae’s trying to help me.

  First, she convinced me to quit stripping. It’s not as ironic a career for a Berkeley grad with an obsessive-compulsive disability as one might think. In fact, there’s a plethora of unstable, well-educated strippers in the Bay Area. I liked the work very much. My schedule was flexible, leaving me with plenty of time to stay home and do rituals, and where I worked, at The Steamin’ Delta, our boss encouraged us to rub down the pole with copious amounts of disinfectant before grinding it. Plus, dancing on stage and for my customers, I didn’t have to worry about you-know-what. All I had to do was focus on moving my body to the rhythm of the music and giving guys boners, and the consequent harmony and order of it all subdued my monster.

  Still, Rae begged me to stop. And I get why. It wasn’t part of the I’m-gonna-save-you-from-sex-work-baby! routine. Rae’s not like that, although I do think she lived a little in fear of stripper burnout. She’s had stripper girlfriends before. No, what Rae really wanted for me was to get a good job, a job with benefits, a job that provided me with health insurance in case shit happened. She found me one, through the classifieds, at Animo School for Adults, smack dab on the Oakland/ Berkeley border, upstairs from the most popular Korean barbecue in town.

  Same week I started teaching night school, I thought Rae was going to propose to me.

  “I bought you something,” she said.

  She’d made me dinner, a juicy vegetarian lasagne, no ricotta, steamed vegetables on the side, and was clearing the dishes. I sipped wine with my hand down my pants and pictured Rae whipping out a diamond ring, getting down on one knee.

  The table was empty except for our bottle of wine and a vase full of fresh daisies. Rae turned and strode across our small kitchen, to a cabinet by the boiler. She peeked inside. She walked back carrying a pink bag with a flouncy black bow on it, setting the bag down in front of me.

  I looked down at Rae’s hands as they retreated back to her sides. They’re gnarled from years of construction work and house cleaning and smeary tattoos start at her wrists while farther up, clearer, newer ones crawl all the way to her shoulders. My favorite she got to honor the memory of her grandpa, Clyde Delmore Pooler, after he died. It’s a gaudy Ferris wheel spinning on her bicep.

  When Rae first showed me the tattoo, she slapped the ride and said, “I can take one of these apart and put it back together again with my eyes shut. Learned how to when I was knee high to a junebug.”

  I traced the ink with my fingers and asked, “Know what?”

  Rae shook her head and grinned.

  I admired the gap between her two front teeth and tapped the top gondola on her Ferris wheel and said, “I imagine me and you making out, stuck right here forever, no one able to rescue us.”

  Rae gets me pure and simple, my frustrations with the loop tape that is my thought process, the boiling pot that is my body. She feels my frustrations because she got a mix-up, too; she’s not really a girl. Like, she’s got a pussy covered with thick hair and she’s got a full rack, but she’s really a guy trapped in a gold mine of a stripper’s body. As a he-she, Rae knows what it’s like to feel bananas. Just like I’m chaotic neurotransmitters imprisoned by flesh and bone, she’s masculinity poured into a body that curves like a Coke bottle.

  “Oh, Rae,” I breathed, touching the black bow. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Go on,” she urged. “Open it.”

  I untied the bow and set it aside. I plunged my hand into the bag and felt a book cover. I pulled out Taming Your OCD: A Self-Help Workbook and Guide.

  Coming from anybody else, this would’ve been a slap in the face. Coming from Rae, I loved it. I looked into her brown eyes.

  “You want me to get better, don’t you?” I asked softly.

  “Did June Carter want Johnny Cash to?”

  “That’s sweet,” I said.

  “I’ll do the dishes. Why don’t you go read?”

  I nodded.

  I picked up my book, carried it with me to the pink-carpeted living room, and lay down on the plaid couch across from the TV. It’s a four-legged orphan I rescued from the curb where a neighbor abandoned it along with his Christmas tree. Tha
t might be appropriate treatment for a useless cadaver but not trash. People underestimate trash, forgetting about how much life-potential things possess, and our living room demonstrates this axiom.

  Take our coffee table, for example. It’s a lavender piece of kitsch we bought off a crackhead at the flea market for three bucks. If we hadn’t bought it, who knows where it would’ve wound up. Our Art Linkletter barcalounger is the same story, a Goodwill score, and the blaxploitation movie posters I tacked up on our walls are relics I caught my landlord trying to throw away.

  John Willie postcards of bondage girls are the main decor hanging in our living room. I happened upon a shoebox at a yard sale and they were inside. I haggled with their seller over the cost.

  “Fine,” he finally said in order to get rid of me. “Take ‘em for a quarter.”

  I did. Now, in tiny frames, damsels in distress dot my walls.

  Hogtied girls comfort me, and I wonder about the girls in the photos sometimes, how some of them are probably great-grandmas now or are maybe deceased, and how back in the day, for extra cash to buy heroin or feed the kids or pay the rent, the ladies dressed up in bullet bras and black girdles and stockings and let people tie them up.

  I stared at the postcard of the girl with Marcel-waved hair. She was gagged, restrained. From how the ropes looked, you could tell she was resisting a little, for show. Marcel Waves’ picture in particular makes me feel safe. I think it’s because rope burn makes me feel safe. I like being tied up. I let Rae do it to me whenever she feels like. I let her whip me with her belt, too. It’s sexy and we have a safe word for when it gets too intense.

  Pickles.

  I looked away from Marcel Waves and opened my book. Taking a deep breath, I let my eyes slide across its table of contents. The chapters had promising, un-Freudian sounding titles like “Becoming Your Own Therapist” and “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Proven Treatment Method.” Instead of reading through the workbook in sequence, I skipped around, looking through the vignettes that appeared every couple of pages in italics. I found it about half an hour in, a description of a high school girl who was in her bedroom one afternoon, doing her homework, who out of the blue started to wonder, “What if I walked into the kitchen right now, pulled a knife out of the drawer and stabbed my whole family with it?”