Yours with love,
Katinka G.
Near Cates Beach, BC, Canada
Katinka’s message had traveled half a mile in a dozen years. But wait—what kind of name is Katinka? A rare enough name, for sure.
I stuck the message and bottle in the car console’s drink caddy and drove to meet my hockey buddy Norm for a beer.
“Katinka?” Norm said. “I think I actually know who she is.”
“What? Really?”
“Yeah, she’s a bit younger than me and lived on the cul-de-sac I grew up on, in that green house with the boat out front that’s been parked there forever.”
I knew the house. After I left Norm, I drove to his old cul-de-sac. The boat was still there (and boy, did it need pressure washing). I parked and walked up to the front door and, fortified by beer courage, I rang the bell. A woman answered. I said, “I know this is strange, but I’m wondering if there’s a Katinka who lives at this address.”
The woman, Ally, turned out to be Katinka’s mom. She reminded me of someone I’d meet at my high school reunion. The stress lines on her face were those of someone my age. She told me Katinka had jumped off a bridge two years after writing the note.
“She was born sad,” she said. “No, that’s not fair. People shouldn’t be born sad, because life will do that to them anyway.”
Ally invited me in, then went to make me coffee. I looked around the living room in silence. It was so fucking depressing.
When she came back, carrying two cups of coffee, she said, “The place is dusty, I know. Please excuse it.” She sat down on a sofa. “Not many visitors these days. Who am I going to have over? Someone I met on an app? The Smashing Pumpkins were right. The world is a vampire.”
What do you say in a situation like this? I said, “You know, Ally—I have a pressure washer I almost never get a chance to use. Why don’t I come over on Sunday and give your boat a blast?”
And Ally said, “Really? Could you?”
And I said, “Yes.”
42
Oxy
HAVE YOU EVER TRIED to hire a hitman? Be honest. The hardest part of it is going through your mental index of all the people you know—or barely know—and trying to choose the person who might actually know someone who will, well…you know. Wink-wink. I thought finding someone would be harder than it turned out to be, and all of that work just to get rid of my useless husband who, truth be told, ought to have been taken out a decade ago.
I know, I just used the phrase “taken out” so casually, like I’m some crime bigshot. I can practically hear you judging me. But put yourself in my shoes. I’m thirty-eight, with my only kid gone off to the next county to huff glue and make ill-advised boyfriend and tattoo choices, and…that’s it. That’s my life and legacy. Oh, and I want to start a dog grooming business to fill my days with productive labor—go capitalism! Yet there was my so-called partner, Paul, sitting at the dinner table waiting for me to feed him, all sweaty from a day at the nursery and totally uninterested in my day or funding my grooming venture.
Insider fact: Paul’s underwear was always filthy because he thought touching his own butt long enough to wash it would turn him gay. He was so unclean. After Kayella was born, he turned into Paul the Wall. He completely stopped talking, which was fine, but he earned a bundle at the nursery and wouldn’t give me start-up money for my grooming business. Then he canceled our trip to Florida to see my sister, and I sat there in the TV room like a houseplant, realizing that unless I did something soon, I was going to be spending the rest of my life sitting in front of a TV like a houseplant.
Okay, in search of a hitman, I ended up going to a strip club where I knew that a friend’s friend’s friend’s loser stepson worked as a janitor. The moment I saw him, I realized he was an easy-to-manipulate goon who’d do anything for anyone for money and/or drugs. His name was Grant.
Listen to me badmouthing young Grant like that. He might not have been a man of words, but he was a man in need of a new crankshaft for his Ski-Doo, and winter was just around the corner. Hashing out the price was a little difficult because Grant honestly saw no difference between a thousand dollars and a million dollars. Finally, I offered him three figures and when he haggled up from five hundred to eight hundred, he thought he’d gotten the better of me. I offered to throw in some oxy on top of it, and we were set. Looking back on it now, I could have paid him with Monopoly money, except he did need the cash for his crankshaft.
Right after we agreed to the price, I realized I’d be safer all around if I handed Grant oxy laced with fentanyl. Dead men can’t talk, right? So I left Grant out behind the dumpster and headed for the strip club office. Please remember, I was dressed like a soccer mom, albeit one who carries a pearl-handled handgun. I barged in on the guy who runs the place, saying, “My niece ended up on a ventilator because of your nasty shit. I won’t go to the cops if you hand over the rest of that batch now so no other kid out there gets hurt.”
It totally worked. He handed me a ziplock bag filled with who-the-fuck-knows-what. Ciao, sucker.
FYI, killing Paul was easy. He jogged a mile every night, always along a patch of rural road that never has traffic. All Grant had to do was run Paul down at seventy miles per hour. Unimpeachable hit-and-run. While all of this was going down, I made sure to be in a Denny’s with CCTVs up the ying-yang. When I left, I dropped a plastic bag with the money and drugs in the parking lot’s far trash can. Ahhh…life was good. Paul was gone. Grant was soon to join him.
People felt so sorry for me, the poor widow!
It turned out there was way more money in the bank than Paul had let on, so:
1) I visited my sister at last,
2) I started my business, and
3) I used some of the leftover bad drugs to get rid of Kayella’s wimpy tattoo artist boyfriend who, the moment he found out I had money, wanted to move in with Kayella and start giving her a full left tattoo sleeve based on those Hobbit movies.
Have you ever tried to get rid of a body? Be honest. On TV, people are always getting rid of bodies, but in real life it’s hard. Your instinct is to dump it in a forest or ditch and throw some branches on top. But there are busybody joggers and smug dog walkers everywhere. So, until I think of a better solution, I bought a sporty-looking cargo carrier for the roof of my new car and stuffed the tattoo artist into it. I figure it will only buy me a little time before the raccoons try to claw their way into it—those little fuckers are smart. I’m sure I’ll think of something.
43
Effexor
THIS GUY SHOWED UP at my door one afternoon holding a plastic Dasani bottle containing a note from my daughter, Katinka, who committed suicide ten years ago. He found it on a beach maybe ten miles from here. Katy took a hundred Valiums and hanged herself in the garage with a yellow extension cord. I think this guy at the door, Clem, was expecting me to be sunshine and happiness to see the bottle and the letter, but instead I felt like a bird who’s flown into a window. To mask my shock, I invited him in and left him to go make coffee while he looked at all the family photos in the living room.
When I came back with the mugs, he said, “Is that her there?” He was pointing to Katy’s grad photo.
I nodded. “She was happy then.”
“Who’s that?” He was pointing to a grad photo of Terry.
“That’s my son. He died of a fentanyl OD a few months back. He was a tattoo artist.”
“Oh jeez.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
Silence.
I told Clem I was going to be frank. I admitted that Katy was a mess almost from the beginning, and I always thought it would never end well for her. She’d make friends, but she couldn’t keep them. “Her mood swings were terrifying, and then some doctor put her on this crap called Effexor, which dialed down the drama for a little while,” I said. “But then the
drama turned into this dark, scary, gloomy crap like self-harming and cutting. I mean, what the fuck is that? I grew up on a farm. I like life when it’s simple. But Katy? Imagine a roller coaster with all its cars on fire.”
Clem wanted to do what a lot of people do, which is to find some comforting moral in all of it, but there isn’t one for Katy—or Terry. It’s nature. It’s the law of averages. It’s randomness. Not everyone’s life has meaning. It bugs me when people try to find silver linings. I tried to get Clem to stop being such a goody two-shoes by telling him I was a pragmatist, not a moralist.
“What do you mean by pragmatist?” he asked.
“Okay, the Olympics.”
“The Olympics?”
“Yes. I mean, why do people get so hung up about doping? You don’t see those judges going apeshit when one athlete wears a springier pair of shoes than the other, do you? Springier shoes confer an artificial advantage, which is apparently no problem. But eat one poppy seed bagel and get blood-tested for opiates, and suddenly you’re the devil.”
“Okay…”
“My point is that taking steroids is no different from wearing a springier pair of shoes, so why shit on dopers? In the end, it’s still the athlete’s physical body that set the world record.”
“They should all run barefooted, then?”
“Well, if they want to be so pure, everyone should be running naked. So, until they all do that, the Olympics is pure hypocrisy.”
Clem smiled. “It would certainly make the Olympics more fun to watch.”
“There you go. And while I’m at it, take vegetables. When people serve you salad, you’re supposed to make a happy face and go, ‘Yay, salad!’ But salads often taste like crap. We’ve all been brainwashed into thinking vegetables are mandatory, but they’re not, they’re a hoax. And, not only that, salad greens are broad-leafed, so they soak up pesticides like sponges—Roundup and all that junk that’s killing bees and butterflies and songbirds and eventually us.”
“That actually makes sense.”
“Thank you.” I was on a roll. “Nuclear weapons.”
Clem did a spit take on that one. “Wha…?”
“Let’s be real, Clem. In the 1950s they were dropping bombs like firecrackers all over Nevada. In the casinos they’d announce the blasts so that the gamblers could go outside to view the mushroom cloud. It was fun. But if you dropped one small nuke now, people would freak out like little babies and run around suing whoever they could and, I don’t know, getting hysterical thyroid cancer.”
“Well, that’s certainly a novel way of looking at things.”
“Thank you. You know what they called seatbelts back in the 1960s?”
“No, what?”
“Sissy strips!”
Clem threw his hands up at that one and laughed.
It turns out he is a mudlarker, someone who goes trawling through mud and sand looking for, as far as I can tell, rusty nails and dead nickels. The real jackpot, he says, is usually a wedding ring. To find a message in a bottle? That choked him up. Once he started telling me this, I could see that finding Katy’s message was truly important to him—it validated his hobby. While it really didn’t mean much to me, he was in my house and I was the host, so I tried to be nice: “Clem, this bottle has given me a real lift.”
I don’t think he bought it. Still, a new look came over his face, and all at once I felt girlish and awkward there in my own living room. I looked around me. “Not many visitors these days. I mean, what’s going to happen—I’m going to have someone over who I met on an app?” I looked into my coffee cup. “The Smashing Pumpkins were right. The world is a vampire.”
Clem said, “You know, Ally—I have a pressure washer I almost never get a chance to use. Why don’t I come over on Sunday and give that boat in your driveway a blast?”
“It’s been parked there since Ernie died,” I said. “Why not?”
44
Rubbermaid Tubs
MY BIGGEST CONCERN in life is figuring out how I’m going to get to New Zealand when civilization collapses. I mean, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. How unstable do things have to get before you go into survival mode and prune your earthly possessions down to what will fit into six translucent plastic tubs, each about the size of a microwave oven? My tubs are Rubbermaid, with the signature Delft-blue plastic tops that make that satisfyingly crisp burping sound when you close one after you’ve placed into it your essential legal documents and a 144-pack of Clif energy bars.
To other people, I look like I have my shit together, and I suppose I do. I take care of my body, and business is good. I’m a florist with good taste and an ability to maximize profits on large ordering events like weddings. I hate that I have to own a car, but what else are you going to do in our society—take a bus? But there’s no way I’ll own a house. Talk about an anchor. Instead, I rent, and invest my business profits into Amazon stock.
I keep my six plastic tubs in my guest room on top of the bed, all ready to go. Even before the pandemic, I never invited people over, worried they might feel uncomfortable after they saw how materially condensed my world is. My minimal furniture is rented, and so are my pots and pans. In essence, I live in a perpetual hotel room, ready to flee at any second.
What will trigger the end? Maybe, on top of the pandemic, some right-wing Proud Boy will set off a small but effective baby nuke inside Manhattan’s Holland Tunnel, and there goes easy metropolitan travel for the next hundred years. There are so many other 9/11s out there in the wings, just waiting to pounce on us.
I remember the morning of the first one. I was in my bathroom, rigorously flossing to see if my gums would bleed. I was watching the mini-TV over my towel rack when Good Morning America cut live to downtown Manhattan. As the towers fell, I threw a bunch of shit into a suitcase (I’m embarrassed by how naive my survivalist selection was. I even threw in a can of Argentinian corned beef) and then raced to the airport. I dumped my car in the crazy-expensive day-park lot so that I could fly to—Canada? Australia? No, New Zealand: the gold standard of survivalist destinations, in my book.
But, of course, the sky was shut down. Fuckers.
I kept cycling through options in my head: Who can I bribe to get me on an Air New Zealand flight to Auckland as soon as the planes start flying again? What sort of premium would it cost me to get someone bumped off that flight? Down the road, would money even be worth anything?
I keep a margarine container full of Krugerrands in one of my Rubbermaid tubs, mixed in with a bunch of cashews so that anyone rifling through my shit maybe won’t find them so easily. I’m ready to bribe like crazy. I’m maybe even ready to kill to get onto an Air New Zealand flight once shit goes down.
My sister asked me why I don’t simply move to New Zealand now and spare myself the apocalyptic angst. It’s a really good question. The thing is, New Zealand isn’t allowing tourists in right now, and they also make immigrating kind of impossible. After all those people who made the Lord of the Rings movies there a few years back bought up the country, New Zealanders sensibly closed their gates. Big chunks of cash won’t get you in the door anymore. Fuckers.
Needless to say, I have loaded handguns in my Rubbermaid tubs. During an apocalypse, we’ll finally get to see all the guns lurking out there. You could stop making guns today and there’d be enough guns for the next ten thousand years. Gun control? That horse left the barn in 1895. For every gun you see, there are fifty thousand more hidden in church basements, in suburban attics and under the front seats of F-150s.
My sister asked what I get out of living this way, always waiting for it to happen. She also suggested that, come the apocalypse, Air New Zealand is likely to stop flying.
Who’s to say she’s right or I’m wrong? One day in the next few thousand years, there’s going to be the last plane that ever flies. What will that plane be, and why will it be the last one? Wi
ll all the gasoline in the world be gone? Will the human race be down to the last five hundred people living on the South Island? Will the world have turned into a perpetual blizzard that has stopped planes forever?
Maybe. I like to think about that kind of stuff, because there’s something about right now that I don’t trust. There’s something about people I don’t trust. Maybe some people fucked me over in my early life. Boo-hoo, but I don’t feel safe in this world.
45
CCTV
JEEZ, JUST LOOK AT my mother, with the new so-called friends she made after Dad got run over and she came into all that dough, all of them just sitting there wearing their fuck hillary cardboard hats and drinking Costco cranberry juice with this weird off-brand vodka that tastes like Purell, talking about how useless men are. So then I go into the other room and they start slut-shaming women who have tattoos, which was totally meant for me to overhear.
I only got half a tattoo before my tattoo artist boyfriend OD’d, but it’s still kind of cool—he was good at his job. It’s an angel with wings, except the face is a skull, and only one wing got finished. When people see it, I can see their brains trying to figure out what’s happening on my shoulder. It reminds me of this joke he used to make about dildos every time we saw someone stuffy on TV, like Nicole Kidman or the Queen. He said no matter how refined they were, if you showed any woman a dildo, they’d be wondering how it would fit inside them.
He amused me, for sure, but the clock was ticking pretty fast on that relationship. He totally cradle-robbed me, for one. And Mom couldn’t bear to look at him because she blamed him for getting me into huffing solvents, which isn’t true. I actually saw something about huffing on YouTube and it made me think, Hey, huffing solvents could be kind of fun. Blame the internet.
I was seeing someone new, anyway: Nathaniel, who I met in the parking lot at the Brentwood Mall after a big bag of Styrofoam packing peanuts he was carrying broke open. It was just so funny. I think we picked up maybe three of them before we started laughing and couldn’t stop, and then we started throwing foam peanuts at each other, and then suddenly we were at his place, which was a trailer with a really good view of the river. It’s kind of like it was meant to be.
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