by Gabby Bess
ALONE WITH OTHER PEOPLE
a collection of prose and poetry
GABBY BESS
Copyright (c) 2013 Gabby Bess
All rights reserved.
CCM & Design by Michael J Seidlinger Cover by Samantha Conlon
& Gabby Bess
ISBN - 978-1-937865-17-7
For more information, find CCM at: http://copingmechanisms.net
For LK.
ALONE WITH OTHER PEOPLE
A WOMAN WANTS WHAT A WOMAN WANTS
THEORETICAL VIOLENCE
PEEK-A-BOO IS A GAME THAT INFANTS ENJOY BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOT DEVELOPED OBJECT PERMANENCE
HOLLY GO LIGHTLY
THE WOMAN AT THE END OF THE CUL-DE-SAC
FRENCH LESSONS
JUST BE FAMOUS
WHAT I CAN OBSERVE WHEN VISITING A CITY NEAR WHERE I ATTENDED HIGH SCHOOL
TIPPING
THE THEMATIC CONTENT OF 1AM TEXTS
I CAN KEEP YOU
I CAN MARRY YOU
THINGS THAT I PUT INTO SARAH’S MOUTH
HOW TO LIVE
EVERYONE WAS HAPPY
BAD BITCH
WE CAN PLAY THAT GAME WHERE WE PRETEND THAT WE ARE IN A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE INTRICACIES OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS
I FEEL OF GREAT IMPORTANCE, HISTORICALLY
DINING ALONE AT PLAZA AZTECA
STEVE BUSCEMI EYES
MINIATURE BEARS
20MG/DAY
THE UNIVERSE HAS TAUGHT US A GREAT TRICK
SELL ME SOMETHING
JEANNE DIELMAN
A THING TO DO IS SIT AROUND AND THINK ABOUT THINGS
I WILL WRITE A NATURE POEM ABOUT FEELING GRATEFUL FOR MY MOUTH
IF INSTEAD OF ASKING ME TO INSTALL UPDATES AND RESTART MY COMPUTER I WAS ASKED IF I WANTED TO DIE INSTANTANEOUSLY I WOULD PROBABLY CLICK YES INSTEAD OF NOT NOW
GOOGLE SEARCH HISTORY: WEBMD FIBROMYALGIA, WEBMD LUMPS IN THROAT, WEBMD THROAT CANCER, HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU HAVE THROAT CANCER, LIKE, FOR REAL?
TRAVEL SOUTH
PUSH NOT PULL
RED GRANITE, WI
11:47 AM
EXPERIENCE THE FUN
OVERSIZED T-SHIRTS
INSIDE OF THIS POEM THERE IS A ROCK AND THEN THERE IS ME
AN EXTREMELY LONG NECK
NERVOUS CREATURES
CONGRATULATIONS, YOU OWN A LARGE ROUNDED STONE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
ideas to get rich (#1)
A WOMAN WANTS WHAT A WOMAN WANTS
The alarm goes off and I wake up
to perform my critically acclaimed
sentience in my morning posture
I seek to achieve the impossible angles of a bird laying dead in the road—with its head and its wings folded down into the asphalt from the vantage point of a crane shot.
To make direct eye contact
with the camera is to move the perspective from
the watched to the watcher or to present an emotion as a publicly observable signifier,
a voyeuristic experience—
The Feel Good Movie of the Year
was my nickname in high school
and as is cinematically compelling,
I brush my teeth for the duration of sand
moving from the top of the blue plastic hourglass
to the bottom. “Look at this existence.
This pathetic, fallible, wonderful body,”
you can say rhetorically, sarcastically, or earnestly and still achieve death.
Look at me falling in love with fallible bodies. Look at me performing emotional labor,
my arms are strong enough
to work a tract of land:
The impatient man calls me
a bitch at my place of work
and the upward movement
of my facial muscles causes
my eyes to wrinkle, a smile.
This is a method of intention setting.
I seek a husband
with broad shoulders and a symmetrical face, a hard worker, whose value is in the width
of his chest. I do not want
men that can teach me. There is nothing more that I want to know; free of want,
I can’t use men in the same way
that they can use me. “Give up
on art and love,” you can say rhetorically, sarcastically, or earnestly and still achieve death. I wouldn’t be a good wife,
but I would be a wife
in a way that was cinematically compelling.
In my dream last night
there was a factory farm
that performed full body castration;
I went there
to lay with the women who wanted
to find a calm somewhere.
I became a body
and my sentience became someone else’s problem as I awoke thinking,
“Where is my value?” as if I had misplaced my lipstick again.
THEORETICAL VIOLENCE
The sex can be rough
to bring pleasure with
choking & punching & the sloshing
of liquids in the back of your throat
to spit near my eye area. To reduce
my suffering, you can take my own
hands within yours
to rub the spit into my eyes &
into my mouth & you can kill me
inside of your head as many times as you need, just to feel calm. Is anyone moved
by the plainness of raw skin anymore?
Where did this tenderness come from?
To reduce your suffering,
I will fill the inner lining of my stomach
with bullets by ingesting them like pills
until I sag heavy
& full in your hands.
The shifting of skin on skin
sounds something like an underhanded truce. Like kissing in a trench with your fingers crossed behind your back. I listen
as the radio plays a song about guns
Just the sound of it—the gunshot
But not an actual gunshot—a human voice mimicking the sound of a gunshot
over a heavy beat.
this image is a series of signals to your brain that allow you to access my guilt
PEEK-A-BOO IS A GAME THAT INFANTS ENJOY BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOT DEVELOPED OBJECT PERMANENCE
Waking alone in a room that doesn’t belong to me under a comforter that covers my entire body, even my head, I turn into myself. The heavy folds of sheets are disorienting.
I can feel my bangs brushing against my face
like an open palm,
covering my eyes like that game
that babies like to play to make the world disappear and then reappear
and then fill with laughter. Where is the second body? Hahaha am I alone here?
HOLLY GO LIGHTLY
At the end of her shift, Juliana walked into the bathroom to check her bangs in the mirror. Her hands were damp and marked red from various casualties throughout the day: the spill of an entire flat of fruit cups on aisle 17, the errant paper cuts from unpacking card- board boxes, the sticky soap from a cracked bottle. In her exhaustion, she absentmindedly touched her bangs with her hands in a spastic sweeping motion across her brow, which now felt a little sticky. She imagined visible remnants from her day clinging to her hair. Juliana felt self-conscious. She felt self-conscious about her bangs. She felt self-conscious about her knees. She felt self-conscious about the fact that her name was Juliana. In 20 years she still hadn’t grown into it. Her name was a foreign language that she couldn’t quite say with the right accent.
Juliana stood in front of the mirror and looked at her face. Her bangs were greasier than she would have liked but she thought that they looked OK.
They sat just above her eyebrows like a pair of flood pants. She felt her oversized and shapeless work-uniform crippled her, in terms of her looks, and reduced her potential for attractive- ness to a mere childlike cuteness. She looked down at her nametag that read, “JULIE” in bold red letters, as she was sure to emphasize to her supervisor that she went by Julie and not Juliana. For the first week of work she wore a nametag that said “Quanique” while she waited for a nametag of her own to arrive. Juliana was Quanique for a week. Being Quanique was very similar to being Juliana except that as Quanique, Juliana felt like she could be more absurd and sarcastic inside of her head. While doing tasks at work she would think, “Qua- nique for a week. Quanique FOREVER” while grinning.
Although now, looking in the employee bathroom mirror, she was simply Juliana. She was Juliana Forever. She was Juliana for the en- tire rest of her life. The new girl that was recently hired was now Quanique on register 9. Oh, the lightness of being Quanique! When Juliana was Quanique, she was new; everything was absurd and sar- castic. Now that Juliana was just Juliana she had to come to terms with the reality of working for minimum wage. And the reality of working for minimum wage was that it was better than working for no wage but worse than other things.
Juliana wanted to pee. She didn’t have to pee but she wanted to. (Don’t be vain. Don’t be so concerned with your looks, she thought.)
She reasoned that it would be good if she at least tried, if she at least sat down. In vanity there is a certain confidence and self-assurance that is unattractive in a young girl and is met with every attempt to be suppressed immediately. Even when she was alone, Juliana behaved as if she was performing for an unknown, ever-present viewer who knew what she really went in the bathroom to do. (Look at her hair. Touch her face. Consider her attributes and watch a grin form across the face reflected back to her.) She inspected her grin in the mir- ror: crooked, but straight from a distance. She often received com- pliments on her teeth. People, strangers, would say, “Oh your teeth are so straight. Did you have braces?” Juliana would reply, “Yes, but I accidentally threw away my retainer on my 10th birthday so now they are crooked” and she would try to smile real wide to show the strangers her teeth. This made her mouth appear misplaced on her face, like it was her elbow or an ill-fitting cowboy hat.
Sometimes she would look in the mirror and think, “Can I sell my- self? Would anyone buy me? Am I something worth having just to look at; like a coffee table book? Just to stand inside of a living room or on top of a fireplace like an arbitrary art thing from IKEA to point at and say, ‘Look at our good taste in arbitrary art things.’”
Juliana’s favorite stall, if she was forced to choose something like a favorite stall, was located in the corner behind the main door to the bathroom. The door always appeared closed which made it diffi- cult to discern if someone was already inside or not and most people moved on to the next stall without bothering to check, leaving the thick roll of toilet paper untouched and minimal amounts of pee on the floor and toilet seat. It was a safe haven for those that wanted a place to sit. Juliana closed the stall door, pulled down her pants and put her ass to the toilet seat. Her ass settled onto the toilet seat, mak- ing a suctioning sound. Juliana sat on the toilet and watched the thin rivers of piss flow through the grout lines in the tiles. Juliana counted to 10 and then flushed the toilet. Juliana un-suctioned herself from the seat and pulled up her pants.
When Juliana arrived home from work she took her MacBook into the bathroom, started the shower water and then started to undress. To Juliana, the bathroom was hers. She could sit on the toilet, doing nothing really, for hours and no one would bother her. In a family household the distinction between public and private space isn’t al- ways so clear. What was hers wasn’t really hers exclusively. But the bathroom seemed to be a safe territory, a neutral zone that would protect anyone that sought asylum there.
Juliana took off her coat, her shirt and her bra. She was able to slide her pants over her thighs and back up again without unbuttoning them or unzipping them. “This is good,” she thought. Juliana opened up Photo Booth and started to take pictures of her shirtless body in front of the medicine cabinet mirror. She saw the tightness of her skin over her ribs. She saw scars across her stomach with unknown origins. Juliana saw her breasts. “Not big enough for... something,” she thought. She deleted all of the pictures immediately after view- ing them. She viewed her life as a TV show that no one watched, or that people watched but they were bored and she knew that the show certainly wouldn’t make it past the first season. Juliana imagined her funeral: a formless crowd of people in a trivial location, chatting amongst themselves, saying things like, “Oh thank God. Finally.”
She stepped away from the mirror and thought, “Oh thank God. Fi- nally.”
Juliana sat down on the toilet and started to idly look at blogs and websites. She noted the shallow dent underneath the Apple logo on her MacBook, fingering the depression like an open wound and laughing while her face contorted into an ugly, sad smile like it does when she remembers ugly, sad things. Juliana thought about the day that she dented her MacBook and her face became increasingly ugly as she smiled wider and crazier while sitting on the toilet. She had trouble thinking about the past. In the past she always seemed hap- pier. She didn’t understand how time could work like that. She didn’t understand how time could twist her face into an ugly, wild thing.
The dent in Juliana’s MacBook appeared on the day when Adam and Juliana were laying down next to each other on Juliana’s bunk bed. Adam was on the inside, closest to the wall, and Juliana was on the outside. That night Juliana was on her period and Adam kept trying to finger her while they were watching “I Love You, Man” on Juli- ana’s MacBook. With her mouth full of Trix cereal Juliana said, “No. Not tonight,” while smiling. Adam leaned in to kiss Juliana. When the movie finished, Adam and Juliana sat in silence until Adam said, “Okay, I should go.” Juliana said, “No” and reached for the box of Trix. Juliana poured what was left of the Trix cereal on top of Adam’s head. Juliana and Adam spent the next thirty minutes eating Trix cereal off of Juliana’s sheets while laughing. After thirty minutes had passed Juliana said, “Okay, you can leave but since you’re on the inside let’s just barrel-roll over each other. Kind of like spies.” David grinned and said, “Okay. On the count of three. You’re obviously go- ing over.”
One (1)
Two (2)
Three (3)
Juliana went over, Adam went under, and Juliana’s MacBook fell ap- proximately seven feet to the ground. It hit the ground like a dead thing and bounced. Juliana felt like she didn’t care about her Mac- Book and she laughed. She kissed Adam and wanted to have sex with him but Juliana was on her period and her roommate was on the bottom bunk the entire time.
Later on that night Adam called Juliana and said, “Come over, I have a surprise for you.” Juliana biked over to Adam’s apartment and found David standing in the doorway with a travel sized bottle lube much like an outdoor cat with a dead squirrel in its mouth, proud and tentative as it presented its gift. The laugh track plays.
“Since you’re on your period do you want to have anal sex?” Adam grinned and Juliana stared at her feet trying to compose her face into an appropriate reaction. Juliana considered her feet. “Sure. What- ever. Whatever you want,” Juliana said as she picked up her face to smile in a way that looked adventurous. Girls always have to look adventurous when propositioned with things like this.
Juliana used her MacBook approximately 16 hours a day so she thought about that story a lot. She memorized it. Edited. Highlighted details. Treating the story, along with every other sensory experi- ence, like a third grade science experiment; naïve, at first, followed by a hopeful diligence for the desired reaction. Which object floats and which sinks in water? What separates from the oil? Juliana tried to make sense of the past year. Trying to bring it closer to the truth, or possibly further, so that when she sat in the overstuffed chair in her therapist�
�s office and these words fell out of her mouth, her therapist would laugh instead of something worse. So that her therapist could see the lightheartedness and comfortable sweetness that possibly outweighed the manipulation and Juliana’s desire to be wanted. Her therapist didn’t see this. She prescribed Juliana Klonopin, Lexapro, and Lamotrigine. Juliana put the story back in the water.
On the toilet, Juliana opened up Omegle in a tab in Safari. “You are now chatting with a stranger. Say hello. You both like [sex].” On some level Juliana didn’t even like sex. On some level—one of the infinite levels that her consciousness seemed to obscure or elucidate, rather vindictively, she thought, ‘at random,’ causing her face to twist in discomfort at the memory of her skin being touched by another person, while she enjoyed feeling a great sadness for herself when her consciousness did choose to partially reveal how she felt about her skin being touched by another person—the act was simply a 10- 45 minute relief where she didn’t have to talk so much, especially if she was being choked.
She constructed herself as the modern tragic figure who would sacri- fice herself for whatever.
Only once had she allowed a guy to go down on her. (Go down on her. Perform oral sex. She didn’t know which term to use; one seemed to be too crude while the other seemed to be giving too much credit.) He attempted to go down on her for almost an hour and when that didn’t prove profitable he drove Juliana home in silence. As they were driv- ing, Juliana’s body curled, wet, and uncomfortable, he looked down at her and said, in a matter of fact tone: