But my dad never came to Clearlake, and the coin issue remained unresolved. Over time the issue turned into verbal artillery used by each party at his own convenience, rarely face-to-face or even directly referred to, but rather alluded to in conversations and one-liners so far from the original point that it was as if language had adapted to accommodate the complex and loaded implications of the words coins and river and France for the explicit benefit of allowing each party to verbally attack the other without having to actually bring up the issue directly.
After a week, I called James. I told him that it was important to me that he wasn’t mad at me, and for him to know that I knew I had fucked up. That I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I had ruined our friendship. That I had never cared about someone as much as I cared about him, but that I also cared about myself and needed time to figure out what I wanted. I hadn’t apologized, but at some point I stopped talking, waiting to be forgiven.
“I have something to say too,” James said.
“Okay.”
“I hung out with Marcy a few times. We hooked up.”
Marcy was once my best friend in high school, but it was a troubled friendship and we drifted apart as it became exceedingly clear that she was happiest when I felt rejected.
I felt my body flush with a level of humiliation previously unknown to me. Suddenly I had lost the one thing that I thought was unconditionally mine.
“You’re disgusting,” I said calmly. “You’re fucking so disgusting that I think I might get off the phone right now so I can go vomit.”
“Shut up. That’s not fair.”
“I’m never touching you again. Also, you should really get tested.”
I didn’t have any reason to believe Marcy had a disease, but I thought it was the meanest thing I could say, and I wanted to cover up the pain I was feeling. I was upset, but it wasn’t James’s fault. I had made this mess for myself, with selfishness and hypocrisy and manipulation and carelessness. I had been using James to create drama that I could control to shield myself from the pain caused by the drama other people were creating and controlling around me, and it wasn’t working anymore.
We both cried helplessly into the phone, knowing that this was the end of whatever we had been doing.
I cried all night, called in sick to work the next morning, and was fired for it the day after. My behavior was unprofessional and irresponsible, I was told. I was simply not cut out to bag groceries full-time in a small town I on-again, off-again resented.
I counted down the days until my return to art school, longing for the simple pleasure of spending all night on an art project I would immediately throw away after the class critique.
I realized the point of being assigned to glue leaves to paper. No one could create anything interesting with such materials with a one-day turnaround, and therefore we had all been assigned to pre-
sent literal garbage, pretending that it was emotionally driven or artistically significant. We had to stand in front of our peers and talk about our garbage, get our teacher on board with the meaning of our garbage, hear ourselves say out loud that it was caused by some burning creative force inside of us. The garbage of our lives.
The point was to internalize the garbage. Even when we threw it out immediately after class, it was there in the backs of our minds, in our body of work, reminding us of the shit that we were capable of. We had to accept what we had done, find something useful in it, and move on.
13
trashy coming-of-age story
During my second year in college, my mom broke up with Jett, and she and my siblings moved out of his house and into a mansion. It was cheaper than renting a regular house, my mom said, but the catch was that the owner of the mansion sometimes lived there, too, so there were parts of the mansion that would be off-limits to my family.
“Are you sure it’s safe to live with a stranger?” I said. “It’s probably worth it to just rent a regular house that you can have to yourselves.”
“It’s fine. He said he’s hardly ever going to be there.”
The other catch, which was actually more of a perk, was that the mansion was filled with stuff. The owner had just purchased the house, and the previous owner seemed to have not taken any of her belongings with her when she left. There was a living room with couches and tables and plants, and a movie room with theater curtains and a movie projector. There was a pool table in the den. The drawers and cupboards were filled with expensive trinkets and old jewelry and dishes and batteries. The various workrooms stored outdated printers and fax machines and sewing machines and craft and hobby supplies of all kinds. The garage had bikes and fishing gear and tool chests and garden equipment and pool toys. It was like walking through an estate sale where everything is sud-
denly yours.
“I’ll be taking these,” I said to my mom, putting a bunch of sewing supplies into my backpack.
“Sure,” she said. “I doubt the new owner even knows what’s here.”
I had never been much of a thief. My cousin and I stole some hair clips from Walmart when I was ten and, feeling guilty, immediately told my mom what we had done. “Be careful,” was all she’d said. The next year, I regularly stole giant Mr. Goodbar and Symphony bars from the grocery store near my elementary school, shoving them into the lining of my corduroy jacket. After that I lost interest in stealing. It didn’t seem worth the risk and I didn’t like candy that much.
But being in my mom’s rental mansion was like being in Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders. The endless bounty of random objects technically belonged to the mansion’s owner, but there was too much stuff to keep track of, and none of it was being used. Plus, the owner was, as he’d promised, never around, and it didn’t feel like stealing if I was taking things from a house my mom lived in.
Whenever I visited, I stole a few little things. A couple skeins of yarn. A basket. Cleaning supplies. Some silverware. A road bike. A digital sewing and embroidery machine. A serger. Some kind of land-surveying equipment that I didn’t understand but that looked valuable and sellable.
And a can of air duster.
At parties I had done whippets, from small cans of nitrous oxide, and thought the duster would feel the same, but the duster was more intense and the effect seemed to last slightly longer. I inhaled deeply, and—briefly, beautifully—lost all my connections to the world. I could see and hear and control my body, but nothing meant anything to me. I didn’t hold any associations. It ended a few seconds after it began, and I would feel completely normal again. I could read, or cook, or do any number of normal activities. But what I did most often was hit the can again, and again, and again. I loved how the blankness felt. I loved being free, completely free, of my anxieties, for even a few seconds.
I knew very quickly that the can of duster was a problem. As much as I loved the feeling it gave me, I was also terrified by how great it felt, how easy it was, how accessible.
“The feeling you’re getting is the feeling of losing hundreds of brain cells simultaneously,” friends told me. And, “You’re going to become brain-dead.”
The can of duster lasted forever. I was afraid it would never run out, but I couldn’t bear to throw it away. I took it to Oakland and encouraged my friends to try it, wanting to share it but also wanting
for it to be consumed more quickly and be out of my life. I started hiding it from myself, and making rules about when and how I could use it: only if someone else also wanted to use it, and even then only ten times in a row at the most. But I found it difficult to follow these rules, and often I would come home drunk and take a few hits by myself, my drunkenness adding nothing to the experience except a lack of self-control.
On one of the many weekends I found myself in Clearlake, my friend Brandon picked me up at my mom’s rental mansion and drove us around aimlessly in his little car. Brandon was one of the few friends from high school I still kept in t
ouch with. Though we rarely talked, and saw each other even less, he felt kindred to me, and each time I saw him it was as if no time had passed.
There were two kinds of people who grew up in our town: people who never considered ever leaving Clearlake, and people who left as quickly as possible and spent the rest of their lives trying to distance themselves from it. Brandon and I were both the second type. Brandon had moved to San Diego after high school but moved back after a year, and was making plans to leave again. I didn’t ask him much about it, not wanting to embarrass him. I was in Oakland but coming back to visit at every opportunity, never knowing why I was still most comfortable hanging out in a town I had so eagerly escaped.
We stopped on the side of the road where there was a good view of the lake. We took turns inhaling from another can of air duster I’d taken from the mansion, and tried to maintain a conversation while floating in and out of consciousness. I didn’t know Brandon to be very interested in drugs, and we’d never done any together, but somehow this felt comfortably within the realm of things I could suggest we do.
“Clearlake is kind of pretty,” I said. “I never realized it when I lived here.”
“Yeah. It was much easier to focus on the petty bullshit,” he said.
He inhaled from the can and was gone for ten seconds.
I took the can from his limp grip and took a hit. Consciousness momentarily left me, leaving nothing to interpret the sensory intake of my body. The world womp-womp-womped as my brain cells died.
“I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. I need to get out of Clearlake,” Brandon said.
I nodded and handed him the can of duster. He took a hit and his head fell back onto his headrest. He looked angelic to me, but I was losing brain cells at a rapid rate, so there is a good chance that what I was seeing was the beautiful effect of the world disintegrat-
ing around me.
“Whenever I do drugs,” I said, “I feel like if I died I wouldn’t care at all. Like I just accept the possibility of death and it doesn’t
scare me.”
“Same,” he said.
“Then when I’m not on drugs I get really sad and guilty about how I felt when I was on drugs.”
“I can see that.”
•
We went to a bonfire party in an abandoned dirt lot off a dirt road. Brandon didn’t really want to go, but I pushed for it.
“What else are we going to do?” I said.
There were forty or fifty people standing around a massive open fire, including all of my least favorite people from high school. Several guys were wrestling near the flames. Some drunk girls with exposed midriffs squealed as another girl drank from a beer bong. A person I knew to be a crackhead put a limp wrist to his chest to indicate the word retard.
“I feel like we’re aliens trying to make sense of some nonsensical civilization that is about to self-destruct,” Brandon said.
“This party would be a good setting for a trashy coming-of-age story,” I said.
We watched someone barf all over his own shirt, take off the shirt, and start drinking again. Someone else spit loogies into the fire while nodding and swaying to music that either we didn’t hear or was nonexistent. Another person was slumped over into the dirt, as if it were the most natural time and place to take a nap.
“God, this town makes everyone so stupid and terrible,” I said.
“It’s not the town’s fault,” Brandon said. “These people were going to be stupid and terrible no matter where they grew up.”
“I don’t know.”
I liked believing that the town had caused such stupidity, because it made me feel strong and intelligent for overcoming it, for making my life interesting despite the bullshit that surrounded me. I was like a beautiful and unlikely fungus growing out of an old, dried-out cow patty.
It was cold outside, but Brandon and I wandered away from the fire and stood in a far corner of the lot taking turns with the duster. Once in a while, some drunk person I vaguely recognized would stumble toward us to ask if we had any cigarettes or alcohol.
We stayed until the bonfire went out, all the beer cans were empty, and mostly everyone had left.
I had felt a deep, all-encompassing apathy for most of the night. I had a complete lack of interest in people or my own feelings or what time it was or the reality of death. It felt like the deepest depression I had ever known but without all the exhausting emotions. It was a feeling that felt like the answer to all the problems of the world.
“What should we do now?” I said.
“I heard some people say they were going to DJ’s house to hang out,” Brandon said. “We could go over there.”
We went to DJ’s, but I don’t think either of us knew why. The can of duster was still pretty full, but I was starting to get a headache. I drank from a vodka bottle. Brandon picked up an acoustic guitar that was lying on the carpet in the corner of the room and started playing.
“That’s my guitar, but you can play it, I don’t care,” someone said. He introduced himself as Lyle. He had long black hair streaked with purple, three eyebrow rings, and eye makeup smeared across his cheeks, possibly from crying. I guessed he was fifteen or sixteen.
“Oh, cool, are you sure?” Brandon said. “I assumed it was DJ’s guitar.”
“Yeah, man.”
Lyle sat down and listed all the different types of alcohol he had consumed in the last twelve hours. Shots of vodka. Beer. Shots of Hot Damn. Peppermint Schnapps with juice. More beer. More shots of vodka.
“That’s a lot,” I said.
“Eh,” he said. “I like to drink as many different things as I can so I can black out and not remember throwing up.”
I was drawn to Lyle’s strange beauty. He looked like the son of two gorgeous, closely related fashion models. His eyes were huge and dark and too far apart. His whole body seemed delicate and limp, as if he hadn’t ever considered the option of becoming strong. He seemed sad and pathetic in an iconic way.
The way I looked at him was the way I wanted others to look at me. I wanted to love and protect him. I handed him my can of duster and instructed him to inhale as he pressed down on the nozzle. He did so without hesitation.
“Don’t do that shit, dude,” someone said, glaring at me as if I were an unknown out-of-town adult giving toxic fumes to a probably troubled teenager. “That is really fucked-up and stupid.”
The person speaking, who looked fifteen or sixteen, picked Lyle up by the wrist and led him to the kitchen, where a group of people were shotgunning beers.
I felt embarrassed. What was I doing? And why was I here? Not just here at this house. Why was I in Clearlake at all? If I hated it so much, why was I here? Why had I spent the whole night following people around who I claimed not to like, noting all the things I didn’t like about them and adding those things to my massive list of reasons I had left Clearlake in the first place?
I was not a beautiful, magical fungus. I was part of the shit. I hadn’t come back to observe the shit stains of my youth with ironic distance; I’d come back so I could act shitty and stupid while still feeling superior. I had come here so I wouldn’t feel accountable for my own behavior.
Brandon dropped me off at my mom’s rental mansion and
we said our goodbye-don’t-know-when-we’ll-see-each-other-agains. Whether I would ever return to Clearlake, and if Brandon would be here when I did, were always indeterminable whenever we parted ways. If things went well for us, we likely wouldn’t be in Clearlake at the same time, and we’d probably never see each other again. It was hard not to hope for it.
I lay down in the home theater room that was my bedroom for the weekend. Thick red velvet curtains were pulled back on each side of the giant TV screen. I unzipped my sleeping bag and got up to see if the curtains could actually be untied, or if they were permanently drawn, a pointless
adornment merely to underline the fact that this was a “theater room,” not just a room with a big TV in it, as I suspected was the case.
The curtains were sewn together in perfect pleats, and the tassels that appeared to be holding them loosely were just another decoration, also sewn in place, indicating that, yes, this was an elaborate facade designed to make other TVs seem lesser by comparison, even though, when it came down to it, TVs without curtains lacked nothing but the evident fear of their own inadequacy.
In the morning I stuffed another can of air duster and two spatulas into my backpack before going back to Oakland.
14
romantic comedy
I was just beginning to feel comfortable with the thought that I would be alone for the rest of my very lonely life when I realized I was in love with my friend Ian.
Ian, who had been my friend for three years. Ian, who I had worked with in our school’s Facilities Department the year before and who had made it his personal goal each day to let everyone on the team know what a useless and lazy employee I was. Ian, who sang to himself during class worktime despite it being the most annoying thing any person could ever do. Ian, who once bragged that everything he was wearing he’d found on the street. Wait. Ian?
I was surprised by my own feelings, which were sudden and strong, just as it always is in romantic comedies when the girl realizes the guy she’s been looking for has been there all along. But in romantic comedies they don’t communicate to you how confusing that is, or how uncomfortable it is to start thinking of your friend in this new, perverted way, or how awkward you feel when you have to talk to that person for the first time after your feelings have been revealed to you. What do you say, exactly? Do you reintroduce yourself? Do you take
your glasses off and whip your hair around dramatically so he finally sees you as a woman?
“Thai iced tea,” I decided to say, the best and only way, I thought, to let him know that I was both available and interested. “Very nice choice.”
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