“Bring me water, homo,” I texted her. She didn’t immediately reply, so I texted her again. “DON’T BE A HOMOPHOBE. BRING ME A WATER.” Drunk Matt assumes the worst of people very quickly. Still no response, I texted her a third time. “Why do you hate gays?!” Nothing.
A few minutes later, she walked over to the table and sat down. “Why aren’t you answering my texts?” I slurred.
“Because you didn’t text me,” she said.
And that’s when I realized I hadn’t been calling Jen a raging pro-dehydration homophobe. I was calling Pam the Broker a raging pro-dehydration homophobe. “OH MY GOD!” I screamed. “I THOUGHT I WAS TEXTING YOU!”
“OMG I’M SO SORRY,” I texted Pam the Broker. “I DON’T THINK YOU HATE GAYS.”
But she never replied. And I never heard from Pam the Broker again.
The next week, I found Pam’s replacement, a broker named Mark. He looked suspiciously like Mr. Clean if Mr. Clean had served time in a federal corrections facility for cooking meth. His shiny bald head was punctuated by bulging skull veins and his biceps were kept at a solid 75 percent flex at all times. In truth, I chose him because I was too scared not to choose him. Somehow, I thought, he’d find me and rent me an apartment and make me move there whether I wanted him to or not.
But Mark, like Pam, proved to be a person of many oddities. On our way to view our first apartment, he stopped me midsentence to ogle two women passing us on the sidewalk. “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “I just get so distracted by beautiful women. You understand, though.” I most certainly did not.
The apartment we found was smaller than the one Pam showed me but livable enough, and Mark’s biceps seemed to throb in approval. Sure, it didn’t have an oven or a fully closable bathroom door, and the toilet was barely bigger than one of those training potty seats parents use to put on top of normal-sized toilets to teach their babies how to shit like civilized humans. But whatever. I was running out of time, and Mark’s skull veins weren’t getting any calmer. Two days later, I was signing a lease. (Along with a piece of paper that said I’d promise not to lick the walls. For real. The lease agent said it was totally standard. “Just a little thing that says you won’t sue us if you chew on the windowsills,” he told me. I signed it, but still. It’s a pretty fucked-up thing to ask of someone. I should be free to chew on whatever I want to in my own apartment.)
I finally had my own apartment to destroy at will, which is perhaps the greatest feeling in the world—to have the freedom to debase a space that belongs to you (however temporarily) in the manner you wish to debase it. There’s nothing greater than sitting on furniture with your bare ass knowing that it’s your furniture to defile, or pissing into an unwashed toilet you know is being seasoned like a skillet with every use, or spilling an entire bowl of cereal in bed, knowing you can ball up the sheets, toss them down the trash chute, and buy new ones the next day with not a single soul to judge you for it. Finding an apartment in New York City is perhaps the greatest struggle, but it yields the greatest and simplest reward.
ON SELF-SUFFICIENCY
I spend a lot of time thinking about how I will almost definitely be the first one to die in the apocalypse. It’s kinda hard not to think about the end of the world when you live in New York City, considering there’s already a very fine line between order and chaos here, and all it really takes to send us into primitive panic is a delayed subway train, an inch of snow, or a giant ball of glitter falling in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Anybody who’s shopped at the Target in Brooklyn knows there are very few rules keeping New York society from descending into all-out bloodshed; I tried returning a microwave there once, and left with three arrow wounds, a snakebite, and Dutch elm disease, which is technically a disease for trees, but apparently not at Target, because nothing matters at Target, especially not the one in Brooklyn. Trust me when I tell you, if the apocalypse strikes New York, whether by way of aliens, zombies, or pandemic, it would take Manhattan less than one hour to burn itself to the ground. (Everybody in Brooklyn, I assume, would die in the initial invasion.) Give us one sighting of a convincing UFO, and we’d all kill one another in the toilet paper aisle at CVS long before CNN told us it was only a stray Goodyear blimp.
And yes, I know for a fact, I would be the first one to die.
It’s not for lack of preparation. I’ve thought about which of my neighbors’ dogs is likely to be the most nutritious and how many bottles of whiskey I could drag back to my apartment in one liquor haul. I know where my closest nuclear fallout shelter is, and I know exactly which apartments in my neighborhood are the most expensive and most likely to satisfy my dream postapocalyptic life of luxury. But mostly, I think about the fact that I would absolutely not make it long enough for any of that to matter.
There’s really no end-of-the-world scenario I can imagine where I’m not the first to go. If aliens invaded, they’d know right away that I’m not strong or coordinated enough to keep as a human slave and that my body is far too ravaged to conduct any meaningful experiments on. I mean, if you’re a superior alien race ransacking earth for servants and test subjects, you’re not gonna kidnap a three-hundred-pound homosexual with seasonal depression and hay fever. If a zombie virus struck, I know my luscious, doughy body would be too irresistible to go undetected on the streets. (I have no doubt that my layers of fat have created the perfect marbling and that I would be absolutely delicious.) If a contagion swept the country, I know my immune system would put up almost no fight. And I know I’m barely tough enough to defend myself against a robot vacuum, let alone a robot army, should one suddenly rise against humanity. I know that I can’t run fast enough to stay out of reach, that I take far too many naps to stay alert for danger, and that my past experience with group projects would make it impossible for me to live in a community of survivors without having a meltdown resulting in my inevitable exile.
But the real problem—the one that would almost certainly get me killed long before the nuclear radiation charred my body from the inside out—is that I have absolutely no conceivable real-world skills. I can’t defend myself. I can’t cook for myself. I can barely gather supplies. The contents of my fridge is currently four cans (yes, cans) of sparkling wine, an expired carton of milk, and a plastic container of sliced watermelon that I bought because I find cutting my own watermelon to be too much work. In my cabinets, there is only a single box of brown rice that I never finished because brown rice is disgusting and an old bag of stroganoff noodles that I bought for a slow cooker recipe but never bothered to cook because slow cookers make you think about what you want to eat for dinner ten hours in advance, and I can only think about what I’m eating as it’s entering my body. The only things I am well stocked in are whiskey and face moisturizer, and I can’t exactly eat either of those. If the world came crashing down right this moment, I’d have enough supplies to last a few hours at best before I’d be forced to go out into nature, where I’d be inevitably mauled, eaten, or enslaved.
How did I turn out this way, you ask? I ask myself that question every time I try opening a jar of maraschino cherries or undertake even the most basic of home improvement tasks. I tried installing a curtain rod with a power drill by myself and somehow bored five holes in the drywall before I got exactly the right spot. And that’s a wall! A completely motionless target! You think I chose to be this inept? No. It was bred into me.
I come from a long line of unabashed weaklings, incubating for decades in the comfort and safety of midwestern middle-class suburbia. My father, who could have spent his time teaching me to hunt venison and identify nonpoisonous berries, spent the lion’s share of his spare energy collecting antique clocks. Hundreds of them. You don’t learn real-world skills from a guy who collects antique clocks. I mean, sure, he could barter the hell out of a cuckoo clock at the flea market, but that’s not gonna save us from roving bands of postapocalyptic motorcycle-riding cannibals. And my mother, finding everything to be a danger, left us ill-prepared for greater
threats. When you grow up thinking a mouse is the most dangerous thing in the world, what happens when you encounter a guy with a baseball bat covered in barbed wire?
Case in point: Chicago, winter 1999, one of the worst winter storms to hit the city in recorded history. In the course of a day, almost three feet of snow fell on Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, and in the days after, temperatures reached lows of minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit, which the National Weather Service categorized as “extremely fucking cold.” It was one of those storms where the weatherman goes outside with a bucket of boiling water, throws it at the sky, and watches as it freezes before it hits the ground. It’s a fun little way of saying, “We’re all going to fucking freeze to death, but at least our bodies will be well preserved.”
As is often the case when a storm of this magnitude hits, power and phone lines were downed and we lost electricity. As was not often the case, we lost power for not just a few hours, but five entire days. That’s five whole days with no heat, no lights, no telephone, no hot water, no microwave, and no access to my AOL account. We lived on a dead-end street, which meant no snowplows could forge a path to set us free, although that didn’t matter much because every car on the block was almost entirely encased, and the front and back doors of our house were snowed shut. We were, quite literally, buried alive. The only way we could let out the dog to pee was by opening a window and slowly lowering her to the ground with a leash and harness.
Now, let me reiterate, we were not a strong family. We relied overwhelmingly on machines to do our brawniest tasks. If we’d all been alive a century and a half earlier, and attempted to brave the Oregon Trail, all of us, including our oxen, would’ve died from dysentery less than a mile from our house, I’m absolutely sure of it. My family could barely survive driving to a restaurant in the same car; we wouldn’t have lasted thirty minutes in the same covered wagon. And now we faced our very own winter apocalypse.
For five nights, we struggled to keep from freezing. We melted snow on the gas stovetop to use as bathing water. We ate what meager food we had by candlelight. After dinner, I played with my rag dolls and pig bladder balloon while Papa played songs on his fiddle. At night, we all slept in the same room to conserve heat, an arrangement that included our two hamsters, Muffin and Biscuit, whose cages we covered in blankets to keep them from icing into tiny hamster steaks.
As the fifth night began, I’d started to think our supplies had finally reached their end. My body would be found frozen to the floor, clutching my Beanie Baby collection. Archaeologists would conclude I was trying to keep them warm in a final act of selfless love. Museum exhibits would be built about me. “NAMELESS GINGER CHILD FOUND CLENCHING HEAP OF GAY STUFFED ANIMALS. A DISSECTION OF HIS STOMACH FOUND ONLY STRAWBERRY POP TARTS AND EGGOS.”
But, on this very night, just as I was closing my eyes in a peaceful acceptance of frozen death, our neighbors managed to pound away enough ice to knock on our front door and offered to share their spare generator. Apparently they’d been using one since the storm first knocked out the power and had been living in comparative luxury less than twenty yards from where I’d been sizing up which hamster would be the most delicious. (Muffin, because she was a girl and had more voluptuous, meaty hips.)
And so, we were saved. Without the kindness of strangers or the aid of a magic electricity machine, we would surely have died and our corpses preserved like the charred victims of that volcano that killed all those people in ancient times. I mean probably. I’m sure we were totally fine, and my parents will read this and be like, “That never happened, we knew exactly what we were doing, why are you always like this?” But I was nine years old, and it felt like we were definitely gonna die, and the fact that I thought we were definitely gonna die should be proof enough that I clearly wasn’t absorbing any meaningful survival skills. Because that snowstorm was only the beginning of a long series of instances in which my capacity for mastering basic survival skills would be tested.
Later that same year, I took my girlfriend to the park, and yes, you’d think that a nine-year-old homosexual having a girlfriend would be the direction I’m going with this, but it’s actually not, so just get that right out of your head. I was nine years old and she had good clothes and nice hair and agreed to be my girlfriend, so it was absolutely real. Yes, the fact that I didn’t know I was gay yet maybe foretold my lack of simple intuition, but that’s not really the focus here. We were on a kid date. We rode our bikes to the park together, and held hands on the swings, and it would’ve been a perfectly magical afternoon had we not been confronted by a drifting gang of fifth-graders determined to ruin our budding heterosexual romance.
I don’t know why these fifth-graders were so intent on ruining our park date, besides the fact that children are trapped in a Darwinian struggle for a higher place in the playground hierarchy, which makes them unusually vicious and cruel. These children were no exception.
Their leader, a skinny but muscley eleven-year-old named Kyle who I’m pretty sure does meth now, approached me and shouted something like, “AWWW. ARE YOU ON A DATE WITH YOUR LITTLE GIRLFRIEND?!” And I had to be all like, “Um, technically we’re not putting any labels on it right now, we’re just kinda testing things out and exploring our likes and dislikes—” But before I could finish, he started lunging at me like a pimply jaguar pouncing on a portly, defenseless antelope, and I had to react.
Now, this is the point where most humans would mount some semblance of a defense, if not for their safety then at least for their dignity. But I was never taught to fight. My idea of self-defense was to simply avoid danger by never leaving the house. My parents never had to worry about teaching me to defend myself because I was rarely ever in nature long enough to put myself at any reasonable risk. (That being said, I guarantee you neither of my parents can throw a punch.)
So I did the only thing I knew how to do well: I froze. I stood frigid with my hands glued to the sides of my hips like I’d been tied up with invisible rope and waited for impact. When his body collided with mine, I fell to the ground like a toppled tree. And I lay there motionless, with his body on top of mine, hoping that if I remained inanimate long enough, he’d think he’d killed me and would move on to his next target.
And surprisingly, it worked. He got up while I stayed on the ground with my eyes closed, waiting for death. He and his friends rode away, and I waited until their distant laughter dissipated before I got up, dusted myself off, grabbed my handbag, and rode home silently beside my heterosexual partner. I’d like to think my bully believed my possum act, but more than likely, he took pity on my lifeless body and realized I was too pathetic of a conquest to punish further. Either way, I survived, but only barely.
I tell this story not for your pity, but to show you how I behave in the midst of confrontation. When presented with the choice between fight or flight, my body is totally like, “You know what? Let’s just shut it down. Let’s just shut this whole thing right on down and reconsider whether it’s even worth it.”
Maybe you’re like, “It’s OK, Matt. Plenty of people can’t fight, but surely you could still weasel your way through the apocalypse like a coward!” But this presumes I have other tested real-world skills.
Even if I did manage to fight my way to the grocery store for supplies, I sure as hell wouldn’t know what to do with them. I haven’t cooked a meal for myself in nearly six months, because last time I tried cooking my apartment smelled like burnt broccoli for twelve agonizing days and I refuse to go through that again. The only successful time I used an oven, I baked a batch of delicious sugar cookies (the Pillsbury kind that you literally just plop on a tray and throw angrily in the oven when you want cookies but you’re too lazy to care about life), and when I left them on the kitchen table to cool, an aggressive New York squirrel busted his way through my window and stole them right from the plate. Even when I succeed at basic tasks, my work is easily undone by even the least formidable opponent. I have no doubt, if the apocalypse hit
tomorrow, that a squirrel would eat me well before any human had the chance.
And if you think I’d be able to domesticate an animal of my own to help in my defense, well, consider that I’ve killed almost every pet I’ve ever been charged with raising. The first pet I had, a beautiful goldfish named Margaret that I’d convinced my parents I was responsible enough to keep alive, lasted less than one week before she died in an apparent suicide. Turns out, I was too proud of Margaret, and lugged her bowl from my bedroom every time guests visited, so I could show her off, but apparently sloshing a goldfish up and down two flights of stairs every day doesn’t provide for the most hospitable of aquatic environments. Rather than endure the tempest I created for her daily, Margaret went on a hunger strike and was found belly-up one afternoon when I went to fetch her for her Wednesday walk. Even Muffin the hamster didn’t last very long, though she died of what we think was an abdominal tumor that I couldn’t possibly have been responsible for. But I still probably had something to do with it.
So no, I do not think I would survive the apocalypse. It’s amazing I’m even able to stay alive without the apocalypse. Give me the slightest hurdle to jump over, and I guarantee you it kills me before my feet have the chance to leave the ground.
ON KEEPING A CLEAN AND TIDY APARTMENT
1. Dusting is something you only do if you don’t yet realize that dust is a lie perpetuated by the feather industry to make us believe rubbing dead goose wings on our furniture will make them clean. Guess what, feather industry? Furniture is like a cat. It basically cleans itself.
2. Likewise, a shower is a self-contained germ vacuum, and only requires an occasional light rinsing or heavy spitting on. I mean, have you ever heard of someone actually cleaning their shower when they’re in there basically every day with shampoos and conditioners and shaving creams? I don’t think so.
Everything Is Awful Page 17