One of ManMonster’s ManMonster friends sees me and shouts many noises. ManMonster runs over: “Ohnononononononowhyyyyyyy!!” I am very relieved that ManMonster is not, as it turns out, gone forever, but also at same time I am very ashamed.
ManMonster grabs constraint and pulls me to door. ManMonster opens door and takes me outside like maybe I want to make waste again. I do not. Waste already made. This is very obvious. ManMonster goes back inside. Closes door. I scratch at door, so ManMonster will remember that I cannot open door, so that ManMonster will come back and open door for me, but door does not open.
I look up at sky.
I hear howling of distant creature.
I think about LittleWhiteHairedCreature who made waste in House and then did not come back to House. I think about how after LittleWhiteHairedCreature made waste, TallSkinny did not come back to House. I wonder where they went. Is this where now I must go? I know, if so, is very appropriate. Is what I deserve. Already, ManMonster was very upset. ManMonster did not also need for greatest companion to make waste in House. This is betrayal at worst possible time. Now I truly know what it means to be reason for Badog.
I think about LargeBrownCreature, who had no ManMonster companion and no House. When I saw before, from across much distance, I wondered how it was like to be LargeBrownCreature with no constraint. Now I feel bad to have wondered. Now I know. Is not good. Is not very happy to feel like this.
ManMonster opens door and I am much relieved. He sits down on step next to me. He makes noise like, “Ay-yi-yi…” I am very ashamed to have made waste in House—I know when I did this I was not a good companion—but also I do not want to be a creature who is not allowed back in House. I look at him and make face like, Please do not condemn me from House. I can be a very good companion from now on. I will be always good to you from now on. I know ManMonster is not always smart about discerning meaning, but hopefully this time he will discern.
ManMonster scratches my back and he makes noise like, “Rufus rufus rufus.” And I know that noise “Rufus” can mean many things. Sometimes “Rufus” means “I am happy to see you” and sometimes it means “I am upset,” and this time I discern that it means both things at once. Somehow this time when ManMonster makes noise like “Rufus rufus rufus,” it is like all the other Rufuses combined together. It means all the things. It means “Well, here we are.” And it means “Yep” and it means “Why?” and “What do we do now?” It means “Goodog” and it means “Badog” and it means “Let me scratch your back for you.”
ManMonster makes noise like, “Rufus rufus rufus,” and he scratches my back and I love him. I love him with everything I am. I love him like he’s a part of myself.
Draw a card. The word at the top is the word you want your teammate to say. The other words are the TABOO WORDS you cannot use while trying to get your teammate to guess your word. You must make your teammate guess your word, WITHOUT using the taboo words.
* * *
FOR EXAMPLE:
* * *
If your word is TALL, you CANNOT say SHORT, BIG, HEIGHT, SIZE, or TALES, but you CAN say, “This is the smallest drink at Starbucks,” or “Your mother, in heels,” or “Last night at Kristen’s party, you talked with that good-looking law student in the cocktail dress who was so strikingly this for over an hour, and when I told you I wanted to go home, you said, ‘Just give me twenty more minutes,’ and I said, ‘I’d really like to leave,’ and you said, ‘Can you please just be patient?’ And I thought that was a real this kind of order. A real this kind of order indeed, Steve.”
* * *
If your word is BED, you CANNOT say BLANKET, PILLOW, SLEEP, ROOM, or HEAD, but you CAN say, “Our this has blue sheets,” or “On Sundays, we strip the this and put the blue sheets in the laundry and replace them with the peach-colored sheets.” You can also say, “Sometimes, Jillian, if I think too much about us before going to this, I have dreams about dragging a car through a snowstorm. What do you suppose that means, Jillian? I guess it might mean I shouldn’t think so much about us before going to this, but it’s difficult when we share a this, when you’re right there in the this with me but you seem so far away.”
* * *
If your word is BREAKFAST, you CANNOT say MEAL, MORNING, PANCAKE, CLUB, or TIFFANY’S, but you CAN say, “It was over this at the Skylight Diner on Thirty-Fourth Street that you and I decided to move in together. We had taken a crack-of-dawn train into Penn Station from your parents’ house in Ronkonkoma. You had an omelet, Steve, and I had a bowl of fruit. You said, ‘It’s stupid that we’re paying rent on two different apartments,’ and I smiled and blushed. To us, the future seemed an endless web of possibilities, like the many-branched line of the Long Island Rail Road.”
* * *
If your word is PARK, you can say, “It was in Fort Greene this where I first realized I loved you, Jillian. It was August, and we bought a copy of the Sunday paper to read out in the this, and you took a nap under a red oak, and when the shadow moved and the sun hit your face, you flinched and then smiled. And I realized: That’s what I wanted. Just like that. Forever. And it occurred to me, right there in the this, that I had fallen for you completely. I was irreparably head over heels for this woman who, two months earlier, had slid up next to me, drunk, at a party and, as if she knew me, slurred into my ear, ‘You deserve someone who will love you in all your damaged glory.’ ”
* * *
If your word is CHANGE, you can say, “This is what I did, gradually, imperceptibly. I can’t say how exactly, but I’m not the same person you fell in love with in Fort Greene Park that Sunday in August. It’s an old cliché that women break up with men because they think they’ll this and they don’t, and men break up with women because they think they won’t this and they do, but is there also a cliché about why men and women stay together?” You can say that, sure, but why would you want to? You may be better off passing. You can say, “PASS,” and your teammate can groan, and you can say, “I’m sorry, Steve, I don’t want to do that one.” And “Besides,” you can say, “this game is stupid. I hate this stupid game. Next time we’re playing Jenga.”
* * *
If your word is TOMORROW, you CANNOT say DAY, TODAY, YESTERDAY, AFTER, or FUTURE—there are a whole lot of things you can’t say—but you CAN say, “This terrifies me and I don’t know why. Maybe I’m just weak. Maybe we’re both so incredibly weak.”
* * *
If your word is EYES, you CANNOT say FACE, NOSE, GLASSES, SEE, or SOUL, but you CAN say, “Last night I looked into your these and I hit a wall. I could make out nothing past the iris, and I realized that the deep unquenchable yearning I long thought I had recognized was actually my own. How foolish of me. How foolish of us all.”
* * *
You can pass, and then your teammate can pass, and then you can thank your guests for coming, and for the cheesecake they brought, and as you clear the wineglasses from the living room, you can say, “This was fun,” in an absent tone that makes it clear that you don’t really mean it, but you don’t exactly not mean it either. And before you crawl off to your blue-sheeted bed, you can pack up the game and put it back on a shelf in the living room closet, where you don’t have to look at it until you drag it out for the next party, where you don’t even have to think about it.
up-and-comers
“Do you ever think maybe you’re overthinking things?” Lizzy asked.
We were getting breakfast together, as we often did, the morning after a very long night, as we’d often had. She was nursing a black eye, as she often was, and we were both nursing hangovers, as we almost always were, and we were talking about a boy who’d asked me out on a date and we were weighing the pros and cons of me going out with him.
“I do think I’m overthinking things,” I said. “I think that all the time. But then I think, What if I’m not overthinking things? What if I’m just regular-thinking things but
then I think I’m overthinking things because I subconsciously want to let myself off the hook?”
Lizzy stirred the vodka into her coffee. “You might be overthinking things.”
I shrugged a yeah, well…shrug and said, “Yeah, well…”
“You know what I think, Porkchop?” Lizzy had started calling me “Porkchop” recently as a reference to an inside joke I was now too embarrassed to admit I didn’t remember. “I think you’re afraid of putting yourself out there because you’re afraid of getting hurt, because you are—and I believe this is the clinical term—a fucking coward.”
“Okay, well, first of all, I am not a coward. I actually saved the world from subterranean bioterrorists just this week.”
Lizzy scrunched up her face in her trademark Lizzy who-gives-a-shit scowl. “Yeah, but that’s like a Tuesday for you. You have super-strength and photon blasts. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome that you did that, but when’s the last time you did something that actually scared you?”
* * *
—
This is a story about superheroes, kind of. I mean, I guess that’s the stuff that everyone wants to hear about—the crazy powers and colorful villains and us all working together to vanquish evil and all that—but actually this is a story about a rock band. Before everything went to shit, Clay used to say he never asked to be a superhero; he just wanted to be a rock star. Well, that’s true of me too, I guess, except I didn’t even really want to be a rock star. I just wanted to get drunk.
I was twenty-three years old and I was living in the Mission and I was scraping by with a hostess job at a restaurant that specialized in olive-based dishes and I had a couple summer dresses that I didn’t look completely terrible in, and everything was going fine, like depressingly so, like things were so fine I wanted to kill myself. I had somehow fallen into the habit of playing piano for this five-piece alt-folk/fuzz-punk/shoe-core collective called the Up-and-Comers, and I guess we were starting to get pretty good, as far as getting a lot of “likes” on Instagram and people paying attention to us and writing nice things about us in indie music blogs and SF Weekly and things like that, and we were talking about going on tour.
Clay (drums, cowbell) had some friends up in Portland and he thought they could get us a gig there and then we could do like a whole Pacific Northwest thing. I had never been to Portland, and I had saved up some vacation days at Why Not Take Olive Me, and things had just kind of fizzled out with this girl I’d been seeing (the less said about her, the better), so I was all for the idea, even though privately I often wondered if maybe the Up-and-Comers weren’t actually all that good, as far as, you know, actually being any good.
“I’m so over the whole touring thing,” said Joelle (lead vox, strong opinions). “I did it with my last band. You spend a lot of money on gas and you play a lot of empty bars and then you come home and no one remembers you. We should focus on building our fan base in the Bay Area, while we’ve got some momentum. Besides,” she added, “Oregon sucks.”
So we didn’t go to Portland.
Instead we stayed in San Francisco and opened for Fuck Shit Piss Karate at Brick & Mortar Music Hall, again, and I tried to figure out what I really wanted to be doing with my life because I was pretty sure it wasn’t this. For some reason I had this idea that I was really special and that I was put here to do something really great and important, but the longer I kept living the more it just seemed like nope, I’m just kind of a normal person just like everybody else.
That’s when Mutt Wang told us about this Battle of the Bands he’d heard about up near Tahoe. Mutt was a guy Lizzy knew from college; he called himself our “manager,” but mostly what that meant was that he would wear a tie to our gigs and buy us all drinks.
We had kind of a regular audience at this point—including Lizzy’s girlfriend, Kathleen, Iris’s weird uncle who always wore a captain’s hat and asked us to call him the Mariner (welcome to San Francisco), and like half a dozen guys who all thought they were Joelle’s boyfriend—but sometimes we’d play shows and Mutt would be the only person there, sitting by himself in a booth in the back and smiling dumbly when we played “Not Hardly” as if he’d never heard it before. The most striking thing about the guy was how decent he was, like how he’d always be the first person to ask if you were cold and do you want to wear his coat, and also could he buy you a drink.
“You should really do this Battle of the Bands,” Mutt said. “I think we need to start thinking bigger than just the Bay Area.”
“Oh, do we?” Joelle said. She was pretty reluctant about the whole thing, as you could probably imagine, but Iris (lead guitar, voice of reason) had this family cabin that we could all stay at up by the lake, a couple miles from the old abandoned government testing facility, and it kind of seemed like a fun excuse to get out of the city.
We piled into Clay’s van (all of us except for Mutt, who—he made sure we knew—wanted to come, but had a work thing he couldn’t get out of, which was totally fine by us, because—Joelle made sure he knew—Mutt wasn’t in the band). We got to the cabin pretty late and immediately started drinking out by the fire pit.
After a couple beers, I noticed Lizzy had wandered into the house. I found her in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and peeling the label off her beer bottle.
“What’s going on? Every time you drink you get all weird and sullen,” I said. “Don’t be weird and sullen, Lizzy.”
She shook her head and tried not to look at me. She scrunched up her face and waved me off, the futile kind of I-don’t-want-to-bother-you-with-my-troubles gesture you make at a good friend who you know wants nothing more than to be bothered with your troubles.
“Lizzy, what is it?”
“Kathleen and I broke up.”
“Oh my God, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, unfinely. She pulled another beer from the fridge.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I just keep thinking, it’s not supposed to be this hard, you know? But I always make it hard. But then again, maybe it’s her fault, because she broke the first rule of rock and roll.”
“What’s that?”
I watched her fumble with the latch on the screen door, and as she pushed out into the night she shouted back at me, “Never fall in love with the bass player!”
I followed her back to the fire. Joelle raised an eyebrow. “Where were you two?”
“Yeah,” said Clay. He had taken Iris’s acoustic guitar and he started half singing to himself as he strummed. “Wheeeere were youuuuuuu twoooooo?”
“We were just talking,” I said.
“Well, I’m glad you’re back,” said Iris, “because I actually have something I want to give you all.” She grabbed her backpack and pulled out these hemp necklaces she’d made for all of us, each with a single blue bead she’d gotten from the strange mystic who lived in the apartment below her and was always stinking up the place with weird incense and taxidermied roadkill (welcome to San Francisco).
Well, we all put the necklaces on, but this started a whole conversation, once again, about What Kind of Band We Were. At this point we were really getting pretty expert at starting conversations about What Kind of Band We Were and could probably get it going from just about anything.
“So, that’s what we are now? A band that wears matching necklaces?”
“Come on, Joelle.”
“What, no one else thinks that’s super-corny?”
Still noodling on the guitar, Clay sang, “Oh, I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation about necklaces when meanwhile we’re still playing songs we wrote three years ago.”
“Bands play old songs, Clay. Bands do do that.”
“Okay, but everyone just heard Iris say doo doo, right?”
“Yeah, but I don’t want to jus
t be a band, you know? Like don’t you guys ever dream of something mo—”
Suddenly a bolt of lightning shot down from the clear black sky, hitting Lizzy’s necklace and ricocheting off our five blue beads, knocking us back into the woods, scattering us into the dead leaves like eraser shavings across a page.
“Is everyone okay?” I shouted.
“Okay-ish,” said Iris, stumbling as soon as she stood up. She rested a hand on a rock, and the whole ground kind of shook and then like ten feet away a little tree fell over.
“Emphasis on the ish,” said Joelle. She was floating three feet in the air. Her eyes looked like they were on fire.
So, I don’t know if it was the lightning, or the mystic’s beads, or our proximity to the old abandoned government testing facility, or the fact that we were all drunk, or if this is just a thing that happens sometimes, but we all got superpowers that night. Again, I really don’t want to harp on the superpowers part of it all—I’d hate to think that the fact that I could now shoot photon blasts out of my fists was like the most interesting thing about me, as opposed to, I don’t know, my sparkling personality—but there were two basic rules to the superpowers: 1) we had to wear our necklaces with the blue beads in order for our powers to work, and 2) we had to be drunk. And the drunker we got, the more powerful we became.
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory Page 11