Mixtape for the Apocalypse

by Jemiah Jefferson

  “Really? Why?”

  “Something about Robert going through your room.”

  “What?!” I grabbed the phone, palms sticky already. Melissa answered. “Melissa, was Robert in my room?” I yelped, my voice shattering like an adenoidal fourteen-year-old’s.

  “I don’t know, Squire. Why are you so paranoid?” She sounded, as usual, disgusted.

  “Is he there?”

  “Yep.”

  “Let me talk to him.” I ground my teeth through the crackle of static, a low hum of interference.

  “Yello?”

  “Robert, Laika called here and said you were in my room . . . um . . . were you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What the hell were you doing?”

  “Looking for cigarettes. I was out and you owe me a pack. Oh, and I looked at some of your comic books. You’ve got a lot of valuable looking stuff.”

  “Christ!”

  “What are you getting so freaked over? I didn’t do anything. Oh, and Melissa says to buy toilet paper on your way home.” He hung up.

  I hung up the phone and slumped onto a stool next to Lucas.

  “Why so sad, Brad?” he said.

  “My housemates are turning on me,” I said.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be so paranoid,” said Lucas. “It’s really annoying to live with someone who’s paranoid.”

  11:30 p.m.

  Wow, I’ve written a shitload today. This diary stuff is addictive. My brain’s all over the place.

  I made Lise come home with me. She chided me (is that the right word? It can’t be “chode”) for being too much of a weenie to go home alone and beat the living shit out of Rob, like I want to do. I actually kind of like it when Lise teases me. It reminds me of high school when my friends and I all pretended to hate each other. It was far more easy to deal with than possibly fake emotional closeness.

  I’m not a weenie. I am realistic.

  Asshole Rob completely ransacked my room—half of my comics are out of their bags, strewn around on the floor, my bed all fucked up like he wrestled an alligator in it. Roblissa weren’t even home when we got here; neither was Laika, though she packed her bong and left it in my room with a note that said “Life sucks. Smoke a bowl.” Lise and I smoked it and didn’t clean my room; instead we listened to Prodigy and read some of the comics, which I haven’t done in a long time. (I almost forgot I had the full run of Wimmen’s Comix; thanks again, Mom.) Too soon, though, Lise gave me a hug and went home. Now I’m listening to the Bunnymen and trying to put the world back in order. And failing.

  some pray for heaven while we live in hell.

  my life’s the disease.

  Amen, bro.

  I spent the next Saturday afternoon at Cafe Trieste, downing cup after cup of coffee with heaps of sugar, nibbling very slowly on an oatmeal cookie, and sketching. My hands ached like hell from the marathon inking job I’d done the other night, but I had to keep drawing or they’d lock up entirely. I had taken home a test printing of the next issue of my book coming out; every once in a while, I’d take it out of my bag and look at it. I’d done the cover—Cabby, our hero, sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair with his eyes strapped open, screaming at a TV screen displaying grey slashes of static (I’d really enjoyed painting that). The caption, lettered by Lucas, read “A Clockwork Duck A l’Orange.” It was a terrible joke, but whatever; I needed a script out the door. The interiors, though, seemed to be all Lucas—his ovals as opposed to my compass-perfect circles, his Cabby a skinny, lanky, slouching figure instead of the disturbingly cute, knobby-kneed, blank-eyed cipher I knew he actually was. I knew his work was sharper, and more commercial, but all I saw was how much the title no longer belonged to me.

  I wrote into my journal:

  8/16/97 I am ever more a supporting player in my own fucking saga.

  I felt a thick lump rising in my throat, and let my pencil rest in the crease of my sketchbook. I left the whole mess sitting there—coffee rings, mug, plate with crumbs—and went to the little phone booth at the back of the café, trembling, making a desperate call.

  “Hello?”

  “Lise, distract me. Get me out of this self-inflicted hell.”

  “Oh, Squire. You’re not trying to pierce your own nose again, are you?”

  I couldn’t laugh. “Huh . . . no. I’m at Triste and I’m hating it. God, what am I doing here?” I moaned.

  She moaned back in sympathy. “You’re finishing up whatever you’re drinking, and you’re coming over here. I’ll make you a mocha and some ramen and then we’ll go see a show.”

  Everything brightened. “A show? Really? Who? Where? How much?”

  “Shack-O-Love, at the Caravan, three dollars, you owe me five drinks. Actually, we can get in free; Jo’s working the door tonight, and she’ll let us in. You’re heard Shack-O-Love, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t remember what they sound like—I was really drunk when they opened for Old Gold.”

  “Well, so were they. They’re good—kind of rockabilly punk with washboard and stuff. So hang up the phone, and get yer ass down here. I’m firing up the espresso machine as we speak.” She gave a handy blast of steam on the phone to demonstrate.

  “You are made out of gold-pressed awesome,” I said.

  “I know,” she replied.

  So I hung up, packed up my stuff, put on my sunglasses, and walked out into the hot, smothery sunshine. I didn’t have any sunscreen and the sun carved into my neck where it was exposed between my hair and my T-shirt. My long fish-belly-pale hands looked like alien limbs. Tanned trucker types looked at me with revulsion and turned away. I checked my fly, checked my upper lip for a coffee mustache. Nothing was amiss—it was my very person that revolted those pillars of society, those salts of the earth. I was a grotesque worm, a mushroom in the sunlight.

  A bus came, vomiting orange exhaust, and I got on it and went directly to the back. I pulled my knees up to my chest and gripped my portfolio bag tightly to my chest, staring over it at the front of the bus. Old ladies, mohawked teenagers, tough guys in warm-up suits—they were all looking back and giving me glances that mixed disgust and impatience. By the time I got to the stop outside of Lise’s apartment building, I was shaking, breathing hard, my palms greasy and slick on the plastic, textured leather, and I jumped out the back door of the bus, almost stumbling on the high curb.

  “My God, Squire, you look like you just got buttfucked by a Nazi,” Lise remarked. I staggered into her apartment and shut the door behind me, then leaned against it, panting.

  “I shoulda walked; I shoulda walked; I’m an idiot; I should have never listened to you. The bus is a torture chamber.” I threw myself full length onto her queen-size futon. The flannel sheets were full of the comforting smell of Lise, and I was so grateful to feel safe and relaxed that I began cackling hysterically.

  “Wow. Oscar-caliber performance. I almost felt sorry for you for a second. Mocha?” She was wearing a perky gingham apron, and she held out a soup-bowl-sized mug at me with her head to one side.

  “Like I need any more coffee.” I took the mug and swallowed about a third of it at once.

  “God, you have a big mouth.” She pointed this out to me every once in a while. It was the first thing she’d ever said to me, during lunch in the lunchroom at Teddy Roosevelt High School, watching me cramming half of a tuna salad sandwich into my mouth at once. “Chill out. I’m just watching TV.” She sat beside me, put a cigarette in one corner of her mouth and a joint in the other, and lit them with a single sweep of her lighter.

  Lise’s studio apartment was tiny but it had high ceilings and hardwood floors that made everything echo like a cathedral. There was a kitchen behind a nice little half-partition that was also a glass-fronted shelf; all of it was painted the whitest white, and she’d thrown cheap rag rugs at random on the floors, where they kept company with cast-off jeans, coats, shoes, magazines. The portrait I’d painted of Lise’s mother was on the wall next to the window—Mrs. B
allard stared out wide-eyed and accusatory, her mouth set in a hard thin line. It wasn’t a very friendly picture, but Lise assured me that it was accurate.

  I finished the other half of the joint and then smoked my own cigarette, staring uncomprehendingly at the television—she was watching a home-shopping channel while she rubbed lotion into her paper-ravaged hands. I turned away from the TV and stared instead at the painting, into Lise’s mother’s acrylic eyes, tracing the little flecks of gray I’d painstakingly dashed into her Van Dyke brown irises. Before I knew it, I fell asleep with my sunglasses still on.

  I awoke to the strains of Gustav Mahler. Lise was changing into a very short little dress with a fluttery skirt, dotted here and there with cigarette burn holes. She didn’t notice me being awake; she was across the room in the kitchen area, fiddling with her bra straps, her underwear, sniffing her armpits. It was a gorgeous sight, really, and I got a very swift and abrupt just-waking-up erection. I turned over onto my face and sighed. “You awake?” came Lise’s voice.

  “Yep,” I said into the pillow.

  “You really conked out there for a while.” She laughed. “You ready to go soon?”

  “Yeah, yeah, gimme a minute.” I got up and brushed past her to the bathroom. I knew Lise better than to think that she’d flip out if she saw me with a stiffy—God knows she’d seen enough of them before—but all the same, I didn’t want her to see one that was actually caused by her, whether she knew it or not. I washed my face in cold water, put in some eyedrops until my contacts slid around pleasantly, and composed myself enough to emerge from the bathroom. Lise was lacing up her big boots, one unshaven, athletic leg up on a kitchen chair. I stared out the window at the orange sun setting over the trees lining Belmont Street, and concentrated hard, hoping to spontaneously develop telepathy, and tell Lise to kiss me using only the powers of my mind, or at least turn toward me so I could see her panties.

  We took the bus downtown to the Caravan. At the club, Lise got a pitcher of beer, and we sat at a table across from the bar. We were way too early. We got bored waiting for the bands to start, and ended up having another pitcher and some shots of whiskey, smoking dozens of cigarettes. Before we noticed much, the club was completely packed with sweaty rock people, all of them shouting at the tops of their lungs. I have no idea what the bands sounded like, but Lise danced and I made sure I didn’t watch her. Randy and Dave from Link-Up showed up, Randy with fiancée in tow. They drank with us and we all shouted at each other. I said something that I thought was funny to Fiancée (I don’t remember what) and she pushed me. Then Randy pushed me. Lise pushed Randy, someone’s elbow flashed in the darkness, and the next thing I recall was Lise and I outside on the sidewalk, leaning against the building.

  “Fuck you guys,” Lise said peevishly.

  “Walking blackout,” I whispered. I walked behind the bus stop, stepping into the rock-gravel of the parking lot across from the club, and threw up. Nothing much came up at first, then it was almost entirely whiskey. “Oh, Christ,” I said.

  “C’mon, Squire, let’s just go to the party. He said we could show up as late as we wanted.”

  “There’s a party? You didn’t mention a party,” I said weakly.

  “Maybe you were asleep. Hey, still, somewhere to go, huh?”

  After staggering down the street for several blocks, I began to feel a little bit more sober. “God, I hate the Caravan,” I burbled.

  “What’s your co-worker’s name . . . Randy, right?”

  “Yeah. And the tanning-bed beef jerky strip is his intended, Jolene.”

  “Damn, Squire, you must want your ass kicked—do you know what you said to her?”

  “No,” I said, laughing.

  “Don’t even try to remember. You don’t want to know. Maybe you should have some water.”

  The party was about twenty blocks away in Northwest. By the time we got there, I had sobered up considerably, enough to feel the octopus limbs of hangover already starting to lock around my brain. We lurched up a set of porch steps just to meet a herd of besotted people going the other way. “Hey Jonny—Jonny!” Lise blurted, dashing into the house where I lost sight of her. I sat down on a saggy couch, picked up an abandoned glass with something in it that looked like margarita, drank it, and then felt the drunk-sickness coming over me again. My fingertips and lips were numb. I sank into the couch where I sat and closed my eyes.

  Lise shook me at some point. “Squire, it’s okay if we crash here,” she said in a whisper. “I don’t have enough money for cab fare and we missed the last bus.”

  “Okay,” I responded dully.

  “You can just stay where you are, I guess.”

  I probably said okay again.

  “You know what you said to Randy’s girlfriend?”

  I couldn’t remember.

  “You said ‘you remind me of my ex-girlfriend—can I come in your mouth? I miss her.’“ She sighed. “Real gentlemanly. I’ll see you in the morning.” I felt her tuck a scratchy blanket around me. I slid over to one side and turned my head sideways, so I wouldn’t choke on vomit in my sleep. I was pretty good at looking out for myself.

  Daylight was cruel, stabbing and bright, even filtered through the madras cotton cloth over the front window. From the light, it was sometime around noon. Lise had already gone. “She didn’t want to wake you up,” said the friend, Jonathan, a diffident queer guy with big round glasses. He sat elegantly and distantly in the wreckage of his apartment, as if the party he’d hosted was part of some other long-gone life. “There’s some coffee on the stove.”

  My contacts were killing me. They hadn’t yet fused to my corneas, so I took them out and roughed it, pawing around in a vaguely nearsighted blur. I’d left my sunglasses at Lise’s apartment, assuming we’d be back there at some point. I drank the coffee and dragged myself to a bus. My black X-Men T-shirt clung to my body with a layer of alcoholic sweat. I wanted more than anything to be back across the river, at home, in the bathroom with the door closed, throwing up.

  The next bus wasn’t due for an hour. Buses on Sundays were the product of the Devil’s workshop. I walked until I found a gas station, went into the bathroom, squatted unsteadily on the slick floor (unwilling to let the knees of my black jeans touch the sickly, damp tiles), and shot the coffee backwards out of my gullet into the porcelain bowl. It didn’t help. There was nothing much more in me. I rinsed my mouth, grateful that there was no mirror, and lurched back to the bus stop. I considered going somewhere and getting something to eat, but I just wanted to get home and get back to puking. I promised myself I’d finish someplace nice; I deserved that, at least.

  It was broiling hot by the time I got home. There was nobody there, although the door was unlocked, and I breathed a sigh of relief that at least nobody would witness the pathetic wreck that I was. I went to the kitchen and got a pre-emptive glass of ice water, then headed for the bathroom to begin my residence.

  Laika’s door was open. The room was empty; stripped bare of everything, clean, even, the hairballs and dust and marijuana crumbs swept away. She was gone, as if some supernatural force had simply sucked her existence up. I stood there in her doorway, stunned, my throat choking back the impatient bile from my belly.

  I spent several minutes on the cool tiles of the bathroom, resting my face against the rug-like toilet-seat cozy, tapping my empty glass against the side of the bowl, but I wasn’t sick anymore. I just felt dead, the venom expelled from me. I toyed with the idea of calling my mother, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to offer me anything of help. Instead, I got my journal from out of my room, sat on the floor of the living room, lit a cigarette, and uncapped my pen.

  17 August

  Laika’s gone. What the fuck.

  No answer was forthcoming. No one came home; no sound came to me in the dead, still living room except the sounds of cars swishing by on the street outside the house. Eventually I got up, took a cold shower, swallowed some aspirin, and went to bed for a while. Writhing
on the twisted sheets, I slept and sweated the rest of the alcohol out of me, awakening with a start in the ultramarine cool of evening.

  I put on clean clothes, put on my glasses, and came out into the living room, rubbing my eyes under the lenses. Melissa and Rob were sprawled on the couch, watching Laika’s TV. They’d rented some dull Julia Roberts movie and were knocking back shots of Southern Comfort. They didn’t greet me or look up. “Where’s Laika’s stuff?” I asked them.

  “With Laika,” replied Rob, grimacing his shot down and holding out his glass for another.

  Melissa topped him up. “She moved out,” she said succinctly.

  “What are you doing with her TV?”

  “She sold it to me,” said Rob.

  “Sssh,” said Melissa.

  “She sold it to you?” I was shouting. “She transacted with you?”

  Melissa glared. “You guys, shut up! I’m trying to hear this!”

  The back of my neck prickled like an angry cat’s. “It’s exactly like every other freakin’ movie you watch! You could recite it in your sleep!”

  Rob stood up and grabbed the collar of my T-shirt, dragging me through the swinging door into the kitchen. “You’re a real little shit, aren’t you?” he growled, tossing me back against the counters. “What the fuck is your problem?”

  “I just—I just want to know why she’s gone.” I was shaking all over, sweating again, cold this time. I could envision Laika being driven away in an unmarked van, her freckled face pressed up against the glass. Laika Come Home with a sad flute on the soundtrack.

  “Don’t ask me. I don’t even know her that well. If you care so much, she traded me the TV for helping her move in my truck.”

  I narrowed my eyes. If he was telling the truth, maybe he’d tell some more. I wanted to satisfy my curiosity. “Why do you sleepwalk?” I asked.

  “I don’t,” he protested.

  “You were sleepwalking the other night. You told me you were going to kill me in my sleep.”

  Rob laughed and spit into the sink. “That’s pretty funny.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s not fucking funny.”

  “I think it is,” said Rob. “Now why don’t you just shut up and be quiet while Melissa’s trying to watch her movie. She’s too good to you—you’re a gutless little turd. And I might as well kill you in your sleep—nobody would care, except maybe your dykey friend.”