Mixtape for the Apocalypse

by Jemiah Jefferson

  Christ, Cock again. What have I done to deserve terrorization by the human penis

  [The “s” trails in a big messy torn scrawl off the edge of the page.]

  8:35 p.m. (approx.)

  I finished. I’m on the bus now, listening to “Seven Seas.” Feeling cheerful. Maybe I should stop being such a turd and try to get my personality together. From now on I vow to stand up to bullies like Rob and Randy, force their stupid girlfriends to stand up for themselves. I’m going to try to be more patient with customers on the phone, and with Cock Kaplan, and with Lucas. They’re just doing their thing. It’s not their fault that they couldn’t possibly understand me. Nobody could ever know what goes on inside my mind.

  Especially not Melissa and Rob. When I think of the way we were before, not so long ago, it doesn’t even seem like the same people. When did I get so small and peevish? When did Melissa get so . . . boring? So normal? Was it that one party when they met? How would any of us have known? It seemed so innocent ... mistletoe . . . mulled wine . . . Creedence Clearwater Revival . . . They were dancing and then they had just disappeared. She dragged herself home at noon the next day with stars in her eyes, just about bursting because she couldn’t brag about what a giant cock Rob has. I’ve heard her go on about it on the phone to everyone, but I wouldn’t care and Laika wouldn’t care—she’s never fucked a guy in her life and doesn’t want to. Laika. I miss her. I miss her braying- donkey laugh and her insistence that every once in a while, we get stoned and play softball catch in the park. I used to really like that. Melissa would come, sometimes, before.

  Okay. Everything’s going to be all right.

  I got off the bus in front of the house. There was a smallish rented Dumpster in the driveway. I imagined it full of leftover Melissa horror food. Stuffing the diary back into my shoulder bag, I walked into the house, whistling cheerfully, ready to give them the full blast of reasonable Squire charm. Nobody was in the living room, so I went to the bathroom and took a piss and fussed with my hair in the mirror for a bit. Then I opened the closed door of my bedroom.

  There was basically nothing in it. The milk crates in which I stored almost everything I owned were empty, and half of them were missing. My futon and futon frame, my banker’s lamp and cheap art table (and the art supplies therein), my bookshelves, my boxes of rare and valuable comic books—all gone. My closet was empty except for a pair of holey long johns on a wire hanger.

  A single photograph lay face down on the bare floor. I bent at the knee and picked it up. It was the picture of my mother and father in Mexico, the color picture, my father staring straight into the camera, his pale eyes drilling accusingly into me. I straightened up and slipped the picture into the back pocket of my jeans.

  I must have stood there for a long time, because when I turned around, Melissa was leaning in the doorway, a self-satisfied smile on her face. “Where’s my stuff?” I asked, my voice strangely neutral.

  “We sold it,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “You sold it.”

  “Well, the house got broken into. Some little asshole didn’t put the screen back on his window right and some thug came in and thugged a bunch of our stuff. My stereo. Robert’s CD player and Walkman and his CDs. The TV.” She bobbed her head towards me for emphasis. “We didn’t know where you were, or whether you were coming back. Besides, you didn’t even pay rent this month—what the fuck were we supposed to think? We sold your shit so we could cover our losses. The rest of the crap, we gave to Goodwill or we tossed it. And we had to rent a Dumpster. So we had to pay for that too.”

  “My bike?” My voice, still dead. “My comic books.”

  Melissa shrugged. “Your bike got ten bucks. And we sold the comics to some dude who works at a comic book store. We got a thousand dollars for them. I can’t imagine why anyone would want them.”

  “A—A thousand dollars? Do you have any idea what those comics were worth?” I felt energy shooting forth out of the top of my head, achieving a kind of kundalini of rage. “I was going to retire on those! All my Toth! And you sold them for a thousand fucking dollars! To cover three hundred dollars in rent! So where’s the rest of the money?”

  Rob loomed over Melissa’s right shoulder, the two of them filling the doorway, cutting off my only escape. It startled me how huge he was—six feet and then some, all vein-popping muscle, aggressive pork-fed fat, thick Cro-Magnon eyebrow ridge. Goose pimples leapt out all over my suddenly icy skin, and I looked at the window for a possible out—unfortunately they’d put the screen back up and nailed it shut. “We spent the money, fuckface,” Rob said. “You got a hearing problem?”

  “I can’t believe this . . .”

  “Believe it,” Melissa said lightly, turning and walking out. I heard a stereo start up, playing “Magnolia Rose” by the Dead. The sound quality was excellent.

  I tried to pursue, but Rob stepped in front of me, folding his arms. “Where do you think you’re going?” he said.

  “I’m going to talk to my housemate, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind,” he said. “She doesn’t want to talk to you anymore. Anything you need to tell her, you can tell me. She’s sick of talking to you because you don’t fuckin’ listen.”

  “You don’t even live here!” I shouted.

  “Since when? Who paid rent this month and who didn’t?”

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Fuck you, you little faggot.”

  “Melissa!” I tried to yell over the Dead. The music got louder.

  “See? Why don’t you save us both a lot of trouble and—”

  “Go fuck yourself!” I snapped, and ducked under his armpit. The stench of his androgens nearly choked me. I went to the doorway of Melissa’s room, but she kicked the door closed.

  I went instead into the kitchen and pocketed my Bettie Page fridge magnet. They couldn’t have that. I took out my keys and struggled to get them off the ring.

  “The rest of your shit’s in the dumpster,” said Rob, leaning against the doorway. “I recommend that you pick it out and get the fuck out of here, before we call the cops and get your ass trespassed.”

  “I’m not a faggot,” I said quietly. I didn’t look at him. He stood aside to let me leave.

  I went outside. The full moon beautifully illuminated an Edward Hopper-esque tableau of utter failure: the rust-colored Dumpster, the yellow printing on its sides, the cracks in the pavement, the smudged toes of my tennis shoes. I climbed into the Dumpster and caught sight of my trashed and broken futon frame, broken window glass, more underwear with holes, the pictures from my walls, and my box of photographs, partially scattered out and dulled by dust. Clothes, shoes, music, and most art supplies were gone. I dug out what sketchbooks that hadn’t been ruined by broken bottles of ink and shoved them into my messenger bag, and started on sorting the photos. I recovered the other photograph of my father, a picture of my mother alone, Polaroids of my American grandparents, pictures of me and Lise when we were high school, a live photo of the Bunnymen taken by another pen pal, and a picture I’d taken of Amanda, my girlfriend in high school. I put them all in my bag except the picture of Amanda, which I let twirl back down into the dry gutter. I’d let that be over.

  I had a sudden all-consuming craving for a drink, a pang so strong that it gave me a stomach cramp. Lugging my overstuffed bag, I slouched into the Bob ‘n’ Barrell on 37th and Belmont—the bar that I usually walked past with a mock-shudder—and sat down at the bar. The place smelled like beer, CornNuts, and vomit (or maybe just vomit). The bartender, a wretched hag of ambiguous age, wearing a Blazers sweatshirt and a red bandana tied inexpertly around her head, silently eyed me with plain distaste. “Give me a shot of gin, straight,” I said after a long pause.

  “Can I see some ID?” Her voice was a ruin.

  “I’m twenty-three,” I groaned, my voice rising somewhat with impatience.

  “Sure you are. You look like a twelve-year-old. ID or no drink.”

 
; I fumbled out my Washington driver’s license. She looked me up and down, then looked carefully at my drivers’ license, holding it up to the light, flicking the edges to see if they’d separate. “Michael Squire,” she read. “Height, five feet five inches, weight, one-eleven. Ain’t barely nothin’ to ya, huh? Ooh! Organ donor.”

  I rolled my eyes and lit a cigarette, tapping my nails on the bar.

  The hag humphed, satisfied, and squirted me a shot of plastic-bottle gin. “I still don’t believe you,” she said to me playfully.

  “I don’t believe you, either.” I pulled my journal out of my bag and slapped it on the bar.

  Most of what I wrote is incomprehensible. There are at least four full pages crammed full of an EKG-esque scrawl, and one page of scratching when the ink ran out of the page. The legible words aren’t really much better—I was drunk almost immediately.

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck my precious first printing Love and Rockets #1 and my X-Men #162 and my oh my god what the hell why the fuck does shit like this always have to happen to me why the fuck can’t somebody else take the blame once in a while why the fuck are all these people out to get me? What did I do to them to make them hate me so much? I’m sorry I was ever born if there was some way to get out of it I would I’d go back in time and tell mom to use a prophylactic

  hate

  hate

  hate

  everything that’s ever existed especially this gin which sucks dingleberries off my ass—where’s that old scruffy bitch I’ll make her give me another one

  That makes three

  That makes four

  That makes six five and I’m out of money so I have to stop fuck where do I sleep tonight—in the park maybe—but then I’ll be killed and robbed and raped and they’ll take away my pictures and my Rapidograph so I don’t want to sleep in the park at least not Laurelhurst Park which is home to the real life actual crazies and not people like me who only toy with being insane so where do I do go? It’s still early and I have a quarter and a dime left so lets see oh shit the old bitch is getting mad at me because I keep laughing and falling off the bar stool oh shit this is actually pretty cool, actually the best night of my life . . .

  bopsie waddy waddy shake your money

  [etc.]

  There’s a dark smudge of dried blood on the page. First of many.

  “Lise!”

  “Squire, is that you? What the fuck’s the matter with you, dude?”

  “H-h-help me?”

  “Help you?”

  “I’m fucking drunk and I fell down and I . . . like . . . fuckin’ skinned my knee and my hands and it like, hurts, can I come in and like, rinse the dirt off?” My whining was repulsively pathetic. “I got kicked out of the house.”

  Lise’s groan buzzed through the speaker grille on the front gate. “I’ll be right down.”

  She burst out the front door, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties, waving her hands agitatedly. “What’s goin’ on?” she asked, unlatching the front gate.

  I slid in and sat heavily on the front steps. I slid my hand through my hair, and the raw skin snagged. “Ow!”

  “You’re all bloody. Jesus. Get inside.”

  She led me inside and stripped me of my T-shirt and jeans. She cleansed the scrapes on my knee and my hands with a very soft wet washcloth, gently digging gravel out of my palm, leaving beads of dark blood. I sobbed my tale of woe openly and drunkenly, complete with flowing tears. “And then the hag threw me into the street,” I concluded, gulping back juniper-flavored mucus. “I almost got ran over by a fire truck.”

  She shushed me quietly and smoothed my hair and dabbed the salt from my face. When she was done wrapping all my hurt parts in gauze, she hugged me and tipped my chin upward so that I was looking at her. I had stopped crying and my eyes were sore and empty; I was full of an almost pleasant, weary apathy. It was over, and I was safe now. She smiled. “I guess you have to buy some new underwear tomorrow, huh?”

  TWO: Squire Takes Love In Stride.

  1 September, 7:30 p.m.

  So it’s the first of the month, and for the first time in ages I don’t have to pay rent to Melissa—instead I just wrote Lise a check for $250. Fifty dollars savings on the room in the house (which wasn’t all that goddamn nice anyway) and all the peace of mind money can’t buy.

  Lise is on the futon at my feet, stretched out on her stomach, watching Jeopardy and lighting a joint, wearing a huge Madness T-shirt and jean shorts. She is a longtime ska, dub, and rocksteady fan. One of the photos I saved is of her at a Specials show, shaven head, dog collar, puffy black down jacket, and plaid miniskirt. That was her in tenth grade, shortly after I first met her. I thought she was ugly and fascinating, being much more into that kind of tiny waifish dark-haired goth girls—in other words, female versions of myself.

  Mom is way into the idea of us living together. Now she doesn’t have to make two separate phone calls to talk to her kid and her best friend. How economical. Lise and my mother talk on the phone all the time. I try not to eavesdrop; it’s not very rewarding when I do. Clothes, books, the foibles of men and of people at work. Normal conversation, easy to tune out.

  I bought another roll of egg-carton-foam for the floor; right now it’s so hot that the lack of blankets is a blessing. Thank God I had all my Bunnymen albums on me. I really miss my other tapes. I wonder what they did with my mix tapes—you can’t sell those. Or can you? (They were really good.)

  You know, I don’t care. I’m so happy to be out of that place that I wouldn’t go back to save my life.

  This is good weed. I’m getting kind of sqiuddly. Maybe I want to draw now. I haven’t started on the next script, either. I haven’t been writing much of anything, actually. The diary’s been neglected. I feel kind of like the anonymous author of Go Ask Alice: Honest, I’ve cleaned up, no more smack, I’m going to be a good kid and appreciate my family and keep a new diary. Of course then Alice turned up dead of an overdose. I love that book.

  Oh sweet—Ren and Stimpy! Lise has cable. I forgot. This rocks so hard.

  2 September, ten to midnight

  I just got off the phone with my mother. In totally separate but cosmically entwined circumstances, we were both a little tipsy (well, in my case, more than a little) and a little stoned (in her case, more than a little). Her poetry group are a bunch of wild people—my mom runs with a bunch of bad kids, where did I go wrong?—and they spend at least as much time drunk, shooting pool, lying out in the woods zonked in mescaline, as they do reading Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein.

  When I think of all the subversive habits I got from my mother, it blows my mind. She takes drugs, but often only to enjoy really mundane and boring tasks, like gardening, cleaning the house, etc. Many was the time when I’d come home from school with Lise to find Mom weeping with happiness as she cleaned out the refrigerator. “Can you believe it, Bronwynn? Can you believe this crazy circle of life and death?” she’d gasp, holding up a very nasty and half-liquidated leaf of forgotten spinach. At first Lise was freaked out and got kind of anxious whenever she came over to our house, but one afternoon Mom just lit up a joint at the kitchen table (on her lunch hour, no less) and got both me and Lise good and baked. Then after she’d left, we found the rice crispy treats she’d made as a “surprise.” After that, Lise wanted to come over every day. It was excellent. After school sometimes meant watching afternoon cartoons and eating Crackerjacks, laughing our heads off with my mom on the couch, handing us the bong.

  I’m sure people would be horrified if they knew the way I grew up. Damn it, my mother’s a verse-crazed beatnik; she lived a great, grand, tragic romance and managed to get through it with some kind of dignity. She gave me drugs for the first time because she knew I was curious, and she wanted to make sure that she knew if the drugs were good or not. She was my official taster, which meant that if I wanted to do acid, I had to wait until she felt like tripping and she could take some and see what it was like. Well, she did that at
first. By the time I went off to college, I was getting my own doses and taking them when I wanted to. What a pathetic rebellion. I had nothing of the kind. Not much to rebel against—except maybe the Beach Boys, who I’ve never been able to comprehend. Oh well.

  “Squire.”

  “Excuse me, sir, hold on.” I punched the hold button on my phone, slid my headset down around my neck, and looked up. Trace loomed over me with a clipboard, squinting at the drawings of him stuck to the sides of my computer monitor. I glanced at the gallery. There were seven or eight of them now, of various levels of detailing from simple Schultz doodles to intensely shaded, crosshatched, stippled portraits, but all of them were unflattering to the extreme. “What’s up? I’m in the middle of a bitch of a Mac call,” I added innocently.

  “Oh, are you now. Sounds to me like you were talking about the best place to get cocktails.”

  I had been. The customer was a twenty-seven-year-old guy in Camas, thinking about moving to Portland, and really into Manhattans and martinis. I was letting him know that the Cazbar was great at martinis, but their Manhattans were like brake fluid. “It was just a way to get him relaxed, so . . . uh . . .” It was no good. Trace stared at me like I’d just eaten his baby.

  “You seem to put a lot of work into these,” he said, flicking one of the Post-Its.

  “Um, yeah, I do them when I’m on the phone. It’s just practice. I can’t really help it.”