After living comfortably at my parents' home for a few years, I lost my head and moved to Denver to stay with my brother. I think I may have done so because I felt bad about mooching off my parents when I had so many brothers to help shoulder the burden. I also had some vague notion that to be a writer I should go out into the world and suffer a little. Not too much, just enough to stir up some good press, maybe.
My brother Michael (name changed) had just graduated from law school in New York, and gotten a job in Denver from some big firm that would eventually fire him for sleeping in his office during his lunch breaks, or maybe it was for telling people he could sneeze at will, I couldn't remember for certain. But at the time I moved in with him he seemed to be doing all right. He had ESPN and some folding chairs and lived in an apartment building for old folks in a predominently gay district near downtown.
The apartment building attracted mainly old folks because it had a supernatural tendency to stay a little too warm all year long, whatever the outside weather. My brother never even turned on the heat, and usually left the windows open, even when it snowed.
As a result of his massive lawyer-level salary, my brother could afford to keep well-stocked with Uncle Ben's beans and rice, which he would prepare for us every night after coming home from an exhausting day of sleeping and sneezing at will. He would spoon my share into the only bowl and eat his share from the pot with the serving spoon while watching baseball games and baseball highlites and baseball recaps and baseball highlite recap shows on ESPN.
Since I'd moved in with my brother to "get some writing done", maybe finish a novel or two, I would spend part of my afternoons typing gibberish with an old typewriter I'd borrowed from my girlfriend, and trying to avoid calls from a groupie I'd picked up from my brother's church group who would call me from her work incessantly all day long whenever she'd come across information about jobs, or magazines that accepted submissions from freelance writers, or apartments in the Denver area - it was all fairly annoying. I appreciated her efforts on my behalf, but I couldn't understand why she had to keep telling me about them.
"Spare me the details and don't call me until you have something concrete," I wanted to tell her. But I didn't, because frankly the novel just wasn't working out, and the phone calls were a bit of a relief from having to pretend to work on the novel and giving myself stomach pains because I hated it so. "Thanks, I'll have to check that out," is what I told her. Then she'd chatter on about it.
Then sometimes after an hour I'd get up and walk around the nearby park which was apparently a famous pickup place in Denver but which I didn't ever realize at the time except there were a lot of cars and people on bikes and I did see a naked man with a turban on his head, reading a book and taking a terrible risk of sunburn and possibly skin cancer in later life.
Eventually I got bored with the trying to write a novel charade and got some temp jobs which were not nearly as impressive to tell about as the failure to write a novel but which paid slightly more and got me out and about. My favorite temp job in Denver was at mailing business in their printer room because my job was to watch a gigantic printer print things and if there was a problem to go see Mr Gonzales and tell him. Mr Gonzales was a nice enough fellow who waxed his mustache and seemed embarassed to have to give me things to do. I went to lunch the first day and when I came back from lunch I couldn't remember how to find the printer room and so I wandered around the office looking and the office was all one floor of a building all around the elevator and it made a full circuit around the elevator with no dividing walls, and I kept going around and around and seeing the same people with every circuit there were more people looking up from their work to stare at me as I passed and with each circuit the mild curiosity of the stares turned to confusion, and the confusion to consternation, and annoyance, and hostility, and finally to uncontrollable laughter, and then I began to panic, and sweat uncontrollably, and I decided to get back on the elevator and go home and then I ran into Mr Gonzales who seemed somewhat embarassed but smiled a confused smile and I told him I was lost and he pointed to a room in the corner where the printer was.
My almost favorite job in Denver was through a friend of the groupie, helping models dress at a fashion show. It sounds like an absurdly fantastic job for a young man, and I can't quite remember why I turned it down. It might have been too early in the morning or something.
I eventually met the groupie's circle of friends and decided I didn't like them very much, and the groupie eventually got a job writing comedy for Bill Marr (name changed slightly). Jeff (name unchanged) got fired from the law firm and we drove back to Salt Lake together. He asked me if I finished the novel and I made some uncomfortable jokes and he asked me if I remembered how much I used to throw up on family trips when I was a kid, and I told him I did. Then he told me that the fellows who lived next door to us in the apartment building in Denver had been a gay couple who thought we had been a gay couple as well, and had been shocked to learn we were brothers.
"Are you sure they were gay?" I asked him. "They were always wearing baseball caps and talking about the Giants."
He told me that gay people often wore baseball caps and were sometimes San Francisco Giant fans. Then he asked me if I'd had any trouble from people when I walked in the park near the apartment. I told him about the naked man in the turban, and he made a pained look, and told me he was sorry I hadn't finished the novel.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
12th East; Beginning of the End (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)
I moved into a duplex on 1200 East and around 600 South in my last year of college, it was near enough the university that I could have walked but I usually drove anyway, because I didn’t want to waste my parking pass and I worried that the manager of the duplex would do something strange to my car if I left it on the curb. He wasn’t a violent man, but he used power tools after midnight, and seemed to prefer to do his yardwork at around that time as well, and carried a fake gun wrapped with duct tape around with him and I therefore knew him to be not entirely reasonable.
But I knew that Waylon (name changed) wasn’t a violent man because if he had been I surely would have perished at his hands a few days after I’d moved in and poured a vat of spaghetti down the garbage disposal in the sink that had no garbage disposal and clogged the pipes and brought in Roto Rooter and I apologized to Waylon for the disaster and told him I would in the future make certain to pour the spaghetti down the drain with the garbage disposal, and he looked at me and I asked him; “which sink is the sink with the garbage disposal?” and he looked at me and then he pointed at the one that I’d poured the spaghetti down and I told him that I’d poured the spaghetti down that sink.
“Uh oh,” Waylon said. Then he installed a garbage disposal in the sink I’d poured the spaghetti down and he showed me the switch that I hadn’t been able to find the previous day after I’d poured the spaghetti because it hadn’t been there the previous day and I’d looked all over the kitchen for it like a defragmenting robot because I’d never lived away from home and could not conceive of a kitchen sink without a garbage disposal unless it was a sink that had another sink right next to it with the garbage disposal. Waylon flipped the switch and the disposal roared and he smiled at me like I was a child. “Hello,” he said beatifically, because he said that when he didn’t say “uh oh.” And I smiled and never poured anything down either sink but water as long as I lived there.
I shared my half of the duplex with a law student or maybe he was a pre-law student but he’d gone to school in Oklahoma for some reason, and learned how to mimic a southern accent there for Hook-up purposes and I can’t remember his name for sure but it may have been Sergei (name changed). I had some troubles with Sergei because all the women I knew seemed to like him a little too much and because he and his large hulking cousin would sometimes get drunk and pick up the Plymouth Champ I drove at the time and put it in places awkward for me to drive out of and in the morning they would be too sick to put it back and I would have to call my girlfriend and ask her to come get my car out of the tree.
I didn’t last at 12th East because I began to realize that with the move I’d taken my first few baby steps out from my mommy’s apron strings and out into the big real world and it felt horribly wrong, and Sergei began to remind me of my brothers and Waylon began wearing a salad bowl on his head and a lead apron whenever he used his PC and one day my girlfriend told me that it was almost a year since I’d moved out on my own and I began packing my dice and my stolen sci-fi paperbacks and my reams and reams of notebooks with secret notes and a few rotting shirts and moved the hell back home.
But I knew that Waylon (name changed) wasn’t a violent man because if he had been I surely would have perished at his hands a few days after I’d moved in and poured a vat of spaghetti down the garbage disposal in the sink that had no garbage disposal and clogged the pipes and brought in Roto Rooter and I apologized to Waylon for the disaster and told him I would in the future make certain to pour the spaghetti down the drain with the garbage disposal, and he looked at me and I asked him; “which sink is the sink with the garbage disposal?” and he looked at me and then he pointed at the one that I’d poured the spaghetti down and I told him that I’d poured the spaghetti down that sink.
“Uh oh,” Waylon said. Then he installed a garbage disposal in the sink I’d poured the spaghetti down and he showed me the switch that I hadn’t been able to find the previous day after I’d poured the spaghetti because it hadn’t been there the previous day and I’d looked all over the kitchen for it like a defragmenting robot because I’d never lived away from home and could not conceive of a kitchen sink without a garbage disposal unless it was a sink that had another sink right next to it with the garbage disposal. Waylon flipped the switch and the disposal roared and he smiled at me like I was a child. “Hello,” he said beatifically, because he said that when he didn’t say “uh oh.” And I smiled and never poured anything down either sink but water as long as I lived there.
I shared my half of the duplex with a law student or maybe he was a pre-law student but he’d gone to school in Oklahoma for some reason, and learned how to mimic a southern accent there for Hook-up purposes and I can’t remember his name for sure but it may have been Sergei (name changed). I had some troubles with Sergei because all the women I knew seemed to like him a little too much and because he and his large hulking cousin would sometimes get drunk and pick up the Plymouth Champ I drove at the time and put it in places awkward for me to drive out of and in the morning they would be too sick to put it back and I would have to call my girlfriend and ask her to come get my car out of the tree.
I didn’t last at 12th East because I began to realize that with the move I’d taken my first few baby steps out from my mommy’s apron strings and out into the big real world and it felt horribly wrong, and Sergei began to remind me of my brothers and Waylon began wearing a salad bowl on his head and a lead apron whenever he used his PC and one day my girlfriend told me that it was almost a year since I’d moved out on my own and I began packing my dice and my stolen sci-fi paperbacks and my reams and reams of notebooks with secret notes and a few rotting shirts and moved the hell back home.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Relocation 2; Down to the Basement (from 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)
For most of my youth I had to share a bedroom with my older brother Jeff (name not changed), and in that time developed a powerful and ultimately destructive urge for a privacy denied me by the overpopulated conditions in our family. I would have been a much happier child, I'm convinced, if I'd not had any siblings, and my parents had confined theirselves to a single birth event in the late sixties and concentrated on the challenges and obscure rewards of raising a single creative genius.
But, like Finwe, the King of the Noldor who couldn't be content with the one genius child (Curufinwe), and had to remarry that Vanyar woman and spread his brood through half of Valinor, my parents chose the evolutionarily safer path of multiple offspring, thinning the family gene pool considerably.
In their defense, and unlike the foolish Finwe, they'd already had four other children when their genius came along, so it would have been somewhat difficult for them to make the one-child decision at that time (but not impossible, as I've pointed out to them on several occasions).
So I had the four older siblings, and there were only the four bedrooms in the house, and Jeff and I were the youngest and by the remorseless illogic of primogeniture forced to share the last bedroom. Trapped in cramped lodgings with a domineering and intrusive older brother, I sought privacy in the last refuge left to me; my own mind. Thus at the very beginning of my life's journey, I diverged into a disastrous path, and developed the habit of interior monologues and dialogues, and interior tribunals, and interior shouted debates that has rendered me unfit for most social intercourse and any meaningful employment.
Of course I exhibited few symptoms of the condition at the time; my nightly prayers tended to go on for a while, so much so that I often fell asleep in mid-prayer, especially after I'd begun giving the prayers on my bed, under the covers. Jeff would wait patiently while I prayed, until he could hear the sound of snoring. Then he would leap out of his bed and slug me in the arm until I came out of my religious stupor.
My only other symptom was a tendency to sleep under blankets tucked in around the entire perimeter of my recumbant body, from head to feet, after an indescribably difficult and time-consuming self-tucking procedure.
About the time I turned eleven, the twins went on missions and left us with a wealth of bedrooms, and Jeff moved downstairs and I was left with my own room, my own empire, a space of my own to mold as I saw fit. The exhilaration of my sudden accession to all that power went, I am ashamed to say, to my head. I forbade any other family members to enter the space, especially my mother, and remodeled the room along strange, fascist lines. The blue of the carpet was declared by my Ministry of Truth to be ocean, and nobody - including myself - could walk on it except by putting books and papers down as stepping stones. The closet was declared to be an evil area, the room's slum, where I was afraid to be at night but enjoyed the occasional tittillating excursion through by the safe light of day.
Sensing my peculiar dread of the closet with an older brother's uncanny instinct for the younger's weakness, Jeff would often hide in that closet and wait for me to return home from school. After I'd had time to retreat into the safe, privacy of my room and relax for a few minutes, he would leap out of the closet to enjoy my harrowed shrieks.
Eventually the twins returned and Jeff went on his own mission. The twins took no interest in acts of terror against my room-state, and I enjoyed a long spell of peaceful detachment from the rest of the family and the world in general - except for school. I molded an army of clay soldiers out of the insulating clay my father sometimes took home from work, and equipped them with screws and razors and sent them out on murderous errands throughout the room, looking for a fight. Usually they ended up hacking each other to pieces. I had an old nerf mini-basketball that I sometimes played with that the soldiers worshipped as a god. I would speak through the nerf mini-basketball to give them their orders.
I also instituted sports leagues for the room, with sports pages full of stats and scores that I would generate by rolling dice and writing down the results. Sometimes my mother would knock on my door and ask if she could come in and I treated her like a foreign reporter that could topple my regime by seeing my secret sports-score generating technique or seeing that the god my soldiers worshipped was a nerf mini-basketball and telling everyone, so when she knocked I would shout and plead with her not to come in and would try to hid the dice and the notebooks full of numbers and the nerf and the soldiers and walk around the room nervously while she came in with my laundry and occasionally pointed at some strange appurtenance in the room.
"Why are your books all over the floor?" she would ask, and I would sullenly answer some lie and try to get her to leave and assure her that there were no human rights violations going on and everyone could vote whenever they pleased.
"I'm reading them."
"Are those little clay men?"
"Yes."
"What are you doing with them? You need to clean those sheets. Help me take them off"
"No! Wait! I'll tell you everything! Let me get the sheets! I'll talk, damn you!"
Like Hitler in the bunker, I took to spending longer and longer periods of my days and weekends in my room, brooding over the wrongs done to me at school during the day, plotting some kind of dark overthrow, imagining secret weapons to turn the tide, postulating the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences that might possibly be induced to invade earth and destroy Washington DC and take my school and my brothers away in flying saucers.
The room, denied competent cleaning for long periods of time, became dingy and subterranean in appearance, despite being on the second floor, with grimy walls and dusty shelves and dark blue cowboy drapes always closed and, truth be told, a strong odor. I'd become an adolescent.
This dreamlike existence ended with a terrible onrush of events: My grandmother moved in with us, and I was moved kicking and screaming down into the basement with my older brothers, and forced to share a room again (albeit a more clean and spacious one). This cataclysmic event shaped and confirmed my world-view not unlike the expulsion of the Israelite tribes from Zion. And as the Israelites lamented at the rivers of Babylon, so I lamented in the shower my expulsion from the room - for as long as I could before my brothers would pound apishly on the bathroom door and howl for me to finish the shower.
And as the expulsion of the Jews from Zion confirmed the words of the doomsayer prophets and won the allegiance of the backsliders wholeheartedly to Yahwism, so my expulsion from the room won my wholehearted allegiance to the path of living inside my head and ensured that rednecks and troglodytes would persecute me for my views and flick spitwads at the back of my head in school.
My grandmother turned out to be a tower of ancient wisdom and taught me about life and coaxed me out of my shell and told long annoying stories over and over and kept doing the dishes all the time when she couldn't see the dirt on them and so my dad had to sneak into the kitchen at night and re-clean them all except when he was irritated at her and would clean the dishes during the day loudly so that she heard and he could tell her she hadn't cleaned them well enough. Once a balloon from my mother's birthday party drifted around the house on the heating vent currents and crept up behind her while she was doing the dishes and scared the bejesus out of her when it touched her shoulder.
But, like Finwe, the King of the Noldor who couldn't be content with the one genius child (Curufinwe), and had to remarry that Vanyar woman and spread his brood through half of Valinor, my parents chose the evolutionarily safer path of multiple offspring, thinning the family gene pool considerably.
In their defense, and unlike the foolish Finwe, they'd already had four other children when their genius came along, so it would have been somewhat difficult for them to make the one-child decision at that time (but not impossible, as I've pointed out to them on several occasions).
So I had the four older siblings, and there were only the four bedrooms in the house, and Jeff and I were the youngest and by the remorseless illogic of primogeniture forced to share the last bedroom. Trapped in cramped lodgings with a domineering and intrusive older brother, I sought privacy in the last refuge left to me; my own mind. Thus at the very beginning of my life's journey, I diverged into a disastrous path, and developed the habit of interior monologues and dialogues, and interior tribunals, and interior shouted debates that has rendered me unfit for most social intercourse and any meaningful employment.
Of course I exhibited few symptoms of the condition at the time; my nightly prayers tended to go on for a while, so much so that I often fell asleep in mid-prayer, especially after I'd begun giving the prayers on my bed, under the covers. Jeff would wait patiently while I prayed, until he could hear the sound of snoring. Then he would leap out of his bed and slug me in the arm until I came out of my religious stupor.
My only other symptom was a tendency to sleep under blankets tucked in around the entire perimeter of my recumbant body, from head to feet, after an indescribably difficult and time-consuming self-tucking procedure.
About the time I turned eleven, the twins went on missions and left us with a wealth of bedrooms, and Jeff moved downstairs and I was left with my own room, my own empire, a space of my own to mold as I saw fit. The exhilaration of my sudden accession to all that power went, I am ashamed to say, to my head. I forbade any other family members to enter the space, especially my mother, and remodeled the room along strange, fascist lines. The blue of the carpet was declared by my Ministry of Truth to be ocean, and nobody - including myself - could walk on it except by putting books and papers down as stepping stones. The closet was declared to be an evil area, the room's slum, where I was afraid to be at night but enjoyed the occasional tittillating excursion through by the safe light of day.
Sensing my peculiar dread of the closet with an older brother's uncanny instinct for the younger's weakness, Jeff would often hide in that closet and wait for me to return home from school. After I'd had time to retreat into the safe, privacy of my room and relax for a few minutes, he would leap out of the closet to enjoy my harrowed shrieks.
Eventually the twins returned and Jeff went on his own mission. The twins took no interest in acts of terror against my room-state, and I enjoyed a long spell of peaceful detachment from the rest of the family and the world in general - except for school. I molded an army of clay soldiers out of the insulating clay my father sometimes took home from work, and equipped them with screws and razors and sent them out on murderous errands throughout the room, looking for a fight. Usually they ended up hacking each other to pieces. I had an old nerf mini-basketball that I sometimes played with that the soldiers worshipped as a god. I would speak through the nerf mini-basketball to give them their orders.
I also instituted sports leagues for the room, with sports pages full of stats and scores that I would generate by rolling dice and writing down the results. Sometimes my mother would knock on my door and ask if she could come in and I treated her like a foreign reporter that could topple my regime by seeing my secret sports-score generating technique or seeing that the god my soldiers worshipped was a nerf mini-basketball and telling everyone, so when she knocked I would shout and plead with her not to come in and would try to hid the dice and the notebooks full of numbers and the nerf and the soldiers and walk around the room nervously while she came in with my laundry and occasionally pointed at some strange appurtenance in the room.
"Why are your books all over the floor?" she would ask, and I would sullenly answer some lie and try to get her to leave and assure her that there were no human rights violations going on and everyone could vote whenever they pleased.
"I'm reading them."
"Are those little clay men?"
"Yes."
"What are you doing with them? You need to clean those sheets. Help me take them off"
"No! Wait! I'll tell you everything! Let me get the sheets! I'll talk, damn you!"
Like Hitler in the bunker, I took to spending longer and longer periods of my days and weekends in my room, brooding over the wrongs done to me at school during the day, plotting some kind of dark overthrow, imagining secret weapons to turn the tide, postulating the existence of extraterrestrial intelligences that might possibly be induced to invade earth and destroy Washington DC and take my school and my brothers away in flying saucers.
The room, denied competent cleaning for long periods of time, became dingy and subterranean in appearance, despite being on the second floor, with grimy walls and dusty shelves and dark blue cowboy drapes always closed and, truth be told, a strong odor. I'd become an adolescent.
This dreamlike existence ended with a terrible onrush of events: My grandmother moved in with us, and I was moved kicking and screaming down into the basement with my older brothers, and forced to share a room again (albeit a more clean and spacious one). This cataclysmic event shaped and confirmed my world-view not unlike the expulsion of the Israelite tribes from Zion. And as the Israelites lamented at the rivers of Babylon, so I lamented in the shower my expulsion from the room - for as long as I could before my brothers would pound apishly on the bathroom door and howl for me to finish the shower.
And as the expulsion of the Jews from Zion confirmed the words of the doomsayer prophets and won the allegiance of the backsliders wholeheartedly to Yahwism, so my expulsion from the room won my wholehearted allegiance to the path of living inside my head and ensured that rednecks and troglodytes would persecute me for my views and flick spitwads at the back of my head in school.
My grandmother turned out to be a tower of ancient wisdom and taught me about life and coaxed me out of my shell and told long annoying stories over and over and kept doing the dishes all the time when she couldn't see the dirt on them and so my dad had to sneak into the kitchen at night and re-clean them all except when he was irritated at her and would clean the dishes during the day loudly so that she heard and he could tell her she hadn't cleaned them well enough. Once a balloon from my mother's birthday party drifted around the house on the heating vent currents and crept up behind her while she was doing the dishes and scared the bejesus out of her when it touched her shoulder.
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