Caterpillar Scheme

[donweasel]

“His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air... It had been a caterpillar scheme – a dream of fabulous escape…”

Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)

9-11-02

I try to imagine the United States’ Department of Necromancy. Millions of dollars in taxes sinking into the bayous of New Orleans. New life out of the muck of Louisiana. Government funded black arts. Today, raising four thousand deceased persons in memory of their deaths. Stand them up in front of a camera at ground zero; let them say a few words so their families can watch. But if you get another day, how do you spend it? After a year of kicking themselves, what would those who died last year do if the ceremonies were really enough to let them live today?

Meghan hates her physics class. She spent four hours today on homework that she never finished. Every Monday and Wednesday morning, she struggles with her professor for three hours as he talks quickly using terms she doesn’t know. She has come to hate him for this. Today, we talk about her class more than we talk about anything else before we both fall silent and turn out the light. She says I smell like I’ve been smoking.

The laundry is in the dryer but I don’t get a chance to fold it before I throw my suitcase and another box in the back of the station wagon. It’s 4:50 PM and I have to get a tire changed before the drive to the City of Angels (my new hometown). I would take my time except that it’s Wednesday so I have a class at 7:00 PM, and, depending on traffic, it can take nearly two hours to drive from Bakersfield (my former hometown).

An unfinished letter to Erika is still rolled into the spool of my electric typewriter.

I don’t want to leave without saying goodbye to Callie. I have a book that I want to give her. We feed each other with recommendations and cultural input. I told her about Harold and Maude and she told me about Dancer in the Dark. I showed her Rushmore, so she lent me her Eloise books. She still has my Mr. Show DVDs, and I still have her graduation present, but we decide to hold on to those so we’ll have a reason to visit each other. Not that we would need a reason, this is just a way of making sure it will happen. Of avoiding regret for not.

Books and DVDs are in one box, the other box contains miscellaneous knick-knacks that I’ll probably never actually unpack, but which are nice to have with me for the sake of having them. There are two typewriters (one manual, one electric) in their respective boxes. My new laptop is in its carrying case and is sitting in the passenger seat beside me. There’s a U.S. Army-issue ammunition box holding the CDs I’ll most likely want to have on hand. I don’t really need all of this. Aside from the suitcase of clothes, I really only need one box of books, DVDs and a few CDs and then the laptop in the front seat. If I’d taken a little more time to do so, I could have gotten my entire life to fit into one box.

She feels good when she’s painting and taking photographs. She loves animals and adores horses. The summer when we started seeing each other, she was an animal trainer in Frazier Park. She wants to be an engineering major because that’s what everyone thinks she should do, because she was always good in math, and she’s still good friends with her high school math teacher. By the time she’s thirty, Meghan wants to have enough money to own a horse and to never have to worry about income, because somewhere in her life, an influential voice convinced her that she’ll be happy if she’s well off and that there’s good money in engineering.

The abbreviation for the state of Louisiana is also LA.

I’m coming into the mountains now on a new pair of tires, and the sky is filled with smoke. There’s a pretty bad brush fire up ahead that spreads for about a mile. The authorities have the fire under control so traffic doesn’t even slow down. I roll down my windows so I can smell the smoke and feel the flames breathe on me as I drive past. In my CD player, Atom is saying “the most incredible thing about coming home to you is the feeling of being in motion again; it’s the most extraordinary thing in the world.” The world shines.

Callie’s smiling and hugging the book, and I’m smiling back as we talk about Indian food a couple of nights ago, and about the details of exodus from Bakersfield. She’s also taking time off of school, moving north in a couple of weeks to live in a cellar at her aunt’s house. She’ll be working during the day at a swanky gym. “I’ve only seen the reception area,” she says “but just the reception area looks like the lobby of some expensive hotel.” She’s excited to work there and to “watch rich people get all sweaty and gross.”

After class, I make plans to meet Justin tomorrow so he can show me where I’ll be living and give me a key to the apartment. I’ll spend tonight in Meghan’s dorm in Thousand Oaks. She’s been at school for a couple of weeks and we haven’t seen much of each other, so she wants me to come visit her so we can hang out. I turn onto the northbound 101 and Tom Waits is singing “I would weep my heart, when I looked in your eyes, and I’d search once again for the spark.”

The book I gave to Callie was called FRAUD.

She smiles like she's heart broken and says “I want to keep you.” And she keeps me in the doorway. Two nights earlier we dressed up (she in a black and white skirt and a black top, I in a three-piece gray pin-striped suit I had just bought from Goodwill) and went out to get Indian food. She said I should go into television and that she just envisioned a box around my head. After dinner we drove out to the bluffs and raised shots of rum (her first-ever taste of it) over Bakersfield. She dedicated her shot to a lady in Berkley (her new hometown) who makes angel wings out of nylon and wire hangers. I dedicated mine “to life in a box; it’s better than no life at all.” And now I’m at her door again and we’re hugging goodbye (our third, and not our last) and she says she’d invite me in to sit down before I go, but she laughs and says she doesn’t think she would let me leave. And I wouldn’t want to, but I have clothes to move into the dryer and a tire to get fixed. So we hug again and I give her a kiss on the cheek and she kisses me back. I’m walking to my car now and I’m thinking that if I crash on the way to L.A., I think Callie will know that I love her.

She hates her physics class and she hates her calculus. She gestures wildly as she talks about her classes, she uses hyperbole and exaggerates to absolutes, she sighs, she tosses her head back and punches her books. She’s miserable there and I tell her that and we go around in circles about her unhappiness. She says she has no recent memories of being happy. She says she just needs to make it through school and get an engineering job so she can start working towards her goals of happiness. She sees nothing wrong with these plans and is growing irritated with my insistence that she wont be happy doing something she hates, so we stop talking and turn out the light. She asks for a kiss goodnight and kicks the covers off because she's hot. i slim myself to fit on the bed. with my elbows tucked in close and my hands folded across my body, I watch the shadows on the wall as tomorrow silently disassembles the night to become a new being.

 

[donweasel]

“And in luxurious Cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest Towers,
And injury and outrage: And when Night
Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.”

John Milton (Paradise Lost)

9/21/2002

As per thermodynamics, the bottle of syrah is slowly warming next to me on the sidewalk. I’m crouched pressing a Bic pen to the inside cover of Delillo’s White Noise, carefully drawing out a message to Chris on his birthday:

"We will see the best minds of our generation destroyed by the cotton screaming static of a waning affect.

Hugs and snuggles,
--Alex"

Justin has the ale now and the Michelob he picked up from the 7-11, so I close the book, pocket the pen, and pick up the bottle by the twin jesters. There are reasons for the amber ale from the Flying Dog Breweries and the bottle of Bonny Doon’s Domaine des Blagueurs Syrah, Sirrah, but as of now the bottles are unopened and I assume they are here because of the Ralph Steadman illustrations on the labels. I like Steadman’s art, and using it to signify small quantities of poison seems appropriate. There’s something menacing about the illustrations on the bottles, particularly those weird scribbles on the bottle of ale: dog-faced fleas with barbed tongues, scrawled manic and desperate from an open wound, all grins and slobber under the banner “Old Scratch.” This, I think, is why I chose the amber ale.

I follow Justin up the frosted-glass steps to the front doors, past the hotel bar, and into the elevators. Chris is sharing his birthday party with his friend Ann, whose birthday is in two weeks. They have pooled their money to reserve a suite for the party tonight, and as such requested that the guests bring food and drink for themselves and their fellow partygoers.

Chris greets us at the door. I give him the wine and the book, which seems to momentarily thwart his focus. He thanks me graciously and sets the items in the closet as he regains his momentum and rattles off his automatic welcome schpiel: “Here’s the fridge. It’s full but you can put your drinks here. The snacks are in the corner. That’s Rob by the window, he helped pay for this so give him a big hug. There’s the bathroom. If you need anything [etc…]” Justin and I stand around for a bit to reorient ourselves as attendees before engaging the party as participants. Carrying an open bottle helps with this.

Ben shows up shortly after we do. He knows more people here than Justin and me and he introduces us to some of them. In jeans and a work shirt, Justin feels a bit out of place as the majority of the party consists of Ann’s super-hip/super-attractive show business friends. In reality, although I’m slightly better dressed than Justin, I’m probably more out of place than he is, but I don’t seem to care as much. Justin lives in an apartment on the corner of Sunset Blvd and Fuller Ave. When people ask him what he does for a living he tells them he works for the Tonight Show. When anyone asks me, I smile kindly and tell them quite honestly “I don’t have a job. I sleep in my car.” For this reason, Ben has begun to introduce me by saying “This is Alex. He just moved here. He performs in the Cage Match on Fridays at the Improv Olympic where he also takes classes.”

For the most part Ben and Justin talk about the girls they’d like to “bang” at the party and tell stories about girls they met and/or “hooked up with” at other parties. I nod, quietly listening to the brunette behind me talk about her roommate’s friend. He had known her roommate in college and came to town from New York for a visit. He claimed to have met Satan and to have, while living in New York, shared cigarettes with him. The brunette explained that this, while disturbing, didn’t concern her until she came home to find him kicking holes in the cabinets and slamming the refrigerator screaming “He found me but I’m not afraid of him! I’m not AFRAID of you!” That’s when she and her roommate had him taken into custody and flown back to his family in New York.

Chris introduces us to his friend Jessa. “This is Ben,” Chris says, “He’s in an upcoming episode of Off Center on the WB”

“Really?” Jessa says, extending a hand. “I hear that show was just cancelled, how do you feel about that?”

This makes me laugh out loud. Chris jokingly reprimands her for being hurtful, even if by accident. I raise my bottle of Old Scratch to Jessa and drink deeply to a remarkable display of intellectual honesty.

When Jessa leaves, Ben nudges me and points out a short Blonde a few feet away, asking me if I think she pads her bra. I tell him I don’t know.

“C’mon,” he says, “you can say yes or no. I mean she’s hot yeah, and she’s got a nice, you know… she’s got a good rack, nice legs, you know, cute ass. She’s got it goin’ on and stuff. Just, there’s something odd about them I think. Maybe it’s just the top she’s wearing.”

“Why don’t you go ask her?” I offer.

“No”

“Why not?”

“Why not? 'Cause I don’t want her to think I’m a jackass.”

“You’re not a jackass? You’re standing here talking to me about her breasts. Alright, given the choice would you rather someone hate you with a passion, or never think of you at all.”

Justin laughs at this.

“Someone like that,” says Ben, “I’d rather they never think of me at all. You just don’t go up to someone and ask if they pad their bra.”

“I just don’t see that it’s a big deal asking her if you're standing here asking me. Who are you to her or she to you?”

He nods and we drink our drinks. “Sympathy for the Devil” is playing quietly and I think about the Brunette’s refrigerator, wondering if Satan ever got out.

Word hits the room that someone saw Kevin Spacey drinking alone at the bar when they went downstairs for a cocktail.

“You should flirt with him,” someone tells Ben, “He’ll put you in a movie. He's totally bi. All you have to do is flirt with him. He’s discovered people that way.”

Gradually the party begins to disassemble, people heading out because it’s late or because the neighbors are probably sick of us, or because the party has started to wind down (all of which are valid arguments if obvious excuses to go star-gazing).

Justin is actually getting tired and has to work in the morning, so we take the opportunity to head out as well. Justin and I stop in the lobby and talk to Jessa. She came down with some of her friends because they wanted to try to talk to Kevin Spacey. Justin disappears to use the restroom and I compliment Jessa again, citing her comment to Ben as the high point of my evening. She thanks me and we joke idly about the party.

“Don’t you want to try to meet Kevin Spacey?” she asks.

I shrug, "You can if you want. I'm not talking to anyone else at the party so it seems odd that I would go out of my way to talk to one stranger just because he's famous."

“But isn’t that the point? He's famous. You're standing around talking to me, you could just as easily go talk to him."

I say, "I have a one-way relationship with Kevin Spacey as a figure in movies and on talk shows. Kevin Spacey the person is nothing to me, and I'm nothing to him. At this point I have more of a relationship with you, and we’ve said all of five sentences a piece to each other."

She smiles and says "But if you went and said something smart-assy you'd have some kind of relationship with him. Even if you pissed him off you'd have made an impression. I'll give you twenty dollars to go up to him and say 'I hear you like little boys.'"

So Jessa follows me past all of the super-hip/super-beautiful people hovering in a horseshoe shape around a single bar stool, pretending they're not trying to meet Kevin Spacey. I put my hand on his shoulder and say "I hear you like little boys."

He is wearing a white baseball cap, jeans and a zip-down sweatshirt. He turns and looks at me out of the corner of his eye and says "Why would you say something like that to me?"

"Two dollars." I say, figuring that if the point was to insult him, I might as well be insulting.

He hangs a cigarette in his mouth, "You put yourself out like that for two dollars?"

I shrugged, "Hey, it's two dollars I wouldn't have otherwise. I don't have a job and I'm living in my car. Two dollars is a Croissandwich tomorrow morning at Jack in the Box."

He shakes his head, "I still say you should have gotten more money."

I nod and extend a hand, “Well, it was nice meeting you.”

He shakes my hand and says “I wish I could say the same thing.”

Jessa tells me that if I would have waited she probably could have gotten me upwards of fifty dollars, which would have been nice, but it was never about the money. We tell Ben and Justin what happened and Ben is mad at me.

“You don’t say shit like that to someone.”

“Why not? Who is Kevin Spacey to me?”

Justin laughs, “He’s Kaiser Soze!”

Exactly.

 

[donweasel]

The adventures of Barefoot and Pregnant (Part I)

Erica sounds far too chipper on her end of the phone. The night before, we had taken a trip to Los Angeles, a two hour drive from Bakersfield, to see a midnight showing of Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We got back into town at about 5:30 this morning and she asked if we could stop into a Ralph’s supermarket to see if they had the medication she needed. My impulse had been to ask, for the sake of conversation, what, specifically, she meant by “medication,” but something told me that this was one of those situations in which I needed to be content with leaving my curiosity unsatisfied, and my suspicions unconfirmed. She had told me that she needed to take a pill by 9:00 this morning. She said that it might not be that big of a deal if she didn’t take it, but that it would just be one less thing to worry about if she did. As I stood watching her at the pharmacy window, awkwardly perusing the condoms and home pregnancy tests, I must have known what she was looking for. I wanted desperately to help, both to find what she needed, and to lift the heavy silence that always takes the place of unspoken embarrassing secrets.

“What are you looking for, exactly?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant, “Maybe I can help find it.”

She paused for a bit, staring blankly at the products in front of her, resting her eyes on their brands and logos, but momentarily looking for something else. She stood up straight with her hands tucked into her back pockets and turned her head to face me, “Um… I’m not sure what the brand is… it’s the morning after pill.”

When we had left Los Angeles, she asked for my opinion on abortion and on the morning after pill. During the ride home we had talked about the difference between making love and fucking. We had talked about magic words and inescapable loneliness and self-destruction and rebirth. She needed to get to a pharmacy and here she was examining the birth control. Of course I knew, and she couldn’t have really expected me not to, but now neither of us had to assume the ignorance of the other. Now that we were on the same page, I suggested asking an employee for help.

We found a woman who was putting fashion magazines in the rack by one of the check out lanes. In a voice suitable for any public library, Erica asked her if they carried the morning after pill. The woman grimaced; looking at once irritated and a little amused, and fumbled a bit with her magazines. She said she didn’t know for certain, so she called over one of the boys in charge of stocking the medicine racks and had Erica ask him.
“The what?” he asked.

“I was just wondering if you carried the morning after pill, and where it would be,” said Erica, a little louder but still not wanting to attract any more attention than necessary.

“Morning after? What’s that do?” asked the stock boy, very honestly confused as to what she meant.

I nearly laughed out loud at this, and had to force myself to keep from giggling as Erica tried to explain. The boy blushed and glanced at me to read my take on the situation.

I didn’t realize until just then that he and the magazine woman must have thought I was involved with the activities of the night before and thus was partially responsible for this quest for a pill the morning after. What then, must they have made of my amused grin—truly the mark of benevolent Schadenfreude between friends? Were I in their position, faced with an adorable blonde in whose life a sequence of grisly decisions might be averted by procuring a fifty dollar pill, I suppose the half-grinning unshaven adolescent standing half-behind her would strike me as a smug little prick who couldn’t put a fifty cent piece of latex to proper use as his half of the responsibility to avoid the current situation. I realized that, to these people, my being any more engaging than aloof and any less concerned than guilty made me the asshole who thinks he’s getting away with something, even though the reality is that I did nothing with which to get away.

The stock boy, having now lost a heartbeat of ignorance to the morning shift at Ralph’s, referred us back to the contraceptives and home pregnancy tests. He spoke quickly in increasingly broken English about how he doesn’t know when the pharmacy will be open and how he needs to get back to work. Erica looked small and a little worried standing next to the tall grid of boxes offering her one step yeses or nos with error-proof results. She sighed, her worry seeming to disappear with a shrug, and decided she would just have to wait and see.

I took her back to her apartment where she fell asleep watching Amelie, at which point I drove home, stopping briefly at a Wallgreen’s for transmission fluid, and to visit their 24-hour pharmacist to ask in grave tones with guilty gestures about the morning after pill.

It’s now noon and she’s calling me on my cell phone because her roommate can’t give her a ride to her car. She asks if I wouldn’t mind driving her, which isn’t a problem for me, exactly, except that it’s Saturday, and I’ve really only gotten four solid hours of sleep. I tell her I’ll be right over, and that if she doesn’t hear from me soon to give me a call because I’ve probably gone back to sleep. I decide to skip my shower, skip brushing my teeth, I even skip putting on my shoes, assuming I’ll be right back to bed as soon as Erica has her car. I lumber out of the house wearing the clothes I wore last night and in twenty minutes I’m standing in Erica’s living room, waiting while she checks the messages on her cell phone.

One message is from me, telling her the man at the 24-hour pharmacy said she can take the morning after pill up until three days after “the activity” (his words, not mine). Her boyfriend left the other message, the entirety of which is, “Take a pill.”

She invites me to sit and watch the last half of Bio-Dome with her. I’m much less groggy at this point, so I agree and settle in on the couch. Erica has just gotten out of the shower, so the air in the apartment is fragrant and damp. It smells of shampoo and body wash and irrefutable cleanliness, which suddenly remind me that I stink of a four-hour car ride and a morning without bathing. I begin to feel self conscious, but watching Erica make coffee, I realize I don’t care.

Erica’s comfort is contagious. She’s one of those people with the innate ability to make you feel like you’re okay where you are. I say, “My mouth tastes like sleep.” She says her toothbrush is on the sink if I want to use it. When you’re around someone like that, all schemes and conventions, both real and imagined, are ignored for the time being; you feel like there’s no reason to second guess yourself; When you’re about to watch a Pauley Shore movie with someone like Erica you’re just happy that you showed up. I can’t quite figure her out for this. I imagine a gland in the back of her jaw that releases some kind of soothing chemical when she asks, “Do you want me to make you a burrito?”

After the movie she decides that, since she’s probably going to get the pill now, she should change out of the T-Shirt she got from Vacation Bible School. I try to talk her out of this, but she would rather not risk being recognized by members of her church for the sake of a bad joke. She disappears to change into something more appropriate for trumping embryos, all the while singing The Safety Dance as it plays over the credits to Bio-Dome. The humor in this is more than enough for me.

I’m fully awake now, and in no rush to get back to bed. Erica is running through her plans for the day: get her car, get to the bank, pick up the pill on the way home, go sing at a wedding rehearsal this afternoon. Her bank is on the way to her car so I offer to stop and save her a trip.

Being that it’s Saturday, the bank proper is closed. The ATMs are working, but Erica’s wallet was stolen a few days ago, so she doesn’t have her cards. There again like I saw at Ralph’s last night, next to the ATM a subtle helplessness marks Erica’s face before she comes back to the car. She has no driver’s license, so she can’t write a check to the pharmacy, she could make a withdrawal if she could talk to a teller, but without her ATM card she’s at a loss until Monday, at which point her window of opportunity to take the pill will be closed.

I’m taking a trip to San Francisco on Monday and a trip to New York on Wednesday, so I have, at present, about $250 in my wallet. I tell her that I can spot her the money if she writes me a check, and then I can just cash the check Monday before I leave. She smiles wide and says ok, “That sounds too easy, though.”

“You don’t have the pill yet.” I remind her.

to be continued