Epidermises: August 2009

Thank you Caitlin

I've spent the last six days with the Russians. When I’m with the Russians, I like to come up with stories about my friends. I have two friends named Caitlin and Jamie. Neither of them exists. The Russians are called Svedka and Absolut. They certainly exist. They watch me from the kitchen table, glinting like diamonds. Outside I can see my mother’s garden. I can see the pines of Napa Valley, the blue sky and the rain clouds on the horizon. Every day I give my poor, ashamed mother a furry, pungent kiss and go into town to work. I stand behind the counter at an independent bookstore. There, I do very little. On most days I bring the Russians with me, concealed in a little flask. This makes the day much more interesting.

If you're wondering why I mentioned my mother and not my father, it's because I don't have one. Well, obviously I HAD one, but he went away. Now don't go getting all misty eyed or anything, I'm doing just fine. In fact I think I'm a fine specimen of a young man. I'm going to do great things—headed for the top, all the way baby.

Think Bill Gates.

Anyway, my father was in the marines for a while and then hit it big with some kind of insurance scam. He set up a hugely successful business selling lawn mowers. When I was born, he ran off with a hooker named Louise. My mother used to tell me, that he'd flown away like a butterfly. This, I realized, was complete horseshit. I told her so, and received a spanking. I think I was five at the time. And now I've gone and told you that I can see you looking at me in a different way, as if I'm one of those crippled kids at the school on our street. I'm fine, I tell you. And I don't have any abandonment issues or anything. You're a prick if you think I do—a small prick. I, for example, was the first in my family to go to college—a well regarded Liberal arts institution located in the green heart of snotty New England. There I got stellar grades and fucked about a hundred girls. I was the perfect college student.

I did a lot of drugs too. Drugs are overrated. It's so passé to be on drugs nowadays.

Think Kurt Cobain. Prick.

* * *

Anyway, back to the story. Jamie is short and sad, with hopelessly kind features. His eyes are like inward mirrors. His expressions tell you everything. Caitlin is too beautiful to describe. If you understand anything at all about love, you will know what I mean. When I look at her I feel like I'm dying, as if I'm turning to stone from the inside out.

Think Medusa. Think Jezebel.

Jamie and Caitlin are two years younger than me, living in New York City, where there's a girl, I don't love at all—I mean it. No matter how I might seem, I rarely think or talk about her. She's certainly not in my dreams. If you think different, you're clearly mad. Or drunk. You must be mishearing me. When I first ran West—literally ran, because I don't own a car—I vowed never to think about her again. I haven't thought of her since. When I send her letters, or call her drunk, she never responds, and this does not count because they're moments of madness and I'm not myself.

Think Circe or some other vindictive bitch.

I certainly don't love her. Even though you probably wouldn't see anything wrong with her face, and eyes, and heart-breaking vintage dresses, and would, in fact, abandon every good thing in your life for her, she's really very ugly. Hell, she's worse than ugly; she's dangerous. I'm warning you: keep your distance. Don't get involved. She ruins guys. She turns them into little blue flames and keeps them beneath her bed. If you go near her, I'll kill you.

* * *

In the cool, blue quiet of her imagined bedroom, Caitlin sits up, arranges her hair, and tells Jamie about her past. This is a very specific past, and if I were there, the Russians would surely shout at her; they have a tendency to do such things. I like Jamie very much, and don't want him to hear Caitlin’s casual "stories," because neither he nor I are particularly strong when it comes to that sort of thing. Let's just say, for example, that one of her tales involves a remote controlled device, given to her by an ex-lover, one component of which inserts—and to be fair she thought this outrageous, and refused to use it—into a rather intimate place. The second component, as you might have guessed, makes the first shake like an epileptic midget with D.Ts. Just thinking about the damn thing, makes me want to visit the Russians. Jamie and I fixate on such things. We worry. We wonder. We spend hours staring off into the shapeless horizon, trying to discern our futures, as if the shadows were tealeaves.

"Lie to me," I ask the Russians. "Tell me it's going to be okay."

Caitlin is originally from Texas. I've seen her driving her father’s Lexus, there. I’ve seen her drink expensive wines and attend her brother’s jazz recitals and receive a string of pearls for her birthday. Pearls are stupid. Oysters are stupid. Do pearls even come from oysters? Whatever, the whole thing's stupid. Caitlin tells Jamie things that he should never know. She casts, with admirable skill, layers of dark light upon moments of idyll. He sees her and an old lover, sleeping in a cemetery. I hear, second hand, of the many things experiences she's had with both and men and women. I marvel at the sheer ease of these experiences—the flippancy with which some people move through life. Sometimes, if I'm thinking of such people in the middle of the night, I will walk out of my house and begin to run through the forest, feeling the smooth air upon my skin. These movements, no matter how frantic, inspire calm—a sense of order. I watch the world reduced to a numbing blur—the shape of ordinary things rushing by in spasmodic bursts of black and gray. It's all very meaningful, almost transcendental. Sometimes I think about getting into poetry, but truth be told, poets are all drunks and they can be quite pompous. Besides, they need me at the bookstore; nobody knows the classics section like I do. Nobody can organize it with such precision.

That's my thing: organization and planning—making sure that the future is immaculately stacked and labeled. My whole life I have been searching for order. I like to arrange the pens on my desk in such a way as to give the illusion that there is a rhyme and reason to my days. I would like to climb Mount Everest. I would like to be loved by everybody. I would like to wise—to be listened to. I would like to preach to people about the little moments in every day when we do something cruel. Life is divided between people who suffer for performing those cruelties, and those who are too oblivious to care. I'd like to organize things otherwise.

Think God or Jesus, or maybe just Nelson Mandela.

Any of them will do.

* * *

One day—only a few hours ago, actually—I did something a little stupid. When I tell you about it you're going to jump to conclusions about my state of mind. I urge you to keep your thoughts to yourself, because it wasn't completely my fault. The guy, my so-called manager, was giving me a lot of poxy, acne-ridden stress about my treatment of certain cantankerous customers; and my Russians had left me; and I was very lonely at home; and all I do is sleep; and you can't imagine how much I just want to hop on a boat and go to India where I will live in an ashram and save orphans; and when combined, and condensed into a short space of time, these things can make a very reasonable guy do something a tad—just a little bit—stupid.

Like nail his manager's hand to the desk with a heavy-duty industrial gun.

Anyway, that’s what set my mind on going back east. It was then I knowed it was time to fulfill my destiny and become a world famous American rambler. I’d hop trains and drink corn liquor beneath a bridge with my bum friends, smoking cigarette butts and talking about the fool suits who walk the street, not even aware they’ve died. I’d learn how to play the guitar, except I’d call it the geetar, and when I was done with that I’d master the fiddle, and the mandolin too.

Right now, though, I have to pack, and kiss my mother goodbye. There’s a shit-storm of litigation and criminal charges coming my way, and I ain’t gone be around to see how it ends. I done gone run afoul of the law, see. Killed man. Caught with my woman in the hen house with him. They was fornicating, see—bucking like a mule in heat. So I put a staple in his head. Hell yeah, I swear it’s true. Wasn’t gonna have my honor besmirched so. Now I’m a bonafide desperado—scourge of Californee. You just watch what you say around me. I got some temper.

Think Sean Penn.

"I'm just going out to the store," I tell my, and I give her a kiss. “Oh,” she says, emerging from the living room where she’s watching a lifetime original movie about a woman with no arms or legs who fights the system and goes to the Olympics where she wins a gold medal for shot put. Get me some milk, a pack of Twinkies, and some tampons.” She looks at me fondly. “You have something to eat, big fella,” she says handing me a ten-dollar note. I take the money and then just stand looking at her for a while, my eyes filling up with tears. “By ma,” I say, and I’m gone, out on the open road in a beaten up station wagon from 1983.

I drive and drive. Somewhere in Colorado I sit on the hood of my car and smoke cigarette after cigarette, thinking about how I’ll jump my first train. Right after my gas runs out, I decide. Then, I think of Caitlin. I think of my girl, how much she loves me, and how she’s probably waiting, holding back until the man in her life comes to sweep her off her feet. I think of how fragile people are. I smile. I buy a handle of cheap vodka in small town and drink until I can no longer drive. I sit at the side of the road. I veer away from North Dakota and go south. America, I think. It all looks the same—strip mall after strip mall, with the occasional authentic saloon or pile of beautiful rocks to break the monotony. All the time, I am happy to be driving. Only the young drive like I do, carefree with the radio turned high. This is the life, I think—all the madness of breathing, and moving and being brave enough to go mad.

In Mississippi I buy a handgun for an exhorbinate amount of money, from a fella who tells me trying to hop an Amtrak train would be sheer madness. “Madness is my middle name,” I tell him. “I’m a desperado.” I drive into the forest and shoot at animals. When I’m out of bullets I put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. I begin to laugh: hahahahahahahahahahaha. I like the sound of my laughter amongst the quiet trees. In the past people lived in this forest. They lived and died and bred here. Now I cannot bear the quiet. I need a city. I need the hum of passing cars. I need the sound of my laughter.

* * *

Caitlin kisses Jamie and tells him she loves him. "I think sex is my religion," she says. Afterwards, he calls me. He tells me he’s got this terrible feeling in his gut. He tells me he doesn’t know anything about anyone anymore. I feel violated, he says, like somebody has put a tumor in my stomach and now my eyesight is gone. I feel like I've surrendered everything that's me. I'm a different person now, all pulled-apart and deformed. I tell him that there’s order to such chaos. I mail him, from Virginia, a bunch of papers I’ve been reading about Chaos Theory in Physics and the Social Sciences. This is New Age bullshit, he laughs. I tell him that it’s pertinent—relevant to our lives at large. From the things that we can’t measure—that we can’t understand—comes growth and change. I tell him that we are made by pain; pain changes us. Look in the mirror, I tell him. See how you’re changing.

"Are you drunk," he asks me down the payphone.

"Fuck you," I say. "I'm as sober as a nun."

I take a swig of Svedka.

Suddenly, standing in the hot, ugly gas station, I want to kiss Jamie. He is my dear friend and I love him. But I will never be close to him in that way. I want to kiss somebody in a way that is pure and innocent. I want to be close and powerless in the arms of somebody kind and selfless. No such person exists. I know that. I've known it forever. I knew it in my mother's womb. That's why there's such loneliness in the world. I start to cry. I leave Virginia and speed north, through the nation’s capital towards the end of the world. Somewhere along the way, I call the girl, and—miracle of miracles—she answers. Angel's descend. A chorus of fairies sings hallelujah. "Hello," she says. For the sake of anonymity I won't use her name. If I do that somebody might figure out the specifics of this story and her high-powered, executive Dad'll sue me. For this reason, I'll call her Sue, and myself Ed.

"Ed," she says. "You can't keep doing this. You need to get better."

You haven't called," I say.

Silence.

"Don't you care how sick I am?"

She tells me she knows. But right now she needs some time. She's protecting herself, I think. "You know everything I do is because I love you," she says. "I just think that we shouldn't talk for a few months."

"I'm losing it here," I say. She hangs up.

You’re just symptomatic of a greater problem, Jamie tells Caitlin. He buys a rifle. He dreams of putting inside her while she sleeps. In Jamie’s dream, Caitlin doesn’t even stir. Jamie wonders what it would be like to fire into her womb. He imagines the bullet moving slowly through brine, flesh and soft tissue, to the center of her body—to the womb of his weary world, where it wouldn't do any damage. It would just sit, like a little, metal baby. He puts the rifle away. He sits on the edge of the bed.

I arrive in New Jersey. Dawn is beginning to break. I pull into a gas station and tell myself that the only disorder is coercion. I smoke a cigarette dangerously near to the pumps. In this day and age, I think, the only evil is to stop others— to squash development. I do not want to coerce anyone. Actually, that's not entirely true. I want to coerce Sue. I want to make her love me. I don't want to kill anybody, of course. I'm a good, peaceful person.

Think Gandhi.

But sometimes…

I’m in New York by noon. I drive towards the gates of the school, a small liberal arts heaven, splashed with sunlight, where drug and sex fueled angels frolic hand in hand through Elysian Fields of blissful academic theory, like beautiful fauns. Here, all the girls are pretty and everyone agrees with everyone. I enter the gate and start to wander around.

"Have you seen Sue?" I ask two people I don't know.

"Which Sue?" they ask.

"Sue," I say. You know, the brunette, blue eyes. Sue." I speak very slowly for them. S…o…o…o…o…o.

Nothing.

"For Christ's sake you two are useless," I say. I ask a few other people, but they're the same—a pack of morons.

Finally, I find her reading in the courtyard of the Art History building. She's shocked to see me. She jabbers. I can see her mouth move. I stand staring at her. I stare at her oval face, her eyes. I see her small nose, the perfect white curve of her teeth. I smell her perfume. She is wearing a pretty blue dress with a white boat on it. It has been months since I saw her—a whole summer and a few weeks of the semester. I don’t move. I say nothing because I can't think of anything that hasn't already been said, in person or to her answering machine. She stands, stunned at first, and then looking at me with a desperately sad expression. She tries to speak, but doesn't know what to say. What did I expect? What could she possibly say? I clench my fists until my face turns red. I realize how foolish I've been—how hopeless my journey East was, even the good parts.

Sue starts to cry.

After a while, she sits on the grass and wipes her eyes. I still haven't moved. I don't know what the hell to do. Caitlin lights a cigarette. When I ask her for one, she doesn't answer. At this point, my motionlessness becomes certain—almost a matter of faith. I can't return. I can't go back to that stupid, little store—hand stapling aside; it would kill me. I'm dying. The stars in my universe, upon realizing the suffocating pointlessness of the matter around them, are preparing for supernova. Here it comes—the explosion inside me.

I realize that somewhere Jamie is disassembling Caitlin and that by doing this, he's taking me apart too. He's taking us to pieces and placing us in a box. He puts the box on a shelf in his room. It doesn’t look right, there. He moves it an inch to the right, a foot to the left. He clears the shelf of all the objects so that only the box occupies it. He lies on the bed and tries to sleep, but he can't help watching the box. Sue is still crying and a couple of her friends—once mutual friends—stop on the nearby path and stare, thinking I suppose whether they should intervene. But I'm not doing anything aggressive. I have been still as a statue for minutes. I could go on forever. I could go for days like this. I could become human statue.

Ant-matter coalesces. Two suns begin to merge. It's building, building. I'm stone cold.

Back in his room, Jamie cannot sleep. He puts the box in his closet but it whispers to him. He puts in the middle of the floor. He clears his room so that there is only the bare wood and the box. He puts all his stuff in the hallway. The people who pass by give him the strangest looks.

Now night is falling and people watch me from their windows. My girl is gone. Having tried to shake me out of my stupor, she slapped me in the face and left. She threatens to call security, again (don't even ask), but eventually decides against it and just walks off. Walking away. Receding across the grass, into one of the darkening buildings. Now is the time to act.

Think Armageddon. Think the destruction of worlds, and the birth of new ones.

I don’t blink. My eyes hurt. My heart is cold. The worst has already happened, in the unseen depths of my body. Now I think that it's strange how reluctant people are to approach me, as if they are scared that I might fall apart if they even breathe on me. I want them to put up a fence. I want them to leave me alone. I want to become a monument to this time, place and feeling, which no one else can know.

I will know. I'll know forever, without sound and movement, fear and pain. Jamie locks the door to his room and then goes to sit by the river. He looks at the river for a long time, thinking of the person he once loved, now torn apart and stored forever in an empty room, which will one day no longer be his, but some other student's. He looks at the water and then wades in, enjoying the cold feeling lapping against his legs. His head, plunges blissfully under. For a few minutes the lake ripples and thrashes. Then everything's still. Everything's still with me too. It's now three a.m. and people are asleep or making love, or reading in their rooms. I am totally alone in the field outside the Art History building, in New York, in 2006, in a state of war, in the endless swirl of light and shadow. Nobody has seen the firework display inside me. It goes unnoticed.

I finally move.

It is only in this state of total isolation that I can finally begin to walk again. I walk out of the gate of the college and down the quiet moonlit street where a cat pads softly along the pavement. At some point I begin to run. I run harder than ever before in my life. I run until my chest is bursting and my eyes are sore. I don’t know when I'll stop, but I can sure as hell tell you it won't here or California, or any other place in this stupid world.

Think Never Never Land.

Think OZ.