Cilantro and Highway Robbery in the Form of Avocados

This is a somewhat mocking and satirical take on second person, post-modern and nihilistic novels about life and philosophy and masturbatory self-deprecation. It'll probably never go anywhere but is darkly funny and in way, kind of emotional. I'm in the throes of applying to grad school and this might get farther than what I'm submitting. Who knows?

            It is at moments like these where you find yourself amazed at your nihilistic existence, brought to tears by the sight of an earring back on your counter as you stand on a kitchen chair, pissing into your sink while the pest control guy blows up your upstairs bathroom. You didn’t fall in love with her until after she left, and she didn’t accept that love until she no longer wanted it. Specificity, you tell yourself. Specificity is what your life needs, not more of this ridiculous and unfocused existing you do an awful lot of.

            You bought yourself a cactus after she left. You named it too, but you forgot the name on three consecutive days of blind stupor courtesy of Ketel One and just called it Plant. It sat on your dresser and looked vaguely disapproving, if plants could look disapproving, and you remembered the Dmitri Martin bit about being less nurturing than a desert and tried to water the thing.

            You remember your mother, the poor fragile thing, throwing caution to the wind when she screamed at you. You told her you wanted to be a concert pianist, she said you might as well be a crack addict. “It’ll only be a matter of days,” she had muttered angrily at you, scrubbing her hands with surgical precision in a kitchen sink filled with tepid, chalkboard colored water. “It’ll only be a matter of days and you’ll be rolling bums for eight balls and stealing comforters out of Laundromats for warmth on the streets of Seattle.”

            “Why Seattle?” you always asked. She never answered. In her mind, Seattle may as well have been the world capital of squalor, the Timbuktu of downtrodden vagrants.

            She’d never been to Seattle but her uncle had choked to death on his own vomit outside Spokane in a heroin fugue after failing to sell even a single set of cutlery to an urban center of three million and a handful which I supposed in her mind was evidence enough for the validity of her prejudice. “You’ll be murmuring to yourself in the second person,” she said, “you’ll be fantasizing about strangling Anglican priests and trying to make some sense of life you’re Kierkegaard or Marx.”

            The closest my mother ever came to swearing was when she screamed tamales, very loudly and very seriously. The bus had broken down and she was on her way to an interview for a job putting stickers that said “grown in the USA” on oranges coming off Barbadian freighters. You were small and easily frightened and the word burned into your memories because in your New Jersey upbringing you hadn’t ever heard of a tamale and the first time you saw a roach coach helmed by a Mexican man named Salvador called “The Tamale Town” you sniggered to yourself in a worldly way.

            She choked back tears when you left and instead handed you a bundle of what turned out to be two hundred and forty-seven dollars in crumpled fives and ones and a hallmark card with a kitten on it that said “You’re a failure” and on the inside it said “Just Kitten” and she had written her name in careful, tight script. No “love”, no “best wishes” just “Just Kitten” and then “Elaine.” You pinned that card up on the mottled and broken wall when you reached Atlanta and cried so hard your throat hurt and your stomach roiled and then the first thing you did when you left your rank and musty room was to use some of that two hundred some-odd to buy a loaf of bread and some hard salami at a price your mother would have called piracy.