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.
