Her fingers scraped across the floor as she hoisted books and bras into an oversized laundry bag meant for our stained sheets and intertwined underwear. On the bed, raped coat hangers and books bought arm in arm, now one ear-tag more mine than hers.
“Jesus Danny, your denial is unbearable,” she seethed, “You’re a human blackout.” Her muffled voice hissed inside the wardrobe: “You and your fucking secret society”
I am a member of the secret Tourette society. We are a motley crew of tapping, humming, rhyming, ticking, eye rolling individuals. We lick elevator doors and caress street lamps, and if you stand next to us on the subway with snow crystals glistening on your hair, we might lick your winter jacket and apologize desperately while tapping you three times on one shoulder, then three times on the other.
“Why are you giving up on me, Mel?” Hissss.
For one year she had been empathetic. But my ticks had become worse in the past months. I lost my job. I found Johnny Black.
You know what I miss? The freedom of a glance, corrected, controlled, diverted. I miss owning my thoughts like as children we owned our imaginations, exploratory but safe. I also miss having sex without mooing like that cow we saw in Costa Rica.
“Your true soul mate will find it endearing,” she said as she dragged her last suitcase to the elevator. Holy fucking shit, I thought. That bitch is right. “Intelligent, independent Journalist, 27, seeks open-minded 20-something for love and friendship. Only those who find mooing endearing need apply.”
I sit on the floor awaiting salvation. She would pause. She would apologize.
My ears and hands, prematurely nostalgic, tingled with the desire to relive every fixation of my infinitely perceptible imagination. To move her hair from my face in the morning. To hear the water falling off her in the shower.
It was time for me to say something. I looked up and saw an empty room, barren and without the seeds of tomorrow. For a moment her sighs were within earshot, but in the time it takes an elevator door to close, I was left alone with my Tourette.
I mooed involuntarily for three hours after those elevator doors closed. I finally went out to get a beer and when the new guy asked me for my ID I showed him my wrinkles and asked for a break. A fake. A rake. A cake. A steak. And fries. And beer. No, only the beer! Give me the goddamn beer! Mooooooo.
Every morning of every day sees the sun rise over another evolution in my tick-eroded personality. Tourette has a whore and that whore is change and change has bastardized my self-determination and left me strange. Two graduate degrees but change is all I got. The change in my ticks. The change in my wallet. And six empty beer bottles, and six empty nights since the elevator doors closed and left me alone.
Inspired by Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
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2 comments:
Luv !t.
See myself licking those doors. people. and other random items that strike my fancy.
+O
went some place i didn't expect, which is always bittersweet when one reads, i think. sweet because surprise is so necessary to enjoy prose, and yet bitter because i suppose one likes to be right about hunches. right? but it made me think about the psychology of writing. when we write thoughts we so often place them in a string of thoughts and actions that hang on each other, explaining and so necessary to make the other happen. this is logical, rational like a good argument - things gotta have a goal and you have to elucidate your argument step by step etc...the irony i feel in these cases is that this way of thinking or writing actually betrays our desires to understand a situation rather than to present it. in other words, there is a difference between thinking through a text and laying it out like a diagram. while thinking is interesting from the point of a, say, psychological perspective, illicting emotions from readers often happens from forcing them to watch things unfold unexplained. that's in fact what made bukowski's work so powerful - it had all the elements of this text but sooooooo pared down that you were reading filets of thoughts. yes filets.
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