July 2002
My boss at the time, the Executive Director, would practice talking to the Board in the men’s room. Sometimes he addressed the entire Board, but usually it was just the Executive Committee or individual members of that committee, most often the chairman of the Finance Committee. I could always tell, based on what he was saying, who he was talking to.
It was pitiful. It was pitiful because he sounded as he always sounded (I mean out the men’s room): like person trying and failing to appear natural.
My desk was only twenty feet from the men’s room door. This is how I knew. He would do his business, then stand before the mirror, at least as I imagined it, practicing not only the words but the gestures.
Didn’t it occur to him that I could hear? Had it been me, I would have run the faucet to drown out the sound. This at least.
When I was a child, I would hide behind the television. I’d do this when something painful came on. I didn’t mind violence so much, because I knew it wasn’t real, but I couldn’t bear to see people being humiliated. Whenever it happened, or would appear to begin to happen, I would quickly turn off the sound, pull the set away from the wall (it sat on a thing with wheels; a television stand), and crawl behind it, crouching amid the wires.
This is how I felt whenever my boss’s voice issued, echoing slightly, from the men’s room, like I wanted a goddamn television to hide behind.
Other than my own, of course, I’d never seen an erection before. I mean, in person. And of course one’s own is not the same as another’s, because for one thing the viewing angle is different. And even when it’s not—when, say, a mirror is employed—there is a sense in which one cannot see a thing that is one’s own. As is the case, for example, with one’s face.
I think his name was Roger. A name like Roger. He was handsome, as I remember him, and short. Exactly how short, I cannot say, because I never saw him stand.
Has he ever stood, I wonder.
When I held him (this was while swinging him into position), he was a full head shorter than me, although some of the difference may have been due to the maneuver itself, which required him to bend, or for me to bend him, at the knees.
He was persistent in the way that certain men are persistent about such things. I’d never been this way myself, nor witnessed it so intimately, and thus didn’t know how to respond. I tried to laugh it off, to pretend it wasn’t happening, but this failed to deter him. If anything, he redoubled his efforts, seeing hope in my passivity.
I don’t recall the specifics of what he proposed to do with me, or vice versa, but whatever it was, it excited him, for suddenly his penis rose up and lengthened, settling at a perpendicular angle to his groin.
I found it comical, more than anything, and sad.
Of course it helped that he was on the toilet at the time and would remain on the toilet until I agreed to transfer him back to his wheelchair and continue with our work that morning—our last together, for obvious reasons.
Mostly I remember the tuna fish sandwich my aunt made for lunch. It had tiny slivers of celery mixed in and was cut diagonally. I had never seen a sandwich cut diagonally and honestly didn’t know you could do that.
My aunt was nice. Tragically, her daughter, my cousin, wasa later in a car accident that left her disfigured. Before that, her son, my other cousin, took drugs that were supposed to make him taller but instead screwed up his digestive system so that he had to have one of those operations where they cut a hole in your side for you to shit out of.
It was my job to mow the lawn. I don’t know why my cousin (the boy cousin) wasn’t doing this himself. Maybe he wasn’t old enough yet. Or maybe my uncle took pity on me because my “situation” back home. It’s a mystery because by this point my family had stopped seeing my uncle’s family because my uncle had refused to visit or even be in the same room as his mother, my grandmother.
I can still see the shape of the lawn, the way it wrapped around the side of the house.
In the middle of everything, my aunt came out and asked if I wanted lunch. Various people despised my aunt for supposedly turning my uncle against his mother, but to me she always seemed nice.
After lunch I ran over the lawn mower cord. I mean, with the lawn mower. Unfortunately it was the actual lawn mower cord and not the extension cord. I say this because otherwise I might have found a way to finish mowing.
I wheeled the mower back to the garage and left the severed cord on the engine. Then I went and told my aunt that I was done mowing.
My aunt gave me money and drove me home. The next time I saw her or anyone in her family was at my sister’s wedding, twenty years later. At that time no one brought up the cord. I’m still not sure who knows about it.
I’m not certain, but I think Jeannie’s face may have been pockmarked in places. When I try to remember it, I can’t see it; I just have this vague sense of holes somewhere in the vicinity of her cheeks.
I was attracted to her; this I know. I was attracted to her but couldn’t act on this attraction out of respect for Carol’s feelings.
Carol was the gardener.
I was the manager, officially. This meant that I booked guests, prepared breakfast, and cleaned the rooms. Unfortunately, only three people showed up the whole time I was there: two cyclists and an older guy. Mostly I just wrote and went for walks in the hills. On weekends the owners drove down from the city and took over. The weekends were the busy time.
I didn’t like the owners and neither did Carol. We became friends by disliking the owners together. We would play a game called Who Can Say The Meanest Thing About Them.
One night Carol got drunk and told me how she felt. This left me no choice but to say how I felt, which she said she already knew but still had to hear. That was painful. And then Carol’s friend Jeannie came to visit.
It was a situation.
Supposedly to get away from the owners for the weekend, I got a ride with Jeannie back to Boston. After about five minutes, we pulled over and started kissing.
As I remember it, and this I may be totally making up, her stick-shift kept getting in the way.
My grandfather didn’t want me to see the papers. He said, “I don’t think you’re old enough.”
He worked the front register; I dusted. I would remove all the items in a particular section and place them in the aisle in the same configuration as on the shelf. Then I’d dust everything, the items and shelves both, and put everything back the same way. It was awful.
My grandfather said, “If you see them, you’re going to have nightmares.”
I didn’t understand it at the time, but my grandfather must have been doing badly to have to work on Sundays in his son-in-law’s pharmacy.
“But I already have nightmares,” I said.
Actually, no, I didn’t say that; I whined.
My grandfather had taken the papers off the shelf and hid them somewhere. I knew this because of the empty spaces.
He said, “Michael, I want you to trust me.”
A sudden memory. The security system. At night a razor-thin beam of light shone across the store at a height of several feet. You couldn’t see it, but it was there. The light was aimed at a piece of reflective material which my father had placed inside some kind of male support product. A tiny rectangular hole had been cut in the front of the package so that it looked liked the man in the photo was wearing a metallic bathing suit.
Finally my grandfather relented, recognizing, as I imagine it, that he couldn’t protect me from anything, as much as he wanted.
It was a tabloid—the National Star or National Enquirer. A cover story about a dog eating a baby’s arm. An enormous photo of a baby and its mostly-eaten arm.
I’ve forgotten the rest: what we said, what I thought about it.
The whole thing just ends with the arm.
In my mind the room is only half a room and I’m standing in the middle of it with a bank of cubbies before me and more cubbies on both sides, though vaguer, and more cubbies beyond those, though vaguer still. It was my job to sort the mail into certain cubbies, then periodically deliver it, using a metal cart, to the people on my floor. At least ten or twelve other employees did the same thing in the same room, and each had their own floor. I believe mine was Six.
The first time I made a delivery, I returned to an empty room. Everyone had left at more or less the same time with more or less the same amount of mail, so where were they? When this same thing happened after my second delivery, I understood that you weren’t supposed to return right away but rather waste time doing personal things. It was crazy how much time you were supposed to waste, but I figured that if I came back too soon, I made everyone else look bad, which I didn’t want to do since I was a temp whereas everyone else was permanent.
I made a similar mistake the first day by sorting my mail as soon as it arrived. No one else did this, because there wasn’t much mail to sort. Basically you had to make the sorting last about five times longer than necessary or else it looked like you weren’t doing anything—which you weren’t. Everyone knew this, too, including the boss, since everyone including the boss was doing just as little as you were, while pretending to do five times as much. Suffice it to say, no one was allowed to do anything that made this state of affairs seem true.
That was pretty much the only rule.
*
No doubt to occupy myself, I became infatuated with a woman on my floor. I would see her at a copy machine near one of the mailboxes where I delivered mail. Evidently her job involved a great deal of copying. I can’t remember a single thing about her except that she was white and not tall, with hair that wasn’t blond. We never spoke, beyond a few mumbled “hi’s,” but I knew her name because I sometimes saw her take mail out of her mailbox.
I had this idea that she didn’t really have so much copying to do and would instead come there to see me because like me she needed to invent ways to occupy herself.
On the morning of my last day, I left her a note saying that it was my last day and asking her to meet me during lunch at a fountain outside where I liked to go after deliveries to waste time.
To my surprise she actually came to the fountain, and at the exact time I asked, only before I could say anything, she handed me a note and walked away. The note said that she had a boyfriend but that I was sweet, or that I was sweet but that she had a boyfriend.
In truth I don’t really remember any of this—I mean the scene at the fountain where I waited and where she came with a note—but still I’m certain it happened, in part because nothing else fits as well with what I do remember.
I was somewhere near or perhaps at the top of Maxwell Street when a man approached me, I think in a car.
Either he was in a car or had been in a car and had just gotten out; definitely a car was involved.
I honestly don’t know what I was doing there alone. When I look around in my memory of it, there’s no one anywhere but me and this car guy. So it was like everyone was at school or something, which very well may have been what was happening.
On second thought I don’t think he got out of the car. Instead he drove up and talked to me from it, but never got out.
Did I want a job, he asked, or something to that effect.
Actually he first wanted to know if I lived near there, so I said yes, I believe, since I did.
I think I started the next day. I remember meeting him or someone, probably the kid I was replacing or maybe both of them, on a certain corner. A shopping cart was involved, and folding.
I liked folding and still do. Folding was the best part.
The worst part was collecting payment. Half the people on my route never paid me. Some outright hid when I came to collect. I don’t remember how the system worked exactly, but however it worked, I had to pay in advance for the papers, which meant I never made a penny from being a newspaper boy.
I quit after less than a month.
I don’t remember anything else, not the actual delivery part, nor getting up early, nor the guy’s reaction when I quit, nor anything else except some vague business of standing in a sad person’s sad apartment, just inside the door, waiting for him to get the money he owed me. I had never been anywhere so sad except maybe my own house, only I hadn’t quite realized that yet. I mean about my own house.
Sometimes when I’m done reading a paper, I fold it the way I was taught to, in thirds, tucking it into itself.
Oblivio is no longer the #1 Google search result for the word motherfucker. That honor now belongs to the New York band Motherfucker, which I am deliberating not linking to anymore, for Oblivious reasons. As of this writing, my original Motherfucker piece appears second, followed by my follow-up piece, Mofo, which is third.
I am depressed.
It is interesting that I am depressed, because just two months ago the last thing I cared about was where Oblivio stood in the Google rankings for the word motherfucker, or for any word for that matter, with the possible exception of the word Oblivio, which I expect to lead straight to my site (“Did you mean: Oblivion”) for as long as I write it.
All I can say is, this is bad news. Nearly everyone I know knows that Oblivio is (or was! “this terrible was,” as Thomas Bernhard says) the #1 search result for motherfucker. Even my mother knows. And as I mentioned in Mofo, there’s no word I’d rather be linked to. So as crazy as it sounds, this search result has come to feel like something I possess. And as with all possessions, or all that matter, I wish to preserve and protect it for as long as I can. For forever, if possible. It is mine, you see; I earned it. And now some soiled band of perverts has stolen it from me.
*
Walking up the block to buy bananas and soy milk, I did a quick mental inventory of the things I own. There isn’t much in the usual sense, for I’m not a “thing” person, believing or rather feeling that things come at a price—a psychic price, that is. I prefer to have fewer things—as few as possible, really—so as to leave room, as I think of it, for my thoughts.
Of the things in my shoebox apartment—a bed, a desk, two chairs, two computers, a printer, scanner, and maybe twenty books—which actually matter to me? None. What about the files; is there anything in the files that matters? Yes, some photos, although not to the point that I would mourn their loss; photos are a crude stand-in for memory.
Oblivio matters to me, and not only because of the pieces I’ve written and archived here. It matters because of the possibility it represents. A staggering (to me) number of people read the site each day, many of whom are not my mother, which means that if I manage to write things, those things will be read—and nearly instantly! It’s fucking nuts, a goddamn miracle, although as is often the case, I’ve adjusted to it and even come to expect it, which I’ll be the first to admit is sad. However, if the site were taken from me, I’d be crushed. Which is interesting because the other significant possession I thought of on my way to the produce store was me, Michael Barrish. The connection to Oblivio should be obvious, as should the connection to this silly search result business. These things matter to me because they represent me. This is particularly true of Oblivio, which from the beginning I conceived as an extended self-portrait.
I was kidding when I said I’m depressed. I’m not really depressed. Although, yes, I’ve definitely enjoyed being #1 for motherfucker. As the story goes, I created this site largely to have the freedom to write what I wanted without fear of offending my business clients, for whom I developed a motherfuckerless alternative. And then in an almost too beautiful twist, Google annointed Oblivio the top motherfucker destination on the web. What’s not to love about that? Still, the whole thing means very little to me. Seriously. Well, just so long as Oblivio remains ranked above the page where you can listen to a calm, possibly sedated man pronounce the word motherfucker.
*
Always with the jokes. However, I wasn’t joking when I spoke of myself as my possession. This is how it feels. Coming up the stairs, I wondered if it would be possible to start again in a different way; as a different person, in a sense. For it struck me that I’ve no real obligation to that man, Michael Barrish, neither to who he has been, nor to what he has made of himself.
It’s a ridiculous thought. Ridiculous and impossible. But it’s interesting in what it indicates. I’ve been feeling tired of myself. In a recent email to a friend, someone who knows me only through Oblivio, I apologized for being in a mood. When are you not in a mood? she asked. It’s a fair question.
A few days ago I watched an hour-long interview of a therapist conducted by my dear friend Gary Roma, who is making a documentary film about, uh, dental floss. The film is called Floss! A Meditation on the Possibility of Change. Years ago Gary was having trouble getting himself to floss, among other things, so his therapist suggested, mid-session, that he make a film (he’s a filmmaker, you see) about floss. In this interview Gary had the therapist explain the thinking behind his suggestion (which by the way worked; Gary is now a regular, one might even say religious, flosser).
Anyway he drove me crazy, the therapist did, by continually referring to unseemly or undesirable behavior as patterns, as in, “Our patterns make us reach for the Nutella.” With his language he drew a line between the things one likes about oneself and the things one doesn’t, and indicated that the bad things are outside invaders who make us act in ways we otherwise wouldn’t. These invaders are very much like the devil—little devils, you might say. I found myself cursing at the television.
You may think me fussy for caring so much about loose, metaphoric language. But it matters. The desire for Nutella is real and comes from within. We can chose to ignore it, but we cannot place it outside of ourselves. The devil without is a lie told to excuse the devil within. Speaking loosely.
Years ago my then girlfriend created a character she called “Bad Michael.” Bad Michael was responsible for all the things she didn’t like about me. It was her idea to surgically remove Bad Michael from the premises, leaving only Good Michael behind to have fun with. I pointed out that for such surgery to be possible, there would need to be a place inside my head that was responsible for specific patterns of behavior: the “Specific Patterns of Behavior Center.” There individual behaviors would be arranged in a hierarchy according to both application and scope. So for example, “become noncommunicative when angry” would occupy a lower level in the heirarchy than the more general “get angry.” Behavior Pattern surgery would involve altering or removing specific patterns of behavior at various levels in the hierarchy. Certain motherfuckers (and I don’t mean that nicely) are attempting to do this very thing, via chemicals and genetic hocus-pocus, which if you ask me is the stupidest and scariest thing yet.
I mention Bad Michael and the little devils because of my thought to abandon myself. For that thought too is a lie. One’s self, whatever it is, is the very thing that cannot be abandoned. Or so, ha-ha, I’ve always believed.
Which leaves me… here. As always. The people’s favorite motherfucker. Whoops: second favorite! Not that I care or anything.
Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker.
10 July 2002 | Endings
Samuel Beckett’s trilogy of post-World War II novels, the first book of which, Molloy, I have always loved, ends with these seven words—a distillation, in a sense, of all he wrote: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” (Similarly, the bible, I’ve heard said, can be reduced in a pinch to a single verse: “Jesus wept.”)
Recently I’ve taken to adding various contemporary expressions to the end of Beckett’s ending, as a kind of joke. This is how I entertain myself.
A few favorites, then, with commentary:
I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Whatever.
Self-knowledge is uncertain, contingent, elusive. We persist despite our avowed inability to do so. Why is this? Why do we say one thing, believe one thing, and yet do another?
Who fucking knows, and more importantly, who fucking cares.
I can’t go on. I’ll go on. What’s up with that?
What indeed. I just remembered that my father was fond of addressing philosophical questions thusly (no lie!):
Me: Dad, why do fools fall in love?
Him: That’s really two questions, son. The first is “Why?” This is a question that philosophers have debated for thousands of years. The second is “Do fools fall in love?” Yes.
I believe my father stole this bit from est. It only worked with “why” questions.
Also, for the record, it was my sister, not me, who ever asked him things.
I can’t go on. I’ll go on. Deal with it.
My notes here read, “Confronting the external critic,” but rather than expound about that, I’ll share some Beckett trivia.
What sport did Beckett love to watch on television? Rugby.
What did Beckett say on his deathbed when asked what he had found valuable in life? “Precious little.”
08 July 2002 | Cabins
I just finished reading Cemetery Nights, a collection of poems by Stephen Dobyns. Over two decades ago Stephen Dobyns had sex with a woman who I later had sex with, let us call her Mila, in a cabin. He was twice her age and possibly married. I’ve never done such a thing, feeling it wrong to have sex with someone so young, unless one is equally young oneself, or nearly so. Stephen Dobyns felt differently no doubt, or made an exception for Mila, who told me this story so long ago that I’ve forgotten where the cabin was.
However I do remember that Stephen Dobyns asked first, I mean before proceeding, which I confess I’ve never done, not with Mila or anyone, although I can see asking if the woman is as young as Mila was and I am as old as Stephen Dobyns was (which as it happens I am) outside that cabin.
In lieu of asking, I simply do what feels right and see what happens—a more subtle and interesting approach, although far be it for me to criticize Stephen Dobyns or anyone else for asking, particularly in a case such as this, wherein you are (I only just remembered this!) the young lady’s poetry teacher at a summer workshop.
Cemetery Nights was published in 1987. I slept with Mila in 1981, three or four years after Stephen Dobyns. I believe I had difficulty maintaining an erection, for reasons that escape me now, assuming I ever knew.
A few years later Mila won an Academy Award for something. By chance I visited her soon after, and she brought it out to show me. It looked exactly like an Academy Award. Mila asked if I wanted to hold it, and I said no, not wanting to. By this point I had stopped liking her very much, for reasons I only dimly recall and which in any case no longer matter.
The only reason I read Cemetery Nights was to see if it had any allusions, direct or otherwise, to cabins. It doesn’t.
07 July 2002 | Fire
People don’t usually burn to death; instead they die of smoke inhalation. Later, as corpses, they burn.
It seems counter-intuitive, but third degree burns are the most severe. These burns may appear white or charred and extend through all seven layers of skin. Victims of third degree burns often experience severe pain, unless the nerve endings are destroyed, in which case they feel nothing, or nearly nothing.
Were my apartment on fire, the first thing I’d grab would be my bag. After that it’s unclear; pretty much everything is in my bag.
Well, my pants: I’d put on my pants, given time. Otherwise I’d grab my pants on the way out and put them on later. This is less a matter of modesty than prudence. I keep my money, driver’s license, credit card, ATM card and subway pass in the two front pockets of my pants.
Only, would I really do this? If the fire forced me to scramble onto the roof to escape, would I scramble carrying my pants? No: I’d either stop to put them on or I’d leave them behind, one or the other, but I wouldn’t carry them. The amount of time I would be slowed down by carrying my pants, particularly up the ladder to the roof, exceeds the time it would take to put them on.
Also I’d probably yell something for Michelle, or for whomever was my bathroommate at the time, assuming that person hadn’t already yelled something for me.
Unfortunately I can never quite remember the name of the woman directly below me. Is it Idoya? I believe it’s something like Idoya. On the rare occasion we speak, invariably in the hall, I skip over the part where you say the other person’s name, for fear of getting it wrong.
So instead of yelling something specific to Idoya, I’d use a more generic approach and address the entire building, including the women under Idoya who I doubt even live here anymore. Something like: “Hey, people, get the fuck out! The building is on fire!”
Only I probably wouldn’t yell fuck because aside from Michelle, with whom I share a bathroom, I don’t really know my neighbors so well—Idoya, or whatever her name is, being a case in point.
