Futureproof (7 page)

He lumbers toward me slowly. “What do I have in the bag?”

Then I start to laugh because it's just so funny that this guy would walk all the way back over here to answer the questions of a dreadlocked asshole yelling at him through a fucking rolled-up poster.

He realizes he's been had, tells me I'm a dick. I laugh. He knows nothing. No pain. No despair.

More people begin exiting the elevators. I turn my attention to them. Any distinguishing characteristic is singled out and duly noted by megaphone for all within earshot.

“You need to shave! Everywhere!”

“Kmart is a notoriously
un
cool place to buy clothing!”

“It's just a fucking movie, Obi-Wan!”

After about twenty minutes of this, Splinter appears looking only slightly better than I imagine I do. He doesn't say anything at first, just sits in the chair beside me and watches with amusement as I continue berating all the losers. People might not like the way I've taken over this security table and used it for my own personal thrills, but fuck them, I thought of it first.

A woman approaches dressed in some kind of cheap Wonder Woman–imitation costume. Splinter says he'd like to take this one. I gladly hand him the megaphone.

“Hey, you! You're fucked!” Splinter yells.

She stops in her tracks, like a cartoon, arms and legs frozen in place, in odd configurations, trying to figure out if this epithet was directed at her. She does the finger-pointing-at-herself thing.

“Yes, you,” Splinter yells, despite the fact that she is only fifteen feet away. “You're fucked!”

Her face falls. “I'm not fat,” she says.

“Not fat,
fucked
. You're fucked! You're FUCKED!”

We're laughing again. Our asses are on the floor. Marvel Girl runs off to find the real security, the non-victimizing kind.

Minutes later real security shows up. They hold flashlights in front of their crotches in that threatening, tapping-the-palms kind of way. I ignore them at first, finish a blistering diatribe directed at an asshole wearing Birkenstock sandals. Then I redirect my yelling at real Security. They don't understand that this must be done. This is Reality Check.

“What, you couldn't get on with the
real
cops?” I yell at them. “Hiring practices too stringent?”

“Sir, if you yell at me through that thing again I'm going to be forced to eject you from the premises,” the black guy says.

“Is it because I'm black?” I say through the rolled-up poster.

He glares at me. I can tell he wants to bust that flashlight across my skull, but at the same time, I don't really give a good goddam.

Splinter laughs on. Then Sinead comes to the table with Trizden. She says her name is Michelle.

As I look at her I'm reminded of my incredible failures. She is wholly representative of failure. She is my shortcoming. She is my end. Transferred from one woman to another, of course. To all women.

“This is what it feels like to be destroyed, ruined for all intents and purposes,” I proclaim through my makeshift megaphone. “Fucked in the ass without even the goddam common courtesy of a reach-around!”

“You and the fucking
Full Metal Jacket
,” Splinter says.

The two guards come up behind the table and they each grab me under an armpit and I keep yelling through the poster and now everyone is watching so I ask them what is so fucking funny and then I realize nobody else is laughing.

And then the plug is pulled.

One of the guards yanks the poster out of my hands. It sounds so strange, to go from magnified and sort of godly sounding, the man behind the curtain, to just some guy yelling indiscriminately at whoever catches his eye.

I suddenly feel penitent. I ask to be let go. I'm much better now. I've just been up too long.

The guards say nothing, place me neatly on the sidewalk outside the front door of the hotel.

I had expected to be thrown, like in the movies.

June

I've been staying with Animal Mother since Dragon*Con. He thinks he needs to protect me from myself. After a couple of weeks I decide I'm ready to see Michelle again but she doesn't show at
Rocky
. I'm kind of relieved that she doesn't, actually, but find myself asking Trizden if he'll run us by Waffle House in case she turns up there.

I can see her through the window as we pull into the parking lot. She's sitting in a booth with Rat and 8-Ball. Everything looks yellow.

I stay in the car. I can't face her in there with those two snarling fucks sitting next to her. On the other side of the window Rat points at me, sneering. Michelle slips out of the booth and comes outside. She has such a great walk.

“Where've you been?” she says.

“Where have
I
been?”

“Yeah, I've been trying to call you at your mom's house since Dragon*Con and she doesn't know where you are. She's really kind of frantic. You should call her.”

“What happened at Dragon*Con?” I say. “Why did you disappear?”

She looks down at the sidewalk for a long while.

“You fucking bitch.”

Her eyes leap to meet mine. “Why are you talking to me like that?”

“Because you fucking betrayed me! You screwed those two assholes. I mean, of all people! You knew I hated them!”

She doesn't say anything, only looks at me with tears in her eyes, tries to touch my face. I pull away.

“And now you're sitting there with them! I hate you. You've killed me. I
loved
you. Do you understand, Michelle, I fucking loved you. I still love you now. And I hate you. I fucking hate you.”

She turns around and starts back inside. I scream and run as hard as I can across the parking lot, lower my head, hit the dumpster, crumple.

 

I'm lying on an inflatable mattress next to Trizden's bed. There's a song playing on the stereo, something about a triangular man meeting a particle man, the triangle man beating the particle man.

I can hear them fucking and it sounds disgusting, the slurp and suck and squeak of sighs and prone bodies. Skinhead Michelle and Trizden. Right there, on the bed, beside me.

I listen for a while, wonder if they think I'm sleeping, wonder if they care whether I am or not.

She's moaning. He is moaning. It must feel good. Their flesh slaps together in rhythm.

I debate whether it would be bad form to stand up in the middle of their session and leave the room. That would definitely indicate that I've been awake the entire time. An embarrassment, maybe more for me than for them. After three or four more minutes of humping I decide I don't care if they know I'm awake, rush out of the room with the door slamming behind me.

I go to the freezer. Animal Mother always has rum or bourbon in there. I pour some, mix with Coke, down the glass, pour another. And another.

After pissing, I look in the giant bathroom mirror above the counter, pull off my shirt. I am skinny and pale, skeletal.

I yank open the drawer beside the sink and grab an unopened package of razors.

Michelle used to do this one thing. She would release her anxiety by cutting her arms with razor blades. She couldn't stand to be bottled up inside. She couldn't stand to live festering. Her arms were testament to this. They were covered in dull pink slash scars, clarifying why she always wears long sleeves and belying the popular image that she has everything together, she has that confidence. But I know better. She is an actress. She is a fucking charlatan.

I break the razor open with my pocketknife, pull out a single blade. It is small and inconsequential. I decide to go for the chest. It's whiter than all the rest of me—a perfect canvas. I draw the blade across the right pectoral. There is nothing, no sign of change. But as I stare at my chest in the mirror a small red line appears, less than an inch long. The slash is shallow, the blood slips out in tiny bubbles spread unevenly across the length of the cut. I go again, on the other side. I push down harder this time. The razor feels no more severe than cutting paper, feels like a paper cut, gets under the skin in a way that is more annoying than painful.

This is easy.

I go again, on the stomach. Then again, on the right shoulder. The left. I keep cutting. It becomes rhythmic, ritualistic. I don't have to hold my breath anymore. I stop periodically to look at my new self and I am rewarded handsomely with a vibrant display of slowly dripping red slashes evenly distributed across my torso. Nearly symmetrical. I contemplate trying to fit my t-shirt back over this rawness I have exposed, my true self. My skin and my heart in ruins. Unending, unendurable pain. Agony tearing at me from every side.

I am finished. I am
finished
.

And I'm still not drunk enough. I'll
never
be drunk enough. You give your heart and you trust and you give and give and give and then, like that—a snap of the fingers—it's all taken away.

We are begging to be killed, begging to be crucified, sacrificed on the altar of dead love.

I stumble into the kitchen, leaving small spatters of blood behind on the carpet, blossoms of the dying tree of me. They will help me find my way back, bread crumbs on a woodland path. I yank open the freezer and drink straight from the bottle, the bourbon spilling from my mouth and setting me on fire as it courses down my chin to the open places in my chest. I'm so hungry. The liquor
only makes me hungrier, just like when Jesus was hanging from the cross and asked for a drink and got a sponge full of vinegar for His trouble, which probably made Him about fifty times thirstier. Those motherfuckers.

Every time I read that story I hold out hope that it will magically change, like a spiritual Choose Your Own Adventure, and this time Jesus will have decided to get up off that cross and destroy
everything
, just eviscerate everyone for miles around. That would show those pricks they were wrong. If He had just allowed them to put Him on that cross, a seemingly inescapable death for any mere mortal…and then, at the darkest hour, summoned the great power He possessed—and just
scourged
them all with His great fury—my God—none of us would be in the predicaments we're in now. Everyone would have known the truth.

My soul is a hollow fucking husk, dried and withered in the sun, whisked away by the wind and scattered.

Everyone would have known what was required of them, what we could expect in return if we followed through and were faithful. But He left us here instead, without any answers. There are no more burning bushes, clouds opening up, or dictates being handed down from above in God's own handwriting. We are stumbling around down here like fucking kittens in a knife drawer, mewing in the darkness.

I am howling these radical ideas and others aloud when Animal Mother stumbles out of his bedroom, squinting in the light. I'm sobbing with the snot running down and everything, mixing with the blood, everything.

“What the fuck did you do? What did you do?” He's screaming and frantic, which sucks because I have just been getting into the groove of this thing, this desperate longing and vivid despair, and he's acting like it's the end of the fucking world.

“I can't live like this anymore, Mother. I can't live anymore—like this.”

“Oh my God! Oh my God!”

“Why are you screaming, man? It's not that big a deal. I'm fine. I didn't do the fabled ‘suicide cuts,'” I say, making the fabled suicide cut motion up the inside of my wrists. “I stuck with the far more common ‘cry for help.'” I show him my wrists to prove that there are, indeed, no vertical slashes running upward from the wrist to the elbow. It's all superficial. Crying for help.

“You fucking assholes,” I slur in Trizden's and now the skinhead girl's direction. “You fucking assholes that think every suicide is an unanswered cry for help have no idea what it means to despair your very existence. Those people didn't give a fuck if you found them ‘just in time' or not. They just wanted to be left alone so they could find out the truth about this whole ‘religion' thing. You know? Who was ‘right'?” Every time I get to a quotation word I do that thing people do where they put their hands up and make imaginary quotations in the air. It always looks like you're smarter that way.

“Who was right, that kinda thing,” I continue. “Buddha vs. Jesus, for example. Winner takes Vishnu. Loser goes to hell. Hell has to be involved somewhere because I can't stand thinking that Hitler gets off that easy. Or Saddam Hussein, whenever he dies. Or that little asshole George Mickelson down the street in seventh grade whose fucking Grizzly Adams dad always had dead deer carcasses hanging off the swing set in the backyard. You know? With their windpipes poking out of these massive gashes in their throats, tongues lolling, bellies emptied of all matter, black holes, their eyes staring at you no matter where you stood.”

Trizden hasn't been listening for the last of my reminiscences. He's on the phone to my mother. She shows up an hour later with
Victor and I'm in the car for about five seconds before he's telling me I'm nuts and they've decided to have me committed.

“I'm not going anywhere I don't want to go.”

“You'll do what we tell you you're going to do or you can get right back out of this car.”

“You couldn't afford to have me committed if you wanted to, you fat fuck.”

He reaches over the seat and backhands me. I taste the blood gathering in my mouth. My mother starts crying again. I jump out of the car at the next red light, my mother pleading after me.

I call Trizden from a gas station pay phone, spitting wads of blood between sentences like it's tobacco juice.

Animal Mother retrieves me. He's always good like that. As I stumble back in the door of his apartment, I notice that my t-shirt sticks to me in many places. Pulling the fabric off the wounds hurts more than it did to actually inflict them.

I pass out sitting up in the recliner. I have the leg part extended out, though, so at least there's that.

 

Flick comes over the next night with his psychotic girlfriend Lydia. Actually, they're both pretty fucked up. When I met him, Flick was a “normal” guy. He used to give me rides to
Rocky
and we'd drive around in his brand-new Ford Escort (Turbo!) listening to The Dead Milkmen's
Beelzebubba
and that first Violent Femmes album, the classic one, and bang our fists on his car's headliner in time with the drumbeats. But at some point Flick had a psychotic break or something. He began composing rap lyrics about how “The Man” was keeping him down, even though he was somehow distantly related to the former Attorney General of the United States Edwin Meese. The Man was in his own family.

Flick met Lydia one night at
Rocky
. She's one of those girls who
has a completely different outward appearance than what her personality might suggest, a librarian type who happens to be into whips and sadomasochistic sex. And while Lydia isn't a librarian by day, not by any stretch of the imagination (she's a cashier at Bi-Lo), she still maintains the stereotypical late-night side of the cliché, with the leather dominatrix outfits, complete with garters concealed underneath calf-length house dresses.

She and Flick were immediately drawn to each other. There was no latency period, no honeymoon phase or whatever you want to call it. That first night, Flick and Lydia sat in a corner of the lobby all night and gave each other eat-shit looks, like they'd known and hated each other for years. Archenemies. Nemeses. Later I asked Flick how he knew her and why they hated each other so much and he said they didn't hate each other, they were in love, love at first sight.

“Why the hell were you slapping the shit out of each other, then? You know, if it's ‘love'?”

“You wouldn't understand this, man. You wouldn't
get
a love that runs so deep that people have to inflict pain on each other just to be able to withstand remaining under the enormous burden of that love” is what his answer was. Seriously. I couldn't make this shit up.

The night after my razor blade episode, Flick and Lydia come over. Splinter has already been called up as reserve support systems for me in my time of need. We're all laughing, joking with each other, trying to avoid, at all costs, the subject of last night, when Flick and Lydia start in with the slapping. Right there in the middle of the living room.

Now, when I say slapping, I'm not talking about the run-of-the-mill foreplay tapping that we all know and love. I'm talking about the hauling off—the reaching way back and walloping like you're try
ing to kill a leprechaun—kind of slapping. Red marks are imprinted. Welts.

The four of us can forget trying to hold a conversation because every few seconds another
CRACK
echoes across the room and that kind of thing just can't be ignored. It's worse than a mother beating her loudmouthed kid on the MARTA train. And then Flick and Lydia take it up a notch.