Stupid and Contagious (6 page)

So I had to take advantage of it while I had it.

Some bitch started pounding on the wal like a maniac to get me to shut up before I got to ful y experience al possible echoes, but I did get my fair share in. Sorry I woke you and your twelve cats up, lady. Jeez.

It’s weird sleeping in the new place. Sarah insists I’l be back, but there’s no way in hel that’s gonna happen. If I left a rent-control ed apartment just to get away from her, al bets are off that I’l be moving back in. I wil not be getting back together with Sarah. I don’t want to date anyone, period. This is going to be my time to be single. End of story.

Heaven

I think I’m suffering from toxic mold poisoning. I’ve been achy and tired and feeling like shit for months. I know some other people that had the same symptoms, and it turned out they had mold in their homes. My friend Deirdre had to move out of her house because of black mold. She and her boyfriend had been sick for months, and as soon as they moved they got better. They could have done mold removal, but they wanted to move anyway. I’m not moving. If I have toxic mold in my house I’l just have to get it removed. I hope it’s not expensive.

I just ordered a mold test kit online for $29.95 from Mr. Mold. After looking it up online, I’m almost positive I have the black mold. This Web site lists al the symptoms. People who have it have at least ten of these symptoms:

1. Respiratory distress, coughing, sneezing

• I cough, I sneeze.

2. Burning in the throat and lungs

• Does acid reflux count?

3.

Diarrhea,

nausea,

piercing

lower

abdominal pains, vomiting

• I’l go with no on this one, except for that time I ate at San Loco. Never eat at San Loco.

4. Dark urine

• No, but I do have fluorescent urine when I take my multivitamin.

5. Memory loss, short-term memory, brain fog

• Definitely.

6. Swol en lymph nodes

• Not sure where my lymph nodes are.

7. Headaches

• Yes. Almost everyone I know gives me one.

8. Anxiety/Depression

• Yes, yes, yes! In fact, I’m getting even more anxious as I go down this list.

9. Ringing in ears

• Yes! And I thought it was tinnitus from too many loud concerts.

10. Chronic fatigue

• Yes.

11. Intermittent twitching

• Not real y. I did have an eye twitch that lasted for a week, but my doctor said that was just stress.

12. Nosebleeds

• No.

13. Night sweats and hot flashes

• No, but I do get overheated when I eat spicy foods. Indian food makes me sweat like a major-league basebal player in a steroids inquiry.

14. Hair loss

• Yikes! Every time I wash my hair I lose enough to make a Barbie-dol wig. I go through two bottles of Drano a month to clear up the hair clogs. I should start saving the hair and actual y make the wigs. If Mattel ever makes “Cancer Barbie” and sel s her in al her bald glory, my wigs wil sel like hotcakes. And I can use the money to pay for the mold removal.

15. Weight change

• Yes. I go up and down daily. I gain five pounds between breakfast and lunch. This is bad. How many yeses do I have now?

16. Infertility

• Knock on wood, I haven’t gotten pregnant. I use condoms. Wel , they use condoms.

Unless . . . oh, great. For al I know, the condoms could have broken, and I never got pregnant because I’m infertile.

17. Heart attack

• Not yet.

18. Rash, hives, bloody lesions al over the body

• Ew! No.

19. Heart palpitations

• Yes. Right now, in fact.

20. Death in some cases

• Not yet.

So I have at least ten, possibly eleven of these things. I could be dying right now and not know it.

Which brings me back to my point about getting married in eighteen months.

I guess I never real y explained that. When I said before that I am engaged, it wasn’t exactly the whole truth. I’m not actual y engaged. Now before you go off thinking I’m some kind of compulsive liar, I’m not.

Because I
am
engaged to be married in eighteen months. I’m just not engaged to anyone in particular.

In eighteen months, I’l be twenty-seven. Twenty-seven is the age at which al of my musical heroes died. Jim Morrison? Dead at twenty-seven. Kurt Cobain? Dead at twenty-seven. Jimi Hendrix?

Twenty-seven. Janis Joplin . . . twenty-seven.

Coincidence? Maybe. But for some reason, I’ve always thought I was going to be dead at twenty-seven, too. Unless I got married. Don’t ask me why I think this. I just do. It’s just something I know in my gut.

If I get married my destiny changes, and I’l live a long and happy life. If not—there’s always my funeral to look forward to, which you know I’m already making preparations for. But let’s not go there. I have every intention of being married within eighteen months. Or dead. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not going to settle. I’m not looking for any old schmuck to put a ring on my finger and save me from my disastrous fate. It has to be the right schmuck. And I’m picky as hel . So understandably, this is a very precarious time.

Brady

I decided to paint one wal in my new place dark blue.

It wil be an accent wal . A friend of mine has one wal painted red, and it looks pretty cool, and
he
cal ed it an “accent wal .” I can’t copy the accent wal
and
use the same color, so I’m going blue. Navy. Not real y navy, but kind of navy. More midnight blue. Which wil make it tempting to put those little plastic glow-in-the-dark stars up, but that would be lame so I’l refrain.

Maybe one star. No, no stars.

The building is pretty nice. It’s wedged in between a twenty-four-hour Duane Reade pharmacy and a little bakery that always smel s like buttery frosting. Can’t be mad at that. Unless you’re on Atkins, which I’m not.

For some reason, my metabolism is pretty good. I guess that’s God’s trade-off for the mass exodus of my hair, which seems to be relocating to my chest . . .

and nose . . . and ears. Christ, even my knuckles and the tops of my toes. In fairness, it’s not so much a mass exodus as a gradual but unmistakable departure to warmer climates south.

I’ve been thinking I need a new career. I’ve always wanted to be an inventor like Uncle Stu. I’m always coming up with new ideas. Always have. And not pot-high-induced ideas that are remarkably stupid upon coming down. And yes, I’ve had my fair share of those, too. I’m talking knock-’em-outta-the-bal park, great fuckin’ ideas. Ideas that would make me the mil ionaire I was born to be. But every time I come up with one, I do one of three things: a) I don’t act on it and eventual y forget what the idea was; b) I don’t act on it and later come to see it invented by some other prick and get pissed off; or c) I store it away in the back of my mind until the day I decide to go for it.

I had the idea for the toilet bowl brush with cleaner in the handle years ago. I let that slide and then one day . . . I’m cruisin’ down aisle five, and there’s my idea: The Ready Brush. Lysol Fuckers. Same thing happened with packaged foods with built-in Ziploc closures. Used to be—and stil is sometimes—once you open some product you bought, it’s exposed to air. Then you either have to fold the plastic bag over and put the contents in something else, or say fuck it and just eat the whole thing. Nowadays, nuts, dried fruit, deli products, lettuce in a bag . . . they al come in bags that have the Ziploc option.
That
was also my idea. Come to think of it, there are stil products that
really
need it and aren’t utilizing it. Like potato chips.

Once you open the bag, what then? My Integrated Zippers would be supergenius and save many a person the trouble of eating the whole bag in one sitting. Which could also aid in solving this country’s obesity problem.

Point is, I have al these great ideas, and I sit on them and watch other people make fortunes off them.

I always say, “Someday . . .” and put it off.

I think that day is here. And though the majority of my aforementioned mil ion-dol ar ideas have already been done, I stil have a couple grand-fucking-slams.

As for my day job, I am the proud owner of Sleestak Records along with my partner, Phil. We’re basical y reshaping the music industry along with our very smal staff. Which actual y consists of Phil and me. My days used to be productive but have devolved into . . . wel , let’s see. I listen to shitty demos, hoping and praying that
one
of the bands wil excite me. I brood. I file e-mails. As if organizing them into categories wil somehow make my life better. I cal the same people I cal ed the week before on behalf of my bands. I Google celebrities’ breasts. There’s something about celebrity boobs that’s better than regular ones. I go on Hotornot.com and give fat girls good scores to make Hotornot.com and give fat girls good scores to make them feel better about themselves. I drink coffee. I wait for the next big thing to happen. But mostly I check out celebrity boobs.

I walk into the office and Phil is looking at an executable file he downloaded which shows President Bush’s head superimposed onto a lingerie-clad model, which then morphs through a series of lingerie-clad bodies and eventual y turns into a monkey. Al this to the background of “Freedom,” a George Michael song.

“Is it wrong that I got a little aroused when I watched that?” he asks.

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“I’m just kidding,” he says and closes the file. We both know he’s not kidding.

“You ever have an idea that you know is gonna make you a mil ionaire?” I ask, not because I think he has, but because I want him to hear mine.

“Huh?”

“Like an invention,” I say. “You ever think of something and think if you just got a patent on it and actual y went for it, you’d be set for life?”

“I don’t think that much.”

“No, you don’t, do you?”

“Nah,” he says. And this resonates for a second.

He’s serious. And it breaks my heart because he’s so earnest. “I do like to draw, though,” he adds.

“Wel then, there’s that.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m looking into getting a patent.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Cool. What does that mean?”

“Means I own the idea.”

“So what’s the idea?”

I walk to the door and shut it even though I know nobody is listening to us. I do it for effect. Sometimes I do things like that because, as I’ve mentioned, my life is like a movie to me. And the songs I hear are, of is like a movie to me. And the songs I hear are, of course, my personal soundtrack. And my character in my movie would have shut the door. So I did, too.

“Cinnamilk,” I say tersely.

“Huh?”

“Cinnamilk,” I say, just as tersely but louder in case he didn’t hear.

“Which is?”

“Exactly like it sounds. You ever eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal when you were a kid?”

“Of course,” he says with what appears to be genuine pride.

“What’s left in the bowl after you run out of cereal?”

“I pour more cereal.”

“Right,” I cut in. “But before you do that or after you’ve poured your second bowl, as it were, you’re left with the milk. The sweet cinnamon-laden goodness.”

“Yeah, that is good,” he says, and I lose him for a minute to his cereal rumination.

“I’m tel ing you! They have chocolate milk, strawberry milk—
why, I don’t know
—but no cinnamon milk. An untapped market—just dying to get out to the masses. And the name—Cinnamilk—rol s off the tongue.”

“Cinnamilk,” he says, nodding slowly with a curious smile.

“Cinnamilk,” I echo.

Phil is kil ing me. We’ve worked together for seven years, but the last few months I feel like everything he does is a personal affront. Like right now he’s playing video games on his computer, and it’s pissing me off.

He should be working. Granted, I’ve played my share of video games, but he does it al day long. I mean, even though we’re partners in this label, we started out with my inheritance from my uncle Stu. And we’ve been steadily losing money for the past three years.

So it makes me think he needs to stop playing Pong.

My life savings are going the way of the VCR, and he’s mocking me by playing. I’m already supposed to be rich.

In addition to believing I was meant to be rich, I also think fame is inevitably in my future. I’ve always thought this, though there’s nothing I’m pursuing to achieve it—except, of course, my inventions. I don’t mean that in a lazy, I-deserve-fame-for-no-reason kind of way either. I mean that I am not real y creative, nor have I ever been. Yet I know I’l be famous for something. So much so that whenever I’ve broken up with someone in the past, my one comforting thought is always, “Boy, wil she be sorry when I’m famous.” I also temper my behavior at times because of it. Not so much in day-to-day things, but big things. Like I always make certain if I make sex tapes with my girlfriends, that they never leave my house. The tapes, not the women. Christ, I’m not Rick James or anything. And I always record over them to be sure. Al to make sure that when fame does come my way, the tapes don’t get out. Not that there’s anything real y deviant on them. There’s not. Mostly, just your plain old run-of-the-mil sex stuff. That’s not to say I’m a boring lay either. I’m not. I’m quite fun, actual y. The point is, I’m protecting my persona, as it were.