the trouble with…

Maybe in another life I’ve moved out west to pan the proverbial gold that is a music career in the “City of Angels”. Maybe I’m fit and happy, with sleek foreign friends who have funny names and accents. Maybe we all drink espresso mid-morning, and talk crap about anything we come into contact with, real euro-trash style. I could be playing in a pop band right now, some gorgeously tan girl waiting for me just off stage left, smiling shyly. I had this dream about a me that wasn’t me. He was just like I am, except he was everything else and not much at all. Actually, we didn’t have a lot to talk about. Actually, I’m pretty sure that somewhere he exists. Actually, I’m not completely sure it was a dream.
At my acupuncturist’s office, I read about parallel universes in Popular Science magazine. Dr. Robert scoffs while telling me the Buddhists had known it all along and I don’t doubt him for a second. Then he lies me down on the couch and rearranges my body. “Three needles” he tells me “that’s all you need”. He opens my heart charka and it burns a hell of a lot. My shirt has a new hole in it now, and he goes to get some Neosporin for what will soon be a pretty little wound on my chest. I start counting my breaths– in and out, 1, in and out, 2, etc. In the next room, his assistant, Michael, practices changing into different animals and moves things with out touching them at all. I know this because the needles tell me so. They’ve got so many answers if you just ask the right questions, if you let your body move out to the tips, let it taste the static metal tinted fresh air. I drift off into a faux-meditation, a sort of mental ebb and flow, bobbing along to the cheesy new age Shakuhatchi recordings. My arms fold quietly over my stomach.
Once, I worked in this office, mixing herbs. I was impressed when I learned that the Chinese use ground cockroaches and coral to dissolve tumors. “It tastes terrible, so you have to put a lot of licorice in” Dr. Robert told me, “but be careful, licorice really gets ladies going, if you know what I mean.” In my experience, it doesn’t.
I worked mixing herbs around the same time that my grandmother was dying of colon cancer. She was living with us in Florida because Colorado was “too damn cold”. Florida (unfortunately, since I love the winter) is never “too damn cold,” but it rains a lot, so we still have something to complain about. Every week while my grandmother lived with us, I would stay home from high school and watch this skeleton that had once bore my mother struggling to open tea bags for our afternoon sun tea. It was depressing but also sort of beautiful.
I used to take my grandmother on long walks in the afternoon. There were many reasons why we did this, but the main two were: 1, my grandmother wanted to work on her tan, and 2, it was often beautiful outside. On one of these walks, I almost pushed my grandmother’s wheel chair in front of a Ford F-350 truck because it felt like she would suffer less in death by three-ton squashing then by slowly becoming a living corpse. This was just after she had insisted we turn back towards home because a black cat had crossed our path. My grandmother was very superstitious.
I’ve kind of come back to reality, but I’m no longer in the doctor’s office. I am, in fact, now driving my car. It is now late, late, late at night and the sky is that sort of pale grey-black cloudy tropical color, which is oppressive and always feels like morning but never actually is. I’m on a highway in the middle of the Everglades (a sweet smelling swampy river which covers most of south Florida and where, as a child, I watched an alligator crush a boy just a little bit older then I was with his mousetrap quick jaws). All of a sudden I am scared. I’ve killed people tonight, and not just one. I’ve done horrible things to their bodies as they died. The police are coming, fast. They’re practically on my heels. I don’t know this for a fact, but I can feel it in my gut—it’s like that other me I dreamed about is whispering it in my ear. I’m tired as hell. It’s way fucking late.
I start toying with the idea of pulling over and letting fate decide my future. The cops will most definitely get me, and then quickly lock me up in seclusion on death row. I’ll be lonely and unhappy for the rest of my life, but I’ll be fed, I’ll be clothed, and I’ll be able to see my parents and little sister. The other available option is I can keep driving. I’ll be alone for a while, but at least there is possibility— the chance I’ll make it to Canada, or Alaska, or something. That would mean I could have a future of love affairs and happiness, a future of trying to forget what I’ve done—which right now I don’t even remember. I start to realize that I’m leaning towards giving up and it terrifies me that I’m losing faith in my own future. It terrifies me that I have so little trust in my ability to provide me with simple human happiness. I’m scared because right then, it seems so overwhelmingly hard, so pointless, and so unnecessary to live. Are the rewards really worth all the suffering? At that moment, I’d rather be caged.
I pull over to wait for my future and from the passenger seat, the dream me starts singing one of his songs– “and, despite my best intentions and against your worst inventions / I keep finding myself at family interventions / and a candle’s just a candle until it’s a bomb / so throw me up that dynamite, I’ve been here too long.” I watch the sun start to rise. It’s orangey pink, and full of fire. “There’s my new life.” I think. “That’s my new sun,” I think. And, all of a sudden it very much is.

“I want to do it to that British girl.”
That was my mantra, so to speak, that whole year. It wasn’t a very good mantra, but it was something, which is what I needed. I had been desperately searching for some sort of meaning in my life since the future became now, since they banned public television and radio, since Hollywood had taken over.
My life had become the stuff of post apocalyptic distopian awareness, but nothing exciting had actually happened. No nuclear bombs had wiped out the big-apple, no epidemic diseases had forced humanity into any sort of careful interactive subtlety, no reason to move underground yet. That British girl was more of a living figment, imagined from some interpreted experience I’d had with an exchange student who had charmed me with her wit and then promptly disappeared into a hazy glamorous Neu-American fashion scheme, full of colors and aggressive sexuality. But, those two minutes, when we had talked about the tragic meandering of the plot in some book I had been trying to read or a song I was obsessed with (I actually don’t remember), had stuck with me. It had been my only real interaction with anything tender and feminine in years.
I’ve never been a very funny person. This accounts for my terrible luck with the ladies. I think if I had been able to turn up the silly and turn on the charm, maybe I’d have been able to stop her from getting all herped up and cavorting with the scantly clad pretty-boys I’d recently seen her exploiting, full swing Neu-American rock star.
At this point, most of my old friends had acquired their fair share of S.T.D.s, which scooted them gently up into the upper echelon of society. It was because of this that I was still living in an old, semi-broken, pink house in a segregated post-resort community with a naked face and an empty ego.
This was a fair amount of time after Justin Timberlake had publicly announced that he finally had AIDS to a crowd of screaming pre-teens and post-adolescent sexy-males. Winnona Ryder was loosing it to Syphilis. Most of my friends had only been able to afford Herpes. The few that had the wit and charisma enough to end up with something stronger were drinking Champaign and Whiskey Sours atop The Standard Hotel while their Valet parked cars shined, newly waxed.
I hadn’t been born to survive in this sort of ultra charged sexual climate. Anyway, even though that British girl was pretty much my last hope, I don’t know why I held on to her as an object of affection so long after she went and got all cool. But I did it. And I did it. I did it while sitting at Starbucks, one of the few glamorous locations that still didn’t require S.T. ID or proof of infection. I did while shopping for groceries. I did during the lambent silence just before bed. I spent most of my time imagining she’d show up at one of these places, drop pretense just enough to say “hi”. I imagined that maybe she remembered what we had talked about, so I’d have to pretend I still did. There wasn’t much chance left of that.
“I hear she writes charming pop songs and drives her car aggressively.” Jasmin had said on my birthday, a windy May Day spent moping yet again, at Starbucks. He was my only compatriot left. He had a moustache, which kept him out of high-society, though he was classy enough to be whisked right up. He loved his moustache. He loved it enough that he was still stuck downstairs with me, while the boozing and schmoozing kept itself happy, up on the top floor.
“I hear she likes cats and isn’t afraid to die.” He’d continued.
“I hear she lies compulsively and reads philosophy for fun.” He was killing me softly, probably for his own entertainment.
“Do you still dream in black and white?” I asked, mostly to change the subject.
Jasmin had a rare disease that I’d actually been trying, unsuccessfully, to catch. For a while he had been physically unable to experience color in his dreams. We shared sips of coffee and sometimes I took tentative drags off of his cigarettes, just so I’d have a chance at perversely infecting myself. I thought it was poetic and sort of oddly romantic, our compulsive friendship, my life with the man with the ladies name. Oh, and I was tired of color.
I had been dreaming of nothing but my own vivid death for years.
“Mmhmm.” He seemed somewhat exasperated. “Every night.”
That’s how it had become. I was tired of bright. I was tired of excitement. I wanted Sunday service and pumpkin pie. I fulfilled small but ever-present companionship issues by finding helpless replacements.
When I was a child, my future was full of flying cars and robot wives. I’d sing myself little robot love songs during gym class. I always wanted to dance. Now, my future is now and it isn’t what I was expecting.
Oddly enough, the British girl did end up at Starbucks—imagine that! Birds were singing. There were probably butterflies. She walked right by us, pretending not to notice we existed. I looked at Jasmin, who had stopped mid sentence. He raised his coffee cup, as if to cheers me and said sweetly, “To heartaches and bad tomorrows.”
We had found my new mantra.