Untitled_111206_inprogress

When I got out, I gave the my caseworker/god a blowjob he’ll never forget; I knew I’d never make it working on some assembly line, as some grocery store cashier. I needed to be near the water. So near, so close, so close that it crept up my nostrils and my hair smelled of salt and synthetic coconut fragrance no. 4 that I knew I’d die without it. I knew it was my savior, the water. The ocean.. After all, I explained to his crotch, still on my knees with a smear of his bitter cum I hadn’t been able to swallow swelling my lips, leaving them shiny and smooth, masking their chapped, chewed state, after all, that is where life began. So is it not terribly presumptuous to believe that my life can begin again, that I cannot be new, cleansed, by this same water? He looked down at me, carefully. He was frightened; his eyes couldn’t focus on my unflinching stare, tears welling up automatically in my eyes. His eyes couldn’t focus on shit, actually. I stood up slowly, hands placed on his knees ever-so-gently to feign my need to regain my balance. I walked slowly around his large but obviously cheap desk, a Wal-Mart version of an executive’s command center, and sat down. I smoothed my salmon pink skirt down to my knees, reached to my left to grasp a tissue between my thumb and index finger and delicately dabbed at the corners of my mouth, leaving some shiny leftovers on my lips as a reminder - a reminder for whom I’m not sure. But I knew I looked good, not great anymore because I was suddenly aware of my age when I looked as hands. The first thing to look at, when guessing or estimating someone’s age is to look at their hands. But I looked good enough, good enough despite the heinous fish-colored-too-big poly-cotton suit my sister -in-law had lent me for this interview, this perfunctory job placement meeting with the Man.
He handed me a single piece of paper across his desk. He finally looked at me. He almost smiled; it was a halfhearted attempted and it resulted in his lower lip curling up on the left side. I could see that he was struggling not to chew the inside of his cheek. I silently thanked all those who had cum before him and took it, again ever so delicately between my freshly manicured fingers and read it. Faster than he thought. I didn’t want him to think that I was reading what I was signing. I always do, it’s all I have left, and I read so quickly he didn’t notice and I read it and scrawled my name across the bottom: Signature: in purposeful loopy cursive, a little heart above the letter I [why won’t my word processor allow me to make a lower case I?] and the Print Name: and I had finished reading and then I stared at the Date:. I wrote it down. I tried not to think about those two years, four months, and three days as I wrote down Today’s Date:; it stared back at me threateningly. It had bested me - even I knew that. I was a lifeguard on a public beach now. I was one of those girls who had the privilege of wearing one of those ill-fitting red bathing suits with a greyed cross screened and peeling on both the back and front of the suit like the Hester Prynne’s coveted “A”. Certainly it held none of the appeal of Pamela Anderson’s Baywatch style, to watch her suit now, I laugh at its inadequacy, however imperative it may be to television‘s babies. I don’t think that’s how other people saw it, I think they intimate a beach bum landing their ultimate job; logging countless hours of dozing under the sun, taking breaks to smoke and toke every other hour. But that’s not how it felt to me: the mark of Hester, comfort of all comforts, embroidered on my chest: I could no longer hurt people :I had to help them: save them, even. No more teachers, no more books, no more of those dirty whoring pig’s pitying looks. The faded red-orange suit was my hairshirt, my nakedness, my exposure as a fraud. She who kills is now Our savior. Every day I wished that someone would almost-drown, just so I could push through the roaring waves and save them. Make up for lost - lost . . . That which is lost, I guess. All of it.
I looked out of the window in my shower as I let the steam build up a seething outer coat on my unscathed skin. Shades of grey, purple, orange, yellow, and a creamy topping of white crowned the sunrise. Again, today was not a new day, it was an again day; what fool coined the phrase “Every day is a new beginning”, not to mention “Today is a new day”. Not that I mind so much, it isn’t monotony, merely the opacity of the mundane, just that I believe these guys ( and male they must be) have some fucked up neuron - synapse connection that accounts for their outrageously grandiose optimism. Maybe they were just rich white guys that never had to bike three miles to work at five am in the morning to work. To do hard work. To do hard time. Generally my Newfound Freedom felt like oldskool masochistic machinery. Not to wax poetic or anything. It was good. Routine was good. Boring as hell, static. I pulled an old white t-shirt of my brother’s over my head (it smelled like him no matter how often I washed it; it was my favorite thing I had ever had the honor of owning) and some old cutoffs and got on my bike. I rode past the guard; he waved and waved back. It was little interactions like this, the small, almost imperceptible movement of his hand that made this life worth trying out. It was my wave, only mine, no one saw it but me. None of the other girls left for work as early as I did, and I came back to the Home earlier than they did so I got the hot water and the first pick at dinner, which wasn’t that bad - especially because I came home the earliest of twelve girls and that meant I was on cooking duty. I can cook. The others are both intensely grateful and extremely pissed off about this. Some of them have never eaten a decent meal in their lives; eighteen years of Smack and smack n’ cheese with a side of expired nuclear orange chips and bug juice. But they don’t know where I learned to cook, or why, and they don’t care. It’s not that they are or are not jealous, jealousy is all we have in Our home and we relish it because it keeps us going; who works harder, fucks more, is thinner, is sexier, is straighter, pulls off more stunts, gets away with more dirty piss tests, who doesn’t have to “get away” with anything: we are the weak and the proud, the deadly, the maternal, the cowardice of a soft wind in the eye of a storm. All differences collapse along the lines of jealousy. So jealousy is far from it: it just makes them suspicious. I could, theoretically, always be a narc. This is a legit suspicion, and certainly one that I would have of a girl or whatever, woman, in my position here. Instead, I think it is nothing less than pure Disgust. No anger, no resentment. I am of the lowest echelon: white, pretty but not too pretty, smart, quiet, opinionated. But I have more tells than the crappiest poker player in all of Vegas, and I can’t seem to rid myself of them: here is where my quietness is nothing but a farce, as my face and body say more than any book by Dostoyevsky or Woolf could ever say. David Foster Wallace’s The Infinite Jest? I feel like that - strong, infinite - but at three in the morning, counting water stained cracks in the ceiling from my filthy top bunk (you would think they would emphasize cleanliness here but there just isn’t enough chutzpah to go around, twelve girls twelve felons thousands of nightmares and daymares and twenty-four placid maniac eyes), I know I am jest. At least to them, these girls who are all broken: or act broken; I can’t be sure nor do I want to be. They whisper; even Marla, who calls herself my friend. Like, I could have grown up rich and thrown it all away. They wouldn’t have, they think, and maybe not; Marla, innocuous looking porcelain doll if she weren’t nearly six feet tall and outlined in track marks like shadows traces in indelible Sharpie on the wall. But they can’t see Inconsequence even in 40/40 hindsight. Which I have. Say what you will, but I do. I had 20/20 in that distant present; I was so clear, I was so lucid, I can only see today through Vaseline-smeared goggles.
I like it that way. I lost 30% of my hearing in one ear, I mean my right ear, and like 15% in the other. The lowered volume is very soothing; it reminds me of heroin, it reminds me of memories before I was able to shape them. Memories shaped by others - parents, my brother, my sister, school, even friends. Yeah, I even had friends - but I’m losing my focus the further away I drift from the super lucid state I was in for those six years, almost to the day, that I began to control my own memories. Not to mentions other’s. You can’t expect to make up your own memories and not have them affect the memories of others. Certain people, I think all their memories are mine. Like they made them up but better: I am immortal in the universal consciousness granted to me without coercion, without question, with unconditional love. Once my friend Nadia said to me: “There is no me - there is only you. Just you. And this,” she pauses in an American way, not her native Polish, when she speaks in her native Polish there are short sighs, tiny grunts, abbreviated high-pitched wails but certainly no silences - though her accent is still thick as Los Angeles smog, “this is a good thing, I think”. I think she got that line from a song, but her English is beyond excellent for having only been in the States for six years. Three of them in lock up, and I hear she did a whole year in the hole, not in a single bout - the craziness would kill anyone who was in the hole for such an unimaginable period of time, even resilient Nadia, but altogether it supposedly amounted to a year and I don‘t doubt it. To leave her country in search of Freedom in exchange for that? The fucking audacity. The fucking audacity of day-to-day life.
And who am I to argue with that sort of logic? Nadia, I sometimes think, had it all wrong: without her and the others I had no memories to make, to make my own: There is no me, there is only the others. And they are the stuff of my legend. Without them I would have no legend, no Memory. No self. For that, dirty yellow rat bastards that they are, I love Them.
And as I ride my bike down the wrong side of the street, staying well within the designated bike path but still eliciting honks of irritated truckers just doing their own jobs and hurled spitballs of profanity from BMWs with temporary tags to Buick Toronados in various stages of lacquered undress, I try and think about this, about all of it, about the single five minutes that some lonely middle-aged paunch still suffering from acne (and I do believe it makes him suffer, I do pity that man). But the Lull takes over, I have tried to meditate before and sitting still never works, I only get more anxious and start to hyperventilate but this, riding my bike along a two-lane highway smelling of salt and exhaust and sewage, I think this is meditating. I push forward, one leg at a time. I notice the sensation of each foot as it applies pressure, and then as the pedal gives, I feel my leg move down. It isn’t conscious, it isn’t muscle memory, it is not even functional. It just is. I glide along and my head is empty and my Breath is just one other thing that is. I just am.