Literary as hell.
How easy it was, at sixteen,
For the earth to tilt on its axis –
A slanted glance, a mean word
Overheard, an arm withheld.
Then the bottom of the evening
Would fall out, and if I could have,
I would have sold my mother’s love
For sex, drink, and sham affection
“How does one become a janitor?” A question posed by John Bender in John Hughes’ classic 1985 movie, The Breakfast Club, is one that I happen to have the answer to. To become a custodian in the Raymond School System, I first had to send in my application. Then I waited five weeks for a response. Once I finally got a response, I went in for an interview in which all of the questions were seemingly completely unrelated to the tasks I would perform as a custodian, such as “Describe a time when you made a mistake and how you fixed the mistake,” and “If you caught someone stealing from your place of employment, would you report them?” We are custodians, what is there worth stealing? Your options range from cleaning products and rags to machines so large you could not possibly sneak them out of the building undetected. No theft was going on there. It is worth noting that Todd, the head of maintenance, was just as bad at interviewing as I was at being interviewed. I told my mom this later and she said it was because we are both “socially awkward as hell.” (Thanks, Mom.)
Todd hired me on the spot, probably because my mom is a full time custodian in the district, but a little nepotism never hurt anybody. He then told me that as a substitute custodian, I would make eight dollars and fifty cents an hour and work twenty-nine hours a week. He told me that there was a mandatory meeting at the high school the Friday before the first Monday of summer work and sent me on my way. “What a wonderful world,” I thought. “I am now employed.” The wonderful feeling did not last long.
I once read that most people cannot tell the difference between pâté and cat food when it’s presented to them. I’ve seen the Fancy Feast commercial, so I don’t doubt it. Particularly bored scientists have done experiments and usually get the same results. A lot of people think they would be able to tell, but it seems like such a simple experiment I’m not certain people aren’t doing it all the time. Maybe there is a vast conspiracy of people serving cat food instead of pâté, just because they can. I sometimes get the sneaking suspicion that I could eat pâté a million times until I was sure I knew what pâté tasted like. Then I’d get another opportunity to eat pâté (or alternatively cat food), and my world would come crashing down. I’d be just another victim of the pâté-cat food schemery.
I feel much the same way about overhearing people having sex. I’m never really convinced I’ve overheard people in the throes of passion. It always happens the same way. I’ll be sitting there, minding my own business, and I’ll hear a sound. Usually a female sound. And after my reaction, saying, “Oh… well… hmm,” and clasping my hands for no reason like I’ve suddenly got to break bad news, I dismiss it. I laugh nervously. Surely, I’m not really overhearing sex, I think. A ton of things sound like people having sex: fight scenes in movies, songs with high pitched notes, really jovial laughter, or even people making awkward sounds in order to make eavesdroppers uncomfortable. And it feels awfully rude for me to assume a stranger is having a private moment when they might be doing something innocuous, like watching tennis or porn.
Maddened by Detail
there is a solitary moment here
nothing too complex
the sky split by a single bird
white clouds shaped as a ladder
death spread upon the street
under the guise of orange fur
(squirrels still have so much to learn)
the window of a house
I walked on eggshells until the yolks
revealed themselves as the true enemies.
Then I beat myself up over
the inevitable, which, too, was inevitable.
The sun told the moon
to thank her lucky stars chickens
kept hatching, uncounted by sheep
pretending they gave a fuck who fell
asleep. Continue reading
V
The wrecker was a converted pickup with blue-silver trim sapped beneath a spread of rust. Its jury-rigged A-frame towered over a bed of dusty orange j-hooks, snatch blocks, and collapsed beer cans, all tumbling in submission to the precess of a flatbed hauler. The straps and rusty ratchets quivered in a silent pitch as an old man with skin like boiled leather coerced a screwdriver into the latch of a corroded wheel chock. The whole scene unnerved him—the herniated engine block, the jagged smear of burnt rubber along the road shoulder, the twisted spires of metal caked in blood. It was enough to set the old man’s teeth on edge. A slip and his gnarled knuckles cracked against the hard plate of the wheel chock, cold metal chipping flakes of skin revealing pink. He snapped his hand and swatted the pain and shouted, “God damn!” His partner, along for the ride on his day off, asked what was wrong but didn’t demand an answer when none was given. The old man sucked the wound.
He’s sixteen, never been to a movie theater. But it’s Friday, the night before Valentine’s Day, and Eric has a date for the ten o’clock show. Her name is Jamie, and she’s one grade younger. In the same way that he understands she lives with her mother in an old, metallic-blue Chevy Nova, which may or may not be stolen, he knows that she knows he doesn’t have a home at all.
It’s dangerous to get attached. That’s what he told himself for the thousandth time since he and Jamie locked eyes a couple of weeks ago, on the fifth day of a toothache so awful he could no longer focus in class. Hoping for some ice, maybe an aspirin, he got into the line of kids for whom the school nurse is an angel and outside whose basement office they collect, a throng of last resorts, snaking down the stairwell to her door.
In the overcrowded halls and along the rows of dented lockers, there are girls prettier than Jamie, with their breasts, bottoms that he’d enjoy seeing naked, but she’s the one he watches, craves: she’s raw and ropy like he is. From the way her brown bangs bounce across her lashes or stick oily flat to her forehead, he guesses the day of the week she has gym and gets to wash her hair. At night, wherever he sleeps, he thinks of that hair, his face buried deep and warmed by its every version.
Dear ABC Family Freeform Network,
How did you do it? Please stop. I’m serious, get out of my head.
Tonight you’re re-branding yourself as the Freeform Network. I know that isn’t just some rando name change. You are tactically teaming up to destroy my life with television.
I’ll be watching tonight, as you launch #Freeform. How could I resist watching the premiere of Shadowhunters? The show follows a young human named Clary as she learns that she is part angel. But it gets better: Clary is just a bit more angel than all the other angel people. Shadowhunters, based on The Mortal Instruments, Clare’s pseudo-original Harry Potter fanfiction, has already been turned into a terribly unsuccessful movie. This feels like a carefully calculated trainwreck, the kind you know I can’t turn away from.
Clary is tortured because she is literally part angel.
I wasn’t always hooked on ABC Family. It begins slowly. Just one episode of Switched at Birth. Wow, the plot seems kind of ludicrous… two families of different races had their babies switched, and one of the parents knew for years but never said anything? This is exactly the kind of content that I, as a young millennial, love to hate-watch. I love to hate-watch it on my Netflix account (that I steal from my dad, obvs). I love to hate-watch it on my phone and my computer, because I am totally hip and free and young. Continue reading
In response to my most recent rant
About the politics of my state
And the new governor who plans, among
Numerous other evils, to save money
By denying dialysis to those on Medicaid,
To establish “right to work zones” where
Workers can be paid whatever the bosses want,
To cut funding by half to universities
Where people might be educated
To be wary of folks like him, Continue reading
Late weeknight phone calls throw me into a panic — fearing news of car accidents, mangled kids, suddenly dead parents. I staggered across my bedroom to the dresser and fumbled to unplug my ringing phone. “Hello?”
“Jenny?” The voice of Nancy, my ex-mother-in-law, one of the few people who called me by the childish name I no longer used. Nancy called me frequently – sometimes too frequently – and always started her phone calls with my name as a question, as if she weren’t sure who would answer at the number she seemed to have on speed dial.
“Yeah,” I responded, relieved but annoyed, assuming I was awoken for something inconsequential.
“Joe’s dead,” she said. Just like that – two and a half syllables forming a sentence akin to being stabbed with a paring knife. She continued speaking calmly, as if she were giving me directions to her house instead of telling me that her son – my ex-husband and the father of my teenage sons – was dead at forty. I couldn’t hear her words any longer, just the murmur of her voice. My mind drifted to the last time Joe and I had spoken. He sounded happy. I should’ve known something was wrong. Continue reading
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