Mixtape for the Apocalypse Page 13

  “You’re making coffee? At this time of night?” Lise asked quizzically.

  “I’m cold, and I’m sleepy,” I justified.

  “You’re making a whole pot? Why not have some tea? You’re going to be amped up all night. No wonder you don’t sleep.”

  Ironic. I sometimes slept for ten, twelve, fourteen hours at a time. Just not every day. Not most days. “I won’t bother you,” I said. “I think I’ll actually get some drawing done tonight.”

  “Would you get me a beer out of the fridge?”

  I handed her a beer. “Why do you drink every single night?” I asked her.

  She gave me a very cold look. “Because I have a job,” she said, and sipped.

  Nothing to say to that. I sank down behind the partition, mummified in the blankets, and waited quietly for my coffee to brew. Lise made some impatient noises, then picked up the phone and called for a pizza with garlic, onions, olives, and feta cheese—the “Breath Freshener.” I got the first cup before all the coffee had run through the filter, added sugar, and crept into the closet. The pen in my grasp steadied me, even if my hand shook. I could get the thoughts out of me so I wouldn’t speak.

  I don’t know what the hell is up with Lise. She’s been workin’ for the Man for too long. She’s not said anything hostile like that to me in a long time. I wish I didn’t deserve this, but I’m basically an egotistical asshole, just like she said.

  I’m watching her through the gap between her long dresses. She’s finally taken off that loathsome fucking shirt. Underneath she’s wearing a Hanes Y-front of the kind that we call “wife beaters.” Horrible term. Her fat, dark nipples are lusciously outlined and erect—the apartment’s cold. I’m afraid to turn the heat on, since I’m not paying any bills. She’s toying with the nipples, circling them with her fingertip, her face leaning into the phone. What a goddamn shame. She doesn’t touch herself that way when she knows I’m looking. She doesn’t want me to see her naked, and I don’t want her to see me naked. It’s just the end of a beautiful friendship, a beautiful relationship, and I want to run out there and tell her that I love her so much, that she’s the only thing keeping me sane, that I wish I could drip through her, a filtered colloid with tiny particles of Lise suspended in me—but she’d only cut me down, laugh at me, smack me in the face. I’m such an asshole.

  She’s on the phone again, more relaxed this time, laughing. She lights a doob. “Yeah, I’m smoking pot,” she admits to the phone, and laughs some more. Obviously not the cops. Why does she have the TV on if she’s not watching it? Is she ever going to turn the heat on? I want to do it myself, but I’m in the closet now. I wish she’d stop talking on the phone about pot. The police have ways of listening in on phone conversations—line taps, cellular things, satellite dishes. They’re going to come in here and haul me off to jail.

  Oh. Shit. She’s on the phone with my mom. She said my mom’s name—Marion—I know Lise doesn’t have any friends our age who are named Marion. I can’t quite figure out what they’re talking about—Lise seems to be talking about work, regurgitating the same information as she gave me when I was in the bathtub. I wish to God she wouldn’t talk to my mom, because I know she’s telling Mom all about what I’ve been like, about how I’ve lost my jobs, blah blah blah. I haven’t told Mom, and she hasn’t called to talk to me, but I know subconsciously that she knows what’s been going on here.

  Lise nervously glances at me in the closet. I’m going to close the door a little bit so I can shut out the insistent noise of the television, blaring ads, strobing off the white walls of the apartment. I see Lise’s apartment, and I want to paint it black, I really do. At least it’s dark in here, except for the book light. I’m almost done with this notebook, and I need to get a new one. I thought it would last me for the year, but it seems seventy pages aren’t really enough, not for my pen to glean this teeming brain. I write too big and I think too small. This is all filled with nonsense. Page after page of incoherent, immature scribbling. No wonder I lost Cabby. I am a sinkhole, a black hole, a singularity of suck.

  Maybe I ought to just throw this away.

  I shut the journal and slid it underneath the egg-carton foam. When I came out of the closet, Lise said quickly, “I gotta go,” and hung up the phone. “Pizza’s here,” she explained to me, looking over her shoulder. I went to the kitchen to refill my coffee cup.

  I was up like a shot in that grey, dry morning, shaken awake by a nightmare so formless and horrible that I couldn’t remember anything about it except the sickening dread. I’d slept in my clothes. I was out of cigarettes. I went downstairs to the store across the street on the corner and put my last five dollars on the counter. “Can I have a pack of Winstons, please?” I asked.

  “ID?” The Asian woman behind the counter was reading a tabloid and didn’t look up.

  “For Chrissake, I come in here every day and buy cigarettes. It’s my goddamn birthday and I’m twenty-four. You mentioned it yesterday!”

  “We’re on camera,” she said, again not looking up. “I don’t card you, manager sees tape, I get fired. I know it’s your birthday and I know how old you are, but the videotape doesn’t know. I have to see ID every time. It’s the law.”

  I fumbled in my back pocket for my wallet, but it wasn’t there. I might have taken it out in my sleep because it was digging into my back. “I don’t have it on me,” I begged. “I’m dying for a cigarette. Can I grab these, and I’ll go back upstairs and get my wallet, okay?”

  Her smooth brown hand slid the cigarettes off the counter and flicked my useless currency back at me. “Sorry; no ID, can’t sell. Come back with it.”

  “Shit.” I trudged back across the street.

  No keys, either. My temples began to throb with the first horrible rush of a nicotine-withdrawal frenzy. I felt like my bones had turned into ash. My jaw clenched; I wanted to urinate; chills went up my spine. And I thought, Happy birthday, man.

  The apartment building’s gate stared at me forbiddingly, its wrought-iron curlicues twisting into a menacing frown, eyebrows drawn down. Locked. You shall not pass. Keys. No keys. Fuck! I patted myself down, pulled all my pockets inside out, then sat down on the concrete stoop and listened to my breath shudder in and out. I needed the nicotine. I needed it. It was ten in the morning, I’d had three hours of sleep (I’d fallen asleep on the end of the futon in front of the TV, watching the repeat of World News Now become Good Morning America), and my lungs were imploding.

  I decided to go to Triste and see if anyone there had a cigarette I could bum.

  I didn’t have my jacket, either, and the biting west wind had picked up since I left the apartment, slicing through my Primus T-shirt as if it were gauze. It was nineteen blocks to Triste. I walked as fast as I could, but my lungs would not cooperate, and I had to pause twice, gasping for breath.

  The hippie lady was there, finishing pulling an espresso for a terse businessman. “Do you have a cigarette?” I begged her.

  She smiled at me. “Hi, there,” she said softly. “No, I had to quit when the nipper was in me. I haven’t smoked since. Sorry.”

  My eyes started to tear up, but the businessman spoke. “I have one,” he said, voice arch with contempt, though I’d just asked him for a laxative.

  “May I please, please, please have one? I’ll give you a quarter for it, if you want.”

  “No, don’t bother,” he sighed, and gave me a long, slim brown cigarette. I watched him leave the café, wondering if he were gay (what straight man ever smoked a More?), and wondering if I’d just outed him in the most oblique way possible.

  “Need a light?” asked the hippie waitress, smiling.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I have matches.”

  “You want to get a coffee?”

  “Depth charge,” I said. “Double. God bless you.” I gave her the five dollars, and went outside to smoke.

  That was one of the best smokes I’d ever had. The cigarette itself wasn’t the very best, bu
t I’ve never loved nicotine more than when it was coming from that slim, breakable cylinder. So what if it made me look like a fruitcake? That was nothing new, after all. I leaned against the brick wall of the Cafe Trieste, smiling and nodding at passersby. When I went back inside, I felt relaxed for the first time that day. Happy birthday, man, I thought, for real this time. You’re on top of the world.

  The hippie had only charged me a dollar for the depth charge, so I tipped her a dollar and went back to my usual table in the back. For a change, I wasn’t the only patron; a couple of other hippies were in there, slumped in their fuzzy Sherpa sweaters and sandals and layers of flannel and faded calico. They were doing a crossword puzzle with the intense concentration of the stoned. My hands itched to write, and ideas hammered at my skull from inside. I couldn’t bear to see the hippies with their pens, working together, murmuring, diligently filling in squares, when I was so helpless, bound and tied in my own thoughts the way I was, with no way to exorcise them. I was sick of being helpless. I went up to the counter, where the hippie barista was feeding her toddler from a small bag of animal crackers. “Excuse me, I’m sorry. Do you have a pen and some paper?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah, sure I do.” She rummaged under the counter, and handed me five sheets of wide-ruled loose-leaf and a green ballpoint. “I hope you don’t mind wide rule,” she apologized with a grin. “I know it drives me crazy.”

  “If it gets on my nerves, I always just divide the lines in half,” I said, and sat down.

  They were playing The Doors’ Best Of. “The End.” I knew the track listing and the production of each song by heart. I consider the Doors to be Bunnymen methadone. I’d been listening to it a lot lately, trying to break out of my rut. But it, and the coffee in my mouth, seemed intensely bitter today, metallic on my palate.

  I put the pen to the paper.

  27 October

  My birthday. I’m 24. Nothing.

  lost in a roman wilderness of pain.

  all the children are insane.

  Jim, ya givin’ me a migraine

  and I’m never listening to the Doors again.

  I am hating this. I bet the hippies had something to do with it. Amanda likes the Doors. That cunt. I wish I didn’t harbor so much bitterness toward her, but I do. She’s ruined me for any other person. Anything that reminds me of Amanda makes me want to shoot people. I think I have a lot of repressed anger towards her, always did; violent feelings that I suppressed, that I sublimated into lust, which is why I came all over her. I substituted spunk for the blood that I wanted to see pouring from wounds in her belly and chest. I used to rub my hand in it, playing with it, fascinated with its texture and its smell, which sickened her because she too could see what I really wanted. I wanted to gut her and then sketch her disorganized entrails. While listening to the Doors. It’s the right soundtrack to a sick sex murder, which is why so many people like it—they have their own sex murder scenarios that play themselves out in their subconscious. Then they sublimate it and it oozes out as hostility towards me.

  Fuck all of you. Go listen to the Doors and live out your sick little fantasies. I wish I had sex-murdered Amanda, especially after that last date. I could see her jeans disappearing into the crack of her ass and I wanted to rip them off and fuck her hard on the concession stand, scattering popcorn and jujubes hither and thither. And then she opened her big mouth and I wanted my head to explode. That would have been worth their entertainment dollar—how often do you get to see a head explode in real life? But, of course, I couldn’t do that. Like everything else, I didn’t get it right.

  I don’t know what’s up. But this coffee sucks. Whatever, thanks for the discount, hippie chick, but you can’t make coffee worth shit. You could have pissed in a cup and put food coloring in it and it would have been the same. This place sucks, all their food and drink and “atmosphere,” all bullshit and it always has been and they just want to rape the real patrons. The real people. Playing the fucking Doors on a weekday morning, as if it didn’t make everyone go into a psychosexual rage. Don’t they have any idea? That bitch snatch manager smells like pogey bait, and her stupid boyfriend Chopper sucks off little boys at the playground, and then jizzes in the sandwiches. I’d like to see his head explode. That and that coconut skull of that stupid baby, who’s spitting up half-chewed crackers right now, trying to get me to puke. And LAUGHING!!! That little shit is laughing at me! Yeah, eat me, you little scumbag—your mother is a crackwhore and your father is a subhuman doper. Fuck off, all of you.

  Fuck

  Right

  Off.

  I punctured a hole through the sheet of wide-rule. I was shaking too badly to hold the pen, which had been slipping out of my fingers and making the last three sentences take forever. I ran my hand over my head and found my scalp dripping with sweat. I rushed to the bathroom with my hand over my mouth, bent over the toilet bowl, and made the coffee come up. It made me feel cleaner.

  When I went back to the counter, I felt like I was trying to walk through a closet full of heavy winter coats. The “nipper” threw a half-chewed animal cracker at me. “Can I get change for the phone?” I asked, staring at the baby.

  “Sure, man.” The hippie chick gave me four quarters. “You okay?”

  “It’s my birthday,” I said, and retreated into the phone booth.

  It sure was nice in there. Though it smelled like stale air, ozone, and cheap cleaning products, at least it was away from the rest of the café, filtering the Doors enough so that I could almost forget they were playing. I felt sick, but I didn’t want to throw up anymore. I gripped the smooth rounded edges of the telephone, willing my stomach to calm. Using the green pen I still held in my sweaty hand, I quickly sketched Cabby on the white paint of the inside of the booth. The effortless execution amazed me, so I did it again, and another time, each better than the last. But they looked too much like Lucas’s version of Cabby, with the oval head and the slouch—not the round head and the rumpled shorts—so I scribbled them away until the ink ran dry. I dialed Lise’s number at work, and as it rang, slipped both arms and my head and the phone receiver inside my thermal shirt. Inside it was as warm and red as the womb, full of my own comfortable sweat smell.

  “Pronto Printing, Lise Ballard speaking. How might I help you today?”

  I sat there for a second, not recognizing her voice.

  “Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”

  “Lise?” I croaked.

  “Squire, is that you?”

  “Yeah, um . . . I locked myself out of the apartment.”

  “You what? Oh, Jesus H. Christ.”

  “I’m so, so sorry,” I said.

  “I am really busy right now, Squire. I mean really busy. Do you think you can chill until I get off work?”

  “I really don’t want to, Lise, I’m sorry. I really want to go home. I’m puking—”

  “You’re always puking. You’re fucking bulimic. Look, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait until my lunch break, at least. The Berkeley group is here and I’m supposed to have lunch with them. And I’ve got two people out sick today. Where are you.”

  “At Triste,” I mumbled.

  “I’ll be there at noon,” she snapped. “Don’t move a muscle. And then I’m letting you in, and I’m going off to do lunch. Don’t ruin this for me, Squire.”

  “Okay, okay, okay. I didn’t do this on purpose.”

  “I really wonder sometimes,” she said, hanging up.

  I held the dead receiver inside my shirt for a while, listening to the dial tone roaring in my ear. If I could have died instantly, I would have. I settled instead for slamming my forehead against the wall next to the phone, hoping something would splinter.

  That didn’t happen, either. I staggered out, out of the phone booth, out of the café, back out onto the street, searching for someone walking by with cigarettes. In the time that I’d been on the phone, the street had become deserted. It had begun to drizzle tiny bits of ice which stung my
neck and face like hot match heads. I sat down on the curb and held out my hands to it, my hands slowly filling with cold water. I could never catch and retain a single fleck of ice; they melted instantly upon contact with my skin. I went back into Triste, sat down, and slumped against the wall, sick and boneless. They had put the Doors album on again, starting at the beginning. Break on through. I couldn’t.

  At twelve-forty, the door flew back on its hinges with a dismaying rattle of the bell, and Lise marched in. “C’mon, Squire,” she grumbled. “Let’s go.” She grabbed me by the arm and yanked me up from the chair.

  She stomped along the sidewalk in her polished, thick black boots, corduroy trousers swishing, and let go, shaking me out into the gutter. “What the fuck is the matter with you?” she finally shrieked.

  “Nothing,” I moaned.

  She kept walking, shaking her head.

  I tried to explain. “I just went out. I couldn’t sleep, and I needed some cigarettes, and I just left the house without anything because I thought I’d be right back. I didn’t do it on purpose. I don’t mean to bug you; I just don’t know what’s happening to me. And the coffee was so bad. And like, the Doors? I mean, shit, y’know? And I didn’t have my ID, so I couldn’t get cigarettes, so could you give me one of yours?”

  “You have to be either high or stupid. And I don’t think you’re high. Damn it.” She dug out her pack, almost full, and handed me the whole thing. “Give me one.”

  When we got to the apartment, she unlocked the front gate, the door, and the apartment door, and grunted, “If you can’t handle going outside, stay home.” She clomped back down the stairs and away.

  After I had smoked and ate some food, I sat at the window and stared numbly down at the street. I saw the mailman approach. Desperate for anything to do, I skipped down to the first floor lobby to pick up the mail.

  In the time that it took me to get down there, the mailman had been joined by a UPS delivery man. They both turned to me and examined me, my ink-stained and cartooned jeans, my threadbare t-shirt, my bare feet. “Apartment 218?” said the UPS man.

  A stab of panic threatened to stop my heart. “H-h-how did you know that?” I stammered, backing away. I felt the cold-water shock again.