I was walking around the old, derelict high school which had just closed down. Here and there, people would pass me and smile. I looked, really quickly, into their eyes, and then looked away. I knew the feeling — it was like when you went on a nature walk and felt like you had to immediately become Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Inside, again, we’d cower, operating under the tenuous premise that the world was still, in any way, functioning. Long ago, I’d stopped getting the newspaper. My last newspaper exploit had involved going into the library, getting a paper and looking for the classified ads for jobs open. I couldn’t find classified ads anywhere, in the entire issue, and toward the end there was this vast, infinite section devoted to recent transactions that had happened at auctions. The whole thing, too, was written in this shorthand sort of legalese-approximating shmear, making it all but impossible to read, even for me, a person with a bachelor’s degree in English.
I watched a lot of sports. In general I felt like people wanted to kill me. I would take my makeshift, haphazard identity and maneuver it the way I could, knowing all the while I didn’t want to have kids on this planet, and somehow, usually, harness some celestial light which would make people homicidal toward me. This was also, though, what made me feel better, on an everyday basis, ironically.
In the bar where I worked, there was this dude who would take pictures of the hot bartender, when she bent over. He was in there every day and would turn his entire head and stare seamlessly, at women, all the time, if they walked up to the bar, even if they were with a husband and even in the case of a 70-year-old woman with a lot of wrinkles, at times. The girl he took a picture of, I have to admit, was so hot that I started hyperventilating, looking at her, one time, when she was bartending at Hooters. I’d actually developed a slight fantasy, one time, though short-lived and ephemeral, of eating some of her feces. When I’d heard she was signing on at the bar I got word that she was cuter than the current, petite and redhead bartender, which I hadn’t prior thought to be within the realm of possibility for anyone.
These were, generally, the hires they made in that bar, which was less than half a mile from the downtown library, where it wasn’t at all out of the ordinary to see a person whose face was so haggard that they were wholly incapable of making facial expressions. The city was now down to three public schools. I’d heard a story about, the very year after I graduated high school, a stampede taking place there and an assistant principal getting his ribs broken, the result of one of the cross-town public schools closing, before which event there had been five functional public schools in the city.
Everywhere, you saw advertisements, and messages like “I know I can / I know I can / Be what I wanna be / Be what I wanna be”. Recently, in Wal-Mart, this black girl, mortally obese, had cursed me out, and then ushered a soft missive which I made out as “Fight me.” I think I remembered her from my high school class, actually. I hadn’t remembered being anything but perfectly polite to her.
In another grocery store, one time, this black dude glared at me when the white woman he was talking to gave me a glance. I was actually just trying to get some allergy pills and get out of there.
When I talked, people tended to laugh. I wouldn’t usually tell them anything, as a general rule.
And all across town, amidst all the late-night cat calls, amidst broken glass, empty buildings with busted-out windows, amidst hostile people on drugs and fat people yoga pants, there could be gleaned the skin initiative. The psychotic eyes of a man with hairy arms lorded over the community like a desperate gossamer, longing, wishing eternally to manifest into an organism more complex than a chimpanzee. I chilled in the Jamaican bar, eventually. The DJ sucked but I didn’t care. The bartender was this nice, kinda cute girl I’d worked with at the Irish pub. The Jamaicans who hung out in there looked generally pretty happy but kind of grossed-out and disgusted, which I liked. I liked sitting by them and I didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother me. These black dudes would come in, seeming really horny for white chicks, but they didn’t really bother me and I’d make small talk with them about basketball and stuff. And, across the street, stood an old edifice, full of fluorescent lights, full of ghosts harking to a time when our streets and buildings filled with messages, signals, little paradigms which indicated that life as a human being were anything more than a debased exercise in primate desperation. I thought of old men telling me stories and jokes. I thought of this old man in Burger King, I’d heard going on a rant to me, telling me he hoped the people died who denied him his degree from Notre Dame from ’96. The lap dance is so much better when the stripper’s crying, so they say.