Things to Do When You're Goth in the Country

by Chavisa Woods

  My sort of unyielding urge for danger was probably what attracted me to her in the first place. Our codependent, peaceful life wasn’t enough excitement for me. After five months of living with her in close-quarter domesticity, I started going out with my friends again. I think it was spurred by the big Y2K party. Everyone was sure it was going to be the end of the world. So we all totally obliterated ourselves. It felt like the end of the world that night. But other than everybody getting obliterated, nothing happened.

  I took massive amounts of hallucinogens, stayed out partying until the sun came up, and returned home smelling like Vicks VapoRub. She hated it. She wanted me with her all the time. She said she didn’t understand why I wanted to go to parties with my dumb friends, who, incidentally, think she’s too dorky for words. And she thinks they are not intelligent enough to have the privilege of my presence.

  That’s the other thing she started doing when she stopped taking her medication, obsessing over calculable intelligence levels, namely, her IQ. She’d been dragging me to at least one Mensa dinner a week, most of which are held at her parents’ house. She started threatening to take the Mensa entrance test a few weeks ago. But then, she ruminated that she didn’t need to take the test because she’s already an unofficial member. The truth is, she was terrified to take the test . . . terrified she might fail. Everyone just assumes she is an out-of-the-ballpark genius. Her parents excuse her schizophrenic tendencies, which mostly show up as small moments of quirky darkness or anxiety in their presence, as side effects of her genius. If she took the test and failed, her insanity would no longer be viewed as the residue of a great mind at work, but just what it was—crazy for the sake of crazy. And I knew being exposed in this way would totally unhinge her.

  I never encouraged her one way or another. She could take the stupid test or not. I openly found the whole idea completely dull.

  Earlier today, Kali asked me to go to a Mensa party with her, but I had other plans.

  “Please,” she begged. “It’ll be different this time. It’s gonna be wild.”

  “It’s never been wild, honey, come on. The wildest it’s ever gotten was when they decided to play strip Trivial Pursuit, and that was really just kind of uncomfortable.”

  “No,” she said, “I promise, it’s gonna be wild. The guy at the radio station gave me something. I’ve been saving it for tonight.”

  “What did he give you?”

  “It’s a surprise. I’ve been saving it for tonight. Please. Just this once? I promise you, this thing he gave me will make the conversations much more interesting.”

  I guess she thought she needed to make her life more interesting to me in order to keep me in it. I was sure she had some coke or maybe pot or something, trying to lure me away from my drugged-up friends by becoming my drugged-up girlfriend. But hey, it worked. I thought it might be kinda funny to interact with the Mensans high. So I went with her.

  I grabbed a hitter and a mirror just in case Kali didn’t have the foresight, and we drove to her parents’ house.

  The party was already under way when we pulled up. A few of the Mensans were still filing into the small, near-mansion, colonial-style house, which she said smelled like grapes (colonial architecture, that is). The lights were all lit up and I could hear the sound of drinking songs coming from the living room. They were singing, “A ghost that’s meshugenah makes Mendelssohn go drown.”

  She turned to me and held out her tiny closed fist. “You ready?”

  “I brought a mirror, and a hitter,” I told her. “Which is it?”

  She opened her hand. Sitting in her palm was a small, folded piece of tinfoil.

  “Oh my god, you’re not serious.”

  She opened the tinfoil. Inside were two little stamps bearing images of the pink elephants from Dumbo, which smiled up at me.

  “Acid? You want to do acid at your parents’ dinner party?”

  She smiled excitedly at me. “Yeah. What? You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah, I’ve done it a lot. Enough to know you shouldn’t do it at your parents’ dinner party.”

  “Oh, but cocaine would have been all right?”

  “Yeah, somehow, it would. I mean, it’s very different. Have you ever even done acid?”

  “Yeah, I did it once. It wasn’t intense. It didn’t really even have any effect on me. Everyone else was tripping but, I don’t know, I have a high alcohol tolerance. Maybe I just have a high tolerance in general.”

  “For acid? An acid tolerance?”

  “Yeah. It had virtually no effect on me. Everything was just black and white for five hours. But other than that, I felt totally normal.”

  “Mmmm-hhhhmmm.”

  “Listen, we don’t have to stay the whole time. If it gets too weird, we can go for a walk or just go upstairs and hang alone.”

  We put the little papers on our tongues and let them dissolve. I wanted to stay outside for a while, smoke a couple cigarettes and prepare myself. But in the time it took to “prepare myself,” the acid started kicking in. And I realized, as I always do the first ten minutes of a trip, that there is no way to prepare oneself for tripping. You can tell yourself all sorts of dumb shit like, Just keep quiet and no one will know. Or, use the drug, don’t let it use you . . . la-di-da. But acid always surprises you. It always comes up with something you had no way to prepare yourself for. My friend Rob swore acid never got the better of him, swore to all sorts of meditation techniques that helped him get the most out of his trips, “to control it,” he said. Why, then, did his mother find him barreling naked through a cornfield on all fours, the words jesus christ why? written backward on his forehead in red lipstick?

  Because there is no way to foresee that these sorts of things might happen. And if there is, how can the before-acid-you tell the post-acid-you not to do these things, no matter how much you want to? How can you foresee that you might want to strip naked and etch the words jesus christ why? backward on your forehead in red lipstick? How can you control that kind of insane wanting? There’s no way to explain this, really. Let’s just say, there is no way you can prepare not to react to self-inflicted schizophrenia.

  Self-inflicted schizophrenia. That’s what tripping is. I never saw it so clearly before that night. But seeing it as such brought up in me a big question, which I probably don’t really want to know the answer to: What is insanity?

  When we walked into her parents’ house, everything was normal. And that’s what I kept telling myself, This is normal, and this feels normal. I’m still acting normal.

  Jan, her mom, came up, handed me a glass of wine, and kissed me on both cheeks. “That’s normal.”

  “What’s normal?”

  Fuck did I say that out loud?

  “It’s normal . . . in Europe, to double-kiss like that,” I told her.

  “Mmm. You’re so worldly, aren’t you?” She never missed a chance to make me feel dumb. “Come in here then. There’s something I want to show you. I think you’re really going to be intrigued by this. You just can’t believe it.”

  The way she said it, I thought she might be leading me into a secret laboratory, and perhaps we would find Dr. Strangelove sitting there with the red button. Whatever it was, it seemed very important the way she kept turning to me and nodding, saying, “Yes, yes, it’s coming any minute now,” and smiling with pride and anticipation. “I’ve got this really terrific thing, you just have to see it. And tell me what you think. Don’t be afraid to give me your real opinion,” she said, an eerie, almost ravenous smile spreading across her face.

  All this anticipation culminated in her taking me into the den and showing me an antique lampshade.

  She talked for literally ten minutes about the history of the lampshade, the design, where she bought it, who owned it before her, and why it was a relevant historical piece. Rich people are hard enough to deal with not on acid. The things that excite them are confusing and hilarious enough without a psychedelic lens magnifyin
g everything. As she went on about the lampshade, I was biting the inside of my cheek very hard to keep from laughing, and I suddenly realized I’d bitten it too hard and I could taste blood in my mouth. My eyes opened up very wide and I said, “Oh!” She thought I was pleased, so she moved on to the cabinet the lamp was sitting on. At this point I became worried that my feet might be melting.

  “This, on the other hand, is not actually an antique,” she said of the cabinet.

  I made some sort of very surprised expression, because I had just relearned how to cross my toes.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s amazing! Jerry made this. He just finished it yesterday. I didn’t know my husband was such a wonder with wood. He stained it this way and la-di-da, and the cut is intended to represent designs from the something-something era.” (I wasn’t totally listening.) “And do you know what we’re going to do?” I stared at the cabinet blankly. “We’re throwing a birthday party for the cabinet.” She laughed gleefully at herself. “We’re having a birthday party for it next week!” she repeated.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She took this as if it were a question: a request for an explanation. But it was very simply an expression of the deep and pressing sorrow I felt for her at that moment.

  “A cabinet birthday party!” Liz boomed, suddenly beside me. Liz was a soft-spoken poetic type who always had to wear something purple. Even if it was “just a dash,” she never, and I mean never, left the house without at least a bit of purple. She was a rich, pseudo-hippie, Buddhist, Jewish journalist. She possessed all of the categories that, at least one of which, most people at the party fit into. “A cabinet party for the cabinet!” she squealed, excitedly, clapping her hands. “I’m wearing my new purple dress.” She was so excited, her oversized tits were shaking beneath her purple sweatshirt. I stared too long at them.

  “Are you coming?”

  “No!” I said, too forcefully.

  “Why not? Do you have other plans?”

  “I don’t know what my plans are,” I said, anger showing in my voice. “But I’m not coming.”

  I usually had an all right time at the parties, but I never felt a connection with these people like my girlfriend did. Mostly I just drank wine and made sarcastic comments when they hurled their trivia disguised as conversation at me. They seemed to like me, though. They were always sort of awed by the fact that I have no interest in appearing super smart, and I can’t quote statistics, but I can quote Skunk Anansie, Warhol, Bill Hicks, and Jello Biafra. My clothes always fit me, and I do my hair before I leave the house. I am the cool kid come down among them.

  It always gets tired for the cool kid, though. Tonight, I worried my sarcastic comments might soon become too close to just being out-and-out malicious. This sudden burst of irrational anger startled Jan and Liz, probably even more than the time I freaked out on Walter, the linguist pedophile who showered his undying affection on me until I turned nineteen.

  He’d given me a piece of manganese with the word “Manganese” inscribed on it from his actual elemental table. That’s right, he kept a real elemental table in his house. It took up an entire room, the table laid out as a vinyl print on the floor and actual samples of all of the elements in the appropriate place, with the exception, of course, of a few radioactive ones. It was rumored, though, that he had two of the minorly radioactive elements locked in a safe by the dresser. He’d cornered me at every party for three months (during the time I was only just eighteen), attempting to deconstruct the origin of my strange name. He’d begun invoking some sexually explicit phrases from Africa, and I finally told him, in so many words, to go fuck himself, loudly. Speak of the devil.

  There was a tap on my shoulder. It was Walter; the sixty-twoyear-old self-admitted pedophile with a PhD in linguistics. It’s not like he’s constantly proclaiming his pedophilia. He just lets it slip from time to time toward the end of some of the more drunken dinner parties. He has no children of his own and has placed a swing set in his backyard for the neighbor kids. He justifies this action by saying he never actually interacts with the neighbor children, he just watches while they swing. So no one gets hurt. It’s a win-win. After he lets shit like this slip, he always finds some “clever” way to remind everyone that he has a PhD in linguistics, like it’s okay to be a pedophile as long as you are very smart.

  “What’s that joke you told me last time?” he asked me, pinching the end of his greasy gray beard. “Ladies,” he said, motioning for the two other women to pay attention, “she told me this amazing joke last time, did you hear it? It goes, A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, ‘Give me one with everything on it.’”

  The ladies looked very contemplatively at him and, I suppose, because he had a PhD in linguistics, they were wondering if perhaps it was just that his joke was over their heads and he was very smart, or if it was that I was very dumb and he was just being nice by retelling my ignorant joke.

  He seems like a really skilled pedophile compared to his skills in linguistics. The joke was supposed to go, A Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, “Make me one with everything.”

  I tried to correct him, but the walls were melting, as were my feet. I shook my head slowly, no. It took me several long seconds to force out the words, “Make me one with everything,” slowly . . . loudly . . . meaningfully. And I am not sure anyone connected my statement with the joke Walter had just told incorrectly, or if my statement existed autonomously, in their minds, from that conversation. “Make me one with everything,” a desperate plea I was suddenly lobbing at them. Jan raised an eyebrow at me, and nodded.

  There was the sound of an elephant honking from the other room. I jumped. Jan and Liz made disgusted faces. “Why do we invite him?” Liz whispered to Jan.

  “He’s a chapter member,” Jan said in a singsong tone, throwing up the hand that was not attached to the wineglass, as if to say she had no power over the situation.

  The sound of the elephant booming had come from Ed. He was an obese math wiz with Coke-bottle glasses who had recently been fired for excessive flatulence from his job in military intelligence.

  “I swear to god, if he eats all of my penguin hors d’oeuvres, I’m going to kill him.” He’d also once been kicked out of an allyou-can-eat buffet for pulling his chair right up to the buffet and eating directly out of the food bins.

  Jan tugged on my shoulder. “Have you seen the penguin olives?” I shook my head no. She led me excitedly out of the den and into the dining room where a statue of Bacchus laughed down at the table, joyfully watching over the impressive spread of cheeses, mini-sandwiches, and fruit. Kali came up beside me and took hold of my arm. Her eyes were wide and she was smiling an oversized smile. She was also sweating. Her mom asked if she was feeling all right. She replied too happily that she was a little nauseous, but it was probably just the medication. (She hadn’t told her mother she’d stopped taking her medication nearly a year ago.)

  Jan ran her finger around the rim of her glass and swayed her hips proudly. “These took me hours to make, but I did it myself. Have you ever seen anything like this?” she asked, holding up an olive that had been cut to resemble a tiny penguin. “I just cut the stomach out and made it the head. It’s stuck on with a toothpick, see. Then I stuffed the stomach with cream cheese. The beak is a carrot, and the little wings are easy to make, just two slits in the sides.” The penguin was flapping its wings and waddling in her hand. It squawked at me. My stomach turned queasy. “Here,” she said, “try it.”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” I told her.

  “Oh, it’s not really a penguin! Don’t be silly!” Then she grabbed the bottom of my chin and literally shoved the penguin hors d’oeuvres in my mouth. “I spent nearly three hours making these,” she told me as she shoved it in. “You have to try it.”

  I closed my mouth and tried to chew while she watched with near reverie, but I could feel the oily flesh of the penguin struggling against my tongue. I heard the miniature penguin s
quealing and squawking in there. It was too much, I opened my mouth and spit it out into my hand, the black-and-white muck of it just lay there, immobile. Jan let out a long disgusted “Ewwwee,” and backed slowly away from me.

  My girlfriend started laughing uncontrollably as I dumped the remains of the dead penguin into the trash can. “Sorry,” I told Jan. But she just shook her head at me and left the room. This wasn’t going well.

  My girlfriend took my arm. “It’s okay. Let’s go sit with them.”

  I protested but she pulled me in. We sat on the couch with Liz, across from Walter and Jerry, my girlfriend’s father, and some others. “So, when are you going to take the test?” Liz asked, patting her on the knee.

  A look of horror struck her face. She looked to me for some answer, pulled her shoulders up and down, and let out a long sigh. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I’m not taking it,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t pass anyway, and I’m fine being an unofficial member of Mensa. You guys are my family, anyway. You’re my best friends.”

  I scanned the room, Ed, Walter, Liz, her father, and two frumpies in the corner playing chess, only taking a swig of their gin and tonic when they lost a piece, and something in my stomach flipped.

  These were her parents’ best friends.

  These were her best friends.

  These were the people who saw her most and never see her at all.

  These people were all at least twenty years older than her.

  These were the only people she wasn’t terrified of.

  Except for me.

  I was her lover.

  I was the only peer she ever interacted with on any intimate level.

  “Nonsense. You would pass! You are so obviously smart. Gee, just becoming a lesbian . . .” she motioned to me and winked. “To hell with men. That’s just smart,” Liz said.

  “That is smart,” one of the frumpy hippie-dippies told her.

  “I wish I had thought of it, don’t you, Jan?” Liz asked Kali’s mother, who’d come to stand in the doorway. Jan took a big gulp of wine and nodded with a passive-aggressive, not really, but really kinda homophobic, “liberal” clench-toothed smile.