He keeps coming back to how cheap this bathroom feels. This town sprung up out of nowhere and they built these shitty apartments out of bullshit but it’s weird how even though he feels numb about pretty much everything else in his life he can’t quite get accustomed to his shitty apartment. The material of the tub against his bony ass feels like you could get up and punch through it. Brittle plastic, brittle bones.
James smokes weed specifically so he can think about his ass against his bathtub and not about the fact that his girlfriend Nicole left an hour ago, stormed out in an angry huff. He’s in the bathtub because on some level he knew that if he hadn’t given himself a project, immediately, he would have followed her out of the apartment, out into the parking lot, and made amends. Apologized, patched things up. But she’s right to be mad: there is something wrong with him. He has no idea what the fuck it is, but he does need to figure it out if he’s ever going to have a normal human relationship. So he was like, Well, I’ll hotbox my bathroom and think about it. He’s working on it. He gave himself a job.
He left his phone on the bed, went into the bathroom, and blocked the crack at the bottom of the door with a towel, an old habit from getting high at his mom’s house when he was fourteen that he didn’t even realize he didn’t need to do any more. He made sure he hadn’t at some point accidentally put the batteries back into the smoke detector, ran a bath, and blazed the shit out of ten or twenty dollars worth of weed. He even used the bong, not one of the pipes. Smoked the buds, no shake. The plan was to smoke until there was no air left in the bathroom. To smoke until he could see through time. To smoke until he figured his shit out.
And he is figuring his shit out. Everybody knows that smoking weed is hardly the path to self-knowledge or anything. It’s probably the path away from self-knowledge, unless self-knowledge is, like, thinking about establishing shots in Stanley Kubrick movies. It is not. But this shit is seriously better for figuring out his shit than sitting on the couch with Nicole, again, watching some dumb movie she wants to watch because all the movies James likes are ‘creepy’ or ‘gross’ or ‘impenetrable’ or whatever.
He should’ve brought his iPod speakers in here or something. Even with smoke instead of air in here it feels shitty to think about this stuff. Fuck feelings.
3.
Eventually you have to come out of the bathroom. Eventually the water goes cold again and he’s already topped it off with hot water twice. Hot water is included in the rent so there’s no reason not to just keep doing this until he falls asleep or dies, but also James is legitimately bored and stewing and he imagines getting out of the tub, stoked to open the door, hurry out of the bathroom, and watch all the smoke billow out of the bathroom like the van in Fast Times At Ridgemont High or a Cheech and Chong movie. He sits in the tub while it drains though. Now he’s legitimately cold. He gets up, wraps a worn-out towel around himself, throws the door open, and rushes out.
The smoke pouring out of the bathroom is a disappointment. There’s smoke, and it sort of rolls out of the bathroom, but it’s not that thick and it doesn’t really seem to be in a hurry. It’s like when you’re smoking and you imagine you’re in a rap video and all this thick smoke is seeping out of your mouth all slow, but then you see yourself in the mirror and you just have a stupid expression on your face and look like an idiot who can’t even fucking smoke right. That kind of smoke. That kind of feeling. Suddenly the subject has changed from this shitty town and its mountain to this scrawny naked boy in this shitty little apartment with overhead lights glaring down and a towel around his shoulders.
Time is coming in gasps a little, which is cool, but it’s a harsh differential, coming out of the humid and smoky bathroom into the cold dry room with the clear air. Like, his lungs feel relieved and stuff but it feels kind of bad in his brain, in his eyes.
James probably hates his apartment. Like the bathtub was a warm safe womb and now he’s suddenly in this horrific bright world. He doesn’t scream like a baby taking its first breath, though. He mopes around like the teenager he was until three months ago. The plates next to his computer with pizza bones and toast crumbs on them are depressing. So are the high white walls with nothing on them and the blue futon with the navy blue sheets tangled in a corner. He doesn’t make the bed. He rarely even really untangles the sheets before sleeping in them. He lives in a one-room apartment where the kitchen corner is so small that you can’t even fit a plate in the sink to leave it there to soak. He doesn’t even have a lamp. The whole thing is lit like a cubicle, just the stupid overhead light with the fancy eco lightbulb that was here when he moved in.
James has never actually seen a cubicle except in movies.
He pulls a pair of boxers from the dresser he’s had since he was a little kid, this blocky wooden thing that he moved out of his mom’s house when he graduated high school and moved into his own place. It looks awkward against the wall in the corner. There are all these burn marks where he’s set down pipes or let joints burn out on it. After the first couple times he burned it he decided, Fuck it, part of my childhood or not this piece of furniture is not going to have any real resale value, and if I start thinking about sentimental value I’m just going to lose my shit about everything everywhere anyway so I might as well just not give a fuck and keep burning it. So any more, like, he will just put a joint on it without an ashtray or anything. What’s one more burn mark. It’s not like this giant block of wood is going to catch on fire.
He thinks about brushing his hair. He thinks about Marsha Brady, Rachel from friends, Zooey Deschanel, but he doesn’t even know where the brush is and he probably didn’t even wash his hair.
Dave Grohl. Robert Plant.
He doesn’t need to put on any more clothes. It’s late and it’s warm enough not to need a shirt. He catches a glimpse of himself in the smallish mirror on the wall and tries to imagine that he has abs instead of a Shaggy from Scooby-Doo scrawny fucking stoner non-abdomen, but it doesn’t work. He has no idea what he looks like.
If he goes to sleep now with wet hair he’ll wake up with a snake’s nest of curly fucked up tangles and weird waves. Plus it’s not even midnight yet. It doesn’t matter that he has to work at eight in the morning, he can never get to sleep before one or two, so he sits down at the computer. He pushes aside the box from the pizza he ate with Nicole tonight and sits in the computer chair, another hand-me-down from his mom’s house. It’s a round-backed nice wooden thing that clearly looks like it should be at a respectable kitchen table, all scrollwork or whatever, and it looks pretty out of place in this shitty bachelor apartment that’s laid out so spartanly for a computer, movies, and sleeping.
He wakes up his computer and types in his password. As if this shitty night was ever going to end any other way.
4.
Nicole is aware that her boyfriend is kind of strange. Not even strange exactly, but distant, or not all the way present, or something. Obviously part of that is how much weed he smokes. James has a literal subscription to High Times. But it seems like it goes deeper than that, like it’s just who he is even underneath the dazed stoner facade.
He’s always been a space cadet like that, even when they were little. Nicole has been with James for a long time now, but they certainly did not have a childhood lifelong love affair. She had crushes when she was little, signs that she’d grow up to be the sex maniac she’s grown up to be, but never, ever one on little James Hanson. He was the weird, dirty kid playing by himself at the edge of the playground while the other kids played sports and house. The joke about James in third grade was that he ate his own boogers. The joke in fifth grade—kind of weird, in retrospect—was that he slept in a bed made out of his own boogers.
She didn’t ask him out because he’d changed. He’s still exactly the same little kid he always was, drinking by himself at a party, inspiring rumors that he’s gay. Nicole started dating him because she changed. When she was fourteen or fifteen she bought a copy of Bitch magazine at Thanks Books
at the base of the mountain on the east side and it was all downhill: classic feminist awakening stuff. Dots started connecting. The righteous fury about having to wear a dress to church when she was little and not being allowed to climb trees with the boys came back with the fury of a thousand suns. Turned out she was right to be mad about the way every grown man in town looked at her starting when she was twelve.
She was the sixteen-year-old talking about Andrea Dworkin at the lunch table. Suddenly it made sense to fantasize about making out with Jason Sanger, the floppy-haired second-string kicker on the football team, and then knocking him over instead of marrying him. Basically she could see through misogynist rape culture and didn’t want anything to do with it. She tried to be a lesbian, but it didn’t work. She would try to think about Kathleen Hanna or Princess Leia or Scarlett Johanson when she jacked off but no luck. At the last second they’d turn into Jason Sanger and his arms, his legs, his smirk and his tiny little butt.
It was a major dilemma until one day, at the lunch table, humorless feminist nonfiction tome on the table in front of her, she noticed James for the first time. Like, noticed noticed. Hair to his shoulders, probably too skinny, almost pretty but carrying himself like a boy, sitting at a table with Mark Richardson, probably talking about weed. James smiled about something. His mouth was probably too big for his head, and this feeling just hit her: That is the kind of boy I need to date. Taller than me but skinny, a boy but not a man, a space cadet instead of an athlete. Somebody who’d listen to her and not try to shut her up.
Those were pretty big assumptions, but Nicole is really smart and she was totally right. She asked him out two days later. She made him a mix tape. Not even on a CD, either, a proper mix tape she made on a boom box. She collaged together a cover and was super intentional about not really including love songs or anything, just the kinds of music that she imagined a cute stoner would like. Long songs, songs where the guitars sound weird, stuff with guitar solos. Suave as hell! But he agreed, even though he looked terrified at first. Nicole has a car so they went to the truckstop out on route 80.
He was checked out from the start, pretty much. He just seemed bewildered, although he did ask to listen to the tape she made him while they were driving. But he didn’t try to kiss her or anything, which kind of made her want him to. She knew that was kind of gross but it’s how she ended up in his lap in the passenger seat of her own car at eleven PM, November 3rd, two years ago, in the dark far corner of the truckstop parking lot. She’s pretty small but it was still pretty uncomfortable and she managed to stop herself from asking him to go fuck her somewhere. Sex-positive feminist or not, she was a seventeen-year-old virgin and not interested in fucking someone before she even knew his middle name. So they made out for a long time but she kept her tights on and then she dropped him off at his parents’ house and they’ve been dating ever since.
And he’s weird. She knows that. Mostly he just likes to watch movies and smoke weed. She smokes with him sometimes, but she’s not as into it as him. She took mushrooms once. Whatever. He likes to smoke. He smokes enough that you can’t really tell he’s stoned when he’s stoned. He just acts normal. Of course, maybe he’s just always high and nobody knows what normal for James Hanson even looks like. So: he smokes and they watch movies, eat food, go to work—he works at Wal-Mart too—and do whatever else it is that weirdo teenagers who just turned twenty do. Once they spent a weekend in Reno.
Sometimes, like tonight, they fight. Sometimes she just want to burn his face down because of how checked out he is, and it makes her want to push him, force him to make a decision. Any decision. Like, she knows that he has really strong opinions about movies, but not because he’d ever tell her about them. Mostly she knows because sometimes he writes about them on his blog. But just now he wouldn’t do it, he was like, Let’s watch a movie, but then he refused to even vote on anything. So she was like, fine. To be an asshole she was like, Let’s watch that movie Drew Carey made a couple years ago. He didn’t even say anything to that, so they ended up watching Drew Carey’s stupid movie. It was like a contest of wills they were having without acknowledging it. Who would get so mad that this movie was so dumb that they would turn it off and pick something good? She was like, It’s not going to be me, but with his Zen ability to disappear, it wasn’t going to be him. How can you be so disinterested but so willful at the same time? Weird shit, James.
Plus the movie wasn’t even that bad. Nicole’s bar for awful is pretty low: no sexual assault and no overt sexism, but it doesn’t even need to pass the Bechdel test. But most movies still can’t even manage that. Somebody always has to make a fat joke or laugh at a girl who isn’t conventionally attractive. But that stuff didn’t even happen! Much. By the end of the movie she was like, Well shit, I guess I don’t even hate Drew Carey. And if she’s going to be honest, she was even more pissed at James than she was before they started watching it. He managed to stay awake, at least, but at the end of the movie she all but blurted, like, What the fuck, dude, now what are we going to do?
She knows she was being a brat, but after sitting there stewing for an hour and forty minutes, she couldn’t just let it go. She wanted to have sex and to have that sex make her feel better, and make him feel better, and bring them closer together, and reset stuff, the way sex is supposed to do. Whatever. She knew it was dumb but she took her jeans off and climbed on his lap. He got mad and pushed her off, so she pulled them on and left without saying anything. Waited for him to say something while she rounded up her flannel, her purse, her keys, the half-empty two-liter of Coke. Drawing out her silent exit as long as she could. Stupid. Whatever. It’s fine, they fight about stuff sometimes. It’s better to let it out, right? She’d rather fight about it than seethe forever. So she came home and he hadn’t called. She’s definitely not going to call him tonight. Fuck him. She’ll hear from him by the weekend and they’ll make up. Meanwhile she’s going to work on this zine she’s been hacking away at for literally like a year. You’re not supposed to take home stripped magazines from Wal-Mart, but she sneaks out a huge stack of them almost every week. She collages the shit out of them. It wasn’t even supposed to be a very long zine, but it keeps getting longer and longer and longer because she keeps having more and more and more to add to it. It’s going to end up being like sixty-four pages.
5.
It’s not like James is proud of the porn that he looks at, but what are you supposed to do? Will yourself not to be a pervert? He’s tried. He’s still trying. He tries most nights.
The only light in the room right now is the light of the computer monitor, the blue and black light of the naked bodies on the screen. He knows how this is going to end, though. He’s going to try to watch men fuck women for about half an hour, get depressed, not be able to even get hard, and then look at blogs of pictures of women with captions that turn the pictures into weird and absurd erotic transvestite scenarios.
There are basically four scenarios.
One blog is devoted entirely to quote unquote Scientific Transformations, so like, it will be a picture of a pretty girl in a space station with a caption that reads, Professor MacMillan stepped out of the body regenerator and his assistant smirked at the error. Or whatever. Like the premise is always nanorobots, or body switching machines, or like, who even knows? Gender-change rayguns. There are just all these pictures of women with captions explaining that they used to be men. It’s stupid that these are supposed to be, like, scientific, because obviously science that can turn you into Pamela Anderson isn’t science anyone is working on. There are archives of these things that go way back into the history of the Internet but that shit is not science, it is fucking magic.
Then there are ones that are explicitly devoted to magic. Like, there will be a picture of a pretty girl in a forest and a caption reading, The evil ice sorceress had turned Brave Samson into a demure maiden. In the erotic minds of the people who make this creeper porn, magic and science are the same thing and mostly wha
t they do is turn men into conventionally attractive women.
There are also angry girlfriend captions. These are the ones where girlfriends make their boyfriends into women for some reason. These ones at least take place kind of in the real world, but it’s not like putting lipstick and a dress on the average clueless stoner boyfriend will make him look like the beautiful women who are inevitably pictured.
Stupid.
There are also hardcore ones that barely even have captions, like a picture of a pretty girl sucking some dude’s dick and it says, like, Suck it, boy, or whatever. You can’t help but wonder who makes these, who is sitting at their computer finding still pictures of blowjobs to write stilted half-sentences on, in order to enable legions of perverts to come all over their computer keyboards? This is a dangerous path of thinking to go down, though, because who the fuck even looks at any of this stuff? It is all so weird and stupid. And at the same time, once you have a boner from looking at this ridiculous shit, suddenly it doesn’t seem weird as much as it seems magic. Potent. Fascinating. Magical! Scientific! It’s like, this is no longer a dumb picture from a fashion magazine or a porn shoot or a Halloween costume advertisement, subtitled with a stupid scenario. Suddenly this shit is functioning in your reptile brain the way that pussy is supposed to function.
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