* * *
The Many Dangers of Food Poisoning does me absolutely no good. I don’t know why I bother. Books never answer those questions burning inside of my mind. Sometimes they come close, but they never give me what I need. Maybe I only go to the library because it feels good to anticipate things. It feels good to think that there is this whole world of untapped potential. Or maybe I go because I like the quiet and the smell. I don’t know, I guess I just like the idea of a library, a house of knowledge, and for a long time my stupid head bought in. Over and over, I keep forgetting that books aren’t written by some grandiose, omniscient think tank, they’re written by people. Yet, over and over, I find myself hunting down truth and promise. Searching and searching, I get excited, list upon list of fantastic titles and interesting subject matters, but more often than not, after investing time in some book or another, I come away dissatisfied, disappointed, struggling with more questions than I had before I started. I should stick with fiction. I have no expectations when it comes to reading fiction. People are good at lying. It’s truth that presents problems.
When I was a kid my dad used to go to the library every week. He loved books on war and fighter planes and other assorted manmade evils. It was his escape from my mom and work and me. One day, out of the blue, my mom thought it would be a good bonding experience for him to take me along. After a bit of coercing he forced a smile and agreed, but even as an idiot eight-year-old I could tell that I wasn’t wanted.
First thing, my dad ditched me at the entrance, trailing, “Be good,” behind him as he headed for the nonfiction racks. Wandering, I felt my way about, pulling various titles, looking at their covers and then pushing them back. Eventually, I stumbled upon a copy of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. The cover art intrigued me, so I sat on the floor and began digesting sentences.
I have never liked reading—I still don’t—but before I knew it an hour had passed and I had become absorbed. I couldn’t understand how an outcast, one nicknamed Wart nonetheless, would one day become king as the title had promised. I had to find out. I had to know how somebody who was ridiculed and pitied on a daily basis could turn his life around and become the great King Arthur.
About thirty pages in, my dad came around and grunted that it was time to go. I was so enrapt in the book that the interruption startled me. My hand began buzzing and shaking uncontrollably and I went into an intense seizure.
The next week my dad refused to take me with him. My mom protested and despite the seizure issue, got her way. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have wanted to go, not after the last fiasco, but The Once and Future King had gotten under my skin and I was willing to risk it. This time I was afforded the chance to read almost thirty more pages of White’s book. Again, I was completely enthralled and again, when my dad came to get me, I went into another full-on seizure. This time, subconsciously I suppose, I held on to the book for dear life. When I came to hours later, the book was still clasped firmly in my hands.
My dad declined to take me with him ever again. My mom fought him tooth and nail, but he wouldn’t budge. He said I was too much of a “liability” and when their fighting escalated into an all-out shouting match, he added that I was a “fucking nut job.” I didn’t care. I didn’t even know what liability meant and I thought nut job sounded kind of funny. Besides, I had my book, my hopes and dreams in typeset text, and I didn’t want to go anywhere near the library for fear they would make me return it.
I suppose I still go to the library today because my dad went to the library and it’s in my genetic makeup to do so. Or maybe I go because T.H. White’s words helped me feel like less of a fucking nut job and more like a little boy with dreams.
Regardless, The Many Dangers of Food Poisoning is a bust. It is the exact opposite of informative. Big surprise. No handy recipes or how-to info—just documented cases, vague details, glimmers, nothing concrete. I had my doubts in the first place. Books that blueprint destructive technique are rarely found in public libraries. There are ways, I suppose: the Internet or mail order or whatever. But I have neither the time, the patience, nor the drive. It looks like I’m on my own with this one. How hard could it be? Sprinkle a little something here or there that doesn’t belong here or there. I’ll manage. I’m stupid, not incapable. Shit, stupid people are extremely adept at destruction. It takes a stupid person to go where a reasoning, logical person wouldn’t.
In case you were wondering, I work as a line cook in a ritzy seafood restaurant.
In case you were wondering, I hate working as a line cook in a ritzy seafood restaurant.
I fucking hate it.
I fucking hate my job.
I know. Chances are you do too, but listen to me.
Slowly now: I really, really, really hate my job.
That’s three reallys, slow and exaggerated and painfully drawn out.
I hate it.
But it’s necessary and I can’t afford to lose it. It’s not like I can pay the bills with my good looks (did I mention I was ugly?).
In a nutshell: I’m stuck (aren’t we all).
No college (go ahead, try and teach me).
No career goals.
No ambition.
But goddamn, without a stable, steady career you’re nothing. No car, no home, no clothes, no real food—just Top Ramen, apartment living, and shopping at Ross Dress for Less every two years when the holes in your jeans get too big to patch.
In a nutshell: I’m stuck (aren’t we all).
Nut job.
I’m hanging in there though. Getting by. Some days feel better than others and I am almost able to forget how worthless I am. I steal what I can. Nothing huge, nothing commandment breaking, just the basics, the things my conscience can justify. It sure makes work a lot more interesting. Puts a little much-needed joy in a place where joy doesn’t exist.
Everyday it’s like a game. Cautious, careful, shifty and nervous, I stuff all I can into my super, deluxe Jansport backpack. One day I’ll work up the nerve and snake a couple pounds of shrimp or some salmon, but for the time being my spice rack is mighty full. The bland shit I eat everyday tastes better for it.
Also, fantasy helps. Thank God for our lovely, image-heavy brains. Thank God, because my life sucks, and fulfillment only comes in wispy, fractured waves of dream patterns.
Sleep, sleep, sleep.
Escape, escape, escape.
All day, all night. Sleeping with my eyes open.
Here, but not really here.
And get this: even if I had gone to college, even if I had a career, even if I had the money and the respect and the power we have all been programmed to crave—even then, American Dream be damned, the majority of my time would be spent in my head, wanting more, dreaming more, fantasizing more. It simply can’t be helped. Our personal dreams, tainted and twisted by the collective, shaped by television and film and print, molded, plastic wrapped and homogenized, have become demons. They’ve become hungry, insatiable, material monsters. The ego reigns supreme. Vanity is our new religion.
I’m not proud but here I am.
I’m not proud, but I spend an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about money and respect and power.
My wish list is much too long, but here is a taste:
Symmetry.
Harmony.
Security.
Vitality.
Charisma.
Control (revenge, rule, regulate, shape).
In summary, I believe Thom Yorke said it the best when he warbled the line: “When I am king, you will be first against the wall.”
Indeed.
So naturally, along with the money and the power and the respect, I fantasize about bringing my workplace down.
Destructive fantasy, that’s what The Many Dangers of Food Poisoning is all about. But The Many Dangers of Food Poisoning does nothing for me and I’m starting to think I should focus this frustrated need to act out upon the library. Maybe check out an uninformative, useless book on explosives
and dream up ways to incinerate condescending Bidge and her library’s exhaustive collection of wasted paper.
But then again, how hard could it be to sprinkle a little something here or there that doesn’t belong here or there?
I don’t really need a book to work this one out. No, this is very easy and very doable and once I get a plan hammered down it’s as good as done. My prick boss deserves as much. I don’t hate him. I don’t think he hates me. But, then again, I could be wrong. Regardless, he still deserves it. He is soooo deserving that each and every moral issue raised by my decision to destroy him instantly, painlessly, becomes a nonissue.
Chapter Two
Purgatory
Sometimes I have to watch television.
Sometimes I can get nauseous just watching television.
Take now for instance. Allen Michael makes me fucking sick. Just look at him. Look at that walk. Look at that shit-eating grin. Look at that confidence. Look at that white suit (who has the audacity to wear a white suit?).
To the uninitiated (if you live in America, there is no escaping him), Allen Michael is a television personality. He is a slick, suave, good-looking, distinguished (he is easily in his late fifties—he barely looks thirty-five) and relatively well-respected celebrity. His show is entitled Contact and like him, it makes me fucking sick. Forgive the redundancy, I realize that he and his show are synonymous and stating that one or the other makes me fucking sick should suffice, but I hate him and his show so very much that I feel the need to say it yet a third time: they make me fucking sick.
Contact is one of those shows that feed upon people’s insecurities. If you haven’t seen it, I am sure you have seen something like it. The format goes like this: said psychic stumbles about the audience pretending to pick up on vibes. What he is really doing is just listening closely, looking for lost lambs. When he finds a suitable rube, he proceeds to use bits of telltale information and make like he is contacting one of the lamb’s departed loved ones. Tears, laughter, and bullshit ensue.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t care about Allen Michael or his show enough to let them sicken me. In all fairness, some people actually get something out of it. Closure isn’t a bad thing. If it works and you are able to fool yourself into believing, I guess it doesn’t really matter how it’s obtained. And to his credit, the man with two first names is very astute when it comes to reading people. It’s a good quality. Someone like me, who can barely talk to people, let alone read them, would even call it a gift.
What sickens me about Allen Michael is that I know he is 100% full of crap. I know he isn’t really contacting the dead. He is just using his gift, his penchant for detail, to exploit pain and wring profits from people’s memories and longings. There are others like him and they are probably full of it as well, but I have no way of knowing. I can’t prove that they are con artists, and I have to take them for what they are. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them can really communicate with the dead. Stranger things have been known to happen. But not Allen Michael. He is the epitome of insincerity. I know this for a fact because his dead wife, Alice Michael, tells me so.
Say what?
Okay, a little backstory: Allen Michael and his dead wife Alice Michael married some thirty-six years ago at the respective ages of eighteen and seventeen. For a number of years they had a near storybook romance, excepting that they were both broke. Allen didn’t work. Alice waited tables. This was okay, as they were young and still trying to figure out what they wanted from life. They had each other and for the time being that was enough. The future would work itself out eventually. It always did.
One night at the end of her shift Alice suddenly dropped to the floor, had a violent, bone-breaking seizure, and died from severe head trauma. She was young, healthy and her untimely death, the cause of that extreme seizure, remains a mystery to this day. Needless to say Allen was heartbroken. He spent the next twenty years lost, drunk and homeless.
By the time Allen had officially hit rock bottom, he was ready to give in. He stopped eating and drinking all together, found an out-of-the-way gutter, lay down in it and awaited death’s blessing. Rumor has it that while at death’s door his dearly departed wife visited him, pulled him from the brink, breathed new life into his lungs and whispered something magical in his ear. The rest is history. Through his wife, Allen Michael supposedly gained the uncanny ability to speak to the dead. Empowered by his potential and spurred on by his dead wife’s urging, he cleaned himself up, impressed the right people and got himself a television show. For eight years now Allen and Alice Michael have been in the business of putting the living in touch with the dead.
Sweet, huh?
Yeah great, except it’s complete bullshit. How do I know? This gets a little weird, but stay with me, it is the absolute truth. Alice Michael seized and bit the dust on my birthday. She passed at the very moment I was being born. I don’t know how or why—through some rift in time and space or by the power of some ancient magic—but every year, on my birthday, she visits my dreams. Thirty-three separate occasions and always the same thing: she whispers in my ear and tells me about lies, how the whole world, including her snake husband, lies. She tells me not to trust anyone and that someday I will have the chance to make all of them pay. She tells me it’s okay to hate, it’s healthy to hate and that I don’t have to feel guilty or ashamed because she hates everybody as much as I do. She tells me to watch her husband’s show and to center my hate on him, to project it, to wish him and everyone who watches him and everyone who knows someone that watches him dead. She floats in my head and tells me I am okay, it’s everybody else who is fucked up.
Back in TV land, Allen paces back and forth, mugging for the camera. His dishonest, symmetrical, adored face fills the entire screen at the end of every episode as he mouths the words I love you to the dead wife he supposedly talks to. America eats it up. Contact consistently breaks the top ten. I never miss an episode; not even the nausea swishing around in my stomach can stop me from watching.
At show’s end, as the credits begin to roll over, there is a slow fade as Allen’s smug face gives way to an old photograph of Allen and Alice, young, toothy smiles, just married, holding hands on a beach, as happy as two people can possibly be.
“She fucking hates you,” I seethe under my breath as I click off the television.
* * *
Last night I had this dream and it’s really weird because here I am in Albertson’s debating the caustic effects of cleansers and detergents and disinfectants when suddenly it seems as though the dream is coming true.
Sleeping with my eyes open.
Here but not really here.
Out of the corner of my eye I see the red-haired girl from the library, but by the time I turn she’s gone, a ruby flash disappearing around the end cap of the aisle.
In my dream things were a bit more distorted, for instance instead of a ruby flash, the girl departed in a lingering cloudburst of red wisps that suddenly, inexplicably, filled the entire grocery store. Still, dramatic flair aside, this is some eerie stuff. I mean, smoke or no smoke, here I am and just like in the dream, there she goes.
Anyway, in the dream panic hit me full-force. My primary fear: arousal. Luckily, my genitals behaved their greasy little selves and my thoughts kept their composure.
Here in the real world it’s the same and relief floods. The arousal thing at the library must have been a fluke, a palm-induced reaction, and I’m glad for it. A small pressure knot at the base of my brain eases up. Ever since yesterday’s erection, nothing but worry, worry, worry.
Anyway, in the dream Nancy Drew mode kicked in:
(Who is this girl and why is she following me?)
[How does she know my name?]
{Is she following me?}
(Will she get me going again?)
[Do I want her to?]
{Of course you don’t!!!}
I dashed through the crimson smoke and caught sight of her just as she was exiting through the
automatic doors, out into the parking lot. Bounding outside, I was shocked to find that the grocery store and its asphalt surroundings were no longer there.
Ditto for the girl.
Ditto for the world.
Awe and an odd sinking feeling twisted my heart as I surveyed the scene: gray and black, smoke or clouds or fog or smog and most disturbingly headstone after headstone. Every shape, size, material and color imaginable. Steeple crosses, rough, stone squares, alabaster smooth, marbleized, modest, metal rectangles screwed into the earth, armor plating the world, on and on and on, in the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit, world without end, amen.
A cemetery—no, a necropolis, but not like any cemetery or necropolis I’ve ever seen. This one stretched out into infinity.
Massive, gargantuan, dizzying—my dream eyes rolled back into my dream head, paralyzed with wonder.
Here, in the real world, Nancy Drew mode goes into arrest. I’m not so quick and I don’t think I want to go chasing down my nightmares. I don’t think. I don’t think, but after a moment’s hesitation I do think and the thought reads: How can I pass this up?
Sleeping with my eyes open.
Here but not really here.
Around the corner and it still feels like the dream minus the smoke. I feel like I’m floating, dream walking, but after a second I notice the checkers and shoppers and their frowning faces. I don’t think they were present in the dream, but I can’t really remember. Either way, they destroy my sense of illusion and I feel stupid and grounded and ready to give up, ready to return to the cleansers when, revitalized, I see the red-haired girl half-jogging into the parking lot. Speeding up, ignoring Albertson’s asshole population, I go after her.
Just before I step through the automatic doors I hold my breath.
I stare hard, harder, hardest, at the sun-baked, material-littered, peopled-peopled-peopled world beyond the glass doors and for a split second I hope. I hope hard, harder, hardest, that my nightmare comes true, fully, in its entirety, and when I step out, I will step out into a world of nothing, a world dissolute, dissolved, decayed, broken down into its purest organic bits. I close my eyes and pray for a world of markers and reminders, a world where life isn’t lived but remembered. Imagine living in an everlasting memory, sweet and augmented, filtered, free of all toxins and impurities. Imagine life streamlined like a dream retained, free of all baseness, cold, smooth, lifeless and always, always, better than it ever was.
I Will Rise Page 2
