Breaking Point

It is a Tuesday and my knees are at breaking point. This is the most desperate I have ever felt, I think. Every time I feel the stinging pleas of my body to quit, to tell these poor, pitiful wankers to go fuck themselves while standing straight, I swallow hard(my pride, my pride) and force myself to think of situations where people had shit lined up much harder than I ever will. Say, the Holocaust.

Think of the showers. When you are about to cry tonight, in your own steamy washroom, rubbing your skin raw with a cloth until you nearly bleed, trying to cleanse yourself of this awful mess, think of the showers. Think of creaking sounds and the echoes of voices about to die. Think of the gas. Think of people stronger than you throwing themselves against the electric fences just to get the hell out of the game.

I would have definitely been one of those. There are just some people, you can tell. D., he is young and resourceful. Not the kind who would toss himself against any fence, electric or otherwise. Me, I am weak. I want to throw myself in front of a moving vehicle. But not really, right? Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here telling you all of this. I wouldn’t be here trying to remedy everything in the first place.


I don’t know what I want. It is a sad truth. Das Uberdog makes me scrub the patio chairs with bleach. Before assigning me this most important of tasks, he hands me a pair of latex gloves. To protect my hands. I don’t know if he is genuinely concerned about my tender digits or if this is just another one of his ways of mocking what he assumes to be my thus-far sheltered and spoiled existence.

Because he saw me wash the floors with rags, bent over like a scarecrow. Of course, as soon as I was done he proceeded to stomp all over the tiles. Black and brown with sooty mud and footprints, a size 43 like. Jurassic fucking Park, you know the kind.

Either way, the gloves he has given me are a few sizes too big and the bleach seeps in and gnaws at my nailbeds.

The look on my face must have said it all. Like I am counting the footprints.
You don’t mind doing it over, do you?
I lie through my teeth, like I do every night in this hologram of hell, even though there isn’t even a need for my lies. I would have to do it anyhow. No choice, no words, no liberty. No more porcelain life, as he calls it.


I don’t know what I want. You already know that.
I am waiting for my shift to end, for this brutal raping of my soul to slow down, and then finally cease. I am going to a show at a nearby club. I feel fifteen all over again. Not the fun parts of fifteen, either.

I invited the other employees at the café to come along, only I am thankful for their polite declines, since I hate them all anyway. I didn’t want them with me so much as I didn’t want to be alone. Cross that, maybe all I ever want to do is to be alone these days. I am going to see Brainville, but first I am going to transcend back in the evolutionary stages of me and go play band-girlfriend for The Clarinet Player. What the fuck, fuck, fuck am I doing.

He meets me outside. In the minutes it takes him to walk towards me I scan the crowd seated outside, disappointed to discover I recognize a long list of faces. He greets me with a kiss and I can feel people staring at me. People like The Solemn Drummer, who is probably fucking sick of seeing me make brief and painful cameos in his social circle, dating around like a vampire preying on his band mates as the years scratch along. I’m perfectly fine with that. I’m equally sick of seeing his oh-tormented-me crushed puppy look. There is the nationality factor kicking in, the fact that I don’t speak this language you have, but I understand enough of the mannerisms to know when an outsider is an outsider.

He says I’m silly because we are all outsiders here, and he is ten-fold the outsider because he is not even really of Russian descent. "Yes," I know, I say, "you’re a hick Hungarian. "

Feuding led to borders we set up in neat and orderly maps, and then wars led to crude redistribution. And people like you and yours were left stranded without clearly outlined roots, left to hang on newly drafted lines and names and treaties. Its okay, I don’t know what I am, either. I just don’t want to hang out here at night with my hands in pockets I don’t have because I am wearing a skirt and feeling quite fucking naked. I don’t care about identity, it is preconceptions I am wrapped around.

Whatever. I collect my guest pass and proceed along with the thirsty herd into the venue. I haven’t been here since...Ah yes, the previous boyfriend and his circus ego show. So you pick up a guitar and you think you can fuck like a god, do you? I suppose that even if you replace the guitar with a clarinet, it is still the same complex hiding underneath the floorboards, when the stage empties.

Whatever. I told you.

I watch the show. I watch people watching me. I watch guys who open their mouths to say things to me but I guess the expression I tend to wear after exiting a shift at the café causes the Pariah alarm to ring off in their heads like a blow to the balls, just in time for reason to kick in. Don’t talk to me. I don’t like anyone. This is a result of having liked everyone for much too long. This expression of lifelessness, with violence at the very core. Much like how something can hurt you long after it is dead. Much like memories of injuries and long lists of allergies and things you happen to hate. This expression, like a whore after a particularly busy day at the brothel.

My lips are burnt. It feels like the time I smoked crack with Narco Polo. near the old Central Station. I am a descendent of the Breslau clan, an Uber-Heeb, the offspring of courthouse heroes and enough MDs to operate a full-scale hospital, but I was spinning off crack in a beat-up car outside the lowest place in all of this wretched city. With a heroin addict. Did I mention that?

Anyway, this is real life, not the rerun. Right now I am in the Zappa, fetching a beer to calm my chapped lips. I suppose I just bit them too hard throughout the day, when I was trying not to disclose to customers just how much I fucking loathe them.

He told me to come to the backstage after the show. To the left of the stage, he said, like I hadn’t been here a million fucking times. I don’t go. In fact, I plant my feet firmly where I’ve been standing the whole time, in order to watch the main event. I don’t know who this supposed super-group is, I’m really far removed from anything relating to Sixties psychodelia, no matter how much acid I’ve shoved down.

I just don’t want to go backstage, to see people and talk and be offered a joint and attention I won't give a shit about.

The super-group takes the stage with British accents and senior citizen looks. A few lines into the second number, I am having the closest I have ever experienced to an acid flashback. Or maybe this is a panic attack.

Someone is giving me gummy worms. I am fifteen. Fifteen! I have yet to meet all the people who will have ruined my life. The love of my life left for a sunny state and I think things will be alright if only he would hurry the fuck up and come back to me already. A heartrate off the charts and an array of pretty colors.

Things change, people change.

The singer is bellowing, Who’s afraid of sex?

Probably not me, judging by the way I’ve been indulging.

Who’s afraid of the dark? Who’s afraid of dogs? Who’s afraid of food? Who’s afraid of looking stupid?

We all look fucking stupid, and I am quite afraid of everything.