Of Mermaids & Malignancy

It has been a hopeless week I am climbing out of. I am still dripping wet with panic, but I am beginning to see a little bit of what people like to call the light at the end of the tunnel.

I am trying very hard to be an optimist, even though this tunnel is fucking never-ending. For over two decades I have been scratching at the surface. Like trying to dig out an escape route from prison using a miniature teaspoon. I don’t understand how people can tell me I have a pessimistic outlook on life when after so many years of disappointment and humiliation I am still here, fighting on, wasting ammunition on a battle where the outcome is never clear.

I am probably the most fucking optimistic person you have ever met.

The first sign to quit, after all, came pressing rather early, in kindergarten. But tumors get removed, and you limp on and re-learn your walk. The first time I understood that this might not be the world for me, it was when I was five or six and I realized, at last, that mermaids, unicorns and centaurs don’t really exist.

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to bring them back to life.
Maybe if we lump together enough tumors cut out from elastic flesh, we could make a mermaid.

They just wont leave you alone in this place. They will mark you with ballpoint pens, ripe for the cutting.

It may sound rotten, but when I was ten, I wasn’t concerned with the future, simply because I assumed the world would crumble to bits by then.

I am quite surprised, frankly, that we are all still here.

I wish we could talk, even though old lovers are of no use to me. What could you possibly say when you understand absolutely nothing?

I am trying to piece things back into form. Trying to heal this sickness, to scrub everything clean. I have even seriously considered quitting smoking. I like entertaining that idea, until the thoughts of my dwindling funds and nauseating duties to society pull me back to my usual pack-a-day habit. I have quit buying smokes, though. My room once more smells like it did in middle school, before I picked up the charming habit.

I wish it was still possible to build a tent from blankets and pillows to hide in. To build a fortress in my bed. It's funny how as beds get bigger, the options become smaller and smaller.

The morning news warns of an upcoming Big Bad, as a result of naughty play in Gaza. I almost can’t wait for the next war, Summer Session 2007. Carnage and carnations. Husky Eyes will be visiting soon. He may not be the most reasonable man, to come here, true, but if there is to be a war, I find nothing more fitting than for us to be sleeping together like we did during the last war.

Sex and war...It’s a little bit like asphyxiation and orgasms. When men feel that close to their final demise, to THE END, they come like they know this is their last chance, their greatest exit. Like they have to somehow push and live on through a wheezing, coughing climax, going into premature rigor mortis, cock-first.

Sex and war, liebe und anarchie. Kisses and katyushas, missiles and moans. That was summer, and I wasn’t even in the war zone for the better part of it all.

But even at a safe distance, it made me live intensely.

Now, in a time of national post-war coma and relative quiet(we are still at the gates of hell, its on every map) I am sporting a mysterious 38 fever that comes and goes, a guilt complex the size of the Vatican, and a long list of casualties.

No mermaids here.


It’s all a matter of trades and barters. Paralysis for action, panic for temporary love, silence for laughter because you’ve got naught better to do.

Oh My God, It's a Greek Tragedy!

Something green and blue is glittering at me from the sidewalk. I kneel down in order to peer, half in love with it already, only to discover to my horror that the regal glow belongs to a dead bird, one of those painfully beautiful ones with the metallic feathers.

When I was little I used to see them swoop by flowers, maybe they were getting their nectar jones out then, I don’t know. I used to have this craving to sneak up on them in order to see them from close up, but they being birds, were smart enough to flee before I ever had the chance.

Now, here was my big day. The poor thing was fucking glued straight to the pavement, as if it had tried to smash directly through it. The metallic green and blue feathers and sleek black beak were laced with little droplets of blood, and I was reminded of my nail polish bottles.

The bugs hadn’t yet gotten to the now-expired specimen, clearly. Must have not been dead for long. I looked and looked until finally I sighed loudly, stating mainly to myself that this was a sad, sad day.

No one gives a shit about a dead pigeon, but this...This was the goddamn pageant queen of birds, not that I knew it by name.

Beautiful things have no staying power.

For some reason this makes me think of The Clarinet Player and the sad, beautiful music he makes. Such hard work it makes his teeth shift in their place, he says. He has the most beautiful hands I have ever seen on a man, with crescent shaped white parts and everything. Smooth, without a ridge. Some women would be quite envious.

The saddest thing is I know we will never work out.

All signs point to yes, but my intuition is screaming no.

Our first big night out, I convince him to skip out on picking up his elderly father from the airport. "Come spend the night with me instead," I say. "Let him take a cab."

I sometimes don’t know if I say things because I really want them to happen, or I am simply checking just how far certain individuals are willing to go for me.

Wait, that’s not entirely true in this case. I want to go home with him. Not to any particular home, really, it’s more of a conceptual thing. I want to fuck like crazy. With him, yes. I don’t know if I could ever explain it, but with some people I just feel this insane, almost animal chemical compatibility, like all my systems are sounding off, MATE IMMEDIATELY. It all boils down to our immune systems and genetic baggage and what his genes have to offer mine, I know, but it’s in the goddamn air.

I convince him quite easily, obviously.
4 AM and in the arrivals terminal at Ben Gurion, a stranger landing from Budapest has to hitch a taxi home because I am holding his son captive.

A few nights afterwards, I sweep him home to my place. I was out earlier, with Little T., who handed me a see-through rock. We were doing lines in public bathrooms and plowing the city with jittery teeth.

He is so sweet, so simple, so pure. Much like the rock I slid into my Cover Girl compact. I don’t use foundation or powders, so it only seemed natural to dump out the original contents of the package and turn it into an easy, breezy parcel for the occasional lump, bud, rock, stamp, powder or pill. Inside I glued a picture from Coney Island, circa 1949. Post-war optimism. The New Look. Coiffed hairdos. A group of people is on an amusement ride of some kind. The women are throwing their hands upwards in exhilaration. Whee! What a fitting image for all that this compact has been through. On the other side, there is the mirror that came with it, adhered to the interior. $2.89 at Rite-Aid, somewhere in Maryland. Cheap thrills.

I am driving in a progressive state of lockjaw. I pick him up even though I suppose I shouldn’t even be driving. We are seated on my bed, and I dig out the compact from my purse.

No one ever says, hey baby, I’m bored and you seem sweet, wanna get lost?

Instead I crush the rock with my Wells Fargo card and offer him a neat line. It’s a little bit like in elementary school, where there are those kids who will go along with nearly anything you pitch them. It’s how we convinced Arthur to accompany us through the woods to the Hook Graveyard in fifth grade, even though he was an only child and was to be grounded for life.

It's how Nash and I always played hooky in summer camp and pocketed silver nail polish and went to smoke in the woods, and Molly was the tag-along. Elaborate plans require scapegoats. People will do almost anything to be accepted. I feel kinda bad thinking all of this about him, but no one makes choices for you. It all boils down to what kind of person you are.

He is nervous and excited, in this adorable way.

What’s it like? He asks. I mean, what does it do to you?

Not a fucking thing, it's what you do to you.

I give a quick presentation on the difference between uppers and downers. In case anything screws up too badly, I am armed with Diazepam, to knock us out for a bit. I shouldn’t be here doing lines with the classical clarinet player, I should be trying to land a new job. I am too smart to wait tables, indicates common Ashkenazi logic. I shouldn’t be out corrupting innocents, I should get my ass back to University and hurry the bloody fuck up with getting a real degree.

I shouldn’t be here with someone who I can already tell is pretty much infatuated with me, when I can’t feel anything for them. I am haunted by thoughts that have nothing to do with me. I am thinking of a difference in class, in upbringing, in our histories. How different we are, how I was raised by bigots and elitists to believe that I am much better than he is. How different we are, and yet here we are doing the exact same thing.

It’s my fault, I know.
We stay up for two days, talking. We only leave the bed for the occasional trip to the washroom, to splash our faces with water, or to the kitchen, to bring some tea. A big pot of tea reminds me of Husky Eyes and Berlin and talking to Claudi until I fell asleep.

He can’t stop talking; he is on the upper wave. He weaves his entire family history spanning four generations back, and this is the most fascinating stuff I’ve ever heard. World Wars, the Holocaust, gypsies, affairs, alcoholism, deception and trickery, insanity and uprooting. It’s like an Amir Kostariza movie, and I tell him I think he should write it all down.

It saddens me to think that he comes from all this. But the most interesting stories are usually the painful ones. Eventually we are coming down, and we fuck. It’s the first time I drag him past the hurdle that always seemed to exist there, Shiri. He emerges with his back marked almost entirely by my nails, little pink half-moons turning dark red as the minutes drag on. I had clawed at him. When it was all over, he was panting so hard it sounded almost like muffled weeping.

Afterwards, he finally crumpled into sleep, but my body was still reeling from the lines. Try as I did I couldn’t fall asleep. My hear rate was shot. I could hear the pulsating beats inside my head, right above my eyes. I tossed and turned and tried to find things to think about in order to avoid thinking of other things.

I am thinking of how Husky Eyes bought a ticket to Israel and how he will be here in a month. I’m thinking of what misconceptions he probably has regarding me and what went on between us. I am thinking of the clarinet player sleeping next to me, in love and unaware. I am thinking of how my grandmother is in the hospital and the doctors can’t seem to pinpoint what’s wrong. I am thinking of how I don’t have cash for gas or parking at the hospital, and how she must feel like she is rotting away and no one gives a shit. No one is coming to visit, and I am a shitty grandchild. I am thinking of how I just got fired, so any thought of leaving my second job at Café Hell is now moot. The things we do for money.

I am also thinking of R. and how I pretty much disappeared on him. Not that I owe him any explanations, really. It’s just that he was so kind to me and withstood a massive amount of unnecessary bullshit on my part. And more than that, worst than that, I miss him, even if only in the most physical of ways.

I never know what I want. And I didn’t know that there was so much to take that I didn’t, until I tried to take the same things from The Clarinet Player, only to encounter a naïve wall of resistance.

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.