I Came Out for This? Read online

  Dee hugged me gratefully when I walked into Terri’s place, as though to say, “I so appreciate you’re being a good sport about all this”. During the gathering Kimba, Linda, and I sat on Terri’s living room floor, and Terri and Dee sat on the couch holding hands. The bitch obviously worked some kind of spell on Dee because she was glowing like one of those frisky, frolicking maidens in a museum painting. After a few minutes, Terri opened her presents—she’s like a little kid with presents; she can’t wait. When she opened my present, she pulled the glass figurine out of the box, looked at me and nodded, and said, “Thank you, Knadel.” When she opened Dee’s present, which was a watch, she looked into Dee’s eyes and kissed her. Kimba and Linda were sitting there the whole evening, looking uncomfortable and feeling sorry for me. I sat there like a statue the whole night except when I got up a couple of times to get pizza and go to the bathroom. I tried to be pleasant and in the spirit of a birthday party, but I drew the line at eating the chocolate cake Dee made with an orange happy face, which was making me sick just to look at it. I politely declined when Dee offered me a slice and Terri looked at me sharply; the woman doesn’t miss a thing.

  Around nine o’clock, Terri started making a big show of carting the dishes to the kitchen. Linda said, “Is this a hint for us to leave?” and Terri said emphatically, “It’s about that time.” She was referring to all of us but Dee, who, when we were leaving, stood at the door next to Terri, kissing everyone goodbye like the lady of the house. I kissed her warmly like the fake that I am and I hugged Terri, who hugged me back stiffly. I walked to the Metro with Kimba, who chattered away about the full moon and something about some of the planets being more visible than in the last million years; one thing about Kimba is that she never asks me if I’m upset. She waits for me to bring it up. But I didn’t want to talk about it. I’m dealing with it on my own. I’m fine. I’m perfectly all right.

  This thing with Dee won’t last long. Terri’s little relationships never last very long. Believe me, she won’t be spending her next birthday with Dee. She’ll be spending it with—well, maybe not me, but with someone else. I don’t give a shit who she spends it with. I don’t care if she ever has a birthday again.

  That’s a terrible thing to say. I didn’t mean it. Well, I did mean it. I feel bad meaning it. I hate hating her. I hate hating anyone. I definitely don’t hate Dee. I just feel like such a jackass, like I missed some kind of opportunity with her, even though I love stupid Terri. I feel like a ninny. Why couldn’t I have called Dee the day after we met for drinks? Terri makes moves and I just sit on my ass and write in this pathetic diary that will probably end just as Tommy and I humorously predicted, with me running naked down Connecticut Avenue, tearing out my hair, and ending up on a loony ward.

  I’m going to stop writing because I have to go to work. It’s Saturday and I need to work because people will be home. I need to stop this moping and kick into my work mode. It’s not as though someone died or anything. Do you hear me, Joanna? Nobody died.

  I just got back from work. It was the worst day of work that I’ve ever had. I couldn’t get anyone to talk to me. The whole time I was out there, I was feeling like a rabbit about to be devoured by a lion—weak and shaky and terrified and doomed. This is ridiculous. I will not allow it to continue. I have always been able to function! Always! No matter what is happening in my life, I work. I write. I talk. I survive. I do not lose control. Even when I was a kid setting fires, I did it with the specific purpose of getting sent away so I could be rescued and also to cultivate an identity as a crazy kid. It’s not in my nature to completely lose control. Dee Williams or no Dee Williams, I need to pull myself together.

  If anyone had seen me today out in the field, they would have thought I was a mental case out practicing her “life skills.” The nightmare started in the Northeast ghetto of Trinidad. I went to a little house with an American flag and a man with a 60s-style Afro came out and I started talking to him in a teeny-weeny little voice, and he said, “I don’t know what you want, Miss, but you ain’t gettin’ any,” and he slammed the door in my face. At the next house a grandmother was standing there with two little kids and I started to squeak something about the study and she said, “I don’t want to get into all that mess,” and shut the door. At the third house a young woman saw me through the screen door and she came over and said “I don’t have time,” and I whimpered that I only needed a few minutes, but she was already walking away. I started to go into a panic and left Trinidad and drove across town to Cleveland Park. The rich people were even meaner than the ghetto people, and I started to lose it. One woman said, “You shouldn’t go knocking on people’s doors,” and I yelled, “That’s the way the study is designed,” and she shut the door on me. I went to another house and a college-aged boy was walking out the door and started to answer questions on his porch, and then he interrupted the interview and looked at me and said, “You should go home and get some sleep.” Then he trotted off down the street, leaving me standing on his porch like an idiot. At that point I should have gone home, but I dragged over to a house with a mezuzah on it and banged on the door until a middle-aged man answered and he looked at me as though I were Hermann Goering and said “Vut do you vant?” and I started to tell him and he said “I’m sorry,” and shut the door, and I banged on it again until he opened it, and I started yelling that he lived in his own little world and he should realize that he was part of a community—I think I said “goddam community,” and that it was no skin off his nose to give me a couple minutes of his time. He said he was going to call the police and shut the door again, and I was too furious to go home, so I drove to a fancy building on Columbia Road that I got kicked out of last week by this desk guard that thinks she’s an army sergeant, and I marched into the ornate lobby and told her that I needed to talk to these people and if she didn’t let me through I would wait outside for them to come home. She said, “I can’t allow that,” but I ignored her and went to my car and hauled a beach chair out of my trunk and parked it in front of the building and sat on it, and I admit I looked foolish sitting in front of this luxury building in my little yellow beach chair, and in ten minutes the police came and I explained my business there and they said too bad, I couldn’t sit out there. I said if it was any building other than “The Fucking Wyoming” they wouldn’t even have bothered to come and they told me if I didn’t leave immediately I would be under arrest and I picked up my beach chair and started to fold it and squeezed my finger in it and said, “Goddam son of a bitch!” and one of the cops said, “Watch your language, Miss” and I muttered, “Fuck you” and left.

  I can’t stand this. I have to do something. I know what I’ll do. Tomorrow I’ll go to Terri’s and try to talk some sense into her. I know that sounds crazy. But I love her. We had such a nice time that night when we had sex in her living room in all those positions and then went to sleep in each other’s arms. Why wouldn’t she want to do it again? Not take Ecstasy again, but just spend some time together, making love and eating and drinking mimosas and cuddling and laughing and talking. I don’t understand why she doesn’t want to do that with me.

  I didn’t eat again today. I know that’s bad.

  (You know it’s bad? Of course it’s bad! You are going to drop over from hunger! Do you want to end up in the hospital?

  —Oh please, mother. Please. I don’t have time for this.

  Never mind you don’t have time for it! What kind of a person goes all day without eating? How much weight have you lost?

  —Twelve pounds.

  Twelve pounds? You are wasting away to nothing. Nothing!)

  I can’t help it. I can’t eat. I keep picturing that chocolate cake with the orange happy face on it and I go to the bathroom and retch into the toilet. It’s already happened three times today.

  Kimba and Bette are sitting here, making me write. They dragged this diary over to the hospital along with my toothbrush and pajamas and dumped it on my lap, telling me it will he
lp keep me sane while I’m here. I’m in the hospital not from not eating, like my mom threatened, but because I crashed the car and I’m lying here all beat up. I can’t believe I did it. I never get into accidents. I’m an excellent driver, just like Raymond in Rain Man. I think I have gone crazy. I’m afraid I’m going to die after I leave here. Kimba said, “Well, we’re all going to die eventually,” and Bette reprimanded her and said, “Don’t worry, honey, we won’t let you die.” But Bette and Kimba can’t be with me every second of the day. They do have to work, after all.

  I can’t believe it was only this morning that the phone woke me and Wanda, my supervisor, was on the other end, telling me there were two complaints called in about me. One was from the Jewish guy and the other from the army sergeant at the Wyoming. Instead of being contrite I said, “Tough shit.” Wanda told me we would discuss it later and hung up the phone. I was too agitated to keep sleeping, so I got up and got dressed and walked over to Terri’s. She was expressionless when she saw me and the whole time I was visiting she treated me like a magazine saleswoman. She spoke to me in a formal voice and called me “Joanna” instead of “Knadel.” She asked about my car, if I’d gotten the brakes fixed. I said I did, and it cost me $300. She asked me how my job was going and I lied and said it was going okay, and then we didn’t have anything more to talk about, but I just kept sitting there. I was feeling so hurt and desperate that I blurted out, “Why don’t we get married?” and it was supposed to be kind of a joke, but she got annoyed and said coldly, “That’s not in the plans.” Pretty soon after that I got up in defeat, and she ushered me out of her apartment.

  I walked home stiffly, feeling like a very old woman, and trudged up the steps and went into the house, and there was a package from my mom in the mail pile. She had told me she was sending me an anthology of Cleveland Orchestra performances conducted by the great George Szell. She was so excited about it. Seeing the box gave me a little lift, a feeling of being loved. I remembered that I needed some milk, so I ran across the street to the store, and when I returned ten minutes later, the package was gone. I started charging through the house, demanding to know if anyone knew where it was. I ran up the stairs and some thugs walked out of Jerome’s room and I asked them if they had seen my package and they looked away from me and one of them said, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” and I figured that one of them had it hidden in his baggy pants, but there was nothing I could do and they trotted down the stairs. Then I went on a rampage, screaming at everyone in the hall that I was sick of people stealing credit cards and stealing food from the refrigerator and now somebody ripped off my fucking CDs and I’m going to kick their fucking ass, and I kicked the walls a few times and then I grabbed a lamp that was sitting on a table in the hall and threw it across the hall and it broke. Then I decided that I would find those thugs who took my CDs and follow them to see where they tried to sell them and I stormed out of the house and sped down T Street, and a woman was crossing the street and I saw her too late and cut the wheel and crashed into a fireplug. My head hit the dashboard and my chest went into the steering wheel and now I’m lying in Howard University Hospital with broken ribs and my face looking like Times Square and my car is all crashed up, but I’m tanked up on Demerol, so I don’t care. In fact, I’m surprisingly chipper for someone who just had a car accident. I wouldn’t mind staying here for a few weeks, or even a few months. What’s not to like? They even gave me my own room.

  I can’t believe what a loser I turned out to be. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me. I was an enfant terrible reaching for the brass ring. And now look at me! Almost fifty years old, living in a rooming house with nuts and weirdos, practically broke, with nobody to love me. Lying in a hospital after going berserk and crashing the car. I’m like one of those scraggly women people take out to lunch and talk to them about how to get their lives on track, and give them a list of resources with names like Bertha’s Room and Hands Across the Water.

  I refuse to go to Hands Across the Water. I won’t. I’d rather live on the streets, which I will be soon if I can’t work.

  Good God. I just got it. Those people out there, they were like me not too long ago. Living in hovels, one step from the streets. And once they were on the streets, they refused to go to “Hands Across the Water” too. And that’s why they’re on the streets—because, like me, they still have their pride and refuse to accept help from pitying people who see what they have become. You have to lose all your pride if you want to rise from the bottom. And since I still have pride, my goose is cooked. I’ll just keep regressing until I’m lying in a trash heap with shit on my pants.

  I can’t believe I’m writing this drivel. I should throw it away before someone sees it. Kimba is sitting on the chair eating a moon pie, but Bette is hovering around my bed, fluffing the pillows and she might try to peek. On the other hand, she probably thinks I’m in such a piteous state that anything I write would be completely incoherent.

  I just met a fellow patient and I poured myself all over him. I hope he doesn’t think I’m crazy. I am in such an awful state with my concussion and broken ribs and broken heart that everything I do or say feels crazy. I don’t think I can function if I leave this hospital. That’s what scares me. I’ve never literally felt as though I was falling apart, except when I was younger and used to have panic attacks, but they would go away. This isn’t going to go away. Terri doesn’t want me and she never will. I can’t deal with it, so I have to stay in this hospital. I’ll figure out some way to do it. I like it here. I’ve always loved institutional food, like Salisbury steak and chicken à-la-king and peach cobbler, even though I’ve been too upset to eat. I like being taken care of, and except for this one harridan, all the nurses here are darling. And I have a new friend, Nicky, except maybe he thinks I’m nuts and won’t talk to me anymore. That’s not true. Of course he will.

  He popped into my room this morning when I was lying in bed, wanting to die, this handsome guy in jeans and slippers and a hospital robe. He said, “Hi! I’m Nicky Stewart!” Then he looked at my face and exclaimed, “Lord Jesus! What happened to you?” I never saw him before in my life, but my whole ridiculous story started pouring out of my mouth. “I never had a car accident in my life,” I babbled, “but the woman I’m in love with is with someone else and I got all distraught about it and drove into a fire hydrant. But not on purpose!” I yelped, not wanting him to think I was suicidal. It was bad enough that I was obviously mentally unstable. But instead of recoiling, Nicky said, “Oh, you poor thing!” and he bopped right over to my bed and sat on it, crossing his legs, Yoga-style. For some reason, I didn’t mind his familiarity. He said, “My boyfriend just left me for a Polish giant.” I really didn’t want to hear his troubles at the moment, but I was feeling better already from being jolted out of my morbid thoughts. “What do you mean, a giant?” I said. “Literally a giant?”

  “Literally a giant,” Nicky said. “Seven feet tall.”

  “Does he play basketball?” I asked.

  “No, he’s a large-animal veterinarian,” Nicky said.

  “Does he look up pigs’ asses?” I said, and Nicky said, “Yes, both at work and at home,” and I laughed. I decided that if this guy could make me laugh in the state I was in, he could sit cross-legged on my bed till doomsday. He told me he was in the hospital because he was having ferocious headaches, probably from the stress of losing his boyfriend. “I’m one of the most successful attorneys in DC and I feel like a little putz,” he said. “My self-esteem is in the toilet, just from being gay. Being gay sucks. Don’t you think so?”

  Well, that may have been the wrong thing to ask me, because I launched into a depressive eruption that even his most hysterical fag friends probably couldn’t match. I told him I didn’t know I was gay until a few years ago, and before that I tried not to be gay and that was even worse. I said I’d always imagined that I had a pretty cool life, because I was a writer and had all these friends and was nice-looking, a
t least when I was younger, and Nicky interjected, “You’re nice-looking now, even underneath all of that phantasmagoria,” and I decided he was going to be my friend for life. I told him that I now realized I’d been fooling myself, and that my life had really been pretty shitty, and all the supposedly cool things about it weren’t cool at all, like acting up at school and setting trash can fires and getting thrown in a loony bin when I was fourteen. “I loved it in there,” I said. “I didn’t want to leave. I couldn’t go out with girls, so I had to get my thrills from flooding the school bathrooms and setting trash fires and being locked up with a bunch of crazy people!”

  “I was in a loony bin when I was fourteen!” Nicky exclaimed, and we high-fived each other. I asked him why he was in loony bin, and he said, “I licked this boy’s ear when he passed me in the hall.”

  “Well, so what if you licked a boy’s ear?” I said furiously. “Why would they put you in a loony bin for that? That’s no big deal!” Once I like someone, even if I’ve only known him for five minutes, I become as loyal as though I were part of his family.

  “He went home and told his father and his father called the principal and the principal had a meeting with my parents,” Nicky said. “He told them that I sometimes engaged in odd behavior. I never forgot that. He made it sound like I was some weirdo. I ended up in a bin for a week. They decided I was just this little faggot and sent me home.”

  “Ha!” I said. “At least they had the good sense to know you were a faggot.” I told him I was in the bin for six months and nobody ever figured out I was gay. I am still astonished at the extent of the ignorance of those so-called experts. I walked with this little swagger, I wore nothing but jeans, and I flirted with all the nurses in the bin. I had crushes on half of them and followed them around like a puppy. I had no attraction to boys at all. Anyone today would have known. But back then in suburban Cleveland they were still living back in the fifties even though it was the sixties. “They thought homosexuality was an incurable disease,” I said to Nicky. “If they had found out I was this little lezzie, it would have been like discovering I had inoperable cancer. ‘We are so sorry to tell you, Mr. and Mrs. Kane, that your daughter is a—what did they call them?—a sexual invert!” Nicky laughed. “Of course, I was just as ignorant as the rest of them,” I said. “I pictured lesbians as these pathetic women hanging around bus stations with big hollow eyes. It took me thirty years to figure out that I was one of them.”