The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Twenty-Three: Voodoo

When I got back to BU, I immersed myself in the Boston bar scene. As much as I hated Incognito, and as much as I loathed the people there, some of it must have rubbed off on me. I would walk into a room full of people I didn’t know and I could talk to any of them and I didn’t have to talk to a single one of them if I didn’t want to, which was thrilling, in a way, and it made me feel like I was in control of something. I could meet someone new or I could drink by myself all night and I enjoyed doing both, maybe a little too much. Although that’s not entirely true—I didn’t enjoy it. I was overwhelmed with anxiety from the moment I left my room until I got home, and rarely did I do anything or meet anyone worth the hassle. But the only thing worse was staying home and watching the minutes pass and feel myself dying.

I went to a few college parties too, but I got even less satisfaction out of these. It was too easy, in a way, to find someone who was lonely enough to want to talk to you or anyone. And there was always at least one person there, wherever you went, from one of your classes, who had never so much as glanced in your direction who wanted to talk to you now, because they felt lost among all those strangers and they needed to cling to something familiar. That, and the parties weren’t as skuzzy as bars, where I could get a real nice feeling of smugness working, and that was half the point of going out in the first place.

One night in October, I got the phone number of a girl named Karen. She was my height and thin, with a bony face and blond hair that was shorter than mine and carefully misarranged. I never would have thought about her if I hadn’t run into her again a month later. I collected lots of numbers at these places and never called any of them. I won’t waste words explaining why, since it’s your textbook stuff—inferiority complex, harmlessly exercising control in the only place I could find it, you know the score. And the important thing is that all the pretending in the world didn’t make me any less lonely.

Anyway, like I said, I never would have remembered ol’ Karen if I hadn’t seen her again. I was in the student union pretending that I was trying to study, although I can’t remember what I was actually doing, probably just killing time or something. I recognized her right away, which is surprising, because it had been a while and it’s not like she had been on my mind or anything and I had been pretty trashed when I had met her. She was sitting at the other end of the room, eating dinner with a friend. The friend was the cuter of the two, truth be told, but I didn’t have her number.

I wasn’t particularly interested in speaking to her again, but I guess I was just curious. She hadn’t seen me. I wanted to see how she would react when my name came up on her phone’s little screen, and when she heard my voice, and when my face came back to her. I still had this lingering doubt in the back of my mind from middle school or before then that presenting myself as a legitimate sexual or even romantic being was nothing less than an absurdity. I was too familiar with myself, I guess, and I was so well-acquainted with all my flaws and embarrassments that I kind of couldn’t stand myself. It was impossible for me to believe that anyone would want to get to know in a serious way the guy who had given himself lead poisoning from chomping on a bunch of old dusty pencils he had found in the corner of his school’s supply closet, or the loon who had chipped his tooth on the coffee table because he had lost his balance pretending to be Pat Sajak hosting Wheel of Fortune, or the nut who compulsively made annoying noises with his teeth and was so afraid of knives that he had been known to saw hopelessly at his meat with index cards. I thought that if I could see her reaction and if she and her friend didn’t immediately break into laughter, it would heal me. Which is dumb, because when you have these dumb, baseless thoughts smoldering someplace, you can’t just throw some water on them and think they’ll go away.

I’ve grown up since then, obviously, but none of this ever goes away. Karen helped me learn this, much later.

“Helped.”

Anyway, I felt at that moment that this is something I needed to see, for my own peace of mind. It was too perfect an opportunity to pass up, so I turned on my phone and I gave her a call. I saw her reach for her phone, which was buzzing in her pocket. She looked at the caller ID and was clearly confused. She showed it to her friend, who shrugged. She picked up. I thought, what an evil little game I’m playing. And then I thought, thank God she gave me her real number, because that would’ve finished me off right there.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this—Karen?” I talked very softly and I covered my mouth. I was afraid she would hear my voice from across the room—even though it was loud and crowded—and then I would be found out. Because how would I recover from that?

“Yes, and your name is Chris?”

I was flattered at first but then I remembered, oh yeah, her phone told her that. “Yeah we met at,” the name of the bar, whatever it was, “remember me?”

From across the cafeteria, I could see her remembering. “Oh, right. You have the brown hair, and you were wearing the bright orange shirt, right?”

“Yes, I think that was me.” I did have a bright orange shirt at the time, which I never liked but I wore it anyway, because what the hell, I’m not going to throw a perfectly good shirt away for no reason.

“You talked about how you were from Connecticut, and how you hated yourself, right?”

Sounded like me, all right. “Yes. Anyway, I called because I wondered if you wanted to get together sometime.”

“What?”

“You know, get together, or something. Dinner or lunch or something, I don’t know.”

“OK.” She sounded surprised, more than anything. “What did you have in mind?”

I froze for a second. This is what I am worst at: the details, and the plans. These things alone are usually enough to persuade me not to call, if an idea doesn’t present itself to me immediately. I was so caught up with this whole watching-her-answer-the-phone thing that I hadn’t really thought about anything else. I had a horrible impulse to say something like “how about we go right to my place, baby,” because I knew she would hang up on me and that would end it, but I managed to suppress it. “I don’t know,” is the best I could muster.

“All right, you want to get lunch on Saturday afternoon?”

“Sure,” I said. “We’ll meet here.” And then I thought, whoops.

“Meet where?”

“Meet there,” I said. “At StuVi,” the Student Village, the nicest dorms on campus. “You said you lived there, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. What a fucking save. It was a little weird, maybe, remembering that and all. But it was better than the alternative, which was giving away that I was huddled in the corner of the student union, watching her from behind a dirty old newspaper with a big muddy footprint across the front that I had found on the ground. Of course, she wasn’t expecting that sort of thing, obviously.

Anyway, the date was set, and I hadn’t learned very much about her. She had been pretty still through the phone call. At one point she had tapped her fingers on the table, but I couldn’t tell if it was because she was annoyed or bored or nervous or maybe it was just a thoughtless, involuntary tic. Mostly, she sat still, and what I could see of her face betrayed nothing. But I figured that she would tell her friend, and I would be able to find a reaction that way.

But I didn’t. She put her phone away and she went back to talking to her friend as if nothing had happened. It looked like the friend hadn’t even asked what the call had been about, and the way they dived back into conversation, I gathered that they just went back to talking about whatever they had been talking about when I had come up with my crazy scheme. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought that she was completely indifferent. And then I realized that I really didn’t know any better, and that she really was completely indifferent.

Indifferent? Outrageous! My heart was beating so fast and my palms were sweating and my whole body was tingling and it didn’t seem right that this should mean so much to me and so little to her. At that moment I felt it was the worst thing I could have possibly seen, although I’m sure I would have landed on that no matter what she did. It would have been worse if she had laughed, of course, and she could have even done a backflip and broken spontaneously into song and I still would have felt insecure for some reason, I’m sure, and probably guilty for tricking her like I had done.

It had nothing to do with me, though. That is just the kind of person she was. These things just didn’t matter to her very much. Or they did, but she saw all the billions of people in the world, and she never lost an ounce of confidence that somewhere among them, she would always be able to find someone worth spending time with, and she would never have to look very hard.

At the time, though, it made me very insecure, which put me in about the same position I had been in before every other date I had ever had. Which in turn made me feel more comfortable about the whole thing. I am interested in this person, and I think that I am much worse than her. Here is a familiar place, I thought. I know how to handle this.

I decided I would try to even the score from the outset by being twenty minutes late. That way, I figured, she would think that I thought that I had better things to do, and she would resent me and probably not want to see me. I stepped off the train and Karen called.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m twenty minutes late. You’ve probably been standing outside waiting, why don’t you just come up?”

So this is her game, I thought, and I admired her cunning. It’s embarrassing to me now, what I thought of women. They were nothing less than masterminds, manipulating every little thing, nothing unplanned or without meaning, and I was always trying to figure out where I really stood with them, and I never stopped trying to outwit them. That they were just people, who were trying to do the things that would make them happy, and who sometimes made mistakes: this never occurred to me.

I stepped off the elevator and found hre door, after a little while. I walked the wrong way down the hallway, of course. This always happens. Whenever I am presented with two directions and I have to pick one or the other, I invariably choose the wrong one. You think I am exaggerating, but I am not. I stopped being frustrated with it long ago, though. Mostly because it would be pointless—it would be like getting pissed off that the sun was rising in the east again. It is inevitable. I don’t even mind—I see more of the world this way.

Her room was at the end of the other end of the hallway. The door was already open, and I could hear cursing coming from that room. I just walked in. It was a beautiful suite with a big common room with windows looking out onto the river, a well-stocked kitchen, four bedrooms and two bathrooms. For comparison, I was living in a room that was long but so thin it was practically two-dimensional, with one dirty window (the “dirty” part being my fault, maybe) that had a view of the back of a crummy alley behind some ugly brick buildings.

I walked towards the cursing and found her digging through a pile of clothes in her bedroom. I stood in the doorway, waiting for her to notice, I guess. I didn’t really know what to say. “Hello?” Yeah, I guess I could have said that.

She turned around like she knew I was there. She looked at me for a second like she was confused. “Oh, I thought you were someone else,” she said. I thought, huh. It didn’t faze her, though, she just said, “ready to go?” She clearly hadn’t found what she had been digging through those clothes for, but I guess it didn’t really matter.

I looked around her room. The walls were bare and her sheets didn’t seem to match—I thought, doesn’t seem like much of a decorator. Which wasn’t entirely true, because I guess the walls had been a weird shade of purple and she had painted it white because she needed soothing white walls or she would “freak out,” is what she told me later, and the sheets were actually part of some larger color scheme—they were blue and green, I think, or maybe red and black—but I don’t have much of an eye for color, I guess, and just assumed she had thrown together whatever she had. Her desk was split in half—the half closest to the window had a huge pile of papers that threatened to fall over and bury the corner of the room in trash and the half closest to me was completely empty except for her computer, which was closed and off and old and bulky and didn’t look like it got used a lot.

The weird thing, though, was all the voodoo dolls. She had a long board that ran across the far wall, and there were dozens of voodoo dolls piled on top of each other, with their weird tortured grins staring back at me from over her window. They had pins sticking out of them, and at first I thought, well maybe for decoration, but they all had strands of hair pinned to them too, which made me realize they were the real deal.

“Voodoo?” I asked. So that was my first word after walking in the room.

“Yeah,” she said, taking them in like it was what she was the proudest of.

“So, you, like, give people stomach aches for fun?”

She rolled her eyes like she got this one all the time. “Voodoo is a lot more complicated than that. There are points on the doll that do different things. I can make someone’s mind clearer for a test or soothe their chest pain or give them the best orgasm they’ve had in their life.” There didn’t seem to be anything in this for me, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was just an old sales pitch she repeated all the time in defense of her dark art. She wasn’t even looking at me, still at the dolls.

“So you use them for good?”

“Well, evil too, but it’s not one-sided, is my point.” Fair enough. “They don’t work anyway.” She was looking for something else, now, in the top-left drawer of her desk.

“So why do you have them?”

“Who knows.” She found whatever she had been looking for in the drawer and slipped it into her back pocket.

“Do you have one for me?” I asked. This sounds like a loaded question, but I have no idea what I was expecting or hoping to hear.

“I don’t need one for you,” she said, again not even bothering to look at me, and just like that she was headed for the elevator. On the way out, one of her suitemates gave me a look like she was either very scared of or for me, I couldn’t tell.

What else can I remember about her? There should be more. In my mind, she is wearing a dress of some thin, almost-white fabric with a floral print that sounds kind of lame but wasn’t and is just in general the thing that usually just knocks me out. But that contradicts what I said earlier about her finding the thing and slipping it into her pocket, I think. Which was it? I don’t know. And also, what month was it? Like, November? Maybe even December. So it couldn’t have been the dress, even though, emotionally, I am so sure it was the dress that any other possibility seems ridiculous. If I could go back I’m sure I would notice more, but the night was so empty of significance to me at the time, I wasn’t thinking—I was probably so consumed with the exit plan (a constant thought whenever I am away from home for more than like ten minutes, no matter who I’m with or what I’m doing—what is the best, fastest way to get myself out of this situation and back home?) that I wasn’t thinking about anything else. What the hell am I talking about?

I do remember that she asked me where we were going, and I said I don’t know. I suggest T. Anthony’s, which is this loud pizza place usually full of loud students and lots of drunk people and is just an absolutely awful atmosphere for a date or pretty much anything, but that’s all I could think of, really. She said she had already been there three times that week and besides she hated it, so we brainstormed, but we hadn’t come up with anything better by the time the elevator reached the lobby so T. Anthony’s it was.

I ordered a slice of cheese and asked her what she wanted. She waved me off, saying she had just eaten.

We sat at an uncomfortable table in the middle of the room. “So tell me a little bit about yourself.” She said. “I already know you’re from Connecticut and you hate yourself. What else?”

I shrugged. Wasn’t that everything?

She frowned like she was upset with me—not for any of the obvious reasons, but like I wasn’t doing something I was meant to be doing, that we both knew I should be doing, which sounds like one of the obvious reasons, but it was less like “you should be treating me nice” and more like “you’re not playing the same game.” She asked me why I had called her. It was a good question, I admit it. I shrugged, was my way of answering.

“I know why you called me,” she said, with a smile. “You wanted to see if I would remember you. You remembered me all these weeks later and wanted to see if you meant anything to me, the way I meant something to you, whatever that is. And I knew it from the start—that’s why I said I thought you were somebody else when you walked in, to throw you off.”

She was wrong. Like I said, it was all about gauging her reaction that day in the student union. It could have been anyone. But I was impressed and flattered by her theory none the less—just the fact that she had even bothered coming up with one—and I told her she was right. Which maybe she was anyway. At least partial credit.

At this point, a guy burst into T. Anthony’s with a gun and started screaming for everyone to not move. He strode right up to the counter and the kids who were in his way scattered off in every direction and everyone who was sitting and eating jumped under their tables and covered their heads. Except the way I saw all this happened was I just kept sitting there, totally still. Karen was pulling on the leg of my jeans, but I stayed above the table for the whole thing. The guy demanded money in a bag, the cashier gave him everything he had (including coins, because the guy still hadn’t grabbed the bag and left after the cashier was finished with the ones) and the cashier seemed to be staring at me with this “what the fuck are you doing” kind of look, not like I was insane, but like I was insulting him for not being afraid for my life. Someone was sobbing and someone with her was telling her to hush. Karen was still yanking on my jeans and hissing something up at me. When the whole register was cleared out, the robber took his bag and his gun and went out the front door. He passed right by me, within inches. Didn’t seem to notice me at all. Nobody moved until at least fifteen or twenty seconds after he left, maybe more, maybe much more.

The question now is, why had I stayed above the table? Let’s discard the obvious, first—it was not bravery. Because there is nothing brave about subjecting yourself to danger for no reason—that’s just reckless and stupid. Did I want to die? I am more tempted by this idea, but I don’t think that’s it either. Had I wanted to die, I might have rushed the guy and tried to take a bullet in the gut and at least gone down looking like a hero in the process. Was I indifferent to whether I lived or died? This is a little closer, maybe. Maybe I wasn’t real keen on dying but didn’t much see the point in living either, and wanted to leave the awful choice in someone else’s hand for once. That’s halfway there, maybe. But I think part of it too was that it’s just my way. I approach life as a spectator, I think, which for the most part, through the long, banal stretches is fine, because things happen around you on the strength of their own inertia. But life also calls for some reactions now and then, and these are what I seem to be lacking most of the time. I glide through life, downhill, and when you do that, you’re going to hurt yourself clipping a few trees now and then. The answer, I’m sure, is way down deep in the unconscious, but the best I can offer is what was going through my conscious mind at the time, which was I was wondering why in the world he was robbing a pizza place full of college kids and not an out-of-the-way convenience store or a bank or something. That puzzled me.

I am sure that I didn’t do it to impress Karen, and had that been my motivation, it would have been a spectacular failure. As soon as she determined it safe to come out from under the table, she was already hitting me on the arm and calling me a fucking idiot.

“Ow,” I said. “Hey.”

“What’s wrong with you? You some kind of big shot?”

“No. Why are you so angry?”

“Why didn’t you get under the table like everyone else?”

Well, you saw above how much trouble I had working it out with all these years to think about it, so you can imagine what my reaction was back then. I shrugged, naturally, and said “I don’t know.” It must have made a strange picture for her, and I would have enlightened her if I could, if only because giving an answer would have been a lot easier than staring dumbly back at her (and she was pretty furious), but it was just something I had (or hadn’t) done, empty of forethought, empty of motivation, empty of sense. It wasn’t even very interesting, when you think about it.

We left immediately after that. My thought was she probably was so disgusted she didn’t want to see me anymore. Not, like, she didn’t want to get together anymore, in the future sense. But that the sight of my dumb round face was too much for her to handle for even another second—like walking into a room full of garbage, where, nothing against the room, but you’ve just got to get out. I was wrong, as it turned out.

It’s not that she wasn’t disgusted with me either, though. I just think she had already made her decision about what was going to happen that night, from the moment I called, or maybe from the moment she woke up that morning and decided what kind of day it was going to be for her. I could have flipped a car, thrown a trash can through a church’s stained glass window and set myself on fire and it wouldn’t have dissuaded her one little bit from what she had already decided.

I’ll try to deal with this part quickly and painlessly, because God knows I don’t enjoy writing it any more than you enjoy reading it. I’m talking about sex now, because I’ve avoided the issue for as long as possible, but I think it’s sort of necessary to paint the picture, here. She didn’t like a lot of touching, during. Basically, she liked us to be as far apart as possible, I think, which is mostly missing the point of it, if you ask me. If she could have figure out a way to do it with us in separate rooms, I’m sure she would have been all for it. I often felt like I was some incidental prop in some thing she was doing with the sheets, or that she was annoyed with me because I was blocking her view of the ceiling (depending).

That first night, when we were both pretending to be asleep, I heard her get up and get something from her desk. Then I heard a snip right behind my right ear—she had cut off a piece of my hair. In the half-light of the early A.M., I saw her pin it to one of her voodoo dolls. I was honored, mostly.