Pierogies

Pierogies (click to zoom)

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Walter White

My sister and her husband named their baby Walter White after Walter White, the character from the show "Breaking Bad." I asked them, why? What was their intent? They said they liked the show, and they admired Bryan Cranston's performance. Well then why not Bryan? A less dated name, and not all tied up with the villainy of the character. They looked at me like I was nuts. Your problem, they said to me, speaking in perfect unison, is that you're determined to live aesthetically instead of practically, and so you're incapable of making yourself happy. Then they stood up and left whatever room we were all in. Their words produced in me a moment of clarity, comparable to only one other time in my life, when my friend Mike called and asked me to give him a ride because he'd driven his car onto a median, and when I was on my was driving over to meet him, there was a troll in the road, a wild, three-foot figure with tangled, matted hair and filthy rags for clothes, stooped over and facing away from me and rubbing itself furiously, it would appear, through the front of its pants. I brought the car to a stop. It was dusk and my headlights cast a glow onto the troll's back. It was a narrow road and I wasn't sure I had enough room to drive around. The troll turned slowly and sneered at me, its back still bobbing up and down as it rubbed harder and harder with the flat of its palm. He grinned a mouth full of rotted, stumpy teeth. I flashed my high beams and it scampered off into the woods, cackling. Before, I said seeing the troll had been a moment of clarity -- what had I meant by that? I don't know. After the troll left I drove over to where Mike had driven his car onto the median and picked him up and took him to his girlfriend's place, his girlfriend was named Gina, and they broke up upstairs while I hung out in Gina's kitchen, or Gina's parents' kitchen, with Gina's younger sister, and then Mike came downstairs with frustrated, confused tears in his eyes and told me he could get a ride home, although God only knows from where. So I drove home. And when I got home my parents and my sister were out and all the lights were off except for one glow coming from my room. And when I got up there the troll was in my bed, under the covers. He was watching MTV on my 13-inch TV, he was watching that show Say What? Karaoke. He looked at me and said, "please, a-mister, I'm-a very-a sick." But how could I help him? I was not a doctor, much less a veterinarian. All I knew about trolls was they liked to eat garbage. So I collected some trash from downstairs, what looked like the heartiest morsels, and brought them up to him. He saw the bounty I laid before him and looked up at me, his face crinkled with gratitude, or the troll equivalent. He brought an empty soup can up to his mouth, but was too weak to chew. He waved me away, so I left to give him his privacy. I slept on the couch that night. No one asked me why. I could hear the troll cursing and grunting all through the night, fighting his fever. So again, what did the troll teach me? What truth gleamed in his black, beady eyes? Maybe something about the composition of the universe, the way the beautiful and the grotesque sustain each other. But I already knew that. So maybe that's what I learned, that I knew everything I needed to know, as if I'd lived this life a hundred times and was already acquainted with each of its grubby disappointments, and that anyone who tried to teach me anything or change my mind was a liar, everyone but the troll. In the morning he was gone, and all he'd left behind was a ripped-open trash bag and a thick, savory, rancid smell in the sheets that never washed out.

The beach (unfinished)

I have nightmares. That I'm relaxing on a deserted beach somewhere, and a gaggle of scantily-clad women bound over and begin dancing for me, and one of them, the most provocatively-yet-conservatively dressed, not like the others, whispers in my ear that she'd like me to take her to bed. My therapist suggests this doesn't sound like a nightmare at all, it sounds, rather, like a rather pleasant dream. She suggests that the nightmare of it is not the dream itself but the waking from it back into my small bed with its limp, soggy sheets in my dreary, lightless apartment. When she says this, I think that my therapist doesn't know me very well. But I don't say this, I just say "yeah ok" and she nods with a very self-satisfied look on her face like she has successfully asserted her dominance over me. And then I talk about work or whatever until the session ends.

I can't afford the therapist, strictly speaking. I mean, I don't have the money to pay her. So what I do is, I give her increasingly large checks, for money owed plus an equal amount into the future "to ensure this doesn't happen again," which I know will bounce. But by the time they bounce, I've already gotten another session or two in, and then I can just give her an even larger check, to "compensate [her] for the inconvenience." The amount on the last check I wrote was somewhere over $16,000. It strains credulity, somewhat, that I, who at one time had less than $100 in my checking account, resulting of the bouncing of even my very first check, would suddenly have the $16,000+ necessary for this latest check to clear. But she goes along with it, every time. I suppose the upside is too enticing, or perhaps it's the downside, the pain of cutting your losses with all those sessions unpaid for, all those debts forgiven, that is the stronger motivation. Regardless, I think her advice is beginning to suffer, as if she's holding our her best analysis until I'm paid up. She recently suggested I indulge in my suicidal ideation of wading into the river and letting the fast-moving current drag me out to sea. She said it would "relieve [me] of [my] fear of rivers." (I confessed to no such fear and, in fact, have none.) When I mentioned idly reading a news article about a brutal war in some distant country to which I have no connection, she said, "you should go there." She didn't even pretend to offer any purported therapeutic benefit to traveling to an active warzone, she just said, "it will be fine." Of course, if I die in a war, she'll lose all hope of ever being paid, but I think her ultimate goal is something else, something more abstract, or maybe it's less abstract, and maybe she just hates me.

One good piece of advice she did give me, though, was to call you again. Even as the quality of her other advice diminished, she kept encouraging me to give you another chance, her enthusiasm for the idea only growing as I fell deeper and deeper into the red. She convince me that you've changed and matured since the last time we spoke, probably, and that it was "very unlikely" you would continue to exploit my feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy as you did in the past to dominate me psychologically, steal my money, make me quit various jobs that did not accord with your vision of the lifestyle you wanted, etc.

And I've changed too. I've made a lot of progress. I no longer feel compelled, I think, to tell lies about your sexual history to our mutual friends, your co-workers, my mother, etc. My therapist says she "think[s] it is unlikely" I will again burst into your office, scream "MARY FUCKS DOGS, SHE CHEATED ON ME WITH A DOG" at everyone, grab the phone and try to figure out how to make an officewide announcement on the P.A. system, be wrestled to the ground by two small receptionists working together, attempt to commit "suicide by cop" by rushing an unarmed security guard, and collapse into a heap and sob and apologize the moment I see your mortified face when you rush out to see the commotion -- she says the chances of that happening are "under 25 percent." And that I should give you a call and see how it goes, because, "what's the worst that could happen?" Which isn't analysis, I realize, but I think it is meant to be a kind of rhetorical device to make me be like, yeah, sure, I'll give her a call.

Do you remember when we went to the beach together? It was one of our good times, one of our last good times. I hadn't found out that you'd emptied my savings account to pay off your credit card, and you hadn't found out that I'd mailed a letter detailing several made-up sexual encounters involving you and our neighbor to your night school professor. It was cold so we kept our coats on but we took off our shoes and we stood in the sand and felt millions of years of obliterated rocks between our toes. We looked out at the waves and we started to argue about where the car was parked. Was it important, then? Faced with that heaving, immovable ocean pushing in, did it matter whether we'd parked in the main lot or the auxiliary lot, especially when there was no actual disagreement as to where the car was, just what the exact designation of the lot was on the official Beach Map posted near the snack bar? I've thought about it a lot, in the months I've been without you, and what I've realized is that, yeah, of course it matters. We're only on this earth for so long, and what's more important than

I'll wear a jean

People ask about the cargo pants -- about the insistence on cargo pants. Well, they're practical, for one. I can carry twice as much as a person wearing so-called "regular" pants. And that's being conservative, since the cargo pockets themselves are much deeper than a regular pocket, so I bet if you really measured it out, I'm carrying three or four times as much. When you think about it that way, it's actually wearing non-cargo pants that comes to seem like a stupid decision, speaking strictly from a point-of-view of which pants have the best carrying capacity.

And it's not just for show, I use that capacity, too. I'll fill my pockets up with interesting bits of trash I find walking around, trash that I think I could maybe use later. Or I'll fill them with nuts to throw at any critters that come too close to me. Sometimes I'll dip the nuts in something like detergent powder, to give the critters an unpleasant little surprise, like they think they're getting a delicious snack, but then they sniff their paws and they're all of a sudden covered in poison, or soap, anyway. But sometimes I'll just give them nuts not dipped in anything, and they're happy about that.

My sister, who worries, got me a pair of jeans last Christmas. Now, I'll wear a jean, when all my cargo pants are in the wash or whatever, I'll wear a carpenter jean with a little hammer loop, not that I carry a hammer generally, but it's nice to have the option. But this jean didn't have a loop or any kind of adornment, it was just, jean. And I did give them a try, for her sake, but they weren't right. I felt absurd, I felt vain. Like, what are these legs for? Not for carrying nuts or trash around, but I'm just, like, presenting them, like, thrusting them into the world, like, look at these legs, aren't they dainty, aren't they pretty? Look at how long and sleek and impractical they are. Aren't I a pretty boy? I tried to go places with them and I'd just, sweat all over and shake, I'd imagine people thinking, what's this guy trying to get away with? Who does he think he is? The kind of guy who wastes a whole pant, pisses away all that carrying capacity, because he's so in love with his leg, qua leg? So what I did was, I made a couple sacks out of some burlap I'd found, and sewed them to the side of the jeans, roughly where cargo pockets would be. And they're not pretty, because I can't sew and I get these dizzy spells that make it difficult to cut straight, but they carry. They carry really well, actually.

That seems right. It even seems right that the sacks are uneven and poorly cut. It answers the question: why are you wearing those jeans? It's not, oh, to show off my prissy, dainty legs. I'm wearing them, obviously, because I need to carry stuff around in these sacks. It answers the question so well that no one has to ask it.

I don't know how they do it, cargo pants, and jeans with sacks sewn onto them, make me feel like no one can see me, even when I'm the only one anywhere wearing them.

What is a specific instance in which you used your customer service skills to defuse a situation?

You know, it’s funny. I’m trying to be helpful and answer your question. And I’m sure I used my customer service skills thousands of times over the years, but I can’t recall for you one specific instance of it. If I’m being honest, I’m having trouble recalling one specific instance of anything. Anything that’s happened in the past twelve years? All those experiences and events and instances, they just kind of puddle together in one graying, undifferentiated, undifferentiable pool of time, and aging. I don’t know. I honestly do not think I could tell you one thing that happened to me since college, except -- I remember this one time. I was sitting at my desk. And a police officer strode into the office and came over to my desk and grabbed me by the shirt, didn’t say anything. Just grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me out of my chair and dragged me into the bathroom, the women’s room. And he kicked open one of the stalls, no one was in there, thank God, and he dunked my head in the toilet. One, two times. And then he pulled me out, and my hair was soaked, obviously, and I have no idea what any of this is about. And the cop just leaves. He just left me there, gasping and spitting up water. And he just left, and didn’t say anything to anybody, and no one said anything to him. And by this point, all I can do is pick myself up off the floor, and I’m trying to dry my hair and my head with these cheap, thin paper towels, but my shirt is just soaked in toilet water, just ruined. I mean I could have taken it home and washed and dried it, but it would have been ruined for me anyway. So I just took it off and balled it up and threw it in the trash. And I had to walk back through the office in just my bra until I could get back to my desk and put on my coat, and I sat there cold-sweating in my coat for the rest of the day. And no one ever said a word to me about it. To the point where, by the end of the day, I wasn’t even sure it had happened. I mean, I knew I was wearing my coat, and I didn’t have a shirt on underneath, and I knew I was still wet. But maybe -- I don’t know, I started to doubt myself, I started to think maybe I had just invented the thing about the cop and the toilet, to mask some other, more psychologically damaging reality, I mean, I don’t know what, but, something. But at the end of the day, I went in the bathroom, and I saw my boss in there, wringing out my shirt in the sink, and then balling it up again and putting it in her bag. So something happened, with the shirt. And then there is the feeling of the cop’s hands on my neck and shoulders, which I cannot forget, and I can’t forget how much they felt like my dad’s hands, even though my dad has never dunked my head in the toilet, and, truth be told, doesn’t even like to touch me. That I remember.

Candiotti

My doctor has urged me to stop eating markers. He says it's the most likely explanation for some of my recent digestive distress. A key clue, he says, is my description of my recent evacuations as "rainbow-colored," which he says is unusual, almost unheard of among his patients who don't eat markers. Well, maybe he's right. But there is still something to be said for it as a quality-of-life issue, as a boost to my psychological well-being. As a kind of relief for someone who lacks the strength to face the long years ahead markerless. I'm not afraid to admit I lack this strength. I can admit my vulnerability. Death seems preferable to markerlessness. Death, at least, is an event, it happens and it's over, whereas markerlessness is a condition, which much be endured until death.

The doctor suggested I "munch" on carrots instead. I sneered back at him. He clearly had no idea what he was talking about. He thought that eating markers was some sort of nervous or obsessive habit, not a visceral pleasure in its own right. He has no clue what to make of the snap of the plastic case, giving way to the rich, spongy innards, soaking my tongue in thin, soupy ink. With the stiff, but yielding, tip saved for last. He simply had no idea!

I did get some carrots. I decided to give the doctor that chance. But the carrots were cold and rigid. They snapped off without any give, and of course, there was no sweet core inside, the texture was the same throughout. There was no air pocket through which my teeth would burst in search of ink, which would run down my throat. A poor imitation; not even an imitation.

Plus, the carrots were covered in filth, because I'd taken them directly out of the soil of a local farm. They were smeared with dirt and smelled of waste. I could have eaten cleaner markers directly out of the trash. Disgusted, I left the carrots to rot on my table.

Four days after I found the carrots, a farmer came to my door. He told me some produce had been recently removed from his farm and he'd received a tip that I might know something about it. My remaining carrots sat plainly on the table behind me, still dusted with black soil. He said he'd also lost some livestock and wondered if I might know anything about that (I had also, I confess, taken a chicken, but it had hopped out of my car at a red light when I'd had to roll down my window to catcall a hot babe). I denied everything, of course. I felt sweat soaking through the skin of my palms.

"Mind if I step inside?" he asked, and instead of waiting for an answer, he simply pivoted around me and stepped into my home. Soil fell from his filthy clothes, soil the same color and consistency, I couldn't help but notice, as the soil on the carrots. The farmer's name was Candiotti. His eyes fell onto the table and found their way to the carrots; my stomach dropped.

"Whence the carrots?" he asked. I squinted as if I hadn't understood the question. "Whither the carrots?" he demanded. I shook my head. "I haven't the slightest idea what objects you might be referring to," I said.

He grabbed a carrot from the table and waggled it at me, profanely. "From where did you obtain these carrots, son?" "Aah!" I said, brightening as if I'd finally understood. "The carrots? I purchased those at the carrot store." Candiotti looked skeptical. "Which carrot store?" he asked. In the days and sleepless nights since I'd taken the carrots and imagined this very conversation, I'd failed to anticipate a follow-up question. "The carrot store was called -- let me think -- " I stalled for time. "The carrot store was called, I believe, Stern's." Candiotti's expression was unreadable. "Yes, it was Stern's, I believe, although I could be wrong, but I believe it was Stern's, though I could be wrong, but I believe it was Stern's. The proprietor was an elderly Jewess." Candiotti's eyebrows shot up. Success! After all, who could doubt a story with such an expertly-chosen detail?!

"I don't believe I've ever sold my carrots to a Stern's," he said.

"Well, then it would appear that these are not your carrots!" I crowed. "In which case, your business here is settled, and you can make your way out." He frowned. "These are Candiotti Carrots," he said. "I'm the only one who breeds them this way." He shoved the carrot underneath my eyes and pointed to something with his grimy fingernails. Sure enough, inscribed on the shaft of the carrot in tiny orange letters was the word CANDIOTTI. I felt sweat prickling my hair follicles.

Candiotti had cornered me, and I had no choice but to quickly change strategy. "Why -- that means -- " I said, as if putting it all together. "Someone must have stolen your carrots, and brought them to Stern's...yes...and sold them to her, and then she...yes, of course...she, unaware they'd been stolen, sold them to me, even though...aah, but could it be? yes, it must!...and then I, most innocent at all, bought them from her!" I feigned a look of shock. "You poor man! I am so sorry for you to have suffered this outrage!" Candiotti scowled. "And your chicken," I continued, "must have jumped out the burglar's car window on the way there!" A sprinkle of truth, to help the lies go down!

"But I didn't say anything about a chicken," he said, "I'd only mentioned livestock, nonspecifically."

"Of course it was a chicken," I replied, "because a cow never would have fit into my car."

Well, old Candiotti cut right to the chase. "I think you know more about the carrots than you're letting on," he said. More? I'd already provided him a surfeit of detail, each elaborate element piling precariously on top of the last to build a perfectly impervious tower of deceit! The sweat poured off me. I pulled a marker out of my pocket and bit into it, a blue crayola. Yes, the different colors do have different tastes, incidentally, though the differences are subtle, and the flavors don't necessarily correspond to a same-color real-world food item. So blue crayola isn't, for example, blueberry, but a something in the way of a summery grass, sun-dappled and dew-spattered. Refreshing and pure.

"You, sir, are eating a marker," Candiotti said. Well, I'm used to the scorn and the mockery you get when you snap into a delicious marker on the city bus or at church. It unfortunately comes with the territory. The mockers and the spitters will make sport of your pleasure. Your friends will misplace their trust in your character and judgment, and they will stop returning your calls. Your doctor will insist that there's something deeply aberrant with your behavior. I'm sure there are thousands of marker-eaters who have simply given up on the one thing that brought them joy, despondent in the face of the public pressure; and thousands more who shamefully indulge at home, in private, hiding their true selves from even their family. In this regard, I am simply made of stronger stuff, and have learned to block it out, and live my life the only way I can bear to live it.

But I saw something else in Candiotti's face. Confusion, yes, but no judgment or scorn. Only...curiosity. And wonder, perhaps, that a person could live so freely.

And so, I offered him a taste.

Candiotti searched my face for a sign -- that I was trying to put one over on him; that he was being made a fool of. I calibrated my expression to communicate gentleness. He tentatively took the marker. He moved it towards his open mouth, then searched my face again for a sign that it was all a trick. I smiled serenely. He took a bite.

He seemed surprise by the crunch of the plastic. His mouth puckered around it, as if exploring some crashed alien life. I heard the sponge of the marker's insides on his tongue. His eyes bulged in surprise. He chewed and swallowed. He looked into what remained of the marker and knocked the ink sponge into his palm. He held it to his lips and took a deep, long pull (rude to do without asking, like scraping the frosting off a birthday cake with your fingers, but it was his first time and he didn't know better). His eyes got wider still. "That's incredible," he said.

I pulled out a pack from a drawer; his jaw dropped. He picked out a yellow (savory, salty, almost like a pork in the distance). He began to unscrew it to get right to the ink. "Ah ah ah," I stopped him. "You must enjoy the fullness of the marker. You must be grateful for everything it has to offer you." He was still wary of the plastic, but he trusted me, then smiled broadly when he'd done it and seen that I was right. We laughed and talked all night long, working our way through the pack, ink-drunk and brimming with newfound love for each other, for having found a linked soul.

Candiotti pulled up all his vegetables after that, and in their place, planted thousands of markers, standing in long rows of gradiented colors all the way to the horizon. I never told him the truth about the carrots, and I never will. I've told him things I've never told another living soul, but I will never tell him about the carrots. All friendships must be built on lies, because the truth, in the end, is unsurvivable. Bring the lies to the light and the whole thing dissolves like a sugar cube in hot water, and you are no longer friends, just two men, who don't trust each other, and chew markers.

The cube surmounts

I just don't think people should be women. It's just not natural. It's bizarre, in fact, the different things that they have that other ("regular") people don't, and vice versa. I'm not unsympathetic to their concerns and problems. It seems like they have a lot of problems. I try to not pay attention to their problems because once their problems become society's problems, it seems like everything gets worse. We cease to understand each other, as members of a society, if -- I mean, you know what I'm talking about.

And listen, do men have a lot of problems? We do. We have horrible stuff going on, and we also -- I mean let's be honest with ourselves. The stuff we have going on. Compared to women, it is much worse, in my opinion, at least in terms of the problems we have to deal with. Thinking of the problems of men as compared to the problems of women -- I actually, and I've said this before, it makes me wish I could spit venom because that is the only way I can adequately express the rage of comparing the "problems" of women to what men have to deal with -- I mean, stuff dangles down there, you know?

I think the perfect person is a totally smooth cube. Six faces and edges, and even the edges are rounded, so that there are no problems, and there is no sharpness. Tomorrow I begin calling to reconstructive surgeons to see which of them have the courage necessary to turn me into a cube. I will also ask, when they are turning me into a cube, if it is possible for them to make it so that I can spit venom when I wish to express my unhappiness, but that is not essential to the project, what is essential is that I become, once and for all, a cube. I think that any half-witted fucking moron of a surgeon could do it, if they only summon within themselves the ambition (the ambition of making a person into a cube).

When I am a cube, I will be more caring, more magnanimous. This is my promise, which I've begun to refer to as the Promise Of The Cube. I did not come to this decision lightly. It was one of two things -- either I would become a Cube, or I would be dead. The weight of the problems aforementioned had foreclosed my options to these two. Maybe the day will come when I will change my mind, but that is one factor that helped me eventually decide on the cube -- in the event that becoming a cube does not work, then it was the only option of the two that is ultimately reversible. But I do think it will work, and I do think that on my first morning as a six-sided object symmetrical from all directions: the sun will shine brighter, and the wind will not blow, and the problems of the world will be, for the first time, to me, surmountable.