I Wish I Was Like You Read online

  Of course I couldn’t admit how much I wanted to walk in her boots; stay up all night dancing in a stranger’s kitchen wearing only body paint and a navel ring; drive a truck to Wyoming in a thunderstorm; wake up in a field of wheat and cavort with beautiful men and women; or interview one of America’s last great literary lions at his ranch in Idaho, and then call him an asshole in print.

  “I can’t believe that fucker,” Daisy had proclaimed, the day she got back. “He has three ex-wives and four daughters waiting on him all day, washing his clothes, cooking his favorite meals, feeding his fat ass, hanging on his words. And he makes all of this money writing novels about men who treat women like shit!”

  She sold the profile piece to SF Weekly. It was one of a handful of articles and interviews with which she acquired a small, fiercely devoted following in L.A., San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. But she still thought of herself as a writer struggling to get published, to find her voice and pay the fucking rent, as she liked to remind me. The words felt like a knife between my ribs.

  I poured two more glasses of Bordeaux. We lit new cigarettes off our half-smoked ones. She collapsed onto the couch and let out the yelp she always used to describe its lack of springs.

  “No shocks,” she would say. “You should stuff this goddamn thing with down. Or pot.”

  “I enjoyed the essay,” I repeated. “Mia Zapata, the city, you’re getting close to nailing this moment, the way young women feel…”

  “Did you feel it?” she asked. Her eyes trained on me, not missing an inflection.

  “I’m not a club kind of girl,” I said. The word ‘girl’ clogged my throat. I was living in dread of the day I called myself a woman and someone laughed.

  “But?” She stretched sideways on the couch, extending her left leg and leaning on her right elbow. “Tell me if it’s garbage!”

  It wasn’t garbage. I wished I’d written it, or lived the life that would allow me to write it. Instead of the ratty, time-wasted, half-drunk biography I owned.

  “Are you covering familiar territory?” I asked. I let the words hang, chill and echoing, while I slugged a mouthful of wine and hoped she wouldn’t throw her glass at me. I never knew. There was the time I criticized her “Santa Steals from Soup Kitchens” piece for being maudlin. That time she stopped mid-stride on the sidewalk, whirled at me, and screamed, full-throttle, “People need to know what the fuck is up with Santa!” Then she laughed so hard she had to hold her ribs.

  “Familiar?” she said and took a long draw on her American Spirit. She let the exhaled smoke fall to her lap. She stared at me. “To whom?” Her lips formed a frosted pink bud, in the wake of her words.

  “You,” I said. “I mean, you’ve written two tributes to Zapata, and you sold one to The Stranger, right?”

  “That was just a quote. They quoted me.”

  “But the article was about Mia, right?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t know. You decide.”

  She stared at me for a second. Then she was on her feet, pacing.

  “Fuck!” she said. “Fuck! I blew it. I waited until I could write with a little more perspective. Now it’s too late. Fuck!”

  She would have gone on like this for a while. Then I would have reassured her and she would have submitted the essay to the Weekly and maybe she would have won an award or maybe they would have hired her to write a weekly column.

  But there was a knock at the door.

  “I’m gone,” Daisy said. She left her essay on the coffee table, a forgotten, mangled draft with one corner of the pages soaking up a wine stain. “I need a boy tonight! A beautiful, hot boy who can kiss, and who can play bass like a motherfucker!”

  “I’ll see you around, then,” I said.

  “You going to meet me at the OK Hotel tomorrow night, baby?”

  “Nope. 7 Year Bitch at RKCNDY,” I lied. I didn’t visit clubs for the music, only the noise, the buzz of drunken voices, and the boys. Occasionally I let Daisy drag me out of my apartment to be part of her entourage.

  “RKCNDY? Never mind. Fuck you, baby.”

  “Fuck you, too.”

  She wrapped me in a fierce embrace and kissed me on the lips. She tasted like honey and wildflowers. Every goodbye with Daisy felt like the last farewell before a 19th century ocean voyage. She pulled her leather jacket from the coat rack. She gave a little grin and an elbow-squeeze to Vaughn when she sidestepped him at the front door.

  “Call me this weekend,” she said and disappeared.

  “Interrupting?” Vaughn asked. Wearing his ‘tell me something scandalous’ expression.

  “No. We’re done,” I said. “Come on in.”

  I poured Vaughn a glass of wine and we parked on the dilapidated couch to watch dusk settle over the street. If you were seated you couldn’t see the ATM or the homeless people who slept in the alcove, only the deepening gray and purple shadows of clouds. From down the hill came the familiar beep-beep-beep of a driver stuck too long in traffic.

  “God, this place is Purgatory,” Vaughn said. “No. It’s an alley off a closed market square in a condemned neighborhood of Purgatory.”

  “You love it,” I said.

  “I love Port Townsend, but Seattle? Okay, maybe two blocks in Wallingford, and a couple of bars on Capitol Hill. Listen…”

  “I know. Some little jerk is losing his mind out there but he’s afraid to really honk the horn…”

  “No, listen.” Vaughn pulled a piece of paper out of his vest pocket and handed it to me. “This is perfect for you. It’s a way in, a way to get started.”

  The ad was clipped from the back page of a newspaper.

  Theater Reviewer Wanted

  Experienced candidates only

  206-328-6200

  Boom City

  “This can’t pay much,” I said. “And what do I know about theater?”

  I knew a little more than I let on. I’d spent half of one miserable summer stage-managing a repertory company of teenagers but I wasn’t about to confess my humiliating secret to Vaughn. He would have enlisted me for more than collecting donations and serving hors d’oeuvres.

  “Jesus save us,” Vaughn said. “What does it matter these days, in this town, how little experience a theater reviewer has? Do you think these people the weeklies send out to cover shows have any idea what they’re talking about? At least you have a brain, my dear, and you have good taste, and a college education…”

  Intimidated by Vaughn’s cultural savvy, I had exaggerated my accomplishments in community college. I lied. I lied like a motherfucker, and ever since Vaughn had been urging me to aim higher and get a better job.

  “Your credentials are superior to those of the sad creatures we get. Remember Demeter, the P-I critic who ran from her seat before the curtain came down, dashed out to the lobby, and loaded her purse with opening night pastries?”

  “Yes. What ever happened to her?”

  “She married a Norwegian boat builder and she’s trying to have a baby. Every woman’s right, of course, none of my business. Although, my god, she’s forty-seven, forty-eight…? The point is, Demeter did not write a review. She absconded with fifteen dollars’ worth of crème puffs and never mentioned the show.”

  “Don’t you want to kill people like that?” I asked.

  “Uh, no,” he said. “Throttle, yes, murder, no. Did I tell you about the giant man the Weekly assigned to review us last time? Poor, lumbering, morose, old thing with a scrap of wig stuck on his giant head? We had to open both of the doors to get him into the theater. He wouldn’t fit in a regular seat so we hauled in a divan.”

  “Well, I guess competence is more important than anything else…”

  “Yes, it is. He lacked competence as well. It’s all because of Jane Bash, the performance editor at the Weekly, who absolutely hates me.”

  “Aren’t you just being paranoid?”
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br />   “No,” he said. “This is true, this really happened. Did I tell you she auditioned for one of our productions? Beatrice. She wanted to play Beatrice to my Benedick. Jane is six feet tall! She has arms like a male nurse, she would have towered over me.”

  “Who played Beatrice?”

  “I cast Henry-James Moody because he had the chops and he’s equally adept at verbal and physical comedy, none of which I would say about Jane.”

  “You cast your ex- as Beatrice?” I asked.

  “I made a purely aesthetic decision for the sake of the production. Henry-James Moody is an incredibly underrated actor.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Well, this was a few years ago when Jane was auditioning all over town and nobody would cast her. She had large teeth, gigantic man arms, and the most awful voice. It was both adenoidal and gruff, like a high-pitched bark, because her vocal chords would seize when she was nervous and she didn’t know how to loosen up. Oh, and she brought a wig along to the audition, and asked whether I imagined her character as a blond or a brunette.”

  “A little presumptuous,” I said.

  “Obnoxious, absolutely convinced she was getting the lead. When I broke the news, you could read the devastation in her eyes. Of course she put on a brave smile and stumbled out the door. Couldn’t be helped, though, she was atrocious.”

  “Not your fault,” I said.

  “Maybe not but she gave up acting soon after, enrolled at UW, and earned a PhD with a dissertation on some deadly branch of Semiotics.”

  “Oh, great,” I smiled. “What the world needs.”

  “But I thought, oh well, theater’s loss is academia’s gain, right? They can keep her! Then I read that the Weekly hired Jane right out of grad school, big teeth, man arms, grudges and all.”

  “Oh.”

  “She did not want to review my new show. But she’s so passive aggressive. Instead of saying no, she sent us this giant, sad man to sit on a sofa to one side of the stage, pulling focus and making the audience cry. And you know what he wrote?”

  “I haven’t read the issue…”

  Vaughn reached into another pocket of his vest and pulled out a second piece of paper. “’Bursting with clichés and festooned with what appear to be the trappings of a children’s party, this unintentionally comedic production makes one pine for Ibsen.’”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Exactly!” Vaughn folded the scrap of paper and put it away. “It’s all about him! The poor, giant man is depressed by parties and pining for Ibsen! He’s probably off his medication. Oh yes, Jane, please send your Man of Misery to review my show! Listen, Greta, if you don’t apply for this job I’m taking your name off the opening night and reading list. I mean it. Don’t test me.”

  “Fine, I give in! Please don’t cut me off!” I’m sure he thought I was joking but it really was about the wine and cheese. I couldn’t risk losing this one scrap of civilization in my crummy life. Vaughn’s congenial readings and his gifts were my only claim to luxury. Without them I would be impoverished and pathetic again, as downcast as the Man of Misery. “I’ll apply. But I am not qualified, so don’t expect anything.”

  I slept badly. I slept badly most nights. Perched on an incline between Bellevue Avenue and Olive Way, my apartment building made settling noises, groans and gurgles. They probably occurred during the day, too, drowned out by sounds of life. In the dark these ordinary utterances of frame, floorboards, and plumbing were magnified. At times it felt as if the entire structure were alive and shifting on its haunches, trying to get comfortable.

  I’d been on the day shift at the copy center for months and it was slowly driving me insane, but it was a form of insanity I knew and believed I could handle. Another job, a real job, would be a trial. Even a brief plunge into the world of people who gave a shit about art and current events would only underscore my status as an outsider and a loser.

  “In fiction and particularly in crime fiction everybody identifies with an outsider,” Lee Todd used to say. “Especially conformists, they idolize mavericks. But then, who doesn’t? We all want to be the guy who comes to town, proves everybody wrong and stupid, and leaves no forwarding address. That guy doesn’t give a shit what we think of him.

  “Listen. In life nobody has the guts to be that guy. Because you know where he’s going when he climbs into his car and leaves those other people in the dust? He’s going home to a cockroach-infested apartment with carpet nails coming loose and a stained mattress for a bed…”

  I had become that guy, the loser who goes home to nothing every day. I didn’t know how I’d accomplished it but this was my life. The thing is, I didn’t want to think about it.

  The next morning a brief phone conversation got me an interview. This should have been a tip-off to how desperate they were but I was distracted by other concerns. One, the interview was scheduled for noon the same day, a Friday. I had to call in sick or beg Tam to cover for me. Two, they asked me to bring my resume (no problem) and a non-fiction writing sample (big problem).

  This might sound like a shitty excuse. In fact, there is no excuse for what I did.

  If I’d been serious about getting a job at a newspaper I would have kept a portfolio or tear sheets for such occasions. I hadn’t been serious about getting a real job, a grownup job, in my life. I’d always wandered along vaguely expecting a brilliant accident to make me rich and famous. My talent would emerge and an admiring agent would be standing by to see it. A relative so distant I’d never heard of him would die and leave me a fortune because he’d met me once as a child and thought I showed promise.

  When none of these events occurred I began, mildly at first but more overtly with each passing month, directing my irritation at anyone whose hard work resulted in success. Ever so briefly and acutely, I wished that person a small disaster, a private catastrophe to wake her up and make her realize all of the events of her life were random. I could be her or she could be me. She wasn’t special or talented, only lucky.

  As far as the reviewing job was concerned, I couldn’t imagine traipsing from one theater production to another, taking it all seriously instead of merely providing a warm body in a seat in exchange for treats. How in the world would anyone sit down and write an honest and thorough critical analysis of performances she didn’t want to see in the first place? I thought of the runaway critic Vaughn mentioned, scraping an armful of pastries into her bag and bolting for the door. I imagined her boat builder waiting outside in a canoe, ready to ferry her away from the ugly memories.

  I hung up the phone and lit a cigarette. I’m not blaming the cigarette. I take responsibility for the following chain of events.

  When I tapped the ashtray I noticed Daisy’s essay about Mia Zapata. Heartfelt, earned, unsentimental, and passionate, Daisy’s tribute was exactly the kind of non-fiction piece I needed. It was well written but it wasn’t exactly journalistic. (Daisy knew this; she only asked my opinion to confirm her own, to narrow down the market for the piece.) It was personal, with no attempt at being objective. Not the aim of an honest reviewer, I thought. (I knew nothing.) Surely such emotion and poetic language couldn’t be the aim of any reviewer with a shred of integrity. The essay was well written, guaranteed to get me the wink of respect I craved before I was booted right out the door.

  I decided to use it. I wouldn’t get the job but I wouldn’t have to feel like a loser. I could tell Vaughn I’d tried, really tried, and that would be the end of it. I could go back to my pointless, easy job at the copy center. Wine and cheese nights would still be mine, for a minimal effort.

  To be absolutely sure of failure I wore a sheer black smock, with a print of tiny scarlet roses, over leggings and a black bra. I didn’t shave my legs and I chose a scuffed pair of Doc Martens with busted, repaired red laces. Looking as unprofessional as I could imagine, I power-walked all six blocks, to build up a sweat-sheen. I took the front stairs two at a time instead of
using the cavernous service elevator.

  Boom City nested on the second floor of a former grain storage warehouse. In the 1970s the space had been split up into six units and leased to small businesses, including a theater company. The company had moved on and the other units had changed hands dozens of times. By autumn of 1993, they were occupied by an independent film distributor, a yoga studio, a rainwear designer, an architect, a massage therapist, and Boom City.

  The poverty of the newspaper announced itself with a half-painted logo on the glass door, a silhouette of a large head, the top open to reveal a cityscape with the Space Needle in the foreground and fireworks flaring overhead. The logo suggested a custom job abandoned for lack of payment. Rejection was looking more likely by the minute.

  Not that I liked my shitty job at the copy center. If anything I’d learned to hate it more every day. Yet aside from the boredom, lousy pay, and being talked down to by half the customers, I didn’t mind it so much after I’d given up writing. Thirty-two hours a week at a photocopy center was its own kind of hell. Yet when I moved on, if I ever moved on, I wanted it to be for money and security, or a windfall I could live on. Not spending my nights watching bad acting in garages and basements, getting paid by the word to tell playwrights and directors what their high school drama teacher should have said, years ago. “You suck. Get out.”

  The second I walked through the door of the Boom City office I took a deep breath and sighed with relief. I was in no danger of being hired. If these people had money, I reasoned, they would have spent some of it on real desks instead of horizontal doors with two-by-fours nailed on for legs. And carpeting instead of remnants tossed at random angles over a peeling wood floor. Lamps rather than clip lights attached to open windows. Or a phone system to transfer calls instead of relying on staff to shout at one another over cubicle panels with surface fabric roughly the color and texture of congealed oatmeal. (Except one panel with a foot-wide collection of what appeared to be nose pickings. As someone would later explain, this was ‘the Snot Wall, a thing and a tribute to a thing.’)