I Wish I Was Like You Read online

  You wanted to be a textile weaver or a folk musician. You lost interest as soon as your mother bought you a loom and a guitar. Your childhood drifted from the dock in gloomy silence as you wandered in the fog from port to port around Puget Sound on your step-daddy’s yacht.

  Your parents and their fussy, silver-haired friends are full of rules and pretensions; their ice-cold houses teem with hideous heirlooms; they never let you talk about anything real. They smirk and chuckle when you rant about human rights, and animal rights, and the planet, and space travel. They live in quaint piles of Victoriana perched on the crumbling edges of Mercer Island.

  A reporter for the Post-Intelligencer once profiled your step-daddy for the weekend edition and described your home as ‘picturesque.’ After you read the article you hid under the bed all day and fell asleep angry because no one came looking for you.

  Lonely child with a trust fund and no need to accept reality, at thirty-five you still believe in spirits, wood sprites, and fuzzy-haired druids. All imaginary friends are welcome in your world. You burn noxious white candles to ward off negative energy.

  You cried for two days over a blue heron crushed by a friend’s motorboat—a heartbroken, overgrown girl with no boundaries. You’re crying about the heron again when I find you sitting cross-legged on the floor of your living room. The floorboards gleam because a maid comes to clean and polish them bi-monthly. Your square fingertips are poised on the planchette of the Ouija board, scanning the arc of letters.

  “Souls who roam, feel free to come and settle here,” you whisper to the gloom. “Settle here beside me…”

  Marvelous smoky clouds roam the night sky, some as low as the rooftops visible through your windows. You imagine ghostly spirits riding those clouds to your doorstep. You long to be connected to those entities, anyone, any sign of a living cosmos beyond your insipid friends with trust funds, yachts, and portfolios. Anything real, you believe, will make you real, too. A bolt of truth from the heavens will render the tedious comforts and illicit dreams of your dowdy life somehow significant. This is what you want, you tell yourself. You tell me.

  I consider your weight, the way the flesh of your feet strains at the leather straps of your sandals. You’ve spent years in therapy, and more years being regimented and counseled by bodywork professionals, to no avail. You can’t find happiness as you are; and you can’t alter your physique, not as your parents want you to do.

  With infinite delicacy and patience I slide my hands over yours. I note the widening of your eyes and the quickening of your pulse. I allow the rough contours of your stubby, childlike fingers to absorb mine, and we begin to sweep the planchette in a pattern, forming my name and a greeting.

  “G-R-E-T-A,” we write. “H-E-L-L-O.”

  Your hands slip from mine, and you scream. You snatch the planchette from the board and fling it across the room to shatter against the window ledge. You keep on screaming despite my efforts at calming you, and then you crab-walk clumsily over the polished floor to the corner. Still screaming, siren-like, you clasp your knees to your chest. The contortion of your plain, sad face tells me this will be your next excuse for medication. Also a month-long stay at your uncle’s farm on Vashon Island; the housekeeper will feed you creamy delicacies three times a day.

  You will give away your books on the occult and take up Jane Austen. You will finally obey your mother and marry a stockbroker, give excruciatingly painful birth to a child you can’t love, and spend your days planning dinner parties and boating trips. And every night you will swallow a tiny pill for seven blissful hours of dreamless sleep. Until the night when you finally feed your soul by swallowing all the pills and washing them down with a bottle of Beaujolais Blanc—all to forget me.

  Chapter Two

  “Keep background information about your characters to a minimum. The quaint childhood habits and adolescent adventures of your protagonist are of no interest to people who read crime fiction. If you’re into that kind of thing, take a walk down the hall in the English Department and don’t stop until you spot a sign with the word ‘Literature’ on it. Bye!” – Lee Todd Butcher, RIP

  Like most people of my generation, I grew up a little bit lazy and extremely bored. I spent thousands of hours doing nothing, skulking in my shredded jeans and Siouxsie T-shirt around the outlying middle-class suburbs of Otisville, in eastern Washington State. The sky is misshapen above my hometown, or at least the clouds and light form an optical illusion so the sky appears to arc downward and then roll up again. The disorientation caused by this legendary natural occurrence is blamed for the higher than average number of traffic accidents.

  My life was ordinary. I rode my bike to school, stole cassette tapes from the music department at Fred Meyer, and drank gin behind trash dumpsters in the alley. I went to school with kids who believed they were a lot cooler than me. A few of them shot heroin or huffed spray paint and died before graduation. Comparatively speaking, my teen years were uneventful.

  I could lie to create a more flattering portrait, but what’s the point?

  Facing an eternity of parenthood, my mom and dad resisted their natural impulse to flee. Instead they wasted their youth paying off a third mortgage on a ranch-style house with three bedrooms, two baths, and a dining area lined in fake wood paneling.

  We lived on a street where all the neighbors could see through one another’s living room window, and nothing ever happened. People went to work and to school. People celebrated holidays with barbecues and fireworks. People met at motels and bars and pretended to be mysterious. A father of four was arrested for indecent exposure at the park. A woman drove drunk through her neighbor’s roses and somebody killed her cat the next day. This was life in the suburbs.

  Nobody murdered anybody, at least nobody who got caught. Families knew one another, or pretended to, from a safe and civil distance. They didn’t discuss anything more controversial than the local football scores. A natural death on our block justified the entire population shambling outdoors in pajamas to drink coffee and watch the paramedics strap down and ferry away one of our own. Afterward, minus information, we speculated.

  “Hal was out of shape. I offered to take him to the gym as my guest. Said he didn’t have time. Look at him now…”

  “He was under too much pressure at work. All that overtime! Stress is a killer. I told him to slow down and spend more time with the family but he didn’t listen. Look at him now…”

  “His marriage was coming apart. I urged him to see a lawyer and get free of the whole mess. Look at him now…”

  Regardless of the slant our gossip took, one thing was consistent; we blamed the dead guy. People always do. It’s a way of siding with life, with energy and bouncy tits, a way of stepping back from death, mocking anyone who seems tired, weak, depressed, or just too goddamn eager to lie down. It’s a way of pretending to be on friendly terms with good fortune.

  Good old good fortune! She’ll never let us down!

  It’s a classic M.O., self-delusion. Mortality comes to shoot us all in the head one day. Speculation and blame won’t make any difference. Yet sanity craves answers. People demand explanations, even if those explanations are ridiculous. Our ability to screech through mundane disasters on a shopping cart of bravado relies on the belief that it matters how we live and where and for how long. The only thing keeping us going is self-importance.

  No wonder suburban kids crave violence. Sugar, too, but mostly violence. Not toward ourselves, necessarily, but we long for something bloody and real, a loud bang to break the tedium and sharpen the senses.

  By my sophomore year I’d seen kids overdose in the public pool; crash into a wall with a motorcycle; shine sunlight through a magnifying glass and blow up a cartridge of shotgun powder at close range; and set a teaching assistant’s wig on fire with a Bunsen burner and a can of hairspray.

  Death occurred often enough but not murder. Where I came from, a murder would have been a blessing. We co
uld have talked about a murder for years. Death without murder seemed naked and over-advertised.

  Murder was one of the few subjects that held my adolescent attention. I pored over the gruesome details in magazines. I thought of both perpetrators and victims as people I knew, maybe because I didn’t have friends. I watched crime dramas on TV and made up elaborate fantasies around them. I read books by an FBI profiler who developed a theory about serial killers. He proposed a plausible combination of factors—prefrontal lobe damage in childhood, early exposure to extreme violence and emotional abuse—indicating higher than average risk. I read all of his case studies and dreamed about turning into a killer. I fell asleep each night reading the most frightening tales of brutality, and woke with a smile on my lips.

  “Trouble,” my mother used to say when she saw me reading my awful books. “Always trouble.” She liked to tell a story about a girl named Finch, and how I’d dislocated her shoulder by dragging her off a swing set in kindergarten. Also a girl named Lana I’d stabbed in the left butt cheek with an unsharpened pencil for cutting in line at lunch. I don’t remember any of this. I know there were no consequences, no counseling or time out, none of the attention afforded ‘special kids’ of my generation. All of which makes me wonder if my mom invented these stories in a misguided attempt to explain empathy to her poker-faced only child.

  My parents urged me to study forensic science, or psychology, or even mortuary management; anything related to my interest that might lead to an income. One way or another I ended up wandering through high school without distinguishing myself. It was hard to believe all the great things our blathering valedictorian claimed he was going to do as soon as he was released upon the unsuspecting world. The thought of someday sharing an office with a guy like that made me want to fill a backpack with candy bars and walk into the woods, hoping to be eaten by bears.

  I didn’t want a practical application for my prurient interest. Its illicit nature was its primary appeal. I didn’t want a degree in a field that would help me find a job. I didn’t want a job. In fact, I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t care what I wanted. It didn’t bother me that I didn’t care.

  While my classmates grudgingly followed their parents into corporate accounting and civil engineering, I maintained my habit of dabbling in coursework and gliding through with a grade point average no one bragged about. After high school I chose a community college instead of a university because it was cheap and located three miles from home. This way I didn’t have to admit it was time to grow up and move on. I had no intention of growing up or moving on. When I tried to picture what a life of mine would be like, I could only see patterns of shifting light and muted colors, fuzzy at the edges, the same way I imagined heaven.

  I inherited a piece-of-crap Gremlin from my mom’s brother when he finally bought a real car. I registered for classes with the faint hope of stumbling onto a subject I could stand to be immersed in for more than a month. Besides murder, of course. Over the dull ensuing days I sampled and gradually stopped attending Creative Mathematics, French, Anthropology, Shakespeare, Spanish, Biology, Latin American History, German, and Humanities.

  I spent my nights drinking Rainier beer and making out with a guy named Jack Brinkerhoff who had a part-time job uninstalling solar panels. We grappled in his Corvette as many times as it took to admit the absence of any attraction between us. It’s hard to say, sometimes, which is the more powerful force: lust or boredom.

  On the drives home, by myself, I let the black shadows flanking the road envelop me. Moonlight faded to a pinpoint and then expanded, stretching across my vision, revealing the night version of our warped, uneven sky.

  The semester before I quit community college I signed up for a class in crime fiction appreciation. The elective course description clicked with the morbid inclinations of my suburban soul, and I figured nothing could be less practical than appreciating gruesome, made-up stories. I thought it would be an easy grade and nothing more.

  The teacher was named Lee Todd Butcher, and my absolute first thought the moment I saw him was: That guy doesn’t know he’s dead. His paperback bio note made him sound like a combination badass martial artist and soldier of fortune. In the cover photo he squinted from beneath a fedora, a poor man’s Clint Eastwood sucking on a Pall Mall cigarette. The guy wore at least three layers of pretentiousness. Yet I couldn’t stop staring at his picture, at the cold blue-gray irises and the shadows under his eyes. Where did he get the nerve?

  The actual Lee Todd was a ghost of his photograph. He leaned a lot and stooped at both shoulders and hips, a once vain man resigned to turning silver and balding in equal measure. Maybe he was heroic when he was younger. Under the fluorescent lights of a classroom, etched against a green chalkboard, he was a middle-aged guy wearing department store sweatpants that barely clung to his narrow hips. His threadbare Iron Maiden T-shirt must have shrunk a couple of sizes, judging from the way it strained against his chest. The rippling effect made him appear more muscular and I wondered if this was why he favored the shirt; he wore it almost every day.

  He said the first session would be an introduction to him and his story, and how he operated. A show of hands revealed less than half the class recognized Lee Todd’s name before showing up, and less than one quarter had read any of his books. So the first order of business, he said, was to tell us all about his career and how he ended up ‘in a shithole like Otisville.’

  Lee Todd had written eight crime novels in the 1970s and early ’80s. Three of them, Rage of Death, Long Way Back, and Whiskey Fever, made the New York Times Best Seller list for their genre. After that he told his friends he was hard at work on a real masterpiece, a hell of a book, a surefire crossover. He was going legit, adding a literary smirk to his signature style. He assured his friends he would finally win an Edgar, and probably a National Book Award for this one.

  Meanwhile he scratched out a few stories for True Detective and Ellery Queen, and managed to stay alive in a Brooklyn apartment where he waged war daily with cockroaches, ants, and writer’s block. He completed the first ten thousand words of his new novel. Then he threw out the pages and wrote five thousand words ‘so bad they held their noses at their own stench.’

  He threw away page after page, day after day, until he ran out of ideas. Then he decided a great idea would come if he didn’t try so hard. He wrote book reviews for a couple of months. He drank and smoked and soon realized he’d written nothing but reviews for a year and a half. Gradually, with a fading sense of purpose, he stopped talking about awards. Then he stopped talking about his novel. Then he stopped answering his agent’s phone calls.

  When Lee Todd finally admitted he couldn’t write another novel, everything went to shit. He’d spent the book advance on cocaine and a piece of land in his home state of Washington. This last he planned on turning into a mud bog for modified-car races, a scheme his accountant Vince Devon insisted was ‘a peerless investment.’

  The land was over-priced. The only person who made a profit from the deal was the accountant. Vince Devon was last seen boarding a plane for the Cayman Islands.

  Casual coke had become a habit though not an addiction, eating up the last of Lee Todd’s savings. In one nightmarish weekend he realized he was broke, he was unemployed, and he would have to hang onto the property in Washington for years, just to see a return.

  When Lee Todd’s publisher canceled his book contract and demanded repayment of the advance, he was forced to give up his grubby apartment and his life in New York. Since his childhood dream had been to conquer the Big Apple as a famous author, this was pretty depressing. He moved back home to a state he despised and settled into a doublewide trailer with a pair of deer antlers over the door and clay wind chimes rattling in the carport. The day his bank account hit zero he called in a favor from a colleague, a writer whose books he had favorably reviewed back in the day.

  “Can you teach?” the writer asked.

  “Who can
’t teach?” Lee Todd answered.

  “This is community college,” said the writer. “It won’t pay much.”

  “Great, I’ll take it,” said Lee Todd, knowing his only alternative at this point would be the night shift at 7-Eleven. Thus began what he hoped would be a temporary career, one that had lasted four years when I met him.

  He recounted this fall from grace, from semi-fame to semi-academia, in the cadences of a world-weary private dick. He included unnecessarily grisly details, and promised an A if we didn't rat him out to the English Chairman for chain-smoking in class.

  He also proposed a list of rules for crime fiction, and made us swear to honor them for all time. These idiosyncratic preferences, I assumed, were all he had left from his glory days. Adhering to the list of rules was a vow I took—not at all seriously—when I chose to be one of his acolytes. I agreed but I was lying, keeping my fingers crossed in my pocket, so to speak.

  This was a long time ago. Certain moments I can recall as if they happened yesterday. Others, once crucial, have all but evaporated.

  Lee Todd Butcher died in a hospital bed with pinholes dotting his liver and a face the color of pumpkin guts. But his words went on resounding in my head. He was the first person I ever met who said what he thought while he was thinking it.

  “Here’s the thing to remember, people. You’re only, what, nineteen years old? What could you possibly know? Your brains aren’t even formed yet. Your writing is crap. Okay? I don’t care how clever your mom thinks it is. It’s crap. Accept that now, today, before you leave this fucking classroom. Or you can all go to hell. Those are your options.”

  The ‘Aurora Bridge’ arches upward, a massive metallic monster in the gray-blue light of a crescent moon. Quick flashing beams of automobiles cut the pale night like blades.