I Wish I Was Like You Page 5

  Xavier never answered photocopy questions without also mentioning his work as a serious painter. He was kicked out for making posters and chapbooks without paying.

  Polly was a glazier who wore Japanese silk robes draped over her 4’ 9” frame. Polly brought her cats to work and baked Mary Patty a pan of vegan zucchini brownies with tufts of fur clinging to the corners.

  Harmon was a speed freak. He popped black beauties, white crosses, whatever was available in quantity. He could operate six machines full-time, over half a million copies on one shift. He was given a raise and offered management training.

  The only perk to my job was being able to call out, “Break!” any time we needed a smoke or a coffee or a walk in the alley to breathe—not fresh air but different air, full of auto exhaust instead of dry toner.

  The day Lee Todd Butcher strolled into the shop I yelled, “Break!” Then I headed right out the back door.

  As I was rounding the corner of the building I saw him standing on the sidewalk waiting for me. This time I wasn’t going to run. I stomped over in my chubby Doc Martens and said, “You look like shit.”

  He really did. His face was waxy with a faint yellow tint. His jeans and jacket hung like a display on a clothing rack.

  “You look good,” he said. “Are you taking care of yourself?”

  “Who cares?” I asked. I felt childish and banal, exactly the way I’d felt the day I stormed out of his office.

  “Listen, Greta,” he said. “It’s important to me to know you’re okay.”

  This was a statement my dad would have called ‘rich.’ Suddenly I was more pissed off than I had been in months.

  “Thanks so much, teacher,” I told him.

  “I’m not joking,” he said. “I hate to see you squandering your life in a place like this.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the copy shop.

  I took a step toward him and put my hands on my hips. I’d never been more aware of the difference in our ages. He was as insubstantial as a scarecrow. I could have knocked him down with one punch.

  “This is nothing,” I said. “I’m saving money to leave this dump.”

  He let up on the scowl. “That’s good,” he said. “Where will you go?”

  “Any place I want,” I told him. “New York, Chicago…”

  “No, come on,” he said. “Don’t go dive into some monster city where you’ll get swallowed up like all the other girls your age…”

  “And maybe get fucked over by a famous writer?”

  “You know that’s not what happened,” he said.

  “Because you’re not famous,” I said.

  “No one took advantage,” he said. “If anything, it was the other way around.”

  “What?” I exploded. I punched his shoulder and he winced. “Why the fuck are you here?”

  “I’m not here to start anything,” he said. “I happened to see you the other day, working in this place, and I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Great, thanks!” I shouted. I wanted to hit him in the face. I really felt the urge. “Great! Don’t come back because I won’t be here. I’ve saved enough money. Screw it. I’m moving away.”

  “Where?”

  “Seattle.” It popped into my head and the word popped out of my mouth.

  “Seattle?” His smile was weird and crooked.

  “Is your hearing going now?” I asked. “Seattle. It’s on the coast, about 300 miles west of here.”

  “There’s nothing there but junkies and shitty music,” he said. “And serial killers.”

  “Exactly! I’m thinking about taking the Ted Bundy Tour. Sounds like fun!” In fact, the day before, I’d spoken with a co-worker about morbid, unofficial attractions offered by the soggy city. We joked about renting a yellow Volkswagen and trekking from one body dumpsite to another. Then we laughed at the idea, at all of our ideas, the shapelessness of our destination, and the sheer nastiness of how we felt. We made photocopies for a living, so our attitude was ’Fuck it all.’

  “Don’t move to Seattle,” Lee Todd said. “I was there on a book tour once. There’s nothing to do. Half the news stories are about sea lions. It’s like Disneyland. People go there to commit suicide…”

  “What I do is none of your business,” I said.

  “Greta, you should go to college.”

  “Maybe I will,” I told him. I turned away and headed back to work—to finish my shift and hand in my notice. “Maybe I’ll go for a degree in forensic science. Or how about this? I’ll turn the story you hated so much into a novel and sell it. Or maybe I’ll hook up with a dirty, old writing teacher, okay, even better than a serial killer, a has-been in sweat pants!”

  “Greta!” he called from somewhere behind me, a voice fading into the past. “Greta!”

  “Fuck off!” I yelled without looking back.

  What a long, miserable bus ride across Washington State. Long stretches of emptiness except for railroad tracks and freeway signs. Ranches with paint peeling off the barns and houses, apple orchards, a few scattered towns where boarded up hotels stared out, ruined and vacant. The nauseating combination of gasoline fumes and the egg salad sandwich eaten by a grizzled hag next to me, the chattering tourists, the hiss and sigh of pistons.

  Coming into view at last, the city was a series of muddy streaks, blue ones and gray ones, Elliott Bay providing a cold backdrop to a handful of skyscrapers and a cluster of historical buildings. Old and new sat on top of one another in no particular order. The rat-tat-tat of jackhammers provided a cruel rhythm.

  Outlying in all directions were brick three- and four-story apartments. The morning air buffeted seagulls and pigeons. Sleepy artists with day jobs and hung-over receptionists, crazed bicycle couriers and shabby law interns crowded the downtown corridor, all slurping coffee and wandering through their workday, when I arrived by Greyhound.

  The flutter in my chest didn’t stop with the tired grunt of farewell from the bus driver. I figured he must have delivered a couple of generations of young women like me. Gazing up and down, taking in the homeless men and seedy street musicians, I had no doubt I’d made a terrible mistake. After all the hype, the place was a dump. It was every bit as gray as my hometown, only bigger and more disappointing.

  What was I thinking? Thousands had come before me and thousands had been wrong about their destiny. Writers, singers, painters, dancers must have come here every year to try to leave a footprint on this town’s ass. They probably ended up working at the Dog House Bar and Grill, or the Elephant Car Wash with its revolving pink sign. What the hell made me any different?

  I would have driven to Seattle but the Gremlin was already in need of repair and I knew I’d have to count every penny to live on. So I’d sold the car for parts, trusting my dad’s assurance that everything in the metro area would be accessible by bus.

  As a measure of how secretly and mysteriously precarious my life had been up to this point, a month after I moved my parents split up. I wasn’t one of those girls who pined for the long-lost days of golden childhood when mummy and daddy held hands and sang songs to each other in a meadow filled with butterflies, but it would have been reassuring to have a place to return to, if things didn’t turn out well.

  I don’t know if my parents ever loved each other. At best I’d say they got along because they liked the same food and music and they were frugal. They didn’t argue much. Nor did they seem happy. They cooperated in the daily business of working, eating, sleeping. They shared duties. They weathered the long, deadening days required to raise a child. And once that child was finally thrust out into the larger world, their work together was done. My absence set them free.

  My father took a job transfer and moved to Michigan, which sounded so far away it occurred to me, briefly, I might never see him again. My mom sold the house in the suburbs and moved to a one-bedroom apartment she said she liked much better because it was easy to clean.

>   Is there any more efficient way to prevent a child returning home than to relocate to a place with no guest room? Our simultaneous departures made me laugh. I realized with a chill that none of us had ever liked the suburbs.

  So this was it, my new adventure—a hint of drizzle in the air; a few sunken-faced teenagers with lumberjack shirts slung around their waists like kilts over ass-revealing, ruined jeans; the crackling odor of street food; tattoo artists smoking cigars on the pavement in front of their shops; the transvestite Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence striding uphill, nearly seven feet tall in their boots, arms linked, wimples tart, veils and habits billowing in swan-like black waves behind them; teenage boys in undershirts kissing in alcoves; teeming newsstands; band posters peeling off telephone poles and kiosks; “Monkey Gone to Heaven” bellowing from the open window of a second floor apartment rife with philodendron vines and curls of black ivy.

  This was not my parents’ hippie, New Age ‘vibe’ shit and it wasn’t Lee Todd’s 1980s delusion of coke-driven mega-success. I was here and it made a stupid kind of sense because nothing made sense and nothing had to make sense and there was no pretense about it anymore. The rundown, burnt-out former lumber town fit my state of mind perfectly.

  “Fucking hell,” I said out loud on that first day, and began to drag my suitcase up the sharp incline of Denny Way, across the freeway overpass, toward Capitol Hill.

  There’s a rough, peeling pine bench near the entrance outside Woodland Park Zoo. From the parking lot the cries of caged animals with no visual reference carry a note of despair. They often call me to this spot.

  Given a chance you would blossom, wouldn’t you? From a nefarious creature skulking behind a row of lockers in the bathroom and hobbling home to masturbate on your futon, you would grow and spread your limbs and become a full-blown rapist. Deny all you like. Throughout your childhood your sweaty joy was leafing through library books of classical art. Your pudgy fingers soiled the corners of those glossy, oversized tomes.

  What do you love? What do you seek? Impassioned scenes of sexual frenzy, especially those ivory-skinned nymphs rutted by earthy satyrs; the soldiers of Odysseus enslaving the women of Troy; Leda subjugated, half conscious, enraptured, penetrated by Zeus—absolved in your eyes by his fine cloak of feathers. Whatever is hidden is made magical in your mind. It becomes inhuman and therefore natural and allowed.

  There’s nothing magical about you, a seventeen-year-old boy who can’t keep his hands out of his trousers. Wherever you turn, you find fragrant, nubile pubescence ‘pretending’ not to notice or want you. The pounding hooves of the centaur on the forest floor, hands spreading the robes of your conquest and prying open her thighs, while a dull genderless teacher of no consequence drones about civil liberties and the Constitution, you imagine all of the American Revolution as a band of men on horseback chasing busty maidens across fields of gold.

  Your lewdness is transformed into love, in that fervent attic of a mind. In there, your chubby face takes on the weathered contours of a handsome man. Your weekend job soliciting magazine subscribers by telephone gives you a daily glimpse into the auditory world of women you imagine hurling to the floor and fucking senseless.

  Oh, you virile ravager of bitches! Here you go, lumbering across the parking lot with your booty, your camera full of the tiny hands and faces of precocious children.

  It’s a quick, bright, satanic joy to track you, to watch you huff and puff as you approach the bus stop, to lurch forward and catch your ankle as you run to board the afternoon bus. So eager to get home and pet your dick with all the images you’ve stored up today.

  Your pear-shaped body tumbles end over end, somersaulting into the street, landing with a loud plop in front of the tires a split second before they roll forward, printing the lower half of your buttocks with a zigzag tattoo. Poor you.

  Chapter Six

  “Nobody likes a dead narrator these days. Not in books, and not in movies. If you think you can do better than Sunset Boulevard, you’re wrong. Besides, readers won’t care what happens to your protagonist after he dies. They only want to know how he’s going to get out of a bad situation, not what he does with his spare time in the fucking afterlife. Which doesn’t exist.” – Lee Todd Butcher, RIP

  How did I get from my bitchy first ascent toward the concrete mecca of Capitol Hill, to the scene of my demise on the floor of my shitty apartment? The way we all travel from mild yearning to keen desperation, from frail, unspoken hope to cynicism—one lousy step at a time.

  Relocating was an act of defiance but I was never sure what or whom I was defying. If I’d had the kind of ambition Lee Todd respected I would have designed a better plan. I would have moved to New York or Chicago, cities with credentials. Unfortunately those places presented a challenge I wasn’t equipped to face. They were too expensive, too sophisticated, too crowded, and too grownup. Despite what I told Lee Todd, in the end I chose Seattle for the same reason I chose community college; it was cheap and it was nearby, relatively speaking.

  “You won’t get a good job,” my father told me the day he dropped me off at the bus station on the fringes of my hometown. “Not without a degree.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I replied. “I appreciate the encouragement.”

  “Maybe you should apply to the University of Washington,” he said without much conviction.

  “Mary Patty said her niece couldn’t get in, and she graduated number one in her high school class. They have a waiting list. Also, I can’t afford the tuition.”

  “Well,” he said. “You’re taking the hard road. As usual.”

  Months later my dad’s words came back to me as I sat on the sofa in my apartment—my first and, as it turned out, my only apartment—dressed in flannel pajamas, my face lined with sleep and boredom. This was the unofficial uniform for my first job in Seattle.

  For the impressive sum of $5.25 an hour I had finagled a temporary position with a sex chat line. By ‘finagled’ I mean I asked a woman for a job and she said yes while we were both drunk at a party.

  The owner ran the business as a franchise out of California, where it was legal. In Seattle the courts had yet to decide whether or not a local manager could hire women to talk dirty to lonely men on the phone. While the managers waited for a final ruling they were allowed to maintain the business, so long as it didn’t involve sex.

  There was only one glitch to this plan. Before being reduced to friendly conversation the service had openly catered to men seeking pleasure. With the same company name, same phone book logo of a sexy silhouette, and same phone number in effect, you can’t blame the guys who just didn’t get it.

  “What I want to do is get behind you…”

  “Roy?”

  “So you can feel how hard I am…”

  “Roy?”

  “Huh?”

  “Roy, we can talk about your day at work, if you like.”

  Pause. I could hear dead air on the line.

  “Roy?”

  “Yeah, uh, Sean?”

  Yes. My chat name was Sean.

  “Yeah?”

  “Uh, Sean, can you just keep talking? I mean, can you explain this to me again? Just talk.”

  Yes, I could. Explaining the temporary change of service was 99% of my job.

  “We can chat about anything you like as long as we stick to friendly subjects rather than intimate ones,” I said. Besides flannel pajamas I wore a headset with cushy ear pads, a food-stained robe and fuzzy animal slippers. My hands were busy drying dishes and trying not to make splashing noises that might give me away.

  “Right, oh man,” said Roy (maybe his name and maybe not). “Could you remind me what’s, uh, intimate?”

  “Touching,” I said.

  “Right…”

  “Touching yourself.”

  “Right…”

  “Describing sensations of a sexual nature.”

  “Oh, right…”

  “Roy?”<
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  “Oh baby…”

  “Roy? You’re going to need to stop now.”

  “Yeah, I just need a second…”

  “Listen, if you keep doing what you’re doing…” I tried but it was always a pretty tricky thing to tell a man in the throes of chat that his pleasure was going to get me fired from my job.

  About this time I could hear the telltale silence—strange but it’s true, in the blank depth of the telephone line it was just barely possible to distinguish between real emptiness and the silence indicating a manager had tuned in to eavesdrop and evaluate. This was their idea of quality control.

  “Roy?” I said.

  “Oh yeah! Oh yeah!”

  “Sean?” Kitty’s voice piped up.

  “Oh, Jesus, have mercy!” Roy went on.

  “Sean, I have to interrupt this call,” said Kitty.

  The silence that followed cut me off from Roy’s finishing moment. I knew there would be a reprimand phone call from Kitty in a minute, and a warning, and I was right.

  “Look, Greta, I’m helping you out here. I hired you even though you have no experience in the industry.”

  “I know,” I said. “I appreciate it, Kitty.”

  “Well, you don’t act like it. If the police catch one call on tape, I’m screwed.”

  “I get it.”

  “The whole business is screwed.”

  “I get it.”

  “If you can’t steer the guys into neutral territory, and keep them there, I’ll have to let you go.”

  “I know. It’s just really tough to know for sure. I mean, they could be masturbating the whole time and I wouldn’t know it,” I said. Which we both knew was sort of true and sort of a lie, like everything else about the job.

  “You’re the one in charge,” Kitty said. This was another one of those true-and-not-true things. “Ask questions to lure them into an ordinary conversation.”