I Wish I Was Like You Page 9

  Mervin’s face widened until it achieved a tight grin. He made a vague motion with his right hand toward the wall behind me and to my left.

  “Feel free to toss your submission on the pile,” he said merrily.

  As I turned it took all of my self-control not to let Mervin see the reaction that shot through me. I realized he was waiting for it, twiddling thumbs and planning how he would recount the story of the uppity girl writer.

  I held myself in check and walked to the wall where four two-foot-tall stacks of manuscripts, some in envelopes and some not, occupied wire baskets. The height of the stacks would have toppled them if they hadn’t tilted toward one another, braced just as though a spiteful office manager had shoved them into place rather than sorting them into smaller stacks.

  With reluctance I lay my manuscript on top of the left-hand pile. I felt a stabbing sense of abandonment. I was suddenly afraid Mervin would discard my story as soon as I left. With as little fuss as I could manage, I picked it up and stuffed it between the other submissions. Since Mervin didn’t know my name and most of the envelopes were identical, I decided this would pose enough of a challenge to put him off.

  Without looking at Mervin I returned to the front door. On my way out I heard him offer what sounded like a snarky farewell.

  By the time I reached Queen Anne Avenue and started my descent—that jerky downhill stomp people acquire on the streets here, an involuntary, embarrassing imitation of the old hippie Keep on Truckin’ walk—my stomach was yowling and tears were rolling down my face.

  I went back to work. One hundred and fifty thousand copies a night, cigarettes with Tam, robbing the cash register, taking shit from customers named Summerly and Montana.

  Three months later, rejection dropped through the mail slot onto the floor of my apartment with a sound like someone saying, “Fuck you.” Not simply rejection. The type that stings worse than any other, a clinically polite form letter without personal notes or any indication of how close I’d come. Signed not by Eve Wallace, the judge of the competition, but by that squirrel of an office boy, Mervin.

  I stood in my apartment in ripped underpants and a perspiration-stained tank top. I heard the traffic in the street—that beep-beep-beep of passive-aggressive drivers—and I screamed. I let loose and screamed with my head tilted back and my vocal chords humming like violin strings. I heard a crash upstairs and felt a spasm of pain in my throat.

  A minute later my doorbell rang. I knew it would be Vaughn.

  “My God!” he exclaimed. He held in one hand a bottle of Pinot noir and in the other a corkscrew. “What’s wrong, darling? Here, have a glass of this and tell me what happened.”

  I hadn’t even felt like crying until I heard the velvet tenderness of that well-trained theatrical voice. In a minute I was a sobbing mess on the couch, with Vaughn’s muscle-man arms wrapped around me.

  “Who did it?” he asked. “Who hurt you? Tell me and I’ll tear out the son of a bitch’s spleen.”

  “No!” I hiccupped. “No!”

  “Okay, I’ll just break his collarbone. What did he do to you?”

  “Nothing!” I took a breath. “I lost! I lost the story contest!”

  “Oh no. Those bastards. Those blind, stupid bastards!”

  “This is the end,” I said, ashamed of my morbidity yet unable to stop.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I quit!”

  “No!” Vaughn held me by both shoulders and gave me a gentle shake. “Now, stop talking like that. You have real talent. And you’re so young! You’re only a child! You have years and years of great writing ahead of you, sweetheart.”

  When he said these things, I felt a quick flash of shame at the times I’d casually trashed Vaughn’s work in conversation with Tam. For a while I’d tried to drag her and her friends along to see Wicked Pursuits productions. One by one they had stopped showing up, and Tam’s friends had stopped answering my calls. Whenever I raised the subject at the copy center, Tam rolled her eyes and said, “No more theater, man. Never again.”

  “Obviously, the judges don’t know good writing when they see it,” said Vaughn. “Which does not surprise me, in this backwoods, barefoot lumber town.”

  I slurped wine and nodded. “God, I’ve met so many assholes in this town!”

  “Tell me about it!”

  “Remember that arts administrator who lost her shit with me because I wrote the organization’s name on my grant application? Jesus! I was only applying for a hundred dollars.”

  “Insane bitch,” Vaughn said. “She was menopausal.”

  “‘We are not the applying agency!’ she kept screaming at me. ‘We are the supporting, umbrella agency, under whose 501(c) 3 status you’re applying!’ She was screaming so hard I thought her vagina would fly out from between her legs onto the floor.”

  “What the hell was she so upset about?” Vaughn said. “Her supporting agency was going to take ten percent of the grant. They stood to make money, and they didn’t have to do a thing.”

  “They even made me pay for a copy of the application! Fifty cents!”

  “Cheap bastards,” said Vaughn.

  “It didn’t matter because they turned me down. ‘Insufficient evidence of ability to accomplish stated artistic goals.’ I guess that says it all.” I hiccupped and Vaughn poured more wine.

  “Go on, sweetheart,” he said. “Get it off your chest.”

  “Remember that English Department chairman, the jerk-off who answered my phone query about entry-level jobs? The guy invited me to his office for a chat. Two hours of ingratiating bullshit later the guy said, ‘Well, we don’t actually have any jobs at the moment. We haven’t had an opening in three years. Most of our people stay until they retire. But it’s nice to get a look at you. I like to see what’s out there in your age group.’”

  “Fucker,” said Vaughn.

  “Yeah. I left a wad of purple gum on the glass-paneled door on my way out.”

  Vaughn laughed.

  “Then there was the literary maven, Cecile, who inherited ‘a million and a mansion.’ Did I tell you about her?”

  “You did,” said Vaughn. “Wasn’t a condition of the inheritance that she could never sell the house? That big, old, draughty 1920s thing on 17th?”

  “Right. She couldn’t stop talking about how she ‘simply didn’t have enough money’ for the upkeep or the overhead, or some other thing poor people never worry about.

  “So Cecile inherited this monster house, and she turned the ground floor into a ‘writing center’ and claimed it as a tax shelter. But the zoning laws baffled her so she never knew for sure if her ‘writing center’ was legal.”

  “Poor thing!” He laughed again.

  “She was always catching cold from standing outside in the damp garden, ushering writers in through the side door and whispering instructions. They had to remove their shoes indoors and promise not to tell anyone where they had been that day…”

  Vaughn roared with laughter. “Oh, yes,” he managed to say. “Cecile.”

  “And later on when people started donating stuff to the ‘writing center,’ the IRS complications drove her into therapy,” I said.

  “What the hell did people donate? Pencils?”

  “All kinds of junk,” I said. “Six scratched-up computer terminals with mainframe, delivered to her doorstep. She goes, ‘Oh no! Does anybody know how to hook these up?’ Pacing in her kimono robe and a necklace made of candy, dusting a framed poster of Stevie Nicks and clutching a brass Ganesha idol. ‘Do they connect to one another? Or do they just sense one another, electronically? Does anybody know what a mainframe is?’”

  “We’re going to need another bottle,” said Vaughn. While he went upstairs and returned with two bottles, my mind went on racing.

  There were the open mic readings at Squid Row Tavern, where writers signed up to enthrall the half-tanked crowd with hot-off-the-typewriter poetry and prose. A
ll the times when I stood at the mic and read a paragraph of my work, and got a boozy smattering of applause. Only to be upstaged by some guy like Ord, of San Francisco, draped in burlap robes, reeking of ejaculate, clopping around on handmade wooden platform sandals, attended by three softly moaning, longhaired women who wore crowns made of leaves, and who explained to anyone who would listen that Ord was a genius and a fertility god.

  The times I saw Jesse Bernstein read his poetry to the same crowd. The way the audience smirked and raised their glasses, and if you asked what they thought of the poetry, they would shake their heads and say, “That’s Jesse, all right. Never changes.” Following his suicide most of the published tributes centered on his body odor, addiction, and madness.

  “This place eats artists alive,” Vaughn said when he sat down and popped the cork on our next bottle. “If you do anything well and you’re serious about it, nobody cares. Now, if you wrote a zany musical about housewives battling mildew and the high cost of suburban living and you called it My Latte or My Life you could make some money.”

  I was finally laughing. Thank goodness for Vaughn, I thought. I liked him. I really did.

  “Let’s drink, and then let’s dance, and then you sleep on it, and don’t make any hasty decisions,” he said. “I’m not letting you give up on your destiny.”

  I burrowed against his shoulder. He smelled so good, so warm and real.

  “Drink,” he said. And we drank.

  We toasted to the necessity of following your dream. We talked about fate and artistry, and what a cesspool Seattle was. We laughed and cried. I promised to keep writing stories but I was lying and I knew it.

  This time, with this competition, something had broken. Or something had been confirmed one too many times. Maybe losing had convinced me that the incessant, tin voice echoing in the back chambers of my imagination, saying, “You’re a fraud, you’re a girl, you’re full of shit, you don’t have any stories worth telling,” was my true voice, my legitimate voice.

  I was born to make photocopies, the voice reminded me, to live and die serving the most trivial needs of other people. I was nothing. I was nobody. I had nothing to lose. On that day—ground up, wounded, and aching with disappointment—I had no idea how dangerous a defeated person could be.

  Part Two

  “Never introduce new information or a change of direction by having a character walk through a door and announce it. Because, let me tell you, that is some lazy-ass construction. Give the reader some goddamn credit.” – Lee Todd Butcher, RIP

  Chapter Ten

  Over the summer my girlfriends traded in scruffy oxfords for boots, steel-toed if we could afford it. Buckled for damage, or laced up and tied in double knots. We wore them with flannel shirts and threadbare jeans falling off our hips. We wore them with flower-print dresses slipping sideways over a black bra and tattooed thighs. We wore them to coffee shops and grocery stores, to work and to weddings. We wore them to bed.

  All day and night, into the vaporous hours before dawn, our boots could be heard stomping up and down the hills of Seattle. Pounding the pavement of Denny and Broadway. The sound was our anthem. Girls proclaimed, over and over, “We will not be killed by your hands, motherfuckers! We will go where we want and we will not hesitate to kick your ass to death on the sidewalk if you cross us!” Where did we find the words? From what corner of our souls did we summon the rage?

  Mia Zapata was dead: a bright, flickering storm cloud, a beauty shouting victory in the dank green vomit-stained taverns and clubs. Strangled. Raped in the goddamn street at three a.m. and left there on the ground.

  When we first heard the news we didn’t stomp. We couldn’t move our limbs. Shock numbs the nervous system. We stopped where we stood. Grief shot down and the impact flattened us all, boys and girls, anyone.

  Chorus, in our youth and ignorance we chimed in on those itchy, lightning-rhythm songs. We pounded the floor in droves, sweating, screaming. So much green beauty on stage, we looked away. We took it all for granted. Remind me someday, when I’m old, how we took all of this for granted.

  Every girl is calling out, listening for an echo, a voice assuring her she is her own captain and her destiny, a soul rising to be seen, unashamed, unabashed, unafraid to walk home in the pitch dark between busted streetlights. And then.

  Despair like pins drove into our flesh, rusting, festering. The knowledge of death was a new communion, bitter ashes to our tongues.

  And here came a deadly orchid, a black heart with a pale certainty. We had always known the violence men could do. Had seen it skirting the room at drunken parties on the Hill. Spent our youth folding it into a box with tissue paper, placing it on a shelf, telling ourselves it wasn’t part of us. It was a gown we had grown out of. It was another generation, our mother’s fear, fringed with ruffles and rotten lace, nothing to do with us. Because we were young and we went everywhere. We had no taste of mortality. And then.

  The orchid took hold. We nurtured it with nods and glances. We held secret conversations about it. We nursed it with resentment every time we hesitated before stepping out the door. Shame flared in every spinal cord each time we glanced over our shoulders. And shame fed the rage until one day we stepped out the door wearing god-awful boots and a new determination not to cower but to kill any man who tried to stop us. Alone or together, in a vicious, unmerciful pack drawn from the shadows, we would kick and punch and crush those who wanted to stop us.

  “I pity the fucking fool who comes at me in a dark alley!” a girl of no more than twenty shouted beneath my window one night, as she stomped up the shoulder of Summit. She would have slammed an attacker to the cement and smashed his throat in. I would have run out to the curb to join her, in less than a heartbeat.

  Mia Zapata sang our song. The man who crushed her body was alive. He was free, anonymous, masquerading as every man, and now He would pay.

  We knew good men, kind and compassionate men and boys. We knew them but we rated them as exceptions to the rule after Mia died. We knew them as friends and allies but no longer part of ‘us.’

  In the aftermath of that July night, we began to train ourselves for something we had never expected to face. We prepared for combat. We set our minds on survival. Utility posts and shop windows were soon plastered with the call to duty. Train your body and your soul. Take the streets by force because—as the days droned on and police failed to find and arrest Mia’s killer—the truth hit us hard: We were on our own in a dangerous world. We had to be ready, and strong enough for the coming years. If we didn’t want to sit quietly, burning down to nothing indoors, we had to kick ass and save ourselves by any means necessary.

  Rage fueled our conversations, over coffee, on the bus, under store awnings, and in the rain. Wherever I went, I heard young women talking.

  “He thought that joke was funny?”

  “Tell you what was funny. When I cracked his jaw with that tiny reading lamp his mom gave him. Fucker. Eat a lamp, fucker!”

  So our days went. We stomped and screamed and promised vengeance. We searched every alley and public bathroom, determined to draw Him out. If one of us could be a target, we would all become targets to draw from the shadows the piece of garbage that killed Mia. And then? And then? God help the shit-eating bastard.

  I let Daisy’s words fade in the room between us. I knew her deep gray eyes were fixed on my expression.

  “It’s good…” I told her, allowing a note of skepticism on the second word.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d cut the dialogue but the rest is good.”

  “Can you feel the mood, the climate, the atmosphere?”

  “Yeah, sure. Your tone, your language, it’s powerful...” Then I nodded and turned to the window. Maybe I lit a cigarette. Yeah. Maybe I was such a bitch I lit a cigarette and stared out the window until she couldn’t stand it anymore and started to twitch.

  “What’s missing?” she asked
. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Come on, Greta, I ask you to read my shit so you can give me notes. What the fuck?” She trumped me by lighting a cigarette—one of mine—with her Godzilla Zippo.

  Daisy Parrish was twenty-four, lithe, golden, and sure of her feelings about the universe. She was ‘born to write,’ as she explained the second time we met, in an overstuffed booth at a joint on Capitol Hill. She felt alive in the world; everywhere she went she was a living part of the stories there.

  I told myself my life was okay; things had calmed down and I’d fallen into the routine of going to work at the copy center, drinking at loud bars where the music made it impossible to think, sleeping; I wasn’t tormenting myself with the fantasy of being a writer. I was in sync with what I was meant to be. But when I listened to Daisy, I tried not to acknowledge the envy writhing in my gut like a worm.

  “I don’t understand how you could give up like that,” she said the night we ran into one another at Ileen’s. “Not if it’s who you are, you know. Not if it’s in your fucking soul!” We drank some Belgian ale she loved, a fruity concoction I puked up later in the alley.

  Writing really was in Daisy’s fucking soul. Her mother was a photojournalist who had worked for Rolling Stone. Her dad stayed home and raised six children on fifty acres of farm and forestland in Northern Oregon. His areas of expertise included mycology, fermentation (home-brewed beer and bread-baking), and raising goats. All of Daisy’s siblings were prodigies including a cellist, an oceanographer, two poets, and a physicist.

  Daisy considered herself to be the least accomplished product of her wild and woolly family, still trying to ‘make her mark’ after having stories published in five major newspapers on the west coast. She was ambitious but not driven, a basically happy creature engaged in the work she loved. Compared to my fretful, alien attempts at writing fiction, her gonzo-infused reporting was a natural, joyous extension of who she was.