Here’s another one from Alicia’s pile of words. She’s no spring chicken anymore, let’s face it, and she’s not taking it all that well. I don’t think she’ll ever understand that men of a certain age feel invisible sometimes, too.
Last year I competed in the NYC rhyming story competition. Or it may have been the year before. Either way, I was quickly eliminated from the contest, placing a not unfamiliar equal last in my heat.
This year, for reasons I find difficult to fathom, I entered again, and have confidence in producing a similar (probably identical) result.
The max word count was 500 requiring a sci-fi story related to ‘back to the drawing board’ and ‘infatuation‘. It is supposed to rhyme ……
*
The Universe is out of Tune
She’s from Venus, he’s from Mars, between them though a billion stars. Love is pure and sweet, however, unlike space won’t last forever.
Well … just more foolishness really. And that is the nature of these things. We are all born brimming with foolishness but, with the passage of time, some of us get over it.
Not me. There was a period somewhere way back that I tried being sensible for a while, it lasted for maybe a week at best, and was exhausting, so I stopped all that and have never really looked back.
So I responded to a poem from Here with a short one of my own – a confession of my own hopeless foolishness.
I was looking through the vaults again and peeking into Alicia’s file where I found this piece. I honestly have no memory of writing it (or of her writing it) a fact which, paradoxically, adds weight to the notion that one of us did, considering the content.
It seems to have a stream of consciousness feel to it, but also clearly a work in progress that’s progress has led to nowhere.
Anyway, here it is. Try to imagine it on a crumpled piece of paper, probably with stains from life on it. Probably blood stains.
As soon as my full-time babysitting duties are over (another 2 weeks?) I will try to write something readable (or have Alicia do it for me).
*
I like it here.
I sleep most of the time and I don’t do much of my own thinking anymore. There is an alien to feed me and there’s another one to bathe me and to brush my teeth. There’s even an alien to shave my legs. And whenever I display any symptoms reminiscent of my former human self – whenever the glare from the coloured lights of another reality start to get my attention, in other words, there is an alien to pump me full of drugs and turn everything to beige again.
I used to live off campus in an apartment down on Market Street. Amongst the beggars and the stolen shopping trolleys. That was after I’d been ejected from Berkeley and had refused to move back into my parents’ house. In retaliation they reduced my allowance by almost half. I had to downsize.
I became comfortable there with surprising ease. There was a balcony that looked into a dark alleyway where, late at night, the drug addicts would inject each other and urinate. I used to wave to them. Sometimes they waved back and so I thought we had an understanding.
Mrs Gavaskar was the landlord. She lived with no husband and four children on the ground floor in an apartment even smaller than mine but she always seemed to be snooping around outside my door whenever I came or went, trying to get a peek inside.
After about four months of not looking for a job and of not even thinking about an alternative path in education I started to let myself go a bit. I stopped wearing makeup or doing my nails and I let my hair grow in all sorts of new directions. I began to put on weight. I looked into the mirror and a fat witch stared unblinkingly back at me. I didn’t talk to anyone. My phone went flat and I didn’t recharge it. One day I was surprised to realise that I had stopped masturbating.
“You really don’t care for yourself anymore, do you?” my mother said when she came to visit me unannounced one day. I don’t think she was talking about the masturbation. She only stayed about ten minutes. She probably thought I might be infectious.
I still showered regularly but I stopped washing my hair. My dental hygiene was virtually non existent. But for some reason I continued shaving my legs. By that stage I had taken to wearing men’s tracksuit pants every day of the week so it wasn’t as if anyone was likely to notice. And anyway, if anyone ever got as far as my legs it would mean that they had already turned a blind eye to so many other atrocities that a little extra fuzz was unlikely to make a difference. It was just an old habit that I couldn’t seem to kick.
Liked a Pakistani guy at the 7/11. Took up smoking so I’d have an excuse to go there every day.
Made up stories for the doctor. Rape, or was it a misunderstanding? My father strangling the cat.
“I see,” he said and nodded before noting something else down.
I was a little shocked by the way he accepted the second fabrication so quickly in preference for the first.
On one crazy Friday I signed up for 12 months of gym membership. I bought myself a ridiculous Lycra outfit and iridescent Nike’s. Just do it, the shoebox urged me. But I never did.
Beverly Hillbillies – an ordinary family that suddenly becomes fabulously rich and for whom, just as suddenly, the world becomes unintelligible.
Star Trek – in one episode the voyagers of the star ship enterprise encounter a race of aliens called ‘The Kardashions’ – hows that for a coincidence?
Gillian’s Island – a group of people set out from Honolulu on an afternoon sightseeing cruise an end up marooned on a desert island for about 20 years. Most people don’t realise that this sort of shit actually happens
Fire on balcony. Furniture, empty pizza boxes and most of my clothes (including the Lycra gym outfit) . I think it was the drug addicts who called the fire brigade. You can’t trust anyone.
Shrink. Visit every Thursday because my parents are paying for it and it provides structure to my life. It’s the only way I could separate one week from another.
He agrees with everything I say but prescribes all sorts of drugs anyway. Reassuring to have him confirm that nothing was my own fault. It turns out that my parents were unloving and had done their best to fuck me up and that the teachers at school (and everybody else there) had been picking on me.
5 days of pizza and beer and then two days of salad and mineral water – as though lettuce and mineral water would cure me of myself.
As far as I can remember I didn’t put up any sort of struggle and I was having no more trouble than usual walking. But they put me on a stretcher anyway and jabbed a needle into my arm before carrying me down the stairs and out onto the street where they had parked the spaceship. I was asleep before takeoff.
Richmond Road 