Whales Call - Published March 2011 Shawbox Magazine

Whales Call

The Cactus is everything that Tara needs, in terms of energy. I've been able to tell that the world has been pulling out her electrons and lining them up to dance since earlier tonight, like somewhere around the chicken-pasta salad at Hunter’s, and that her need to do something other than talk is happening faster than she can keep up with it. The vibes coming off of her are making me fidgety and hyper, and I am being sucked into her vortex. I don't know what else to do with the buzz but put it in motion.

When we arrive at Bruce's kingdom, the crowd is enjoying the show but subdued. Tara and I order drinks, and I go ahead and pay with cash instead of setting up a tab. I can’t determine if this distraction is going to be enough for her. The monster needs to feed, and the energy here is somewhere between the 53^rd kiss of a relationship and the kiddie coaster at the Tippecanoe county fair. The one shaped like a really long dragon. The one where anyone over four feet tall has bruises on their knees from riding it the morning after. However, Tara is enjoying the antics of Bruce’s performance, everything from the stupid shark hat that he wears for the stupid Jimmy Buffet song to the Elton John costume he dons when my personal request hits the poorly polished surface of his baby grand. I'm bouncing back and forth between watching Tara out of the corner of my eye and texting madly to you before your energy is depleted and sleep claims you as belonging to it for the rest of the night. There is a thick line between what parts of you belong to me and what parts of you belong to the night. The night is not simply the realm of darkness we rest in, but it is also the blackness that I cannot see that resides at your home, in your house, in your bed, around the corner where your real life takes place...a place I have heard of, just like some people hear about Carnival cruises and picnics with authentic picnic baskets held on checkered tablecloths. I am drawn to know it, and I avoid it too because I didn't think of it myself. I don't want someone else's sloppy seconds when I feel like I should have been creative enough to come up with something better on my own.

Tara's third drink becomes her fourth. My second drink becomes her sixth. I've switched to Amaretto sours because I can drink gallons of it, and it doesn't affect my sobriety at all. I could IV it straight into my system than do a Jam stomps routine from the third year of camp counseling. The one that I haven't done in over seven years. I mentally thank my dad for being a natural high-tolerance machine. My cells have absorbed the alcohol and screamed back at me, "That's all you got???"

Tara discovers she's drunk the first time she goes to stand on a stool and can't find it, despite the fact that it's taller than she is. Its leg is almost wider than the skinny part of her ankle. She chucks her sling-backs onto the floor in the mistaken assumption that this will improve her balance. I hold her around the waist as she climbs over me onto her stool. Bruce highlights the moment by congratulating me for being able to have my head on her ovaries, which she is pressing into my ear, but I cannot hear the ocean in her navel. I think I could if I put my head to her discarded shoe. No, in her shoe I would hear the pounding of a semi-truck rumbling down the highway, cleverly disguised as the noise of a college piano bar. Tara climbs down a while later to dance with a girl named Asia, which I think is cheating because she's outdone my daughter’s name with a whole continent. I don't think this is fair because she's at least three-times my daughter's age, and I'm a big believer in fair play. Tara begins the bump and grind with Asia, and I'm slowly becoming aware that Houston called in a problem a few hundred seconds ago, but that I was helpless to stop the fall from grace. Tara begins babbling over her 200th drink about how she thinks we should make out. I reply something insignificant about how it shouldn't be in a smoky bar, which she instantly denies ever wanting to attempt. I try to keep junior-high-school-dance-distance between us as she drags me out of my chair and around the room, shaking to I Want You to Want Me. I slow dance with her to Blue Eyes. I hug her a little too tight, because the desperation is coming off of her in waves thicker than the Captain on her breath. I remember this and what it is; that feeling of needing to replace pain with anything else, and I wish there was something I could say, something I could do, but I know that isn't the way it's done. I can already see an outline of that discussion in my head. It begins and ends with, "Jess, I'm fine!" So I hold her and wish that I could fix her little broken heart and give her something she needs, but she's already found something to fill the void. It's temporary, but it might last another hour.

Tara leaves for a cig, and a short while later I am informed by the doorman that she's been denied re-entry to the bar. I close the tab and run out to rescue her to find her babbling about the insane need to pee. I rush her back home and have to catch her before she can fall out of the car, into my carport, up the stairs, into the railing, back down the stairs, through my house. She makes it to the bathroom before she throws up. I wet a towel. She holds it to her forehead and suspends her face above and precariously close to the puke in the toilet. I leave her in privacy for the moment. I make up a bed, I find spare pajamas. She strips in front of me, apologizing, and I tell her that if she's going to do this with anyone, better to be me. She snorts and chuckles in agreement. The tattooed stars on her body wink at me as she kicks her clothing down the laundry chute. She ties on my size small pajama shorts, and I watch the waistline bunch together, puckering under her belly-button. I suck in the tiny pool of fat that still blankets my ovaries, even after losing twenty-five pounds. If she pressed her ear to my navel, she could hear whales call. My eyes follow her as she stumbles outside for another cig. I wonder how in the world someone that just threw up can swallow smoke. I guess that anything would taste better, though. I clean up the bathroom. I throw away my basket of toilet-reading material, only slightly mourning the loss of my Family Guy book. I am more concerned with the concentrated smell of desperation that is hovering in my bathroom, cleverly disguised as alcohol and too much good times. I know that she doesn't know that this is all self-punishment. I know there is nothing I can say to make her look at her situation as anything other than another failure in the game of life. I am foolishly grateful I didn't have to try to talk her out of making out with me. I couldn't think of an excuse that didn't sound lame.

As I hear her pass out in China's room, I throw all rags down the chute, and go down to take another shower. I think that that was a waste of perfectly good pasta salad. I stand under the scalding spray and feel incredibly guilty that all of my friends are hurting and the best thing I've been able to do for any of them is distract them. I feel bad that I've texted you a bazillion times, begging you to come out when you've got about a million other things to do in your real life that are far more urgent than my good time. I feel selfish and petty. I scrub my face, washing my makeup that took far too long to apply down the drain, feeling the tarantula-like prickliness of my eyelashes, which will need their own specialized cleansing session because of a little miracle known as mascara. I scrub down my legs, which I only recently shaved. I realize that I cleaned my own bathroom for the first time in high heels. I thank my ability to procrastinate, because the bathroom was due for cleaning anyway. That's also why I wait until the last minute to put gas in my car. I know if I did it religiously, I'd crash it right after I filled the tank up to full. I’ve let fate make all of my decisions from whether I shave my legs to whether I let my friend going through a bad divorce get hammered and then clean up her puke. I promise myself to stop texting you, making stupid requests late at night. I promise myself to shut up while you do things that are important. I rinse my hair off in the still hot water and then get out of the shower. I didn't bring down a towel down with me, so I take a laundry basket full of dry clothes still in the dryer from the beginning of the week up the stairs while naked, dripping all over the floor. I convince myself that if I was shot at an interesting angle in black and white, I might be considered art, even with the ass-legs hanging off the back of my thighs. All the lights are on, but I know no one from my neighborhood notices that I walk through my house naked half of the time from the shower. People have a hard time paying attention to other people unless they have it scheduled in.

I change into the pajamas from yesterday because I always wear my pajamas twice, my underwear once, and my jeans until I decide they are tired. I fold laundry and listen for the washer to stop.

I don't hear it anymore, so it's time to change it over.

I think of you.

I think of Tara.

I think of things that I don't know how to fix.

I feel guilty for having a good life that I can't give to others that deserve it more than me.

And I think of you again.

I'm ready for sleep. As I roll over, the whales call. 

TV 18 New Interview Tonight at 5 and 6.

Just to let you all know, I'm going to be on the news tonight for TV 18. Kristen interviewed me. You can also watch the story on their website, www.wlfi.com. Thanks to all for tuning in!

50/50

so this agent that decided not to represent my work told me she loved a movie that I hated watching last weekend.  art really is subjective.

Then I remembered that I have a personality type only 2 percent of the entire world has. I think I might be in some real trouble here.

High Fedelity

I've been making compilation tapes for people since the first cassette tape player I ever had. I remember doing it at six. I might have been doing it before then.I also remember recording movie clips and mixing the two together, back before MTV made that kind of thing cool. I didn't know what MTV was until I was twelve. We didn't watch television and never had cable while I was living at home. The hands-down best compilation tape I ever received was from a man named Joshua Bell. I contacted Josh on accident the first time. I was intending to send a message to someone else. I was doing one of those "Oh, his first name is this and his last name is this, which would make his email address blahblahfirstinitallastname@indstate.edu. That's the problem with blonde logic. It's stupid. 

Anyways, Josh emailed me to tell me I got the wrong dude. I made some pithy remark back and so on. Next thing you know, we were sending snippets of each other's writing. But we had both already been burned pretty badly. We weren't willing to take any leaps into the romantic void. Instead, we had the coolest non-relationship I ever had. We left shit for each other at the reference desk in the library. The first time, he left me a compilation tape and a book named "Kinky", which was a book of short poems all about a deflated, depressed, washed out Barbie doll in various situations. Very feminist. On that first compilation tape, he introduced me to greats like Afghan Whigs and Spot 1019. They would lead me into other artists that would rock my world more than MTV would later let me down. 

I only ever met Josh in person once. I went to one of his readings on campus. We shook hands. We never saw each other again. 

I know now that he was only a slice of the person I would later strive to become. I can think of a handful of men that have passed in and out of my life in that way, showing me a glimpse of what I could be if I just tried harder. Josh went on to publish a book of poetry and get his doctorate. I should be surprised how much he pops up in my head, but I'm not. He was the first to show me the hidden door - - proof that I wasn't as dense as everyone else thought I was. I couldn't be pushed through that door by someone else. I had to walk through tall, on my own. But Josh showed me where the door was...and that it was within my reach. 

His book, No Planets Strike, is my favorite collection of poetry. Particularly "Milk Division."

You've got potential

I hate it when people say to me "You have such potential!" Let me tell you something. It's awfully hard to get anywhere with anyone when you're not in the position to offer anything of value to anyone else.

Take, for instance, this quote:
"It takes money to make money."

Whoever came up with that one knew exactly what they were talking about. Let's face it, you can't make nothing from nothing. So if you have nothing, you're never gonna get something, therefore leaving you right back where you started. So rule out money.

"Potential" is the equivalent of having five bucks in your pocket that could one day inflate to $500,000 and trying to go to the bus station to get somewhere now. What are you supposed to do in the years it takes your worth to inflate? So we trudge onward.

Here is the message I want you all to take away from this. Please, please, don't tell me I have potential. Instead try, "I'm going to give you your big break." I promise to pay it forward.