Going Home

I've enjoyed my time in this city, at least to a degree. Things about it have irked me, some to the point of making it clear that I could never make this my permanent home. In other areas, though, it's been good. I've enjoyed working in an office, enjoyed knowing that I can survive in a new environment, and enjoyed the company of some of the lovely agents and interns I've met here, a few of whom I now count as friends.

I'm ready to go home, though.

My parents will arrive here tomorrow morning with Thomas and Pie and, after a day and night together in the city, we'll get into their car and drive back to Southern State.

I feel as if I'm finally lying down to rest after being tired for a very long time.

The Neverending Morn

Every eve as I lay down to pray
I ask for Him to keep the dreams away
I beg for precious hours of respite
My one recourse, the fortress of true night

Where waking thoughts of hurt do not intrude
Into that silence far more black than gloom
Where I am not deemed heinous or unfit
Where memory's wings beat not even a flit

Where I can make believe I've never been
Or had to fight a war I couldn't win
Where all my hope and ugliness and pain
Is swept away off Nothing's endless plane

I like to think by not thinking at all
That eastern light will never come to call
But every day the charcoal sky is torn
My life is but a neverending morn

The Love Lost

When I was a child, there were so many things I wanted Anne to be. In my head she was smart, beautiful, and cool, the mother who would love me like my adoptive mother never had, who would take me out of my father's abusive arms and provide me with a wonderful life in which I wouldn't have to fear.

I don't know if she ever could have been any of that. I don't know if there was ever a glimmer of any kind of substance beneath the shallow pool of absurdity and astounding self-absorption that is my birth-mother. I don't know.

In my younger years it was easy to fantasize. Anne, tellingly, was not around (which by itself should have said everything that needed saying), but being tender and naive I imbued her absence with wonderful dreams about her rather than imputing to it the callousness and neglect it implied.

Since my adolescence I've come to know her better, though, and that process has inevitably involved outrage, a huge amount of disappointment, and, increasingly, disbelief. The disappointment and disbelief kind of feed into each other. I am astounded by the scope and degree of her failures, which in turn begets more disillusionment that further lowers my opinion of her and in due course compels a wave of surrealism.

To the elementary school me, she was a giant. She was everything. But she's nothing.

She's nothing and she's done nothing.

Her visit here one week ago confirmed that and emphasized all the things about her that I find sickening. To begin with, there was a considerable chance that she wouldn't be able to make it up. She is, as she has always been, destitute, and the $100 train ticket from Decaying State was a luxury item for her. The most maddening thing about her poverty is the degree to which it is self-imposed: she won't divorce her husband, who makes six figures a year and still lets her flounder, yet she refuses to buckle down and get a real job. Instead she expends an enormous amount of time and energy scouring yard sales and thrift shops for items to sell on eBay, in search always of the one big find that will pay her bills and fill her coffers.


It's been twenty years and it hasn't happened.

Instead of recognizing defeat, though, instead of putting this away and pursuing an actual career, she pushes on in wretched want. Her refusal to seek conventional success is deeply frustrating, if for no other reason than for the sheer number of opportunities thrown her way, opportunities that are all inevitably disregarded.

In December of 2010 a wealthy friend offered to take her in and give her the assistance her husband withheld. She moved in with him for a week only to sneak out in the dead of night and return home. In the spring of 2009 she was extended a $10,000 grant to go to school in Decaying State. She turned it down because my grandmother was ill and doesn't look back into it now because that money is "probably gone." When she was nineteen years old she was awarded a full scholarship to a prestigious Southern university. She rejected it because there was "a lot going on" in the family.

Time and time again, she's proven the most extensive self-saboteur I've ever seen.

She will then survey her privation, won by the dedicated labor of her own hand, and complain endlessly about what it means to be poor. Complaining is an extreme sport for her, and always brings her conveniently to her favorite topic: herself.

Anne really is the most incredibly self-absorbed person I have ever met. Of course, everyone is prone to self-centeredness from time to time, and, as one reader pointed out in the comments section of my last post, I am no exception. My self-absorption has bounds, though. Anne's doesn't. I have literally never seen her sincerely focused on something other than herself or her own problems, and in the rare moments when she pays attention to something beyond Anne she backslides quickly into familiar territory.


An example of this came in January when I visited her for Little Christmas. I was preparing to return to school after the semester I took off for American Idol and, typically, was panicked about how to get money for tuition as my parents had once again refused to pay. Frightened and unsure, I sought Anne out for maternal reassurance and guidance. I oughtn't have.

The conversation that I continually tried to direct toward my school worries veered like a heat-seeking missile back to eBay, where Anne is convinced other users are plotting against her.

Exasperated and tired of being subtle, I finally broke in, "So, yeah, I'm pretty much scared to death."

Her response was immediate.

"I've always been scared to death," she moaned. "And I've never known what's going to happen."

All I wanted was for her to tell me that everything would be okay, even if she had no way of knowing whether it was true. That's all I wanted. Couldn't she have done that?

It's beyond her, though.

When I get to the Selected Entries section for June of 2004 you are literally not going to believe some of what you read. I spent a month of that summer with her and left when a collapsed lung put my grandfather in the hospital and within weeks of death. I can still remember, with the same astonishment I had then, what she said to me when I told her that I wanted to cut my time with in Decaying State short to be at my ailing grandfather's side.

"You're supposed to come help me at the flea market this week," she responded after listening with an irritated expression to my request for transport to Native State. The flea markets were how she made her pitiful income even then, and she dragged me to them whenever she could despite knowing full and well that I hated going.

"I know that, Mom," I said. "But Grand Pa is in the hospital and it doesn't look good. Grand Ma's taking it really hard. I want to be there for her."

Anne huffed, her irateness increasing.

"You sure seem to care a lot about helping her," she said. "But not so much about helping me."

I can remember staring at her for a good five seconds straight and not knowing how to respond. Even at sixteen I was blown away by the level of apathy and selfishness in that statement.

"Well," I said slowly. "Her sick husband situation is a little different from your flea market situation."

That was Anne's cue to raise her hands in the air and begin screaming "I don't care! I don't care!" over and over as loudly as she could.

It would like to say that time has moderated her behavior. It has not. And if the previous anecdote sounds unbelievable, that's because it is unbelievable; her pathological egocentrism is matched only by a level of melodrama that is baffling, angering, and at times quite scary.


The last time Powell and I spent Thanksgiving with her, in 2008, we awoke one morning to animalistic shrieks from the first floor.

"WHAT DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND!?!" came the ear-splitting wails at seven o'clock. "I'M NOT YOUR FATHER! I HAVE NO FUCKING MONEY! I HAVE NOTHING!!!"

She'd forgotten a quart of milk behind the orange juice and assumed that my brother or I had drunk it.

I don't know why her visit here brought all of this into such sharp focus.

Maybe it was the frustration of trying to have a normal conversation with her and being unable to. Maybe it was her indignant response when I asked her if we could avoid discussing eBay during our dinner outing.

"Okay, then," she said, her self-righteousness prickling. "Let's make a list of all the things we're not allowed to talk about! How about we don't talk about your internship, or your job, or what you're doing with music! How about that!"

I don't see why she can't understand her role with me. She is my parent, and therefore when we interact the focus is on me, in the same way that when I'm home I allow the focus to fall on Thomas and Pie. The discourse I have with my younger siblings is not wholly one-sided, of course, but their interests and endeavors take priority over mine. That's as it should be.

Her failure to comprehend such a simple aspect of interpersonal dynamics is really frustrating.

Like I said, many things are possibly to blame for why I found my latest encounter with Anne particularly cringeworthy. It might have been just looking at her. In her blotched, sagging, lined brown visage there is barely a shadow of the woman whose phenomenal beauty lasted well into her thirties despite her alcoholism and heroin addiction. A healthy and stable Anne likely would have endured in stunning gorgeousness for a very long time.

Of course, a healthy and stable Anne also likely would have spotted the telltale signs of what was going on in our childhood home and moved to stop it. Instead, what happened happened, and every time I gaze upon her ruined face I see a hideous living emblem of drug abuse and poverty.

It was with relief that I deposited her on the train at the end of last week, and as we parted ways I realized I did not love the woman whom I'd just kissed goodbye. I did not, and do not, love the human being who carried me for nine months and then brought me into the world. Beyond that, I don't even particularly like her. It would be safe to say that I in fact actively dislike her. Her fate, unless I should stand to benefit from it (as would be my due), is inconsequential to me. I just don't care.

Now that I've acknowledged this to myself, I'm not really sure how to handle it. I feel it would be cruel to tell her the truth (not that I wouldn't be justified) and yet it seems inauthentic to go on pretending as if things are fine between us. I will never be able to accept or love her. Would it not then be fairer to cut her out of my life, inform her of my reasons, and be on with it? I don't know why I'm holding back from that. It's certainly not because of affection. Could it be fear of the confrontation?

It's all a bit confusing.

Drunk

Yet again.

Oh, bloggers. What to talk about? How about my ability to avoid typos despite intense inebriation? That's always been impressive.

How about my hair? Impressive as well. Quite long. Golden and whatnot. An admirable feature. It keeps me from looking thirteen, so all the better.

My relentless insistence on total anonymity? Impressive yet the more. The very fact that I can be this impaired and write coherently without completely giving myself away seems worthy of a gold medal or something.

I don't really know what else to say. Drunkenness is supposed to yield honestly, right? Well, here it goes:

I'm horny. It's a sad but true fact. In this City of desirable youths, of which I am unquestionably one, I am left hungry. What gives? I'm thin, I'm blonde, my hair could wrap around the Equator, and, what's more, I'm WHITE.

Have you any idea how valuable whiteness is to a young gay man? We're like the Megan Foxes of our demographic.

And nothing.

Woozie remains awesome.

Drunken links are clearly the best.

My name is BB. It's not, but it might as well be.

Fuck, am I drunk.

The City of Fate is a strange place. I wish Woozie were here. I'm really devastatingly lonely from time to time. Only from time to time. My internship helps. Work helps. Networking events, such as the one at which I got hammered tonight, help.

Sometimes I turn myself on. Is that weird?

Sometimes I look in the mirror and see that thin waist and that non-existent stomach and that fresh face and that golden hair and I just go insane. It's the height of narcissism.

Of course, I doubt I could be a true narcissist; I cannot fire myself as others can fire me. It's true.

I don't love Anne. She gave birth to me. If she died tomorrow, I wouldn't care. That may be wrong, but it's true. She's the single most selfish person I know. She was absent. If not for her colossal failures and lack of stability, my parents may not have gotten away with their crimes. I bet that heinous cunt has never thought of that, though.

Bitterness is awkward. I really don't get why I don't disown her.

Woozie just called me a boner face. We're chatting on instant messenger.

Slowly but surely, I'm building something here.

I have to go to bed. Goodnight.

The Audience

It was weird to have them all here at the same time. I was well acquainted with each, of course, in some cases more happily than others, but their personalities and overall temperaments had conspired to keep them from visiting together.

I guess this was one issue where their interests converged.

"I can tell you're feeling it," the brunette standing closest to my kitchen counter smirked. Her deceptively pretty blue-green eyes gleamed from beneath her brown fringe and her lips were contorted in an expression that was more a purse than a smile.

I cast a cold glance at Cruelty, whose designer jeans and fashionably side swept bangs made her all the more contemptible to me.

"I'm not feeling anything," I pronounced.

Her smile became more savage.

"Well, that would be in keeping with what you are, wouldn't it?"

She was taunting me behind her garish makeup. Somehow, being tormented by someone who lacked the ability to properly apply eye shadow was doubly infuriating.

"Oh, honey," she winced. "You're never going to be more than this disease. I figured some time in the real world would be just the thing to show you that."

Her face now arranged itself into a picture of fake sympathy. Of course it was foolish of me to think I could have a normal life. She, who had caused the condition, was just being a good person by reluctantly informing me that I should give up. It really pained her to do so. It was just so necessary.

"Have you thought about killing yourself yet?" she asked brightly. "You know that you're forty times more likely than the average person to do that, right?"

The grin was back, as reptilian as ever. She was goading me.

"You'll remember Misery, of course," she said, gesturing with her hand to the ragged young woman who was sobbing in the corner next to my refrigerator. "I arranged your introduction the day you were born."

Misery and I had, in fact, been acquainted for as long as I could remember. I'd never seen her face, though. I didn't know if she had one. Hers was always a variation of the same pose: huddled over, her alleged visage buried in her knees, weeping.

"Why did you do it?" I asked Cruelty. I was trying to hide my emotion, for whatever front I put on for her the truth was that I had been feeling everything lately. It played heavily on my mind.

"Well," she said, once again with the air of a wise person who must explain an unfortunate fact to an inferior. "Some people just don't deserve anything but shit. And you're one of them. I could see that even then."

Her face was so animated as she spoke the toxic words that I wanted to bash her skull in.

"It was mean," I declared.

She threw back her head and cackled.

"Oh, 'mean?'" This seemed to supremely amuse her. "Was it 'mean?'"

She wiped the tears from her eyes and threw me a pitying look that did not quite conceal her vindictive pleasure. It was a funny joke that I, of course, just lacked the capacity to understand. Poor, stupid BB. In that instant she reminded me a great deal of my mother.

"You have a little boy's mind to go along with a little boy's body," she exulted. "Maybe that's why real men just aren't interested and you'll never have anybody. Unless you want to let your neighbor the pedophile have another crack at you."

"I think I'll be fine, thanks," I managed with as much dignity as I could muster.

"Oh, but you won't be fine," she smiled broadly. "That's the beauty of it. You'll never actually be fine. How long do you think you can really go on before you end it?"

She looked at the other individuals in the room.

"You see, the condition itself isn't terminal," she projected, speaking as much to them as to me. "A neat little gem I concocted. It destroys absolutely everything but can't actually kill you."

Her voice went husky as she turned with satisfaction back to me.

"I can think of no purer definition of Hell."

I looked at her in defiance.

"If Hell is measured in orders of tacky mascara, then I can think of a much purer definition," I said. "And we're in the seventh circle."

The old man standing by the sink suppressed a chuckle that Cruelty stared down with a murderous glare.

"Laugh away, Fate," she hissed. "I'll have my way with this adolescent yet and you'll help me do it."

Her fierce face turned to me.

"You are a stupid invalid who no one will ever love," she said. "Who the fuck did you think you were by coming here? Do you think you deserve any of this?"

She swept her hands in the air, indicating not only my apartment, but, I knew, my internship, my prospective job, my friends, and every bit of happiness I'd managed to achieve.

"Honestly," she continued. "Do you think you'll get to keep it?"

My chest burned as I leaned forward and sank my eyes into hers.

"Listen to me you worthless cunt," I fumed. "I don't think I'll keep it. I know. No matter what you try to throw at me, no matter how hard you make it, you will fail. Now get the fuck out of my apartment."

The teal of her irises gleamed with liquid fire as she backed away.

"And take her with you," I spat in the direction of Misery. "She has no place here."

Cruelty turned to me, her face a grimace of anger.

"I'll be back for you," she growled. "I'm taking you one way or another."

With that she turned and stalked down the hall. Misery alighted from the floor with a shriek as Cruelty's hand caught her unkempt hair and dragged her from the room.

The three of us remaining in the kitchen were deathly silent as the front door slammed and the two wretched beings stormed down the stairs. After several wordless moments Fate turned to me.

"BB, I--"

I cut him off with a raised hand.

"No," said. I could tell that my eyes were wide with fury. "No. Just leave."

Fate was rarely flummoxed and usually brushed off my admonitions for him to go, but something about me that day silenced him at once. He nodded and backed straight through a third-floor window.

There was just me and one other now, all alone.

I turned toward the west-facing window as she approached and put her hand on my shoulder. I waited for her to say that everything was going to be alright but she'd never been one to lie, and certainly not to me. Her fingers were tender on my collar. The sun was so bright.

"Do you think he'll help her?" I asked finally.

She hesitated.

"I don't know," she answered after a moment. "He might not have a choice."

I turned around and looked into her face.

"Why not?" I wanted to know. "Why can't he fight back?"

Good sighed and brushed a blonde lock away from her face. She looked wearier every time I saw her.

"Don't be too hard on Fate," she said. "He has a more difficult job than anyone realizes. You don't know how often he has to do things he hates."

"Good, I need to know something, and you have to be honest with me."

She smiled. It was her way of saying, I always have been, which she was too polite to actually say.

I took a deep breath.

"Do I have a chance?"

Her expression grew resolute.

"You have a chance," she said. "You have more than a chance. Just keep fighting. Always keep fighting."

She ran a finger down my cheek.

"And don't ever let yourself turn into her."

"I never will," I promised.

We sat there together for a very long time. I thought about how beautiful the sun was and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.

In the City of Fate

I am aware that I lead a strange life in many ways.

Most people do not, for instance, pack up a bag of clothing and head out to a strange city they've only visited twice before. Most people do not, upon their arrival in that city, begin an internship at a prestigious literary agency, start work at a movie theater, embark on a search for a guitarist, and commence fielding prospective employment opportunities from advertising agencies. None of it is that weird where I'm concerned, though.

These are just the kind of things that happen to me.

One month into my stay in the City of Fate my journey has branched out in several directions, some of them unexpected. My time at Book Agency is going well, or at least I imagine it is. It's kind of hard to tell, really; Literary Agent is either more abrupt or less socially conscious than I anticipated, and his lack of feedback on assignments has been a source of frustration to me and the other intern working under him. At points I've asked specifically for clarification and on more than one occasion gotten snappy with him in response to his misinterpreting me.

While the more seasoned professionals among you may deem such conduct to be inadvisable, he seems to enjoy it on some level. One of the first things he told me when I came on was that I mustn't be afraid to push back at him.

He really had my number when he mused, "Somehow, I don't think that's going to be a problem with you."

Literary Agent continues to accept materials from me without comment, but he also continues to send me boatloads of manuscripts while burying the other intern, Sun Dress Girl, in marketing research. I am taking this, optimistically, to mean that he trusts my judgement with regard to literature. The only time he tends to voice any opinion at all is when he has a significant objection.

"Okay," he responded to a letter I recently wrote beseeching a famous actor to write a memoir and then let the Book Agency represent it. "This is way too bland. Give me specifics: why does the world need to hear this story?"

In these rare moments of criticism Literary Agent is blunt without being rude, and so at present I'm content to plug away and hope I'm moving in the right direction.

Of late, my efforts to perform well at the Book Agency have been distracted by my exertions in another profession: sweeping.

I receive a great deal of personal satisfaction from my work at the Book Agency but I do not, sadly, receive any money and so have been obliged to seek sustenance elsewhere. The effort to find work, carried out as it was in the nation's largest city, proved more difficult I imagined, and my initial inability to land a job nearly resulted in my returning to Southern State early. After about a month of searching, however, I was able to secure employment in, of all places, a movie theater.



Those of you who are longtime readers will remember that I worked in Western City Movie Theater, an establishment near Mountain Town, for nearly two years. It seemed to make sense that, when in pursuit of easy labor and quick money, I would turn here to a movie theater as well.

Mid-Island Movie Theater is populated by people of the same age as those in Western City Movie Theater, though the general hue is somewhat darker and the attitude more gregarious. That's something I've noticed since coming here: for all the good press that the South gets about its hospitality, I have found people in the North to, on the whole, be better mannered, more courteous, and more familiar with the basic rules of civility than their Southern counterparts. The people here are nicer.

One excellent way to gauge this is to examine how those individuals in a socially superior position treat those in a socially inferior position. During my time at Western City Movie Theater I experienced some truly audacious handling from patrons who knew no demographic commonality; from semi-literate rednecks to insufferable nouveau riche professionals, each group seemed to have a set of representatives united only in their entitlement and rudeness. By contrast, most of the people I've seen here have demonstrated a surprising amount of maturity.

If there is a line, they wait in it. They don't berate some helpless underage employee with their idiotic whining, because they know that the staff are working their hardest and that complaining won't speed anything up. When they are helped, they express gratitude. When asked how they are doing, they engage (as opposed to simply ignoring the greeting and intoning the name of the movie they're seeing, which is how I once got "Drag Me to Hell" in response to "How are you?").

All of this leads me to believe that we've overindulged Middle America. Everyone, from elected officials to movie studios to television networks to pop singers, has pandered to these people, and the objects of the fawning have become the cultural equivalent of spoiled children as a result. I've never been one for corporal punishment, but if it were up to me we would correct these infants with a heavy hand.

Whether the customers I interact with are courteous or not, the money I'm receiving from the Mid-Island Movie Theater should prove helpful in paying my rent, which I became responsible for on June 15th.

After two weeks of sleeping on Gay Writer's couch, I moved my things in the middle of June to the apartment one floor down that had been vacated when its owners embarked on a six-month trip to Africa.

I knew the place was nice by City of Fate standards, but didn't become aware of just how true that was until I hosted a friend this afternoon.

"Holy shit!" she exclaimed when she walked through the door. "This is huge!"



"Really?" I laughed. I had no basis for comparison.

"Yeah," she said. "How much is the rent?"

The actual rent is $2,500.00, but what I'm paying, thanks to a deal negotiated by Gay Writer, is $600.00.

I like it well enough.

I have a spacious living room (with eminent furnishings that have given me an unearned reputation for good taste), a full kitchen, a bathroom, a master bedroom with perhaps the softest bed that has ever existed, a washer and dryer for convenient laundry, and a guest room for when I host.

At first, lonely in a new city and intimidated by having so much space to myself, I was loath to leave my neighbors' couch. Almost immediately upon moving into my new quarters, however, I began to appreciate the benefits that solitary living offered. For one thing, the perennial feeling of awkwardness I'd had upstairs was gone; the Runner and Gay Writer welcomed me into their home without reservation, but when you don't go out because you have no friends you begin to feel like a third wheel in a married couple's house. Another plus is my ability to make my own schedule. Up until the move, I was cautious at night, timidly quiet lest I should wake anyone. Now I stay up until all hours, typing away on my keyboard, watching movies, making food, and even occasionally doing vocal exercises (something I indulged in several nights ago at the strident time of 2:30a.m.).

My departure is probably for the best on several counts. Gay Writer got a bit too friendly for comfort one night, attempting to make a move on me while his husband lay asleep down the hall. He then justified the conduct by telling me I was "just a boy," informed me that there was a "difference between love and sex," and explained that while he might be gay he was "still a man."

It was all quite charming.



In the meantime, this apartment will be mine until the middle of August and possibly even longer.

Before I wrote professional opportunities off during my job application blitz I sent in materials to an advertising agency. I dismissed the possibility of employment there when I didn't hear back from them for several weeks, but about a month following my initial e-mail, after I'd already started at Mid-Island Movie Theater, I received a message from the company inviting me to call them. When I did, the greeting given me was enthusiastic.

"Hey, I was really impressed by your samples and cover letter," a company official told me. "We're looking for someone to serve as a full-time copywriter and we'd be pretty negotiable on giving you a salary that's enough to live off of in the City of Fate."

My interview is on Tuesday. Depending on how that goes, I might not be leaving in August after all.

You Have Seen Nothing

You have seen nothing until you've seen a homeless man ask a subway passenger for change and then indignantly bang on the wall beside the passenger's head when he realized the man was asleep.

You have seen nothing until you've seen this same homeless man, with an air of supreme entitlement, request money from the startled passenger.

You have seen nothing until you've seen the homeless man's irritation, as if the passenger had been wasting his time by daring to sleep when the homeless man was petitioning for funds.

You have seen nothing until you've seen a homeless man, angry that he could not reap the fruits of someone else's labor, exit the train in a huff.