TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I am not so many handticks from thirty years old and my hourly wage is only Canadian pennies more than it was when I worked at Taco Bell a decade ago. My current place of employment isn’t as pastel as the Gap or refried as Applebees or money as Wall Street and I have to wear a headset and pretend that Christmas carols don’t make my inner Jew bristle. It hasn’t actually been that bad so far, although I’ve only worked for five hours and that includes the nap I took during a PowerPoint on how to greet people today. This particular big box bookstore might actually be kind of fun—it’s quintessential stoner work, and even though I’m not a stoner, I like working with them because they make me look smart. Regardless, I’m still looking for someone to blame this employment situation on. I should be entering my last semester of graduate school, studying for comprehensive exams, working on my thesis, and wavering between spending my graduation money on a gold tooth or a power suit. But I’m not sending out CVs or introducing myself as Dr. Herzog in my bathroom mirror just to get used to the feel of the words on my tongue. Nope, instead of entering the professional world, I’m cashiering my way through seasonal employment and wondering if lo mein or pizza is more appropriate for Christmas take-out.

I suppose this job thing is another no-one-to-blame-but-yourself-situation, but I prefer to attribute my minimum wage earnings on my particular blend of nucleic acids. Some people are planners: some of us innately prefer to wait for situations to self-correct, like the rotting banana in your fruit bowl that will decompose and disappear in just seven short years, saving you a trip to the compost pile. As fundamentally as I’m not blond or diabetic or under four feet tall, I’m also not a five-year-plan-planner, or, for that matter, a five-minutes-from-now-planner. If you asked me if I’d like to get dinner at the end of this sentence, I’d be like, “Huh? Why don’t you ask me when I get to the period? I can’t think that far ahead.” This obviously flawed practice has infiltrated all parts of my decision-making process. You want to see if I can fit inside that mailbox even though I’m supposed to be on the bus in forty-five seconds? Sure! Forty-five seconds or an hour? It’s all the future!

There is one part of my life, however, that is immune from this type of juvenile thinking: I have been preparing for disaster my entire life, be it nuclear winter, vegan jihad, a neighborhood takeover by Steve the Mailman. I can barely get through the morning without peeing on myself because by the time I’ve realized that my bladder is full it’s already empty, but I am ready for far-reaching disasters, especially the ones that will probably never occur in my lifetime and/or zip code. When I’m in a particularly stressful yoga pose, for instance, I don’t try to achieve a state of meditation or mindfulness; I think about how much better shape I’ll be in than the other detainees at Gitmo. When I bathe, I ask whoever I’m living with to hold my head under water so I’ll be ready in case of a water-boarding party. No matter how much I struggle, I say, Don’t let me up. I need this. I know this is crazy. I’ve never thought that burning every employment bridge I’ve had might be problematic for my long term ability to have a cell phone and/or health insurance, and now I have all the earning power of a seven-year-old Cambodia with missing pinkies. And yet, I’ve been mentally preparing for disease and disaster since I was a child. As a five-year-old, when my twin sister asked for Barbies and Cabbage Patch dolls for Christmas, I wanted a fire extinguisher and a hacksaw. Other kids wanted to swing, I wanted to learn CPR. While most of friends would rather watch indie films that not only challenge your cultural assumptions but also make you look intelligent, I prefer to watch Bruce Willis and take notes while he dismantles bombs.

I can’t plan a dinner party, but I have disaster contingency plans locked in a fireproof safe. I like to think this is the mark of the truly pragmatic, but it might be less about survival and more about anxiety. When I lived in Portland, what started as slight and totally reasonable fear that any bridge I was on was about to wave like a homecoming queen on the back of a convertible and flip my unprepared ass into the water below turned into full-blown panics attack anytime I saw an elevated roadway. If I spotted a ten-foot-high dam in the distance, I would pull the car over and stick my head between my knees and hyperventilate until my girlfriend agreed to switch seats with me so I’d stop getting snot on the upholstery. The bridge anxiety abated with cognitive behavioral therapy and a prescription for Valium, but when I stopped stressing about bridge collapse, I became paranoid about earthquakes and other natural disasters. Over dinner, I made my girlfriend recite our plan in case of the second coming. We’ll meet under the Burnside Bridge. But what if the river is flooding over the bridges? Shit. Once I realized that there was no way to plan a meeting spot without knowing what the nature of the disaster would be, I bought us matching Walkie Talkies, insisting that even if they seemed impractical, this simple technology would be our salvation when the phone lines went out.

This fear lives inside me like a blood-borne illness but the symptoms come and go in waves. Living in a small North Carolina town has greatly reduced my fear of terrorist attack, volcanic eruption, and killer bees. Because it’s almost impossible to be afraid when you live in a town where the most terrifying sight is a group of moms hula-hooping on the co-op lawn to a high school jam band, it’s cancer that has replaced natural disaster in the dark hole of my mind. I see it everywhere. When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a healthy young woman who rarely gets sick even when those around cough and wheeze, I see disease. On nights when everyone else is playing bingo or working late, I put on the bald cap I bought for my Howie Mandel costume a few years ago and stare at myself in the mirror, preparing for the day when it’s not a five dollar piece of latex that I’ll see but my actual bald head, soft and vulnerable and slightly flat from not being held enough as a child. I cover my eyebrows in concealer and suck in my cheeks. Better get used to it, I think. I look at my face and wonder if my friends will buy Livestrong bracelets and wear pink ribbons, if anyone will offer to shave their head in solidarity, a gesture I will appreciate while insisting that there’s no reason to cut that beautiful hair. I think about the ways I’ll have to change my lifestyle. Might as well buy some heavy sweaters and take up a comforting hobby; give up coffee now so I don’t have to deal with caffeine headaches on top of chemo. There goes the occasional cigarette and hamburger.

Worrying about myself, about my own disease and dismemberment and death, is far easier than worrying about other peoples’. When you love someone, the world is beautiful and terrifying at once. This is the world that made the person you love, that brought her into your space and you into hers. But it is also that world that could swallow her as easily and thoughtlessly as a piece of dust floating in the wind. With enough preparation, I can survive it all—lymphoma, nuclear wind, meteors falling from space and crushing everything but my underground bunker. I will survive just fine, my concrete walls intact, my air filtered, my water supply clear, alive and glad to have spent the energy I could have used finishing school or finding work on more practical things like stockpiling food and Geiger counters. But if she doesn’t show up at our meeting place, if the Walk Talkie doesn’t beep, if I never know what happens, I will wish for the poison to drift through a crack in my bunker, causing my skin to slough off like sheets of filo dough and my eyes to turned upward and inward before falling out and rolling across the sterile floor. I will wish that I had let the cancer take me instead of fighting to survive because there is no survival without her, without you, without the people who will hold ice cubes to my lips when the radiation that will save me feels like it is killing me; the people who will say that I look better even though I will see their fear as clearly as the hair falling from my scalp; the people who make me want to live when breathing itself hurts. There is no contingency for this, no plan b, no mental preparation, just the hope that if it does happen, if she dies with the rest, I won’t be far behind, wishing that I hadn’t fought so hard, that I let the cancer take me when it could have, knowing that this final wish is the most selfish: that she, that all of you, would have outlasted me, that you would have to mourn my death so that I wouldn’t have to mourn yours; wishing that I had spent my time planning for the future that approaches rather than the one that ends it all.

This weekend I played the role of the badkhn—a sort of disgruntled court jester—at fake Jewish wedding. I basically read some real nasty and/or depressing shit about marriage and love and gay people and Jesus and made everyone uncomfortable. I didn’t want to do it because I think marriage should be between one impotent man and one child bride, but it was fun and I’m glad to have been a part of a fake marriage between four girls. The local klezmer band Gmish played as I read, so imagine some melancholy Jew music in the background. Afterward, Gmish played some happy Jew music and all the fake Jews danced and were Jewy. What follows is my monologue. Mazeltov!

———-

Remember when the drummer from the lesbian punk band Broken Heart, Broken Hymen cave-manned you against the handicapped stall in the bathroom of a dive bar and then left before you could pay your tab or get her number? And remember that circle jerk in a hostel in Amsterdam, which isn’t something you would normally do, but it was Amsterdam and you were on drugs and you’d never been with a man before because you aren’t some kind of faggot but, shit, when in Amsterdam, do as the dutch: get high and circle jerk with four German tourists on a hostel carpet. And remember your freshman year when you thought you were taking her virginity and she was taking your virginity because she told you that she was a virgin and you believed her because you were a virgin, the last virgin on your hall or maybe even in your entire dorm, but it turns out that she wasn’t just not a virgin, she was on her period, and afterward it looked like you’d dipped your penis in a in a bucket of red paint, which would be okay except that it was also kind of clotted and distinctly not romantic. Remember that? And remember the time you fucked the Jehovah’s Witness, the two of you snorting coke off a hotel bedside table and bumping your vaginas together until your thighs were like suction cups and made embarrassing farting sounds that you pretended not to hear? Remember how she later asked if you thought Jesus was sad for what you had just done, to which you replied, You got off three times. Nobody’s sad.

These are the things you will think of as you lie in a hospital bed at the age of 90, passing urine through a tube, not even pushing it out but letting gravity and modern medicine drain your kidneys. You might think of today, your wedding day, and you might think of the day your daughter was born, but mostly you will think about the things that happened before today. The things that happened before you joined another family and then made another family, before the mass holiday cards and the family portraits and the all day swim meets that you were obligated to attend. You may think of how much you loved your son when he was so young that his Speedo wasn’t yet embarrassing or creepy, but also wished he were less into swimming and more into watching TV. You might also think about how that same son kind of turned into an asshole in his twenties and is still one today, on what may be the last day of your life before the darkness takes you even farther from your youth. You will think of the wedding and the kids and the grand kids, of course, but mostly you will think of the things that happened before today, the things that happened before you wed, the things that happened when you still had something to look forward too.

You never thought you’d be this person. You never thought you’d stand here before your friends and family and your parents’ friends, who you don’t even know but who you had to invite because your dad is paying for the wedding. You thought you were better than this. Different, radical, above convention and ceremony, not a lamb, an individual. When did you turn into your mother? Today, today you become your mother and your father and every one else who has done this before you and everyone else who will do this after you. And why? Because you are scared. Because you are a quarter of the way through your life and you don’t even know what you want to be when you grow up. Because you just realized that adults aren’t actually adults but are children who pay bills and you are one of these child grown-ups, not scared of the dark but scared of dying alone with no one to change your diapers or clip your toe nails or wipe the drool from your chin. You are here because you are looking for the person who will save you. You are here because this is what people do.

But she won’t save you and he will annoy you. Yes, you will have your moments. Sometimes you wag your tail when he comes home from work, sometimes you want to hibernate under a pile of warm laundry with her, but you will always wish for the past, the day before today, yesterday, when you were still excited to leave the house because who might you run into on a Thursday night? Because anything can happen on a Thursday night when you are young and alive. You could climb a parking deck with Helen Mirren. You could dance in a store window with your neighborhood mailman. You could meet the love of your life. But you’ve already met the love of your life and now nothing will happen on a Thursday night because you are tethered to the person beside you like a disease that isn’t terminal but is chronic. You will sit on your couch and watch movies for the rest of your life. That’s all there is left after today. Movies and couches and laundry to fold.

Crushes don’t stop when you get married. You will flirt with the girl with the toaster tattoo who makes your Americano. You go to the coffee shop instead of percolating at home even though you should be saving for your anniversary cruise, a trip you don’t even want to take because the only people who take cruises are those who convince themselves that cruises aren’t what they are, which is seeing the world from a mile’s remove, seeing the world from an endless buffet. You will think of someone else when you fuck your spouse, which isn’t all that often, which you are okay with because you can only fuck the same person so many times until it is like fucking yourself, which you can do without pretending to care if she gets off. You will think of someone who isn’t him, someone who doesn’t piss on his feet in the shower because he thinks it cures athletes foot. You will think of someone who isn’t her, someone who doesn’t talk about yeast infections and stretch marks and hasn’t sucked you off since she found the Nailin Palin porno on your computer. When she gets over the sexy Republican porn and you have your monthly fuck, you will think of the woman at the gym who wears her iPod attached to her biceps with a pink band, biceps that are so much better than your wife’s biceps, not too muscular, but lean and toned, not like a lesbian gym teacher but like a pilates instructor, which she is your fantasy: a pilates instructor and a massage therapist and a really good cook with an insatiable sex drive and a beautiful wine collection. You will turn to the Internet, to Big&Busty69@hotmail.com and fuck her through your finger tips and thank God that email doesn’t cost 99 cents a minute. You will fuck her in your mind. You’re wife will relieved that you’re not pressing your erection into her back every night when she wants to go to sleep and wake up and be 19 years old again, just like you do.

The gays are the worst. The gays, the bane of the good Lord’s existence, the people who beat Jesus with strap-ons and drowned him in a vat of lube, the people who will rot in a hell where everyone’s a bottom and they lie in bed for eternity waiting for someone else to make the first move, even they, born without a conscience but with a hungry prostate, desire to make the same mistake you are about to make. They get teary when they see two mommies; they framed the People magazine spread of Ellen D’Generis and Portia DaRossi sitting cross-legged on velvet pillows surrounded by friends, family, and vegan fare; they talk about “equal rights” and “marriage equality.” They are naive, these queers. They should thank the bigots for saving them from the misery that is marriage and run from the altar as fast as possible, Dykes on Bikes piggybacking fags and twinks. We should all be so lucky.

Romeo and Juliet are the most romantic couple in history. They married and then they died. They didn’t have to pay bills. They didn’t have to go to parent/teacher conferences. They didn’t take turns cleaning out the litter box. The honeymoon never ended because it never began. Real love is real death, side by side in a glass coffin, not talking for eternity.

But for now, at least for tonight, there is no disappointment, only possibility. You don’t yet know that he will get drunk at your office Christmas party and ask your boss when the baby’s due even though she’s just bloated. You don’t know that her mother will move in with you in just seven short years, bringing three cats and her collection of nutcrackers. What you know tonight is that the arch of her foot is the most beautiful geometry in the world; that the color of his eyes exists only in his eyes and nowhere else; that everyone else in this room is secondary; that all the love you’ve ever felt is nothing against this new love; that you will spend your last years together, too old and ugly and tired to change the channel or fold the laundry, but still glad that if the lives you’ve created have to dim, at least they will dim together.

After a mostly-perfect trip to San Francisco a few months ago—a trip complete with narrowly escaping white slavery, meeting my Virtual Girlfriend and her amazing rack, and hyena laughing with my dear long-distance palsie who left me with a four-poster bed and weighty heart at her departure last spring—I decided I would move there. I would sit in Golden Gate Park and go to actual museums in an actual city and eat ceviche on the street and meet people, new people, maybe even a new person to fall in love with after a courtship in which I would send her envelopes filled with ocean pebbles and lavender petals even though mailing rocks is kind of expensive. I thought I would move there and live under a coffee table or in a bunk bed with Small Fry, my other butt cheek, who would also move there and who is not just my other butt cheek but is also my Huck or my Tom depending on who’s in charge on any given afternoon. But I’m not going, at least not any time soon. It’s not that I don’t want to, but that I’m poor, so poor that if I had cable, I’d have to cancel it. This, Carrboro, North Carolina, is where I live. It just is. But my other butt cheek is moving there, to San Francisco, to the land of rainbows and rainbow flags, the land of fog and parks, where it’s okay to touch your girlfriend’s cheek the way your parents did when you young and they were in love. Small Fry, the person who looks nothing like me but gets mistaken for me as I get mistaken for her, is leaving tomorrow. The person who wakes me up in the morning and dances with me before noon, the person who is the other half of our package deal, the buy-one-get-one-free, is flying away.

Because I am as unable to think of the future as I am to sit on the furniture at the bar across the street because I heard a tall guy with long hair and neck tattoos who thinks his band will change the world finger banged a goth girl on the couch in front of the stage, it’s happening tomorrow and I’m not ready, not ready at all. I’m as unprepared to say goodbye as I’ll be when Kirk Cameron leads all the good Christians to heaven and leaves us sinners and sodomites to rot in the Church of the Bloody Mary, which is a hell where the eggs Benedict are always over-cooked and when you order a mimosa, the zombie servers bring you skim milk instead. But it is happening now. She is packing up her life and I am here, avoiding the truthful truth, the real truth, that I will take her to the airport tomorrow, ask if she has her ID and her ticket, get her bags out of the trunk, drop her off at the curb, and say goodbye.

The first real goodbye I said was at sixteen when my twin sister went to boarding school. I don’t remember if we were particularly close as teenagers. I’m guessing we actually weren’t in the day-to-day sense. She was a good student, swam and played soccer, did her homework, looked normal, made good impressions, didn’t get in trouble. I spent most of my afternoons smoking weed out of tin cans or hollowed out apples with the seniors who adopted me because I would light their cigarettes and tell the cashier at Taco Bell that there was a hair in my burrito and give the free one to them. But even if Betsy and I weren’t all that close socially, didn’t have the same friends or do the same things, I was so very sad when she left. There is a moment in twins’ lives when you separate, a necessary, if unconscious, thing so that you are not tethered together for the rest of your dual lives, unable to love anyone else as much as you love each other. Most twins make this cut, but not all. There were twins in my college who did not. They dressed alike. They took the same classes, lived in the same dorm room, were indistinguishable except for different colored glasses—one frame blue, the other red. They will always be “the twins,” forever an egg that didn’t want to split. This was never going to be Betsy and I. We were always different, always individual, but her leaving was the first goodbye and it hurt all the same. Twins lives are parallel, separated by five minutes or eight minutes or an hour, but connected in time and genetics and sharing a body before you even were a body. And then, sixteen years after we slipped into the world, she was gone. When my parents and I drove away, separating us and I for the first time in our lives, I cried like I had never cried before.

There have been others. The have been break up goodbyes, which aren’t necessarily even goodbyes but sad or angry see you laters because maybe you live in the same town and will see each other even when you don’t want to see each other, like when she is grocery shopping with her new girlfriend and you are buying cans of tuna and single servings of mac ‘n cheese. And there are the goodbyes when you are the one leaving. When I moved to Portland, I cried all the way across the country. But as much as I hated to say goodbye to the people who had been my family in the years before, I was glad to be the one leaving. My friends rolled spliffs and lined them in a tampon box for me while my girlfriend packed the car and I cried in the bathroom, sad but knowing that it is easier to leave than to stay.

But I am not the one leaving this time, Small Fry is. We have a friendship born not out of blood but out of who we are, because we are the same and because we are different, because we are good for each other and bad for each other, because we congratulate ourselves on staying young while everyone else gets old, all the while knowing that it cannot last for ever. This is the beginning of the severing, like it was when I was sixteen and Betsy walked to her dorm and I drove away with my parents. She leaves not so much a hole in my heart as in my day. We are going our separate ways, Small Fry and I, approaching, perhaps, the thing that terrifies us most—adulthood, when friends are less important than jobs and partners, houses and families. We will do the things that people do, and wish sometimes that we are back in our living room fort, sitting back-to-back on our matching laptops, picking each other up and swinging each other around, bumping chests until one of us falls onto her back, talking about girlfriends and non-girlfriends and the ones we wish would be our girlfriends and the ones we wish we’d never met, talking about how this will never end, how we will always be Peter Pans in a grown-up world.

There was rain storm that day ten years ago when we drove my sister her to her new life. We left the windows open while we unpacked her bags and met her roommate, and the back of the car was soaking wet, buckets-of-water-on-the-seats-wet, when it was time to leave, so I folded the seats down and lay on the back of them and covered my face with a sopping sweater and cried the five hours home, so sad and so embarrassed to be so sad. This will happen again tomorrow when I drop my other butt cheek off at the airport. I won’t be able to hold it in. I will sob on the curb and drive blindly home, back to Carrboro, back to the place and the life I have chosen, a place and a life that will be a little more empty.