TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I collect diagnoses. First, I had a bouncing case of adult onset ADD. Then I was half bi-polar and half anti-social. Next it was hypersensitivity disorder and then I was compulsively obsessive. At this point, I nod and fill prescriptions in anticipation of the apocalypse, when I’ll trade SSRIs and mood stabilizers and the antibiotics I’ve been collecting for “sore throats” and “severe yeast infections” for fresh water and pastries. There is one diagnosis, however, that I cannot fix with big pharma, as anyone who’s observed me on public transit, my face scuba, my paws latex, can probably tell.

I am afraid of upholstered furniture. That’s right. Furniture. And though I’ve heard that Billy Bob Thorton has some issues with antique furniture (and harpsichords) as well, this particular phobia is rare, not even as common as Coprastasophobia, or the fear of constipation, which is at least popular enough to have a name and easy enough to cure with a breakfast of coffee and a cigarette. Indeed, there are only 1540 hits for “upholstered furniture phobia” on Google, which is only sightly more than the number of hits for “I want a lobotomy.” And, yet, I devote a fair square of brain space to this matter. I stand up on buses. I would rather sleep on a pile of dirt than a hotel bed. My ideal house is furnished only with tree stumps.

Other phobias are irrational, but this one is not. Think about it. The train seat on your evening commute that seems such a reprieve from your swivel chair would probably spit Folger’s in your eye just for putting your feet on the seat back in front of you. And have you never considered the possibility of contracting lice from leaning against the headrest in your rental car? Think about that next time you Greyhound. The potential for physical and emotional harm from contaminated fabric is endless.

Unfortunately, when I say “I have a fear of upholstered furniture,” what I really mean is “I have a fear of anything that anyone else has ever touched or maybe even looked at, especially upholstered furniture.” Now this is a problem. I am basically a welfare mom with a taste for truffle oil instead of children. I can’t afford new clothes but I’d have to be running naked down 15-501 after an acid spill before I’d walk through the doors of Goodwill. That thrift store smell—a nose of dandruff and bleach with a finish of scabies—gives me mouth vomit enough to ruin enamel.

And then there’s the shit that gets hidden among the drop-offs. I know a dude who worked at the Bins, a Goodwill that sells other peoples’ throwaways by the pound. You have to dig through mounds of shit to find that vintage Calvin Klein windbreaker. This guy told me that he once found a giant double-headed dildo in the bins. Somebody else’s dildo. And you know anyone who’d throw a sex toy in the give-away pile doesn’t boil that shit first.

The biggest problem is my own furniture. When A—, the only girlfriend who was fool enough to be my girlfriend, and I moved across the country, we had to set up any entirely new household as her Saturn wagon had room for her clothes and my protective plastic sheeting but not much else. But because we could barely afford the gas to Ikea, much less anything actually in the store, we had to turn to used goods if we weren’t going to eat Indian-style on the floor, which actually would have been fine with me. A—, however, didn’t want to sleep side-by-side on matching yoga mats, despite my argument that the harder the surface, the stronger your back, so off we were to consignment shops.

After sleeping on an air mattress for the six months before we moved, A— was desperate to sleep on a bed, a real bed, and ignored my panic attack when paying for a used mattress, which, incidentally, is illegal in North Carolina but not in Oregon, where they don’t realize you can get pregnant from a toilet seat. Because I was not about to sleep under the bed when our only source of heat was each other, I got over it through meditation and reminding myself that as soon as A— finished law school I’d be wiping with velvet toilet paper. By Christmas, I was able to fall asleep without the aid of thirteen PBRs and seven Tylenol PM. Changing the sheets, however, meant actually touching the mattress, so A— got that chore. I scrubbed the toilet.

There were more danger zones in that house. I could deal with our used dresser as long as the drawer liners where in place, but the living room furniture made me pull out my application to the most spartan monastery I could find with wireless. Actually, the couch was napable. It came from family friends and had a washable cover. It was an old hotel chair that really shuddered me. At first, I could barely look at that chair unless my inhaler was nearby. I soon decided, however, that the chair was safe when fully covered with an old fleece blanket that Mazog gave me after my power got turned off one winter. The blanket made it okay. I spent our first winter in Portland in that hotel chair, feet propped on the radiator in wool Christmas socks. But once the blue fleece was designated to the chair, I couldn’t bring it to bed. It was the chair blanket, not the bed blanket. We couldn’t possibly sleep under a blanket that had touched the hotel chair. A— disagreed, but I bought her a hot water bottle and a sleeping bag and she forgave my neuroses. (The funny thing about this particular phobia is that when I really care about someone—like love her so hard I would rather kick a puppy then beat her at kickball—her DNA becomes precious like a kilo of hard drugs is precious. A— could have pissed on my feet and I wouldn’t change my socks, blown her nose in the sheets and I wouldn’t have washed them, painted the front step with her menses and I would laugh and step over it.)

This problem hasn’t exactly gotten better with time. My current home was furnished entirely by friends and family. Things that are used by people I care about generally get a free pass from my neuroses. A four poster bed from a pal moving to San Francisco? A well-loved sake set from a former drinking buddy fresh from rehab? A spare colostomy bag from a doctor friend who knows how I feel about public bathrooms? Thanks, guys! My mattress was donated by my sister before she moved to Aspen, Colorado, the Land of Milk and Money, but I told myself it was cool cause we share DNA.

Once again, however, I have couch issues. After realizing that you catch more honeys with pillows than with folding chairs, I gratefully accepted a friend’s couch. Considering that said friend wears shoes from Goodwill without socks on, I probably should have realized her couch was rescued from Craigslist, but I was too busy trying to move out of my house before my roommates got back from work to think about it. Now I sit on it only because my therapist told me to do one thing that scares me every day. And it does scare me. This is the problem with phobias. It’s not that you can’t shop at Goodwill, it’s that it makes your world very small. It’s starts with a slight annoyance that your neighbor left footprints in your carpet after you’d just vacuumed, but soon you’re thinking about those footprints in the carpet more than you should, dragging the vacuum behind you when you walk around your house. And then you’re avoiding the carpet altogether, jumping from couch to chair to tile, anything to avoid those insidious footprints. Eventually you can’t leave the house, not now and not ever, because everything out there is so terrifying, so toxic, so out of your control. Eventually you are standing in the middle of your living room, not touching anything, waiting for the walls to disappear.