For What It's Worth

Wal-Mart has what I need: soap, ammunition and black spray paint. On the drive there I stop by Anna's apartment. I might need some company, and there are always interesting people at Anna's. Matt lives in the apartment next door with Adam. Matt is the newest in Adam's long line of roommates.Everyone's lived with Adam at one point in their lives--my short stint as Adam's roommate ended when I let a schizophrenic street girl live on the couch. I also got high on Robitussin and set fire to his kitchen. The crazy girl and the kitchen-torching, those two events are not related.Tonight, Matt is over here. Matt just got a job bussing tables in a casino restaurant. Amy is over here. She works in a gym. With her is Katie Brown, who works the register in an adult bookstore.Years ago, I applied to work in the same adult bookstore. Instead of me, they hired a woman who looked like she'd been pulled straight out of the 1980s--hairspray hair, T-shirt hanging off her shoulder, spandex stirrup pants. I understood their decision to hire her, since she was older and probably had more cash handling experience. Also, she looked like a better person to sell you pornography and sex toys than I did.At the apartment we bullshit with each other. We smoke cigarettes and talk about the random shit we usually talk about with the TV blaring in the background. It's playing whatever comes on FOX on a Sunday night. That's the only channel that comes in.Bugy comes in shirtless. He says he lost his shirt. I'm sure this is a total lie, since he has an entire closet full of nothing but white T-shirts and blue jeans. Albert Einstein did the same thing, but he was a genius. Bugy used to be a promoter, booking punk shows and that sort of thing until he burned out and became a skinhead. Any promoter can quit and become a surly construction worker with a shaved head who thinks immigrants are stealing our jobs. You just need the right set of circumstances.To make sense of some things, Bugy and Amy have an on-again off-again relationship that I try to ignore.Bugy asks anyone in the room for a cigarette. This was less of a request for a cigarette than a demand--a shirtless convicted felon walks into the room and says, "someone give me a cigarette".I tell him it's my last one--no lie this time--but he doesn't understand the social norms that say I'm not giving you my last cigarette unless there's the possibility of sex."Look, I'll give you a quarter for it," he says.I give him my last cigarette since he's as emotionally unstable as I am. I can always buy more. I'm in a good mood so I don't feel like jamming a salad fork into his hand. The last time he asked for a cigarette was under different circumstances. I'd just picked him up from the county jail where he'd been booked for domestic battery. The cops accused him of being on meth, which he wasn't. He was really upset about that--his irises are so brown they look like a continuation of his pupils. With his head shaved, his face looks skeleton-gaunt. The body doesn't match--he's in great shape. His life revolves around work, weightlifting and sex.Amy will say later, Bugy was actually in a good mood tonight. That is, he didn't go all Emo, cry, and beg her to get back together with him. Or grab her ass, press her up against the fridge and ram his tongue down her throat.Amy told me all about Bugy's sweet, sensitive side that contrasts with how he behaves in public. He can be like a little kid. Then he can go out and get drunk and become homicidally enraged over tiny little things.After Matt finishes a phone call to his out-of-town girlfriend we head out to Wal-Mart. Matt's girlfriend lives in Chico and comes up every now and then, although I hardly ever see them together.I'm out of soap. The spray paint to is to do a half-assed job of repainting my car. It was black-and-white urban camouflage at the time. Even though it's 10:30 and there's a guy behind the gun counter at Wal-Mart, he won't sell me any ammo. Because if I'm buying ammunition at night, I must be a gang member, or some other kind of undesirable that's going to shoot people.Corporate logic is that if I'm a gang member, I can't buy bullets during the day. Sunlight must kill gang members.Really, I just want to drive out to the desert where people dump their dead appliances and garbage and old cars. Out in the desert, the sun gives you skin cancer and flies land on you even though you're not dead. Out there I can fire my rifle at some sun-bleached washing machine and hope that someone else doesn't mistake my garbage-car for a target.Wal-Mart's spray paint isn't great, but it's 98 cents a can--you can buy a lot of it for cheap. My car, a '74 Datsun 710 is beyond fucked, with windows missing and a gigantic dent that kept the passenger side door from opening. I had to drill holes though the body, run a cable through and pull the dent out by hand. It's still visible. I don't care how the thing looks--I just want it to be a different color.The car usually runs, but people will look at the body and ask if I rolled it. For the door, "dent" was the wrong word. Picture someone who hates you holding a basketball-sized rock over his head like a movie barbarian with a two-handed sword. You swerve so the rock doesn't go through your window, but it still hits hard.Matt looks at air rifles. He needs to kill the stray cat that's been pissing in his hallway. Matt doesn't want all the scary legal problems caused by firing a handgun in his apartment building.Matt takes me over to the fabric section and looks at electric blue leopard print velour. I ask Matt if he started rolling again. He says he's making a cape."Wait--you're going to have a blue leopard print cape?""No way," he says, "I just need it for the lining."After Matt turned 21, he took a lot of Ecstasy. Matt would go out to the clubs on Friday and Saturday night and roll both times. Week after week that can't be healthy.Twice he's suffered severe head trauma in childhood. Don't laugh, the first was falling out of a tree. The second was the car accident that killed his mother.At the funeral, the family stuffed the coffin with crisp one-dollar bills. His mother loved to play dollar slots. Alanis Morisette irony, his sister grew up to be a stripper.Matt and I drive back to Anna's with a car full of soap and black spray paint. I have no bullets; Matt has no awful fabric. Society is safe for another night.A small group of punks and one white tattooed Rastafari with lobster-claw hands are drinking cheap whiskey back at the apartment. This is the kind of generic whiskey you can find on the bottom shelf at any grocery store. It doesn't have a real name, just the type of alcohol printed on a cheap label on the plastic half-gallon bottle: "Whiskey", "Vodka", "Gin". There's Joy, Rodney, Nikki and Angie, who I'm pretty much indifferent to.Corey was born without any middle fingers and became a Rastifari sometime between then and now. When he wants to flip someone off he'll hold out his fist, knuckles down and say "fill in the blank".Angie once talked about buying a miniature donkey, putting a sombrero on its head and feeding it Tequila. I said that would kill the donkey, and the only good reason to kill a donkey is if it's trying to eat your eggs.Yeah, I got weird looks for saying that. I didn't mean it in a sexual way. It made sense to me at the time.In the time it took me to go to Wal-Mart the punks had finished off half the whiskey. Not that that's a bad thing.Tonight, Nikki looks like one of the Devotchkas. She's drunk, horny and lonely, and she's hanging all over Corey. He's also drunk, horny and lonely and has been in jail for the past couple months.One of the least subtle ways of flirting with someone is to pull your tits out of your shirt and show them to everyone in the room--except for the guy you want to fuck. Make him shut his eyes. This builds longing and desire. It's classy as fuck.Shave your hair into double mohawks. Wear a plaid bra. Talk about the matching panties that you aren't wearing. Put on a miniskirt, fishnets, garter belt, and 20-eye Doc Martens.She looks nice, really. I'd say Nikki has the best use of pubic hair I've ever seen. It's there, but trimmed down to a very small, manageable triangle the size of a book of matches. She sits cross-legged on the floor, and she's drunk and distracted by Corey. If you sit right on the couch, you can see everything.Nikki's breasts sag a little. Maybe that's because she used to weigh 170 pounds and lost a lot of weight when she came to Reno. She has stretch marks and those flat, silver-dollar nipples.She looks good considering she's been drunk for the past two weeks. I won't see her entirely naked tonight. It's not like the time I only heard about, when she got trashed, took of her clothes and put on Bill's studded leather jacket. Bill's over six feet tall and Nikki's dwarfed by this jacket where my name is painted on the side, my name on Bill's shit list. Because of the time I set fire to Adam's kitchen.Sorta-naked and drunk, she waved around the AK-47 I'd later buy. Not a real Kalishnikov, just a knock-off made from Romanian and US parts.It's not like those times Nikki had to go to the hospital because of alcohol poisoning and the paramedics cut off all her clothes. Or the time the paramedics cut off all her clothes when she slipped and fell thirty feet down the side of a cliff.The thing that really saved her life in that fall was alcohol. She had a backpack filled with 40-ounce bottles of some cheap malt liquor, and that broke her fall. She sliced her scalp open on a rock, but was spared any kind of spinal injuries. That's Alanis Morisette irony for you.She told me about how she woke up in a strange place with no clothes, a head full of alcohol and painkillers. How her box hurt from the catheter. And she says that she knew she didn't have any fun.After the fall, Matt took advantage of the head injury and the painkillers and moved in with her as her boyfriend. This was after I told Matt--my best friend since ninth grade--about how the other night I got this close to sex with this girl named Nikki.After raiding grocery store dumpsters for produce and a hundred cans of Coke that were mysteriously thrown away, we end up at the motel room she's living out of at the time. All the chairs have her books and clothes stacked on them, so the only place to sit is on the bed.Four A.M., our faces stuck together, her on me, my hand inside her jeans with the tendons in my wrist all painful, her ex-boyfriend knocks on the door like some divine-sent mood killer. He's fat and mopey and his feet hurt from walking miles and miles to tell her he loves her. He smells like sweat and boot-rot.She has sympathy enough to let him sleep at the foot of her bed. Nikki and I fall asleep on the bed still dressed, and nothing else happens, ever.Months later she puts her arm around my waist and pulls me towards her, but this is after I bring her a dresser I found curbside. The dresser was a housewarming present. She moved out of the motel.And after she loses her factory job and gets evicted from the little Chinese-style one room house she's renting, she starts drinking harder, probably just to spite everyone in some weird passive-aggressive way.But I'm not much better. I've had times I'm not proud of. You wake up on a steel picnic table, cold and soaked with rain. Some security guy at the truck stop gas station keeps poking you with a Maglight because he thinks you're dead. The PCP overdose. The meth overdose. The other meth overdose, because apparently you don't learn. Little anger problems, picking fights you can't win with people you don't know. People get drunk, people get high. They do stupid shit. At some point, it all becomes dick-sizing. My chemical dependence can beat up your chemical dependence.And we lie to each other. We steal from each other. We steal from each other and help look for the missing stuff we stole. And it's so obvious, and even though I complain about it, I do it to. But I'm smart. I don't show off my expensive new whatever after something turns up missing. It's never my grudge, it's me righting someone else's wrong, by filling up the back of my car with stuff from their apartment. Not stuff you could get money for at a pawn shop. Yearbooks, journals, pictures people keep. That irreplaceable personal stuff that we all drag around for our entire lives.The kitchen fire, the stuff at Adam's years and years ago, it wasn't an accident.Back at the apartment there's a weird sexual tension permeating the entire room--the dead-body stench of loneliness and sexual frustration pouring out of everyone.Joy's tits scare me. She's fat. She has nipples the size of ashtrays. Joy is Rodney's girlfriend. Rodney once told me he could only date or fuck girls he thought were ugly.Most of what I see of Joy is feminist-solidarity tit-showing. I've seen this sort of behavior before where a bunch of drunk girls will flash each other for some reason I can't comprehend. The rest of Joy that I see is due to an argument over what constitutes shaving your pubic hair.I'm sober through all of this. Nikki is rubbing Corey's back. Hanging on him. She faces me where I'm sitting on the couch and has her legs open wide enough that I'd be able to describe her box to a police sketch artist. Go ahead and look, since you can't look away.Yes officer, that looks like the vulva that robbed my store.I had to wonder if this was intentional. Intentional as in her saying, "look at what you'll never have", speaking to me with another set of lips. I'm not Sigmund Freud.Nikki's not crazy enough for me to date. I flat-out told her this on several occasions. She's still in her "dating losers and beating herself up for it" phase. During every Boyfriend Argument of hers I've overheard, she still tries to use logic and reason. She'll get back together with people because she thinks the relationship can still work, for fuck's sake.I've never had a model for a healthy relationship. I've spent a good portion of my life searching for someone with problems. A lot of problems. Whether I'm all fucked up inside or not, the important thing is that I have a tendency to perceive myself that way.Bristol was a manic-depressive self-mutilating Aleut Indian who had an unnatural fascination with the Columbine killers. This didn't disturb me as much as it should have until I discovered her oil pastel paintings of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold sitting cross-legged in a field of daisies.Holly, although not of Native American ancestry, also cut herself and had wild mood swings. She would blame these on me. She would take the things I said and use them against me, going so far as to tape all of our phone conversations for later use. The day we broke up I found a dead rabbit on my doorstep. I couldn't tell how it died.It's funny how you can take any relationship, one-night stand, drunken hook-up and distill its essence into a single paragraph.Brian, Nikki's last boyfriend is having "away time" tonight. Brian got his last girlfriend pregnant and left her, and has a domestic battery warrant out on his head. Brian told Nikki he's going to leave for Portland with an 18-year-old girl who's probably a police informant.That night I tell Nikki she should just stop all this bullshit and end it by setting fire to everything Brian owns. She agrees with me. It's not like I hate Brian. Weeks earlier I helped him move his stuff when he left his girlfriend. It was probably for the better. It's unpleasant when you have to stand there--without taking sides--and watch a woman who's eight months pregnant scream, throw things, and use your words because she's too worked up to think of her own."You stupid shit," she'll yell at her boyfriend, "you know I just used you so I could have a baby. You're nothing but..."She'll freeze up and look at you."A sperm donor?" you'll say. And she'll nod, and the argument will continue.When Brian said that I should bring two garbage bags to help him move, I asked, "One for the legs, one for the torso?"He laughed.Later that night Amy comes back to the apartment with Ellie and Anna. Ellie and Anna are telemarketers. I've fucked one of them and the other is a casual heroin user. Specifying which one is which is not important. The sex was terrible.There's some big festival downtown--some excuse to close off all the streets and set off goddamn fireworks, I don't know why. A bunch of the punk kids go downtown to mill around and cause trouble, I stay back at the apartment to watch this drunken spectacle of Nikki and Corey play out.The punk kids get into a big argument with some guys outside of a bar. As Amy tells me, one of the guys hits Joy in the face because he thinks she's a Nazi. The real story could be anything. Joy likes to antagonize people. If you look punk rock or different, people on the street will yell at you. You have the choice to either walk away or perpetuate that. Like I learned in high school, sometimes when you yell at people, they'll hit you in the face.Rodney flips out over the fact that someone hit his girlfriend. Before a real fight can start, before anyone can get really hurt, the cops show up to break it up. No one is arrested, and the guys go back into the bar to drink.Rodney punches out a storefront window on the way back to Anna's. He's drunk, emotional and uncoordinated and falls through the plate glass window. His left hand and left arm, the one he uses to write with stabs into what's left of the glass window. There was blood everywhere--Amy says "like a running faucet".And even though I now feel like a total bastard for thinking this, the first thing that went through my mind was, I hope it wasn't the window of that Mexican restaurant I like. It turns out it was an abandoned storefront right next to that Mexican restaurant I like. I don't feel any sense of relief when I went out to inspect the scene.The bottom half of the window is smashed in--little glass knives without too much blood on them. Most of the broken glass that's not in Rodney's arm is inside the storefront. The blood around the window is still congealing and sticks to the soles of your shoes. There are some people still milling around at this hour, dismantling sound stages from the festival. It looks like a cheap rip-off of Mardi Gras, although this is in late July.You could follow the blood trial for four blocks to the hospital. He was bleeding that much. Along the way, there are big pools of blood where Joy had to stop him from going back to Anna's. She had to beg him to go to the hospital. There's heavier blood splatter where he had to wait at a crosswalk. He cut through the Circus Circus parking garage, smearing a stripe of blood across the passenger side of a white Cadillac SUV. There are places on the sidewalk where it looks like he was staggering, or walking in circles, or stopped to light a cigarette. The blood stops about fifty feet from the entrance to the Emergency Room.You may be bleeding to death, but there's no reason you can't have fun with it. The hospital guys cut off Rodney's vest across the shoulders. They take out all his piercings and put them inside a latex glove. They chop open his T-shirt through the print. This all comes home--back to Anna's--in a clear plastic bag marked "Patient Belongings", along with blood-soaked blue jeans, blood-soaked Chuck Taylors, blood-soaked boxer shorts and a wallet.Amy gets to work on sewing his vest back together with dental floss. The vest has the least damage out of all his clothing. The T-shirt may be a lost cause, but I help by hauling out the duct tape to patch it together while Amy sews. We never get the shirt done before heading out to the hospital.It's maybe three in the morning at this point. Joy's in the ER with Rodney. He's waiting for stitches, pumped full of morphine. Joy's fucking apeshit--about him not getting the medical attention she knows he deserves, even though he's a rocker. About the fuckers who indirectly led to him going through a window. Through all of this I can see that she really cares about him.She's been burning herself with cigarettes when she goes outside to smoke. She's mostly a cutter, and up until now I thought her bipolar disorder was a big scam to get SSI. You know, crazy money. The government pays you not to work. I can empathize now.I hate the hospital. Everything's clean and orderly, just another huge office building to disguise the fact this is one of the places where people go when they fuck up. They let Rodney go past the triage nurse and straight into a bed.The waiting room has the kind of chairs that hook together to form benches. They're upholstered with some kind of ratty desert-ish fabric and it's impossible to get comfortable in one. They have one of those children's toys with the colored wires and the wooden beads. Some children's books made of that cardboard stuff. There's a TV set tuned to MSNBC set in the wall, but the sound is turned off.My left eye decides to stop working from lack of sleep. I get coffee from the machine downstairs. Amy goes in to see Rodney, since he's only allowed one visitor, and we're all apparently a bunch of deviants faking life-threatening injury in order to steal painkillers.With the exception of Nikki and Corey who went back to his place to fuck, everyone from the apartment is there. Nate came to check on Rodney, and stays to construct elaborate revenge scenarios with Joy involving the guys outside the bar and a metal bat. He leaves and comes back with Brian, who's been sleeping by the river. His mohawk is all fucked up and matted and he has river grime on his face. It takes Brian a few tries to get all of the story straight.They'll never find the bar guys, but I don't tell them about my doubts. I don't say what I've learned about starting shit with people. Or making it worse. Like, if you get into a fistfight in someone's kitchen because some guy wants to kill you because of his psychotic homosexual crush on you, make sure the fight ends there. Sooner or later he'll say something that pisses you off again, and you'll try to run him over. Then he sends a small boulder into your car.With all this Unity stuff, I kind of feel bad about my driving need to set fire to all his possessions to prove some kind of point about responsibility. You can't hitchhike effectively without a backpack and extra clothes. Call me crazy.Anna cries for the first time in a year and a half. She tells me she didn't even cry when she signed over the adoption papers for her baby. Rodney's kid. Maybe to take her mind off the current situation, she tells me about all those funny hospital visit stories where she broke her nose. She's had it broken four, maybe five times.She can list them all. Fell down some stairs. Collided with a dashboard. Platform shoes. Boyfriend. Stairs, again. Amy and Nikki told me about this theory they have, about how they're always tougher than the guys they're dating. He's the one who's crying the most.Amy tells me in gory detail, away from Anna, about Rodney getting stitched up. The doctor and the nurse were having an argument about muscles, basic anatomy. They didn't even notice one cut across the palm of his hand. Amy said they wanted to amputate.Rodney's left arm is worse, and he's left-handed. It's all bandaged up in thick mummy gauze which is going to fuck up his life even more. He started a new job in a Thai restaurant the day before.When Rodney is discharged I tell him the story about when I was working in the kitchen at a steakhouse and one of the cooks had his arm fall in a deep fryer. I didn't know the guy very well, he was on the line and not in the prep area with the guy hooked on Ritalin, the guy on parole, the Hispanic dwarf, the woman, the 30-year-old virgin and me--people you shouldn't trust with knives. The line cook came back the next day with his arm in a sling and a bunch of gauze, except they had him in the front of the house in a different uniform seating the guests.I say in a funny voice, "Hello. Let me show you folks to your seat, and I am a dumbass."Rodney laughs, and smokes his cigarette with his non-dominant hand. He's been discharged and has surgery scheduled in two days. He might not go. He has a habit of putting off medical attention, like when Nick punched him in the mouth so hard he had to have two teeth removed.The teeth didn't fly out of his mouth like in the movies, they just dangled there held in by whatever keeps your teeth anchored in your jaw.Joy still thinks this is her fault. People get drunk, people get high, people do stupid shit. I'm not much better. Back in high school, all those people that said you were worthless and would never amount to anything, maybe they were right. But I say they can all go fuck themselves.If I've learned anything, when you know when to keep your mouth shut, you can be everybody's friend.The next day I come over with road flares and a can of acetone to set fire to all of Brian's stuff. Nikki tells me she was only drunk and joking. Some people can never commit to anything.

For What It's Worth

Saturday, April 16, 2011

1. Khan Academy

2. Flickr

3. Oxfam Unwrapped

4. Google Apps

5. Project Gutenberg

6. Vimeo

Friday, April 15, 2011

7. Spotify

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

8. StumbleUpon

9. The Grilled Cheese Academy

10. Prezi

Wednesday, September 20, 2006