Leaving
Let’s Blow this Popsicle Stand
You can leave.
When you do, it will take some time to recognize how limited your options are.
You can leave your family and be with someone who has not left their family and suffer disconnect.
You can leave your family and be with someone who has also left their family, but the two of you have so few options when shit hits the fan.
You can leave your family and be with someone rich who won’t care a bit about all that, as long as you can maintain the image of whatever lifestyle they’re projecting. You can’t.
You can go to the city, where everyone takes advantage of you.
You can go somewhere small where only your landlord, your boss, his friends, strangers in public and cops take advantage of you, but these small-town types are used to high rates of success.
Either way can leave you with calluses. Callousness. Both.
You can let people take advantage of you, because it is advantageous to you.
You can let people take advantage of you to gain their trust, give them a false sense of security and possibly allow you an upper hand down the line.
You can realize, or not, that you’re deluding yourself into a false sense of narrative control as a response to the psychological manipulation you’re enduring.
“Taking advantage of” includes unfair pay for undesirable tasks, being used as a foil, an object of desire, the butt-end of jokes, or your butt and other parts in contact with eyes, fantasies or suspect frequency of touches construed as accidental.
They may continue to take advantage of you for as long as you are there.
You can react, but you’ll be “the bitch” or “that little bitch.” You’ll be “crazy.”
You can preempt, but someone wonders aloud why you’re so suspicious and why you always assume the worst about everybody in every situation.
You can learn to live with it. You can learn to less-than-live with it.
You can want to die.
There are, however, other ways to go.
You can leave when you get taken off the schedule for a 1-star Yelp review in which a “better-dressed” customer feels slighted when your attention seems focused on another, “badly-dressed” customer.
You can leave, but not before a customer invites you to sit on his lap and eat his lunch for him, since you said his order “sounds good.” His friends laugh, and during the rush, all you do is ask another server to take over the table.
You can leave, but not before your coworker’s phone is trained on you as you sit eating on a break. You glance up, and he spins around so fast his fedora nearly falls off. He slams open a dark and empty oven to pan the interior, and you see his screen. It is still filming.
He “can’t believe you would think he could ever do something like that” when confronted the next afternoon. Your boss believes “anything after this whole Weinstein business, my god.” But “Roger is a really good friend,” and nothing changes.
You can leave, but not before your coworker grabs an entire half of your ass under the skirt you wore to look cute on your birthday.
You can leave when you get caught stealing and are fired.
You can leave with the song “Fuck and Run” in your head. You were never into Liz Phair like your early 2000’s feminist friends, but whenever you find yourself fucking, as in sex, or fucking, as in someone or some thing over, and fleeing, the refrain comes to you.
You can leave extravagant tips for the services you hire to try and make up for what you know is probably a shit day, a shit week and a shit job.
You can hope they know how to supplement their income. You can wish you’d stolen more.
You can leave again, again, again and again, but you’ll tire of it.
You might leave off on the drinking, but relish in the bravado before your method falls apart and you with it.
You can leave as many messages as you want on his “shop phone,” each more desperate than the last, but if you don’t leave your callback number he never will, and it’s years before you realize that he may not have stood you up that night. When you see him again he’s holding a small toddler and you think, “dodged that bullet,” but he probably stood you up.
You can learn to leave from a lover, who learned it in another love’s going horribly wrong.
You can leave your house, dressed up and for once not stoned, to meet that lover’s family for a graduation dinner and promptly be mauled by 2 gaunt and giant yearlings aside the abandoned Acura dealership. The attack leaves scars on your ribs and elbows, but not on your throat, thanks to those elbows.
The most curious casualty is your ability to leave the house not-stoned.
The scars look cool. Other memories accompany them.
You can leave, and it takes them an hour to find you high up in the deer stand by the Dosters’ pond, which has a small dock and motorboat and is stocked with sporting fish, but you never see anyone out on it. Before they build the pond it’s a wetlands full of saplings containing a quality of light you never see again.
You can leave with a family friend after asking the couch for permission when you’re 3, since you don’t want to wake your father napping with your baby sister. When you get back your mother is home early from work crying in her pretty dress in the driveway next to police cruisers’ flashing lights.
You can leave and go sit in the dusty sweetness of a beech tree in winter, its silver-bright trunk shining yards through the taller, darker, matte-barked pines. Its leaves of muted gold hang on until translucent green offerings in the spring push off the last year’s growth.
You can leave, in a way, when Child Protective Services comes to your parents’ houses after witnesses alert them to your sister and father hitting each other in the parking lot of the new Publix. All you need to do is back up your sister’s claim that your mother’s an alcoholic. What you find out later about the foster care system makes you glad you didn’t.
You could leave and go to a friend’s house, if you had any, or later, if there were any that lived close by.
You can leave and go on an adventure with your first Black friends and find an abandoned graveyard past the dead end all grown over with oaks and vines, but your father’s only response is to tell you that you’re not allowed to hang out with kids from The Projects anymore.
Adult strangers in the pool across the street are fine, though.
You can leave when your father shoves your teenage half-brother into the wall so hard it shatters the plaster, leaving a hole by the stove that your mother, perversely, never repairs but after a few years converts to a recessed shelf for her collection of antique Czechoslovakian ceramic birds.
After all, your brother then your father did. Leave.
You can leave and go skate in the church parking lot up the road, but you should stop after the second concussion. Taking a nap is not smart.
You can leave school and drive to Atlanta, but skinheads are scary and the other punks are too fashion, so you buy a reissued Clash LP you could have gotten in Athens and hope your ’60s Ford makes it home.
You can leave your weed in one of the single-occupancy bathrooms for students with disabilities at your school. If you stand on the toilet, lifting up the ceiling panel is easy. Then, when the cops do their drug search of student cars, the only things they’ll find are cigarettes and a pocket knife in the glove compartment, so you’re not under arrest.
That soon after Columbine, though, and the three-inch blade warrants a two-week suspension from school and a two-month suspension of your driver’s license for truancy. They confiscate the cigarettes and the knife, which is nice.
You are not aware of the license suspension until you receive a letter from the county six weeks into it. Your mom makes you take the bus for the remainder.
You can want to leave off thinking about these sorts of things, but the thoughts might have other ideas about leaving you alone.
After all, you can’t leave when the graduate student, a stranger, begins touching your genitals, because your little sister won’t come with you.
She asks why you want to leave, but you’re 9 and a pit in your stomach has taken over, so you can’t tell her. Besides, it doesn’t make sense, you just got there. So you stay, and he presses your backside against the cock grown too large for the Speedo, again, but there’s no penetration at least and you get out of the pool and sit despondent until your dad gets back.
Your parents believe you.
They meet at the police station. Afterwards you watch a Palmetto bug reflect sulfurous street light as it crawls across hot asphalt and they argue. The policewoman doesn’t believe you, and Palmetto bugs are just what Southerners call giant cockroaches.
You can’t leave the witness stand at the rarely-convened tribunal in a stately columned building in the Greek style on the north edge of campus until you tell them why you didn’t leave at the time of the alleged incident.
Your mother will be asked to leave the room unless she controls herself and stops these emotional outbursts.
The grad student is forced to leave, back to Brazil now that his student visa has been revoked on account of him being expelled, despite his defense that it was a matter of cultural misunderstanding.
A professor from Brazil your mother knows from the university tells her that in his country, the man would have been killed by the fathers of the village where something like this happened. You sometimes hope he is still in Brazil, this kind of dead.
You also hope he doesn’t have any more victims, creating a paradox.
Writing this will leave you prone to frequent disclosures to roommates and tears.
You can leave, clear your mind and walk to Koreana Plaza. Wonder at the impressions, some shadows, some etchings, that certain fallen leaves make of themselves in concrete sidewalks. Some are disturbingly detailed, like a chalk body-outline with facial features. Others are blurred. Some are both, layered. The complexity of such material interaction causes you to reconsider the vastness of your own life, implicated within near-infinite chemical reactions, spontaneous and ongoing, conducted as age and movement caress the Earth.
A Formal Request: When I leave, I would like something planted atop my undiluted corpse. No embalming, cardboard coffin. My preference is Magnolia grandiflora (Southern magnolia) or Fagus grandifolia (American beech). Even if I’m cremated I would like this resting place. Tell them not to bother raking up the leaves.
