Chapter 2: Joe’s Blankie
Also featuring: Joe’s Muffin Story
The next day, Joe was supposed to be working. It was the beginning of his workday. He had promised himself:no fucking around. No one who tried to pester him would be listened to. Things would get done fast and efficient, no matter what: setting himself up to win. No more falling asleep on his computer. No sense in working like a dog if you’re a dead dog! Then maybe he would get to relax afterwards, maybe even… the nice manuscripts. Or he could watch a movie. He hadn’t watched a movie in a long, long while. Or… go look for a girl? No; that would take a while. That might never happen again, actually, but thinking about that made him… those old people you see alone, dying alone… they didn’t think they were going to end up that way…that made him…. time to work again!
Unfortunately, first he had to eat again. The old nuisances of mammalian life. He hurried toward his favorite all-night restaurant — the only one that didn’t start inserting an irritating high-pitched tone under the music in the speakers arond 3 AM to get all the customers to go away for a while.
His eyes were tired, though, and he might even admit they were tearing a bit, which made navigation amongst the population of suburban LA very difficult; people seemed to become very angry if they were not presented with five feet of personal space in any given direction. Avoiding a woman who clearly had once assumed she would be a movie star, he nearly fell in a bush, was relieved, then did fall in the next bush—avoiding what he would have sworn was the same sun-ravaged woman, but with the gnarled feet packed into a different color of high-heeled sandal. He rested for a moment in the bush, with the slightly embarrassed air of a man who knew this would be strange for most people, but he was used to it; he was cradled by comforting pink flowers, surreally bright. He tried idly to catch a glimpse of the woman’s toenail polish color, hoping to be distracted from the reason he had gotten dizzy. For some reason, the way their meaty toes overhung the edges of the shoe always annoyed him. She had that strutting walk that looked so silly as they aged. He knew they had only been consciously thinking “i’m hot i’m hot i’m hot” when they developed the walk; now it was just a habit. But it still looked like they were screaming something that wasn’t true. Life is so sad. He arose.
Despite the slapstick, the feeling was still there. He wobbled again, then clenched his teeth and persisted; some of this had to be hunger. Several times a day, Joe was accosted by an overpowering feeling. It was like sadness. But it had no object. But “diffuse” was the opposite of what you would call it. If depression is like a warm blanket of melancholy, this was a battery-powered crown of sadness thorns, rotating like a Christmas decoration. (Well, technically, Easter; but Easter doesn’t seem to bother people the way Christmas does.)
It felt like he was missing someone he loved very much, while being homesick at the same time. But he had no one and nowhere to miss.
Joe had many bad memories of his family and a lifelong romantic batting average of 0.001 — the 1 being a very nice girl he got drunk and nervously threw up on, and the remainder being clinically all mad with something vicious.
His hometown, which was distasteful to Joe to begin with, had been sucked into the event horizon of some larger historical force (this one was called NAFTA), and was now unreachable except by private vehicles which Joe was too legally blind to operate. Not that anyone would voluntarily go there, unless they wanted to collect used drug baggies for some concetal art project, which he supposed w‘
xza’ a possibility.
Lonely, homesick… Both feelings were extremely strong, but since they had no mental object to latch onto, they could only fall upon Joe’s body. It was a highly unpleasant sensation, and more often than not, when under its sway, he fell into a bush, pile of merchandise, or angry passer-by. He didn’t know why they got so angry; surely Los Angeles was lousy with people like Joe…. Maybe that was why.
Well, they were welcome to go to his home and start their fucking art project. At least the drug baggies in Los Angeles probably had at least some of the drug they were supposed to have in them. Joe had bought drugs back in high school exactly once. He bought it from one of the other guys who had walked the fine line between nerd and burnout. When he eagerly tore the powder baggie open, it smelled suspiciously like the kid’s house; to be precise, the carpet cleaner powder his mom used to get the cigarette smell out of the shag rug. (Well, maybe the drug market had improved by now; with the legal labor market as it was, carpet cleaner was probably not sufficient to meet the regional demand for stupefaciants.)
He stumbled through the restaurant’s door at last, dragging Borriss and everyone else . You would think he could at least find a restaurant for himself that didn’t allow for pets — but Borriss had managed to get himself certified as a service animal under California law.
Making matters worse, when Joe went out, his entourage tended to grow by at least two creatures: one of them being Heather. Heather consisted entirely of clothing, and she was there to bitch him out on behalf of other people’s neuroses. Which really ought to be their own fucking problem, thought Joe; nonetheless, there was Heather. She was there, all right. Today she was dressed head to toe in strips of human skin. She had been inspired by the singer Princess Gag’s “meat dress” from years before. But the extra cruelty of using a particularly sentient being really tickled her. It was too bad there were no REALLY sensitive animals on the godforsaken planet—ones who could go on cogitating robustly through thousands of years of torture— but you can’t have everything.
So Joe sat down to work. His task wasn’t hard. The problem was, suddenly he was in a nice place. The restaurant had a kindly feel; the staff were cheery and the customers fairly reasoned and ashamed about their dreadfulness. Worst of all, the place had good food and delicious coffee. They even gave Joe a warm muffin gratis before his meal, with real butter in its own dainty little paper ramikinm,and with the coffee it was heaven. They gave Joe a flood of good feelings throughout his body. It was hard to believe how awful he had felt just minutes ago. He felt warm and almost open enough to crack his shell and talk to people, like people do. It had been a really long time since Joe had eaten a solid meal, and far longer than that since he had eaten with pleasure. He had his work before him, he had plenty of energy for work and that feeling that the brain is going to run like a good engine—when they say she’s purring like a kitten—but before he knew it, he hasn’t working. That energy was up, and it was flowing, but it was flowing away from THEMESS: he was making a new nice manuscsript.
Borriss found this very exciting, and made it a point to rub Joe’s had gratefully and give him a pleasant tingling sensation. Life was good. This was why you struggled through it. He tried to ignore the guilt.
Heather looked at what he was writing over his shoulder and rolled her eyes. “Boy, a lot of people are gonna loove this feel-good shit. I don’t think that’s in fashion. You have to be all, you know, deplatformed and oppressed and have something… political. Yes, political, that’s the thing. You have to find what’s juuuuust about to be the thing to be. It’s got to be just a little bit oppressed just yet, though. You have to have the right thoughts at the right time…no, not like that. A bit more towards men now. But not too much. Here, let me…”
“Fuck off, Heather.”
“You really have to have it both ways, don’t you? You want to be read, and you want to have some honor. Don’t work that way, sorry, you spoiled little bitch-boy. Here, let me—”
Heather’s twin sister, Winnie, shoved Heather aside. She shoved her so hard Heather fell to the floor, but the other customers didn’t notice. She cocked her head and looked at the text more thoughtfully. She was a bit like Heather , in fact, except she gave a shit about the people. Heather wanted to impress and intimidate them and make them feel they were worse than Joe; Heather’s was a very difficult job and left her cranky.
Winnie, on the other hand, got to do things like the following: she wrinkled her forehead irritably yet somehow adorably, and said, “I think it’s sweet.”
Joe’s Story
Holy shit, I’m deliriously happy to have a delicious omelette and to have coffee and even a muffin too while I’m perfectly dry and warm and able to do my work right now… plus Christmas music from the 50s and 60s and an Americana atmosphere that’s been cheesy so long it turned into something comfotrong, if not real. Oh, what the hell is real? Nothing had seemed real to Joe for a very long time. His life tok lace in an angel’s dream. Well, angel’s dream on the good daPoinsettias, a crowd that’s small but not dead. You hate sounding like an ad for a restaurant, cause they’re all a private hell for some dishwasher or busser, but the Kettle in Manhattan Beach is my favorite restaurant on the planet right now. And I was feeling depressed as hell before I came here. I have no rational reason to feel any better right now.
Fuck you, Buddha, Mr. Emperor Aurelius, you and your champagne stoicism. The circumstances really do matter. This killer is, you can only experience great, simple joy like this if you also have to put up with a lot of sorrow. James Baldwin said that. He said a couple of things like that and they said he hit the nail right on the head. And so they didn’t make him suffer anymore. They said he was the best and gave him everything and he had money and everyone respected and so he couldn’t write any new books.
Sometime I wonder whether we can even feel things without contrast. James Baldwin didn’t dry up; he went blind. For all I know, there’s a doppelganger sitting next to me, and I can’t see her. Is that why I keep waking up bruised? She hits me in the night and I get her back right in the same spot and we can’t even tell. Would I go blind if everything stopped being terrible?
I’d be willing to risk it.
When I was a litttle kid, I noticed I didn’t love my Blankie as much in the summer, and wondered what was wrong with me that I was so fickle.
But then winter would come round again, and I would have feelings for blankets that weren’t even Blankie.
What a fucking whore.
I’d actually be surprised if spoiled, bratty adults who used to be suburban teenagers didn’t think I’m a whore.
But to really make love to an omelette, you gotta get your ass kicked by a few eggs.
Heather snorted. “Why the fuck are you writing about this like you’re a woman?”
Joe shrugged. “It’s a character now. It’s fiction. The person seemed like a girl. That’s just how it came out. I don’t know, I’ve been reading a lot of booksd with girls in them lately. I’m used to seeing the main person being ‘she.’ And I dunno, maybe it will make me less… self-indulgent. Make me think about things from the other guy’s point of view. Er, girl’s. See, Heather, it’s a nice manuscript… if I’m gonna waste my work time on a nice manuscript, it should be the real thing, shouldn’t it?”
“That’s funny and ironic,” HEathersaid. “Cause before you so rudely interrupted me, I was about to tell you to ‘Get real.’”
Joe looked confused. “Interrupted…? But you asked me a qu — “
“Every word ever written is an autobiography. You gotta lie too?” She waved her hands at an imaginary audience. “They know the score. You’re the only person you’ve ever, ever fooled, and you did a half-assed job at that. God in Heaven, you should be thrown off a three-story building. Make sure you die nice and slow.”
“Geez, Heather, it’s just a story.”
“A story is the moral foundation of morality!”
“When you’re done biting your tail, Heather, shut up and let me enjoy things before my brain decides it wants to lurch in another direction, chemical soup-wise, eh?
Heather stared at him. “I wish it were the 80s so I could say you’re gay.”
“You could say it anyway.”
“But it’s not a thing IIIIIIII would say now.”
“‘The passage of time and all of its sickening crimes.’” Joe quoted.
Heather turned red, trying not to say it, but she said it. “Gay.”
