I change channels.
I change channels.
I change channels.
Sixteen channels away, a beautiful young woman in a sequined dress is smiling and dropping animal wastes into a Num Num Snack Factory.
Evie and me, we did this infomercial. It’s one of those television commercials you think is a real program except it’s just a thirty-minute pitch. The television camera cuts to another girl in a sequined dress, this one is wading through an audience of snowbirds and Midwest tourists. The girl offers a golden anniversary couple in matching Hawaiian shirts a selection of canapés from a silver tray, but the couple and everybody else in their double knits and camera necklaces, they’re staring up and to the right at something off camera.
You know it’s the monitor.
It’s eerie, but what’s happening is the folks are staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor, on and on, completely trapped in a reality loop that never ends.
The girl with the tray, her desperate eyes are contact-lens too green and her lips are heavy red outside the natural lip line. The blond hair is thick and teased up so the girl’s shoulders don’t look so big-boned. The canapés she keeps waving under all the old noses are soda crackers pooped on with meat by-products. Waving her tray, the girl wades farther up into the studio audience bleachers with her too-green eyes and big-boned hair. This is my best friend, Evie Cottrell.
This has to be Evie because here comes Manus stepping up to save her with his good looks. Manus, special police vice operative that he is, he takes one of those pooped-on soda crackers and puts it between his capped teeth. And chews. And tilts his handsome square-jawed face back and closes his eyes, Manus closes his power-blue eyes and twists his head just so much side to side and swallows.
Thick black hair like Manus has, it reminds you how people’s hair is just vestigial fur with mousse on it. Such a sexy hair dog, Manus is.
The square-jawed face rocks down to give the camera a full-face, eyes-open look of complete and total love and satisfaction. So déjà vu. This was exactly the same look Manus used to give me when he’d ask if I got my orgasm.
Then Manus turns to give the exact same look to Evie, while the studio audience all looks off in another direction, watching themselves watch themselves watch themselves watch Manus smile with total and complete love and satisfaction at Evie.
Evie smiles back her red-outside-the-natural-lip-line smile at Manus, and I’m this tiny sparkling figure in the background. That’s me just over Manus’s shoulder, tiny me smiling away like a space heater and dropping animal matter into the Plexiglas funnel on top of the Num Num Snack Factory.
How could I be so dumb?
Let’s go sailing.
Sure.
I should’ve known the deal was Manus and Evie all the time.
Even here, lying in a hotel bed a year after the whole story is over, I’m making fists. I could’ve just watched the stupid infomercial and known Manus and Evie had some tortured sick relationship they wanted to think was true love.
Okay, I did watch it. Okay, about a hundred times I watched it, but I was only watching myself. That reality loop thing.
The camera comes back to the first girl, the one onstage, and she’s me. And I’m so beautiful. On television, I demonstrate the easy cleanability of the snack factory, and I’m so beautiful. I snap the blades out of the Plexiglas cover and rinse off the chewed-up animal waste under running water. And, jeez, I’m beautiful.
The disembodied voice-over is saying how the Num Num Snack Factory takes meat by-products, whatever you have—your tongues or hearts or lips or genitals—chews them up, seasons them, and poops them out in the shape of a spade or a diamond or a club onto your choice of cracker for you to eat yourself.
Here in bed, I’m crying.
Bubba-Joan Got Her Jaw Shot Off.
All these thousands of miles later, all these different people I’ve been, and it’s still the same story. Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that’s usually how you end up crying? How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?
Chapter 7
ump way back to the last Christmas before my accident, when I go home to open presents with my folks. My folks put up the same fake tree every year, scratchy green and making that hot poly-plastic smell that gives you a dizzy flu headache when the lights are plugged in too long. The tree’s all magic and sparkle, crowded with our red and gold glass ornaments and those strands of silver plastic loaded with static electricity that people call icicles. It’s the same ratty angel with a rubber doll face on top of the tree. Covering the mantel is the same spun-fiberglass angel hair that works into your skin and gives you an infected rash if you even touch it. It’s the same Perry Como Christmas album on the stereo. This is back when I still had a face so I wasn’t so confronted by singing Christmas carols.
My brother Shane’s still dead so I try not to expect much attention, just a quiet Christmas. By this point, my boyfriend, Manus, was getting weird about losing his police job, and what I needed was a couple days out of the spotlight. We all talked, my mom, my dad, and me, and agreed to not buy big gifts for each other this year. Maybe just little gifts, my folks say, just stocking stuffers.
Perry Como is singing “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.”
The red felt stockings my mom sewed for each of us, for Shane and me, are hanging on the fireplace, each one red felt with our names spelled out, top to bottom, in fancy white felt letters. Each one lumpy with the gifts stuffed inside. It’s Christmas morning, and we’re all sitting around the tree, my father ready with his jackknife for the knotted ribbons. My mom has a brown paper shopping bag and says, “Before things get out of hand, the wrapping paper goes in here, not all over the place.”
My mom and dad sit in recliner chairs. I sit on the floor in front of the fireplace with the stockings by me. This scene is always blocked this way. Them sitting with coffee, leaned down over me, watching for my reaction. Me Indian-sitting on the floor. All of us in bathrobes and pajamas still.
Perry Como is singing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”
The first thing out of my stocking is a little stuffed koala bear, the kind that grips your pencil with its spring-loaded hands and feet. This is who my folks think I am. My mom hands me hot chocolate in a mug with miniature marshmallows floating on top. I say, “Thanks.” Under the little koala is a box I take out.
My folks stop everything, lean over their cups of coffee, and just watch me.
Perry Como is singing “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
The little box is condoms.
Sitting right next to our sparkling, magic Christmas tree, my father says, “We don’t know how many partners you have every year, but we want you to play safe.”
I stash the condoms in my bathrobe pocket and look down at the miniature marshmallows melting. I say, “Thanks.”
“Those are latex,” says my mom. “You need to use only a water-based sexual lubricant. If you need a lubricant at your age. Not petroleum jelly or shortenings or any kind of lotion.” She says, “We didn’t get you the kind made from sheep intestines because those have tiny pores that can allow the transmission of HIV.”
Next inside my stocking is another little box. This is more condoms. The color marked on the box is Nude. This seems redundant. Next to that, the label says odorless and tasteless.
Oh, I could tell you all about tasteless.
“A study,” my father says, “a telephone survey of heterosexuals in urban areas with a high incidence of HIV infection, showed that thirty-five percent of people are uncomfortable buying their own condoms.”