1
Chang and I are in Indiana in the Jetta.
The sun is out and the sky is blue.
An all-around nice day.
It is good to travel down a highway on a pretty day.
Chang and I have never been out west before.
We don’t know what we’re doing.
We don’t know if this is a good or bad or medium-okay choice.
We left Youngstown, that’s what matters.
Our lives up to this point have been pretty much spent in the east.
Both of us have been to New York City and to Disney World.
Which is lame.
We are lame.
Since the car has no radio, Chang brought a small boombox to play CDs.
We are listening to a lot of classic rock like The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix and also emo music like Sunny Day Real Estate and The Get Up Kids.
We know where we are stopping tonight.
In Illinois, there’s a guy in his twenties with a blog called Iraq Jimmy.
On his blog he describes his miserable life in Iraq.
A lot of people check out his blog.
It gets over a thousand hits a day.
Chang emailed him and asked if we could visit and he said okay.
Chang and I are becoming less nervous as we get farther away from Youngstown.
Between the nice day and going somewhere far away, we feel better.
We are driving along and I say, “I’m glad we left.”
“Yes, a good idea.”
“It felt like my brain was being attacked by a giant squid.”
“Our lives were ruined there.”
“I would stand in front of Gina. And she would be there. And I couldn’t speak. I would go home and listen to emo music and wait to die.”
“I sat in my room. Time went on and on and on. I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t know what to do. I’ve never known what to do with myself. My parents never told me what to do.”
“My parents didn’t either. They didn’t beat me enough,” I say.
“I couldn’t leave my house. I would go outside and the choice between walking to the store and walking to the park was too much. I thought if I was poor, like only living off the SSI checks I wouldn’t have much to choose. At first I felt fine. I was on good medication, but then time passed and it all came flooding in again. Instead of being indecisive about what job to have, what woman to hit on and be rejected by, where I should drive my car, if I should go to the mall in Niles or the one in Boardman, I started worrying about little things, like what to eat, a sandwich or cereal.”
“In the middle of the night I would tell Sasha I was going to the Waffle House and not go at all. I would go to the twenty-four-hour supermarket and buy flowers and drive out to Lizaveta’s grave and put the flowers down and sit there. I would become scared though. I don’t know why. The cemetery is a scary place at night. It is hard to live with her body lying immobile so close by. I always know where Lizaveta is. She’s dead on Warren-Sharon Road. And then I would feel funny. I would feel like I was neglecting her dead body if I didn’t go and visit her in the middle of the night. But what was there to visit? She is dead, that is her. That is Lizaveta, dead.”
“She is dead.”
“This thing bothers me though. Tell me if it bothers you. Sometimes you are listening to a person bitch and you know and have figured out that it is their fault. That no one caused it but themselves. But you can’t say it out loud. You can’t just say the truth. Because they are your friend and you like them, or they might not be your friend and you don’t know them like that. So you sit there in some disgusting passive silence, withering away. And instead of actually saying anything, you say nice little things to reinforce their lies.”
“Been there.”
“Some nights I would drive around Youngstown and not know what to do. I would keep driving, staring at the same trees and houses. They all became like a monster engulfing me. But I had become so used to this monster I started to enjoy it. It was like I enjoyed suffering. What a horrible concept, the enjoyment of one’s own misery. Maybe in some strange way I started to enjoy others’ misery. I started listening to people talk for hours in bars and diners and at work on smoke breaks about their miserable lives. I wouldn’t offer any advice or have any real interest in it. I just wanted to hear it. I think I wanted to eat their suffering. I loved my own suffering and I loved theirs. It didn’t make me feel better about myself. It was like an addiction.”
“No, I get you. I would sit in my room and listen to miserable music and let the misery overtake me. I would get myself all emotional. All crazy inside. All raving and mad over nothing. I couldn’t even think of something to be miserable about. I would be emotional. I wanted to be emotional. I wanted to feel pain and hurt. Like in some way I was doing a penance. I started to think I deserved misery. That I deserved to be alone. To hate myself. But some days I couldn’t think of any good sins. So I would let the music wrap me up in a little ball of tender emotion and force myself to hate myself,” Chang says.
“People do not like happiness. It is like an enemy to them. Perhaps it isn’t an enemy. Perhaps we’ve never felt it really. We’ve felt escape. I’ve gone to amusement parks and had fun, I’ve gone camping and had fun, I’ve had sex and had fun. But fun is not the same as happiness. I’m not sure what happiness is. Is it an emotion? Is it a way of life? Is it owning certain objects or having certain amounts of power?”
“I don’t know happiness. Sounds like a word made up by someone very lonely.”
“Probably.”
I’m driving and Chang is looking out the window at Indiana’s empty fields.
I say to Chang, “I remember when I was fourteen. I was at that skating rink in Cortland. It was a Saturday night. Remember how they would lock the doors and the kids could hang out there all night?”
“Yeah, I did that a couple of times.”
“Yeah, it was one of those nights. I was flirting with some girl named Renee. She was so sweet and beautiful. She had bleach-blonde hair and soft milky skin. She had these green eyes that were so beautiful. I was so happy to be flirting with her. And we were talking and talking as we skated around the rink. And like two young horny fucks we started sitting next to each other. And eventually she let me kiss her cheek. It was nice. Then we kissed on the lips and that was great. I think about that sometimes when I can’t sleep.”
Chang says, “I was fifteen and at a party. It was a huge party. Like kids from three schools were there. There were so many people it was fucking terrifying. Well, there was this girl named Dedra. She was a little plump. Personally I’ve always liked them a little plump. I like meat. Most men don’t like meat. Actually I think most men do like meat. But they are afraid to admit it. To go on, Dedra had these big tits that stuck out firm and lovely. We went off into the woods. I wanted to get away from all the people anyway. They were starting to get on my nerves. And Dedra lay down in the woods and I got on top of her and I jammed my tongue deep in her throat. And I was so hard. I remember being so hard. I mean, I was fucking hard. I could have hammered a nail and killed an elephant with my cock that night I was so hard. But we didn’t do it. We just made out.”
“My parents sent me to a counselor. The guy was a total jackoff. He didn’t understand me at all and had no interest in understanding me. He believed in God and at the same time reincarnation and Buddha and Krishna and all kinds of mystic crap. The guy was a total
lie-to-yourself machine
The man had a lie for everything. I told him how I hated my mother and that she was a piece of shit. And he would tell me to understand where she was coming from. I fucking knew where she was coming from, from some shithole in Russia. I know what makes her crazy and narcissistic. But I have to deal with my mother on a personal basis. Her personality makes me hate her. Her personality makes me want to scream and run away. I can have empathy for her. But that doesn’t mean I have to like her as a person,” I say.