This is how I began my story months ago, in the midst of all
the craziness. It sounds frenetic because yeah, I was frantic at times. I was
trying to squish the background down to a few pages to get to the substance of
the story. Now that I’ve stabilized, I’m trying again. After you read the first
chapter below, you can read subsequent rewrites. There is more cohesion to
them, now that I understand what’s going on.
My Landlady
is an Undercover Fed
(And so is my
roommate)
Or housemate.
We don’t share the same bedroom, only common areas, kitchen, bathroom, laundry
facilities, pantry, and it was great for a while. Until I started noticing
things.
The mobile
home that I lived in was beautiful. One could not have guessed from the inside
that outside, it was manufactured upstate and shipped downstate. The residence
I moved into was spacious for a pre-made house, bigger than the ones around it.
Inside, it was richly renovated, with uneven hardwood floors that mimicked real
trees. The kitchen fixtures were new: the cabinets high for tall people, the hanging
microwave even higher so that I could not see the tray, earthy granite
countertops, picture frame table dressings, Moroccan rugs under the dining room
table and the living room coffee table.
The curio
cabinet showcased dinnerware and all forms of alcohol that I did not
understand, Jack Daniels, crystal wine glasses, wedding gifts that Lorraine had
yet to use. She said I was welcome to use anything.
My bedroom
was an invitation to a homeless creature and I grabbed it at first sight. Sage
green linens on the bed, which was set right of the door. No bedframe. Cream
colored comforter with Chinese characters scrawled in rust, a black night table
on the far side of the bed between it and the recessed space where a closet was
meant to be. The dresser matched the black hole black of the night table.
Inside the closet pace, a matching IKEA floor-to-ceiling shelf filled the entire
recessed area into the wall. There were no closet doors. Instead, a plastic
ivory bar was hung with rings from which black nylon curtains hung. The windows
faced west.
Outside,
there was a wall-sized bush that separated Lorraine’s mobile home and her neighbor’s.
In the far corner from the bedroom door was a white nylon fabric wardrobe with
plenty of hangers. Nice ones, too. Why the recessed space meant for clothes was
filled with a wall-sized shelf and a portable wardrobe bought for when closet
space was tight I did not question. Actually, I needed more shelf space that
hanging space so this setup was perfect.
The floor was
newly installed. I loved it. Asthma prevented me from living in carpeted homes,
and trying to find a room in a house or apartment that had hardwood floors on
my budget was difficult. The walls were painted in robin’s egg blue. My
favorite.
Next door
between the master bedroom and my bedroom was my housemate’s room. It was
slightly larger than mine. The good room always gets taken first. Across the
narrow hall, two steps away was the bathroom. Rustic tiling, shower curtain
hung for a seven-foot basketball player.
Before I tell
you the things I noticed—it’s important that you practice the same vigilance so
that you do not find yourself trapped in a house surrounded by federal
agents—please allow me to step back, for I really need to catch my breath.
The last few
months have been an archetypal action-adventure movie. The only difference is
that it’s fun watching the poor slob on the screen running around for dear life
without anyone to help him. When it happens to you, it feels as if you are
going to die. If you are lucky that is.
If you live,
you will understand what Godot was waiting for.
Even if you
never wanted to.
I never did
because I was too happy waiting for nothing and doing everything. That was me
as a child, bouncing around until it hurt. I was lucky, I never hurt too much
but maybe others did. I don’t know, or I did and I didn’t care. Or rather, I
knew the difference when to care and when to move on.
Somewhere
along the line I lost it. That ability to move on. I got clogged on in the
trivial, I magnified the minutiae, I inhaled deep regrets
that should have been tooted out as applesauce is that does not agree with a toddler.
“Don’t notice
so much,” my mother often told me. I couldn’t help it. Noticing is the
foundation of progress. And I have always been a progressive liberal. Too
progressive some say. Overly liberal, others claim. So much so that my friends
are libertarians.
I raced
through school with an enthusiasm that was marred pretty much with only the
fact that it didn’t last long enough. I went to college then grad school, then
did my postdoc, you get the picture. Had I gone slower, I wouldn’t have enjoyed
it as much. Huh? That’s me. The negatives of any positive are a direct
consequence of my happiness, and any reduction in my discontent would have been
proportionately matched by a decrease in my happiness, such that I preferred
the extremes.
Greater
happiness paired with greater sorrow outranked moderate happiness coupled with
moderate discontent.
Such was my
utility function, the first that will explain why, when I discovered that my
landlady was a federal agent, why, I did not hightail it and run out of there
but instead stood my ground, dug a trench into her newly renovated hardwood
floors, and battled it out while on all sides of me the enemy spun a web so
voluminous its incompetence was insured by layers of stupidity that when
stacked against each other translated to this:
At the
universal level: Where an enemy has relatively unlimited resources, and you
have no money, no job, no friends nearby, then in the end and in the beginning,
they will win.
At the
particular level: where the strongest government in the world has its most
elite federal agents on a mission to smash you into the pavement, it does not
matter that you are lucky enough to find a pothole to keep from being smeared
into smithereens.
Eventually,
that is your end. If you be so foolish to fight the mightiest nation in the
world. Remember, only one country came out victorious in war with America the
Beautiful. Maybe it was that heritage that pulled me through. Who knows. I only
know that I speak one language, English. That I believe that I live in the
greatest nation in the world, even after my government, whose President I love
so very much, beat me up with an insensitivity that would have even made that
harshest of judges on American Idol cringe.
Then, my
government spit me out when it had no further use of me. That’s when I picked
myself up, dusted off my only decent suit that I had been using for interviews
after being so long out of the job market, and decided to get back into the
ring. For if you think fighting nine rounds with the government is rough, you
have not lived through the last eighteen years with me.
Those were
the best and hardest years of my life. I was in the only long-term relationship
in my life. It lasted eighteen years. Although I wanted it to last another
eighteen years, fortunately for me I did not get my own way. I finally pulled
myself out of a relationship with the only man I ever loved and likely the
greatest love of my life. And each pull was like a screaming wrench to my
heartstrings because they were made of elastic and were durable with each
stretch and snap of my heartstrings.
Each time I
thought I could take no more of days fixing oatmeal, potato, defrosting whole wheat
bread, orange juice and tea, followed by some chores, a walk within mmm, seven
or eight blocks where I lived for I did not have a car, then home to do some
more cleaning and attend to the list of things left for me to do, I rallied
myself for another day of neutral repetition. It took me a while to understand
why battling the government was so similar to my days of doing nothing, when
the principle for which I fought was freedom. Freedom in spite of my fear.
The first ten
of those eighteen years, I was in academia, student, postdoc, lecturer. For the
last eight years I did not have a job. For a mind like mine, you might as well
lobotomize me and go watch the celebrity news on your flat screen because that
would have been more merciful: ending me at the beginning, than letting me die
by epsilons those eight years. You would not have seen anything, I mean I was
certainly dying because I sure as hell was not living, but you could not have
noticed for it was even less imperceptible that watching your fingernails grow.
But it was there, the process, its results, so irrefutable you could not have
noticed had the results been displayed on a billboard in New York Times. Only
the message took near a decade to deliver that the obviousness got lost in
sheer “doing-nothingness” state, if that makes sense.
It’s as if
the word “Help!” were to be flashed on a Times Square Billboard one letter at a
time but so slowly that the “H” was left hanging, “H--” and everyone in the
square got tired of looking and walked on and the newly entered into the square
or the few who continued thinking about it asked themselves, “H—ello?” “Hi?”
“Hey there?” In other words, the urgency of the message never came through
because it came through too slowly. “H—ee—l—pp--!” Snore.
Seriously, Ssal is dying because she is doing nothing with her life except tending to the ones
that she loves. Huh? Wouldn’t this be the ultimate reason for living? One would
think so, except if one were able to care for the masses, then caring for the
individual one. at. a. time. is so inefficient it goes beyond thinking how long
it would take to care for all the individuals one vaccine or scientific
discovery could do in an instant.
That was my
dilemma. Like the prodigal son, I had squandered what god and prosperity had
endowed me with and when famine struck, I was left to my own devices.
The details
of having failed for doing nothing for the last eighteen years so clearly set
my path for my unprecedented battle with the government of goliath proportions,
epic when you have no weapon but your mind—the one that I did not use for
better during the past eighteen years, over half my life ago—but hey, David
only had a boomerang, right? I mean, correct?
My battle
with the government started immediately after I wrenched myself from an
eighteen-year relationship. It’s so painful to think about, it made my
experience with the federal government seem like a joke, for I certainly
laughed a lot, deliriously sometimes with my new partner in battle, Steve. He
laughed a lot too, a loud laugh that made everyone in the room look, and then
quietly think, thank goodness I’m not him. But that never stopped him from
laughing, which is why I loved hearing him laugh so much, even when he got on
my nerves. Not really.
I had just
found a job, too, quite proud of myself. Being out of the job market that long
with such a promising resume made me seem like a joke. No one took me
seriously. It was either, “We want someone who will stay, not leave us after
we’ve trained them.” They had no idea what a stable rock I was for the last two
decades. Or it was, if you read between the comments, “We want someone
dedicated, not a dilettante who has the luxury of practicing as an attorney
years after she passed the bar.” It was not until I had engaged my foe that
anyone realized how seriously I was about the law. For law and order are ideas
that I cherished, before I saw those endowed with protecting order abuse the
law.
What did I want to do in the long run? I was asked during my first
interview, to which I stuttered something about partaking in the firm’s profit
share. Considering that the firm was wholly owned by the bossman, who
incidentally, was the one interviewing me, that sounded quite lame. I had done
my research the night before, when I had been called in for an interview, but
there did not seem to be very many good answers for this very obvious of
interview questions. It seemed a bit less lame than, “I want to argue in front
of the Supreme Court on one of these issues: Civil Rights in terms of equality
that eliminates discrimination even though I will never benefit from affirmative
action, healthcare because no one deserves to wait longer in an emergency room
because they do not have health insurance, freedom of speech because Americans
are way more squeamish about sex than violence.” How would a workers’
compensation case ever get to the Supreme Court of the land? So I gave the
profit sharing answer that was suggested in the “How to Land a Job by using
these 100 Best Answers to the 100 Most Obvious Interview Questions Ever”.
I didn’t get
the full-time job, but the independent contractor position instead. I was happy
with that, as it could swing me into a permanent position elsewhere. Things
were good, as I looked at the cuffs on the sleeves of my suit. Thought I had removed all the lint from my
suit prior to my interview, peering closely at why the lint would not pull off.
Oh, I realized, it was not lint sticking out, the threads of my suit were
fraying I had worn it so many times even if not recently. My best black suit
was almost ten years old. It fit pretty well considering. I had a few that fit
better but those were stuck at my ex’s place. I choked on that word, even in
thought. “Ex,” how do you call someone whom you’ve been with for almost two
decades an ex when you will always love them? And definitely no less tomorrow
than today. I stopped picking at the threads of my suit because I was only making
the threads longer.
The day I got
offered one job, I got offered a second. Life was wonderful. I had finally
picked myself up by the scruff of my neck and was ready to conquer the world, a
decade or two late but ready nonetheless. This called for a celebration. But
with whom, I chuckled to myself. I had spent the last ten years laser focused
on everyone else except myself. I had let friendships slide by until friends
became acquaintances and strangers looked more familiar than my acquaintances. But
no more. I knew how to say no. I was going to hoard my time for myself. Even if
it killed me. Little did I know how often I would be repeating that to myself
in the near future.
So there I
was, a middle-aged woman, a cougar almost, beginning her career. Single, having
to find roommates, driving a rental car, with no one to celebrate with except
my mother. I called her first, she was proud of me. I smiled at her support,
which was always there. The comfort and the security only a mother could give.
Had some
interneting to do, so I set off looking for a Starbucks or a Coffee-Grind. Somewhere
young and hip, I needed to feel alive. I did feel alive, as I drove my car to
the Westside on a Friday evening. I looked at my dashboard, which warned me: 51
miles to empty. That’s plenty, I laughed. The windows were down and the wind
cut my cheeks sharply so that I wanted to feel more. I felt footloose, free,
and no longer in need of refueling.
Part 2. Meet
Steve Patina
I rolled
along the ten freeway going west, going as far west as Horace Greeley urged. I
was almost at the end when I heard a roar of a bike coming up on my left. A rider
sped by with the wind maxing out his jacket like a sail, fullblown and free. I
looked at my speedometer. I was only going eighty…five. And he was long gone. I
hit the accelerator and it the steering wheel. Where was the damn horn? Was it
one of those side horns or button horns? My left hand steered while my right
groped for the—there it is. a loud honk.
