wallace

The informal house meeting, or as Diana calls it, our "little power-point demonstration", ended ten minutes ago. I sat through the whole conflict, enraged to silence, clutching my comfort tea mug in both hands, sitting lotus in the wicker chaise, trying not to raise my voice or even look at Diana or Arthur. Neither of them paid their rent yet this month, it now being the fifteenth.Despite that, Diana seems to think it's a reasonable idea to throw yet another party next weekend, being her friend Tara's best friend Mandy's birthday -- and all.

It's Wednesday. She still hasn't mustered the energy to clean up after the bash she had this weekend. The hard wood floors in the living and dining room are lined with black crusty filth that accumulates from spilt beer and tread. There's a pony keg, tipped on it's side under the dining table, leaking fermented puddle. The unplugged fridge is starting to reak like curdled milk and rotten fruit. Apparantly the clattering cage rattle noise it made was too much for her coked-up friends to handle at three in the morning. So she just unplugged it, full of our produce, milk, eggs, chicken and anything else that could go rotten in the hours before we woke up. "It's all good." Today there's freon, slowly dripping down it's insides like fluorescent stalactites, riddling our various foods with poison chemical. She says she'll get to it. Once she finishes her new story. She thinks she's Hemmingway with breasts.
"Wallace. Writing is the loneliest sport."

So I fill our one rusty mop bucket in the bathtub, mixing in the contents of two practically empty bottles of generic CVS floor cleaner (Arthur worked there for two weeks last month, the only time he's bought cleaners or toilet paper) and some dish soap. The hot water sends warm pulses of goose bumps up into my shoulders, it's steam sticking to my face. Our basement heater ran out of oil this morning. I had always assumed that during the winter months, legally, the oil company had to fill it up, even if you hadn't paid the bill in two or three months. Case in point: not so.
The deteriorated house is practically a mansion with giant fifteen foot ceilings and, counting the basement, four full floors to heat. Every available space is occupied, including our presence. Happy Harbor (our name for the house) is a halfway home for emotionally crippled students, young professionals and unemployed ne'er do wells anchoring themselves with parent's checks. Kyle and Bruce attribute the massive bill to the broken window we found in the basement.

While the mop soaks I put in a taped copy of O.K.Computer into the shabby kitchen stereo just under the spice rack. One of the two crusty decks is broken. I have to remember which, so I test it out with Diana's copy of The Who By Numbers. Unfortunatly it isn't eaten up or spit back at me in a stream of filmy brown reel. It's difficult choosing a record to represent a break-up, but O.K. Computer was what Linda and I listened to during our last, final, climactic bout of sex. Perfect for it actually, the sex I mean, not the break-up, because of the way the record crescendos and then drops off at the apex of "Electioneering."

I heard somewhere on the radio last week, NPR probably, that most companies actually fail financially all year until the holiday season strikes. Then they compensate their net in one fell swoop. Are human beings the same? Do we just go through one miserable long spell after another? Sleeping alone, languishing in melancholy, going to work, going to bed, going to eat, going simply bankrupt in emotional complexity -- until our own personal holiday season comes along, spending and consuming our accumulated product, waiting for us to flummox it all over again.

I realize, once the floors get wet, I won't be able to scrub the filth and debris off the oven, sink, formica and tables. The stove top is a particular horrid mess, covered in dried tomato sauce, flecks of hardened basil, tiny chunks of ramen. The sink's ragged brillo pad can barely accomodate, leaving streaks of rust colored slaver. The microwave's exterior seems decent enough, but inside it there's splattered soup and burned cheese and sauces. Do these food fragments re-heat, melt and then drip their way into our various dinners everytime we push "start?" I'm eating little nuggets that have gone bad and been nuked a hundred times over and over?
Kyle's on the first phone in the living room. He's stoned I think, half-watching The Simpsons, barely managing his way through the conversation at hand.

"Oh...so you're going...you're going to Avalon?"

Pause.

"Spicy."

Pause.

"So you won't be at the...uh...whatsit...Model?"

Pause.

"Mmm. Super-spicy."

Our television's fuzzy and distorted, making Krusty the Clown almost menacing in tone. His trademark huck-huck-huck-huck is turning into an imminent and threatening cackle. Kyle's drifting off, his take-out Chinese is going to spill and stain the couch again.

"Have you ever heard of lucid dreaming?"

Pause.

"No?"

Pause.

"Spicy."

He's a simpering twit pretending to be a liberal intellectual. But at least he paid rent this month. Sometimes, when he's not completely stoned, he comes up with these faux subversive projects for himself. Like last month he wanted to pretend to be a door-to-door bible salesman and go to the Mormon conclave across the street. Then when he actually got in there he was going to preach all this hopeless banter about anarachism and protesting in Seattle.

"Come on, it would be like, like giving them a taste of their own medicine man," followed by a five minute self back-patting of "spiciness"over the incidental combination of the words "medicine" and "man", a favorite movie of his, starring Sean Connery as a jungle recluse searching for the cure to cancer. Kyle's enamour with the film still evades me. I asked if it was that he thought it was cool in an ironic way and he just shrugged at me and said, "To the death of irony man."

The microwave's removable plate is going to have to soak, so I turn back to the mop bucket, too lukewarm now, refill it, leave my hands under the hot tap again and then dry off. I'm thirsty, but when I go to get a glass there's nothing but a measuring cup in the pantry. The sink, is a mound of scummy, chipped plates and plastic cups with wet cigarette butts floating and dissolving in flat beer. Any glasses to drink from are under this pile and there's no way that I'm going to either do someone else's dishes again or drink from this fucking measuring cup.

I run down into the basement, Bruce is there, fixing his bikes or something.

"Do we have a hammer?"

"Yeah, hold on a sec," he says, sifting through his tool-box, and then points over at his work bench, "Third shelf from the top."

It takes me a second to find it, hanging between the chains and gears neatly organized, hanging from their own individual nails over his power saw. I notice the makeshift board has fallen off the broken window and landed on the two worthless dryers we inherited when we moved into this place. I think to mention it to Bruce, but stop myself, not wanting to lose my irritation over the dishes.

Bruce deters me half-way up the stairs.

"So what did you think about tonight? At the meeting?"

"Not much. We need heat. We need to pay rent."

He fidgets with a pair of needle nose pliers, not looking at me. He probably feels like a real ass, not having paid the oil yet.

"That thing that Jenn said? The uh... orgy thing? That was a little weird don't you think?"

"She was just fucking around," I say to him, "you know, about being able to keep warm tonight."

"It didn't sound like a joke to me. And what about Arthur? That's sick."

"Their whole family is screwed up. Have you met their other brother?"

"Would she have him in a house orgy too?"

Why is he so effected by this? I had always assumed Bruce and Jenn were sleeping together when I moved in. He would pinch her ass when she was going up the stairs, make innuendos about her blowing him under the dinner table. She would smirk. When we were painting the upstairs bathroom, I remember her bending over to dip her brush, tank top sliding up, exposing her curved and freckled back. He came up behind her and slipped his hands under there, caressing her bra strap. Jann had slept with everyone who used to live here: Ted, Hal, Barry. I've heard that she even had a threesome with Oliver and Dinah last New Year's.

I run back upstairs, go to the sink, grab three or four dishes off the top, take them and the hammer out back on the big mortar slab we use as a back step. And begin smashing. There's a brief pop with every strike, like shattering Christmas ornaments. With each blow I evoke every left out pot of soup, every empty roll of toilet paper, every unflushed toilet bowl, unpaid bill, burnt skillet, late night party and nasty note. I gather up the remnants, scoop them into a sandwhich baggie and tape it the wall, just above the sink, with DO DISHES written in large black capitals with a sharpie.
The upstairs phone rings. Kyle’s still on the downstairs line, “...like a control over some unassumed form of reality -- y’know and then into your own life....” I pause and wait for someone to get it on the second floor. It rings again. Surveyal of the room reveals not much accomplished: the mop bucket barely warm again, the tape deck clicking, still broken unable to flip sides, that stove range slather of foamy brown and crust, fizzling into less bubbles of soap and back to filth, microwave wide open the faint smell of cooked lemon detergent and szechuan sauce. Kyle must have reheated that Red Dragon special without wiping the glazed microwave door or walls, while I was with Bruce.

Again it rings. No footfall above, or doors opening. No clipped bleep of the upstairs remote phone being removed from it’s cradle. The sink pile shifts behind me, clattering under itself, a wine glass shatters under its weight. That's three rings -- the voice mail picks up on four.

I bound down the hallway, then up the spiral stairs three at a time, yanking myself up the wood rail’s leverage, feeling screws rip out of the wall, the rail goes limp, connected only to my hand, sending me reeling across the second floor hallway, sliding into the stained coffee table the phone cradle rests on, buried under bicycle magazines and junk mail. The table jostles. Ring. I swat the mound of refuse aside and swipe the phone from it’s cradle, hearing that afformentioned bleep just before my own curt, “Hello?”

“Diana there?” A droned male voice, probably her boy toy, the Keith Moon sequel.

Clark opens his bedroom door, just across from the phone table, “...”

“Is Diana here?”

“How would I know?”

Into the phone, “Hold on a sec.”

Up to the third floor. The stairs carpeted with threadbare tartan tapestry. Diana’s room is the first to the right, postcard hanging to the right of her door frame, a craquelure stamp of violet lipstick proclaiming “Viva La Femme.” There’s a yellow post-it note stuck on the door itself -- THERE IS NO DIANA. MUST FINISH ART.

Behind the note, the door, I can hear the faded stunted English singing of Nico, “I don’t do too much talking these days....” and the slow single punching of a computer keyboard, one letter at a time. I knock anyway.

A brief pause, probably a cigarette drag, and then, “I’m trying to work in here!”

“Yeah...sorry...but you’ve got a phone call.”

A brief flurry of noises: desk chair rolling, a patter of feet, something falling and then clunking to the floor.

“Who would call? I’m fucking working?!? Deadlines!”

“Well...look...would you like me to take a message?”

The door swings open. She’s completely dry, wearing nothing but an aqua blue, terry cloth bath towel tucked just below her clavicle.

“Give it.”

I’ve heard, both from Bruce and Clark, that Diana has a long, jagged scar just below her navel. Bruce guessed it was from some digestive problem. Clark said cervical cancer. That scar, whatever it’s origin, molted and almost plastic, not like flesh at all, stretching down her lower abdomen towards her well-used nethers, is all I can think about as she flips that umber hair back and holds out her right palm.

I imagine it, the scar: taut and hard, to be her sole weakness. Once it’s exposed to human eyes, she would be overwhelmed by such vain insecurity that she would acquiesce to every house decree, committed to the cooperative imperative of cleanliness and responsibility. It takes every ounce of self-control in my frame not to snatch that towel away, revealing her frailty, running my finger gingerly along it with sarcasm and then, just when she thinks I’m going to submit to her wiles, flicking her with a painful snap.

Instead, in one sweeping motion she lets out a harried, bellabored sigh, swipes the phone from my hand, and slams the door shut.