Moodswing - A big huge burden

Sometimes I still get mad at Lary for shooting at me. The bullet hit a brick and could have ricocheted into my throat or something, and I might have died horribly, flopping like an octopus in a private ocean of my own blood. “You were breaking into my house,” Lary likes to point out. “You have only yourself to blame.” It’s just his reflex, he says, to start shooting when someone shatters his window. I can’t believe to this day he tries to blame me for his broken window just because I tossed a rock through it.He’s to blame, of course. If he had a doorbell like a normal person, I wouldn’t have to throw stuff at his house to alert him to my presence. Anyway, he says he wasn’t really aiming at me, because if he were I’d be dead right now, and he would’ve had to bury me in the giant concrete bay he’s building along his property line so he can plant a wall of bamboo stalks to keep all the ice-cream colored houses next door out of sight.

And he acts like it would have been a hassle, a big huge burden having to dispose of my body. Does he not remember his own instructions to me in the event of his own death? How I’m supposed to push his corpse out of a helicopter at a high altitude with his cat strapped to his chest? And on top of that, I have to aim for a suburban cul-de-sac because he wants to end up impaled on a swing set. One last fright for the neighborhood kids, he says. And plus he doesn’t even care if his cat outlives him, I’m still supposed to strap her — scratching and hissing — to his dead chest. Now how’s that for a burden?

Daniel and Grant, on the other hand, refuse to let me be the executor of their living wills. They know I will never pull the plug, even if there was nothing left but their heads in a fish bowl. They’re probably afraid I’ll go senile and beat them with their own feeding tubes until I tire out. So instead they are each other’s informal executor, with explicit instructions to euthanize one another when the need for adult diapers comes into play, which I think is excessive. “You might like the diapers,” I try to reason. “Jesus, don’t just die,” I plead, but they just laugh, like they’re looking forward to it.

It’s the burden, I suppose. People have different thresholds for dealing with it, and some have none at all. I think it has to do with your heart, and whether you follow it. I used to work in the copy office of a city magazine alongside three bitter old acid vats who treated me like a burden because they had to teach me the intricacies of an outdated system they themselves made sure to keep complicated in order to postpone their own obsolescence. When they weren’t resenting me, they resented each other, and I agonized over it. It murdered me that I didn’t fit in. The one closest to my age was twice my age, a woman named Marty with bulbous, thyroid eyes and a limitless collection of those spangle earrings you buy at bad craft shows.

She’d been working there longer than the lives of a lot of rock stars, and when she left to start her own novelty toilet-paper company (you could order rolls emblazoned with pictures of your ex-boyfriend’s face or something), she was heralded like an escaped hostage and sent off with a fond farewell that consisted of copious lunch-hour drinking.

But the venture didn’t work out for her. She was back within months, broke both financially and spiritually. In her absence, the editors had learned they didn’t need to replace her so when she asked to return, they fired me to make room. At the time I felt defeated, but I’ve since realized that Marty was simply returning to her lair like a sick elephant, because there is more than one way to die, and this was hers. My last image of Marty is watching her approach her old desk like it was the electric chair.

So instead I try to remember her after her farewell celebration when, in a moment of booze-induced comradery, she told me how happy she was to leave the office because she feared she’d be trapped there like a corpse in a crypt. Then she brandished a company picture taken over a decade prior, when her hair fell long and thick in a braid down her back. The image was a far cry from the liver-mottled, boozy-breathed wretch who pinched the photo with her thumb and ring finger to better accommodate the lit cigarette also occupying her dried-out hoof. I truly hated her and she truly hated me, but at that moment she was about to embark on an exploration, choosing to bear the burden of her aspiration rather than let it dissipate without a trace, and I have to respect her for that. Because at that moment she was free, free to let the world wipe its ass on her dream.??