On this lovely morning the jury is hung &the house echoes nothings , now everyone’s gone. It’s the coldest day I’ve seen in December thus far. I don’t want to stock up for the winter, So I’m calling for a hunger-strike. I’m cashing in coupons and saving up my change for salvation or a pack of cigarettes. You’ll be holding your daughter while the laundry dries in my backyard. I’ll marry a doctor after witnessing a message (not a murder) &from here on out I’ll invest in good men—not lost boys—and I’ll watch the skyline like a monument. I’ll watch the window for your silhouette &if you return I’ll shoot you down. We’ll call the troops &act on instinct. I will forget your stomach and your backbone and I will believe in day traders instead of night traitors so when the storm comes in it will all fall into place. There’s a place for you in everything, especially the scripture you read your daughter every night, wanting her so badly to believe in something, in something more than the man made lakes you try and drown in every single night.
And you know I’m not a good swimmer, that I’ve started drinking too much coffee again. That Blair gives me donuts while I sit at the counter of Jimmy’s Diner and write, like some version of a regular, or Perez Hilton. I want to tell the man lying naked next to me in my bed that when I go stay at my parent’s house it’s like wanting to play a piano that already plays itself. The man laying next to me in bed, I don’t think he really wants me to tell him anything at all. I go on anyway: I want to be a regular, but I don’t want my teeth to get stained in the process, so I am going to drink this coffee through a straw, I am going to wipe these crumbs from my mouth. I need to call Trade Secret in Clearwater, Florida, call the mall where I used to work and demand that Randy Phoenix fix my hair. Randy, everyone has ruined it, they’ve ravaged it. It’s everyone’s hands all up on my head, all up in my grill.
I’ve been living it out in bathtubs, touching necks that don’t remind me of yours. It’s not that it’s really different from what it used to be, you know? It’s just that my position has changed. I’m always eager in the kitchen, perched over the sink with my middle finger reaching further down my throat then you had ever even thought of going. Still you’re the one taunting my insides, begging my breasts to bring up the past and then watch it as it’s swept up with the sink and trembles down the drain. “You’ll never be a regular, Daniela Scrima, you don’t even have that in you, look, you’ve gotten crumbs all up in your hair.”
Failed attempts at just bein’ a human, like last week when I tried to take up smoking and couldnt decide on which hand would be held or which man would wake up naked next to me in bed—but I knew the lighting would be perfect, I knew the music would be queued, and the dogs would be shitting on the pristine tile floor. You were looking at me like you were the palm reader, like out of all of the women in the world , you could hold this deck of cards over me, telling me no man wants to play games during the first cold week of December.
A storm front was coming &the semen was damned. I told you that was my favorite television show but I don’t know why you believed me. The troops were lyin out in front of trenches, I was slathering on tanning lotion, massaging the bullet holes in your chest. Everyone’s laughing when I’m talking, except Nick, who knows I’ve never made a joke in my life, who knows he shares the same name as my father, and knows that to me, well names, mean everything. He asks for prawns to break my spirit. The troops call their estranged mother’s and their hot tempered daddies and they read the truth from index cards that I keep in my room. They laugh when you love me and they die when you declare that love is dead. You want to see my signature pose? My leg trick? It seems like I’ll do it for just about anyone, these days.
I go to my old apartment and sit with my old roommate who calls are old supplier while we sit on the old carpet. I say “when I first moved to New York City, I slept next to that radiator, right on the floor,” You round up my influence and you kiss their wrists and ankles like love is your middle name. Like love was my middle name. Cuts on lips will always remind me of you. God wouldn’t dare damn a boy like you. Not with the stars so soft and the view so clear. God couldn’t do that to us, no sir, no baby, no never. If God did he would have nowhere to showcase the New York City skyline—the one so obscured with structures that it would forever remind you of free men and dying women, the one so dark sans constellations that we wont even know when an old moon meets new. The God you believe in, well that God let me in on his big secret, kid, he warned me that boys will be boys until he sees a man where the moon should be.
On Monday, my stock broker broke down and bought a shotgun. It’s the market, it’s the times, it’s the collapse, don’t forget to do nothing when Wednesday comes, we got to prove were equal after all. You say, you say. Just like you did last week, telling me on Thanksgiving that you bought one too. You say all men have guns in Virginia, baby, don’t get so blue. This soups on the house. You tell me to stop pretend I am south of the Mason-Dixon line. You look at me with wide eyes and say “this is not a wise investment, see in New York City, we call boys like this a ‘throw-away,” you look around my bedrooms, noticing the bones &bruises. I tell one man that I am an individual and I tell another that I am made of metal, that they never gave me braces so my mouth and manners and movements are crooked. Let’s get Cotarded in here.. Let’s get Cotarded in here.
The jury is hung, the crumbs in my hair, the soups getting cold, you’re telling me to get the fuck away from the counter, you’re saying “put your clothes back on, this is my song &you’re not going to steal it”.
In bed naked, I don’t want to give a speech unless it’s a monologue. A monologue I learned a long time ago, and I’m gonna deliver it in any voice that I want to. Maybe I will become a regular, maybe I’ll sit at this counter every day instead of going to the library or sitting at my own desk, so I can keep saying that this is my job. Who am I kidding? I love everyone I’ve ever met. I may not remember their names, their faces or meeting them at all, but I’ll fucking love them anyway.
Anyway, I am drinking my coffee with a straw. I have finals next week. I scheduled a hair appointment with Randy from Trade Secret, my favorite drag queen &my favorite hair dresser. If I am going to put my head in anyone’s hands it will be that man. See, my heart is up for grabs, I’ll leave it on the counter with donut crumbs, but my hair, oh honey my hair, you’re going to have to wait more than a minute or a second or a year, you’re going to have run your fingers through it for the rest of my life. That is true love, that is what true love really is, you can feel it stop, you can’t wash it out, you cant wash it out, but you can knot it up, you can ravage it to all hell. The jury is hung and the house echoes now that they’ve gone. There’s a place for all of you in everything, especially the scripture that you read to your daughter every night, but baby, please, stop making these man made lakes, I can’t see the moon, and all I need the water for is washing a hunger-strike out of my hair, I know you think the time has come, but I’m not ready to let you watch me drown, God says he is going to stop building men with eyes that work that way.
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I want a banana. Like a baby wants a banana. Sitting outside I just want to say "please don't be mean" or maybe show men what women look like without skin. I could take them to a museum where they would be lined up on display, and then we could discuss it on a daytime talk show. I would explain that these women have no skin now even though they have spent years growing it back. I wonder if it would have any effect, like the burn victims on the television screen. The burn victims are massaging ointment on to their arms-- or their stubs, the places where their arms used to be. They speak directly to you, me, God and the cameraman, they say "it still really hurts."
I ask him to come in the room and watch this with me. I think he says "this is sick" or "this is fucked up" or "what is wrong with you?" And then he goes back to playing some video game where he gets to have a machine gun, where I don't get to talk. I keep speaking even though I am sure he cant hear me, and I say "you know they were babies too, you know they had high chairs," I continue, "someone puts cheerios on a high chair and they still eat them, don't you get that?" I try, and I try, but I cannot get up to the change channel.
All of the phone calls I make are long distances, but it doesn't really matter anymore. I don't know how my phone works, or how phone works in general. I don't understand how you can hear me right away. I don't like the telephone and I wish there was a thirty second delay so I could feel like it was working somehow. Long distances phone calls also don't matter, because I don't think my cell phone provider takes note of this. I can call anyone nationally and it makes no difference. I am always under my minutes every month so they roll over to the next month, and I cant get a smaller plan than what I already have. I miss my lovers and their landlines. I want to call and ask if you are home. I think that text messages could have quite possibly ruined our lives.
And I can't make excuses anymore, I can't say "oh, I'm sorry I wasn't home," because it doesn't matter if I was home or not, anyone can reach me anywhere. People can even gps my location with their phones. We can make maps of each other across the city. We are a video game that I obviously am not good at. I force myself to work through this, I sit down and listen to all of my voice mails and sometimes it shocks me that anyone says my name, the way my name sounds coming out of other peoples mouths. He leaves me a voice mail, "Daniela, it's me" I suck my stomach in and I stare at the television screen.
I swore I'd quit, you know, like some people say they will quit smoking, or how certain men have really great ideas. I've put myself all over the internet since puberty, it was a natural response to outside circumstance, to being thirteen years old. Sometimes I wish there was one giant delete button, I guess we all feel like that sometimes. But the rest of the time, I just don't stop. I am part of a larger hybrid that does this also, I don't know if this is a collective society, if we are doing this together, competing for attention or still just having an outlet. I feel like this is habit, because I can do this easily, and I cannot answer the phone or respond to my own name. I don't know how this name thing has happened-- when I began to feel it was unfair for anyone to say my name. My parents call and I want to say "I AM SORRY NO ONE LIVES HERE bY THAT NAME," as if they'd never met me. I don't want to hear about the running tab I am as a human, my carbon foot print or the words I said as a toddler. If anyone asks me why I lied, I will tell them it is because I do not remember getting teeth.
After I've finished reading and writing my papers, I learn my real life lessons through daytime television. I watch one year of a woman's life as she loses half her body weight through gastric bypass surgery. I like this story for so many reasons. I like it because they are not acknowledging the real issue at all, it's a three hour special and all they talk about is the food she consumes in secret. They don't stop to make the connection to emotional eating, or maybe they do, but not enough. I don't think they make note of it enough because they act like it will go away. I have read about people ripping through their new stomachs, snapping through their lapbands. And it has nothing to do with being hungry. You don't go to a drive thru, pull up in your car and order three value meals because you need something to eat.
They say she is happy now, except for the excess skin. A surgery is scheduled. She cries in front of the camera, and I think I would cry too, but I don't. He comes upstairs and glares me down, like he does not make love to me, I am just some body that shares his body. His eyes are blank and I almost start laughing. This is a man or boy that has no knowledge of our government, doesn't understand how anything in the political system works and refuses to register to vote. He tells me about his high scores and I want to say "I am sorry, the person you are looking for does not reside at this residence."
I just wanted to be the prodigal son, mom. Can't I come home now? Can't we change the genders and prove everything right, mom? Why don't you listen to my voicemails, mom? I make these requests to God himself and it's like his secretary is mimicking me, when I ask to speak to him, they just tell me I have the wrong number. It doesn't even matter that I called the landline.
A famous author hangs himself. I know I should tell you he hanged himself but it still doesn't sound right to me. I have never understood that pattern in speech, and I never had to think about it until Sadam Hussein is going to be executed. I do not watch this event on daytime television, I instead watch it on youtube the next day. Everyone is watching the ball drop, bringing in The New Year-- and I can't help but to find this so disturbing. I wish he would have offed himself, or that they could have given him the choice. I understand that he was a horrible man, but I know that tomorrow it is going to be 2007, and I don't want to see a video of a man being hanged. I don't like the way it sounds. I don't want to imagine the presidents face. I tell myself that things will change when I move to the city, like this is not a global event. Alone in my childhood bedroom, I take this very personally.
On television nearly two years later I watch the Republican National Convention every night for a week. The whole time I keep putting my hand on my heart. I cant chant "drill, baby, drill" and I am not understanding any of the jokes. The boy or man I mentioned earlier doesn't walk into the room because he does not live here, has never lived here, has never slept in my new bed in my new bedroom. I tell myself this is sterile ground. I change my phone number. I get new mouth wash. I answer the phone and I sound as uplifting as I can, someone on the other line, maybe you says "Daniela?" and I am so happy, so happy with the receiver that isn't a receiver at all, so happy with the minutes that arent minutes at all. I start to tell you right away, before it cuts to the machine, I start to tell you "I am so happy to hear from you! I don't remember the last time we talked! Did you hear all the men were hanged? Do you remember getting teeth? Oh you do! Well that's good. That's good." I lie, "i do not remember getting teeth."
& it's memories that I'm stealing, but you're innocent when you dream, when you dream."
During the week days, the mornings are mostly the same. I used to fear the mornings because of “going through the motions,” because of the process, but now I enjoy it. I enjoy the ritual. I do it alone. I set the water to boil and go make the bed, I pour the coffee and while it cools I place myself on the hardwood floor &stretch my limbs in different ways. In a few paragraphs I will tell you everything, I decided to when the water was boiling. If you wanted this to be your business before, then here you go, it can still be your business now.
When I am off the floor I try and write, I have lost a story line, kept my mouth shut &forgot about plot, this morning I remind myself to take note of this again. I used to think simply in narrative, I could have delivered a voice over if you would have put a microphone inside of my brain, it could have been in all of your favorite commercials. I should give up coffee again, I did so well for a while, but now I’m back to it. The only reason I want to give it up is so I can start drinking it again. My roommate has a French press and when classes began this year I started pouring myself a cup. I would drink something, and then feel something. The fact that I could feel the effects of caffeine became a new & astonishing revelation. Caffeine existed after all. Something is actually there. There are things I know but that does not mean I really choose to believe them. Just because something happens to be a fact does not mean that I will happen to feel it.
Isn’t that right Alexander Graham Bell--why won’t you stop phoning me in the middle of the night? Isn’t that right Abigail Folger- - lying bloody on the floor?
My reaction to statements and questions is no longer answered with "I think" or "i know" instead I always say "I believe in that" or "I don't believe in that." My roommate said she was stubborn because three generations of her family are stubborn and I said "I don't believe in that.” I want to know what people believe in not what they think, not what they know tell me how it feeels. Everyone tears up in front of me all the time, so I just don't cry at all.
There are enough people crying around me. These days, I never have to cry for anyone. For years, I had to cry for them all. In all of my dreams there are cars and roads and motions that I cannot control. The roads go up mountains or the air and the world is usually desolate, there are not many people, there are things left over. In the dream I already know what's happened, but when I wake up, I can't figure it out.
You know, when I was in my last Florida relationship, I always drove down to St.Pete. My boyfriend and I both lived off of the same road, about 45 minutes apart. But it was the same road, Belcher Road, our houses were directly lined up on a map. It was a two turn drive. Left out of my parent’s driveway onto Belcher, down Belcher for forty, forty-five minutes, maybe longer maybe shorter, and then a left onto his street, there was his house. We both lived on cul-de-sacs, fake dead end roads. Mine was connected to a trailer park and his linked on to some neighborhood.
The thing was, I always made that drive. It was always me driving, in my car. First I called it the Drive of Shame, they thought I was funny, I made up names for things, I marked landmarks on the road i said "I've just driven over Jurassic Park" and they loved me. There I was, bearing gifts, shelling out hair products and advise and babysitting and it was always me making that drive, two times a day or every night. He didn't make that drive. And now, much later, I am glad he didn’t. I am glad that I don’t process the narrative that way, because then, my god, who would have had the right?
I became ac costumed to his house, his family, his bedroom. I watched his home movies, I went over his grandmother's, I went to softball games and I brought over baked goods. And in retrospect, I did this all for a person who knew so little about me, who really in the end doesn’t know that much about me at all. I never shared the good stuff, I was busy naming the streets.
I think if he was asked what color my eyes are, he wouldn’t remember.
I am absolutely sure he would have no idea what color my eyes are.
And it's funny, because I had no eyes back then. I didn't even have eyes. I covered them up. I made them bright blue, or dark green or hazel. I pushed contact lenses into them so you would never know. No one knew the difference, I could have said my eyes were born hazel and it would have been the same as giving a small child a balloon. And that’s the thing, I had no eyes back then, I had someone else's eyes, someone else's eyes, and someone else's family.
After it all ended, after he cheats on me and causes a scene like a toddler and I am exiled off the block, pulling at my own hair, I realize how some things are just for nothing. If I show up with a shampoo I don’t really have to share a part of myself, I just have to tell you what it does to the follicles of your hair. No one sincerely believes me when I explain how much I liked working at K-Mart or the mall when I was younger, but I did. I liked it because it had so little to do with me. I believed in. I believe in hair conditioner, I don’t believe in retinas.
One day in the kitchen, after I decided I would just move to New York, I told my mother "I gave them everything and now they don't even know me at all." Because he never knew my family, he never saw my home movies, he has touched my body one million times and he still if he saw me today would ask where I got that scar. And every time I told him a different story. He never caught on, he never remembered.. He never will. I could tell him
“I fell out of a tree,” “I burned to death in a fire,” “I fell down the stairs,” “I was bit by a mouse,” “I was born this way,” and each time he nodded his head, not piecing anything together. That was my fault. That was me playing the role of George, looking at Lennie deep in his eyes, he asks me where I got that scar and I tell him if he can just stay out of trouble, I'll let him tend to the rabbits.
"Oh will you? Will you let me tend to the rabbits, George?"
But that is what I Wanted love to be like. I wanted it to be easy, I wanted to be in control. And when the ball dropped, I lost it. I wanted to settle for something simple. My father would scoff in the beginning "stop referring to your boyfriend as simple, it makes him sound stupid." But he was both. He ate when he was hungry and he slept when he was tired.
There are two kinds of people in this world: the kind that eat when they are hungry and the kind that sleep when they are tired, and those that cannot manage to do either.
It figures, I have acted out all of my best scenes for a blind audience, I have given the best speeches to deaf ears.
And now I don't really love anyone, there is never anyone new. At some point I decided I would just never tell any of these stories. I would believe in: stories, feelings, hardwood floors.
I don't want to have to tell any of these stories, you know, even though that’s what I am doing right now. I wish I could hand over a transcript, some survey like the ones we used to fill out on the internet--- do you remember? First we would send them to each other in e-mails, then later on we would copy &paste them into our blogs?
That could just answer the questions for me. Name, Age, Place of Birth, Parents, Every school I've ever gone to, Everyone I ever made love to, Who my best friends are, What my parents do, What countries I have been to, What states. .
They could study it and get back to me and when I tried to kiss their mouths I'd realize that they had no lips.
They have no lips, my god, they have no tongues. It's all teeth, my god. I'ts all bone. It was all bone.
After I started having serious relationships at the age of thirteen, I kind of discovered that the pain would go away. Even if I was hurting, even if we were acting out the biggest scene, I gained some perspective that when I was older it really wouldn’t matter anymore. Yes, there are certain people that I will probably never stop loving, but then there are those who I never really loved at all. I could never be the victim in this story, just because I was stabbed in the front does not mean I didn’t bring it up on myself. I just wanted to be stabbed in the face instead of the back. It’s not like I picked my ex-boyfriend out of the crowd for his brain, it was more the fact that I liked the way he looked in pictures; I liked the fact that he had nothing to say and if I stuck to it my life would have no possibilities.
And I have blogged all of my serious relationships, it was just at some point that I stopped blogging the break ups, I didn’t write the bad parts down because then I would have been a failure. My perception became so skewed that I didn’t know what photographs I’d be able to accumulate for you. Back then, the mornings were never the same, I woke up at different times and did different things, there was no ritual it was just the mundane. You see, there were signs that said DEAD END ROAD but I thought because I knew the shortcuts, the side entrances, the best way to make a three-point turn that I could get to wherever I was going. And I don’t know if this will surprise you or not, but all the dead end roads were dead.
There was always something comforting in this idea that maybe I would never have to live up to any expectations, that I could have just been barefoot and pregnant on some shitty tile floor without a thought in my head. And then it’s over and you realize that maybe all the things you went through really weren’t that much, I want to say simple sentences like “get your idiot body away from mine,” or “don’t you ever tell me to get over anything in my life,” I will start singing to strangers: if you don’t know me by now, you won’t never ever ever ever know meeee, oooooooooo.
For two years I stopped writing the truth and instead just blurted out some vague sentences starring: Daniela Scrima! As Loopy Pieces of Metal! But now I don’t see the point in protecting the identities of the innocent, you know, I’ve been telling you this story since the day I was born, may as well not stop now, right? I don’t feel like it will be any fun of it’s all bone. What kind of ritual would I have if I spared your name? If I didn't ask you to tell me all of your dreams about owning this land, before I politely asked you to turn around &face that tree, you know baby, just so I could see the back of your head.
