Alright, this is another one. This one didn’t have an original, hand-written draft; I just wrote it on the computer. Tentative title: WORDSWORDSWORDS.
Before I begin to tell my story, let me preface it by saying this: as a moderately gifted artist, and a fiction writer at that, my two greatest talents are drinking and making shit up. There are hundreds of bars in San Francisco, perhaps even thousands, and many of them are dinky and poorly lit and located at the ends of flicker dark corridors or on the top floor of nail salons, so it seems entirely plausible that someone like I could stumble upon one early in the drizzly Saturday morning fog, get plastered, find a taxi home, and then never walk in to the same exact bar ever again. Many of them don’t really welcome newcomers, due to the nature of the wares they peddle, and I suspect that they frequently change their names and pay crooked back-alley officials to keep their locations clandestine. Perhaps the bar exists solely in my head, the product of a lonely, whiskey-soaked cortex searching for higher meaning the random misfiring of my neurons. Or perhaps it is there somewhere, floating in between the fabrics of reality. It doesn’t matter, really. Either way, I know I’ll never be able to find my way back to what I was before. It changed me.
I’ll admit that by the time I got to the bar, I was already drunk. The evening started as a promotion party for a book that a psychologist friend of mine wrote. It was a collection of vignettes, the sum of which illustrated a “great and riveting Truth about the nature of reality and what it means to be human,” or something like that, according to the back flap of the dust jacket. I didn’t really know, I was only half listening to the long-winded and self-indulgent description I had apparently asked for when I raised one eyebrow in mock interest at the conversation that my psychologist friend and one of his colleagues were having by the snack table. Truthfully, my eyebrow elevation was a reaction to the chocolate fondue pot that my friend was about to carelessly stick his elbow in, but the gesture was interpreted as an interest in the conversation, and therefore reason enough to embark on a twenty minute monologue about the subtleties of the form and how it must be easy for people like me, who only write made-up stories, and don’t need to incorporate any deeper, psychological undertones…
The bartender made excellent martinis, and then later excellent screwdrivers and White Russians which only got better as the night went on. I took a break at 11 and nursed a mimosa for a half hour before heading to the bathroom to survey the facilities. To be fair, I don’t even think that the mimosa was alcoholic—it tasted sweet and it went down smooth and I felt almost sober by the time I got down to the pulpy dregs. But then, I stood up, and decided that I could postpone my trip to the toilets no longer. After a brief liaison with the bathroom floor, I washed up in the sink and returned to the bar. My friend had moved over to a small table in the corner and was surrounded by a group of bookies who were eagerly leaning in close to his bearded face, hanging on every word, captivated. Most of them were grad students who had read some of his work for a psychology class, or old women who had been seduced by his schmutsy charm, but a couple of young Lolitas hanging by his left shoulder looked like they could actually get him in trouble, if he wasn’t careful. I didn’t care to warn him, and I wasn’t even sure that he would appreciate my advice, anyway. I snuck up the staircase to the street while he was still distracted.
The streets of the city feel like nostalgia at night, but like the nostalgia you have for a place you’ve never been. I’d equate it to longing, but it’s much more resigned than that. It’s living in a memory and not being able to know it at the same time. The lights flashed around me and cars honked and I wondered how things got to be the way they were. What part of the primordial psyche do the neon lights fulfill, why the poker and the mind-games and the shower gel and the egg beaters? Why pluots? In my head, most of it seems to boil down to power, humanity just wants to flex its technological muscle, but is that really all it is? Who is the show for? Perhaps we think that if we impress enough, impress ourselves or the universe or the Greater Than, that we’ll somehow be preserved, saved from the inevitable entropy which governs everything around us. Or perhaps it’s all just a distraction, to keep ourselves busy until the end, pretend that we’re answering the universal questions while avoiding any question with real substance. These thoughts stumbled, disorderly, through my head. My body mimicked my mind and I made my way joltingly along the side streets into the dark, quiet spaces in between. The atmosphere squeezed and pulled through my head, in one ear and out the other like floss, threading through my lungs, in-out, in-out, a loop. I held myself up on a slimy brick wall as I paused to pick the string from between my teeth, and suddenly my hand was illuminated by a faint, blue-glowing light. I turned to find the source, and there it was, across the alleyway. A small sign, blue neon, (or perhaps it was a special kind of glow-in-the-dark chalk, the memory grows fainter as I try to remember) above a dark green door which was flush with the brick wall, almost as if it was painted there. The sign read “fmb” in lowercase letters. The font was very modern, but the door looked outstandingly old. It was battered and smeared, and the hinges were rusting and decayed. Around the frame, the brick was crumbling away. It looked as if the oldness of the door was radiating from it, permeating the wall around it. It’s all very fuzzy now, but I remember the door very, very clearly. The door was…a landmark, of sorts. It looked like something that had always been there, since the beginning, and that would continue to be there for a very, very long time. It comforted me, somehow, this essential knowledge, and it gave me the courage to approach, pull the handle, and go inside.
Up until now, perhaps, the story has been mostly believable. The fact that I was drunk is most certainly believable, considering the circumstance of the promotion party (and, I’ll be honest, considering my propensities in general.) The alleyway, perfectly predictable, the sign, almost ordinary, and the door, well, the door could just be the sentimental ramblings of a drunk old man. It wasn’t, I can assure you, but what I mean to be saying is that, so far, nothing out of the realm of the easily imaginable has happened. I approach the next segment of my story with caution, therefore, because there is really no delicate way to stick your needles in the yarn I am about to weave.
The bar was dimly lit, but not in the way that most bars are dimly lit. This lighting wasn’t meant to hide features, rather it seemed to slant in from an unseen source overhead, like in a library in the evening, after everyone has gone home. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a library after hours, but I’m sure that there’s some situation to which it’s akin. It’s like…it’s like a solar eclipse, in a meadow where no one is. It’s what I imagined a primeval sunrise was like, before the sun has actually risen and when the first flickers of daylight start to hint on the horizon. It’s like standing on top of a hill and watching it happen, the sunrise, and knowing that the Earth is totally alone and that you could walk for miles without encountering another person. That’s not something that anyone alive today has ever experienced, but it’s something that we still reminisce about, like what I was talking about earlier: nostalgia for things that you’ve never experienced. Cultural memory, maybe. That’s what the lighting in the bar was like.
At first, I thought I was alone, but as my eyes adjusted, I started to see characters moving in the dim. They seemed to shift in and out of reality unless I held them in my peripheral vision, and then I could see multitudes of people, mingling and chatting with each other. There were so many of them, and as I turned I noticed that the room was actually much larger than I had initially anticipated. It must have taken up the entire block; it was the size fifty grand ballrooms and it stretched back beyond my line of vision. Strangely though, the only noise I heard was a low muttering, like they were speaking from the other side of a thick glass wall. The only one who seemed to notice my abrupt appearance was a young girl, standing about fifteen feet away from me and leaning against a table. She cocked her head inquisitively, and when she began to move towards me she suddenly came into clear focus, as if she was in the foreground and everyone else had faded into wallpaper. She was wearing a floofy turquoise skirt, which swished jauntily around her knees as she walked. Her shirt was barely a shirt at all: it fell off of one shoulder and was held together by a single strip of fabric in the front. The back was kept long, however, and it hung down to the small of her back. She wore nothing else underneath it, and she seemed in constant danger of over-exposure, though it somehow always managed to cover the right places. She had small breasts, and wide-set hips. Her legs were sturdy, like horse legs, but not at all beefy. Her face was long and triangular, and her eyes were small and almond-shaped, and very close together on her face. On her head, she wore paper cranes, stuck into her messy buns with chopsticks. Her hair was bright red. On anyone else, the ensemble would have been appalling, but somehow the discordant nature of it all seemed to play perfectly to her nature. She strode up close and leaned on one hip as she surveyed me, eyeing my sagging shoulders and beat-up leather jacket with a blank face. And then, she asked me—I wish I would have known then what she really meant, because then I could have answered her truly—she asked me what I was called. Not what my name was, or who I was—she asked what I was called. I told her, then, that my name was Jim, and her brow furrowed for a fraction of a second while she pondered my answer. I asked her for her name.
“I’m quirky,” she said jutting her chin forward and tilting her head to one side. Her paper cranes flopped ominously, threatening to fall out.
“Well, yes, but that’s not exactly what I was asking,” I replied. “What is your name? What do people call me.”
“That is what I am called.” She looked perplexed again, pouting her lips to one side and squinting her eyes at me. I let it be. She asked me if I wanted a drink, and I thought about telling her that I was already quite drunk, but before I could form the sentence in my head my mouth had already formed the words ‘Yes, please,’ and so she hurried off to the bar, leaving me alone by the small table. I took a seat and held my head in my hands, realizing that I hadn’t told her what I wanted and wondering what drinks she would bring back. In the back of my mind, I hoped that it wasn’t something too strong, but even further back in my mind, I secretly wished that it was. She soon returned with two drinks in thin-stemmed glasses.
“What are these?” I asked.
“Martinis,” she replied frankly, and bit the olive off of her toothpick. A woman was sitting on the table in front of me. I thought she must have knocked my glass off, but I was too drunk to care. She was in a tight black pencil skirt with a matching fitted jacket. I hadn’t seen a suit with such wide shoulder pads since the eighties, but it didn’t look tacky. Her nut-brown hair was held up loosely with a pencil, but she pulled it out nonchalantly and the locks came tumbling down playfully around her shoulders. Her eyes danced with golden water and lit up as she laughed a sparkling laugh and threw one leg up over the other. I choked and sputtered for a moment, and then blinked, and she was gone. Miraculously, my drink was still upright. I took a sip and tasted the color of her eyes.
“Who was that?” I asked my strange drinking mate, and she frowned slightly at me. Before she could answer, a huge noise came from over by the bar. Three enormous men were pounding on the counter and kicking at each other’s bar stools, laughing outrageously. The beer slopped from their mugs onto their faces and huge, bushy beards, and mixed with the saliva which came dripping sloppily from their gaping mouths. The one on the far left was the tallest and lankiest, though he was by no means scrawny. His beard was dark and wiry, and his stubby nose sat on top of it like a ruddy cauliflower. The man in the middle was short and fat, his belly pouring over his tiny legs which stuck straight out from his torso and wiggled wildly as he laughed. The last man was leaning over onto the shoulder of the smallest man, tears of mirth streaming from his swollen, bloodshot eyes and combining with the various other fluids which flowed down his face and collected like dew in his burnt-caramel beard. All three of them were dressed in leather tunics and thick woolen tights which were obviously old, but looked generally well cared for. They were all laughing in reaction to something that the man sitting to the right of them had said. The man on the right was much smaller and clean-shaven, and he had his arms across the counter, leaning in eagerly towards the three men. His hair was slicked back and he looked as if he would smell mildly of aftershave. He wore well-creased slacks and a white dress shirt, though the top two buttons were undone and his tie was loose around his neck.
“What the hell are they doing over there? They’re going to bring the place down!”
“Oh, that’s just riot, raucous, and uproar. They’re always like that.” Ignoring her incomprehensible statement, I asked her, “Who’s the man sitting next to him?”
“The one in the tie? He’s clever. He’s generally very nice, but he can be a bit too much to handle sometimes, if you know what I mean.” She gave me a pointed look and took another sip of her martini. I heard the echo of a tinkling laugh. At this point, I was no longer drunk, I was sick, and I was beginning to feel the pressing nausea that comes with being in a strange place at a very strange hour of the night and seeing other people drinking and laughing when you really all ought to be in bed. I really needed to get some answers.
“Look, who are you people? I mean, are you some sort of club? Why do you know everyone?” She didn’t mask her obvious confusion this time and she shook her head as she said,
“People? But, we’re not ALL people. There’s only one of him. We’re words, aren’t we?”
“Words?” Due to my inebriated state, my perception of reality was taking much longer than usual to catch up with my mind, but in the lag time, I was enjoying a wonderful sense of clarity which stemmed from a complete lack of common sense.
“Oh, I see!” I shouted, finally understanding. “You aren’t all named such funny things, you are them! You’re words!”
“Well, of course we are!” Quirky shot her arms into the air in triumph and exasperation.
“Well, I’m not!” I looked at her incredulously.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m…I’m a man.” I patted my hands across my jacket for emphasis, and to confirm my state of existence.
“No, no you can’t be. I just saw man, he’s over there, by the buffet table. He’s always trying to sneak food away under his jacket, even though we all told him that it’s free, once you pay for entry. He never listens.” She glanced over at the table and shook her head slightly.
“No, listen to me, really, I am. I’m a man named Jim, I’m a writer and an apartment owner and…hold on then. How are we talking? How are we using words to talk, if you are all words?”
“Words, used, to, talk, they’re, all, here,” she said, and the words were all there, standing next to her. They waved faintly and dispersed among the crowd.
“But, don’t you know about sentences? What about paragraphs, and dialogue?”
“Oh, please. You believe in that stuff?” She shot me a disapproving look and pursed her lips.
“I mean, I know some are into that sort of thing, but I never pegged you out to be the type. Me myself, I’m illiterate.”
It was then that my mind finally caught up with me, and everything began to grow fuzzy. The table was a table, and then it was a stout, middle-aged woman with short, mousy brown hair, and then a table once again. The barstools were suddenly thin, bald men in sharp, silver suits, balancing the other words on their shoulders like Atlas, and then they were three-legged seats once more. The very atmosphere around me became a being and caressed me in its muggy hold, probing deep inside of me, violating my mouth and lungs. I gasped for breath and realized that it was the first time I had opened my mouth in hours. I felt for my voice in the back of my throat and it croaked out with great difficulty
“No, listen to me! LISTEN TO ME! I’m not a word, I’m a person, a real person! My name’s Jim and I’m a brother, and a cousin, and the father of two cats, I’m a human and a being, I’m an amateur astronomer, please! I’m an AUTHOR!” As I struggled to inhale the newly sentient air I saw my words materialize around me, ‘brother,’ ‘cousin,’ ‘author,’ ‘amateur,’ all of them absorbing the essence that came pouring out of me, each piece of me seeping into its meaning and deepening it, giving it cause and purpose. I felt it leaving me and I wondered what would be left, when they were done, whether there was a word for ‘Jim,’ or whether I was just the composite of so many other things.
I don’t remember how I got out of the bar, but I did, and I don’t remember how I got home, but I did that, as well. Sometime in the early hours of the morning I fell into bed and I didn’t regain consciousness until nearly 6:00 the next evening. It’s been a week, since, and I haven’t been able to write until just today, just now, when I wrote down this story. Every time I’ve tried, I get caught up in the individual words and I never get past the first sentence. I couldn’t get out of the individual word perspective, I couldn’t put them together into whole thoughts, not until now. I had to try to forget, to try to see like I used to, to put my thoughts into sentences and my sentences into paragraphs. I have to block it out, to distract that part of my mind while my subconscious spills itself out onto the paper. Whenever I stop, however, for even just a moment, I am overwhelmed by the vastness of what I am doing, and I have to stop, lest I lose my mind completely. I fear that someday soon, I won’t be able to write anymore, at all. And then, I ask you, what will become of me? And what will I become?
TWO NEUROTIC BITCHES 