The Muse (3 page)

I landed on another shot, this one a seductive pose. She was leaning back against a wall, one foot bent against it, the other supporting her. A sexy, sneaky smile danced on her lips. Her eyes bore into mine, as if she knew I’d be sneaking around her photos one of these days. Just as I leaned in a bit closer, Doreen sprang up behind me. Flustered, I spun in my chair.

“Do you have last week’s hard copy proof of the Escape Outdoors ad we were running?” I shuffled my feet around for balance. My face grew red hot. Her large figure overtook my senses, overpowered my breathing, and stole all air from my cubicle. I was a little girl caught playing with matches, flushing deep shades of red, and covering up my naughty snooping secret with a rapid tap to the computer screen’s power button.

My emergency response system fired off all sorts of pulses, which raced along my arms and to my chest, exploding like firecrackers on my delicate skin. “Hmm.” I circled around pretending to rummage through my file cabinet, knowing full well I never put the proof in there. I needed an escape. “I’m not feeling well.” I bolted past her. Her curious eyes branded me in embarrassment all the way to the bathroom.

Burying myself under work protected me from these types of crazy situations. I wasn’t used to leaping into fire pits, taking to the open road, diving into pools of hot lava. I never ignored a looming deadline. I shoved that deadline way into the back seat that day. My mind wrapped around one thing, and this one thing had nothing to do with whether every letter ‘i’ was dotted and every letter ‘t’ was crossed in a sporting goods catalog.

Eva Handel intrigued me. Playing with such intrigue tickled me in all the right places. I was addicted, and it wasn’t even lunch time yet.

I stood in the bathroom and splashed water on my face, shook my head, and tucked some loose strands behind my ears. Composed and back in control, I went back to my desk and pressed the on button to my monitor. Without as much as looking up at the screen and back into her eyes, I instead clicked the little x to close out Twitter and its compromising effect on my sense of control. When Doreen asked me what happened, I simply shrugged off her question and told her I was fine. I was always fine.

Absolutely freaking fine.

# #

My neighbor Larry understood me. I understood him, too. When he first moved in across the hall from me, I freaked out because he knocked on my door wearing nothing but black boxer shorts with yellow smiley faces and a look of panic. He danced on his toes and wiggled around like a worm screaming about a spider in his bathroom sink. I led the march to his bathroom, weaving us through a tidy maze of moving boxes, stopping only once to take in his beautiful upright Baldwin piano. He pointed me to the farthest door at the end of his condo’s hallway. His scrawny chest bellowed in and out, and his fingers, stuffed halfway in his mouth, trembled. I never saw a man look more like a scared little girl than I did in that moment. His fear comforted me right away, breaking down my usual defenses before they even had a chance to stack up.

Larry was gay and just finally started to date a decent guy. He had been seeking a boyfriend since that day I met him; that day I removed the rabid wolf spider from his bathroom sink. In his defense, the spider was big and hairy. I understood his need to cry once I picked it up with my bare fingers and placed it in a plastic cup. I stood bravely against anything nonhuman that could threaten my salvation. Stick an Anaconda in front of me and ask me to wrap it around my neck and take it out for a walk, and I’d be just as comfy as if I were lounging in a bathtub of soapy bubbles listening to Baroque. Yet, put me in a party environment where cracking jokes and idling on current events were supposed to pass as fun, and I clammed up tighter than a hermit crab basking in the glory of salt water.

I trusted insects, reptiles, and amphibians because I understood why they acted the way they did. They didn’t set out to be mean. They didn’t set out to bully others just for the fun of it. When they attacked, they did so because that survival mechanism weaved into their DNA. They killed for food. Their survival depended on their ability to be the fitter, the stronger, the alphas. Human beings, we didn’t need to do this. Yet, we swung around like a bunch of wild monkeys shelling out insults and punches like useless banana peels. Instead of killing each other, we hurt each other and that hurt lingered on, sometimes, like in my case, forever. This hurt sneaked up on me at odd times, like at a buffet when someone pushed me to grab a slab of bacon, or like when my birthday rolled around and I blew out candles alone in a dark room because I remembered the pain of humiliation from when no one showed at my slumber parties. I’d rather be alone than deal with rejection. Facing such ordeals alone was just easier.

Did it suck? I would imagine for someone who was social and outgoing, it would. For someone like me, someone more comforted by solitude, not in the least bit. Being alone was a freaking party; one big, laughing opportunity after another. I got to celebrate holidays eating as much pie and cookies as I wanted and never had to be judged by onlookers wearing skinny dresses and monitoring their water, fruit, and veggie intakes. You would never find carrot sticks and celery overflowing with cream cheese at my solo parties. And salad at a Thanksgiving Day table? Ha! Please, I would never eat rabbit food. But, sweet potatoes floating in a sea of brown sugar and melted butter? Now we’re talking.

Another great benefit of being alone was I never had to share the remote control with someone. If I wanted to lounge in my baggy sweatpants in front of the tube and watch a
House
television marathon, then move over to-do list.

Single life didn’t suck.

Single life
fucking
sucked.

I lived my life hidden behind my condo door, behind my endless piles of crap work, behind my pile of rejection letters from editors of magazines. Living life from behind a comfort prop, be that a slice of pizza, a laptop, or a double locked condo door sucked. It cored me open like a volcano and spewed all sorts of life-erasing lava around so no one could get near me. Well, no one except for Doreen and Larry.

Thank goodness for those two, otherwise I might’ve been committed to a rubber room where guards served me happy pills round the clock just to keep me from stabbing myself with the leg of a folding chair.

Before Larry met his newest love interest, Tim, a man I had yet to meet, he obsessed over finding a boyfriend. We’d have web search parties. We loaded up profiles on every gay dating site known to mankind. He would get some hits, but none ever met his standards. He wanted a hunky, tall, rich man who enjoyed dogs, kids, and sailing. Oh, and the man needed to love Riesling wine and own a company. He was not into men who desired to climb any corporate ladders. They needed to tout an entrepreneurial spirit, because that spelled adventure and free thinking. According to Larry, this dream guy needed to be on his same path. He’d say this with a straight face as if he owned and managed a life of his own where he could come and go as he pleased. The only trek Larry took out of his comfort zone was volunteering at an LGBT youth center. Larry, by all other accounts, was what I could only refer to as a security and safety junkie. He worked for the government for five years, was fully vested in his retirement account, enjoyed his fringe benefits package which included, but was not limited to, twenty-two vacation days a year, twelve sick days, ten holidays, and of course a flexible spending account.

Yup, you guessed it; Larry was just as screwed up as I was. I couldn’t love him more for that. If he was straight, and I was even a smidgeon attracted to him to the point I wouldn’t throw up if he tried to hold my hand, then we’d be a perfect couple.

Larry was the only person on the planet who knew my story. Well, part of my story. He could only handle so much drama. Yes, a gay man, who screamed at the sight of sugar ants crawling up his windowsill, wanted to avoid drama. Let’s just say his brain could only cradle a certain amount of backstory before he exploded into a torrent of tears. I couldn’t stand to see a grown man cry. Especially a gay man who tended to slip into overdramatic weeping at the confession of a bully attack.

Big deal, I was bullied and tormented as a kid. Bigger problems plagued this world than a teenager, in her most vulnerable years, being bullied by her supposed best friends at the time. The global economy was going to shit. The air quality was ridiculous. Gas prices had soared out of control. Children were starving in the streets. So what, I had to brave a dozen girls and their mean attacks for several years during my most formative stage and my parents and sister had to uproot to avoid the retaliation? Oh and that little sister was still battling a drug addiction brought on by moving away from all stability and being tossed into a feeding frenzy of popular girls doing drugs.

If you hadn’t guessed by now, I caused not only myself loads of trouble, but also everyone who trailed alongside me, too. I was danger. I should’ve worn a sign attached to the center of my chest that read ‘toxic.’ If, as members of society, we had to create a tag line for ourselves, mine would definitely be, ‘I fuck up lives.’

I only allowed myself to go into the deep, dark recesses of my mind every once in a great while. Usually I dove into them around the same time when the leaves started to crisp and fall off the trees in piles deep enough to jump into and get lost. Something about the ripened smell of Macintosh apples and brisk mornings pulled me back to those days when I’d press my thumb onto the tip of a bottle of Jean Nate perfume, armed to defend myself as I walked past the tangle of girls drenching me in insults. They’d line up like a chained link fence, supported in strength by their numbers, and laugh as one would trip me with an outstretched foot, or pelt me with rocks as I ran into the building’s only unlocked entrance. They’d call me names, chanting rumors about my being a lesbian.

At twenty-nine-years-old, I still cringed when I traveled back through the memory of my former best friend, Barbara, and how she grabbed my personal journal and bolted down the school hall laughing at me for what I’d written about her. I was a dumb teenager, high on hormones or whatever. I wrote some silly stuff about her eyes sparkling and wanting to kiss her petal soft lips and a bunch of other sexually explicit stuff that I should never have written down. I had stupidly left my locker open as I talked with a couple of other girls, and Barbara decided to snoop around. Well, she locked in on the bright blue spiral notebook tattered and littered with flower and butterfly stickers and hearts that said things like – ‘I love someone’ and ‘I think someone’s cute.’ Barbara, being my best friend and all, took this to mean she could read its contents. I was too busy chatting with the others about Brian Luding’s new haircut and didn’t notice her reading it. One moment I was bubbling over in giggles with the girls about how adorable Brian was when he swung a baseball bat, and the next, I was ripping the spiral notebook out of my shocked best friend’s hands. Not fifteen minutes later, my life spiraled out of control along with her laughter and her lack of concern for my future happiness.

They marked me as disgusting, a mere pile of crap to avoid at all costs for the remainder of my time at the middle school. Rock pelting, foot tripping, profane graffiti on my locker, squirt guns and the occasional black eye and bruised cheeks followed.

When I entered high school, and our neighbor ran to my parents and told them he had just saved me from suffocating under a pile of boys who were attempting to gang rape me into being straight, my father did the thing any respectable father would do. He called a real estate agent and placed the first home he had ever owned, his pride and joy, on the market. Within one day, a young couple with a dog and two toddlers purchased it. The U-Haul pulled up and all of our aunts, uncles and cousins piled all of our shit into it and moved us four towns over where surely my bullying days would end.

Thankfully they did. No one bothered me. I turned to reading instead of seeking out new friends. Books became my new best friends. They would never hurt me like people could.

My sister required more than a book to entertain her. She needed to belong, to be part of the in-crowd, to live life out loud. So, she turned to drugs. She got reeled in by the popular druggie crowd. She smoked pot every night and dropped out in her senior year. She never came right out and said she hated me for uprooting her and taking her from the safety of a cheerleader squad and dropping her in the middle of what could only be described as teenager hazing hell. But I knew, when she scurried off to work as a bagger at the grocery store, she resented that I caused this rift in her future dream of becoming a doctor. Many would argue she carved out and followed her own path. I would argue back that with desperate times, came desperate methods. She didn’t know how to be unpopular. So, pot and then other more potent stuff massaged this cruel, new world into something doable, livable, and eventually unmanageable.

My parents to this day still held firmly to their position that they don’t hate me for ruining their lives by forcing us to pack up all of our belongings and run away from the abuses of many. I still don’t believe them.