Skinny Jeans

Oh, what my father must have heard from the other side of the paper-thin wall, separated by only drywall, paint and a few framed pictures, on his side, of my mother. The parade of one-nighters, some two or three nights, but never four, strung together by accident or desperation when I once thought to save myself (when I wanted to save myself) it would only take the right hole. Holes are how I saw women, girls, and sometimes guys who were feminine enough to fool my sexuality. I wonder what he heard from his room, languidly lying there riddled with cancer watching television or playing his bassoon with a foot in the grave. Why did he play that damn instrument? It must have sounded like a zoo some nights, a medieval torture chamber on others, or like I was a giant bug zapper, attracting fat moths and dangerous juicy mosquitoes—the slaps, bumps, screams, squeals, cries like feral cats in heat under a full hot moon fucking on metal trash can lids in a wet alley.

One of those more-than-one-nighters was a girl who thought she was a cat—not in another life. Oh, no—in this one. She purred perfectly and licked herself as best she could seductively, which it was, until her saliva dried and it smelled the way pear trees smell when their spring blooms rot. She had been psychologically damaged by a molesting neighbor, she accidentally told me, and the cruelty of grade school classmates who tagged her with the name Kitty because her last name was Katz. Kitty Katz—her real first name I don’t even know, nor did I ever ask. She was beautiful but too thin, like she had been eating out of a dumpster most of her life. Her hip bones protruded from her taught tattooed flesh and grabbing her during sex was like carrying a cabinet drawer. But she had no drug addiction, which was a plus and she didn’t stink, except for the saliva. She had cheetah tattoos on her chest and shoulders, tiger stripes on her backside and whiskers she drew with a black sharpie across her cheeks. She was only seventeen so she wasn’t allowed to get any face tattoos, she said. That is where her alcoholic mother drew a firm line. I never knew if she used a litter box, or if she ate Fancy Feast, or if she had an instinctive fondness for killing mice and baby rabbits, but none of those things would have surprised me much. I had hoped that she or another of those unstable bedmates would have killed me but truly there are not as many psychopaths in the world then they make there out to be on TV. I can hear the sirens on the news from my father’s television sometimes, and the velvety voice of a news anchor talking about another murder in Boston. “Police are looking for this man...” They sometimes throw in a rape here and there for flavor. Natural disasters don’t come often enough for the ratings.

Once the sex was over they got dressed and left. No one wants to stay. That isn’t the arrangement or the expectation of fucked-up people. We are artists; writers; musicians; naturalists; losers who have woefully underachieved all of our lives as far as our talent goes, who hang out in coffee shops bumming free Wi-Fi, at poetry readings getting stoned, bookstores, or at neighborhood bars, who come regularly but who never become regulars. I am shamefully of this lot for I have never proudly been anything, never achieved anything. I am a misfit toy on that island waiting for Rudolph. I usually lie there with my back turned to them, perfectly vulnerable. There are scissors on the nightstand and a butcher knife on the dresser at their disposal, but all I get is a glum goodbye and the dispassion of a closing door and fading footsteps down the hall and another closing door when they get to the living room. Where have all the murderers gone? Sometimes when I don’t feel I want to be murdered I watch them dress. It is funny watching them put on their skinny jeans, but not as funny as watching them undress from them, awkwardly pulling their proportionately oversized feet from the tiny little openings. I hate people who like sex in the dark. There is no humiliation in it.  

Needless to say I never found a happy hole. I have tried to commit suicide thirty seven times in my life dating back to when I was fourteen and tried to hang myself with my shoelaces. The laces supported my weight but my dog, Suzy, a ginger-colored cocker spaniel, walked in my room and spoiled it by barking ferociously until my dad came in and cut me down from the ceiling fan with his pocket knife. A week later I cut out a paper effigy of myself, colored it with Crayolas and lynched it by red yarn to the ceiling fan to remind myself of my mistake. It was what my counselor suggested I do but it didn’t make me feel how he wanted it to make me feel. Suzy didn’t like it and would bark at the paper me, especially when the fan was on and I would spin wildly. She would frantically jump and bark. For a while my father would run into the room with his pocket knife open and ready but then I learned to yell that I was okay and he wouldn’t come. Recalling the other thirty six times would be a bore, but at thirty-five years old, I became quite desperate before I lost more hair, or gained more weight, or gave anyone else another piece of my deteriorating soul, and the past nine attempts, all this year, have been pretty sensational like the grand finale at the fireworks. Yet, here I am.

I threw myself out of the sixth floor of the fabulous Lenox Hotel and miraculously bounced off an awning and into the back of an empty horse-drawn carriage. The worst part of failing at suicide is the embarrassment of it. I lied, made up a fantastic story about seeing a warbler on the ledge, and trying to take a picture I tumbled out of the unlatched window. A meddlesome nurse at the hospital said I was lucky and suggested I play the lottery on my way home, or that I file a lawsuit against the hotel for the unlatched window. A burnt-out social worker came in and talked to me before I was allowed to leave but I was so adept at lying that she left me alone after only three questions when it usually takes thirty two. She stunk of cigarettes and red onions. I smile like a car salesman and always have a remarkable life stashed in my pocket that I pull out pretending it is real, complete with a job I love and a fiancé named Sasha who is way too beautiful to be with me. I never knew anyone named Sasha but, boy, did I talk her up! I lied so well I almost believed that she was waiting for me at a downtown restaurant wearing a red dress and looking at the door impatiently. There was a lemon wedge on her glass of water which she taps with her right index finger when she is nervous. She is from Budapest.

A day later I tried to hang myself in the garage of the apartment. I pulled out my father’s mint El Camino and closed the door behind me. I used a sturdy length of rope I bought at Walmart. I thought of that swirling paper me on the red yarn when I was a kid as I stood up on an antique highchair that I once sat and ate in so happily. I was a fat baby with curly hair. I am not fat anymore, nor do I have the curly hair, nor am I happy. I probably spit up carrots where my tiptoes were pressed, I thought. I stood there with the carefully tied noose around my neck, the knot of which would give any boy scout a boner. Then I kicked it away and the two by four support beam collapsed at the mercy of my 150 whopping pounds and I tumbled to the ground the way Humpty Dumpty did in the storybooks. Shortly after this, I took a bath with a toaster oven. Electrocution was the last way I wanted to die but I was desperate and frustrated with all my failures. As I sat in the water I held it up and parted my legs. I turned it on 350 degrees and held it there like someone offering something to the Gods. Then I dropped it. But just before it hit the water the power went out. My father’s bassoon stopped for a moment. “Someone must have hit a pole,” he hollered pitifully. The toaster oven, still plugged in and set to 350 degrees, floated between my legs in the dark bathroom. I got out for a moment and the power turned back on as I stood naked on the floor mat. The toaster over sparked without me, then fizzed and our power went out again. God doesn’t like me, I concluded.

Leaving it up to me didn’t seem like something that would ever work. Yet still I tried. “Persistent” is an adjective I use frequently to describe myself when the time calls for a self-describing one word adjective. Dating services ask that as did three of my four counselors, all of whom seemed to only be doing it for the money. Everyone does it for the money. When I abruptly quit going none of them called to see if I was okay. I waited by the phone for a while. It didn’t ring. A month or so later I got a letter in the mail saying they would close out my file unless I wanted to make another appointment. They closed with “best regards.” Best regards? They should have said in PS, are you still alive, stupid? Persistently, I bought a nine millimeter handgun and loaded the clip. I put the clip in the gun and cocked it, flipped off the safety, as it said in the manual which I read carefully, and leveled it to my temple and pulled the trigger. No bang. I pulled it again. No bang. The gun jammed.

“Made in China,” the old man dealer at the pawn store where I bought it said to me. He pointed the very words out on the butt, snickered with some sick satisfaction as his gray finger ran patriotically across it. Then he unloaded it, reloaded it, and told me to take it home and try it out again. Of course, he didn’t know what he was saying. He didn’t know I tried to kill myself with it. I asked for a refund and he bought it back off me for two-thirds what I paid for it. I bought a bicycle from him. Maybe I could get hit by a car and the 150 thousand dollar life insurance policy I had selected when I began to work at Citi Bank would pay my beneficiary. I thought of him when I rode the bike home across busy streets doing everything I could do to get hit. Horns blared, vulgar profanities were screamed out of rolled down windows. “Asshole! Dickhead! You cocksucker! Stupid fuck! Dumb nigger!” I heard everyone’s favorite curse words, thrown at me like stones; they would have hit me if they could have gotten away with it; if I wouldn’t fuck up their paint job. Their breaks squealed like some of my one-nighters and I did everything but pedal straight into a bus, which seemed rather dramatic. A one word adjective that doesn’t describe me is “dramatic.” I didn’t get hit on the way home and I didn’t get mugged for my bike pedaling slowly through the ghetto, though I was wearing Ray Ban sunglasses and a handsome leather coat that anyone could easily fence for some crack or a hoe. And though I stopped at a liquor store, made direct eye contact with a crazy man in a stained-white wife beater carrying a crowbar, and sat there on my Schwinn as white as a polar bear’s ass in a neighborhood known affectionately as “White Man’s Graveyard,” no one killed me! No one even gave me a second goddamn look. Those were attempts five, six and seven.

A week later, attempt eight and nine came and went like two farts in the wind. I read in a newspaper that there was a Neo-Nazi meeting at a gun show in New Hampshire. I took my dad’s El Camino, wore a yarmulke on back of my head and signed myself into the registry in the pole-barn as Saul Schwartz. Loud death metal music played on a small radio that sat in the corner like a scared child and there were tables full of knives and guns in the crowded room and Nazi flags and posters hanging all over the walls. I was given hateful looks. I was out of place. I was wearing khakis, a blue dress shirt and the yarmulke; they wore black jeans or fatigues, black boots, black t-shirts with some sort of Nazi theme on them, and their heads were shaved. Every single head in attendance, whether they were lumpy or small, was shaved but mine. Some even had tattoos on their heads and faces, expressing their dedication and their desire to never work again in the public sector. I don’t know why their heads were shaved. I have seen pictures of Adolf Hitler and he had plenty of Jew-brown hair and a funny little mustache—the same one that grew on the much happier face of Charlie Chaplin. One of the men had the same mustache and I looked at it and laughed. He was fat and angry and even angrier when he saw me laughing.   

 We were directed to another room in the back. The double doors opened and there was red carpet and metal folding chairs in neat Nazi rows. There was a wood podium with a red swastika painted on it. There was a large framed picture of old Adolf on one wall and some tapestries that someone’s Nazi grandma must have sewn on another. She probably also baked the swastika-shaped iced sugar cookies and made the sweat tea that sat on the “Eva Braun” refreshment table. I most identified with the fake plants that sat awkwardly by the podium. The man who spoke first was the president. He had hair—pepper-colored hair that was combed over. He was an attorney, he said more than once. He wanted to speak like Adolf Hitler but no one can get that riled-up these days, especially not in English. That kind of hateful passion is dead. I sat awkwardly in the back and listened to his dumb speech. He glared at me once in a while. All I could think was that it is really fucked up how all I want to do is die, yet these hateful ungrateful assholes want to kill and live. But I have to believe they want to die, too. I believe that all murderers want to die but they haven’t the courage to kill themselves so they kill others or try to kill others with words and ideologies. Suicide isn’t such a bad thing. The asshole that shot John Lennon tried and failed to kill himself more than once. It is sad he did not succeed. When it came time for me to introduce myself, I proudly stood and said, “I am Saul Schwartz and Adolf Hitler was a psychopathic, half-Jew, butt-fucker.”

Getting your ass kicked is a far cry from being murdered. It turns out their real hatred these days is for blacks, Muslims and Mexicans, they say. Jews don’t bother them so much anymore. I should have worn blackface.

A few days later when my wounds began to heal I revisited the idea of life being for a purpose. As much as I tossed it out, it kept coming back. I have noticed the most contented-seeming people are religious people—the ones who wake up every Sunday morning faithfully for Church, who smile a lot, who don’t scoff at the collection plate wondering where that money goes, who have a blind trust in God and their church and who bring poinsettias every Christmas. I envy them. But that thought never stays because I have too much doubt to believe in anything or anyone. And God, being merciful, would surely recognize the pain in me and do something about it rather than simply bounce me off hotel awnings, collapse support beams from above, jam guns, and flip off the power just when I am about to fry myself. I spoke to a Catholic priest about it in confession, though I wasn’t supposed to be in there because I wasn’t Catholic. I just wandered in like a stray dog because it was a pretty church. When I asked him if I should leave he said “No, you can stay,” with the sort of facileness of someone who is thinking “You are here. Might as well talk.”

He told me that God is giving me free will to decide for myself what my purpose is. He said it with the arrogance that God sent him a text message or called him on the other side of that confessional. He said that God will not interfere and spell it out for me. That God is to be thanked for the miracles that saved me but certainly not blamed for the depression that caused me to require such miracles. He told me to go home and figure it out for myself, to check into counseling again and come back and join the church if I am ready. When I asked him if I should say some Hail Mary’s he said that was a Catholic thing, as though it works only for Catholics, like penance. So I began reading the Bible, though it really bored me. I slept through most of it and skimmed through other parts. I should have bought the children’s Bible with the pictures, written in simple language. But I stuck with it. I really envied Christ for being crucified. Perhaps, I thought, he was like me. Maybe he really wanted to die and failed at it too, until Judas and the Jews...

I was working full-time as a teller at Citi Bank. I convinced myself I was in love with a girl I worked with named Adrianna, who had really long nails and who was far too tall and skinny for my taste, but who smelled nice and who had a great personality. So the possibility of someday being with her, however remote, kept me afloat for a while, lingering there nine to five. I washed my clothes for work and sprayed my neck 2.5 times with expensive cologne I bought for no other purpose. She asked about my scars from my beating and I told her I was in an amateur hockey league which started a beautiful conversation about the NHL and opened the door for me to ask her out to a Bruins’ game. She said yes. It doesn’t help my chances that she is married, but marriages fall apart all the time and someone has to be there to sweep up the pieces with a broom and a dustpan. Her husband is an asshole and she is angelic. He doesn’t deserve her. I seethed at him when he came in to work to get things from her. Never bringing flowers or stopping just to say hello. He always came for something, money, keys, something. So I then divided the world into two distinct parts: Givers and Takers. Hitler was a taker. Chaplin was a giver. I was a giver. Dave was a taker.

It was when Adrianna told me that she and Dave were going to “work things out” that I decided I had it. She wouldn’t even go to the game with me. I threw my Bible into the Charles and walked to a bar and got very drunk and picked up a man and had sex in a laundry-mat. Then I went back to the bar and picked up a tired-looking girl and took her back to my apartment. We took the T and didn’t speak the entire way. Our drunken bodies swayed dramatically with the motion of the railcar. My father wasn’t making a sound in his room but I didn’t check on him the way I usually do. We smoked cigarettes and listened to Christmas music and had sex the way lonely people have sex, like terrible actors who haven’t made a dime at it in a very long time. She had never seen It’s a Wonderful Life, but fell asleep before it was over. I was being a taker when all along I thought I was something better. I woke her up and told her she had to leave. She didn’t look the least bit surprised.  

That night I walked across the Charlestown Bridge and as though thinking of it would foil my plan yet again, quickly I jumped. I should have died from the fall. I should have died from being in the water for at least twenty two minutes but I didn’t. I was rescued by a brawny police officer who received an accommodation for bravery for jumping in and rescuing me. He was in his parked cruiser beneath the bridge when I dropped past his window. I gave him my two tickets to the Bruins’ game as an insincere thank you after I explained that I slipped on some ice, mentioning Sasha from Budapest again. Someone from the city called me the next day to ensure that I had no intention in suing. I hung up on them when they started asking me the details of how exactly I slipped. My father was in his room playing Christmas songs on his bassoon and snow fell out the window like the snow that fell in Bedford Falls. That was number nine.

It was New Year’s Eve and snowing. I took a bottle of Tylenol and drank a gallon of champagne, refilling a wine glass I bought for the occasion until I was too drunk to pour. It was sad buying only one glass. The girl who rang me up looked sad for me. I never had champagne before so I didn’t know what to get but after playing eenie-meenie-minie-moe, I chose two large bottles. Then I picked up a cheap corkscrew. Ryan Seacrest’s absurd face was on TV with a bunch of happy assholes in Time’s Square, counting down yet another year, blowing kazoos and wearing beads and tacky sunglasses. It felt as though they were counting down the minutes of my life. It has always felt that way even when it was Dick Clark and I was young. I watched them with gross envy but they began to blur and my father’s bassoon rendition of “Auld Langsyne” grew fainter and fainter. It felt as though my soul was on a roller-coaster that slowly began to ascend the first hill. Then the chain broke and men in white suits were running up the steps on both sides as I sat there frozen. I remember the paramedics, the ambulance and the shining light, not of a Catholic Heaven, but from a flashlight. They were checking my pupils. The ambulance squawked down the cold street. I could feel the brakes grind. I could see Boston out the two back windows and I remember she told me she loved peacocks.

It wasn’t my father who saved me. It was Emma. Emma Katz—the cat girl who I only before knew as Kitty. She ditched a party and came over to see me on a whim with a bottle of champagne. My father let her in and she found me in my room on my bed. I was prosecuted for attempting suicide, sentenced to community service, mandatory counseling and court fees. My community service assignment was to work at a dog shelter—dogs that were shit on by society, shoved into a sunless building in small urine-soaked cages with concrete floors in place of backyard grass, or the carpet of a friendly living room. I thought of Suzy. After ninety days, if no one claimed them they were put to death. “Undesirables,” as they were often referred. I adopted a husky black lab-mix named Coco.

My favorite part of working at the shelter was walking the dogs, which wasn’t part of our job but if I got their kennels cleaned quickly enough and stuck around I was allowed to walk them. There was a nice area behind the despairing aluminum–sided building with poplar trees and pines and plenty of sticks for them to chew. They were excitable, reenergized in the presence of all the squirrels and chipmunks. They were always grateful to be walked and sniffed the air and grass appreciatively, with such enthusiasm that it seemed as though they were capable of inhaling the world. The terrible part was when the dogs reached their ninety days and were scheduled to be euthanized. On the same leash that I took them on walks they were walked to the small white room with only a metal table in the center, a sink and white cabinets. There were instruments on the countertop and the needle. The dogs got excited when I clipped the leash onto their collar thinking we were going outside. I couldn’t imagine their disappointment. I never felt more like a Judas in all of my life.

After my community service time ended I stayed. I was too attached and couldn’t imagine those dogs not getting breaths of fresh air, sticks, glances of squirrels, or chances to mark their territory another time for what it’s worth. “Life is about marking your territory,” I told my counselor, “however you chose to do that.” I wouldn’t want someone cold and indifferent to take them to that room, someone who would not hold their heads as they went to sleep. Though I couldn’t help but to envy them a little, my attitude changed. Watching them gave me an appreciation for life. Emma held my head in back of that ambulance. She lied and told the paramedics she was my wife, they laughed at her sharpie whiskers, and I looked out into the cold night and wondered what it is to sleep...

Emma met me for lunch on Tuesdays when she had time between classes, or when she ditched school. We walked Coco all over Boston and despite being part cat she volunteered at the shelter with me. The dogs went nuts when she was around. On Friday and Saturday nights we lied in bed and listened to my father blowing his bassoon, trying to guess the song, no longer wondering why he played it. My life was saved by the way her right leg felt across my naked waist in the dark room and by her skinny jeans that lied humorously on my floor. Oh, what my father must have heard through our wall.