Doom & Despair

Natasha flipped her head back, trying to get her glossy black hair to move.

“See, it’s not moving.” She mumbled.

She had it hanging over her left eye in a weird faux 80’s
tease. With Nat, it was never a throwback fashion, it was something
else. As if she had tripped forward a few years and come back with the
latest fad.

She flipped her head again, the hair unmoving. “See?”

“Maybe,” I said, “you could comb the hairspray out of it or something?”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “You
don’t understand anything, do you Nach? The space between us is empty.”
She threw herself back onto the bed, arms splayed out, and began
screaming, “Empty! Empty!”

“Nat, please,”

She rolled off the bed, still screaming, and tore open the closet
doors. Then, as calm as she could be, she looked over her shoulder and
asked, “Dress or slacks?”

“What?”

“Quick now, boy! Dress or slacks?”

“Well, I…”

“Do you like my knees?”

“Your knees?”

“Do you like them?”

“I’ve never really…”

“Fine. Be that way.” She ripped clothes off of hangers until she had an
armful of black and trailing belts, then she stomped off into the
bathroom. I returned to a gentle ride through the blankness of middle
space, attempting to pull myself together. March had been an exhausting
month, and I was feeling a distance between myself and the world. I’d
finished a novel and piled the writing plate pretty high. It was more
than a challenge to roll through these things when there was still life
to worry about. Dayjobs and friends, family and sickness,
responsibilities and madness. Creating a novel kind of gives you a clue
as to why God even had to say fuck it and go to the pub on the 7th day.

I’m surprised my friends had bothered to stick around, but they were
starting to give me some space. The writing they don’t understand, but
the fallout makes perfect sense. It’s akin to depression, in that all
things must stop. My own 7th day. Nat had maintained her ground, of
course, as she was always involved in these things. But her mood often
reflected mine, which wasn’t always a productive situation. She
advocated more work, never stop, always write. Finish one, start the
other. Advice I had given others always thrown back in my direction.
Write the second novel before the first is even sold, if it’s sold, if
I can write, if all this works out.

“You’re far too sensitive,” Natasha said from the bathroom. She was
nude. She’d gone in there to pretend at being modest, but she hadn’t
bothered closing the door. Everything’s just for show. Watch from the
right angle, and Nat’s a modest girl. Watch from the front row and
you’ve got another thing coming.

“What?” I’m never sure what she’s talking about when she opens up a conversation like this.

“That old debate,” she pointed at me, the harsh mirror light pouring
across her pale flesh, her small body in profile. You don’t look at her
ass or her tits when she’s looking at you. You look at those eyes, that
queer unblinking glare that she puts on. She clicked her tongue,
“You’re thinking it,”

I was. I was thinking about the friends and co-workers and
acquaintances that surround me, all of us slowly crawling into age and
the realizations of adulthood. I was thinking about criticism, all the
things I’ve been told. I’m arrogant, aristocratic, on the wrong path,
rude, obsessed with despair, doom, death. I’m depressed, anti-social,
dismissive. I’m a pessimist. It seems that every time I get together
with people these days, I hear something along those lines. Why don’t I
get a writing-related job? What am I doing? There’s no defense, either.
I used to try and tell them that a writing-related job is death for the
creative writer. That doesn’t make sense. Writing doesn’t make sense.
Hell, it doesn’t make sense to me. I only do it because I’ve always
done it, because –

“Hey,” Nat shouted out, “Why do all the Girl Scouts on the cookie boxes look like retards?”

I looked at her standing there, still nude, as she gazed at a purple bra.

“Do they?”

“They do.” She threw the bra over her shoulder into the bathtub.
“Anyway, back to your meandering, incoherent and dangerously childlike
thoughts, my dear Mr. Sasha. There’s one lesson for you to grasp.” She
spun to stand in the door, raising her hands over her head and pressing
against the frame, “Your family is so good at being a group of
hard-core weirdoes, I’m dying to know where you got your
hypersensitivity from. Because you’re an only child? Because you should
have been born female? I don’t know, but you waste too much of your
life stuck on what your little friends say. Do you ever wonder if half
the people you hang out with only stick with you because they like to
have a whipping boy around? Because they’re big old balls of pathetic
that enjoy hoodwinking you?”

There’s a lesson I should take to heart, something that’s been told to
me by just about every family member and true friend. Something Natasha
is about to quote back to me.

“If someone criticizes you it’s because they are doubly guilty of the same thing.”

That comes from my grandfather’s side of the family. My grandmother
says, if someone criticizes you, you should lash them to a tree and
whip them. But she grew up in the deep mountains and they have
different rules. I’ve always tried to play the jolly friend. Someone
says I’m too pessimistic and I launch into self mockery, playing up the
pessimism, and they love it. Those glass house people eat it up. Then
they come to Greatsociety, read the latest Nacho adventure and, it
seems, they take notes for next time. I’ll see them again and they’ll
quote back articles to me – did you really drink yourself sick at 8am?
Did you really kill that hooker in Vegas? Did you really… Every word
written taken for absolute truth.

The family teaching that says people who criticize are sick and wrong
also dictates that I don’t criticize back. I maintain cordial support
of every stupid, misguided, diseased life choice they make. A friend is
supportive in every way, I’ve been taught, so I sit and take it.

Of course, these days, the situation is a bit more clear. Most people
who criticize me are taking a dangerous and terrifying cocktail of mood
enhancement drugs that do nothing, really, but give them diarrhea,
sexual dysfunction and make them depressed. Ever notice that? The
people taking drugs for depression are depressed because they’re taking
the drugs?

“How come all the people who take medication for being crazy are crazier than normal crazy folk?” I asked out loud.

Natasha had vanished into the bathroom closet, but she answered
quickly, “Big kickback for all those drugs. Get on them, lose your mind
and self identity, lie on the floor with a limp dick and bloody piss
and your doctor gets a 20% bonus.” She poked her head out around the
door, “Proven fact. The kickback.”

“So, criticism.” I said, “Why am I so sensitive? Why do I care?”

“Because you’re a whining bitch?” Nat slammed the closet door. “And
because you’re out of aspirin.” She pressed her hands to her lower
belly, “Oh, the pain, the pain!” Then she laughed cruelly. “Let’s look
at a slice of Nacho Sasha, the man, the legend, the disturbingly
flippant sexist.”

“Oh, let’s.”

“For those who have an enormous amount of free time to read thousands
of pages of your poorly structured rants spread over the last three
years, it’s pretty clear that you live a wild life. Whether or not they
doubt the existence of, say, me, they know you’re a world traveler with
an international network of friends off of whom you can freeload
liberally. They know you’ve put your body through the wringer –
shattered elbows, broken wrists, speeding Cadillac’s, dislocated knees,
jaws caved in. They know you’ve lived through chronic nerve pain,
walked on the wrong side of town on three continents and have been
chased by construction workers, Satanists, military police and mounted
State troopers. You’ve walked in on black masses, fallen through the
floors of abandoned buildings and been washed down sluice pipes. You’ve
jumped three stories into a snow drift, buried loved ones and committed
countless deviant sex acts with a string of insane women.

“So love, death, sex, horror, adventure. To the majority of folks
coming by your darling little page, it’s just a story. But those ‘close
friends’ who always have a comment about your lifestyle, well, they’re
just envious. You’ve earned your doom and despair. The proper way.
Constructively and with real human experience.”

“Wow, Nat. Been working on that one?”

She grinned, “I like to read Natasha Gives A Pep Talk segments in your
articles. It makes me look like a power player in your life. Now come
here and comb out this hair spray.”

So my despair, which seems to be a recent thing, is rooted in one
thing. This is my realization. That all the people who call me a
pessimist have lived slow lives and are part of a great Generation of
Fear which makes Nazi Germany look like a good time. Now there’s a
topic for an article which, one of these days, I might get around to
writing.

Natasha let her head be pulled back as I ran a comb through her black
hair. Her eyes looked up at my face but, this time, I stared at her
body in the mirror.

“You’re about to have an episode, aren’t you?” She asked.

“I’ve earned it, yes?”

“No. I don’t think I meant that.”

“Hold still.”

“Nacho, it’s just another day. Write me an article where I give you
that pep talk, and don’t use my voice. Don’t use all that bad language
I used or the silly tangents. Boil it down to the basic thing, and just
write it for yourself.”

And then she did it again.

“My voice is yours,” she said, “You’d think you’d start to get the hint by now.”

“The comb’s stuck in your hair.”