I Wanted to be Invisible

I wanted to be invisible. Out of nowhere, with, I swear, nothing in my
history to predict it, I’d done something people regard as sick and
disgusting and I wanted to disappear.I should say that at first I wasn’t so sure what I’d done was all that
awful, and I certainly didn’t concur with the character judgment
implicit in such a definition. It didn’t seem in my case to be fair. I
felt this way because I’d always had an exceptionally inquisitive mind,
a mind that, forever in search of the deepest truths, often compelled
me to challenge things (the assumption that boundary lines in nature
are fixed and inviolable for example) that others never questioned. And
that was a good thing, right? What’s more—and who would argue with
this?—when you call your dog “Maureen” you’re clearly asking for
trouble. And not only that, hadn’t Larry Flynt confessed to the SERIAL
RAPING OF CHICKENS without suffering one iota of damage to his
reputation?

But I stopped protesting pretty quickly. It was impossible for me to
deflect for long the look on the face of Maureen’s owner (and my now
erstwhile girlfriend) when, on the evening in question, she came home
unexpectedly early.

Preoccupied, and with the stereo at full volume, I didn’t pick up on
the fact that Annie was home until she was suddenly big in the room.
Maureen, I realized afterwards, was aware of Annie’s untimely return
before I was. I saw one of her ears rise and I saw what I also
understood later to be a look of apprehensiveness on her face as she
turned it towards me. But, her countenance being open to several
interpretations at that moment, her heads up went right by me.

In any event, I hadn’t seen the expression on Annie’s face since my
mother caught me barfing into the family “Important Documents” chest
when I was five. The horror it conveyed seemed, in its breathtaking
proportions, to have issued from the gods themselves. No, try as I
might I couldn’t deny it. Diddling Maureen had been an egregious crime
that was in no way mitigated by the fact that it was unpremeditated
and, for me, unprecedented.

And in the following months (and along with a discombobulated Annie’s
exclamation: “My God, she’s just a puppy!” echoing in my head) I was
seeing similar expressions everywhere. Were guilt and shame working
their poisons on my psyche or was no one liking me anymore? I mean no
one SEEMED to be liking me anymore for shit. Total strangers I passed
on the street all but recoiled at the sight of me. And dogs too. Dogs
had always been as indifferent to me as I was to them. But now,
straining at their leashes, they growled deep guttural growls when I
walked by. Were dogs—in ways we’ve yet to appreciate—able to
communicate to one another, and over great distances, the indignities
humans perpetrated on them?

In all manner of torment and confusion, I spent my days scouring my
brain in a frantic effort to uncover the reason for my…well…BESTIAL
behavior.

What could possibly have dispatched me to such a forsaken place?

Had the philosopher in me simply chosen a less than auspicious moment
to take the leap from rumination to hands-on investigation?

Had I been trying to tell Annie something? Our relationship not going
so well, had I been saying to her, “See? This is what happens when you
deprive a person of sex.”?

Had the fact that Maureen had been bathed that morning and that her
shimmering coat smelled a lot like Rive Gauche—a fragrance widely known
to be irresistibly seductive—maybe been at the bottom of it?

Was it conceivable that the extra tablespoon of Nyquil I’d taken for a
vicious post-nasal drip had caused me to lose my species bearings for a
minute?

But nothing I came up with rang true for me. All I knew for sure was
that I’d become, say it, the definition of “pervert.” I could not have
descended to a much lower depth if I’d done so deliberately.

As you can see, I very much needed to get out of this dreadful
situation and the first exit I thought of was suicide. But while
destroying my body, which was making me much too noticeable, was
certainly an attractive idea, a large problem that I have with dying
discouraged me from acting on it. I’m not trying to be funny.
Transforming into something comparable to what Maureen might leave on a
curbside is a prospect that weighs very heavily on me—much more heavily
than it seems to on others. In fact, to make it hard for the gods to
find me when my time comes, I’ve endeavored even in normal
circumstances to not stand out too much, to be, you know, as anonymous
as possible. (This explains the “C” average that I’ve steadfastly
maintained throughout my life.)

And if there’s any substance to the reincarnation thing and the
immortality it promises, suicide posed a very serious risk. The gods,
everyone knows, tend to frown on people who take their own lives, no
matter how wretched their conditions may be. That made it unlikely—
especially after the way I’d comported myself this time around—that
they’d send me back as anything better than a water bug or dental
plaque.

Passing on suicide, I contemplated surgically altering my appearance or
moving to another city. But these choices were cost prohibitive and the
latter would also have involved a lot of heavy lifting, which I really
hate.

Finally I considered going insane. Well within my budget, what this
option offered was the opportunity to stay alive AND lose my body (my
unrelenting self-consciousness anyway) at the same time. But to achieve
a genuine psychosis—to, that is, retreat into the bowels of your brain,
live in a world of your own invention and become completely oblivious
to what’s going on outside of it—isn’t so easy.

I know because I really tried. Thinking that I could maybe connect to
madness by faking some emblematic symptoms (and sufficiently desperate
by now to chance still more humiliation) I ran a serious experiment. It
was the middle of August and wearing a tattered overcoat—and with a
week’s growth of beard and my hair wild—I stood on a street corner and
commenced to babble unintelligibly at various decibel levels. After a
few minutes of that I shouted, “Fucking motherfuckers, I’m gonna break
your fucking hearts and shove the fucking bits and pieces up your
hungry assholes.” Then I babbled some more and then, kicking and
swiping at the air, I snarled, “PILLOWS? What else you asswipes got in
store? The meerkats shat in your cereal shit? THAT crapola again?
That—ha ha—GRANOLA crapola?”

But my face crimson with embarrassment all the while, my act (with its
admittedly lame material) never stopped being just that and my
self-consciousness was only heightened. (If I needed confirmation of my
failure to accomplish my objective it was more than adequately
furnished by a woman who remarked to her companion, “Must be some kind
of fraternity initiation.”)

So it was evident that even the fact that I was doubtless more screwed
up than I knew I was when I realized exactly how screwed up I was,
didn’t give me an advantage here. However odd the angle at which I
protruded from it may have been, I was as mired in reality as anyone
else. I mean, despite my preoccupation, I still worried a lot about
real world things. I worried about losing my job. I worried about
getting to the laundry in time to collect my shirts. I worried that I
might have picked up a dose of heartworm from Maureen. And if that
wasn’t enough, I couldn’t stop caring about what people thought. It was
possible, in fact, that I’d come to care more about what people thought
than Louis Harris and George Gallup put together.

So I could do no more than envy the real thing—those guys who’ve
established permanent residence in a fissure between their cerebellums
and their medulla oblongata. Yes, I know THEIR weird and terrible
utterances can be, in their obvious authenticity, very scary and lead
you to conclude that even in the worst of times only a schmuck would
want to take refuge in the kinds of worlds they inhabit. But long
before my interest in the subject would become personal I discovered
that if you were willing to pay close attention you could sometimes
pick up indications that where they live is not without a recreational
dimension. On one occasion I was actually able to make out, in the
background of a nasty mix of epithets, cacophonous outbursts and sundry
other emissions, the strains of a tinkling piano and the clinking of
glass and ice cubes—persuasive evidence, you’ll agree, of a party in
progress.

I wanted to find that party guy and see if I could get him to show me
the ropes. But I knew that I had as much chance of prying instructions
out of him as I did of getting the name of his caterer.

So what did I do?

Well, standing as I was on the corner of “Terror Street and Agony Way”
(as the poet described it), what I did then was what you have no choice
but to do in this circumstance.

I resolved to redeem myself.

I would try to get the gods to FORGIVE me!

Now I recognized, of course, that the level of depravity to which I’d
sunk made redemption a tall order. The gods would hardly respond to a
less than stellar effort. But after thinking long and hard about it, I
finally came up with something I thought was near to perfect in its
symmetry. Something that they’d just have to applaud.

With the help of donations I opened an animal shelter.

Forget what you’re thinking. Okay? I never went into the kennels. I
functioned—it’s the truth—in a strictly administrative capacity.

Anyway, it turned out that I was nothing short of brilliant in this
role. Under my supervision the shelter quickly became a huge success,
and, sure enough—it could not have worked out better—with each rescue
and adoption of a mangy dog or one-eyed cat my Maureen burden grew
lighter until, just like that, it was gone.

With that monstrous problem behind me I felt, as you can imagine, more
than very good. But this wasn’t the only reason for my high spirits.
They derived as well from the even greater reward that my act of
redemption yielded. In the delirium that develops from the certainty
that you’re pleasing the gods and earning their approval, you get to
feel that you’re atoning not only for the crime at hand but also for
whatever you did to warrant the death sentence you were handed at
birth. In turn you can believe that your atonement actually makes you
eligible to survive your death—that it’s your ticket to heaven!

This, you’ll have to concede, is some spectacular shit and it occurred
to me one night that it was right here that the answer to the question
that had been eating at me might be found.

Was it possible that I’d subconsciously set the whole thing up: that my
fear of death, maybe even more consuming than I realized, I’d seized on
the happenstance of a random hardon and a bitch in heat to fashion an
opportunity for my ultimate redemption?

That I’d FUCKED A DOG TO GET INTO HEAVEN?

(I should note that I flashed on that after an evening of heavy
drinking with a bunch of veterinarians. It came to me while I was
crawling on my hands and knees up three flights of stairs, just moments
before I puked on my welcome mat.)

Now I don’t want to leave the impression that I was entirely free of
issues. Although my guilt and shame had evaporated there was still
something pertaining to Maureen that bothered me a little. Whenever I
thought of her, I would find myself wondering how she’d, you know,
rated me. If, you know, she wanted to see me again.

But male ego aside, I felt in all other ways terrific. And, indeed,
when I was interviewed on Animal Planet on the occasion of my shelter’s
first anniversary, I was fully at ease with being visible, more at ease
with it than I’d ever been before.