Bobby
A chill descended, first over the gin in my glass (removed five minutes ago from the depths of the freezer) then over the conversation in the room. An uncomfortable silence ensued. It seemed to be that everyone had frozen still, as if time had stopped. Someone had said something, and I thought I had missed it. I didn�t think it was strange; it had happened quite a bit over the course of the night, as a consequence of the double-fisted gin and strawberry daiquiris fortified with Everclear. I suddenly remembered that the dude next to me had been trying to talk with me. Unfortunately, after he had spilled his beer all over his shirt while he was introducing himself, I had stopped paying attention to him. In an effort to not be entirely rude, I turned back to him. A quick glance at Ted from Lower Merion revealed no response; it was only the foam bubble popping on his sodden shirt that told me he had stopped talking, and I wasn�t just imagining things in slow motion � as I tend to do when I am drunk. His friend from LaSalle was in mid-stride, mid-sentence and mid-air. I could see crumbs fall off the sole of his shoe from the pretzel he had just stepped on. Across the room, I could see a couple who were about to snuggle. The fly that had been buzzing around their heads had stopped to hover between them. And then, my eyes lit on the girl in the far right corner of the room. For what seemed to be an eternity, I soaked in the softness and smoothness of her thick brown hair, carelessly tied in a loose knot and thrown nonchalantly over her shoulder to entrance the poor fool who happened to look. Something in her eyes shouted of warm summer nights, fuzzy teddy bears and the Little Bear nightlight that I used to stare at at night when I was a little kid. Puckered pink lips, forming amused O�s while she laughed at things that people had said, though they were, for the moment, frozen. The crinkle in her cheek reminded me of warm milk on cold nights, honey and lime over pie, whipped cream and raspberries. Powerful, and beautiful. She was my Marshmallow Queen.
First effort was startingly erotic, this second one toned down somewhat. It was still a little bit disturbing to realize that his yearning had risen so close to the surface that he had to write about it so suddenly. It was as if he couldn�t get his heart�s content any other way � he had to write about it. Anyone else would have gone to pictures, taken by others, and stories, written by others, and movies, made by others, to open the door to their room and walk out content with the universe and the magic instilled within. What was stranger than his incessant need to write about everything was his inability to write so descriptively about anything other than his emotional need for others. That wasn�t quite true � but the other times were when he had been extraordinarily motivated, and there had been a computer or a piece of paper nearby to shoot out his thoughts into letters and punctuation marks and spaces that could be understood by anyone that would happen to find it and actually read it. There were poignant lines that had a spark of imagination in them, but it was too hard for him to actually think about extending them, fleshing them out into full-blooded ideas that could stand alone.
My name is Robert Shelley Kani. I wish I had a cooler name sometimes. I mean, there must be a couple dozen kids named Robert here at school. And they�re all shortened to Rob, sometimes to Robbie or Bobby, and even less, to Berto. As in Robert-o, without the Ro. Now, one would ask why I wouldn�t mind Berto when � if I had talked to you before you read this � one would also know that I detest the name Bert, because it sounded like the bad side of gay � not those attractive and sensitive homosexuals on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or Queer As Folk, but the fat, balding perverts selling pictures of them and underage children underneath a leaky bridge. Well? I guess I don�t know. To be on the safe side, no one should call me Berto either. And then god have mercy on the poor soul that calls me Shelley � just because I was middle-named for some silly poet doesn�t mean that whatshisface can call me Shelley and then laugh about pansy poets in front of my face. I mean, if I wasn�t torn over a love hate relationship with that regrettable alterego � Percy Bysshe Shelley, in my imagination, of course � I would have taken great offense and really, really pulled a fast one on Ted from Lower Merion. Fortunately, if I wanted to get into real details, I could have come back with this: he slept with more women than you ever did. His wife, Mary, was a hot young thing that wrote out her strangely erotic tales into Frankenstein where she also ripped apart the Oedipal fantasy and patriarchal ego of the 19th century. His friend, George Gordon, Lord Byron, slept with way more women than he did, and eventually fought with poet Shelley because Shelley accused Byron of sleeping with Mary. Which wasn�t true, at least, to history�s blind eye, but who knows? But I never get into such details unless I�m outmatched and outnumbered. And sober. But I digress. Here I am, sadly enough, wandering around the basement of this place just contemplating how I will eventually pass out. I�m sure I will very soon, especially if I go through with drinking this half handle of Drambuie (layered in two decades worth of dust) that I found down here, while searching for some electrical cord. I think I had a vague notion that I would go after the two assholes I came with, who were last seen going toward my Marshmallow Queen intent on the game. Maybe it�s better that I drink this down, than I won�t notice what�s invariably gonna happen. I�ll go back upstairs, and they�ll all be gone. This Drambuie sure would fit in, along with the drinks already down there � the gin, the Everclear, the handle and a half of mixed scotch whiskies that tasted rather like shoe polish. My Marshmallow Queen � that sounds good. I want to tell her what her new nickname is, but along with Mr. Midnite Cowboy Meets Electrical Cord, it probably wouldn�t be the best combination of events. And what was I thinking anyway? I�d go postal on two of my best friends for doing nothing more than what I should be doing at the moment? Saying hello, kissing goodbye. Being drunk sucks.
Bobby was telling the truth, this time around. His stories usually went one way, and then the other, a tribute to his skill as a storyteller. Any truth he would write would come out smelling of roses, and even the stories with so-called bad endings would sound like the penitent confession of an honest monk in a cloister. Somehow, he couldn�t bring himself to lighten up this account, written as if he were really introducing himself to readers decades in the future who would have no idea what everyone else thought and thus could understand directly from his point of view what he meant when he said �being drunk sucks.� Maybe it was because it was startingly obvious to him that he was in the worst spot of his entire school career. Here lies Bobby, a lonely drunken fool with a trash basket between his knees and a glass of water for remedying the eventual hangover, typing memos to himself at 4 AM. His knees were shaking rather heavily, knocking against the side of the table and threatening him with a bad case of the pins and needles (he could feel the numbness starting in his toes). Bobby liked to think that he knew how to handle himself, that he knew when to stop, but the fact that his BAC right now must be well over his entire lifetime course record really shook him. He had half a mind to go and pay a little visit to Melissa, his friend�s fabulous water bong. If she were a woman, it was said, she was a keeper � because by the mere breath of her, he experienced the illusion of orgasm for aeons until the next shot of cognac brought him to another version of reality. It wouldn�t be out of character (at least to everyone else, who thought he smoked up every day) but then again, he really hadn�t smoked up for 4 months and being high and drunk would really kill any chance of doing anything the next day, and thus prolong the entire depression-uselessness cycle. But he could still type.
So I come back upstairs and she�s still there, in that corner. The two assholes apparently didn�t do so well, because they scuttled home. And I decide to lay off the Drambuie. Because, as we all know, sometimes it�s just better to see things right the first time. I mean, who wouldn�t stare, as if time had stopped and there was nothing better to do but dwell in the beauty of this heavenly creature of the night. She walks in beauty� how did the rest of that poem go? You would think that I could remember it, having studied the poem for two semesters running, as I had failed 19th century British Lit the first semester and was taking the exact same course again. Checking things out before I deigned to say hi, I gathered that she was also a sophomore. Good. So how would things start? �Hey, so I hear you�re my year.� No, that was so lame. OK, different one. �This party�s fuckin� cool, what�s your name?� I didn�t think that one would work either. I was on the verge of another not-quite-as-socially-disastrous idea when suddenly, time seemed to stop again. Actually, it was only me stopping � according to different witness viewpoints, I had keeled straight backward, hitting my head on the side of the keg, splashing beer up into the face of Ted from Lower Merion and then, tipping the plastic bucket over onto the carpet. Not only did the girls living in the house have to clean up the huge mess, they also got in trouble with the landlord and their parents a few hours later who had heard through the grapevine that someone got a concussion at some party at this house and luckily didn�t add another casualty to the drunk and collapsing college student morgue list. Not to mention the possible-suit-defendant list. I wonder how that had happened, because the hospital is supposed to keep those kinds of things quiet when treating alcohol related injuries. So - I either said something to someone in a drunken stupor or somebody told on me, on them� traitor. Guilt. It�s there � but more so, I have shame, because after all, the impression I made on my Queen was not one I�d like her to remember. And I didn�t even get to say hi. How embarrassing.
Bobby loved writing. It was when he couldn�t sleep that he would usually sit down, and driven by inspiration, insomnia or a gross combination of the two, he would write for hours and hours before going to bed at a ridiculous hour. Later, he would sit back and read what he had written, and go to bed with the peacefulness of a happy man. Some nights it was some unspeakable heartache that kept him at it; the mental exhausion of prolonging the lovely picture he had in his mind for creative purposes wearied him to the point where he could not write any more, and on these nights, he would sit awake in the dark, lonely and unhappy. Tonight was one of those lonely nights. He was back from the hospital after spending hours sobering up in one of the cold white examination rooms, waiting for the nurse and doctor to check him over and kick him out, concluding that Robert Kami had merely tripped on a wet spot on the floor and not in any danger of dying. Somehow, his night � really, closer to morning now - had gone from bad to worse, and he was still awake in the darkness of his room, waiting for inspiration to return so he could get his emotional stresses out onto paper. He figured that it was a good kind of therapy. He knew it would help him overcome his own shame � but he couldn�t get over the fact that other people would learn what had went down and call him on it. His parents. What would they say? His friends. Would they laugh? But for now, it was only a private shame, to be shared with himself, and� his marshmallow queen.
After embarking on the great spiritual quest to find myself, I see, with not just a little sadness, that I have again failed. Not because � as Mom would put it, on rainy dark nights when I get home from a rough semester all miserable and bedraggled � I was screwing around (though at times, I certainly thought that the periods of my college life where I had done that had done me much more good than this, for lack of a better word, crash�n�burn) but because, naturally, I was trying too hard. Like Spun, that flick I had went to see last week at the Ritz on the Bourse on a lonely afternoon, everything was spinning around and around and no one was there to stop it but me. Did anyone really care? Was I left alone, to fend for my fragile mental state � quite adaptive and resilient for such a breakable object, if you ask me � or would somebody stop and smile, and suddenly I would find that I wasn�t quite alone, I had a great job, I had a 4.0 GPA and everything was all right? I didn�t have high hopes; all I had to show for myself was a wasted two years receding behind my back and a wasted two years stretching like a gaping pit leading straight to hell before me. All I could feel was that emptiness, but this time I couldn�t tell whether it was one of those periodic melancholy self-doubt question-my-life voids, or the I haven�t slept before 3 AM in 3 months feelings that I get around to every single night.
I think about other things, like going to work. But there, I am seated with thirtysomethings who have managed to age to their 60s while maintaining their alien 30s social life, hanging out at crawls like Bleu where the twentysomethings and the almost twentysomethings walk past the open windows and shudder at what this vision of their nether years will consist of. Not quite sagging features, gray hairs, watered down champagne, underdone bleu cheese and pickle beef burgers and an inherent loneliness still visible underneath the Jil Sander scarves, Armani suits and strong clouds of Ralph Lauren cologne. One calls out �call for you, toots� from one room in this suite of offices, so that the one on the other side can say �got it, dear�, before proceeding to talk to the other thirtysomething invariably present on the other line, because we all know that these research offices are populated by these female thirtysomething drones who, as soon as they start looking forty, are shipped out to remote islands in the sweltering ocean of urban employment where their best hope is to look a little more grey, so they resemble the cardboard coloring of all the other unhappy middle aged people who have come home to roost. Then I wonder what I am doing here, stuffing envelopes for correspondence with colleagues of the professor who I work for, who could hardly give a damn about what such and such old coot says to some carefree young researcher who desperately wants to get out of the nursing home, grab a beer and get it on with anyone or anything that can get the image of all these vultures waiting to steal the youth out of his or her soul. Images of cheek-pinching stalkers. I see, through the open door, Mr. Professor Man open up a similar envelope like the one I�m working on at the moment, take out the paper in it, crumple up the attached message that someone like me meticulously stuffed in it thinking it was supposed to be important, and then pile the research paper under a large pile of other papers marked To Be Filed. By drones like me, naturally.
I contemplate running away. It would certainly help clear up a lot of things, would give me all that time to think, yadda yadda. But then I remember where my food is coming from, where my rent money comes from, and who harps at me all the time that they are paying to have me cooped up in a large private educational institution in the middle of a populated urban area with plenty of crime and shadiness to make it too exciting for the mind of an 18-year old alive at the best time in a person�s life. Running away never works, because sooner or later, you come crashing back into reality � but with an emptier stomach, a more parched mouth, drawn eyes, clothes in dire need of a laundry run and a soul overcome by the horridness of doing nothing among people I�ve been trained to look down upon as lazy good-for-nothings. Though by my own inner sense of decency or some inner seed of rebellion against my middle class values, I give a lot more respect to the street bum�s sense of survival and honesty in trying times than I do to people who preach to me the corruption of the homeless. Don�t give him money, he�ll just use it on booze! If I ran away, would someone take one look at me and say the same thing? I shudder to think what people would say. Maybe, he�s so skinny, he�s probably gonna buy more downers, lose his appetite and get skinnier � so don�t, Harold, what are you doing, don�t give him money? I like those guys who walk up to you and say, �yo, man, I need another dollar for a six pack. It�s been a long day, and shit, yo, I need some beer, if ya had some change, I�d be so happy.� Or sometimes, �hey, college student guy, some food? No, no, if you could give me some food, I don�t need all that change.� Then I realize why it�s mostly guys � living in Philly or any othe urban center for that matter, the homeless women can hide out in shelters under the cover of �abuse� even though the last time they had a man around was either when they still had a pimp or that bum who kept on stealing their corner space and wouldn�t shove his smelly ass to some other rowhouse not yet taken over by the city, while the guys get one night somewhere (probably St. Jude�s, right around the corner) and a little bit of food, then kicked out to �make it for themselves� when everyone very well knows they ain�t goin nowhere. Who�s gonna give a job to a guy who still smells of beer, piss and stale cigarettes and wears women�s clothing because their last sweater just got worn to strands of wool? Me, that�s who. Yeah. And so, I stop going down that road.
I should get back to being busy. Now that I have time on my hands � because I just finished a huge show; wait, I know why my mind is going to hell! Too much time, damn. From past history, I know that time lets me think up the craziest things, have the most messed up suspicions and ruins my sleep for a little while until I finally come to the realization that everything is so simple, and I only needed 2 seconds and some good old naivete to come to that conclusion.
Remembering the weeks and weeks of spending busy, tiring nights under the direction of theatre freaks who live and breathe theatre and who will never be happy until everything they do becomes a private drama which, if someone else were to live it, would be able to understand the exploding passions that they seem to find in the most invisible of actions and emotions. Sitting there amidst the amazing structures built to project wild party to the � hopefully � hundreds and hundreds of audience members who will willingly empty their pockets and rush in the theater with awed silences and glassy eyes ready to weep at our concerted command� I begin to imagine the absurdness of the joy I will be feeling after my time is done. But joy quickly turns to puzzlement, which quickly turns to despair. Then, however, it was still at abated breath, and so it would stay, as long as I had interesting distractions at hand. The director, staring sullen and hardfaced at the actors; the musical director, sweating under the stage lights and squeezing his way through the cramped pit into his position as keyboard one at the window where he would later shout out his one line in a role as Indignant Neighbour; the set carpenters, covering everything with a fire retardant covering; the lights people, messing around with gels and filters and positions and setting up the board and dealing with the deleted settings that had happened somehow during the night because of a failure to save data onto a disk which was later clarified as a problem of communication which was then attributed to no one, so blame was scattered to the wind; the actors, messing with their carefully applied makeup and costumes to the chagrin of the people downstairs who were working on those respective parts of the setup; and the other musicians. Ah yes, the other musicians. The ones used to life in the pit were the jungle monkeys, hidden high in the foliage of the jungle trees and laughing with scorn at the fumbling of lesser creatures, including newbies and audience members � mainly because they knew the feeling of getting little recognition for a job that they put their blood, sweat and tears into, until they realized that it didn�t really matter if they did. So, passion was lost. But then, the other ones, passionately devoted to the music, and not caring about the rest of the process � these guys were firmly defiant and aggravating, and stretched things to the point of collapse, but retracted at the last minute, saving the entire routine. Finally, the new people, lush with experience in high school pit orchestras but coming for the first time to a college musical where they would experience the rush of pleasure at being in a professional production. Little prepared for the chaos, all they would see were the blind spots created by the glare of the lights.
Being sexily quiet, I imagine, has its drawbacks. But none so far, that I can actually think of. This new girl sits there, imagining her life as a supermodel. Or maybe, as number one yes woman on any political advisory committee to some candidate or other that needs huge boosts in self-confidence by surrounding himself with attractive young interns or people who were wholly in agreement with his wise words, or even better, with a combination of the two. She sits there under a spotlight as if it were the only spotlight in the room; someone signals in the back to get moving, but I just sit there, contemplating what the quirky smile on her features has to do with a clarinet score and squeaky music stands and the inevitable air of �this one time, at band camp�� I don�t remember exactly how it happened, but somehow I had brought her on board this production, and here she was, happy as a bedbug. Thanks, she shouted silently. I�m so glad I�m doing this. Instead of sitting in your room? And I sigh, knowing that there were other people in the world who were still so innocent and curious in everything; they haven�t been soured yet to the inevitabilities of modern life. A revolutionary idea comes to mind: they know all about it, but are still innocent and curious regardless. I see this as a miracle: her stature seems to grow in front of my eyes by leaps and bounds. The endless longevity of the human spirit. It is, you know, a good time to be alive. But good as this wonderful vision is, she�s not my whipped cream on strawberries. Try as I might, I can�t stop seeing Marshmallow Queen, there in the corner�
I tried to get back into serious story writing again tonight. It didn�t quite work�I was just being lame, and lame, and lame�it wouldn�t stop. Like, start out with a piece of shit and try to work it into something wonderful, and what do you end up with? A wonderful piece of shit. So yeah, after five tries and such alternating boring and hyper-dramatic scenes, I felt it was time to give it a rest. Am I trying too hard? Is my creative output gone? Mr. Lonely Screwup in seventh grade told us that all us writers had to have the IDEA (in large capitals, as he had written it on his fancy whiteboard, which, a year later, was given to the PE teacher who could supposedly make �more efficient use of school materials� and replaced with a blackboard that could not be rid of the chalk dust that just would not leave, even after many applications of soap and water � and just a year later, he committed suicide in a barn outside of town; his suicide note said �I forgot my IDEA. And my wife left me. And my kids told me yesterday they wished they hadn�t been born.�) and then the rest would come. I do constant tangos wih the backspace key. Backspace is my favorite dancer; her lean, lithe figure calls for constant caresses, done to the rhythm of romance and bitterness. I can more descriptively project what I thought of the recently deceased paragraphs than project the paragraph itself � so un-majestic, un-possessing, un-clear, and un-interesting. Death to - not Smoochy � that would be too pass�, for I was above referencing popular culture for cheap literary thrills..
What is it about her? I can�t stop thinking of her. But I hardly think that we should have another chance to meet. I don�t think I could face up to her if I did see her. That�s between you and me, all right? I mean, nobody really knows about this blog � kinda useless to post it, but whatever � so all this pain and self pity has nowhere to go but back into that glut known as the world wide web. Three cheers for anonymity and quiet sorrow.
Bobby had suffered a long time. It was loneliness, he told himself finally. Even though he was certainly good at adapting to what seemed to him to be extremely hostile situations, he could only weave his web strong enough for others to get trapped in; he could never persuade his inner self that everything was going his way, no matter which way he twisted the words. He was lonely, he admitted. Walking around by himself and talking to the air, to the trees, to the squirrels, to the birds � he spouted out his acknowledgement that he was lonely, and he was frustrated. He was a science student, a biology major, why should he not be lonely? For science was the loneliest field; exploration of facts requires concentration and an intimate knowledge of the capabilities of the self. Discipline of the mind was what was necessary, and then came friends, and social well being. Science was cold. It didn�t care about having a heart � it was as a bureaucracy, yet not, for it demanded that things be done with the minimum of fuss about the process but the maximum for results. And that, he understood, was his base problem. He had process, but not results. In one drunken ramble, he had cleared up the basic issue: got good entry game, got middle game, but ain�t got no end game. He had his one escape though, another story within the story, an emotional schizophrenia, setting up his house of cards to eventually collapse again. But it worked for the time he needed it to. A soul funnel � transfer of one self into another personality within himself, and thus his pain was no longer his own. From this burnt out shell came a butterfly, with only the phantasm of the caterpillar lingering as he propelled himself into a frenzied existence as a new creature in the world.
At home, his father had been the Ogre, the in-house oppressor. He was an ogre in the sense that he was able to create the aura of ogreish behavior without actually having to be an ogre. He left most of that to the imagination; the rest came from innuendos given off by his wife, Mrs. Kani. She was at once savior and righteous punisher � she did not understand herself to be mean in any way and so therefore differed from the mister by intention. During his high school years, she had astonished him daily by constantly waking up before him and checking to make sure that 1) his homework was done, 2) his bag was free from drugs and inexplicable devices and 3) he had eaten his lunch the previous day or at least had thrown it away well. In third grade, he could still remember her, marching her way into the lunchroom after school and somehow (miraculously?) finding the day�s sandwich, still with the Bobby Kani sticker on it, and coming back to the car with it. After 2 minutes of explanation of which all the passengers of the neighboring cars in the parking lot could hear, Bobby Kani began to eat the sandwich. She used to tell him that when he lied about his mistakes, he was actually making two mistakes. The mistake itself, and then the lie to cover it up. So while other kids would have gotten a time out or a grounding or a drop in allowance or more embarrassing behavior from the parents in public, Bobby got the whole shebang. The next week, she came to school and had lunch with him. She made sure he finished his sandwich, his juice box, and the little bag of chips she had placed neatly into his lunch box, no doubt embarrassing him half to death. More recently, however, it was Mr. Kani who began to show actual opposition to Bobby; no longer did his voice reside in the realm of the silent, it was now aware of its growing irritability with what it considered to be Bobby�s truly unwise decisions. They had been discussing Bobby�s love of writing and its consequent clash with what a scientific career required, and Mr. Kani had suddenly mentioned how writing really didn�t pay. In a loud, sometimes querulous voice, he began to expound on the fact that some writers were paid by the word, even after they spent years as a magazine hack and bottom dweller at local newspapers. Some even earned their money by spouting out nonsense in support of movies �Thumbs up!� says Mr. No Name of no-name newspaper, about some movie that no one really wants to see. And then came his final point: some people even supported their families with this work � and if they could, then Bobby Kani could also.
And then, Mr. Kani got very purple in the face.
I had that dream again. You know, the one where you�re falling down a hole and screaming all the way down? Well, actually, it was a bit worse than usual. I was falling up, and I could hear, on both sides, Ma and Pa whining at me as usual. Ma was goin on about the binge I had went on last week, broke the windshield on the family car and that I couldn�t drive it ever again (was that symbolic of something in my life now?), and Pa was sayin somethin� about not getting a red cent, if I was gonna continue on with this self-destructive behavior � did he mean the drinking or the writing? They were being ridiculously unsupportive. And then the dream moved on. This part was the worst part� as if getting the verbal smackdown put upon me not enough. The marshmallow queen � oh, the hair! The hair! - she was kindly informing me that I could never see her again. Why? I shouted at her back, to no avail. She would always turn � with her hair still covering her face, like that little freaky girl in the Ring (I�ve gotta watch that one again. Rachel says she screams like a little girl every time she watches it. I always tell her that she is a little girl, and then she kinda punches me, and then I tickle her, and she slaps my hand, and then we forget all about the movie.) and then she would say, �because you can�t. And I can�t.� I got really freaked out about that part. I woke up with all this sweat plastered on me. It wasn�t even a scary dream, it was more like one of those fucked-up French movies that you feel like you shouldn�t have watched, like there are too many bad memories, even though they aren�t really memories at all. So then I take a shower, at 4 AM, and one of my neighbors knocks on the bathroom door (not being able to sleep at all, as usual) and I say, go the hell away. She starts kidding me about drinking and smoking that weed and trying to get the smell off and how I couldn�t be one of those nice boys, we�d all be fine if it was just fooling with the girls (though I couldn�t tell her that I was feeling a little woozy over someone I�d never met because then that whole hospital story would come out of the woodwork). Coming back from my shower, I was kinda in the reflective mode (getting gutted out makes my mind wander), I was persuaded by some evil minion in my psyche to get back to writing. I didn�t know if I cared enough to write, I just knew I had enough of being here. Alone, in my single. Wondering if my thoughts would come out, who I could tell, if I could write and who would I write to and if anyone was listening or reading and as far as I could tell, they were the same questions, reflected from my confusion into the collective black hole of insomnia and listlessness so that what little light I thought I might have vanished into somebody else�s universe.
I looked back at what I had written a couple years ago. It seems particularly poignant to me right now�
"I dread the arrival of the knock on my door. It was always a tirade on my supposed waste of time. Though she didn�t know exactly what I was supposed to be doing, I didn�t think she would ever be able to understand the insurmountable problems that I had. Writer�s block was a dragon to be slayed. And then art. I must serve art. I couldn�t allow imperfection; it had to be a perfect creation because that was my standard. That she definitely would not understand. Perfection, as she understood it, came from doing the agreed house chores right the first time and not having to check over if he had taken out the garbage or washed the dishes clean or actually vacuumed the crap all over the common room floor from the time the hamster somehow overturned his cage in the middle of the room, though everybody suspected that he had accidentally hooked himself onto the cage, spilled everything on the floor and didn�t want to be responsible for the huge mess and the loss of the hamster. The hamster was later found in a decomposed state in the bottom of the recycle bin after it had mistakenly squeezed into a sharp metal can and killed itself. Of course, since he always forgot to take out the garbage (and the recycled stuff with it), the hamster lay there for a total of two weeks before it was found. She, at the time, complained that the smell of the trash was too much and that I had forgotten to take it out again (with much emphasis on the again) and would I please take it now or maybe have to start paying her to do his chores and to stop being inconsiderate to the housekeeper, that�s all I took her for these days anyway. But I have to keep on writing. I have to. For meaning, for love, for what�s best for me � it is only in a perfect work of art that I can find solace in the imperfection that is me."
Back to the kitchen table � his mother, batting his father on the back uselessly, crying out about how he should have gotten off the cholesterol binge, all those fatty foods, and why didn�t he take a walk more often, though it was her usually telling him to stop going for �walks� and fooling around with the wife of that guy at the end of the block. And then Mr. Kani, briefly remembering his own affairs: last, with his daughter�s English teacher (who also happened to be an old friend of his wife�s). He desperately wanted his son to write something, maybe about him if need be. Something reminded him of Florence, 14th century. The Catholic Medici�s marrying into other Italian nobility � the children engaged at 10, married at 14, and on the night in question, watched by both households to ensure a consummation of the marriage and the virginity of the bride involved. Childhood temptation and sin as proof of moral uprightness and proper upbringing It was a wonderful paragraph that could potentially be turned into the middle paragraph of the first chapter on a cross-historical tale of morals, ethics and human emotion. Bobby could write about that, he wouldn�t think his dad was an old fart, would he? Blackness.
Bobby wasn�t paying attention. He was seeing Marshmallow Queen again. It was last night, he remembered, and she was talking to him, all excited and flushed and lovely in her rendition of �my latest hookup�. He thought that the scarlet in her cheeks was a nice color. He imagined that if he wanted some clothes with that color, he�d have to find a color sample somewhere, for he knew he had never seen that color anywhere else. It was astonishingly bright, almost to what he imagined was a thick syrupy orange.
�Yeah, you remember him, right? Ted? From Lower Merion?�
It was over.