Last Batch Before Dawn
A bit about me, then a story in which Tootsie Memoir dreams Poe's Law into being
[Y’all. I did not give you a story this weekend, though I did pull The Sanguine Experiment into its own Word document to mess with. This site feels lonely without the New Confederacy stories, I’ll tell you that. I think I’m still having a letdown — no longer a love-letdown, but a letdown from that amount of creative energy expended so quickly. I’m going to give you some notes on my life and then put on my big girl panties and share a story I wrote a month or so ago.
First, notes on where I am in life:
I’ve been eating less. Always a bad sign. I think I subconsciously predicted it, writing all that about Walter. I won’t spiral — my discipline is always stronger than my madness, which is a handicap of its own sometimes. No respite from sanity. But the discipline that sits me at a table three times a day looks the other way when I go from sandwich and side to just a sandwich, or a whole sandwich to half a sandwich. Snacks are by the wayside. Not directly related, I’ve started CrossFit. It’s my new jam. OMG SO GOOD FAVORITE EVER.
Got a cup of ice with dinner tonight — slightly crushy, not real pebble ice — and I remembered why ice is my favorite food ever. Like salt, like blood. When you habitually eat ice, you can’t eat food without eating ice because food makes your mouth taste foodlike and gross. You end up chasing each bite of food with a mouthful of ice, carefully watching the balance so you have more ice than food. Never finish with a bite of food. You won’t be able to rest until you find more ice.
“You pace yourself well,” the CrossFit instructor said. No shit, my hemoglobin hovers around 6.5. It teaches good habits.
I haven’t been dancing, except my own dances, at home. I was off my foot, off rotation in my standing leg, out of alignment. Habitually, and it was getting worse. So I finally said fuck it.
I’m going to be 51 next month.
I have a crush on content creator (and incidentally Olympic gymnast) Nile Wilson. Who is 1) about 27 years old and 2) in another country and 3) a mess of bad habits. I watch as much of his content as I can — silly videos, serious vlogs, competitions, podcast interviews. (The boy really is a one-man content marketing firm devoted to a single client: himself. As a content marketer by trade, I’m impressed.) I see a luminous youth turning into a creature still sparking with energy but, in some lights, wizened, a man who looks close to 40 at 27. And so lovely still. Ugh, impossible crushes are the worst. And this one crept up on me. It’s a weird effect, gobbling 5+ years of video content of one person. Time runs in fast-forward, then doubles back to make its point. I woke up last Thursday from a dream I don’t remember, crying so hard tears were running into my ears on either side, just flowing out without any sobs, and there it was. Ugh ugh ugh. Maybe I’ll write him a story.
Back in the realm of the real: His Nibs reached out to me. Haven’t heard from him since 2009. I’m not letting myself feel all the things I want to feel. Mostly afraid of error, and afraid of hope, either of which throw you off your leg. Did I mention I am SO BAD AT LIFE? But maybe it will be all right. If you write someone big love letters and they keep talking to you (even two or three words at a time) that’s a good sign, right? Right? But anyhow, I won’t lie. Life is short and His Nibs’ blood may be made of ice water — or acid — but he’ll die knowing I loved him, more than anything, for years and years. Maybe it’ll give him a laugh.
I am giving DanceChatt to someone who is is an extremely gifted dance critic. I’ll still write about dance sometimes, but she’ll keep the trains running. I have too many trains on my tracks at my day job to keep trains on tracks as a free night job.
The day job has hopped the fence. Days, nights, weekends — yeah. We all support each other. We’re all so trauma bonded. I love my work family. We had a physical get-together the other week, first time in years, and I felt so happy I could have cried. We talked but I got the sense we were mostly all just sort of gazing at each other. Wow, this person is here. I g-chat them every day, but I am again in their presence after three years. How they have changed. How time flies. We grow old, we grow old —
My dad’s cancer has spread. Bigger intestinal tumors at several points. A big gall bladder tumor. His oncologist told him no surgeon would consider him for a second bowel resection. He’s reading fairy tales. He’s no longer strong enough to try and slap anyone my size, though I wouldn’t put it past him to push or twist my mom, who’s pretty tiny.
My mom’s life. For what did she give it away, more than 50 years ago? For what?
I’m beginning to think my calling as a writer is surrealism. And it’s HARD. I’m not good at it. I’m sort of tiptoeing up to it. Surrealism and love. And love is a catastrophic joke. And yet so beautiful, a real calling of the gods, the first step up a cartoon ladder whose rungs slither off as you climb. Until maybe, you fly.
Or not. But you gotta climb. As Walter says, “It’s the scale that gets you, every time.”
Whew! Thanks for sticking with me. Here’s a bit of dreamy fiction for y’all. Trigger warnings for so many things, a whole Poe’s L’awful of trigger warnings. This one’s for Walter, my always, imaginary boyfriend. You’ve still got my back.]
Utica, New York
Notebook pages written in blue ink, splotchy, with hearts as dots over the i’s, photographed and uploaded into a Facebook post
But that’s not enough, I want to tell you all the ugly things, the reasons I didn’t have an abortion that time and that other time, which are not noble reasons let me tell YEW.
Who would it help? The son (or daughter) of the abortion I didn’t have (twice)? Make him feel better about his life?
i want i want i want
Years before, crying in bed over that boy, until I read, on rec.arts.sf.tv.deepspace9 or somewhere similar, Garak’s speech: A real intelligence agent has no ego, no conscience, no remorse — only a sense of professionalism.
Oh, that gives me a thrill.
And I try it out on my roommate:
Liz: “I want to kill myself. I think I’m going to kill myself. My mother told me she’d wished she had an abortion, and she was right.”
Me: “Well, Liz, if you’ve considered it carefully, I won’t help you but I won’t stop you either. You have to do what seems right. It’s really up to you.”
Couldn’t stop being in love with people who hadn’t spoken to me for six months, but boy howdy, I could be a right bastard to everyone else — lecturing her from the top bunk and weighing, I know for sure, 25 pounds less than she did and feeling proud of every ounce of negative mass — oh I’m fierce, I’m cold, can’t make me cry, yeahhh
Matter, remember, is despicable.
Of course it’s all right if I cut myself.
— What, you think anorexics who cut themselves and write love letters about it to helpless boys are nice people?
How do I capture the grotesquerie of being 17 or 19 or 23? The longing, the ego turning into negation, the maw — open wide enough and a pig’s snout pokes out.
But that’s a lie, too. Or only sometimes true. Sometimes there’s an echoing fall (if I keep contradicting myself this story will turn into hog slop, but every statement evokes its opposite, and heaven forbid I ponder the contradiction alone with the whole internet out there to tell me how I should feel so HALP, I type onto the Facebook post, selecting a red background and a round-mouthed emoticon, Tootsie Memoir is feeling panicked, HALP)
I believed in fairies then, too, al was this land fulfild of fayerye, and saw them — I tell you this as plain fact —
Later I attempt an ethical practice of care. Later I work on friendship and fairness and compassion — not the emotion, which I really do have trouble with, but the acts.
I don’t blame young me for being a cold-blooded bastard to everyone but the assholes she was in love with. She got me to here.
I don’t mind the pills I took later, past 40, plenty of miscarriages under my belt, that was fine. Glad — for a while — we were free. For a while we were free. And when I dream about that abortion that I never had (twice) I dream about an office building in icy Syracuse, that city of the dreary surreal, that ruin of a mobster’s paradise.
(Heard in Syracuse:
How’d he die?
Natural causes. Drank himself to death.)
We’ve taken over, as a kind of night crew, a pop-up performance, an office building installed into and on top of some kind of late-19th-century industrial structure. We’ve carpeted a few floors gray, put up gray-carpeted moveable partitions for a semblance of privacy. By we I mean the Collective, I mean the group who provides abortions. I’m clerical support, not a client, but this is mutual aid; if I work fast enough I’ll have my turn. It’s not like real life, we’re in threes and fours in the crowded rooms, and even then — I dreamed this in 2012 or so — we know the police might shut us down, so we hurry.
Hurry to the files, the supply locker, the keys, where are the keys??
The elevator stalls. Art deco elevator, bad 90s trim in the halls of the finished sections of the building, all that Laura Ashley-mauve wallpaper until you come to the end of a corridor and almost step into empty space where 100 feet away and 70 feet down a coal-powered steam generator hovers in shadow and chains hang from the gantry —
But every computer we’ve appropriated has that icon in cornflower.
A bouquet of dossiers tumbles from my arms, but that’s not right, why are we keeping records?
Pound up the stairwell, hurl myself at the doors of another elevator. Fifth floor? No, the kind stranger1 says, you want the seventh. Floor seven.
Another elevator, but it’s going down. I race again for the stairwell.
Floor seven.
Not just me, we’re crowding, shouldering, but in sympathy with each other, all these shy young men — I mean what I said — seeking their abortions.
One or two may present a little femmy but they are, we are, they are all humans, just humans, a little round and uncomfortable, and now we’re tipped back in our chairs that will unfold any minute into exam tables, chatting a bit, relieved, “we got in,” last batch before dawn, afraid but together.
The plump young man next to me wipes his glasses. He has curly hair tumbling over his forehead. Ruddy cheeks, rosebud mouth. He’ll be showing soon, but not anymore. His shirt strains over his breasts. He’s wearing a dapper waistcoat, but I forget the color. We meet each others’ eyes in sympathy and break our gaze again, but there’s only so much space and just one technician. It’s all, you know, pretty cozy. The technician has a rolling chair and she moves from patient to patient, woman to woman, man to man.
I realize we’re all women in various stages of androgyny — well, what did I think — but then I unrealize it again and we’re all of humanity here, having our abortions.2
When I wake up my brow is dewey — really dewey — and my body’s at ease and I think: I have never felt so human.
It’s the strangest thing. Pregnant with the daughter (or son) of the abortion I never had (twice) I grew an inch taller.
No joke: I have my dressmaker’s measurements.
The kind stranger is, of course, Statius, but what is he doing in a dream Tootsie Memoir had in 2012? I invented him this year. He’s in the New Confederacy universe and she’s in a jazzed-up version of the universe with Walter and Linen, I think.
This is for internet friend Joe, who casually compared abortion to both human sacrifice and the Holocaust. It was like a parody of a pro-life position, but, strange as this is to say of someone I know and respect, I think he really believed. And then, you know, I thought, he’s right about the sacrifice part, I had a dream where abortion was this beautiful religious experience that saved me. I’m quite sure this is a variant of Poe’s Law. Just need Dorrie to work out the math.