There’s a question I ask myself a heap of times a day. Mostly I ask it in the morning when I’m hosing myself off in the emergency eyewash station we call a shower in our four hundred square foot efficiency. I guess you could say it’s intimate.
The apartment sits on top of a photo printing and processing lab where most of my immediate family has worked the majority of their lives. I’ll be working there until I get to Austin in a couple months, too.
Sidenote: I worked there for a day once in the dark room with my now current step mother but only because I was on suicide watch after ingesting all of the Sinutab and Nuprin I could find in our medicine cabinet. I think my pre-adult whoreanus girlfriends had rubbed Oreos in our window screens the day before and I simply had no choice but to relieve my sinus pressure TO DEATH. Fifteen was a turbulent year!
The low point of my week is having to cut through the boardroom on the way out of the apartment in order to get to the office. I tip toe and dress as tawny as possible in order to blend in with the walls, but they turn around every time. Occasionally I’ll get a side-splitting, “HEY APRIL, I HOPE YOU DON’T GET CAUGHT IN TRAFFIC!” Then I’m beaten with the uncontrollable urge to raise my middle finger. I have to hide it behind a composition notebook like a middle school boner.
My birth control is no longer in pill form because I have to look at a ton of newborn baby photos closely resembling a bald, asphyxiated Archie Bunker.
Don’t get me wrong, there are upsides. It’s been incredible to live so close to my family for a change.
We were even able to visit my aunt at a nursing home in Minneola, Texas where she’s recovering from a stroke like a god damned soldier. We all played a game of Farkle (yeah, my dad and I couldn’t leave that one alone for long) that day so she could practice using her frankenhand and I saw my very Mormon grandparents drink two cans of miscreant, caffeinated soda.
My hands were visibly vibrating as I scooted them across the table. I wasn’t sure what would happen when the Diet Coke hit their lips. Surely nothing short of what we all know happens when you feed a mogwai after midnight. I imagined my grandpa’s white hair swooping up from both sides into the center to form a mohawk like the bad Gremlin leader, Stripe.
I’m just super thankful that my grandmother was too jacked up on the pop to hear one of the residents approach me in the hallway with the following pick up line,
“Why don’t you follow me to my room?! I’ll show you where I beat myself up!”
I misread the “I’ll show you where I beat myself up” line. I’m pretty sure you can figure out how I intrepreted it. What can I say, except that I volunteered at a retirement home once when I was a teen and ran away screaming. Really old men smell funny and are WAY too horny.
My dad was standing right behind me and SWEARS he said what you thought I typed. He may have, but I’d like to stay in denial. I’m not saying I’d like to build a summer home here, but the trees are quite lovely.
As you wish.
Wow, monkey lips. You manage to write most fetchingly about your family, so much so that I wanna visit with a tuna jello mold and some Velveeta on white.
I’m grateful you didn’t succeed in your suicide attempt. it does make a pile of misery.
As a midwife, I’m often pressed to say something ‘nice’ about a baby. ‘Healthy’ ‘well fed’ ‘happy’ usually works. Not Pillsbury Dough boy’ or ‘toad like.’ If you can, avoid conception with a pasty white person. I’m sure a brown baby would delight your family.
Kisses, Chi Chi Boom Boom and her performing pussies
I would be delighted to give my family the first brown baby. We already have a yellow one, and I believe the two hues compliment each other quite nicely.
Love you, miss you, chi chi b b and your p p.