Mixtape for the Apocalypse, Page 2

  My mother engaged in a whining contest with me, and as usual, she won. Her adulthood was already firmly established, so much easier to set aside when the need arose. “Bronwynn, sweetie, c’mon, help out your old stupid mother; it’ll only take a minute.”

  While I walked my mother though the software installation and set-up process, Melissa and Rob got into a shouting match right outside my door, shattering my concentration and making a delicate explanation impossible. Mom announced with a sort of gleeful disappointment, “It looks like I’ve had a system crash; what should I do now?” At roughly the same time she said “crash,” I heard glass break outside. “Hang on, Mom,” I bit out, threw the phone receiver down as hard as I could onto the floor, and stormed outside. Someone had thrown an empty jelly jar against my door and it lay in shattered pieces right in my path.

  “WILL YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I bellowed.

  The next thing I knew I was slumped against the wall with a spreading blossom of pain coming from my chest. It took about three tries before I could breathe successfully. Rob stood over me, shaking his canned-ham-sized fist. “Don’t talk to my girlfriend like that!” he yelled back.

  “. . .What . . ?” I said.

  Melissa was in the far corner of the room, shaking her head sadly at me, like I’d pulled a Jerry Lewis and tripped over the low brown pile. “Get up, Squire. God, you’re so lame. This has nothing to do with you.”

  “I’m . . .” To my horror, I felt tears starting up in my eyes. “I’m trying to talk to my mother on the phone . . .”

  “Just stay out of our business, Squire. And clean up that glass before somebody gets cut.” Melissa and Rob turned as one, and disappeared into her room.

  My body felt like one big bruise. I’m not much more substantial than tissue paper at the best of times. I dragged myself back into my room and put the phone receiver back together. “What took you so long?” Mom’s voice came to me as if through a wind tunnel. “This is long distance . . . and I’m not made out of money, which you know . . .”

  “Rob hit me,” I muttered. “Really hard. In the sternum.”

  “Oh, Squire. What did you say to him?”

  “To him? What did I say to him?” I laughed. “He’s a fuckin’ asshole, Mom. He just hit me for no reason.”

  “Squire, I think you should move out.”

  “Mom . . . Could we . . . could we try this again later? Why don’t you just call your ISP? At least that’s a local call.”

  “Well, okay. But I think you should stand up to this guy before you get really hurt.”

  “Too late,” I said, and hung up.

  Later that night I hung out with Laika in her room. She had a TV and a very nice two-chambered bong, and she was always packing, thanks to her hippie girlfriend. We watched sci-fi and ate cookies. “Fuckin’ Rob,” I mumbled after a couple of pleasant silent hours.

  “Do you have a bruise?” Laika asked.

  I looked down my T-shirt. “No,” I said with disappointment.

  “He’s totally never been mean to me,” said Laika distantly. “I don’t know . . . you guys just don’t get along.”

  “No shit. I should move out.”

  “You haven’t paid this month’s rent yet,” Laika reminded me.

  “Yeah, I forgot.”

  “Bullshit, you forgot.”

  “I forgot,” I insisted.

  “You should cough it up,” said Laika knowingly. “You’re more than a week late. That’s not cool. And stop listening to that stupid eighties music.”

  “It’s not stupid,” I protested, but I smiled. “I like it. It’s important to me. I wouldn’t tell you to stop listening to the fucking Gipsy Kings.”

  “Screw you.” Laika leaned over me to grab another cookie. “My girlfriend is moving to Seattle,” she said.

  “That sucks,” I replied. “Why?”

  “She hates Portland.” Laika shrugged. Her reddish blonde hair was parted in the middle and never particularly combed; it just hung greasily onto her shoulders. On her, it was actually appealing. She was a kind of a beautiful grunge waif who genuinely didn’t care about her looks, but was attractive nonetheless, even if I’d never personally been attracted to her. We were buddies, having met when we were both trying to hit on the same girl. (Laika got her.) “I can see her point. There’s nothing to do here.”

  “There’s plenty to do,” I protested.

  “Like what? Go play video games for a nickel? See some overpriced movie, drink some overhyped beer? Oh boy, the Rose Garden. Oh boy, the Blazers. Oh boy, Everclear. That’s the problem with this town—all its faults are the things that people love about it and the people . . . the people like . . . aw, fuck, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “No, actually, you’re rambling. And I hate Everclear. I’m not asking Portland to marry me or anything; I just don’t see what’s so wrong with it.”

  Laika chuckled and wrinkled her freckled nose. “Anyway . . .”

  “Was that the last cookie?”

  “Uh, yeah. Sorry.”

  “You suck,” I said affectionately. “Thanks for the smoke.”

  “Any time, pal, any time. You know that. We’re still good.” She shook my hand elaborately, her handful of silver rings digging gently into me. Her nails were very short, and when it occurred to me why she kept them that way, I took my hand back, turned away so she wouldn’t see me, and sniffed it. It just smelled like marijuana, which made sense.

  10 August, 12:35 p.m.

  My favorite things (per request; Lise is sick of hearing about them).

  -Kisses. As if I remember what they’re like.

  -Tim Roth, especially in Reservoir Dogs. His fake American accent reminds me of Uncle Bill.

  -Rapidograph pens.

  -My Internet flirt object, “Juba.” She’s fifteen and she and her friend “Arachne” take pictures of themselves wearing nothing but black lace underwear, their fragile wrists bound up with black duct tape, duct tape over their eyes, etc., and then they send me the pictures as e-mail attachments. I suppose I shouldn’t encourage them, but she seems so innocent and fun and naughty, and Juba writes me all the time to complain about how close-minded high school is. I haven’t seen nipple yet, but Juba promises me that it’s forthcoming. They’ll have to do it when Arachne’s parents aren’t home. They are fans of my comic book.

  -Alex Toth. My favorite artist. Second is Aubrey Beardsley, though he never did comics. I’d like to bridge that gap.

  -My bike. I don’t ride it enough.

  -Foccacia sandwiches at Cafe Triste.

  -The word “pugnacious.”

  -Getting off work and going drinking with Lise.

  -Echo and the Bunnymen. Hands down my favorite group ever. Scratch that—my FAVOURITE band ever. I think they deserve the British U. I don’t care that they broke up years ago; it’s like being upset that James Dean is dead. It’s just a beautiful shame, that’s all.

  -Beatnik goths. I consider myself one (perhaps wrongly, but who creates a valid cultural category, if not the man himself?). More beatnikky, actually. I even went so far as to grow a goatee, thinking it would help my weak chin, but so many people laughed at me—even random people on the street—that I shaved it off. That’s one of my most painful memories.

  -The word “slovenly.”

  6:00 p.m.

  Back from my cigarette break. Only an hour to go. I don’t know if I can even stand it. Link-Up’s T1 went down at 2 and we’ve been apologizing and explaining our asses off all afternoon. I don’t know why I went into tech support—I hate people and I don’t want to help them. I don’t want to explain it all and yet make it feel like I’m not patronizing them. Dammit, I am patronizing them. I had to learn all this shit from scratch, why can’t they? I shouldn’t complain, I guess—it does pay me pretty well for a whole shitload of slacking—but goddamn it, I hate people. Most of all I hate Trace. He’s a fucker. I hate knowing he owns all of this. The sight of him makes my hackles rise and the
amount of tension in the entire room increases a thousand fold. It’s not just me. We spend a lot of time writing each other e-mail across the room, screaming in ASCII bitterness about Trace’s injustices to both customers and employees. Or sometimes just how much we hate Trace’s flat ass and his carefully combed thinning hair and his total lack of lips. And how we think he must jerk off in his office over the latest issue of Wired. That zinger was Thomas’s, and was so brilliant that I saved the e-mail, a somewhat risky move. Trace thinks nothing of searching through our personal accounts; he hands out the passwords, so he knows them all. We can’t really hide from him, not on Link-Up’s machines.

  Oh, well. One more call and I’m going to bugger off.

  Five minutes before seven, I turned my phone off and started gathering my things. Summoned by my body language, some of the usual crew wandered over, Randy and Dave specifically. “It’s five minutes early,” said Randy, crunching on curiously strong peppermints.

  “So it is,” I said.

  “Don’t let Trace catch you.” Dave picked up from where Randy had left off. I had given up trying to guess which was trying to be more like the other; they had been friends so long that they were essentially the same mind controlling two separate bodies. They were quite different physically—Randy tall, sandy blond, piercingly emotionless eyes; and Dave short and dark with aviator glasses that were so flyspecked and smudgy that it made my head ache. I could never live with such filthy glasses. “Big Bossman’s been on the warpath about people signing off early.”

  “Doesn’t he have better things to do?” I grumbled, pulling my shoes back on.

  Dave leaned way over me and squinted at my computer screen. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “What, my desktop? Oh; that.” He pointed at the caricature of our company’s president I’d done while on the phone earlier today, stuck onto the side of my monitor with a piece of tape. I’d drawn him as Dracula—long hollow cheeks, bristling eyebrows, huge maniacal eyes—in other words, a pretty good likeness. “I should take that down.”

  “No, no, man, leave it up. That’s really good.”

  “I am an artist, you know,” I said, standing up and flicking off my monitor. “Excuse me; gotta get.” Before they could give me any more advice, I was out the door, in the elevator, and down on the street.

  Lise worked at Pronto Printing, the copy shop downstairs and around the corner from Link-Up Telecommunications, Inc. The shop was a hive of activity that evening—yellow polo shirts darting back and forth, customers squirming in line, the constant soothing techno hum of high-powered copiers and the slap-slap-chunk-chunk of bound, stapled, and collated copies falling into bins. Lise, behind the counter, looked up from a stack of pinkish forms she was stuffing into manila envelopes. “Yo, yo,” she said, smiling. “Gimme a minute.”

  “Walkin’ the dog.” I leaned against the counter to wait, fingering a cigarette in the most inviting way possible. Lise Severina Ballard is seventeen days older than me, one inch shorter, twenty pounds heavier (sometimes a little more), and has always had shorter hair than me. She has a heart-shaped face and brown eyes with silvery-grey around the pupils. At that point, we had known each other for nine years, since we were both fifteen. She’d gone to college in Olympia, and I’d gone to Portland. She’d dropped out after her second year and moved to Portland because she couldn’t make enough “friendly connections” in Olympia. On that day, her hair was about an inch and a half long all over, growing out brown from a brassy yellow bleach job, heavily gelled so that the blond parts looked like porcupine quills. She’s the only person I’ve ever known who can look good in a yellow Pronto Printing polo shirt.

  After finishing the envelope stuffing, she disappeared into one of the back rooms and came out wearing half-shredded blue-jean cutoffs and a plain white T-shirt, hoisting her purse over her shoulder. Her breasts looked amazing, but I didn’t mention it. Outside, she lit my cigarette and one of her own and we began walking slowly to the bus stop. “What’s the matter with you, Squire?” she demanded after we’d gone a few blocks without speaking.

  “What . . . ?”

  “Usually, the minute you see me, you start talking non-stop. When you have something that’s bugging you, you make me drag it out of you. So I’m dragging.”

  “Oh . . . work sucked particularly today. Oh, yeah, and Rob was such an asshole to me the other day.”

  “Melissa’s boyfriend? The ogre?”

  “More like a troll. They were having a little lover’s quarrel right outside my room while I was trying on the phone with Mom trying to fix her modem, so I went out and told them to pipe the fuck down; and then the son of a bitch hit me in the chest so hard I couldn’t breathe.”

  “What?” Lise laughed in disbelief.

  “He—fuckin’—” I struggled to find the right words to describe my outrage. “He fuckin’ hit me.”

  “What a dick!”

  “And somebody threw a glass against my door, but they made me clean it up.”

  “That guy’s a fuckin’ psycho.”

  “He’s gonna kill me in my sleep.”

  “Probably,” Lise supplied helpfully. “Anyway, let’s drink. I’ll buy you one. Where ya wanna go?”

  “Triste. I’m hungry.”

  “Triste?” she whined.

  “What’s the matter with Triste? It’s our favorite café.”

  “It’s your favorite café. Besides, we always go there. They don’t even like you there. They don’t even have booze there.”

  “We’ll just look in. I’ll grab a sandwich. Then we can go . . . I don’t know, somewhere else.”

  “You’re such a creature of habit.”

  “I’m hanging out with you, aren’t I?” I pointed out.

  We did some mock slap-fighting on the bus stop that continued on the bus. The other passengers stared at us. I got self-conscious and stopped, but Lise licked her finger and jammed it into my ear. “People are looking, Squire!” she screamed, laughing.

  “Shut up!”

  “Pee-ple are loo-king!”

  “Shut! Up!” My face was on fire.

  “You kids cut it out back there,” came the bus driver’s voice, authoritative and godlike through the P.A. Everyone else on the bus laughed nastily, and I sunk as far as physically possible into the millimeter of plush covering the seat.

  Cafe Trieste was in its usual state on a Wednesday night, populated by about ten people sitting around sipping tall glasses of iced coffee, picking at massive sagging slabs of tiramisu, cheesecake, or their Legendary Scary Foccacia Monster sandwiches that always fell apart into your lap if you tried to be macho and pick them up like ordinary sandwiches. Lise knew that I wanted my usual, so she went up to the counter while I sat at a table along the wall and whipped out my diary.

  7:31 p.m.

  At Café Triste. Actually it’s “Trieste” but it’s such a sad and maudlin little place that my drunken mispronunciation suits it perfectly. It always smells like bleach, no matter how much Nag Champa they burn trying to cover it up. The general clientele is boring and pretentious, though the “café scene” that Triste was trying to join is kind of already dead, and the only reason why I come here really is because they put crack or something into their sandwiches—I’m hopelessly addicted to them.

  The slutty chick isn’t working tonight, it doesn’t look like. Scheiss. I was maybe going to try to put the moves on her. On the other hand, I doubt I could have done it with Lise around, since she calls bullshit when she sees it. This chick—her name’s Marcy, blech—is the kind of willowy femme that Lise loves to hate—she wears T-shirts made for four-year-old boys and miniskirts slit up to the ass. I saw her panties once—greyish, cotton. Not too exciting. Juba et. al. have spoiled me—I swear their lingerie budget must be something like the

  Lise came back to our table with glasses of coffee. “What are you doing, Bronwynn?” she asked, ripping her straw paper with her teeth.

  “Journal,” I said, covering i
t with my elbow and finishing the last sentence.

  gross national product.

  “Really? No wonder you’ve been so quiet. You’re not drawing in it, are you?” She grinned.

  I arched one eyebrow. “Of course not, what do you take me for? Besides, I left my sketchbook at home. I’m not drawing right now. I have a new path.” I put the cap back on my pen. “I’m a letterer.”

  “Bullshit, Squire. Look at you. Every inch the art fag. The unkempt hair; the Truman Capote glasses. A black T-shirt and black jeans in the summer! Everything about you says ‘tortured fanboy’. . .”

  Lise’s soliloquy was interrupted by the less-than-cute waiter, the manager’s boyfriend in fact, bringing my sandwich. He slopped it on the table, spattering me with drops of runny pesto. “Hi, Lise,” he said, pointedly ignoring me. “How come you don’t come in any more?”

  “I do come in,” she protested. “I come here with Squire every damn week.”

  I stuffed a corner of sandwich in my mouth and bent over the book again.

  These Triste fuckers really annoy me sometimes. I think that dweeb—Charles or Chopper or something—knows that I’ve had a really shitty day. God, I hate my job. I hate Trace. The thought of him curdles my blood—the little psychological games he plays, the smiley sheen of sexism and sadism that he puts on, the little “deals” he cuts people. Moll told me that, before I was hired, Trace told Moll she could have a promotion if she would agree to “not make waves.” She took it. Then he tried to ask her out. She refused, and she was instantly demoted back to the phone support department. I’m glad I’m not a nice-looking chick, that’s all I have to say. I just hope that son of a bitch hasn’t been reading my e-mail.

  “Squire . . . that’s really rude . . .”

  “What?” I almost knocked my coffee glass over, I was so startled.

  “I’m trying to talk to you,” Lise said, smiling patiently. “Put it away.”

  I slid the notebook under the table. “Oh. What were you saying?”

  She ran her hand over her porcupine quills. “I was telling you that I’m getting a raise at work, and they’re thinking about making me primary shift manager on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  I blinked. “Oh? Yeah?” But Lise hated her job, too.