There will be rabbits here again
About how I left Chicago, which wasn’t home, to land in a place that looks more like home but probably isn’t (New Orleans) and went through some shitty stuff in between.
I had seen the book, Breeding better rabbits, in Anna’s bathroom. I had seen her Rabbit Breeders membership card held by a magnet on her fridge, but I hadn’t seen any rabbits around. Only her black pit bull and a bunch of reptiles: three turtles in the living room (who liked to bathe in the morning), a gecko and some sort of big, thorny lizard in the tiny guest room where my cat and I were sleeping. The gecko, who was named after a jazzman pictured in a photo above the cage, had never come out in the three days I spent there. The lizard never moved from under the dead branch and seemed to stare at me suspiciously. Not quite a fearful look, rather the opposite. I think it was meant to be intimidating. I knew it wasn’t personal but it still hurt a little. Maybe Spike is just curious, I decided. The room was empty most of the time so this guy had nothing to look at all day. I tried to express curiosity back. Then I got bored and posted his picture on Instagram.
I thought I knew all about fear versus curiosity because I HAD READ A BOOK ABOUT IT. This book was one of the two books I had been reading at Nancy’s in Kansas, where I had stopped on my way to Louisiana. The other was a book about financial capitalism by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. In case you didn’t know: we’re fucked, as a civilization. But that other book, the book about mindfulness, had taught me that as long as we are afraid of stuff we engage the part of our brain which activates the fight-or-flight response, which does a lot of really bad things to our bodies, especially long-term, since most of our perceived threats, it turns out, aren’t tigers. Most of the time what we are afraid of are our own thoughts and feelings, imagined scenarios of doom and failure. I am really really good at imagining the worst, in case you don’t know me personally.
According to this damn book I was reading, there are a variety of techniques to make things a little better for ourselves, and they involve reconnecting with our bodies and switching from “problem-solving” mode to “being” mode, which gives a lot of relief to our minds, partially because those same thoughts and emotions can be looked at with a sense of curiosity rather than fear. Curiosity activates a completely different part of the brain, and it isn’t accompanied by negative emotions. Living beings are better at being curious than at being afraid. It literally makes us more intelligent, because we are more relaxed and creative when we aren’t scared out of our skulls, and, more importantly, we stop the endless loop of depression caused by trying to solve our problems when we are literally made dumb by fear. It sounds like evolution hasn’t equipped us (yet?) with mental tools that can help us face obstacles that are more complex than OH MY GOD A MONSTER IS TRYING TO EAT ME. Or rather, the book says that you can teach your mind to do more useful things than freeze or frantically try to eliminate the source of your worries, but it’s as hard as learning to play an instrument. And I don’t have much discipline for playing instruments or learning any new skills, which is why I have been playing guitar since I was a teenager but I still suck at it. Robert Fripp once told me, at one of his Guitar Craft courses: “Valentina, not mastering a skill is going to be a problem for you. Pick one. Anything. It doesn’t have to be the guitar. Pick a thing and stick with it.” I didn’t follow his advice.
For the fifteen months following my graduation I was overwhelmed with with fear and sadness and I still hadn’t found the fucking Mindfulness book. My kind Jungian analyst’s pleas to meditate in the morning only maddened me because, as I kept telling him, I needed TO SOLVE MY PROBLEMS, not to sit on a stupid pillow. I NEED MONEY, I said, AND A FULFILLING JOB, AND PEOPLE TO LOOK AT MY WORK AND TELL ME THEY LIKE IT! AND MY THYROID HAS BEEN DESTROYED BY MY OWN IMMUNE SYSTEM! AND CHICAGO SUCKS! AND THE UNIVERSE IS COLD AND BARREN! AND WHY ISN’T ANYONE OFFERING ME A TEACHING JOB WHEN SO MANY PEOPLE I KNOW ARE GETTING THOSE?
Now, Chicago truly does suck, and the universe is a pretty barren place, but in general I wasn’t making a lot of sense. I still don’t know why nobody offered me a teaching job in Chicago but considering my feelings for the city I think I wouldn’t have survived another winter there anyway, and I mean that literally, since I thought about painless ways to kill myself at least once a week, so it was all for the better. I am lying anyway: I know why I didn’t get a job offer. I didn’t go to SAIC and I am an introvert (INFP if you care to know. Don’t dismiss it! It’s based on Jungian psychology), which means that I tend to be quiet around new people and I don’t express myself well verbally. If I’d gone to SAIC my introversion wouldn’t have mattered much, because the Powers That Be in Chicago would have come in contact with my work regardless, but a graduate degree from Columbia College is as useful as a degree from Zimbabwe so you’ve gotta have a pretty loud and aggressive personality to make yourself heard up there. Or maybe nobody would have liked me anyway, either because I am a terrible artist or because in my work I deal with emotions, myth and biographical storytelling, all stuff that in the rarefied midwestern academic art world is considered kitsch and sentimental and not intellectual enough. But what about Chris Kraus? Or is it just because my work requires a considerable time investment and no one was willing to spend time with it except my professors, friends and random strangers who had come to my show? I had invited curators to experience my installation and my subsequent performance at Links Hall but they hadn’t come. After graduating in May 2014 I had experienced a slow but steady descent into depression as the rejection pile and my credit card debt grew, and I lost faith in myself as an artist and a human being.
Which is why I came down here, in the sultry, soulful, colorful New Orleans which is not surprisingly also darker, more violent (there is risk of gunfire in every neighborhood, not just in specific areas like in Chicago) and teeming with cockroaches and mosquitoes. I gave up on the possibility of living with my boyfriend in a clean and sunny one-bedroom in Chicago to look for a less repressed culture, more in touch with its shadow, open and direct instead of midwestern nice. Plus, the architecture reminds me of Europe.
But what if it’s just about the pretty houses? Who cares about those? Rome is beautiful but I HATED it. I am now sweating from every pore and I am poor and friendless and a little desperate, a step away from booking a flight to Rome and never coming back. Hahaha. Rome. I loathe you Rome, but you’re still my home, in your perverse way. I haven’t been back in two years. I can eat gelato and become a nun. A buddhist nun? BREATHE THROUGH YOUR NOSE, FEEL THE BELLY EXPAND AND CONTRACT, EXPAND AND CONTRACT. YOU ARE NOT YOUR FUCKING STUPID THOUGHTS AND YOUR DESPERATE LONELINESS, YOU FUCKING IDIOT. My mother would welcome me back home and she would surely make pasta alla Norma every evening, if I asked her to. Would she make it for two weeks straight? Until my body turned into an eggplant?
Such a shame, suchagoddamshame that I am losing it again, because when I was in Kansas things were pretty good. But it takes a lot of effort to feel bad when a grounded couple in their sixties treat you like their daughter, feeding you delicious, organic, vegetarian food, killing the poisonous spiders in your room (“Nancy, ahem, can you come look at a spider? It looks a lot like these pictures of a brown recluse on google”), telling you entertaining and edifying stories and providing you with a safe and beautiful place to stay, among horses and donkeys and cats and dogs. Ariel Napkins, my partner in A Ride West is one of those horses. I donated him to them and I hadn’t seen him since the summer 2013. His new name is Stony, and he likes Nancy way more than he ever liked me, and that’s okay. I wanted STUFF from him, a strong body that would carry me across America, but also partnership and love, and RIGHT THIS SECOND. Nancy doesn’t ask for anything that he can’t give, so he has granted her his loyalty. He falls asleep next to her in the pasture.
I spent my days reading in the shade, petting animals and learning those mindfulness techniques sitting on the floor on a heart-shaped pillow. After ten days I thought I had it down. I called my boyfriend in Chicago and told him that he needed to read the fucking book, because it’s all in the fucking book! All our problems and our violent fights and THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE, YOU SEE? WE DON’T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH OUR UNHEALTHY COPING MECHANISMS. THERE ARE BETTER WAYS TO BE A PERSON! WE’VE GOTTA TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR OWN SHIT! WE NEED TO STOP REACTING AND TALKING FROM A PLACE OF BITTERNESS AND ANGER!.
I know, I sounded really annoying, but don’t you worry! Just a few days later karma would bite me in the ass. Wait for it. Just a few paragraphs down.
When I announced at dinner that I was going to leave in two days I noticed that John made a sad, surprised face. “We’ll hate to see you go.”
I wasn’t expecting that. In fact, at that point I was worried that I might have overstayed my welcome. They live a peaceful, quiet life, and I was imagining that I had been bringing too much commotion into their days, with my stories and my sometimes frantic energy. My sweet orange cat, who had been very stressed during the long car ride to Kansas, had been sneezing and feverish for a few days, and I had just regained some composure over it, after taking him to the local vet. So yeah, when I said that my stay at Nancy’s had been all peace and meditation I had somehow completely forgotten (not just omitted) that my cat had fallen sick and that two years after “failing” as a caretaker for my horse I had again felt like I sucked at taking care of a helpless creature, and that I could not bear the heaviness of this role (no children for me I guess). William (the cat) would sleep next to me under the covers, sneezing and panting. I would wake up many times at night, concerned that he might just have died in my arms. When I took him to the local vet I was told that he was just allergic. “This cortisone shot will fix it!” he said. I asked: “Oh, then it isn’t a cold?” He said: “It’s probably a virus, Calicivirus.” He then proceeded to give him an antibiotic. I highly doubt that William had allergies AND a cold virus AND a bacterial infection but somehow he did seem to get better after that. He might have gotten better even without those, especially if it was indeed a viral infection, but oh the mighty powers of medicine. Before leaving I also received a lesson about Jesus, which I took as sign of affection, because the nice rural vet wouldn't want his nice customers to rot in hell, so I thanked him profusely and left. When William stopped sneezing I announced my intention to leave Kansas.
Four years in Chicago have made me paranoid about people’s true feelings behind their smiles and politeness. But I had no doubt that John was sincere when he said that they would hate to see me go. I felt overwhelmingly grateful for what John and Nancy had done for me. I felt better than I had felt in a year and a half thanks to being immersed in human kindness for ten days. I was ready to rebuild my life and my art practice.
I wasn’t going to drive directly to New Orleans, though, since Kellen, a recent graduate from my program, had been emailing me for a couple of months with updates about Texas. She’d told me that I was welcome to stop by on my way down. She explained that she was trying to start a DIY residency at her parents’ land (which was really a compound, shared by many of her relatives), west of Fort Worth, and that maybe I could be the first resident! We could make art! And also do nothing! Just look at trees! She’d said that her brother could teach us to do some light construction work, but that in general I didn’t really need to do anything if I planned to stay less than a week. I told her that I would still love to help with whatever, after putting in the minimum hours of my boring tele-commute Google Ads Rater job, which she assured me I could do at her parents’ cabin. Please forgive the tediousness of these details; I promise they all matter, since the paragraph where karma bites me in the ass is near.
Ten hours after leaving Nancy and John I found myself in what appeared to be, at night, middle-of-nowhere-America. I was very happy to see Kellen. When I spend many hours driving on American highways (with or without a distressed cat meowing in agony) I never forget that the odds of getting into a deadly accident are pretty high. I don’t know if it’s the same for other people, but every long car drive is a near-death experience for me. Is it because of the accident I had when I was nineteen? Am I just a very anxious person? At the end of each drive I feel thankful and alive, and already apprehensive about the next time I will have to be on the road. That night I was especially happy to see Kellen and her strange sweet dachshund on wheels. Ziggy hurt her back a few years ago, so her hind legs are paralyzed but thanks to her wheels she still runs around like the high-energy small dog that she is. Kellen told me that I’d be staying in a room in the trailer where she and her husband Barry had been living in the past few weeks, and that the trailer belonged to her aunt. They were planning on staying a few more months while they decided what to do next. Barry was away that night, visiting Kellen’s mom. There was a cat staying with them, but Kellen told me that he was mostly an outdoor cat, and that he could stay in the outside porch. I told her that I would just keep the cat inside my room, since I had been doing that at Nancy’s without any problems.
We stayed up talking until midnight, sharing post-graduation anxieties. I brought in a few possessions from my overloaded car, including my wonderful Berkey filter, since she told me that the water wasn’t good there. The water wasn’t good in Kansas either, and John and Nancy had enjoyed my filter so much that they had ordered one on Amazon for themselves. It was the 22nd of September, and I told her that I was planning on reaching New Orleans before the end of the month.
The next day was uneventful. I rated ads for (a company that works for) Google; I talked to Kellen about theatrical productions; I met her dad; we all ate the rice and beans that Kellen made for dinner. Barry went to Kellen’s brother’s garage to fix a guitar amp. The next day Kellen and I went to buy groceries and run errands. I bought eggs, cheese, milk, okra and a lot of pasta so that I could make them some semi-Italian food at some point. We talked about maybe going to Dallas over the weekend, to see Tiffany Funk’s show and to meet Emma, an artist friend of mine who had recently moved there and who shared with Kellen a passion for cheese. There was more ads rating on my part, while Kellen and Barry spent time watching tv on the upstairs floor of the cabin, which her dad had turned into a huge man-cave-bar. At that point I was almost done with my ten hours of mandatory work and I was looking forward to make some art with Kellen. When we got back to the trailer, which was a short drive away from the cabin, Kellen explained that all her relatives were pretty standard Texas republicans. “Does it ever feel lonely for you?” I asked. “Sometimes. It used to be worse. Also, Barry is sleeping at my parents’ cabin tonight. You know, I think I made a mistake. Barry isn’t really used to having guests, and I guess I didn’t communicate well with him. He assumed that you would only be here for a couple of days. So I was wondering what your plans are. Barry is also thinking of visiting a friend on Saturday and I think I want to go with him.”
I was taken aback. That was my third evening there and we hadn't made any art yet. I had made a detour to Texas only because she had invited me to come. I felt confused and a bit hurt but I hurried to say that of course, relationships are hard, and oh, isn’t it easier when you are single and you just do whatever you want hahaha, MEN, (nervous laugh), but of course of course I would contact my friend in New Orleans and find a place to stay and I would leave, of course of course. Now, all this is already quite strange and is making you uneasy, isn’t it, but you see, I completely forgot to mention that on my second day there, when I was doing my “google job” (as I incorrectly and unforgivably call it, because I am just a subcontractor hired by a company which is hired by Google and I can’t say otherwise by contract, yessir) and I was occasionally checking Facebook I had found out that a friend of mine, an artist known by everyone in Chicago and who had moved to Arizona to be a full-time art professor, had disappeared at the beginning of September with his new girlfriend, leaving a suicide note in a truck. I had shared my anxiety over this terrible news with Kellen and Barry. Nothing I knew about Jeriah, the tall, loud but thoughtful, kilt-wearing painter made me think that he was the suicidal type, but the article mentioned that he had been forced to resign from his job at NAU over sexual misconduct allegations. Did he think his career was over? Was this connected with the fact that his wife Stephanie (also my friend) had decided to divorce him? Hopefully he had just staged his death and disappeared into the woods. The last time I saw them together they were drawing a giant Krampus on a wall at the Co-Prosperity Sphere. I lived a couple of blocks south on Morgan so they invited me to drink beers with them while they took turns tracing the lines using a projector. They were the most unusual art couple I had ever met, obsessed with guns and snakes and survivalist stuff, but they were also some of the sweetest, most authentic people I knew in Chicago. They always knew who was real and who was faking it in our small and often annoying art community. Both Jeriah and I had at one point named our vehicles Sleipnir, after Odin’s eight-legged horse. A couple of months ago Jeriah had told me by email that I should send my resume to a guy in his department because they were hiring part-time faculty. He knew that I had been applying for teaching jobs without success. I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to move to Flagstaff to teach drawing part-time, but I did consider the possibility for a while. On my notebook I had written: send material to Jeriah’s school.
Horrified comments from the Chicago art community were popping up under Stephanie’s post. After a few hours one of her friends mentioned that Jeriah and her girlfriend had been found dead in the woods, close to the car. I was shocked and horrified. I told Kellen and Barry, who were in the same room. “Don’t believe it if it’s not been confirmed.” He said.
We went back to the trailer, where there is no phone reception. Around midnight I went outside in the dark, looking for the one spot on that land where phones could sometimes pick up a signal. It took many minutes, but at last the updated newspaper article loaded on my smartphone. Jeriah and Ashley were indeed dead, and had been dead for weeks.
I could hardly sleep that night. None of it made any sense. It was straight out of a movie about small-town America, the ones I would watch with my mom when I still had no idea that I would move there one day. I kept seeing images in my head. Their bodies in the woods. Animals feeding on them for weeks. That was my second night there. I was in a trailer, in the middle of Texas, so far away from home.
The next evening (Thursday the 24th) as I was still trying to cope with Jeriah’s suicide and I was feeling less and less optimistic about my future I would hear the little speech by Kellen about having to leave by Saturday. I was baffled and eager to get the hell out of there. I wondered if the suicide of my friend had somehow disturbed Barry. Was it the fact that I had brought in my water filter and my coffee stuff? Did he feel that my cat had displaced his cat Otis? Did Kellen fail to mention that it had been her idea to let Otis be outside while William stretched his legs during the day in the trailer? Did he misinterpret my “Are you making all the food?” question on the second evening as implying that I expected him to make food for me as well? It was just my clumsy attempt at emulating millennials who say phrases like I FEEL ALL THE FEELZ, but I could see how he might have misinterpreted it. He definitely seemed weird when he responded, without looking at me: “I just made myself some chicken nuggets and fries.” I did feel a bit weird after that, wondering what might have happened to my friend Jeriah while Kellen and Barry ate a truly American dinner watching tv and drinking cheap beer upstairs.
But let’s jump ahead to the morning of my fourth day. Kellen had given me her sorry-you-might-have-to-leave speech on the previous night, so we went back to the cabin where I could put a couple more hours of work in and contact my friends and friends of friends in New Orleans. I had been sending texts and emails and couchsurfing requests but I still hadn’t heard back from anyone. At some point I noticed that everybody had left. When Kellen’s father came back in I asked him if he knew where Kellen was. He didn’t reply. I asked again, more loudly. “Isn’t she upstairs?” he said. It had been very quiet for a while around there and something didn’t feel right. I also wondered if he was ignoring me on purpose. I went upstairs. Kellen was sitting on the couch, working on her computer. “Here you are! I had no idea you were here all along!” I sat next to her. A few minutes later Barry walked up. He sat on the couch as well. “So what are your plans?mHas you friend replied to you?” I said that she hadn’t replied yet. His falsely polite mask fell, and he said, aggressively: “We need you to leave by the morning.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the face. I already knew I had to leave. What was this about? “Why are YOU telling me this, Barry?” I turned to look at Kellen. She was stone-faced. I turned back to Barry. He hissed: “I am telling you this because this is where I live and I need you to be gone.” My eyes started to fill with tears. “Why are you telling me this so aggressively? Kellen knows that I can be gone in an hour! Somebody give me the keys to the trailer!” I said, almost crying. “I’ll open it for you” He said. I drove to the trailer. He followed me there with his car and opened the door. I packed all my stuff frantically. I put the cat in his carrier. At last I went to the refrigerator, which was on the outside porch. He was standing there, holding his cat Otis. I grabbed my cheese without looking at him, I got into the car and I drove away, crying, while William meowed in distress. My phone didn’t have gps signal. I had no idea if I was going the right way. I needed to go, go somewhere, where people weren’t ignorant monsters. The cat was making frantic sounds, my heart was pounding in my chest, I wanted to feel safe but I felt out of control. I received a text from Kellen: “Hey love—I’m real sorry Barry wasn’t as delicate as he should have been. I did wish to host you tonight so you’d have some time to hear from Louisiana folks. I’m sorry it went down like that. I hope all goes better in New Orleans.”
I felt desperate and alone and I couldn’t stop crying. I thought that maybe I was having a heart attack. I realized that I shouldn’t be driving in that mental state but I didn’t know what else to do. I wanted to get far away from Texas and never come back. I stopped to get gas. The only thought that provided some comfort was that I would GET AWAY FROM THE UNITED STATES AND NEVER COME BACK. My arms were shaking. I texted my boyfriend. I told him that I was in an emergency and would he please call me NOW.
I started driving towards Louisiana. When Daniel called me I could hardly form words. I couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t breathe well. “I think I’m having a panic attack, Daniel. I hate Texas, Daniel. What is this place? What is this place? Why am I here? What am I doing in this country? I want to go go home, I want to go home, I want to go home.”
The cat was meowing desperately, a mournful, painful cry. “I think this is going to kill the cat, Daniel, I couldn’t give him the tranquilizer, he is driving me insane, what AM I GOING TO DO WITH THE CAT, DANIEL? I KNEW IT WAS A MISTAKE TO TAKE HIM WITH ME ON THIS JOURNEY, HE SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN CHICAGO WITH YOU, I SHOULD HAVE GIVEN HIM TO LISA UNTIL I FOUND A HOME, I AM GOING TO HAVE TO GIVE HIM TO SOMEONE, ANYONE, BECAUSE I CAN’T TAKE CARE OF HIM, I CAN’T EVEN TAKE CARE OF MYSELF. WHAT IS WRONG WITH TEXAS? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?
“Fuck these people, Valentina. They are horrible and crazy and you did nothing wrong. Hold on, Valentina. And leave the cat alone! He will be fine.”
“Daniel, I think I’m going back to Europe. You don’t understand, the cat is desperate, his sounds are making me feel even crazier, I can’t drive like this for ten hours, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do. I want to go home. New Orleans isn’t going to work.”
Talking to him was making me cry even more violently so I told him that I would call him back. I tried to find a decent radio station to drown the desperate meows. EVERY. SINGLE. STATION. WAS A CHRISTIAN RADIO STATION.
At last I found NPR, which was broadcasting classical music. Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Gershwin. My hands were still shaking. I knew I was doing something stupid, driving while crying, with my heart racing. The cat was still meowing. I called back Daniel.
“How far is Louisiana? I need to get out of here.”
“I think Shreveport isn’t too far from Dallas. Are you in Dallas?”
“I think I am almost in Dallas. I will get to Shreveport.”
“You should get there around 9pm if you’re not far from Dallas, I will send you some motel links, okay?”
“Okay, okay. Can you hear the cat? This is killing me, I can’t do it.”
“It’ll be alright. Hold on. Hold on. You’ll be alright.”
“I will never go back to Texas. This place is evil.”
I tried to focus on my breath but all those techniques felt ridiculous in that moment. I slowly got calmer but the image of Barry telling me that I needed to be gone kept replaying in my head and I would start crying again, which would in turn prompt the cat to start meowing more loudly. I thought about Jeriah, how it made some sort of sense to me now that he would decide to kill himself when his career was over. A day earlier it had seemed impossible but I was witnessing myself have a total meltdown over something that was objectively infinitely less dramatic. Why was I reacting this way? I could see that I wasn’t making any sense but I seemed powerless to stop feeling that despair. I concentrated on the air coming through my nose, the texture of the steering wheel on my fingers. I tried to remember the words in the Mindfulness book. “Whatever this is, it is already here. Just observe it.” And I would start sobbing again. Loud, unstoppable sobs.
When I got to Shreveport it had been dark for a while. I checked into a cheap motel. Everybody was staring at me from the balconies, smoking cigarettes. The cat had peed in his carrier. I tried to rinse it in the shower. My shampoo had leaked through my backpack. The bed cover was soaked. I tried to rinse that as well.
I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror. I looked old and tired, with heavy blue circles around my eyes. I remembered the other times I had tasted this specific quality of despair.
That one time in Budapest when I stormed out of Chris’s apartment at three in the morning.
When I ran away from my father’s summer house in Santa Severa. I was eighteen and he wasn’t making any sense. He even hit a car with his fist while yelling at me. I wouldn’t talk to him for a whole year after that.
When I went home from G*****’s apartment the night he told me that he didn’t really care about me. I think I accidentally took his door off its hinges. Something happened to some mirrors as well, I’ve been told.
When I was thirteen in Paris, with a hopeless crush on a boy who had shown some interest in me at first but who started ignoring me as soon as I got quiet and pensive, as I always did when I liked someone.
Again right before I moved away from Italy, in 2009. I had been staying at that same Santa Severa summer house, trying to become a ceramic artist. That was my thing, at the time. I had bought a kiln and an electric wheel. Then I received an email from my father, who told me that I couldn’t stay there, that the summer house was his retreat and that I needed to grow up and take care of myself. I hadn’t planned to stay there for a long time and I had indeed asked him if it was okay to put my equipment there and he had said that of course of course it was. I was trying to make work and plan my next steps there with Matthew. I was so hurt by his email that Matthew and I filed for my immigrant visa to the US the next day so that I could start again somewhere new.
Such a cliché, this sequence. An incomplete chart of my main psychological complex. The shame of rejection lived over and over. The pain of seeing indifference on someone’s face when I had opened my heart to them or of being kicked out from a place of comfort when I was doing my very best at getting my shit together or, as in the case of my Texas misadventure, being exiled by people that I trusted, in a moment of extreme vulnerability. When I was homeless, alone, sad about my friend’s death, far away from anyone who cared about me. And the irresistible impulse to flee.
I could not sleep. Around 4am I turned the tv on. At first I didn’t recognize the movie. The actor, a bearded thirty-something, was talking about all the terrible things that might happen to him that would prevent him from being a good dad. “I could walk into a construction site and be hit by something!”
“Stay away from construction sites!” The thirty-something actress replied. She looked pregnant. Could it be...? Could this be that movie written by Dave Eggers in which an expecting couple look for a good place where they can raise their baby and end up moving to Louisiana??? I was talking about this movie to Daniel a few weeks ago! I had seen it with Matthew.
I watched it till the end, when Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski walk into the beautiful house that she grew up in and then out through the back door, where she looks out to the Mississippi river and she cries and they are happy and THE END.
I don’t believe in signs but that was the closest thing to a sign I had ever seen. I turned the tv off and fell asleep.
In the morning I texted Cassidy again. I told her that things got really weird in Texas and DID SHE HAPPEN TO HAVE ANY LEADS FOR ME ABOUT PLACES TO STAY FOR ME AND MY CAT? Cassidy moved to Michigan two weeks ago but she was in New Orleans for a couple of years. Coincidentally (or not) I had met her through G***** when she still studied at SAIC.
I liked her a lot, and she had said some really nice things about my work. She would have become a close friend if things hadn’t gotten so weird between G***** and me.
I saw her updates on Facebook, though, so I kept up with her life.
Cassidy told me to contact her friend Anna. When I was half-way to New Orleans I received a text back from Anna. It looked like I had a place to stay for the night.
I had given a tranquilizer to William so the five-hour drive was peaceful. I would still occasionally see Barry’s face in my mind, a man child playing at being a tyrant for no apparent reason. The aggression in his voice. The lack of expression on Kellen’s face. At the time I thought that maybe she was in an abusive relationship. That maybe he was the one making ALL the decisions, something that she might not find so strange since she grew up in a family where the father thinks it’s okay to turn the whole top floor of a cabin into his tacky man-cave with beer banners, neons, video games and posters of guns. Oh the patriarchy.
But now I wonder. Maybe she wanted to get rid of me as much as Barry did and had him do the dirty job. Maybe she didn’t believe me when I said that I would leave on Saturday. Her text was puzzling. It didn’t sound like an apology at all. What did she mean by “I’m real sorry Barry wasn’t as delicate as he should have been”? How could she let him treat me that way? It sounded like she agreed on the content if not on the method.
I couldn’t bring myself to reply to her.
When I arrived at Anna’s house I was happier than I knew how to express. She had a long blonde braid and an open smile. I introduced myself to her. “Oh, we’ve met before, but you don't remember me. I used to live in Chicago.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize… wait, did you use to live in the Meat House in Pilsen?”
“Yes, yes, I lived there, yes. We all moved down here, basically!”
I spent three days there, recovering from Texas and looking for a room to rent. We read, relaxed, went to a show at Siberia, talked about New Orleans, how lovely it is, and about Chicago, how much we dislike it there. On my last day at her place I asked: “Do you keep in touch with G******?” She said that she does indeed.
I almost told her that she shouldn’t mention me to him ever. That even though I had crossed the threshold of the Meat House as G******’s friend I hadn’t been his friend since 2012. And not because I stormed out of his apartment. That had been mended soon enough. It was an unfortunate set of circumstances that had to do with his Texan girlfriend long after I had accepted that G****** and I would only ever be friends. She saw me as a threat so he made him promise to her that he would never speak to me again. And he didn’t, for as long as they were together.
I know it’s silly to judge a state by the handful of people you know who are from there but that’s how the human brain works. Until proven wrong I’m going to assume that something is seriously wrong with Texas. The only other Texan I know is a dude named Nathan who ended up going to prison last year for raping his ex. He had given me a black bike with a pink seat, pink pedals, a pink bar tape.
“I can’t believe it took me this long…. You are the owner of the rabbits! The many many rabbits who lived in the basement of the Meat House! I mention your rabbits in A Ride West, this long video I made about trying to ride a horse across America.”
“Haha, yes, those were mine. I moved down here with them but unfortunately they were all eaten by stray dogs.”
“Oh no! That’s very sad.”
“Yes. But I have rabbits living on farms around the city! And I am going to start breeding rabbits here as well. There will be rabbits here again.”
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