My life smoothed out the day I stopped knuckling under. I'd had enough. Fuck it, I said. I walked off my job right in the middle of a rush-up on an English bulldog (I worked for a taxidermist, a saturnine old man whose single pleasure seemed to be in making dead things look more or less alive). A Shih Tzu was waiting, and the old man had promised to stuff a kinkajou and a Shetland pony the next day for some blue-haired crone who had more money than sense, but I couldn't deal with the dead things that looked as alive as their owners any more. That sad-faced bulldog with its nose shaved and its belly open as we packed it full of unnatural things -- different kinds of space-age acetates and foam rubber-suddenly reminded me of myself: stuffed full of somebody else's crop. It was a powerful flash. So I went home, got a beer out of the triage, flopped on the couch and watched television for the rest of the afternoon.
I didn't enjoy it much because it reminded me of taxidermy.
By the time my wife came home, I had emptied a six pack and was feeling fuzzy, not to mention a little blank from the TV, which sort of dry -cleans the lobes.
"What are you doing home?" Wanda asked first thing. Women love order, routine, schedules; it has to do with their being on a cycle themselves.
"I live here," I said. "I'm watching TV. I'm drinking beer." That should cover it, I thought.
"You're unraveling," she said, plopping in a recline chair across from me. She stared at me and sighed. "I'm not surprised."
Women are like that. You could all of a sudden shave your head and paint it fuchsia, they'd say "I knew it, I've been expecting it."
I ignored her. I was about ready to decide that she didn't exist when she sighed again. Wanda was an Olympic sigher and hard to ignore. I sang what I could remember of a Bob Dylan song, and on the line, "When you din' t got nothin', you got nothin' to lose," she interrupted.
"Do you think you could be a little reasonable?" she asked.
"Not by your definition." I thought a moment, then added, "Not by anybody else's definition."
"I shudder to think what yours might be." Sarcastic, not the least bit interested in anything different.
"It's a matter of perspective. I no longer have a vested interest in " I waved my arm in a wide semi-circle to indicate as much as possible.
"Oh boy," she said.
After a while she sighed again a world-class exhalation then left the room. Marriage is a broken
door, its hinge always creaking.
I tried to remember the last time we'd made love, but I couldn't. I'll bet she couldn't
either. Marriage. Why can't we see that for the working population it's a snare, a device
for social control.
When Wanda came back into the room, she had two packed suitcases. "I'm leaving," she announced. So conventional.
I waved good-by.
She left.
I drank beer and watched TV.
After a week or so I had to go out for groceries. At the super-market I loaded up and waited until the boxboy had put all the sacks into a shopping cart and the checker had announced the total for the third time "Fifty-two-eighty-seven," he repeated, frowning, a bit curious but not yet apprehensive; his lines had always worked before, so he trusted his script, and kept giving me my cue.
I smiled and started pushing the cart out of the store.
"Hey!" the cashier yelled. Improvising now, no script, but he knew his role. "You can't do that."
The world has too many people saying things like that. Don't you agree?
I kept going.
I got through the doors before the cashier and a manager stopped me. The checker was holding the cash register tape in front of him like a dead snake.
"Nice catch," I said.
They both scowled. The manager, a pudgy guy around forty with a sagging face, thinning hair, and a defeat in his eyes, said, "You didn't pay for your groceries."
"Don't be absurd." Denial invites confrontation.
The manager looked at the checker, who was still clutching his paper snake.
"He didn't."
I started to move he cart away. Nonchalantly.
"Wait," the manager said, sounding uncertain. "We've got to get this straightened out."
"Do as you please," I said, and pushed the cart to my car. They looked confused by my freaky advice. Sort of an alien concept, and not one to be dealt with in a supermarket parking lot.
They came to the car and watched me load the sacks into it. "He says you didn't pay," the manager whined.
"I've paid all my 1ife", I said, getting in to the car. I looked at him, at his sad, defeated eyes that reminded me of that bulldog. "Just as you are paying." I started the engine. They stood still as statues and watched me drive out of the lot.
There are ways to get by.
On weekends I would dress up and drive to the well-to-do neighborhoods, those exclusive residential areas of the privileged, and cruise around until I spotted a party. Sometimes I would just walk in, grab a drink and head for the buffet table. Other times I would ring the bell, depending on how I felt. Whoever came to the door would look at me with an ambiguous smile, and I'd sac something like, "I couldn't get here before now hang-up at the office," and barge right in. Only twice was I asked who I was, and I made up a phony name and said, "I'm a friend of Mike's. "At a big party -- or maybe even a small one -- there's always a Mike. Sure. Americans love Mike.
Food, booze, cocaine and even invitations to other parties. Once I came home with three fine joints of blood dancing weed that came from the District Attorney's office, another time with half a gram of pharmaceutical coke, and always with food and hooch. I spent only enough money to keep the electricity and water coming in and to avoid eviction.
At one of those parties I met a wild-eyed woman on the upside of thirty who told me about certain things she wanted to try before she got married and settled down, both of which she was planning to do in a few months. Her name was Samantha. I took her home with me and we spent a couple of months in uninhibited revelry, carnal ventures, exploration of slippery boundaries. We devoured the sensual like amorous birds of prey. We did as we pleased. Why not?
She paid the bills, and would have stayed longer, but the wedding date had been announced.
There are lots of ways to get by.
I drew unemployment for six months. Many papers involved, nearly all meaningless since each document is designed to serve as evidence in case of fraud, which is rare very few people lie about being out of work, a disgrace in this country. Nevertheless, the State is suspicious and resentful. For my first payment I had to wait an extra two weeks as a penalty for quitting (the State dislikes any voluntary act), but I told the petty bureaucrats that I had developed an allergy to dead things and they accepted that. It was the truth, and something the paper pushers could understand. Most of them were dead, too, all the light gone out of their eyes, zombies going through the motions, doing their jobs.
God bless America. Land of the free.
After nineteen weeks in succession of being the uninvited guest at parties, I got booted out ofa house. The hostess caught me stuffing sandwiches in my .jacket.
I have to admit, I was getting a little loose.
Cops came to the door two or three times, but I didn't answer, even though they knew I was home. They made threats through he door, irritated that they couldn't exercise their authority, but they were rookies, hadn't learned to lie well yet. A direct correlation exists between authority and lying: the more authority one has, the more he lies. The president? He tells only enough of the truth to give some credence to all the lies.
Shine, perishing republic.
One day Wanda showed up, said she was filing for a divorce. More papers.
"Do as you please," I said, remembering that when she cooked, she always followed the recipe exactly. Good soldier.
Wanda works for a monolithic insurance company. She believes in actuarial tables, statistics, order. She knows that every day so many people die and so many are born. She has the figures.
Millions of years of evolution and what do we have? Statistics.
Wanda stared at me and didn't sigh. "I'm worried about you, Jack," she said. "I'm frightened."
"Considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening," I replied quoting Gertrude Stein. Do you think Gertie would say the same thing if she could see the world today? Probably. After so much, there's no point in worrying any more.
She claimed her lawyer had sent me papers to sign and I hadn't returned them. I invited her to go through what was in three large pasteboard boxes by the front door.
"Jesus," she said, plowing through all the flyers, bulk rate mail, solicitations, bills, threats whatever the carrier left in the box. She found seven letters addressed to neighbors and one to another person several streets over.
"Close," I said, remembering the haggard looking postman and his bulging shoulder bag. I felt sorry for the guy, slogging his route day after day like Sisyphus to make sure everyone knew about the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes. "We shouldn't expect too much."
Wanda shook her head and kept digging until she found the letter from her lawyer. She opened it and asked me if I would sign the form inside.
"Sure," I said.
Quite legibly but with a flourish at the end, I signed Gerald Nixon Reagan.
Wanda sighed.
So predictable.
The reason people love conformity is that everything is predictable, and as long as people act in a predictable fashion, we can delude ourselves into thinking that everything's under control.
But it's not.
"Aberrant behavior," the judge intoned, reading from a sheaf of papers, looking as though he took everything seriously.
especially himself and aberrant behavior.' Wanda had filed some real red-line papers, not just the fill-in-the-blanks form to unlock the fetters of marriage. In my best interests, she claimed, and that got my attention. When anybody does something in someone else's interest, that other person is likely to get pokered something fierce.
She was going to have me "put away" unless I could provide the court with satisfactory reasons for my nonconformity.
How could I explain anything to that judge, a red-faced man sitting at a desk elevated like a throne and wearing reading glasses with strings attached to the temples and looped around his neck so that he would never misplace them. A careful man, has never taken a chance in his life, keeps his money pinned to an inside pocket, votes straight Republican. Aberrant behavior? Well, I guess so.
He shuffled his papers. If it weren't for the invention or the microchip, I was thinking, the human race would sooner or later bury itself under paper, its own records. Praise be to silicon.
Holding up the document with Gerald Nixon Reagan on it, the judge asked me, "Why did you do this?"
"She asked me to sign it," I said.
The judge frowned. Somewhere behind me I heard Wanda sigh. She was in good form.
"What do you take seriously?" the judge asked.
That was a hard one. Anyway, what could I say that would make sense to a man wearing a dress?
Naturally I couldn't come up with anything and the judge acted in my best interests. Have you ever noticed that the State has no interest in you whatever unless you cause a problem? You could beg for help day and night, and get nothing but stony silence and indifference; however, if you fail to give up your money or in any way screw with the system, you're in trouble.
I was in trouble.
But I wasn't worried. Worry is for the accountant who has to get his numbers right. Worry is for the salesman (or traffic cop) who has to make his quota. Worry is for the bill-paying citizen whose life. like a highway paved with paper, is mortgaged to his grave. Figures. Worry and figures go together. Statistics. Ah, Wanda, no wonder you learned to sigh so expertly.
What could they do to me that would be worse than marriage, wage slavery, and generally living life between the lines and following the arrows? I couldn't think of anything. Can you?
After some cursory examination by psychiatrists, who asked their textbook questions in rote order, and another pseudo somber and mechanical hearing, I was committed to an institution and gotten out of the way. The status quo was safely quo. Hail Columbia.
What did you expect? That I'd be permitted to run loose, snubbing my nose at the culture and giving the finger to expectations? Not a chance. I had to be put where the rule followers couldn't see me. They might get ideas. So they threw me in the briar patch. And here I am, certified abnormal. Hah.
Some of the people who are "institutionalized" here, believe it or not, are well-adjusted. More than anything else, they enjoy putting the wig-warpers on, which shows that they love to act, they just don't like the scripts they were given. To be sure, we have some zombied-out shells, just as you have out there; only these no longer bother going through lock-step motions to please others.
I talk to a psychiatrist every week, sometimes twice a week if he needs it. Initially he played games with me, but I 've cured him of such nonsense. The first time I went in, he sat and stared at me without saying anything. Shrinks go to school for twenty years and all learn the same thing. They think if they sit and stare silently at you so that you will get spooked and blurt out that you wanted to kill your father or something. Not me.
It was quiet and I enjoyed the rest. He didn't like that at all.
Now, he asks me questions and I tell him the truth. He is, of course, fascinated by my answers, thinks he's discovered a new kind of socio-psycho-imbalance, one that perhaps will be named after him. He's writing an article and thinking about a book. His name is Scheicker and he calls my "problem" (which is really his problem) the Scheicker Shirker Syndrome. It's an awful misnomer, but he's so hungry for recognition that he can't bring himself to remove his own name from the label. Poor fellow, he has a lot of trouble getting his needs met.
At least he has forgotten about trying to "help" me, and I'm glad. He could be dangerous.
The wig-warpers know about various and sundry kinds of craziness, delusions, hallucinations, but they know nothing about sanity. Which means that I'll be a permanent resident. I'm secure. The shrink, however, could get fired.
It's safe here, much safer than living in any city could be. The vast majority of mental patients are not criminals and, as a matter of fact, have never harmed anyone unlike most politicians, say, or manufacturers, or just about any other group of people who in some way dominate others.
The inmates are rather pacifistic, not aggressive, and I like that. They lack power or they wouldn't be here in the first place, and now they are kept powerless. But it seems to me that, in a subtle but very real way, we have control. Like those who rule outside, we do nothing to keep all the machines going, whereas the people who watch over us have to run the treadmill. They are slaves.
Life is smooth now. I have nothing to worry about. Don't need a retirement plan, don't care about the stock market, don't worry about insurance, inflation, taxes, trade deficits, IRS not even the FBI. And I never have to say "Have a nice day." Or hear it either, a blessing in itself.
Oh you may object, "What about the Bomb, Star Wars, Thermonuclear devastation, the environment?" I, like you, have no control over the future of the planet, which is, as you know, dependent upon madmen. Worrying about the future could drive you crazy. Not worrying about it means you are crazy. It's your decision. Do as you please.
I'm content, the food here could be better (a little too starchy for my taste, so I exercise regularly to bum it off -- mens sand in corpore sano, right?) but I can't complain. The orderlies have all kinds of dope which they use a lot themselves and for the most part we're living co-ed. I've got a girl friend who is like Samantha except that this one isn't going no settle down, and the TV is on cable. It still reminds me of taxidermy, but then so do most people, especially the ones who take care of us.
Oh well. Nothing's perfect.
Ben Satterfield has never served, done hard time, or been a deep-sea diver, but he still has devoted his life to making good dust jacket copy by working at a number of jobs that would disaffect anyone close to normal, whatever that might be. His fiction, poetry and articles have appeared in scores of magazines, and a novel, JUNKMAN, will be published in 1989 if the world lasts that long.
For other stories by Ben Satterfield, click here.
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