Her Name was Sisyphus

 “Get me another beer, bitch.” 

Laura rolled her eyes at him and ducked into the kitchen. She reached in the fridge, mindful of her nails as she grabbed him 12 ounces of oblivion. He was glaring at the TV, watching a show about a family that communicated by messenger and bonded via derision, ridicule and sarcasm. Mike giggled, grunted, and snatched up the beer. He racked it open and deftly upended it, eyeing her scornfully as he swallowed. His eyes crawled over her with a quick smirk of contempt, some primal glare…of what? she wondered. Ownership, she thought, and then dismissed it. She glanced at the TV, noting the veneer of dust on top of it. There was a nubile, ditzy and painfully beautiful teenager (dressed much like the way she was now) sitting on a couch, talking at her father. The father appeared haggard and shallow. He had a look of perpetual surprise—he seemed to be in a permanent state of shock of how bad the life he chose devolved into this. He looked miserable and ripped off—a shadow of the blind, obedient man he once was…a man that got married and bred because he thought that’s what he was supposed to do. The father was lamenting about his daughter’s potential for anything but one night stands and sexual favors in exchange for getting ahead in life. The girl denied this vehemently and began listing the quality men that she had “dated”—including one of her teachers, a PE coach and her best friend’s older brother who was an airplane mechanic. She did so with a vacuous and ever so ingrained naiveté. This was the sum of her character. The audience roared. So did Mike.  

“You dress like a slut even when you’re not at work, you know that?” 

“Isn’t that why you hit on me in the first place?” she retorted and walked back into the kitchen. He ignored her, took another pull on his beer and settled back into his show. 

The Mike and Laura Affair started a few months ago at the Gentlemen’s Club in town where she was one of several main attractions. Against what little better judgment she might have once had about seeing her customers, she began seeing Mike. First, she saw him in the parking lot in his car, and then once or twice in the dressing room bathroom, then in his apartment, and a couple times in between cars in the parking lot.  They were a couple by the third tryst and fell comfortably into an arrangement neither of them understood but comfortable. She had only been stripping for a year. Prior to that, she worked as a dispatcher for a carpet cleaning company. The money there was sufficient, but not enough to fund her growing list of needs and distractions. Prior to her career change, she fell in love with someone that she was quite sure she would never forget. 

She took a basket of laundry into her room and began to fold it. She reviewed her resume of personal achievements and failures. She thought about life up until now. She thought about Jim as a fleeting, distant rescue ship from her own island—where she now sat willfully, purposefully and stoically stranded. 

He was everything a girl would ever want, but nothing few could endure for an extended period of time. At least this was her explanation for why, when she was on a “girl’s trip” in Mexico one drunken night she succumbed to the misognystic, slurred charms and one-liners of a Marine on leave from dragging his knuckles and “shooting towelheads in the middle east in the name of freedom.” She fucked him on the beach and when she came-to the next morning, had a vague recollection of his square, chiseled features, but that was all. An eternity of what could have been was erased in a few minutes of reckless abandon. She was inwardly horrified about her behavior, but that quickly gave way to justification. She was able to make sense of it in the same way a jaundiced bloated drunk in the throes of DT’s soaked in his own piss and bile made sense of “it’s not that bad…” 

She told Jim a few weeks later, more out of guilt and the need to make sure she could move on than for any other reasons of moral obligation. The night she told him it was in this detached, matter of fact and cold.  The look in his eyes never left her. They broke up, and went their separate ways: He, to a men’s retreat, and her to a bar. Running lasted only so long and one day she found herself in therapy, filled with remorse and self -loathing for this single act of premeditated sabotage. 

Therapy! She couldn’t believe it! The mere thought made her bristle. But after a few sessions it melded into some sort of normalcy and routine, like going to the gym, or doing her nails or finding the next distraction/man-friend. She continually and habitually negotiated a series of shuddering orgasms & gropings that ended I the relationship du jour…month…year, ad nauseum.  

And now, she was here: with the antithesis of Jim—Mike. Truth was, Jim had scared her with this constant talk about things that mattered, with his transparency and feelings.  Mike passed the days eating, drinking and talking about all the things he would never be or do. Back to normal, she thought as she carefully folded his shirts. His income, as were his table manners, personal grooming, vocabulary and analytical thinking skills were mediocre. 

Back to normal, she sighed.  

Her therapist, a neat, stocky and intensely probing man named Gerald had a penchant for sitting with his hands folded and nodding a lot. He never probed  or prodded, though. His was an intervention of just being, listening and letting the folly of her rationalizations, self-help platitudes and insistence on forgiving and living in the moment hang in the air…where they became just that—rationalizations, justifications, and her making sense out of things that were sucking her soul and relieving her of actually being loving with herself and those who truly deserved it. This angered her, as did the whole dance of learning about herself, of therapy.  

Gerald spoke with precision, confidence and an irritating calm. Everything about their interactions and meetings was foreign to her. Silence and the dance of self-discovery was unchartered territory. It wasn’t predictable and couldn’t be controlled. Sometimes, she wondered about Gerald in a sexual way and at least once she fantasized about him.  But the more she got to know him, the less this was her focus. Eventually, he became repulsive to her, for she had become vulnerable to him. He was genuinely caring and concerned for her welfare and didn’t want anything in return. Up to that phase of her development it had not occurred to her that she had traded plenty of things for plenty of other things and the snake eating its tail seemed to be catching up with her. Until one day, she realized why she ran away from Jim and why she no longer wanted to fuck Gerald but to hit him; he had seen her, knew her, and this was the essence of vulnerability.  

She was used to every form of the monotony that she called love, but on the day Gerald fired her, he inadvertently provided the only kind of love that would get her attention. It was an intervention of sorts, but loving; blunt, raw, and unfiltered. 

“Laura,” he asked, “Who are you?” 

The question shook her foundations—the sands of time she tried to run across, the sand that mired her trapped her and kept her where she was, which was…here. 

“What?” she half-stammered, unsure of what he was asking…and then she was not completely sure why she was stammering. 

“You know damn well what I’m asking you!” he said firmly as he leaned forward. Her attraction—transference, is that what they called it–she read about it in her Cosmo magazine that she read religiously—she wasn’t sure which one. 

He had a gleam in his eye, cocksure—but earnest, caring and intent, but it was a gleam and it filled her with a terror she had known since childhood. “Who,” –he was whispering now– “…are you?” He emphasized the last word and she felt a sinking emptiness from her stomach to her core and felt nauseous realizing that this feeling dogged her for as long as she could remember.  

“I don’t…I’m not….” she muttered, near tears but also on the verge of screaming this at him. 

“Yes you do, and yes you are.” he finished, not allowing her to finish her verbal stalling. “We’ve been doing this dance of consciousness for four months now. You’ve talked about what you should do;  about the parade of sailors, plumbers and construction worker abusers in your life; about all the things you felt and did and the resume of despair, horror and shame. You sat here and wasted my time with this fair-tale meandering about how you’d like it to be…but so far have been totally unwilling to undo what’s been done or heal the wounds that have are festering. I can’t do that for you, Laura. That’s your job. You can sit here and educate me how you tell all of your prospective asshole substitute fathers how caring and nurturing and “in therapy” you are or you can do something about it. Start by answering that question. Who are you, Laura?” 

She didn’t remember the rest of the conversation. He tore into her for 10 minutes and when she left she felt like throwing up, like leaving Mike and quitting her job at the “Gentleman’s” Club—and she wasn’t even sure why. She pulled over on the way home and sobbed uncontrollably. But it went away as the fog of familiarity returned. Gerald told her not to come back until she was ‘serious’ and had some evidence that she had changed….How…what? she asked…but Gerald was not giving the answers. He walked her out to the door of his office that day, her jaw agape, eyes wide, her brain aflutter with thoughts of Doing Things Differently. She drove home shaking, feeling empty, devoid of any sense of self. It was if his question sucked what little she had of a “self’ and replaced it with an uneasy, ongoing dissonance. That was the first time anyone had said anything to her that held such weight and power over her. That day she left The Rapist’s office all of it was dismantled, undermined and placed under the terrible light of scrutiny. 

And still, it haunted her as she tried to sleep that night, for she couldn’t answer that question. Maybe that was the point; she had no idea who she was and on a good day defined all that by comparing herself to her fucked up friends, the homeless, those dying of AIDS and those not fortunate enough to live in the USA. 

That day, as moments of clarity go, however, was quickly forgotten and forgotten sooner because since Gerald fired her; she didn’t have to go back and check in on what needed changing and checking. Thus, she settled into the discomfort of familiarity and the erratic consistency that was her life, and began about what he asked her. She folded the laundry mechanically.  

I’m a Stepford Wife, living a Stepford Life. But we’re not even married. She shuddered. Marry Mike? Was that the next indicated thing to do? She felt sick. IT was familiarity, comfort, secuirty. Yes, that’s it…. 

Mike guffawed from the living room, through its thin walls and Target décor and shattered her train of thought. Suddenly, she hated him and hated herself for being with him. She vacillated between being infuriated, depressed and empty.  

Laura worked son the pile of towels hurriedly, arranging them haphazardly into not -so -very -neat squares and placing them in a stack on her perfectly made bed. The phone rang. The respite from her thoughts was welcome, as most distractions were, though she was acutely unaware of this. It was her best friend, Tanya whose love and proclivity for distractions was equal to hers. Tanya was also unaware of this. 

“Hey,” Tanya said cheerfully, “Whatcha doin?” 

“Nothing,” Laura said folding towels and work shirts. She was not aware of this, but she did so with the same deliberate precision as her mother. 

“Yeah, me neither,” Tanya said, and Laura noted with sheer nausea and irritation that her friend was watching the exact same show David was; there was a millisecond of delay in the broadcast from phone to the ambient noise in her room, making it all the more irritating 

“I was thinking,” Tanya said to no one in particular to the woman on the other end of the phone who suddenly felt as if she was out of her body and about to faint, “what if me and Arsin didn’t break up till after Christmas, at least then we could go to his Uncle’s cabin for Christmas. I mean, he’s a great fuck, he’s got a lot of money, but let’s face it, he’s half Armo and got a hairy back. I just can’t deal.” Tanya finished as the background drone indicated some new improved product that was guaranteed to take you away from yourself long enough to forget that you were not on the phone with someone that you couldn’t give a shit about, while in a horrific dead-end relationship, feeling like a fat, ugly worthless bloated piece of shit (never mind the fact that most men that ran into you wanted to fuck your brains out and volunteered—usually at work—to leave their fat wives and children if you blew them every day) and felt as if you were going to puke, faint and explode at the same time. 

“Well, you know what my dad used to say,” Laura said absently as she put the folded towels in the hall closet and noticed with disgust the dust bunnies by the doorjamb. 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, ‘Nothing lasts.’ ” Tanya finished. Tanya, who was painting her toenails, was at home in her apartment and glanced out the window to notice the meter reader, and wondered what it would be like to fuck his brains out. “Your dad was weird. Why do you still talk about him?” 

“I don’t know,” Laura said absently. She knew why, but an explanation to Tanya was pointless and she intuitively knew this to be the case, so I Don’t Know was a response that few people argued with—hence it’s irrefutable value as a response and beacon to change the subject. 

Her father died a few years ago. Daddy was a depressive alcoholic who loved Hemingway—and all of the bullfights, hunting and booze that went along with that hero worship. Like Hemingway, her father had been depressed—a depressed writer who took his anger out on the typewriter, and whose solitary time -consuming craft had taken its toll. And, like Hemingway, he committed suicide. 

“Well, anyway, I was home wondering what you guys were doing tonight.” Tanya trailed off as the manufactured sounds of audience laughter drowned out the constant snapping and chewing of the constant cud of gum in her mouth. More like constant wad of cum, Laura thought of her friend, and then became instantly mortified at the instantaneous condemnation of her friend who once admitted to having sex with three men she just met while in the throes of a cocaine and alcohol binge. 

“Not much. I think Dipshit is going out with his friends to go play ‘pool.’” Laura sighed, unfolding a dishtowel because it didn’t quite fit with the stack that was already on her bed. She folded the towel again, and then picked up the stack and put it away in the linen closet. She noted more dust bunnies. Mike belched from the next room with the white noise from the TV. A siren wailed outside past the house. 

“The strip club. Right.” Tanya rephrased the euphemism. 

“Yeah. So, I think I’m going to hang out here tonight, I’m not sure.” 

“Yeah, well, I’ll let you know if I do anything, too.” Tanya said as she removed the cotton from between her toes. She grimaced as she glanced at herself in the mirror. She looked fat, she thought, and reminded herself to begin skipping breakfast and lunch now. 

“OK. I’m gonna finish cleaning up around here. See you later.” 

Tanya murmured something. Laura hung up. Mike hollered at the TV. The nymph daughter in the TV family was attempting grade school math and failing miserably. 

She sighed and thought about her father. Indeed, just like Hemingway. Although, unlike Mr. Hemingway, her dad sobered up, as it were. He was a sober, recovering alcoholic who tired of the drone of whatever it is Twelve Steppers did—their meetings, their coffee, their constant and incessant attention to what was The Matter. She never understood what it was all about—to be sure, never cared—but more than anything she was resentful of her father and the newfound happiness that didn’t include his family .She forever loathed and despised the sober kooks that suddenly flooded her home, called at all hours of the night and sat around for hours on end laughing and talking all of the their happy “spiritual” horseshit. She never understood how all of them gloated about what great people they were, how great their lives were—yet they ignored and isolated themselves from their families, hid out as it were and escaped the reality of life by staying in their meetings and doing whatever it was they did. 

One of her father’s “friends” had tried to explain it to her one night after they had one of their sober get togethers. His name was Joey– Joey Hill. He was one of her dad’s good friends. Joey Hill was a sick fuck— as were most men. It became apparent as they talked that he was doing more than his compassionate and selfless 12 Step babble; he was trying to hit on her. She was 19 years old then—19 and beginning to feel the precursors of the power she would have over men. She had already had her share of seeing creepy men in parked cars jacking off while she walked home on hot summer days, men trying to film and photograph her at the beach…men willing to sell their souls and leave their wives just to “….taste it.” 

It was a hot June night and they were out on the patio deck; her father was playing dominoes inside with his sober buddies. Their overt shit talking, hollering and bone slapping could be heard all over the neighborhood—a quaint Last Great White Hope of a neighborhood called Sierra Madre. He used a lull in the conversation they were having (about her resentment and frustration with all of the happy 12 step horseshit) to segue into a massage session. He put his hands on her shoulders and began to massage her, telling her it must have been hard for her when her father was drinking. She touched his hand. The perverted mantra always began something like this: “Yes, yes. I know. Yes, that’s right…” She stood up slowly, and turned toward him. At 19, she stood almost six feet tall and she was painfully beautiful—enough boys and men had already pointed this out to her. She knew this, but never felt it. 

“Did you, ummm,” she said as sultrily as she could manage without laughing or driving her knee into his groin, “Did you want me to suck it?” She slowly brought the fingers of one of his hands to her mouth as she said this and eyed his suddenly rising gorge. 

Joey Hill whose sole claim to fame had been at the age of 31 when he violated a 14 year old in the bathroom stall of a coffee house he frequented, was completely fucking flummoxed. This hot piece of 19-year-old ass was coming on to him and her dad was less than a few feet away. Was it that easy? His eyes met hers in utter and complete surprise as if to say, What? 

“I bet you do,” she laughed and dropped his hand, spinning around and walking away. “I should tell my dad, you fucking pig.” 

“Daddy!” She yelled. She remembered all the color draining from Joey Sick Fuck’s face as she proceeded to ask her father if she could borrow his car. Joey Sick Fuck, violator of a 14 year old confused mess of a girl who had only been off crystal meth and heroin for a week, stood on the porch with his boner slowly waning–his jaw dropped in shock, surprise, horror and then relief–remained completely fucking flummoxed for several minutes. In one instant he had envisioned bending her over the car in the garage and just giving it to her there and then– fucking her from behind, grabbing handfuls of her hair to ride her like a (whore) horse– and then suddenly he saw a nasty fistfight between two grown men, one accused of trying to rape the other’s daughter. The dichotomy left one unsure, confused and horny man standing there, unsure of whether to run away or go home immediately and jerk off to what could have been, but never was… 

This was one in a series of discoveries of the Power she held over men. This she used to her advantage for she hated them so much. Toying with them this way always gave her pleasure. She had had her share of one-night stands (more than a few starting the same way as Sick Fuck had attempted to lay his Mack on her and more than a few that were several years older then her…or her father, for that matter). She had had her share of anonymous gropings and grapplings in drunken alleys, cars, and bedrooms. (And, when she got to college, desks and office floors.) She graduated with a 3.56 GPA. Some classes she did well in, others she didn’t. Some things were rudimentary like that. It was rudimentary political science: she who had the gold made the rules. She knew what was between her legs and in the way she acted towards men was gold. All of that would change, eventually. The power of sex and attraction and the relationship with her father would somehow meld into the great tragedy of her life from which all of her emptiness and fear of being left alone would come. 

It was desolate November day when she found him—a week after her birthday—when the wind was most cruel and the nights began to start earlier. She remembered that she was not in a good mood to begin with—she was irritated, angry and snappy. The front door was locked, so she went in through the back door, by the washroom. When she stepped in, the first thing she noticed was the smell—a musty smell of gunpowder, shit and piss. As she recoiled from the smell, she noticed her father slumped over on top of the washing machine. He was half on the dryer and half on the washer, mouth agape, tongue hanging out of his mouth. The moment was eternal—she stood and watched, studied—and remembered. The bullet did not exit and splatter his brains all over the walls like in the movies. Rather, it ricocheted inside his skull, leaving bloody dents on his balding pate and forehead. Trails of blood seeped from the cracks, tracing lines spider leg rivers down his face and neck. There was so much blood. Congealed blood. Bloody jellies, she thought before she ran outside and started throwing up. Out of all the places to try and off himself, he did it in the fucking washroom, she thought as she retched all over the backyard, with her dog running wildly in circles around her. 

After that, November was the cruelest month. First her birthday and then the anniversary of daddy’s suicide. She was thinking about this when the TV went off abruptly, signaling that Mike’s TV show was over and that it was  time to either eat, fuck, sleep or shit. He rose, belched loudly and lumbered into the bathroom, slammed the door. Time to shit, she thought, as the image of the father she never mourned dissipated. She put the laundry away. 

The rest of the night was a blur—chores, phone calls with people whose lives were as vacuous and vapid as hers. We are who we love, she thought. Dread sank into her the way her fourth abortion did. Emptiness as a rock. A god sized hole. 

She was home alone the day the world ended. She was starting at the Tube when suddenly, the Emergency Broadcast signal announced that this was not, in fact, a fucking test. The signal droned and before she could receive the official news, there were  heard screams outside. Then, screech of tires, metal on metal, more screams. Gunshots. Maniacal whelping. Inhuman ululations.  Sirens and air raid serenades. The universe burped. Everything was wrong There was an empty feeling not unlike the one she usually felt. Then, the TV was on again and  a news announcer came on,  but his customary and signature upbeat  mannerisms were strained and surreal. Because the Real Thing never came with a script. Haltingly, the reporter relayed  an update: At 3:33 p.m. Eastern Standard Time people all over the world began disappearing, causing mass destruction and mayhem as all forms of transportation, commerce and utilities were rendered inoperable—or suddenly left without someone to operate them. The initial reports as to the number of ‘missing persons’ was somewhere in the “thousands’ but then the announcer began sweating profusely and said THE DISAPPEAREDS several times. Phone and communication lines were jammed, the internet was mostly unavailable, which threw the things it controlled into a hyperspace  shut down. Chaos was ensuing as looters, religious fanatics and criminal opportunists ran amok in the streets. Religious leaders were proclaiming this as the Second Coming, the Rapture that was promised to happen where all of those lucky enough to get a free pass into Heaven were saved from the horrors and abominations that were about to be released by the Antichrist. The Antichrist, the newscaster said—now more than just a little uncomfortable as the weight of the situation seemed to sink in—was the son of the Devil. Many believed that he was at the head of a global cabal that was systematically destroying the world with destructive policies, laws and economic institutions. There were unconfirmed reports that the UN building was “under siege” by fanatics intent upon proving the UN’s complicity in the global conspiracy. This Rapture, he went on, signaled the Beginning of the End. 

Laura listened in disbelief as the newsman talked about the advisories issued by the State Department for all persons to be electronically fingerprinted immediately, in order to preempt identity theft and similar fraud in order to escape bad debts, increase wealth and otherwise benefit from the sudden physical disappearance of thousands of people. Bedlam had ensued at the White House, as the President and his cabinet struggled to keep order amidst chaos of such immense proportions. (The White House, it was reported, was unaffected by the inexplicable tragedy, as only the service staff were among the missing. The President was preparing to make a statement and it would be broadcast live later on) She sat there, stunned and horrified, and then became aware of the sounds of chaos—barking dogs, sirens, screams, breaking glass, and an occasional gunshot (Murder? Or was it suicide?). She heard arguments and the moans, screams and laughter. She guessed all of these sounds were of those present when loved ones suddenly disappeared. She was numb as the old adage went, certainly unable to feel anything at the time. The newscaster rambled on, his brow growing sweatier as reports were handed to him by people who now walked right in front of the camera (the angle had since gotten wider, showing the whole studio; there were no facades to keep anymore. Laura wondered if anyone was even operating the camera. And then, as the dream always went, she heard a knock on the door. It was a priest. He had dark sunglasses on and he looked like Leonard Cohen. 

The priest smiled, extended a claw and said, “Hello, Laura. I’m here to rape you.” 

That’s usually when she woke up. 

It was 4 a.m. Mike was in a self-induced coma. The stereo was still on; Chuck Berry sang about how a lot of women were shedding tears over a brown-eyed handsome man. She rose, went and got a drink of water, returned to bed. The dream was a recurring one, a lingering place that returned to her every so often in the vulnerable twilight of sleep. In many ways Laura had come to accept it as much as she had accepted the feelings of emptiness, boredom and depression that had long ago seemed to become a part of her. 

She lie there for several more minutes….and then an hour and then a fugue of insomnia. The backdrop was a low-grade hit parade of angst and lost love, drugs, sex, and the pain of being human. She reminisced–about all the things she would never be and Mike could never be for her. She mulled–over her inability to feel complete and the chronic feelings of emptiness that were as much a part of her as the skin she often felt like crawling out of. She pondered how often she thought of killing herself. She agonized over the countless one-night stands since then. She fretted over her body and her ability to be enough for all the people that needed her, let alone for herself. She felt as if she wandered around in a constant state of anxiety and always feeling as if something wasn’t right. She pained about her anger spells and how sometimes she got irascible without notice. She lamented her numbness in the face of love and thought once more of that man she trashed and left sabotaged something that was potentially beautiful and storybook sacred. She cried, finally, wondering how many conversations she’d had with her best friends in the past month where she failed to mention any of this. Mike lay oblivious to the sobs, to her pain and her inner turmoil, for that was his role and his purpose. He was impervious to any of it; he was a sham, a necessary convenience, an old habit that she desperately needed for the chaotic homeostasis that sustained her. 

She fell into one more tortured sleep as the birds began to hail the dawn of another day. She woke up a few hours later, and the feeling of unease and dread came to her, for she knew that it was the beginning of another day, and the bad dreams, she realized for the first time, weren’t so bad after all. 

 

1998/1999. Unpublished work. mab.