Please see author's note in the Prologue.

 ONE: On Any Other Day, That Might Seem Strange

in which Squire introduces himself, rediscovers his place in the world, and finds his way home.

 8 AUGUST

 I pray and nothing happens;

Jesus, it's all in my mind

You say stop looking for answers

and reasons they're all in your mind

ah that's better -- nothing like a good quote to overcome the terrifying tabula rasa of the first blank page in a blank book. That one, of course, is Echo and the Bunnymen. They are one of the things that defines me -- one of the countless particles that, in a colloid, a miasma, makes me that one -- Michael Bronwynn Squire.

This is my diary. I don't want this to be read by the wrong people. If you are one of the wrong people, namely, someone other than M.B.S., please do me a heap big favor and PUT MY MOTHERFUCKING BOOK DOWN YOU PIG-SHIT EATING COCKSUCKER!!!!. Ha ha... if you're still reading, you're going to burn in hell while the demons rip you a plethora of new assholes, none of which are going to work, so you deserve anything you get.

So what do I want to talk about today? Well, I'm supposed to be at work right now, but I called in sick, claiming a migraine (a very convenient excuse. How can they prove me wrong? A CAT scan?). Instead of going to Link-Up and instructing a whole new wave of subhumans on how to join in that grand universe known as the Internet, so that they too can "surf" the "web", I did something good. I went to Art Store. I love Art Store -- I love anything called only what it is -- Liquor Store, Restaurant, Cafe. I bought zipatone and a new pen and a huge, lovely bottle of dark green ink in a really great bottle that I actually kissed as I was in the checkout line. The cute underage goth girl who works there laughed at me. I don't know her name, but she knows mine -- I'm in there about once a week, usually when I know she's working. She was wearing some kind of tattery velvet thing today -- hair up in chopsticks.

And I bought a new blank, lined book to use as my diary. I've been using my sketchbook too much for random text observations, and not enough for drawing street corners or ugly people on the bus. Lise suggested I start a diary, so here we are. Actually, both Lise and my mother have been on me to start a diary; mom because she thinks it'll improve my writing skills (she'd rather have an author for a son than a lowly comic artist), and Lise, so that I'll stop talking about myself so much. I think I can quote her -- "Obviously you're a supreme egotist, Squire. There's nothing inherently wrong with that -- but sometimes I don't want to hear about what your favorite kinds of cheese are, and why." Lise is so rad.

Right now... I'm sitting in my room having some more coffee, writing at my desk, listening to a remix of "Temple of Dreams" by Messiah that Lise put onto tape for me when it came out. I like this remix best of all, even though, only two years after it was released, it already sounds quaint. I remember when I thought this shit was the hardest of the hard, and now it sounds like Lawrence Welk. We set up these insane paths of progress for ourselves, only to overtake ourselves and become lost, hundreds of steps away from where we thought we'd end up.

Melissa and Rob are outside, listening to the Beach Boys. Half the reason why I put on Messiah is because I know that techno annoys her -- she's one of those people who's a fascist about music made after 1968. I like old stuff as much as the next fellow, but for God's sake, join the 20th century sometime.

Things I need to do today --

balance checkbook. Yuck.

Return videos (BEFORE 6 p.m.!)

Check e-mail. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Deliver art supplies to Squirrell

Call Mom

Call Lise

This is the way my first diary begins.

My handwriting starts out very careful, me being a born letterer, but then gets sloppier as I began to write faster, more cursively. It's a grey composition book with a marble-printed cover, the black plastic spine cracked now; it makes a crunchy sound when it opens and closes. The texture of the paper is the silkiness of cheap bond stock, worn with age and softened by the moist air of basements.

After finishing writing my to-do list, I'd closed the book with a resounding slam and went outside to see what was going on. As mentioned, my housemate Melissa and her boyfriend Rob were in the kitchen, cooking another one of their fright-meals that always seemed to contain lima beans or TVP, and that Melissa never ate more than a few bites of, leaving the remainder in the fridge for me to discover and dispose of, weeks later. I leaned against the doorjamb of the kitchen and lit a cigarette, a devastatingly witty and cutting remark poised on the tip of my tongue. Unfortunately, before I could deliver it, the telephone rang. Melissa and Rob completely ignored it, so I had to run across the room and pick it up. "Laika, Melissa, and Squire's Angst Volume Warehouse, how can I take your order?" I answered.

"Hi, honey."

"Oh, hi, Mom."

"You sound even more bitter than usual."

I walked the phone on its long cord back into my room and shut the door. "Oh, it's that fucker Rob. I'm so sick of him being in my house smelling like Brut and scratching his basket all day. He doesn't pay rent, he doesn't pay bills, he just sits around the house and stinks."

As usual, Mom laughed her ass off at my ranting. She thought it was the funniest thing ever. "Why don't you just confront him, Squire? It's your house, too."

"Confront? Me? You mean the kid who saw the bowl of every toilet in high school from close up, courtesy of the wrestling team? That's a great one, Mom. Why don't I just join the Green Berets."

"Come on. Get Laika to help you."

"Laika doesn't care about him one way or the other -- she's never home. She's over at her girlfriend's house all night. Rob's a really scary guy. Lise saw him beat the shit out of some guy last weekend. We're talking bloody nose here. And it wasn't even for any reason -- he was just drunk."

"And you told me you wanted to live with these people. What happened to 'Melissa is such an awesome girl, Mom, you're gonna love her,' huh? I told you, Squire, never move in with friends. Especially friends from your college days."

"Yeah, I know. It's everybody's favorite phrase, 'I Told You So.'" I leaned against my art table, scattering pencils and wads of Art Gum. Melissa and Laika and I had been Student Union fixtures all throughout senior year, holding down couches, drinking hot tea, smoking, and filling out crossword puzzles. While we each had our own distinct social group -- me with the artists (and Lise, who wasn't in school but hung around with us on campus), Laika with the stoners, and Melissa with the hippies -- the three of us spent hours a day with one another, courteously bringing each other tea and newspapers and keeping an ear out for good drug deals. "I thought I could trust them. We all knew each other so well. But they just turned on me all of a sudden. I think it was Rob. Everybody likes Rob except me and Lise. Nobody can understand why I don't love living with the big lug."

"Speaking of Lise, tell her to call me. I haven't heard from her in weeks!"

"She sent you e-mail. She's actually been wondering why you haven't replied."

"Oh, actually, that's what I was calling you about. I can't get the Internet to work."

I ground my teeth. "Mom, it's totally easy, I even wrote you custom instructions."

"Squire, you're assuming a level of fundamental knowledge that I just don't have. Assume you're teaching a six-year-old how to do it."

"Half the six-year-olds in America could teach me my job."

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 arises. "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?" and at the same time she said "crash", I heard glass break outside. "Hang on, Mom," I bit out, threw the phone down as hard as I could onto the floor, and stormed outside. Someone had thrown my totally one-of-a-kind blue handmade martini glass against the door and it lay in shards on the carpet.

"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. I tried about three times before I could breathe successfully. Rob stood over me, shaking his canned-ham-sized fist. "Don't talk to my girlfriend like that!" he said.

"...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 shag. "Get up, Squire. You are 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." Melissa and Rob turned as one, and disappeared into her room.

My body felt like one big bruise. I'm not that 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. I fell down."

"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."

"With what money? You know how much it costs to get a place these days? Could we... could we try this again later? Why don't you just call your ISP? At least that's a local call."

"Well, OK. 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 mega-stoner hippie lesbian earth-mother lover. We watched some 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 the rent yet," Laika reminded me.

"Yeah, I forgot."

"Bullshit, you forgot."

"I forgot," I insisted.

"You should cough it up," said Laika knowingly. "And stop listening to that stupid eighties music."

"'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."

"My girlfriend is moving to Seattle," she said, leaning over to grab another cookie from the plate.

"That sucks," I said. "Why?"

"She hates Portland," Laika shrugged. She was an anthropology student who hadn't managed to turn her thesis in on time, and just never bothered to come back or finish her degree. 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 kind of appealing, in a rock-chick kind of skanky way. "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, the fucking rednecks. 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'm not asking Portland to marry me or anything... I just don't see what's so wrong with it."

"But anyway..."

"Is that the last cookie?"

"Uh, yeah, sorry."

"You bought 'em," I said. "Thanks for the smoke."

"Any time, pal, any time. You know that. We're still good." She shook my hand elaborately, her handfuls 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 and wiped it on the leg of my jeans.

10 august, 12:35 pm

My favorite things. (per request.)

kisses. Like 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 slut, "Juba". She's fifteen and she and her slutty friend "Arachne" take pictures of themselves wearing nothing but black lace panties, 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.

Dave McKean. 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 extra U. Favourite Bunnymen song -- "Thorn of Crowns" with "Do It Clean" a close second.

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 enough people laughed at me -- even random people on the street -- that I shaved it off. I have that as one of my most painful memories.

The word "slovenly".

6:00 pm

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 you? I shouldn't complain, I guess -- it does pay me well for a whole shitload of slacking -- but goddamn it, I hate people. Most of all I hate Trace. He's a fucker. 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, both to 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 was one of Thomas', 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, 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. "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 was looking 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 with long hollow cheeks like Dracula, 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, I'm outta here." 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."

"Yo, yo to you, too." 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. At that time, 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. At that time, also, August 10th, 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. 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 you see me and just 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, just that work sucked particularly today. And man, Rob was such an asshole to me the other day."

"Melissa's boyfriend? The ogre?"

"Ogre's too nice a word to describe him. They were having a little lover's quarrel right outside my room while I was trying to get Mom's connection set up, and then they broke my blue martini glass, and then the son of a bitch hit me in the chest so hard I couldn't breathe."

"What?"

"He -- fucking'---" I was wordless, apoplectic. "He fuckin' hit me. And he broke the Blue Martini."

"Not the Blue Martini!"

"And then they made me clean it up." That was something of an embellishment -- I'd cleaned it up myself without any encouraging, since I didn't want big chunks of blue glass stabbing me in the foot every time I wanted to go into my room.

"That guy's a fuckin' psycho."

"He's gonna kill me in my sleep."

"I wouldn't doubt it," 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 cafe."

"It's your favorite cafe. Besides, we always go there. They don't even like you 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 fuckin' habit."

"I'm hanging out with you, aren't I?" I pointed out.

We did some rassling 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 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 -- about ten people sitting around sipping tall glasses of coffee, picking at massive sagging slabs of tiramisu or cheesecake or their Legendary Scary Foccacia Monster sandwiches that always fell apart into your lap if you tried to be macho and eat them 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.

Cafe 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 people are pretty boring and pretentious, though the "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. 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 vinyl 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.

"Diary," I said, covering it with my elbow and finishing the last sentence.

gross national product.

"Really? How cool... you're not drawing in it, are you?" She grinned.

I gave her "the offended eyebrow". "Of course not, what do you take me for? Besides, I left my sketchbook at home. I'm an inker now." I put the cap back on my pen. "A letterer."

"Bullshit, Squire. You're an artist. Look at you. Every inch the art fag. Everything about you says 'tortured"..."

Lise's soliloquy was interrupted by the less than cute counter guy, 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 of something -- knows that I've had a really shitty day what with trace always lurking around. 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. Before I was hired, he told Moll she could have a promotion if she would agree to "not make waves". She took it. He apparently tried to ask her out once, 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," she said. She smiled patiently. "Put it away."

"Oh. What were you saying?"

She ran her hand over her porcupine quills. "It was nothing. Just bitching about work. I'm getting a raise, though, and they're thinking about making me primary shift manager on Tuesdays and Thursdays."

"So what does that mean?"

"More responsibility. More money. I'm mainly excited about the money. I've been working there for long enough, they might as well throw me a bone now."

"Oh, well I guess that's cool."

"It means I can buy more drugs," she winked. "And it means I can buy my pathetic friends drinks when the meanest guy in the world smacks 'em around."

"I tell you," I said, shaking my head," you should have beaten him up when you had the chance."

Later we went a couple of blocks down the street to the Cazbar and Lise and I drank several kamikazes apiece. She actually went down for the count -- forehead pressed into her arm on the table, mumbling incoherently -- and in the interval I wrote more.

Dude here we are at the cazbarrr. A very cheesy joke that nobody's ever really minded. Portland's way too mellow for that. Bad puns abound. I have had five cocktails and Lise has had four and a shot of plain vodka. I think we might be drinking too much, but damn it I like to drink. That's what your 20s are all about -- getting totally fucked up and learning why it's dumb, so you don't spend the rest of your life as a pathetic alkie. Like most of my British relatives. They've all got dreadful cirrhosis of the liver and cancers and blah de blah. They drink pint after pint after pint night after night after night. I don't really have many younger relatives that I know, but James, the one that's a little younger than me, is a complete raver and never sleeps because he's tweaking on x all the time. He doesn't drink though.

A toast! To cannibal women!

She walked me to "the fork in the road" -- the corner of 39th and Hawthorne -- where we "merry meet and merry part and merry meet again", which is what Lise always said when we went our separate ways there after getting wasted at the Cazbar. I stood still and watched her lose her balance and stumble into the curb, ripping the knee of her new red stockings. She popped up again, laughing, and waved at me some more, staggering backward a few steps.

I walked slowly back to my own house. It was a lovely night -- warm and clear, all the stars pricked out in the sky like pinholes in a blue velvet backdrop. It seemed a waste to go inside and destroy this happy tipsy feeling, so I sat on the porch and smoked another cigarette before I went in.

The house was quiet and dark. I tiptoed in, shutting the door and locking it behind me as quietly as I could. Despite my best efforts, though, Rob shuffled down from Melissa's room as I was in the kitchen getting a glass of water. His eyes were completely closed and he felt his way along the kitchen cabinets. I stood stock still, not even breathing, hoping he'd just go past me to the bathroom and not notice that I was there, but he paused and cocked his head back, regarding me through his closed eyelids. His package hung distended and gruesomely large inside his permanently stained white underwear -- I couldn't take my eyes away from it and I couldn't breathe.

"'Zat you, you little dipshit?" he muttered.

I said nothing. His eyeballs darted uneasily behind his closed lids. He was sleepwalking, it seemed, or trying to freak me out, one of the two. It was working, if the latter was his intention.

"I'm gonna kill you one of these days," Rob mumbled.

I drew in my breath before I could stop myself.

"I'll kill you in your sleep."

I slid down the kitchen cabinets until I was sitting on the floor, then I crab-walked to the kitchen doorway. He lumbered forward, after me.

I collapsed onto the living room carpet. He stood over me, still mumbling something about killing under his breath. Melissa appeared at the kitchen doorway, dressed only in a tie-dyed T-shirt, her pubes a dark stain visible under the hem. She grabbed Rob by the arm and steered him back toward the kitchen. "He's sleepwalking again," she mumbled, yawning.

"He says he's going to kill me," I said faintly.

"He says that every night. Just go to bed."

"How long has he been sleepwalking?"

"Since he was a kid," Melissa explained. "It's stress-related."

"Oh," I said, and got up. "Stress-related, huh? What's he got to be stressed about?"

"You wouldn't understand," she said, glaring over her shoulder. "All you care about is yourself." She guided Rob up the stairs and slammed the door behind her.

I lay naked in bed, unable to sleep for a long time. When I dozed off, I woke with a jerk of panic, spent the rest of the night staring at the luminous green numbers of the clock, listening to the infinitesimal click of the digital numbers reforming themselves. When the sky outside began to lighten, I took a shower and put on clean clothes and left before the sun was even up.

I spent the morning waiting on the sidewalk outside Cafe Trieste, waiting for them to open at seven, reading the newspaper.

12 august 9:45 pm

Oh, shit, I forgot to write anything yesterday. Well, what did I do? I got up super early. went to work. Juba sent me another picture -- just her at the mall food court in the town where she lives, wearing a letterman's jacket and really tight black jeans -- she's leaning over the railing as if to spit into a fountain. She has flippy big mall hair and wears a lot of mascara. I ate a baloney sandwich for lunch (with mustard, white bread -- oooh yeah) and then went to Squirrell and picked up some mail. Then I came home and Melissa had actually made something edible -- veggie lasagna -- but she wouldn't let me have any, begging the leftovers clause. So I was very lean and hungry and sad until Laika came out of her room stoned and we went to the sev for nachos and juice. Then we went home and I went to bed and masturbated and fell asleep.

Today I... went to work (nothing from J.), then went to the other work and inked for a couple of hours and listened to Job talk about his beautiful, wonderful, gorgeous, smart, funky girlfriend. I just got home a little while ago and Laika gave me a pot brownie. I'm eating toasted baloney sandwiches (three of them, with mustard and American cheese, lightly buttered -- ooooh yeah) and writing in my diary, and listening to Skinny Puppy. I never thought that industrial music and marijuana would go together, but that was before I'd really tried dope. Now I can't imagine listening to Nitzer Ebb, or Ministry, or god forbid New Order without being baked first. Actually I don't like New Order anymore. I used to -- in high school they were all the rage. I tend much more to the Joy Division side of things. Besides, Joy Division sounds more like the Bunnymen, which can only be a good thing.

Wow, I didn't know I could ramble like a stoner on the page. I thought I only did that out loud.

SQUIRE'S IMMORTAL TOASTED BALONEY SANDWICH RECIPE:

2 slices of white bread (Wonder is best -- don't settle for less)

2 slices of Oscar Meyer all-beef bologna (actually, any baloney's fine)

1 slice of American cheese (anything but Kraft -- if I wanted a glass of milk, I'd drink a glass of milk. I'm in this for the cheese, thank you very much.)

Scrapings of butter

lightly butter one side of a slice of bread. lay it butter side down in a hot skillet -- cast iron works best. Add a slice of 'loney, then the cheese, then the second slice of 'loney -- then top it off with the last slice of bread, also buttered on the outward side.

Hold your sandwich carefully when you flip it. If this is too much trouble, you can do half a slice of cheese on the bread before the baloney. I don't like too much cheese myself -- it's bad for the digestion. One thing that can be said about Michael Bronwynn Squire is that he has a healthy colon.

Uh... stoned much?

Good night. Time to jerk off.

13 august 11:02 am

I'm at work -- hiding the comp book under my tech support manual whenever anyone walks by. It's taken me ten minutes to write this sentence. Fuck it.

1:28 PM

Lunchtime. What a semi-civilized notion.

If I had a car or a scooter I'd go to Triste for lunch. At lunchtime it's an even more bleak place than it is at night -- the sunlight coming in through the windows gives off a milky grey luminescence that makes everyone look like they're recovering from viral pneumonia. Instead I'm in the bar downstairs from Link-Up having an over priced and understuffed sandwich, watching "Cops" on the closed-circuit TV.

So what am I thinking about today? Mainly Link-Up. Tech support. The Internet. The Industry. The other poor schmucks like me, whose only crime is that we weren't geeky enough, early enough, to become hardcore geeks - programmers, system administrators, software developers. I'm bitter, yeah. I was a nerd, but I spent all my high school pimple years in the art room, stuffing Rapidographs down my pants and penciling superhero physique. How was I to know?

I'm getting kind of tipsy. I had a pink lemonade and gin, perfect on a sticky-hot day like this, with my krab salad sammich. Getting tipsy brings out my sense of injustice.

2:15 PM

All right I'm thinking about work.

"What kind of person works at Link-Up?" Well, there's me, M. B. Squire, sarcastic, voluble, my cubicle decorated with pages from R. Crumb comics and every postcard I can find of Isabella Rosellini. (That makes five, mostly European, postmarked. I had a pen pal.)

To the immediate left of me is Randy. He's blond and stocky and really into Windows 95 -- I mean, really into it. He's engaged to some chick and they show no signs of actually getting married; I think they just get off on the anticipation, the ego trip of dangling the possibility of marriage over the heads of their single friends. No decorations in his cubicle.

Around the corner from me is Moll Malone. I love to write or speak her name -- so 18th Century! She sounds like an adventurer. Actually she's more of a boring normal suburban girl with a long history of customer service positions. She's got a great phone voice and excels at calming angry, agitated customers (not a skill that I myself share). Decorations are family and boyfriend Polaroids, employee of the month placard, cute fuzzy puppy calendar.

Richard and Dave across the room. They spend a lot of time off the phone talking about upgrades, sweet new hardware, whatnot. True geeks. Dave is squat, beefy, vaguely slovenly; computer-generated pinup girls and the drawing of Tank Girl I did for him in his cube. Richard is tall and blunt, probably strong as hell (but from what...?). I've drawn him a couple of times as a typical thug in TEXTILES. Cubicle decorations kind of like a mixture of Moll's and Dave's.

Lisa and Thomas are OK. They're on the other side of the room. Good support folks. I've never noticed what they have up in their cubicles -- maybe I should go look.

3:00 pm

Busted.

Trace came by when I was standing over there talking to Lisa. He helpfully informed me that I hadn't picked up a support call in 40 minutes. He just slips it in, subtly reminding us that he's monitoring us, watching our phone stats like a nervous nurse checking in on the vital signs of an ER patient. That fucker.

Now I'm all agitated. Maybe I'll take my cigarette break now.

"Squire."

He followed me down and out, whisking away my cigarette exhale with a wrinkled hand. His eyes, two beads of jet floating in custard.

"Taking a break already?"

"Actually," I coughed, "this is the time when my breaks are regularly scheduled every day. It was your idea to institute timed and scheduled AM and PM breaks -- and a fine idea it was too." I smiled, showing him all my teeth.

His predatory smile, like a shark's, nauseated me to see it. It did not mean good things. "Actually, Squire, I figure since you wasted at least a half hour off the phone, you've forfeited your break for the afternoon. And just to be fair, you should stay on the phone for an extra fifteen minutes late this evening."

"Uh, actually, I can't do that today, Trace -- I have to go to Squirrell today and be there at five-thirty. I can't make it there in time if --"

"You're a creative guy, Squire. I'm sure you can think of something to tell them." The wrinkled mitt smacked me on the shoulder. "And move away from the front of the building when you're smoking -- we've had complaints."

When I got back to my desk, while on a call to a know-nothing podunk in Astoria, I sketched Trace on a another Post-it -- the shifty li'l eyes, eight arachnid hands, the claws dripping with gore. And the smile. He held the head of an unfortunate supportnik between double rows of teeth. The end result was so perfect that I had to put the Astoria podunk on hold and laugh.

Moll came around, wondering what had me in stitches. I showed her the Post-it. Her face reddened and swelled, just a hint of a smile warping her mouth into a curly bracket.

5:28PM

on the bus.

drew great caricature of Trace. Moll liked it. She's kind of pretty when she looks like she's going to explode.

A new rock opera about relativity -- "Einstein on the bus". Old Al finds out the hard way that, when you're on a bus at rush hour and you're late, time is objectively elongated and subjectively compressed.

I'm trying not to think about that whole Rob thing.

My boss at Squirrell Graphics was actually named Rooster. His parents named him that. Nobody knew why. We called him Cock. Cock Kaplan. It didn't help that, in the right light, he did kind of resemble a penis. A penis in a polo shirt.

I used to wear my Squirrell Graphics polo shirt at first. I was proud to be part of the collective. We were vanguards, very young, idealistic doesn't even begin to describe it, and thrilled to find that our little venture into comics publishing seemed to be going somewhere. Ten years ago Cock Kaplan got some money from an insurance settlement and started publishing indie titles of his friends that had gotten dropped from their regular houses, or had never been "really published" before. Three years ago Cock took a shine to my 16-page mini-comics, designed, drawn, Xeroxed, and distributed by hand (well, Mom sold a couple at her store), stuck me with someone like-minded, and gave us some money.

Squirrell was one of the few independent comics publishing houses that wasn't floundering; it was doing quite well, in fact, with twenty titles, five of them profitable (TEXTILES being one of these), two of them really profitable, a quarterly, a nice business in T-shirts, and a seemingly endless stream of beautiful 17-year-old front receptionists. If we were lucky, they knew how to make coffee and Xeroxes; usually they spent a couple of days talking to their boyfriends on the phone and doing their nails and reading glossy magazines, and then there was a new one in her place, sometimes with a different shade of hair.

I now used my Squirrell polo shirt to wipe my face after I shaved -- it was softer than any of my towels -- and I just smiled when every other artist on board got to do the cover of the quarterly except me. I'd done the first one, beautiful exquisite eight-color pointillism, psychedelic as hell, practically an optical illusion, and I hadn't been asked back because the first issue of the quarterly didn't sell half its print run. Was that my fault? Were people scared away by the mad pure vision I'd had one rainy day? All right, so I was too good for comics. A lot of comic artists are.

"You were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago." Cock was shooting hoops at his miniature basketball setup on the wall. "We do have deadlines, you know."

"Sorry. I had to work late at my other job."

"Your other job." Sneer. "Squire, I really think you should consider getting serious about your comics career. A man cannot obey two masters -- well, he can, but he produces shit if he does. The quality of your pages has gone way downhill."

"Look, man, I can't live on what I make here. It's nice, but I'd be living in a cardboard box. I have student loans --"

"My name's not 'Man'." Cock's eyes were ball bearings forged from nail-blue steel. I couldn't look into them -- not even when he was being nice to me. "The fact of the matter is, you're late. I'd like to think we sometimes pretend to be professionals. Go in there and see if Job is done with his last panel."

When I was working on my own, everything was great. I was still in school, taking a superbly light load of senior courses including a studio art thesis, and it was nothing to hole up for eight hours or so with a bottle of Tanqueray and crank out page after page of "refreshing line drawings reminiscent of Art Deco and the Yellow Kid" and "stories that had [the critics] apoplectic with laughter". It gave me a special, nearly erotic thrill to walk into a comic book store, the landscape of my childhood and adolescence, and to see my own handwriting, my own brush stroke (and it still does, on those weird occasions when I find a comic store that still has back issues of TEXTILES). It was nothing. Three years ago. Painfully close, but far enough away that it might as well have never happened. Comics were in trouble. I was in trouble.

Job Listener was at the light table, nose almost pressed against the glass. "Laika called," he told me emotionlessly, tracing medieval lettering from a photocopy.

"Really? Why?"

"Something about Robert going through your room."

"What?!' I grabbed the phone, palms sticky already. Melissa answered. "Melissa, was Robert in my room?" I yelped, my voice shattering like an adenoidal 14-year-old's.

"I don't know, Squire. Why are you so paranoid?" She sounded, as usual, disgusted.

"Is he there?"

"Yep."

"Let me talk to him." I ground my teeth through the crackle of static, a low hum of cellular interference.

"Yello?" "Robert, Laika called here and said you were in my room... were you?"

"Yeah."

"What the hell were you doing?"

"Looking for cigarettes. I was out and you owe me a pack. Oh, and I looked at some of your comic books. You've got a lot of valuable looking stuff."

"Christ!"

"What are you getting so freaked over? I didn't do anything. Oh, and Melissa says to buy toilet paper on your way home." And then he hung up.

I hung up the phone and sat on a stool next to Job.

"Why so sad, Brad?" he said.

"My housemates are turning on me," I said.

"Maybe you shouldn't be so paranoid," said Job. "It's really annoying to live with someone who's paranoid."

11:30 pm

Wow, I've written a shitload today. This diary stuff is addictive.

I made Lise come home with me. She chided me (is that the right word? It can't be "chode", since that's the area between your balls and your asshole) for being too much of a weenie to go home alone and beat the living shit out of Rob, like I want to do. I actually kind of like it when Lise teases me. It reminds me of high school when my friends and I all pretended to hate each other. It was far more easy to deal with than possibly fake emotional closeness; when everything is a lie, it makes life more comfortable.

Asshole Rob has completely ransacked my room -- all my comics are out of their bags, strewn around, my bed all fucked up like he wrestled an alligator in it.

Melissa and Rob weren't even home when we got here; neither was Laika, though she packed her bong and left it in my room with a note that said "Life sucks. Smoke a bowl." Lise and I smoked it and then didn't clean my room; instead we listened to Prodigy and read some of the comics, which I haven't done in a long time. After a while she gave me a hug and walked home. Now I'm listening to the Bunnymen.

some pray for heaven while we live in hell.

my life's the disease.

Amen, bro.

I spent Saturday afternoon at Cafe Trieste, downing cup after cup of coffee with heaps of sugar, nibbling very slowly on an oatmeal cookie, and sketching. I was no longer the primary penciller on TEXTILES, the book that had made my name (and helped to define Squirrell as a house), the book that Job and Cock and I came up with one night when we were pretty drunk and sitting around Cock's dinner table and ogling Cock's voluptuous trophy wife. It's not as though I'd run out of ideas -- I still scripted them, gave the scripts to Job, who blocked the panels and penciled in the action of the panels. Job's drawing style was not completely dissimilar to mine, and in fact he studied my pencils for a good long time while we were both young and dumb and just signed to Squirrell Graphics. Job told me that he loved my pencils, that he loved the way I drew faces, reactions, expressions. I was, however, not so good at drawing interiors -- rooms, walls, drapery, what have you. Cock Kaplan had, at the beginning of the summer, decided that we should switch roles, and that Job should do the pencils. Job had most of a degree in architecture, and he could draw an archway like you wouldn't believe. The more "sensitive work", the inking, was given to me. Oftentimes the pencils just blocked out the scene and the inker actually did the "artwork" -- but Job was a professional, and he pencilled like an inker. To change anything of his would be to throw the entire panel, the entire page, out of composition -- I'd have to do it all over again, from scratch, and I simply wasn't good enough to do, on my own, the kind of intensely detailed books that TEXTILES was known for. I just had to bite the bullet and ink precisely over what Job had drawn, fixing his mark in stone.

I had a test printing of the next issue coming out with me at Triste; every once in a while, I'd take it out of my bag and look at it. I'd done the cover -- Cabby, our hero, sitting in a La-Z-Boy chair with his eyes strapped open, screaming at a TV screen displaying grey slashes of static (I'd really enjoyed painting that). The caption, lettered by Job, read "A Clockwork Duck A l'Orange". It was a terrible joke, but ... whatever. The interior, though, seemed to be all Job -- his ovals as opposed to my compass-perfect circles, his Cabby a skinny, lanky, slouching figure instead of the disturbingly cute, knobby-kneed, blank-eyed cipher I knew he actually was. I'd inked the entire issue in two sleepless nights, held aloft by cigarettes and high-speed techno music, without even seeing what I was drawing. I knew I shouldn't have been looking at the issue, obsessing over it -- I'd only see the flaws -- but all I saw was how much the title no longer belonged to me.

I wrote into my sketchbook (which I don't have in front of me, but I'll never forget this phrase)

I am ever more a supporting player in my own fucking saga.

I felt a thick lump rising in my throat, and let my pencil rest in the crease of my sketchbook. I left the whole mess sitting there -- coffee rings, mug, plate with crumbs -- and went to the little phone booth at the back of the cafe.

"Hello?"

"Lise, get me out of this self-inflicted hell."

"Oh, Squire. You're not torturing yourself again, are you?"

"God, what am I doing here?" I moaned.

"You're finishing up whatever you're drinking, and you're getting on the bus and coming over here. I'll make you a mocha and some ramen and then we'll go see a show."

I brightened. "A show? Really? Who? Where? How much?"

"Shack-O-Love, at the Caravan, three dollars, I'll buy drinks. Actually, we can get in free, Jo's working the door tonight, and she'll let us in. You're heard Shack-O-Love, haven't you?"

"I don't remember what they sound like -- I was really drunk when they opened for Old Gold."

"Well, so were they. They're good -- kind of rockabilly punk with washboard and stuff. So hang up the phone, and get yer ass down here. I'm firing up the espresso machine as we speak." She gave a handy blast of steam on the phone to demonstrate.

So I hung up, packed up my stuff, put on my sunglasses, and walked out into the hot, smothery sunshine. I didn't have any sunscreen and the sun carved into my neck where it was exposed between my hair and my T-shirt. My skin is lily-white and the touch of sunlight actually hurts it -- I don't have much choice about my fashionable gothic pallor. My long pale hands looked like alien limbs on the bus stop, and tanned trucker types looked at me with revulsion and turned away. I checked my fly, checked my upper lip for a coffee mustache. Nothing was amiss -- it was my very person that revolted those pillars of society, those salts of the earth. I was a grotesque worm, a mushroom in the sunlight.

A bus came, vomiting orange exhaust, and I got on it and went directly to the back. I pulled my knees up to my chest and gripped my portfolio bag tightly to my chest, staring over it at the front of the bus. Old ladies, mohawked teenagers, tough guys in shellsuits -- they were all looking back and giving me glances that mixed disgust and impatience. By the time I got to the stop outside of Lise's apartment building, I was shaking, breathing hard, my palms greasy and slick on the plastic, textured leather, and I jumped out the back door of the bus and almost stumbled on the high curb.

"My God, Squire, you look like you just got buttfucked by a Nazi," Lise remarked. I staggered in and shut the door behind me, then leaned against it, panting.

"God, save me from those people," I gasped, and threw myself full length onto her queen-size futon. The flannel sheets were full of the comforting smell of Lise, and I was so grateful to feel safe and relaxed that I began cackling hysterically.

"Squire, you're a freak. Mocha?" She was wearing a perky gingham apron, and she held out a soup-bowl-sized mug at me with her head to one side.

"Like I need any more coffee." I took the mug and swallowed about a third of it at once.

"God, you have a big mouth." She pointed this out to me every once in a while. It was the first thing she'd ever said to me, during lunch in the lunchroom at Teddy Roosevelt High School, watching me cramming half of a tuna salad sandwich into my mouth at once. "I mean that anatomically. And in figurative terms, as well. Why don't you lay there and chill out? I'm just watching TV." She sat beside me, put a cigarette in one corner of her mouth and a joint in the other, and lit them with a single sweep of her lighter.

Lise's studio apartment was tiny but it had high ceilings and hardwood floors that made everything echo like a cathedral. There was a kitchen behind a nice little half-partition that was also a glass-fronted shelf; all of it was painted the whitest white, and she'd thrown cheap rag rugs at random on the floors, where they kept company with cast-off jeans, coats, shoes, magazines. The portrait I'd painted of Lise's mother was on the wall next to the window -- she stared out wide-eyed and accusatory, her mouth set in a hard thin line. The resemblance was remarkable.

I finished the other half of the joint and then smoked my own cigarette, staring uncomprehendingly at the television -- she was watching a home-shopping channel while she rubbed lotion into her paper-ravaged hands. I turned away from the TV and stared instead at the painting, into Lise's mother's acrylic eyes, tracing the little flecks of ur-color I'd painstakingly dashed into her irises. Before I knew it, I'd fallen asleep with my sunglasses on.

I awoke to the strains of Gustav Mahler. Lise was changing into a very short little dress with a fluttery skirt, dotted here and there with cigarette burn holes. She didn't notice me being awake; she was across the room in the kitchen area, fiddling with her bra straps, her underwear, sniffing her armpits. It was a gorgeous sight, really, and I got a very swift and abrupt just-waking-up erection. I turned over onto my face and sighed. "You awake?" came Lise's voice.

"Yep," I said into the pillow.

"You really conked out there for a while." She laughed. "You ready to go soon?"

"Yeah, yeah, gimme a minute." I got up and brushed past her to the bathroom. I knew Lise better than to think that she'd flip out if she saw me with a stiffy -- God knows she'd seen enough of them before -- but all the same, I didn't want her to see one that was actually caused by her, whether she knew it or not. I washed my face in cold water, put some eyedrops in until my contacts slid around pleasantly, and composed myself enough to emerge from the bathroom. Lise was lacing up her big boots, one unshaven rugby-player's leg up on the kitchen table. I lit a cigarette and stared out the window at the orange sun setting over the trees down Belmont.

We got on a bus downtown to the Caravan; it still wasn't dark yet, and nearly showtime. Lise got a pitcher of beer and we sat at a table across from the bar. We got bored waiting for the bands to start, and ended up having another pitcher and then some shots of whiskey, smoking dozens of cigarettes. Before we noticed much, the club was completely packed with sweaty rock people, all of them shouting at the tops of their lungs. I have no idea what the bands sounded like. Randy and Dave from Link-Up showed up, Randy with fiancee in tow, and they drank with us and we all shouted. I said something that I thought was funny to Fiancee and she pushed me, and then Randy pushed me. Lise pushed Randy, and then Lise and I were outside on the sidewalk, sitting on the curb.

I walked over behind the bus stop into the rock-gravel of the parking lot across from the club, and threw up. Nothing much came up at first, then it was almost entirely whiskey. "Oh, Christ," I said.

"C'mon, Squire, I know of this dude who's having a party tonight! He said we could show up as late as we wanted -- there's a keg of porter and a margarita bar."

"Oh... yeah... cool," I said weakly.

After staggering down the street for several blocks, I began to feel a little bit more sober. "God, I hate the Caravan," I burbled.

"Yeah, me too. What's up with that Randy dude?"

"Oh, I dunno. He's engaged to that piece of tanning-bed beef jerky."

"No shit. Damn, Squire, you must want your ass kicked -- do you know what you said to her?"

"No," I said, laughing.

"Don't even try to remember. You don't want to know."

The party was about twenty blocks away in Northwest; we lurched up a set of porch steps just to meet a herd of besotted people going the other way. "Hey Jonny -- Jonny --!" Lise blurted, dashing into the house where I lost sight of her. I sat down, picked up an abandoned glass with something in it that looked like margarita, drank it, and then felt the drunk-sickness coming over me again. My fingertips and lips were numb. I sank into the couch where I sat and closed my eyes.

Lise shook me at some point. "Squire, it's OK if we crash here," she said in a whisper. "I don't have enough money for cab fare and we missed the last bus."

"OK," I responded dully.

"You can just stay where you are, I guess."

"OK."

"You know what you said to Randy's girlfriend?"

"No, whad I say?"

"You said 'you remind me of my ex-girlfriend a lot -- can I come in your mouth too?'"

"Oh," was all I could say. "I don't remember that."

"I'll see you in the morning," she sighed, and I felt her tuck a scratchy blanket around me. I slid over to one side and turned my head sideways, so I wouldn't choke on vomit in my sleep. I was pretty good at looking out for myself.

Daylight was cruel, stabbing and bright, even filtered through the madras cotton cloth over the front window. From the light, it was already sometime around noon. Lise had already gone. "She didn't want to wake you up," said the friend, Jonathan, a diffident fag with big round glasses. He sat elegantly and distantly in the wreckage of his apartment, as if the party he'd hosted was part of some other long-gone life. "There's some coffee on the stove."

My contacts were killing me. They hadn't yet fused to my corneas, so I took them out and roughed it, pawing around in a vaguely nearsighted blur. I'd left my sunglasses at Lise's apartment, assuming we'd be back there at some point. I drank the coffee and dragged myself to a bus. In the bright sunlight, without my diary or sketchbook, I felt like I was missing a limb. My black T-shirt clung to my body with a layer of alcoholic sweat. I wanted more than anything to be back across the river, in Southeast, at home, in the bathroom with the door closed, throwing up.

There were no buses for an hour. Buses on Sundays were the Devil's work. I walked for six blocks until I found a gas station, went into the bathroom, squatted unsteadily on the slick floor (unwilling to let the knees of my black jeans touch the sickly, damp tiles), and shot the coffee backwards out of my gullet into the porcelain bowl. It didn't help. There was nothing much more in me. I rinsed my mouth, grateful that there was no mirror, and lurched back to the bus stop.

It was actually beginning to cool off by the time I went up the steps of the house where I lived. There was nobody home, although the door was unlocked, and I breathed a sigh of relief that at least nobody would witness the pathetic wreck that I was. I went to the kitchen and got a pre-emptive glass of ice water, then headed for the bathroom.

Laika's door was open. The room was empty; stripped bare of everything, even clean, the hairballs and dust and marijuana crumbs swept away. She was gone, as if some supernatural force had simply sucked her existence up. I stood there in her doorway, stunned, my throat choking back the impatient bile from my belly.

I spent a while on the cool tiles of the bathroom, resting my face against the rug-like toilet-seat cozy, tapping my glass of water against the side of the bowl, but I wasn't sick anymore. I just felt dead, the venom expelled from me. I toyed with the idea of calling my mother, but I knew she wouldn't be able to offer me anything of help. Instead, I got my diary from out of my room, sat on the floor of the living room, lit a cigarette, and uncapped my pen.

16 august.

Laika's gone. What the fuck.

No answer was forthcoming. No one came home; no sound came to me in the dead, still living room except the sounds of cars swishing by on the street outside the house. Eventually I got up, took some aspirin, and went to bed for a while. Writhing on the twisted sheets, I slept and sweated the rest of the alcohol out of me, awakening with a start in the ultramarine cool of evening.

I put on my glasses and came out into the living room, blinking, rubbing my eyes under the lenses. Melissa and Rob were sprawled on the couch, watching Laika's TV -- they'd rented some dull Julia Roberts movie and were knocking back shots of Southern Comfort. They didn't greet me or look up. "Where's Laika's stuff?" I asked them.

"With Laika," replied Rob, grimacing his shot down and holding out his glass for another.

Melissa topped him up. "She moved out," she said succinctly.

"What are you doing with her TV?"

"She sold it to me," said Rob.

"Sssh," said Melissa.

"She sold it to you?" I was shouting. "She transacted with you?"

"You guys, shut up! I'm trying to hear this!"

Rob stood up and grabbed the collar of my T-shirt, dragging me through the swinging door into the kitchen. "You're a real little shit, aren't you?" he asked me, tossing me back against the counters. "Why can't you just leave it alone?"

"I just -- I just want to know why she's gone." I was shaking all over, sweating again, cold this time. I could envision Laika being driven away in an unmarked van, her freckled face pressed up against the glass. Laika Come Home.

"Don't ask me. I don't even know her that well. If you want to know, she traded me the TV for helping her move in my truck."

"Why do you sleepwalk?" I asked.

"I don't," he protested.

"You were sleepwalking the other night. You told me you were going to kill me in my sleep."

Rob laughed and spit into the sink. "That's pretty funny."

"No, it's not. It's not fucking funny."

"I think it is," said Rob. "Now why don't you just shut up and be quiet while Melissa's trying to watch her movie. She's too good to you -- you're a gutless little turd. And I might as well kill you in your sleep -- nobody would care, except maybe your dykey friend."

I couldn't even think of anything to say. I watched him go back into the dark living room and say something to Melissa, and she laughed and answered him in the same tone of voice. They both looked over their shoulders at me and giggled to each other.

I got into the shower and washed all the dried sweat off my skin, washed the smell of cigarette smoke and sick out of my hair, cupped my balls gently in my hand for a long time, trying to reassure myself with their presence. When I went back into my room I closed the door securely, then propped my chair against the doorknob and shoved a pair of tennis shoes under the door. I put on a clean T-shirt and clean underwear and the only clean pair of jeans I had left, then I sat on the windowsill and wrote.

9:50 pm

Well, isn't this just typical. Puke my guts out, spend all day getting home on the stupid bus, and then find out the only housemate that I can trust has just "moved out". Took off. Sold Attila the Construction Worker the television set, so that Melissa can further melt her brains with the help of old Horse-Face and the rest of the cast of While You Were Sleeping. It's almost enough to make you laugh, but my sense of humor isn't that fucked up yet.

I guess I got dressed because I want to go out again. I'm exhausted. Where would I go? It's Sunday night. Triste is closed. And then I'd only have to come back. I feel like packing up my bandanna on a stick and running away to join the circus. And I can't face going out through that living room again -- I can't stand to wonder what the hell they're laughing at. What's so funny? Is it the general Camus-like pointlessness of my life? Or is that filthy scarecrow that They Might Be Giants warned me about, following me around, parodying my rants and frustration? I guess that would be pretty funny. If I wasn't living it.

I grabbed my shoulder bag (a holdover from my two weeks working as a bike messenger), put my diary and sketchbook, all my Bunnymen tapes, my Walkman, and my copy of Understanding Comics in it, slipped into the tennis shoes I'd recently stuffed under the door, and worked the screen off my window. I dropped down into the coarse gravel below the window, a much further drop than I'd realized. It was too far for me to put the screen back on the window -- besides, it had to be done from inside -- so I scrambled up and cranked the window as far as it would go before my arms gave out and I dropped back down on all fours in the gravel.

I started to walk.

I found myself at the front steps of Lise's apartment building, eerily lit in the yellow light of the sign across the street. I was shagged out from the hangover and I didn't want to go any further; in the olden days I would have taken the bus to Link-Up and slept in the break lounge (which I'd done many a night when I was at Link-Up during the day and busting my ass at Squirrell all night), but this time I could barely keep holding my head upright.

I buzzed.

"Who the hell is it?" came her voice, fuzzy and thick.

"Squire. I'm sorry I woke you up, I know you have to work tomorrow, but I do too and I can't stay at home -- I'm gonna freak out or something."

"Aw, Christ." She buzzed me in.

I found her in candlelight, wearing a white Hanes Y-front and faded satin pajama pants. The room smelled richly of incense, dope, and sweat -- not a bad smell, all told. She smirked at me. "What is it now, Squire," she said.

"Can I crash here?" I asked sheepishly.

"Sure," she said. She tossed her blankets on the floor, then grabbed another sheet from a crate of folded linens and wrapped herself in it. "I'll wake you when I get up. G'night." She flopped over in bed again and closed her eyes.

I kicked off my shoes and my jeans, blew out the candles, and settled on the nest of blankets on the floor, the hardwood pleasantly chilly against my hipbones. Only after I'd relaxed and stopped rustling around did I notice that music was playing -- almost silent, humming just audibly, like the tune came from the wood and the white paint itself.

15 August 8:30 pm

slight break between TV shows. Lise is in the kitchen boiling ramen, singing along with the Cure. We're both a little goofy on beer.

This is pretty cool. I haven't mentioned going home yet and neither has she. I'm still sleeping on the floor, but there's a piece of egg-carton foam that I can curl up on tonight. Today at Link-Up I was so sore and stiff that I couldn't handle almost any calls. I spent the day answering e-mail, writing to Juba, reading alt.gothic, and doing the crossword puzzle online. Nobody seemed to catch on -- at least, nobody gave me any shit.

Must call my mother. I guess she's getting online now, but she can't figure out how to find anything. This damned older generation -- making everything harder than it really needs to be. They should stop looking for explanation or interconnections -- just do as the little manual says. Don't try to psych it out. Just obey. There's plenty of time for questioning and going out on your own once you know what the hell you're doing.

THINGS TO DO TOMORROW:

Go home. Change underwear.

Buy Lise some replacement ramen.

Tell Juba to resend the attachment. It came through as text, and I was really annoyed.

Figure out where Laika went.

get to grips with the ups and downs,

'cos there's nothing in between.

16 August, 1:12 pm

Lunchtime. Chicken in a pita. Pint of muddy brown stout.

I suppose Laika's in Seattle. Damn her. How could she leave me here alone? Her stupid girlfriend. I don't know what I'll do if I ever see her again. These betrayals I've been experiencing lately just blow my mind. I mean, I trusted those girls. I really did. We were a team, goddamn it, practically a family. Then Melissa meets Rob and turns into a fucking white trash bitch supreme, and Laika softens me up and then just takes off in the middle of the night. I can't believe it.

I need to start looking at apartment listings or other houses that I can join. God, I hate that part. L and M and I have been together for almost two full years; we got couches together; we bought bad art; we made coffee for each other. It's enough to make you puke.

At least Lise is groovy. We had a blast last night. We drank a four-pack of Mickey's and listened to the Cure until the upstairs neighbors hammered on the ceiling. Then we lay in our respective bedding nests and talked in the dark until something like three in the morning -- mostly about high school and all the creeps who made our lives hell. I even remember the names of all the kids who made fun of me when I was little. She was impressed with how much detail I remembered. "Maybe you should cut that stuff out of your memory," she said. "That bitterness shit's poisoning you." But I explained that bitterness was my only salvation. She seemed to accept that.

I really ought to go home. I skipped the underpants today. It's actually not bad. I feel like Jim Morrison.

11:45 PM

Lise has fallen asleep in front of the TV. I'm sketching. I didn't go home. I really miss my art supplies. I take a pencil and sketchbook and an Onyx Micro with me wherever I go, but ....

17 August, 1:00 pm

Lunchtime. Pizza and root beer. Chocolate truffle bar in my pocket, to be enjoyed with my afternoon coffee. A Squirrell night -- dinner at Cock's, supposedly. Mrs. Kaplan -- we know her name is Cindy, but Cock wants us to call her Mrs. Kaplan -- if he was a dog, he'd piss on her to show his ownership -- will probably make another really hideous go at haute cuisine, namely, dry chicken breast halves, a French-cut green bean, and a sliver of pickled ginger. No wonder she's skinny as a model (except for those amazing tits) and he looks like a Green Beret (with a ponytail). I wonder if she's going to wear those amazing red clingy pants again. Certainly it'll be another clingy lacy top so sheer you can see her red satin bra. Red lips, long blonde curls. Probably gives great head. Like I'd know what great head feels like.

Crap.

I feel quite low today, the truffle bar notwithstanding. No underwear, again. I can feel the seams digging into Mr. Frisky. My jeans smell funny. All of me smells funny. I like the white musk, but it doesn't quite go with my natural odor, which is something... well, I don't know. I don't know what I smell like. I know I like it, certainly. I wonder if girls find my smell sexy, or if they'd find me sexier if I didn't wash. Maybe I should have gone gamy today for dinner with Mrs. Cindy K., Mrs. Cock. She loves comic books, apparently. She loves TEXTILES.

10:20 pm

Thank God they have an upstairs bathroom.

Yes, a yucky dinner, though Job and I smacked our lips and made much of it. Job kept on talking about his girlfriend, really obviously. Cindy K. kept on looking over at me, sadly, sympathetically, her lips slightly parted to show a slightly crooked front tooth. She had her hair in a ponytail with one tendril left loose and trailing across her table-tanned cheekbone. She kept licking her fork and "yumm"ing, then looking pointedly at me. So I went upstairs and jacked off. Who can blame me? I wish I hadn't let out that little "ugh!" when I came, though... I sat back at the table hot from exertion and Cindy K. asked me with sex-kitten innocence, "Squire, you're all red, is everything OK? Are you having an allergic reaction? The sauce does have peanuts in it -- are you allergic to peanuts?" etc. etc. I had to flee before she brought out "dessert", which was something like kiwi sorbet. Run in fear.

I hope Lise has pot. I really need it. I'm starving, for one thing, and I could really use a couple of tokes and then a big bowl of oriental flavoring. Real oriental flavoring. Like out of a foil packet.

I hate Cock more than ever now. Before I simply distrusted him. Now I know he does shit specifically to fuck with me. "Where's your girlfriend, Squire?" he asked me in the middle of dinner, when I was dripping peanut-laden sauce down my chin because I was gaping at Cindy K.'s bared honey-baked cleavage so hard. So I instinctively told the truth, I didn't have any girlfriend, and Cock said "Who's that blah blah blah," and I told him that was Laika, who he'd seen at some industry party -- I'd brought her because I had to bring a guest, and Lise was visiting her dad in Vancouver. "I was wondering, she seemed a little out of your league," he said. What a shitty thing to say. Laika is not out of my league. Laika is a lesbian. A taken lesbian, at that. She's not even that good-looking, for Chrissakes. She's not that good-looking at all. Bastard.

I'm jumbled up.

Maybe I'm losing my touch.

But you know I didn't have it anyway.

19 August 1:00 pm

Lunchtime. Turkey, pastrami, provolone, pickles, dark rye. Best lunch I've had all week. Not enough left over for a beverage. Sitting outside, looking in the window of Pronto. Lise inside, working one of the big copy machines. She's got her head down, staring at the surface. Walkman on. She looks exceptionally pretty today, wearing a dress under her polo shirt.

She nicely smoked me out last night and we stayed up late talking again, eating an entire bag of rice crackers. What a wonderful friend. I also called my mother today and she was also wonderful. Mom told me about her latest pot- and wine-soaked exploits with the Poetry Coalition -- apparently they went skinny dipping in someone's pond and somebody called the cops. Nobody got hauled in, but there was much 'splainin' to do. I laughed so much that I got in trouble, and Trace called me and told me to get back to work.

I really must go home tonight. I really must. I'm sick to death of these jeans and this T-shirt. And Dave actually called me on wearing the same clothes four days in a row, like he's the fashion plate of the world. He's gonna get his. Whatever... I must make my peace with the world...

Yeah, right, dude. Good one!

How did Jim Morrison do it?...

More lists of me:

- my favorite soda is Green River, and not just because that was the name Soundgarden had before they were Soundgarden: I really do appreciate it for what it is.

- my mom tells me that my dad could never fail to get her to come. They only had sex something like five times, but it was always fantastic. Or at least, that's what my mother says. seems to me like she was so idolizingly in love with him that when he was even vaguely sexually interested in her, she felt like the luckiest girl in the world. It kind of reminds me of the Angie/David Bowie situation, and mom agrees except that "your dad isn't an asshole. David never cared a damn for Angie, he just wanted a mommy. Jeremy honestly cares about me -- well, cared." My mom still every once in a while describes him as if he were still alive. I think she's still in this fantasy of denial and she thinks he's still tripping around Nepal being bored and gorgeous or something, instead of dead, really dead, in an urn on a mantel in the East End next to a framed picture of Charles and Di and a candy dish of Malteasers. And Gran couldn't figure out why I wouldn't eat the Malteasers, and instead spent the afternoon outside burning ants with a magnifying glass.

-my favorite food is corned beef sandwiches. Well, sometimes. Let me qualify that. Sometimes it's chocolate pudding, or popsicles, or fettucine pesto at that place in Seattle I can never remember the name of, or blueberries. No other kind of berry, but I really love blueberries. Raw, or cooked.

-My favorite childhood game was making tents out of two chairs and a sheet. as long as we weren't expecting company, I'd set it up in the living room and "sleep out" in the makeshift tent. I don't know why I preferred it over sleeping in my room, the way I prefer blueberries -- it's a matter of taste, really. Of romance. It was like a treat. I felt safe in there, buffered against the TV when I wanted the TV on, but everything showing was terrible; buffered against the sight of our dreadful little 70's apartment, my mother's exhausted face, worn out from working two shift, going to school, and raising me -- alone. Kind of like a Lifetime Channel movie of the week, just with a lot of pot smoking.

-my favorite kind of bagel is jalapeno cheddar.

And now I must go back to work because I'm twenty minutes late.

By Friday I couldn't take it anymore. Lise and I met for lunch at the pizza place across the street. "I've got to get home and put some underpants on," I groused.

"Chafing?"

"To put it mildly. It would be fine if it was a little cooler outside -- but I feel like my johnson's been acid-washed."

"Ouch."

"Besides, maybe they've forgotten all about how much they hate me by now. Maybe they'll think 'Who's this nice stranger? We like him!'"

"There is always that chance," Lise drawled, picking the encrusted cheese off my paper plate and eating it like a monkey pulling grubs from a log.

"And I'd hate to overstay my welcome."

"That's the funny thing," she smiled. "I haven't minded it at all, actually. I kind of like having you around. Creepy. Maybe I've lived by myself for a little too long."

"Maybe we're just getting old and complacent."

"You, maybe. I'm still full of spit and vinegar."

"That's 'piss and vinegar'. Get it straight, wench."

I actually did a good afternoon's work, and went to Squirrell in a great mood. At Squirrell nobody was much in a mood to joke or play around; the quarterly was nearing deadline, and a lot of the artists had flaked on getting their completed work to Cock Kaplan in time. Of course, Job and I never had that problem; with Cock breathing down our necks 24 hours a day, we got our pieces done in record time. All I had to do that day, in fact, was the cleanup work on our piece, since Job had taken the weekend off to go visit his girlfriend in Vegas. Cock hovered over me as I bent over my table, erasing the panels gently and repetitively, erasing Job away and leaving me there. "Squire, don't take this the wrong way, but you smell funny," he said.

"Funny?" My good mood went out the window.

"Flowery."

"I've been using Body Shop White Musk shampoo," I explained, bending over the work again. His proximity was giving me a headache.

"Why?"

I looked up at him. He was giving me a confused, dubious look. "I've been staying with a girl, if you must know," I said.

Cock Kaplan looked relieved. "Why don't you get your own shampoo? Something neutral smelling. Like Head and Shoulders. You smell like a fairy."

I sighed elaborately. "Mr. Kaplan, all respect due, but I can come in here drenched in White Shoulders if I want. What does my signature scent or my sexual orientation have to do with anything as far as you're concerned? I'm here, doing my cleanup work, so we can get the quarterly out in time. Now, if you'll excuse me."

There was a long moment of silence, stretched tight and thin like a decaying rubber band. I began to regret speaking so freely, but I kept stroking the art gum across the panel, willing him to walk away, to forget I said anything, to have a sudden sharp blow to the head which would cause permanent and total amnesia, anything, but he just kept standing there, as if waiting for me to say something else. "I want that panel on my desk in perfect -- and I do mean PERFECT -- condition at seven o'clock or there will be serious consequences," he finally snapped, and then turned precisely and marched from the room.

I had my diary balanced and open on my knees, and I dipped a convenient pen into blue-black India ink and wrote

Cock Kaplan sure has a military baton stuck up his ass for being an ex-hippie Hunter S. Thompson burnout freak. Yuppies do that I guess.

Maybe he can't put it to his wife the way she likes it.

Damn it, I have a line from "Stars are Stars" stuck on my brain -- Lise and I were listening to the Bunnymen last night while we did the dishes. It's not a very nice line, now that I think about it --

now we spit out the sky

because it's empty and hollow

all your dreams are hanging out to dry.

It was the first thing on my mind when I woke up this morning. I know it's a sign from my subconscious, trying to tell me something. I carry this mental Ian McCulloch around with me night and day and I always listen to what he has to say. He's always right, no matter how painful the truth is. I remember I realized this when I was finishing my thesis and I'd been up all night -- when the mini-thins wore off, I dropped a half tab of acid to keep myself awake. I was listening to heaven up here and during the long freakout jam that bisects "Over the Wall" and there's the great line

I can't sleep at night

c'mon and hold me tight

to the logical limit

Mac practically howling. Pattinson giving heartbeat. De Freitas giving stuttery breath. Seargant just ripping the shit out of every string on that guitar. It's like having the marrow flayed from your bones. It was the most intense spiritual experience of my life. I really felt like Mac was my symbiote, that he needed me somehow, and I needed him. To survive. To exist. Without me, Ian McCulloch is just another package on the shelf, without identity or worth, and without Mac, I am just a blind and crawling fetus. Echo and the Bunnymen are my spiritual nourishment, my friend, lover, nag, even soothsayer -- when I'm listening to the Buns, if I pause in whatever I'm doing or thinking or saying, whatever line happens next is completely appropriate to my emotion, or my situation. But who is the host and who is the parasite? Is it my marrow being sucked or his?

Christ, Cock again. What have I done to deserve terrorization by the human penis

[The "s" trails in a big messy torn scrawl off the edge of the page.]

8:35 pm (approx.)

I finished. I'm on the bus now, listening to "Seven Seas". Feeling cheerful. maybe I should stop being such a turd and try to get my personality together. From now on I vow to stand up to bullies like Rob and Randy, force their stupid girlfriends to stand up for themselves. I'm going to try to be more patient with customers on the phone and with Cock Kaplan and with Job. They're just doing their thing. It's not their fault that they couldn't possibly understand me. Nobody could ever know what goes on inside my mind.

Especially not Melissa and Rob. When I think of the way we were before, not so long ago, it doesn't even seem like the same people. When did I get so small and peevish? When did Melissa get so...boring? So normal? Was it that one party? How would any of us have known? It seemed so innocent... mistletoe... mulled wine... Creedence Clearwater Revival... they were dancing and then they had just disappeared. She dragged herself home at noon the next day with stars in her eyes, just about bursting because she couldn't brag about what a giant cock Rob has. I've heard her go on about it on the phone to everyone, but I wouldn't care and Laika wouldn't care -- she's never fucked a guy in her life and doesn't want to. Laika. I miss her. I miss her donkey-braying laugh and her insistence that every once in a while, we get stoned and play softball catch in the park. I used to really like that. Melissa would come, sometimes, before.

OK. Everything's going to be all right.

I got off the bus in front of the house. There was a smallish rented dumpster in the driveway. I imagined it full of leftover Melissa horror food. Stuffing the diary back into my shoulder bag, I walked into the house, whistling cheerfully, ready to give them the full blast of reasonable Squire charm. Nobody was in the living room of course, so I went to the bathroom and took a piss and fussed with my hair in the mirror for a bit. Then I opened the closed door of my bedroom.

There was basically nothing in it. The milk crates in which I stored almost everything I owned were empty, and half of them were missing. My futon and futon frame, my banker's lamp and cheap art table (and the art supplies therein), my bookshelves, my boxes of rare and valuable comic books -- all gone. My closet was empty except for a pair of holey long johns on a wire hanger.

A single photograph lay face down on the bare floor -- I bent at the knee and picked it up. It was the picture of my mother and father in Mexico, the color picture, my father staring straight into the camera, his pale eyes boring accusingly into me. I straightened up and slipped the picture into the back pocket of my jeans.

I must have stood there for a long time, because when I turned around, Melissa was leaning in the doorway, a self-satisfied smile on her face. "Where's my stuff?" I asked, my voice strangely neutral.

"We sold it," she said matter-of-factly.

"You sold it."

"The house got broken into. Some little asshole didn't put the screen back on his window right and some thug came in and thugged a bunch of our stuff. My stereo. Robert's CD player and Walkman and his CDs. The TV." She bobbed her head towards me for emphasis. "We didn't know where you were, or whether you were coming back. Besides, you didn't even pay rent this month -- what the fuck were we supposed to think? We sold your shit so we could cover our losses. The rest of the crap, we gave to Goodwill or we tossed it. And we had to rent a dumpster. So we had to pay for that too."

"My bike?" My voice, still dead. "My comic books."

Melissa shrugged. "Your bike got ten bucks. And we sold the comics to some dude who works at a comic book store. We got a thousand dollars for them. I can't imagine why anyone would want them."

"A - A THOUSAND DOLLARS? Do you have any idea what those comics were worth?" I felt energy shooting forth out of the top of my head, achieving a kind of kundalini of rage. "I was going to retire with how much money those were worth! And you sold them for a thousand fucking dollars! For three hundred dollars in rent! So where's the rest of the money?" Rob loomed over Melissa's right shoulder, the two of them filling the doorway, cutting off my only escape. It startled me how huge he was -- six feet and then some, all vein-popping muscle, aggressive pork-fed fat, thick Cro-Magnon eyebrow ridge. Goosepimples leapt out all over my suddenly icy skin, and I looked at the window for a possible out -- unfortunately they'd put the screen back up and nailed it shut. "We spent the money, Squire," Rob said. "You got a hearing problem?"

"I can't believe this..."

"Believe it," Melissa said lightly, turning and walking out. I heard a stereo start up playing "Magnolia Rose" by the Dead -- the sound quality was excellent.

I tried to pursue, but Rob stepped in front of me, folding his arms. "Where do you think you're going?" he said.

"I'm going to talk to my housemate if you don't mind."

"I do mind," he said. "She doesn't want to talk to you anymore. Anything you need to tell her, you can tell me. She's sick of talking to you because you don't fuckin' listen."

"You don't even live here!" I shouted.

"Since when? Who paid rent this month and who didn't?"

"Fuck you," I said.

"Fuck you, you little faggot."

"Melissa!" I tried to yell over the Dead. The music got louder.

"See? Why don't you save us both a lot of trouble and --"

"Go fuck yourself!" I snapped, and ducked under his armpit. The stench of his androgens choked me. I went to the doorway of Melissa's room, but she kicked the door closed, clipping me on the nose.

I went instead into the kitchen and took down my Bettie Page fridge magnet, took out my keys and struggled to get them off the ring.

"The rest of your shit's in the dumpster," said Rob, leaning against the doorway. "I recommend that you pick it out and get the fuck out of here, before we call the cops and get your ass trespassed."

I didn't reply. I didn't look at him. He stood aside to let me leave.

So then, the dumpster. All was beautifully lit with full moonlight -- the rust-colored dumpster, the yellow printing on the sides, the tired grey toes of my tennis shoes. My trashed and broken futon frame, broken blue glass, more underwear with holes, the pictures from my walls, and my box of photographs, partially scattered out and dulled by dust. I climbed into the dumpster and recovered the other photograph of my father, a picture of my mother alone, several pictures of myself and Lise when we were high school newspaper photographers and spent a hundred dollars a week on film, a live photo of the Bunnymen taken by another pen pal, and a picture I'd taken of my girlfriend in high school, Amanda. I put them all in my pocket except the picture of Amanda, which I let twirl back down into the dry gutter. I didn't need her image -- all teeth and pink tongue-tip and hair like colorless candy-floss -- leaping out at me anymore.

I wanted a drink so suddenly and consumingly that it gave me a stomach cramp. I slouched into the Bob 'n Barrell on 37th and Belmont -- the bar that I usually walked past with a mock-shudder -- and sat down at the bar. The place smelled like beer, CornNuts, and throw-up (or maybe just throw-up). The bartender, a wretched hag of ambiguous age, wearing a Blazers sweatshirt and a bandanna inexpertly tied around her head, eyed me with plain distaste, without speaking. "Give me a shot of gin, straight," I said after a long pause.

"Can I see some I.D.?" Her voice was a ruin.

"I'm twenty-three," I groaned, my voice rising somewhat with impatience.

"Sure you are. You look like a twelve-year-old. I.D. or no drink."

I fumbled out my Washington driver's license. She looked me up and down, then looked carefully at the I.D., holding it up to the light, flicking the edges to see if they'd separate. "Michael Squire," she read. "Height, five feet five inches, weight, one-eleven. Ooh! Organ donor."

I rolled my eyes and lit a cigarette, tapping my nails on the bar.

The hag humphed, satisfied, and squirted me a shot of plastic-bottle gin. "I still don't believe you," she said to me playfully.

"I don't believe you, either." I pulled my diary out of my bag and slapped it on the bar.

Most of what I wrote is completely incomprehensible. There are at least four full pages crammed full of an EKG-esque scrawl, and one page of scratching when the ink ran out of the page. What's there isn't really much better -- I was drunk almost immediately.

fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck my precious first printing love and rockets and my X-men and my oh my god what the hell why the fuck does shit like this always have to happen to me why the fuck can't somebody else take the blame once in a while why the fuck are all these people out to get me? What did I do to them to make them hate me so much? I'm sorry I was ever born if there was some way to get out of it I would I'd go back in time and tell mom to use a prophylactic

hate

hate

hate

everything that's ever existed especially this gin which sucks dingleberries off my ass -- where's that old scruffy bitch I'll make her give me another one

That makes three

that makes four

that makes six five and I'm out of money so I have to stop fuck where do I sleep tonight -- in the park maybe -- but then I'll be killed and robbed and raped and they'll take away my pictures and my Rapidograph so I don't want to sleep in the park at least not Laurelhurst Park which is home to the real life actual crazies and not people like me who only toy with being insane so where do I do go? it's still early and I have a quarter and a dime left so lets see oh shit the old bitch is getting mad at me because I keep laughing and falling off the bar stool oh shit this is actually pretty cool, actually the best night of my life.....

bopsie waddy waddy shake your money

bopsie waddy waddy shake your money

[scrawl, scrawl, scrawl.]

"Lise!"

"Squire, is that you? What the fuck's the matter with you, dude?"

"H....help me?"

"Help you?"

"I'm fucking drunk and I fell down and I... like ... fuckin' skinned my knee and my hands and it like, hurts, can I come in and like, rinse the dirt off?" I paused and wiped my face on the tail of my T-shirt. "I got kicked out of the house."

"I'll be right down."

She burst out the front door, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties, waving her hands agitatedly. "What's goin' on?" she asked, unlatching the front gate.

I slid in and sat heavily on the front steps. I forgot and slid my hand through my hair, pausing to moan, "Ow."

"You're all bloody. Come inside, I'm practically naked."

She led me inside and stripped me of my T-shirt and jeans and she cleansed the scrapes on my knee and my hands with a very soft wet washcloth, and I sobbed openly and drunkenly my tale of woe. "And then she threw me into the street," I concluded, gulping back juniper-flavored mucus. "I almost got ran over by a fire truck."

She said nothing, but shushed me quietly and smoothed my hair and dabbed the salt from my face. When she was done anointing my knees with antibiotic ointment, she hugged me and tipped my chin upward so that I was looking at her. I had stopped weeping and my eyes were sore and empty, and I was full of a kind of pleasant weariness and apathy. She smiled. "I guess you have to get some new underwear tomorrow, huh?"