("Nothing Left..." / Page 2 of 5)

There/That's how I did it. Those were the stories I told myself in order to MAINTAIN the hip, detached, and ironic way that my generation deals with everything. Sure, it's arrogant and EVEN EXTREMELY annoying, but if we actually CARED about all the shit that’s going on, we'd be heartbroken. So in the SELF-CONSCIOUSLY POST-MODERN WAY OF MY PEOPLE, I stood there for hours... taking it all in...

switching my weight back and forth between my left and right feet, pounding at the new varicose veins popping alive in my legs. Even as the blood pooled in my ankles, I believed I was destined for something BETTER.

This was just one of those setbacks that'd be great for my “Vanity Fair” interview.

 

Yeah, that's right baby.

 

I once had it all and I was a cocky, know-it-all member of the middle class and I didn't give a fuck about sitting in the front of the bus because I thought the bus was too disgusting to ride in the first place.

 

That's right! I used to live in the suburbs and SCOFF at poverty and eat meat before it was even born!

 

I clubbed baby lambs for parchment because I was trying to save the trees from becoming paper. I rubbed their placenta under my eyes, and walked in their snouts for slippers and made my ruthless American bootstraps out of all that was left.

 

The world was my oyster and that gave me the right to pry it open a little so I could fuck it.

 

Yeah, the only animals who were safe from the likes of me were the ones who'd ROLL OVER AND BEG.

 

--AND THAT’S precisely what the universe suddenly seemed to do : The clouds parted and the future rolled over and begged, asking-- "Mrs. Lopez, pray tell, what can we do for you now?"

 

And rays of options shone through the clouds like pick a card, any card--and it was time to pick MY OWN manifest destiny, and I didn’t want to be some artist, noddin’ out, with a line of gallery dealers gang-raping my armpits, cracks, and folds--so I decided to be a writer. Yes, a writer, because it was cute, compact and fit nicely in my teeny tiny apartment on a little kitchen counter, you know, back in the corner near the sugar canister.

 

And then I'd find an agent to tell indifferent strangers how FABULOUS MY BOOKS WERE-- LOTS + LOTS OF BODICE-RIPPING BOOKS--with candlelight, delicately parted butt-cracks, and oh-so-sexy eye patches. They’d make movies out of them--LOTS + LOTS OF BODICE-RIPPING MOVIES--starring former child actors from the ‘80s, BECAUSE IT WAS 6PM AND WASN’T IT HIGH TIME WE KNOW WHERE THEY WERE NOW???

 

Then I'd fly OVER to my seaside home and bowls of eat foie gras and watch myself on a huge plasma screen TV suspended from the stars. The commercials would be sneak previews of a BRIGHT AND CHEERY future of how one day YOU’D be able to afford YOUR own little driveway WITH A VIEW, and be able to stop renting apartments from greedy landlords who're always trying to get you to hurl yourself down the stairs and DIE, and still pay rent from THE GREAT BEYOND.

 

Life was fabulous. Almost too good to believe. My first editor and publicist were like angels, glowing as if you had Vaseline in your eyes. He was amazing! She was amazing!--

 

--The SERVICE was amazing!

 

I’d order tiny green salads with pears and pecans, the filet mignon was rare--but seared with freshly crushed pepper and I was tossing my chin back and laughing--"Ha ha ha!" I screamed over and over again and for dessert we made love on the veranda.

 

Who did?

 

Oh, we all did, darling. We all made love, all the time, to everything, and afterwards we drank sherry and farted in the silk sheets. It was an expensive, pricey kind of love and we signed for the bill without ever asking how or why or when or if.

 

Oh sure, maybe I only had seventeen fans, but oh how they were fans! They were the best damn fans a girl could hope for. Ho, I was big in my day! Big! Big! Big! "Hurry! Act NOW!" They all screamed. "Buy now! Pay later!" They all chanted.

 

 

So with only 17 fans, I never did get the seaside home and plasma screen TV, but I did get the #4 VALUE MEAL and a BRIGHT and CHEERY high yella’ motorcycle with all cash--no money down. I’d paid in FULL in case things got really bad--- I'd always be able to BLOW TOWN and ride across this great land, doing my part and gang-raping SWEATY white women in republican hairdos EVERYWHERE.

 

Oh, EXCUSE ME, they don't sweat; they GLISTEN. They glisten like pigs down in Alabama, and that's exactly what I was doing when the universe's clouds gathered overhead and snapped its RAYS OF OPTIONS closed like the deck of cards and stormed off with my future without saying a word.  LEAVING ME WITH NOTHING. LESS THAN NOTHING.

 

Life... life has a way of grabbing your cheek and pinching it until the flesh separates from the bone with an excruciatingly wet and ragged tear, because five years after the Boca Raton News wrote a review of my first--and most micro-famous book--Flaming Iguanas, saying : "Erika Lopez is an American original! ... Lopez won't have to worry about food stamps in the future!" weeeell, not only do I have to worry about food stamps AGAIN...

 

 ...I just had to go and add welfare. Fucking WELFARE.

 

DO you know how hard it is to get on welfare and food stamps? Huh? Well, let me tell you : writing a book and getting it published was easier--hey, giving birth to the Solid Gold Dancers out of your butt would be less painful.

 

So here I am again, seven years later facing my "Window A" destiny and the smell that comes with it.

 

"The smell?" You ask. I'll get to the smell in a second because first I was SHUFFLING through the metal detector while guards without necks were ignoring us and eating Twizzlers for breakfast.

 

As I shuffled on toward the greasy table holding slabs of applications, I wondered if the screaming six-year-old kid over there licking the crud from the corners of the floor is the bagel-earring, French-blue NYLON offspring from seven years earlier.

 

I'm in a line and a craggy little old white man with one big matted dreadlock flapping against his back like an old screen door, shuffles by in a long straight black skirt found on the street. He lives in a Datsun on my block. He’s the neighborhood's scary monster man.

 

Every neighborhood has one. You know that.

 

Now, back east you don't talk to homeless people : You walk by them unless you're feeling so liberal you won't vote, in which case, you sit on the steam grate with them because charity's like recycling-- it makes you feel good without changing the problem.

 

But in San Francisco, if you ignore homeless people, they throw a FUCKING hissy fit.

 

And here we were TOGETHER--the veal eater GIRL and the MATTED screen door man having our own “hands-across-America” moment in the welfare office and he’s passing me by like a welfare comrade, giving me the cool-guy little "UP" nod. If you're cool, you've seen it up close; if not, you may've seen it from afar, like over in the COOLER neighborhood.

(NEXT page...)

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