That Balding Angel

This week a drunken teenager I didn't recognize came swinging at me on Chapel Street as though we were in old Verona and I a Montague and she a Capulet with very hard inner city fists instead of a rapier. I had been screening menacing obscene phone calls from an anonymous creepy dyke I suspected was the six-foot-two, abusive, male-identified, ex-but-not-ex-enough-lover of some nut-case I went out with for three weeks in March. Then I had this Colombian nurse, Elena, who's married to the mob, announce that she's wrecking her home after I told her I wouldn't get involved with a married woman. Elena showed up on my doorstep the night before my National Medical Boards with a lemon meringue pie and the news that she was leaving her husband and telling her teenagers she's a lesbian on Friday. Would I go out with her on Saturday?

Since I had the one-night stand with the bizarrely body-pierced anthropology student, dumped the deeply disturbed office manager, disentangled myself from the nymphomaniac hospital chaplain, and tried to let the unemployed college grad with generalized anxiety disorder down easily, I've crawled under my bed terrified and eschewed the search for love altogether. For the last two months I've avoided most human contact, read thousands of pages of medicine and rented movies every night so I wouldn't miss people. All that happened was that I developed a horrendous crush on the boy who rents me the movies in the video store. That struck me as so pathetic that at the end of the two months I inadvisedly accepted an invitation for a date with this nurse, Elena. I didn't find out she was married until after she showed up with the roses. Teach me to stick my head out of my hobbit hole.

The afternoon before my Boards the change in barometric pressure must have gotten to a lot of people, because I walked into the movie store and started the weirdest, most awkward, abject conversation with Mr. Video that I've ever had with anyone. It was about the boy's favorite director, Orson Welles, all of whose available movies I had watched twice in the past two weeks. The boy was very kind, and made it indirectly clear that he was living with a woman. The woman who works with him at the store, in fact, who happened in as I was trying to come on to him. My chest was thumping, my ears were roaring, and I am sure my voice sounded strangled. Still, I did feel rather relieved when I realized the situation. At least I wouldn't have to sit through Citizen Kane again. But as I somewhat listlessly continued to feign interest with the girlfriend in low camera angles and deep focus, the boy very sweetly bounded out of the store to their apartment and ran back with their own personal copies of two of Welles' obscurest oeuvres to lend me. “Just don't drop them down the chute when you're done, okay?”

You know, I'm a little shy, a little smart and a little bisexual. Other than that, I'm a normal, stable, boring individual. I write short stories, sing in the shower, and take care of sick kids. That's it, that's me. Even my sexual tastes turn out to be, after recent wide investigation, rather pedestrian in the grander scheme of things. I'm a human vanilla milk shake. I've played a star student; I've played an idealistic young Peace Corps Volunteer. I was even once a happily married woman, for a while. So can you tell me why today my family thinks I'm a pervert and people I don't even know want to kill me? Just what is it about me that borderline psychotics find so fucking attractive, anyway?

I think my life is a joke, and here it is. When I was nineteen my creative writing professor, Grace Mojtabai, invited me into her office and said:

“It's hard for me to tell you this, but I promised Robert Fitzgerald that I would make you understand that you were accepted into the writing program not because of your poems, but in spite of them.”

“Oh. Um, thanks.”

“It's very important that you spend the entire coming summer working on your fiction.”

How could I say to this elfin-featured, swan-necked, over-educated beauty that some people had to work full-time in the summers to remain in Ivy League havens like the one in which we presently conversed? I told her I couldn't spend the whole summer writing, because I hadn't done anything for years except study. Maybe I'd been writing poetry because poems didn't need plots to hang all the lovely words on. I'd been listening to people chanting all year: “Death to the adjective. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Write what you know.” Well, all I knew was school, and I had exhausted the subjects of exam panic, drug experimentation, garage bands and blind groping. I needed to go do some actual living.

Grace made this funny expression between a grin and a smirk.

“What,” I said, annoyed. I could never tell what she was thinking. The only information about herself she had ever let slip was that she had degrees in math and philosophy. There were rumors that she had come by her exotic surname from a marriage to a Muslim, and that she had spent several years in a harem. I got a flash of her in purdah in some sandy country.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “So go live.”

I now believe that the moment I walked out of the room, Grace picked up the phone and placed a person-to-seraph call to her lone contact in the celestial hierarchy, an out-of-work avenging angel.

“I know how you can have some fun,” she said.

Now that balding angel is sending me real-life, absurd, insane plots so fast I don't even know how to live them, much less have time to write them down. He's up there chuckling right now, and he's got one weird sense of humor, let me tell you. He is wearing Birkenstocks and using an antiquated word processing program.

“For God's sake!” I shout up at him.

“Watch it.” He doesn't miss a keystroke.

“I know you've always wanted to write for the screen, but must you pander to the lowest common denominator with all this random sex and violence? I've got to get some work done. I'm trying to learn enough medicine not to kill kids by accident.”

“It's my script,” he snaps. “You don't even necessarily get a credit.”

“You think I'd let anyone put my name on this drek?”

“At least it's not as boring as it would be if you wrote it yourself,” he sneers down at me.

“And this violence is not random. You deserve it.”

“For going out on a date with a nurse? I didn't even kiss her!”

“For that hospital chaplain—”

“Oh, please. Don't start—”

“—over whom you agonized so verbosely because she was living with somebody else—”

“—with the karma again—”

“—and you mouthed all that pompous bullshit about sisterhood and unity in the face of lack of societal support for lesbian relationships, creating one's own community and role models, remember that? Then you went ahead and fucked her on her girlfriend's futon, right under the Frida Kahlo poster—”

“So what do I have to do? Yom Kippur's coming up. You want me to get my face bashed in by Elena's Italian husband and his brothers or something?”

“Word around here is a whole cycle of death and rebirth, then we'll see.”

“For fucking a chaplain? She jumped me. The woman would have chewed me up alive and spit out my fillings and fingernails if it gave her an orgasm.”

“Not my problem. Your problem. Piss off, I feel a creative burst coming on.”

So the Big Bad Boards turned out to be just a brief relaxing vacation from the Life That Is Stranger Than Fiction. Well, if I'm going to get killed this week, I guess I'd better make sure there's a hard copy of the stories lying around here somewhere and destroy all those awful poems.