Train In Vain

I should have known better than to accept Ellen's invitation. I was working as a temporary clerk at a law firm where Ellen was a senior partner. Part of my job was tracking down old court records and case files for her and she wound up being so impressed with my alphanumeric derring-do that she sent me an email inviting me to lunch. I guess she must have won the case or something, because her email had smiley-face emoticons all over it, which was kinda weird to see coming from an old lady.

And Ellen was really old, like maybe forty or even forty-five, at least twenty years older than me. It was like being invited to lunch by one of my mother's friends, a neighbor that Mom always half-jokingly warned me not to take candy from. I always wondered what she meant by that. Or I used to, anyway.

Don't get me wrong. I mean, I sure was glad to be getting a free lunch and all, but I was afraid that my girlfriend Gloria or one of her friends from school would see me out with Ellen and think that I was dating some old chick. Plus,at work they make me wear khakis and long-sleeves that cover up my tattoos, so it would be a double-whammy of uncool if some hot art-major chicks saw me.

I considered the risk of being spotted, trying to do that 'look before you leap' thing that Dad always yells about, except he says it like 'look before you fucking leap, you stupid piece of shit' - and we aren't allowed to cuss at work so I tried to keep my thinking clean.

After some pre-leap looking, I decided I'd be safe as long as we didn't go to Starbucks, since half my class seems to work there, including Gloria's best friend Dan. Dan is a big, good-looking guy, but he's gay, so I don't get upset when she kisses him or stays at his house for a week or two. They have never come out and told me, but I'm pretty sure that Gloria just pretends to date Dan so people don't know he's gay. It works too, because I think I am the only one who has figured it out.

Like, Gloria isn't really my official girlfriend right quite yet, I just know that she really digs me and that one day we'll hook up for sure.

See, the last time my band, The Sickening Thud, played out, Gloria was the only person in the whole town that came out to see us play- she was the only person in the whole club except the manager and the soundman- that's how much she digs me and my band. She even came out from behind the bar so that she could listen to us play while she stacked the chairs on top of the tables and I bet anything that she woulda listened to our whole set if the the douche-bag soundman hadn't come up to the stage and told us that he was closing early because there was no audience and that we owed him fifty bucks and that it would be an extra hundred bucks if we wanted to finish our set.

We were so busy packing up our gear that Gloria didn't have a chance to make her move on me, so she left before we did, which kinda sucked. Plus it cost me 25 bucks because me and our singer Matt are the only dudes in the band with jobs so we wind up paying for everything.

Anyway, fate would have it that me and Gloria had about a zillion mutual friends on Facebook, so I sent her a request and she friended me right back the next week! So now all I needed to do was let nature take its course. Unless I got busted being seen with Ellen. Not that there was anything dirty going on, but it would look funny, ya know what I mean?

Well, I didn't have to worry, because Ellen took me to The Open Flue, which I think sounds like a cool band name but is actually an expensive high-class restaurant. I had applied for a job there during my freshman year, but they wouldn't hire me because of my tattoos unless I wanted a job as valet. But then they turned me down for that, too. They said it was because of my driving record, but I think it was really discrimination on account of my tats.

I gotta admit, the food was top-notch excellent stuff. I asked for a hamburger but Ellen ordered a steak for me instead. I told the waiter that I would like french fries and he told me that they did not normally serve french fries, but that he could get the cook to prepare some for me. Pretty classy, eh? And it was yummy too. I had a coke, but Ellen had at least three glasses of wine. She really was reminding of Mom's friend by then.

Ellen told me that she had won the case- it was something to do with a railroad- and the client had given her a train-set as a gift and that I looked really strong and healthy and would I mind coming over to her house to help her put her choo-choo back on track? I didn't know how strong you had to be to put together a toy train, but I guess I musta looked like Superman or something to her on account of her being old and maybe drunk too.

I also figured she meant for me to help her after work or something, but it turned out she meant right then, so after she paid for the meal, we took her Jaguar - that same one- way over to the Belle View part of town, which is big-time rich people territory. She had a giant house with a circle driveway that had a dancing bird statue in a fountain inside the circle, which was cool even if the water in it looked a little green and mossy and wasn't really a fountain, since it wasn't moving.

Inside her house was like the inside of a house you would see in one of those boring dental waiting-room kind of magazines, except it isn't boring in real life, it is more like scary- like what if I accidentally broke something or got something dirty or something like that happened ? I'd be broke forever paying for it.

Ellen said the train set was in her dressing room, which had open floor space to set it up on. I figured a table would have been better, but she is my boss and technically I was still at work, so I said ok.

Sure enough, there was a really super-deluxe train set still in the box. It was sitting on top of a dresser drawer. Most dudes probably don't even know what a model train set is, much less how to set one up, but Dad had one and I sorta knew how they worked. I placed the box on the floor, knelt down and looked at the contents. The track was a simple oval loop, it would be easy to snap together.

"Think you can you handle it?" , she asked. I told her sure I could , no problem.

" Great. I need to change clothes, so don't turn around."

No problem, the train would keep me busy.

But she must've forgot that there was a double-sized wall mirror directly opposite me and that I could see her in the reflection as she undressed. I noticed how slow and careful-like she was taking her clothes off and wondered if she was afraid of wrinkling them and that my mom had some tricks for getting wrinkles out of clothes, but the train distracted me and I didn't pass on mom's wrinkle advice or look at the mirror for a few minutes even when Ellen told me that I had a nice ass.

How could she tell through my khakis? I guess she was just being nice.

"You can look now", she said. I looked.

Ellen didn't look like a lawyer anymore. She was wearing a black shiny outfit that looked like something Catwoman would wear, except a lot less so. I'm embarrassed to admit that it gave me a boner just looking her. I stayed kneeling down on the rug, facing away from her so he wouldn't see me like that.

Not to be to gross or anything, but khakis are lightweight fabric and don't hide boners very well so I didn't want to stand up right then, except she asked me to help light her cigarette for her and took a look right at my privates. Then she put here hand down there and I'm not really gonna say much more because I feel like I really let Gloria down over what happened.

The next time I see Gloria, I will have to confess about what happened and ask her forgiveness and hope that she still might want to go on a date or something even though I'd cheated on her before we were a couple. Love is funny like that.

But Ellen kept making me do stuff and I kinda couldn't stop even though I kinda felt embarrassed about it. Eventually she fell asleep and I noticed that she'd finished two whole bottles of wine since we got there, so I figured she'd be asleep for a long time and I could finally finish setting up the train. That is when I looked at the clock.

It was nine o'clock and I had to have Dad's car back home by ten and Dad's car was still parked at work. I tried waking Ellen up, but she just mumbled some dirty words and went back to sleep.

I should have looked before I leapt, but instead I wound up fishing the keys to her Jag out of her purse. I was going to drive it to work, get dad's car, drive dad's car home and then walk back to work and get Ellen's car.

Hopefully she would still be asleep and I could finish putting her train together. The big problem was that instead of driving from work back to Ellen's house, I wound up hitting a mailbox about a half-mile down the road from there, which is where you found me.

If you let me make another phone call, I'm sure Ellen will be awake by now and she will clear this whole thing up.

.

A Confederate Sea of Dunces

The Confederate flag was proudly flying above the drunken rabble in the NASCAR parking lot this morning . Here was the Budweiser-for-Breakfast Club, massed and ready for action; Made In America, Drunk In Public and Proud Of It.

I heard Molly Hatchet playing. From more than one truck.


The tribe pictured above seems to worship canned meat products. There's an inflatable canopic jar tethered to the top- I think that at the end of the ongoing ceremony the wienier idol will be released from it's moorings and Ascend Heavenward , taking the devout with it. Good riddance.



Did you know that there is a flavor of Vienna Sausage called "Bilingual Chicken"? There is.
It wasn't mentioned at this Armour tent...I doubt that the company's decision to print labels in Spanish would have been a hit with this crowd. I saw more than a few "America is Full" t-shirts - at first, I thought that it was merely an incomplete sentence but I quickly caught on that it was an anti-immigrant statement.


I didn't see any Mexican NASCAR fans, nor did I see any Cinco De Mayo festivities.
I did see the U.S. Border Patrol. They are hiring.



Here we see a NASCAR version of inter-racial harmony. Off-key, it was.
There was a tent that urged onlookers to sign up for credit cards, enlist in the Armed Forces and embarrass themselves at karaoke - all under one roof!
Public drunkenness was not only allowed, it was encouraged and exploited.
This is a dangerous place.


More wiener worship. These (above) are marinated in 30-weight motor oil , rolled in sawdust and cornmeal and then deep-fried in boiling Crisco. One will cost you five dollars.
Two might kill you.



The only fresh food I saw was what was in my cooler. I didn't see any apples, oranges or bananas on the grounds, other than this. No fruit juice either. I tried to blend in by quaffing an energy soda that I scored from the trailer next to mine, but my banana gave me away, marked me as Other; on my breaks I hid under a trailer and ate stealthily.

I didn't know this, but if you are crew , you are supposed to eat the Corn Dogs and drink the Kool-Aid.
Literally.
There was Kool-Aid available to those who could afford it but juice, as noted, was conspicuously absent.
Notice the Navy recruiter in the background,above...military recruiters were ubiquitous at the track. The end begins here for some, I imagine.

I drank as little fluid as possible, as dehydration was preferable to urination- the toilets were straight out of Trainspotting. Bad scene in there. Very, very bad.

One thing that fascinated me was the amount of Nationalistic jingoism I overheard... over and over...only American Cars were acceptable...everyone hated foreign cars, Jap cars in 'tickular. I started fearing for my Volvo's safety, it being parked alone in a sea of Amurrican Trucks and all, but then I noticed that a great many of the diesel rigs were Volvo.
Maybe Volvo is OK ? They are made by Aryans.

I really wanted to point out that nothing for sale in my booth was Made In America; that all the toys, shirts, gimcracks and geegaws were manufactured overseas, mostly in China. I wonder how much gasoline was consumed during this event- attendees, vendors, the race itself- how much of that money gets used to pay for ski resorts in Dubai?

From an economic standpoint, NASCAR seems to move an awful lot of American money and jobs overseas.
It's not exactly a green sport either.

I kept these thoughts to myself.

One of my crewmates told me that this race was smaller than last year's, which was smaller than the year before... I heard many tales of woe about the costs of operating diesel rigs for ten months out of every year- bitching about how the "global warming assholes" were going to ruin the country- how Cheerios suck the big one- it was an overload of cognitive dissonance.


Apparently, each driver's company releases a 'collectible car' for every racing season. This year's 'collectible' was actually a pretty cool toy -but it came with a $70 price tag! Parents would admonish their kids, telling them that they could have that car, but they wouldn't be allowed to play with it, otherwise it "wouldn't be worth anything".
Then they would by a left-over toy car from the previous year for use as a 'play' toy.
These older toys were available for 10%-25% of the original price.
I saw a pattern here... this year's $70 'collectible' will be next year's $12 'play toy'...hmmm.

When I ran a comics shop, kids would ask me: "how much will [this comic] be worth in ten years?"
My stock reply was : "That book won't even be worth reading."
Then they'd tell me that "they don't read " the comics, the books are investments.
They'd often buy two copies after these exchanges, thinking that I was trying to talk them out of buying the book in question so that I could retain ownership of it , hoard it for ten years, sell it and retire.

Free advice: If something leaves the factory with the phrase "Collector's Item" printed on it, the odds are very,very good that it will never increase in value. Ever.


I had to wear a NASCAR shirt while I fed lead-based Chinese toys to hungry Americans. It felt weird.

I wonder what would have happened if I'd worn an Obama '08 T-shirt? I saw a great deal of anti-Hillary ephemera but no openly anti-Obama statements.
I guess the Confederate flag speaks for itself.

The Rocket

Alec Long missed his mother. On the summer between the fifth and sixth grade of school, Alec had traveled from his grandparent's home in Maryland to visit her for the first time since she had moved away.

Alec's parents had divorced when he was still a baby and after the split, his mother Gina had moved Out West to live with an older man named Carol. Apparently his mom had married Carol years ago, but that marriage had been short-lived and the only thing Gina had to show for it was the rather old and battered Mercedes sedan that Alec was currently sitting in.

The car itself was parked on a desolate stretch of private dirt road somewhere on the sprawling Wyoming ranch of Mr. Simm, a cattleman who owned the bar where Alec's mom served drinks. Mr. Simm's bar was called the Jolly Roger and sported a faux 'pirate' theme. There was a fake pirate ship in the parking lot which Alec thought was funny because the nearest ocean seemed to be at least ten million miles away from the tedious desert landscape surrounding Evanston, the little oilfield town where his mother had settled after her second divorce.

That is stupid, he had laughed to himself, there aren't any pirate ships in the desert.

Alec didn't like boats.

Most of Alec's young life had been spent with his father's parents, as his father Jeff had taken a job as a steward on a cruise ship two days before Alec's premature birth and was, as his grandfather was fond of saying, lost at sea, although he wasn't truly lost like a Robinson Crusoe shipwreck; Jeff just didn't come home very often and when he did , he tended to show up drunk and stay that way until he left. Which was usually sooner than later.

Last Christmas Jeff had given his son a small bag of brightly-colored toy plastic dinosaurs and claimed that he had brought them special all the way from China, see, it says so right on the bag. Alec knew better but he had been so glad to see his father that he didn't mention seeing those same dinosaurs last week, pegged to the wall at the local 7-11, right next to the store's comic-book rack.

Those same dinosaurs were keeping Alec company as he waited for his mother to return. She had followed Mr. Simm's pickup truck as it drove over the half-graveled road, the Mercedes lurching crazily as it bounced on the uneven surface, headlights casting frenzied searchlight beams into the plume of dust left in Mr. Simm's wake. Mr. Simm is always in a hurry, Gina had told her son, but this car can't go that fast on this road.

After a few miles of turbulent driving, they saw the headlights of Mr. Simm' s Ford. He had turned around a few hundred feet ahead of them and stopped. His headlights flashed twice and then went dark. Gina stopped her car, turned off the engine and opened her door.

Wait here, honey. I need to talk to Mr. Simm for a little bit. I brought your comic-books with us- they are in the backseat, so sit tight until I get back, OK?

Alec wanted to tell her that it wasn't OK. He wanted to tell her that he was scared, that it was dark outside and he couldn't see anything and that if she left now he knew that she would never come back for him. He wanted to tell her that he knew dinosaurs didn't really come special from China just for him. He wanted to scream.

OK, Mom, he said.

Alec clambered into the back and rummaged around in the small red cooler Gina always traveled with, pushing aside the ghastly yellow cans of Coors beer until he finally came up with a chilly can of Coke. He opened it and carefully placed the curled metal tab in the car's ashtray. One of his schoolteachers had told Alec that baby squirrels often strangled on metal pull-tabs that careless people threw out of their car windows. Alec didn't want any part of that.

He had already read the comics at least a dozen times but there wasn't much else to do, so he flicked on the dim overhead lamp and started reading The Amazing Spider-Man again. It was the issue where Peter Parker discovers that the evil Green Goblin is actually his best friend's father. In it, the Green Goblin accidentally gets killed while fighting Spider-Man and now everyone-including Peter's best friend Harry, the New York police and Peter's sickly Aunt May- blames Spider-Man. Peter has to listen to his friends and family talk about how rotten Spider-Man is, when the whole time Peter is Spider-Man. Alec sometimes felt as if his own family secretly hated him. When he thought about his parents, he always wanted to cry, although he also wanted to be strong, even if it was the secret kind of strength like what Peter Parker had, the kind of strength that no one else could ever know about. So most of the time he didn't cry, even when he felt like it.

The comic story made Alec sad so he turned to his favorite part of the book, which was an advertisement for Estes model rockets. One of Alec's classmates owned a model rocket and had taken Alec out on a launch not long ago and ever since then, Alec had been asking his grandparents for a rocket of his own. He wanted a Saturn model, it was excitingly complicated-looking, with multiple engines that would ignite in stages, just like real thing. In his imagination, he painted the rocket in red and blue patches with black webs , just like Spider-Man's costume, and named it AF-15, after the first-ever Spidey book, Amazing Fantasy #15.

Maybe you can get one for Christmas, Granpa had said. But not sooner, we don't have money for trifles. Ask your mother when you get Out West. Maybe she has triflin' money.

After Alec arrived in Wyoming, Gina asked him if there was anything special he wanted. He showed her his tattered mail-order rocket catalog with the Saturn model circled in red magic marker. Gina whistled.

That is a lot of money. How about ice cream? Do you like ice cream?

He was ashamed of it, but he started to cry when Gina asked him if he liked ice cream. He really wanted that rocket and he hadn't seen his mom in forever and she couldn't even give him the rocket he had been dreaming of for so long. And suddenly Gina was crying too and Alec didn't know why , only that the grown-ups he knew seemed to cry a lot more than he did , and he was just a kid. She hugged him and said I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry in a whisper he could barely hear.

I am like Spidey, I am sad and everybody I love hates the real me, but I am strong and I don't cry. But he did cry.

Later, Gina told him that she had talked to Mr. Simm and that he was going to help her buy the rocket for him, the best rocket in the whole catalog, with extra engines, parachutes and decals and a deluxe electronic ignition kit that used a large battery to light the missile, not the cheap and unreliable fuses like Alec's friend had used.

Alec didn't know why Mr. Simm wanted them to drive all the way out to nowhere to talk about rockets, but the grownups in Alec's life were always going off to talk to each other in secret places, usually right before they dumped him off with a relative or family friend for a while. Alec didn't want to live with Mr. Simm, rocket or no rocket. He waited in the car, wondering where he might be tomorrow.

For a while, Alec's dinosaurs had an imaginary argument over which toy would be the first one to ride the rocket into space. That lasted for a few minutes and then he looked again at the rocket advertisement while he finished his Coke. Time passed until he had to step out of the car to pee.

After he was done he stared through the moonless night toward the low shadowy bulk of Mr. Simm's Ford. Without thinking, he crouched and started creeping slowly towards it, walking just off to the side of the road. As he neared it, he could hear faint strains of country-music coming from the cab He couldn't see inside from where he stood, so he snuck closer and stood on his tip-toes, peering diagonally across the truck bed and through the rear cabin window. He remained there for a few minutes.

When he got back to the Mercedes, his mouth was parched dry and he felt like he might choke on the spongy mass of his own tongue. He reached into the cooler for another Coke, but there weren't any, just a half-dozen Coors lazing in the dirty, icy water. Alec had tasted beer before, of course, and found it disgusting, but there was nothing else, so he popped the top of the nearest can. Out of habit, he placed the ring in the ashtray, then he steeled himself and took a small sip, then another, larger one.

It tasted very good to him.

.

One Chapter

It was a terrible plan, I thought to myself as I thunked ketchup out of the glass bottle and onto my mother's old wig. This ketchup wouldn't fool anyone and the only people who might actually stop would be the police, and what would I do with a stolen police car anyway? They probably had some secret cop trick to keep their cars from getting stolen and I'd just get caught again. That wouldn't suit me anymore than it would suit the court, which would be of the adult variety the next time I saw one, me having just turned eighteen a few weeks ago.

I was pretty sure I had some more trips to court in my future, but right now I had bigger problems, mainly getting out of town before one of Dobbie's thugs found me. About the only way I could afford to travel would be the bus and Dobbie knew that; someone would be watching the bus station, so that was out. Hitchhiking always makes me feel vulnerable and I hate feeling vulnerable, so I decided that stealing a car for my getaway would be a lot safer and easier than relying on the roadside kindness of strangers.

Like most of my plans, it didn't start off being terrible, it just wound up that way. I mean, stealing a car is a pretty sensible thing to do if you don't have one and you need one, but a lot of how sensible it is depends on how you steal it. Mostly it's easier if you steal a car that doesn't have anyone else in it, but I wanted a car that was already on the highway and that is where the canvas rucksack came in. In it , I had the wig, a bottle of ketchup, a couple packs of matches, a large Mason jar full of kerosene and about twenty pounds of bloody pork bones that I stole from the renderer's barrel in the alley behind the butcher's shop. The mannequin wouldn't fit in the bag, so I had to un-peg the legs and arms from the fake plastic torso and put them in a cardboard box that wasn't so much heavy as it was awkward and difficult to walk through the woods with. So you can see how my plan was heading towards terrible by this point.

Usually I did OK without a plan. Like how I got the mannequin.

I was killing time, feeling old and lost after my birthday, walking around town for the first time in years when I stumbled across one of those new 'shopping malls' , which is like a fenceless prison compound with a cluster of large single-story flat-topped buildings that are surrounded by parking lots and divided into lots of cells, only they aren't really cells, they are stores and shops, with a big two-story Montgomery Ward department store looming over them all like a lopsided guard tower, except instead of guards it was full of girls my age who were there voluntarily.

I imagined those loser girls in their matching frocks, getting paid a fifty cents an hour to sell lipstick and skin balms to saggy old ladies who couldn't look young again even if they had a time machine. It made me want to shoplift but I wasn't wearing shoplifting clothes, just jeans and light blue t-shirt. I had no large pockets and no purse.

I hate purses. If you ever see me with a purse, it's probably full of stolen clothes or stolen drugs. Or both. And I probably stole the purse too, which, if you think about it, is a hell of a lot better than buying one because the ones you buy don't come with all the neat stuff that the stolen ones have inside- one time I found a loaded .22 in a bag I snatched from an old lady in downtown Cincinnati. I guess she thought the gun would make her safer from people like me. But I hate guns so I traded it for mescaline. I hate mescaline too, but I didn't know that then.

So I walked around behind the Montgomery Wards store where a large loading dock faced a patch of woods. There weren't any people on the dock, but I saw a green-painted metal door standing open on the far end of the platform , so I hopped up and peeked in. There was a large stockroom area on one side and on the other side a small hallway led to what looked like a set of offices. I heard voices coming from the office area but saw no one. Right inside the door was a folding metal chair which some counter-girl had dropped her blue sales smock across the back of. I took the garment and put it on. The red plastic name tag pinned to the front said 'Norma' in white stenciled letters, which I thought was funny since my name is Jean and people always told me I looked like Marilyn Monroe, which is nice thing if a woman tells you but not always so nice when a boy does. Mostly, boys say that to me because they want to make me sticky. And I hate that, so I wear my hair plain and never touch makeup except when I'm stealing it or trying to look like someone that isn't me.

I was tying the little string on the back of the ugly blue apron when two men in white shirts and thin black ties came out of one of the offices and walked right past me without seeming to notice I was there. After they passed, one of them- a flabby, pear-shaped man who was sweating just from walking- turned around and looked at me.

"Break time is only five minutes, sweetheart. We don't pay you to stand around. Now get your pretty little behind out there and finish clearing section five. We need the old dolls off the floor. And no more wearing dungarees to work", he finished.

Old dolls? I was curious so I followed the rude fat man through the stockroom doors as he gestured towards a cluster of stripped-down female mannequins in the nearby corner. Old dolls.

They weren't nearly as heavy as a real person, so I picked one up and carried it back into the stockroom, out through the open door, across the loading dock and into the woods behind the store, where I hid it until it got dark outside and we came to pick it up in Dobbie's car. That was back when Dobbie and I were still friends, like maybe two weeks ago. So that's how I got the store dummy.

The ketchup was an unnaturally bright red against the blond wig and the whole mess didn't look very convincing on the mannequin. Fake blood on fake hair on fake body. I guessed maybe that it would work for my purposes, although I chickened out when it came to dumping the red sauce on my own blonde hair, which I had tried to grow long but was now hacked off , messily and unevenly just above my shoulders. I had done it myself earlier that morning and I'd been in a hurry at the time so it looked pretty bad, even compared to what we got at Watertown Home for Girls.

I wish I'd thought to bring the scissors with me. I wasn't really in the mood for cutting myself but what I was planning on doing was pretty crazy and cutting someone else would make things even more exciting. A lot better than this ketchup could ever hope to be, that's for sure.

When I was in the Watertown Home I had to spend some of my afternoons talking to adults who asked a lot of questions, most of which weren't really about what I had done and why I was there. Except they were about that, it was just that the questions were in disguise, sorta.

Like, sometimes the questions would really be pictures instead of questions and at first it seemed like all the answers I gave were the wrong ones. I don't think it was fair, it isn't my fault that they kept showing me ink-blobs that looked like my parents burning and screaming in a pool of bloody fire. I don't know where they found those pictures but it kinda shows that even though I was the inmate, the so-called doctors were really the sick ones. After what I'd done and been through, you'd think they'd show me pictures of flowers and butterflies, not horrible blobs like the ones they had put on the table in front of me. No wonder I have nightmares.

I don't really remember deciding to do it, or even doing it really, but one day the docs came to my ward and they asked me how long I planned on staying quiet. It seemed like a familiar question, I think maybe they asked me the same thing every day but I wasn't really paying attention so I'm not sure.

"Long enough", I answered. I don't know why I said that, but they seemed pleased and told me it was a breakthrough because I hadn't spoken for six months. I hadn't? That surprised me.

Like I said, I don't really recall being quiet for so long but after my breakthrough I decided to tell the doctors that their pictures looked like butterflies and flowers and they called that a breakthrough too.

Before long, one of them confided to me that I'd been recommended for EST- which is like being electrocuted to make you stop being crazy- but since I was having so many breakthroughs, they'd decided to postpone that indefinitely. There were a lot of people on the outside, she told me, who thought EST was a bad idea and that it messed up people's brains and if I was lucky, it would be banned before my turn came and the postponement wouldn't matter anyway. The way she said it made me feel like she was one of those people on the outside, and that I should be relieved that she thought EST was a bad idea. It turned out that she was right and by the time I turned 18, the docs had pretty much stopped using it, although the table they used was still there, waiting threateningly in the scary basement room that no one I knew could ever quite remember being in, no matter how many times they were taken there.