Psycho Killer - Pt. II

(For the first part of "How Our Intrepid Heroine Came To Live With a Self-Proclaimed Serial Killer, see Part I.)

I know what you're thinking. "My parents never would’ve let me move across the country to live with a man I'd just met! Online! Who claimed to have killed people!"

Guess what? My parents wouldn't have, either.

Their path to parenthood was long and hard-won. Your illustrious narrator, their first, arrived only after a decade of marriage, several years of fruitless "trying" and a few miracles of modern medicine. Although my sisters were born in rapid succession, my parents never lost their sense of awe and gratitude. As a result, they were deeply loving but also quite protective.

We watched PBS.

We drank 100% juice.

We didn't bike too far from home.

And we certainly didn't move to Georgia to cohabitate with self-proclaimed psychopaths.

---

Unfortunately for my parents (and their best intentions), I was an astonishingly willful child. From earliest toddlerhood, I ripped through life with white-knuckled determinism. Teenage narcissism intensified this trait; love-bordering-on-religious-fanaticism exploded it. Seventeen Year-Old Jul was not "challenging" or "difficult". Seventeen Year-Old Jul was a Category-5 hurricane: one did not attempt to control it or contain it so much as survive it.

My parents were painfully aware of how any attempts to divert my southbound trajectory would end. Using brute force would be tantamount to hugging an eel. The harder their embrace, the more likely I would be to squirm free, decamp to the nearest Greyhound station and vanish in a cloud of exhaust. Unwilling to risk losing all ties with their child, they were forced to assume the unenviable role of prisoners currying favor with their captor. The overall situation was wretched and unalterable. Via grudging cooperation, they hoped to maintain a small sliver of influence in their daughter’s life.

Of course, they were entirely unaware of David's scary little secret. Had they known, I have no doubt they would've liquidated their assets, hired a squad of deprogrammers and developed a sudden, uncharacteristic faith in an interventionist god.

---

In early January, with my parents' grudging consent, David traveled to Philadelphia to claim his intended bride. I still remember my first glimpse of him as he ascended the stairs at 30th Street Station. He was lithe and blonde, with bright, penetrating eyes… a cherub grown up and grown dark. We locked eyes, lit up, collided in a fervent embrace. I half-expected the entire cavernous structure to disintegrate around our shoulders, shaken apart to marble-dust and cigarette butts.

For years, I couldn't walk past that building without my breath catching and my eyes watering. The next time I form an intense, architecture-linked memory, I'll make damned sure it's with a yurt in Tibet.

We spent the car ride back to my parents' house gently entwining our fingers, staring at one another before grinning and looking away.

We spent that afternoon clumsily rolling around on my futon, marinating in cigarette smoke and sweat. It was here, less than eight hours after we'd met, that the first tiny chink appeared in a previously armor-clad illusion of love.

"Um, baby?” he said, running his fingers over my bare back, "Do you think that next time, you could maybe TRY to keep the same rhythm as me?"

Tears welled up in my eyes. The first seeds of what would become a veritable bumper crop of self-loathing began to sprout in my head. I'd disappointed my soulmate. I was a lousy lay. I wasn't worthy. "Uh... yeah. I'm sorry," I stammered, "I just haven't... y'know... done this a whole lot."

I'd done it so little, in fact, that I was still keeping a mental tally.

It was my ninth time.

If I'd known that the next three months of my life would make that unpleasant little exchange look like "She Walks in Beauty", would I have still gone? You know, I believe I would've. A flotilla of seizure-inducing warning signs wouldn't have altered my course. As is typical of the cocksure, the love-drunk, the inexperienced, I walked in idiocy.

---

Three days, eight hundred miles and a few dozen uppercuts to my self-worth later, we arrived Home: David's parents' finished basement. While I'd been aware that he still lived at home ("keeps the overhead low", he'd explained inscrutably), my first glimpse of the 15'x25' room where my beloved hung his hat was rather disheartening. It was a dim, low-ceilinged cell with Taco Bell wrappers and Dungeons & Dragons paraphernalia scattered over every free surface. The cheeriest touch was the scuffed checkerboard linoleum. "This?” I thought, as that first tiny chink began to grow, "THIS is where all the amoral adventures and shadowy plans for world domination take place? This glorified dorm room is where David the Mastermind spends his time?"

It certainly was. It was where I'd be spending 99% of mine, too.

---

Many women's first few weeks of motherhood are characterized by unimaginable exhaustion, slow-motion panic and a profound sense of isolation. There ceases to be any appreciable difference between 1:00 AM and 1:00 PM. The blinds stay perpetually drawn. A sharp delineation appears between Out There and In Here. The latter arena is so all-consuming - life measured in twenty-minute naps, number of diapers wet and dirtied, frantic calls to the pediatrician - that Out There might as well cease to exist.

I've been there. I've sobbed into a passport-sized diaper. I've lost twenty pounds in under a month because my sudden, graduate-level crash-course in Keeping Infant Alive simply didn't allow for meal breaks.

Georgia was worse.

David worked from home (read: did ten minutes' worth of maintenance on his father's website each month). As a result, he was able to set his own schedule. Ever the iconoclast, he chose the Circadian-altering, crazy-making third shift. We rose mid-afternoon and spent all night concocting impassioned plans to conquer the world, the e-commerce sector or the mall frogurt-stand clerk who skimped on toppings. While unskilled in almost every other area, David was phenomenally charismatic, Anton LaVey crossed with Tony Robbins. It was this slick, sinister enthusiasm which held everything together. Of course our midnight machinations were nothing more than a house of cards. Under dim incandescents, though, the illusion was just too dazzling to doubt.

In addition to being nocturnal, my betrothed was also something of an agoraphobic. Well, that's not strictly true. There were the bimonthly cigarette-replenishment trips, occasional forays to Waffle House for coffee and waitress-derision. There was one action-packed trip to Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Georgia which featured extensive firearm practice, Skoal-sampling and my first tattoo (a malformed mass of squiggles, applied by a burly gent who drank a Bud and told homophobic jokes the entire time). The majority of the time, however, David preferred to stay tucked away in our wood-paneled oubliette, orchestrating mayhem... or, as was more often the case, playing "Metal Gear: Solid" for 48 hours in a row.

"When did he find time to systematically slay thirteen Atlanta-area individuals?” I'd briefly ponder before chastising myself for lack of loyalty, "We haven't left this room in four days..."

After a month of subterranean cohabitation, tiny flaws had enlarged to gaping cracks. The mystique had gone musty. Little, needling jabs had escalated to full-on harpoonings, delivered at rapid clip... "Honey, your design is just way too amateurish for my new website." "We both need work before we can pitch this project to the local paper... my project-management skills aren't that great, and you're just not a very good writer." "Yeah, my parents... they don't really, you know, like you that much."

Cruel barb aside, I wouldn't have liked me very much, either. I was a shadowy, puffy-eyed presence, scurrying into the kitchen under cover of darkness to make David sandwiches. Of course I wasn't terribly conversational. The fantasy for which I'd abandoned my family, my schooling and my rationality was crumbling to bits in front of me. Small talk was for those not attempting to hold an entire world together with trembling hands and unevenly-sliced tomatoes. My feeble, oversudsed and undercooked stabs at domesticity made me resemble a smudged-eyeliner version of the Myra Gale character in "Great Balls of Fire!”… young, desperate to please and prone to dissolving in tears and wailing, "I don't know HOW to be a good wife, Jerry Lee!"

In the movie, Jerry Lee comforted his poor, distraught, underage sweetheart. In real life, David snapped, "Well, I guess next time you'll know that barbecue sauce doesn't go too well with cream cheese", while ordering a pizza.

---

Three months in, the facade had more or less disintegrated. "Tell me more about what it's like," I'd whisper in bed, desperately trying to push him back into an intriguing but ill-fitting mold. "Maybe later... tired... too intense," he'd mutter, drifting off. If David really was the ringleader of a nefarious, multi-state crime syndicate, he apparently performed his duties during the twenty minutes a day I was in the shower. If he’d killed anyone, the deed must’ve been done in the BP, the Waffle House or his own driveway, because he certainly didn’t venture anywhere else. The driveway did feature a large, discolored stain. I was pretty sure it was motor oil rather than the blood of an enemy, an inferior, a sheep righteously culled.

In less than ninety days, the contract was irrevocably breached. The bloom was off the rose. The rosebush had been weed-whacked down to a stump. I was unwilling to face the truth and incapable of stomping out, slamming the door and stepping into the daylight. This was my one and only future. I’d sold my morality and my soul for this vacation, and I was damned if it was going to be rained out.

"I am you," I'd whisper to myself during my protracted shower-cries, tracing our initials on steam-fogged glass, "I am you, I am you, I am you."

I'd lie beside him at night, tracing my fingers over his skin, trying to memorize his scent. Tears trickling down my face, sobbing silently so I didn’t wake him.

---

It ended abruptly. Just-like-that. In retrospect, it’s a wonder my sojourn lasted as long as it did. David was constantly in search of the new, the neuron-tickling, the Next Big Thing. He’d exhausted the possibilities of a fragile, fawning live-in acolyte well before April reared its blossom-bedecked head.

It was six AM. We’d stayed up all night, drinking warmish Jack ‘n Dew, alternately pawing one another and retreating to our separate computer chairs, damp and restless, tapping out our mutual dissatisfaction.

“I’m sending you home.” David turned to me, lapis eyes vivid. “First thing tomorrow.”

So this is shock, I thought as my face went cold and my hair prickled.

“You’re kidding,” I said, more accusation than question.

“This isn’t fun any more- ,” he began.

“I know, I know, babe,” I pleaded, “But I’m trying so hard, every day…”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” said David. “I never really loved you. This was a game… a test to see how much you’d believe, how far you’d go. I gotta say, I'm proud... you took it all the way. And you were twisted enough to actually LIKE it. But you’re not me. You’re nothing like me, not even after three months of trying to be a fucking chameleon. It’s getting old.”

“Was ANY of it true?” I blurted, still glued in the same position, my eyes dry, wide and terrified.
“I’m not going to tell you. Maybe the whole thing was a game. Maybe it was all true, and because part of me does love you, I’m protecting you from me and my life. You’re never going to know. Ever.”

Just as I’d kept a 4” Gerber in my boot, David kept a loaded .22 on his desk. I looked at it, sitting under a burrito wrapper. My hands twitched ineffectually in my lap.

“Don’t even fucking think about it,” said David. “First, a .22 round would only piss me off, and then I’d have to kick your ass. Second… that’s not you. Can’t you tell that by now?”

“No,” I blubbered, tears finally coursing down my chilly face, “You can’t… I won’t… there’s no one else in the world like me…”

“There are PLENTY of people like you,” he said, the last word brimming with happy disgust. “Here’s the phone. Call your parents and tell them you’re flying home tomorrow morning.”

“No,” I blurted, inching my chair away, “Can’t…”

“Well, do whatever the fuck you’d like. I’ll call them. You’re still going home.”

I was free. I was catatonic. I was a 120-amp fuse, overloaded with emotional agony, waiting to break, waiting to blow, and yet inexplicably still sitting here, staring at a stranger with a thin smile and a United Airlines envelope in his hand.

---

The next few days are a pile of blurry snapshots. I remember sleeping with David twice that evening, trying to hold on to just a little of his sweat, his spit, him. Oddly, it wasn’t the worst sex I’ve ever had. I remember packing my beloved stuffed giraffe and birth certificate, leaving my platform sneakers and copy of “ANSWER Me!”. I remember being handed a twenty to buy a snack while in transit (unnecessary; I didn’t eat for nearly a week). I remember David’s father briskly shaking my hand, an impersonal farewell to an impersonal acquaintance. I remember stepping off the plane and seeing my father, remember how he walked up and held me tightly for what seemed like hours, didn’t say a word as I sobbed into his flannel shirt.

---

My sister Sarah claims that my capacity for emotional recovery is much like Wolverine’s healing factor. “Dude,” she’s marveled, “You get pistol-whipped by some totally awful trauma, and thirty seconds later, you’re peeling yourself off the ground, spitting out gravel and yelling, ‘Was that shit really necessary?’!”

This is not strictly accurate.

My first days home from Georgia were quite educational. I learned that while it’s possible to live on diet Coke, it’s not a great idea for your teeth or your psyche. I learned that crying yourself to sleep, crying intermittently through the night and crying before you open your eyes in the morning doesn’t leave a person particularly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I learned that no matter how much you wish it would, a broken heart won’t kill you.

Most importantly, however, I learned how to fake it.

I didn’t want to wake up in the morning. I faked it.
I didn’t want to be conscious. Ever. I faked it.
I didn’t want to interact with my family. I faked it.
I didn’t want to eat or smile or put on a snappy little suit and interview for secretarial jobs. I faked it.

The only thing I really wanted to do was sit in front of the computer, chatting with David, eagerly lapping up my daily ration of emotional abuse, frantically trying to wheedle my way back into his heart. It would be another six months before his grip on my mind and spirit would begin to grow slack.

In the interim, I dated men I couldn’t stand. I saw silly, explosion-laden movies. I went to Friendly’s at three in the morning, scalded my innards with Buffalo wings and coffee, wrote bad, lovesick poems on napkins. I got my second tattoo, a stylized outline of David’s beloved silver ring, a heavy, hand-formed knot which had briefly served as my engagement ring.

And I faked it.

Living – no matter how forced and arbitrary and tiresome – is still not grieving. If you do enough of the former, it’ll eventually start to seem more pleasant and endurable than the latter. Eventually, despite yourself, you’ll utter one genuine laugh, enjoy a plate of homemade spaghetti, nod your head awkwardly to a good, bassy song.

At which point you’ll promptly burst into tears. But it’ll happen again… soon.

You don’t fake it ‘til you make it, exactly. You fake it until time inches forward, the world changes shape and the disingenuous existence you fashioned becomes Velveteen Rabbit-real.

You fake it ‘til it’s made FOR you.

---

It’s been seven years, five months and some-odd days since I returned home. Some very odd days, indeed, as well as some tremendously happy and fulfilling ones. I’ve never had that second tattoo removed; the memory, like the ink, is indelible. I no longer grieve for David. I harbor no delusions of finding the “one other person in the entire world” who shares my snarled strand of emotional DNA. It’s all mine and one-of-a-kind. But that experience – the scary, the sad, the humiliating – is part of it, too. I never want to forget.

I was seventeen. It doesn’t excuse, it doesn’t explain and it doesn’t change.

When I was seventeen, I let a dark, not-entirely-normal part of myself rage out of control. I fed it, nurtured it, flaunted it, and lured a monster to my doorstep. Not a psycho-killer, but someone capable of showing me what my worst, most hateful tendencies would look like in a few years unless I tried very, very hard keep them pinned beneath my boot heel. Who’s sicker – someone falsely claiming to be a killer, or someone genuinely drawn to that person?

The fault lies with me… because it is me. One doesn’t annihilate the dark half so much as work each day to keep it in remission.

I’m as kind and loving to my family, my friends and my son as I can possibly be. I devote myself fully to living a good, moral life because I know it’s a choice. I fight for it with every particle of my being. I surround that dark blotch on my soul with compassion, understanding, sympathetic words and helpful works. I fake like it doesn’t exist… and pretend - or hope - that someday, maybe it won’t.

Psycho Killer - Pt. I

I don't dedicate.
Nonetheless...
For C.

The New Jersey public school system, Stolichnaya, C-SPAN, the Unabomber, my abnormal psych professor, Sub Pop Records and ENIAC are all partially to blame.

But it's mainly on me. Or rather, the sixteen year-old version of me.

Now, maybe the sixteen year-old you was a delightful, upstanding young adult, starring in drama club productions, dishing up meals at the soup kitchen and never letting your boyfriend's hands bypass the orcas swimming across your Sierra Club t-shirt.

Sixteen Year-Old Jul, however, was a monstrous little bastard. I was poorly-informed, endlessly-opinionated, incredibly foul-mouthed (well, some things never change). I was chubby, shy and ensnared in an H.R. Giger painting's worth of orthodontia. I was also deep in the throes of Teenage Ebola: low self-esteem and enormous ego, battling for control within a single body, leaving the host in piss-poor shape for the duration.

I didn't have a boyfriend... but that was because teenage boys were malodorous, slack-jawed cretins. My teachers were liars, charlatans and entirely too fond of poly-blend separates. My parents were cruel oppressors with archaic views of freedom, personal responsibility and the difference between "clean dishes" and "dishes still encrusted with recognizable chunks of Stroganoff, so re-wash them again NOW, young lady".

I kept a 4" pocket knife tucked in one Doc Marten at all times, presumably as proof of my Junior Bad-Ass League membership. I'd practice flicking it open with one hand while alone in my bedroom, periodically losing my grip and spearing my Kermit the Frog pillow.

I should not have been left in charge of a goldfish bowl, let alone my own path to adulthood.

All of this elaborates, but doesn't explain. And it most definitely doesn't excuse.

---

Shortly after I turned seventeen, I made the biggest mistake of my life. In a somewhat off-kilter tribute to the Talking Heads, I'm going to call him David.

We met online in September.

By Halloween, we were deliriously in love.

By Thanksgiving, I'd made plans to leave college and move to Georgia to be with him.

Around the time of the first snowfall, I packed up my stuffed animals and broad collection of misanthropic literature, hopped in my father's dung-colored K-car and sputtered off towards my destiny.

Thing is, around Election Day, we'd had the following instant-message exchange.

David: You know, I've killed before.
Jul: Um... seriously?
David: I've never told anyone, obviously, but I know I can trust you. And I'm absolutely not joking.
Jul: Hmmmmn. Tell me more...

Not incredulity, not horror, not shock... "tell me more".

Psycho killer / qu'est-ce que c'est?

That's stuck with me, more than anything else which happened during that tumultuous, heartbreaking, life-shaping year. "Tell me more".

Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa...

I've forgiven David. You already know where his story is headed (nowhere, fast, bottle of Depakote rattling alongside).

Someday, I may forgive myself.

---

The day of my sixteenth birthday, I woke up, chugged a diet Mountain Dew and dropped out of high school. Tired of being an awkward, geeky outcast, I planned to both reinvent myself and achieve my true potential at Scrub Pine Community College. The latter goal got off to a ripping start; my first semester GPA was a Rod Carew-like 4.0. However, I was still horrifically geeky.... and now, I was paying for the privilege of being ignored by my classmates. I sat alone in the dining hall each day, nibbling a homogeneous chicken patty and shooting daggers at my sheep-like inferiors. My romantic life was limited to a few clumsy liaisons with an aloof Lothario who disappeared for weeks on end and returned my breathy, "I'm so in love with you!", with a measured, "Well, I care for you as well, BUT...".

Things clearly hadn't gone the way I'd imagined. This chapped my pompous little ass to no end. How DARE life deviate from my meticulously-crafted plan? Had I been older and less insufferable, I could have reevaluated my options. Had I been humbler, I could've saved years of strife and reevaluated myself. I could've said hello to the early-education majors, rather than attempting to ignite their scrunchies with the force of my glare.

I was sixteen. It doesn't excuse, but it'll have to explain.

While watching a filmstrip in Abnormal Psychology class one afternoon, I decided that the explanation for my social difficulties was blindingly simple: I was afflicted with antisocial personality disorder... in other words, a sociopath.

I'll repeat: sixteen.

I'd received a copy of the DSM-IV as a birthday present several months earlier. Soon, the section devoted to ASPD had been burnished to a soft gleam by my eager little fingers. "This is SO ACCURATE!" I marveled, copying choice diagnostic criteria onto pastel index cards, "I DO fail to conform to social norms!" I carried this small stack of symptomology with me at all times, periodically pausing in 7-11 or the campus bookstore to leaf through them and murmur, "I HAVE rationalized having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another! Why, just yesterday I punched Junket because she stole my Dr Pepper-flavored lip gloss! If that doesn't indicate a lack of conscience, I don't know WHAT does!"

I applied a zestful, can-do spirit towards nurturing my newfound sociopathy. I spent hours analyzing the seminal hate-zine "ANSWER Me!" as though it were a misanthropic Dead Sea scroll. I located and downloaded the most graphic, disturbing images I could find (crime-scene snapshots, an infamous Steve Albini album cover) in an attempt to "desensitize" myself to them. I stared at my bright, bratty little sisters and exhausted but doting parents and tried (in vain, thankfully) to convince myself that I felt no emotion towards them whatsoever. It was an unsustainably strange way to live; had things gone differently, I'm sure I would have retired the close-range shotgun-blast photos and unsmiling facade within a few months.

Then I met David.

---

My first-ever website was a slow-loading monstrosity known as "Craven Chicky's Wicked Lair" (my screen name having been inspired by Craven Walker, inventor of the Lava Lamp). In addition to a 50MB WAV file of my sister belching punk rock lyrics, it also featured some half-decent (if painfully immature) writing. One day, I received an e-mail from "VitriolLad88", complimenting me on my angry teenage wordsmithery and asking if I'd be interested in chatting on instant messenger. Attention- and affection-starved, I installed ICQ and sent him a message less than five minutes later ("So, what's a nice boy like you doing on a worldwide interconnected computer network like this?").

Later that day, he and I exchanged ten minutes' worth of witty banter.

The next day, we chatted for several hours.

The day after that, the drug really took hold. We stayed up all night, exchanging flirtatious bon mots, deep-rooted secrets and shared hatred of the civilized world. At nine AM, I staggered off to school, exhausted but grinning. In between classes, I scurried to the computer lab to see if a particularly vitriolic lad had fired off any new correspondence.

Of course he'd sent a gorgeous e-mail. Of course it was five pages long.

---

David, you see, was manic-depressive, unmedicated by choice. Falling in love with a person in the grips of an active mania is sort of like riding a malfunctioning roller coaster. The experience is so fantastically exhilarating that it takes you a little too long to notice that something's wrong. By then, you're strapped in place, going ninety miles an hour and helpless to do anything but close your eyes and pray.

Youth is idiocy, enthusiasm is contagious and mistakes are inevitable. Within weeks, I was gone... catastrophically in love and deep under David's spell. Even when young and idealistic, I hadn't been terribly young or idealistic... no bacon-thwarted attempts at veganism, no circulating hand-scrawled petitions at the mall. My bond with this mysterious stranger living eight hundred miles away was the first thing I was absolutely, positively sure of. We spent every spare moment online, chatting, conspiring, marvelling that we'd found the one other soul in the world which perfectly matched our own. "The words 'I love you' don't even come close," wrote David one night, "I AM you... pure and simple." I was enraptured, a believer at last. Never before (and, to be brutally honest, never since) have I felt so adored and adoring, so inextricably tethered to a lover's heart. "I want to gather all the false love I've bestowed upon other women, stack it like cordwood and set it alight," he wrote, "I want to make a massive, towering pyre in honor of everyone and everything which made me who I am, which made me capable of loving you."

Oh, he was good.

David's top-secret sinister "revelation" was delivered at 3 AM, roughly a month after we'd met. It had much the same effect on our nascent bond as tempering does on steel. My love was a killer... because he could, because he was bigger, greater, more powerful than any of society's rules. And I? I was the one woman in the world who knew him, through and through. I was him. I wouldn't blanch at his actions, I would celebrate them. My convictions were now exponentially stronger and more solid than they'd been before. My high-school acquaintances were buying prom dresses and beaten-up cars. I was buying a mythology. I was a feverish, twisted mess, intoxicated by love and potential, enraged by everything else. One night, in response to my escalating verbal abuse, my mother pleaded, "Jul, your family can't TAKE this anymore! You never, ever stop hurting us. I just don't think you can continue to live in this house."

"I don't think so, either," I replied icily (even though my teeth were clenched and my nails gouging divots in my palms), "I'm moving to Georgia... and I'm getting married."

Several days earlier, in a move which had made my already-inflamed heart practically rupture, David had been referring to me as his "wife".

It was the brass ring. It was my whole world, my destiny.

It was, as it turned out, nothing as I'd imagined. But I'd find that out soon enough.

"WHAT?", exclaimed my mother, "With... with the guy you've been talking to on the computer? Are you insane?"

"You have no idea", I replied.

To Be Continued...

The Contract (Ms. Bitterless)

• We will never go to IKEA together. Should we require modern Scandinavian furnishings, we will enlist an objective third party to procure our PAARTIKLE BORD dining set for us. I have seen the face of the male IKEA patron, and it is not pretty. Ranging from "bemused and haggard" to "soul-deadened and haggard", they trail behind their partners, forlorn, clutching fabric swatches and dreams. They say they prefer the beech stain to the espresso; in actuality, they fail to give a shit about this or any other topic. Their Abercrombie t-shirt-clad little hearts weep silently for a break, a truce, some Swedish meatballs, a different life entirely.
  
  I will slit my wrists with a miniature Allen wrench before I let that fate befall you, Imaginary Boyfriend.


• You will appreciate my grilled cheeses. They do not contain a single, one-note cheese, but the symphonic convergence of three. Every millimeter of their interior surface area is slicked with a special mustard/mayo concoction; the last bite is as unctuous and well-seasoned as the first. An arcane dance of squishing, flipping and wiggling produces their Pantone-perfect crispy exterior. And they are made with such love, such buttery-warm affection that it seems as though your name has been scrawled across them, writ small a million times in lacy golden-brown.

• Your presence in my life will make sweetly romantic alt-rock that much better. The treble brighter, juicier. Bass as lust incarnate, pushing and pressing through crackly speakers. The singer's hushed lilt a weak acid capable of dissolving our bodies, sweeping the resultant dust across thousands of miles and causing Pan-Pacific teenagers to sniffle and sigh with the sheer beauty of it all.
  
  As opposed to your current absence, which leads only to my oft-expressed desire to garrote Pete Yorn with his own guitar strings.



• We'll conjure up our own tiny, localized Indian summer... fling off the ennui like a too-warm quilt, open all the windows, flood the house with good smells and golden light. We'll run our fingers through every chain-link fence we pass, kick up flurries of dry, spicy leaves, eat bacon and eggs and cream-shot coffee for breakfast because Wheaties clearly aren't enough to nourish something so ravenous, insatiable, twenty feet tall and growing by the second.



• We will walk in the snow.
  
  You will find my pom-pom-topped knit hat strangely alluring.
  
  We will play eagerly, mittens sticking to ice-crusted playground equipment, snowballs exploding against puffy coats, the air glacially clean and sweet.
  
  We will create our own small ice-world, sparkling and fuzzily aglow under sodium-arc lights. In the midst of a particularly heated snowball battle, the laughing, wet-mittened Ice King will push the flushed, red-nosed Ice Queen down next to the slides. Rather than shoving icicles down the back of her parka (as was his stated intent), he'll cover her chilly face in kisses... freezing, cold, thawing, downright warm, okay then, hot. Crows and rabbits will pause in amazement at the strange creatures with Gore-Tex hides tussling in the snow, smashing delicate drifts, ripping off soaked wool, melting in the chill.
  
  And then you'll shove icicles down my parka.



• You'll read my writing, of your own volition, because it's mine. You'll catch the occasional glimpse of yourself from behind the dense thickets of adjective. You will swoon in exactly the way I imagined while mangling the keyboard with one hand and drinking wine from a party cup with the other. You will leave adorable, purposefully-obscure comments under names which I only I would recognize... FoieGrasApocalyse218, BordentownNewJerseyDeathTrip99.



• You'll send flowers to my office on my birthday. Not vanilla-with-no-toppings roses, not cheap-little-hussy carnations, not the ever-popular and allergy-provoking Asiatic lilies. Flame-orange tulips, luridly purple mini-Callas, one of those eerie, luminescent flowers which only bloom once every twenty years and must be stolen in a risky, late-night commando raid on the local arboretum. Those are more my style. You know.



• The Replacements' "Unsatisfied" : the role you and I play in each other's lives should be the diametric opposite of the sentiment expressed in this song. My liberty and my chances will never be just a lie, damn it.
  
  "Kiss Me On the Bus", though? Westerberg's sweet, pleading, low-grit rasp? Rollicking guitars lewdly rubbing against joyous chimes? That sudden, manic itch to stop reading Spanish public-service posters, stand up and be magically alive for the next three minutes?
  
  I'll be that for you if you'll be that for me.



• You'll let me grow close enough so that it'll really, truly sting if either one of us ever pulls back. You'll be geeky and goofy and captivating enough so that I'll rip through the standard "hesitating/contemplating/flinging-self-off-cliff" rigmarole in record time, no matter how intense that hypothetical sting might be.
  
  And when I'm discussing my busted-up heart and gun-shy disposition, you'll recognize and call me on my complete, utter bullshit.



• You'll always give me quarters for the jukebox.
  
  You'll admire my exaggerated hip-swishing as I saunter back, and your slightly-crooked, drink-stirrer-chewing grin will assure me that yes, 0812 was exactly totally perfectly right.

Anti-Bush

Hello, and welcome to Too Much Information Theater. I'm your host, Jul Thumbscrew. Over the next hour, we're going to delve into one of the deepest, innermost areas of the delightful Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma, Cloaked in Intrigue, Stuffed with Smoked Gouda and Rolled in Panko Crumbs which is Me. This is an area to which few individuals have been privy... and I've generally made them buy me a drink or two first.

Yeah, that's right. Having already exposed my contused, confused little heart to the entire modem-bearing world, I figured I might as well drop my pants.

Some women are capable of accepting - nay, loving - their bodies' natural, goddess-given state. For example, when viewed from the knee down, one of the teachers at J.Q.'s daycare resembles nothing so much as Robin Williams, if Robin developed a sudden affinity for floral capris and jangly little anklets. Point being, Ms. Doubtfire is unconcerned with societal standards of beauty, choosing instead to be comfortable in her own skin (her furry, furry skin).

She and I could not be more different.

I am ALL ABOUT the stupid societal standards of beauty. I exfoliate and epilate. I tone and condition. I attempt to make certain areas darker (my skin, skim-milky enough to make Casper the Friendly Ghost look like George Hamilton) and others lighter (my teeth, an unfortunate casualty of diet Coke addiction, along with "once-full change jar" and "ability to sit still for more than ten seconds without doing a twitchy, recumbent version of the Macarena"). I have purchased enough Biore strips to de-schwarzkopf Germany, despite the fact that those little fuckers have proven utterly ineffectual in removing anything but $6.75 from my wallet. But more time-consuming than the bleaching, more expensive than the burnishing, more painful than getting Noxzema in one's eyeball... is the hair removal.

Despite being minimally hirsute, I still react to the slightest emergence of fuzz with the balls-out hysterics of someone who has spied a palmetto bug scurrying up their Levi's - i.e. "EEEEAAAAGH! GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!", frenzied swatting, etc. From the time I was a wee lass, I was ever-vigilant with the Lady Bic, determined to ensure that my own personal trichological territory never extended below my eyelashes. While it was fairly easy to keep my extremeties as smooth as David's chilly marble ass, other areas required a bit more ingenuity.

Specifically, THAT area. How to put this gently?

Instead of a 'fro down below, I have a Kojack down low, Jack.

I've got a nectarine in lieu of a peach.

My muffin, it has no streusel.

Yes, I could do this all day.

Keeping one's grassy knoll defoliated is more difficult than it might appear. It is a strange, squishy region, riddled with mysterious nooks and inscrutable crannies. Luckily for those of you who might wish to keep Down There delightfully bare, I have tried more or less every method available for de-lichening the ol' glacier, the results of which I am abundantly happy to share. Without further ado (or groan-inducing gynecological euphemism), I present:

Jul's Guide to Turning Your Lyle Lovett Into a Michael Stipe

1. Nair : don't bother. If the idea of slathering caustic goo all over your widget doesn't deter you, the whole "ignited German Shepard" smell which inevitably results oughta do the trick.



2. "Nads" and other goopy preparations which seem like they could also be used as a dessert topping: don't bother. Unless you are the nimble-fingered Zen fucking master of ripping those little cloth strips off, you'll be left with unwashable sugary goo all over your lady-region. At best, this will lead to painful "yanking" sensations when going about your daily routine; at worst, you'll have sucrose-crazed insects dive-bombing your gear all day long, like little exoskeleton-clad Van Halen groupies.
   



3. Shaving : somewhat of a mixed bag.
   
   Pros: quick, cheap, thorough.
   
   Cons: lightning-fast regrowth, which leads to either mandatory daily touch-ups or the singularly unappetizing "scruffy" look (trust me, it looks a LOT sexier on Jake Gyllenhaal than on your hoo-hoo). Ingrown hairs, which lead to scratching, clawing, redness and other agonies.
   
   If you do choose to shave, follow these handy tips:
   
• Exfoliate the hell out of that puppy beforehand. A Buff-Puff is nice. A loofah may be a bit extreme for non-BDSM folks. If you ARE a BDSM folk, then use a black, studded loofah, because that would be hilarious.
  



• Use the cheapest disposable razor money can buy - they tend to be irritating yet effective, like the Marine Corps drill seargants of the hair-removal world. Replace it every week.
  



• Use conditioner in lieu of shaving cream... preferrably the thickest, goopiest stuff you can find. If it's Slurpee-colored and sold in sixteen-ounce tubs at your local bodega, it'll do nicely.
  



• Moisturize every single day. MORE than that, even. Shit, squirt some Jergens down there while you're waiting in line at the DMV. Nothing is more effective at preventing bumps, ingrowns and other horrors.
  



4. Rip It! Rip It Good! Waxing, Tweezing, Epi-Lady... ing. This is my method of choice. It lasts a loooong time and is unlikely to lead to shaving-style dermatalogical disasters. There is, however, the unavoidable pain factor. This - like choosing to de-thatch one's cottage to begin with - is a very personal matter. Do you, like me, fancy yourself something of a pain bad-ass? Do you refuse to purchase "ouchless" Band-Aids on principle? Then this method might work well for you. Are you a more sensitive soul? Do you own an aloe vera plant solely for minor first-aid usage? Does it have a name? God, what a freaking wuss. Ahem... I mean, you might want to give this one a pass.

If you choose the Snatch Yourself Bald method, the following tips may help:

• They're not kidding when they say "hold skin taut". Hold it REALLY taut. Like, Mickey Rourke's face-type taut.
  



• Re: waxing. The Faster You Rip, The Better the Trip. Or, if you prefer: Rip Quick, Neat Trick. Rip Slow... um... To Hell You Will Momentarily Go? You Will Use a Turn of Phrase Much More Vulgar Than "Whoa!"? Run Outside and Dip Your Flaming Crotch in the Snow?
  



• Re: the Epilady. I am not sure if this contraption is incredibly cool or sadistically Kafka-esque. Either way, it's what I use to keep my own field fallow. It was also the inspiration for a new cocktail creation:
  
  "The Owie"

1. Fill sandwich-sized Ziplock bag with ice.
   
2. Top off with adult beverage of choice.
   
3. Bite corner off of bag, ingest beverage.
   
4. Deposit resultant sack of nicely-melty ice atop boo-boo.
   
   I don't think it's going to replace Tylenol 3 anytime soon, but for those of us committed to maintaining a bullrush-free Nile, it's a taste of sweet, sweet victory.

Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself

I react to stress much like a horror movie villain reacts to being whacked upside the head by the terrified-yet-resourceful cheerleader. We both roar, retreat, rub our tender spots in solitude. Then, just as the residents of Predictable Plot Twist Terrace are heaving big, naive sighs of relief that no more teenagers will be forcibly de-spleened... YAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH! We come busting through the nearest wall with a gore-encrusted scimitar and a smile, ready to dispatch our stressors (be they marital problems or bat-wielding blondes) with extreme prejudice. Vengeance is administered. Gallons upon gallons of red-tinted corn syrup are splattered around the joint. What you don't see - even in the deluxe, unrated director's cut - is what happens After. The curses have been hurled, the possessions divided, the ties that bind painstakingly unraveled. Susie Q. Debate team has been neatly relieved of both Louisville Slugger and spleen. We both stand in a stranger's living room, sweaty and panting, wondering what the hell just happened.

Laughter may be the best medicine, but it is surely an over-the-counter one, dispensed in a cheery yellow carton right next to "Time", "Hindsight" and "Don't Pick at It". For sheer illicit neuron-tickling, nothing beats panic. It's always been my drug of choice. Kitchen fires, transmission troubles and emotional meltdowns are like flame coursing through my veins (not to mention across my stovetop). Beneath the pounding pulse and dampened palms, I'm eerily calm. I can almost feel each polished wooden bead click softly against its neighbor as my mental abacus calculates how to remedy the situation at hand. I have pondered careers as an EMT, a crime scene cleanup specialist and an air traffic controller (the latter when "Pushing Tin" was in heavy rotation on HBO; if John Cusack played a compost farmer, I'd probably spend a few weeks waxing rhapsodic about moldering banana peels). I actually enjoy helping others move; relocating a person's entire life in several short hours (in a truck with screechy brakes, while being char-broiled under the summer sun) is nothing if not a dull, controlled panic. The majority of the time, I crave the solutions, not the cheap thrills which necessitate them.

Whirring computers, blatant infidelity, three feet of snow and more on the way… I’m on it. I’m a fixer. Unfortunately for me – and the rest of the few, the proud, the compulsively fidgety – there is no solution tidy enough so as to be completely invisible. Life’s like grape juice… there will always be traces; ghostly, indelible, utterly infuriating streaks announcing that Yes, This Actually Happened. When operating in a state of jaw-grind, barrel-of-a-.38 terror, everything else tends to melt away. It’s a strangely soothing, almost autistic state… you cannot look at anything but the problem, because there is only the problem. The rest of the universe has been smudged into a deep, fuzzy nothingness. There comes a point, however, when you’ve got to snap out of your reverie, step back and regard your handiwork. Naturally, it is never quite as you imagined.

The time, the unholy quantity of time… that’s what surprised me. I’d spend an hour splayed across the couch, just thinking, so peculiarly free of obligations that I almost expected to float away the second I sat up.

At our darkest, snot-drenched worst, my husband and I spent hours each night sitting in bed, talking, crying, dissecting and debating. Drawing circles and loops and Spirograph patterns around an impossible problem, wondering why bright young things such as ourselves couldn’t just solve the damned thing already. When one or both of us was utterly spent, we’d collapse in the dark, burying damp, puffy faces in rough pillowcases. Occasionally, one of us would snake a tentative hand across the blankets, out of kindness or a distant hope that maybe skin-on-skin might correct what mind-on-mind seemed powerless to address. We’d sleep for five fitful hours, stumble off to work, come home, repeat the entire process. It was exhausting, agonizing and fruitless, but it was something, and clearly, something had to be done. Something always has to be done. Relatives still bring gelatin desserts to terminal cancer patients. Jell-O never cured anything, but it’s a testament, a wobbly neon monolith to the irresistible urge to throw yourself head-first at a bad situation. You’ve got to ride that panic like a big, shimmering, jiggling wave… otherwise, you might get washed away.

I got washed away. I drifted, idiotically poked jellyfish, subsisted on kelp, family and antidepressants. I washed up in Philadelphia. Staggering ashore, I was stunned. I was still alive. I felt glad, self-confident, hopeful for the future. I had a cute little apartment, a precocious little boy, a pack of wonderful, supportive female friends. And yet there was that odd, tender spot inside, like a nagging sprain. And the time – oh, lord, all that damned time.

The couch and I bonded. It began to seem like the ideal partner – supportive, a fine listener and an excellent lay (insert rimshot here). It might have been dumpy and the world’s ugliest shade of industrial blue, but it was a nice, solid surface to cling to while being battered by the big truths. I had spend the past six months acting, reacting, booking therapy appointments, hustling my panicked little ass off. All of which had made it conveniently easy to blur out everything else. Like the fact that I was going to get divorced and be a single mother at twenty-four. Like the radical personality changes this trial by fire had instilled in me. Like the realization that I’d spent the past seven years – important, formative years – with a man who, while generally sweet and supportive, just wasn’t terribly into me. I somehow doubt that the authors of the bestselling “He’s Just Not That Into You” will ever release a sequel entitled “P.S. – And You Still Married Him, You Dipshit!” The topic is just a wee bit too weighty for the pop-psych section of Barnes & Noble.

When the good ol’ adrenal glands have spurted their last, when your heart rate has dipped back down to a steady thrum, when you have re-donned your rain slicker and skulked off into the distance, preparing for the inevitable sequel… there is not despair, exactly. Or at least there doesn’t have to be. Every event has the capacity to make an individual better or worse. I choose to be made better, to let each kick in the ass propel me that much closer to the person I’d like to be. There isn’t a bad feeling, or a good feeling, so much as a scooped-out, empty feeling. Everything extraneous has been removed and tossed down the Insinkerator, and you’ve got no choice but to regard your new life with a kind of shell-shocked bemusement. Guess what, tough gal? Yes, This Actually Happened.

It’s time for a road trip. In the words of the late, luscious Soul Coughing, I’m “running on fumes, I got to get right with this.” Tucked away in the bachelorette pad, it is a slow, strange process. I still pause at least once a day to grin, sniffle and mutter, “Huh, these are MY coffee mugs”, as though they were a dusty ruin of a long-dead culture rather than six bucks’ worth of IKEA-ish porcelain. I need to hang up the scimitar, come down off the ceiling, go crashing through some nature preserves, freshen up my bug bites. This actually happened, and it’s actually still happening. It’s time to fuel up the Civic, open the road atlas and get right with this.