Fanned Out in Triplicate

Dear Adam Powers,

You may be aware that back in 2005-06, I wasted two years of my life as an assistant manager for Starbucks. While the job did teach me a lot about keeping my mouth shut in every frustrating situation imaginable and surviving in long sleeves in hundred-degree heat in order to pretend I did not have tattoos, I’m not sure that McBucks’ intended lessons of entrepreneurship and corporate structure ever made it past my stubborn ears (which could only boast one earring a piece, quite a departure from my usual setup of seven in each).

They weren’t sad to see me go. They declared me “Non-Starbucks Material.”  I thanked them without a trace of irony in my voice.  Ten minutes after I put in my two weeks’ notice, I saw an announcement scrawled in my manager’s juvenile bubble script on the dry erase board. It said, “Congrats to our assistant manager, Mandy, who will be leaving Starbucks to pursue new and exciting business ventures.” I said this sentence aloud the entire ride home until it acquired a sort of iambic cadence and ceased to make any sense at all. Mandey was spelled incorrectly. I was partner number 1271551, now retired.

“New and exciting business ventures.”

“NEW and exCITing BUSiness VENtures.”

Sounded so. . .glamorous. So fancy. So. . .unlike me. . .because I knew that instead of pursuing business verntures, I was instead sitting in my cluttered little ranch-style rent house eating three day old fennel salad straight out the Tupperware while my dog chewed her butthole on the sofa and my roommate screamed at the computer screen in the background and there had been a dead mouse on my porch for two days and there was a crack deal happening across the street.

The next day, while I scrambled for a business venture without actually pursuing one, I experienced my first bout of “Settled Life Envy.” Primo and I went over to Mike Benson’s house to watch the basketball game and have brunch. Mike owns several restaurants here and in DC. He is very good at life and at business ventures. When I got to his house, there were married couples and beautiful children and polished oak banisters and foyers and silver serving dishes and doorbells that played special songs. I had entered a realm I did not recognize, one full of spouses and careers and coppered baby booties and sunrooms with grand pianos.

Did I miss out on this? I always wondered. I’m 27 now and while I’m not freaking out that I’ve been single for years, other people are freaking out for me, and THAT freaks me out.

“Don’t worry, hun. Someone will come along and he’ll be lucky to have you.” I keep hearing this, unsolicited, from people every time I choose to bring my brother to a social event.

I don’t rely on luck. And I’m not worried. I am not waiting for a someone to come and sweep me away and keep me from using “Picket Fences” as an expletive. I can brainwash myself on my own. I don’t really know exactly what it is that I want. I just want everything to be settled. I want to stop hanging up the same posters and the same pictures wherever I live. I feel stunted, young. At the basketball brunch I felt lost, a little. The husbands were all watching TV, so I gravitated over to the mommies. The mommies were well dressed, fashionably harried, talking about where they buy their babies’ clothes and when their babies started teething, talking, walking. I had nothing to contribute.  All I could think to say when one woman said her baby was 8 pounds when she was born was, “Oh, I was four pounds!” They didn’t want to hear about me. But all I could do was pull from my own babyhood. So I didn’t.

And it’s not to say I want to have a life that revolves around the texture of my baby’s shit or one that revolves around my afterbirth descriptions or the hassles of breastfeeding. The only thing I know about breastfeeding is I’ll have to take my nipple rings out first to do it.

I really just want stability.  I want to have wooden decks in my backyard and framed black-and-white photographs on my walls and copies of “DC Luxury” fanned out in triplicate on the armoire in my parlor. I want to hold regular Sunday brunches and be able to invite the types of people who will bring Bloody Mary ingredients without prompt. I want perfect angel children who fish for plastic piranhas and play with Technicolor mobiles and wear tiny corduroy suit jackets. I need a car equipped with Bluetooth technology that will recognize my telephone ring and display messages on my dashboard alerting me to the call. I need a dog trainer and a sense of stability. I need a cobblestone or two or forty to build a wall around my front lawn. It’s all stuff, just stuff. Just thingamabobs. I don’t need it. But I want it. .

I want it. . .

You know I bought that bar shortly after the Starbucks debacle. But now I don’t even work there anymore. I’m just a sad, silent little partner. Gone are the days when I thought it’d be nice to run a family during the day and a bar at night, gone are the days when I thought it’d be cool to be recognized at Better Business Bureau meetings for my contributions to small-town economy.

I want to pursue new and exciting business ventures. But I’m so tired of looking for them. If I don’t find something soon, I’m gonna end up being an Avon lady, forever in search of a large house with mysterious shrubs shaped like various people and animals in the front yard.

Whatever.

Love,
Mandey.

Home.

Dear Adam Powers:

It is raining so hard outside. I am at Fenario, the name of the house where half my band lives. We are recording tonight. It is a tense affair. Scotts is wrestling with Logic Studio and the midi tones are fighting the good fight. Des is strumming away as he is wont to do, wandering aimlessly and saying little or nothing.

I am waiting patiently for my Pizza Rolls to cook. There are four people in this house right now, and three of us are planning on eating Pizza Rolls like it’s our job. One of us is currently having a “pre-snack” consisting of two Banquet Microwave Dinners and some guacamole and chips and says he will “only have a few.” I figure if I make forty-two Pizza Rolls, we will be safe.

Logic Studio is a confusing program and Scotts, although he is a genius, is fed up and doesn’t really want to deal with the leak in the ceiling. He slams a saucepot next to the drumset to catch the drip. I leave the room.

Though I refuse to admit it out loud, storms make me want to throw up. Rain is the reason that I had to move to North Carolina, and it is the memory of rain that makes my dad wake up screaming in the middle of the night, rain that hardened a mother I thought was already as tough as nails. Rain put my brother in Raleigh selling cars to no one thanks to a bad economy. Katrina was a bitch but we move on.

Secretly being in such close proximity to a memory of New Orleans that screams “past tense!” with its black shocks of hair like daggers on otherwise translucent and pallid backdrops, and it’s not a matter of want or need, but it’s the elephant on the bench next to you, in the past tense, and it’s bowls full, blow UP, snacks and juice and techno music, sketches and naps and jerking, constricted bodies, slight and sparse and strong and pale, charcoal soul, virgin soil, cotton, kool-aid, helium throats. Mimeographed, stamped, closed and filed in a cabinet box that won’t be pried.

Home came up in conversation the other day when I was with some friends, over a beer, at a table covered in cracked linoleum, and a girl unrelated to my group spilled her pink drink all over the terrazo floor. . .and I thought of those disgusting, fantastic, seafood-rotten streets as that liquid hit the ground running. Sedimentary bricks, crumbling, ivy-covered iron bars to promote humilty, modesty, and my face just peeking through, planning, approved, everything so sinister and crude, puddles of muck that never dry up, watch where I step, keep your eyes attuned to neon.

After Katrina I never wanted to hear about the politics, the newsprint smudging fingertips, and I’d blow it off, but inside I’m blowing up, no needles, no pebbles, no stickers in the grass, no egg hunts, no track and field, no hair sticking to the side of the face smoking a cigarette outside the tattoo shop, no closed circuit cameras behind the bartenders’ heads, no walking down the balcony steps wishing I’d jumped instead.

No more hanging at the library learning the cajun two-step, playing in teepees, interactive culture toys, archaeologist dig, dig, City Park lusher by the minutes, minutes, teeming Magazine, iced coffee, brats in the Whole Foods, skaters kept to the left, smoky clubs and cock-a-roaches everywhere all over the sofa, loafing, back when I liked cider beer, back when Snake N Jakes was the best thing next to well-deserved demerits and lesbian phases in high school, back when the pot was best smoked in a school uniform next to the train tracks, seeing the guts of the bars countless times from blocks away but never going in, I’m heartfuckingbroken but too scared to be dramatic, these being my only remaining vestiges of The Big Sleazy.

Logic Studio has been abandoned thanks to copious bouts of lightning; even the cows in the Fenario cattle field are too scared to show themselves.

Pizza Rolls are ready. I have to go divvy them up. These boys are greedy. That’s not true.

Love,

Mandey

Breakin’ the Lawn, Breakin’ the Lawn

Dear Adam Powers:

Today I mowed my lawn. Don’t be startled; I promise you I had supervision. My neighbor Webster sat on the porch and watched me the whole time. I know what you’re thinking, I know. You’re thinking, “Mandey, isn’t Webster the one who was beating his wife the other day and you had to make that anonymous phone call to the policecops so they could come and unlock his three screaming children from the car in 102 degree heat because that’s where they had been stored during the three hours it took for the domestic incident to unfold? What makes you think he will protect you?”

Adam, thank you for your concern. But see, I have it all figured out. I live in the GHETTO, remember? Webster and I have a special bond because I gave him a free television as a peace offering. He looks out for me.

So I was a little upset when my landlord threatened to evict us because we refused to take care of our grass. As far as I am concerned, our grass was the only reason we hadn’t been broken into like every. Single. Other. House. On. Our. Street. MY reasoning was that if the bad guys can’t see the house behind the lawn/moat, they won’t know it’s there to rob.

Good idea, huh?

So I boycotted the lawn for a year. Well, my dad got sad that I might get evicted, so he brought me a lawnmower yesterday. He got it off Craigslist for ten dollars and he chained it to the couch underneath my carport.

What?

I TOLD you I lived in the ghetto. I’m allowed to chain my lawncare machines to the outdoor living room setup. As you can see, there is also a crockpot out there in case we ever get real hongre’.

Okay, so I mowed the lawn. And let me tell you, while other girls may have to marry rich, I in fact have to marry HANDY. I may be the WORST lawnmower EVER. I tried that whole “pattern” thing and it did not work. I simply mowed wherever it looked bad. I am sure I looked both blind and drunk throughout the ordeal. But this mower was badass. It tore through plastic drinking straws like nobody’s bidness. And this I know because there were no less than six (6) plastic drinking straws scattered among the detritus on the lawn. I tried to clean it all up beforehand, but the grass masked all the trash. I found, while mowing:

1. One phone charger

2. Four Frisbees

3. One duck-shaped bathmat

4. A bag of Fritos

5. One shoe from a toddler’s Princess Dress-up Kit (!)

6. Copious amounts of aluminum foil

7. One Christmas-themed sock

And I promptly destroyed it all with the mower. I also ran over a bush. No lie. I SHREDDED that shrubbery. It was amazing. I didn’t know it was a bush until I hit the trunk of it and it stopped the mower dead in its tracks.

This is a picture Webster took of me with my new friend. My dad wants to know what I named the mower. Any suggestions?  The name “Murray” keeps popping into my head though I don’t know why.  Weird, huh?

And get this.  As an added bonus, when my roommate found out I mowed the lawn, he felt so guilty because:

1. He was supposed to do it

and

2. He knows it is a terrible idea to put these sorts of tools in my possession, because I tend to hurt myself doing just about anything. . .

. . .that he went straight to the store and came back with a PBR and an Ice Cream Drumstick as rewards for my hard work!

Score!

K Later,

Mandey.

To Wed? Or Not, Instead?

Dear Adam Powers,

I just got off the phone with my lovely Grandma.

The first thing she said when she realized who she was talking to was, “I gotta get off my CELL PHONE and git on tha REGULA’ phone I cain’t HEAR YA.”

She does not have a cell phone. She thinks her cordless phone is a cell phone.

The next thing she said was, before any sort of greeting, was, “DO YA HAVE A BOYFREN?”

No, Grandma. The answer has been “No” for years.

“HOWZABOUT CHOICH?”

“Choich” means “church,” in her lovely Southern Louisiana accent, and she wants to know if I have found one in Norf Carolina yet.

No, Grandma. Choich is a place to compare clothing.

She proceeded to tell me all about my cousins and their babies and husbands, which I recognize as a thinly veiled attempt to make me feel guilty. I am the oldest unmarried, childless female in my family, and everyone is baffled as to why I am having such a hard time finding a rich dude to knock me up and make me the thrilled kept woman they know I’d love to one day be. I caught the bouquet at my cousin’s wedding five years ago, and they have not forgotten. I didn’t mean to catch it. I was trying to swat it away from me in a panic. It was aimed for my face.

My extended family’s collective relationship track record is less than inspiring. My Uncle Pat, Grandma’s son, is my favorite.

I remember he bought a Dodge Neon years ago, and he called all his family members and told us about the fabulous view he had from the windshield. “I mean, I really made a good purchase. Worth every penny,” he told us. How lucky was he to have bought a car that would allow him such great visual interaction with the highway vista?

Uncle Pat has been married five times. Want the rundown?

1. Suzen: He knocked her up when she was 15. They were married for six months. Suzen died a few years later in a house fire. Thank god she didn’t survive, because she would have gone to jail for arson and attempted murder. She was trying to burn down the house so she could kill her boyfriend, Smiley. Smiley wasn’t even home.

2. Rosemary Mosby was next. She was the alcoholic daughter of a Mississippi millionaire. Miss Mosby had a bowling alley in her house. They were married for seven months, and then my uncle left her which prompted her to overdose with a quickness.

3. Doris was the half Chinese alcoholic lesbian who married Pat so she could breed. They were actually married for five years. And yes, they bred.

4. Crystal. Oh, Crystal. Another five year marriage. I actually met this one. Crystal was an overweight Merry Maid with a weird face rash thanks to an Ajax mishap. Crystal had a habit of “entertaining” all of the (male) neighbors, and one day Pat came home to find an empty house. And when I say empty, I mean no wife, no clothes, no furniture, and no note. Crystal talked very loud in movie theaters. She was under the impression that she was the only one within earshot of her overbearing, nasally, grating, nonsensical Yat dialect.

5. Marisol. Marisol was a prostitute who would perform oral sex on policemen for cash, which she would spend on coke. Pat told me once that every time he and Marisol had sex, he would leave five dollars on the night table before he left for work. He thought this was hysterical. She tried to steal his Neon once. Apparently that was not hysterical. So he hit her upside the head with the business end of a hammer. They, um, got divorced after that.

So his marriages sucked. But damn, he had a great view from his windshield every time he drove away from one.

So yeah. I’m all for gettin’ hitched. But that shit terrifies me.

I’ll talk to you later buddy. I have a busy day planned. I’m gonna sit in my house, alone, thinking how nice it is that there’s no one to fight with.

Love,

Mandey.

Jesus Don’t Pass the Salt

Dear Adam Powers:

So let me tell you about my Grandma.

She’s so friggin cute. She’s 4’10”, hasn’t driven a day in her life, doesn’t own any pants, thinks “pregnant” is a cuss, and she uses that weird old lady loose powder all the time, the kind with the big ol’ puff. She’s the sweetest lady you will ever meet. That’s her, up there in the picture. My friend Sean and I were trying to get her to understand the working of the MacBook built-in Webcam. We failed. Keep in mind that this is a lady who once called me and asked what “Dotcom” meant. She kept hearing it at the end of all her commercials. Where to even start?

Her sister, my 91-year-old Aunt Tee, is also 4’10” and she hates everything. She’s miserable. She’s very nice, just miserable. She sits around all day looking for things to complain about. If her alarm clock breaks, then that surely means that all of Casio is plotting against her. She once ran out of things to be pissed about, so she started telling everybody she hated trees for stealing all our oxygen. She’s the great-aunt who always put exactly $3 in an envelope for each of us at Christmastime, which is like leaving a penny for a tip. My Grandma and her sister are creatively referred to by my family as The Old Ladies.

SInce the Old Ladies’ husbands are both dead, my mom and her two sisters had to divvy up The Old Lady Chores. Aunt Melody takes them to the beauty parlor on Fridays. Aunt Laurie takes The Old Ladies to Church and Lunch on Sundays. My mom takes The Old Ladies grocery shopping on Thursdays (an enormous feat, since both the Old Ladies are senile and almost blind and can most often be found on the canned goods aisle with their faces pressed up against cans of field peas, trying in vain to read the ingredients. The. Ingredients. Are. Field. Peas. Jeeezus.)

So now that my mom lives in Raleigh, my aunts are solely responsible for The Old Ladies. Aunt Laurie had possession of them this past Sunday, which was my Grandma’s 87th birthday. Grandma was THRILLED her birthday fell on The Lord’s Day.

Aunt Laurie took them to the bakery so she could pick up Grandma’s birthday cake. She parks and cracks each of The Old Ladies’ windows an inch and tells them to stay in the car. The bakery is crowded and it would be WAY unnecessary for the Old Ladies to go inside. Plus, they can survive the heat in the car because neither one of them can read the thermostat in their houses, and they both live alone (somehow), so they never use the AC.

So my aunt gets through the line at the bakery, and, true to form for Louisiana weather, the sunnyshine has mutated into a thunderstorm over the course of twenty minutes. My aunt runs through the rain to the passenger side door in order to put the cake on the floor by Grandma’s feet.

Only Aunt Laurie can’t open the passenger side door. And why?

Because Grandma has decided it would be a great idea to OPEN HER UMBRELLA inside my aunt’s Honda Civic. Now she can’t close the umbrella, the corner of which is wedged into the one inch crack in the window, so my aunt can’t open the door.

My grandma thinks she is being rained on. She’s not. And Tee, who is in the back seat, is leaning forward with her bad hip all twisted, trying to huddle underneath the umbrella, all the while complaining that the rain might get in through the crack in the window.

So my aunt runs to the driver’s side door in exasperation, gets in, and peals out of the parking lot with the cake in her lap. She is speechless, but feels like she needs to say SOMETHING.

So after a few minutes of silence, she finds something vaguely suitable.

“Mom. You know it’s bad luck to open an umbrella indoors.”

The Old Ladies say nothing. Grandma probably didn’t even hear her, and Tee just doesn’t have a biting retort cooked up yet. But then Tee finds one, and sort of timidly says, “You know Laurie, it’s Unchristian to be superstitious.” She is satisfied with this response, and sits back with a self-satisfied smile, mired in negativity.

My Grandma hears this, and wants to participate. “You know, Tee,” she says, “When we were little, Miss Edith at The Church said it was bad luck to walk underneath a ladder!”

“And it’s bad luck to sweep after midnight,” Tee chimes in.  Apparently it is no longer Unchristian to recite superstitions.

“And you can’t take a salt shaker directly from someone’s hand,” says my Grandma. Aunt Laurie just looks at her, perplexed, because this is obviously made up. She is mixing superstitions like people mix metaphors.

“And you can’t sweep after midnight,” Tee repeats, inexplicably.

“Or break mirrors. That’s seven years,” pipes up Grandma.

Silence. Tee is flailing, frantically trying to come up with a response. She finds one.

“Or sweep after midnight,” repeats Tee, again. You don’t understand. She’s not trying to emphasize her point. She just doesn’t remember that she’s already said the thing about sweeping THREE TIMES ALREADY.

The conversations ends in abrupt communication breakdown, the Old Ladies’ list of superstitions apparently exhausted, and they finish the ride home in silence, my aunt’s neck craned to see around the umbrella covering half the windshield.

Adam.

If we are still friends when I am 91, can you do me a favor and duct tape my mouth shut?

That’s all I really wanted to ask you. I just thought it may be an odd request without some sort of back story.

Kthxbye,

Manduh.

Katrina, could you buy me some beer?

Dear Adam Powers:

It is upsetting to me that I cannot buy hooch at the gas stations in this town.  I am from New Orleans, where there are Drive-Thru Daiquiris shops.  But yeah, no Jack Daniels here.  Only beer.  And wine, which I do not drink too often.  I mean, I’m drinking some right now, but that’s only because the only other alcohol in my house is a collection of High Lifes I found under my bed and I don’t know if those are okay to consume.

Mandey.  Ever heard of water?  Apparently not.

Anyway, so the other day I go to the BP to get a case of PBR for band practice.  I approach the kindly-looking Ethiopian proprietor.  I don’t know if he is Ethiopian.  It’s selective xenophobia, not racism.

I got myself a NC ID, but I still keep my Louisiana one in the car in case I need another form of identification.  No bouncer, gas station employee, or waitress can ever find my birthdate in under twelve minutes so I have a habit of putting the ID on the counter wherever I am, with my finger already pointing to the “10/11/1980” in the bottom left corner.  So I did this at the BP, and Ethiopia looks at me and smiles. Slyly. Smugly. His eyes narrow slightly, as if I am trying to put one over on him.

“What? 1980,” I say.

“Ahhh. Yes. But yoo need to geet a valeed ID, one from the Uniteed States,” he says triumphantly. He thinks he’s got me.

I was stumped. “Louisiana. It’s a state. In the united states,” I reply.

“NO.” and Slap! goes his palm on the counter next to the very valid license. “Eet need to be from Uniteed States ID!! Thees no Uniteed States ID! Must be Uniteed States!”

W.

T.

F.

“It is from LOUISIANA. It is SOUTH of here. DOWN,” and I point at the floor. “SOUTH.”  I have no clue where south actually is, no matter where I am.  I could be standing in front of a goddamn compass.  I always just point down.

“Where ees Looeesiana?”  He’s starting to falter, to doubt himself.

I hesitate. My brain is frantically searching. I am trying to figure out if the BP station has WiFi so I can MapQuest Louisiana. I look around, and then I figure What the Hell.  This dude works in a gas station, and so he must have seen a newspaper or two.

“It’s in New Orleans, man. Louisiana is a state in New Orleans.”

His face is immediately stricken with apologetic horror. “Ooooohhhhhhh. Katreena! Katreena! I am very fameeliar weeth New Orleens. Katreena! I am so sorry about your rain! Of course. Loueesiana is in New Orleens!”

Score.

Yr beer’s in the mail, dude.  Katrina sends her love.

As do I,

Mandey

Dem Soobarooz.

Dear Adam Powers,

Hello.

I am here at the LaundryBar.

There is a sloppy fat woman on the television wearing a tarp, her embroidered flowers shaking as she wheezes her words.  She’s bitching about snotty neighbors. She says, “Ah don’t care if’n ya got one a dem big ole. . .oh. . .uh. . .SOObarus or one-a dem big ole vee-hicles. It don’t make you betta.”

I’m imagining her life outside of being a local TV Star. She’s been a receptionist for twelve years, for a grade-B chiropractor with particle-board office walls. Every morning she arrives at her desk fifteen minutes early with a stale hunk of Entemann’s Raspberry and Cheese Danish and two Strawberry Slim-Fasts. She tucks into the breakfast quietly, free from the din of telephones, the chatter of octogenarian arthritics complaining. They won’t be here for another ten minutes. She straightens the framed piece of cardstock on her desk that announces, “Give Me the Chocolate and Nobody Gets Hurt!” with a smileyface underneath. It is a treasured gift from her aunt.

She runs her fingers through her teased, hair-sprayed Mall Bangs (circa 1982). She knows her roots are showing, but she can’t get her highlights redone just yet because she’s spending all her money feeding her trifecta of pre-pubescent sticky faced child-obesity-stricken progeny. They will never grow out of it. There they are, smiling up at her through glittery cracked Wal-Mart frames.

There is a menagerie of minature cats. There is a battalion of plastic angels.  At home, there is a room devoted to her doll collection, they are lined up on shelves, staring blankly, forming a porcelain alliance, concocting a petticoat coup.

She wipes almost all of the danish away from her non-existent upper lip and unlocks the office door. She greets every patient merrily, with an “Is it Friday Yet?” or an “Are we Having Fun Yet?” When the doctor arrives, windblown and put-upon, she falls apart a little inside, because she’s been in love with him for a decade. He says, on autopilot and without punctuation, “Hello Gloria how are you this morning?” and she replies, “Oh, you know, haven’t had my coffee yet!” She knows she hasn’t had a cup of coffee in years, except for the cup or two of decaf she sneaks when her disgusting, unemployed, NASCAR-loving husband is asleep on the couch. Every time a patient leaves the office, she cries out, “Have a Blessed Day!”

The word blessed, she pronounces with two syllables.

She’s not unhappy, though, because next Tuesday she is to appear on Channel 12 Public Access Television to talk about SUVs that she covets but will never be able to afford.

Adam, do you have any idea how sad this makes me?  I don’t know which one I’m more upset about:  that I might be right about her, or that I am such a judgmental cunt.

What horrible fate awaits me if I let myself go at 30 (and I’m almost there) and I settle for terrazzo tile in Suburbia, leaving this life in the dust, forgetting my easel and my keyboard and my penchant for filthy, beautiful, flippy-haired, silent, artist-type, aloof boys?  What will happen?

It terrifies me, the prospect that I will one day forget to travel, to love, to be excited about prospects and flirting, forget how easy it is to be childless and broke and alone.  It’s so easy.  I’m so scared.

Have a blessed day.

Mandey