An Excerpt from the upcoming book, ‘THE RUDE MECHANICAL’
Saturday, October 27th, 2007CHAPTER ONE
I have no reason to jump, so for the time being I don’t; I tiptoe along the edge of the pebbled stone rooftop with slightly more comfort than you would expect or probably even want from a young girl of twenty one, seven storeys up. Around me the sky is beautiful, a rich blue, complete with round, whispery clouds that float by with a glacial ease. For the moment at least, I’m content to step along the edges of the building. The reason for this, of course, is that I had long decided that suicide was probably the avenue I was most interested in exploring. The possibility of ending it all was just a half step to my left at this point. The whole ordeal wasn’t a look-at-my-shitty-life type thing, nor was it a feeble cry for attention. This whole endeavour had a purpose. And I wouldn’t do it until I had the perfect, most artistic method of doing so. I needed something that would really resonate with people. It would be the bell toll for an entire generation of misunderstood youth, something that encapsulated our angst or our passion, like oversized belts or jeans ripped at the knee. That was the problem with the world nowadays, there used to only be two or three directions the teenaged and early adult demographics could go but now there are millions and we’re all lost and lonely but with no real way to connect with each other because to find someone who feels the same way you do and can articulate it to you in a way that you understand is almost impossible.
I had this idea that involved piano strings. Don’t ask me why they were specifically the strings from a piano, that’s just how I thought it up. Though, I’m sure I could kill myself with equal success with guitar strings or possibly even those really strong shoelaces that mountaineers or those Goth kids wear in their boots. I would tie one end of them to the handle on the fire exit up on a roof (not unlike the one I was on at the moment), and I would tie the other end to myself – all around my neck and my body – in such a way that when I dove off of the building, they would pull perfectly taut and sever my head from my body. Except, my body would still be suspended by the strings and I would end up headless and hanging just outside the window of some poor guy’s office. Or maybe a classroom. I’d obviously have a profound message written on the t-shirt I was wearing. It would be vague, because people love to search for the ‘real’ meaning in something and I wanted to give them food for thought that would last for hundreds or thousands of years. I could possibly would write it in black felt tip pen across my naked chest. I hadn’t decided about this part yet. I was also thinking that if I did it properly, I could probably work it so that my head didn’t hurtle to the ground in the aftermath, where it could hit some poor passer-by, that it somehow would be suspended there with me. I still needed to work on the logistics. The whole thing was still a work in progress. But it would definitely be artistic. People would talk about it for years, probably most of them, to a paid psychiatrist or mental health physician. But at least they would be talking.
I don’t know how I got into the whole art thing. I definitely got into it hard, but there was no epiphany or anything that took me there. I didn’t get taken to the Paris one day by my parents and then met a really cute French guy who I followed into the Louvre, wherein I saw the Mona Lisa and decided that art was only thing for me. Although that would be a great story to be able to tell, probably more interesting than this one, in fact. It would also be a lie though, because saying that up close, the Mona Lisa is a little disappointing is like saying that up close, Wesley Snipes is a little black. I guess that my parents probably started the whole thing. I believe in that stuff about you growing up to like Lionel Richie or Wet, Wet, Wet (both, unfortunately true of me), just because your parents listened to them. I’m sure that my distaste for the French stems from a story my father once told me about a French man mistreating him at some point during his youth. It was something about passports; I don’t really remember the details. All I know is that whenever something bad happened to the French people, usually in the arena of sport my Dad would celebrate like he had scored some major victory over them as a people. He was the kind of person who felt like he was – by proxy of the English rugby team – teaching them a lesson.
“That’ll teach ‘em!” He’d shout.
And alas, the lesson would have been taught.
When I look back on it now, my art as a child had been truly mediocre; I did the exact same stuff that every other child did. Square houses with four more squares for windows, a squiggly line for smoke, that kind of thing. But my parents were the overly indulgent type (you know, the ones who bring flasks of coffee and snacks to their Little League games and spend the entire time shouting support) and they actually succeeded in making me believe that I was an artistic prodigy. I was to art, what Mozart was to music, or Britney Spears is to not thinking shit through. Of course, we shrug a certain amount of this off as we grow up; we aren’t so naïve as to believe everything our parents have ever told us. But a little bit of it remained, I guess. When I was six or so years old, my father had taken me for a picnic. He often did this as a way for us to bond, and as far as I can remember, I enjoyed it. I think it stemmed secretly from his desire to have a male child that he could teach to play football or karate. When instead, he’d had me. We’d kick a ball around, but it would never be the same; I still ran with that distinctly female grace, couldn’t properly coordinate my feet and my brain and was simply never going to slide-tackle anything, not in my nice pink dress. On this particular day though, after eating, while we lay in the grass, I had been drawing a picture of a man and a woman holding hands. The woman had a squiggly yellow line above her head.
My father had asked me, “Who are they, Alice?”
“That’s my husband and me.”
“Your husband! I see, and what’s this on your head?”
“It’s a crown.”
“Oh, you’re a princess?”
“Mm-hmm.” I had beamed.
And then, suddenly my face had dropped, I remembered something a little girl in my class had told me: “Suzie Merican told me that I’ll never be a princess and I’ll never find a prince and we’ll never get married because my Daddy just pumps petrol and its stupid.”
My father – without missing a beat – had swept me up into his husky arms and said “Yes, well a lie can run all the way around the world before the truth even gets its shoes on. And you, are beautiful and intelligent and a wonderful artist. You’re my favourite person in the world and it’s not because you’re my daughter. Any prince would be lucky to have you.”
The thing is though, any other person would probably think about what he said and smile. Like it’s sweet. In fact I’m sure that if more people had more of these sorts of stories Marilyn Manson and musicians of his ilk could very possibly have gone out of business years ago. But I look back on that memory with nothing but distaste. Talk about sugarcoating. My father should have told me that I was never going to be a princess, that no-one in this day and age meets and falls in love with princes, not unless they look like Adriana Lima and either put out on the first date (or not at all, provided they can do that thing where they make sex seem both elusive and attainable for years). And also that no one slays dragons for love anymore, or even wears tights. And if these guys are incredibly dashing and wearing tights, well then they’re probably just looking for other men in tights.
Unfortunately, I would never get the chance to tell him this, because several years later, before I had really had the chance to look back critically on my youth, both of my parents had died in a horrific car-crash. It had happened early one morning when they had gone out to the supermarket together to get some ham and bread for lunch that day.
I was at the funeral and I had hated it. I know that goes without saying to some people, but I – when I attended the thing – was of the school of thought that believed funerals were about celebrating the lives of the people who had passed away. Not true either. It was an impossibly macabre affair. Everyone wore black and had black umbrellas. You don’t help matters by bathing a situation in darkness. Nobody spoke to me. They said words, but they didn’t really talk to me. Strangers felt the pathological need to walk over and tell me they were sorry and that my parents were great people. What were they sorry for? And I knew that they were great people, I didn’t need someone to tell me that. It was as if they had brought me up but I knew nothing about them. The whole thing was too routine, and all of these people were being too routinely nice. I would have loved it if one of them had walked up to me and told me a story about my father sneaking into the girl’s locker room at college or my mother getting drunk and waking up on a park bench in Brazil or something. All they did was read the script, though:
Person: Hi Alice
Me: Hi.
Person: I’m sorry for you loss.
Me: Thanks.
Person: You know, your parents were wonderful people.
Me: Great. (Optional sarcastic thumbs up or finger/thumb gun motion)
All around me, the rain had poured down. God either had no sense of humour or he had a shitty one. While everyone paid their respects and cried their eyes out, I wondered if all adults owned a black umbrella just in case of a funeral, or if they had gone out and bought them especially.
Every child at some point or another wishes that his/her parents were dead. Whenever something like that would happen in a movie or in a trashy sit-com, all I would think was how lucky that character was! Sure you’re gonna feel like shit for like a day, but after that it’s going to be spectacular. You’re gonna be on easy-street! And it’s not out of hatred for them – although that can, at some extremely tense moment be true – but just because – emotional anguish aside – it would be awesome to be suddenly orphaned. We, as children, don’t really consider the repercussions of being thrown into foster care, or the problem of suddenly having no primary caregivers, we focus on the positives: everyone would feel sorry for us. Everybody wants to be that part in the movie where there’s a musical montage and our hero is sat all melancholy on the beach, while everyone goes out of their mind worrying about how to make it up to them. The hero returns to civilisation and there’s a party waiting. We don’t want the party per se, but we do want all the people who desperately want to help us. In our juvenile minds, we believe that there would be absolutely no problem getting over the hurt, and pretty much immediately, people would be stumbling all over themselves to help us. Can I get that door for you? You’ve been through so much — Here, let me help you with your homework. It must be hard for you to concentrate at the moment, huh? — Hey, let me buy you that new Hawaiian Hula Dancer Barbie, I know your father would if he was around. I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have brought that up.
It’s not so hot when it actually happens.
I had for a while figured that the best way to get over such incredible tragedy was to look on what people generally refer to as ‘the bright side’. I couldn’t picture this so-called ‘bright side’, but I nevertheless tried to get there. I had figured the best way to identify it was to make a list of the things that were worse than both of my parents dying. It didn’t go very well or last very long, though. I came up with the following:
1. The holocaust.
2. JFK’s assassination.
3. The AIDS virus.
4. Nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
5. MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This”.
6. George Clooney in ‘Batman and Robin’.
Losing your parents changes you. There’s nothing you can do about that. It certainly can make you want to listen to My Chemical Romance and feel like killing yourself (often because you’re listening to My Chemical Romance), but it didn’t do that to me. I could take it. Somehow, or for some reason I had some immense inner strength that I never knew existed. It made me bitter and cynical, but for the most part I could deal with the pain, just as I had fantasised. Maybe it was some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. What did affect me though, was the loss of those overly indulgent kind words that had caressed me as a child. People deal with the death of their parents in a billion different ways. Some people lock themselves in a room and cry for days on end, others go home for the funeral and then inexplicably hook up with Natalie Portman, or at least that’s what Hollywood would have me believe. I chose to paint. I don’t know why, but once my parents were gone, the only thing that I had a burning desire to do was to paint.
Copyright (C) 2007 by J Thoo