Since most of what I do is mediocre, my art has become leaving behind secret and confusing messages for people. Bacon in a tree, a blender full of shoelaces in a church parking lot, and for my old landlord, a flyer describing panic attack disorder tacked to the graffiti-covered wall and a coffeepot full of vomit. To me the messages are loud and clear. Shoelaces in a blender? Duh, there is no God. Panic attack flyer with coffeepot vomit? Hey, jerk, you should not have evicted me in such a manner.

I may get this from my father who, instead of leaving notes behind, leaves shoes to let you know he stopped by and you’ve missed him. I am the only one who can decipher his cryptic messages. If the shoe is upside down, he just got out of jail and wanted to say hello. Sideways shoe means he will stop back by in a few hours. Shoe with laces removed means when I see him I must refer to him only as Rich Kennedy, that being the alias he came up with to use while speaking to police officers. He believe it acts as a subliminal tool. No one wants to mess with a Rich Kennedy.

My aliases have been far less effective. I was going by Awesome McCoolrad when I was arrested, the arrest resulting in the aforementioned eviction. The arrest itself was pretty standard: Histrionic friend freaks out and calls an ambulance because she believes I have consumed too much alcohol mixed with too much Valium. Police show up, demand I accompany them outside, I remind them I am of age and drunk in my own home, they get me outside hogtied and deposit me in the back of the police car. After the event, I pressed charges and the harassment began.

It started with officers spontaneously showing up at my house to “have a look around.” I incited their rage by politely refusing to let them in. After the fifth attempt to enter my apartment, an officer shouted through the door that he was coming back with a search warrant. I invited him to do so. In the meantime I turned my fog machine on full blast and sat waiting on the couch with my sunglasses on.

The officer came back saying he had obtained a search warrant—impossible in such a short period of time, but why waste a good bottle of fog juice? I let him in. When he asked what was going on, I told him that I had my fog machine going (by this time you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face), reminded him that it is perfectly legal to run a fog machine in one’s own home, and invited him to look around while I relaxed on the couch.

Later, the officer contacted my landlord to let her know I was running a “rat factory” out of the apartment and the unit should be quarantined. Having a pet rat apparently constitutes a “rat factory.”

I’m not even sure what one does with a rat factory, but I imagined rats with clipboards and goggles training other rats in the ways of factory work. “Here is where you punch your time card, this is where you hang your coat, and this is how you spread the plague.”

My landlord visited me a few days later and asked that I move within three days. My reaction was to flee to San Francisco. Leaving behind most my belongings, I tacked up the panic attack disorder pamphlet explaining my behavior, puked in a coffeepot and walked out the door. The police were coming at me full force for filing charges against one of their boys, and my old “Don’t you know who my father is?” line wasn’t working on them. They knew I was young, poor and probably didn’t know most of my rights.

Now I know that the next time the police come knocking on my door, it is well within my rights to respond with a lacquered copy of 1984 and a clip-on mustache pushed through the mail slot. They’ll understand what I mean.

Ethan says I might be obsessive compulsive because I made the mistake of telling him that I wash only one hand after I go to the bathroom. He says it’s not the act that makes me neurotic, but the motivation behind it.

The way I see it, I need to wash only the hand I wiped with, as the other hand is leaving the room in exactly the same state it entered. Any time spent washing the non-wiping hand is time wasted. I don’t exactly know who I feel like I’m pulling one over on, but the feeling is there. I felt like this was my own little secret, a winning strategy that no one else knew about. I let Ethan in on the secret and instead of the thanks I deserve, I get slander and ridicule. I guess the OCD part is the compulsion to wash only the one hand even though I am willing to admit that washing both might be advantageous.

Well, Ethan has a few “neurotic” habits of his own. He doesn’t like me to touch his feet with my feet, and he takes a really long time to get his boots on. I usually tell him it’s time to leave 20 minutes early to accommodate his long shoe-application process. And his mother keeps an array of scissors in her toothbrush holder instead of toothbrushes. That is weird.

There is other stuff too, but unfortunately I don’t have the memory Ethan has, and his case against me is stronger because of it.  He hasn’t forgotten about the time he got pee in my eye and I started screaming that I was going to go blind and needed to go to the hospital.

It was only the slightest drop of pee. We were in bed and he had gotten up to urinate, when he came back he stepped over me, and a small drop just happened to find my open eye. It was a one-in-a-million shot. It did sting a bit, but I may have overreacted.

The other day I accidentally went into a porn shop. The sign said Imagine That novelty shop, and I’ve been looking for a fart machine. I strutted in with confidence to ask the shopkeep about the fart machine until I realized I was surrounded by rubber vaginas and naked people.

You don’t ask a porn store owner for a fart machine; they might think it’s your kink. I just shouted, “Hello, lovely store you have here!” and proceeded to investigate the Rambone. I couldn’t just walk out because then he would know that I hadn’t known what kind of store I was entering. I don’t have a problem going into a “novelty” shop, but I have to prepare myself first, usually by peeling all of the skin off of my cuticle area and vomiting away my fear. In this instance I had no preparation time.

When I got back to the car Ethan asked me what took so long. I explained that I had to spend a lot of time pretending that I had come in intentionally to inspect the giant rubber penises before deciding they were not in my budget. Ethan told me that it would have been perfectly reasonable to leave without the charade, and that someone walking in and leaving without looking at anything probably would not have topped the shopkeep’s list of crazy things that happened during the workweek in the pornography business, but I just don’t see it that way.

While attending Shasta College I took a class that promised to develop my interpersonal communication skills. The only thing it did was reinforce my obsessive-compulsive behavior and alert me to the fact that I might be a freak.

The second week of class, I 
thought it was a coincidence that the instructor wore the same pattern of 
clothes in the same order:

Monday: Salmon shirt, brown pocket-free
 elastic-waisted slacks, salmon Crocs

Wednesday: Blue shirt, tan pocket-free
 elastic-waisted slacks, blue Crocs

Friday: Pink shirt, blue pocket-free 
elastic-waisted slacks, pink Crocs.

I noticed for two reasons. First, 
when did gardening shoes become appropriate work attire? Second, 
I couldn’t believe someone not only matched their Crocs to their shirt, 
but did it in the same order every week.

As the weeks progressed, I
 realized that this was no coincidence. This woman had a strategy. I 
had settled comfortably in, knowing exactly what to expect on any given day, and then it happened.

Monday was a holiday. Naturally I 
assumed Wednesday would resume its usual pattern of blue-tan-blue,
 but then the instructor comes sashaying into class wearing salmon-brown-salmon.

What the hell, man?

What did she wear on Monday? What was 
going to happen on Friday? Would the following Monday go back to 
salmon-brown-salmon, or would this rift continue?

After months of being comfortable, I was
 now frantically grasping for any kind of pattern. That holiday really 
messed everything up. It was now anything goes: salmon on blue, brown
 on pink, pink on salmon. How was I to be expected to concentrate on my studies? It was total chaos.

One day this teacher, a woman to whom I attribute my sophomore-year hives, instructed the class to form a large circle around the room. We were then told to rub the shoulders of the person in front of us. All right, I thought, you can do this: Just get control of your hands, stop the shaking, put your fingers on their shoulders, pinch and you’re done.

I silently congratulated myself for having made it through this excruciating exercise without vomiting on the back of my peer.

But then it was time to switch directions, and I panicked. The instructor was circling the class talking about how nice it feels to have affectionate human contact—unless, she added, “You’re one of those freaks from a dysfunctional home.”

I am one of those freaks. I have to count to three before going in for a hug from people I know well. The very thought of physical contact from strangers is enough to give me instant diarrhea. The moment my peer’s clammy hands made contact with my shoulders I had to run to the bathroom, where I was forced to face my second worst fear, the public toilet.

Due to my weak thigh muscles I knew I would have trouble hovering long enough to release the pressure that was building, so I had to triple-wrap the seat with protective covers. I ran into a snag when the toilet sensor kept mistaking my turning around to sit on the toilet as a sign that I was finished and flushing down my seat covers. It cost me three seat covers before I had the idea of 
ripping the hanging bit off of the paper cover.

In the end I outsmarted the toilet, but I can’t help feeling all of this could have been avoided had the instructor just stuck to her wardrobe algorithm.

A few years back, my uncle Terry stabbed my father because, from what I’ve gathered, he took too big a swig from the bottle of $500 whiskey Uncle Terry purchased with “the settlement money.”

My father didn’t press charges, but due to some other issues Uncle Terry was taken to jail anyway. While he was incarcerated I happened to be living a block from the jail. My dad would frequently come get me so we could walk down to the corner store and purchase cigarettes, beer and donuts.

Then, on the sidewalk, we’d eat and smoke while holding the ice-cold 12-pack on our shoulders, all the while laughing and skipping. We took turns covering each side of the building to be sure that when Uncle Terry happened to look out, there we would be: smoking, eating not–jail food, and enjoying our freedom.

This was the extent of my father’s revenge for the shanking.

When I was 18 and living in my first real-life apartment, with my first real-life roommates, Simon and Ambrose, I thought I would pull a little joke on Amby.

Ambrose loved to play 007. He was champion, and at the time I believe it was his only real form of escape. I thought it would be hilarious to stage a break-in and make him believe his beloved television and game console had been stolen.

With the help of a friend, I placed the devices in the bottom of the overflowing dirty laundry hamper and hid in a cabinet in the kitchen to be sure I would hear his whimpers and wails.

As Ambrose got home from school,  my friend stood in the doorway and said, “Hey what’s going on? I got here and the door was open, but no Ami.”

Ambrose saw that his precious was gone and almost immediately found it in the hamper. He then proceeded to comment, “That Ami is crazy, you know.”

Well, I was still hiding in the cabinet, hearing it all but unable to jump out to defend myself. You just cannot jump out of a small cabinet in the kitchen to proclaim that you are not, in fact, crazy.

As time went on my situation worsened. If it was crazy to jump out of a cabinet after someone calls you crazy, then it was even worse to wait 15 minutes before jumping out of the cabinet.

To prove I wasn’t crazy, I had to wait until Ambrose left the house before emerging from the cabinet. I am not exactly sure, but I think I waited in that cabinet for upwards of two hours, all to prove my sanity.

I used to have this friend who was very unemotional and kind of stoic all of the time. It was very frustrating to me.

Once when I needed a ride across town, this friend’s mother offered to take me as she was traveling near my destination anyway. I happily accepted. During the ride we chit-chatted and made small talk. I was enjoying myself until I glanced over and noticed her hands.

Suddenly everything changed. I felt like I had accidentally discovered some horrible family secret, and my friend’s aloof nature began to make sense to me. This woman’s hands were the size of those foam hands one gets at a basketball game.

I knew I had to act casual about this whole thing. I kept waiting for her to say, “So you may have noticed my hands are enormous,” or something to that effect. It was like when you first meet someone in a wheelchair; you don’t want to say, “So, I see you are in a wheelchair,” but you don’t want to completely ignore the fact that they are in a wheelchair either. There is a delicate line between looking too long and pretending not to notice, and I was having a lot of trouble with this situation.

I am sure this sounds crazy, but these hands were that big; they were uncomfortably large. Also, they were covered in unsightly veins, and she wore giant turquoise rings that really made them stand out.

I started talking in a soft, low voice to this person after I found out about her hands, kind of like the way I might speak to someone I just found out is dying of cancer. It was always strange to me that no one ever talked about her hands. I assumed everyone was trying to not talk about her hands whenever she was around, but why didn’t my friend ever confide in me when she wasn’t around? I just went on with my business pretending not to notice, but I was never comfortable around that woman again.

Often when the realities of my work become too much, I will escape to my fantasy life with the aid of my new magical music-playing device.

One of my favorite scenarios involves me at a dance club. I am only there to have an after-work drink, but when Billy Ocean’s Lover Boy comes on, how can I not dance?

I sashay and shimmy all around the dance floor. Soon everyone is dancing around me, clapping; often it turns into some kind of contest…

I get very upset if one of the residents interrupts me for a glass of water, some medication or any silly thing like that. “Damn it, Denise, your meds can wait. Can’t you see I’m in the middle of a very important competition?”  “Susie, your arm is not broken. Now shoo. Everything is riding on this dance.”

My second most popular fantasy escape is too sad to really go into detail about, but I will say this: It involves a pair of very cute pink shoes, all the people who have ever wronged me, and Pachelbel’s Canon in D Minor.

My dad is in the process of getting “crazy money.” That’s what we Jeromes call Social Security disability payments: crazy money.

He has been over-perusing my DSM for the perfect mental illness. I suggested that perhaps desperately trying to fool the government into giving you crazy money is a mental disorder in and of itself, but he doesn’t think that will cut it.

My other suggestions involved his exhibiting real-life behaviors in front of the interviewer. “Why not go in wearing the orange peels that are usually duct-taped to your random cuts and scrapes?”

He seemed to take offense to this. “But that’s not crazy—orange peels have incredible healing properties.”

“Then how about you just show them the contents of your trunk: one astronaut suit, duct tape, one bag fake mustaches (just in case), one copy of Morning of the Magicians, one can “Great Stuff,” one Davy Crockett hat and 13 doll arms Superglued together?”

Katie gave Ethan a copy of Richard Brautigan’s Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork for his birthday. If I ever speak in tongues it will be for Richard Brautigan. I originally fell in deep with In Watermelon Sugar, but lately it has been getting creepy. Immediately after reading:

Walter

part 11

Every night: just before he falls asleep

Walter coughs. Having never slept

in a room with another person, he thinks

that everybody coughs just before they fall

asleep. That’s his world.

My first impulse was to tear the page out and eat it. What better way to show my love? I may need to mention this to my therapist so I can work on appropriate displays of affection. Being inappropriate, however, was not what kept me from eating the page.

The thought that somehow, magically the poem could pass through my bowels undigested, and end up lying around in a gutter somewhere for some random person to find scared me. Could this someone understand the significance? Or would they see a Richard Brautigan poem lying on the ground, covered in human feces, and get the wrong idea about how I felt for it?

At night between changing and feeding one child and soothing the other back to sleep, I imagine scenarios in which Lucifer comes to me to make a deal, only he collects body parts instead of souls. I spend a great deal of time thinking about which body part I would be willing to separate with in exchange for a full night’s sleep. I think about myself missing various parts: a leg, an arm, a hand. Would a hand and an arm be worth the same amount of sleep or would the entire arm earn me a few extra hours? Would a hunk of meat count as a body part? Are butt cheeks body parts? Since the size of one’s butt can change rapidly with weight loss or gain, I would think that the wishy-washy rump would not be a valid element in this sort of bargaining.

I have spent considerable time working out the minutiae of my fantasy. Lucifer comes to the door instead of up through the floor, he is holding a Samsonite briefcase, and he asks for a cup of lemon zinger tea while we go over the specifics of our arrangement.

I wonder what I would look like and whether it would be worth it. Would I be able to afford the prosthetic version of the missing part? It’s more likely that my husband Ethan would insist he could make a superior product himself.

This is a character trait I feel ambivalent about. He does a great job constructing bookshelves and playhouses for the kids, and I really respect his anti-consumer philosophy, but sometimes I really just want to get the product we need preassembled, not make it from found objects.

Throughout our relationship I have seen my share of milk-crate furniture, bungee-cord “door handles” for the van and pieces of 4×4 with holes drilled in them to be used as menorahs. I am dreading the day the kids need new car seats because I know he can make them out of old sleds and leather belts.

I imagine myself with these same kind of makeshift limbs: a leg whittled of the finest Styrofoam, an arm crafted from driftwood, an oven mitt full of marbles for a hand.

Everything I do lately is done in a haze. This morning Ethan sat me down to gently tell me that he was 
sure it was just him being “old fashioned,” but perhaps we shouldn’t put soiled diapers in our salad bowls.

I find myself shouting things like “HEY, ETHAN, DON’T DRAG THE BACON!” and “GREASE TRAIL,” then cackling maniacally and wondering why no one else gets the joke. I haven’t felt this out of it since Key West, Florida circa 2001, when, after smoking large amounts of speed with “The Bird Man,” I ran circles around a man I accused of being Rod Stewart over and over again until he ran away. 
“You’re Rod Stewart, look everyone Rod Stewart, Roooddd Steeewwwaart, that’s you!”

I fear I am getting dangerously close to accosting another individual.