I studied literature in college, but it didn’t seem to get me anywhere. I graduated and I was still stuck with the same brainless temp jobs I had worked to put myself through school. I had assumed that my writing would break out and be well received by the time I graduated, but I was lagging. A year and a half after graduation I was working nights at a data entry and processing job, midnight to 8am. These kinds of long, brainless jobs make one tired from nothing, the simple monotony of it is like a trap and an escape all at once. I guess that’s just how it goes when your sleep schedule alone makes you a zombie; an outlaw. My energy was wasting away, and I had no time to write, let alone try and get a better job.
I worked with two other people- a bleached blonde women who used “I had to get my man off” as an excuse for being late, and an old man who never talked.
Of course, I had put myself above these people, separated the job and them from me and my life. The old man was bitter and blank-faced; this job was more his life than it would ever be mine. Even in my feminist ideologies I had dismissed the bleach blonde woman, told myself I’d never be that submissive to a female stereotype or to a man the way she seemed to be. I had convinced myself I was an intellectual, and intellectuals were above all uneducated people who didn’t bother to read theory or discuss politics. I was bitter towards my coworkers for not bothering to be as educated as I was, for not looking outside of their minds once in a while to witness all the beauty and chaos. But on the long bike rides home, sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a God, and if so, I wondered if he was punishing me. I wondered if it was my fate to be trapped doing mindless temp work forever.
Then this nerd started to work the graveyard shift, too. He was kind of like me but different, he seemed a little more unstrung, although something made me doubt that he would be on drugs. I had worked many temporary office jobs and had learned many people on graveyard shifts were on some kinds of drugs, whether it be caffeine pills or meth. The bleach blonde woman would constantly talk about how she had previously been a meth addict, but I saw the way her arms moved feverishly when she scanned the documents. Her teeth would chatter sometimes and she’d scratch at her arms until they looked dry, puffy and swollen. My last year of college I had dated a boy who was a writer from upstate New York who was a cocaine addict- at the time he denied it, and I didn’t find out until he o.d.’ed. He didn’t die, but he dropped out of college and went to rehab. Later on, after we had broken up, I heard he was back to his old habit- someone had walked into the bathroom and caught him with a dollar bill up his nose at the release party for his first book. The boy wore glasses and had greasy hair; he was a typical card-carrying nerd. But he did teach me that drug addicts are liars, and they keep their using a secret to anyone they aren’t using with. I applied this knowledge to the bleached-blonde woman- she might say that she had quit using, but her behavior told me otherwise. It was the same everywhere, it doesn’t matter where you are, drug addicts are always liars. And it wasn’t just drug addicts either. Everyone is a liar when you know enough about them.
I remember when I started to notice that nerdy boys were the same as regular, acceptable boys. It started when I overheard this boy at a party say, “This girl was like, sucking my cock and I don’t think she was very into it because I’m a nerdy guy.”
My initial reaction was to laugh because of the way the nerdy boys always walk around with the same overbearing sense of authority that all boys have, but nerdy boys have more intellect to back it up. The idea is that nerdy boys are less threatening than the big, athletic, macho guys, or the heart throb studs, because of this intellect that they carry. Their intelligence puts them above other men's’ actions, makes them more aware of the world around them. But being a nerd supposedly isn’t a desirable thing to be, because being a nerd isn’t cool. The nerds don’t get the girls.
But after the initial reaction, I thought more about it, and I started to notice that there were nerdy boys all over the city; greasy boys on bikes with evil eyes and glasses that parodied their intelligent image. Being a nerd is a commodity. Everyone’s so over the beat generation, everyone's over being PC, everyone's over self-consciousness and fashion, it’s all about the irony now, and how could I complain? Irony is all the rage.
I was glad another person was hired- the workload between the old man, bleach blonde woman and I was becoming overwhelming. However, I was immediately annoyed by him, as his appearance of being a hip nerdy commodity seemed almost forced. We both rode our bikes to work. He would ignore me a lot in the beginning, like he seemed disinterested or distracted by something and couldn’t even say hello. I knew that he had introduced himself to both the old man and the bleach blonde woman because he was friendly with both of them, but I seemed invisible to him. It didn’t matter, though, I didn’t need his approval. I would mind my own business, zone out and think of escape routes or plans for the future or cute people I saw on the street.
Then one day, out of no where he looked down at me and smiled as we were locking up our bikes.
“Do you like Charles Bukowski?” he asked. I didn’t know quite what to say so I just looked at him, searching for any bit of humor or emotion to indicate what he was getting at by asking me this question.
Finally he added, “I bet you hate him, huh?”
“Why are you wondering?”
“Oh, I just saw that T-shirt you wore the other day and thought you were probably into like, Kathy Acker or some shit.”
I was shocked. First of all because he even knew who Kathy Acker was, but also because he had even noticed the T-shirt I was wearing the other day, and given enough thought to what it might mean. I had always kind of assumed that he had never spoken to me before because he didn’t see me as someone worth talking to. It was proof I had not gone unnoticed by him this whole time.
The T-shirt was black and white, a book stencil-style screen-printed with the words “I love books” above it, in huge typewriter font. Except the love was in the shape of a heart, it wasn’t the actual word “love”. I liked it because it showed that I had punk rock roots, from before the time I spent in college, but also because it was a simplistic way of letting people know that I am an intellectual.
“How do you know about Kathy Acker?”
He shrugged like it was nothing. “A book was recommended to me in my postmodern literature class. It was pretty intense, but good.”
My mouth was practically hanging open at this point. The nerd that had never talked to me took a postmodern literature class?
“Which book?” I asked.
“Blood and Guts in High School.”
“You have to be kidding me. That is one of my favorite books. I can’t believe you’ve read it.”
He shrugged again, his face going a bit cold as he finished locking his bike. “Why not? You’ve never talked to me before. You don’t know anything about me.”
The statement came as an unexpected jab of embarrassment in the chest. But I responded as if I had not noticed his comment’s angry tone.
“That’s true,” I said. “But you don’t know much about me either, and if you must know, I love Charles Bukowski.”
That day while filing papers, I started to think about Bukowski and about Acker, and their similarities. Bukowski’s stories were all about alcoholism, and drinking and apathy and complete disrespect of people, and sex so obscenely graphic and over the top while being nondescript. Acker’s stories were overflowing with passion and emotion, so much so that it was painful to read. But their ideas and concepts of sex went to such the extremes of their genders. In Bukowski’s stories his cock took over the whole room thoughtlessly; in Acker’s stories the female character allowed the man’s cock to take up the whole room thoughtless and she absolutely ripped her heart out for him. Both authors were, for this reason, uncomfortable for me to read, triggering so many feelings of powerlessness given to me by men, but at the same time I kept reading the stories because the stark brutality fascinated me.
How could people write things that are so real and painful and true, so much so that they make you feel numb to emotional devastation? Maybe this was why my writing wasn’t making me successful; I tended to pay more attention to sentence structure, vocabulary and grammar than to emotional content. But it seemed too hard to be honest with myself about what I felt. It’s like when you’re drinking and you black out, you become the person inside of you that you were afraid to be, the person you hate more than anyone. For me it had been the girl who had let people walk all over her, who actually cared what the boys, even the nerdy ones thought.
When I saw the nerd at work from then on, something was different, it was like we knew about each other but we didn’t know each other at all.
‘He must be such an asshole,’ I thought. He was so clumsy with his long, wiry, mechanical arms, and his lopsided grin. I imagined him sitting in his room with the lights off, only a desk lamp on like a sneaky teenager, reading Bukowski and laughing, knowingly and sinister. But the attraction was almost undeniable and I couldn’t figure out why. When he’d walk into the room and give me that look like I was scum, his eyes narrowed and smiling it made me weak in the knees like a teenage girl.
