saint-louise's Diaryland Diary
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The female sweetness. The glow of motherhood. The deadly aim.
Have mercy. It's 92 degrees out.
(Did you know that more murders are committed at 92 degrees Fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once. At lower temperatures, people are easy-going. Over 92, it's too hot to move. But just 92�people get irritable!)
I'm trying to remember how I coped with living in Phoenix. I certainly tended to wear less clothing than I do now. Of course, I was much younger and firmer than now. And also much less concerned with having skin the texture and color of beef jerky by the time I was 25. All that mattered was the lovely, golden, smooth teenaged skin I used to have. Slowly choking to death in the merciless desert sun, but looking pretty damned decent in a swimsuit in the meantime.
Hey. Hey, Me. Hey, 19-year-old Me. Go fuck yourself.
No. I'm serious. I'll pimp-slap you. Get lost, you little tart.
Ten years and tits fraught with gravity say so.
I do remember planning most of my summer time outdoors during midday in Phoenix so that I could easily duck from one air conditioned environment to the next, if needed. I also kept a pair of oven mitts in my car, and used a windshield screen made of lead to keep the inside temperature of the vehicle as close to slightly-cooler-than-the-surface-of-the-sun as possible.
Once, I accidentally left my makeup bag in my car. When I went back to get it, the eyebrow brush and the compact were melted together. I couldn't open my eyeliner, as the lid had fused to the base. Upon opening my mascara, it hissed like an overheated radiator, and the makeup poured out like steaming, black soup.
After this experience, I began having barbecues in the parking lot, using the hood of my car for steaks and the trunk for baked potatoes.
But it's a dry heat.
I was one hot, sweaty bitch in those days.
Let's see how many google hits THAT gets me.
I was still living in Phoenix when I was nine months pregnant with my daughter. I had been put on couch rest for the last two months of the gestation.
Wait. Listen to that word: "gestation." Sounds like it's describing some roiling, gelatinous, gurgling mass of lard, right? Okay, then. You're with me on this one.
Couch rest is only slightly less torturous than bed rest. I could sit up, but I still had more time than is merciful to watch horrible daytime television, eat whatever was near my puffy fingers (my sister would set out food and water for the cats and for me before she left for work in the morning), and measure how far my ass had spread. It had enveloped most of the sofa and part of an end table by the time my daughter was born. After this, as my ass slowly dwindled to near its original size, we discovered the semi-conscious body of a paper boy who had been missing for two weeks. It was determined that my ass had seized him, like The Blob!, as he walked by delivering papers one day. He was revived and has since recovered, save for the therapy.
As the temperature climbed with spring approaching, and most of me responded in kind by expanding like rising dough, I found it more and more challenging to get decent amounts of sleep. I took to dozing in a kind of lethargy during the hottest times of the day, lying like a bloated corpse under the living room ceiling fan. I discovered that the couch was more comfortable to sleep on at night than my bed, most likely because I had spent so much time there that it had molded to the mountains of my flesh. I did whatever tricks I could to try to make myself comfortable enough to be unconscious for longer than ten minutes at a time, but most of it was to no avail. Therefore, I was in a particularly bad mood one April morning around 2:00, when my charming neighbors across the hall came home from a night out, still in the throes of carousing.
Ah. Another word to examine: "carousing." Sounds jolly, doesn't it? Infectious fun, reaching out to dance with everyone who passes by, leaving them with amused and indulgent smiles on their faces.
Perhaps "carouse" isn't the right word for this situation, then. Hmmm. Most likely not.
Let's go with: �still in the throes of stomping around in a drunken, smelly stupor, yelling "FUCK YEAH!" repeatedly and for no apparent reason, and generally exuding blatant stupidity as evidence of being on intellectual par with burnt toast, and that's only because they both contain carbon.
For a little while, I just grumbled and sighed as I listened to them carry on across the walkway. The clinking beer bottles and laughter like braying donkeys didn't really keep me from drifting off into occasional slumber any more than the small human being inside of me, with her feet braced firmly against my ribcage and her tender little head using my bladder as a pillow.
But then they did something very strange, those funny little frat boy neighbors of mine. They placed a CD into their stereo. They pushed "play." They put one song on repeat. And then they turned the knob marked "volume" on the stereo as far as they possibly could toward the side that indicates potential hearing loss. Suddenly, everyone for ten miles around was enjoying "Tainted Love."
Over. And over. And. Over.
At this point, I remember sitting up on the couch, slowly, like the Bride of Frankenstein. I turned toward my front door, brain churning, eyes bulging, hands grasping. The last, precious shreds of my ability to sleep had been snatched up by Marc Almond, crammed into his throat, and then regurgitated to plaintive words of spoiled, spoiled love. Nay! Tainted!
I'm sure I would have felt a lot more sympathy for poor Mr. Almond if I hadn't been fully dedicated to the idea of brutal violence toward my neighbors.
I found myself on my porch, facing the fratboys' door, and I stared at it for a moment, thinking perhaps the potency of my wrath might rear up over their heads and gag them into silence. Then I looked down at my feet to see the empty beverage bottles that I had set out for recycling. I picked them up. One by one. And threw them. At my neighbors' door.
I found that the plastic water bottles, although they made a relatively satisfying, hollow THUMP as they made contact, were not nearly as therapeutic as the glass juice bottles, which shattered gracefully, spewing glass and sending the metal bottle tops spinning off like the remnants of firecrackers. I didn't stop until there were no more bottles to throw.
I considered going into the house to retrieve a couple of gallons of milk to toss over for good measure, but then I realized that the music had stopped. It was a startled quiet, like an hysterical woman slapped into silence. Then the front door of my neighbors' apartment began to slowly open, and one of the neighbors poked the top of his head through the crack and peered at me with an expression somewhere between bewilderment and fear.
Deep inside of me, the bottle-launching harridan was still gnashing her teeth, urging me to scream a string of profanities that would burn the spiky, bleach-tipped hair right off of the person in front of me. But in the eerie quiet that had suddenly descended, I merely narrowed my eyes to slits, glowing with badly-stirred hormones and sleep deprivation, and growled, "Shut. Up."
Sometimes the understatement works best, yes?
But they did, oddly enough. Shut up, that is. For the next couple of months, until I moved out, I heard nary a peep from them again. Looking back, I think of it this way: You know how sometimes you will see a small child throwing an ear-piercing tantrum in the grocery store, and the embarrassed parent will give them what they want to keep from drawing further attention to themselves?
My dear fraternity boys must have had something going on in that apartment. And � somehow, through some bizarre fluke in the natural balance of the universe � they were bright enough to realize that angry, obscenely pregnant women firing bottles at their front door at 2:00 in the morning was not the best way to keep their little secrets out of public view.
Aaaaand, the moral of the story is: Soft Cell makes me twitch.
Go on, then. Procreate. It's a barrel of laughs.
Would I lie?
3:50 p.m. - 2003-05-28
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