Dog Days - 2

By Robert Levin

But nothing I came up with rang true for me. All I knew for sure was that I'd become, say it, the definition of "pervert." I could not have descended to a much lower depth if I'd done so intentionally.

As you can see, I very much needed to get out of this dreadful situation and the first exit I thought of was suicide. But while destroying my body, which was making me much too noticeable, was certainly an attractive idea, a large problem that I have with dying discouraged me from acting on it. I'm not trying to be funny. Transforming into something comparable to what Maureen might leave on a curbside is a prospect that weighs very heavily on me. In fact, to make it hard for the gods to find me when my time comes, I've endeavored even in normal circumstances to not stand out too much, to be, you know, as anonymous as possible. (This explains the "C" average that I've steadfastly maintained throughout my life.)

And if there's any substance to the reincarnation thing and the immortality it promises, suicide posed a very serious risk. The gods, everyone knows, tend to frown on people who take their own lives, no matter how wretched their conditions may be. That made it unlikely - especially after the way I'd comported myself this time around - that they'd send me back as anything better than a water bug or dental plaque.

Passing on suicide, I contemplated surgically altering my appearance or moving to another city. But these choices were cost prohibitive and the latter would also have involved a lot of heavy lifting, which I really hate.

Finally I considered going insane. Well within my budget, what this option offered was the opportunity to stay alive AND lose my body (my unrelenting self-consciousness anyway) at the same time. But to achieve a genuine psychosis - to, that is, retreat into the bowels of your brain, live in a world of your own invention and become completely oblivious to what's going on outside it - isn't so easy.

I know because I tried. Thinking that I could maybe connect to madness by faking some emblematic symptoms (and sufficiently desperate by now to chance still more humiliation) I ran an experiment. It was the middle of August and wearing a tattered overcoat - and with a week's growth of beard and my hair wild - I stood on a street corner and commenced to babble unintelligibly at various decibel levels. After a few minutes of that I shouted, "Fucking motherfuckers, I'm gonna break your fucking hearts and shove the fucking bits and pieces up your hungry assholes." Then I babbled some more and then, kicking and swiping at the air, I snarled, "PILLOWS? What else you asswipes got in store? The armadillos shat in your cereal shit? THAT crapola again? That - ha ha - GRANOLA crapola?"

But my face crimson with embarrassment all the while, my act (with its admittedly lame material) never stopped being just that and my self-consciousness was only heightened. (If I needed confirmation of my failure to accomplish my objective it was more than adequately furnished by a woman who remarked to her companion, "Must be some kind of fraternity initiation.")

So it became evident that even the fact that I was doubtless more screwed up than I knew I was when I realized exactly how screwed up I was, didn't give me an advantage here. However odd the angle at which I protruded from it may have been, I was as mired in reality as anyone else. I mean, despite my preoccupation, I still worried a lot about real world things. I worried about losing my job. I worried about getting to the laundry in time to collect my shirts. I worried that I might have picked up a dose of heartworm from Maureen. And if that wasn't enough, I couldn't stop caring about what people thought. It was possible, in fact, that I'd come to care more about what people thought than Louis Harris and George Gallup put together.

So I could do no more than envy the real thing - those guys who've established permanent residence in a fissure between their cerebellums and their medulla oblongata. Yes, I know THEIR weird and terrible utterances can be, in their obvious authenticity, very scary and lead you to conclude that even in the worst of times only a schmuck would want to take refuge in the kinds of worlds they inhabit. But long before my interest in the subject became personal I discovered that if you were willing to pay close attention you could sometimes pick up indications that where they live is not without a recreational dimension. On one occasion I was actually able to make out, in the background of a nasty mix of epithets, cacophonous outbursts and sundry other emissions, the strains of a tinkling piano and the clinking of glass and ice cubes - persuasive evidence, you'll agree, of a party in progress.

I wanted to find that party guy now and see if I could get him to show me the ropes. But I knew that I had as much chance of prying instructions out of him as I did of getting the name of his caterer.

So what did I do?

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