You Could Have Saved Me If You Wanted To

In the nineties you learned how to perform the Heimlich maneuver on yourself. You frequently locked yourself out of your apartment. You had as many friends as you do now - none. When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, your father did a spit take, clapped, and lost his mind with joy. You attended the lectures by Dick Hebdige, learned what the sartorial signification of an electric blue ascot was, and caught him during office hours performing cunnilingus on a redheaded student you sat next to in class who told you she slept with David Lynch an hour after she turned eighteen. When you saw her in the halls, you looked at her not looking at you. You wrote a screenplay that your father took from you and claimed was his because you wrote it under a roof he provided for you. You refused to graduate from college because you refused to get a job. You were invited to a drag bar by an older woman who smelled like bananas and owned a website that was sold for twenty-five million dollars, and when you tongue-kissed the inside of her knee she said, "Ooh-la-la." You read short works of French theory and didn't understand a single word. You distanced yourself from your family and then made up stories about their failings to justify the distance. You got beat up by an elderly Lebanese man who pulled you out of your car through the driver's-side window, got you in a guillotine headlock, and told you to tap his arm when you had had enough, which you did. You had sex with a Jewish woman who asked if you were gay when you were putting your underwear back on, a black woman twice your size, the daughter of Harvey Korman, an Japanese woman with a tattoo of Fat Man on one thigh and Little Boy on the other, a woman you went to elementary school with who said the only reason she wanted to sleep with you was because you reminded her of the male teacher who used to be your elementary school teacher, and a born-again Christian who wrote a book of poetry containing 100 poems about the the ribald adventures William Shakespeare's Juliet might have had if she had survived the poisoning. You were given the job of putting down three of your father's dying dogs with a homemade hot shot. When the dogs saw you coming they showed you their asses and tried to defend themselves by hosing you down with what remained of their insides.