Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(23)
I could have easily held a full-time job, then come home at night and tied twigs together, but in a way I needed the poverty, needed it as proof that I was truly creative. It was a cliché, of course, but one that was reinforced every time you turned around. People didn’t say “artist,” they said “starving artist,” so even if you weren’t doing anything of consequence, as long as you were hungry you were on the right track, weren’t you?
Being broke was also an excuse to stay put. When I was twenty there’d been no stopping me. I’d been fearless—the type who’d hitchhike to Mexico on a dare. I lived in San Francisco for a while, and in Oregon. Then I returned to my parents’ basement and lost whatever nerve I’d ever had. Since I’d come back to Raleigh, my most daring achievement was to move into my own apartment, this at my father’s insistence and done practically at knifepoint. Meaning well, my mother would visit with groceries. “I just thought you could use some meat,” she’d say, handing me a blood-soaked bag with ground beef and pork chops and sometimes twenty dollars in it.
My situation improved somewhat in the winter of 1981, when my sister Gretchen moved into the apartment upstairs. Because I was a few years older, she looked up to me; not so much that it strained her neck, but enough to make me feel that I wasn’t completely worthless. When I saw myself through my parents’ eyes, I saw a worm crawling through mud and shit toward a psychedelic mushroom, but when I saw myself through hers, I felt that things were possibly not as bad as they seemed. I wasn’t broken, just resting, readying myself for the next big thing.
Gretchen had just completed two and a half years of college in the mountains of North Carolina, at the same school I had gone to for a while. Now she was hoping to transfer to the Rhode Island School of Design, promising that if she got in, she’d never refer to it as “Risdee.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said, knowing that when a person gets busy, the first things to go are the extra syllables.
Gretchen submitted her portfolio, and while waiting to see if she’d been accepted, she enrolled in an entomology class at NC State and took a waitressing job at a pizza parlor near the university. At the end of every shift she’d collect a couple of leftover slices, some with the mushrooms or pepperoni picked off, and bring them to me wrapped in foil. Then I’d get high and she’d trot out her insects, one of which was usually languishing in her killing jar. This she carried everywhere she went, a portable gas chamber for any lacewing, caddis fly, or camel cricket unfortunate enough to catch her attention.
As spring arrived and her death toll mounted, I found extra work at the university, modeling for a life-drawing class. I didn’t do it nude, or even shirtless—I was far too modest—and for that reason I was called in only occasionally. Because I was clothed, the instructor, a woman named Susan, encouraged me to arrive with a variety of outfits, the more conflicting prints the better. “And don’t forget hats!” she said.
When frozen stock-still before a roomful of students, I’d find that my thoughts usually drifted toward money, one instance in particular when I had it in my grasp and foolishly let it slip away. That had happened shortly after the New Year, when I’d gone with a friend to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Before setting out to see the collection, we left our things with the woman at the coat check. When it came time to leave, I presented this same woman with my stub, and after searching around in her racks, she returned to hand me a full-length mink, auburn-colored and lined with emerald green satin. It was much heavier than I’d expected, like holding a bear that had fainted in my arms. After thinking it might be a trick, I realized that the woman wasn’t paying attention. All the easier, then, to turn around and walk out the door. I was close enough to feel the cold air on my face when I chickened out and returned to the coat check. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you seem to have made a mistake.”
The woman looked at the mink laid before her on the counter. “And you’re just now noticing it?” she asked.
“What a bitch,” I said to my friend, walking to the car in my thrift-store overcoat. “She should have been thanking me. Better still, she should have rewarded me.”
How stupid can you get? I now thought, standing before a classroom with a paisley turban on my head. That mink could have made a real difference in my life. It wasn’t exactly stealing, I reasoned, not technically. The coat’s rightful owner would have been compensated, so who, really, would it have harmed?
The building that Gretchen and I lived in—a large shabby house now sliced into apartments—was located midway between downtown and the university. Neither of us knew how to drive, so when going to work or school, we either walked, cycled, or begged people for rides, just like we had when we were children. Half a mile away, on the other side of a fine, well-manicured neighborhood, there was a shopping center called Cameron Village. It included a twenty-four-hour supermarket, and while walking home from it one night, a bag of groceries in one hand and her killing jar in the other, my sister was attacked by a man who came from behind and tried to drag her into the bushes.
He had the element of surprise, but Gretchen’s tall, at least for a Sedaris, and powerful. As soon as she got her bearings, she broke loose and headed to the nearest house for help. No lights came on, so she ran three blocks down the middle of the street and onto our front porch. I heard a banging on my door, and when I opened it she bolted past me into the kitchen, then stood trembling and mute—in shock, most likely, and with leaves in her hair. I phoned the police and set about hiding my drugs. After that I called my parents, aware that I was stealing someone else’s news, and aware too of how dramatic I sounded. “Gretchen’s been attacked.”