Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing(68)

I was proud of my ingenuity until the guy showed up. His polo shirt was tucked neatly into his Dockers and his shoes had been shined, actually hand-shined. He wore wraparound Oakleys. He looked like a cop. I told him so.

He said, “Yeah, well, so do you.”

I’d tried to not look like a cop. I really did. I mean that my jeans had holes in them and I’d tousled my hair. What else can you do. My roommate and I had smoked some of the little we had in the living room just before the guy’s arrival. But it didn’t help. And he wasn’t wrong. I do look like that dyke cop who mocked you for crying about the speeding ticket. It’s the haircut, mostly.

   Anyway, we were at an impasse. I couldn’t smoke in front of him to assuage his fears. He sure as fuck wasn’t going to smoke in front of someone who was definitely a cop. We probably stood there in my living room for a solid ten minutes trying to solve the problem when my sketchy roommate with the cockring gauges in her ears came up from the basement to ask me for a lighter. She saw the obvious cop in my living room and startled, dropped the bowl, and dropped to her knees, picking at the carpet, saying, “My drugs. Oh no. Not my drugs.”

Someday I’ll move somewhere where weed is legal, or they’ll legalize it everywhere. Someday. Until then, at least the current guy doesn’t have a snake.

After Ryan with the waterbed, I got a job bouncing at a gay bar. Part of my job was telling people to please not smoke pot on the patio. Are you serious? Go around the corner so you’re not on our property. I simply waited until a regular lit up on the patio, and I asked him for his plug, and to please go around the corner to smoke. I finally have a pot dealer who doesn’t own a reptile or a record collection or a waterbed. And the guy on his couch is a drag queen, who has a lot of scissoring jokes.

While I can feel relatively safe buying drugs from a dealer, and while you can walk into a store in LA or Portland or Denver, show your ID, and pick out a designer brand of weed, some gummies, and a new vape pen, there are people sitting in cells for years, for fucking decades, because a cop didn’t like them, because of the color of their skin, because he saw the bumper sticker of a team he hated on their car and ran their plates and found a dead inspection. And when he searched their car, because of the color of their skin, because they hurt his delicate ego by not calling him “sir,” the cop found a long-forgotten roach under their seat.

   If I lived in nearly any state but Texas, I could get a medical license for PTSD and depression—not at the VA, though. While my current VA doctor knows how I treat my symptoms and would gladly prescribe marijuana based on countless studies proving its efficacy, she’s barred by federal law from prescribing it. They can prescribe me anything but the one thing I know helps. And every time I drive home from a dealer’s house, I risk going to jail, not to mention a small fortune in lawyer’s fees, because the pills didn’t work.





Cable Guy


I can’t tell you about a specific day as a cable tech. I can’t tell you my first customer was a cat hoarder. I can tell you the details, sure. That I smeared Vicks on my lip to try to cover the stench of rugs and walls and upholstery soaked in cat piss. That I wore booties, not to protect the carpets from the mud on my boots but to keep the cat piss off my soles. I can tell you the problem with her cable service was that her cats chewed through the wiring. That I had to move a mummified cat behind the television to replace the jumper. That ammonia seeped into the polyester fibers of my itchy blue uniform, clung to the sweat in my hair. That the smell stuck to me through the next job.

But what was the next job? This is the shit I can’t remember—how a particular day unfolded. Maybe the next job was the Great Falls, Virginia, housewife who answered the door in some black skimpy thing I never really saw because I work very hard at eye contact when faced with out-of-context nudity. She was expecting a man. I’m a six-foot lesbian. If I showed up at your door in a uniform with my hair cut in what’s known to barbers as the International Lesbian Option No. 2, you might mistake me for a man. Everyone does. She was rare in that she realized I’m a woman. We laughed about it. She found a robe while I replaced her cable box. She asked if I needed to use a bathroom, and I loved her.

   For ten years, I worked as a cable tech in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Those ten years, the apartments, the McMansions, the customers, the bugs and snakes, the telephone poles, the traffic, the cold and heat and rain, have blurred together in my mind. Even then, I wouldn’t remember a job from the day before unless there was something remarkable about it. Remarkable is subjective and changes with every day spent witnessing what people who work in offices will never see—their coworkers at home during the weekday, the American id in its underpants, wondering if it remembered to delete the browsing history.



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Mostly all I remember is needing to pee.

And I remember those little glimpses of the grotesque. The one that comes to mind now is the anti-gay lobbyist whose office was lined with framed appreciation from Focus on the Family, and pictures with Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell, but whose son’s room was painted pink and littered with Barbies. The hypocrite’s son said he was still a boy. He just thought his sundress was really cute. I agreed, told him I love daisies, and he beamed. His father thanked me, and I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. How the fuck do you actively work to ensure the world’s a more dangerous place for your beautiful little kid? But I didn’t ask him that. I just stood and glared at him until he looked away. I needed the job. I assumed his kid would grow up to hate him.