The Prodigal Daughter

What can I tell you about my family. My father died when I was nine and my mother is a nurse at the medical center. She works long hours and always has. I have a little brother. He’s 8 years younger. He never knew my father, which could probably be considered a good thing. It’s not as if I knew him either. I just remember going to a church, and everyone wearing black. It smelt like old people and flowers. I am convinced to this day that all older women wear the same perfume. It’s layered with death and flowers.

Vernica sweetie are you ready?
I think so are my shoes shiny enough? I want daddy to see how shiny they are.
Honey your shoes are perfect (she tries not to blow cigarette smoke at me and she makes a funny face while accomplishing this)
Is Roddy coming?
No your brother is staying at the neighbors. Now lets get in the car and go say goodbye to daddy.
We’re saying goodbye? (deep sigh from her and she inhales deeply on her cigarette)
Yes honey. Yes we are. Now buckle up.
Ok. Mommy?
Yes?
Where’s daddy going?
Somewhere a whole hell of a lot better then here. (she laughs at herself, and sighs. She hopes it’s better)

I can safely say that my presence was most definitely missed during the time that I was away. I am the center unit of the family. Which is probably the reason why I always wanted to run away so bad. I attempted and failed many times over. When I was 11 I packed lunch in a brown paper bag. There were potato chips, a sandwich, and some mashed potatoes I had stuffed into a plastic back. I brought my blankie, and my wristwatch, and was convinced that I was set for the road. I packed it all away in a bandanna and attached it to a stick, like I had seen in an old movie. I made it to the playground up the hill from our house, at which point I was hungry. I decided to eat my lunch. I thought I would easily be picked up by some nice family who would ask me to do anything like baby-sit, make dinner, clean the house, or anything. Just be happy to have me enough to do what I wanted. I opened my bandanna and the mashed potatoes has leaked all over the place (mom always made them a little runny) and made everything soggy. I had to go back. And I was devastated. I arrived back at the house and my mother was there. I hadn’t been gone for more than an hour. She just puffed on her cigarette and smiled down at me. I guess she must have been home from a split shift. She didn’t say a word, but made me tomato soup and grilled cheese. This last time was supposed to be for good, but there were…complications.

wish list…more crap that i want. bweeeeooooooo.

if i can grow new brain cells into adult hood (read this) then how come i feel so brain dead right now. ouch. working working working. i swear i am working on this book. not tonight. all night on friday. promise. stop looking at me like that.

i made home made eggnog today. better with rum, than with brandy. i also watched an interesting special on channel Thirteen about the Dyker Lights. It’s some crazy place in brooklyn or something with all these dudes who have horrible ny accents rabidly decorating their houses. the scariest thing of all was a santa. was robotic and you could talk to it through a speaker. it would then answer you. the creepy thing was that it was answered by a guy who had set it up so that there was a video feed and a microphone in his house. he was dirty and balding, and very, very unkempt. the thing itslef wasn’t pleasent to look at:

this article made me laugh. but not because of the alleged sex tape, or the goofy behavior of ms.spears. but because of this quote:
“Spears maintains (a) there is no Pam-and-Tommy tape (b) there was no threatened leak (c) there was no viewing party for lawyers (d) ‘there was no laughter, disgust or goofy behavior while watching the video…because they did not watch any video…because there is no such video.’”
and this one:
“ast week to refute the coverage about divisions between the singer and the aspiring rapper”<—–that. is. funny.

I worked in a building named Plaza One. It is a brown building that looked liked it was someone’s brilliant idea in the 70’s. By this I mean that it’s constructed of light brown bricks and it looks something a child would make out of legos. It is three stories and on the right hand side there is a large window that reveals an awful decision in lighting fixtures. When I had to walk everywhere as a teenager we knew that is was one of the only places we could go into air conditioning and smoke. The top floors are reserved for offices, but I am not even sure who works in them or what they’re for. The front was dedicated to a strip mall housing an Italian ice place, a tuxedo rental place, and Video Thrills. That’s where I worked. Seems pretty inconspicuous and yellow neon sign proclaiming that it was where thrills involving that of the video nature were located. I want you to break it down though. Do you think we specialized in action films and that’s what thrilled? I will give you a word. Pornography. That’s what we were constantly thrilling people with.
At first Marty, my boss, wouldn’t hire me. It didn’t matter how much retail experience I had. There was no way he was going to hire a girl. I said:

Look Marty I don’t want to tell you how to run your store, but I think that it’s pretty sexist for you to just turn someone away just because they are a girl. I could probably call some people. Plus I think having a girl work here instead of a sleazy guy then you probably get more customers in here. I know what kind of people these are and I know how to handle myself and…

Well I had the job now didn’t I? Besides it would have been hard for him to turn me away. He’s an old friend of the family. My mother’s friend to be exact. I think at one point my parents were probably swingers. What she would have done with fat old Marty Schillman was beyond me. Maybe he was a real looker back in the 70’s, just the Plaza One building may have been a good idea. Or even the interior of Video Thrills. Red counter with a white base. Shelves behind the counter of the same nature. Because Marty is a real genius with interior design. That’s what I always told him anyway. It was situated so that in the front there were old vhs copies of bad movies and then there was a back section. It was kind of a cheap front because I didn’t think that Marty really bothered to stock anything after 1992. We didn’t have any horror either because my friend had ripped most of it off. I don’t think Marty ever noticed.
The good thing about the job was that I could read as much as I wanted to and also be on the internet for long periods of time. I had a little monitor where I could watch to see if anyone was stealing Cum Guzzlers. It was usually just some shady looking middle aged man who roams the aisles for and hour and a half and comes out with Dirty Debutants 2. People love Ed Powers I guess.

More about the character:
she works at video thrills (the porn store in an old 70’s throwback building)
was that worth your time? i hope so.

Scream 3 is on. not much to report.

i was driving around a lot with jim today and i wondered to myself “hey, almost every small town with a main street has corny light up snowflakes, or something, lining the street. where on earth would they get something like that and how much would it cost? do they get a catalogue each year from their distributor?” Because i am pretty bored and too tired to write something to do with my book (even though i have some goodies to share) i did some research. i found a webite that sells giant snow flakes. the ones that flemington seems to have cost $72.00, but if you order more then six they are $50.40 each. interesting. i’m thinking that flemington has about 12 of them, i’m estimating. i haven’t counted. so does that mean they may have spent $600 on their snowflakes. what about the giant christmas tree near the hospitol? who knows how many strings of c7’s they have on that sucker. i came across some other interesting finds (you would not believe how may sites there are related to this). Do you want to create an extravaganza of lights that people can tour? then these people can help you out. this is my personal favorite:

this goes for $53,591.00. there also seems to be a huge market for light up palm trees and tropical type stuff. i really didn’t know and neither did you and now, thanks to my boredom, you do.

this is still the book btw, not my life. although a lot of times the line is blurry.

The alarm beeped at me. I casually rolled over and looked at it. 8:00 on the digital face and it looked like it was shaking at me. The numbers were doing a dance, wavering to and fro. Telling me to wake up. I lay there and contemplated going to my shitty job. I closed my eyes and told myself, twenty more minutes. In that twenty minutes I would reach into my underwear and relieve the sexual tension that had been built up for the past week to my secret fantasy. It wasn’t unlike any other morning I had had since I moved back in with my mother. The masturbation was a little odd, but other then that I brushed my teeth, did a bump, and went down for coffee. I wasn’t staying long anyway. Just a couple of months before I could move. Then I would get out of the town that had raised me. A town that was stifling and boring and didn’t have a real bar.

I guess it’s like a lot of suburbs. About three or four chain restaurants that have bars, a couple of convenience stores. A diner. Basically a crossroads with nothing in it. At the time I worked in retail. It paid shit, but for some reason I didn’t think I could do better. I didn’t think much of anything since I had arrived back. Oh yeah. I totally lived in a city. And it was totally cool. Which is what I tell all of the old friends that I run into, because they haven’t left and never will. They will be trapped here and that’s how they like it. If they wanted to leave they could. It never happens that way though. Dollar bowling on Mondays and half price drinks at the name-a-chain restaurant on every Thursday. Why not? Why not live in your parents’ basement and fuck when no one is awake? They can’t come up with good enough reasons to leave, but I can’t come up with good enough reasons to stay.

“Astronomers use a star’s light to determine the star’s temperature, composition and motion. Astronomers analyze a star’s light by looking at it’s intensity at different wavelengths. Also known as Wien’s displacement law (developed by German physicist Wilhelm Wien) links the wavelength at which the most energy is given out by an object and its temperature. Astronomers put filters of different standard colors on a telescope to allow only light of a particular color from a star to pass. In this way, astronomers determine the brightness of a star at particular wavelengths. From this information, astronomers can use Wien’s law to determine the star’s surface temperature.”
–Microsoft Encarta. 2001

I stood there, with my booted foot on his bad knee and my Beretta Tomcat in his face.
“Don’t you fucking move” I said as calmly as I could. He just laughed. This frustrated me to the point that I dug my heel into his kneecap. I think I witnessed a wince of pain but I couldn’t tell if it was the drugs at that point or not. I couldn’t tell much of anything. I could only feel the rage that boiled inside of me with an intensity comparable to the surface of a white dwarf stars. For some reason my astronomy class was running through my brain. The different intensities of stars and the scale they used. They were hard to remember because letters were assigned to each one.
“Are you going to shoot me?” he laughed under his breath. All I wanted to do was remember the letters.
“You better shut the fuck up” I snapped back. I shot the gun in the air and the pieces of stucco ceiling fell lightly on us like snow. And then everything was quiet. And we starred at each other for a moment. Assessing the situation. What could either of us do, or for that matter, what would we do?”