My Word!

I thesaurussed “thesaurus” and I think it’s extinct now

I will get to that in a minute but something else came up and if it had a headline it would be this:

I think Amber Heard has been in my backyard

I’ve drawn Daisy so many times – she says none of them look like her – but I at least got her size rightish so you know she’s spindly/medium but the poo I picked up today let me tell you it’s like she’s been eating dachshunds.

Now back to the regularly scheduled headline except one more thing I was thinking about when I half-quoted Daisy saying it doesn’t even look like me. Isn’t it funny how we deny we look like the camera says except when – due to excessive angles luck lighting or darkness – we look skinny.

Then it doesn’t fucking matter about nose shadows, wrinkles, whiskers, eyes closed crossed or both, and so there you are face like Béla fucking Lugosi but that’s the one becomes your everything pic and by you I mean me

Now back to the headline for real.

So I wrote a story this morning and it’s for a new series called The Beatniks Next Door and this is the third one and it’s about Cynthia who was at first named Zoe and she is a Zoe for sure but the story is set in the 60’s, the entire series is, and Zoe wasn’t a name then unless you were Frank Zappa’s kid or something so it’s about Cynthia whose middle name is Zoe although this is not revealed in the story so keep it under your hat.

Went swimmingly, one word after the other, sort of, couple of challenges but I got it in the end, you know, got that feeling and suddenly I realized like always that the paragraph I’m typing’s going to be the last and then I keep going until I realize the sentence I’m on is going to be the last and then it happens again for the last word, plunk, period, return return return and then usually I slam my laptop shut and Daisy looks over and I swoop up and she swoops up and we get going for a warble which looks like a spellcheck thing but was on purpose due to warbling.

But not today, Zurg

That last word which I am not going to tell you in advance but I just couldn’t find it and I tried a few then a few more then another then back to the other until I decided to thesaurus.com the feeling you know and I’d already thought of most of what spewed out and the others weren’t appropriate so I tried a few million more and was almost able to convince myself I got the right one and I wasn’t exactly satisfied but I slammed the laptop shut anyway maybe without the same verve, and off we went, also without the same verve.

Wasn’t until on the way back it suddenly landed, my word I mean, the perfect word, and it was the one I thesaurussed in the first place, and that’s when I executed extinction.

So here’s the story if you feel like it, and if you don’t, here it isn’t.

The Beatniks Next Door – Cynthia

Truth or Consequences came before The Price is Right, very different shows but Bob Barker was handsome and charming in both. Of course The Price was just one big fucking commercial but Truth was a trivia show where eager contestants became comedy fodder when they got it wrong which I think some of them did on purpose because I was just a kid and I got nearly all of them right. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand adults and not because I wasn’t smart enough but because theyweren’t. As an added bonus, the contestants on Truth sometimes got a surprise such as a niece they’d never seen, a cadet on leave was a popular one in the 70s, but in the 60s – and this story takes place in the 60s – the quivering souls standing there when the curtains opened were children and that’s where Cynthia came in. She’d enter stage left or right like a blond short-skirted babysitter crouch down try to loosen the kid up but you can only have so much empathy for this to work and Cynthia was loaded with it and of course the frozen children saw it and automatically collapsed into her arms, their tragic faces pointed into her neck, and Mr. Barker looked on in what seemed like kind fatherly tolerance but she knew was careful rage as the reunion part of the show flopped time after time.

Cynthia knew she must toughen up in order to keep her job and in those days the demand for short skirted blonds was lesser than now, the boom started with The Price, slim white arms indicating Danger Will Robinson!-style the big fucking camper as if you needed it pointed out.

So Cynthia practiced on twelve-year-old me. My mother said feel free he’s too sensitive anyway which hurt my feelings tra-la.

Cynthia lived across the street in a little white shack so completely covered in green vines it looked like a monopoly house when I stared at it through my bedroom window waiting for her to cross the street in her worn-out go-go boots, the same mini-dress she always wore.

It was weird, those visits so intimate and secret. Maybe I could tell you if we were on butting barstools, last call, and I could swoop it all into a couple of sentences but to spell it out in words and spaces with or without punctuation I think might ruin it – which is essentially what both Cynthia and my mother tried to do to me – they tried to ruin me, to abort me from myself if that makes any sense. Ugh. Let me try that again. The plan was for Cynthia to lessen my connection to things that gave me comfort and joy like Walt Disney movies, pop music, my love of dance, sissy things my parents called them, and in doing so she would learn to lessen her natural bent for empathy and be able to manage the Truth children and single-handedly increase the popularity of that segment of the show so she could afford different dresses new boots get a convertible buy the house instead of rent gas the vines, all of which she did, and eventually she moved right along with Bob Barker to, you guessed it, The Price is Right.

Cynthia will never read this anyway so with a successful ending in mind I am going to tell you what went on those visits after all. Suddenly doesn’t seem so difficult. Anything for a good ending.

At first when we were still ourselves there was this feeling we’d get between us and it was like what you get during an eclipse or when the ocean’s under velvet or when you see a single wild iris and next thing you notice it’s the entire field. You can even get that feeling when somebody says let’s go for a drive or how about a swim or I read your story, you know, little things like that.

It was like we were on a teeter-totter me and Cynthia, very nearly identical, and also like we were in a staring contest at the same time.

She asked why I liked dancing and I somehow switched her imperfect accusation into a request and gathered air between my fingers, started with a slow-motion plié followed by an exquisite pirouette three more and a lingering fourth. Her mouth dropped open and she cried it was so perfect, so unexpected, so you can see it wasn’t going to go well us changing one another, so we decided right there on the teeter-totter that all we’d do is work on pretending, and so that’s what we did, we pretended, and let me tell you those afternoons the sun slanting in through the windows curtains billowing shadows moving – moments so true between glorious bouts of pretending – I’ve never been so happy.