"There's the boy again from yesterday!" says Louise, glancing behind me. Louise is so cool. She's got a sort of Patricia Arquette sexiness about her. She can get away with these little glances and gestures that only gutsy temptresses in movies can get away with...
"What boy? Wait, the POETRY boy?"
"Yes!" Louise hisses, sort of grinning. Damn, I wish I could hiss like that. Louise is too sexy for me.
Last night, Louise and I were watched for well over an hour by a boy with a blank book, into which he appeared to be recording poetry. He was STARING at us -- no shame, no shyness, just staring... I swivel around in my chair a little bit, trying to catch a glimpse of Poetry Boy. Sure enough, here he is, a second consecutive night, staring at us.
"Jesus Christ!" I try to hiss, sounding a little bit like Brian. "He's staring AGAIN!"
Louise and I eat our dinners. She eats some crappy looking vegetable shit, and I eat some crappy-looking meat-shit. Poetry boy watches us. He's got a small blue journal that looks strikingly like my little blue journal, Diane. That makes me nervous. Of course, I know he doesn't have Diane; it's just that... well, I know what kind of incriminating and horrendous stuff can get recorded in a journal like that... A people-watching journal, that's what he's carrying... Only, he seems intent on just watching Louise and I -- his eyes never seem to stray... Finally, Poetry Boy gets up to leave. He takes his tray with him. We breathe a simultaneous sigh of relief.
But no luck. Poetry Boy has left his blue notebook at the table. I'll be DAMNED, will he NEVER leave? Nope. He gets another cup of tea and sits back down at his table with his notebook. He's not bothering to write in the notebook tonight; he's just LOOKING at us. Louise squints at him over my shoulder. Sexybitch. But he doesn't appear to notice that we've noticed him.
We leave the cafeteria. Poetry Boy gets up too.
"Which way did he go?" I ask.
"I think he went upstairs..."
"Oh, okay... So he's probably not, like, following us, right?"
We head upstairs to look for a copy of the Cooper Point Journal. We locate one, sit down on a bench, and look at some comic strips written by a boy in Louise's class. We giggle. And I suddenly get the feeling that something's walking across the back of my neck... I glance around slowly... Sure as hell, Poetry Boy has taken up post on the balcony above us. There's NOBODY else on the balcony. There's no reason for anybody to BE on the balcony at this time of night. He's standing there with his own copy of the Cooper Point Journal (CPJ if you're a real Northwesterner, but I'm not entirely assimilated yet...), peering over the top of it, straight down at Louise and me.
"Lou... Don't look now, but he's STILL here..."
"He's not... He's not on the balcony is he? Are you SERIOUS?"
"Yep. He's reading a newspaper, and he's looking over the top of it straight down at us..."
"WEIRD!!! He's not very subtle, is he?"
This strikes us as funny. Not very subtle, is he? Please! What kind of a doofus would follow a couple of girls around the cafeteria building, peering at them over the edge of a balcony, thinking that they can't see him!? Duh. What a dork. We laugh out loud, and it echoes off the walls in the building. I glance at Louise. Louise glances at me. I'm willing to bet a small amount of money that we're both picturing Poetry Boy naked. We both have that squeamish look on our faces... Okay, okay, we're probably both thinking; this kid wants to get laid, and he's following two cute chicks around, without talking to them, without even sitting near them, trying not to let his presence be known... How lame does it get?
Or maybe he's writing some epic poem about one of us. Maybe both of us. He certainly doesn't seem to stare at one of us over the other. Fucked up.
We leave the building. We sit outside the library. We laugh about Poetry Boy. I sing merrily: "Don't look behind you!" Louise said: "He's Eurotrash." She just likes that word I think. Thirty seconds later, who should appear behind us........?
Louise and I have a stalker. He went away when we split up, but we're pretty sure he'll be back. Feeling a bit worried after we'd split up, I went back to find Louise to make sure she hadn't been abducted and dragged into some bushes where a long-haired poetry fiend would subject her to gahd knows what manner of verse... No sign of him, and Louise was just calmly pouting at her homework, so evidently all's well...
Mike called me last night from El Paso. He says he's moving to San Antonio this summer after his wedding with Aimée. I say: "what's in San Antonio?"
He says: "The Alamo."
I say: "Oh, I forgot about the Alamo."
Mike giggles at me.
I say: "Oh, wait... I was supposed to REMEMBER the Alamo, wasn't I? Oh, dammit..."
Mike giggles harder. I tell him about the stash of porn magazines on my floor's lounge. We recall the good ol' days, in which the two of us would literally spend hours cutting up old porn magazines in the name of art. I gave some of my porn creations to people once. Nobody appreciated it. Oh well. Mike appreciated it. Mike rocks. I swear, if it wasn't so grossly inappropriate, I'd buy a huge, huge stash of porn and give it to Mike as a wedding gift. Maybe if he has a bachelor party or something... No, that's still kind of awful. Aimée's sweet, and I adore her, and I can't imagine what she'd think if I gave her husband-to-be a pile of pictures of naked women... Gross. I'd never REALLY do that! The thing is, Mike and I seriously didn't do anything else with the porn except cut it up. Oh, and once we hung a centerfold in the boys' shower so we could listen to the heroin addicts jerking off and laugh at them... I dunno. It's dumb. Guess you woulda had to've been there.
Remember kids: remember the Alamo.
I've received five of my seven W-2 tax forms in the mail as of now. Yep; that's right: SEVEN jobs I had last year. Cripes.
So I was looking over my W-2's, and I witnessed a miracle... Seriously, I did.
Helena Thomas made less than $8,000 last year.
As a matter of fact, Helena Thomas is pretty sure she couldn't have possibly made much more than $7,300. As in, that's a REALLY high estimate.
So what's all this about a miracle, Helena?
I fucking SURVIVED on $7,300 for an entire YEAR, that's what the miracle is! Not only did I survive, but I: paid rent; bought food; paid for cable for seven months (and accidentally got it for free for about three months... *grin*); paid off most of my phone bill and all of my electric bill; took a massively expensive daytrip to New York City; took a ten-day vacation to Seattle where I poured the bulk of my savings into the Seattle Metro bus system; bought a few Christmas presents; spent gahd knows HOW much money on post office paraphernalia; put myself through five credits of community college -- in CASH; and supported a Camel habit. Do you have ANY fucking idea how amazing that is?
I figured this out last night: after rent, I had about sixty-eight dollars a week on which to live. Okay. After utilities, I had about fifty-three dollars, give or take. After cigarettes, I had about thirty-seven. That leaves five dollars and twenty-nine cents for food, per day. How the HELL did I manage to get myself to Seattle? How the HELL did I manage to get myself to NYC for a day? How the HELL did I manage to register for that class at Broome? And how the HELL did I manage to put away so many steaks, cheeseburgers, and gallons of orange juice?
I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I've bought a grand total of *ba-da-BUM* seven CDs in the past year. One was the "Mulholland Drive" soundtrack, which I would probably insist on having if I was going to a desert island. One was Poe's second album, which sucked, so I traded it to somebody for two Nine Inch Nails CDs, which I only listen to when I do dishes. One was REM's "Life's Rich Pageant." That was a used copy, and I couldn't resist. I have also seen approximately five movies in theaters last year, two of which were "Mulholland Drive," which would be playing in the one and only theater on my desert island. I have also consumed approximately a hundred cups of coffee at restaurants or coffeehouses. I have also, at one point or another, had enough money to lend Norman thirty bucks and buy dinner at Denny's for Aaron. I've had maybe thirty or forty drinks in the past year, most of them of the $2.50 wine-from-a-box-at-the-Belmar variety. And maybe once a week, maybe every two weeks, I made damn sure I treated myself to a homemade steak dinner.
HOW did I do it?
I SWEAR to you, I have no fucking idea. I did borrow about $300 (which I will happily be able to pay back by this coming Monday), and I did do some weird odd-jobs (nude modelling, dog-sitting, and bottle-returning...), but all of that combined could not have POSSIBLY added up to more than $500 dollars last year. Not even the fact that I sold my TV pushes that number much higher.
(...have I mentioned I sold my TV last year? Brand spankin' new, practically, and I had to sell a $150 TV for thirty bucks in order to eat. Then, the girl who bought it had the fucking nerve to complain that there wasn't a remote control. I wanted to kill her. Sometimes I have no idea why I'm nice to some people...)
Okay, so here's the thing... I'm seriously pretty sure I've witnessed a miracle. There's like, absolutely NO way a human being can have done everything I did last year having only the resources that I had. I've seriously got to give myself a handshake here; I REALLY, REALLY rock for this one...
Debt? you ask? Less than two grand, total. That's including my five hundred dollar emergency room bill from when I had mono, and my seven-hundred dollar credit card bill. Yeah, I'm still in the hole, but I'm NOT in a bottomless pit...
I've also got to give myself a handshake for not bitching as much as I could have. I know, I bitched a lot, I really did. But would ANY of you EVER have guessed that I lived an entire year on little more than seven grand? No indeed, messieurs and mesdames; I bitched, but I didn't bitch NEARLY as much as I could have. Maybe I deserved to bitch more than I did. It is to my great credit that I did not spend the majority of last year weeping. It is also a great credit to my friends and family for putting up with my occasional whining, feeding me once in awhile, and distracting me from my shitty circumstances.
...And to all of you who bitched at me for being "frugal," I'm not going to tell you to shove it up your ass, but I DO hope you're reading this, and I do hope you have some idea of how damned responsible I was last year. Especially Aaron. Aaron and I had almost identical incomes last year, but Aaron was living with his parents. And Aaron was always complaining about how broke he was, and saying he had it just as bad as me, and that I didn't know what HE was going through. Tell you what, Aaron: I'm not mad at you, I'm not even a little mad, but if you EVER give me that "poor me; you have no idea what it's like" shit EVER again, I will make you eat your cell phone, your stereo equipment, your computer, and a year's worth of arm-bracelets from the Empire Club. I mean it, too.
...And you know, I didn't even STEAL that much last year! A little bit of toilet paper, a couple of things of bread, and a couple of notebooks, but...
Yeah.
Stuff rocks. I rock. Everybody rocks except people who bitch that my brand new TV isn't worth $30 because it was missing the remote control. Those people are cuntrags. Everybody else rocks. Miracles exist. Somebody buy me a freakin' glass of wine-in-a-box!
I've got to get going -- I've got some homework to do before tomorrow morning... Oh yeah, and thanks, kids. Really, SERIOUSLY, thanks.
Love,
~Helena*
PS -- Oh yes, and this is for Norman... A little present for Norman, because I miss him very much tonight, and this is to make both of us feel a little warmer...