Annie
Styxx is a gay bar in downtown Portland. Matt and I have been there for about three hours, and we’re taking a breath of not particularly fresh air outside when a girl comes up. She points at Matt’s San Francisco T-shirt and demands to know why he’s wearing it. Matt, unfazed by her head-on approach – we’ve never seen this girl before in our lives – explains that he spent some time in San Francisco in college. The girl’s been to San Francisco. They talk about it. The girl explains that she’d been feeling tense earlier so she drank about seven beers. She’s tall, with crimson hair and a sort of jovial intensity that I attribute to the beers. She’s with a friend, a taller guy who doesn’t say anything.
The girl asks me why the hell I’m here and I say I’m visiting Matt. I ask her her name, and she says it’s long and Eastern European. “You’ve never heard a name like this,” she says.
“Uh huh,” I say. “So what’s your name?” She grins at me in a way that reminds me of Annie Wilkes in Misery and refuses to tell me her name, and then refuses to tell me why she’s refusing to tell me her name. “Tell me something that will scare me,” Annie says. “Tell me something that will convince me I’m not the scariest person I’ve ever met.”
I tell Annie I’m a wanted sociopath and degenerate with a history of violence. She doesn’t even blink.
“That didn’t scare me,” she says. “I’m not leaving until you scare me.”
My imagination fails me and I just look at her. I’m exhausted and dehydrated from dancing and I have no idea what will freak her out. She doesn’t seem very freakable. I’m getting the idea that Annie’s looking for something really dysfunctional, some lurid tale of a botched childhood, some diabolically cynical worldview that no sane person would have or admit to having. I can’t think of a thing, and it irritates me. I feel shallow.
Annie tells me that I’m going to be the first to walk away from this conversation, she just knows it. “I have never met anyone scarier than I am,” she says. “I just haven’t. It’s boring, knowing that I can scare anyone.” She’s smiling the entire time, eyes never leaving my face. Either she’s practiced this, or she really is crazy. Matt and the guy are deep in conversation about twenty feet away.
“The internet doesn’t know about me,” Annie says. “You can google me and you won’t get even one result. I think that’s fantastic. I just love that.”
“They’ll get you eventually,” I tell Annie. “They always do. You’ll slip, something will happen. You’ll see.”
Annie smirks. The guy next to us is ranting about last night’s hookup, which was apparently rotten. If Annie really wants to be freaked out, she won’t have to go very far. She doesn’t even seem to hear him, though. A worn-looking drag queen wanders by and Annie yells something at him and grabs his ass. He nods back. I have no idea if she knows him and he’s used to this, or if she’s just randomly attacking complete strangers. A number of the people around us look like they could send her screaming for the hills, but I’m getting the idea that Annie is either more messed up than anyone here, or she’s bluffing.
I don’t buy her claim about Google. Someone like this has got to be on the web, some dark corner, some forgotten web site, somewhere. The internet snags people before they even know what they’ve done. One indiscreet comment on somebody’s blog, one early personal web site, and it could be up there forever, immortalized in the guts of some massive cache: Google, Archive.org, whatever. It’s hard for me to imagine that the internet doesn’t know about someone as strange as Annie. If you look long and hard enough, the internet knows about everyone.
Annie says I’ve failed to scare her. She starts to walk away. “Hey,” I say. She looks around.
“You walked away first,” I say, just to get at her.
She says something I don’t hear, flashes a frightening smile, and keeps walking. But we both know I didn’t scare her off, I bored her off. It’s not a victory, and it bugs me.
I go back inside. The crowd has thinned to a small horde of indeterminate gender clustered around the pool table, and a few random guys collapsed against each other in the darkest corners they can find. The DJ is bellowing something unintelligible, and people are clearing up. It’s 3 am and it’s time to go home.
Steve
Matt’s talking to a guy when I get outside again – not Annie’s friend, someone else. His name is Steve and he lives around here, in a small apartment that he sheepishly describes as “straight-guy messy”. It’s three in the morning, but he invites us over anyway.
Steve’s exaggerating about the mess. His place doesn’t come close to what mine was in college, and it isn’t so much messy as cramped – a lot of books, a lot of furniture, and a lot of cats. Steve is sort of a patron saint for unwanted cats. He has ten of them. Most of them avoid us. One of them hops up on the sofa and steps squarely on my crotch. This is Scratch, who Steve admits is “a bit of an attention whore”. Steve also collects airline safety cards the way some people collect baseball cards or stamps. He’s an expert on safety cards and has one for probably every airline there is – not so surprising, he tells us, since his mother is a flight attendant. He has a book about airline safety cards. I’m impressed.
We go out on Steve’s balcony. It’s small, accessible only by a narrow staircase and his bathroom and living room windows, but it has room for three chairs and a number of his plants. I learn a little about Steve – he’s working with people who are deaf and developmentally disabled, and he’s nearly fluent in sign language.
I like Steve immediately. He’s completely honest, sweet in an open, genuine way, even when he’s in the middle of an enraged tirade against people who mistreat or abandon animals. For all his politeness, he has no problem telling off tourists who pay to see trained bears do tricks, or bitterly complaining about a couple who ditched their cat on him and then went ahead and got another cat. He’s got a number of interesting stories – about the people he works with, about the neighborhood, about the area. At one point, after his neighborhood had two drug-related stabbings in the same week, he went out and posted a sign on his building door telling the drug dealers to go and stab themselves in their own neighborhoods. (We asked him if anyone had gotten stabbed since then. He said no.)
At some point a few hours later, I notice that the sky outside is blue.
The shore
Matt knows a place that ought to be beautiful at seven in the morning – a local park running along the shore. We go there. Matt parks by the side of the road and we walk through the woods to the edge of the shore, and look off into nowhere. It’s early, foggy on the ground and cloudy above. The shore ends and the white begins, and then the white doesn’t end. It’s deadly quiet.
For some reason, the concept of absolute nothingness has always registered on me as a sort of dull white, rather than black – what TV static might be without the static. That’s what we’re looking into now: absolute end-of-creation nothingness. No dim outlines of trees, no birds, no discernibly shifting clouds. Nothing, until you look up and notice the fog and clouds starting to thin.
This isn’t a sand beach, it’s a craggy mess of layered rock, seaweed, and tidepools. Matt wonders aloud if there are any crabs in the tidepools. We look carefully and find at least three, scuttling for cover as they notice us. There’s a scattering of boulders a little ways down the beach. We scramble up them and sit there for a while, listening to the silence and looking at the nothing.
Seeing double
Matt and I are in a diner somewhere in Lewiston. Matt’s discussing social issues – maybe the situation in New Orleans, maybe something else. I’m trying to focus on what he’s saying, but I’m dead tired and starving and I can barely concentrating.
Chris: “Ugggh…I think I’m seeing double…”
Matt: “Sometimes seeing double is seeing straight.”
I have no idea what this means, but it sounds like it will mean something sooner or later, given a chance.