Sara Benincasa - Agorafabulous!: dispatches from my bedroom

Agorafabulous!

DISPATCHES FROM MY BEDROOM

Sara Benincasa

For my parents, Lillian and Jonathan, and my grandmother Jean

And for Sam

So keep fightin for freedom and justice, beloveds, but dont you forget to have fun doin it.... And when you get through kickin ass and celebratin the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.

Molly Ivins, Mother Jones

Contents

I didnt know what to call this part of the book. I guess you could call it a preface, but that sounds too fancy to me. Ive already got an introduction (that comes later) and this obviously isnt a table of contents. You might call it a foreword, but dont other people usually write forewords? You know, like the authors famous friends. Ive got some of those, but theyre usually pretty busy signing autographs and swimming in great vats of their own money, Scrooge McDuckstyle.

Anyway, I want to tell you some important stuff up front, before we get to the rest of this tragicomic journey into the depths of my lady-soul. This story is mostly true. I tried my best to keep it real, as the children say, but Im not a fucking journalist. I didnt have a damn tape recorder on me during every conversation.

Please also keep in mind that when a lot of the stuff chronicled in this book actually happened, I was crazy as a loon. On meth. In a crack house. I had to fill in some of the fuzzier memories with my best guesses as to what actually happened.

A few of the characters represent amalgamated mishmashes of people I once knew. I changed some names, places, and identifying details for a couple of reasons. I still talk to some of the people in this book, and Id like to keep it that way. I dont talk to some of the others, and Id really like to keep it that way.

Rest assured that the grossest, meanest, ugliest, most foolish things that I do in this story all actually happened in real life. I subscribe to the notion that if you can laugh at the shittiest moments in your life, you can transcend them. And if other people can laugh at your awful shit as well, then I guess you can officially call yourself a comedian.

That is all. Thank you. I hope you like the rest of my book. If not, feel free to use it for kindling to warm yourself in the cold night when the Revolution comes. And oh, its coming.

When I was seventeen years old, I met the hottest guy in seriously the entire world at a free academic summer program run by the state of New Jersey. The camp, held at a public university down the Jersey Shore, was called the New Jersey Governors School on Public Issues and the Future of the State. It doesnt sound like the place to find Adonis, but there he was: a dreamboat straight-A football captain named Kevin, whose extracurricular activities also included coaching little kids sports teams and volunteering at a convalescent home for nuns. When he turned seventeen that summer (he was young for his grade), his mom brought a cake with a car on it, because he and his twin sister were finally going to get their drivers licenses. He told me once that his sister was the only person he really trusted. She and I had the same first name, except hers had an h at the end and mine didnt.

He was very nice, too nice to be true, and the other students at Governors SchoolType-A student-council brats, mostlywondered what his deal was. You couldnt be that smart and that hot and that nice and not secretly be crazy, or a werewolf, or something. I found it deeply disappointing that he failed to offer to relieve me of my virginity. And at a certain point, his plastic perfection started to weird me out. Oh, I totally still wouldve let him put his fingers down my pants, but a strange kind of resentment arose within me, as well. As a funny (read: insufficiently hot) girl, I wasnt privy to the mating behaviors of popular alpha males. But I was savvy enough to intuit that I was never going to be Kevins girlfriend.

Eventually, I did find a boyfriend. He wasnt as hot as Kevin, and we never had sex, but he played tennis and was good at finger-banging. Plus, we liked a lot of the same books, Philip Roths Goodbye, Columbus chief among them.

Governors School ended, and we all went off to our respective high schools to start our senior years. Kevin entered a new high school in a new town and was immediately nominated for Best Looking, Most Likely to Succeed, and Best Personalitya stunning trifecta of high school laurels. I heard about it and thought, with slight annoyance, Of course.

Then, one night in the spring, he walked into his garage, filled a bottle with gasoline, brought it upstairs into the bathroom, locked the door, poured some of the gasoline down his throat, soaked himself in the rest, and lit a match.

When they broke the door down, he was still alive. He still responded to his name. The end took a little more time in comingless than a handful of hours, but if you measure time in pain, I imagine it felt like years to himbecause indeed he was still there, after the fire, still conscious, still feeling everything. I think he wanted it that way. Not for him the quiet chemical sleep of too many pills; not for him the instant, violent relief of the shot to the head. If his death taught me anything, its that when life doesnt hand us the punishment we think we deserve, we are wholly adept at delivering it unto ourselves.

In the weeks that followed, I heard rumors about things he had supposedly done and things that had supposedly been done to him, but they were rumors only, confused teenagers attempts at explaining the inexplicable. I have always regretted not going to his funeral. We were never very close, but maybe it would have made more sense, being there, seeing his family and all his friends. Maybe he would have made more sense.

Ive thought of him often in the intervening years, through friendships and love affairs, college and graduate school, times of joy and times of breakdown. I dont know if I believe in God. I dont know if I believe in Heaven. I dont know if I believe that Kevin is watching me, or that he hears me when I speak his name. He didnt watch me often on earth, so I dont know why he would feel the need to do so from any other plane of existence. Maybe I shouldve worn tighter shorts the summer I knew him.

What I do know is that Kevin was very much on my mind during the times when I walked myself to the edge of the abyss and stared down, feeling my toes curl over the lip, seriously considering giving myself over to the yawning absence of anything. And so Kevin has been with me, in one form or another, perhaps just as a thought, on numerous occasions.

He was with me when I stacked empty cans and jars against the wall of my tiny apartment because I was afraid to take the recycling outsideor do anything outside the confines of my home. He was there when I began urinating in cereal bowls and shoving them under my bed because I was frightened of using the toilet or even the sink. He was there when I admitted, finally, that sometimes I thought about doing secret and terrible things to myselfand I didnt put those things into words, because I didnt want to, and I didnt need to. He sat with me while the knives whined their siren song from the drawer and I rocked back and forth, gently, sort of ignoring them but mostly just waiting.

Kevin was there somewhere, perched in the back of my mind, reminding me that clear-cut choices are few and far between, and I had better not fuck this one up.

In Simplest Terms and Most Convenient Definitions