The changling secretarygirl type, that's you. You're behind Bernie's desk, or maybe it's mine. Anyway, it's at the office. You're tall, lanky, mousey one minute. Brassy and titty the next. First you're wearing Underoos—all primary colors, thick stitch and lump, like my four-year-old son's. No other clothes. Then our attention—Bernie's with me you remember—drifts or something, just for a second, and you've got this blond bob and you're changing your clothes. You're at the foot of the stairs, we're at the top. It's an old, empty building, big falling-down house maybe—something that looks like it'd be next to the old train station, where that guy, you know, was found frozen in a two-foot puddle in the empty elevator shaft, his legs sticking out like popsicle sticks, the poor fuck. The joint looks like it should smell, but it don't. You tell us you've got a shrink appointment you don't want to be late for. Bernie says, But we want you here. My mouth is taped, what the hell can I say? The carpet is ground into the floor, like my first apartment. The walls are paneled in spots, peeled to the wood bones elsewheres. The lights don't work. You're climbing the old staircase because you have to go to the bathroom so bad you say. Bernie and me follow you into the bathroom. "hAppy twAt dAy" says the door in dripping black letters. Inside, a bunch of rave parties, a meth lab, Detroit itself, worse, been and gone. Stalls torn down, just a row of, like, outhouse openings, holes in the floor. Lots of air and another floor below. You finished doing whatever. We can't hold it, either, so we squat, hoping it's quick, hoping not to slip through to the down below. Bernie sounds like a Clidesdale in the next stall, gnashing around, neighing and whatnot. He kills me. I try not to grunt. It's useless. I can't take a shit that just slides out easy. Take Metamucil, my wife always says. Bah.
place!—in corners, wadded up, tossed aside here, there, sticky side down, color side up. Remember the scene in that Airplane movie where the passengers were reenacting a crash and people were scattered upside down and every which way, across seats, in the aisles, even June Cleaver, all old now. Even she's upside down, on her head. Like that, but no smell. No dirt, even. Just what was once inside now old and shed. Showing. Gah. But it ain't me, I ain't that kind. And you disappear. Just—pht—and now I'm blond and bobbed and. So I'm thinking to myself: These once-here women are my kind? These are not my kind. I am not this kind. But what can you do? And I'm carefully wrapping my own pad in white tissue, round and round, nice, sanitary-like. But looking around there's not toilet paper left to do what one does with it, not a garbage pail—and in barges my wife like somebody's chasing her—and all a sudden my blood pressure's through the roof—I can't be found contaminated with. Well, you know what I mean. Getting charged in on like that and. Eh, Bernie's gone. It's just me. You're gone. Bernie's gone. I'm in this place, looking like I belong to it, or worse—maybe I like it. But I ain't this kind. So I chuck the wad in the corner of the room, trying to think up a story, some lie because here I am. So my pad wad is sailing across the carcasses of who knows what shinola's in there, towards this open window but it don't make it. And my wife kinda joglopes-like over to me—mind you, my ass is still waving in the breeze like a surrender flag or whatever, and I'm giving her this what the— look, and she says, Hi honey, having a good time? with this tiny little shit-eating smirk and that hAppy twAt dAy door behind her a ways...and all the while I'm thinking, Oh god I am this kind. I am somehow exactly this kind.
STACY MUSZYNSKI
I turn to my right, looking for the TP, I guess. I always look right first. Always put my right sock, right shoe, do up my right laces first. Just the way it goes. There, on my right...used maxi pads or whatever stuck to surfaces, all over the
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