Well, this was no longer my problem.
The next morning I woke early. I decided the practical thing would be to find a room in a share house with junkies, something cheap and affordable so I wouldn’t drain my meager savings just on shelter. I answered a bunch of ads in the newspaper. There weren’t many that didn’t specifically ask for, in capital letters, a FEMALE. It seemed to be common knowledge that men hadn’t made the right kind of evolutionary leap, the one that allowed them to tidy up after themselves. The apartments and houses that did permit males to exist there weren’t so bad, but they all had people living in them. Of course I knew this beforehand, but it wasn’t until I was face-to-face with the other humans that I realized I needed to be alone. We were expected to be civil to each other, not just once in a while, but every day. And what if I wanted to sit in my underwear and stare out the kitchen window for six hours? No, the solitude of living in a hut in the center of a labyrinth had ruined me for cohabitation.
In the end I decided on a studio apartment and took the first one I saw. One room and a bathroom and a partition between the main area and the little kitchen, which ran alongside a wall. It was nothing to get excited about. There was not one feature of it about which you could say, “But look at this! It has a ____________________!” It had nothing. It was just a room. I signed the lease, paid the rent and the security deposit, and took the keys. I went inside and sat in the empty room on the floor and smoked one cigarette after another. I rented a van and drove home to my hut and threw all my possessions worth keeping into it.
Then I went up to the house. Dad was standing in the kitchen wearing his dressing gown that still had the price tag on. He was whistling atonally while cooking pasta.
“Where’s Anouk?” I asked.
“Not sure.”
Maybe with Oscar Hobbs, I thought.
The pasta sauce was spluttering, and in another pan he seemed to be overboiling vegetables so as to bleed every last nuance of flavor out of them. He gazed at me with a rare look of affection and said, “I understand you were a bit shocked. We should’ve told you. But anyway, you know now. Hey- maybe the four of us can go out sometime?”
“The four of who?”
“Anouk and me and you and your plaything.”
“Dad, I’m leaving.”
“I didn’t mean tonight.”
“No. I’m leaving leaving.”
“Leaving leaving? You mean…leaving?”
“I’ve found an apartment in the city. A studio.”
“You already found a place?”
“Yeah- put down a security deposit and the first two weeks’ rent.”
There was a shiver running through him, a shiver I could see.
“And you’re moving out when?”
“Now.”
“Right now?”
“I’ve come to say goodbye.”
“What about your stuff?”
“I hired a van. I packed everything I need.”
Dad stretched his limbs strangely, and in a dull, artificial voice he said, “You’re not giving me much say in the matter.”
“I suppose not.”
“What about your hut?”
“I’m not taking it with me.”
“No, I mean…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t know what he meant. Dad started breathing heavily through his nostrils. He was trying not to look wretched. I was trying not to feel guilty. I knew that by losing me he was losing the only person who understood him. But I was guilty for other reasons too; I wondered what was going to happen to his mind. And how could I leave him with that face? That sad and lonely and terrified face?
“You need help moving?”
“No, it’s OK.”
It was as if we had been playing a game all our lives and the game was ending, and we were going to take off our masks and our uniforms and shake hands and say, “Great game.”
But we didn’t.
Suddenly all my bitterness and hatred for him evaporated. I felt enormously sorry for him. I saw him as a spider who woke up thinking he was a fly and didn’t understand he was caught in his own web.
“Well, I’d better get going,” I said.
“Do you have a phone number?”
“Not yet. I’ll call you when I get the phone on.”
“Right. Well, bye.”
“See ya.”
As I turned and walked out, Dad let out a little rumbling grunt, like the sound of troubled bowels.
FIVE
Author’s note: My original version of this chapter went hurtling into the shredder as soon as I discovered among my father’s papers the first five chapters of his unfinished autobiography. I’d just finished pouring out my entire story and I was frankly annoyed- mostly because his account covered this period better than my version of the events. Not only was his version more concise, because it did not contain my long digression on the recent glut of calendars featuring sexy priests, but I was irritated that Dad’s version of events contradicted much of my own, and even some of the previous chapter (four), which I’d really labored over. Nevertheless, under the influence of my two guiding stars, impatience and laziness, I’ve not amended any part of Chapter Four, and decided to print Dad’s unfinished autobiography here, slightly edited, as Chapter Five. My version of Chapter Five is still around somewhere- I didn’t really throw it in the shredder. Hopefully, in years to come it will be of curiosity value- to the highest bidder.
My Life by Martin Dean
A Loner’s Story by Martin Dean
A Loser’s Story by Martin Dean
Born to Be Snide by Martin Dean
Untitled Autobiography of Martin Dean by Martin Dean
Chapter One
Why write this autobiography? Because it’s the privilege of my class. Now before you start screaming, I’m not talking about working, middle-, or upper-middle class. I’m talking about the real class struggle: the celebrity vs. the ordinary schmo. Like it or not, I am a celebrity, and that means that you are interested in how many sheets of toilet paper I use to wipe my arse, whereas I have no interest in whether you wipe your arse at all or just leave it as is. You know how the relationship works. Let’s not pretend it’s any different.
All celebrities who write their biographies play the same trick on readers: they tell you some terrible degrading truth about themselves, putting you in a position where you think they must be honest chaps, then they turn on the lies. I won’t do that. I’ll tell you only the truth, even if I come off smelling like lawn fertilizer. And, just so you know, I understand that an autobiography should cover the early years of my life (e.g., Martin Dean was born on such-and-such a date, went to such-and-such a school, accidentally got such-and-such a woman pregnant, and so on), but I won’t be doing that either. My life up until one year ago is none of your business. Instead, I’ll start from where my life was at the moment when the great change occurred.
I was forty-one at the time, unemployed and living off child support even though I was the parent. Admittedly, this is not the spirit that has made our country great, but it is the spirit that has made it so you can go to the beach on a weekday and see it full of people. Once a week I would make myself busy at the dole office showing them a list of jobs I hadn’t gone for, and this was taking increasing amounts of energy and imagination. I tell you, the jobs out there are getting harder and harder not to get. Some bosses will hire anyone!
On top of this, I was going through the humiliating process of aging. Everywhere I went I met my memories, and I had that old sinking feeling of betrayal, of having betrayed my destiny. I wasted many months thinking about my death, until it began to feel like the death of a great-uncle I didn’t know I had. It was at this time I became addicted to talk-back radio, listening to mostly elderly people who stepped out of their houses one day and just didn’t recognize anything, and the more I listened to their interminable griping, the more I realized they were, in their way, doing the same thing I was: protesting the present as if it were a future one still has the option of voting against.