Fists & Fingernails

Your sanity or your apartment—it’s impossible to determine which one you lost first. There was a time, say four years ago, when you definitely still had both. You think of it now as the Witness phase, the time when you looked on in pity. An objective observer, chronicling in your mind various incidents of rage. You didn’t realize it at first, that you were doing it at all, the tally in your head. It’s only looking back when you see that you must have been paying attention all along.

The first time was in Los Angeles, or at least nearby in Marina del Rey. You had gone with your boyfriend Patrick for a long weekend at the beach. Neither of you were into sunbathing, but you took your bikes and planned to ride up and down the long path that lines the beach all the way to Santa Monica. You arrived in the evening after a long day of driving. After you got checked in, you went out in search of a caffeinated beverage. As you were walking down the street, which was wide but fairly quiet, you headed toward a promising street. Patrick thought he had caught a glimpse of a neon sign in the shape of a coffee cup that direction. Sure enough, as you walked up to the intersection and pushed the crosswalk button, you spotted it in the distance. Beachfront Coffee Shop.

“It’s not exactly on the beach,” you pointed out. “We’re at least five blocks away.”

“Well, if the coffee’s no good, you can demand a refund on the basis of false advertising.”

You laughed and took his arm. You were in love with him back then. It took a long time for the crosswalk sign to switch to “walk,” but the time didn’t matter. There were a few kids hanging out down the street. Not too much was open. You crossed the street together.

Patrick put his arm around you, kissed your cheek. Then out of nowhere came a deep voice that started as a whisper, but ended as a scream: “fucking KILL YOURSELF.”

It scared you half to death to see the stranger with his mouth an inch away from Patrick’s ear. He had snuck up from behind, then just as fast as he had come, he took off into the night. You don’t know whether he was homeless or just some punk teenager. It was dark, and it happened so fast, it was hard to know for sure. But you never could get his voice out of your head. You still hear it at night sometimes, as though it had been screamed directly into your ear instead of Patrick’s. You wonder if Patrick still hears it too, wherever he might be. You broke up not long after.

The second incident was in San Francisco. You were jogging down your usual path when you spotted a homeless man sitting near a dumpster just behind the corner market. He looked straight at you as you went by and called out “bitch!” The word stung like a slap on the face, as though you had never encountered it before. You realized some minutes later that there was all the difference in the world between hearing the word in the abstract and hearing it hurled at you directly. You never forgot that either, the venom in his eyes. The way he hated you.

The third incident was similar, though you were walking instead of running. A homeless man—just a kid, really, perhaps no more than eighteen—walked past and flipped you off. You had seen him around before, and you saw him after that as well, several different times. He was always muttering to himself. He flipped off everyone he past by, sometimes even people in passing cars. But that time, it had been you.

The fourth and final incident was not an obvious case of rage. It took a long time for you to class it officially with the others, though somehow you always suspected it was linked. You were driving in Oakland, waiting at the light to turn onto Lakeshore and circle around Lake Merritt. Right in front of you, on the opposite side of the street, an unkempt woman, maybe in her thirties, stepped up to the curb, turned her backside to you, and then in one single fluid motion, dropped her pants, bent down, and took a shit right into the gutter. The whole thing took about ten seconds. Then she pulled her pants back up and proceeded down the sidewalk.

More than the others, this last incident baffled you. It wasn’t that you were offended by it. You felt almost a sort of awe. How was it possible for someone to have so little sense of shame that they could relieve themselves like that, in such a public way? Only later did you conclude that you had witnessed a virtuoso performance. A sort of grand “fuck you.”

***

The first letter you remember writing was around the time you moved out to California. You had closed down all your utilities before leaving, which included a landline phone with DSL internet service. It was the last landline you ever had; you had decided to transition to cell-phone-only. There was a small balance due back to you on the account with Southwestern Bell. The woman on the phone said you would receive a check in fourteen days. You gave her your new address is California.

But a month passed, and no check arrived. You wrote a letter to the phone company stating the bald facts of the situation. You enclosed your final statement showing they owed you $7.38. You pointed out no check had ever arrived and asked that it be sent. You gave them the address yet again. Two months passed, then three, then four. The check never did arrive. It was a ridiculously small amount, and you decided to let it go. After all, you had a new job and other things to attend to. Important things, like Patrick. Looking back, you suspect this was your first mistake.

There were no more letters for several years, not until after the Oakland incident. You got a call one day at home from your supervisor, which itself was most unusual. Your parents happened to be visiting at the time, and they were in the room when you took the call. Your boss (his name was Abe) told you, unofficially, that you were going to be let go. This came as something of a shock. Although the company had been downsizing, you had been invited some two months earlier with a few other people to a business dinner at a fancy seafood place that looked out across the Bay, a dinner where you and the select group of chosen others were told of the coming layoffs and assured that your own jobs were quite secure. But it seemed that things had changed. You would get an official notice in a week or so, Abe told you. He just wanted to let you know privately in advance.

So there you were, sitting in your Bay Area living room with a large bay window that looked out across the distant San Francisco Bay, with your boss on the phone calmly informing you that you had been lied to about your job security and that in less than a month’s time, you would be unable to afford your bay window view. Your parents were sitting nearby on the sofa, watching you intently.

“I’m really sorry,” Abe told you. Of course, he knew what you were thinking. He had been present at the fancy seafood dinner.

You kept your voice steady, your face impassive. “Well, thanks for letting me know.”

You told your parents about the impending layoff. They said how sorry they were. Your mother bought you a painted trinket in Chinatown to cheer you up. A few days later, they went home, back to their secure and steady jobs in a place they could easily afford.

The next week, Abe asked you if you wanted to do the formal meeting with HR or if you wanted to forego that and do the final paperwork just with him. You decided on the latter option. Abe informed you that your company email would be shut down sometime that day and asked you for another email where he could reach you.

That night, when you got home after too many vodka tonics, you checked your email around 1:00 a.m. There was one from HR, a formal notice of your severance, a link to unemployment information, and a statement that your health care would end as of that day. And there it was, the final statement: “Any unspent funds in your health savings account will expire at midnight.” The new fiscal year had started just a few weeks earlier, and you had put $1000 into your account.

So that was the second letter, a statement of the facts with a demand that they either return the balance of your account or provide you with at least twenty-fours to spend it. You imagined yourself going around to every drugstore within a five-mile radius and buying up every last box of Band-Aids, bottles of cough syrup, Tylenol, anything so as to not lose the money. The company replied that “since you chose to forego the HR meeting,” they were not responsible.

More letters followed this one, both to the unscrupulous company you now pretend you never worked for and to a host of other companies that provided misleading information, faulty products, sub-par services. All of them were carefully written to include all of the factual information: names, dates, order numbers, product ID and bar code numbers. They cited laws and posted company policies. Some of them quoted from the contracts you had signed. All of them were sent to an appropriate person.

Sometimes you heard back, though more often you received no reply at all. Not that it mattered much either way. No one ever acknowledged the validity of a single claim or offered to replace a product or returned a single penny of your money.

During the Letter-Writing phase, you jogged more frequently, your pace seeming to increase each day. You held a number of temporary and part-time jobs. And you began attacking your own flesh with surprising vigor and regularity.

Thanks to a liking for milk, your fingernails had always been healthy and strong. They were your first weapons, which you used to dig out small chunks from your forearms and calves. You could have done more damage with a knife, but you prefer the visceral quality of using your own body against itself. The wounds from your nails were not particularly deep, but they had the added advantage of scabs. You could pick at them for weeks or months, prolonging the healing process almost indefinitely on those days when you lacked the energy for fresh attacks.

The fist developed of its own accord. You were sitting across from Thomas, your last boyfriend, trying to budget. You had a pencil in your right hand. Suddenly, the futility of it all hit you, and you felt a violent urge to stab yourself in the arm with the pencil that was getting you nowhere. But some small part of you knew this would be too much for Thomas. And so you threw the pencil aside and hit your left forearm with your fist instead. Again and again you let your fist fly, clenched as though it were holding an imaginary pencil. It hit the same spot on your arm each time with a satisfying thwack that reverberated throughout the room. Thomas watched with a certain detachment. You held your forearm steady with admiration for the strength of your punch. You stopped on your own after about thirty strokes, afraid that you were about to lose control.

The result was as good as you could have hoped for. Your entire forearm arm was black and blue for well over a month. Thomas insisted you wear long-sleeved shirts whenever you left the house, particularly with him. You obliged. There was no way anyone would believe that you caused those bruises yourself.

Things with Thomas went downhill after that. Not that you blame him. You only blame yourself.

***

The letters never really stopped. They simply changed their character. Once you were out on the streets, they became long, rambling affairs filled more with emotion than with logic. They were no longer business-like, but full of curse words, the same ones repeated in different combinations or attached to different nouns. Fuck is particularly versatile, you quickly discovered, able to serve as a noun, an adjective, a verb, even in a pinch as an adverb. You suspect that if anyone read those letters, they would deem them the product of an unsound mind.

But you have a right to your anger, don’t you? It is a question you never can answer to your own satisfaction.

You wrote to the bank about the way their fees impact the poor. You wrote to the mayor about his abysmal failure to provide clean and decent shelters. You wrote to the governor and to several state senators about the lack of public toilets. You wrote to your parents about things you had completely forgotten about. Not that any of them got sent. There’s no need to waste what little money you have on a stamp. You still write them on occasion even now.

But of late, you have taken to verbalizing your thoughts instead. You yell out “fuck” and “goddamn it” indiscriminately whenever it is too loud for you to think, when you are jostled as you walk down the street, when you feel hungry and tired and frustrated. You go inside your tent and complain loudly about your neighbors as though you were talking to someone who was present. You mutter furious retorts to rude strangers under your breath.

Your bowels have become unreliable. When you can’t find a private location to relieve yourself, you sometimes hold it in for days. It becomes a habit. Self-perpetuating. Plus, you have almost entirely stopped drinking water since there are very few places to pee unseen in a city of millions.

One day, you finally let go and scream at the top of your lungs as you lay into your forearm. You wonder if this is what that guy meant when he said to fucking kill yourself. Did he mean with your own fist? You think maybe it’s possible to do so.

The next day, your throat is so sore you can barely speak audibly. You have to repeat your request to the cashier several times before he can make it out. When you exit the store, some guy in a blazer tries to shove past you. You grab his head with both hands. You look straight into his terrified eyes, and you let out an ear-splitting scream.