I realize with shattering gravity that the only thing for me to do is clean it, and set to work. Clothes are sorted into piles, which are subsorted by type of clothing and how often I wear it. Books are laid out in columns by author, and then by subject matter, and then by the color of the bindings. All my music (and there is not much of it) goes into a large shoebox that I found in the closet. Soon I develop an easy rhythm with it, putting things where they belong. I have never before been this analytical, and it feels nice. I feel like Jon, or someone better than him.
My trash can fills up, and I inaugurate a very old planter without a plant in it to take second place as Garbage Holder General. I start in on very old papers, notebooks from my mental-health stage in life, and they cheer me up immensely. Lots of little stories about things I used to notice more often, and the typical teeny whining about state of the government and HOW am I going to save the whales if no one else wants to help? and things. None of these notebooks wind up in the planter, and I designate a shelf for them. I like shelves. They are simple and unalterable, and you can put many things on them to be retrieved at a later date. The only issue being, when are you going to slam the door too hard and watch them all fall? This hasn�t happened yet, and I am doing my darndest not to let it happen. I have spent a lot of time coercing my shelves to suspend themselves on my wall, and a collapse is not something I look forward to repairing.
I come upon some very old food, and it gets chucked into the planter without a second thought. Who keeps raisins under their bed? I do, apparently.
The next odd object is a packet of hair gel. Not a bottle, but one of those little sample packets you find in magazines and such. For a moment I am puzzled and go to chuck it in the planter, but then I remember its origins.
I talk about my best friend from high school a lot. I don�t talk about him enough. He wore his hair in this crazy spiked-up mess that tried so hard to be like one of the metal gods he loved, but his mother wouldn�t let him buy hair gel, so he scavenged it from people�s magazines: shaking through my Seventeens and Elle Girls for something�anything!�to prop up his hair. We started a pool around my friends�once a month you bring in last month�s magazines for Shawn to forage through. It was kind of cute, but I guess we should have realized by then that there were problems at his house. Maybe we should have done something.
Shawn was nervous-looking, with big baggy Metallica shirts and faded jeans. He liked talking late at night, and he�d call me on my big house phone and I�d run to the hall phone and sit and calm him down. He�d always have these crazy ideas, these big grandiosities and new plans. He�d want to sneak into the school and write poetry on the bottoms of desks, or put the flag upside down in every classroom. Shawn was big into Communism, but I don�t think he fully understood it. And I�d finally talk him down and go back to bed at two or three or four in the morning, my throat sore from whispering all night.
One night I didn�t pick up the phone. I figured he�d find a way to talk himself down, and I had a date the next day. I wanted to look cool, so I didn�t pick up the phone. And then I came into school and he wasn�t there, and I panicked, thinking he�d offed himself. Sixth period he stomped in, wearing big Doc Marten boots and fingerless gloves that covered his wrists and said that he slept in. Shawn was a bad liar, but I relaxed.
A week later, he killed himself. The coroner said he�d tried to slit his wrists, but stopped before making deep enough cuts to die from, and then pulled out the Drano. He was rushed and sloppy because his mother was coming home from a PTA meeting soon, and he hadn�t planned to be there when she came home. But it stung him and burned him and he hurt so much there, lying on his bed. He drank the whole bottle, because he didn�t want to know how much it would take, and most of it came up again, on his bedspread in his room in the dark. But he was so weak already that it didn�t take much. His mother found him dead there the next day, called the cops, called the hospital, called on Jesus. It didn�t do much.
At his funeral, I snuck a hand in his pocket and took the packet of gel there. His mother didn�t have him dressed in anything special; I�d say she didn�t care about him but she did. She loved her boy but was angry, and that�s why she didn�t bother to have him changed from his vomit-stained Metallica shirt, jeans and spike necklace. Right Mrs. Foreman?
It was your typical �I�m weeping and need some fragment of a friend with which to comfort myself� but the hair gel was so disgusting and sticky and used, like the soiled condoms we used to find walking home from school, our toes leaping away in disgust. So I did a horrible thing�I threw it out. Years and years ago. This small one I hold in my hand was a feeble replacement, put in there one drunken night when I felt guilty. But I know it�s not his, I don�t understand why I hang on to it. Just�something won�t let me hold my hand over this planter and throw it out. If I were in a Dickin�s novel, I�d say it was his ghostly hand holding me back, but it�s all me. If I know anything, it�s my contorted brain, and that is the only thing keeping me from further abolishing mess from my room, by way of tossing out this little gel packet.
I sort things and I fold clothes and after a while I have a clean room. It�s astonishing, and I am no longer angry, but it�s past eight. I much on an orange found from just a few days ago in the top drawer of my dresser and go to sleep. Why not?
I have no dreams.
I wake up at nine. It�s time to go downstairs.