January,
2003
©
Paula Anderson, 2003
First
published January, 2003
ISBN 0-9728200-0-0
Published by
Word
Riot Press
114
Word
Riot Press ® is a registered trademark
of
Word Riot Press Publishers
Paula
Anderson
http://www.poorpaula.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted without express permission of
the author or Word Riot.
This text is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to
persons alive or dead is purely coincidental.
Printed in the
I would like
to thank the following people:
Daniel Anderson Jr., Jackie Anderson, Barry Briggs, Ave Caron, Naomi Graham,
Liz "Imee" Greene, Wayne Hausfeld, Conan Hernandez, Steve Kozischek,
David
Mumm, Fred Ourt, Robert Posner, Pam Prevatte
Richard Brautigan and JT LeRoy for the inspiration.
And special thanks are in order for:
Mike Conti - Thank you for tirelessly putting up with me, and holding the
string to my helium balloon. I love you!
Chris McLendon - What would I have to write about, had I never met you?
and Jackie Corley - Somehow, you work magic. You turned a little idea of
mine into a magazine EMPIRE, and you turned 200 pages of rough, unstructured
nonsensical CRAP into something we both should be proud of. None of this
would have happened if not for you.
-Paula Anderson
INTRODUCTION
The Internet has
been a catalyst for many things, not least of which is the revitalization of
indy media. We’ve grown so used to
instant communication that a desire for artful communication has
reemerged. E-mail, AIM, E-zines, Blogs –
the methods and means of culture are evolving.
The works of artists and writers our children will cherish are now
appearing in Jpegs and html. And yet,
the essential beauty of what these new talents are trying to tell us is
timeless.
Paula Anderson is
one of these talents.
The book you’re holding
contains writing from an online journal – or blog - Paula has maintained for
over a year. The journal’s place online
created an initial element of performance: a well-conceived tale rather than
aimless introspection. That’s not to say
Paula hasn’t discovered something in the process of this journal – she has, but
as a character in her story.
Positioning herself
as narrator, Paula weaves the reader into the journal. We learn something about loving life
passionately from Paula and her friends in the same way we learned it from Dean
Moriarty and his gang.
This brutal, fire passion is what Word Riot Press is all about. Don’t let the simple quality of the book
cover fool you – Blood Tender is an electric experience.
-Jackie Corley
Editor & Publisher
Word Riot Press
President Grant Has A Mighty Fine Face
...which I know because his face is on the
fifty dollar bill that Papa gave me.
I love my grandfather.
Papa's name is Jake Gidst. He was a running
back for Washington and Lee in the fifties. We have some old newspaper
clippings with pictures of him. He's cuter than old Johnny Unitas. Number 33,
that was Papa. He even played in a couple of bowl games.
He owned an apple orchard. He owned a
Southern States. He was the mayor of Boone's Mill, VA once (which, since I know
you've never heard of it, is in the heart of moonshine country, about 10 miles
outside of
Lately he's taken to telling jokes. When my
brother came off the plane at the
I've always been proud of my grandfather.
He's a simple guy, but at the same time, he ain't no hick. His suits are
expensive, his house is huge, and whenever they come down, he takes us out to
wherever we want to eat, and he never even looks at the check, even though Zeke
always orders something like surf and turf.
Papa's got a full head of dirty-blonde hair
too, and I challenge you to find me another 70-year-old man that can say the
same. There's a streak of gray in the front, but you can barely see it...kinda
suits him anyway...So I'm sitting here staring at this fifty dollar bill,
and remembering how he pressed it into my hand as we were about to leave.
"Here's a little Thanksgiving money.
Y’all have a safe trip home."
I love my grandpa.
My Grandma's Reign
of Terror Is Over.
I call my grandmother 'Omom', just for
future reference.
So Omom has never really liked me. She has
this thing about being fat - if you are, she doesn't like it. And I am the only
person in the whole family that is. My aunt Francine used to be, but then she
went all bulimia. So maybe Francine’s teeth are rotten, but she ain't fat no
more. I wonder which Francine Omom likes
better.
To add to all of that, I talked a lot as a
kid. And I wasn't sensible. Not that I'm sensible now. Fuck that. So it was
always me in last place, with my brother being a star athlete, Marcus (my
cousin) being a star athlete, and Chelsea (my other cousin and Marcus’s sister)
being a straight A student, and it was a recipe for total shittiness.
She was always really good at veiled
insults. "Do you really need that second helping?" "We
have diet soda, you know..." So it goes.
Zeke, Marcus, and Chelsea have grown up to
be these total models of physical perfection. Zeke and Marcus are halfway
through their freshman year of college. And doing ok.
But this time? She wasn't so slick. I mean,
she just was really obvious about it, and she ended up looking like an ass. Me
and Zeke were talking about me spending my life living in a trailer on the
beach, working at the movie theater and playing in a band on weekends. Her ass
just butted right in in medias res and said "You can't put a
trailer on the beach." Yeah, I forgot you're such an expert on beaches,
living in a valley in the
Omom: Oh you play the guitar, huh? I've
never heard you play a note.
Me: Yeah, well you've never seen me
take a shit either, but I bet you aren't so quick to dispute that.
Ok I didn't say that.
But I wanted to. That would have been the best day of my entire life.
Omom: Well, people who are in bands are
people who have played for years and years before they ever even think about
joining a band. You aren't in a choir, you didn't take chorus in high
school....
Paula: Well actually there's a lot of
bands, like the Chili Peppers, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles, who weren't
people who'd played for years. When John Lennon started a band, he could barely
play at all. Stu Sutcliffe, George Harrison – they both were extremely
inexperienced.
Omom: I don't think that's right.
Paula: Well, I'm afraid it is.
Omom: Whatever.
She lost that smoothness and just was out to
draw blood. It was like the parade in
So tonight would be the Blue Moon. And
knowing that almost makes it seem more beautiful when you look at it through
the tree branches in the wind with a rain of leftover leaves falling all
around.
Not that it really is any more beautiful,
but somehow it makes me tingle on my extremities like I'm sprouting new buds.
Even makes my heart skip a little when I go out to smoke, because under a blue
moon everything is more real and more alive.
It's the witching hour.
I keep noticing bizarre little things, like
the little something hanging from the lampshade by invisible strings. It almost
looks like Tinkerbell. And the spot in the hall that feels colder than the rest
of the house. The rustling noises every time I step outside.
Why is it that beautiful things are so
scary? Scary and beautiful like Carol of the Bells.
In the glow of the computer, the black and
white family faces in the silver-framed portrait look like ghouls and heroin
junkies.
Everything makes me shudder, even though my
eyes are glassy from taking in beauty.
Only in a blue moon.
I've been disenchanted with
Christmas for a few years. Just seems like there's nothing in it, once you're
not a kid anymore. I'm not a Christian; I could give a fuck about Jesus Christ.
I don't particularly like my family, so I don't get that glad-to-be-home
feeling. And once you don't get to rip open shiny boxes, what the hell is the
point?
Jessica Y. was a Christmas girl. When we
were 14, she'd always put little post-scripts at the end of the notes she wrote
me. 164 days till Christmas!!!!!!! She had a great family. She was
Catholic. She lived the American Dream, the tacky kind of exact monetary
planning of what a person could get for gifts, knowing the exact amount each
relative would spend, and exactly what could be obtained for that amount. And
to her, that was lovely. That was Christmas.
But what was it for me? What is it for me
now? Just another day. I spent the last 2 Christmases alone, with the family up
in VA.
So I gave Pivot Daniels a ride down to the
nondescript building where his van was being fixed (a building with one of
those catch-all kind of names that could mean anything from furniture rental to
Volvo mechanic) and on the way back, he told me about Christmas in Grenada,
where he's from.
His accent (which is similar to the Jamaican
accent that my father has, only much thicker and much more indecipherable) made
the storytelling a little harder to understand, but gave it more weight, more
depth than any easily-forgotten American tale of what-I-did-over-winter-break.
In the islands, he said, you know it's
Christmas when you start seeing the eggs. Dyed eggs, like Easter, I gathered.
People would take the eggs directly from the fowl they kept in their
yard and dye some up to display for Christmas.
In the islands, you start cooking lots and
lots of food 9 days before Christmas, because everyone comes from door to door.
A few drinks, some good island food (some curried goat or jerk chicken maybe.
Dumplings with fried bananas and meat patty) and some good conversation, and
then it's off to the next house.
Boy I tell you, he said, that's
Christmas. You go out all day every day all night every night to the fetes,
to the clubs and everybody dances. In the streets there’s people playing steel
drums and guitars. You throw them a dollar all in good spirit as you head on to
whatever's next.
It's hot, too, it's always hot, but who
cares when you got an ocean right there? And you get so drunk your friends have
to carry you home, drop you at the door, and then off to the next house, to the
next bit of Christmas. And on this day,
Jesus was born.
You got to get the roots, he said, if
you're going down dere.
And that sounds more like Christmas than
anything I ever heard of. That sounds like where I want, no, where I need
to be. So I made a pledge right there in the car. Next Christmas I spend in
I'm getting my roots and I'm packing my
bags, and no matter what it takes, I'm going down dere.
I couldn't hack it at telemarketing. So I
tainted up my karma some more by telling them that my grandfather died, and
that I may or may not have to move to
If I ever thought I felt shitty before, I
was wrong. I knew it would be an interesting day anyway, due to the conversation
I had in front of WalMart that morning. I was waiting for a song to finish,
sitting in my car, singing away at the top of my lungs. I open my eyes and a
woman is standing there. Which is, of course, not a usual occurrence, so I was
pretty freaked out. She proceeds to tell me that rock music is Satan's music
(yeah, like that would be any kind of deterrent, even if I DID believe it.)
Spend some of that energy praying, she says. And so I say, Why don't you spend
some of YOUR energy on suicide?
Bad tinged with good. Good tainted by bad.
Like undigested corn in a perfectly good toilet floater. Like an unexpected fly
in a starving person's unexpected sandwich.
Which is another thing. I've decided to
spend Christmas Day at the soup kitchen. And it's not just because I like soup,
either. (Ba-dum-ching!) I'm fucking sick of usurping natural resources without
giving back. I make myself sick. So it's either help somebody or ice-pick
myself to death. I like option one, thankyouverymuch.
Oh, so I got off the point.
I quit my job. Or, I will quit it in a few
hours. I couldn't hack it - I can't, absolutely can't sell to people anymore. I
just don't have it in me. Manda alerted me to the fact that the local factory
is hiring and the pay, benefits, hours, and conditions are much better than
telemarketing. Plus, she'd be there, and she happened to come along in my life
at this perfect time where I'm on the watch for some amazing new thing, so I
can't completely discount the possibility that she's part of that. But I
digress...again.
Mom didn't understand, and what's more, she
wouldn't even listen to the factory information. She just said that if I
couldn't do telemarketing that "there were going to be changes" and
that she'd take all my stuff away and sell what she could to pay for
professional help for me.
So this hurried conversation took place in
the 5 minutes between when she came home from work, and when she took Pivot
Daniels and Jag Creek down to the car rental place to pick up a car to take to
So in my extreme caffeine-induced haze
(we're talking maybe 6 cups of doublecoffee here) I raced around trying to
think of what to do. I decided that Step 1 would be to sell everything I can
possibly part with. I managed to scrape up 35 CD's that I don't really need
(although it hurts like bloody hell) and my fairly new (and mostly unused)
keyboard, and even my 3 Beatles albums on vinyl (not that I really planned on
selling them.) I raced around, thinking, thinking, whatdoidonow?
So I call up Manda and figure that in the
state of mind I'm in, I need somebody to talk to. Somebody to help me figure
out what the hell I'm going to do with myself. So I drive out to Swansboro-by-the-beach
to pick her up, which is maybe a 20 minute drive, and drive on back into the
city where we realized that Retro Records, the store where I was going to sell
my CDs was closed, so I hooked a quick U-Turn and we went to the dollar theater
just in time to see Don't Say A Word.
So I got home right when I usually get home
from work, so Jackie (the mother) was none the wiser.
So my solution?
I'm leaving.
I pondered where to go. It has to be far
enough away that I can't fall back on her anymore. The best way to teach a kid
to swim is to throw him in the water - he might start sinking, but he'll
grapple till he ain’t anymore. And if he doesn't, then he wasn't meant to be in
the Olympics anyway.
So is this just another crazy plan? I don't
fucking know - I never know this stuff...I just.... don’t want to feel like I
should ice-pick myself to death anymore. I just want to go till I can't go
anymore.
'Come Into My Den', Said the Spider to the Fly
The time is Sunday morning and Mom pulls me
out of bed at the crack of
So we sang Negro spirituals to pass the
time. Good advice, they have. In the middle of 'Wade In The Water', it came to
me that the birds here don't fly south for the winter. They're fine where they
are - which tells you something about the coast of
So I had to go to the beach.
I knew I'd see sharks - there's always something going about. And there were,
too, double fins rising and falling, a little too close to where I would have
been swimming, had Pete been there.
I unpacked my bookbag of CDs to sell. I
don't know how I thought I'd be able to part with them. Even my Donna Summer
Greatest Hits album is worth something to me, and that's more than $2. I'm just waiting for the high to end.
I want to scream somewhere where I won't be
heard. There's so much pressure inside of me, filling me up to the top of my
head - you could see it swimming behind my eyes, if you were to look very
closely.
It's all a merry-go-round, and here I am,
going along in such a ridiculous way. We all are, I suppose. Makes me think and
say ridiculous things, and stay up late at night, listening to a taped Vince
Vaughn interview on NPR through my headphones, in my darkened bedless bedroom
on my couch under blankets.
And there are stars.
There are always stars.
People think I'm a heroin addict, on account
of the needle marks on my arms. Sometimes I think maybe I really am, only I
can't remember it. It would certainly go a long way toward explaining things.
It usually seems like the whole world is
going just a little bit faster than it's supposed to, like a record played on
78. I wonder if people look at me like a record played on 16. I wonder what
that would be like.
My uncle Edison says that my memory is bad
because I lie so much I can't distinguish fact from fiction. Well, I always could
tell a good story. I used to always think it was really cool when people made
observations about me that were totally on the money - I thought it was the
coolest thing in the world, and I'd always ask people to 'tell me about me.'
I can't remember anything anymore, and
really, I'm not too sure if
Weather's Here.
Wish You Were Nice.
Love is a needle goes all the way down...I'm
always surprised...I'm feeling so Kristin Hersh today. And listening to Juliana
Hatfield. Wish I was a lesbian so I could do this every day. Wish I was a
lesbian anyway.
I wish I hadn't waited so long to write; now
all of a sudden there's too much stuff to say and for some reason I'm
frustrated enough to cry, because I know I'll truncate this in the telling. I'm
such a lazy bastard.
But I'm trying. Lord knows I'm trying.
Some day or other last week, there was a
party. But actually, if we're going in sequential order, that doesn't come yet.
First is Pete. Pete Pete fucking Pete. Pete
came home for Christmas and somehow I thought it would be different this time.
I'm so naive sometimes.
I went to see him, and all of a sudden he's
Captain Marvel come home again. I decided that song was about him. He's been taking writing classes and reading,
and then it's like he's gotten so smart and so on it that I could barely take
it. I'm almost mad that he's not just some geek anymore. At least then he was
mine. Now he's everyone's, and everyone wants him, too.
So Pete spent an entire night reading to me
and making me listen to the finer nuances of the Deftones and all. Commanding
my total attention as usual. And I guess at the time I thought it was really
awesome and I allowed myself to forget that I said I'd never call him again,
that I'd wait for him to come to me. Because deep down I know that that call
would never come.
That wolf stalking me from the backyard is coming back. I think (too much.) I could hear it between the notes of a
Donovan song this morning.
I'm going to die.
I
love (too fiercely.) And it's always
unrequited. I even love the wolf
stalking me from the backyard. Quirky
like Deacon O'Reilly the Republican bum and not half as putrid.
I
depend (on controlled substances to help me maintain.) Fuck Zoloft or Prozac or whatever. I'll be sane on cocaine...just don't sneak up
on me too quick.
It's paranoia.
Must be the season of the witch.
January 19, 2002:
We Like The Boys
With The Bulletproof Vests
All of a sudden I've been thinking again
about society. It's a worm I just can't get off my brain. It's like everything's
decaying and decaying everywhere you look. Was it always like this? Was I
asleep? It wasn't even gradual; it's like I just looked up one day and there it
was. Decay.
I made Pete cry today. I thought there'd be
some kind of satisfaction in that. In making him feel. And there was, when he
was yelling, but the crying was different. He tears at my heart so much, in
ways I never thought I'd let anybody. Because I never did before. I've been
tiptoeing around him, telling him I love him and being so sweet because he has
that demon lurking around him. Sadness. It's a clown. And you can smell it. So
I try and try and strive and pine and worry and wonder every time the phone
rings if it's going to be Hippie telling me he's dead or something weird like that.
And then today he starts patronizing me
again, like he does. I know why he's an asshole - I'm not perceptive, by any
means, but he made it so clear that night...That he feels inferior and feels
like they all (we all) hate him, and so better to be an asshole.
And so I yelled at him and said all these
terrible things and he's yelling and then all of a sudden he's crying and I'm
not feeling satisfied anymore. I just feel all apologetic and scared and so I
compensate by re-stating the obvious.
I would die for
you. I would drink your fucking bathwater. I love you I love you I love you.
Don't ever leave me because I'll never leave you because you're my best friend
(if not more like I wanted...)
And now I've gotten all off-subject. I
wanted to talk about decay. And not Pete’s decay because it's just scary and I
don't like it.
I found a note from my-gay-ex Swain inside a
book of mine. I guess he meant for me to find it whenever. It's sort of like
him - surprises.
I want
to get a job
So I
can buy you things.
I want
you to go insane for me
Every
time you're under my thumb.
I want
to write you poetry.
I want
to always know the right thing to say.
Love,
Swain
When I hear the words in my mind,
it's Pete’s voice behind them. So much decay.
I'd say I'm weary but I'm not. Abnormal
sleep patterns. That was on the checklist. Decay.
A three-day high comes to an end. It's back
to feeling-sorry-for-myself. And then there's lists.
I hate when people make lists of people...feels
like high school. That was 3 years of embarrassment at not making the lists,
and 1 year of embarrassment at making the list and feeling inferior to everyone
else on the list. I decided I'd never
ever make lists of people again. Shout-outs, invitations, they all make my
stomach knot up. When we had to make "Senior Will and Testaments", I
was on the staff that compiled them, and I waited until everyone else had
turned theirs in, so I could make sure to include everyone that had included
me, as well as every single person I could recall any inside joke about. And
even some random people, just thrown into the mix. Mine was the longest one of
all, by far.
I remember in 1999 I had a party at my
house, and I was so nervous to invite anyone and risk leaving out someone, that
I invited everyone around me at any given time for days. It seemed to be the
best plan anyway; it was a great party.
But I digress.
The whole point is that my high is over. Not
just because of lists, but also because of fatigue, which made me finally drop
off to sleep today. When I woke up I cried because I'd ruined it all by
sleeping. I always ruin it all.
Or, I should say, it always gets
ruined.
I need some more of that No-Doz and coffee,
some more of that sunshine-thru-rain, some more of that spinny happy dazey days
feeling of extreme connectedness-but-solitude and voids of rhyme and reason,
and love.
And love.
I wonder if it's going to be a Wilmington
summer...
January 22, 2002: Tap-Dancing On A Landmine
And I can't just stop at that.
Because it's not even like that - with Pete,
I mean. Because I can sit up here saying I don't care about him anymore, but
the truth is, I enjoy his depression.
My sad dirty dirty sad secret.
I like it. Because I want him to need me. I
want to be the sweeping in heroine and fix it all for him. Or if not the
heroine, then at least the heroin so I can make him forget.
I wanna say things, lines they'll remember
in 100 years. Things they'd say on TV.
It's such a dangerous cliff-edge I'm walking
though, the wanting putting a strain on a friendship of 7 years.
I'm in love. Shit was supposed to feel good.
But I'm just confused.......Diary cliché
phrases like "we're all going along in a ridiculous way" that I could
apply to my whole life and every single entry.
The tiny fragment of lust left for Brody
James that nags because there's no Pete without Brody and no me without
Pete...or something.