part 10
Subject: hi
To: MackAttack
From:BoPeep
Date: 11/05 3:52 a.m.
Dear Mack,
I really didn’t like your tone of the last letter. I mean, I got the feeling you were making fun of me. Were you?
Davey came back to the stuff that came for him in the mail, mostly from electronics companies and the like. He was brisque, business-like, and wouldn’t even look at me. He just picked up the stuff, and walked out the door, and I ran after him. I saw him drive away in this huge luxury car! Some blonde was driving. It wasn’t the girl in my bed. Someone else. I think he left me because he found someone rich!
Mack, look, you’ve made bad choices before, so you should understand this. I don’t know why I fell for this guy. It doesn’t make any sense at all. It was like being totally swept off my feet, but it didn’t feel good, either. Still doesn’t. I feel so lost, and sad, still.
Maybe it’s just because I wanted someone to love me and I thought he was my last chance. My only hope. Maybe by looking in the gutter I can find someone who won’t leave. But, everyone leaves me. I don’t think I can be loved.
Aimee
Subject: plague
To: BoPeep
From: MackAttack
Date: 11/07 8:19 p.m.
Dear Aimee,
I’m home from work with the flu. It’s 90 degrees out and I’m shivering with some bug squashing all the energy out of me. Then I am giddy, giggling (possibly going crazy?). Swirling thoughts and memories: are they real? I loved you, Aimee, but hated what I had to be to keep you. Want me to speak for other guys, for Davey? Get over here, shave your pubes, and put a pickle up your rosey red rectum and let me spank you. You don’t even have to bring chicken soup.
Naw, don’t come. I don’t want to infect you. I don’t want to hurt you, repel you, make fun of you. The place is a mess and stinks and so do I. If I told you I’m sorry Davey left you, I’d be lying. I don’t know if you still have fits in your sleep like you did when we were a couple. We never got to sleep all night together. It would have been hard with you making little stifled crying noises and kicking around like you were fighting something. You could never remember what it was about. If Davey could leave you for that, I don’t know. Him going off with a rich woman? Probably more to it. That kind of thing doesn’t happen. Girls go off with rich guys, not the other way around.
I can’t understand your bad choices when the lessons from my own haven’t sunk in. And even if I knew the answer, hon, you wouldn’t accept my authority to teach .
I’ve got to get myself together and stagger to the store for something to eat. Then I’ll say a prayer for you.
Love, Mack
Subject: fuck fuck fuck
To: mackattack
From: bopeep
Date: 11/10 2:10p.m.
Dear Mack,
Sorry to hear about your sickness. Hope you’re better soon.
FUCK!
Yeah, I know, I don’t swear, usually. But Davey has infested my life. I just found out that I have herpes, from him! (Who ELSE could it be?) And, I found out that all that stuff came was charged on MY CREDIT CARDS. He just phoned in a bunch of orders, used up my credit card balance and used my address for delivery.
How can I be so stupid!
He also applied for a bunch of other credit cards in my name and in the name of Shaylala Jones. Two arrived in my mailbox today. The mailman came early. He said “oh, your boyfriend is a really nice guy, I see him all the time.” Evidently these aren’t the first credit cards he’s gotten, because I have a huge stack of bills on credit cards that I didn’t know I had!
I went to the police. I brought all the bills, the new cards. I sat with a detective and told him the whole story (well, not the whole story, only YOU know that). They thought it was weird that I let some guy live in my house for weeks, but I never saw his drivers license, or knew what his “real” last name was, or if he had any friends, or family. They just sort of looked at me like I was a total loser. But, anyway, this young detective sat and wrote everything down, then he went to this older guy. The older guy was obviously really interested, because he kept looking at me. He came over and started asking me more questions. When I mentioned that he had been in jail, and the release date, he got really interested. They asked me to look at a big book of photographs. Sure enough, Davey is in it. His name isn’t Davey, it’s Roberto La Chuga. (I would have never guessed he was Mexican!)
Anyway, it’s a mess. Just a huge mess. He’s stolen my identity. He’s ruined my credit. The police called that Jones woman and it seems she’s got the same story. He lived with her for a while, and when he got arrested she just dumped his ass. (Maybe she’s who he was talking about when he called me?) But, she was smart, she got his fingerprints, and brought them into the police. I didn’t even think of that. I’m so stupid!
He’s wanted in several states. He’s been doing this for a long time, and they let him out because of a clerical mistake. He has a long arrest record, for battery, and assault. Before he was 18 he was incarcerated for rape.
Mack. I have to go to work. I’m so upset. I feel so stupid. I feel so used.
You’re right, though, I am really stupid.
Love
Aimee
Subject: Phew! Alive again!
To: BoPeep
From: MackAttack
Date: 11/15 12:04p.m.
Dear Aimee,
I’m not back to work yet, but my fever broke with a religious experience (seemed like a dream but I knew what was going on). I went flying up out of myself, out of my body, bed, through the ceiling into the sky outside. I was stark naked and felt wonderful — completely relieved of all of my sickness and sorrows, fears, the works. Then the most gorgeous music I’ve ever heard filled the space and I had emotional orgasms.
More happened but you’ll think I’m nuts and/or kinky. What if I am both? My nuts are kinky (lol). Anyway, when I woke up here, I was cured. I still feel weak and nothing tastes right yet. But I wish I had that kind of dream every night and could take you with me. Get you away from all of your woes. Maybe there is nothing wrong with running away from certain realities?
Aimee, I don’t know why you are attracted to thugs. I don’t mean to get on your case right now. I meet your world weekdays in the store, and think I should stop resisting my snotty arty-farty feelings of being much too fine and high-minded for it. People simply hated that about me and it could be dangerous. Bobby liked to remind me of the day the regular guys (thugs) beat the snot out of me on general principles. It wasn’t so tough learning how to be like them. You simply rule more and more out of your life as things a regular guy doesn’t do. A regular guy can play the keyboards but it better be rock because everything else is fairy music.
You never told me you liked me because I was different than them. Seemed to bug you, instead. “Why can you just be normal, Mack? Why isn’t the real world good enough for you, Mack?” None of my answers were good enough for the real world. About the only time I made Bobby laugh was when I said, “Reality is a second-rate experience.”
My parents cared about how I would grow up and there was a time when they were concerned that I wouldn’t be normal. Funny how it all channels into a fear that the boy will want to fuck other boys. It’s as if they lose memory that it is normal regular guy to circle-jerk. Kind of gets phased out after sophomore or junior year.
It was even more important to Daphne that I be a regular guy and not embarrass her. She could beat it down with the silent treatment, nagging, sexual embargoes. I could be different only if the difference made money for her to spend. She gave me talks about how I was going nowhere in the corporation because they could tell I was not Totally Devoted to the corporation.
The difference about me – whatever it is – got distorted and bizarre living with Daphne. I call it my soul, Aimee. I couldn’t leave my soul behind. This does not go back to some childhood thing for me. I wasn’t always in trouble with a feeling of having pissed people off. Actually, it started with you. I felt in deep-shit with you lots of times. Then it only got worse with Daphne.
The scary thing about being me is the sense that I will always be alone. If only I could meet a women who didn’t make me feel in constant trouble. I’ll never go back to something like that again. I’ve never been too young to think about dying. In the gutter, or wherever. I mean, I do get scared sometimes, especially recent times when I was sick alone here. I had a weird episode in the bathroom when I really noticed age lines in the mirror. Some emotion of dread swept up, and then my face contorted and I moaned, “No, no, no!” Yes, well, there it was.
Well, I’ll send this now and hope things are better for you. If I had the money, I’d bail you out — you know that.
Love, Mack
Aimee Is A Little Crazy 