I had my nervous breakdown behind the restaurant where everyone went out to smoke once the tables had their food and seemed to be as happy as they would ever get during a meal.
It was that little secret cove for the smokers that I found salvage in, oddly enough. I leaned against that red brick wall and slowly slid down it onto dirty butts.
My chest heaved. About a hundred years passed and I started to drown in cigarette butts. There were millions of them and they were smothering me with ash and nicotine and lipstick stains and sticky bird shit that also had been on the ground. There might have been bubble gum too, but when you are drowning you don’t pay attention to anything except oxygen and that is what I couldn’t find anywhere. Somebody help me my brain told my mouth to say but my mouth was drowning and closed.
Nothing came out except the word Enough.
Enough waitressing. Enough guilt. Enough anorexia. Enough pretending I don’t have a hearing problem. Enough numbing myself. Enough sleeping to numb myself. Enough eating to numb myself. Enough starving to numb myself. Enough drinking to numb myself. Enough saying what I don’t want instead of what I do want. Enough sex with people I don’t love or even like very much. Enough living in the past. Enough worrying about the future. Enough wearing 6 inch platform shoes because I feel being short means I am inadequate.
Enough self-hatred.
Enough. That one word slipped out and traveled down Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood, past all the shops and the traffic, and I saw just for one brief second where it was headed before I lost sight of it behind the roller skating homeless man.
And then it was gone and I was pumping my heart back to life.
Table 32 needed me for Cholula sauce and a chicken quesadilla was ready for table 30. I crawled out of the ruins of old cigarettes and stood for a moment looking into the restaurant where I had spent my entire 20’s with such a hatred I almost passed out from its power and stench.
Did you know hatred smells? It smells like dead animal.
It smells like nothing could ever beat inside it anymore, although it once might have, but had long since rotted.
So I stood there and almost passed out from the smell before I gathered my apron and tried to inhale.
Nothing entered my lungs.
I was slowly dying.
I walked back into the restaurant and up to my table.
I would have thought you would have made something of yourself by now, the woman who stared at me like I was a ghost muttered as she half-looked at the menu and half at me, her ghost waitress.
How can you still be here? What’s it been? Ten years? Twelve? How is that even possible? This is L.A. She was eyeing the chicken pot pie on the menu like there was a possibility she wouldn’t get it. She always got the pot pie. I remembered 
everything everyone ordered.
To her I was a ghost. I couldn’t possibly still be there.
I represented all of her lost dreams and fuck-ups, because that’s what we do to people. Isn’t it? We size them up in direct relation to our own lives. When they are doing well we use it as a gage, our own small lives falling away and when they are failing we either feel like we are failing too or else we feel like we’ve won.
We’ve won the competition of life.
I’ll have a red wine. What do you have by the glass? She said looking at the menu and not at me.
I wanted to scream: You are looking at the menu, woman! Look and see what we have.
Instead I said: We have a nice Pinot. I love our Pinot. You had it last time.
I haven’t been here in a year! I can’t believe you remember. Honey, did you hear that? She remembers what I drank, she said to either her husband or her boyfriend or her gay husband. He looked gay. She was a gossip columnist. I remembered that and her penchant for potpies.
I am sure he was gay.
You had the chicken pot pie last time.
Maybe you are a career waitress, after all! She said it like it was funny or ironic as she pushed her glasses up her nose to look at me like she was just seeing me for the first time.
I wonder what I looked like to her, this failed ghost?
A career waitress. A ghost.
People don’t change my gay friend who worked with me at the restaurant used to tell me. I believed, up until then, that gay men knew everything. How to dress, what to eat, what women want, what was funny and what wasn’t.
I’d felt scared when he said it.
My heart fell out of my body and as soon as the busboy came by he swept it up, and, just like that, it was gone. No more heart. Just a hollow cave where everyone could see my insides. They could all see that I dropped out of college. That I was a failure.
That I was going to be here at this restaurant forever.
Do you think Rodney will ever change? I asked about the guy I had been sleeping with for almost two years and whom I loved or thought I loved but who wouldn’t let me say I was his girlfriend. My gay friend, T, was African-American like Rodney, so aside from already knowing how relationships work because he was a gay man, he would tell me how black men worked because he was a black man.
Never, T said as he did his sidework of refilling hot sauce bottles.
I knew he wouldn’t change. And everytime I let him have sex with me I cried when he left because I knew he would never change.
And that I wouldn’t either.
*
After my father died we fled New Jersey. We left the house in Pennsauken to my aunt and her two daughters much to my chagrin. My youngest cousin and I didn’t get along and the thought of her having our house made me lose sleep at night.
That same cousin bit me in the leg in the laundry room and used to masturbate on the den floor of the house in New Jersey where my father had died. Curled in front of the television in her flimsy nightgown and Care Bear sleeping bag she would rock back and forth, rubbing herself. As I traced the purple outline of her teeth on my thigh, I watched her roll around on the ground, a mummy wrapped in polyester, pressing her privates. She would grind until she fell asleep.
I never understood what it was she was trying to achieve, what it was she was trying to feel. At the time, I couldn’t feel a thing.
I tried the rubbing, the rollicking, the undulating, and still, I could not feel a thing.
I hated that cousin.
She overdosed on heroin 3 years ago at age 34.
I tried to remember a time where we loved each other, where we got along or played as kids. I couldn’t.
She left behind four beautiful children whom I love dearly. I did not love their mother however, except maybe as an idea, and not until after she had died. She was the same from childhood until she overdosed at age 34.
My aunt says that she died the first day she did heroin at age 17.
People change, people change, people change.
Do they?
What if we are stuck? What if who we once were is who we always are?
I think we change people. In our own minds. After they die or leave us, we glorify them, or, we worship them, but they are still who they were. Our memories simply slip into wine or nostalgia or sentimentality.
Had my father, or my cousin, actually wanted to change badly enough, could they be sitting in my living room right now watching tv? Could he have not choked on his own vomit? Who’s to say? Maybe she would have stayed on the methadone and not gone back to heroin just one last time.
One minute you are in your bed watching an episode of M*A*S*H and the next, you are drowning in your own bodily fluids.
That is someone who did not want to change. Who simply decided that they had had enough, that life was too much to bear and I think I will take some more amphetamines.
How can death be that easy when life isn’t?
To dislodge means to leave a place previously occupied. This is what happens with death. (I imagine.) You dislodge yourself from your body.
And that’s that.
If it weren’t for the things that stuck, things like your smell, or rather the smell of an old leather wallet and how it has become your smell, and your sheep’s laugh, that high cackle and how it would run around the room before it landed back in your throat. If it weren’t for things like the four kids left behind, it would be like you never existed. And if you never existed then you would never have to change.
Maybe that is what it’s all about. I won’t exist. I will be a ghost and therefore incapable of change. I will not be accountable.
I will be undone.
The moments just before my father died: He feels like nothing now. Like he does not even exist in the world as anyone’s father or husband or son, that he is just a head on a pillow that is yellow with green leaves and a body on a bed and that they aren’t even attached anymore.He can feel everything now and at the same time nothing.
What he said as he was dying: Is this what it feels like? My mother. The nursing home in Philadelphia. Can people really hold you accountable for every Godamn thing you say? Where is my mother? My arm is a bell. That fucking ringing. Please forgive me for the despicable. My God, I have made mistakes. I need to sleep. I don’t even need a cigarette. I would like a doughnut. Where is my bell? I don’t need the cigarettes and the Almond Joy. Come back.
You don’t have to kill yourself to change. You have to want it. My cousin didn’t want it. My father didn’t want it.
The will to grow but must outweigh the need to feel safe.
I can’t promise that you, or me, or anyone, will change. Promise. The word itself sleazy. Hard at first, then sizzling out at the end like something that can’t last. A snake. A word that can’t get up off the ground. You. You promised. I promise you. We promise. I promise.
You have to stop being a ghost though. You have to get up from that brick wall and wipe the bird-shit gum and dirty cigarettes from your feet and you have to walk back into that restaurant and say I am here.
Elizabeth Bishop knew how the world worked:
The roaring alongside he takes for granted,
and that every so often the world is bound to shake.
You’ve been told the world is bound to shake but until it did you didn’t believe it. You simply strolled along as if you were unscathed.
You were never unscathed.
How can you defend yourself against this shaking? you might wonder.
You can’t. You can only decide when you are ready to stop being a ghost.
*
I stopped being a ghost when I finally let myself become undone.
After 13 years, I left the restaurant. I became a yoga teacher. I started writing again.
We have to want it so bad that it overrides the taste or the heroin or whatever else it may be that kills us.
We have to want it so bad that it cleans up the papers on the desk and starts writing every single day no matter what the pile of shit says. And the pile of shit will talk. It will say things like You can’t do this. You don’t finish anything. You will never change. You are always going to be a waitress. You haven’t changed so far so why do you think you can?
Here’s what you do when that pile starts taking. You light a match. Light it all on fire and watch it burn with a combination of sadness and elation.
Unless you want to keep letting all the piles of shit run your life. Then don’t burn it. Let it keep you the same as you have always been. At least you will be a reliable and predictable ghost.
To Hell with predictable.
Burn that pile of shit and say I am as capable as raw bone. I am the bead. I am bone to bead and beyond.
What I know to be true is that as human beings, we sometimes forget our own humanness. We stop letting our own humanness astound us.
We live as ghosts.
So sometimes, when someone or something reminds us, when they literally shove it in our face like a crumpled up coffee stained map and we have no choice but to pull over in the car and stop on the side of the road to read the map with its coffee stink and fingerprints and out-of-dated-ness, we somehow find our way.
30 responses
exquisite. beautiful and breathtaking. thank you <3
Beautiful! Really beautiful. I always wonder what it is that allows some people the energy and motivation to change. I guess it is just their time. Their destiny, although you have to be open to accept the opportunity.
Beautifully said! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this very subject, feeling myself on the verge of some big changes that I want (and need) to make. Interestingly enough, I think many of us have to go through this process many times during our lives.
It is amazing how we can let things pile up and last way longer than they should. It is equally amazing how a person cam manage to pull themselves out of it and actually, genuinely change. Yes, it does happen. What a wonderful, thought-provoking piece. More of this, please.
I cried while reading this…for everything that was relatable, for the sadness that was palpable, and for the haunting beauty of your words. Love reading this kind of work on The Rumpus and can’t wait to read your next piece here!
Honest. Raw. Beautiful. Just like you. So many th OK ngs resonate at such a deep level with me. Change is one of the hardest things to accept, and one of the hardest things to execute. Sometimes…Even when you want it. Beautiful writing. Raw humanity. I love this so much.
This is powerful and truly inspiring. Thank you so much.
Why I love your writing so much is because SOOO many of us go through those exact same thoughts and emotions and even breakdowns but we just don’t have the ability to put them to words. Sometimes we don’t even know what we’re feeling. We all have our bird shit gum and dirty cigarettes and feel like ghosts to the same nasty bitch that doesn’t even look at us from her menu and the “play” may be the same but just with different characters and scenes but most of us keep it all tucked away inside because it’s more socially acceptable. But what I love most about that piece is the 2nd half when you talk about how you stopped being a ghost when you let yourself come undone and you became a yoga teacher and started writing again. It just speaks soooo much to the fact that we can’t undergo that “metamorphosis” until we learn how to surrender. With every piece you write … with every video blog you create, you’re teaching. You’re teaching the rest of us that it’s sometimes OK to be out of control and to surrender because it’s from those moments of “burning that pile of shit” and “wiping the bird shit gum and dirty cigarettes” from our feet that big changes can happen. Keep writing, Jen. Much love.
Amazingly powerful. Terrific writing!
Inspiring, gritty dark truth, light.
You are never too old or too sick or too stuck or too anything to change. We change when we decide we’ve had enough. Go out and create your beautiful life!
I’m picky and grow extremely bored, most of the time, while reading. This was such an amazing piece! I will definitely look into reading more of your writing. Very inspiring.
Captivating, brilliant! Thank you for introducing me to Rumpus, (such timing in my parenting struggles). I dropped out of college also; that stormy cloud sat on my shoulder for over years. You help me so very much. Love to you and yours!
Speaks to me on many levels. I am glad I had a bottom to my misery–And picked up and kept going. What you’ve written speaks volumes.
One thought: we are a sum of all our parts of life. Like a Russian matroyshka doll (nesting doll) the infant me is the inside and each set of years adds a new shell. The past versions of me are there, altogether at once, and sometimes the 7 year old me will speak up–sometimes my teen self will–all still present, but with the wisdom of my current 46 years to guide them through, speak today’s truth, learn, and love them. And today, I like that image very much.
I know sometimes the truth is hard to write or read but that is when life comes across real. Beautiful post.
I feel sorry for Jenn’s father and cousin in the way their memories have been mined for content and exposed for all the world to see.
Truly compelling. Yours words capture the vulnerability of our human spirit.
yes. your truth. absolutely, positively, beautifully. my truth.
thank you jennifer. your writing inspires the fire in me to be free, to write my truth, raw and ugly and real. thank you!
Response to Eve: It’s a tricky one. On the one hand, yes, none of us want our stories put out necessarily, when it’s to do with our failings. On the other hand, if any of us were to tell our stories, there are always other people involved. Our stories are intertwined with those of everyone else in our lives. To leave everyone else out of our own stories would mean we don’t have much of a story of our own to tell. Much of life is about our influences and interactions.
love this and am so happy to be introduced to rumpus. change…you have to really want to/it, don’t you? thank you for this…poetic and powerful. rare in blogs, methinks.
Thank you so much for such an honest essay. This was beautiful and so raw. I love reading about your experiences and the tenacity you have to endure and overcome things. You inspire so many through your words. I can’t wait to read more by you here on the Rumpus. I agree with you that we must be ready and willing to change, however large or small that shift is. If we can’t commit to wanting to let go of what we hold that makes us feel that sense of security and change our perspectives we won’t ever change. I think you sum it up perfectly with “the will to grow must outweigh the need to feel safe”. You go Jen, keep sending out your light to those of us ready to change!
Such powerfully honest writing. Keep your father in your writing, Jen. Don’t feel that you must stop writing about him. Bless you. It must have been so hard to lose him.
Jean
Very raw and very real, and very true. It is said that “comparison is the killer of joy”. What people say to us can hurt us more than any sort of physical pain imaginable, but it can also push us to change.
Jen – you took my breath away and then, I started breathing again. You are truly an exceptional human being. I am honored to call you my friend.
I love you!
Amanda
In response to Eve, and Jenn’s response to her: I agree with Jenn. My mother once asked me why so much of my writing about my childhood revolved around her. She didn’t want to be in my story. But she was there….how do you write from a place of honesty and truth within the strictures of “leave me out of it?” By nature, our brains interpret our experiences. Even as you read, you absorb what resonates for you.
This is an amazing piece of work and thinking and feeling. I want everyone I know to read this — friends, coworkers, my daughter –“the shit will talk” — this is so true. So much negativity — so easy to give in but you have a sharp weapon you share with us. thank you for this thank you.
Jen,
Your words are always straight from the heart and reveal the depths of our humanity.
Thank you.
Fave lines (I couldn’t pick just one!):
How can death be that easy, when life isn’t?
The will to grow must outweigh the need to feel safe.
I stopped being a ghost when I finally let myself come undone.
To hell with predictable.
What I know to be true is that as human beings, we sometimes forget our own humanness. We stop letting our own humanness astound us.
Just beautiful, Jen…
With Gratitude & So Much Love,
Denise 🙂
Disturbingly beautiful!
Amazing … I devoured every word! Stunning
Really loved this!
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