Everything Is Awful Page 2

  Of course, if you’ve seen Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” you know that this is a wild mischaracterization of what happens in the video. Dogs are friendly and they are nice and they lick your face. Michael Jackson does not turn into a dog. Michael Jackson turns into a jagged-fanged, yellow-eyed, contorted-faced werewolf who literally rips a girl to shreds. And my mother made me watch that shit. The second his eyes turned into angry yellow slits, I screamed like he had personally burst through our front door, and I leapt headfirst into my mother’s uterus (or what was left of it), refusing to reemerge for nearly three days. Some nights, I close my eyes, and I still see his face.

  And perhaps I would’ve forgotten this event, had it not been for my brother, who purchased a rubber werewolf mask days later, just to chase me around the house while I screamed for mercy.

  To make matters even worse, not long after this, my older cousin Nick tried to scare me into obedience with a story about a clown named Pennywise who stole insubordinate children in their sleep and forced them to work in underground labor camps. It didn’t matter that this was merely a bastardized version of a Stephen King novel. I believed it outright, and spent four straight nights without sleep, shaking uncontrollably, fearful that closing my eyes guaranteed my immediate kidnapping.

  This is all to say that I entered adolescence scarred not just by my mother, but also by my brother, my cousin, Pennywise the child-stealing clown, and Michael Jackson himself. It should be no surprise that I’m fucked up. I spent most of early childhood fully expecting every person I met to transform into a wild-eyed beast who would kill me in my sleep, if they could get to me before the clown forced me into hard labor.

  Eventually, of course, I grew up, and those fears went away. But the fun thing about fears is that they’re easily replaced with a bunch of new fears that are just as believable and overwhelming. Don’t drive a car faster than 10 mph, because you will crash and we won’t even be able to identify your body. Don’t drink alcohol before you’re twenty-one, or your liver will tell your brain to become an alcoholic, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in rehab, where they don’t even get all the TV channels. Don’t get on airplanes because airplanes are the number-one travel method of terrorists, and if the terrorists don’t kill you, it doesn’t even matter, because the plane is gonna crash on its own anyway.

  It’s a miracle I make it outside of the house at all.

  So here we are. I’m now twenty-six, which is the age at which people start to assess whether you have your shit together, or at least whether you have the mental and physical capacity for one day getting your shit together. It’s the age at which people start categorizing your laziness as less of an endearing quirk and more of a problem the government will have to solve one day. It’s when people start to wonder how long you really have before shit goes entirely off the rails and you end up as one of those people on the evening news who managed to live unnoticed in the basement of a Staten Island Burger King, and when the reporter asks you why you’ve been living down here all these years, you ramble about trampolines and snow days and Michael Jackson and a demon clown.

  It’s the age at which you should know what the fuck you’re doing, regardless of how much the world fucked you up.

  And yet, I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t date. I don’t drive. I don’t eat right. I don’t exercise. I don’t cook. I don’t clean. I don’t know how to dress myself. And I can’t remember where I left my remote, which should be the least of my concerns, but somehow it’s the most upsetting.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Matt, none of us know what the fuck we’re doing with our lives and all of us have problems and we’re all just meaningless sacks of meat wandering aimlessly around a rock that’s hurtling through space, and eventually that rock will slam into the sun and the universe will explode and none of this will mean a damn thing.” Which is true. But also I can’t help but feel like the Italian boy behind the bodega counter is judging me every time I show up at three in the morning to buy a pint of mint chocolate chip gelato. He doesn’t seem to care that the sun is gonna melt the earth one day. All he seems to care about is that I only need one plastic spoon and no bag, because he knows I’m popping the lid off this thing the second I walk out the door.

  So yes. I have no idea what I’m doing. Today, I went outside. I ate a sandwich and a muffin. I drank a chocolate milk. I took a long nap. And it was a productive day.

  ON THE TRAUMA OF HAVING (OR NOT HAVING) HAIR

  I was born with a freakish amount of hair. Or so they tell me. I don’t really like to talk about the day I was born, because it’s the first and only time I touched a vagina, and I like to pretend I have a clean record. And yes, technically my picture got taken right after I slid out, but you can’t really tell how much hair a baby has from a picture taken seconds after it emerges from amniotic juices. Based on the sole surviving photograph I have of that day, whatever hair I had was caked in what looks like thick strawberry jam, except it wasn’t strawberry jam, it was bits of placenta, because they don’t even dry you all the way off before they snap the picture that will one day end up on your birthday cakes. They should really wait until the placenta dries and flakes off before they take the picture.

  So no, I don’t know exactly how much hair I had when I was born, but my mother likes to brag that I had a lot of it. Which is kind of a weird thing to gloat about, if you ask me. I don’t like seeing a single strand of hair on my dinner plate. I can’t imagine an entire ball of it growing in my uterus for nine months and emerging from my body, sentient and screaming for food, and then being like, “Yeah, I made that. And now I’m gonna let it live in my house for twenty years.” In fact, in eighth-grade health class, that most sacred of American public school institutions, wherein children are first informed that hair will start growing from places previously unheard of in life, I distinctly remember watching The Miracle of Birth, a horrid documentary in which a Wisconsin woman with a bad perm is freed of an alien that’s been swelling in her abdomen. It astounds me, to this day, that we force thirteen-year-olds to watch a woman giving birth on VHS tape and consider this sexual education. I barely even knew what a vagina looked like on a regular day, let alone the day a screaming mass of hair decides to claw out of it. But that’s not the point. The point is, I had to watch that mess, and I remember viscerally gagging during the scene when It Happens, not because of the miracle of it all, but because of the sheer amount of hair that’s involved in the whole thing. Babies are covered in it. Vaginas are covered in it. I tried to avoid looking at it straight on by peering above my glasses and letting my blurry vision dull my ability to see what was happening, but I still remember, fuzzy eyesight be damned, the angry, throbbing ball of fur emerging from between that screaming woman’s legs. It was like watching a ball of rats crawl through the hole of a sewer drain. During a mudslide. (To make matters worse, my health teacher—who also happened to be my gym teacher, my history teacher, and the football coach, because American public schools are masters of efficiency—was a widower whose wife died in childbirth because, by some freak medical anomaly, a hair got into her bloodstream when she was in labor and murdered her to death. I’m not making this up. The bulk of my sexual education came from a man whose life was literally ruined by hair. And that’s not even mentioning the pictures of hairy, gonorrhea-stricken genitals he showed us on the first day of class.)

  I guess my mother didn’t know that hair kills, or maybe she was happy simply knowing that my hairy ass didn’t murder her on the way out, because she still talks about walking down the hospital hallway to the tiny deli counter they keep the babies in and being able to spot me right away, my wispy ginger hair blowing in the wind. Little did she know, that wispy ginger hair would go on to ruin my life.

  This may go without saying, but I don’t like hair. Hair is disgusting, and a generally terrible inconvenience. It collects grease and dirt and particles of old, crusty food. It gathers in clumps, a unit of measurement t
hat has never been used to describe anything good in this world. (You know what else gathers in clumps? Herpes.) It clogs my shower drain. It mixes with toothpaste to congeal on the sides of my sink. It piles up in thickets beneath my furniture and comes scurrying out like tumbleweeds the second I have someone over. And let’s be real, it’s far outlasted its evolutionary purpose. Cavemen needed hair to keep warm and, I can only imagine, given their relative abundance of free time, to have something to aimlessly braid between hump sessions. But let’s face it, I have central heating and the Internet, so whatever value hair added to the cave people’s lives seems to have been generally satisfied. Apparently, anthropologists think humans lost our cave hair when we gained the ability to walk on two legs and needed to better regulate our body temperatures for long-distance runs. Considering I have never, and will never, run any long distances in my life, once again, hair’s purpose is unnecessary.

  Worst of all, hair is needy. My hair has never been longer than a few inches, and yet, I’ve used approximately every product ever made in the entirety of history to attempt to wield power over it, a list that grows every year as they invent new ways to get me to spend my money on chemicals. In the nineties, there was just gel, mousse, or hairspray, and you put it on your frosted tips, and that was the end of it. But now, hell has expanded, and there are pastes, pomades, waxes, putties, glues, clays, creams and crèmes (difference unclear), lotions, oils, exfoliating scalp treatments, grooming serums, and, I’m not fucking around with you on this one, quicksand. And we haven’t even gotten to the endless varieties of conditioners—the function of which I still don’t entirely understand—and shampoos, which you can now apparently use in dry form, a luxury I refuse to believe actually works. And this is just the hair on your head! There are the creams, foams, and tonics you’re supposed to use before you shave, and the moisturizers, oils, and lotions you’re supposed to use after you shave, and of course, you have to get a shaver, or actually two shavers, unless you want to shave the hair around your mouth with the same instrument you use to shave the hair around your testicles. Oh, and also one of those weird-shaped shavers that go up your nostrils and inside your ears, and possibly one of those contraptions you can use to shave the hair on your back. And tweezers for everything in between. And despite all of this, my hair still looks like it belongs on the head of a politician who tries to solicit sex in an airport bathroom. (Oh, and don’t even get me started on the TSA’s crusade against hair products on airplanes. What havoc could I possibly wreak on an airplane with a bottle of ultra-firm holding spray? Answer me that, TSA people! You know who had awful hair? Osama bin Laden. By making me throw away my conditioner, you’re just playing into his master plan. This is what he wanted.)

  In fairness, I am a man, and my struggle with hair is but a fraction of the battle that women are expected to wage daily. My haircuts cost less than a McDonald’s value meal, and theoretically, I could just decide to stop caring about it one day, and everybody would assume I was preparing for my breakout role as Guy Who Sniffs Paint Behind a Denny’s. And of course, as a white guy, my hair carries none of the cultural baggage that people of color reckon with every day. Nobody has tried to reach out and touch my hair on the train, and generally speaking, nobody has questioned how often I wash it. All things considered, I have it relatively easy.

  But still, I don’t like hair. I don’t like the hair on my head, or the hair in my armpits, or the hair that grows in all the other places that hair has absolutely no reason growing other than to serve as itchy, sweaty decoration. I hate that I have to wash it, and condition it, and cut it, and style it, and make sure there are no bugs making babies in it. I hate that I can’t get rid of it because my skull is the shape of a peeled yam and my skin is oily and if I went fully bald, my scalp would look like an angry jack-o’-lantern. I hate that I have to brush it every time I leave my apartment because I look like I’m plotting to steal Christmas if I don’t. And I hate that it has had the audacity to make me care for it—to grow it and water it and pet it every day for almost three loving decades—and now it’s finally deciding to go away, strand by strand, and refusing to come back.

  Perhaps it finally caught on to the fact that I don’t like it very much, and made the unilateral decision to abandon me en masse, but that’s typical hair behavior. It gives you hell and demands it all, and then leaves the second you start getting used to it.

  My dependency on hair started before I can even remember. I was born with the comb-over of a televangelist, and forces beyond my control decided to make this the only haircut that would ever work with my body type and facial features long before I could possibly have any say in the matter. For one disastrous week in 1999, I attempted to take matters into my own hands and experimented with a center part, and my entire life nearly fell to pieces. The order of the universe continues to depend on my hair being parted in the same spot it was first parted by Moses himself, which is exactly 30 percent across my scalp, from left to right.

  Every morning of my childhood, for as long as I could remember, I would run up to my mother with a long comb and a spray bottle full of water. She would wet my hair until I could feel the tiny droplets dripping down my temples, and then part it in two or three short strokes, always in the same spot. Then, while it was still damp, she would pick up an oversized aerosol can and thoroughly douse my head in a gallon of megahold hairspray until my hair turned into virtual stone. I spent most of my adolescence with the shiny, immovable hair of a pin-striped eighties stockbroker. In almost every picture of me as a child, it’s almost impossible to tell I had ginger hair at all, because it was covered in so much product, it looked like the color of wet clay, and had the stiffness of titanium. And it soon became part of my public identity. Classmates would gather around me on the playground during recess and take turns knocking on my hair like they were knocking on a slab of concrete. On weekends, the local blacksmith would come to our house and use my hair to forge wrought iron into various decorative metal fixtures. And I once won a battering contest against a very formidable ram.

  Of course, as with any well-publicized strength, vulnerabilities were right around the corner. And my enemies knew this well.

  My brother, who is six years older than I am, had plenty of time to reckon with his hair journey long before I came along. A true child of the nineties, he was far more adventurous with using hair as a form of expressing inner angst, and cycled through countless iterations of spikes, colored tips, and bleaches, including a brief foray into pink hair dye that nearly tore our family apart. (He insisted on dying his head the color of chewed bubble gum. Mom and Dad insisted that any such action was akin to joining one of those cults where you have to drown a kitten to get in. He did it anyway. My parents had to kill a cat just to prove their point.)

  Now, many years later, he’s given up on taming his hair entirely, opting instead for a shaggy, unkempt mop and an unwieldy beard. He looks very much like the kind of person who goes hunting for game with his bare hands and has bitten directly into a still-beating deer heart. In many ways, the disparity in our hair choices is emblematic of the differences we exhibited more broadly: he preferred the more rebellious, Hot Topic–inspired way of life, and I preferred the more genteel lifestyle of a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman. To say we did not particularly mesh would be an understatement. And yet, I insisted on being included in whatever activities he partook in, per my contractual duties as younger sibling.

  When he inevitably exploded (which was often, I was very annoying), no retaliatory target was as appealing as my hair. It was, after all, the thing I seemingly cared most about, and representative of my general stodginess and infuriating nature. If I were a terrorist looking to inflict the most symbolic damage on my annoying eight-year-old self, I would’ve chosen my hair, too. By then, I’d learned how to wet it, comb it, and spray it myself, and spent a considerable amount of time in the bathroom every morning getting every strand just right, so as to be best prepared for my daily regimen
of aggressive pestering. My hair was precious to me.

  I don’t remember what I did to piss him off this particular time. We were outside in the middle of summer. I might’ve taken his bike or stepped on his foot or sprayed his back too many times with the water gun I’d gotten for my birthday. But whatever it was, it sent him into a wild-eyed rage. He came at me, I screamed at an octave only birds could hear, he grabbed me by the shoulders and, taking a deep breath, spit the wad of chewing gum he’d been chomping on directly onto my scalp.

  Now you’d think, given the amount of hairspray I’d covered it with, that my hair would’ve been protected by a sort of chemical force field, that the gum would’ve hit the hard surface and bounced right off, and I’d have been free to continue my pestering emboldened by my brother’s failed revenge plot. But you’d be fucking wrong. Because of course it didn’t bounce right off. It fucking stuck. Because that’s what gum does.

  I figured, at first, that if it had stuck only lightly, I could reach in and pluck it right out, like picking a grape out of a shag carpet. (This is the best metaphor I could think of, and I’m sorry. Backup options included: “like fetching a hard-boiled egg from a patch of weeds,” and “like fishing a piece of orange chicken from a pile of hay.”) Naturally, my attempts to pick it out merely exacerbated the situation, and I ran wailing to my mother, whose own attempts proved even less effective, perhaps because my body was convulsing in dramatic sobs as her fingers spread the gum into more and more clumps. If you’ve ever tried cleaning shit out of a dog’s ass hair, you know exactly what we were dealing with here. Every time you try to wipe, the dog moves, and the shit somehow multiplies, until it has spread into a far larger, even shittier patch of destruction.