I Wanted To Be Invisible

I wanted to be invisible. Out of nowhere, with, I swear, nothing in
my history to predict it, I’d done something people regard as sick and
disgusting and I wanted to disappear.

I should say that, at first, I wasn’t so sure what I’d done was all
that horrendous, and I certainly didn’t concur with the character
judgment implicit in such a description. It didn’t seem in my case to be
fair. I felt this way because I’d always had an exceptionally
inquisitive mind, a mind that, forever in search of the deepest truths,
often compelled me to challenge things (the assumption that boundary
lines in nature are fixed and inviolable, for example) that others never
questioned. And that was a good thing, right? What’s more — and who
would argue with this? — when you call your dog “Maureen” you’re clearly
asking for trouble. And not only that, hadn’t Larry Flynt confessed to
the serial raping of chickens without suffering one iota of damage to his reputation?

But I stopped protesting pretty quickly. It was impossible for me to
deflect for long the look on the face of Maureen’s owner (and my now
erstwhile live-in girlfriend) when, on the evening in question, she came
home unexpectedly early.

Preoccupied, and with the stereo at full volume, I didn’t pick up on
the fact that Maryellen was home until she was suddenly big in the room.
Maureen, I realized afterwards, was aware of Maryellen’s untimely
return before I was. I saw one of her ears rise and I saw what I also
understood later to be a look of apprehensiveness as she turned towards
me. But, and probably because her countenance was open to several
interpretations at that moment, her heads up went right by me.

In any event, I hadn’t seen the expression on Maryellen’s face since
my mother caught me barfing into the family “Important Documents” chest
when I was five. The horror it conveyed seemed, in its breathtaking
proportions, to have issued from the gods themselves. No, try as I
might, I couldn’t deny it. Diddling Maureen had been an egregious crime
that was in no way mitigated by the fact that it was unpremeditated and,
for me, unprecedented.

And in the following months (and along with Maryellen’s entering
exclamation, “My God, she’s just a puppy!”,  echoing in my head) I was
seeing similar expressions everywhere. Were guilt and shame working
their poisons on my psyche or was it true that no one was liking me
anymore? I mean no one seemed to be liking me anymore for shit.
Total strangers I passed on the street all but recoiled at the sight of
me. And dogs. What was up with dogs? Dogs had always been as
indifferent to me as I was to them. But now, straining at their leashes,
they growled deep guttural growls when I walked by. Was it possible
that dogs — in ways we’ve yet to appreciate — were able to communicate
to one another, and over great distances, the indignities humans
perpetrated on them?

In all manner of torment and confusion, I spent my days scouring my brain in a frantic effort to uncover the reason for my…well…bestial behavior.

What had dispatched me to such a forsaken place?

Could the fact that Maureen had been bathed that morning and that her
shimmering coat smelled a lot like Rive Gauche — a fragrance widely
known to be irresistibly seductive — been at the bottom of it?

Was it conceivable that — strict dosage instructions included for a
reason — the extra teaspoon of Nyquil I’d taken for a wicked post-nasal
drip had caused me to lose my species bearings for a minute?

Had I been trying to tell Maryellen something? Our relationship not
going so well, had I been saying to her, “See, this is what happens when
you deprive a person of sex?”

Or, going back to the deep thinker thing, had the philosopher in me
simply chosen a less than auspicious moment to take the leap from
rumination to hands-on investigation?

But nothing I came up with rang true for me. All I knew for sure was
that I’d become, say it, the definition of “pervert.” I could not have
descended to a much lower depth if I’d done so intentionally.

As you can see, I very much needed to get out of this dreadful
situation and the first exit I thought of was suicide. But while
destroying my body, which was making me much too noticeable, was
certainly an attractive idea, a large problem that I have with dying
discouraged me from acting on it. I’m not trying to be funny.
Transforming into something comparable to what Maureen might leave on a
curbside is a prospect that weighs very heavily on me. In fact, to make
it hard for the gods to find me when my time comes, I’ve endeavored,
even in normal circumstances, to not stand out too much, to be, you
know, as anonymous as possible. (This explains the “C” average that I’ve
steadfastly maintained throughout my life.)

And if there’s any substance to the reincarnation thing and the
immortality it promises, suicide posed a very serious risk. The gods,
everyone knows, tend to frown on people who take their own lives, no
matter how wretched their conditions may be. That made it unlikely —
especially after the way I’d comported myself this time around — that
they’d send me back as anything better than a water bug or dental
plaque.

Passing on suicide, I contemplated surgically altering my appearance
or moving to another city. But these choices were cost prohibitive and
the latter would also have involved a lot of heavy lifting, which I
really hate.

Finally, I considered going insane. Well within my budget, what this option offered was the opportunity to stay alive and
lose my body (my unrelenting self-consciousness anyway) at the same
time. But to achieve a genuine psychosis — to, that is, retreat into the
bowels of your brain, live in a world of your own invention and become
completely oblivious to what’s going on outside of it — isn’t so easy.

I know because I tried. Thinking that I could maybe connect to
madness by faking some emblematic symptoms (and sufficiently desperate
by now to chance still more humiliation), I ran an experiment. It was
the middle of August and wearing a tattered overcoat — and with a week’s
growth of beard and my hair wild — I stood on a street corner and
commenced to babble unintelligibly at various decibel levels. After a
few minutes of that, I shouted, “Fucking motherfuckers, I’m gonna break
your fucking hearts and shove the fucking bits and pieces up your hungry
assholes.” Then I babbled some more and then, kicking and swiping at
the air, I snarled, “Pillows? What else you asswipes got in store? The armadillos shat in your cereal shit? That crapola again? That — ha ha — granola crapola?”

But my face crimson with embarrassment all the while, my act (with
its admittedly lame material) never stopped being just that and my
self-consciousness was only heightened. (If I needed confirmation of my
failure to accomplish my objective it was more than adequately furnished
by a woman who remarked to her companion, “Must be some kind of
fraternity initiation.”)

So it became evident that even the fact that I was doubtless more
screwed up than I knew I was when I realized exactly how screwed up I
was, didn’t give me an advantage here. However odd the angle at which I
protruded from it may have been, I was as mired in reality as anyone
else. I mean, despite my preoccupation, I still worried a lot about
practical matters. I worried about losing my job. I worried about
getting to the laundry in time to collect my shirts. I worried that I
might have picked up a dose of heart worm from Maureen. And if that
wasn’t enough, I couldn’t stop caring about what people thought. It was
possible, in fact, that I’d come to care more about what people thought
than Louis Harris and George Gallup put together.

No. I could do no more than envy the real thing – those guys who’ve
established permanent residence in a fissure between their cerebellums
and their medulla oblongata. Yes, I know their weird and
terrible utterances can be, in their obvious authenticity, very scary
and lead you to conclude that even in the worst of times only a schmuck
would want to take refuge in the kinds of worlds they inhabit. But, long
before my interest in the subject got personal, I discovered that if
you were willing to pay close attention you could sometimes pick up
indications that where they live is not without a recreational
dimension. On one occasion I was actually able to make out, in the
background of a nasty mix of epithets, cacophonous outbursts and sundry
other emissions, the strains of a tinkling piano and the clinking of
glass and ice cubes — persuasive evidence, you’ll agree, of a party in
progress.

I wanted to find that party guy now and see if I could get him to
show me the ropes. But I knew that I had as much chance of prying
instructions out of him as I did of getting the name of his caterer.

So what did I do?

Well, standing as I was on the corner of “Terror Street and Agony
Way” (as the poet described it), what I did then was what’s left for you
to do in this circumstance.

I resolved to — what else? — redeem myself.

I mean what choice did I have at this point but to try to get the gods to forgive me?

Now I certainly recognized that the level of depravity to which I’d
sunk made redemption a tall order. The gods would hardly respond to a
less than stellar effort. But after thinking long and hard about it, I
finally came up with something I thought was near to perfect in its
symmetry. Something that they’d just have to applaud.

With the help of donations, I opened an animal shelter.

Forget what you’re thinking. Okay? I never went into the kennels. I
functioned — it’s the truth — in a strictly administrative capacity.

Anyway, it turned out that I was nothing short of brilliant in this
role. Under my supervision the shelter quickly became a huge success,
and, sure enough — it could not have worked out better — with each
rescue and adoption of a mangy dog or one-eyed cat my Maureen burden
grew lighter until, just like that, it was gone.

With that monstrous problem behind me I felt, as you can imagine,
something like great. But this wasn’t the only reason for my high
spirits. No. They derived as well from an even bigger reward that my act
of redemption yielded. In the delirium that develops from the knowledge
that you’re successfully making amends with the gods — from the certainty
that you’re pleasing them and earning their approval – you get to feel
that you’re atoning not only for the crime at hand but also — they
become one and the same — for whatever you did to warrant the death sentence you were handed at birth! In turn, you can feel that your atonement actually makes you eligible to survive your death in an exalted afterlife!

This, you’ll have to concede, is some spectacular shit and it
occurred to me one night that it was right here that the answer to the
question that had been eating at me might be found.

Had I maybe set the whole thing up? Was my act intentional after all?
Was it possible that my problem with mortality weighed more heavily on
me than I’d realized and that, ingeniously exploiting the concurrence of
a bitch in heat and a simple, random hardon, I’d deliberately committed
an appalling but absolvable crime in order to fashion an opportunity to experience my ultimate redemption?

Subliminal and convoluted as my process may have been, was it possible that I’d fucked a dog to get into heaven?

(I should note that I flashed on this after an evening of heavy
drinking with a bunch of veterinarians. It came to me while I was
crawling on my hands and knees up three flights of stairs, just moments
before I passed out on my welcome mat.)

Now I don’t want to leave the impression that I was entirely free of
issues. Although my guilt and shame had evaporated, there was still
something pertaining to Maureen that bothered me a little. Whenever I
thought of her, I would find myself wondering how she’d, you know, rated
me. If she, you know, wanted to do it again.

But male ego aside, I felt in all other ways terrific. And, indeed,
when I was interviewed by Animal Planet on the occasion of my shelter’s
first anniversary, I was fully at ease with being visible, more at ease
with it than I’d ever been before.