I had run out of the bar, literally. Just turned heel, and dashed down Division--Rush and Division, in case you want to know where I was--in a pair of stiletto boots with no coat. I knocked people over. I ran into a telephone pole. I tripped and fell.

This dash continued for miles, until I reached the dark--half-yuppie, half-gangland--outskirts of downtown Chicago proper. I was somewhere near Cabrini Green when I realized I should probably get my pasty ass in a cab.

The dash was a snap decision, certainly. One doesn't take to the streets like this, leaving behind one's credit card and beautiful leather coat one's over-generous father picked up in Milan to be stolen if the decision to run away isn't snap, snappity snap. I don't recall much about the decision, only the gist and how it came to me. I was nuzzling a neck and ear--intoxicated--when I snapped to and remembered that the owner of the neck and ear that seemed so soft and inviting at the moment--the man with his hand down my open fly--was quite mean to me in real time, and that I had sworn on the lives of my dogs that I wasn't going to take it anymore, wasn't going to tumble down his slippery slope into a smelly apartment and find myself sucking his ant-lionish dick as if it had the antidote to all my mental diseases.

Those were ribald years, the Chicago ones. I let alcohol lead me wherever it wanted to, because I had worked out a nice little blame system, a blame-game you could say. I never led myself anywhere. Where I went was the fault of the drink. The naughty parts of me, which were shameful and had been penned out of the circus so long I couldn't keep them contained any longer, were very fond of alcohol. Alcohol was the gate opener.

Now, without it, I was my usual self: needless, likable, void of desire, and generally a rational human being. When I drank, I used to envision myself in a lab coat standing over my liver--which was pinned out in one of those dissection trays they carve frogs on--and me hovering over it in a smart lab jacket with a beaker full of tequila, the drips of my beaker dropping onto the liver and sizzling, over and over, till the liver turned green, jumped from the pan with a fully-formed face and advanced musculature, and smashed everything within its reach. "Liver smash!" I had the "liver of the covenant." My liver could melt Nazi faces.

Now, it must be said: I was not a good person. I was pretending it wasn't my fault when I destroyed property in bars, when I fought in bars, did drugs in bars, fucked in bars, on bars, underneath bars. I was an animal telling myself that I was a normal girl who simply and understandably could NOT handle her liquor, and simultaneously having violent, spiritual explosions on the firewater.

I can't believe I never got arrested.

But I tangent. Once again, I tried to explain something funny and ended up sounding like the princess of doom. This was a funny night, this night I took to the streets with my pants hanging open, and snot pouring down my upper lip. I was determined. It was a night I was GOING TO change.

So I dashed to Cabrini Green, formerly one of the worst housing projects in America, and currently not so bad. It's mostly abandoned, located catty corner to a Starbucks and Lincoln Park, the richest neighborhood in Chicago. This doesn't mean there isn't trouble to be found there. I sort of sobered up when I saw the towers. I sensed danger, of course, but there was also great deal of pain in my feet, some adrenaline moving, some serious blood flow. I was also terrifically excited to go to sleep a shit-storm and wake up totally different, totally together and worthy of self love, of course. Naturally.

I had done a number of tequila shots before the bolting, but they hadn't processed. The ten to twelve minutes I stood afore the Cabrini Green catty corner grocers with my arm outstretched were relatively calm and lucid, but they did not stay that way. For instance, I don't remember anything about a cab, but I was apparently inside one, and then got out of one, because when I came to in a snowy alley on the north side of Chicago, a few miles from my apartment, some lovely middle eastern chap was sidling his cab up to my right flank, and protesting, "Ma'am, you ran from my cab. You owe me money."

Now, I don't know if I did or didn't get out of his cab, but it sounds like something I would do, not because I'm cheap, but because I'm crazy. I tossed him everything I had in my wallet. It could have been five dollars; it could have been fifty.

"Is this okay?" I asked. He shook his head for no. "It's all I have," I said. I couldn't discern his eyes from his asshole, but his energy clearly read: frustrated. "I don't have any more, see?" I opened up my wallet. Nothing was there, and his five swirling heads could all see this and they sped off into the night.

I walked another mile, sloshing to and fro in my boots, until the cops picked me up and took me to my apartment. Again, I can't recall the details, but I remember the cops were smoking stogies, and that they were very nice to me. I threw up in the back of their car a little bit, and I still feel bad about that.

However, vomit could not dampen my spirits. Not even the shame of being so drunk and so alone at such an inappropriate hour that the cops had to escort me home could dampen my spirits.

They dropped me off at my apartment, stomach acid and tequila in my teeth, positivity in my veins. I ran the four flights of steps to my floor, singing and chirping the way, my face meeting me in the stairwell mirrors with two blurry grins. Even my dogs could sense the difference in me, for they overtook me at the door, knocked me back into the stairwell railing and Murph pissed down my leg. I took them out to the courtyard to pee and poo. It had began to snow, or had been snowing all along and I was too trashed to notice, but in the courtyard I was truly elated by the snow. I tipped my head up to see if I couldn't catch some flakes on my tongue while the mutts left paw prints, brown piles and steaming yellow holes in the accumulated flakes that blanketed my courtyard. The sky was turning a midnight blue, the kind of blue that suggests positive self-change (at the time, it did), and I thought:

Hey, it's probably about four in the morning. This would be the time that I would be getting fucked with a belt around my neck, but I am neither fucked nor belted, and no one can change that. I am already making gains! Self change rocks.

Till well into the morning, Murph and I sat and pondered life. We ate the only non-pet food in my apartment, baked, stale, Costco bulk peanuts, and watched early morning television. I would periodically ask her questions. "Murph, what is my purpose? What am I doing here?" She didn't answer, of course, because she's a dog, but she did offer me the comfort of her paw in exchange for a peanut as if to say "It's all going to be better now." It was relaxing, and for the price of a few stale legumes, it was also a bargain.

I wonder, do you ever sit up late at night and watch those televangelists preach from the Southern mega-churches? You know, the dudes with the spray tans and super white teeth? They put the cheescloth over the camera and it's like a religious soap opera only everyone is ugly. I watch a lot of late night television, being who I am and all, and so I've seen quite a few televangelists move their special blend of product. The demographic--lost twenty-somethings with substance abuse problems--that is most open to the idea of Jesus can be reached at those hours, and churches are pretty crafty. They know how to snatch the bewildered. Churches know that the souls without a clear path, the ones asking their dog existential questions while eating stale peanuts in their panties at five in the morning, are prime targets. Five in the morning is seeking-out-self-change time.

This night was no different. I was out for self-change, I think I've mentioned that. I was malleable. I was willing to take chances. I was going to stick my neck out and really give something silly a shot, and it was with this zeal I found meaning in the early morning television. I found purpose. My life was going to be all better.

But I wasn't watching televangelism.

"That's amazing!" I exclaimed to Murph. She grunted for a peanut. "What is this fascinating machine? You lie upon it, and it's quite fun like a hammock, only the movement is up and down, natural-like. Shit, I can do that."

I was watching an infomercial for an ab-tightening excersize machine called the AbLounge. It was an tummy-defining play toy. It was a sit-n-spin for adults, a hammockish, humping machine with straps fore and aft for arms and legs. The happy people that sang its praises looked very together and positive about their lives and their midsections. It dawned on me that everyone I knew who was really successful and happy (the imaginary people in television shows and movies) had toned "cores." That was what the AbLounge people called the belly. The "core." Clearly the key to happiness lied within my lascent ab muscles. I had only to remove the layer of fat between my skin and those muscles, and the key to self change and true happiness would be mine. I was going to order this AbLounge, and it was going to change me. In seven business days or less, I would strap myself into this miracle machine and cease to leave it until I had the kind of hardened abdominals that ENSURE success in life.

"We are on our way, Murph."

I fell asleep on the couch in my panties with the peanuts. I woke with the usual thumping in my head. There was a checkbook in my crotch and my phone was beneath my right hand, wedged between the cushions my couch. Murph had consumed the remainder of the peanuts at some point in the night--in shell--and barfed them into her toy bin.

Nothing had changed. Nothing at all.

Seven business days later, a package arrived at my apartment. I never opened it, but discerned from the label that it was an ab lounge. I promptly sent it back to the manufacturer, went out, drank and sucked dick like it had the antidote, because abs are just muscles, and self change comes slowly.

It does come, eventually. Still waiting on the abs, though.

Posted by The Bunny at 6:44 AM

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