Less Than Hero (6 page)

That’s very important to Sophie. To recycle her pixie dust. To never throw any of it away.

“It’s cosmic,” she says. “It floats around and settles on those who need it the most.”

While I humor Sophie about her pixie dust, I don’t believe there’s anything magical about it. It’s just glitter that gets on everything and in everything and I’m pretty sure has been the cause of more than one serious rash.

After all, you can’t change someone’s life by sprinkling silver metallic glitter over them.

“Can you take Vegan to the vet tomorrow?” Sophie asks. “Mandy’s out sick and they asked if I could work a double shift.”

“Sure.” I take a bite of tofu and glance down at Vegan, who stares up at me with either contempt or hunger, I can’t tell which. “What’s the matter with him?”

“His upper-respiratory thing has come back,” she says. “I think he might be allergic to the new food we’ve been buying.”

On cue, Vegan sneezes.

I notice he has pixie dust on top of his head and stuck to his nose and I wonder if the upper-respiratory infections Vegan sometimes gets are related to his diet or to the good fortune Sophie sprinkles around the apartment.

Fortunately, Sophie’s job compensates her well enough that she can afford Vegan’s vet bills, which she usually pays with some of the extra money she makes as the Fairy. I chip in for groceries and rent and utilities, splitting most of our costs, though Sophie gets some of our organic food at discount. And between the money I earn volunteering for clinical trials plus the tax-free income I take home from panhandling, I earn more than $50,000 annually.

Not bad for someone who makes his living taking experimental drugs and begging for money in Central Park.

A few minutes of silence pass before Sophie says, “So how was your diabetes trial?”

The trial Randy, Vic, Isaac, and I recently wrapped up was a one-week, outpatient, placebo-controlled, double-blind study for an investigative diabetes drug.

“Fine,” I say, as if I don’t have any idea where this is going.

Every few weeks we have a conversation about volunteering for clinical trials, with Sophie trying to convince me to stop. After nearly a year of this, I can tell what’s coming next. It’s like a guided tour I’ve taken so many times that I know the route by heart.

“Have you thought any more about looking for something with health benefits?” she asks.

Up here on the left, we have passive-aggressive pragmatism.

“Yes,” I say.

“And?”

“And I’m still thinking about it.”

I’m not, really. But admitting that I’m not looking for another job is one thing. Admitting that I don’t have the confidence or the ambition to make a living doing something other than volunteering for clinical trials is a whole other kind of honesty.

“I wish you could find something in marketing,” she says.

And up here on the right, we have unreasonable optimism.

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” I say. “It’s been five years since I worked in marketing, and my résumé isn’t exactly up to snuff.”

“Well, I know you’d be great at it.”

Sophie’s always trying to make me feel better about myself, telling me I’m good enough and smart enough to do anything I want—be it marketing, teaching, acting, or running my own business.

The people who love us see all of our potential and promise and the bright, shiny edges, while we often focus on our failings and missed opportunities and the dull, tarnished surfaces.

This tends to be the self-image default setting when you don’t believe in yourself.

And although our loved ones and ardent supporters do their best to encourage us and make us believe in what we have to offer and how talented we are, sometimes the stories we tell ourselves have more power. And the more often we tell ourselves these stories, the more likely we are to believe them.

“What about working with me at Westerly?” she asks. “I can see about getting you an interview there.”

And if you look out the window to the other side of the road, you can see a disaster waiting to happen.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess it’s kind of like you and anal sex. It’s not really my thing.”

To be honest, I don’t know what my thing is. I’ve never found anything I was particularly good at or really wanted to do. Even my dream jobs are just that. Dreams. I don’t expect them to come true. And even if they did, I don’t know if I’d be all that happy managing a baseball team or playing professional golf or taking pictures of beautiful naked women.

Okay, yes, I’d probably enjoy that last one. But if you asked me what I’m
passionate
about, if you asked me what I want to do that would make me happy and fill me with a sense of satisfaction and personal enrichment, doing something that mattered to me and nurtured my soul? I couldn’t give you more than a shrug and a blank expression.

I’m thirty years old and still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

“I realize working in a grocery store isn’t your thing,” Sophie says, attempting to guide me into adulthood. “But I wish you’d at least think about it. Putting all of these chemicals in your body can’t be good for you. You don’t know the possible long-term effects of all of these drugs you’ve been testing.”

Over there, behind loving concern, is thinly disguised questioning of intelligence.

While I understand Sophie’s anxiety, I’ve been a guinea pig for
almost five years and I have a pretty good understanding of what I’m doing. And if any adverse side effects were going to manifest themselves, they probably would have done so by now.

“I like being a professional guinea pig,” I say, which isn’t an entirely factual statement. While I do enjoy the freedom and flexibility my lifestyle affords me, it’s more like I’ve just grown used to the idea of doing what I do and I don’t have the desire or motivation to change.

I’m a victim of my own inertia, having succumbed to the ennui of my existence.

But I don’t think I’m alone. The American dream hasn’t worked out the way a lot of people imagined, so they’ve settled into their lives, existing in a pervasive, low-level misery: commuting an hour to work; sitting in makeshift offices surrounded by false walls; sharing half-hour lunches and fifteen-minute breaks with office mates who have their own makeshift offices; spending nine hours a day in a garden of cubicles beneath a sky of fluorescent lights; taking another hour to get home, then waking up the next day and doing it all over again.

Somehow I doubt this is the life anyone dreamed about when they were kids.

“I know you like the freedom your job offers,” Sophie says. “And I respect your choices, Lollipop . . .”

That’s Sophie’s pet name for me. I asked her once, why Lollipop? She told me it’s because I’m sweeter than an apple pie.

“. . . but don’t you ever think about your future? Don’t you think about your destiny?”

I’ve never been a big believer in fate or destiny, in the idea that
there’s some invisible, cosmic force planning out my life or guiding me to my inevitable doom.

I’m more of a
shit happens
kind of guy.

Good shit, bad shit. It doesn’t matter. It’s all shit and it either happens or it doesn’t. I’ve had my share of both, though I don’t have a Swiss bank account or a penthouse apartment on Central Park West. But it’s kind of embarrassing to complain about your life when you’re a white, heterosexual male living in the twenty-first century.

Sophie, on the other hand, believes everyone has a destiny and that we all need to figure out what that is, who we’re meant to be, and what we’re supposed to do. I don’t think much about my future, because it makes it that much harder to live in the present. And I believe
destiny
is just a word people throw around to make themselves feel like they have some kind of special role to play when in reality, we’re all just turds caught in the siphoning water of a giant toilet, our lives getting flushed down the drain one day at a time.

No one has ever suggested that I become a motivational speaker.

Rather than share my cynical analogy with Sophie, I just smile and say, “As far as I’m concerned, my destiny is right here with you.”

Sophie doesn’t return my false cheer. “I just don’t think being a professional guinea pig is a long-term plan.”

And straight ahead of us is a philosophical roadblock.

“Do we really have to talk about long-term plans?” I ask, realizing too late that was the wrong thing to say to someone I’ve been living with for five years. I try to come up with something to make it better, but when you’re a man, sometimes it’s best to just quit while you’re behind.

Which brings us to the end of our tour.

We finish the rest of our meal in silence, then I do the dishes while Sophie straightens up the apartment and waters the plants, whispering to them before she sprinkles some of her pixie dust over their leaves and soil. I think that’s the main reason plants don’t tend to do very well in our apartment: pixie dust doesn’t make good fertilizer. Sophie, on the other hand, blames their poor health on the lack of south-facing windows.

When I’m done in the kitchen, I turn on the television and flip from the Discovery Channel to Animal Planet, trying to entice Sophie to stop cleaning and come over and join me on the couch while hoping that I don’t end up spending the night on it like I did when I moved in with Sophie five years ago.

For the first month or so I slept on the couch and continued to look for a full-time marketing job while keeping both of my part-time jobs. Sophie and I weren’t dating or having sex. I was just a new friend crashing on her couch and she was just a kind and trusting person who gave me a place to live for cheap while I tried to get my life back in order.

Then one day, while riding the F train from one part-time gig to the next, I saw an ad inside the train, right above the emergency instructions and next to a Dr. Zizmor notice for beautiful, clear skin:

DO YOU HAVE A DRINKING PROBLEM AND BIPOLAR DISORDER
?

The ad described a research study for men and women, age twenty-one to sixty, who were bipolar alcoholics and who would be willing to take medications or placebos for two weeks. The study offered to pay eligible participants up to $2,000.

I didn’t have a drinking problem or bipolar disorder, but I was
willing to have both of them if it would get me two grand for a couple of weeks of doing nothing but taking medications.

So I started searching the Internet for clinical trials and found a study in Brooklyn for the association between brain function and depression. They wanted healthy subjects as controls to be given PET scans and MRIs. It only paid $600, but it was the easiest $600 I’d ever made. And they told me I could come back to participate in two more studies.

At the time, I figured volunteering for clinical trials would just be a temporary solution to my financial situation and allow me more time to find a full-time job. But eventually I stopped looking for a marketing career and started looking for more clinical trials. And somewhere along the way, I stopped sleeping on the couch and started sleeping in Sophie’s bed.

That’s more or less the way my life has gone. I don’t make decisions so much as I fall into things. But the problem with falling into things is that you don’t think about having a plan. And the problem with not having a plan is that you don’t learn how to follow through on anything.

This isn’t the best blueprint for financial success.

Eventually Sophie finishes watering the plants and joins me on the couch, neither of us saying a word. After a few minutes of our silent standoff, she breaches the empty space between us and curls up next to me with a small sigh. I kiss her on the top of her head and put my arm around her and we watch TV for another half hour in silence before going to bed.

I’m not expecting makeup sex and don’t make any overtures to that effect, but Sophie surprises me with her desire to get naked, and I don’t argue. It’s more or less the way we resolve our
problems or disagreements. Physical intimacy is a great salve for emotional wounds. The problem is, the scabs often get pulled off before the wounds can properly heal.

When we’re done, Sophie sprinkles pixie dust on my penis, blows the rest across my thighs and abdomen, then curls up next to me and kisses me good night. I want to get up and go into the bathroom and wash off the pixie dust before it gives me another rash, but I can’t get up without disturbing Sophie, so instead I listen to her soft exhalations as she drifts off into sleep.

I stare at the ceiling for a few minutes before I close my eyes and wait for sleep to claim me, but thoughts keep racing inside my head, chasing each other around and around until they finally fall down, exhausted. A moment later, off in the distance, comes the pitter-patter of more thoughts.

Some of them are about clinical trials. Some are about the kid on the skateboard. Some are about black-and-white cookies and coconut cream–filled doughnuts.

But most of my thoughts are about Sophie.

Sometimes I think she deserves someone better than me. Someone with more ambition and the courage to think about his future. Someone who has his shit together and knows what he’s doing and where he’s going. Someone who has his life mapped out. Any map I may have once had of my life is good and lost.

This is not the kind of internal dialogue that is conducive to getting a good night’s sleep.

I get like this sometimes after a trial, my head filled with thoughts that keep me up into the early morning. I’ve tried counting sheep. Counting backward. Meditating before going
to bed. Taking valerian root. None of it works. Lately it’s been getting worse, happening to me more often, resulting in a lot of unscheduled afternoon naps and stifled yawns. I’m hoping it’s a phase and that it’ll pass, sooner rather than later.

I’m still hoping this at three in the morning, when I finally drift off into a restless slumber.

From the New York
Daily News
, page 4:

FORGET-ME-NOWS:

MANHATTAN MUGGING VICTIMS DRAW BLANKS

A string of muggings in Lower Manhattan has victims and police scratching their heads.