Overqualified (6 page)

Joey Comeau

Dear IBM,

Perverts are everywhere, and I'm no exception. I used to joke that I should never get a webcam. I reasoned that if I did, I would be on the Internet disgracing myself within hours. That timeline, it appears, was optimistic. A webcam came with my new keyboard, and within ten minutes of installing it, my pants were pulled down and my shirt was pulled up and I honestly couldn't choose between being mortified at myself and thinking, “If dignity means I can't do this, then fuck dignity!”

There's a weird magic to your image, though. I don't care if that sounds crazy. I've started believing in magic. Magic and ghosts and family.

I brought a Polaroid JoyCam to bed with a friend and we took photographs in the dark. It's weird to pose for yourself, your future self. How do you cater to your own tastes if your taste is the unexpected? Flash. Flash. Flash. And afterward, we sat on my bed and we looked through the pictures with the lights on, all wrapped in blankets and sweatshirts. The pictures were harshly lit and terrifying and sort of perfect in their ugliness. Our skin looked too white from the flash. We were always squinting. Our bodies didn't look natural. They looked the way nighttime photos of moles and bats always look.

We decided that we had to get rid of them. But of course we couldn't just put them in the garbage, because what if
someone found them? No, we had to destroy them. I was afraid to burn them because of chemicals, so we cut them open, pushing my pocket knife between the layers and scraping away the image. I don't think that was the best idea. The chemical powder stuck to the blade. It scratched down onto my sheets.

And there's a sick feeling you get when you're scratching away your own face. We agreed we would scratch ourselves. I don't think I could have handled scratching away someone else's face. I could hardly handle mine. I woke up the next morning feeling quiet. Feeling cursed. I still have one of the photos that we missed, and I'm afraid to throw it away. I get a sick feeling in my stomach when I think about those scratched out pictures and I wish I had all of the pictures still. I would put them up on my wall, all ugly and broken and perverted and squinty-eyed and alive.

I feel weird writing this, I guess, but what if we die and nobody remembers those parts of us? What if all that's left is the censored version?

Joey Comeau

Dear General Electric,

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to sneak past the locked front doors of apartment buildings. There were four apartment buildings in my neighbourhood. One of them was harder than the others to get into, until we figured out that there was an exit in the back of the building and we could just wait out there until someone left and then catch the door. Once we were inside we just wandered the halls the same way we wandered our neighbourhood. We climbed the stairs to the very top, and there was a public balcony on this floor, just like on the others. You could stand and look out over everything.

We bought parachute men to throw from the balcony. They rocked and drifted and we took the elevator down to try and beat them to the ground, only to find them caught in bushes and trees. We bought those styrofoam planes that you have to punch out of the sheet and build, that are printed with designs on one side and are blank white on the other. They flew in spirals down to the ground, or around the side of the building. Once, my plane flew to the building across the street and down the road. It flew straight and slowly. We loved to take the elevator down and walk out the front, coming from behind the locked door, like we lived there, like we had every right.

And then, climbing the back stairs one day, we stopped to unscrew one of the light bulbs. Adrian took the next one, and then I took the next. There was a light bulb on each of
the little landings on the way up the stairs. We climbed to the top, stealing light bulbs the whole way. We climbed and the stairs went dark behind us, as though there was something back there, following us up. We stole bulbs until we were on the balcony in the sun with a shirtful each.

I want to say that we looked first, but maybe not. All I remember for certain is that there were two kinds of bulbs. They weren't all the same. Some were made of white glass and some were clear. We threw bulb after bulb, as fast as we could. There were a half dozen in the air before the explosions started below. We never worried whether it was safe. We lived for the danger. We lived for that crazy sound a light bulb makes when it bursts against pavement. And then we were running as fast as we could down the dark concrete stairs.

I love the feeling of running down stairs. It's an activity the body was made for, something that feels perfect and correct.

Joey Comeau

Dear Danny Carey, of Danny Carey Insurance,

I am writing to apply for the position of life insurance sales agent, and I have included my resume, which details my years of experience, as well as my years of schooling in insurance law.

But my resume doesn't explain what I have to offer the agency on a personal level. What will your customers deal with on a face-to-face basis? Well, I'm someone that they can relate to. I used to be them. I put every cent of my money into investments, into insurance. I devoted my life to planning for the future. I obsessed over what might happen. I needed contingencies. I needed plans B, C, and D.

And there's nothing wrong with that. What's good for you in the short term is often less than acceptable in the long term. Going home with the girl who has been making eyes at you across the bar is fine right now, but in two weeks you might be standing in line at the pharmacy, embarrassed.

This was how I used to think. I spent hours at the library, running risk management statistics on blow jobs. I used to grill girls on their recent sexual history, demand to see STD testing documentation. I was single for a very long time.

I devoted my time to personal forms of life insurance, to eating well, to making careful decisions, never taking risks. And while I was focusing my attention on the short term, on
avoiding clear risks, it didn't occur to me that I was going to die anyway.

It didn't occur to me until a car drove through the front of my house, stopping inches from my head. A hooker stumbled out, a bomb strapped to her stomach, digital clock counting down from five minutes. Lice crawling through her hair as she threatened me with a rusty crowbar that had used needles taped to the end. She tied me down and fucked me without a condom. She wasn't going to leave until I came inside her, she said, and the clock kept counting down. Afterward, when she was climbing back into the car, I asked her if she was on the pill, and she laughed at me. She backed out onto the front lawn and exploded to death. I got a little cut on my face, from glass.

There are no contingency plans for old age. My pitch to your customers will be simple. The door will open and I will say, “You are going to die. Why are you wasting your time haggling? Pick a fucking plan and go climb a tree. Learn a new language. Write a biography of your grandmother, even if she insists that she's never done anything. Go home and tell your wife that you're tired of watching Martha Stewart every fucking night — some nights you just want to watch girls' soccer.”

Joey Comeau

Dear Royal Bank,

I was thrilled to read that you are seeking temporary bilingual administrators, and I am applying for the job. I've included my resume, and I know that once you've taken a look, you will be greatly impressed. But first, let me tell you a little about myself.

I am an Acadian, with strong emotional ties to the French language, but I am not a native speaker. Since my grandfather's death, my grandmother is the only member of my family who speaks our Acadian dialect of the language. She told me that she wanted me to learn French, and I promised. I took classes, five nights a week. I threw myself into my studies for months, and after a while I found that I could hold reasonable conversations in both French and English.

I was bilingual.

By this time, I was studying toward my Master's in Business Administration, at the top of every class. When I learned of the opportunity, I decided to study abroad, finishing my MBA at a French university where I could hone my new skill. I believed that my life was starting to find its track.

On my second day in France, I was knocked to the ground. It was only a Vespa, and the doctors insisted that I wasn't seriously injured, but after the accident I started to notice gaps in my ability to speak French. The French language I
had begun to love was turning back into a hodgepodge of unintelligible sounds.

It was no longer poetry in my ears. It was noise.

My sentences became simpler and simpler. My vocabulary began to narrow. And so I threw myself back into the study of the language. It was no use. If I studied the tenses, my ability to remember the vocabulary would all but vanish. If I studied vocabulary, my ability to conjugate verbs would falter.

I have never been a quitter.

There is a window of time between when I learn the language rules and when I forget them. If I study all weekend, I can function bilingually for all of Monday and well into Tuesday morning. Sometimes into Wednesday, if I spend my lunch hours reviewing. But then it is gone again.

This temporary bilingualism has made it impossible for me to find traditional bilingual work, naturally, because most jobs require the ability to speak the language all week long, not just on Mondays and Tuesdays. It has been a curse to me, but —

Actually, you know what? Fuck it. This is a stupid joke. “Temporary Bilingualism.” I'm sorry. I don't know what to do anymore. I talk to my grandmother on the telephone, and I try to talk French. She's the only one left who speaks
it. She never taught my father, or my aunts and uncles. She knew that you needed English to get work. When I tell her I want to learn Acadian she shakes her head. She says, “It isn't proper French. It's just a patois. You want to learn real French.” But I don't. I want to learn the language of my family. I try to pick up the small differences in Acadian.
“Je sais pas”
instead of
“je ne sais pas.”
It's hard. And she always switches to English.

I don't know how else to hold on.

Yours,

Joseph Comeau

Dear Farmers Dairy,

Some days I feel like all I do is sit around and calculate odds. What are the odds that this chocolate milk carton I left out overnight has drinkable chocolate milk in it?

I used to say, “Life wouldn't be as good without chocolate milk,” and I sort of still believe that. But I don't know if we measure the goodness of life on some ultimate scale, or the good parts against the bad. If there was no chocolate milk, probably fruit punch would pick up the slack. Or maybe nightmares wouldn't seem so bad.

I'm teaching my grandmother to speak Arabic. Here's a language we're both terrible at. I can ask her, where is my fork? You have my fork. Do you have my fork? My name is Joey.

I am teaching her to pick locks. She's a little bewildered by all this attention, I think. I am living in the guest room. I bought some locks so we can practice. Picking locks is surprisingly easy. She learns quick, too, my grandmother. She's so sharp.

This morning she asked me, what next? I told her everything is next. We'll learn to pick pockets next, to hack computers and telephone networks, to disarm someone quickly and efficiently, to seduce anyone and steal their keycards while they sleep, to live on submarines.

We'll wake up every day and we'll tell ourselves, “Live for today, you retarded little shit. The end is near.”

Joey Comeau

the end.

Joey Comeau lives in Toronto. He co-creates a comic called
A Softer World
with Emily Horne, which can be found at www.asofterworld.com. That website is also where you can find links to his other work! For instance, there is a story on there called “One Bloody Thing After Another,” if you like scary stories that are also sort of sad.