In Jamaica, speed bumps are called sleeping policemen, which I always kind of liked—the image of a guy with a round, smiling face and a starched white uniform, lying back with the brim of his hat pulled down over his eyes. Gingerly rolling over him at two miles an hour, careful not to disturb him. Delicately: b-bump b-bump.
Over that spring, summer, and fall, on the road to a better life, I rolled over quite a few speed bumps. But not gingerly at two miles an hour. Nope. I was waving and screaming, “Outta the way! Outta the way!” doing eighty-five in a rickety tub of shit with bolts and hubcaps flying off, drink spilling, ass bouncing off the seat, head smacking the roof. Flattening the motherfucker. SQUISH! Nice white suit all red, buttons popped off, surprised look on his jolly Jamaican face. Just a few speed bumps on Multiple Road, that’s all. Don't worry ... be happy.
No, I didn’t get cut, and my hand didn’t get smashed again.
Leif stopped pushing me with such ferocity. We all took time to write in the journal, and everyone got a chance to come out in the morning after Kyle went to school. We even got a twoyear-old Golden Retriever, named Baylie, from the Golden Retriever Rescue Foundation. I started running four miles a day with him and taking him for hikes at Diablo. On the surface things looked pretty good.
Well, the part about the running and hiking was good. I was lean and fit. And having Baylie was great. He didn’t care if I was a nut. I was the guy who saved him from a life of eating scraps in a dark garage. Baylie was doing great compared to me.
Nobody’d saved me. Nobody was feeding me grapes in the garden. Although alters were allowed out, it didn’t make me happy. It was an annoyance, slowed me down. What business did they have coming around while I was the one still scratching my way through school? I started pushing them down again little by little, breathing fire, moosing that boulder, inch by inch, course by course, up Ph.D. hill. I was getting near the top, too, which was good. But I was starting to worry about what would happen when I got there.
Janna knew, Rikki knew—and I knew, too—that becoming Dr. West wouldn’t make me feel a damn bit better about myself than I did being Citizen West. Citizen West, Citizen Kane, sugar cane, Sugar Ray Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Robinson miso, miso soup, black bean soup, black sticky soup, black sticky me. Yeah. Inside I was still a fetid and festering corpse covered in sticky blackness, still mired in putrid shame and scorching self-hatred. I could write an 86-page essay comparing the features of Borderline Personality Disorder with those of Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I barely knew what day it was, or even what month, never knew where the car was parked when Dusty would come out of the grocery store, couldn’t look in the mirror for fear of what—or whom—I’d see.
Rikki, Kyle, and I took some family vacations, including a trip to Disneyland and one to the San Diego Zoo, and I gave my best effort each time, but things never worked out too well. Anna and Trudi and Clay and Wyatt and Mozart kept coming out, and Kyle kept getting nervous and saying, “Mom, Dad’s ‘out’ again,” and, “Cam, come back,” and Rikki would explain to him that it was just the crowds and the commotion, and she’d nudge me and say, “Cam!” with a steely look in her eye that worked until the next time I switched.
Rikki still saw Andy, although with less frequency, which was a gleaming gift from a sparkly angel. We didn’t talk about it—that ice was too thin already—we just skated along. And as far as sex, well, it wasn’t mangoes in Maui. It was more like mukluks in Minsk. That didn’t help my self-esteem any more than needing Kyle to go through the checkout line at the video store because I couldn’t figure out the money, or having a clerk and a line of people behind me stare while Clay tried for two minutes to sign my name to a check.
Every session at Janna’s was forty minutes of wrinkling and ten minutes of ironing; either I was too wrinkled or she wasn’t hot enough. I was a shirt that just wouldn’t stay pressed. It was The Rake.
I started getting banged off light poles and mailboxes while Baylie and I were running, as if I’d been blasted by a big gust of wind, but it wasn’t windy and it wasn’t Baylie doing the banging. Behind the wheel, my hand was twitchy and my foot was too heavy; overpasses filled my sight and undertakers filled my mind. I needed a “brake” and I needed it bad.
We had serious trouble right here in River City. And that ends with Y and that rhymes with die and that stands for dead.