Alpha to Omega

This post is dedicated to LingLing and Zydeco Fish, for obvious reasons.

I met Angie while holed up in a suburban house, crazy from the prescription drugs my enlightened physician had insisted would cure me and high on perkocet and hash to dull the crazy. I was there because I was dating one of the losers who lived there. I don’t say loser as a kind of afterthought to ease the pain of a difficult break-up or a betrayal; I say it because it’s the truth and my being pissy about distracting myself for so long with such a loser makes it no less true.

Angie got there by virtue of a boyfriend as well. He worked as a cook at an all-night diner; Angie worked at a gas station. This was Angie’s fourth job that year. It was June. Despite the thick haze of drugs in my blood, which made the world a peaceful and happy place but for the occasional dark-side freak-out, I began to suspect that things were not right when Angie came home from the gas station one day with what she called her “tips”.

“Who tipped you, Angie?”
“Ha ha—I raided the box on the counter”

How noble. Especially when you consider that the jar was for a missing children’s charity and she had one of her own. This was a fact that she would often use to garner sympathy. You see, her child had been adopted, though she would often pretend that the adoption had not been her choice. She would further exacerbate the lie by proclaiming that the adoptive parents were “total pricks” to her and wouldn’t let her see her child, despite the open adoption agreement. Then she would pull out pictures of the child and explain that she had had to “hide in the bushes” to get the picture, even though they had obviously been posed.

The association with Angie and babies didn’t stop there. Angie was one of those women whose ability to reproduce became a fundamental part of her identity. Babies. Marriage. These were the words associated with her bizarre ideal of perfection. These things would make everything okay. And whenever she fought with her boyfriend, we all had to be reminded of these this.

“I don’t know how to work it out. We fight all the time.”
“Maybe you should spend some time apart”
“I really think a baby would bring us closer together. I think I’m ready to have one again. I’ve been very tempted to skip some pills.”

Unfortunately, even if babies and marriage were the keys to happiness, they would never exist in Angie’s world without the harmonious accompaniment of alcohol, drugs and general sluttery.

“My doctor told me when I was pregnant that I shouldn’t quit smoking.”
“What?”
“Yeah, if I quit in the middle of the pregnancy, the baby could have withdrawls. He said the same thing about pot too. So, as long as you’re doing it when you get pregnant, you don’t have to stop.”
Unless you aren’t a selfish cunt and you actually give a fuck about your child’s well-being. But, you know, you don’t have to.

And of course, the sluttery:

“John doesn’t really treat me right, I think I might have to cheat on him just to get him to understand that.”
“uh…”
“There’s this guy who comes into the gas station all the time…”

And finally, my favourite; Angie loved to avoid responsibility:

“I can basically do whatever I want. I mean, if someone fucks with me, I can pretty much kick the shit out of them or kill them or whatever and not be convicted. It’s because they did tests on me and I’m legally insane.”