Larissa Shmailo

Interview

My autobiography will read: I am hired. But no: I am still here, in this little office, where the fluorescent light surrounds me like cloacal fluid. The personnel manager’s eyes are dark and dilated, without visible irises, whether from the peculiar quanta of the overhead light or the cocaine of my need, I don’t know.

She is self-satisfied and content now, self-consciously busy, and she preens herself with papers on her desk. She is almost ready to talk to me. I wait like a dog who has not been walked for a long time.

Finally, she turns her attention to me. Why do you want this job? she asks.

I'm desperate, I reply. My unemployment checks ran out two weeks ago and I have no money. I've been on unemployment a lot these last few years and I have no reserves; in all senses of the word, I have no reserves left. You see, I have a manic-depressive illness, a very severe one, not just a few moodswings here or there, or a common cold-type depression, but grand mal mania with delusions, and I've lost a lot of jobs. I don't get fired per se—they just eliminate my position and this way, they don’t get sued. But I did sue one place, not for firing me because I was a manic-depressive, but because I was a manic-depressive. Is there a difference? I don’t know.

I got unemployment that time, and then again when I danced over where the AIDS orphans were buried. I was coming late because I had to dervish over their corpses, the corpses of unburied dead. I was dancing to mark the spot. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps, they would see and understand, but they fired me. I was coming late a lot. They eliminated my position—they were glad to give me unemployment. Really, they would have done a lot more just to be rid of me.

I take medication now. It makes me slow, but I can still do this work. Not with any enthusiasm—I am no longer sharp. I'm burnt out as you can imagine from so many illnesses. Sometimes my thinking is fuzzy, and I simply don’t have the fire any more. I used to be quite good, quite an overachiever. I worked long hours and slaved to make everything perfect. Now, I just rewrite the old. It’s all old.

With supervision, I know I will be okay. I'm hoping for a boss who is indecisive and a little lazy, and if we can pass letters back and forth for endless time-consuming corrections, it wouldn’t bother me at all. That would be just fine. Bureaucracy and indecision used to bother me, I worried about my brilliant career and how the slowness and incompetence and stupidity of my boss would hold me back, but then I became a poet and didn’t give a shit anymore. I once cared passionately about poetry, too, but now I don’t worry about that much, either. I just want a paycheck and a place to go during the day so I don’t crawl into bed and piss on the sheets.

You know, a job like this one wasn’t good enough for me once, but now this really is the best I can do. I would be delighted if I got this job. If I could do it. If I could show up. If I don’t just crawl back into bed. But you see I live entirely on the charity of my mother. The alimony runs out soon. I was always so confident, confident in my ability to take care of myself, to come back from any disaster. That's gone now, you understand, completely, utterly gone ... I used to think I could change the world; now, I don’t think I can change my sheets ...

But I'm pretty sure I can still do this job, as long as I don't have to create anything. If I can copy a template, I know I’ll do fine. I was once creative; I was a bright, no, brilliant kid, but I drank a lot, spent a lot of time on psych wards, and it started to catch up with me. There’s only so many times you can get really manic before the permanent damage sets in. Anyway, my psychiatrist says I need some structure, and I agree, and a job would really help.

Does that answer your question? You know, your pupils are so dilated. It’s an interview, a two-way street. Have you seen into me? I can't see into you. Maybe you're a manic-depressive, too. Maybe you rush out from here every day to the office of a waiting shrink to weep and scream your despair, to say, I can't go on, it hurts too much ...

I see your irises now, blue like mine, and know you have lived without sickness and without despair, and your normal life of normal frustrations and no huge events looks at me without a trace of pity. This interview and our interaction is the worst thing that will happen to you this month I know you've had your troubles, too. It’s just that I have to come back from a place that doesn't even exist to sit here today, and I'm so tired I could just die. If I could do it, I would, but I’m afraid to jump and the pills just don’t work. I know, I've tried a dozen times.

If this were the thirties, you would give me a break. Back then, no one pretended that things were just fine. People liked homeless people, called them hoboes, gave them jobs. I gave my diamond engagement ring to a homeless man last year, I gave all my clothes away to the poor, because I was confident back then. Do you know what I would do for one ounce of confidence today?

I stopped and the fluorescence ate my words. The papers on her desk absorbed the sounds, and around me like sewage my cheerful interview-self returned, and I answered the other questions as anybody would, and she pretended that she hadn’t heard a word of what I had said.

Fitness

The definition of fitness in genetics is to reproduce successfully. I have no genetic fitness. I did once: my genetic material was carried by my sister’s daughter, my godchild and niece, Irene, whom I raised and let down. She committed suicide at the age of 35. She was a psychiatrist who knew pharmacology well and a determined individual who said that if she were to kill herself, she would do it so that no one would know. And, so she did.

As a young woman, I seemed to want to get pregnant pretty badly. I had many boyfriends and did not use birth control. Mentally ill and quite alcoholic, I had three abortions, two by a kind brilliant father and one by either of two men, a pockmarked writer or a mediocre bassist. It never occurred to me to tell the kind brilliant father, with whom I had a long-term relationship, about the pregnancies; my mother said he would not want to know and I accepted that. It turned out she was right.

I had a complete nervous breakdown at the time of my third abortion, with a vivid hallucination of a brown, curly-headed fetus, the subject of my poem “Abortion Hallucination”:

Abortion Hallucination

A vision   of a snake   with glowing red eyes  
formed by the light of     garbage trucks and    screeching   new cars  
driven by men   who had once    bought me dinner  
then hated me when I didn’t want to fuck them twice.
 
Carlight   passing late at night   on a street   of an   ugly
precinct   lying   deceiving   the unwary who think it leads home
 
It is late so dark it is almost light   that time of night when
the light hits the metal and the glass of summer windows left ajar
make me want something   someone   I don’t know who
 
The metal gate to the yard refracts this message via Queens boys who
drive too fast too late at night      refracts this message to the window   where
I watch from the couch
 
In the corner of the basement where my father used to lie I
 
Watch, interested, as the snake
grows larger and more menacing    I am
taken slightly aback but remember him    remember that I like
handling snakes    and smile
and as always he softens   grows smaller
becomes a hippopotamus   I have won again   I have stared him down
made him warm
and the Nile gives up its life to me
animals carnivorous and calm   come home to me
two by two
 
I watch for the longest time
until the largest fills the window with his face
black as light
Agnus Dei
 
for this man’s baby for    this man’s    baby for this man’s baby
came the flood.

I contented myself with being my niece’s crazy aunt, and she idolized me as a child. Later, as she saw my feet of clay, the hero worship ended and she became more distant, going about med school and being married and becoming rich. Around then, in my thirties, sober and functioning on a successful med combo, I saw I might have the chance not to totally wreck a poor child’s life. I had an intense desire to have a child. The problem was that I would need to come off my teratogenic medications. I tried: I was stark raving mad for three years until I finally gave up the idea.

I became more committed and involved as a poet and sublimated my reproductive instincts. And there was still my niece, brilliant and successful. Until the call in the middle of the night in October sixteen years ago from my sister: “Lora, Irene is dead.” Dead. I was sober and I couldn’t smoke, but my sister and I hit every IHOPS in the suburbs of San Francisco, eating ourselves into a coma during the funeral and the wake. I gained 50 pounds that autumn.

My pen doesn’t flow for Irene—the ink drips slowly and meagerly, like clotted blood. I am aware that I am not her mother and don’t have a mother’s right to grieve. But I can still feel her tiny hands pulling on the hairs of my arms as I cradled her infant form to sleep, can remember baptizing her, remember telling her the plot of Hamlet when she was five, watching her read all of Dickens (why Dickens?), hearing her call out “help me, Mama!” during a brutal depression, seeing the cut marks on her teenaged wrists.

Aerial View of the Rockies

The gods like to trace their fingers in the world;
like leaves from a primordial tree, landforms
bare their veins. Clever of her to suicide this way
leaving no one but me to know. Impassive as
the dead face she wanted no one to see, clouds
hide rigor in the lines, purposeful or not, below.
In winter, sunrise looks like sunset in this distant
land, soon to be nearer, nearer, soon.

Near the end of her life, my mother, given to bursts of anger, carefully prepared and delivered a measured speech to me and my sister, to each of us separately. She quietly and sincerely stated that if she had it to do over, she would not have had children. It was important to her that her daughters know this. I thought for a moment that perhaps she was consoling me for my childlessness, but that would have been another woman, not my Mama.

I have no nuclear family now—Mama, Papa, my sister Tamara, and my niece and godchild Irene are dead. I quickly sold the family home last year, but am haunted by it in my dreams. And I have no fitness, no genetic material except my cousins’ daughters, bright, pretty, too distant for me to care. I have buried everyone, and have no one to bury me; I counted on Irene for that, and she would have done me proud. But I suppose when the time comes, I won’t be in the condition to mind.

Madwoman

Here I am again walking among these vague and tepid people they evoke a slight feeling of distaste in me they smell my pain they have no idea I just hold my phone the cellular phone I use for a disguise and I talk, talk to the ultimate answering service I walk and I talk to God

When you died I ripped the electrodes out of my skull and ran away from the land of cables and TV sets great battles of television were fought here great battles were lost Soho is no different from uptown or downtown it’s all money and talking and bars sex and cars job job job so I went to see the trees

The trees were luminous the leaves forming patterns of light on the ground and as the light played on my hair and my cheeks I realized that no one ever dies they just become trees even Marilyn Monroe was alive in a leaf I saw for an instant your face all acquiver in the shaking of a fern in the light of the wind and I kissed the trees so I knew you were not dead not really you would not be so cruel as to die really die

Under the West Side Highway I met all the men who lived there and one girl she was 22 and pregnant and had AIDS I didn't stay long but I stayed long enough under the West Side Highway I slept with Jesus in a cap talked madman Spanish with Tito and the dirty apostles knew there would always be enough loaves and fishes for me knew that no matter how hard it got I would always be safe and held near close to God it was my destiny to be greatly loved

I chose then to be close to God to throw away my clothing and be close to God there were times when not even a shirt came between me and God

Under the West Side Highway I spoke to Jesus his face always changing now Alex who lived in a tent near the wall now Panama drinking wine now Juan in his tin and cardboard hut

You followed me watched me you were worried how would I get home and back to the life I had known and I said look who's talking you died after all it's hardly for you to criticize me if I go off the beaten path a little too

And as for the others they worried too unknown to them the protection that I had and had always had I said to them all don't worry I will love you pray you home look can't you see….I am your guardian angel and you thought I was just homeless and mad as though God hadn't made the whole world just for me

Well now I am cured I go to the bank I take pills I sit in restaurants have a job I worry about money and whether my new boyfriend has AIDs we don't even have sex he's too busy with his job it's just as well none of these men have anything that would compel you or keep you through the night its just banging bones after all

You see very few men have souls and very few men have courage the few who have the courage to follow their souls are mostly all dead lost in leaves people kill them you know I don't know any more I take pills and talk into the cellular phone sometimes I think I hear your voice sometimes I think I hear you and then no it’s just the pills I get a hum in my ear its not you I know you are not dead but you're not here either and I miss you

I am cured so they say but you can't really ever take the gift of madness away once you have been stripped by God of everything clothing family freedom senses you are his for life and I was stripped oh yes dear lord of everything every last thing God took everything leaving only my soul but I found that was enough

And you you people think you have things but really the next breath you take is the only thing you have so how different are you from me

Look at us again we the homeless and see us for who we are the archangels of God

You can not take the gift of madness away I will always know about trees will always see the arch of my lover's neck in the patterns of their light I will know that the patch of sky between the birch tree and the willow is him his azure face and I will always hear the voice of God wherever I go no pill can block him out no TV set can drown his voice no fool can block the face of God from me

Look at me madwoman I am Magdalene I am Joan of Arc I am St. Marilyn Monroe and I will always be your angel baby I will always be your saint pray to me.