Mallory's Camera

Nine hours of light. Sun rises at 7:12am and sets at 4:25pm.

Doesn't help that I spend most of those hours in the world's ugliest office. By the time I leave to go home, it's pitch black.

Exercise has always been what's saved me in the past when full spectrum sunlight is scarce. But I don't have much interest in exercising in the dark.

I suppose I could join a gym. But I hate gyms.

All I really want to do is sleep and veg. And star in a remake of Old Yeller because at any time of the night or day this time of year, it only takes me about five seconds to burst into tears. (The futility of life. The frustrating interface of iTunes 11. The poor little doggies and kitties without homes. Etcetera.)

Honestly, I don't see how people who live in the northern-most reaches of Scandinavia and Japan where winter sun may shine for as little as five hours a day manage to cope. Presumably, they eat a lot of fish, high in Vitamin D, DHA and other omega fatty acids. I'm trying to see this in terms of the extremely white skin of the homogeneous Scandinavians – is it some kind of genetic mutation selected for because white skin absorbs what little sunlight there is more efficiently? Perhaps all the dark-skinned Vikings threw themselves into the fjords during basic Rape and Plunder training. But surely melatonin is what allows people to harvest available sunlight most efficiently for Vitamin D production. Melatonin is what they prescribe for people suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder, after all.

It seems to be worse this year than how I remember it being in the past.

Framing it as a test of willpower – You vill finish baking Christmas cookies to send to ze troops back home! -- doesn't seem to be working at all.

###

At least I've managed to frame the opening scenes of my fictional foray into Huguette Clark-land. Ybel and Christopher work at the Buttercup Bakery together. She's a waitress; he's a line cook. They smoke cigarettes together, grow friendly, start doing psychedelic drugs together and eventually Ybel invites him back to the seedy North Oakland apartment to play with her toys. (Shades of Roberta.) She has managed to rescue her old dollhouse from the ruins of her childhood, and they act out a scene where a doll leaps from the dollhouse parapets just before Christopher jumps out her window. Thus the incidental action supports the basic theme of the novel.

Interesting factoids about the Buttercup Bakery:

• Suze Orman worked as a waitress there for many years when her finances were just as messy as yours and mine, before she became a famous Money Guru.

• I worked there as a waitress too. Very briefly. If I was introduced to Suze Orman, I don't remember her.

• I generally parked my car in the Bank of America parking lot across the street from the Buttercup. The parking lot abutted a building that had once been owned by Marybeth's grandfather, the one who founded the Plumbing Dynasty. Susan's brother Steve lived in that building when I was first going out with him. Steve is one of the regrets with which I line my pillow.

One night, very late, I was leaving the Buttercup, my purse slung over my shoulder by a long strap, when a kid materialized from the parking lot shadows and tried to snatch it. I was studying Tai Kwan Do in those days. I landed a roundhouse kick to the kid's face and heard a crunch as I broke his nose.

The kid fell in a dazed heap.

"Are you all right?" I asked the kid, and he began to cry.

For a minute I thought about calling an ambulance. Or possibly auditioning for a remake of Old Yeller.

Then I thought better of it, got in my car and drove off.

One afternoon last spring I went into my bedroom and closed the door. Sat down on the bed. I thought I was going to cry. Instead when I opened my mouth, I surprised myself.

I screamed.

It had been some seventeen years ago since I’d last screamed. Then as that afternoon the noise issuing from my throat was more of a bleat than the robust shrieks Jamie Lee Curtis might make fleeing from Michael Meyers.

Seventeen years ago I was living in Sacramento after landing a relatively high-paying sinecure with the Department of Developmental Services. The problem with the job was that I had absolutely to do, quite literally – they’d only hired me because not to hire someone meant the Department would have to give back part of its budget. So all day long I sat in a cubicle in front of a computer and did nothing. Eight hours a day. Nothing. The ninth hour was lunch.

This was before Bill Hare moved to southern California. We followed Solomon’s suggestion, splitting Max right down the middle. Two weeks a month I was Max’s custodial parent. I didn’t really do right by him. I’d had to stick him in a horrible, assembly line daycare because the rules of the sinecure were such that I had to clock in every day at 8am and I couldn’t leave until 5pm, and this daycare was the only place that opened its doors at 7:30am. I felt horribly guilty.

I also had Beasters the Dog who required walking three times a day. I’d worked out a schedule: I walked her once in the morning around 6am before I woke up Max; I hurried back to the anono-apartment during my lunch breaks, walked her again; then I walked her one last time at night after I read Max to sleep. Of course leaving Max alone in the apartment while I walked Beasters the Dog made me feel even more like the World’s Worst Mother, but what was I supposed to do? I’d already tried to give Beasters away – to Lisa Ronay, my next-door neighbor on San Lorenzo street. Lisa had promptly returned her, saying, “She lies there all day, staring at me. I’m sorry but I just can’t stand it. She’s baleful.”

The bottom line was that I’d had Beasters longer than I’d had Max. I felt a sense of obligation.

So there I was walking Beasters one night. The temperature that day had been up over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and it was still very warm. I was wearing a sleeveless, buttercup yellow silk blouse – a color I’ve never worn since – and I looked good, my arms still toned from all those years of Tai Kwon Do pre-Max. I may have been miserable, but I looked good. I told myself it was some consolation.

And then I noticed a car had started trailing me. I caught a glimpse of sunglasses above the steering wheel. Sunglasses? At ten o’clock at night? My heart began to beat faster. I looked around nervously: the streets were absolutely deserted. You’re imagining things, one part of my mind told me while the other warned, this is how it happens… I picked up my pace.

The car stopped. A heavy-set bearded guy got out of it, walking towards me. He said something and it was as though he was talking underwater, syllables unnaturally deep and prolonged. (Years later I read an essay by Malcolm Gladwell on adrenalin’s effects on the perception of time. Apparently the fight/flight response appears to slow everything down.)

He grabbed my shoulder, tried to pull me towards the car. But what about Max? I thought. If Max wakes up and I’m not there he’s going to be very, very frightened. I was already the World’s Worst Mother, I didn’t want to be the Afterlife’s Worst Mother too.

So I opened my mouth and I tried to scream. Except what came out of my mouth was this wimpy noise, raspy, broken, passive, as though I couldn’t protest what was happening to me because I suspected I deserved it.

It was enough though. A porch light flickered, a window opened. The man ran back towards his car.

(Beasters, I am sorry to say, had taken one look at the guy and fled with her tail between her legs. I never forgave her for that and she lived out the subsequent eleven years of her life under the black cloud of my disapprobation.)

My screaming skills hadn’t improved any in the ensuing seventeen years but they were enough to alarm Robin who came running into the room. “What’s wrong? Why are you screaming?”

I looked at him, opened my mouth and screamed some more.

“Stop it, Mom. Stop it! You’re scaring me!”

And he burst into tears.

Of course Robin’s behavior was a major reason why I felt the need to scream. Robin, exhaustion, over-work, the complete lack of anybody who cared for me enough to say, “I’m so sorry this is happening to you.”

I realized, though, that I was on the verge of going seriously crazy. Sane people have freedom, crazy people have license. If you exercise your freedom to do crazy things, then other people redefine you.

I mention this because for the last two weeks I’ve been fighting the impulse to start screaming again. Scream first, kill myself next. It’s taken every inch of mental strength I have not to give in.

###

On Christmas Eve I took pity on the dogs and decided to take them to the beach. The sump pump went out on the red Veedub two weeks ago so I’ve been driving the van. The van’s registration expired seven months ago; the reason I haven’t renewed it is because, believe it or not, $70 represents a significant sum of money to me.

So anyway there I was driving down Franklin street in this utterly dilapidated piece-of-shit when I see the flashing lights of a police car behind me. Oh shit, I think.

The guy who pulls me over is a little older than the typical rookie cop. Second choice, I think to myself. Something he liked much better didn’t work out for him.

I’m appropriately penitent about the expired registration. Fix-it ticket, I think. A drag but something I could deal with.

He spends about 20 minutes dealing with the license check and I see that he’s talking to another cop, a heavy-set Hispanic. When he comes back over, he says, “I need you to come over to the back of the vehicle, ma’am. I need to show you something.”

At the back of the van he says, “Your vehicle registration expired over six months ago. We’re going to have to impound the vehicle.”

“But it’s Christmas Eve,” I say. “Can’t you give me a break? I’ll drive it straight home – we’re only four blocks away. I swear I’ll register it first thing Friday morning –“

“It’s the law, ma’am.”

“But it’s gonna cost $400 to get the van back. Four hundred bucks that I don’t have! I mean, I’m so broke I couldn’t even pay my house rent this month. Please, I’m begging you. Take pity on me. It’s Christmas Eve!”

“It won’t cost that much,” says the Hispanic cop. He’s evidently the trainer.

“Please!” I say. Crying won’t hack it with these guys, I’m too old and ugly. Appeals to their Nazi-like absolute power, maybe? So I start sinking down on my knees in front of the Hispanic guy. Fuck dignity. Dignity’s not a bargaining chip in situations like this.

“Ma’am, ma’am, get up please,” says the Hispanic. He doesn’t seem particularly embarrassed. Maybe he just thinks I’m crazy. And through the mental fog and anguish, an alarm goes off – the last thing you want is for someone to 5150 you. However bad you think things are now, you sink to a whole new circle of hell if that happens.

I get up. “Please,” I beg the Hispanic cop. “Have a heart. It’s Christmas Eve.”

The Hispanic exchanges glances with the rookie. “Ma’am, it’s my decision, not his,” the rookie says. “And the law is the law.”

Bullshit, I think. Cops have almost unlimited discretion over what they choose to notice and what they choose to ignore. But now was not a good time to argue the finer points of criminology.

I gave up. Listened dully to their instructions. Thought: another reason to hate fucking Christmas. Thought: things can’t possibly get any worst. But immediately retracted the thought – God, I didn’t really mean that – because every time you think that it’s like daring the Universe. And the Universe retaliates. And things do get worse.