how I drink!
I have a gun, mati , a lady pistol made of chrome and steel. I stole it from someone’s bedroom, from underneath their leopard-patterned pillow covered with dandruff, at a Halloween party last year. I was Pinhead from the Ramones song. I keep the gun hidden in my book-shelf,right behind the complete Mayakovsky, wrapped up in a rag. Eric doesn’t know. There are bullets in it, six of them, but only the first one matters, right? I’m sorry I’m so much like you in this respect.
In what way am I like my father? Sense of humor? Ability to turn off the outside world? In what way, mati ?
I love a girl. Melissa. Her hair oozes like honey. It’s orange in the sun. She loves me, mati . She’s American. She goes to church. She wears a cross right where her freckles disappear into her cleavage. She volunteers. She takes forty minutes to scramble eggs over really low heat, but when they’re done they explode in your mouth like fireworks, bursts of fatty yolk and coarse salt and cracked pepper and sharp melted cheddar and something called thyme. She’s sharp. She drives like a lunatic. She’s capable of both warmth and coldness, and just hanging around her to see what it will be that day is worth it.
I don’t miss home, mati . I’m there all the time. In the past. In fiction.
Excerpts from Ismet Prci’s Diary
from January 1999
More things I can’t tell you, mati :
I asked Melissa to marry me. Not now, obviously. Sometime in the future. Her friends hate me for it. They think she’s too young, that she’s supposed to go wild and crazy now, guzzle beer, experiment. That I’m too old and serious, that I drink too much, eat too much mayo. If they only knew .
I’m turning American, mati . I don’t go by Ismet any longer. Eric gave me a new name, a rock ’n’ roll name. Izzy. He has been schooling me in the ways of American culture, helping me assimilate. He’s a living encyclopedia and he knows what books I need to read, what TV shows I have to see, what albums I need to know by heart. The night I turned twenty-one, at midnight, we jumped the apartment complex wall, trudged through some abandoned compounds all the way down to Thousand Oaks Boulevard to a 7-Eleven there. I put a six-pack of Becks on the counter and the clerk didn’t even notice it was my birthday, didn’t say anything. He just swiped my driver’s license through a machine and told me the total. Eric and I went back home, lit some fat candles, and he played Tom Waits for me, mademe follow along with the lyrics on the record’s inner sleeve. It was then, mati, that love was born in Izzy for America, for its sadness and madness, for its naïveté and wisdom, for its vastness, its innumerable nooks where a person can disappear.
I look at Eric. He loves his girlfriend, his record collection, our giant couch. He hates his work, driving this vet around the Valley so that he can look at X-rays, but he bears it, makes it work. While waiting for his boss in clinic parking lots, he rocks out or writes or reads, smokes like a chimney (alternating between regulars and menthols), and warms up his lunch sandwich on the hood of the van. He loves his projects, making mixed CDs, putting together seemingly clashing artists into a unique and unified whole. He’s obsessed with Faulkner and has created a map of Faulkner’s imaginary county and a bunch of family trees of his characters, trying to look at all that fiction and make it as real as possible. He loves his TV and records almost everything on VHS tapes of which our storage room above the parking space is full. He loves his family and they talk on the phone every day; he swings by their place all the time. We hang out at night looking for boobs on cable and every time he goes out on the balcony to smoke or to the bathroom to take a whiz I yell, “BRIEF NUDITY!” and he scrambles into our living room to see.
I live this kind of life, this day-to-day, too, but you haunt me, mati . I have two