The Joys Of Getting Your Shoelace Stuck In An Escalator ( A Memoir, Unabridged and Extended Cut)
It's not an easy task to walk. It wasn't an easy thing either when my mom walked out on the rest of the family when I was 27 months old - just over 2 years as a matter of fact. But I couldn't even stride to the door after her, so what's the point in using years? Yes, I did learn to walk eventually but it's not like I remember any of it.. or her. I was 27 after all, there's no reason for me to be ashamed of missing my mom.
What I learned from growing up with two brothers and a single father, whom faced constant unemployment due to one of the brothers having autism as a handicap so no one and their mother would consider a modest babysitting rate, and whilst having to deal with ungrateful relatives who never seemed to be available after all the hard work my dad had done on both the interior and exterior of their god-damned house . . . was two things:
- Never rely on anyone but yourself (so you don't have to be disappointed when your sister and/or cousin won't return your calls to take care of your kids until 9.)
- Don't waste time (so your mom doesn't leave you at 27.)
It's not an easy task to be a single parent. On the other hand, being the child of a single parent is pretty great. You get to stay at home with no parental supervision once you're at the arbitrary age of "Don't do anything stupid, and take care of your brother." It's very freeing because I don't have to worry someone's going to walk in while I'm crying, or while I'm masturbating (he has food and the stove's off, so don't judge). Although, when I was doing neither of those things, I was occupied in thinking of a way to make money.
One of the greatest revelations that ever occurred to me was that money solves all your problems. Would it ever help me get a clean orgasm? Probably not, but that's a disappointment I can live with. What it "can" do is solve my two rules. Being rich, you never have to rely on anyone else because you can just take anything you want from them (well not love, but it's over-rated), and no one can ever say that making money is a waste of one's time. Therefore, if I could find a way to make all the money that I would ever want, then my life would be perfect.
My earliest and insanely-lucrative exploit involved buying a 12-pack of Coca-Cola and walking around the trailer park selling individual cans at a dollar a can. I had to walk two miles down to the gas station to buy the cans, but I only a pack a day and I only had to pay 6 dollars there! On a daily basis, all I had to do was walk four miles for the cans, another two miles to sell the cans, that would take around 8 hours of the day, and I would have 6 dollars left over (such wow). If I could have told myself then I was making 0.75 dollars an hour, then maybe I wouldn't have done it for as long as I did, which was an entire fucking summer.
I got a lot of attention from the other kids the next school year because apparently I had lost over 50 pounds from walking around all summer, so naturally I betrayed myself and spent an entire school year just wasting time with friends. Listen, things have changed; I wasn't the chubby 13-year old kid who masturbated in his room all day anymore. I was now the slightly overweight, 13-year old kid who masturbated in the shower (no one walks in on you and it saves so much time, why didn't I think of this sooner?), who also wasn't a pariah at school. Seriously, who would have thought that if you weren't staring at the floor when you were walking, there were people right in front of you who want to wave at you and say "Hello!" when you're walking by? Despite my incredibly sarcastic tone, I had not experienced previously how easy it was to have friends. You can just walk up to someone and complement them on something nice they have like shoes . . . or two parents.
Fast-forward to when I was 15 and in high school, and suddenly I have to re-visit my money-making schemes again. But it wasn't for Runescape membership or gem-studded pencil holders this time. I had to rent a tux for dress attire in the school choir (because that's what cool kids did when I was 15, believe me) and my dad was too stingy to put up a measly 25 dollars. Well, I'm the son of a single parent, aren't I? I'm resourceful, with a lot of perseverance, so that means I can get those 25 dollars myself!
"Not like this...", I told myself as I walked away after selling every Pokemon game I had. Afterwards, the sight of my DS Lite with no game attached was just too hard to bear, and so I sold that too (it was also just paperweight at that point.) However, once I overcame (repressed) my emotions over the lost games, I was already on my way to put that money to good use. Interestingly enough, I didn't go right ahead and rent the tux; instead, I had arranged for one of my acquaintances at my church to buy me a couple of boxes of M & M's in bulk - 52 wrappers in each box that I could sell for a dollar. He had a Sam's Club membership and was more than happy to run that errand for me out of kindness (what a loser). So now, the plan was to go around and sell these wrappers and have some money left over to buy more boxes of M & M's in order to have a self-sustaining business. That was the idea, but in the end I barely had enough money to rent the tux. Now here's why.
See, one of my brothers happened to have been hooked on marijuana at the time, so he was pretty much selling anything he could get his hands on. I'm not sure whether he stole my business idea or just flat-out ate my merchandise; all I know is that once my inventory started disappearing it was safe to assume that "under my bed" wasn't a good spot to keep something away from an older brother. This incident was rather irksome because these chocolates were the last shred of my ownership of those Pokemon games, and in turn my brother was theoretically eating my Pokemon games (my head is still throbbing as I write this). There was little I could do about it though except try to salvage the last of my chocolates and try to sell faster, which meant walk more miles every day. Some of you might be wondering why I don't just put up a fight with my older brother, and the answer to that is when it comes to brains, I got the lion's share but when it comes to brute of strength, I'm afraid I'm at the shallow end of the gene pool. On a separate note, I can recite every line of "The Lion King" by heart and have memorized dozens of trivia facts - I can even list the cast in alphabetical and order of appearance.
Fast forward to my senior year of high school, and it seemed that, compared to when I was just a freshman, my goals and aspirations were no longer surrounded in ambiguity, but had manifested into a set of concrete blocks that no one has the fucking time to work with. I had college applications, college courses, honors society, student advisory council, choir practice, and the one activity that I was very proud of but would often grind my gears; I was the CEO of a company.
Well, not actually a company. It was a school-based program called Virtual Enterprise where high school students can learn the basic operations of running a company. Every company is expected to handle paperwork such as loan applications, office leases, payroll and the biggest assignment of them all, a business presentation which required hours and hours of work after office hours (whichever class period you would have Virtual Enterprise was referred to as the "Office Hours"). Me, being the plucky and witty person that I am, somehow weaseled my way to the front of the pack and became the CEO for the year. If I had known what hell-hole I had just walked in to, I would have immediately resigned and let some other unlucky fellow take the position, but we can't learn if we don't make mistakes.
However, one very shiny gold nugget came out of my experience with Virtual Enterprise; a 3-day trip to San Francisco. They paid for all travelling and lodging expenses, so we only had to pay for food and I was excited because I've never left the east coast before. It took a long while to get ready, and coaxing all of my teachers to let me miss 4 days of school, but the week arrived and we finally touched down - relieved that there was solid ground under all that smog. We weren't there for just sight-seeing though, it was first and foremost a business trip my company. The We had entered several competitions from animation and commercial design, to a 1 - minute "elevator pitch" competition. It was a gruesome day, filled with a lot of waiting on our company's results, but we somehow made it out okay with decent scores and no one felt bad afterwards (except me because I'm always hard on myself). Finally we were all ready for some sight-seeing.
First it was Alcatraz, then it was the Golden Gate Bridge, then it was China Town, and somewhere in between Lombard Street and trollies. I wasn't as immersed in the whole experience as the others from my company had been. Sure, we weren't last place in any of the competition but we weren't first either. Is this what I'm going to expect from myself in the future? I don't feel comfortable with mediocrity and I don't think I ever will. Why should I lower myself to these expectations so soon? Also, I was still torn on which college to go to. I was offered admission at Baruch College - the most selective public college in New York City - but I also wanted to try my luck outside of the city at the University at Albany. Baruch is so business-minded, and while I did enjoy my experience in Virtual Enterprise with the weekly fuck-ups and desperately number-crunching in the office until midnight, everything just seemed to go by too fast. I needed a change of pace . . . and that's when it happened.
We were in leaving San Francisco and heading back to New York City. We were going to take the BART to the airport and then we would be back home in 8 hours time. I had barely talked during all the sight-seeing and I was deep in thought staring into my luggage when a girl behind me noticed that I still had the tag on my luggage from the last flight. "If you don't take it off, your luggage isn't going to leave the airport," she said. I thanked her for her perception and began working on the tag. My grip was very weak since I didn't masturbate like I used to, and I pulled on the tag for a considerable amount of time. This would be a good time to mention that we were at this point going down on an escalator, and the last thing on my mind was what I was going to do once I've reached the end of it.
It happened in an instant - I reached the end of the escalator, the girl behind me told me to move forward, I darted up, realizing that it was time to get off the escalator, and just as I was taking a step forward, my foot jerked in mid-air and I tripped forward along with my luggage. This caused the girl behind me to fall on top of me with her luggage, and the girl behind her and her luggage, and the guy behind her and his luggage, and so on. From then on, the scene turned into a group of angry people telling me to get up and a flurry of high school students tripping over each other or perhaps their own luggage if not someone else's. Everyone who had fallen had gotten up and walked away as if it was just such a natural thing to do except me. I was stuck at the base of the escalator causing people to either jump off the escalator or brace for impact. I knew if my shoes were tied, this wouldn't have happened but I knew damn well why my shoes weren't tied.
It's not an easy task to tie your shoes. I only learned how to tie my shoes when it was 15 fucking years old. Up until then, I kept losing the bunny ears because I didn't know where the hole was for the second loop-dee-loop. And my dad just kept saying "It's easy, it's easy" and that didn't help at all. So anyways, I only learned how to make a working tie when I was 15 and none of my ties ever stayed on for a long while. I've found myself tying my shoelaces every hour even with double-knots because I'm just not good at them. I've actually grown accustomed to either walking with untied shoelaces or tucking them in - the former being the most convenient.
Back to the escalator, it took a whole half a minute before someone hit the emergency breaks on the escalator so they could sort everything out. Once the bells rang, the escalator stopped and the whirring sound of commotion ceased and the scene devolved into order; all expect for me lying helplessly on the floor. I was asked to get up one more time, but rather than answer back I continued, rather unsuccessfully, trying to pull my shoelace out from the escalator. Once everyone realized what the problem was, a few guys rushed over to attempt to pull my shoe free, whilst the on-lookers exclaimed with outrage towards my untied shoelaces. I wasn't worried about my shoe - or my foot for that matter - until they started pulling, but after about a minute my shoe was free so everything was fine. No one was injured, and I even kept the aglet on my shoelace.
Afterwards it took me four days to try to take the shoe off since my shoe was pulled by an escalator for half a minute, but looking back to that time I can only think of fun-loving innocent excitement. In the process, I broke my only two rules, but the experience as a whole is something I've never come to regret not once (in reference, I have regretted everything).It's a sensation of being in a certain moment and not mulling over anything in the background that made me feel liberated from my thoughts in the first time since, well, forever. Something I don't think will ever be possible is learning how to find those exciting opportunities to share unforgettable moments with other people. I believe that escalator was life's way of pulling me back down to earth, and for good reason; it's lonely out in space.
EXTENDED CUT
So now I'm 19, I'm in college, and I've got this chick sitting on my bed and we're "sharing our hearts". It was pretty hard for me to talk about these things; I've never opened up to someone before. "Well," I began, "my mom walked out on us." "How old were you," she asked. "I think I was 27 at the time," I said, fighting back a tear. "But how is that-", she continued. "Months," I said, crying into her breasts, finally relieved of the tears that have built inside of me for so long. "There, there", she said, "It's okay, I'm here with you now. And you'll always have me." "Thank you, Penny. Just one more thing," I said, reaching over the bed. I pulled out a brown leather belt, and almost instantly her face flushed pink and she let out a gasp. "Do you know what I want to do with this belt, Penny", I said, in an almost teasing fashion. "No . . . what", she asked shyly, holding her chest. I placed the belt gently on her lap, and I leaned in close into her ear. "Do you know what I want 'you' to do with this belt, Penny", in an almost whisper-like tone as I traced my fingers down her back, holding her head in the other hand. "Just tell me!" she shrieked, burying her face in my torso. "I want you . . . ", I continued, pulling a spiked collar from underneath a blanket, "to teach me how to walk."