For all my complaining about how people don’t remember generic conversations from their past, especially ones that are decades lost, I do remember the morning you told me about the impending back surgery. You started right in before I pulled away from the sidewalk in front of your place. I’d never heard you talk so fast and so much, weirdly breathless about the whole thing. Wanting to have your back straightened/healed isn’t weird, of course. That’s not what I mean. There was something else there and it was tied to your bottomless-pitted self-esteem. Your exuberance in telling me all the gory details was less about you having something new to tell me, something out of the ordinary, and was more that somehow this crazy major surgery would in and of itself transform you into a special or remarkable person, instead of the life-altering procedure being something you’d have to overcome on the journey of continued remarkableness. Huh? How’s that for masturbatory memoir indulgence and two-bit analysis? Goddamn it, it’s your fault I sound like a New Age guru again. So fuck you very much for that.

You did talk about the Marfan’s stuff that morning, and I made heartless jokes about your ticker. I remember your Terminator joke too. You incorrectly said “exoskeleton.” I didn’t correct you because I didn’t want to be that person.

The Renfield quip is utter bullshit. Ignoring the casual, comfortable cruelty of a jab at your surgical expense, I would’ve known Renfield wasn’t famously hunchbacked. I was the horror fan before you were, remember? Or at the very least, that character wouldn’t be my go-to. Igor, fine, maybe, though Quasimodo is the easiest and obvious reference point. And now that I’ve googled your “Dr. Seward” name choice—he’s a character in Stoker’s Dracula, as if you didn’t know—I’m getting the sinking suspicion you’re using our relationship to construct a metaphor—or allegory, I often confuse the two—that I do not appreciate. No, sir, I don’t like it.

Folklore

FOLKLORE

(March 1989)

A chapter with a lion in which Mercy pretends to be or becomes (you get to choose by the end of this book) a vampire to help me with my homework

I cleaned that up for you.

In my senior elective class, New England: A Local History, Mrs. Danforth assigned a research project. We students were to find a lesser-known event (something we had not studied in the course) tucked within the nooks of New England’s history on which to write a five- to seven-page, properly cited paper. Despite the chorus of groans, wails, and laments that she was no longer our favorite teacher, she encouraged us to be creative and have fun. Then she supervillained a laugh in our faces. I was instantly in a semi-panic over the assignment.