Any Life But Mine

Before I left my apartment, I was confident that when I reached my destination and met the camera's scrutiny with my body pivoted and my head turned left, that it would be my best look. My head didn't seem as pudgy and my broad shoulders were well-served by a diminshed angle.

I took the M7 bus this time, departing from the usual #3 train. Something made me want to stay above ground--in visual range of the streets and the people. Block by block, my confidence built. I practiced the pose while sitting in my seat. The bus interior was cool and made for a wonderful studio. Blue was turning out to be my favorite color.

A heavyset woman whom I'd taken the liberty to assume was near my age but younger, boarded. She had been proceeded by her mother, I also assumed, who tottered unsteadily into the coach while her daughter paid their fare. They spoke misheard words to one another as mother tried to get her barings and grow comfortable with the strangers before her. She had a kind and gentle face. Her mouth was naturally dowturned and without makeup. Her chestnut skin folded in weathered patterns from her upswept brows and downdraped eyes.

In the seat just in front of me, a man contemporary to Mother's age was waiting for the bus to take him to his stop. He, like myself, was balding. His hair, unlike mine, was all white--a low-cut curly carpet of snow. The contrast against his polished egg-brown head looked good. I could only hope my hair would look as good even if my skin was darker than his. In my mind, I married him to the sad-eyed Mother and bid them create me.

I took leave of the bus at 72nd Street and Columbus Avenue. Two avenues east was my favorite neighborhood, and I headed. I had found that a branch of the store of choice was in this neighborhood from the new Yellow Pages, so a combination of need and pleasure created a determined course of action. I had watched through the bus window as the demographs transformed from where I lived to where I was now, and only felt a twinge of guilt at the spreading comfort it had created. Although I'd adopted the sad-eyed Mother and gently balding father for parents, I enfolded the bohemian white twenty-somethings of Broadway as my brothers and sisters.

The Fromex store was small, divided in half by the counter. The clerk who answered my questions was Boricua. She snatched up a strange looking camera/computer peripheral and bid me stand against a paper drape taped to a mirror wall. I struck my pose, dismayed that the camera angle was coming from below my eye level. The twilight zone of infinite time between the photographer's word "Ready?" and the flash descended. I floundered in it. Do I smile a confident smile, even though I was missing side teeth? Do I let a funny thought pre-occupy my mind, or will that spoil the--

FLASH!

Oh well. There it went. She showed me the back of the device where there was a postage stamp-sized image of me in shadow and pixels, and asked me if it was okay. Like an idiot, I said "Yes." I sat on the window ledge and waited for the little computer image to become a real picture that I could use. When I turned to idly look at myself in the mirror wall, I watched me look back at me posed in my confident yet casual stance.

I was devilishly handsome. Black fuzzy vandyke framing my mouth and my sharp, full lips. I had canted eyebrows, the left salted with grey, over eyes that earned me many a question about a possible Asian geneology. I had a strong neck set into a chunky plateau of muscle. I had a feathery dusting of curly hair across the exposed V at my collar. I had a shadowy hint of a cleft between pectorals and collar bones. My eyes were confirming what I suspected--I had at least a chance.

Boricua Mami interrupted my self-love to give me the finished product.

The troll in the small picture stared back at and behind me, cross-eyed. From deep inside an eruption of reality and loathing boiled. Who the HELL was this pear-headed, fat bodied, scabby-looking, blotchy, pretentious mongoloid in these pictures? Everytime I took one--EVERY TIME--I was beset by this monster. A monster of benign, misshapen proportions. What happened to the chiseled jawline I saw in the mirror, gilded with an ever-so-slight Tom Selleckian jowl? Why did the camera turn it into the chins of pre-death Marlon Brando? Why did my alluring eyes become the product of an extra chromosome?? Why did my sexy Saturday Night Fever open shirt transform into a wrinkled, raggedy swath of cheap cloth in a death grip on my distended, bloated belly? Why was my chocolate skin now freezer-burnt and oxidized with ingrown beard hair?

What happened to the real me?

I paid the woman way too much for the insult and stormed out of the store. A few paces away, and I had to stop, just to ctach my breath. It was going to be like this forever. I was never going to get any better. I was ugly. I was fat. Putting my picture up on eHarmony.com was tantamount to putting a gun in my mouth. Of course, I was supposed to be getting the pics to submit to the licensing board of New York State in the hopes that before the summer's end, I'd have my license to practice and not have to move out of the city to survive. Albany wasn't going to care what I looked like, just as long as it matched my driver's license.

But the fringe benefit would have been to also finish my application process on the eHarmony website and be able to supply the curious women who were matched to me with my image. Then we'd communicate enough for me to fall hopelessly in love, which is my pre-requisite for generating enough guts to go on a first date. I'd have to scour the internet for ideas on having Free fun in NYC and hope my inventiveness would be enough to impress my date away from the fact that I hadn't a pair of nickels to rub together. That hope was paired with another, namely that my wry wit and devilish good-looks would keep her entranced with me through the revelation of the truth. (That I'm a broke-ass, 40 yr old virgin just coming to terms with the fact that I'm also a survivor-wannabe of sexual abuse with a maladjusted method of escapism for coping, which has kept me out of social functioning through all my productive adult years).

But I don't even have devilish good-looks it seems.

And that's not the half of it! Wait until I tell you about how I lost my car again, and how my attempt to wrangle those kids has failed again, and how I'm going back to Starbucks, and how I'm going to try to get Financial assistance and reactivate my Food Stamps! Very entertaining.

Me at 7/07/2005 08:02:00 PM

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