It's the Only Way to Live

My name is Georgie Porgie. I am named, as my mother likes to say, “after a drug-induced chant,” in her age-inappropriate, coquettish manner, usually followed by a cringe-inducing cackle. She always has a glass of vodka mixed with Red Bull in her slender, veiny hand. I escape to Burger King, a mechanical response to the discomfort that bubbles up in my stomach when I am around her. One of my many mechanical responses to many things.

When going to and coming home from Burger King, there is a street I must cross. A street that many people must cross. One day, I waited for the little sign to do its job: to signify when it would be safe to cross this street. The white-green man in mid-stride lit up and I mimicked his frozen-in-time movement. I was halfway across when I became ill. It suddenly occurred to me that I needed a sign to tell me what to do. A tiny white-green man was my temporary God. My legs moved with little conscious thought. I immediately stopped. My legs came together, side by side and stiff, and I felt robbed of humanness. I was still in the street, about a dozen feet from the curb. A line of cars started to form. I turned on my heels and faced them. I was headed east, toward home. Now I faced south, and the cars faced north, horns blaring, headlights intermittently flashing. I accepted the slew of slurs and epithets and expletives hurled in my direction, the faintest of which seemed to carry the most hateful weight. The line continued to grow.

The sun reflected itself in each windshield and punished my retinas. I could not place faces with the insults, only white-hot glare. The motorists’ anger was now collective, a globule of gross sound emitting from an immaculate line of cars, which was still growing. Funny, wasn’t it? No car broke the line. Everyone waited. They hated it, but they waited. They, the cars, each piloted by reflected sun, waited for me, Georgie Porgie, to make my move. And I realized that a line of human beings would not wait. A line of human beings, such as one outside a Wal-Mart on Black Friday, would jog around me, past me, would shove me and kick me out of the way. Would trample me once I was down until I was dead. But not so with a line of cars. Yes, this was human. This was the triumph of the human over the mechanical. I had the power to control the will of machines. This was my triumph. I was human. And so I walked away, to home, triumphant.

I made my way up to my room, after avoiding eye contact and chit-chat with my drink-sodden mother, and threw myself onto my bed, beaming proudly. I masturbated swiftly and efficiently and stretched out with my hands behind my head, still smiling. I took a deep breath and exhaled fiercely toward the ceiling. I was human. And I masturbated again.