Other People's Stories

I collect stories.  As a nonfiction major (read: concentration, because it is technically correct), most of the stories are my own, but occasionally I take a break from self-absorption and add other people into the pile.  Other people’s stories are tricky.  I write about other people rarely because I don’t want to misrepresent them.  I don’t want to force them into a tutu and make them perform a ballet dance they didn’t sign up for.  I don’t want to act like I know what I’m talking about when I only know what they’ve told me – what they’ve chosen to tell me.  I avoid other people’s stories whenever I can.  There is one type of Other People’s Stories that I really love, though.  I love those stories that you can only speculate about.  You see something, out in public, at the store, a scrap of paper left behind – something that you just know is the start to a story that is floating out in space.  And you know that it is a story that needs to be told, a constellation that needs lines to be drawn in it.  It is hard to tell Other People’s Stories, yes – but it is much, much easier when you don’t know anything about the person.  When you will probably never meet them, and all you have of them is this small piece of something, a story unwritten.  Those are the Other People’s Stories that I love.

I have decided to tell some of the stories that I have collected.  It is time that I took them out of the jar on my shelf and threw them up into the sky to be written among others.  I’m not sure just how I am going to tell these stories; the methods may vary.  But here is my first Other People’s Story.  If you are offended by language, I suggest you stop reading here, although really I don’t, because you’ve got to open yourself up to the world around you, regardless of how that part of the world may be worded.  I assure you in this case that the language is necessary—and that it is not my own words that I am repeating.

“The Fuck-up”

I don’t remember where I was.  I think it was Milledgeville, but it doesn’t matter.  I could have been anywhere.  This could have been any gas station, because it could have been anybody’s car.  I was getting gas, likely only filling up to whatever ten dollars would get me, and very possibly contemplating if I wanted to actually put in nine dollars and use the remaining money on an ice cream bar.  I scoped out the other pumps, a precaution I have developed as a paranoid young woman who views everybody as a potential rapist/serial killer, and I saw the car.

It was an old car, that much I do remember.  The kind of car that your parents give you that you really don’t want, but it’s better than no car, so you take it and try to play it off like it’s vintage.  But really it’s right there on the line between vintage and just an old car that hasn’t gained vintage coolness yet.  Instead of looking like a rockstar car connoisseur, you just look poor.  Of course this is all speculation.  Maybe the kid wasn’t poor and maybe it was really a vintage car.  What do I know about cars?  What really caught my attention wasn’t the questionable vintage-ness-bordering-on-hand-me-down-ness of the car.  It was that carved into the car, covering the entire passenger side in a way that would be impossible to conceal, was the word “Fuck-up.”  I don’t remember if it was hyphenated or even if it should be.  I imagine that whoever carved it was not the kind of grammarian or linguist who would pause to look up the proper punctuation of the word or words.  But there it was, bold, harsh, screaming.  Fuck-up.

There is no getting away from a mark like that.  That guy had to drive his car around town, pick up movies at Blockbuster, fill up with gas, drive himself to class, to friends’ houses, to parties, home to his parents – with the word “Fuck-up” glaring at him.  Really, the “Fuck-up” was glaring at other people on the road, but the message was clear.  Everybody saw that carving.  Everybody he passed, whether he cut them off or graciously yielded the right-of-way – it was there.  And for that reason, it may as well have seared through the door, burning the letters into the car’s interior. 

We are all fuck-ups at some point.  Except maybe for my brother, who has probably never done anything worse than steal a fork from a small roadside diner, everybody has those low moments we’d rather pretend didn’t happen altogether.  In high school I left the kid I babysat at home because my sister was there and I was only going to be gone a minute.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  It was by far one of the worst things I have ever done, and it was almost like the me who is logical and thoughtful and conscientious floated out of my body and some other me came in – one who was stupid and careless and selfish and who had serious problems with priorities (I would just like to point out that there is more to that story, but that it is not the focus here).  We all have those mental snapshots that belong in the mental bonfire, but no matter how hard they are to forget, those moments are not physically etched into our possessions.  When I open my laptop, you can see scratches.  They’re from the many times the computer was dropped and from my cat sleeping on it, his claws that we never clip scratching into the aluminum cover.  The marks don’t spell out my weaknesses, short of maybe being a poor computer owner.

But imagine if they did.  What if my computer spelled out “Irresponsible”?  Or “Unemployed”?  I could go further and say “Only one in class to not get a job,” but I doubt people would really take the time to read that.  What if my car had “helpless” or “worthless” or some other “-less” carved  into the side door, out there for everyone to see my lowest moments?  I (and I imagine most of the rest of us) walk through life constantly afraid of judgment.  I want people to like me, to think I’m funny and interesting and smart.  I want people to overlook the job situation and believe me when I say that it’s not my fault, I am trying everything I can.  I want people to want to be my friend and to care about me and to please, please, please not see what I see on my worst days.  For this guy, this Fuck-up, everybody could see all the time that he was worthless and hopeless and probably irresponsible or lazy or a liar or a cheater or a heathen.  It will not matter what he does to redeem himself; short of buying a new car, there is no way out of a branding like that.

I don’t know what he did to deserve the carving.  Maybe he cheated on his girlfriend, maybe he stole his best friend’s fiancé.  Maybe he was responsible for keeping up with something and lost it: a ring or a document or a picture of the enemy for a foreign network of spies.  Probably not that last one.  His side of the story is unfortunately silent.  But I feel like even if he did get a chance to voice his side, we wouldn’t be able to hear anything over the sound of the word “Fuck-up,” shouted like a battle cry from the side of his car.