DIARY OF AN OXYGEN THIEF By Anonymous (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (8 page)

             
But it wouldn’t budge.

             
One night, I returned home after refusing to go to the company Christmas Party. Somehow, they had arranged to have two ice sculptures placed on either side of the path to my door. Big cylinders of ice with candles inside.

             
Quite nice, really.

             
I kicked them both in. To me, these homely sculptures represented the fact that I wasn't safe from their prying eyes, even in my overpriced fucking house. I was in a bad way. So I'd come into work and do the best I could. I did good work. But nothing I conceived ever got through. I couldn't help thinking that all they really wanted was to mine ideas, and lob them into a communal conceptual pool from which the Lifers could draw.

             
Lifers were their favorites. The ones who would never leave and so were never expected to come up with their own ideas. Loyalty rewarded with stresslessness. They were usually married with kids and a house and so weren't going anywhere. They constantly needed new flesh to feed on. And they got it. Fair enough, once you knew the rules. Pretty scary if you bought the party line, which stated, “We love all of our people. You are part of our family.”

             
Made me want to go and wash. My whole raison d'être was not to become a Lifer. Have you ever seen a movie called The Firm? That's what it was like. A company that knew your every move and controlled you. Everything was fine, until you went against their teachings.
             

             
By the way, I fully accept that a lot of what I'm saying is paranoia. Everything that follows could well be my own imaginings and totally unfounded. I mean, the actual facts and figures are true. Dates, salaries, locations, awards, etc… But the motivations and emotions of the people surrounding those solids are smoke.

             
I was working for a very weird but brilliant company. I didn't care because it was interesting to be in the States even if it was only Minnesota and it was beneficial to me because Killallon Fitz had a reputation for producing fantastic award-winning work and even if I didn’t get anything produced it was more exciting than sitting in London doing the same stuff I'd been doing for years. I won't pretend I enjoyed it at the time, but sitting here in the East Village, extricating myself from London and moving to the States was a great thing to have done.

             
Anyway, well into my second year there, my fourth year off the booze, I was still refusing to get involved with any female. My favourite masturbation technique was to take a nice hot bath and soap up my baldy lad well and truly, and then give him a good old beating. At one stage I was going to write a screenplay all about my right hand, a love story. There would have been scenes where I let my hand brush against my thigh and I would blush. In another, my right hand would get jealous of my left and refuse to make love.

             
Many's the evening I rushed home to make passionate love to myself. Storing away the beautiful asses of the secretaries during the day I’d mentally combine them into one composite perfectitude of buttockness. It worked. As you can see from the previous pages, it didn't have any perverse effect on my mental or spiritual state. If anything, another room full of McDonald's patrons was spared the inconvenience of drawing on their medical insurance.

             
Also, I was saved the heartache of having to spend fourteen years married to some woman of Swedish extraction who was paid by my company to marry me in the first place. Imagine all those ice sculptures on my driveway every Christmas (I'm shuddering here and it's August).

             
Suffice it to say much masturbation took place during this Minnesotan period. You know, anyone reading this, you would be forgiven for thinking, “What's wrong with this guy? What's his beef? He lands a cool job in the States and all he's done since the beginning of this is whine.” Let me just say this, I'm whining in retrospect. At the time, I never whined. Not once. I was the picture of humility and gratitude.

             
“Oh, thank you. Oh no, thank you. Come in on the weekend? Of course, I'm not doing anything, anyway. I don’t even have a girlfriend so there’s no danger of anything like that getting in the way of your requirements. You don't like that concept? Course you don't, it's weak. I should have known better than to present it to you."

             
I'd all but reverse out of the room bowing. I had to. I was in no position to bargain. With a $3,500 a month mortgage, and no Green Card I needed not to piss anyone off. Jesus, looking back on it, it's even more scary than I let myself realize. Funny that, when things are dodgy and I don't like the way they're going, I move into just-for-today mode. It's an old AA trick for staying off booze. I don't have to do whatever-it-is forever, I just do it today. It makes even the heaviest shit bearable. But then later when I look back and see just how heavy it was, I exhale.

             
But hang on, I have to tell you about something that happened the first Christmas after Da died. Remember now, I’ve only been in Minnesota four months and I won’t meet Aisling till the following November. My mother and I were sitting in the kitchen sizing each other up. We were both in shock; her from the fact that her husband of forty years was suddenly missing, (she told me she had a dream where they were on holiday and she couldn't find him) and me from losing my father and being uprooted to live in the Arctic.

             
A roasted turkey with no legs was steaming in the space between us. It was the first time my mother had bought a turkey on her own and it had seemed like a bargain to her to buy the one that had no legs. It was considerably cheaper that the able-bodied version. After a lifetime of having a man to deal with all financial matters, the cost of living had become urgent. The turkey-steam softened our image of each other that Christmas.

             
Later during that visit I was doing the Chair at local AA meeting in Kilkenny. Doing the Chair meant a member told his story. How he drank, how he stopped and what it's like now. At smaller meetings they got tired of hearing the same people again and again so when someone came home on holiday they were often asked to speak. It was my turn this Sunday. Amongst the regular attendees, many of whom I'd gotten to know quite well over the years, was a very young well-dressed red-haired girl, slender, tall, elegant, definitely stood out. Could have been a model.

             
Probably was. 

             
I tried not to embellish my story too much for her sake. I began telling the assorted morning circle about how I used to enjoy hurting people, girls in particular. I touched on the pleasure I got from it, the pleasure I felt when they reacted with such abhorrence. The need I had to hurt. Not unlike some of the stuff I’ve shared with your good selves but in a more general way.

             
I went on to say how I now believed this behaviour was linked to my alcoholism, and that I didn't feel the need to do it anymore, and that I still felt like I owed an amends to every one of those girls, but that the AA way was not to go back to places where we might cause even more pain. The best amends I could make was to stay out of their lives. I had no right to go back and make their load heavier just to relieve mine.

             
After I finished my talk, the red-haired girl came up and thanked me. Standard procedure. But she said some things that didn't sink in until a year, and much turbulence, later. She said she had a friend who liked to do what I'd been talking about. Only she did it to men. The kinds of things I described were very similar to the kind of thing her friend got up to. She said this friend lived in New York now but was originally from Dublin. A photographer’s assistant. And if I ever met her, I should be very careful. I must have had my polite face on because she suddenly said, ‘She knows about you.”

             
This girl was obviously out of her tree. It happened a lot in AA someone came in for one meeting and you never saw them again. I hoped this would be the case here.

             
She went on to say she was staying with this so-called evil girl’s uncle that weekend in Kilkenny  and that she’d needed an AA meeting because she couldn’t handle the drinking and the sick behaviour. I imagined Satanic orgies going on in the uncle’s house and was even ready to hear some details until she mentioned his name.

             
Tom Bannister.

             
I knew the name very well because I had money with this guy on my father’s recommendation. I suppose you could say he was my financial advisor. She had my attention now but the significance didn’t register. Because there was nothing to react to.

             
Later, much later, I remembered that nine months before this encounter, when I was still working in London, an article had appeared in the Kilkenny People supplied and written by myself announcing my appointment as senior art director at Killallon Fitzpatrick. It was the kind of thing local papers loved. Kilkenny boy does well. I did it as much for my dad as anyone.

             
He loved to brag to his friends about me.

He even got a mention as the parent of the wunderkind along with the school I attended and my hobbies (I put writing and music) and I couldn’t help but include the fact that I was single. Well, why not? There might be a nice Irish girl out there reading it.

             
Apparently not.

             
Could Aisling have read this article during one of her Uncle Tom visits? It would explain how she knew about me. “She’s evil,” said the redhead. She herself had witnessed the awful effect she could have on some guys. She looked at me for far too long. Like I wasn't taking her seriously enough. I wasn't.

             
I thought she was just a rich Dun Laoighre type who'd overdone the coke and was in AA to keep her rich husband happy. Now I think she was trying to warn me. She took on an even more serious tone as she turned to me before leaving, “It's her eyes…that's what does it…they can't believe she could be so bad.” I remember thinking it’s a pity she's so fucked up because she’s very tasty. But I also figured that who she was talking about had certainly put the fear of God into her. So I thought no more about it. Why would I? There are a lot of people, some of them strange, some of them not, who pass through AA all the time.

             
I never saw the redhead again. So, off I went back with a heavy heart to the Tundra in January. I made a pledge to myself that I would leave there before the year was out. This was the second time I’d made this promise. It would take slightly longer. I was working on BNV. I was working on BNV only. It's tough when you are only working on one subject, you can't get any fresh air, so to speak. It's very tough when you're on it for almost two years. Also, it's very draining.

             
At one point, I would resist even making a joke with my small circle of AA friends, because I feared the waste of creative energy would usurp my bank and I'd be depleted when BNV came to make yet another withdrawal. Oh yes. When you've been on it four weekends in a row, and there's no sunshine or vacation in sight, and you don't want to be in the country, let alone the office, it's important to refrain from spending your reserves.

             
You may still have a long way to go. And although I promised myself I’d be out soon, my cautious side reminded me that I had said that before. It was now February. Three, maybe four, more months of frightening weather still to go. A combination of hiding behind the big broad sheets of The Observer and the warm glow of the TV screen, I somehow made it to…Spring which lasted about a week and then the Summer was upon me.

             
Everything transformed. Where once was a white sheet of paper there now began to appear, the most delicate crayon flicks of grass and leaves and bud and flower.

             
And the girls.

             
Unbelievable Aryan examples of breast and thigh. Healthy to the point of insulting. Like well-trained troops circumnavigating the lakes on bikes, roller-blades and, of course, on foot. The Sexual Infantry. I very quickly learned they were married or about-to-be. Snapped up early by canny investors. Go ahead, leer. They'd scratch their noses or adjust their various straps, sending me a clear Morse message with the glinting rings.

             
N-O--C-H-A-N-C-E--P-E-R-V-E-R-T.

             
Fair enough. The more beautiful and clear-skinned, the bigger and more blinding the glint. It was their fiancé's voice warning me by proxy. Saving me time. How very Minnesotan. Polite. There also seemed to be a great deal of pride in the bulbous nature of a pregnant belly; a phenomenon I had not yet encountered. In London, pregnancy was associated with failure and social death. Here it was encouraged. People got promoted after having a kid. A little fleshy anchor prevented the minds of America's corporate soldiers from drifting too far from its assignments.

             
Not the place for single males.

             
Especially single males from somewhere else. Summer in St Lacroix is as hot as The Winter is cold. Humidity makes the very air thick to breathe. All bared flesh becomes prey to the mighty mosquito, Minnesota's State Bird.