Fictionalizing My Life to Make It Livable
All Stories by Kevin Wilson
My freshman year of college, I bought a wildly expensive pair of rollerblades. The first semester had been a disaster. I barely passed my classes and had not retained a single piece of information, but who cared about that. I didn’t. What troubled me was that I had no friends, had not gone to a single party since I’d started college. One night, while I pretended to be asleep, facing the cinderblock wall of my dorm, my roommate and two of his friends were talking about me. “Your roommate, dude,” one of the guys said, “looks exactly like fucking Mr. Bean.” His name was Wynn Banks, and he already looked like he was in his forties; he always wore pastel shorts, even in the winter. He had a maid clean his dorm room every week. “He looks like fucking Mr. Bean,” Wynn said again.
“I mean, kind of?” my roommate said.
“You hearing this, Bean?” Wynn asked, but I still pretended I was asleep. When he was certain that I wasn’t going to respond, he said, “I’d kill myself if I looked like that.”
As soon as I returned to campus after Christmas break, I took the money my grandmother had given me and bought the rollerblades. At night after I’d done my homework and reading, so I didn’t have to see my roommate and his friends, I’d skate around the city, swinging my arms, the rollerblades clickety-clacking on the cracks in the sidewalk. My breath would gush out of me in clouds of mist, my face so cold. I’d skate until I could barely breathe, until I was so far from my dorm that I didn’t quite know how I was going to get back. The streaks of light the cars made as they zoomed past me felt like drugs, like I was in a video game. I wouldn’t think about anything. I wouldn’t think about how there was no way I was going to graduate. I wouldn’t think about how I’d never kissed another person in my entire life. I wouldn’t think about how, in my junior year of high school, I’d driven my car into a tree on purpose and returned to consciousness a week later with a huge scar on the right side of my face. I wouldn’t think about the pills that I had to take every day after that accident, and how I had stopped taking them a month earlier. And then, somehow, I’d be back in my dorm room, under the covers, and I’d finally let myself think one thing. Another day. I had made it another day.
I had signed up for a creative writing workshop, and we read Raymond Carver’s “A Small Good Thing” and Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.” It wasn’t like everything got better for me, because it was still so bad, but I liked reading these stories. I liked it when my professor, who had written an award-winning collection of stories and was so soft-spoken and sensitive, would diagram sentences on the chalkboard. One time he drew a stick figure, and then he drew a giant boulder in the figure’s way, and he said this was what stories were: simply finding a way to get the figure over that boulder. In my notebook I drew a boulder on top of a stick figure, his little arms and legs poking out from under this massive rock. To me, that’s what a story was. I wanted to tell the professor that I’d tried to drive through the boulder, smash into it, but I wasn’t sure what had happened. I didn’t know where the boulder had gone.
I wanted to tell him that, now, empty air felt like a boulder to me. I couldn’t name it, couldn’t see it, and so how did I write a story about that?
There was this girl in the workshop, a junior, a biology major, who was taking the class for fun. She had close-cut hair that showed off her ears, which were huge and pointed like an elf ’s. She’d bleached her hair blonde, and now the roots were showing, but she didn’t seem to care. She was so intense, was always talking about the stories in the workshop like they really mattered, like we’d cure cancer if we could just get this character to have a believable epiphany. Our professor loved her, even though he was clearly intimidated by her.
I kept running into her on campus, three or four times a week, just random moments when we were standing in the same line to buy coffee or I was walking into a building as she was walking out, and one time she grabbed both my arms and looked into my eyes, and said, “Why does this keep happening?”
I said I didn’t know.
“Maybe we’re soulmates,” she said.
“Maybe?” I squeaked.
“I mean, I have a boyfriend, but, you know, something’s going on. I’m keeping my eye on you.”
In her first story for workshop, a woman went on a long hike in the woods with a man who was married to her cousin. Toward the end, the woman lay down on this huge rock and they had pretty explicit sex. When the professor said, “Does anybody want to talk about the scene on the rock?” my face burned so red that I put my head on the table. Everyone was silent, and the professor said, “Okay, I guess not.” And that was that. The professor said the story was nearly perfect, and then the girl—her name was Karin—said she thought maybe it was part of a novel, but she didn’t have the time or inclination to write a whole novel.
After workshop she grabbed me. “Boy, you really went crazy red there at the table. You looked so cute, like you’d just shown up from Narnia.”
“The room is sometimes overly hot,” I said.
“Come with me,” she said, and so I walked with her off campus, to an apartment complex. The whole time she was telling me about crocodiles, which was her focus in biology, and about how she was going to Africa as a research assistant to study them for the entire summer. “It’s all because of Lyle the fucking Crocodile,” she said, and I remembered those books, the crocodile that lives in some fancy house in New York or something like that. She talked so fast, pulling me along, and I tried to take in everything she said like there would be a test on it someday.
“I want to paint your nails.” She pushed me onto her bed, got out some sparkly blue nail polish, and knelt down beside me. She held my hand so gently, the most tender thing a stranger had ever done to me.
I remembered the way my mom lightly traced the scar on my face on the first night after I was released from the hospital. She said, “You are such a beautiful boy,” and I cried and I cried, and I apologized maybe thirty times for trying to kill myself. And now Karin was holding my hand, painting my nails, so careful not to get it on my skin, and I thought I was going to cry again. But I didn’t. I watched my nails sparkle in the light of her room. I stared at the dark roots of her hair. She smelled like green apples.
“You have to let them dry,” she said. “You can’t touch anything.”
I wanted to tell her this was easy, that I was so good at not touching anything.
She went over to her stereo and played Bob Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather” and then she asked me to lie down. So I did. And then she lay right next to me. This was the first time I’d really heard a Bob Dylan song. I was so tired, all of a sudden, the room so warm. I could feel the heat of her body right next to me, but I didn’t reach for her. She didn’t reach for me either, which was such a relief.
“Can I ask how you got that scar?”
“It’s pretty boring. Car accident.”
“I was hoping it was something boring. If somebody knifed you or kicked you off the bleachers in high school, I was going to be so angry.”
“I can feel it even if I don’t touch it,” I said. “I can always feel it.”
“I think that’s good,” she said. “I wish my body worked like that.”
We lay there together for a long time. After the CD ended, I heard Karin snoring, and I got out of the bed and walked back to my dorm. My roommate and his friends were in the room. “Bean!” Wynn said. “What the fuck did you do to your fingernails?”
“I’m just getting my rollerblades,” I said.
As I closed the door, I heard Wynn ask my roommate, “Is he gay? Is Mr. Bean gay?”
“Who knows,” my roommate replied.
The following week, I had my first story workshopped. I’d spent more time on it than I wanted to admit, wanted it to be perfect, even as I could feel it falling apart the more I typed. It was about a boy in some undetermined past, maybe the Great Depression, who plays in the woods and falls out of a tree and breaks his leg. He’s trying to crawl home when a hobo pulling a junk cart finds him and gives him some water and offers to take him home. But instead the hobo just pulls him deeper and deeper into the woods, the sun setting, and the boy decides there’s no point trying to get out of the cart.
No one in the workshop had much to say, except that the two characters were kind of flat and it was hard to tell if any of it was real or not. Karin spoke up and said she thought it was really good but that it wasn’t a short story. “It’s a fairy tale, right?” she asked me, but I wasn’t allowed to talk. She turned to the professor. “Isn’t it a fairy tale?” The professor shrugged. “I think it has elements of a fairy tale, sure,” he offered. He seemed to consider the question a little more deeply. “I think it’s a story, “ he finally said, and Karin seemed like maybe she didn’t believe him. She looked at me, her eyes wide. No doubt I was bright red again. I looked down at my own story, the words completely foreign to me. Had I written this?
The professor said the hobo reminded him of the character Arnold Friend from a Joyce Carol Oates story and he recommended that I read it, said it might help me add depth to the character. “But this is promising,” he added, and I felt so happy and yet so jumbled, so confused. What had I done to earn that assessment? How could I build upon that promise? Why in the world had I written a story with a hobo in it? I knew the boy was me, of course, but who was the hobo? All writing was doing for me was teaching me that I didn’t know much of anything, that all I had was what was inside of me, and what was inside of me had almost made me kill myself. It was frightening. And thrilling.
All I had was what was inside of me, and what was inside of me had almost made me kill myself. It was frightening. And thrilling.
After workshop, Karin told me that I didn’t need to read that story by Joyce Carol Oates, and that my story was great because it was really a fairy tale and fairy tales had flat characters who served as symbols.
“But this is a short story class,” I said. “I should probably try to write a short story.”
“What dorm do you live in?” she asked.
“Upton,” I said. “On the top floor.”
“Oh, god, all the gross boys lived in Upton when I was a freshman,” she said. “One of them got drunk and pried open the elevator doors and fell all the way down. And he didn’t even fucking die.”
“There are a lot of gross boys in my dorm,” I offered.
“Come back to my place,” she said, taking my hand. And I went. Where else would I go?
We lay on her bed, on top of the covers, and she rested her head on my chest. She had put on a Magnetic Fields album, music entirely foreign to me, and the lead singer’s deep voice made me feel like I’d taken drugs. I kept waiting for the moment when I would kiss her, put my arms around her, but it never felt quite right. We were lying on her bed. She could hear my heartbeat. Why wasn’t this sexual? Or why was it also something else? Was this why I had no friends? Because I could not properly understand the context of any moment of my existence?
“Could I dress you up?” she suddenly asked. “Have you ever worn makeup?”
“What now?” I asked, my heartbeat speeding up, my hands turning clammy.
“You would be the most beautiful girl, do you know that?”
“I don’t know that,” I said. It was most certainly not true. I was and had always been ugly. I started to realize that Karin might be unbalanced, that her weird kind of confidence had hypnotized me.
“Are you gay?” she asked.
“No,” I said. This made her lift her head and she turned to face me, her expression concerned. “I mean . . . I don’t think so,” I continued. “ I guess I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” She seemed genuinely surprised.
“How would I know?”
“Do you like boys or girls?” she asked, like it was so simple. The truth was that I’d never felt much of anything for anyone, was too scared to think about it. It was one of the reasons why I’d tried to kill myself, because I felt so deficient, could not make connections with people.
“I don’t know. Girls? Maybe both?”
“Oh, okay,” she said, like that explained everything. “You’re bisexual. Like me. Though most people who are bisexual are really one or the other, but I can imagine that you are, too.”
“I’ve never even kissed anyone,” I admitted. I felt like I was about to cry.
“I believe that,” she said. “You have that kind of vibe.”
We both just sat there on her bed. Finally, she said, “I could kiss you, if you wanted.”
“You could?”
“Yeah, I could. We’re soulmates, right?”
“What about your boyfriend?”
“It’s complicated. He’s actually one of my professors. He has a wife and a kid.”
“Is he the one that you’re going to Africa with?”
“He is. Like I said, it’s complicated. But don’t think about any of that. Do you want me to kiss you or not?”
“I do,” I told her.
And so she kissed me. Her mouth was so soft. She ran her fingers through my hair. She flicked her tongue against mine. I could feel the scar on my face burning. I couldn’t tell if what I was feeling was attraction. But it still felt nice.
And then she pulled away. “Would you let me put makeup on you?” she asked.
“Yeah, okay,” I said, and she smiled, jumped off the bed, and ran to her bathroom for her cosmetics. I could already see what was going to happen. She would adorn my face with the bluest of eyeshadows, the reddest of lipsticks. She would use that little mascara wand on my eyes and laugh as I flinched. She would make my cheeks so rosy, balance out my skin tone. She would have me take off my clothes, even my underwear. I would put on her lingerie, one of her dresses, since we were about the same size. She would take pictures of me with her camera and I would never know what would become of those photos, if she’d even developed them. I’d look in the mirror and, holy shit, I was kind of beautiful. She’d kiss me again and again. We’d have sex, her showing me how to do it, me concentrating so hard not to mess it up. It would not feel real at all. And after, when her boyfriend, the professor, called to say that he needed to see her, she would tell me I could spend the night in her apartment, sleep in her bed. When I woke up in the morning, alone, I would look at her pillow, the smear of my makeup on the fabric, and I would put on my own clothes and walk back to my dorm, thinking about how slowly I moved without my rollerblades, how heavy each step felt, how it seemed like I’d never get where I wanted to go.
I bought the story collection that my professor had published. I wondered why I’d taken so long to read any of his work. I think maybe I was afraid that if it was bad, I would have trouble listening to him in class. But it was very good. He wrote about sadness in ways that felt true, about how we disappoint other people. The story at the end of the book, a pretty short one, was what I focused on the most. A man living in some industrial city in the Midwest, newly married to a wife who’s a big-deal administrator at a hospital, is between jobs. He’s working on a novel, but he hasn’t written anything since they moved. Every day he takes long walks across this bridge, and he starts to think about jumping off. He goes two or three times a day, standing on the bridge, until one day a police officer stops and asks if he needs help. They both seem to understand what’s happening, what could happen, and the man talks about his wife, about moving to this city, about his unhappiness. The cop drives him home and makes the man promise not to walk over the bridge again. Back in his house, he looks at the clock and there are two hours before his wife will get home from work. He thinks about walking back to the bridge. He looks at the clock and then at the door. He tries to will himself to stay on the couch. And that’s the end of the story.
I kept hoping there was more. I read the story three times, as if it would be different at the end, but it was always the same. I don’t know exactly what I wanted the ending to be, but I knew I wanted something more.
The next day, I went to the professor’s office hours and told him how much I liked the story. He seemed embarrassed that I’d read his book. And I don’t know why, maybe because the professor radiated a kind of kindness, or it could have just been patience, I asked him if the story was autobiographical. This made him blush, and he looked out the window of his office. Regaining his composure, he said, “Well, all stories have some element of autobiography.”
“I drove my car into a tree when I was in high school,” I said. He picked up his pen and then put it back down on the desk. He looked so unprepared for this conversation. I must have looked so desperate.
“That story of yours meant something to me. It made sense to me,” I told him.
“Thank you.” After a pause he said, “Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if that police officer had never stopped.”
“It’s harder than it seems to kill yourself,” I told him, and he laughed and then instantly looked horrified.
“Can I ask you something?” he said. I nodded. “Do you need help? Are you okay?”
“I think I’m okay,” I said, growing uneasy now that the focus was on me, despite the fact that I’d caused this. “I’m not a danger to myself or anything.” I thought about all those pills I hadn’t been taking, how they just piled up in my desk drawer. Was I saving them for some reason?
“I’m here to talk, if you ever need to.” He took a little piece of paper and wrote down a phone number. “That’s my home number. You can call anytime that you feel like . . . you can just call if you need to talk to someone.”
“I better get going,” I said. He handed me the paper as I stood up, and I took it from him. Just before I walked out of his office, I turned to him and said, “I think I’d like to be a writer.”
“I think that would be a very good thing,” he replied, smiling.
At night, after she got back from studying reptile bones or sleeping with her professor, Karin walked me through the ways of sex, doing things that usually felt good but sometimes didn’t.
I stopped rollerblading as much, was sleeping every night at Karin’s apartment. She let me have a key to her place and I could come by anytime, though often she was out. I have no idea what my roommate thought was happening, if he even noticed that I wasn’t there anymore. At night, after she got back from studying reptile bones or sleeping with her professor, Karin walked me through the ways of sex, doing things that usually felt good but sometimes didn’t. It all felt momentous, though. She made me dress up in her clothes. She bought more and more outlandish makeup for me. I didn’t mind. I didn’t like it exactly, but it also felt somewhat natural, like Karin knew me better than I did, knew what was best for me, how to be the best version of myself.
The night before her second story was due for workshop, Karin stayed out all night at the library to write it. The next day, I read the story while she lay next to me in bed. “It’s intense,” she warned me. In my short history of knowing her, I found everything about Karin to be intense. I was becoming more prepared for it.
The story was about a woman who goes to the house of her professor, with whom she is having an affair, and confronts him. The wife, holding their baby, asks the professor what the fuck is going on, and the professor responds that this woman is certifiably insane; has developed an unhealthy attachment; and has been stalking him, leaving countless voice mail messages. And the woman, in that moment, feels so stupid that she’d believed the professor when he said he would leave his wife, that the two of them would be together, be research partners, would publish so many important papers on crocodiles, and raise their children in the wild, and teach them to appreciate the natural world. She takes a bundle of letters out of her backpack, letters the professor explicitly told her to destroy after she read them, and gives them to the wife. Then she leaves. She thinks about Sobek, a fertility-god with the head of a crocodile. She had imagined having a baby named Sobek with the professor, whether it was a girl or a boy.
When I finished reading, I asked if the story was true, and what exactly was going on.
“It’s fiction,” she said.
“Well, the professor says all stories have some element of autobiography.” I was wearing a teddy that she had bought for me. It was all so domestic—some version of domesticity.
“He doesn’t know everything.”
“Did you ever go to your boyfriend’s house?” I asked. “Did you talk to his wife?”
“Well, yeah. I did. The same night that I wrote the story.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, so confused.
“Because that’s my own business.” The lipstick she had put on my mouth earlier that night was now smeared across her face.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Not go to Africa,” she finally said.
It was a delicate workshop. The professor praised the precise details, the way Karin controlled the tension in the narrative. The other kids in the class seemed to know that this story was at least partially true. Some of them had taken a class with the professor they took to be the professor in the story. One kid asked how libel worked, if fiction was exempt from that kind of legal stuff. I said I liked the way the setting contained the story and contributed to the tension. The professor said it was a very astute observation, that he agreed wholeheartedly. When the discussion was over and Karin could finally say something, she just shook her head, not looking at anyone. We all filed out.
“Are you okay?” I asked her. She looked so pale.
“I want to be alone for a little while,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“You go back to the apartment. Get dressed up for me. Okay? I’ll be home later, when I get my mind right.”
I put on something she would like. I put on my makeup, which I’d gotten better at doing. I lay in bed and waited. And I waited some more. I thought that Karin had probably gone back to the professor’s house. But I didn’t know what I could do about that. So I fell asleep, my hands resting on my chest, like Sleeping Beauty, waiting for her to come back.
I awoke to the sound of the lock on the front door turning, then swinging open. I called out, still partly asleep, “Karin?” and I heard a man say, “Who’s in here?”
“It’s . . . me,” I said, confused. Before I could even get out of bed, I saw two men standing in the doorway of the bedroom, looks of horror on their faces.
“What the fuck are you doing in here?” the older man said, a handsome, businessman-type in a fancy overcoat.
“Waiting for Karin,” I offered sheepishly.
“I’m her father. Karin checked herself into a mental health facility last night. I’m here to get some of her things.”
The other man, looking embarrassed, simply said, “I’m the super.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Karin’s father said to me. He started grabbing some clothes from a dresser, not really paying attention to what he was taking. “If I come back, you better not be here. I don’t want to know what you’re doing, what’s going on, what kind of fucked-up things you’ve done to my daughter, but I don’t want you here. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He turned to the super and said, “Make sure he leaves, okay?” and the super nodded. Her father went into the bathroom for toiletries.
“Could I go see her?” I called out weakly.
He immediately poked his head back into the bedroom. “Are you serious?” he shouted. “No! No! Not at all.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I looked at the super, who kind of shrugged, like, what can you do?
After Karin’s dad left, the super stood there, shifting from one foot to the other. “So,” he said, “I’m just going to leave and I trust that you’ll get out of here in a timely fashion.”
“Okay,” I said. Okay, yes,”
“Sorry about your girlfriend,” he said, and then he turned to leave.
“Thank you,” I replied, not wanting to get into a long conversation with this very polite man about how Karin maybe wasn’t my girlfriend but was something way more complicated.
And because I was paralyzed by the situation, the weight of it, I went back to sleep, something akin to a coma, and when I woke up, it was late in the evening. I had missed both of my classes for the day, and now I needed to leave, to find somewhere else for my body to be. I had no idea where to go. I reached into my backpack for the professor’s phone number, but I couldn’t bear to call him. Instead, I washed off the makeup, changed into my clothes, and strapped on my rollerblades.
I skated through downtown, cars humming past me. Near an old warehouse that was being renovated, I stood at the edge of a steep hill. There was no clarity, not like that time in high school, in the car, when everything made so much sense, like there was no other option. My mind was empty. Nothing in there. And I bombed that hill, closing my eyes until I got too scared and opened them again. At the end of the hill was an intersection and I could see traffic rushing by. I was so close to the end of the hill, almost there, almost there. As I hit that cross street, I made this sound, like an animal, so ragged, something I did not want inside of me. A car honked, swerved, and I sailed on, across the street, not a mark on me, still alive, still so goddamned alive.
I didn’t stop, didn’t think. I just kept skating. I navigated the streets, pumped my arms, until I was back at my dorm, taking the elevator up to my room. It took me a minute to find my key, and then I walked in, and my roommate, who had been jacking off, screamed, “What the fuck, dude?”
I didn’t answer, didn’t care. I went to my desk and got out the bottles of pills. I took one of each. I knew they wouldn’t do anything. I knew it would take forever for them to have any effect on me, but I took them anyway. If I had to take them the rest of my life, I decided that I would.
“Where the fuck have you been, dude?” my roommate asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Out.”
“I thought you left school,” he said.
I got out my computer and started writing my story for workshop. I wrote about that moment when I came home from the hospital, my mom touching my scar. We were not a family that showed much affection. I wrote about how nice it felt, her hand on my face, her fingers trembling just a little. I wrote about how, after a few moments of silence, I told her I was scared that I was going to try again. And how my mom said, crying, to hold off for as long as I could stand it. To be as strong as I could for as long as I could. In real life, I hadn’t been able to respond, to give my mom that little thing she needed to believe that I was safe. I just cried some more. But in the story, as I put it together, the boy promises his mom that he’ll try.
I didn’t know if it was a story. Well, no, I knew it was a story, but I didn’t know if it was any good. But there was this feeling, once I’d written it, that it became fiction. It became a story about someone else. Ever since I’d tried to kill myself, this little piece of metal stuck in my heart sometimes shocked me when I felt it inside of me. The story I wrote made it disappear. Or made it easier to live with it. I didn’t know. I only knew that I wanted to keep doing this, write my way toward a life, hold on for as long as I could stand it. And then, when I couldn’t stand it, when it was too much? I would keep going.
