I woke later that day in bed with Charisma, enough memory left to know that she and I hadn’t fucked—not at all this trip—and I was glad, fooling myself that we wouldn’t do it all this weekend..that me and Brooklyn would hook up. I remembered the internal arc of Charisma’s pussal area, from the shaved lips to her colossally stretched cat-or-mouse focal tube, once animal tempting, now widened and the angle of the slide tilted back so that (I thought) she received as much pleasure as always while I knew from experience that my pleasure would be savagely reduced. I imagined lions in the savannah giving birth, fucking their brief, brief sex—punch punch—dragons of the present moment. Additionally, this Charisma gave off a smell—she needed to bathe, but I didn’t know how to ask her: “When was the last time you bathed, formerly cute girl—now you’re only cute from the neck up, only beautiful from here to here.” When I met you your cuteness ran from head to toe and across your breasts and inside your mouth and up inside your pussy area and right around your pussy entrance—it was all cute—all except your long-ass telephone calls. Those were never funny—not one, not at all.
I reached down and grabbed my laptop from its bag, trying of course not to make any noise. I truly loved Charisma—waking her from her (still cute) sleep is the last thing I would want to do to her. Opened the cover of my machine. Logged in. SSHd to a virtual server—that gives me more power that my laptop has, and I can use it from wherever I have a connection to the internet. Updated my source code. This was the key to those snail puzzles I had printed and covered my floor with like scraps of carpet, never intending to cover it but only there to show windows into the systems I had developed. This was the key: something present in these existing systems that I had to rearrange. I knew from my whiteboard excursions in Tucson that binary systems in nature were actually operating from a place of four instead of two. That’s as tight as I could get it: four instead of two. Past that I didn’t know shit. And here I was again: up against the same problem. And here I was in life, with the same problem.
Here I had woke up with the same problem I woke up with yesterday: woke up coked out unable to really sleep, next to a girl I didn’t really want to fuck, with a problem I couldn’t frame in words much less solve. I just knew there was something deeper or maybe higher than what I was looking at now. I felt my life was useless: Why am I in Dayton Ohio sleeping next to my old fuck buddy who I have not fucked one time during this entire trip? I seem confused. I love/hate cocaine—I love/hate Charisma. In fact I’ve developed a crush on her roommate but social rules (which I’m following) makes it dangerous to try and fuck Brooklyn—there am I weak! If I was operating orthogonally to society I would not only sleep with Brooklyn but rape her if necessary. A good femme would go along with it, just like those lions 🦁 in the savannah—lie there and take it, and it will be quick.
I did a few useless commands—checking to see that everything still compiled, which I knew it did. Then I started programming. I invented some data structures. I knew I needed data structures—in fact I knew more than that. I had discovered in high school that sometimes the correct design of data structures for your program makes the program superfluous. In this example, in high school, the problem had been: if you have a certain number of points, and they are maximally connected with lines, how many lines are there? I didn’t realize there was already a solution to this problem, but once I created the data structure to represent the way the computer would think about solving this problem, it was obvious what the solution was without even writing the rest of the program. I wondered if I created..somehow proper data structures for this new problem..if the data structures themselves would tell me something about how to extend or boil down this situation I was looking at. So I programmed the structures.
I felt like a loser—epically. Coke, the fuck friend, my crush on Brooklyn, the fact I was in Dayton while I should have been in LA. Even when I woke up in LA I didn’t feel like I fit—I was sitting in the back of my screenwriting class developing snail puzzles, letting my classmates catch a glimpse of the graphical representations of these, then turning my laptop screen back to where only I could see them as soon as our professor came back into the room. He could tell something was going on and everyone pointed at me so I turned my laptop screen to face the front of the room, and Professor Rosenthal lifted his eyebrows and shook his head. Later he would say of my thesis project, “Matthew, I may never understand what’s on the screen, but I will always leave the theater saying: That’s an artist.” I accept his compliment with its caveat.
Charisma’s ribs expanded, contracted. I put my hand on her and felt her breathe. I was so guilty for having disliked her ‘cause she was fat—I felt terrible. She was fat when I first met her—now she was just fatter than before—too fat to fuck (apparently). My ex-girlfriend Deidre once told me she could tell I wasn’t going to settle until I found someone who brought me body and mind—and I did hold out for that for a while. Oddly, I think Deidre had both—and she broke up with me. I have told myself that if Deidre had never broke up with me, that I would have never broken up with her. Charisma I guess this weekend—I mean Charisma’s body—broke us up as fuck friends. It broke up the fuck part of us and when only the friend part of us was left, I wasn’t sure that any part of us was left.
I coded, a type of extemporaneous coding with much akin to poetry. It compiled but it didn’t do anything yet. You could read it and tell that it made sense, but not what it was about. I felt the buzz around my eyes, knowing I would do more coke with them today—this family I was entrenched with, these two mothers of coke—literally, mothers who had done coke, and I imagined there might be in a close-by alternate universe a word “cokemother” that describes them. It would be like “motherfucker” in its taboo, but it would sound natural like motherfucker. There would be no male equivalent. It would have no one literal meaning. It would just mean you mean business. Cokemother.
My typing ran furious. I knew that every time I pressed a key, that it backed me out of cokemother and coke weekend and horrible student and terrible programmer and failed writer and bad kid (to my parents) and average human into some semi/super human who knew more and more things that no one else would know—which of course meant money. The more things I knew that were important to the world but that few others knew translated directly to me making more money. My ex-girlfriend Sashi told me once after we met at an LA attraction (the oxygen bar)—Sashi told me I should apply for “crazy money” which is what some of her friends were on, and which years later I am actually on as I write this book. Government crazy money, if you have a personality type (illness) that is genetic (un-help-able) that makes it intolerable (impossible) for companies to hire you, and so you fall into this gap where you’re not (allowed) to work a normal job but we don’t want to kill you (as a society) because we don’t really get you (or what’s wrong with you). Hence: crazy money. Disability. Your mind is so fucking crazy that we want to stipend you through life so that on any particular year you can buy glasses or get your teeth cleaned. This is the type of crazy I am now. And you can blame it on the coke unless you happened to know me in high school before I had ever drank or smoked pot—if you had observed me back then at the distance of my friends, you would have diagnosed me as bipolar (as my friend Tuesday Welder did). She called me bipolar (in a helpful way) and I thought the word applied to her (not to me). It was another 10 years before my first psych ward admission and bipolar diagnosis—and another five before a different set of psychiatrists diagnosed me schizophrenic and bipolar. And at that point (which is where I still am) I don’t know what to think—Maybe I just like fucking fat girls!
Why am I telling you this, from the point of view of my coke weekend, feeling terrible (physically and in my life), and fixing myself with a little programming (which gave my life meaning)? I’m only telling you this because if I had known (and believed) then, what I know now (that I’m sick), I might have understood why I did drugs (why I have a problem with them—especially alcohol and cocaine)..I might have understood my drug weekend to Ohio as a manic weekend in Ohio—and instead of blaming myself for being bad, I could have understood the genetic reason for my being “crazy.”
It had to happen this way, though. This way, with me having technical interests and having that encouraged in me by the tech companies where I worked, I later worked through those snail puzzles and invented a new way to define them that allowed the system to look not only at its neighbors to the left and right, but to its memories of any cell in the present or past. I started that work at Charisma’s house. It broadened the definition of cellular automata—I am extremely proud of that.