Photo by Samantha. That’s me, between Manuel and Daymented.
As I get older, the Voice of reason speaks more loudly, helping me to avoid past mistakes that by all means should have crippled me with syphilis or permanently bad taste in pants or some affliction equally dreadful. But when I was 25, I couldn’t stand the Voice. It grated like fingernails on fiberglass, or like Parmesan on a, er, grater. It sounded like the parent I never had and could never stand, like Nellie Oleson from Little House on the Prairie, or like LaTasha from McGregor, Texas, who always won first chair from me, even though my sax was dented and shiny, like a real musician’s, but god bless her, she was raised right, and not enough pundits know what that’s worth and how miserably well-behaved kids get treated in school. God bless her. I can only hope she double orgasmed her first time out and got a scholarship letter to Brown the next day after prom. I haven’t seen her in 22 years, so I can only hope.
I retired the Voice in 95, right after I got back from a year long trip to Romania, because it did me no good when I needed it, and made things worse when I didn’t. I replaced the actor who played the Voice, like you see on a soap opera, a voice-over announced that the part of the Voice today will be played by insert wide-eyed Iowan transplant’s name here. And I replaced it with a boy, a boy I met overseas who always did in fact get me into trouble, damn near beaten up by black market money dealers in Sibiu, damn near arrested in Medias, damn near frozen and starved in istanbul. The irony of that new voice was not lost on me.
And not only was the sound different, but the advice changed, too. The new Voice persuaded me into mischief. Trouble as healing, you might say. The worse I acted, the better I felt. Fortunately it never encouraged me to do anything worse than adultery or drug abuse, but I guess some people might say that’s plenty bad enough. And through no intervention on my part, the boy Voice recommended I change his voice so as not to arouse suspicions. And if you were to ask me now, I’d tell you that, in fact, He is actually a She, but I’m really desperate to hide his identity. It might seem kind of jarring for a woman to be making some of the remarks the Voice now makes to me, and for your reference, when I say now what I mean is 1998, when the Voice, a he disguised as a she, gave me some of the worst advice a compulsive neurotic might ever hope to hear. Things are much better in the actual now, which is 5:15 on a Tuesday afternoon in November, 2005.
In 2001, I realized the he-Voice, which I had assumed to be disguised as a she (incidentally, one who walked with a limp and spoke with a unique kind of lisp that caused her to replace all her Ls with Ts) was never really a he. But I can’t say who that she is, because her name causes all sorts of frictions. In any case, she’s given up on getting me into trouble, and is content to wait the whole thing out, I suppose. And that’s the kind of friendship whose memories you cherish and future you adore.
As I get older, the voice of reason speaks more softly. She keeps me out of trouble. The irony of this is not lost on me.
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