Joan Eztherhas' multiple-personality disorder is most apparent when she's at home, trying to fill her time. That's when I get to see her. I'm something that fills her time, something to feed and rub against. I come in from outside with bits of worm between my toes to meet her, walking through the door with a bag of kibble and a box of beer. "I saw Hubert at Wal-Mart," she tells me without looking at me. "He was wearing the vintage Funkadelic shirt I got for him, the bastard, should've kept it myself." She lets the box of beer land hard on the counter, I like that sound. "That was a comfortable shirt."
From one side of Joan's MPD tugs the personality of extreme cultural esotericism, the desire for everyone to see exactly what she has seen and know what she's talking about—people don't always know what Joan is talking about. Joan's point of reference has lost its commonality. This side of her personality is pestering and strange to Joan. She thinks of it embodied as a hip handbag that talks, one with Andy Warhol prints on it, in neon. Warhol Joan is the side of her that, by all appearances, has gone retarded from self-referentiality. Warhol Joan feels like her life is a film—a five-hour and twenty-minute film of herself sleeping—which she finds fascinating, that encompasses everything, that people keep walking out on. This personality is a handbag and her life is an experimental film, what a wonder she feels un-understood.
I'm a sounding board for Warhol Joan. "I'm going to write an editorial about how 90's hardcore bands owe their stylized way of titling songs to George Clinton and Isaac Hayes. People need to know," she says. I want to tell her to have another beer so I can kick the empty around the kitchen tile—that's probably my favorite sound.
From another side of Joan looms the personality of severe emotional isolation. Joan has these potent emotions—Lord, how potent—that she only expresses in general terms like "sad," "tired," "fine"—otherwise people would think she was overreacting or complaining. What could be worse? She used to put polysyllabic words to these emotions. She used to read the Romantic poets in high school and couldn't see why their feelings were valued by history, her teacher, and her classmates (especially the boy who sat in front of her) more than her own. To compensate, she used the word "beauteous" regularly.
Joan, now twenty-nine, thinks of this personality as the seventeen-year-old version of herself that never shuts up. Joan has to keep Teenage Joan as quiet as possible, lest she betray her romantic immaturity. Teenage Joan will cry in public, given the chance, to prove to anybody who wanted to watch that she can still feel with measurable force.
Each of these personalities pulls Joan further from comprehensibility.
After two beers she puts her pajamas on and smokes a cigarette outside, standing with shoulders slumped and elbows closed tight to her ribs. She breathes lightest then, and it's an easy decision to crawl into bed with her. She's the closest thing to a furnace in the house.
The next morning, Joan catches me chasing a lizard into her closet and starts moaning that the lizard has more business in her house than she does. Another time, I was chasing a lizard into the recycling bin and I found a personal ad written by Warhol Joan that appeared in the Thanksgiving-weekend paper:
Would you know what I meant if I made the analogy: Winona Ryder is to Edward Scissorhands as Marissa Tomei is to Untamed Heart? Would you know what I meant if I said that I wish that when we were kids, they had a Muppet who was characterized by its sense of doom? Or that Animal had gotten more screen time? If I compared Leonard Cohen's lyricism to Kris Kristofferson's, and then claimed that this comparison revealed more about Janis Joplin than it did about either of them, would you understand? Is this too much to ask?
I know what all that stuff means, because I know Joan. Joan likes movie heroines who take chances on misfit boys—a familiar trope in teen movies. She wants to have been treated with honesty when she was young, and she realizes how little of a difference that would've made. She likes folk music and knows which folksingers dated each other in the 60's.
If Joan were to publish the ad again, she would instead ask at the end, Is this worth asking?
Teenage Joan thinks she thinks too long about these things. Nobody else seems to. The supreme value she gives to her own experiences with pop culture—where else would she put it? What do other people value? Whatever they value, they at least seem to not feel like it's a waste. Joan feels like she bet on a horse that's still in the race, but got left off the bill, and nobody else cares to bet on it. She bet on the one horse that couldn't make any money. She made mistakes in value placement somewhere, obviously, but what they were, when, and why they haven't been corrected are frustrating blanks to her.
I could fill in those blanks. I could tell you about the other Joans that have somewhat different values.
In fact, let me make you a quick sample diagram:
Personality of Joan's Type of Frustration Objective Catchphrase
Warhol Joan Fashionable World domination I'd forego all fifteen minutes of fame if it got me down to just fifteen minutes of pain.
Teenage Joan Total Escape Who thinks I'm beauteous?
Popular Joan Sexual Sex Who wants to pucker my crack?
Daughter-Jane Joan Middle-Class Succeed I'm going nowhere.
Worthy Joan Fear of success Fail I'd rather go somewhere instead.
Calloused Joan With Humanity Build walls If I told you all the things I do, it'd kill you, too.
Holliday Joan & Bitter Joan (twins) Sexual Suicide before New Years I don't see why Mom's getting me a new mattress for Christmas, I'm going to kill myself soon anyway.
They're all essentially variations on Warhol Joan and Teenage Joan. I mean, most of those catchphrases are song lyrics that nobody catches. "Puckering at the crack," I believe, is a phrase she learned from her ex-boyfriend, Hubert, who worked as a concrete man.
I could recant Joan's Sisyphus-like history with unrequited love, each case subsequent and the same. That might explain something. But the distance between cause and effect widens while you're not paying attention. Or if you're expecting someone else to pay attention. I pay attention to Joan, but not enough to make up for her own lapses. For instance, I know that Calloused Joan builds walls and Bitter Joan forgets how to take them down, Daughter-Jane Joan pushes the boulder up the cliff and Worthy Joan stands in the way when it starts to barrel back down into the valley—but that's hardly the source of anything, is it. She wants to know how she got stuck in the valley. Eventually, after day upon mind-numbing day, even Sisyphus would forget his crime.
Joan would trade all those other Joans to be one Joan—Joan Doe—empty and allowed to be invisible. I don't know which Joan took me home from the shelter years ago. She drove a Honda Civic.
I have seen the True Joan, she is there, though she doesn't get out much. She is the Joan that called the company that manufactured her apartment complex's washing machines to find out what exactly were their definitions of a "micro," "normal," and "turbo" load. She didn't want to tell it to wash a turbo load when it was really just a normal load. She didn't want to lie to the machine.
After finally catching the lizard in the closet, and deciding it was too bony to eat, I go to plop down on Joan's computer keyboard for a nap, but when I touch the keys, an email pops up onscreen. It's an email that Teenage Joan had just sent to Hubert, I guess because she ran into him last night, even though it has been a full three months since they broke up and Hubert stopped talking to her because Joan couldn't stop herself from talking shit about Hubert and all his friends. It read:
you can't possibly hate me that much. when i think about our fucked-up friendship, i remember two hugs—being able to ask for a second hug, i remember when we were drinking by the pool all afternoon and you rushing back to my refrigerator to pour chocolate syrup down your throat to hide the smell of alcohol because you had to go have dinner with your grandmother, i remember how talking to you was the only time i was ever able to perfectly articulate my religion, i remember you calling me while you were babysitting your nephew, i remember when i was upset about you spending the day with maria when she was in town, and you signed online at like 2 in the morning and wanted to see if i was ok, i remember your bandage from donating blood—it was tied with a blue bow—you'd never given blood before—i'm still scared to, i remember how to escape from alligators on foot. Zig Zags!
Hubert deleted that email address. Now, Joan Eztherhas goes speed dating. I come. She brings me. The hectic pace prevents either Warhol Joan or Teenage Joan from completely taking hold. I don't mind going because I can't get enough of that clinking sound of ice cubes and glass. It sounds like the sounds she made for me when I was young—spoons against the cat-food tin, tin against kitchen tile. Now, beer against beer, and crunching of kibble. It's all a little more dulled. Anyway, the dating service has some suggested ice-breakers, but after the first few rounds, most people ignore them, as they try to ignore me:
GUY 1: What kind of being, besides a human, would you most like to be?
JOAN: Snakes get to shed their skin. Trees just add on layer after layer. I wish I were a snake.
GUY 1: Then you might have to give up your cat.
JOAN: If you could live in any time period other than this one, what would it be?
GUY 2: The time before standardized time.
JOAN: Are How and Why really the same question? And Who the same as What?
GUY 7: What?
JOAN: Don't wait for the translation—yes or no!
GUY 12: Sorry I make bad conversation.
JOAN: It's ok, it happens to lots of guys. Is my pussy intimidating?
GUY 16: Can I buy you a drink?
JOAN: It's an open bar.
JOAN: I don't understand why most anti-depressants have side-effects that include more severe
depression. That's just sickeningly unfair. Cruel. Isn't the reason why most people are depressed in the first place because they feel like nothing works out for them in the way it's supposed to—that they always wind up with the side-effects and never the cure. Isn't that why the band is called The Cure? Do you like The Cure?
JOAN: Think about this: together, we can be "one" but that's not even half of "someone," is it?
GUY 17: I thought this was the year I would become irresistible.
GUY 19: Have you seen the urinals in the place!
JOAN: Don't you think that if Mr. Spock grew out his hair he would look like the dad from the
Brady Bunch?
GUY 22: Yes, I suppose there is some common sideburnage. You're a little unhinged, aren't
you?
JOAN: I think I am unhinged, but I don't think I'm as unhinged as I think I am.
As a young man, Mike Ostrov was led astray by country music. It took him to horrible places like dive-bars and undergraduate programs. In 2010, he married Townes Van Zandt's horse, Amigo, in a privite ceremony in Vermont. He currently lives in Gainesville FL but hopes someday to die in Denver CO.
