Believe me when I tell you, I’ve never been exposed to anything stronger than commercial potato bug spray, and maybe some suspect pot. That’s it. No nuclear waste, no zaps of electricity. My family has no history of medical freakery and we don’t make a practice of staring at eclipses or marrying our first cousins. We’re generally not gifted in anything. None of us are even really that smart, even. But I have this thing, this ability I’m going to call it, this power, and it doesn’t have a specific name and it’s got nothing to do with wordplay ability so I can’t think of one myself. Like right now I’m trying to think of a way to describe it and the problem is, there’s no easy way to box it up like flight or invisibility or morphin’. Description gets all tricky. So does proof. Like, if I broke the sound barrier on foot you’d say wow, that’s amazing, you must really be The Amazing Speedster and not some wingnut who wandered in from Crazy Street. And if we were in like, a bank together, and there was a robber and I kicked him through a concrete vault wall? You’d dub me The Ninja Kick Hero, or maybe Ninja Kick Menace depending on how you feel about vigilantism. But if I did for you what I do for real, there’d be nothing even to see at first. My thing, it takes time. It takes a specific set of circumstances and follows a specific set of rules and I had to figure them all out by myself through careful testing on my roommate. Even now I’m still trying to figure things out, and now things are starting to get complicated and weird, and I guess that’s really why I’m here. I need, I need to just talk this through with someone.

Don’t worry about my roommate. Just listen, okay? Just let me back up a bit first, that will help.

Three years ago I’m on a Brooklyn-bound F train, rush hour, everyone’s wearing headphones and got their Subway Faces on. I was right out of college then, this annoying little noob who didn’t even know you need a Subway Face, or that you need to watch out for the threats; who’s a beggar, who’s a jostler, who looks insane. These days I’m all over that stuff. Like yesterday my conductor announced this station was closed for an ongoing police investigation and I didn’t crack once, not even raise an eyebrow. Not even when we passed that station and cops in full-out ET spacesuits were moonwalking around looking for anthrax. Whatever, my face said. I’m a New Yorker now. I don’t react to things. Fuck you, anthrax. If I react to you, the terrorists win.

Sorry about that. For the swearing. I’m just nervous, is all.

So anyway this day, my CD player runs out of batteries and I end up with nothing to listen to. I get bored, I start looking at the people around me, all these people who didn’t want to make any eye contact which worked out fine, I could just look without worrying about catching their eyes and make them think I’m one of the threats. The subway’s a weird place, right? In terms of proximities? I think about that all the time now. Where else do you get to step so far into the spheres of complete strangers? You’re so close together, in those cars. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we all started to think about it at the same time and had a collective stampede freakout.

Anyway. This one guy catches my eye. He was this middle-aged white guy sitting in the spot directly beneath the map of all the subway lines. He had a gut the size of a watermelon resting on his knees and the strain on his t-shirt was pulling apart the fibers of the fabric. Like, you could tell that shirt wasn’t long for this world. It looked like the kind of gut that would droop, you know, the kind you’d have to shift around to find your genitalia. He had on cargo pants and tan work boots and the cleats of the boots had dried dirt caked on. Two of his knuckles were wrapped up in tape. Patchy head of hair. Not completely bald but getting there, horrible comb-over, hair this plain indistinguishable color you’d have a hard time describing to a police sketch artist because it’s just so bland. Dust colored, almost. Flesh colored. I was standing at the center pole and I could see flakes of dead-skin sunburn peel on the bare part of his scalp, just waiting for a draft or something to come along and blow them into the atmosphere of the subway car. Sick, right? But not over the top. He wasn’t really that special. A run-of-the-mill ugly guy. Not Phantom of the Opera gross, just gross.

Out of nowhere I think to myself: let’s play a game. Pick three things to change about this guy to make him a prettier person.

First two were easy. Hair. Weight. For hair I thought, make it thick, cover his whole head with no scalp breakthroughs, and turn it a nice rich rufous shade. Yes, rufous. A nice brown-red combination, like rust. Color of oxyidozied iron. It’s nice. He looked like the kind of guy who’d look good with rufous hair. Nice thick head of rufous hair with no bald spots. Next, lose eighty pounds.

Third one I had to think about. So I’m looking at him, and the more I look the more I realize there’s something throwing off his face. He had these really prominent veins, like red thread draped all over his nose and cheeks. Like a subway map. So for the third thing I thought, take away the nose-veins, leave him with smooth, blemish-free face skin.

And that was that. He got off at the next stop. Harmless stupid little superficial game to fill some downtime with a dude I’d never see again. You see so many people on a subway, right? Even if you ride the same route every day the chances of reencountering the same stranger aren’t that great. But here’s the thing, the thing that set this whole other thing off. The thing is, this guy, this melon-bellied non-phantom ugly guy, he had a tattoo on the meat of his hand, that fleshy part right beneath the thumb. Tattoo was a skull with only one eye socket. I remember thinking at the time, I wonder if he’s a fan of The Goonies. You know that movie, The Goonies? One-Eyed Willie? Little Mikey finally makes it to the pirate ship and pulls up the skeleton’s eyepatch with a shaking hand and it’s all filled in? Guess that’s why they call you One-Eyed Willie, One-Eyed Willie (*inhaler cough*). Anyway, this guy had a One-Eyed Willie skull tattoo on his thumb, and it stuck in my head, and the next time I saw him, a freak re-encounter on the subway, me going home, him going who knows where, that next time we met I saw the tattoo and I recognized him.

This was maybe two months later, maybe three. I had a working CD player and was rocking out to this old drinking tunes mix I’d made, and I happened to look up (I’m standing at the center pole again) and I see a guy in a seat by the door with a one-eyed skull tattooed on his thumb. I know that guy, I thought, and there were the dirt-encrusted work boots, same cargo pants, gray t-shirt. But the watermelon gut was gone. Like, almost completely. I was all confused; I practically did a spit-take, wondering if I had the wrong guy. This man had a face full of clear vein-less skin. Midsection wasn’t perfect, maybe a double-handful of flab to grab, but nothing close to melon. And his head, that was the kicker, his head’s covered in beautiful brown-red rufous hair, shampoo-commercial thickness, more perfect and lush than any non-actor hair had any right to be. It’s not the same guy, I told myself, but there was the tattoo, the clothes, the look of the man, that hair, the exact same color I’d assigned it. It was the same guy, and he had like, morphed to the specifications I had laid out.

I changed him. No I didn’t, that’s stupid. I changed him. No, I didn’t.

That’s the fight I had with myself over the next few days. I kept trying to dismiss it, talk myself down, you know? Convince myself I’d made a mistake. Maybe it was even some massive cosmic coincidence, like, when I saw that man last he was already planning to start radical weight loss, already had his eye set on a box of rufous hair dye. But there was another part of me that knew even then what had really happened. A part of me knew the truth. That man had changed because of me. I picked three features to trade up and it had happened.

So there was only one thing to do. I had to do it again. Just to make sure.

This is where Patrick comes in. Remember I mentioned him earlier? He’s my roommate. Was my roommate. He was my orientation buddy freshmen year of college and we were best friends for four years of undergrad and when we graduated we both landed jobs in the city and moved in together. He held down a whole slew of bartending gigs while he auditioned around town for off-Broadway plays. Like, real off-Broadway. Like, some of them were in backyard stages in Westport. Patrick’s the greatest guy in the world and that’s something that you and your cronies haven’t really gotten yet, by the way, how badly the world needs great gay men. They just, I don’t know, they just put out this energy that needs to be there. Patrick does, at least.

Anyway, one night me and Patrick decide to go out and get some drinks at this bar we both like. The owners let people bring their dogs inside and they’ve got a hundred different kinds of beer on tap. It’s one subway stop up the F track from where we live. So on this one night we get on the train on a half-empty car and I’m sitting across from Patrick, looking at him, and he’s all upset about this Shakespeare in the Park part he didn’t get a callback for, and I’m just looking at him and thinking about One-Eyed Willie Tattoo Dude. And I look at Patrick’s hair, which is starting to thin a little at the very center of the pate. His hair is a Thoroughbred horse-brown, used to be thick as golf turf back in college. But a little after we moved to New York it started to recede and he knew it, too. He’d stand in front of our mirror in the bathroom and talk to it while he brushed: please don’t fall out little hairs, please don’t go away, I’m not butch enough to pull off bald.

So while Patrick’s launching into some Hamlet soliloquy and I’m nodding along, kicking my heels against my seat, I stare at his head and say the words slowly, very deliberately, to myself.

Thicken the hair to twice its current thickness, fill in his head completely, no bald spots, strong thick hair that won’t fall out or recede or thin for the next fifty years.

And that was all I was gonna do, originally. But something didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel quite done, like I had stopped just short of completely scratching an itch. I remembered I did three things with One-Eyed Willie, so I added two more, two things I knew kind of bothered Patrick. The thing about Patrick is, his parents weren’t poor but they weren’t that well off, and for one reason or another they never got his teeth fixed and his two canines were a little crooked. Not enough to notice on the street, but he had to have all these headshots of himself when he went out on auditions and they take those real close up. And Patrick had enough trouble with those pictures anyway because his skin was always breaking out. He never really grew out of his acne. Like even then, right at that second on the subway, he had a big purple volcano setting up camp on his forehead. So I made like, eye contact with the zit, and

Perfectly straight teeth.

I said, and:

Flawless skin, no zits, no acne, no ingrown hairs or oil or blackheads, nothing but baby-ass smooth skin.

And you know, for as sure as I’d been about the first guy, about the fact that I really had changed him, I instantly started to doubt that I’d do anything for Patrick. Nothing was gonna happen. I felt pretty freaking stupid about it. First guy was a fluke, or maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. And I was all nervous and dejected and stuff and then, then over the next ten days this is what happened. Morning number one Patrick’s standing in front of the mirror, all: good job, little hairs, you go on and cover that bald spot. Next day: wow, you’ve got to try this toothpaste, look how much better my teeth look. Two days later: it is just me, or does my skin look freaking fabulous? On and on and on. Morning five, look at my hair, oh my God I swear to God, I’m growing more hair. I’m having a hair renaissance, is what he started to call it. Morning seven, he’s singing customized Oklahoma lyrics. Oh what a beautiful moooorning, oooooh what a beautiful daaaaaaay, I’ve got a beautiful feeeeeling, my hair kicks ass and I’m gaaaaaaay.

He thought it was all . . . actually, I don’t know what he thought. He just, he just bounced around the apartment. Tenth morning he says to me, don’t stress about hitting your mid-twenties, your skin clears up like a Neutrogena wet dream and even those gnatty blackheads go the way of the dinosaurs. And he was right. His skin was perfect. Perfect. Like it was carved from stone. His hair was beautiful. When we sat in our apartment armchairs watching TV his hair’d catch the light from the overhead bulbs and shine like a halo. It was so thick it’s like you could lose things in it, like you lose things in underbrush. Patrick had changed, and I had changed him. Just like the man with the tattoo.

How did it make me feel? Nah, that’s not what I want to talk about yet. I’ve got an order here. Just let me get through it.

Okay?

Okay. So, the power only works once a day, but I can do it as many times as I want to the same person. It only works in threes. If you do two or one or ten at a time, nothing changes. I figured this all out using Patrick as a guinea pig, and before you get up on the high holy ground let me tell you that Patrick is probably the best looking man in the world right now. Definitely in New York City, and isn’t that basically the same thing? I refined that boy. I added two inches to his height and an inch to . . . to another place, and carved him out a jaw you could cut paper with and his eyes, you should see his eyes, and in fact if you want to, go on down to Times Square and look up. That billboard with the half-naked Adonis-looking dude in the Calvin Kleins? That’s Patrick. Those eyes are what you call powdered synthetic ultramarine. I did that color later on, after I’d been screwing around with the power for long enough to realize that I needed to learn more colors than just blue, green, aquamarine. You should see some of the eyes I’ve given people. It’s like creating your own cast of live-action anime characters. Oh, just on a side note? Listerine mint mouthwash sounds like a cool idea for eye color, but it’s really not. Looks like a freaking vampire. Or a demon, or something.

Oh yeah, of course he noticed. Patrick’s not stupid. I didn’t tell him anything because I didn’t want him to know, but he did notice. He kept telling people the Glitter Prince did it. That was his version of god. Whenever something good happened to him, even back in college, it was the Glitter Prince that did it. The Glitter Prince sprinkled glitter and made him gay, the Glitter Prince got him into college, got him boyfriends, passed his tests, and now the Glitter Prince was making him beautiful.

Why didn’t I tell him? Would you? Seriously, would you? What do you think would happen if you told someone you had the sole power of making them physically perfect? What if people thought you were some effed-up genie, their own personal glitter prince? Everyone kissing your ass, angling for favors, obsessing over what you can do for them. No, I didn’t tell him because I didn’t want our relationship to get weird. I didn’t want anything to change. Which, saying that now, aloud? Sounds kinds of stupid. God, I didn’t even realize that at the time. The irony, or whatever.

Huh.

Hey, I did other people too, you know. Besides Patrick. Like, I used David Schwimmer to figure out I couldn’t reach people through the TV. I tried to change his hair to blond and his irises to purple and make him lose twenty pounds, just to see what would happen. If it had worked I’d have fixed him, if he seemed pissed. But the power’s a no go through the TV. That’s the craziest thing about this. The power doesn’t work unless I’m on a subway car looking at the person. I couldn’t change Patrick in our apartment, even sitting right next to him. I couldn’t change him in a car, on the street, on an above-ground train, or on a plane which I tried when he flew us both to Vegas as a birthday present to me. We had to be in the subway. It took me a while to figure that out. Weird, right? Like, almost weirder than the actual power. Why the subway? What’s the connection? I don’t get it.

But as long as it was the subway, I could get you. I did friends of ours, friends of mine, some co-workers who came out with me after work. This one girl, Mary, very cool girl who took over my job when I got promoted, she and I got friendly and when we both lived in Brooklyn we’d ride in to work together sometimes. She was about twenty pounds overweight and came from two sides of Greek gene pools that left her with hair thick enough to braid on her upper lip and forearms and even the lower halves of her fingers. Once she wore a v-cut shirt to work, and I caught sight of a few stray hairs growing in her cleavage. And she didn’t have great cleavage to boot. Not enough to compensate for a pelt. So one day she and me, we’re riding home talking baseball, and in my head I shaved off twenty pounds and gave her permanent hair removal all over her body and filled her out to a nice C cup. And that fixed her right up. And thank god, right? What would have happened if I hadn’t been there? What kind of girl deserved to battle her way through life with hairy cleavage? Not many. Not her, specifically.

Which reminds me of this one guy I didn’t really like, this guy from work who liked to pick on the janitorial staff and take credit for other people’s sales. He once called a delivery boy a fag. I took a ride with him and fixed him up with a double-chin and male-pattern baldness and some ass-acne that I can only assume came in nice and thick. That’s when I figured out I could make people worse. I’d been wondering about that for a while. And don’t worry, I fixed it all a few weeks later. He just looked too sad with horseshoe hair. And he’s really toned down the douchery since then, so who knows? Maybe he made the connection.

Sure, I did strangers. Lots of them. That’s all I do in the subways anymore. Most common thing is weight. I almost always suck off a few pounds as one of the three. At first it was just a general minus twenty pounds, shave away ten pounds, remove fifty pounds order, and sometimes it still is. But other times I have to get specific. I’m still trying to figure out how specific I have to be. Like, is this power some kind of an evil genie-type situation, where if you don’t make your wish loophole-proof something awful happens? Wish for your son back he comes back a zombie; wish for a million dollars you get like, Monopoly money, or cursed pirate gold. I’ve tried a few things on Patrick and I’ve never had a jerk-ass genie kind of a result, but it does seem that the more specific I am, the better. Like with the weight. There are some insane body shapes out there that must drive people insane, and sometimes I specifically target them.

I once sat in front of a woman standing at the center pole who, from the waist up, was a perfectly normal-sized woman, probably a size eight or so, but below the belt she had on a pair of pants that had to have been custom-made to encompass the enormity of her ass. It was as ass of epic proportions, the kind that gets you wondering just how does this poor thing go to the bathroom, does she have to develop an aim, line up the holes to make sure she’s not pooing over the side of the toilet? Not to get graphic or anything. And then once you got past her ass, her legs were perfectly normal size eight legs. It was like she was a camel, except instead of a hump filled with water she had this ass. So I said,

Proportion her ass to the rest of her body; shrink the ass to match, and not the other way around. Smaller, ass, smaller ass, smaller size eight ass.

I did the other two, too, but the ass was the main thing. Never saw her again, of course. But I hope that made her happy. What a crock deal, getting stuck with a problem like that. She’d probably been fighting with that section of her body for years. It was probably the biggest problem in her life. No, no pun intended. Come on, now. This is serious. Okay, maybe not the ass thing so much, but other things are serious.

It’s not all fun and games, you know? I keep running into problems. Complicated stuff. It’s starting to get to me.

I ended up sitting next to a Little Person once, on my way to Times Square. She was about four feet tall and had that bottom-heavy build that most of them have, big head, that Little Person waddle, and short fingers too, I noticed that. She dropped a coin on the floor and had a lot of trouble picking it up. Stupid, stubby fingers. She had very pretty red hair, this beautiful orange-red shade with vermillion highlights thrown in. Did she want to be taller? That was my first instinct, to make her taller. Normal height. Proportion her out. But would that be something she even wanted? Some people, they get so possessive of everything about them, even if it’s something that the rest of us would say sucks, they hang on to it. You know how some deaf people are like, screw you implants, I like being deaf? I didn’t know if she’d thank me or not for stepping in. I didn’t know if she had Little People friends, a Little People husband or boyfriend or partner or whatever who would kick her out the second she starting shooting up because she just wouldn’t understand after that, what it meant to be part of the small world.

Oh god, and then there was this other time, even more of a killer call, this time I was on my way to the Village for Halloween and I ended up sharing a car with a whole bunch of decked-out trannies. There was this one in particular, this real tall girl with fantastic legs, absolutely devoid of hair, feet packed into black stripper heels that looked like torture devices. She had on a shiny blue-plastic dress and the cleavage looked like the real deal. I know that a lot of times you can get pretty decent cleavage with a roll of duct tape and some padding but this, this was either the most magical tape in the world or some very tasteful cosmetic surgery. The hair, on the other hand, looked like wig. An expensive blond Dolly Parton wig a la Steel Magnolias era. And this really threw me because I wondered, was this the kind of tranny who was a full-on born-in-the-wrong-body kind of person who was saving every penny for an eventual sex reassignment surgery, or was this just someone who liked to cross-dress? Big difference. Big big difference. And I couldn’t just ask a stranger on the train, excuse me Miss, do you want a real vagina? But how else was I supposed to know?

That was the closest I’d ever come to telling someone, about my power. If Patrick had still been my roommate I’d have gone home and told him the whole thing. But he’d moved out by that point. He had gotten an agent, some pretty good gigs, the money starting pouring in and he was gone, moved to Manhattan. And for a while he didn’t really keep in touch that well. He’d send me an email telling me to check his Facebook page. That’s how I was supposed to keep up, Facebook quizzes and Twitter updates and online picture of him doing fun things with lots of very pretty people. He’s gonna start doing soap operas next month.

Did I mention yet, that the power doesn’t work on myself? It doesn’t. Just for the record.

The Little Person and the tranny? Sure, I’ll tell you what I did. Changed her, nothing on him. Froze on him. Froze on her, I mean. Don’t ask me why that decision. I have no rationale. Nothing. I think about those two every day, wondering if I made the biggest mistake of their lives. Should it have been the other way around? Should I have done both? Neither? I honest to god think that if I run into them again or someone like them in the subway, I’ll ask. Even if they punch me out, I have to know. What should I have done? Someone needs to tell me, what was I supposed to do?

Yeah, funny you should say that. It flashes through my head a lot, the whole playing god thing. I do feel like I’m playing god. I do. I think this is what doctors must feel like all the time. The decisions they make, the consequences they create. Doctors and snipers and I guess anyone in any kind of power position. Here’s my theory, and here’s really why I picked you to come talk to. There’s a lot of people I could pick who have to keep quiet, confidentiality and all that. Doctors and shrinks, right? But I figure you spend a lot of time thinking about god stuff. I do too, lately. Because I think I really am god.

No, listen. Just listen a second. I think I really am god, but that doesn’t make me important, that just makes god a nobody too. I don’t believe in god capital G God. I’m starting to wonder if the world is full of people like me and that’s why things happen, random things or miracle things, things that no one can explain. What if the whole world is filled with people with really specific superpowers? Like, there’s someone who can make babies mathematical geniuses if they shake hands with their mothers on a Tuesday. There’s someone who keeps dying patients alive on the operating table if they stamp their foot eight times in a hospital elevator.

And this, this is the freaky part. Maybe there’s someone out there who can cause cancer, or crashes planes or calls in hurricanes from the sea. Instead of me in the subway losing sleep over some guy’s lost vagina they’re like, villains, cackling, going about their business, going out everyday and doing what they do to hurt people. They’re the evil gods, the evil side of capital G God. Or maybe they don’t even know. Maybe they’re completely unaware of all the chaos they’re causing, and completely unaware that stepping on all those freaking cracks are breaking a whole bunch of mothers’ backs. Like, how messed up is that?

Let me ask you something. Has anybody else ever come in here and told a story like mine? I bet I’m the first, right? I bet. I know you can’t tell me.

Wow. That was a long silence.

No, I do have more.

Okay. Okay. So Patrick showed up at my doorstep a few weeks ago. Middle of the night. I thought someone was trying to break in and then it’s just him, weeping, and he’s so pretty even the tears look beautiful. It’s amazing how grotesque stuff can look pretty when you make it a statue. Like that statue of Mary holding dead Jesus. It’s called something, it has a name.

Yeah, that’s it.

Anyway, Patrick was all upset because his mother came to visit and he thought it was just because she wanted to see his new place. But they had gone out to dinner that night and she tells him, Patrick I’ve got cancer. They caught it early, but not too early, and they think it’s treatable, but they’re not sure. Breast cancer. She wanted to tell him in person.

I’ll skip most of that conversation, because a lot of it was him hysterical, talking about his mom, trying to apologize to me, and the whole time all I can think is, I’ve got to get this woman in the subway. That was one of the last big things I’d been wondering about. Can I fix something on the inside of the body too, and not just the outside? That was a really tricky thing to test, cause I didn’t know any sick people, and it’s hard to tell what’s wrong with people’s insides just by looking. Bald wheelchair-bound deathly pale dying people don’t really ride the subway, right? But here, this was my chance. Here was my chance to help Patrick, help his mother, make up for any of the mistakes I’d made, any of the people I’d accidentally messed up, who woke up hating their new hair, new eyes, newly skinny ass. Even though I don’t really believe anybody woke up hating being not fat. I’m sorry, that’s awful, right? Maybe there is. I don’t know. Whatever. The point is, this was the chance to do something really, really important.

I’ll skip the details. I’ll just say, it wasn’t that hard to arrange. Patrick’s mom wasn’t really sick yet, and she’d always wanted to ride a New York subway. We all three got on a train. She wanted to see Ground Zero. She’d always wanted to see me again too, she said. Used to see me all the time in college, wasn’t it nice that we two old friends had each other in the city. Sweet woman. Pretty. A little pale. She said I hadn’t changed a bit.

I smiled and nodded and erased the fine lines around her eyes and sucked out the beginnings of a turkey neck, then I looked right at her chest, this cute red sweater with flowers decorating the front, covering up the part of the body that was trying to kill her, and I said

Cancer is gone from the body, every trace of it, from every part, never to return. This woman has a cancer-free body.

And that was that. She and Patrick went back to his apartment. She went home. Patrick called me every day. He came to our old apartment, I went to his new one, and everything was the same between us except for this new tension. This waiting for the phone call tension. I didn’t mention the c-word at all. He did only once. He said he thought the whole thing was his fault, that he was being punished because he let things go to his head. I wasn’t the only one he cut from his life, he said. He hadn’t talked to his mother in months. She had to call him four times before he finally called her back, so she could tell him about the cancer. It’s the Glitter Prince’s evil twin, he said. The Tumor Prince, the Cancer King, punishing him for turning into a bad person.

I told him that was stupid. And that’s all I told him. I was waiting for the phone call. If his mother was okay I was going to tell him everything. Hell, if it turned out I could cure freaking cancer I’d need to tell him so he could be my sidekick, help me plot to get whole oncology wings into the subway so we could heal the world together.

But it didn’t matter. His mother called and the cancer was there and worse than they thought and they needed to operate right away. Double-mastectomy. Radiation to follow. She’s doing all right now, treatment seems to be working. And if she ever makes it back to the subways I’ll go with her and give her any head of hair she wants, fix up her mastectomy scars and put some weight back on her body. Radiation really wears you down, you know? She lost a ton of weight. Not in a good way. I think I’ll light a candle for her here, before I leave. I don’t know if stuff like that works but who am I to say they don’t?

What do I want from you? Good question.

At first I thought I wanted to come and ask for penance. You guys do that, right? Give me some prayers to say, tell me some things I can do to make up for whatever it is I’ve done wrong. I thought, look at me, going around making these superficial changes while people are dying and real things are happening and mentally lipo-sucking the fat from strangers’ asses isn’t doing anything to help. And yeah, I don’t buy into capital G God but it won’t kill me to apologize. That’s what I figured, at least. But now I don’t think that’s true. I am doing something real, I think. And maybe I make mistakes and maybe I’m not curing cancer but I am making some people happy somewhere. I have to be, right? And I have to keep doing what I’m doing.

So I think what I want from you is, I want a simple little pat on the back. I want someone to tell me I’m doing a good job. Just once. I want someone to help me talk out the problems, think of new solutions, someone to listen to me rant for a while before I go back to work. And I think that’s gonna have to be you. You’re a really good listener, and I feel better already, just from this. I really do.

And hey, to make up for barging in here and laying all this crap on your lap, what do you say we go take a ride somewhere? I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve got one hell of a nose on you, and who couldn’t stand to lose a few pounds at your age?

Come on. There’s no line outside. No one wants to confess on a Wednesday morning. Come tell me if I’m the Glitter Prince. Or god. Or both. Come tell me what your favorite color is, and if you think it would look good as an iris.

Come on. Let’s take a ride. You’ll feel better too with some fresh subway air.