“What are you doing up there, Walter?” Harriet yelled up to me as I carried a few things out Tracey Flagler’s apartment after her suicide. Harriet, a beautician and brazen hussy of sorts from Great Britain, lived in the apartment directly below, but she was seldom seen around the complex. Her brassy voice was occasionally heard by all from time to time as she conversed with one resident or another at the top of her lungs on the walkway, usually voicing complaints about the poor upkeep up the property.
“Tracey’s stuff is up for grabs,” I responded over the railing. “The landlord said we can take whatever we want before the Salvation Army truck gets here.”
“I don’t know if I could touch anything of hers. That woman was a weird witch. She was into the spirit world - I could tell that, I’m sensitive to that kind of thing… Oh, look at this crap!” she said, waving at the litter in the yard, and then pointing at the huge pile of dog excrement on the sidewalk outside her door. “These people are from the wrong side of the tracks. I try to keep the area in front of my apartment clean, but a lot of good that does with this kind of neighbor around. I called the landlord the other day. Why doesn’t he clean this place up regularly, and paint the buildings, I asked him. ‘Who would want to rent apartments in your dirty place?’ I asked, and I told him I was so ashamed to have guests that I might move out any time now.”
“I had the Queen Elizabeth over yesterday,” I jested, “and she was appalled by the deplorable conditions here. Come on up, there’s a big chair and a couch up here, maybe there’s something you can use.”
“I don’t know. It’s a bad thing what she did, doing herself in like that. She was a dope addict, I bet, and a slag.”
“What is a slag?”
“A slag is a tawdry tart, but she doesn’t bother to charge, just gives it away to everyone.”
“You mean a slut? I saw only one boyfriend around”
“That black man was probably her pimp or dope connection, maybe both.”
“So you think she was charging after all?”
“Well, I didn’t know her, really. I suppose a girl has got to do what she has to do, but I didn’t like her.”
“Why didn’t you like her?”
“I’ve got to get my sleep, you know, and that bitch was a noisy one, rattling the railing when she chained her bike, pacing around and around all night long up there like a crazy woman, and I could hear her bloody cats scrambling around on the floor all the time.”
“Aw, Harriet, give her a break. We’ve got to make allowances for people. I think she was really a sweet girl. Come on up, see if there’s anything you want.”
Harriet climbed the flight of stairs and entered the apartment with me: “Whew! What a smell!”
“It’s the cats, and the kitchen drain is clogged up with dead roaches.”
“Gawd, look at this place! I knew it. I knew she was dirty bitch. I’m glad she’s out of here, but I’m worried someone worse will move in, will be stomping around up here and disturbing me. I heard you walking around. I never make noise – do you hear my stereo playing downstairs?”
“No. But the ceilings are thin, and if the windows are open the neighbors can hear everything – the woman in the front building is a screamer, she keeps waking me up with her orgasms.”
“Really, now, I’ve never seen her with anyone.”
“I don’t think she has a lover. She had her lamp on one night when she woke me up with her groans. I looked into her open window from mine and she was masturbating with a long purple dildo. So I wrote her a polite note about it and put it under her door. I offered to help her out with no strings attached. I enjoy being used to please a woman, and I need the practice, but I need my sleep, I wrote, and I myself would sleep better after a climax or two if I got to bed early. Now she keeps her back window closed and her curtain pulled.”
“Hmm…that’s very interesting. I might like to help her out myself, but I’m glad she doesn’t live above me.”
“Harriet, the noise wasn’t Tracey’s fault, really. This whole apartment complex is like an echo chamber. All you got to do is say boo to wake everyone up at night. Look how the floor buckles as we walk on it. Why don’t you move into this room, be on top instead of below? Then you wouldn’t be bothered by people and other animals walking around on your ceiling.”
“Not after she’s been here. This place can never be cleaned enough. I can feel something weird in here. I tell you, I can feel that sort of thing. Don’t you feel it? She was weird, a voodoo woman, I’ll bet. Look at that little string doll with stuff on it, hanging by the door there. And all that pacing – she must have been on heroin.”
“No. Pacing would be speed or cocaine. Actually, I took her diaries after I found her corpse, and I found out she had kicked drugs. Alcohol was the big problem. Some people seem to be born into withdrawal. They want something to curb the inborn craving, to dampen the energy, or to help them just let go of it and do what it wants.”
“Yeah, I know,” Harriet said, with an understanding look.
“She craved power but she also wanted to totally relax, so the booze got her high and depressed her too.”
“When you have total power you also totally relax because nothing stands in your way when it’s uncorked,” Harriet opined wittily.
“She was in AA, was dry for a long time, and getting herself together. That’s why she rode her bike, and probably why she paced a lot, trying to outpace demon alcohol.”
“Oh, poor thing,” Harriet’s whole demeanor had softened. I suspected she was an alcoholic herself, and had picked up her brazen attitude in London pubs. “I saw her on the beach in the mornings, doing yoga.”
“Trying to calm down, get some peace. Her long hours as a waitress did not tire her out, as she was gripped by a terrible thirst for spirits”
“Oh, I understand, that’s why she killed herself…”
“And when she was not pacing around, she was writing in circles in her notebooks, repeating herself over and over, drawing wheels with ‘I’ in the center of each one and writing wishes between the spokes. She often addressed an imaginary friend named Abraham in her notebooks, and referred to the Secret.”
“Oh my God!” Harriet exclaimed. “She was into the Secret?”
“Yeah, she was. I hear lots and lots of people got into it since Oprah started recommending it. I feel sorry for Tracey. She got so deeply involved with the Secret cult, got her hopes raised sky high just to be let down, and then she felt guilty because the Secret had taught her that she was responsible for failure. I think that’s part of what killed her. Someone ought to do a study of the relationship between suicide and the Secret.”
“What are you saying? What’s wrong with the Secret? The Secret is wonderful!”
“For one thing, as the real African high priest revealed to his initiate, there is no secret in the sacred lodge. Anyway, the whole thing about the Secret turned me off after I read the Salon’s revelation of what is really going on with that.”
“What salon gossip is that? What’s the name of the salon?”
“Not a beauty salon, an Internet magazine called the Salon.”
“What was said?”
“For one thing, the guy who wrote the article, Peter Birkenhead, thinks Oprah is ruining her reputation recommending the Secret. I got the impression that he thinks Oprah is a greedy bitch, to use your word.”
“What a dickhead he is to day that! Oprah is not a bitch and she would not recommend the Secret unless it was good.”
“He says Oprah is preaching Golden Bull, the worship of Mammon and the love of money, and that the Secret is the usual instant-success, instant-gratification, self-help snake oil in a rosy bottle. If you drink a bottle every day, then you can lay your hands onto $2.5 billion like she did, just take a swig and visualize the bucks well enough and talk it up, and if you don’t get it it’s your own damn fault for making bad choices. She claims that the only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their negative thoughts.”
“She’s right. Your thoughts set up magnetic waves that attract whatever you want.”
“Do you have your million, yet, Harriet?” I asked with a smile.
“I’m working on it. I deserve one as much as anyone else. There’s no reason why anyone doesn’t have a million if they really want one and focus on it. You don’t have to be a Jesus or Moses to be millionaires like they were.”
“OK, you know the Secret. The Salon writer said if the secret of the Secret were true, then people deserve to get bad things because they have bad thoughts, that poor people deserve to be poor, people in Darfur deserve to be raped and murdered by the Janjaweed, stuff like that. If you don’t get something good, too bad for you – I guess you kill yourself, maybe take a few people with you.”
“That makes sense,” Harriet claimed. “Losers block good stuff with wrong thinking. I don’t want to do that. I want to be the best me I can be, a leader and not a follower!”
“You go girl! I can tell you that Tracey adored Oprah and even wanted to teach the Secret. Oprah has set herself up now as Secret teacher. What the guy at the Salon seems worried about is that the being all you can be in our culture amounts to being as greedy as you can be, grabbing everything you can for your self. The faith of the Secret is placed in the self, in believing in the self whatever it might be instead of actually knowing the self including one’s limits. Consumers who do not know themselves nor know what to do to be successful enough to buy whatever they think they might want instead of what they really need, flock to hear this magical means of instant success. In other words, Oprah is a cheesy con woman and the Secret is a cheap con.”
“That’s a lot of pong! Oprah’s a goddess, the most honest woman in the world, and she didn’t get rich conning people. We’re not stupid! She knows how we feel, and we don’t have to feel weird with her, like we’re freaks because of sex, our looks, because we are overweight, did drugs. She’s someone we can confess to and help ourselves. What does that bloody critic know about anything? He’s a blooming idiot and they can shove him. I’ll bet he’s got a small one and can’t make a living with his negative writing. You’ve got to think big, visualize what you want, that’s what I say. Excuse me now, I’ve got to get back to the salon – I’m working twelve hours today.”
“You work long hours.”
“It’s worth it. Beauty inspires.”
“Don’t you want any of Tracey’s stuff? How about this stuffed chair?”
“No, it’s too big. I have my own stuff. You know, I’m glad you told me about Tracey. There was something I always liked about her, but I didn’t know what it was. If only she had kept on thinking about what she wanted, but in the right way, she would have gotten it and would be living joyfully now. I wish we had gotten together for tea while she was here. We would have been good friends, I’m sure. God bless her. May she rest in peace.”
