Lazy Jane

When I was a kid, my mom used to sit me down before dinner and make me say grace, and if I missed a word or stumbled over something, she’d hit me on the top of my head so hard that sometimes I’d bite my tongue. If I cried, she’d hit me again, so it didn’t take me long to learn to stop crying whenever I bit my tongue.

My mom was many things. She was a liar first, and a cheater second. Sometimes she was one of those women who hits her kids and calls it discipline. She was a Christian, but only by name. She never went to church but she still made me say grace, which brings me back to my original point. The tongue-biting thing.

Right now, my mom doesn’t even know she’s my mom. I’m feeding her porridge, and I can see a dribble of it rolling down her wrinkled chin, and it’s hard not to feel sorry for her.

It’s hard, but I think I manage it pretty well.

She doesn’t talk to me when I come to visit her, which is fine because I don’t know what I’d say. She just sits there, staring at the wall, looking suitably tragic as I sit here loathing her existence. She’s wearing the face of a woman who has been victimised by the circumstances of a terrible life, but really she’s sitting on silk cushions, living comfortably on a sizeable portion of my earnings.

My earnings. Right.

It’s almost half past. I need to be at the office by eleven, and it’s a twenty minute drive. I could stay here a little while longer, but to be perfectly fucking honest, I’d rather not. It stinks of death and stagnation and that particular kind of smell you get when you’re surrounded by the ancient and pathetic.

I leave the spoon in the porridge and press a kiss into my mom’s cotton-candy hair just in case anyone’s watching. Wouldn’t want people to think I’m insensitive.


“Financially,” says my accountant, “you’re pretty much fucked.”

There’s a pause, stagnant with bathos.

“Is that the technical term?” I ask, and kind of hate myself for saying it. I’m trying to be funny and it’s not working. I try a smile instead, a sad smile that says, oh, man, this sucks. It does, though, really. Being financially fucked. I might as well just end it now and give the gossip magazines something to write about. Ethan Marsden, internationally famous fuck-up, has been found dead in a hotel room. Initial reports suggest he blew his head off with a sawn-off shotgun.

Right here in my accountant’s office I decide suicide isn’t for me. I’m too much of a coward for that.

“You’re basically running on fumes,” he continues superfluously. I don’t need him to tell me I’m essentially bankrupt – I got that from the whole you’re fucked thing. “You really need to find a job, as soon as possible.”

I tug a hand over my face, feeling week-old stubble bump under my fingers. “See, that’s not as easy as it sounds,” I say, keeping my voice light and off-handed even though I fee like grabbing the guy by his lapels and throwing him out of that stupid huge glass window behind him. Who needs a window that size anyway? “I could go to every director in Hollywood and offer to pay them to appear in their movie and they still wouldn’t touch me with someone else’s ten foot barge pole.”

My accountant looks sheepish. “When I said job, I wasn’t specifying acting.”

“What, do you want me packing bags at a grocery store?” I snap, and then I snort at the image. Me, standing by the tills, chanting paper or plastic like it’s a sacrificial rite, lugging sanitary towels and cartons of eggs into bags while people look on and mutter, ‘Hey, isn’t that the All Before Noon guy?’

“Listen,” he says, and I tighten my lips like I’m bracing myself for some cold, hard truths. “Ethan, you’re a nice guy. You’re a great actor. But if you can’t get another acting job, you’re gonna have to look elsewhere, because the world doesn’t stop turning just so you can catch up.”

I lean back in the seat, stubble digging golf-ball pockmarks into the palm of my hand. He’s right.


I call my agent while I’m waiting for the hot water to boil, and ask her to find me a job as I stand over the sink trying not to spill ramen on the kitchen floor. How the mighty fall from grace.