a character sketch written on 23 Jan 2024

Jeanette McCarthy lived with her iguana, Bruce, in a studio apartment in a vague town in Nebraska. She worked at a call center, constantly getting yelled at by customers and having to motivate herself between tears to take calls.

For her 34th birthday at the end of 2009, Jeanette took a rendezvous to the reptile zoo in town. She watched Titanic documentaries that night until she passed out on her couch. She always said the best combination was “reptiles and ships.”

Jeanette strongly believes that she’s the only real person in the world and that everyone around her is a mindless drone. She says no one ever hears her and that “they are just sheep following a herd.”

While her grandma homeschooled her for most of her childhood, Jeanette spent her senior year in public school. She believed she was an outcast because she was homeschooled, but she had a big issue holding in her irritation in class. People would find her mumbling to herself, which they thought was a form of witchcraft. She was called into the counselor’s office weekly.

Besides Bruce, one of Jeanette’s joys in life is feeding the feral raccoons outside her apartment. At first, it was a peace offering in exchange for her stolen belongings, but after a while, it became a pleasant routine after work. However, her neighbors would complain constantly. She still fed the raccoons secretly but was evicted after several attempts to stop.

When Jeanette was 10, a girl named Bridget lived two doors down from her. Bridget went to public school and was “super cool” in Jeanette’s eyes. Jeanette was so excited to finally have a friend her age that she visited Bridget’s house daily. After public school started that fall, Jeanette continued to come to Bridget’s house, waiting outside for 10 minutes till she realized no one was coming to the door. The next day, she knocked on Bridget’s door again. Finally, Bridget answered to tell her, “My parents said I can’t be friends with you anymore,” and then closed the door. To this day, she avoids going near Bridget’s house.

Once a week, Jeanette would hear the phone ring at her grandma’s house, though her grandma never answered. One day, Jeanette was curious and picked it up to hear an older lady on the phone, “How are you, baby? I’m sorry I haven’t called in a while.” They would talk for an hour, and then the woman on the phone would have to leave for bingo night, “Don’t be a stranger, okay? I love you, baby.”

“I love you too, Mom,” Jeanette replies, then hangs up. They talk every week, and she still doesn’t know the woman’s name.

Jeanette has never had a boyfriend, but she’s had crushes on guys. Her last crush was a coworker at her first job as a server. He had promptly quit, only stating that he got a new job elsewhere. She later found out during her daily eavesdropping in the bathroom that her crush thought she was creepy and had a “menacing stare that seemed to follow you everywhere you went.” She quit a few days later.

Jeanette loves flowers. Flowers make more sense to her than people. She knows when they will die and doesn’t have to talk to them, which is why she quit her job as a call representative.

Jeanette would describe Bruce as somewhat of a Houdini. She would find him dangling from her bedroom window before she would catch him and put him back in his enclosure.

Before her birthday in 2010, she decided to write an autobiography. However, no publishing company would take it, so she wrote a short story about Bruce and published it.

In 2011, Rango came out in movie theatres. Jeanette believed her story was stolen, so she wrote several strongly worded emails to the producer. She was presumably put on the blocklist.