|
10/23/06 On Awaiting Autumn and Bathroom Graffiti It is a stifling night in this Brooklyn apartment, and New York appears, uncharacteristically, to be lagging this year in its usually smooth and decisive transition between the summer and autumn seasons. It's almost as if the busy city at some point accidentally lost track of its cherished months, and is now moving forward on tentative toes, and taking a few too many cautionary glances back over its shoulder. Yes, the leaves in the park are slowly changing colors, and on some afternoons the temperature cools and the sky dims before letting forth a grey rainfall; but the summer heat (which is, as a rule, annoyingly fastidious about not leaving work a minute earlier than it was scheduled) is still stubbornly refusing to give an inch until it has rechecked all the facts and found its bearings. Meanwhile, autumn has casually arrived (hung-over but smiling) to take over the next shift. In my opinion, the summer heat is being rather discourteous to the autumn season this year. The summer heat has complained that autumn is irresponsible and irrepressible -- a season brimming with impractical romance, unchecked sadness, and moody listlessness. "Autumn," accuses the summer, "always shows up to work either early or late -- never on-time. And it's also been written up on repeated occasions of taking long lunch-breaks." This may be true, but autumn's a lot more fun to be around. In a roundabout way (which seems to be the only way this writer ever gets around to doing anything), this lingering summer heat brings me to the subject of this essay, in so far as there is one. Which there isn't really. My friend Amanda predicted an Indian summer some six weeks ago, before I had moved back into the city, and so I'm not entirely surprised with the hot weather now, because her statement seemed slightly ominous to me then. It stuck with me, in any case, and I've recently begun paying attention to phrases that stick with me. It seems to me that you cannot be too careful about an unusual phrase, especially if the friend delivering it has something of a far-off, unseeing look in their eyes. "We're going to have an Indian summer" carries roughly the same weight as "Beware the ides of March" -- to me, anyway. I'm not exactly a political leader in danger of a violent coup, and so usually concern myself with such smaller forebodings as the weather. Anyway, such unusual phrases should be observed and stored away for later, and if you empty your mind of all agendas and ambitions for a few hours a day (perhaps take a walk, or maybe sit quietly in a cafe), I'm confident you'll be able to find them floating around you; in the street corners, from the apartments above, and rustling behind the dumpsters. These unusual phrases abound in a city like New York. If you cock your ear right, you'll hear ominous mumblings of the future, queer incantations of the past, and haunting insights into our very own times, which are wisely ignored by practical sorts. I'm quite sure nobody is prepared to just take me at my word on this, and I don't even advise you to. It might be madness I'm going on about, but I am willing to try to explain, as clearly as I can, the vague impression I'm speaking of. The other afternoon, after a few cocktails in the East Village, Meredith and I were strolling down the streets, rather aimlessly and happily, and we had no particular destination in mind for two very good reasons: we were slightly drunk, and we were discussing our similar fascination with bathroom graffiti. The usually drunken, sometimes religious, mostly depraved, and always obscure scribblings on the dingy walls of bathrooms, whether they be penned in bar or gas-station, restaurant or fish-market, have something to them, we decided -- something we couldn't quite put our fingers on, but something to them just the same, and something unnerving at that. I trust you won't doubt that it is a strange feeling indeed to be standing in a restroom, feeling reasonably safe and alone (but still vulnerable -- unbuckling your belt, for goodness sake), only to notice that someone has taken the time to write HOPE LIES WITHIN on the dirty trash can near the toilet. I find it almost as alarming to see PUSSY LOVE scrawled into the bus-stop pole while I'm waiting to commute, but with the case of the trash-can prophesy it seemed (to me, at least) that this faceless stranger must have meant something by that. I'm not too sure if I'd like to know exactly what they meant, and I can't swear to you beyond any doubt that we had a slightly devious philosopher on our hands, but I do think we can at least agree that it would be peculiar if the writer didn't mean anything by it. I myself have never taken the time to write anything on a bathroom wall (or soiled trash-can, for that matter), and I don't intend to until I find it absolutely necessary to do so. However unsettling it is, there is something compelling about reading HOPE LIES WITHIN on a dirty trash-can: who put it there? Why? And in what state of mind? These are the puzzling questions of bathroom graffiti. Some examples are perhaps less vexing, less paradoxical, yet equally uneasy and strange. Meredith was able to appreciate, with a appropriately cynical laugh, the irony of what she observed the other day, but my guess is that she still found it hard to completely shake the initial shiver of seeing ACCEPT JESUS AS YOUR PERSONAL LORD AND SAVIOR -- RIGHT NOW! staring her in the face from a stall door, stark as a billboard, just as she was getting ready to peacefully vacate the premises. No pressing desire to become a Christian immediately (or really at all) has been inspired from any of the rest of her unsolicited interactions with witnessing evangelicals, and seeing the demand in a bathroom stall didn't exactly put her on her knees in prayer. It did, however, succeed greatly in totally creeping her the fuck out. As someone who grew up in the Christian church (and has studied and memorized his fair share of Bible verses), I have to wonder whether Jesus, when delivering The Great Commission, really had dingy bathroom stalls in mind. It gives me some pause for thought, but not much. I've never quite understood the concept of evangelizing in the first place, and I suppose I would give evangelical bathroom-graffiti the same respect I give to street-corner missionaries. Both methods have certainly proven themselves to be equally effective. But back to subject. These haunting and bewildering cases of bathroom graffiti -- the intricate drawing of an alien staring at you with empty eyes (two inches away from Slutty Sally's phone number); the call to accept Christ and be saved! (four inches from a crudely drawn penis); the James Joyce quote (which someone has taken the time to respond to underneath, dutifully reassuring the reader that, regardless of what Joyce had to say, "FRANK IS SO GAY!") -- all of them have something vaguely prophetic and ghostly to them, almost as if you've seen the same image or phrase scrawled across some forgotten childhood dream. Or at least almost as if someone was drunk, found a serendipitous permanent marker in their pocket, and got sort of bored while they were taking a shit. Either way -- whether or not there really is anything to all of this -- Meredith and I had a pleasant conversation about it, sort of spooked ourselves out, and now sometimes report what strange Writings On The Wall we've discovered when we return safely to dinner and each other. It's inevitable that sometimes the messages are only mildly amusing (or not really at all), but sometimes these phrases penned (or dismally chipped) into the walls are so strangely haunting, so permanently mysterious, that the only real consolation you're afforded afterwards is finding that your napkin has been freshly folded in your absence, assumably by some empathetic waiter or conscientious busser who has experienced the very same horror when visiting their restaurant's bathroom stalls, and knows how you feel. But tonight it is the heat, and not any graffiti, that is keeping me up. I'm sweating and typing away in what appears to be the Indian Summer that Amanda predicted, and neither Mer or I can sleep as the hot night yawns on. If this isn't an Indian summer, it is at least a somewhat awkward and embarrassed autumn, appearing this year like a slightly too-intelligent schoolboy on his first day at a new school -- welcomed politely by the professors, but uneasily convinced that all of the other children have assembled an already tightly-knit group of friends who disapprove categorically of all slightly too-intelligent newcomers. Being a slightly too intelligent newcomer myself (since I entered the world, in fact; a fat and moody infant of ten pounds, reading a used copy of Crime and Punishment), I know how autumn feels. Let me then be the first to gladly extend my hand in welcome to this slightly-too intelligent newcomer, autumn. Some of us appreciate your arrival, and are looking forward to getting a little sleep around here without waking up the next morning on damp, sweaty pillows, in clinging pajamas. If the summer heat has any issue with this, let the bastard take it up with me. Because remember, beloved Autumn: if you happen to be awkward and tentative at this early stage, you are as you must be, and this is natural, not embarrassing. It is the senior summer heat that is still creepily lingering around the school halls, trying to chat up the incoming freshman girls, and I recommend strongly that this already graduated jock suck it up, hang its crummy certificate in its own badly decorated apartment, and get the hell off campus already. I'm sure it will be back again next year, relieved beyond relief to see that all of its old friends haven't moved forward an inch, so that it can get drunk and relive the glory days of its past. In the meantime, my metaphors are breaking down in a hurry, and so I'm going to get out while the going's good, open a bottle of beer, and smoke a cigarette. With any luck (or Divine grace -- extended to us, I trust, from a nearby bathroom-stall Pentecost), Mer and I will be able to find a rotating fan. I have nothing left to say tonight, and so will leave the reader with two quotations from writers better than I. You can chew on these pieces of wisdom while we await the turning of the seasons. "Listen!
the wind is rising, "Frank is
so gay!"
4/28/06 Touring Gas station, fast-food,
banana-cream pie blizzard from Dairy Queen. In the restroom, on a wallpaper
strip of painted fawns in the forrest, someone has written "MY
NAME IS CHUCK AND I DON'T GIVE A FUCK." Nathan's sick, absent,
saving his voice, drinking tea. I'm sick. Everybody's sick. Wandered
Madison yesterday in the heat. Drew a (bad) picture of Central Park.
Doodled. Smoked cigarettes and drank iced Americanos while watching
the local college girls dressed up for Spring. Tom Waits on the stereo.
Jacobs wears a cowboy hat and a handlebar mustache. Another gas-station.
Wander the isles, buy a lemon tea. Squint in the sun outside, somewhere
between Wisconsin and Minneapolis. Walked over to a dive bar by myself
the other day, maybe a week ago, in Pittsburgh. Walked an old dirt road
and looked down on the city. All the glimmering white and yellow lights
from the darkened buildings reflected in the river, under the bridge.
All those bridges. Walked over to the bar, o Bethany removes her glasses and wipes some tears from her eyes, sitting next to me on the bus. Stares out at the passing fields. Nothing to say. MacDonnalds signs. Telephone poles. Gas stations. Drank after the show in Madison, danced a number with some girl who sang karaoke. Fell over. Called some guy a prick. Called some friends, muttered aimlessly into the phone, am told I started crying but don't remember. After the show at Calvin College, where we saw Salmond Rushdie speak (articulate and funny), was invited by some students to play capture the flag in a graveyard. Declined politely. Played some piano backstage. Undressed the other day and stared at my ass. Looks like hamburger. Scarred up from the cysts. Gonna tell my wife, assuming I wind up with somebody some day, that I got it in the war. Street-fight. Shrapnel. Doesn't matter. "Sorry about my old hamburger ass," I'll say. Called my mom in Chicago, walked around Mer's kitchen, cried. Said I missed home. Big alligator tears. Show in Chicago went well. After crying and talking with my mom, went up and read Mer part of a story until she fell back asleep (since I had woken her up to say hello). Gave up reading when she woke up again ten or fifteen minutes later to go to work. People sleeping in bunks. People sitting on the bus. China and Kate, up front, talk animatedly. Bethany checks her phone. Jacobs reading one of his music industry books. Mears bought a new pair of jeans and white cons. Adam asleep all day. Pass a used car sales lot and a Blockbuster. $2.50 CLEANERS. Middle America. Jesus on the billboards. Cars glinting white-hot in the late afternoon sun, slung low over the flat roads. Trees green and stiffling. Some vague city on our left. Interstate 94. Been reading Hemmingway in public restrooms. Getting used to shitting in them. Pass what might be a church. Throat hurts. Wake up in a new town. Wake up in an old town, worn out three nights. Ask Marke at a gas-station if we have a show tonight. Take Sebastian for a walk around a parking lot on his leash, going nowhere, going in a circle. Collect vegetable oil. Rubber gloves, oil pump, sniffing back the snot. Watching a cigarette smoke itself. Fly to Seattle for a friend's wedding. Go down to the docks. Shadows like olive paint dabs floating in the water. Seagulls skim the surface. A furnace between my eyes. Take some photos in a photo machine with Rachel. Red wine, a cigar. Whiskey and beer with Caleb. Argue with a Scottish kid about American cigarettes. A girl pipes in defending him. "You can't trust HER," I say. "She smokes menthol, for chrissake." Meet up with band in Pittsburgh, nervous breakdown in the airport, hearing temporarily lost in one ear. Buy some advil and a bottled water and rub my sinuses. Blood in my mucus. Cyst maybe returning. Walk into an airport bathroom and lock myself in a stall. Pull down my pants and feel my ass, the soft bump, the other scars, all hamburger, pull my fingers away with blood on them. Try to call my dad but it's maybe 4:30 in the morning. No answer. Nathan is saying something to me but I can't hear him. His plane leaves twenty minutes before mine. He'll meet me in Pittsburgh. I tell him okay and stumble through the airport, shaking. When I awoke on the descent into Chicago twenty minutes earlier I thought I might die, staring out the window at the ghostly sky as the air-pressure built to a silent scream in my ears. Had to piss, but the elderly couple next to me were sleeping, slumped over their trays. Wondered if they were dead. Looked out the window, expecting to . . . discover something. Hold my head and concentrate on not chewing through my teeth, mouthing "Oh-my-fucking-God" silently. Pray to God it will be over. Think the words "My own personal twenty-minute hell," and, "I will never hear again." Everything is silent and suspended. I look around the cabin expected everybody screaming in pain, but nobody moves. Everyone is normal as my head shrinks and I crumple over, holding my head and chewing at my teeth. Plane lands, the pressure subsides but I still can't hear, Nathan tells me to answer him, not ignore him, I start shaking and whisper (it feels like I'm yelling) "I . . . can't . . . hear . . . a . . . fucking . . . thing." Freaking out. Curse him out. Apologize later, Pittsburgh airport, Hyatt lobby, black coffee, then read Bukowski on the lawn outside. Meet up with the band a few hours later. I'm not talking, just reading. Somebody says, "You heard Modest Mouse's song about Bukowski?" "No. Is it . . . awesome?" I say. They look at me weird. Bus pulls into
Minneapolis. The Varsity. Beautiful theatre. Exposed brick, shimmering,
translucent sheets hung like gossamer from the high exposed ceilings,
lit low and ghostly by lamps, a dusky escape into the past, or at least
I'm pretending in my head. Piano man playing on an old, falling apart
baby-grand. Pitcher of water next to him. Persian rugs laid out on the
wooden floor. The Varsity: Presenting The Cinematic Underground With
Painted Saints. Walk down the street and buy cigarettes and a beautiful
old lighter at a tobacco shop. Dinner in Dinkytown, a block up from
the Varsity. Bottle of wine. Denny, who we're staying with, tells us
the same guy designed these two buildings. Walk into the bathroom. White
and black marble tile, offset by old brick, old sinks, separate HOT
and COLD faucets. I think, inexplicably, that I'd like a shave. Some
guy plays the saxophone from the stage at the restaurant. He's good:
he's old and sad and good. "I like that motherfucke After dinner, bound across the street with Jacobs for coffee. "I only trust assholes," I grin at him, leaning against the register while we wait for our coffees. "That's why a grew a fu-man-chu," he says, gesturing smugly at his mustache. "It says: 'you will not like me.' It says 'Go Away.'" I laugh. Then the coffees are ready. Walk back, turn around to get a lid, walk back. Nathan's smiling tiredly, if not feeling better. It's really a beautiful theatre. I walk up-stairs, pass through a lounge with a pool table and a few cues, think about The Hustler, walk into the bathroom, tiled in black and white -- like the restaurant -- and the door is held open by a small round table. Decide for the fifth time this evening that I would like to shave in a place like this, and think vaguely about moving in, living in the rafters, The Phantom of the Varsity. Had a dream a few weeks ago which started out sexy with a girl before people walked in on us and her apartment turned crazily into some gothic-century Cabaret and I danced through people in masks with my suit-coat flowing like a cape, like the Phantom of the Opera, and waved at her while she danced in a line of girls, wearing black satin and mesh stockings. Woke up from the dream, had a cup of coffee, and read a Rolling Stones issue. Pull my phone from my suit pocket after hanging my garment bag in the stall of the bathroom. Text-message from Ben: "Watch out for the skeleton upstairs, behind the stage, at the Varsity." The Fray played here a few weeks ago. Text-message from Scott: "I just got fired, ha!" Sit down in the stall with Hemingway. Balance my coffee on the porcelain. Blow my nose: no blood. Good sign. Read my book and shit. Feel safe in proportion to the cramped stall. Wash my hands and examine my face in the mirror. After a minute of dispassionate scrutiny, decide there's nothing new, leave the mirror and change into my suit in the stall. 9:30. We go on at 10, 10:30, not sure. It's so quiet in the bathroom. Walk downstairs and the lady taking tickets, pretty and disaffected, gives me an orange wristband for drinks. "Guest-list?" she asks Jacobs. "We don't have any friends," I say. "Me neither," she says. Walk outside, smoke a cigarette, Kate's talking with a friend of hers. Sit down on a stoop and read Hemingway. Sports bar across the street. I hate sports bars. I hate the TVs, I hate the games, I hate the interviews with the players. Blue TV screens blinking, fuzzing through the windows across the streets, and I can barely read a paragraph because I'm getting paranoid because the windows are fuzzing blue and some guy is getting interviewed. I hate sports bars. Then opening acts, then we go on. Show's good - empty crowd but the band's tight, we're listening to each other, we're playing music with each other, an audience of one, order a beer afterwards, sweat dripping down my neck, tired muscles, grinning red-faced while I shoot the shit with the bartender. Hug some people in the band. Yeah Yeah Yeah's on the speakers, tear down with Marke, talking music, smiling at each other. Lazily disassemble my drum-kit, make a few jokes with Mears, order another beer, wander over the the broken-down baby-grand and clunk out my new song, about Scott and Amanda, and the theatre dies out, the lights dim, and the bar closes up. Order a beer and get it for free. Bartender's counting out her tips, and I leave a few more dollars. Some people are still hanging around: Kate's friend and a few others. I don't know who they are, and eventually they probably wander out, but I don't notice when. Drink another beer from the bus, from when Adam and I checked into a hotel and drank and smoked and watched TV. Pee outside the bar and think about high school, then back to grade-school. Trying to remember what I was like, which is this new hobby of mine. Remember in the fourth grade when I walked up and pretended to run into the chalk board, subtly kicking the wall to get the sound effect, and flinging my head back and grabbing my nose. Got a laugh from the class. Katie Tracy embarrassed. Always embarrassed. Sends a messenger: "Katie says she's breaking up with you." I'm standing on the playground with some guy who liked Star Trek, and I think maybe was named Kenton, although I'm not sure. "Ok," I say. Next morning,
after the show, afternoon: a rainy afternoon. We're in Minneapolis.
It's warm and rainy. I'm feeling good. No idea why. Whenever it rains.
Denny drives us into town -- we slept at his place, in his living room,
and some of us at his girlfriend's -- and we see Friends With Money,
which I love, and which puts me in a very introspective sort of mood,
and so I stare out the back of the van on the way home, watching those
rainy streets, the old buildings, the block-lettering erected above
them on wires and metal. Adam starts singing this song he always sings.
We park and while we're walking down the hall into Denny's apartment
he keeps singing it, and so I shush him loudly. He stops, turns, and
looks at me. Looks hurt and affronted, like a goddam doe or something.
Really breaks my heart. "Who are you shushing?" Bethany asks.
"Adam," I say, walking past him, still stunned in the hall.
"How come?" Bethany asks. "Because he always sings that
song, and it's abo "No refunds," I said, and went down to Spice Market in the meat-packing district, where Scott worked before he got fired, and where Scott got me free whiskeys for about an hour before he got off. Then we went back to the apartment and watched Monk and drank beer with Amanda. Woke up late, alarm didn't go off, hurried my ass down to Chinatown after saying goodbye and giving my love to Scott and Amanda, and four hours back to Boston, and we've got a show that night probably, but hell, I didn't know because I never know. And we go out on the road for a couple of weeks, and it's gas stations, and searching for vegetable oil for the bus, and it's fast food, blurred cities, paperbacks shaking like crazy while you try to read them, some stops have wireless, trying to find half an hour for a cup of coffee, pissing in a water bottle up at the front of the bus, trying not to leak down on the goddam steps, dropping the warm bottle out the window and hoping there aren't any cops around, and Peddley used to sing Beach Boys when he drove the bus in winter, back when we stood outside the bar in Chicago, after the bus left him, waiting for Mer to pick us up because the venue bar had closed down, and goddam, it sure was cold, even with our buffer of Scotch, but Mer shows up and our asses are saved! "She's lovely," Peddley tells me later. "I know," I say. And it snows for the first time last year while I'm riding around the next day with Meredith, smoking a cigarette in her passenger seat and watching all that white snow fall, and listening to the Beatles with her, and looking at her hair on our way to lunch. She kisses me at a red-light and for three days I feel young again. Then we leave Chicago and we play Calvin College and we play some other places, God knows where, and more gas-stations with bathrooms with condom machines for seventy-five cents and I buy one and give it to somebody in the band as a joke, but it's not actually funny, and we play Galapagos in New York, and Kate reads a book when we throw a small party in my cousin's place in Brooklyn, while everybody else is drinking, and I wander over to Greenpoint, where Scott lives with The Films, and we drink and talk and laugh, and the tour's over for the Fall, and I stay in New York for a few days after the band leaves, and I have a nervous breakdown on the Upper West Side, at Marcus and Tyler's place, and Marcus breaks the empty whiskey bottle and starts scraping into his stomach, telling me in a steady voice that he's going to cut the demons out, and I talk him down with Dawn, his girlfriend at the time, and I tell him that he's loved, that God loves him, and I scrape up my own arm while looking at him in the eyes, and I say, "There, my demons are fucking out too, so calm the fuck down," and I get him to bed with Dawn after hugging him, and then I go straight for her vodka and I'm so drunk suddenly I'm blind and the tears won't stop coming all of the sudden and I'm putting cigarettes out on my forearms and screaming, and then I punch Tyler in the face twice because he's refusing to tell me why I exist, and later I piss on his floor in the living room. The next morning Dawn makes eggs, and I eat some, and someone says "What a crazy night" and laughs, and I almost puke. I look around the table and everybody's eating their eggs. "Thanks, Dawn," I manage, get up and leave in a daze and meet up with Scott in SoHo, and he says "Christ, Charlie" when I show him my arms, and we get on the Chinatown bus to go to Boston together for Thanksgiving, and I fall asleep curled up next to him on the bus. When we get there I cry and cry when I see the band, and I show them and my family starts crying, and Nathan takes a long walk with me, and Seth buys me bandages and ointment, and Nathan and I come back and Seth bandages my arms and I hug Marke for a long time. At Thanksgiving we have a party down in Hyde Park, and there's new people to meet but I don't talk to any of them, and Kim and Marke and I talk about how we don't have any room left for more people. Scott gets lovably drunk off of his wine and I help carry him home. He leaves. Then Christmas comes. I go back to Colorado and drink myself dumb for a few weeks and read Life Without God on the toilet at Caleb and Tyler's apartment, usually when drunk, but I also take some nice walks with my mom around the lake by our home, and have some good drives with my dad, trading music new and old. And Christmas comes and goes, and the New Year. When midnight arrives I'm driving by myself downtown, listening to Ryan Adams. I arrive at Caleb and Tyler's around ten-minutes past 12:00 and talk with some people I haven't seen since high school (how does Caleb know them?) and try to catch up on drinking. I visit a psychologist a few times. I go to the dermotologist. And at sometime I wind up back in Boston, and the band picks up again, plays around the town a bit, and heads out for tour, and then we're back in New York at Galapagos, and then we return to Boston. I take a walk in the Commons, but it's freezing and the lights on the trees left over from Christmas aren't hung very well, and I try to create a feeling of romance in myself but nothing happens, so I go see a movie at the Lowes by the park. Two-week break from tour, no money, nothing to do, and so I ring up a tab on Adam and we watch a movie a day, and I go to bed at eleven AM and wake up at 5 PM, never taking off my suit or long-underwear for two weeks, except to sleep and shower, and in the shower I sit down and feel my patchy, reddish scruff, and my cyst grows to the size of a golf-ball so that I can barely walk, and I've been cutting down on the drinking since Christmas, but we buy beer and whiskey, and I try to write a song but I can't think, and so at the end of the two-weeks we pack everything up and move out, but I stay behind in the empty house for a few hours as the first hot day moves into evening, waiting to catch my flight back to Colorado later that afternoon as the band heads out again on tour. I will rejoin
them in two weeks, after the surgery. My bags sit packed and I eat a
few chocolate donuts and drink a beer I found still in the fridge after
I finish the coffee I had picked up earlier in the day, walking back
from the post-office while everyone loaded boxes and suitcases and shit
into the bus. Kim's frustrated with me, and has, I decide, every right
to be. I'm lazy. My parents have lent me a few hundred bucks. Mears
is going to cover the drums, and he sounds great after learning the
parts in one day. The band leaves on the bus, and so I clean the bathroom
up-stairs and sit around in the empty house, play a little on the old,
out-of-tune piano, walk out in the garden and call Meredith. I order
a taxi when night falls, and then I eat another donut while I wait for
it. "Where to?" asks the driver. "Airport," I say.
"Where you headed?" he says. I start to say "Airport"
again, but realize that's not what he meant. "Colorado," I
say. We shoot the shit about Then it's two very peaceful weeks with my parents and younger siblings in Colorado, I get my cyst lanced, I read and watch movies, I spend my days drawing at a coffee shop, then a weekend in Seattle, fly to Pittsburgh via Chicago to meet up with the band (which makes me think of the Wilco song Via Chicago, and during the hour lay-over in Chicago I wonder if Mer's sleeping or if she's still awake at four in the morning, staring out her window, the TV on in the background...), and we play Pittsburgh, and we play Calvin College, then some other city, then Madison, and we drive to Minneapolis and play the Varsity, and tomorrow we head to St. Louis, and tonight Adam's friend Denny is grilling us meat down at the community pool, and tomorrow it's gas-stations and rest-stops and fast-food, Arby's connected to a petrol station, discount DVDs, changing cigarette prices, bathrooms, graffiti, looking for books left on the bus, fishing through bags, laughing, feeling dead, lying on the bunks and watching the passing scenery through the window as night falls, giving some serious consideration to crying like a baby, wondering when I last showered, haven't shaved in weeks, Marke's beard is full and Russian, his unruly hair tucked beneath his conductor's hat, and another gas-station, and I'm drinking some Dayquil that somebody gave Adam (or did he say he found it?), STAR magazine and US Weekly at a Shell station, buying . . . pretzles, the wind blowing through the open windows on the bus, Springtime in the air, Kate gives me a pillow while I'm sleeping on the floor, Amanda writes me regular updates from New York that make me smile, that I actually can't live without, Scott and I have a talk that makes me feel at home, I take a shit at a restaurant, look at my hamburger ass, reading Hemingway, discounted beer at a show, forty bucks from an ATM, wandering a city before a show, coffee, blood back in my mucus, rainy days, iPod charged, a fan loves the show (and I feel sincere and grateful when I say, "Thanks."), meeting other people I don't remember five minutes later, a hotel for a night with four people in a room, foreign showers, Seth ruffles my hair and says that I'm "a cutie," packing up drums, cloudy mirrors, out of cigarettes, flavored Mocha, China grins at me while we're playing a set, watch Family Guy episodes at a nameless hotel with Adam, trees passing, bridges, buildings, beautiful sunrises, boring sunrises, pack of cigarettes, masturbate, scammed out of forty dollars in Pittsburgh, someone has scrawled HOPE LIES WITHIN on a dirty trashcan in a bathroom, more discount DVDs, Burger King, and I'm walking out of a gas-station drinking a Pepsi and my mind is blank and somebody asks me if I've heard the song about Bukowski by Modest Mouse and I say, "Yeah, Adam showed me. I thought it was funny. I liked it."
1/9/06 SCOTT, SMOKE-STACKS, AND OTHER INCIDENTALS My friend Scott has this thing that he sometimes does, which is he calls me up and when I answer, he says, "Hi Charlie. Listen, could you hold on for a second?" It reminds me of this thing that Sam would sometimes do, which was write me an email about how she was going to write me an email soon. I never knew exactly what the desired response to this was. Ok? I look forward to it? You have my permission to do so? Scott somehow manages to get away with doing this, calling me to ask me if I can hold on for a second, without pissing me off, which is a wonder because most people manage piss me off (or send me into an unsettling dread) by even calling in the first place. I always feel like I should be pissed off on principle when Scott does this, but he has a charisma to him so mischievous and dorky, and has done it enough times, that I just end up thinking it's too funny to be upset. So, resigning myself to a smile, I say, "Yeah, Charlie, I can hold on. But, um, you know you could just call me when you're ready, right? You don't have to, you know . . . warn me." He's of course clicked off before I've even said that yes, I can hold on, and returns to the phone in a few minutes, interrupting my rambling with a beaming, clueless warmth as he settles into "So, Charlie, how are you? What's up?" as if there is nothing but time and sunshine in the world. If ever approached about it, I'm convinced he would give an unmistakable little guffaw of joy (that he would try to hide) before composing himself to protest, the absolute picture of injured innocence, "What? I don't do that." But that unmistakable little guffaw, as if he were being presented a huge award for a sport he didn't even know he participated in, would give him away. Scott's the sort of person where if you call him out on something, he laughs and looks very proud of himself, happy, I guess, to finally be receiving a little recognition. Yesterday I went to see a shrink. I was very proud of myself, and told people about it all day. "What are you doing today, Zach?" "Going to see a shrink, then a little recording." "What are you doing today, Zach?" "Going to see a shrink. You?" "Hey, Zach, it's Caleb. What are you doing later this evening?" "Nothing, but I'm going to see a shrink this afternoon." I took a personality-disorder test because I wanted to know if I was crazy or not, and it was compiled of statements that you had to mark as True or False. Like, for example, "I feel tense and sad for no reason that I can think of directly after having a joyful experience." True. One of the statements was "I have flown across the Atlantic 30 times this year." I thought that was funny, because what if an airline stewardess was taking the test. "But I really did fly across the Atlantic 30 times this year." "I know you think you did, Shirley." "But . . . but I did." "We're going to work through this, Shirley. It's okay." I finished the test in what I thought was pretty record time, considering all of the fun I was having creating scenarios in which other people were taking the test. I liked the shrink I saw. We made jokes about depression and talked about Dostoyevsky. He was a pretty sharp and friendly guy, and so I didn't mind admitting that I sometimes pretend to be depressed so that I can keep my happiness a secret. I also told him that I considered my melancholy to be a spiritual condition more than a chemical imbalance, and he wondered, after some light discussion, if one could not search for the meaning of life without being depressed, a condition of mind and body which certainly didn't aid creativity or intellectual pursuit, in his opinion. I said that I thought that was a good question, and that I would have to think about it. I said that my mind said yes, but that my feelings emptied out into a void, and sullenly refused to commit to any answer. I didn't say it exactly like that. I am suprisingly inarticulate when I am actually thinking something through. Or when I am on dates. We started talking about the existential writers -- I had lamely compared my feelings to Camus' The Stranger --, and he was saying how many of them died young. "If they had the answer to life so figured out," he asked, "then why were they not living?" "Or," I countered, "if they knew the answer to life was nothing, then why didn't they do away with themselves sooner?" He thought that was funny and agreed. I thought it was funny too, only I didn't know on whose side I was supposed to be on anymore. I also more or less borrowed that wit from something my brother Marke once said. "The only thing I'm saying," said the shrink amiably, as if he had considered these questions of existence before (which I find puzzling from shrinks in general), "is that in the search for truth, I don't see too many people who are going around saying 'life is meaningless, life sucks -- oh, look at that beautiful sunset!' And I personally would like to find truth while enjoying sunsets." "But that's it!" I exclaimed. "That's precisely my problem. You've described precisely my attitude towards life, and my attention-span: Life is meaningless, life sucks -- oooh, look at that beautiful sunset!" We both thought that was funny. And then, after our laughter subsided, I felt depressed and picked up my coffee cup, staring emptily into its black, tepid contents. "I feel tense and sad for no reason that I can think of directly after having a joyful experience." True. One of the other statements on the personality-disorder test was: "I've been on the cover of many popular magazines in the last year." I thought this was funny too. I kept wanting to check True to these questions, but I didn't. Mostly because of a conversation I had had with my friend, Kyle, the night before. "So why are you going to see a shrink again?" "Mainly I just want to take this personality-disorder test." "Why?" "Because I think it would be interesting." "Oh, that's great, Zach. That's really great. In fact, that's exactly what you should tell him. 'So, why are you here, Zachary?' 'Eh...I thought it would be interesting.' " "What? It is interesting." "You don't go to a shrink to amuse yourself, Zach. People don't go to shrinks to amuse themselves, because they think it might be an interesting sort of thing to do on a Friday afternoon." "Well I don't even know if I want to go anymore anyway. I just sort of brought it up with my dad a few days ago because it seemed interesting, and because sometimes I really do feel crazy. But I guess I was sort of just talking, and didn't really expect him to set up an appointment." Kyle was silent for a moment, and then laughed this laugh he often does when regarding me -- this "you'll never cease to amaze me, you crazy bastard" sort of laugh, and said, "I know why you're going. I've just now figured it out. You're going to a shrink because you're just bored of fucking with us simpletons. 'Look, I'm Zach. I'm smart. I'm sort of tired of mind-fucking with my friends. I want to fuck with someone who has a degree!' " Kyle loves me, but he's pretty sure that my primary goal in life is to fuck with people. He used to do loads of drugs, and lived out highschool as if he were in a Rock and Roll band, which he was. Sex, booze, drugs, getting kicked out of his home and living in his car, all of it. He's now clean and a Christian, and he sometimes asks me questions like, "Are you content?" or "Are you happy?" "I don't know how to answer those questions, Kyle," I say. "Yes, you do. I think you do. Are you happy?" "I don't even know what 'happy' means. What in the hell do you mean by 'happy'?" "Are you happy, Zach." I light a cigarette and look at him. "No," I finally say. "Sometimes the light of a certain time of day makes me feel like disappearing and never returning, and sometimes I wake up and my jaw hurts and I'm convinced the whole world is a hellish, post-apocalyptic nightmare, only nobody knows it but me, and one time I turned on the TV and Howard Stern was playing and I wanted to put my head through the television set because no sound was being emitted from the station and so I was just watching a girl with a brown bag over her head walking around in a bikini, and I could see Howard Stern laughing maliciously at her, but I couldn't hear anything but fuzz, and so I wanted to put my head through the television set but I didn't want to pay for the damage and my knees started buckling uncontrollably and I couldn't do anything about it and it was nine o'clock in the evening and I was steadying myself against a radiator in a room at the YMCA in midtown and I didn't know who I was." But then, almost to balance myself, I talk about how much I love life, and how beautiful God sometimes seems, subtly revealed in the simple purity of a child discovering the world or something, and how love and dedication are meaningful pursuits, and how cynicism seems weak-minded and lazy because it's not examining the whole truth, but only the darker, more fashionable and obvious side. "It's like you're arguing with yourself. You don't even need me here. Do you really even believe anything of what you've just said?" "I don't know." And so he thinks I'm always fucking with people. He's also always mad at me because I don't like the phone, and one time, after he had called about three times in a row, I finally picked up and said, "You're like a needy ex-girlfriend." For the record, none of my ex-girlfriends have ever been needy. I've been a needy ex-boyfriend, but I've never seen anything but grace and silence from my ex-girlfriends. It's been a few days since I've written anything here. It's six o'clock in the evening, and my mom woke me up an hour ago, softly asking if I knew what time it was. "No. What time is it?" I asked from my bed. One of my two blankets had fallen off during the course of the night, and I was vaguely thinking about this. "It's five o'clock. I'm going to pick up Jordan from her dance class, and then I was going to watch that movie, which you could watch with me if you wanted to, and we'll see about dinner." "Ok," I said. "Ok, honey," she said. I've been again starting to feel like I did my first year in New York. Nobody knows what to do with me. And I wish I could nod happily at them, like a funny old man with twinkling, secretive eyes, and give their shoulder an encouraging squeeze, as if to say "Sorry for your trouble. This will someday end. I'll see a shrink. I'll do whatever I can." Last night I drove to Golden to see an old friend. It was about ten o'clock when I left, and so I drove slowly on Highway 58, which was mostly deserted and which I hadn't driven in years. I was listening to Ryan Adams and as I moved out of Arvada, heading west towards the mountains, I could see the industrial smokestacks of the Coors brewery on the horizon, silent and seeming out of another world, teetering quietly above the isolated web of lights burning white below. I felt alive in a very quiet and delicate way. I used to drive down Highway 58 to Golden with Scott, extended lazily in the passenger seat of his old white jeep that he used to have, and we would listen to Our Lady Peace and sing along, or listen to Belle and Sebastian and just listen, content to smoke cigarettes and watch the horizon on our way to get coffee at Starbucks or pizza at Woody's. He used to hold down a job at the Starbucks in Golden, which he transfered for a job at a Starbucks in Queens when we both moved to New York to become actors. One day in New York I got a call from Scott. "I think I just quit my job," he said. I asked him what he meant, which was what I was supposed to ask apparently, since it didn't seem he was going to offer any more information until I did, and seemed to have picked the words to his first sentence carefully, giving each of them a mysterious, sad, and aloofly scheming tone. "Well," he said, sounding vaguely worried and vaguely proud of himself at the same time, "I was scheduled to open this morning, but when I woke up, I decided I didn't want to, and so I just didn't go in. I guess it took them about four hours to figure out nobody had opened the shop, and so nobody in Astoria could get their morning coffee today." He said this last part with a certain amount of child-like glee, as if he had really stuck it to somebody. Which, in his own small way, I guess he had. That morning there were undoubtedly many regulars wondering why Starbucks should be closed when it wasn't a holiday or anything, and it was all -- the helplessness of people wanting coffee for their commute, the confusion and the scrambling on the part of the management, who also didn't know what was going on -- because of him. "Well?" he said. I thought it was funny, but I didn't want to encourage him because now he was jobless and had kissed-goodbye any chances of getting a referral from his managers by not even pretending to call in sick, but just staying home and smiling up at the ceiling from his warm bed. "Well," I said, "I guess that is one way to quit a job." "Yeah, probably the best way," he said. I wish I was a better writer so that I could describe the way those smoke-stacks looked in Golden last night. If I were ever to disappear for a year and write a novel, I think I would set its beginnings in the alien world of those smoke-stacks that I feel so strangely close to. Because if I could ever describe them right, if I could find the key to those smoke-stacks, I would know how to write the rest of the novel. I would like to photograph them, to draw them, to compose symphonies that would resonate sadly of them, these dimly-lit memories that dawn on one in evening's hours, these ghostly shadows against the winter horizon, dwarfed but teeming with foreign workers and wires and bulbs beneath the dark mountains, hidden away from my waking-life and untouchable, but ominous and present, ever in the distance in my dreams. On the other hand, maybe I just need to stop writing these articles in evening, since apparently my sense of humor goes straight to shit after five o'clock and I start thinking about smoke-stacks.
12/14/05
I am a very good person to talk to about relationships. Sometimes a friend of mine who is having girl-problems will come to me and tell me about it. Then I say, "Yeah. That's tough shit, buddy." I guess sometimes I shrug and actually talk through the problem with them, in order to try to make them feel better, like somebody understands, and because I don't have anything better to do. This usually ends with me somehow convincing them that their relationship, along with every other relationship in the world, is completely shitty, too complicated, and only destined to be a big, fat failure. And then we sit side by side, staring out into the distance. They are depressed, and I am sitting there thinking, "Whoops." One time I was sitting in the living room of my old apartment in New York, minding my own business, when my friend Mike said that he felt lonely, and couldn't wait to have a girlfriend someday. I folded up my US Weekly, lit a cigarette, and said, "Do you want to know my life-philosophy? You're born, and you have five happy years that you take for granted because you don't figure on anything else that's going to follow. Perhaps every once in awhile you think, 'I can't wait to be an adult.' Then you go to kindergarten, and it sucks, so you spend grade-school waiting for summer vacation. During summer vacation you get bored and wish you had something to do. Eventually you're convinced that everything will be more fun when you get to middle school. You get to middle school and you hate it, so you're waiting around for summer vacation again, determined not to be bored this time. Then summer vacation comes and it would be great, except by now you have to get a job. Now you're working eight or ten hours a day, and you long for the days when you only had to go to school for about six. Then you're wishing you could be in high school because everyone is so immature in middle school. Then you get to high school, and you realize that everyone is just as immature, except the girls now have breasts and they still don't want to be your girlfriend, which is worse than when they didn't before, when they didn't have breasts. You start thinking about breasts a lot. Anyway, you still look forward to summer vacations, and you still kick yourself when you remember that you have to get a job when summer vacation rolls around. By this point, you're pretty discontent with high school, and you can't wait to leave your crumby hometown and go to college. 'I wish I could be in college,' you're thinking, because then you'll be studying the things you want to study, and not wasting two hours every other day pretending to learn the Spanish verb tenses. And finally you graduate. Your life is now beginning, you think. And so you go to college and it sucks. Everyone acts just like they did in high school, and so you're thinking, Christ, I can't wait to get out of college and get into the real world. You talk about the real world condescendingly to people when they ask you why you ditched morning classes. And then you get out into the real world, and it sucks, because now you have to pay bills and actually work at the job you've spent all of this nice, lazy time preparing for -- everything seems nice and lazy in retrospect. And by this point, you're also sick as hell of casually dating everybody who will let you, and you think, 'I can't wait to cut this shit out, and get into a serious relationship.' And so finally you find her, the girl who your world just revolves around, and so you decide to get married. Then you both get a little bored with each other, and so you decide to have kids because then you'll have done something meaningful. So you have a kid, and everything's great, except five years later you realize that you have to put them in kindergarden. They're eating a fucking popsicle in the back-yard, thinking everything is really nifty, and you're sitting there, knowing that you're going to have to eternally kill their happiness at the beginning of September. You're not sure why you have to do it, but you're pretty sure you have to. You can't wait to figure out why. At some point after this, your kid is thinking that they can't wait to get into middle school, and you're wishing your wife wasn't so boring and distant, and you're wishing she didn't think you were so boring and distant. Hell, you're wishing you weren't so boring and distant; you know you are, but you can't wait for when you'll have some ephipany. You're making lots of money, but you're tired of working the job you're in and coming home to a stale marriage and a kid who can't wait to turn into you, and you just can't wait until you're old enough to retire, because you figure then you will finally be able to enjoy all of the fruits of your labor, and that maybe you and your wife can reconnect while traveling the world or something. You're saving up, and your wife is saving up, and you both just can't wait to retire, to get back to the simpler life, like when you were five, of eating popsicles and doing whatever the hell you want. So you've been waiting for this your whole life, and finally you get old enough and rich enough, and finally, after all of these years of wanting the next thing and then being disappointed -- finally, you retire!" Mike looked at me. "And then you're happy?" he asked. "No. Then
you fucking die." I'm not always such a smart-ass. Last night I called Scott on the telephone. "Hi Charlie," he said. Sometimes we call each other Charlie. I don't know why. "Hi Charlie," I said. Then I immediately started to cry. I cried for a good long while, and then, after I felt a bit better, sniffling and wiping my eyes, we got to talking about him and his girlfriend, Amanda. I was fascinated by how they could have arguments and not worry about the other person just storming out and never returning, which is something I've worried about in my relationships since I was in the fourth grade. "That's amazing," I said. "Tell me, how do you do it?" "How do I do what?" Scott asked. "How are you and Amanda able to have arguments? What's your secret?" I was positively beaming. Amanda is terrific. Scott and Amanda are in the running for the "Best Couple of the Year" Award. She made him learn a secret handshake in case an alien ever steals his body pretends to be him. Anyway, so I was asking Scott what his secret to arguing with Amanda was -- or really, how he's ever been able to have an argument with any girl. "Aren't you always plagued by the paralyzing fear that, at any moment, she might hate you more than she's ever hated anybody in her whole life and abandon you forever? Or kill you, or write a mass-email to every other woman in the world saying, 'Scott has a hillariously small penis - stay clear.' ?" "What?" "Do you ever get afraid about things like that?" "I - what? No." "You don't?" "No. My penis is huge." "That's not what I meant." "What did you mean?" "I get scared when it comes to arguing with a girl." "My penis
is not hillariously small, Charlie." "Who?" "My girlfriend." "You don't have a girlfriend." "I know that." "Right. Of course. Um...so what are y-" "Hypothetically." "Oh." He paused thoughtfully. "Well, buddy, you just have to not care too much about the outcome." "Ah. Like Buddhism," I said, excited now. "No. It's like what Salinger talks about in Seymour. I think it's in Seymour. Anyway, about how when Seymour threw marbles, he didn't aim for the mark." "Yeah, the Zen principle, the Buddhist principle. Detachment. Salinger loved that stuff." "Well, it's not only a Buddhist principle," he said. "No. Well, I mean, it's of course more universal, but you know. Zen and the Art of Archery and all that. Don't aim for the mark if you want to hit it." "Exactly. Salinger. Marbles." "Buddhism." Then he quoted a Counting Crows lyric at me. That is how the conversation went, more or less. Apparently I know how to argue with Scott. That is how our conversations go. We hardly ever talk about what we're talking about for long before we start bickering. People say we're like an old married couple, but say what you want, there is only so long you can feel sad and confused about Meredith if you call Scott and he just keeps wanting to talk about J. D. Salinger. Amanda, Scott's girlfriend, is the most attentive listener I know. When she is in a conversation, she makes so many subtle expressions, wild and nuanced and changing, that I often just watch her listen and lose track of the conversation. I love it. You should see her when she talks to Scott. She makes the best faces. She'll hear a word and snarl, then scrunch up her face in thoughtful confusion, and then smile in a dubious way, all within the range of a sentence. It's the most exciting thing in the world. She also gives the cutest accusatory glance I've seen, which Scott manages to be the recipient of all the time. Scott has managed to be the receiver of lots of accusatory glances in his life. Sometimes people even give me an accusing glance after Scott does or says something innapropriate. I have no idea why. I always get exasperated, and say, "What did I do?" because all I've been doing is smoking cigarettes and listening. Then they give me another look, which roughly translates into: You know what you did, and I'm disappointed in you. Then I get exasperated and say, "What did I do?" again because, still, all I've been doing is smoking cigarettes and listening. Scott, in the meantime, has found something else entirely inappropriate to say. We saw Harry Potter movie together when I was in New York a few weeks ago with Scott and Amanda, then twirled our umbrellas in the rain while we walked to the subway. Amanda has a stuffed bear that Scott named Charlie Pineapple. I am the bear's Godfather. It is an honor that they bestowed on me, and I don't intend on taking it lightly. Sometimes I take honors lightly. I've been in a couple of weddings, for instance. "Will you be a groomsman in my wedding?" "Oh, Christ. Fine." I won "Best-Dressed" in high school. That was an honor I also took lightly. When we had to take photos for the awards in the yearbook, I wore the same outfit I had been wearing for a month. I do this. I wear the same outfit for a whole season sometimes. I like to be a constant in people's lives, like Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin always wears the same outfit. Hobbes doesn't wear anything. Because he is a tiger. That's not true, actually. I did pick out an outfit for the day when we had to take the photos. But I do often wear the same outfit, with small variations, for a whole season. And I also have just decided that I do not like referring to what I wear as "outfits." When a girl becomes
distant, I often feel the misplaced urge to call her up out of the blue
and say, "Whatever, I won 'Best-Dressed' in high school."
If a girl ever becomes intimate, when we are laying next to each other
after kissing, our fingers delicately roaming exposed skin and creased,
cotton shirts, I often feel the misplaced urge to start talking about
Calvin and Hobbes. I don't know why. This made me more confused, so I nodded to him in earnest agreement, and then changed my mind and tried to salvage the message, saying, "Actually, nevermind. I'm not sorry about being sorry for calling when I was drunk. I'm not even sorry at all for calling! I'm the opposite of sorry. I'm terribly happy to have called. Shit, um...nevermind. I'm done, I'm hanging up. This message is officially over. Kaput. Finished. Um, over." Then, unable to help it, "Sorry." Scott, meanwhile, was going crazy in the corner of his room, chain-smoking like a maniac, waving his arms in the air, and frantically mouthing, "Abort! Abort!" That's nothing. One time I left five successive messages on Meredith's machine because I missed her, and I ended the last message by singing "My Little Buttercup" from The Three Amigos. Which seemed like a good idea at the time. Thank God she thought that was funny instead of crazy, which it was. She called me the next day and left a very nice message. She wasn't even mad. "Hi, geeko! I got your messages. They were great. Um, one's fine, too, you know. It's fine to leave only one message...But anyway,-" Boy, did I apologize for that. And I figured, ok, buddy: you're fine now, but three strikes and you're out. I hate phones, and so I never answer mine. The only problem is that when I get drunk, I suddenly want to talk to everybody. I go looking through my phone, occasionally shouting, "Who the hell is Madison? I don't know anybody named Madison," at no one in particular, and then I call some long-lost friend that I haven't talked to since high school. "Hello?" "Hi. It's...um...Zach! How are you?!" "Good. Are you drunk?" "I live in New York!" "That's great, I heard. Are you drunk?" "No. Sort of. Yes." Then, "Ehhhhhhh. I would say 'pleasantly buzzed.'" "You're drunk." "Yep...um...I live in New York?" I don't live in New York anymore. I'm back in Colorado for the holidays, and two nights ago I drank whiskey with Tyler, Caleb, and Meg, Tyler's wonderful girlfriend, at Tyler and Caleb's apartment downtown. The next day Tyler and I woke up, hungover, and watched Arrested Development on the couch. "Are there any cigarettes around here?" asked Tyler. "No. I smoked them all." "Oh, here's some." "Oh. Jesus, the last thing I need's another cigarette. Gimme one." Then we laughed because something funny happened on Arrested Development. Then we groaned and rubbed our heads because it hurt to laugh. We were lousy. Later on Meg came home from work and we all decided to watch The O.C. I've never seen it, and I liked it so much that I stood up and made up a dance, which I called "The O.C.D. dance" even though I was still too hung-over to be making up dances. Sarah, Caleb's wonderful girlfriend, stopped by the apartment on her way to grab a few martinis with a friend. She rarely drinks, and disapproves wholeheartedly with how much Caleb, Tyler, and I sometimes do. She doesn't understand it, and once asked me why I get drunk. "Text-book escapism," I said, then lit a cigarette and smiled winningly. She couldn't tell if I was being a smart-ass. Neither could I. So she walked in, and I stood up to give her a hug, and then again parked my ass on the couch to continue The O.C. "Too bad you guy's aren't all twenty-one, because I'm going for martinis with a friend," she called from the kitchen. "Doesn't make a difference. I'm off the sauce," I reported from my position on the couch. "Off the sauce, huh?" "Yep." Then I gave her a long lecture on how she shouldn'tdrink so much because I knew it would rile her up. It did, too. "You're in no position to lecture me about drinking, buddy. I had a lousy day at work, and I'm going to have a martini, and you're in absolutely no position to lecture me about that." "In the first place," I said, absently rubbing my jaw, "as of this morning, I'm officially off the sauce, and so I am in a perfect position to lecture you about drinking. And you need to stop turning to alcohol every time you have a lousy day at work." "And in the second place?" "Oh, that was it. The part about you needing to not turn to alcohol ever time you-" "Got it. Sionora, buddy-o. Have fun being off the sauce." She turned briskly and headed for the door with a smile. "Sarah, oh Sarah, you're killing everyone who loves you with your self-destructive behavior -- Don't you SEE that?" I pleaded after her. "Mmm-hmm," she may or may not have mumbled. I love Sarah. Before we had started watching The O.C., I said, "Man, we need some cherry pepsi or something." Tyler agreed. "By God, you're right. We can walk to the store up the street. Meg, you want cherry pepsi?" "Sure. Are we all going?" "We don't all have to go," I said. "Ok. Do you wanna go, Zach?" said Tyler. "I don't want to go by myself." "Ok." "Let's all go." We walked up the street to a little store. They didn't havecherry pepsi, and the lady working, who spoke little English, said, "We have Orange soda! Very good!" She was very helpful. "We have Fanta!" she screeched, and went into hysterics. She apparently thought this was very funny, Fanta. We decided on just regular coke, and I went up to pay. "That will be only four dollar," she said with a bright smile. Tyler thought that was great. "Only four dollars," he repeated. "That's a veritable steal," I said. He picked up the twelve pack and I asked him if he wanted me to carry it. "That's ok. I've got it." "Good." Then I told him that I didn't really want to carry it, but figured that it would be safe to ask because he'd probably say no. He thought that was funny, because he knew I was telling the truth. I do that sort of thing all the time. It's only bad when someone replies wrongly with, "Oh, yeah, could you? That would be great." Then you have to carry it because you offered. And so then I glare at them, and mumble something about my charitable nature being abused. So then we watched about five episodes of The O.C. and drank regular coke. And between episodes I would stand up and do my "O.C.D. dance." Meg liked it. "You look much less intimidating when you're doing that dance," she laughed. It's a goofy as hell dance. And after every episode, like a kid, I smiled a sneaky smile at them, raising my eyebrows, before abruptly shouting, "Another!" I like watching The O.C. because when you're watching a serious film, you can't very well yell things like, "Seth, for god's sake, forget Summer and go for Ana, or I'll kill you!" at the screen. The O.C. also leads to thoughtful conversational topics: "Why do you think Summer always goes around in just her bra?" asked Tyler. "I don't know, buddy, but I don't mind." I just went and saw a serious movie today with an ex-girlfriend, Ana, who is great. Anyway, we saw Syriana, and half-way through the movie, I leaned over and whispered guiltily, "Do you understand anything of what's happening?" "No," she whispered back meekly. "Me neither," I whispered. Then we went back to watching the screen and I smiled, because I didn't feel alone. Anyway, after The O.C., Tyler and Meg drove me home. Meg fell asleep in the passenger seat. "She's sleeping," Tyler whispered at me. He thinks everything she does is cute as hell, no matter what. It is, too. I asked them what their secret to having healthy arguments was too, the night before. "We haven't argued yet," said Meg. "We haven't been together long enough to have anything to argue about." "Oh,"
I said. "Well, let me know when you find out." "It's exactly your apathy that's letting this country go to shit," she said after a few minutes, full of passion. "You need to get involved." "I agree with you," I said. I did, too. "But you don't care?" "Not really," I said. I didn't, either. Somehow the topic moved on to religion. I used to love to argue about religion and philosophy, but lately it just makes everything feel more useless than it already does. That doesn't stop me, though. Whether I believe what I'm saying or not anymore, I'm still well-versed on how to conduct an argument about religion and philosophy without really committing to a side. She committed to a side at once, and one that I felt was too easy, predictable, and, it seemed to me, altogether too trendy. So I got involved. "I'm not saying that this is even my position, or what I believe, but it is worth a small amount of consideration, and yet -- surprisingly, actually -- you're still hung up on equating Christians with God, which is the easiest thing to do in the world. Any fourteen-year-old with a chip on their shoulder can confidently say God is dead because he met some asshole of a Christian. Christ, everybody knows a bunch of bastard Christians; they're goddam inescapable. I mean, they're goddam everywhere, but to think that they in some way diminish God, or even have anything to do with God... I mean, I'm not even a Christian, and I can argue Christianity better than most Christians I know, because, yes, most of them -- or a good majority of them -- are so dumb or self-righteous, or both, that they've managed to make a mockery out of everything they claim to believe while patting themselves on the back for 'spreading the good news.' I'll give you that -- I'm only too happy to give you that, but for you to continue to excuse yourself from examining the questions of existence because you had the not particularly novel experience of running into some moron Jesus-freak at some point in your life, that's just lazy. I mean, if you were fourteen, I would be applauding you, encouraging you in your questioning, but you're studying at Columbia, for Chrissake, and your questioning hasn't gone any deeper than, 'Well, shit - if this is what Christians are like, then God must be a big crock of shit.'? I know you're more intelligent than that: in every other subject that we've ever talked about, you're miles more intelligent than that. But if you think God has anything remotely to do with his followers, then you're just looking at this whole thing simplistically. You're looking at the details, at the goddam politics of it all. I'm not even saying there is or isn't a God, but I am saying it's worth a little more consideration that that." Then I probably rubbed my eyes in exasperation, like I had a headache or something. I'm such an asshole. But I actually got frustrated with her, and the argument even got heated. I was sort of proud of myself, for not feeling too insecure to disagree with a girl that I liked a lot. She didn't think it was as fun. We left the restaurant after eating, and got a couple of cups of coffee at some place. We sat outside and lit cigarettes. "I mean, if you're such a relativist, then how do you justify saying that I should get involved with politics. With which side should I get involved? What issues should I have problems with? What should I champion, other than what's fashionable at the moment? How do we judge what's healthy or not with no bar to measure it against? And don't tell me whatever works for the greater-good, because that's a sentimental argument in the first place, and even that, half-baked as it is, insists on the idea of some sort of original Good, of some absolute, if unclear, distinction between Good and Evil -- or between beneficial and harmful, if you prefer. I mean, forget God for a moment -- and please stop substituting it with Christianity whenever I mention God -- forget God for a moment, and just take a look at morality, and whether or not there is anything that we, as subjective humans, can still call objective or absolute," I began, now starting to get comfortable. "I don't want to talk about this anymore," she said, staring off into the distance. "I didn't want to talk about it in the first place," I said, "But you brought it up, so let's talkabout it." I was now in argument mode, and I'd be damned if we were going to cut it short. "Zach, I don't want to talk about this anymore," she said again, her voice quiet. "Look, I don't think you're stupid, ok? I don't think you're simplistic. You know I don't. I think you're smart as hell, but I think you're lying about what you really think. And I don't know why. I'm trying to figure out why you're pretending to think so simplistically about this. It makes me frustrated, because the things you're saying -- Christ, I hear them from every hipster who moved to Brooklyn and wrote an A. P. Lit paper on Camus when they were in high school. I mean, earlier on you said -- you actually said, with a straight face -- that rape wasn't 'necessarily' wrong -- that you personally thought it was, but that it wasn't necessarily absolutely, objectively wrong. What does that even mean? I mean, how the hell do you expect me to react to that? What am I supposed to think, what options have you left me, other than you're just purposefully pretending to be stupid? I mean, are you fucking kidding me? Rape is not 'necessarily' wrong? Listen, I'm not some uptight moron in high school debate class that you're trying to rile-up, or some teacher that you're trying to shock by taking a controversial stance on the issue of slavery. I understand perfectly that if you were taking a boring ethics class, you could probably come up with some far-fetched rational for how rape could be justified under certain circumstances and shadowy definitions, but I don't understand why you feel the need to do that with me, or how you thought that I would go for it, and give you an A for 'daring-bullshitty-intellectual-circle-running' or something. I mean, I'm actually a little insulted that you seemed to think I might go for it. I'm not a fucking moron, and this isn't be bored in debate class and say shocking things that you can defend because you're smarter than the rest of the class -- we're talking, and I thought we were actually talking, not being clever, and I know you don't believe the things you're saying, but you're still saying them. You're still insisting on things that you refuse to defend. Why?" "I'm not
fucking kidding, Zach," she said, on the verge of tears, "I
don't want to fucking talk about this anymore." "Can I come home with you tonight?" I said. "We don't have to do anything." "Are you inviting yourself to sleep over?" she smiled. "Yes." "Ok." "Are you sure? I mean, do you want me to come over? Is that ok?" "I wouldn't
say yes if I didn't. I'm not running a charity." I fell asleep tonight while I was watching On Golden Pond with my family, or with the members of my family that are in town at the moment. Not everybody is home for Christmas yet. Now that is a good movie, On Golden Pond. It's touching, but never sentimental, and Henry Fonda is hilarious in it. It's a classic film, and I've loved it ever since my dad made me watch it when I was younger, against my protests that it looked "boring." He's also the one who made me watch Cool Hand Luke, which I also thought looked boring, and which is now my favorite film. My dad always had much better taste than I used gave him credit for. Of course, sometimes this would lapse in hilarious ways and we would end up watching Harry and the Hendersons. According to legend, he used to always rent Harry and the Hendersons for my older siblings when we were all young. It became an epic joke; he would go to the movie store, and everyone would shout, "Not Harry and the Hendersons!" and he would return twenty minutes later, and with all of the feigned innocence and straight face he could muster, say, "Have you guys ever seen Harry and the Hendersons?" And to the loud groans of protest, seemingly forgetting that he rented it last week, "What? It's a classic." Actually, he still feigns innocence. When the story comes up around the dinner table with everyone, he gets this look of nostalgic recollection on his face, and muses, "Harry and the Hendersons...that's a great movie. We should really rent that." I think he often actually rented it along with the real movie he had rented for them even though he knew nobody would watch it, just because he thought it was so funny. He's out of town right now, so he didn't watch On Golden Pond with us. He's been working very hard lately and he's very sad these days. Anyway, towards the end of On Golden Pond I fell asleep on the carpet in the living room, I guess because I was tired, or maybe because I felt safe. I can only fall asleep if I feel safe or exhausted. Sometimes I can fall asleep if my mind is distracted, so I often listen to this Christian-radio program for kids called Adventures in Odysee before I go to bed. I've been doing it since I was young. It's really very quality radio-theatre. The writing is terrific, funny, and smart, and full of moral lessons. I own lots of them on cassette. I remember when I got kicked out of school when I was in the tenth grade, and had to go to a new school where nobody liked me very much. I always calmed myself down at night by listening to Adventures in Odysee tapes, and entering a world of imagination and discovery, which is what the beginning of the program welcomes you to do. That's what they say, "a world of excitement, imagination, and discovery!" I love that. I like all of the adventures of Mr. Whitaker and Eugene and Connie in the small, made-up town of Odysee, which lies somewhere outside of Chicago. Everybody calls Mr. Whitaker "Whit," and he owns a soda-shop and learning-emporium called Whit's End. Eugene is this brilliant computer nerd who's pretty socially awkward, and he always says stuff like, "To borrow the colloquialism." Eugene, you crazy nerd. He's my favorite. Anyway, I fell asleep during On Golden Pond. I woke up a few hours later and the house was empty and dark. In the beginning moments of waking it felt like a burning sheet of metal or something was being slowly pressed into the shin of my left leg, and I reached down and rubbed it, blinking at the rug from my position of laying on my side and wondering why my leg felt like it was on fire when it wasn't. Then it went away, and I thought about how the portion of the rug closest to my face was out of focus. The rug is pinkish red, I thought. The rug seems to become purple in the distance. I felt so lonely suddenly, and I couldn't think of why, and I wanted to cry. Or I wanted to scream and sob, but I didn't, because that's crazy, to scream and sob because the rug is purple in the night. I stood up, shaking, turned on the lights in the kitchen, found my phone, and looked through every person in it, but there was nobody I could call that would be able to fix me, I thought, even though a few people would have been more than happy to listen. So I put my phone away because I decided I didn't have anything to say. I just felt so lonely, and I felt like crying. I considered for a moment calling Ana and asking if she would mind coming over and sleeping next to me tonight, but that didn't seem like a normal thing to do. It was only ten-thirty, so I put on my coat and drove downtown to an old coffee shop I used to frequent in high school. It's a garishly-lit, loud place, dense with stale smoke. It's Denver's den of hell, for the misfits and the prom queens. Paris on the Platte, trendy to a flaw, where everybody is a goth or a hipster or, once in awhile, an out-of-place looking group of preppy guys, huddled together and staring at everybody else with the word "faggots" just dripping from their thin, silent lips, I swear to God. I feel as lonely tonight in Denver as I ever did in New York. Anywhere you go can be the loneliest place in the world if you want it to be. Except for Hawaii, where everything, even loneliness, is happy. I always tell Meredith that I want to take her to Hawaii. Maybe she would be happy in Hawaii for a little while if we went. Meredith is the loneliest person I know. It is a funny thing to return to my home, which I left two and a half years ago with such relentless ambition. I don't feel very ambitious anymore, and it's funny to wake up on your living-room floor and remember why you made yourself leave in the first place: because you were scared that if you didn't go to New York, you would never want to leave this place, because you never wanted to leave home again since the first day that you had to go to kindergarden when you were five years old. But nobody wants to be the pussy who cries on the first day of first-grade, pleading with your recess teacher to let you call your mom and have her come pick you up and take you away, and so you leave your crumby hometown and move to New York, full of talent and fierceness and coldness, which becomes more comfortable the more you live in it. It becomes your own. You learn to be alone and your body becomes lean and hard, and your eyes become weary and cynical, like you always wanted them to be because you used to feel so young when you looked in the mirror with puffy eyes. This is why I like to be awake for hours after everyone else, so that I won't ever wake up in an empty, dark house that was awake and vibrant a few hours earlier, full of people who love me. If you're still awake when everyone goes to bed, and you're wandering an abandoned city in the middle of the night, the only person in the world, the loneliness is yours, and loneliness doesn't hurt so much if it's yours. And hell, you could always go home. It scared me when I realized that the subway tracks beneath the city had started to feel like home. I forced myself to love them, and I lived in them during my commutes, but I didn't know they would actually start to feel like my own. I made them mine after Meredith left New York, and after I started to isolate myself and trying to make myself go crazy. I met Meredith when I was sixteen. I had moved to New York for a six-week summer-program at the acting conservatory that we would later attend after high school, although she moved back to Chicago after one semester for reasons that I can't talk about, that have nothing to do with me, and that make me sad. If you're to endure in New York for two years when you are young, you must learn to make the subways your own. The subways were ours when she was there, because once we were riding somewhere, and she was leaning against me and her hair smelled of shampoo, like peaches or something else equally nice. And one time, years later, we were both back in New York, and she was so drunk that I had to hold her up on the subway so that she wouldn't fall over. And one time we were riding to Time's Square to check movie times because her boyfriend was coming to town to visit and a bunch of us were going to see a movie, and she lay her head on my shoulder. I visited New York a few weeks ago, but the subways didn't feel like they were mine anymore. I was a tourist. It's now three in the morning. Paris on the Platte closed at one, and so I drove to Denny's. Colorado is lonely at night in a different way than a city is. It's different driving through somewhere, where cheap motels and Village Inns and empty fields or areas of commerce float silently along the edges of your windshield, removed from you. I don't know why I'm still awake. Sometimes at night I draw pictures, which makes me feel like I've accomplished something, and then I feel safe enough to go to bed. Sometimes I masturbate which makes me feel empty enough to go to bed. Sometimes I walk around a city, or drive around, stopping at coffee shops and wondering why the other people there are still awake. Actually, I don't like to wonder why the other people there are awake. Eventually this makes me exhausted, and so I go to bed. Tomorrow I will wake up late, and a whole world of activity will already be underway. And I will show up fashionably late. Meredith is the first girl I ever slept in the same bed with. During the six-week summer program at the acting conservatory, we lived in this old hotel near Chelsea. It was called the George Washington Hotel, and I lived two floors above her, on the 9th floor, and we saw each other all the time. I woke up one morning, young and scared and lonely, and then I remembered that Meredith was next to me, still asleep. She was sort of snoring, which I thought was cute, so I went over to the fridge and poured her a glass of juice. I wish that I was somebody else, and not me, so that I could go talk to me about feeling lonely tonight. Then I would say back to me, "Yeah. That's tough shit, buddy." And I would think that was a funny response and laugh. Then I would pour a glass of juice for me, which I would politely decline, because I don't especially like juice.
|