A thick blade of yellow, dead grass tickles the sensitive membrane inside the rim of my nose. My whole body spasms; I snap upright and paw with dirty palms at my eyes, chipping away the grainy caulk of unconsciousness. Eyes open, I seem stricken by synaesthesia: the phosphorescent lemon sunlight registers as a Gilbert Gottfried exhortation. I feel hydrocephalic: brain swollen, it strains at the tight confines of my skull. It takes half a minute to rein in the reluctant scouts of my senses and process what reconnaissance they offer; at first everything comes on too fast and all my left brain can produce is a miserable whimper and a mumbling of the word “bad.”
When I’ve fully awakened, this is what I realize: I sit in a field, earth alternately muddy and desiccated, no road in sight—not in any direction. My jeans are torn, sodden and soiled; palms and phalanges are beige with hardened dirt, fingernails are black half-moons, as if they’ve received some hideous, infernal manicure. I have a belt, but it’s unbuckled. My hair is matted and ridden with dry leaves and cool, damp pebbles. I have no idea how I got here. I have no idea where Here is.
What I know is this: at six p.m. last evening, I went on a date. I recall sipping a cold coconut soda in the shade of a city stoop. The memories collide, conflate, degrade, the further they radiate from that moment.
What I know is I visited more bars than I can name.[1] I’m sure I shook hands with lowlives and idiots, deadbeat dads and addled addicts, all friends and well-wishers of the girl I wanted desperately to impress.[2] I know I clinked glasses, swallowed shots, ran a tab, all in hope of hearing, “You’re remarkable, I’m crazy about you.”[3]
I know I was repulsed, repelled, repellant—even as the night wore on. I know I couldn’t stop. I know I was nauseated and nauseous.
I know the girl: all calamity, impulse and buck-toothed braggadocio. I know she gets what she wants because people fear her, fear being dragged down with her in her talk show kind of life.[4] I know she paid attention to me; I know my bar is set so low that even a snake can slither over and end up a savior. I know I wanted her, but didn’t; I wanted anyone at all, I wanted not to feel so alone. And I know that alcohol helps chase the lonelies away.
I know myself: I’m embarrassed too easily, I’m embarrassed by everything. I know I’ll do anything to avoid it, that burning feeling: red hot curls of the ears and tingling cheeks, the twisting of feet and eyes on the floor. I know I’ll keep drinking until the feeling fades into the colored blur the world becomes.
My final memories of the night involve Salsa dancing.[5] Involve a chilly, acidulous mojito and even chillier glares from Chicanos ’round the stonewalled room. Cold shoulders and mean-spirited snickers. The last scrap on the shrine of anamnesis involves staring at round, red taillights driving away, her taillights. Shambling down some city sidewalk, being rather closer to my car than I’d predicted, sitting at a steering wheel and wondering what’s next.[6]
I know that the drive home can sometimes seem so long.
Presently, I stand on shaky legs and weak knees, follow the trajectory of distant power lines to the west. I hear crickets, cicadas, but don’t even see any fucking birds. My cheeks stick to my teeth and my tongue feels fat, independent of my mouth.
The walk doesn’t last long before I fall to my knees and let out a scream. Scream into the greener grass by a copse of budding trees. Scream until my throat tightens and I taste blood; until the stiff, old rubber bands of my vocal cords fail to produce volume and merely creak; until the sweat in my eyes feels like the sharp stones under my knees. Then I stop. And I decide to call for help.
“I can’t,” I declare, “I can’t do this alone anymore.”
I crawl through the knapweeds and thistle until my cell phone finds a signal. Scratch itching shins, brush blackflies and ticks from my thighs. Piss into a shaded puddle aswarm with midges. I sit and dial information for the right number and lick the salty filth from chapped lips. I key the digits, make my call for help, and when the operator answers, he’s got a child’s voice, nasal and bathetic, the voice of an adolescent cockalorum. I’d have given anything for the softer, sympathetic ear of a woman. Some matronly saint with two chins and gnawed nails; grown kids and too much time; a woman with perhaps an over-watered garden (love to spare); a Kentucky expatriate trying so hard to hide an accent that emerges when she sighs, and says, “Sugar, easy, you ain’t alone.” But I settle, like always, for the attention that is offered.
“Hello,” he says, “Lifeline. This is Jon.[7] How can I help you?”
“Jon,” I gasp, “Just listen a minute. Don’t talk. I need help and I hate asking. I never ask. I never ask anyone for help, ever. I can’t believe I’ve called, but this is it—there’s no worse it can get. I can’t talk to my friends because, well, I don’t want to worry anyone and I’m just a novelty item to most of them anyway. I feel like a fucking conical hat you can strap on for a laugh when you’re down.” Jon does some non-committal curmurring and urges me to continue. The only reason I do is because I have to assume that my story is second-rate, the sort of thing he’s heard worse-than versions of.
“Okay,” I say, then inhale in preparation for the logorrheic speech that I know is coming, that oozes out only semi-intelligibly. It comes as one run-on sentence, punctuated by half-stifled gasps and the sucking back of thick, salty mucus that’s leaked from my nose.[8]
“I just woke up in some field and it’s because I’ve been drinking. I’ve been drinking because I want to be dead. I’ve been trying so hard to want to keep going, but nothing works right; I’ve got some arbitrary distinction that keeps people away—like Cain’s Brand of Ill Omen revamped for a postmodern age.[9] So all I can do—and I’ve been trying to hold back for years since I earnestly tried to end it—is work on getting out and away, work hard on an early death. But I’m a passive-aggressive idiot with team spirit all the way, so I can’t buy a gun or step into traffic—that time I tried, I hanged myself, but with shitty, laughable results. So I end up drinking and driving and swerving towards the other lane, hoping for someone to swerve into me. I end up as the guy who’ll eat the mystery pills my pharmacist friend finds in her pant cuffs at the end of a shift.[10]
“I’ve never met my father and my mother is dead and, if I’m going to live, I need to know when I’ll be able to stop coming back to that. I need to know when I can watch Field of Dreams and not cry when Kevin Costner plays catch. I need to know when I can hear someone talk about their parents interfering in their wedding plans and not need to immediately drink. I’m almost twenty-four and I’ve never had a real relationship; almost twenty-four and I’m terrified I’ll die, like mom, alone with brain cancer before I stumble ass-backwards into something that at least smacks of ‘love.’ Before I muster the guts to swan dive off a skyscraper. I’ve got a couple people who call themselves my friends, but friends aren’t enough: they’ve got their own dramas and traumas and pathologies and live-in lovers and I can’t—I just can’t—expect anything from them. I don’t ask; they don’t offer.
“So what I’m asking, Jon, is for just a single second of comfort. Just a moment where I don’t feel so alone. When I’m not snow-blinded by the fucking whiteness of so much conspicuous absence.[11] A single second where I’m not embarrassed, so completely and wholly embarrassed, by everything I am and fear and love. I need a reprieve from shame, responsibility and loneliness. I need to not feel so old for a minute or two because I know I’m just a goddamn kid. I just need you to talk to me for five or ten minutes. I need you to promise me that everything, simply everything, is going to be alright.”
I collect myself and my breath and lie back on the grass. Set my head on the dry, knobby root of a stunted butternut tree. Corncrakes (birds, finally!) scuttle along branches above and, any other day, such susurration would be peaceful, positively halcyon. At the moment, I feel adrift in a dinghy, out on the briny ocean—land, after so long, coming into view. I feel like a castaway and Jon, I pray, will be, if not the coast, then a close by trawler.[12] He clears his throat once; it sounds like an iron spade digging into a heap of gravel.
“Okay,” he says. He draws the vowel sound out and hesitates when he completes the word. ‘O’ with an umlaut. I can hear the wet smacking of his lips, like a spoon stirring a warm pot of buttery pasta. “You need to understand something, first. This is Lifeline. We help old people.”
I’m silent. It seems the whole world has paused. I can’t hear the birds, the leaves, the insects, the wind.
“You know?” he asks. “The ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up’ people? You may want to call,” he drags the L sound out, thinking. “Anyone else. It sounds like you might want to, you know, get some therapy or something, dude. I’m sorry.”
Lifeline: Not just a suicide hotline anymore. Apparently.
Lying there, oblivious to, immune to the glorious summer day, I feel first chilly, then hot. And there it is, deep and hideous as ever: the red hot curls of my ears and tingling cheeks. I am florid. Toes cross in my shoes as I drag my heels toward my ass. Going fetal. I feel dizzy, sick. I’ve embarrassed myself again, indefeasibly. Once adrift, now aground, marooned. That land dead ahead was not the shore, but a ravaged, craggy cay.[13] I am more alone than before—more alone than last night, more alone than when I first awoke.
Marooned.
Moving the receiver slowly away from my ear, I hear Jon’s final words—the most grating, offensive words I’ve ever heard. It’s common palaver, this insipid politesse, but here so poorly placed. I heard the same words from the lighthearted men who dragged my mother’s stiff, colostomy-stinking corpse away from my side and to the crematorium. “Have a nice day,” Jon says.[14]
The click of my clapped shut phone is explosive and unsettling in the still, dry air of the field. I roll to my chest, mash my face in the dirt. Resolve to never leave, never take another drink, never call that detestable girl again.[15] That harpie, that games-playing shrew. I want nothing more than to slowly crisp and bake here, in the dry heat. The sunlight is so intense that the leaves themselves look candent. Reclined, I might asphyxiate under the deadweight of my ribcage, as dehydration becomes severe. Come nightfall, I’ll lie still as stalking foxes come to sup themselves on my marrow bones. Some straggling hunter will stumble across my bleached bones, here, in the dirt; a forensic scientist will run a brush down my spine, tickling me with the gentlest touch. She will cradle my ribs in her arms and wish the best of all ends for what’s left of me.
She will believe that what became of my life was a tragedy.
And in some city dive bar, I will live on as a half-drunk Jon lights another Marlboro Light and smiles a goatee-ringed, lopsided smile at that winsome, gap-toothed girl. Desperate for her attention, though her callow solipsism makes him half-sick, he’ll blow a ring of smoke, mouth a fumarole, and say to her, “You think that’s embarrassing? Well let me tell you about the idiot who called me one Saturday morning.”[16]
[1] I can recall six at the time of this writing, but there were, I feel, at least several more. [BACK]
[2] I remember three men with whom I shared a handshake were missing frontal dentition and one, white, wore a shirt that inexplicably read, “No one’s your nigger.” [BACK]
[3] I went through a phase where—after one girl genuinely said to me, “I’m crazy about you”—I practically begged women to say this to me. Not as aphrodisiac, not in a “call me daddy” sort of way, but as something else—something, I think, more pathetic even. [BACK]
[4] Also, she had great cocksucking lips. Never underestimate what most men will do for a woman with great cocksucking lips. It’s in the ballpark of what many well-manicured women will suffer for a guy with an AmEx Black. Tragically, she refused to use them to that end. [BACK]
[5] Until an acquaintance forced me to slow-dance to Sinatra at a wedding, this night remained the only dancing I’d ever done. The world, I recall, should thank me for my abstinence. [BACK]
[6] For eighteen months, I made a twenty-five minute drive back to the suburbs at the close of hard-drinking evenings—which were frequent and often involved the draining of whole bottles of Jameson, Gran Marnier or Johnnie Walker’s Red Label. No one was ever hurt, but it is to my everlasting shame that I did so. [BACK]
[7] I’ve chosen to spell his name this way because I feel that he spelt it so; because it annoys the hell out of me when people spell Jon with no “h.” [BACK]
[8] This gasping and snot are just, if Reader will excuse the metaphor, the pre-ejaculate of actual tears which would never come. At the time of these events, I remained still unable to cry unless part of an audience, viz. reading a book, watching a movie, once at a National Geographic snapshot, once at a concert. If I’d been able to cry, I think the phone call would have seemed at least somewhat redundant and this whole shameful mess might have been avoided. [BACK]
[9] That’s certainly better punctuated for print, but I really did say that to the poor bastard. Blame my nerdy youth spend with Magic: The Gathering for the fact that the phrase “Brand of Ill Omen” seemed like a reasonable four-word phrase to spit. [BACK]
[10] Yep. And once there was quite a surfeit of giggles when, two hours after the Anyone’s Guess Gulp, in which I took down three pills, a new visitor and his Physician’s Desk Reference guide informed the gathering that I’d eaten a fair helping of estrogen. Then there was the mixed bag of sedatives which put me down for a full weekend. Nowadays they have online pill identification software for this sort of thing. Sigh. [BACK]
[11] Parts, if not most of this, sound rehearsed. That is, in fact, the case. “Conspicuous absence” is a favorite phrase. Considering that, at the time, I lived and spent most of my time resoundingly alone, drafting, redrafting, and scrapping stories which echoed these sentiments, the words sort of were rehearsed. Drink a fifth of Southern Comfort while living in a government-subsidized housing project and, even if you’re not a writer, you’re apt to find yourself ranting at the bathroom mirror. [BACK]
[12] I’m not sure why I went nautical with the metaphor here. I’m also unsure whether or not I dragged it far past the point of utility. [BACK]
[13] If the prenominate metaphor was not before inutile, it is by this point. Suffice it to say, I felt wretched, hopelessly and utterly alone. Past the point of rescue, &c. [BACK]
[14] Perhaps born out of a temporally significant bid in food service—province of scrupulous politesse and other pretended cheer—but I do truly despise this phrase with full-body revulsion. I also find “How are you,” when disingenuously queried, entirely rebarbative. And it’s almost always disingenuously spoken. [BACK]
[15] The former resolution lasts another fourteen hours. The latter, one week. [BACK]
[16] It was only during the editorial process that I realized: I neglected to include in this essay any sense whatever of closure for its narrative. Here’s the end of the topical crisis: after twenty minutes (which felt like two hours), I climbed to my feet and followed those power lines for another five. I came to a creek and, less than two minutes away down a steep declivity, I discovered my car, parked just off a main suburban drag. I was about thirty minutes away from the city proper (where the date had gone so horribly awry) and fifteen minutes from home. I still have no idea how or why I came to be in that field. [BACK]
