Public Apology: In Which a Man Grapples With a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time

by Dave Bry

  But I was stuck midsentence, floundering, and the pause was getting too long. So I did the best I could. “Everybody’s…really, umm…fiending for a new Jungle Brothers album.”

  I cringed when I said it. I sounded like Officer Hopkins from Sanford and Son, the super-square cop who always made clumsy attempts at hip jive talk. (“Right up!” instead of “right on,” etc.) I was glad you could not see me and glad that I was not using a tape recorder.

  You weren’t fazed. You didn’t laugh at me or anything. You said you guys were working on new music but didn’t know when it would come out. I thanked you for your time and we hung up.

  I rewrote the quote that I had jotted down for Danyel’s story on a fresh page of the notebook, ripped it out, and carried it to her office.

  “How did it go?” she asked from her desk.

  “Fine, I think,” I said, handing her the piece of paper. “Except…” I started to laugh at myself and shook my head. “I told him everybody was really fiending for the new music.”

  “You’re stupid, Bry.”

  She said it in an affectionate way. But she was right, too.

  Dear Residents of 208 East Seventh Street,

  Sorry for leaving that couch outside our door on the fourth-floor stairwell for two weeks.

  We were just moving into the building, my friend Tim and I, fall of 1995. I had graduated college that spring and this was the first apartment I’d ever officially leased. And I didn’t know a lot about neighborly etiquette. Or making a good first impression.

  The couch did not completely block the stairwell or access to the short hallway off which our door opened. It was off to the side, tipped up on an armrest, leaning vertically against the wall. Obviously, we would have preferred it to be inside our apartment. It was a long, cushioned couch upholstered with stripes of velour in various shades of green. Tim had bought it for twenty dollars at a secondhand furniture place near where he’d grown up outside of Syracuse and driven it down the weekend we moved in. We had carried it up three flights of steps and then struggled for at least an hour, sweating and cursing profusely, trying every possible angle and alignment to get it through our door, which opened awkwardly, infuriatingly, into a much-too-thin interior hallway. We unscrewed the legs of the couch, we took the door off its hinges, hoping than any extra inch of leeway would make the difference. It didn’t. We had nowhere to store the couch while we figured out what to do next. We were exhausted. So we left it there.

  We discussed the possibility of bringing it back down to the street and leaving it for someone else to take. But we really liked the couch. And Tim had come so far with it. It was hard to accept defeat.

  Days passed. Then a week. We were not very good problem solvers, Tim and I.

  We were aware that the situation was suboptimal. Two white kids, fresh out of college, moving into a heavily black and Latino neighborhood; it was early in the Clinton boom years, and there was a lot of talk about gentrification in the East Village at the time; we knew that we were part of an unpopular wave. The last thing we would have wanted to do was annoy anyone.

  But sure enough, one day during the second week the couch was out there, I came home to find a piece of paper taped to it with words written in black Magic Marker. “Move this couch,” it said. “Slave days are over.”

  Completely reasonable. (Though it feels important to say that we were not expecting anybody else to handle this problem for us.) Also, a thank-you, to whichever one of our neighbors wrote the sign, for using the piece of paper.

  I took the sign inside and replaced it with a similar one saying, “Sorry—will move soon,” and Tim and I gave ourselves one more day, two tops, to try to figure out a way to get the couch inside. Might we be able to bring the couch up onto the roof and lower it down with rope and pull it in through a window? We measured the windows. Nope.

  I had given up and was advocating that Tim do the same, when his friend Armin came up with an idea. Armin lived nearby. He was a photo researcher for The New Yorker and competent in a way that Tim and I were clearly not.

  The next night, he showed up at our door with a toolbox. We flipped the couch over so that its legs were facing up. Armin took out an X-Acto knife and slit the underside cloth down the middle. We held the flaps open while he inspected the structure—there were lots of springs inside and metal bars and wood. Then he took a small saw out of his box and sawed one piece of wood in half. One piece of wood, out of the whole inscrutable mess of furniture guts, and voilà! Our heavy, sturdy, previously rigid ten-foot couch bent like an accordion. How had he done it? Had he studied couch design? Had he gone to carpentry school? “No.” Armin shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s no big deal.”

  Funny how different people’s brains work so differently. I would not have thought to do that in a million years. And even if I had thought of it, the execution would have been way beyond me. I am not technically inclined.

  Needless to say, a flexible couch is much more easily moved around corners. We brought it in through our door, down the hall past the bathroom, carried it in through the kitchen, and into our living room—where Armin then braced the piece of wood he’d sawed with two smaller pieces of wood (a ruler, I think, and a paint stirrer) and duct taped it back together, good as new. The front of the couch had a little curtain that hung to the floor, so we didn’t even have to sew up the cut cloth.

  Tim and Armin fell out of touch shortly after that. But Armin has remained, for me, one of those people you pass on the sidewalk or spot in a crowded bar more frequently than you do other people—the kismet of similar routes and schedules. For seventeen years now, I’ve been seeing him what seems like at least once or twice a year, even as I’ve moved to different neighborhoods and changed jobs and stuff. We’ve long since stopped saying hello to each other; he’d likely not even recognize me. I saw him just last week actually at a Mets game. I was there with my kid; he was standing on line for hot dogs with two kids of his own. (Or maybe his kid and a friend of his kid’s?) I didn’t wave and he didn’t notice me. But as I do every time I see him, I thought to myself, That guy’s smart!

  It’s interesting how, in the city, people so easily drift in and out of other people’s lives. When anonymity is generally assumed and expected, people can go from being strangers to friends to strangers again without any hassles or hang-ups or hurt feelings. It’s a good thing. Of course, as I write this, I wonder if any of you see me from time to time without my knowing it. Maybe I’ve stopped recognizing you as Armin has done with me. What do you think to yourself when you see me? I bet it’s something other than That guy’s smart.

  Dear LexisNexis On-site Training Executive,

  I’m sorry you had to learn my secret password.

  You were just doing your job, back in 1996, visiting the offices of companies that had recently purchased accounts with the new computer database of newspaper articles and legal papers called LexisNexis. I was working as a freelance fact-checker in the research department at Vibe magazine. LexisNexis was an invaluable research tool. Vibe ponied up.

  A week or so after we fact-checkers had been granted access to the service, you arrived at our office to give us a day’s worth of tutoring in how to most efficiently use it. You were pert and pretty, ten years older than most of us, your square-shouldered navy suit out of place among our sagging jeans and T-shirts. But you were not shy, and after a short lecture and demonstration, you walked around our windowless work space, coming to each of our computers, watching over our shoulders, offering helpful bits of advice.

  I was having trouble. Unable to find an article, I’d gotten myself stuck somewhere in the database web and couldn’t find my way back to the start of my search session.

  You came over to talk me through the problem but were soon frowning, flummoxed as I was. It didn’t surprise me that I’d found a new and challenging way to get lost in a computer system; I’ve never been good with machines. “Here,” you said, motioning to the keyboard. “Let me sit down.�
�� I got up and stood behind you while you started pressing buttons.

  “You know what,” you said. “Let’s just start over.” You typed a combination of keys and the screen blinked back to the log-in page. That’s better, I thought.

  Then, still looking at the screen, you asked, “What’s your password?”

  I felt myself turn red. All the pores on my skin opened at once. “Ummm,” I said, stalling. “My password?”

  “Yeah.” You turned to me. “So we can log back in.”

  “Ummm, it’s…” I couldn’t think fast enough. I should have said I’d forgotten it. I should have made up something new and blamed a typo or a computer glitch and just shrugged when it wouldn’t work.

  You looked at me blankly.

  I started to sweat. “It’s…ummm…It’s silly,” I said with a desperate giggle. “I guess I should have…It’s bad.”

  You raised your eyebrows.

  I didn’t know what to do. “It’s…ummm…” I couldn’t think of any way out of it. Other people were starting to look. Stiffening my lip, I lowered my voice and told you.

  “Horsedick.”

  I’d like to say that this was an old nickname of mine. It was not. It was a reference to a favorite joke, a cartoon I’d seen in a Playboy magazine someone had snuck into school back in fifth grade or so. A middle-aged man opens the door to his suburban house to find a hulking young brute standing there with flowers in his hand. “Tell Sally Horsedick’s here,” says the caption. (I’d always assumed Sally to be the man’s daughter. But thinking about it now, I suppose she could have been meant to be his wife. Either way—kinda funny, right? Okay.)

  I hadn’t had a lot of experience with computer passwords up to that point in my life. It had never occurred to me that I might one day find myself in a situation where I’d have to share mine with an attractive older woman in a business suit. It was supposed to be secret, after all.

  To your eternal credit, you were very cool. Nothing if not professional.

  You shook your head, turned back to the screen, set your hands on the keyboard, and sighed. “One word or two?”

  Dear Everlast from House of Pain,

  I’m sorry for calling you a “Leprechaun of Rage.”

  This was in a review I wrote for Vibe magazine of the third and last House of Pain album, Truth Crushed to Earth Shall Rise Again.

  It was not a very nice thing to say, especially there where I put it, in the first line of the piece. “Make way for the Leprechauns of Rage,” I said. It was a reference to the Public Enemy song “Prophets of Rage,” of course. You guys being an Irish American rap group rather than black, like Public Enemy and most other rap groups. It seems less clever to me now than it did at the time. But I guess that’s the thing about getting older, huh?

  I said lots of other not-so-nice things in the review, too. It wasn’t a very good album. By way of comparison, it didn’t “bang like shillelaghs,” as I said the first two House of Pain albums did. (I’m not sure that that could have ever sounded clever. But I did mean it; I really like those albums.) I criticized your lyrics and the beats you used and insinuated that the group’s prior success might have been reliant on your former executive producer, Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs. I threw a couple more Irish jokes in at the end, too.

  It was early in my career. I’d just started writing record reviews. People liked the pans, I’d noticed, and snide wit. Also, I’d grown up not Irish in a heavily Irish town, among a heavily Irish circle of friends who liked to crack back and forth about matters of ethnicity. So when I was assigned to review an album from a rap group that had always been very vocal about its Irishness, and when I didn’t like that album, I got my knives out. In my mind, I was back in the Red Bank Regional lunchroom with Matt McCabe, Ted O’Brien, Mark McCarthy.

  Was there an even uglier impulse? Did the glee I took in attacking your album have to do with the fact that I was a white guy at a largely black magazine writing about a bunch of other white guys in hip-hop? Did I use the opportunity to take you down a peg as a way to earn some kind of stripes? I’d like to think not. Not consciously. But might there’ve been just a smidgen of that slipping in there with those jokes? I wonder.

  You read the review when it came out. I shouldn’t have found that surprising, but I did—and strangely flattering, the thought of a rap star, someone I’d seen on MTV, sitting there reading words I had written. But you didn’t appreciate my criticisms or, apparently, find my jokes very funny. I know all this because both your publicist at the time and a friend of mine at the magazine who was friends with some of your friends told me you had spoken about wanting to beat me up.

  Coincidentally, your album and my review of it came out around the same time as the movie Swingers with Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau. As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s a scene in that movie where a friend of the protagonists shocks everybody by pulling out a gun during a shouting match with a bunch of white hip-hop heads. Vince Vaughn admonishes him for overreacting. “Like fuckin’ House of Pain was gonna do anything?” he says. So I can understand why you might have been extra cranky those days.

  According to reports from the friends of my friend, you were the type of guy who most certainly would have done something. So I’m grateful that your publicist fended off your requests that he bring you to a Vibe party and point me out to you. I would likely have ended up picking my teeth out of a platter of vegetable spring rolls.

  When the album flopped and House of Pain broke up sometime in the next year, people around the office joked that my review was like the famous one Jon Landau wrote in Rolling Stone that convinced Eric Clapton to disband Cream in 1968. I knew that was unlikely the case in this instance, but the feeling I got from even just the idea pushed past flattering into something that made me uncomfortable. Things got worse soon thereafter, when news broke that you had suffered a coronary attack that almost killed you. You were unconscious in the hospital for three days, I learned, while surgeons replaced a valve in your heart. You were twenty-nine.

  Thankfully, you are a resilient person. Not only did you recover quickly from the surgery, you switched directions musically and scored a major hit with a jangly acoustic-rock tune, “What It’s Like.” Your solo album, Whitey Ford Sings the Blues, sold two million copies. A couple years later, you had that song with Santana on that album of his that sold like twenty million copies: “Put Your Lights On.” You won a Grammy for that one. I’m sure you have enough money to last you the rest of your life. I’d imagine you don’t often think about record reviews from thirteen years ago.

  But still, it was stupid what I did. Not to criticize the album, but to do it so mean-spiritedly. It was the mistake of a young writer feeling himself a little too much. Not taking his job seriously enough, not understanding what it means to put something in print. There’s a responsibility that comes with publishing directly related to the fact that the words you write are being read by a circle of people wider than your three best friends from high school. It’s more important to refrain from taking cheap shots.

  So now, seriously, sorry.

  Dear Jen,

  I’m sorry I said your allergies were psychosomatic.

  We were visiting San Francisco in 1997, staying with my old college roommates Drew, Pete, and Scott. We’d slept at our friend Becca’s place the night before but left because you were allergic to her cat. You hadn’t slept well and you were in a sour mood. We both were. It had been a long day, and we’d been arguing all through it. We were often arguing back then. We are still often arguing actually. This has always been the nature of our relationship: we are close, arguing friends. “It’s too hot out,” I’ll say. “Oh, I like this weather,” you’ll say.

  I was spreading a futon mattress on the living room floor when your sneezing started up again. And coughing and sniffling and wheezing. “Ughh,” you said, your nose all red. “The dust. I’m allergic to this whole city.”

  “You know it’s all in your mind,” I said.


  You dropped the pillow you were holding and looked at me like I’d slapped you.

  “What?!”

  “I think allergies are largely psychosomatic. Like a manifestation of stress or something.”

  “No,” you said, straining for patience, as if you were talking to a five-year-old. “There are tiny particles in the air that I am actually allergic to. And when I breathe them in, they trigger a physical reaction.”

  I said something that included the phrase mind over matter.

  “Fuck you!” you said, trying to keep your voice low. It was late, we were guests. “Here I am suffering and miserable, and you’re going to tell me it’s my fault?!”

  You were right to be angry. I was being a jerk. Though at the time, I didn’t see what I’d said for the attack that it was. Not fully anyway. To some extent, I honestly thought I was trying to help. My father was a psychologist who specialized in pain management through hypnosis. He’d taught me some visualization techniques that were pretty effective at getting rid of headaches and stuff. This combined with the part I always remembered from Stephen King’s It (that highly regarded medical manual) where one of the kids realizes that his asthma is a symptom of anxiety and cures himself by throwing away his inhaler, and also a general and unfortunate mistrust of science I developed through an overzealous critique of Descartes in a modern philosophy course, and also finding more meaning than there actually is in a line from a Van Morrison song called “Enlightenment” about how we create our own reality—all of this informed what I now believe was an excessive adherence to the notion of mind over matter.