“That’s not all we shared,” he said, leaning in close so his face filled the screen. “Primitive sexual practices—”
“Indy, stop.” I couldn’t let this drag on. “There’s something I have to tell you, and… it may come as a shock.”
“Nothing shocks me,” he said. “I’m a scientist.”
He waited, still smiling—and even though I hated myself, I knew I had to do it. “I can’t see you anymore.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I’m getting married.”
“Holy shit!”
“I know—it’s huge! I never even thought I’d fall in love, let alone—“ I trailed off when I saw his face; it was hurt but also angry, like in Last Crusade when Elsa tries to steal the Holy Grail.
“Boy, you’re something!” he said, turning to walk away.
I followed, moving down the aisle closer to the screen. “Indy, come ON,” I said. “What do you care?”
He turned back, his face twisted in a scowl. “Now you’re getting nasty!”
“You have your artifacts, your adventures—you don’t need me!”
“I’m sorry you think so!”
“It’s not like we’ve ever been exclusive! You had Marion and Willie—“
“I can only say I’m sorry so many times.”
He sounded so defeated.
“Indy,” I said, reaching out to touch his arm, but he jerked it back.
“Please, I don’t need a nurse.”
I wasn’t sure what else to say, so I borrowed from all the guys who’d dumped me over the years: “Fate just isn’t on our side.”
He laughed in my face. “I don’t believe in that magical, superstitious hocus pocus!”
I pointed my finger at the screen and yelled, “Our whole relationship is magical hocus pocus!”
He looked shocked—like that time he was brainwashed into thinking he was a Fugee High Priest and Shorty burned him with a torch—and I wondered if he’d ever realized how different our worlds were. I looked around the theater at all those faces so in love with Indiana Jones. In an hour and a half, the lights would go up, and they’d return to their lives.
This time, I needed to do the same.
The music started then, low and distant: “Da-da-da-DAAAA! Da-da-DAAA!” And I felt a sudden pang of courage. “Indiana,” I said, pointing behind me at the doors out to the lobby. “There’s a whole world for me out there, and you’ve got your own in here. Turn around, look!” He did, and saw the giant bearded Samurai dude coming at him, flipping his machete around like he was about to slice Jones in half. “You don’t have to fight,” I called. “Just shoot him, it’ll go much quicker.” He did as told and turned back to me. “Now you have to find Marion,” I instructed. “Just follow her voice; she’s loud as Hell. They’re going to try to make you think she blew up in that Nazi truck, but they’ve really got her stashed away in some tent. Remember that and you’ll be fine.” He nodded and made as if to rush off, then turned back to face me.
“Sweetheart, after all the fun we’ve had together,” he said, and I smiled.
“We have had fun, haven’t we?” I said.
From the surround sound around me, I heard Marion yelling, “Inddeeeee.” And then he was off, back to his own world. I pushed open those theater doors and went out into mine: the city, the street, and Christopher parked out front, waiting to drive me off into the sunset.
THE DOMINO EFFECT
ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO, I waited tables at a brunch restaurant in Wicker Park called the Bongo Room, known for its insanely amazing Chocolate Mascarpone French Toast and the insanely large crowds of people waiting to eat it.1 Every Sunday, these guys would come in—we’ll call them Steve, Jim, Mark, and Chip. Steve, Jim, and Mark were cool; they talked about last night at the Hunt Club, dressed head-to-toe in Abercrombie and Fitch, and tried to buddy me up for faster service. “Hi, what’s your name?” they’d say when I got to the table. Then, “Hi, Megan! We’re Steve, Jim, Mark, and Chip!” I didn’t bother saying they’d told me before, told me last week, told me eighteen thousand times, so can you just get on with the pancakes and Bloody Marys, ‘cause the wait for a table is over an hour; the guy at twenty-three is bitching about his benedict; I just got a nine-top on twenty-four, eight of whom want soy lattes—soy, for chrissakes!—and I don’t have time to yak it up. So can you order?
But of course, they couldn’t.
“You see her?” Chip said, nodding at a girl a couple tables over. She was perfect. Shiny hair, great body, big smile; imagine a television commercial for toothpaste or hairspray.
I looked back at Chip and said, “Yeah?”
“Can you find out if she’s married?” he asked, and right away, Steve, Jim, and Mark started laughing. I should point out that Chip wasn’t like the other three. He was kinda chubby, kinda balding, kinda boring—like, if I say tax attorney, you might imagine a guy like Chip.
“You wanna date her?” said Steve, Jim, and Mark. This was always how they treated him—sometimes he was the punchline, sometimes the punching bag. And while usually he’d turn red and laugh along with them, today he gripped the edge of the table and said, “No, I don’t want to date her; I want to marry her.”
The reaction was immediate:
“That girl wouldn’t be caught dead with a guy like you.”
“That girl eats guys like you for breakfast.”
“An appetizer for the main course, know what I’m saying?”
Chip looked at me.
“Please?” he said.
It was the please that did it.
I went by her table, planning on doing a quick left hand check—ring or no ring?—and then back to Chip with the verdict, but it wasn’t that simple. The girl was sitting with her left arm crossed over her stomach and her left hand tucked underneath her right armpit. I watched her for nearly a half hour, and the whole time she ate, drank, and gestured with only her right hand.
“Well?” Chip asked.
“I’m working on it,” I said. Then I walked to her table and dropped a napkin on the floor, squatting down to hands and knees on the ground and looking up at her lap—no go.
“What are you doing?” asked my friend/co-worker, Molly, once I was back in the service station.
I told her.
“That’s so romantic!” she said, jumping up and down and clapping. “It’s like when you’re on the subway, and you see someone, and you lock eyes, and it gets too intense, so you have to look away, and when you look back, they’re looking away, and what I always wonder is: what would happen if you just kept looking?”
I didn’t know.
“We’ll never know,” Molly said, “because nobody ever tries!”
Before I could fully wrap my brain around that idea, I saw that Chip’s girl was standing up. She was reaching for her jacket. She was dropping her left arm down and, no, there wasn’t any ring, because there weren’t any fingers. There was a hand and some stumps of varying sizes, where fingers ought to be but weren’t.
I went to Chip’s table. “She doesn’t have fingers,” I announced.
They looked at me blankly, so I held up my left hand and folded my fingers into my palm. “No fingers,” I said again.
Steve, Jim, and Mark nearly died laughing.
“Leave it to you to fall for a—”
“Guess she’s not so perfect anymore—”
“The one time you have balls enough to—”
But Chip didn’t hear any of it. He just watched as she left restaurant, and then, when the front door closed behind her, he did the last thing you’d ever expect from a punchline or a punching bag:
He got up and ran after her.
About six months later, I was walking around the restaurant refilling coffee and there, at a two-top by the front window, was Chip—who, FYI, looked fantastic; he’d shaved his head, muscled up a bit, and dressed more cutting edge. Like, if I say CEO of New
Social Media Empire, you might imagine a guy like Chip. It was easy to see the reason behind the change, because sitting across the table from him was—wait for it—the girl. His beautiful, fingerless, perfect girl.
It took everything I had not to cheer.
They told me the whole story: how he caught up with her on the sidewalk; how he didn’t know what to say because he’d never done anything like that before, but, dammit, he tried; and how, when people ask where they met, they talk about the crazy waitress at the Bongo Room who crawled around on the floor.
Hearing that story, for me, was a gift. At the time, I was single, sort of bitter—just done with it. Have you been there? And knowing that these two people were giving it a go—that they were trying—had a huge impact on me. Enough to start trying myself. Enough to tell this story over and over to friends of mine in similar situations. Enough to write it for a storytelling series I work with where we tell our stories aloud in the hopes that they will inspire our audience to consider their own, and how—even as we celebrate our differences—there are still multiple connections in our lives.
Here’s the power of a story: someone hands it to me like a gift (I imagine it wrapped in shiny paper with the bow, the handmade letterpress card—the whole nine yards). And in that gift, I find parts of myself that have been missing, parts of our world that I never imagined, and aspects of this life that I’m challenged to further examine. Then—and this is the important part; the money shot, if you will—I take that gift and share it. In my own writing, sure, but the kind of sharing I’m talking about here is the domino effect: how I hear/read/watch/ a story and then tell everybody and their mother about it, and then they tell everybody and their mother, and somewhere in that long line of people is someone who, at this exact point in their life, needed its message more than we’ll ever know.
We do this all the time: “Oh my gosh, I just saw heard/read/watched/experienced the most awesome thing! It’s called [insert awesome thing]2 and it made me think about—”
What?
What did the last story you heard/read/watched/experienced make you think about?
Did it help you find parts of yourself that have been missing? Parts of our world that you never imagined? Aspects of this life that you’re challenged to further examine?
My God—what a gift.
And now, you wrap it up and give it away. Somebody out there really needs a good present. Maybe your friend, maybe a co-worker, maybe that random person sitting next to you on a bus.
Or maybe the crazy waitress at that restaurant you go to every single day; the one who’s ready to crawl around on the floor if it helps you find the love of your life.
Footnotes:
1. The Bongo Room should also be known for the kindness and generosity of its owners, Derrick Robles and John Latino, whose friendship and business supported me while I put myself through school, made art, kicked off a teaching career, and generally figured out what the hell I was doing. I’d wager there are many theatre artists, literary artists, visual artists, and artists who can say the same. So, on behalf of us all, I’d like to say thank you to the service industry for helping us pay our rent and live our dreams, for allowing us the flexibility to audition and finish projects, for giving our audiences the space to discuss our art over yummy food, for our after parties (!), for coffee, for wine, and—most of all—the lifelong friendships.
2. Anything and everything by Roxane Gay. 2nd Story. The Paper Machete at the Green Mill. Oona… rocks. Kafka. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. East of Eden. Geek Love. Miles From Nowhere. Why I Fight. Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir, Fall on Your Knees, The Temple of Air, and Just Kids. Aleksander Hemon’s The Book of My Lives. Kiese Layman’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water. “Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula,” by Lindsay Hunter, and “Return from the Depot!” by Elizabeth Crane. Anything and everything by Dorothy Allison, but mostly “River of Names,” which I saw her read at a beautiful old church/arts center as part of the Sister Spit tour. Hearing Dorothy Allison read, in and of itself, is a sacred thing, but hearing her in a church… It was one of those moments when you almost believe in God. Anything and everything by Cheryl Strayed, but most of all this from Tiny Beautiful Things: “You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts. You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.” Anything and everything by Toni Morrison, but most of all this: “I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” Anything and everything by bell hooks. The personal essays published at The Rumpus, Guernica, The Millions, and Electric Literature. Rookie: a website for teenage girls (but also for me). The visual art curated at Colossal. Everything on Brainpicker. Samantha fucking’ Irby at BitchesGottaEat. Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room. Anna Schuleit’s Bloom. Mica Angela Hendricks’ illustrations with her four-year-old daughter. Exposure #42: N.Y.C. Broome & Crosby Streets, 06.09.06, 7:12 p.m. by Barbara Probst. Those crazy underwater sculptures by Jason deCaires Taylor. Stefanie Posavec. Paul Octavius. Alexy Terenin. Amy Martin. Alison Bechdel. The Sketchbook Project. The You Are Beautiful Project. The part during The Artist is Present when Marina opens her eyes and sees Ulay. Zoe Keating. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood by Nina Simone. Anything and everything by Nina Simone. PJ Harvey’s “Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea.” Ambulance by TV on the Radio. Sweet Honey in the Rock. Girl Talk. Mucca Pazza. Scotty Karate. Summertime Rolls. That TED talk by Chimamanda Adichie called The Danger of a Single Story. The TED talk by Adora Svitak called What Kids Can Learn From Adults. The TED talk about dancing your PhD. Jim Coudal’s talk at Creative Mornings. Lana Wachowski’s acceptance speech for the HRC Visibility Award. Trinity in The Matrix. The Matrix, period. The Princess and the Warrior. City of Lost Children. The original Pitch Black. The part in LOTR where Legolas slides down the elephant. The Wire. Firefly. 24. 30 Rock. Homeland and House of Cards and Veep. The Walking Dead, both the graphic novels and the TV series #teammichonne. Game of Thrones, both the books and the TV series #teamkhaleesi. #teamsydneybristow. #teamoliviapope. Khanisha Foster in Actor of Color. Julie Ganey in Love Thy Neighbor. Liza Minelli’s Daughter by Mary Fons, Burning Bluebird by Jay Torrence, and There is a Happiness That Morning Is by Mickle Maher starring Diana Slickman #teamslickman. What’s the T? by the About Face Youth Theatre, and the mighty Young Chicago Authors with Louder Than a Bomb. This, from designer Frank Chimero: “Once the work is done, it’s not yours anymore. You draw the comic, write the book, make the app, and then it makes its way out into the world. And it starts to talk back to you. It’s the weirdest thing—if the thing you make goes anywhere, it’s because other people carried it. Your thing becomes our thing. This is deeply unsettling, but it is also a beautiful situation that binds us to one another.” This, from the Chicago poet Coya Paz: “The work is enough. I feel grateful I am able to do it, that every day I wake up to a job I love, a privilege afforded the very few and I am wise enough now to know it.” And this, from Letters to a Young Poet: “a work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.”
WAKE THE GODDAMN WORLD
MAYBE I’M REMEMBERING IT WRONG. It happened over a decade ago, and that’s plenty of time for the mind to play tricks. She was screaming—that much is certain—and scared. Right? Wasn’t she? It sounded like it, but maybe I’m thinking of all the movies and TV shows
and news broadcasts I’ve seen where the man raises his hand and the woman cowers. Maybe I’m using bits and pieces from those stories to fill in this one.
Here’s what I know for sure: It was the middle of the night. I heard screaming. I got out of bed and went to the window. Four stories down, the two of them were in front of our building. There was a street lamp. I saw some, but not all.
There was pushing.
Dull smacking sounds—palm on skin? Fist on bone?
But maybe I’m making that part up.
•
I spent the bulk of 2004 in Prague, teaching Kafka for an American study abroad program. My boyfriend and I paid $500 a month for a one-bedroom walk-up, fully furnished from IKEA, with huge windows that overlooked an idyllic cobblestone street. I hung wet clothes from those windows to dry. Sometimes birds flew in, getting stuck in corners where the ceiling met the walls. One time, I threw coconuts to the ground, four stories below, trying to crack them open. We were making gumbo from a recipe we got off the internet; for some reason, it called for coconuts. Where do you get a coconut in the Czech Republic? “Kokosovy orech?” we asked grocer after grocer, our accents cutting pinpricks into the thick, tongue-heavy Czech. Finally, we found some at the Prazska Trznice and bought them all—an enormous stack of impossible, impenetrable fruit sitting on the counter and taunting us. Our furnished kitchen, with its fully-stocked drawers, held nothing that resembled a meat cleaver. Or a screwdriver. Or a blow torch, or a buzz saw, or a machete.
It was the ultimate defeat.
It’s worth mentioning that, at the time, I was starting to feel a bit crazy: a head full of Kafka, homesick, and reeling from the recent U.S. presidential election. It was mid-November, and a permanent gray mist had blanketed the castles and cobblestone, perfect and Goth and mysterious for the first few months, but then—gray. In Chicago, Seasonal Depression is a thing; we prep for the winter the way others might for the apocalypse, and for the record, it has little to do with temperature. My brother in Fairbanks, Alaska, plugs his car into a generator every night so the engine won’t freeze, and he laughs when I complain about Midwest winters. But truly, the gray is no joke; It slides into your psyche, every month getting darker. By March, we’re ready to climb out of our skin. I start to resemble a character from The Shining.
Once I Was Cool Page 5
