I forgot about the man after that, but the episode awakened in me a desire to do helpful works. This would be a good thing had I actually followed through on that impulse. But I did not. Not then, and not now. Yes, I contribute modest amounts to various charities throughout the year. And yes, I help my kids pick up litter on Earth Day, but we get free ice cream at the end, so I’m not sure that counts. I have lent my name to assorted causes and played poker on television for hunger relief. But none of it costs me much in any meaningful sense, and thus, none of it feels worthwhile. When 9/11 happened, the closest I got to being helpful was driving to the local hospital to donate blood, only to be told they did not need any more blood. I stopped at KFC on the way home, my reward for almost doing something good. I know I am supposed to help others as surely as I know I am supposed to get that colonoscopy. And I will, just not today.
Altruism produces some of the exact same results as running. Both involve a certain amount of effort and anxiety. Both produce feelings of healthfulness and well-being. Whenever I do either, I vow to continue, only to disappoint myself with my lack of try-try-again. Why are some people so much better than me? Why are some people so goddamned good?
The bone marrow people did not forget about me. Even after I moved multiple times and changed my name and faked my own death, they somehow managed to find me twice more over the years. Twice more they have contacted me as a potential match. Twice more I have hauled myself to the nearest lab for additional blood work. And twice more, I have felt that same anxiety build in my gut for a week or so, only to be told that I am no longer a candidate for donation. Each time I am pinged with that same combination of relief and regret.
Volunteering to save that girl’s life opened a Pandora’s box on my own humanity. Before that, it was easy enough to pretend that I would remain forever untouched by other people’s problems. After all, I dealt with my own troubles without any outside assistance, and aside from crippling depression, spiritual malaise, and emotional retardation, I was fine. Shouldn’t other people handle their problems the same way? Isn’t self-reliance what America is all about? But when confronted with the opportunity to endure personal suffering for the sake of a stranger, something opened in my heart that I could no longer stuff back in. Out fluttered empathy and guilt and remorse and, worst of all, the desire to do better.
Thankfully, I got myself some Lexapro to make all those feelings go away. As the years have gone by, I have tried to do some good. I do all the correct little things: opening doors for people, giving up my subway seat for pregnant ladies and old people and old, pregnant ladies. When the Boy Scouts come to my door every year selling Christmas wreaths, I always buy one even though—and this is the crucial point—I do not want a Christmas wreath. But none of it taxes me very much. Better if I made myself a regular presence at the food pantry or the animal shelter or volunteered my time at a school. Better if I did better. But I don’t.
Chapter Fifteen
“What happened to your face?”
I got punched in the face once. Maybe that doesn’t seem like such a big deal. After all, a simple right hook to the jaw is nothing compared to the varied and wondrous mayhems conjured for us every day in our television shows, movies, and video games, where a single punch is nothing more than an appetizer to the actual violence about to occur. It is a prelude, an amuse-bouche. In my experience, though, being struck by the full force of another man’s fist feels less like an appetizer and more like a Cheesecake Factory–size entrée of pain.
It happened during one of those few times in my life when I tried to be a Good Samaritan, a couple of years after I volunteered to save that girl’s life with my stupid bone marrow. This was back in the bad old days of Times Square, before the successive mayoralties of His Honors Giuliani and Bloomberg scrubbed away the area’s graffiti and grime, replacing the neighborhood peep shows with a Ripley’s Believe It or Not. What had been the native habitat of grifters and skeevy streetwalkers gave way to an invasive species of sandal-wearing tourists spouting corny European accents. Many New Yorkers bemoaned the changes. They said New York had lost its edge, that it had become “Disneyfied.” That may be true. But I suspect most of the people complaining didn’t have to navigate those streets every morning, as I once did on my way to class, dodging crack peddlers and scabby hookers. It was a filthy, scary place and I do not mourn its passing.
Of the now-extinct species in Times Square, the only one I remember with a certain fondness is the three-card-monte hustler. Three-card monte is an ancient scam, dating back to at least the fifteenth century. The game is simple and probably familiar to most people. A hustler shuffles three cards, usually two red and one black, facedown on a flat surface. After several quick shuffles, a player wagers he can find the one black card of the three. The game looks easy enough: Any sufficiently attentive human can follow the black card as it weaves its way among its brothers. An unsuspecting mark is, therefore, surprised to discover players around him consistently guessing wrong, while he, the silent observer, always guesses right. Does he possess some preternatural card-following abilities? He must. What other explanation could there be? After watching several rounds, the mark steps forward to accept the dealer’s offer to play. He confidently takes out his money, watches the shuffle, picks his card, and is stunned to discover that he has inexplicably chosen wrong, losing his money. Either he plays (and loses) again, or he stumbles away, feeling like a total fool, never realizing that the other players were all confederates in the con, all of them enacting an elaborate charade to entice suckers like himself into surrendering his dignity twenty dollars at a time.
I used to stop whatever I was doing to watch these games, reasoning it to be a relatively harmless scam. Players rarely lost more than twenty or forty dollars, and it was great entertainment watching the con unfold, time after time.
One afternoon, I took my normal station alongside a game. Beside me stood a Japanese tourist watching the game, riveted, slowly convincing himself he could beat it. Finally, as the dealer went back into his rap: “Twenty gets you forty, twenty gets you forty,” I saw the guy reach into his pocket for cash. He stood there for a second, eyes intent on the game, a twenty-dollar bill in hand, deciding whether or not to play. The dealer finished his shuffle, and pointed to the guy: “Pick a card.”
The tourist, perhaps sensing a losing proposition, wisely changed his mind and attempted to return the money to his wallet. The dealer wouldn’t have it. “No, man! You took out your money. You got to pick a card!”
The Japanese tourist shook his head no, a nervous smile blooming on his lips.
“Pick a card!”
The tourist was confused, his English nonexistent. He tried to wave the guy off, tried to tell him he did not want to play. The dealer’s accomplices, of which there were suddenly many, closed in around him, yelling, “You got to pick a card. You took out your money, you got to pick a card!”
The tourist seemed frightened, as anybody would be after finding themselves boxed in by a cluster of people jabbering at him in a foreign tongue. None of the other onlookers said anything, so I took it upon myself to act as the tourist’s proxy. I did this because I am stupid. Stepping forward, I wedged myself between the tourist and the dealer and proffered my best legal argument: “C’mon man, leave him alone.” (I used the word man to connote familiarity with the hustler’s street patois and demonstrate my own hipness, and as a subtle means of letting him know I had once read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.)
After I spoke, all action froze. Blithely, I continued. “He shouldn’t have to pick a card until he hands over the money.” The defense rests. The defense is about to get punched in the face.
One of the lookouts issued a sharp, loud whistle. The dealer knocked over the stacked cardboard boxes he’d been using as his playing surface, spun on his heel, and strutted away. The crowd around him scattered like pigeons, along with the Japanese tourist I had just defended. Within seconds, it was like the game had never been th
ere at all. Then, a guy about my height but beefier stepped up to me and, without a word, hit me as hard as he could square on the jaw.
BAM!
If you’ve never been punched in the face, here’s how it feels: bad. It feels like getting slammed in the nuts, only the nuts are your face. Even so, I did not go down, a fact of which I remain ridiculously proud to this day. No, I remained standing. I stood and took the punch like a big, gaping idiot. Even now, twenty-plus years later, I can still recall the seismic force of that punch. Having never been punched in the face before, I have no way to compare its quality to other punches, but had I been a ringside announcer, I would have yelled something like, “Oh! Black just took a SHOT to the jaw! How is he even still standing? I admire him very much!”
After my face snapped back into place, I found myself locking eyes with my assailant. It was a weird, intimate moment, lasting less than a second. I have no idea what he saw in my eyes. Probably utter shock. But in his eyes—and I apologize in advance for what I’m about to say because it’s going to make me sound like even more of a caricature of a bleeding-heart liberal than I actually am—I saw something more complicated. He looked pained and guilty and suddenly very young; he looked like a kid who’d just been caught stealing money from his mom’s purse. In that microsecond before he stomped away—and this is the part I’m really embarrassed to write because I feel like such a pansy for even saying this—I felt sorry for him.
My assailant followed his coworkers down the block, leaving me alone on the sidewalk, a fresh white pain bulldozing its way across my skull. I mean, I wasn’t literally alone; there must have been dozens of people who witnessed what happened, but nobody did anything. Nobody even asked if I was okay. Nor did I expect them to. This was big, bad New York, where people more or less expected to be assaulted at any given moment. In hindsight, I’m just lucky nobody picked my pocket after I got slugged. I remained rooted to the site of my assault for a long moment, letting the wobble in my brain slow and stop, my hand holding my jaw to keep it from shattering to the ground. I found my bearings and started walking.
By the time I got home, I could not close my mouth. The bottom would not align with the top, giving me the slightly baffled look of somebody who just saw a goat wearing a sombrero. My girlfriend of the time asked me what happened, but I didn’t give her a direct answer.
“I got hit,” I mumbled from the still-functioning side of my mouth.
She wanted details but I didn’t feel like giving them. What about the police, she asked. I just shook my head no. There was no point. What was I going to tell them? I got punched in the face by a guy who looked pretty much like every other guy? Besides, talking hurt too much and I felt ashamed. Why did I get involved? If the tourist was dumb enough to take out his money, he was dumb enough to get ripped off. This was New York, after all. Don’t come if you don’t want to get conned or mugged or stabbed.
My girlfriend gave me ice for the swelling. I planted myself on the couch for two weeks. That’s how long it took for my face to return to normal. Two weeks of soft foods and ibuprofen and responding to the same unwanted question again and again. “What happened to your face?” is a question nobody ever wants to answer.
After that, the world no longer felt quite so benign. I knew that crummy things sometimes happened to good people, but they weren’t supposed to happen to me. And if some guy could just punch me out of the blue when I was simply doing my bit for international diplomacy, it seemed to me that anything could happen whenever it damn well chose. For the first time in my life, I felt physically vulnerable, which sent me down a wormhole of self-pity. What kind of man could not defend himself? What if it had been my girlfriend being attacked? What could I have done? The answer, immediate and stark: nothing.
Not much is expected of men anymore. No longer are we the family’s sole providers. No longer assumed to hold positions of leadership over women. We are barely necessary for procreation. But in times of danger, men are still expected to step forward, still expected to rush into the burning building, to stay aboard the sinking ship, to risk life and limb for those more vulnerable than ourselves. But if a man cannot help even himself, then what good is he at all?
Now that I have a wife and two kids, my entire function is to ensure their safety and well-being. But just as I felt powerless over my assailant, just as I could do nothing to save my father, just as I cannot now cure my mother, I know I am running a fool’s errand with my own family. Yes, I can give them a roof and food and I can make sure they buckle themselves in when we go for a drive. I can do all the things parents are supposed to do to keep their families safe. But the world is a big place and my dominion over it limited.
So far, as parents, we’ve been lucky. Our only real scare occurred when Ruthie was two, and a persistent high fever sent her to the hospital, the result of an infection from a faulty bladder valve. She spent several days there, hooked up to IVs, my wife and I trading time at her side while the other tended to Elijah. The valve eventually corrected itself without surgery. Now she’s happy and healthy and eleven years old. Lucky. In the town next to mine here in the wilds of Connecticut, a gunman opened fire at an elementary school, killing twenty-six people, twenty of whom were children. It was a school just like the ones my kids were attending, at that moment, less than a dozen miles away. An event like that strikes a community like a meteor, devastating and unknowably alien. So I know how lucky we’ve been.
It is true that, ultimately, a punch to the face isn’t that big a deal. My body, scrawny as it was, took the hit without suffering any lasting consequences. In the years that followed, I did nothing to better my chances in any such future encounters. I took no martial arts classes. I learned no kickboxing. No guns found themselves tucked into my underwear waistband. Maybe I kept my head down a little more. Maybe I grew a little more aware of my surroundings. Maybe I became a touch more cynical about my fellow man, and maybe if I stumbled upon a three-card-monte game again, I wouldn’t put myself at risk to protect some stupid tourist. But, then again, maybe I would.
Chapter Sixteen
Douche nozzle
It’s one thing to find yourself an unassuming victim of violence, still another to consciously put yourself in a position where violence is apt to be forced upon you. I did such a thing once. I shouldn’t have.
On the occasion of the release of my first book, My Custom Van (and 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face), I found myself keeping careful tabs on my book’s climb up the Amazon humor charts. To my surprise, the book seemed to be selling pretty well, rising all the way to number three, behind one of David Sedaris’s perpetual bestsellers and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, by Tucker Max.
Considering I hadn’t expected anybody to buy the book, the fact that it now seemed poised to, perhaps, become the number one best-selling humor book in the nation lit a fire under my ass, prompting me to do what I could to juice the numbers. Nothing sells better than controversy, so I used a blog I kept at the time to attempt to instigate a literary feud with my fellow authors, figuring I could maybe generate some attention, and, thus, book sales.
My first target was the guy immediately ahead of me on the charts, David Sedaris. I don’t know David, and certainly had nothing against him, but I figured if he had a sense of humor, he might play along, which could be good for both of us. Obviously, I had no way of knowing if he would even hear of my “feud” with him, but I reasoned that the Internet is a big place, and somebody might draw his attention to it.
I decided to create a contest called “The First-Ever Turn David Sedaris into a Supervillain” competition, in which readers were invited to send in ideas for a David Sedaris supervillain. The winning entry was “Frenchy McStink,” a Photoshopped image of David Sedaris’s head grafted onto a Pepe LePew–looking cartoon skunk. The description of his supervillain powers read as such: “He draws in his victims with his nonchalant attitude and basket of well-arranged flowers. He then emits comp
elling and rather stinky excerpts from his latest collection of essays.”
Silly, harmless fun, no? I wrote several blog posts excoriating Mr. Sedaris but never received a response. Although he didn’t take my bait, I am told that once he was doing a book reading, and during the question-and-answer session somebody asked about his literary feud with Michael Ian Black. His response: “Who?”
Who indeed, Mr. Sedaris? Who indeed.
This feud proved so successful that my book actually passed Sedaris’s on the humor charts, kicking me up to number two. I had never ranked so highly at anything in my life. I felt elated, invincible. Only Tucker Max remained ahead of me in my quest for the top spot. For those unfamiliar with Mr. Max’s oeuvre, I present his self-description, taken from the back of his book:
“My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.”
Tucker’s book is a collection of stories detailing his drunken carousing and sexual misadventures with equally plastered girls, whereafter one or both of them invariably concludes the encounter with some variety of excrement and/or vomit. Naturally, the book was a huge, runaway bestseller, number one in the humor category for at least a year before I entered the charts. I could certainly understand the book’s success: It’s hard not to like a guy who so consistently throws up. Literature has a long list of lovable alcoholic scamps who act like pigs. The kid who wrote that book about heaven being real, for example.
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