Navel Gazing

by Michael Ian Black

  We played our show fast and tight. Fifteen minutes, six songs. Afterward, I pried a tiny black splinter from the stage and shoved it into my pocket, a souvenir. My ears rang all the way back to New Jersey.

  Did we pass the audition? A few days went by without any word from CB’s. Then a week. Then two. Finally, one day at rehearsal, I summoned the nerve to call the club myself. “CB’s,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Yeah, hi. Uh, my name is Michael. My band the Pleased played the audition night a couple weeks ago and we were wondering if we passed.”

  A long pause.

  “Yeah, you passed.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.” Another pause. “Congratulations.”

  Holy shit, we passed! I hung up and told the other guys. We couldn’t believe it. We danced around the room, cheering ourselves. Passing that audition felt like punk validation; it was like getting a French kiss from Joey Ramone himself. So what exactly did passing the audition mean? Until that moment, I never thought to ask. If pressed, I would have assumed it meant we would soon be regularly playing CB’s, opening for our musical heroes. Further, it would probably mean a lot of travel, since we’d soon start touring, plus we’d have to find somebody to take on the road with us to drive the van and deal with all the merch. Or maybe we should just get a tour bus to save on hotel expenses. Dealing with all the logistics would be a nightmare, so we should maybe think about hiring a tour manager, but how much would that cost? Then we would be having to decide whether to sign with the majors or stick with an indie label. Did we want to play SNL or would that look like selling out? Wow, passing this audition was definitely cool, but I could see that our impending success was going to present a host of problems we hadn’t anticipated. Not that I was complaining; I’d signed up for this rocket ride. Now it was time to shoot the moon.

  We never heard from CBGB again.

  Never did it occur to me—or to the other guys—that Monday afternoons and evenings are probably a pretty slow time in the world of live music venues and that one way to bring in a little business would be to hold “auditions,” and to ask the bands gullible enough to sign up to bring as many fans as they could—fans who would have to pay a five-dollar cover and purchase a two-drink minimum. Never did it occur to us that the audition was a scam. After all, punk rockers don’t scam other people. That went against the whole punk rock credo, at least as interpreted by four New Jersey teenagers. We were honest and true, a small force for good in a sick and corrupted world. It never occurred to us that the whole thing was just a dog and pony show. It never occurred to us at all.

  We graduated not long after that. Three of us would be headed off to college in the fall, and Mark would continue his career stealing credit card information. The band would not survive, could not survive—and yet, we had passed that audition, hadn’t we? Maybe some hope still existed for us. Maybe we could each take a year off from college and petty thievery to give this thing a real go.

  But if we were going to give the Pleased a shot, we had to do something about Tim. The simple fact of the matter was that Tim could not play bass, at least not to the level expected of a band that had passed the audition at CBGB. After much back-and-forth, we decided Tim had to go.

  Tim, who had cofounded the band. Tim, the only legitimate punk among us. Tim, who was my best friend in the group and who loved the band more than even I, who loved the band with every fiber of my being.

  We called a rehearsal at Mark’s house and I delivered the news. He took it with grace, which is to say he screamed, “Fuck you guys!” and stormed out of the house calling us assholes and traitors as he went.

  Which we were.

  Which I was.

  To this day, firing Tim from the Pleased is one of my life’s biggest regrets. Had I stopped to soberly consider the situation even for a minute, I would have realized we were done. Were any of us really going to give up college to play shitty dive bars with what basically amounted to a below-average punk rock cover band? Of course not. Why couldn’t I just leave well enough alone, and let the Pleased die a noble, punk rock death? Did I really believe my singing was any better than Tim’s bass playing? We were equally inept, and yet I somehow convinced myself that he was the band’s single liability, that without him, we’d have a record deal and a shitty van and be driving across the country and crashing on couches and sleeping with groupies. Why did I blow up my friendship with Tim over a pipe dream? God, I was such an asshole.

  Years went by. Somebody invented Facebook. One day, I got a friendship request from an old friend. Tim. Did I want to get together, have lunch, catch up?

  We met in the city. He looked the same, only with a sleeve of tattoos he hadn’t had before. He seemed mellow and happy and he asked me all about my life. I answered. When I finished, I asked about his. He’d gone to art school for a while, pissed around, done a little of this and that, started roadying for some bands, then put together a band of his own. He wasn’t playing bass anymore. He was singing. Or “singing.” They had a record deal. They toured the world in shitty vans, crashed on couches, and preached that good punk rock sermon to all the righteous and unloved teenagers of the world. It blew my mind. Tim, the seventeen-year-old punk rocker who I could not imagine doing anything else with his life, is now in his forties, and he is a professional punk rocker.

  For its short existence, the Pleased meant everything to me. It meant validation. It meant belonging to something at a time when I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. But now I am going deaf. The ringing in my ears doesn’t stop, a low-grade tinnitus (pronounced TIN-i-tis, not tin-EYE-tis, as the audiologist told me) that will never get better and may end up degrading my hearing to the point that I need a hearing aid sooner rather than later. Many times, I find myself responding to people without having had any idea what they’ve just told me, nodding or laughing as I deem appropriate based on visual cues. The word I say with the most frequency is “what?” as in, “What did you just say?” It drives Martha crazy. It drives me crazy.

  Was my year as a punk rocker worth losing my hearing over? New Jersey sucked. My home life sucked. School sucked. The band didn’t suck. The band gave me the ability to endure everything else. When we played, I felt invulnerable. I felt electric. I felt the most like myself I had ever felt until that point. So was it worth it?

  Hell, no.

  No, I’d much rather have my hearing than those memories, especially considering the sour taste I still have in my mouth for how it ended. But since I can’t get my hearing back, I’ll take the memories. I’ll take the rehearsals in Mark’s hoarder house and the Battle of the Bands and the cassette and my six songs on the beat-up old stage in that old punk mecca, gone now, replaced by a John Varvatos clothing store that sells four-hundred-dollar pairs of shoes. Forming that band was the first time I’d undertaken a serious creative endeavor, the first time I thought, “I could do that,” then actually done it. That’s a valuable lesson for anybody. So even though the trade-off is that I now have to turn up the television volume to unacceptable levels when watching anything more narratively complicated than Sesame Street, I’ll take it. It may not be a fair trade, but all things considered, I’m pleased.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I need some reassurance that everything is going to be okay

  People who say you should do things all the way or not do them at all have obviously never run a half marathon. Even its name says you will only be doing things in half measures, so it’s a cop-out right off the bat. But half of something extremely hard and tedious is still something pretty hard and tedious.

  A full marathon is 26.2 miles, the distance from New York City to Tokyo. Divide that by two and you’ve still got 13.1 miles, which is still a hell of a long way to go by foot. Could I run that far? I first asked myself that question toward the end of my sedentary winter following the 10K I’d run the previous autumn. I hadn’t exercised at all during the cold months, preferring the company of warm cookies to tha
t of the chilly woods, making all sorts of excuses to myself as to why I could not possibly run: The ground is too muddy, too cold, too wet, my complexion too delicate, my chakra misaligned, etc. But as winter melted into spring, some primal urge started poking at me. Didn’t I need to get back out there? I mean, here I was, forty-two years old, lazing about, feeling like a fat squidge.

  Could I really commit to a training regimen that would have me out there four days a week, running ever-increasing miles in anticipation of a thirteen-mile footrace? Of course I could. The half marathon was only a little more than twice as long as the 10K, which hadn’t been terrible. Just do two of those plus a little more and boom, that’s a half marathon. I could do that, just not all at once. Maybe spaced out over a couple weeks.

  After a long time off from exercise, the hardest thing to do is taking that first step. Tying my running shoes felt like climbing a mountain. Ugh—was I really going to do this again? I did not want to. Did not want to. Did not want to. I repeated this mantra down the stairs from my bedroom and out the front door and onto my driveway, where I set my running app for three miles and began my first slow jog in months and I did not want to. But I did.

  My new training program called for a lot of running, up to twelve miles a day toward the end. That is so much running, the kind of running where, when you take a shower afterward, your nipples hurt because they have chafed against the fabric of your technical shirt. If these shirts are so technical, why don’t they have an anti-nipple-chafe feature? Bloody nipples are no joke. I mean, they’re kind of a joke if they’re happening to somebody else, because the idea of bloody nipples is at least a little bit funny. I’d heard about such a thing but never experienced it, and although it hurt, I have to say I felt proud that an athletic endeavor I undertook was so difficult it actually caused my nipples to bleed. That’s pretty hard-core.

  The toughest thing about training for the half marathon was the time commitment: hours per week, hours that could have been more fruitfully been spent not running. Why did I persist, week after week, through the summer heat and into the chilly days of autumn? What was my fascination with running? What was I looking for from the simple activity of placing one foot in front of the other faster than normal? What did I want? The truth is, I knew what I wanted from running, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to admit it: I wanted enlightenment. And this is where are all my convoluted feelings about my body and Mom’s declining health and aging and my own fear of death and praytheism congeal into a goopy sludge. This is the nexus. It is a stupid nexus, to be sure, but I could not quite shake the idea that running could save me.

  It’s not such a crazy idea. After all, lots of mundane activities give meaning to people’s lives. Think of the ladies who volunteer to knit tiny pink and blue hospital caps for newborn babies. Or people who meditate. Or fish. Can’t we find enlightenment in anything if we look hard enough? I don’t think a profound spiritual awakening is too much to ask from jogging a few miles. It’s what I’d been looking for from the moment I took my first step as a runner. It’s a hard thing to admit because it seems so foolish, but it’s the truth. I have no church. I have no faith. My mother is falling apart in pieces and my children are growing up and I am getting old and I need some reassurance that everything is going to be okay.

  How could running possibly provide such reassurance? I did not know, but some part of me believed it would. If I just ran enough miles, suffered enough, climbed enough hills, put myself through a terrible enough physical crucible, I might emerge on the other side somehow (and this is the word that is most embarrassing but also the truest description of what I sought) holy.

  I did what I could when I ran. I breathed and repeated nonsensical little mantras. I tried to clear my head of extraneous thoughts, to focus on one step following the other through space. I tried listening to music and not listening to music. When the highs came, they felt delicious but not revelatory, which only encouraged me to dig deeper, to dredge up more. I knew the highs were illusions, just endorphins flooding into my nervous system, but I thought if I sifted through them, I could find something richer, gold in the dirt of my earthy emotions. And when I suffered, I tried to cast the suffering in metaphysical terms, the price mystics paid for enlightenment. And when I let the hot water run over my head and sting my bloody nipples at the end of my workout, I tried to hold on to whatever I’d learned during my exertions. What had I learned?

  Not much. Possibly nothing.

  I didn’t know if I would recognize what I sought if I ever found it. What was I even looking for? Would it be like The Matrix, when Keanu Reeves starts seeing binary code everywhere? Or would it be like that time I took LSD in the Badlands of South Dakota and saw the gates of hell open before me? If I had to put it into words, I would say I was seeking a spiritual orgasm. If I couldn’t have that, I supposed I would settle for a traditional orgasm.

  I got neither, which only strengthened my resolve. I began reading accounts of ultramarathons, those fifty- and hundred-mile races that have grown in popularity over the last few years. What else would propel people to run those distances other than the same quest I found myself on? We all sense that our limits extend farther than we know, and that, in pushing ourselves past what we believe possible, we find something new, something otherwise unseen. The question was: What do we find? None of the ultramarathoners I read about said anything about enlightenment. Instead they discussed blackened toenails and diarrhea cramps and sunburn in the morning and hypothermia at night. Pictures of them at the eighty- or ninety-mile mark showed gaunt and haggard zombies, eyes glazed, stumbling toward a finish line still miles in the distance. They looked more beat-up than beatific. Yet, most of them came back time and time again. Why?

  I scrutinized my body for changes. Yes, enlightenment was one of my goals, but having a ripped, hot bod was another. Little progress on that front, either. Sure, I dropped a few pounds but I did not acquire Bruce Whitehall’s lean physique and gleaming teeth. I still looked like me, a version of myself pretty much indistinguishable from the guy who’d been sitting on the couch all those months. So if I looked the same and felt the same, what the hell was I doing?

  As my half-marathon day approached, I conspired with my mountain bike buddy Matt to run the thing together. Matt is a better athlete than me, and I worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with him during the long slog. Not that it mattered much. The point was to run my own race regardless of how quickly Matt ran. If I fell behind, I fell behind. No big deal. I mean, I obviously wouldn’t let myself fall too far behind. Or at all. Fuck it: I wasn’t going to let Matt beat me. Also, I instructed my family where and when to meet, confident Martha would not screw it up this time. If she did, I would not only divorce her, I would start a letter-writing campaign to Amnesty International to have her declared a violator of human rights. She swore to me up and down that she and the kids would be waiting for me at the finish line.

  So there we were, several hundred of us, gathered just beyond the starting line outside a middle school somewhere in the wilds of Connecticut. The racecourse would take us in a loop through a series of cutesy neighborhoods before dumping us onto Main Street for a triumphal processional to glory. When the starter pistol fired, we shuffled along with the herd to the starting line, and then onto the course itself, our numbers gradually spreading out until Matt and I found ourselves among no more than half a dozen runners at a time. We kept careful pace because I swore to myself not to make the same mistake I had in my first race, going out too fast and then faltering at the end. It was a good promise to make and an impossible one to keep. I ran much too fast because of the adrenaline, yes, but also because I’m a buffoon.

  “How’re you feeling?” Matt would ask me as we huffed along.

  “Good, man!” Which was true for the first few miles. Less so for the next few, and not at all true as we approached the ten-mile mark. Matt began pulling away from me a little bit at a time. At first I tried to keep up, but I eventually c
oncluded it was a fool’s errand. I’d run too fast in an effort to stay with my buddy and now I was paying the price. At the ten-mile mark, it’s tempting to exalt, “I’ve run ten miles! There’s only three miles to go!” Which is true, except that, after running so many, each subsequent mile takes on a “dog’s year” quality.

  Finally I told Matt to go on without me, words I’d only expected to ever use after being pinned down in an ice crevasse following an avalanche. “You go ahead,” I panted, knowing that, as a gentleman, he would refuse.

  “Okay,” he said, kicking into a gear that I not only didn’t possess after ten miles of running, but had never possessed. After Matt disappeared over a distant hill, I began having insidious thoughts like: “Why don’t you just take a little break? Nobody will know. You could just sit down for a few minutes and rest. C’mon, Michael, you’ve earned it. Just stop and get your shit together for a second. You don’t want to finish this race looking less than handsome. Take a seat—that’s not cheating.”

  And, of course, it’s true: Resting isn’t cheating. But it felt like cheating, and I did not want to cheat. And this is where I began to discover what all those miles of training had been good for. While seeking enlightenment, I discovered something else: fortitude. Truth be told, I would have preferred the enlightenment, but at mile ten, you take what you can get.

  “No,” I told myself. “I’m not going to stop. I might slow down, but I’m not going to stop. And I’m not going to walk.”

  I ran those last few miles feeling like I had somebody standing on my feet. All the while, my mind’s little hobgoblin would not shut up: “Why run at all? What’s the point? What’s the point of anything when you really think about it, you know?” But once my mind started resorting to existential questions like “What’s the point?” I knew I had it beat. Because even though I sought transcendence, part of me suspected there had been no point from the very beginning. The point was, in fact, beside the point. Finishing was the only point, and the only way to make the point was to finish.