I Don't Have a Happy Place

by Kim Korson

  • • • • • •

  The first time I saw Buzz, he was walking down Beacon Street. He wore a tie-dyed T-shirt with an unbuttoned baby-blue oxford over it and carried a navy backpack, a sheet of looseleaf crunched in the zipper. A swirl of his black hair escaped its ponytail, and the faded jeans he chose that morning seemed to be falling off, defying his canvas belt. Stopping at a huddle of boys, Buzz listened, then laughed by throwing his head back while keeping his mouth wide open, like Guy Smiley.

  “There!” said my friend Mitzi, pointing her Camel Light across the street. “There he is!”

  “That guy?” I said.

  “Yes!”

  “That guy?”

  She grabbed my arm. “Yes. That’s him. Isn’t he cute?”

  “Cute?” I said, looking for my smokes. I was wearing a black off-the-shoulder snug-fitting shirt, a man’s suit vest, jean shorts over multicolored floral tights, black John Cougar Mellencamp–inspired western shoe-boots, and a top hat. “That guy looks ­ridiculous.”

  “He went to camp with my sister,” Mitzi said, as if that changed the fact that he resembled Tiny Tim without the warble and ukulele. “I think we know a lot of the same people.”

  “He’s still ridiculous.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  We smoked, sitting on the fourth stair of the building’s front stoop that served as Emerson College’s student lounge. Most of our classes took place in the converted living rooms of old brownstone buildings that dotted the Back Bay of Boston, but the steps of 130 Beacon Street were social and cigarette-­smoking headquarters. Buzz traipsed along, eventually disappearing around the corner as Mitzi news-briefed me that he, like us, had transferred to our school sophomore year. He was a Jew from a fancy Wasp town in Connecticut and went to summer camp in Ontario, Canada, which is where he met Mitzi’s sister. He majored in advertising, had a girlfriend who went to another college in the area, and when he drove his off-white 1973 Super Beetle he wore a signature wool hat with earflaps, no matter the season, which he called his Driving Hat.

  “Come on,” Mitzi said when he was no longer in sight. “You don’t think he’s even a teeny bit cute?”

  “No.”

  • • •

  I replay the original Buzz sighting of 1990 in my head often, wondering how I got here. Here is a rental car we’ve secured at the Cancun airport, a red compact we will sit in for two hours along a highway that is crumbling, not unlike my life, and even in my state of despair I am able to see the irony—or is it a metaphor—and I add messed-up road to the running mental list I began before we left, entitled “Signs.”

  That morning, to the untrained eye, I might have looked like I was minding my own business in the vestibule, waiting for the town car to arrive and speed us to the airport. Buzz didn’t notice me inspecting his Plane Pants, which were really just cargo pants from the Gap. Buzz didn’t like wearing jeans on a plane, as he found them too constricting and without enough pockets. After spending four months locating the perfect pair of travel bottoms, he then gave them a moniker, which was not unusual for Buzz, as evidenced by his Club Shirt in college and the recently scored Dog-Run Jacket from Filene’s Basement. The Plane Pants were equipped with deep pockets, and I spent a good amount of time lacing my Pumas, pretending I wasn’t searching for a lump that could pass as a small velvet box. When that proved fruitless, I asked if I could get some gum from his backpack, which he obliged, making it clear there was nothing concealed in his bag either. I tried to stay optimistic by switching the nature of my investigation, focusing less on hard evidence, more on behavior.

  But I should have known better than to flirt with optimism. Buzz was not a morning person, or a big conversationalist, so it was usual for him to be quiet and dazed as we waited. To clarify, Buzz is a talker—so chock-full of information they should farm him out for weddings to keep topics flowing—but he is not a conversationalist.

  Me, I can easily go ten rounds on Do you think the laundry ladies hate me? Or Do you like the bus? Or Do you think our deli guy hates me? But on these subjects, he has nothing to add. On the morning of our Mexican vacation, Buzz was acting just like Buzz. Not squirrelly, not like he was concealing anything. Signs were quickly turning into omens. I sat on the dirty lobby floor, eyes on the Spackle-colored sky, comforted that I was not the only rain cloud on Columbus Avenue that morning.

  • • •

  I wasn’t always like this. As a kid, nuptials were not my thing. I didn’t have sunny yellow wallpaper or the disposition to match. I didn’t wear headbands or the Esprit sweaters my mother pushed me toward in the store, and I certainly never ripped out pictures of wedding dresses, cataloging them in a binder for my eventual big day. It’s not that I was against the event. I wanted to marry Duran Duran as much as the next person, but I could never imagine myself in a poufy white dress.

  Having been raised by a nineteen-inch color Zenith, I thought this is what weddings were. Dresses of any kind were not welcome in our closets because my mother was a feminist. Minus the burgundy velvet floor-length skirt with bustle she wore to my brother’s bar mitzvah, I never saw my mother in a dress. She wore suit pants, with panty hose underneath, because Marlo Thomas said mommies were people and people wore pants. As I came of age in the ‘80s, things got more confusing. From the neck down my mother looked like she worked for IBM, but above the shoulder pads she glazed her face with pinks and blues and molded her hair into a domed helmet that would make Joan Collins look like she’d given up.

  It’s possible my mother was trying to convey messages of strength and equality, but to me they were filtered through a colossal game of visual Telephone. We didn’t have intimate talks, because my mother was private. So I learned to focus on what was physically in front of me, which was usually a bag of mixed messages. As a result, in the sixth grade I never took off my steel-toed boots, because we were feminists. But I was also encouraged at thirteen to buy blue eyeliner and small jars of Indian Earth because it made us look less tired. My father must have wanted to be a feminist, too, because he also started wearing bronzer.

  When I moved out of my childhood home, I was confused. Finally living on my own, I would get to the bottom of what it meant to be a grown woman. I achieved this by doing the opposite of everything I’d seen my mother do to date. Skirt buying became an addiction. I renounced hairspray. And I took not being vain to such champion levels, Buzz often said I looked homeless. As a strong woman, I would have solid reasons for my actions and belief systems that I’d share with others. No accessories for me. I was going to have substance. I was also going to have lists. Because what better way to show you meant business than bullet points? When friends started talking emerald-cut rings and three-tiered lemon-chiffon cake with raspberry cream, I hung the following list above my toilet.

  WHY I DON’T WANT TO GET MARRIED:

  1. Jordan almonds are stupid.

  2. You can’t wear a veil if you wear glasses.

  3. Dancing is dumb.

  4. Chicken, beef, or fish?

  5. Don’t have enough friends to invite so would appear like loser at own nuptials.

  6. Can’t call in sick to own wedding like you do for other parties.

  7. I don’t like parties.

  I lived my life with limp hair and strong convictions for many years. Now, in my late twenties, I suddenly found myself in one of those movies where someone gets hit in the head and sees things differently and learns lessons and switches bodies with Fred Savage. Now, seven years into this relationship, I ached to get married.

  • • •

  Tulum is a sleepy pueblo, on the eastern side of the Caribbean coast in Quintana Roo, Mexico. It is home to a well-known archeological Mayan ruin but not known enough to warrant a call from my mother reminding me of a Dateline she saw recently and to please watch out for kidnapping and decapitation. Today Tulum has a “hotel zone” and
nightlife and an ATM and a gym and there is talk of an international airport, but back in 2000 tourism was limited to a few Mayan-style thatched huts for lodging and a mellow quality that made Buzz repeat (frequently) that it was a place for “travelers, not tourists.”

  This was a return trip for us. Two years earlier, we’d driven this same fissured road to spend six days on a divine beach we had just about to ourselves, minus the odd stray dog, the stunning woman with mermaid hair covering her boobs while practicing naked yoga in the distance, and the small group of fellow travelers we dined with occasionally even though one of them, a gay blind man named Blair, was so detestable that Buzz and I spent the better part of the week debating the karma, rules, and social implications of having a problem with the sightless. Mostly we just wanted to know if we were allowed to hate the blind guy.

  One had to be vigilant driving this route from Cancun so that a Mexican crater didn’t swallow up your rental. There were no dividing lines to hint at where you should be driving and seemingly no road rules at all. This kind of driving was Buzz’s Super Bowl. Back home in New York, if I slammed on the pretend passenger brake or gripped the handle above the window where people sometimes hung their dry cleaning, Buzz would just shrug and say, “What?” On the Mexican highway, however, I had sunk deep into the bowels of a slump and couldn’t even be bothered to police Buzz’s driving. Instead, I pressed my forehead to the window and seethed. I thought, Drive like an asshole, see if I care. Get into a head-on collision and get us both killed. I’ll just look at your stupid run-overed face and say, “What?”

  Up ahead, I noticed the green highway sign with white lettering that read, EXCUSE TO DISTURB YOU IMPROVEMENT THIS ROAD FOR YOUR COMFORT. Last visit, Buzz and I enjoyed this sign a great deal, quoting it often, followed by general laughing and pats on the back for our hilarious senses of humor. This time, Buzz hit my arm to signal its presence but I ignored him, leaving him to laugh alone. He didn’t even notice. (Signs.) We turned right, heading toward the very end of the Boca Pailla road.

  “I’m starving,” Buzz said, turning off the car. “You?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Guacamole?” he said. “Maybe fajitas.”

  He got out with our bags, disappearing into the hotel, not noticing I was still locked inside.

  • • •

  Mitzi ended up in Voice and Articulation class with Buzz, Thursdays at 8:30 a.m. They became fast friends sitting in the back, learning of sibilant s’s and dentalized d’s. Since fast-friend making was not my strong suit, I just glommed on to Mitzi’s choices. I learned right away that Buzz was charming, if not a nincompoop, but pretty focused academically for someone who drank so hard he spent more than a few nights asleep on a stoop on Exeter Street. No matter the damage he’d done to himself the night before, he’d show up to every class with books in hand and a ring of Pepto-Bismol around his lips.

  We were creatures from different parts of the zoo. He, a quasi-Deadhead sporto part-time vegetarian/alcoholic with a rotating stable of girls passing through his bedroom. Me, an occasional agoraphobic listening to DJ Jazzy Jeff CDs and the original soundtrack to Les Misérables while still making crank calls. He made dean’s list three years running and I missed the first month of Novel into Film because I couldn’t locate the classroom it was held in.

  In 1990, Emerson College was about 35 percent male, and half that population was gay. These were the statistics I attributed to Buzz being so lady lucky. To this day, he contends that I, like the rest of the female population, was in love with him, which is completely false, as I was perfectly busy being obsessed with a flamboyant Richard Grieco lookalike we dubbed Booker.

  Pretty soon after our newfound friendship, Mitzi lost romantic interest in Buzz and moved on to a senior with a Hollywood pedigree. Buzz ended up with a model-singer Mariel Hemingway doppelganger as his main course, with a lazy Susan of dark-haired coeds and one art major who did her photo thesis on Buzz as Jesus in a toga. I didn’t like Buzz as more than a friend, but you couldn’t help but appreciate the guy who, for Valentine’s Day, mailed me a flappy, almost wet, slice of deli turkey in a small white envelope and, for my birthday, gifted me a three-pack of those plastic rain bonnets my nana used to wear.

  • • •

  I moved to New York in the fall of 1992—three bucks, two bags, and all that—in order to become a talent agent and marry Adam Sandler. My previous Boston boss knew a working actor in the city whom she’d convinced to let me sublet an apartment from. The rules were simple:

  1. Keep it clean.

  2. Pay rent on time.

  3. Never receive mail, never check the mailbox. Do not play music, talk to anyone, be seen coming in or out of the building, get deliveries, or keep the lights on too long. And please, take the trash out under cover of night.

  And, as with the rules in Gremlins, I followed none of the above.

  The studio apartment was dinky at best, the only piece of useable furniture being a double bed. It served as sleeping place, dining area, hangout spot, guest seating, and a surface for my clothes since there was no closet and I was forbidden to use the dresser. Hostile about that rule, I rifled through his top drawer the first day I moved in, only to find a men’s navy-blue G-string with a golden zipper on the crotch. I made a mental note to go against my snooping instincts for the duration of my sublet. The walls were layered with chipped white paint, and the pipes clanked so loud and often it sounded as though a trapped chain gang was trying to get out.

  The kitchen was galley-style, delineated by a thin chrome rail covering the linoleum, over which I tripped hourly. I was thankful for the television, though it housed a poltergeist that turned the thing on and off for sport whenever the mood struck. The one window did not let in any light but was generous with the sounds of the hookers outside who, after midnight, laughed or fought or splattered vomit onto the sidewalks below. I often thought of my mother turning her nose up at a bellboy showing us to a perfectly fine room on a family trip—“Uch, this is not what I asked for,” she’d say, annoyed by the wrong view or unacceptable bathroom—as I sat on my borrowed multipurpose bed/couch/chair, eating cold sesame noodles with my fingers while trying to ignore the International Male undies hiding in the drawer, and watching the television as it turned itself on and off.

  Buzz was living with his sister in a fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side. She was in the advertising game and got paid quite well while wearing suit pants and heading to an office every day. Naturally, we thought she was a sucker. To us, it was like looking at our parents, who’d chosen boring lives, not cool ones like ours would be once they got off the ground.

  Mitzi resided in Chelsea, with her gray cat and boyfriend, where she hosted parties for the new friends I didn’t care for. My sublet was in Murray Hill, which, at the time, had a few Indian spice shops, an Irish bar or two, one Chinese restaurant, and an overall depressing quality that made every hour of every day feel like 4:30 on a November Sunday.

  Since I wasn’t allowed out in the hallway, I stayed in a lot, as did my neighbor across the hall. I had moved to Manhattan to look for a job, but I spent the first two weeks as a New Yorker doing nothing but keeping my eye on the peephole of my door lest my mystery neighbor emerge. When it comes to things that do not matter in the slightest, I am nothing if not tenacious. For five days I kept watch but there was no movement. On the sixth day, I saw a skeletal appendage sticking out of the door and a sliver of bordello-style wallpaper, deep red and possibly textured. The light inside was yellow and dim and I felt the presence of a kindred spirit, someone who understood the value of staying home and also loathed overhead lighting.

  I watched as the arm collected a paper bag from Meals-On-Wheels. I’d come to figure out, from going through the mail too large to fit into his mailbox, that he was a vintage-instrument enthusiast and also in the midst of dying at home. This put a damper on my plan for him to emerge and
be the Rhoda to my Mary. With that hope dashed, I had nothing left to do with my days except send out a few resumes and watch Rudy on an endless loop, weeping each time at the end as if I never saw it coming. When Buzz called with a job opportunity, I knew I had to say yes.

  Mitzi had somehow already gotten herself a job at MTV where she was in a position to hire, and she recruited Buzz to work on various lip-syncing and sometimes spring break–style gigs, where he’d spend the week in Lake Havasu, Arizona, wearing a headset and sleeping with random coworkers. But the jobs were finite and sometimes Buzz found himself out of work, like me.

  The stint Buzz called me about had something to do with the New York Times and data compiling. Some corporate babble I had no understanding of, but it would be a few days’ work for $200 and I needed more Chinese food money.

  I consulted my bus map for the stealthiest way to get to Buzz’s place on the other side of town. Sure, I was still too scared to take the subway, but I found the bus the city’s most pleasant surprise. It had a way of making you feel six and eighty-six at the same time.

  Slow and steady up the five flights, I stopped at each landing to catch my breath and also see if any pigeons were hanging out on the windowsills, waiting to flutter. Buzz’s sister was moving on up and getting her own apartment in three months, and I was slated to move in as the new roommate. I spent nights in my sad sublet wondering how I’d handle the birds taunting me in the stairwell. At least my typical uniform—denim overalls with one strap unfastened—was like a bear bell for those damn birds.

  “Nice suit, Mr. Green Jeans,” Buzz said when he opened the door. He couldn’t resist mockery of any variety and his specialty was clothing one-liners.

  “Shut up,” I said, squeezing by him, since two people could not fit into the skinny front hall of the place.

  The compiling station, as we’d come to call it, was set up on a small foldout table in the middle of the room. On it was a stack of Xeroxed sheets, two barely sharpened golf pencils, and a New York Times tucked into the blue plastic bag you saw all over the city on Sunday mornings. The actual work was mind numbing, involving one of us reading data aloud and the other one jotting it down. About eight minutes in, Buzz suggested we take a nap. I should note here that Buzz and I had napped together a few times at school because we were often very tired. And college was sometimes boring.