But my first real job after college sucked all the fun out of it for me. I worked for a publications company in La Jolla, in an office only two blocks from the beach and near this awful but insanely popular Mexican restaurant, Jose’s. I used to talk my friend Tom from the graphics department into joining me there for tequila-soaked lunches. Then we’d wobble to the cove and throw Frisbees at each other until we remembered we had jobs.
I loved Tom, his presence made my pointless job infinitely more tolerable. He made me a big sign once, of a mime with his thumbs proudly tucked under his suspenders. It was dumb, made even more so by the caption “Never Mime,” but it harkened back to an inside joke of had-to-be-there hilarity surrounding an incident at the cove that involved a street performer, a copious amount of tequila, and pornographic balloon animals.
Tom and I had a great time working together until our company’s owner came back from prison. I had yet to meet our boss, Richard, because I was hired in the middle of his eighteen-month term at a minimum-security prison for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a young man’s trust fund, for which Richard had been the (very bad) executor. I considered his incarceration a perk when I applied for the job, because the fact is that even today, with the wizardry of modern communication, it’s still hard to harass your employees all the way from the hoosegow.
Then one day I walked into the office, and there were signs everywhere—not overt signs, like the kind Tom was good at making—but subtle, maddening signs that things were different. My coworkers were guarded, well dressed, and, worst of all, working. Tom hissed a warning before I could shriek out my usual obscene salutations. “Richard’s back,” he hissed. So I finally got to meet Richard, and immediately afterward he handed me an assignment that would take actual effort to complete.
God! This sucks, I thought. That day I could hardly get anyone to come to lunch with me, even after offering to pick up the tab on a round of shots. Only Tom took me up on it. In a spree of hooch-generated defiance, we spent the rest of the afternoon on a terrace overlooking the ocean at a restaurant we could afford only because of promotional coupons. Tom told me how he had lost his former job as a chauffeur in Atlantic City because he stopped the limo on the freeway to save a dog struck by a car, stuffing the injured animal into the front seat and ignoring the irate complaints of the paying passenger in back as he detoured to the animal hospital. “He was just lying there on the emergency lane with his legs broken but sitting up, you know, watching the cars pass,” Tom recalled of the dog. “Every time a car went by it would ruffle the fur on his coat.”
As we belted more margaritas he kept talking about the dog. Stupidly, I thought he regretted losing his job as a driver. But I should have seen the signs. I should have seen Tom’s eyes—big, spaniel eyes rounded in regret—and his hands, cupping and uncupping his margarita glass in painful reminiscence. “Hey,” I said nervously when I saw the tears start to well up in his eyes. “Hey, Tom. So you lost your crappy job carting people around, so what?”
Then he told me the truth. He hadn’t saved the dog after all. As his limo passed the animal on the road, the wind ruffled the fur on its coat. He’d hated himself ever since, hated himself for not even slowing down as the dog looked up hopefully. Sometimes, though, Tom would rewrite history and see himself stopping the car and laying the injured animal in the front seat, oblivious to the bitching from the passenger in back. But Tom was incapable of maintaining this fake recollection, and after enough margaritas the truth would return. “I should have stopped,” he said softly, then his big eyes began to leak.
After we returned to work, Tom was canned but not me, so I quit out of sympathy. It was the least I could do for my kind friend, the guy who made me signs and supported my boozy ravings against the establishment, my Frisbee buddy with the sad eyes of a spaniel who is forever haunted by the ruffled fur of a dying dog he did nothing to save. Yes, I quit right on the spot.
Or I wish I had. Christ, I really wish I had. Instead, I just took it as a sign to stop drinking during the day.
A Reason to Live
I was driving along that butt smear of a freeway section south of Freedom Parkway, the part where the badly planned number of lanes swell and contract like a big constipated boa constrictor, and I was thinking about life in general, and how it would be nice not to die that day in particular. I’ve had days, of course, when I felt differently. Nothing major, it’s just that there were times when I got out of bed completely burdened with the fact that I was still breathing, having missed a perfectly good opportunity to croak in my sleep. On those days I’d call Lary. “I’m on the ledge,” I’d bleat. “I’m gonna jump.”
“Well,” he always says, “what’s stopping ya?”
“I meant figuratively, you fuck!” I’d shriek, and shrieking at Lary always provides me with a reason to live. Soon I’d be chirping into the phone, “Why do you keep bags of cat litter in your dishwasher? I mean, what’s the reason for that?” But Lary’s redeeming quality is his complete comfort with lack of reason. A few years ago the four of us, Daniel, Grant, Lary, and I, traveled to Prague, and I thought I’d be the tour guide, considering that I am, after all, an official foreign-language interpreter. I don’t speak Czech specifically, but on the average I’d traveled to Europe more times in one month than these three plebeians had in their lifetimes, so I assumed they would all sit at my knee enthralled with my knowledge the whole time, letting me explain the reasons for things.
“Wanna know why you should keep your head at armrest level when evacuating a smoke-filled aircraft?” I’d tweet smugly during the safety demonstration. “It’s because smoke rises while noxious chemical fumes sink, so the safest air is in between.”
Out of the perfect pureness of friendship, Daniel and Grant were prepared to ruin their vacation and provide me with a constant audience, but once in Prague, Lary kept ditching us only to reappear later with absorbing stories of peg-legged whores and, like, bald cab drivers with boils on their heads and stuff.
With Grant and Lary at a subway station in Prague
Soon even I had to admit—after a spitting fit of jealousy in which I hit Lary with a plastic jar of Vaseline—that we’d have more fun if we just followed Lary around. After that we stuck to him like putty and, as a reward, were given a fascinating tour through the human sewage pipe of Prague. At one point we found ourselves in a sweaty underground gay bar belting shots of ouzo. Grant, who at that time was still an acting straight man (it was a bad act, but still), noticed that the walls along the dance floor were outfitted with rows of toilet-paper dispensers.
“What’s the reason for that?” he asked.
But Grant is another who feels no need to search for reason, so he simply resumed his practice of allowing the world to unfurl its surprises. The fact that he’s gay isn’t one of them. We all knew that before he did, or before he chose to tell us since on some level he always knew. Since then he has lived completely unfettered by expectations. “I feel so much better,” he likes to say, “since I gave up hope.”
A Jewish cemetery in Prague
Daniel and I wish we could be that way. In contrast we are always searching, and we don’t even know for what. “Why do I do this?” Daniel says sometimes, referring to his art. Usually it’s after a bad newspaper review or an unsuccessful meeting with a New York gallery. Once we both found ourselves in a slough of despond at his place, drinking wine while he colored in lips on the faces of his hand-drawn exhibit announcements. That was back when he did faces. “What’s the point?” he grieved while methodically brushing each envelope with a red crayon. There were hundreds of envelopes. “I should just give up.”
Prague
“Right,” I slobbered. I was there seeking solace myself because the editor who’d accepted my article at Esquire had just been fired, pulling the chair out from under the biggest milestone of my career. So I wasn’t jolly full of fun either, but still I perked up slightly when I saw that Daniel had accidentally skipped
an envelope. “You missed one,” I said, handing him the culprit that escaped his crayon.
“Well,” Daniel said, stopping to correct the error, “there’s no reason for leaving the house without lips, now is there?” Then I helped him resume his task, because right then I realized there’s no time for seeking reasons to live when there are stacks of envelopes to be colored.
Left Behind
Lary started selling autographed pictures of Jesus, in case anyone’s interested. He got the idea after working the TV camera at a Benny Hinn religious revival conference years ago. He found himself surrounded by “thousands of these fucked-up Bible freaks” and it actually scared him, which says a lot, because almost nothing scares Lary. For example, one Halloween he showed up in white flowing robes with the words “I’m Jesus, Your Fucking Savior” scrawled across his back in black marker. “I’m tempting the gods,” he laughed, “like there are any.”
But the religious freak show at the old Georgia Dome scared Lary. “Why?” I asked him. “I mean, did you feel yourself start to convert? Was a tiny piece of your condemned soul tugging at the rest of you, threatening to draw you into the writhing throng? Threatening to chisel a crack in that crab shell you keep around your heart?”
“Hell, no,” he said, irritated that I implied he had a heart. “These people were insane, possessed. Shaking and twitching and foaming at the mouth and falling over one another. Thousands of them, surrounding me, screaming and moaning and chanting.” He shivered, as if the memory was too much for him.
And I get it. It’s like that Left Behind series of books in which all the good Christian folk get sucked into heaven and leave people like Lary to deal with the ensuing Hell on earth. “Rapture,” it’s called, and I’d probably fear it more if I’d been allowed to go to church as a kid. But my mother was an atheist and my father was too busy nursing his hangovers on Sunday mornings to drive us—both very viable reasons if you ask me.
“What bigger Hell is there,” my mother used to say, pointing her cigarette at a passing church bus, “than a heaven full of people like that?”
So I figure that explains why Lary was scared at the Benny Hinn conference. He must have looked around and found himself in pretty much a pit, packed with undulating, screaming, sweaty possessed people, heads flailing, voices modulating, arms reaching, fingers grasping. And the crying. God, the crying. “Wailing and wailing.” Lary shuddered, remembering that they sounded like sick sea elephants.
Lary realized he was alone in that pit, having been left behind by any sign of reason or civil decorum, and his whole personal philosophy was tested at that point. He believed it was foolish to go through life frightened by the prospect of Hell, because up until then he’d been so certain there was no Hell. But when he found himself in that pit with those people, penned in by an ocean of sobbing fanatics, the realization hit him that there certainly is a Hell after all, and that he was certainly in it. “Get me out of here,” he inwardly screamed.
I’ve felt that way before. In high school I once went to church with a fragile girl who had latched on to my inability to gracefully decline her efforts to salvage my endangered soul, and I decided to take it as an opportunity to rebel against my irreligious upbringing. The church was not really a church but a cinder-block building that had all the beauty of a big public toilet. The service was a barely tolerable torrent of promised eternal agony for those who didn’t adhere to every letter of their particular sect, and when it was over, I felt a soaring relief interrupted by the distressing realization that it really wasn’t over after all. The worst was yet to come.
“Now we will speak in tongues,” the girl told me, her translucent skin glowing with an inner awfulness visible only to me. Speaking in tongues entailed, as far as I could tell, basically flopping around at the foot of an icon and babbling. I was a shy kid at fourteen, and tough, already having grown an emotional crust not easily penetrated by fervor of any kind, so my enthusiasm for flopping and babbling was found to be insufficient by this crowd. They tried to correct it by literally pushing me around. So there I was, the daughter of an atheist and a drunk, bobbing around in a little sea of gibbering religious freaks, bouncing from fist to fist like some infidel hot potato. In all, it failed to knock me free from my ingrained paganism. I did gibber a little though. “Get me out of here,” I gibbered again and again, drowned out by the bigger babbling around me.
Lary and I laugh because we have this in common: Both of us, at one point in our past, walked right into Hell and were left there alone for a while, begging to be freed until finally, graciously, we were. “Get me out of here,” we’d each pleaded inwardly. Yes, we’d pleaded, but to this day I’m still wondering to whom those pleas were made, and wondering who answered them.
On My Knees
I have my father to thank for my unsaved soul, because my brother, for one, had tried for years to reserve me a window seat in heaven. This is before he became the embittered, godless Starbucks manager that he is today, back when he still had hope and would return from college for the holidays and lecture us on the flammability of our afterlives. He’d have to whisper all the eternal torments in store for my heathen sisters and me because if my father heard him he’d risk a beating with the top of that tin flour bin in the kitchen.
“Hell? I’ll give you hell,” my father once roared at my brother when he spied my sisters and me on our knees in the living room about to accept Jesus into our hearts. My father got in a few noisy thwaks with the flour bin cover before my brother bounded out the side door, shielding his head with his Bible like he was protecting his hairdo from wet weather.
I thought I could go back to finding solace in TV reruns and fantasizing about being one of the five hundred dead fiancées of the Cartwright brothers, but no such luck. There we were, my sisters and me, on our knees, pretty far down the road to redemption, when my father figured he had to debrief us by breaking out the big illustrated children’s Bible, the one in which Satan was permanently sunburned and Jesus looked like a honey-haired underwear model. Regardless of the beatings and the bellowing and the downright banishment of my brother’s beliefs, my father didn’t generally disapprove of Bible thumping, he disapproved of my brother’s Bible thumping because he didn’t want his grade-school daughters getting a God habit that would require him to drive us places, like church and whatnot, which would’ve cut into his bar time at the local tavern.
“You got all the God you need right here in this book,” my father told us, tapping the children’s Bible with the same thick finger he always used to flick us in the head when we bothered him. So there we had to stay, on our knees, while my father read random passages in his imitation James Earl Jones voice until my mother, the one true atheist in the family, saved us by handing him an opened Budweiser.
I was grateful. I don’t like being on my knees. I remember accidentally ending up at some marathon mass in England once, lured there by my best friend, Laura, who was studying with me in the same Oxford college program that year. She told me we were just going to look at the interior of the cathedral because she was shocked I’d never seen one. I followed her inside like a bovine and suddenly we were filed into a pew and hemmed in all around by worshipers. Then the priest glided in, all cloaked in sparkly curtains like a parade float, with a pointy hat, and before I knew it we were spending the next five thousand years doing knee bends while the priest bellowed in some language only Beowulf could understand. “Fuck the hell out of you,” I hissed at Laura as we herded ourselves out of the cathedral afterward. She laughed in response. “Don’t you feel redeemed?”
Not really. It was a spring day in England, uncharacteristically warm, and the afternoon had been wasted while I’d been trapped under a dome of stained glass. This made me late meeting other friends at a pub, so I took a shortcut through a meadow that, I swear, the week before had been little more than a field of mud. In that time, though, it had bloomed to a level of luster that rivaled paradise. And I didn’t even see it at firs
t. I was too busy blindly hurrying, as if there was actually a point to my arrival at wherever I was expected, when something caught my eye.
Is that a damn pony? I asked myself, chuckling. Oh, my God, there was a pony grazing not ten yards away. The sight was simultaneously so puerile and so beautiful that I geared up myself to laugh again, but when I opened my mouth, a sob came out instead. A sob so deep it must have started somewhere in the back of my unsaved soul and gathered momentum over the years until it finally burst free, bringing every filament that made up the cynical mess of my life together right then, just for a second, to reveal the unfathomable beauty of the world. And for that second I knew I was young, and I knew neither would last—not the beauty before me nor the beauty within me. Suddenly I felt so fraught with longing, so overwhelmed at having survived the complete car wreck of my life in order to be there, in that meadow, in the middle of Oxford, where ponies roamed in the glow of a rare British sunset. It utterly defeated me, or it redeemed me…it doesn’t matter, as both occasions are marked by falling to your knees.
Killer Turkey
Thinking back to our family Thanksgivings, it‘s a wonder I survived my childhood. My mother knew she couldn’t cook, so she compensated with what she considered her own flair. I remember more than one family dinner in which she simply slapped a bunch of Slim Jims on the table and told us to chow down. For fancy occasions she’d take the wrappers off before serving them. So if an entrée didn’t come in a can or a box loaded with enough chemicals to kill all lesser life forms, she didn’t dawdle with it. That was fine with me, because what kid likes fresh figs in their turkey stuffing anyway?
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