From Lake Effect – Spring, 2013
I run into an old friend while rooting through a downtown salad bar…
He is wearing a suit more dreadful than my own, a suit that makes me think he is still working in accounting.
“How have you been?” I ask, because I have to say something.
“I’m tired,” he says. And he tells me about his fourteen-hour days.
“Really?” I say, and because I’m exhausted by all these people who say they work so hard, I add, “I’ve been working twenty-two hour days.”
“That’s impossible,” he says.
“You’d think so,” I answer. “But I went to work this morning at 1 a.m.”
***
There is a certain pain you feel when the car you are traveling in gets hit by a UPS truck. When you are hanging upside down, with your neck bent at an oblique angle, waiting for the experts who perform this type of extraction, you can run through all the words you know that are pain-related, and then attempt to select one that best fits. Of course, there is no language for what you feel, but you can pass the time by giving it a try. Mind-blowing. Exquisite. Excruciating.
When the rescue workers arrive they will help supply you with the proper term. William, my paramedic, squatted down and said to himself, “Look at all those ouchies.” Then William and I concluded that the word that best described my pain was throbbing. He told me not to pass out. He asked me if I could feel my legs and I said I couldn’t reach them.
Behind William was a man wearing a brown UPS suit. The UPS driver was talking to a police officer and they were both upside down and drinking coffee. That the UPS man could be enjoying a beverage led me to conclude that the accident had been my fault. Then again, seeing as this was the holiday season, a time when UPS drivers scuttle about even more than usual, perhaps the accident was his fault. Surely there was someone I could blame for the predicament I was in. I learned later that the person I could blame was a suicidal naked woman who dashed out in the road. The UPS driver swerved to avoid the woman but knocked me over instead. (“Hey, Sophie’s Choice, whaddya gonna do,” he said when he visited me in the hospital.) The semi behind the UPS truck mopped up the suicide anyway, and in a manner best described as decisive.
I remember asking William when the jaws-of-life would arrive, not because I was anxious to come out, but the silence was uncomfortable. In the end they were able to rip the door off with their bare hands (my car was a ’88 Mercury) and I poured out like a puddle.
Unfortunately, I’d suffered a number of contusions as well as a concussion and several other things that started with the letter “c.” I also fractured my jaw, probably on the steering wheel, and that was a bummer. So when the UPS windbag came to visit me, I couldn’t talk, not even to tell him to get the hell out. Thankfully, a nurse entered my room and prompted his removal by reminding him that this was his busy season. That got him gone, and then the nurse shot something warm into my bag, and I was doubly grateful for her kindness.
A broken jaw is a good thing because you no longer have to avoid people you don’t want to talk to. You can pass them in hallways and shrug your shoulders (whaddya gonna do?). You get to drink shakes and smoothies, which is good for about a week. When you start eating regular foods, your jaw gets tired like it did when you were a kid eating bread at your grandmother’s house.
***
This is a true story: When I was a kid on my parents’ pre-divorce vacation, I went swimming in the ocean and felt something slimy on my leg. Instead of making a squeaking noise and running for the shore, which I was apt to do because I was such a squeamish child, I reached down and touched the thing. It turned out to be a diver’s mask of the finest quality. I suspected it came from someone who was killed in a shark attack and I put it on right away. The briny ocean teemed with life, but I could see none of it through the sandy water, so I took my mask to the pool. Within five minutes I’d found nineteen dollars and sixty-five cents. There was a rotten kid at one end of the pool eating a Chunky, and I suspected he had unwittingly just paid twenty-dollars for a candy bar. Found money is blessed money, so I decided to put it away and do something important with it, like save my parents’ marriage. But the next day I saw a cool raft in the beachfront store. It was red and had armrests that blew up separate. I rode on it a few minutes, and then, while chasing some kid’s Frisbee, watched it blow away toward Cuba.
***
The thing that impresses upon my memory, more than fortune, is pain. Am I glad of that car accident so many years ago? Yes I am. I drag a whole world into my present from that one incident. When my jaw hurts, which it does from time to time, I get all sorts of great stuff back, like the music of Coolio, which I listened to on a Sony Discman while recuperating. Whenever I see nurses, or doctors, or anyone in a baggy white uniform (scientist, film processor), I remember the gorgeous women who took care of me and filled me with drugs and touched me in a caring, motherly, very sexy sort of way.
***
What I remember most vividly from my early childhood is being attacked by a raccoon.
***
Those spikes of pain that I speak so fondly of rarely break through the steady hum of dullness that is my new life. Getting fired would be a good spike of pain, or getting hit by a taxicab would be nice. But if I lose my job my wife will kill me. I don’t think she’s the type to enjoy spikes of pain. Lately, she doesn’t seem interested in spikes of pleasure, either. We have an ACCOUNT, which must be added to each month by a certain AMOUNT. And when that ACCOUNT reaches a certain AMOUNT, then we will be having a CHILD. I have no reason to believe that I want a child, except that I have, from time to time, said it out loud. “I’d like to have kids,” I may say, not having a broken jaw to spare me. Perhaps I am at a cocktail party, leaning against a refrigerator. “Kids?” I’ll say. “Sure, why not?”
The problem with being hit by a motorized vehicle is that I have developed an adult fear for debilitating injuries. What if I were paralyzed, for God’s sake? What kind of life is that, being just a head that is pushed around from room to room? Maybe the only thing that suicidal woman wanted years ago when she streaked into the road was to enjoy a spike of pain. Instead, she lost her head. I, myself, am very attached to my head.
Cocktail parties are a unique kind of pain. Not only must one have a conversation about the stock market and Tiger Woods, but one must also be constantly on the lookout for high school chums. They are to be avoided at all costs. The sight of one, however, is the exact kind of pain imprint that I am talking about. Of the cocktail parties my wife and I have attended, I remember few. We had mind-blowing sex in somebody’s bedroom, I remember that one, and that may not count because all I remember is that my wife was wearing black and saying, “Hurry,” over and over again. But I distinctly remember a party on Montrose, because I bumped into Jerry Slater, a peripheral member of the “old gang.” He embarked on a verbal rampage while sweat beads gathered on my forehead. I remember what I was wearing (black camel hair blazer), what he was wearing (turtleneck with mistletoe pin), what was inside the canapés (spinach of course), and where I was hiding, later, from Jerry, when the hostess played her record of barking dogs singing Christmas carols (back porch).
As I drove home from the party with the girl who would become my wife, I told her about how terrible my night had been and we laughed. Then she told me a miserable story or two, and we laughed some more. And because we’d fled the party so early, we had time to catch a late movie, a thriller about a space ship set adrift. It was a terrible film, and we had the grandest time.
My wife has since come to accept cocktail parties as a way of life. She has gone so far as to say she lives for them. What this says about me, that the thing she lives for is to stand in uncomfortable rooms in uncomfortable shoes guessing when she’s supposed to laugh, I am afraid to ask. It is simply unacceptable for a married woman to go to a cocktail party without her husband, so I am inevitably prodded off the couch and hosed down, dressed up and driven to some polished hardwood space that has soft music playing on the CD player.
What is it that makes veterans gather together and exchange war stories? Why, when our plane is delayed, do we immediately seek someone out to tell all our traveling mishaps to? Is it so important to tell a good story that we find ourselves wishing our plane would crash, just so we have something to talk about? I have told my car accident story a thousand times, and I am constantly adding graphic details. I now tell people that I received permanent head damage. I tell them that I can’t feel hot or cold and that a part of my brain is in decay so that some day I will be unable to have feelings for other human beings. My listeners retaliate with their own stories, of congenital heart defects or tongue-swelling allergic reactions or accidents with spinning blades. One guy told me a bug entered his body while he was sleeping on the African ground and now, if unwound, would measure seventeen feet. A nurse told me that she treated a man who had a cockroach in his ear. To get it out, they turned off all the lights and put a bowl of milk next to his head.
“Cockroaches don’t drink milk,” my wife said when I told her the story. She has a way of ruining everything.
“What do they drink then?” I asked.
“Water.”
“Milk is water,” I said. I had no idea what I was talking about.
My wife took a bite of pie. We were sitting at our little kitchen table after a party. We smelled like candles and I was drunk. “Orange juice would be more believable,” she said.
She was, of course, absolutely right.
***
Why do I wish that I would catch my wife having an affair? I feel sub-human imagining it. While I spank her, which I do because she likes it, I imagine that she has been with another man. I don’t fantasize about watching her with another man, but about knowing she’s been with someone else, and then I get to imagine myself taking lonely midnight walks thinking about how tragic it all is. The crappy music that is on the radio now would suddenly mean something. (I f-f-forgot how much I love you – Yes, exactly!) I’d buy the CD’s and then be able to listen to them years from now and feel the same wonderful intensity. Maybe I’d make up with my wife and we’d make exquisite love. Maybe I’d have drinks after work with Margie, the woman who works at the cube next to mine, and then go to her place and have awful sex. I could slip out of Margie’s bed and sit on her front stoop (does she have a stoop? Does she have a “place”?) with a blanket wrapped around me, thinking about the woman who was my wife.
Neither my father nor my mother remarried after their divorce. They both retired early and traveled around the world, though in opposite directions. I suppose they crossed somewhere, Morocco probably. My father survived his travels, but fell off a mountain a few years later in Colorado, incurring the ultimate injury. My mother went to the city of his funeral, but didn’t attend the ceremony, instead choosing to sun herself by the hotel pool in a black bikini. She looked fantastic at dinner that night, surrounded by me and sipping a sea breeze. She had the waiter take a picture—several pictures—and told me that she was sleeping with a woman named Flo. She paid, I got the tip, and I dropped her at her hotel. “You were a good son,” she said, and exited the vehicle.
Why had my mother adopted such recklessness? This was before I met the girl who would become my wife, so I called Margie, who had enough affection for me to make up for the indifference I felt for her. “She’s grieving,” Margie said about my mother. “In her own way.”
I told Margie she was full of shit.
“So how are you?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to say. There weren’t words for how I felt. It was impossible to describe, so instead I asked Margie what she was wearing. Her underwear, that night, was chartreuse.
I believe that the emotion one should feel—one who masturbates over the telephone on the night of his father’s funeral to the thought of a simpleminded, chartreuse-pantied woman—is guilt. But I didn’t feel guilty, and have never been ashamed when looking back on that night. The pain of it, the tragedy of having someone you love fall off a big rock, releases you from the world of normal expectations. What you get in this grief bath is the privilege to feel however you want. You can project forward and blame any perverted or slightly immoral act on the insanity of grief. I wouldn’t do something crazy, like rob a bank, but while Margie was telling me where to put my hands and fingers, I was thinking about how great it would be if it was my mother in bed with me, touching me. Disgusting? I argue that it can’t be, as I was in pain, relieved even from the responsibility of decency.
Freud said that we learn pain as babies when we are deprived access to our mother. He called it the hungry baby. A baby will cry, cry, cry, and then, when reunited with his mother’s breast, will understand pleasure. There have been many times when I have asked my wife, “Hungry, Baby?” Usually, when I ask, she is, and I’ll take her to a restaurant that I know she likes. Or I’ll make her something, perhaps an egg sandwich. (I know so much about my wife.) Sometimes she’ll ask me, “Hungry, Baby?” And then she takes me to a restaurant. Or she’ll make me something, like a piece of buttered, white toast.
I have felt an excruciating love for my wife a number of times, but I have never loved her more deeply than when she took a vacation to Greece with her friends from college. My second night without her I ate spanakopita and got drunk on ouzo, sat on the floor in front of the stereo and listened to all her records. She called me at three a.m. and I woke up so hysterical that I couldn’t speak. “Calm down,” she kept saying, from thousands of miles away, over a pay phone, on an island painted blue and white.
Vietnam prisoners of war often talk about how they killed time by remembering the precise layout of all the homes they ever lived in. I find myself doing the same thing lately, with our first apartment, which we moved out of five years ago. When I try to reconfigure in my head where everything went, I picture myself walking barefoot through the apartment, my wife’s music playing, a glass of ouzo in my hand. I can remember the pattern of the Oriental rug and the kinds of fish in the fish tank. Usually, when I imagine this, my wife isn’t in the apartment. But sometimes she is in every room. When I enter, she’ll stop what she is doing, look up, and smile.
My mother and Flo were in town recently, promoting either a liberal cause or a composite of liberal causes. Flo is an intriguing person, the kind of woman who aspires above everything else to be a mystic. It is tedious and aggravating, and I’m not saying that just because she turned my mother into a lesbian. For someone who is seeking transcendence to a higher plane, she has chosen an odd way to do it. My wife calls her “Flo-caine.” She indulges in the drug casually, daintily even, with the air of an Englishwoman putting on rouge. Her cocaine-zen philosophy intrigues me (primarily because of the intense calms that are its cornerstones), so I told her about remembering the apartment the way I do and about how much I loved my wife during the ten days she was in Greece. “You’re nostalgic,” she said.
“For what?” I asked. We were in a downtown tapas bar.
“Your wife,” she answered.
“My wife is in the bathroom,” I said. “She’s been gone two minutes.” (My wife always waits for me to be in a deep conversation with Flo before leaving the table, as she is afraid Flo will join her in the bathroom and offer her drugs.)
Cleverness is not high-ranking on Flo’s characteristics chart. She swooshed some flowy fabric dramatically over her shoulder. It always appears that Flo is wearing an excessive number of articles of clothing, half of which trail off her like paper on the back of a “Just Married” vehicle. “You miss that wife, the girl she was then,” she said. “The girl, in whose absence, you could create her to be, the girl—”
I cut Flo off midstream and told her she was buying dinner. She nodded her head in a way that made me think she knew something about my marriage that I didn’t know.
The word “Nostalgia” has its own roots in Greece. “Nostos” is Greek for “to return home.” The pain part of nostalgia, of course, is that you can’t return home. I can think of the girl who was to become my wife, and I can almost conjure her up (perhaps this is why I like Flo so much, because she makes it seem like such a thing could happen). This is especially true during the times when my wife isn’t around. Am I closer to her in her absence? I better not tell her that I think this may be so. If she were to leave me altogether, I would become unbearably close to her, and then I would have no choice but to love her desperately forever. (Funny, I think I heard this same sentiment on the radio recently). I am guilty of avoiding my wife, of always keeping her at arm’s length because I want so much to remember how she was when we were first together.
I am not sure when my wife began liking cocktail parties. I don’t know why our physical relationship is tainted with the disturbing. I am afraid that having a child is a last-ditch effort to save ourselves, or perhaps just an act of total resignation. All I know is we will never sit across from each other on the floor of our first apartment, spread eagle, pressing the bottoms of our feet together, throwing a bottle cap at the bottles of beer between our legs. But we are always, always, almost there.
Lacan called this jouissance. Not the bottle cap game I played with the girl who would become my wife, but the game I play, circulating this memory, this nostalgia, over and over in my head. I will never get at the center, will never get that wonderful moment back. The pain I feel in not getting at the center, in moving around and around, Lacan suggests, provides me with pleasure. What scares me now is that I am not adding new memories to rotate around in the future. Is yesterday’s salad bar reunion the best I can do? Is it possible that it, too, will some day become a memory I can take pleasure from?
I have my doubts. But, I will wait and see. In the meantime, I will keep using what has worked for me so far. I will think about my wife sunning herself on a Greek island. About my gray-headed father plummeting off a mountain. And about myself, hanging upside down in a wrecked car, waiting for someone to come save me.