There's something violently beautiful about those who can't get over something. Maybe more if it's for a *someone*. Almost everybody can and does. We're designed to. Even the stuff you don't walk away from, after a while it just feels like graffiti on your heart. You get used to it. Mostly our impact amounts to a minor crater or gentle speed bump in the lives we touch. Another rotten deal is how lots of us operate as unpaid publicity departments for the people coming down the pike towards those we care about. Our baggage and childhood files come off like the sucker punch to our whole lives. But suicide is special for one big fat reason that separates it from every other decision anyone ever makes. It's the biggest decision you can make that's impossible to regret. Provided it pans out, it's no tag-backs. Everybody whose left behind is, to various degrees of gray, IT. This David Foster Wallace suicide bummed me out. A lot less than Hunter S. Thompson's suicide a few years ago, but still. It sucks. Not because I liked him---I didn't---but because I had to go and cram a thousand pages of him over the week following his suicide on account of not having had my FILL of nursing my grudge just yet. Even worse, after five pages I liked him. A few more pages and it got much worse---I missed him. I guess I wasn't pissed off at him in the first place. Just what he represented. It gave me the willies. Mariah Careys in music, or with words, can nail every expensive note and octave they want and drive plastic extinct with all the records they sell---I'll still be pining for Billie Holiday and how her voice cracks sometimes and forgives me for everything wrong I've ever done to anybody or tucks me in at night when it goes a little off-key. Everybody gets more flowers when they're dead than when they're alive these days. When that happen? My best friend's leaving town pretty soon, probably for a couple years. Kinda leaves anything else I could say about it one long stutter. Art school in Germany is swiping my emotional nightlight. Why'dja have to tie me those tracks with that nasty train pawing its way toward me? Sorta funny, I was looking at this photo somebody else took of my girl. Few thousand miles between us, I spend an awful lot of my time thinking about that face of hers. It's my favorite face because its calling card is chipping off some new piece of me every time I see it. But here was that face in a photo, obviously taken by somebody who loved her. Who has dibs? I dunno. I know she's staring into the camera but I have no idea what she's looking at. Her expression doesn't give it away. Likewise with her beauty, it just sorta says, "Relax, this won't hurt..." And Brinny gets dropped in the first round like Glass Joe each and every time.
Some girls just have a holiday in their eyes. At least, that's the best I can come up with to explain a nagging quality of this one girl that a lot of people, including me, got hung up on. Because there wasn't anything particularly special in the color, they had the same light blue as Connecticut Avenue on a Monopoly board. Other girls had Boardwalk or Park Place-blue, but pretty soon people started passing them over for cheaper real estate. Before we knew it we were hooked. She had us on a string.
What kind of impression did she make entering a room? Not much. Garden variety entrance. She never seemed interested in being the center of attention. She preferred being a member of the audience in welcoming somebody. From that setting she was a little more handy at distinguishing herself. She wasn't Don King in bringing her own one-woman-parade to welcome you, but she was sneaky about it. She perfected the art of sucker-punch compliments. It went a long way. You'd bump into her being in a lousy mood and she'd lick her suction cup dart compliment and fire it at you and it could stick for the whole week. She saw people and she let them know it with compliments. Everywhere else she was low-key. Anything about her was on the lam. She had four or five sisters homely as pack mules which only increased your curiosity about how she'd missed that bullet.
She exited a room differently than other girls and it stayed with you more and longer than even the really expensive ones. It felt like she disappeared every time. Nobody else could do that. She's the only girl I ever saw leaving a room who didn't have some kind of bumpersticker on her fender about what it meant. A girl's ass usually gives a helluva lot away about her. Not much of what any girl has ever told me has plucked the heart of her mystery more than just how she walks. She had a great ass too, but no matter how hard you tried you couldn't focus on it when she turned a corner. Where was she going? You'd over heard that already. She was going to go FOR A WALK. What fifteen year old goes for walks? What did she do last weekend? She went to a movie---BY HERSELF. By CHOICE. Wait a minute. This was all wrong. Nobody should be able to get away with these antics! Fortunately this was right around the time of a miracle of earth shattering, BIBLICAL proportions. Saved By the Bell, the balm on legions of teenagers wounded lives, suddenly and magically was transported from Indiana to Bayside, California. Zack Morris had now ALWAYS been a California kid complete with an entirely rewritten background and new, lifelong, better looking friends. AND a sniper opened fire on the school!!! Miss Bliss had been rubbed out. Mikey was 86'd. Another female friend of Zack's that I can't remember the name of (ugly, curly haired) was knocked off too. Lisa Turtle survived the hail of bullets taking refuge in an obsession with beyond belief hideous fashion!
BUT WAIT!
What was the explanation provided for us to account for this incomprehensible bloodbath and seismic geographical and temporal shift in Zack Morris' high school universe?!
None. No explanation necessary. FUCK YOU, it's better this way. Here's a Kelly. Here's a Jesse Spanno. And fresh from wrestling practice, sipping from his water bottle apparently the fountain of youth, I GIVE TO THEE THE AGELESS, AC SLATER. We got a handle on this situation now. You're in good hands. We'll stick to this story line, no tag backs.
Which, albeit in a bit of a stretch, seemed to coincide with the girl I was talking about earlier and her trick: we were still under house arrest in the same classroom---which we could never leave---but everything outside had improved a million fold. And it was left to our imagination. And why? Just because...
We needed stuff like this. It was a tough time after we lost Hulk Hogan. Childhood was a breeze for me and a lot of people I knew for the very simple reason that we believed more in Hulk Hogan being REAL than any Christian we'd ever met believed in Jesus being real. The man's hair was spun from the fucking Golden Fleece! Hulk Hogan was on our watch provided we guzzled down vitamins, said prayers (I prayed to Hogan himself), and I forget the third thing he required but I know I blindly did it with zeal. Think about it, if Jesus showed up all of a sudden, parting the clouds or something, do you think HE could do a pose down routine for 30 minutes and have all of us crying and cheering him on to stay on stage for more? No. There'd be boos. Maybe some cracks about Jesus Christ Superstar or some Aramaic taunts and whistles. 20 minutes cheering for JC tops unless he deals from the bottom of the deck some 1st rate miracles to compete with body slamming the 8th Wonder of the World. Good luck, daddy.
What a peculiar jungle New York is now. Maybe King Kong scared off all the lions. You can still find the claw marks---they're clearly marked and roped off---but whatever made them are extinct. The pecking order is off, unnatural, fucked-up, hopelessly illiterate to the story it desperately wants to tell. Whatever joke is going on here has an audience that's desperately willing to clap on cue for it, but they don't know how to laugh. The comedian seems bitter about it. Flags hanging off the hotels don't shiver from any local roars. I just can't bring myself to accept that these timid creatures strutting along the avenues turned this place into such a trophy case. Can't wrap my head around it quite yet. THIS culture, whatever it is/means, tearing off the manes of lions for their toilet seats.
But my heart is as complicated as mini-golf. Ask anybody. Stop giving me that dirty look and look up at that Puerto Rican kid in the wife-beater smoking on the fire escape above us, or that pebbly path of taxi tail lights paving North up Broadway, or those paper airplanes inseminating the gray clouds over the brownstones, or the subway rumbling that grate under our sneakers, or the jammed ambulance in traffic reminding me it's hard to move without a path.
Maybe Van Gogh painted this number left-handed. Beats me. This is her hometown. Is my job to help burn it down? I start chewing on a match on my way to see the Statue of Liberty. Peek down a street and see what's left of the towers. Every block or so somebody's hauling a camera wiping their brow. Tourists loitering near the site, sipping Starbucks, leaning over some stairs. Why is everybody just standing around? No camera flashes. Conversation's still popping. But they just seem like they wanna be NEAR this place. And it makes everything more fuzzy for me on the one hand, and this strangeness more vivid.
So I'm here to meet her parents. Well, we all have in common we're crazy about the same girl. That's a beginning. That's a production right there, she lives on Broadway after all.
Some pleasant intros:"Hey, your daughter's my private petting-zoo. Appreciate it."
"Hey, nice to meet you. If we get married I'll take her name. Seriously. Mine sucks."
"Hey, we've toured all the sewers of each other's parents lives and swapped plenty of photos and souvenirs about why their relationships didn't pan out and basically decided we were sufficiently fucked up to qualify as a couple. So, gee, thanks."
"Hi, despite the fact I resemble a caveman I'm angelic."
Brass tacks: Both our dads had either been on or dragged by the wagon of an addiction for their adult lives and remained high-functioning enough that their wagon was invisible to most. We admired and cherished the cloaking device they possessed and simultaneously feared it. Both of us loved our dads in an odd way, we never had the power to forgive that which they craved to be forgiven for. We could never hold it against them in the first place. We got it, pretty early. Reducing them to their dirty headlines wasn't ever gonna happen. We loved the whole story and reread it over and over. Besides, we couldn't understand how these other wackos were hacking their lives WITHOUT mainlining junk. Far more terrifying to grapple with. By comparison, booze seemed pretty tame. Which gave us that curious badge of gray. We were witnesses and kindling for their addictions. She got the phone calls, I went to secure the goods from the store.
He walked into her mother's apartment, where she and I were staying, and shook my hand. He was blinking a lot. He was taller than me. His daughter was watching us. His shirt was tucked in. He didn't shake hands like an asshole. I saw her in his face. Did he know she had my favorite face? Did he know that I owed him for it? Did he pick up that we were both shy and maybe his daughter dug this about us? Was this all right to admit?
"I've heard a lot about you. Do I look like you imagined I'd look?"
He hadn't let go of my hand yet and I smiled. It was more a question that would run through your head than one you'd ask. Which I liked immediately.
"I'd imagined you looked like David Letterman. That's what I was, uh, forewarned."
Why did you say FOREWARNED, Brin? WHY? When is the last time you have EVER used that fucking word?
"So?" he asked, equal measure amused and impatient.
"You DO look like David Letterman."
"Hmmm."
And we both looked over at the girl and then back at each other and let our hands return to our sides. Eye contact felt like air-hockey with him...
I spook easy: spiders, flying, yelling, bus stations, seafood, white women, soup, Tijuana, make-up, imagination-less smart people, skinny-jeans, Stevie Wonder songs, and, most of all, MEETING PARENTS. On the flight over to New York City, shoehorned into my seat, I was being gang-raped by five phobias. For starters, I was in the air. I'm not meant to be there. Then there was the melting candle woman next to me, oozing over the armrest, eating an especially pungent, sorry-looking 4th-world Tuna sandwich. Stevie Wonder was Continental Airlines background music to the flight crew instructions. Bollywood James Bond and his minty fresh Bond-girl smiling about potential emergencies and calamities. White women were EVERYWHERE up and down the aisle, insecure as the luggage being stuffed into the compartments over their heads. A hideous cross-section of these insidious Harpees: bickering ancient white women, lobotomized-eyed white girls plugging into white corded ipods, white wives stuck in their seats like decaying teeth to diseased gums, venomous white mistresses, folksinger-sized white lesbians---the whole kit and caboodle of never discriminated against moisturized pale flesh. Me as one-man mob of intolerance, Rosie Parks of the struggle, glaring wrath upon all. Most dire of all, I was on my way to meet my girl's folks. Let's be honest---I'm a strange, challenging case to sell at the best of times. Favorable conditions these were not. We wanted to move in together. But not where she was from. Not in New York. She wanted to move out to Vancouver to be with me. We seemed to get along pretty well when she came to visit in Vancouver. Better the second time. By the third time it seemed pretty obvious it was worth giving a try. She felt like summer camp and a mermaid rolled up into one. Now try selling that to her parents... Possible future slogans Canadian tourism might use to sell Vancouver to the world employing stereotypical Canadian aplomb and politeness: "CANADA, we don't mean to inconvenience or bother you in suggesting, have you ever considered the possibility?" "CANADA, why not?" "CANADA, c'mon it won't be so bad!" "CANADA, forget peace, give US a chance?" "CANADA, as the USA's retarded little-brother, we have a much sweeter disposition than most places that we're pretty sure, if you don't mind us presuming, you'll enjoy." "CANADA, wonderful drinking water and, possibly, MORE!" "CANADA, don't forget about us, we haven't forgotten about you!" "CANADA, we didn't mean to frustrate Ryan Adams with being confused for OUR guy. Sorry. Really. Check us out." "CANADA, stop by sometime." "CANADA, it's quite the place." "CANADA, if suicide is the biggest decision of your life you can't ever regret, we'll do everything in our power to minimize regretting visiting us!" On the way through customs the same fucking question: "Where you going?" "New York." "What's there?" "Girlfriend." "Whose she?" "My girlfriend." "How'd you meet her?" "Uhhh." "How do you know her?" I imagine the response her parents registered as I utter, "I met her on the internet." Part II forthcoming...
