| Guys really like my hair. I don’t know what it is lately. My last haircut is well past its expiration date, and my locks flop down on either side of my eyes all day. My hair could very well be shoved up my own nose if it weren’t so curly and Kleenex were less abundant. I think it suits me. The women in my life all look at me the way you look at your cat when she brings you a dead thing as a gift. But the guys I pal around with are flippin’ obsequious. Men I’ve known for years get an eyeful of my bushy melon and suddenly switch gender stereotypes on me. "I love what you’ve done with your hair!" they say. "You must tell me your secret! Do you condition?" It’s f***ing creepy. Male attention is really not what I’m looking for. I just feel I need to appreciate my hair while I’ve got it. Friday night was one of the lighter hair compliment occasions; I only had a couple of my friends stroke my head that night, which hopefully signals the end of that trend. Several of us met up at the art house to catch Crouching Tiger, Singing Llama after a month of failed attempts and missed connections. It’s fortunate I didn’t get too much stroking, although I might have been cheered by the attention; by the time I got to the theater, you see, I was crimson with frustration over a stupid, minor inconvenience. I give the little things a lot of power. But I’ll remember this one time for the rest of my life. The Friday I was ready to storm the Bastille over a book.
An article online that morning had reminded me that, despite being King of Dorks since I was in junior high, I had never gotten around to reading Batman: Year One. Batman: Year One is one of those comic books more defensive nerds will refer to as a "graphic novel" and reverently point to as evidence that comics really can be a medium for adults, albeit portly dateless adults. It was one of those books you would read conspicuously around other little nerds to demonstrate how mature you were. "Yeah, that’s right. Check me out. No more ‘Richie Rich’ for me. I’m readin’ a Graphic Novel! Car keys and smoking are right around the corner now!"
Anyway, I decided that as long as I was already a dateless longhair, I might as well finally go get a copy of this book and read it. I just needed to run over to the bookstore by my house on the way to the movies and grab it from their graphic novel section. Run in, pay, run out; I knew right where I needed to go in the store. The graphic novel section had been on that exact same shelf for a decade now. Needless to say, the one time since I was seventeen that I actually wanted to buy something off of this shelf, the entire shelf was gone. Removed from the store, never to return. I was livid. And as I scrambled to get to the movie on time, I punched the steering wheel and said, "Goddammit! Why does this s*** always happen to me?!?! GRRRRRRRR!!!" Like I was Job, on the receiving end of the thunderbolt. All seems pretty stupid now. After the movie, none of us could decide what to do next, or even if we were going to do anything at all. Some of us had passengers who needed to be dropped off at home. I wanted to try and hit one more book store. We agreed to split up and reconvene after our other business was done. I decided to run home before I went to the bookstore, to drop off my too-heavy coat and check my messages. The theme song from "Malcolm in the Middle" was on the radio, and I sang along loudly with forced cheer at the thought that They Might Be Giants might finally get famous after all these years. The tune seemed pretty apropos considering my mood. "Life is unfair," I crooned into the dashboard, "life is unfair." I trudged into my unlit apartment and hit the button on the answering machine without breaking stride. A woman’s voice came back at me, and then I had to pause. Where do I know that voice from? It sounded prerecorded. Like one of those sales calls that they put on an autodialer, or those automated campaign ads that wreck your dinner in October. Who did she say she was with? Rewind. "Hi, Jim. This is Karen. If you would, I need you to give me a call..." Oh! It’s Karen. Oh. When Karen calls me, she chirps. She whines at the machine because I’m not home. She calls me James Earl or some other random nickname in a voice that sounds like she’s taken some kind of pill, and then she leaves a singsongy plea for a prompt reply. Karen is happy to talk to me. She does not talk to me like MovieFone. Well, Susannah must have died. In many tight-knit groups of friends, I think a kind of group psychology takes over in times of tragedy or crisis. Over years in close proximity, people develop roles and play them. Someone will be the Hysterical Bawler; someone will be the Therapist; someone will be the Gallows Comedian; someone will be the Investigative Reporter. In the impenetrably close group of Karen’s childhood friends from Viz Academy, who someone once dubbed the Vizet Cong, Karen is the Professional. When something awful happens, people will be upset and distracted. People won’t be thinking straight. Karen will be thinking straight. She will figure out what needs to be taken care of, and she will take care of it in a calm, measured voice, like she’s waiting for cobra antivenom and needs to keep her heart rate slow and steady so the syringe gets to her in time. The kind of voice in which people say, "Now I need you to listen to me very carefully.…" The kind of voice that was on my answering machine. "...you can go ahead and call me on my cell phone whenever you get this message. Or, if you want, I’m over at Fred’s; the number is.…" She’s at Fredrica’s house. Here in town. Well, that verifies that. Susannah has died. I went to get the phone out of my bedroom and ended up sitting on my bed in the dark for a good long while before I picked it up. It’s strange, how you can see something coming for months and still be completely surprised by it. I’ve known Susannah had cystic fibrosis since we were in high school. I knew she’d been in and out of the hospital all year. I knew about the waiting list for the lung transplant. Her death was still somehow a terrible shock, even though Susannah’s illness had been hanging heavy over the heads of her friends for quite some time. I should say now that I was not really one of those friends. Don’t get me wrong; I was always concerned with how she was doing, I prayed for her, and news of her fight was deeply disturbing to me. But that was more than just concern for her; I was concerned about Karen’s and Fredrica’s and everyone else’s emotional well-being too. I hadn’t talked to Susannah in probably six years... seven years?... and when I did, we did not really see eye-to-eye. She was uninhibited and spirited and extroverted; I was... very much not. I don’t think I ever did anything to her, but when we hung out I kinda got the impression that she thought I had a rod up my ass and she was going to teach me a lesson. Not that we ever fought. We got along okay I guess. She was a nice kid. Talented musician. Really good friend to a lot of people. She brought smiles to a lot of other people’s faces. But we didn’t make any pretense of keeping in touch when college started. Which is why, after about a minute of being terribly shocked by her death, I smacked my head and admonished myself that I had no business being terribly shocked about anything. Snap out of it, mopey. Need to go find out if Karen needs anything. Did Susannah come to our prom with us? I think she did. Who did she go with?... Did she go with Ken? I think she did. She was Ken’s prom date, and she was Karen’s best friend, and now she’s dead. Huh. I stared at the ceiling for a while before the one neuron that was working late reminded me to pick up the phone. I got the Professional on the phone, and she explained the situation to me. Susannah had been in the hospital. Fred was there with her. At about 3:00 a.m., she choked. Her heart stopped and she died. I essentially knew this before I ever picked up the phone, but hearing it was still something of a shock. I wish I knew why that was. Oh, God. Fred was there when it happened. Fred would have been a wreck just hearing about this over the phone. I can only imagine what she’s going through right now. Poor Fred. Poor Susannah. I wonder if she was conscious. I think I’d rather not know. Karen got the news at about 5:00 and promptly drove into town and began making phone calls. The Vizet Cong were descending on the city from all over America as we spoke, like someone had activated the Bat Signal. The Just Us League. I thought about the people I would want to be at my funeral if it were tomorrow. I wondered how many of them would make it into town. I don’t think the Bat Signal would go up. My friends are close to me, but not really to each other. They wouldn’t rush to congregate. "Susannah was really lucky to have you guys," I said, "and you’re all very lucky to have one another. If there is even a morsel of solace to be taken from this whole thing, that’s it. The way you all have come together to help her and her family and support one another is nothing short of remarkable, especially considering how long you’ve stayed close. I can locate exactly two of the people I knew my first day of high school. I am in awe and envy of how amazing your friendship is. There are plenty of people who can’t handle mortality who slink away uncomfortably when their friends get sick. A terrible thing has happened, but you are all tremendous, and you need to know that." It felt like an important thing to say. People need to hear these things far more often than they actually do. Karen then did her Professional duty, informing me of the dates, times and places for the wake and funeral. And you know, regardless of how this might sound, I have to say: a couple of people have recently gone out of their way to tell me what a good friend I am, but that is quite simply not true. I am a terrible friend. I am a gnarled, blackhearted, soulless villain. And I know this because Karen needed me at this wake, and as she gave me the information I said, "Uh-huh... uh-huh..." as if I was taking careful note of the details, but the whole time I was listening to her I had but one thought. There is no f***ing way I am going within ten miles of this wake. It’s just not gonna happen. Sorry. Nope. I knew I needed to go. I couldn’t not go. You would have to be completely inhuman to have her call you and tell you all this and then skip out to, what, watch golf on TV or something? I just really did not want to do my job this time. It was so horrible, I couldn’t bear the thought of it. My suit was stayin’ in the closet. A lot of people who are better socially adjusted than I will go to mourn automatically, if for no other reason than it’s better to do too much than to do too little in situations like this. They will go to the wake unless something prevents them from going. I am the exact opposite. I will totally flake out on the whole affair without a second thought unless somehow prodded, reasoning that the family and loved ones certainly have their minds on weightier things than whether or not I’ll be attending. Actually, I’m often the same way about weddings. One of the central tenets of my life is the notion that I will not be missed. Usually, it’s an above-average instinct to have. "Uh-huh... got it. 3:00 to 8:00. Uh-huh. Out west. Gotcha." No chance. None. "Thanks, Jim. Thanks for calling. I’ll talk to you later." click Boy, that comic book sure was important an hour ago. What an injustice that was, huh? Didn’t get my comic book. Ooh, what next? Maybe a light bulb will burn out and the world will end. You f***ing ninnygoat.
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| I decided to steer clear of Ken for ten hours or so. I didn’t want to be the one to tell him she was dead. He had tried to get in touch with her recently when he heard she was in the hospital. She hadn’t gotten back to him. Perhaps fearing that this was intentional, he had not gotten a chance to visit her. When Karen asked me to let her tell him, I thought, Oh no, don’t worry; you can be the one to break this news. Any uncertainty of Ken’s about Susannah was understandable. Between Ken and the Vizet Cong, a lot of water had gone under the bridge. A lot of bloody water. Some folks were dated and broken up with. There was some malfeasance. People were treated badly. Fidelity may or may not have been an issue. I don’t have the information personally, and I don’t want it. All I know is, some women in this circle hated Ken in high school, and then when he and Karen broke up in college, whatever went down with that breakup caused this seismic shift in the hatred. It went from let’s-not-invite-Ken hatred to mail-him-a-vial-of-anthrax hatred. They hated him so much that when he “reformed” and Karen became a good friend of his, he was still the evil that dare not be mentioned. These people did not use the man’s name anymore. They called him the Redhead. Like he was some kind of Viking pillager spoken about in hushed tones through the oral tradition. Swear ta Gawd. Issues like these were the ones that had me convinced that I simply could not go and mourn Susannah. Grief politics. Weighing most heavily in my mind: one of the other people there would be a woman I hadn’t seen in six or seven years, my... high school sweetheart? Ex-girlfriend? High school crush? I don’t even know what to call her. I was mad for her as a kid. I’d have done anything for her, and she knew it, and she acted accordingly. It wasn’t so much cat-and-mouse as it was cat-and-ball-of-string. There have been a couple of women in my life that have heard me say, “I will be here for you no matter what,” and really taken that and run with it, as if For-Granted-Taking was some kind of Olympic sport. It was not an auspicious beginning for my “love life.” At least, not as I remember it. I’m sure other versions have circulated throughout the years. Anyway, after a long period of perceiving myself as slighted, a really minor disagreement between us caused me to completely unload on this woman like a cardboard river dam, in a way I had never done before and have never done to anyone since. There was some kind of insignificant tipping point, and I gave her a dressing down that was volcanic. I wrote an email of such scathing, hateful, irredeemably mean-spirited vitriol that the monitor glass tinted with smoke as I sent it. (Oh, of course it was an e-mail. The most spectacular fights are never more than two degrees away from a poorly punctuated e-mail, are they?) It was base. Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever seen in these pages, double it, then spit on it and throw it through somebody’s window tied to a brick. You’ll have to imagine it, because I have no memory whatsoever what it was about. Certainly seemed important at the time. All I know is that, after I sent it, we weren’t allowed to talk anymore and a lot of our mutual friends stopped coming around for a good long while. The second worst year of my life began the moment I hit “send.” There was a long period of time when I thought of myself as a complete bastard, and that period started with the sending of that e-mail. I once had a girlfriend who hated the way I got quieter and calmer as I got angrier, but sophomore year conclusively proved to me that the alternative was much, much worse. There had never been such a sudden, hot, vicious outburst of hatred and frustration from me, and a friendship had never ended with such a conclusive slamming. And it was pretty likely she was going to be at the funeral. That was the excuse I was giving myself not to go. I thought it was a pretty good one. It’s not that I really wanted to avoid her. On the contrary; I would love to apologize, have that apology be accepted, and find out what she’s like as an adult, out of curiosity if nothing else. But word on the street was that I was still Public Enemy #666, and quite frankly I thought the circumstances were painful enough without me coming around and making anybody feel worse. Your friend has died, and now here’s someone you hate! Best day ever! I find it’s better to just stay out of the way. (And you see, that is why I am still an ass. How egotistical do you have to be to believe, even for a moment, that you can ruin a funeral?) I spent a day trying to keep my mind off of the whole thing. Then on Saturday night Ken came over, and the next thing I knew I was going to a wake. When he arrived, I had just gotten off the phone with my mom, who had left a message on my machine saying, “Oh no! Oh no! This is your mother, call me back! It’s an emergency!” Given some of the other phone calls I’d had that weekend, I called her immediately in a state of panic. Her computer had done something weird when she turned it on. But it was all better now. Given some of the other phone calls I’d had that weekend, I felt inclined to share with my mom a rather heated definition of the word “emergency.” My policy is to never hang up angry, so after some explanations and reconciliation I got off the phone to find Ken on the other side of my door. Karen had apparently gotten in touch with him the night before. He knew what she was calling about before she even said anything. It really is all in the delivery. Because Ken's roommates had also come over, (to watch Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, one of these indie films that is so NYU-film-school-wankariffic that it makes you want to run to the mall megaplex and buy six tickets to Charlie's Angels just on general principle) we were better able to avoid the awful theme of the weekend. Then Adam got out one of my photo albums (teaching at his high school has made him the melancholy flavor of nostalgic) and without really meaning to, we found ourselves looking at our prom pictures. And hey!, there were Ken and Susannah. "We ought to go together to this thing tomorrow," said Ken. "Oh," said I, "actually, no. I'm not going." "No no no," Ken said quite matter-of-factly. "I don't think you understand. You are going. We are going together." "See, though..." I whined. "I don't know the family, and I have NO idea what to say to her fiancé...” That’s right! Her fiancé! This just keeps finding new ways to be horrible! “...and plus She's gonna be there, and there'll be a Whole Big Thing, and--" "Now you listen to me," said Ken with the eyes of a general. "You are not sending me in there alone. You cannot send me into that without backup. I will be eaten alive. It's just that simple." "But--" "Listen to me. I will come and get you. You will not have to drive. We will have a bite to eat. We will pay our respects. We will be there for Karen, and maybe if we go early enough no one else will be there and I will not be injured." Ken needs me to be there. Ken needs me to be there for Karen, and Ken needs me to be there for Ken, and Karen needs me to be there in general. You don’t just get to decide to stop being needed. It should not have taken me an entire day to come to this realization. So, Ken is now my Jiminy Cricket? Keep an eye out for mad hatters and cheshire cats. We woke up on the wrong side of the looking glass. So, that was that. Sunday morning, I took my suit out of the closet, Ken came over, and we drove out to the wake of the girl he went to prom with. I think this story goes on for eight pages before I even get to the wake for the same reason the story has taken three weeks to get finished and posted online. It shouldn't take this long; it is a simple story to tell; it essentially tells itself. But I’ve actually written entire other things that take place later rather than finish this, because the longer I draw it out, the longer I get to put off revisiting the fact that the whole thing was quite simply one of the most profoundly disturbing episodes I've encountered in a long, long time. A daisy-chain of prolonged sense-jarring experiences with a horrible tragedy as a jumping-off point. Increasing levels of surrealism, like a dream about some kind of game. We went out to the car but had to go back inside and look up the funeral home in the Yellow Pages because I hadn't written down the directions Friday night. Ken drove, and for the entirety of the trip I kept having to talk. I was under orders to talk. Any time I stopped talking, even to look out the window, I was quickly reminded to talk. Silence was crushing Ken's mind. I got the sense that if I stopped the distracting chatter, we'd drive into another car on the highway just to keep from having to think anymore. Ken was trying to put the best possible face on the fact that he was terribly upset by the whole thing, more upset than I was. After all, I didn't really know her that well. That's what I'd been telling myself the whole weekend. It was easier to get past the whole thing as long as I reassured myself that Susannah had only been an acquaintance, as if that meant nothing awful had really happened because I'd managed to remove it from my life by a sufficient number of degrees. Upset? What do I have to be upset about? The whole trip there was like the ascent that begins the roller coaster, but with the fires of hell eternal at the bottom. We were sitting there with our hands on the lap bar and listening to the click-click-click-click as we went up, and up, and up... here we go... here we go!... I have never had to stand in line to get into a funeral home before. Our decision to get there early was essentially a complete mistake, although for all I know the place was packed all day long. We could see from our place in line that the room hadn’t a foot of elbow room anywhere in it. Her family was enormous. Her friends were plentiful. It was a huge and sincere outpouring of love for this person that everyone in the room had been suddenly and permanently separated from, far earlier than seemed fair. Hundreds of people surrounded by understated misery.
While we waited to sign the guest book, I looked down into the bustling room of mourners and was reminded of the Where’s Waldo? books. See if you can find... This game is harder to play when you don’t want to look like you’re playing it. I think I see the Vizet Cong. I wonder which ones hate Ken, which ones hate me for not hating Ken, which ones hate me for entirely independent reasons, and which ones don’t remember me but are willing to play along. We probably shouldn’t have come. I’d chicken out, but I don’t want to lose my place in line. How can one person be this loved in a quarter century? At least this has already gotten as horrible as it can possibly be. I wonder which one is the fiancé. We eventually made our way into the main room to find nobody we really knew. I was pretty sure Karen was over by the coffin with the rest of her classmates. Ken didn’t want to go over and upset anybody who had enmity towards him, and I was in complete agreement, so we decided to wait on the other end of the crowded room in the off chance that Karen would see us and/or wander by. In the meantime, we looked at photo collages. Photo collages seem to be the latest big funeral trend. (I have recently been given the opportunity to notice and enjoy funeral trends.) I never saw them when I was younger, but lately they’re all the rage; people grieve by going home and collecting dozens of old photos, then they put them on poster board and display them on easels around the funeral parlor. The last four or five funerals I’ve been to have featured them. Those funerals, though, were for matriarchs and captains of industry. The people in those pictures usually didn’t even resemble the deceased anymore. They were people who had accumulated a lot of pictures through a lot of living. Old people. The pictures on Susannah’s collages were all fairly recent. The girl in the pictures and the girl in the casket looked pretty much identical. I shook a little bit at the realization. In a lower corner of the second collage, fairly prominently placed, my eyes landed on a picture from our prom. Rather unceremoniously stuck in there among the baby pictures, la la la, BAM there we all were. I recognized it by the dresses; I had thumbed through that photo album dozens of times after I blew it sophomore year, and I could remember everything everyone had worn as if I’d just changed out of my tux that morning. And when I saw that picture resting there on the poster board, I suddenly felt as if I was right there in the coffin beside her. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know if that was a normal reaction to have. I almost had to sit down, or would have if there’d been a free chair in the place. I pointed it out to Ken so I wouldn’t have to suffer alone, and then I closed my eyes for fear of looking up and seeing that they’d taken the liberty of chiseling me a tombstone while they were at it.
So this is what it’s like when people your own age die. I’m sure I’ve probably mentioned this before, but one of my dirty little secrets is that I’ve got a pretty wicked crowd phobia. It’s been a while since I’ve gone to the mall and felt like a lost child or anything, but let’s leave it at saying that I’m acutely aware of how trapped or trampled I could be at any given moment in a lot of rooms. It’s why I’m such a homebody; it’s why I’m extra-cranky about bars and clubs; I don’t make a Thing out of it, but I know it about myself and plan accordingly. Try though I might, there are some situations that put me really close to clobbering my way to the nearest exit. This wake, with literally hundreds of bereaved people, definitely qualified. Unfortunately, after about half an hour of staring at collages in the corner, it became clear that nobody we knew was coming over to talk to us, and Ken still wasn’t going to tempt fate, so I decided that I was going to have to walk through this mob of people over to the body where Karen and Fred were. I had decided when I went that morning that I would be there for my friends, but that I wouldn’t be spending any time in any serious proximity to my peer’s body. But if this whole thing demonstrated anything to me, it is that Life doesn’t care about our plans. I compromised by deciding as I swatted people out of my way (haven’t you f***ing people ever heard of personal space?! Go talk in the lounge or something!) that I would go over without devoting any serious time to looking or gawking at Susannah. Karen and Fred were there playing their roles in the group psychology, although Fred was much more composed than I expected her to be. I imagine the whole thing was washing over them in waves, and we had come at low tide. We exchanged hugs, and they sincerely thanked me for coming. I accepted their thanks, all the while knowing what an asshole I actually was and pretty much wanting to sew a red “A” on the breast of my suit. We talked about the preparations, how everyone was doing, the usual funeral blather that I actually find myself getting better at. I do not like the idea of getting good at funeral chitchat. I took the opportunity to repeat the “You Guys Are Tremendous Friends (She Was Lucky to Have You)” speech that I had given Karen on the phone Friday night, almost word for word, after she began trying to publicly thank me for saying it to her. The Vizet Cong was genuinely appreciative of the sentiment, and because of that I was later able to leave with at least the sense that I had done or said one small good thing in all of this. Of course, as I was talking to them, my Old Flame was standing about four feet from me, facing me but looking just over my shoulder and through me like one of those Magic Eye pictures. I was not acknowledged. But I wasn’t spit on. We have to pick our victories. At that point, Julie came up to me briskly and declared that I had to hug her. I did so, but curiously, as this was the first time I had seen or heard from Julie in about five or six years. Julie was the girl I should have been paying attention to when I was in high school chasing around those other girls. She’d been a genuinely nice girl, quiet, non-drinker... but even back then, something always made me go after the ones who seemed like hard work. I am forever after the fixer-upper girl, or the approval of the one who isn’t interested. (Smarter people call these women by another name, “incompatible.”) I had tried to strike up a closer friendship with Julie in college, after she had moved away (and hence become hard work), but somehow we had stopped talking sophomore year. “It’s really good to see you,” I said to her after our hug and general inquiries about her well-being during All This. “It must have been five years easily. It really is a shame. I can’t even remember why we stopped talking anymore, to be honest.” “I started drinking,” she replied. Oh my God! I didn’t know Julie was an alcoholic! Why didn’t somebody... Oh. Hang on. She doesn’t mean she started drinking chronically. She means she consumed alcohol, and Jimski the Dry exiled her from the kingdom. And it was so important, I don’t even remember it now. Useless Principles: 1. Friendship: 0. Goddamn, I'm a charmer. “Isn’t dogmatic thinking wonderful?” I said lamely. We mercifully moved on. “I must confess I was having trouble keeping the politics straight on the way over here, who I am and am not allowed to talk to. I almost bolted out of line when we got spotted.” “Actually,” she said, “we didn’t recognize you at all. We just thought you were someone that had come in with... the Redhead.” “It was probably the hair,” I said. “I’ve let my hair get too long.” She smirked. “Your hair was always too long.” Guys like my hair a lot. I just can’t figure it out. Eventually, I spent a lot of time with Fred, who had announced her engagement about a week before Susannah died and was getting progressively sicker of being congratulated on “the good news” at her friend’s funeral. So, that was awful as well. More awful was when I asked for and received the details of Susannah’s final moments, knowing that Fred had been the one staying with her at the time. I don’t know what prompted me to ask. I guess I was just trying to give Fred the opportunity for catharsis and trying to keep her from internalizing any irrational guilt or anything. But... my goodness. This whole time, Ken was on the other end of the room alone, staring intently at a video of Susannah playing piano. His eyes never deviated from the screen. I decided that enough was enough and broached the subject of the Redhead with the Vizet Cong. His so-called enemies were unanimous: somebody go get him. Karen did. He hugged a lot of people that were supposed to hate him. Bygones were bygones. And it was just such a deep relief to see the love that was underlying years of alienation and resentment come rushing to the surface. For Ken, anyway. I stood next to my first whatever-you-want-to-call-Her for an hour and a half, no further than I am from the monitor right now, often directly facing one another, and She never even made eye contact with me the entire time. And that was the final shade of awful. Because although I don’t know her at all, really, although she probably resembles that sixteen year old in no way whatsoever anymore, I feel like the impenetrable invisible wall between us locks away so much of what was good about being a kid. Like there are so many memories of youthful happiness that have been taken away and filed somewhere, and I can’t ever have them back. I mean, for God’s sake; we’re adult professionals playing ‘Jim Is Invisible’ at somebody’s funeral. Maybe it was all too much to handle in one weekend. But still. I would love to see that wall torn down. I guess it’s not really my call. I don’t know what I was hoping would happen. I suppose I should just be happy I didn’t get yelled at and acknowledge that a part of my life has been boxed and buried as well. When we got ready to leave, I started to cry for no reason whatsoever. “Are you all right?” asked Karen. “I don’t know why I wouldn’t be,” I said. “I’ve spent all day making sure everybody else was okay, and now all of a sudden I’m not sure I am. It’s not like I really knew her or anything. It’s just all so much...” Ken and I went to dinner, and he bought me a CD. On the way back home, we began to drive to the childhood homes of all the people we had known when we were seniors in high school. Just to see if we could still remember where they were. Just in case the information became useful again someday.
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TO: orders@amazon.com FROM: jimski@jimski.net SUBJ: UPS difficulties Dearest Amazon, A week or so ago, I ordered four books from your fine mercantile establishment (the order#: 104-1264409-7788766). I had specifically checked off that these packages should be shipped via "standard shipping" in a feeble, desperate attempt to avoid the excruciating back-and-forth that I have to endure from UPS as an apartment dweller. A half dozen times I have asked them, a half dozen times I have called them, but still they simply will not leave packages at my door. They insist that I must be at home to sign for the packages. Since I have a job, that is never going to happen. That is why I do everything in my power not to have to deal with UPS. For some reason, however, for the first time I can remember, Amazon sent my books via UPS, and as a result the books I ordered are currently sitting lonely, confused and unread in a UPS warehouse rather than at my front door for the second day in a row. Tomorrow (1/23) will be the last delivery attempt. I will not be here again. You see, I am never, ever going to be at home during the day. That's when I make the money that pays for the packages. I'm sure you understand. UPS does not. They tell me that in order for them to deliver the packages without handing them to me personally, you have to fax them a notice instructing them it is okay to do so. I swear to God, it is okay to do so. Please send them the fax they require so that my book purchase actually results in me having books. Also, please let me know if there is anything I can do to ensure that amazon never ships anything to me via UPS again. Thanks very much for any help you can give. Sincerely, Jim ---
From: orders@amazon.com Dear Jim, Greetings from Amazon.com! I am sorry to hear that UPS is causing you problems. I have created a replacement order (#001-81178543-2486369) to be shipped again, and I have requested this one be shipped USPS, as perhaps they are more cooperative. You will not be charged for this replacement shipment, and no doubt UPS will be returning your original order to us shortly. I hope this works. Thank you for shopping Amazon.com. We look forward to serving you in the future. Best regards,
Sara D. ---
TO: orders@amazon.com Dear Amazon, I am writing once again regarding my order from three weeks ago today, Order#: 104-1264409-7788766. Your records may show that I wrote in begging for help because inexplicably, just this one time, Amazon decided to ship my order via UPS. This had never happened before, and that was a good thing; since I'm not a member of the landed class, UPS cannot be persuaded to actually deliver my packages unless I lie in ambush and wait for them, having constructed a UPS Guy trap using chicken wire, a girly magazine and a great bit hoagie. No matter how many times I write, call, or picket to have parcels left at my apartment doorstep, all I ever get are little yellow notes. My yellow note collection is getting very impressive, so thanks for that. My book collection, on the other hand? Not so much. I went through the usual bizarre Kafkaesque charade for a week with UPS again, me calling them in tears asking them to deliver my package (it's what they do for a living, you know) and some bureaucrat with his GED telling me that you had to send them a fax permitting them to deliver the package I paid them to deliver. I wrote asking you to send them this fax. You told me that instead you would simply send my package again, this time via the Postal Service, a swell bunch of folks who despite being government workers have learned how to put a box at a doorstep. This seemed acceptable. One week later, I still do not have my books. I do, however, finally have enough little yellow notes to construct that Big Bird costume I've always dreamed about. Because you see, it appears that you've sent me my replacement package via UPS. Again. Why do you hate me? What did I ever do to you? I just want to give you my money. Don't you want my money? I didn't have to work this hard to buy my last car. Please, make it stop. The newest order # is 001-81178543-2486369. I encourage you not to send a replacement replacement order, as UPS only has so much warehouse space. As it is, I picture a cadre of disgruntled delivery men, unable to set a spell because all those boxes full of my books finally had to be piled in the break room. Instead, consider calling UPS and saying, "It's his box. It's his money. It's his doorstep. If he says it's okay to leave it there, it really oughtta be his call." It didn't work when I tried it, but you may have more "pull," as the kids say. Please let me know what you can do to redeem this prolonged waking nightmare over $30 worth of bound paper. As it stands, my current plan is to take a couple of days off of work in the hopes of finally meeting the Phantom UPS Man, and perhaps kicking him repeatedly in the shins. Thank you, Jim
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| So, two days after the funeral I found myself in a junkyard with jumper cables around my neck and arms loaded with medical scrubs. Around the same time all the Vizet Cong turmoil was winding down, the call finally came in that Joan's car (which, you may recall, got totalled while she was in town for a visit before Christmas) was never going to run again. Since Joan still lives several hours from here, and somehow managed to get back home without crashing the plane, somebody needed to go and salvage her stuff from the inside of the car before Zeke and Cletus turned it into a cube and/or avant garde smashy smashy performance art. The auto yard was a lot easier to get to without a foot of snow on the ground, and a lot easier to find as well. Last time I had been there, we were in a race against sunrise; this time, it was a race against sunset. When I told Joan I'd take care of it for her, she told me that unfortunately the yard was only open until 5:30, which meant I'd need to take off from work early and sorta scramble back to my 'hood. Scramble I did, and I arrived while the sky was still pink, restlessly shifting Joan's emailed instructions about what was wheat and what was chaff from hand to hand. Other than what was in this e-mail, I had no idea what was going on. Where's the office? Who do I talk to? Do I need to have some signed paper to ransack a car? If somebody were ransacking your car, wouldn't you want some signed paper to be involved before somebody just let 'em in? All I've got is this e-mail. I could have written this e-mail. I found the office with relative ease. It was the part of the auto yard that wasn't a broken car. "Hi. I'm here to clean out a car?" I said in that way that makes questions out of statements, that way that implies an unspoken ending to the sentence, "...but I have no clue what the hell is going on." Inside the office were about half a dozen people. Some of them were working at too-close computer terminals; a couple of them were standing by a little copier. One was standing at the desk. He was the one that said, "We're closed." "B-bb... it's 5:05." Shrug. "We close at 5:00." Brow furrow. "You close at 5:30." Shrug. "I'd like to help you, but we're all on our way out the door." I looked around the room. They were working on computers. They were copying things. The lights were on. Nobody was putting on a coat. They just didn't wanna go outside. "Listen," I said, "the driver called this morning and you told her you were open until 5:30. I came all this way. Couldn't you just please tell me where the car is on the lot?" "We open at 8:30 tomorrow." "I work across town at 9:00." "I'm really very sorry." Blink. "That much is obvious. Tomorrow, then." In the time since the funeral, I kept coming back to the idea of importance. I kept thinking about all the things I had thought about as important in my lifetime, and how many of them actually ended up mattering. Girls I liked whose names I couldn't remember now. Any grade in any class I had in grade school... or high school... or... any grade in any class I had. Which classes I had. Which campus issues I almost assassinated college administrators over. Items that had been impossible to find that I'd tracked down furiously, only to throw them away after months of having them languishing unused in my closet. (These past few days I have been a harsh housekeeper. Just about anything I haven't touched in a couple of weeks is in mortal danger of being dumpster food.) The point is, I repeatedly come to the conclusion that not much matters, and that therefore there isn't much worth being upset about. Then I get turned away at the door to an auto yard and forget all that s***. By the time I started my car that night, I was in full face-breakin' mode. “Grumblerumblefrigginasshole sitthereandtellMEyergoddamnclosed andyersittinthereplayintetris driveallthewaydownhere leaveworkearly comingbacktomorrowwithafriggincanofpeppersprayandmyrunningshoes goddamnGRRRRR!" And then I thought, "On the other hand, I don’t have cystic fibrosis. I can breathe unassisted. And yet I'm hyperventilating by choice." And then, of course, I feel angry and guilty, guilty about being angry, angry about being guilty. I backed down, though, and I went back the next morning before work. The rain-on-your-wedding-day is, the damn car wasn’t even locked in the first place. Had I known approximately where it was, I wouldn’t even have needed them to find me the friggin’ keys or even given me permission. I could have gone under cover of darkness like the Glove Box Ninja and taken care of business. There’s a kind of logic behind not locking a totalled car that I guess I appreciate. Still, I’m going back someday to take a bunch of other people’s tapes and maps. Just to say that I did. You know. Rebel rebel, and all that. They didn’t make me sign paper, but they did Xerox my driver’s license. Hilariously enough (to me, anyway) they also insisted on suspiciously photocopying the e-mail from Joan I’d printed out. So they now have a folder in their system for this completely unaddressed document. “Be sure to get my turnpike box. Oh, and the mix tapes. You’re the best. Signed, no one.” Legally, that’s ironclad. Iron-damn-clad. They are covered. You learn a lot by cleaning out someone else’s car. Tapes. Jumper cables. Medical scrubs. A bathmat and its receipt. (This mat was the crown jewel of the excavation. This bathmat was destined to be exchanged months ago, hundreds of miles from here. It has traveled across this country via backseat and mail truck to get back to a store about three blocks from its owner’s home. It is the K-Mart Return Against All Odds.) Cletus the Junk Oaf came out to check on me after a while, right around the time I had the cables around my neck, and decided to make small talk with me in a way that pretty concisely illustrated why it’s called “small talk.” It reminded me of when I worked nights behind the front desk at the dorm, and the security guards would come in and yak my ear off about hockey or people they could have shot in the line of duty if only they were allowed to have guns instead of jolly little whistles. I specifically took that f***in’ midnight shift so I could read uninterrupted, and they’d see me and reason, “Oh my God, that person is so bored he’s reading on purpose! I’d better rescue him and regale him with tales of the seedy underworld of ticketing cars and hitting on coeds!” Cletus’ big malfunction was that he was totally blown away by me finding medical scrubs in the trunk after telling him it was a woman’s car. “So, your friend’s a nurse?” he said after a pregnant pause. “Nope,” I said with all the 8:30 cheer I gots in me. “As I said before, she’s a doctor. She was in town checking out hospitals to work at. As a doctor.” Loooong pause. “Well, I guess she didn’t get hurt in the accident too bad. She could use her nursin’ to take care of herself until she got to the doctors.” Sometimes, I think life is unfair. Other times, I think the people who are destined to work in junkyards end up there after all. --- I broke. I couldn’t take it any more. I busted out the Harry Potter books. I’m in the cult now. I borrowed them from my mom. She didn’t buy them for herself, mind you. She got them for her grandkids. In case she ever has any. Because I needed to start hearing that now, with my last girlfriend engaged and most of the others already married. So these books seem to be about as good as everybody says they are, although I don’t know what I’d have made of them when I was younger. I can see why they’re huge with kids, because this Rowling tells the story exactly the way the five-year-old neighbor kid would. “And then it was Harry’s birthday and nobody cared and an elf came and knocked over the pudding and they locked Harry up but then a flying car came and took him out the window and then they had breakfast and bought their books and then the school year was over and Harry got married and died. PAGE 3.” The books’ best feature is that they make you feel like a genius, because you sit down and VVVVOOM there go 200 pages. It is this feature that is also the downfall of the Harry Potter books, because it amazes grown people with their own reading aptitude so much that it causes them to brag stupidly. “Oh, Harry Potter? I burned through those books! I read that first one in one day! In one sitting! I read a book in a day!” Ummm... yeah, you did, there. See... it’s... it’s a children’s book. If Hop on Pop takes less than two sittings to get through, you’re not in line for a grant.
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