My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (14 page)

Phil gave me a glance, thoroughly confused by what was happening, but too intent on the game’s closing minutes to worry too much about me and Lon’s detente. He was on his cell phone with a buddy in Florida who was also watching the game.

“I can’t quit,” said Lon, very, very quietly, almost inaudible over the cries of the announcers on the TV. “I need the money. I have a wife. I have a kid.” He rocked back and forth a little, inspecting the bottle of pee in his hand.

“You have real victims,” I said. “Go down to the Legacy Room. Talk to them.”

“It’s nothing they can’t afford,” he said, with a hint of bitterness.

“You know what the worst thing is? You don’t even read their books!” I reached into my backpack and pulled out the spiral-bound novel that the woman from Minnesota had given me,
Aiden’s Quest
, along with the other books I’d collected. I felt my voice rising to a shout as I held them out and shook them in the air. “All these people, all they want is for their books to get read!”

“Guys, chill out!” snapped Phil. “Hit the peace pipe. Or take it into the hallway.” He said into his phone, “Yeah, no, just the usual riffraff that can’t handle their drink.”

Lon sat staring at the floor. His heavy girth weighted the bed down low, and I had the thought that it must be really difficult to go through life so obese. “I’m just trying to live my life,” he said. “What do people want from me.”

We fell into a stalemate. In the end, even if Lon shitted on some people’s heads, it wasn’t genocide. It was extremely fucking lame, is what it was, and truly hurtful to some, I was sure, having witnessed just the tiniest bit of his casual destruction firsthand, but he wasn’t prostituting ten-year-old girls, or abducting family pets, or selling guns to gangs—he was organizing failed literary conventions.

“Leave my room or I’m gonna call Security,” he said at last.

That pissed me off. “You know,” I said to him, “the only motherfucker who’s more of a loser than you is me. ’Cause I’m the one who’s gonna spend my life following you, hounding you, harassing you, dirtying your name, and mailing you bottles of pee, until I shut you down.”

“Aaiiieeeeeeee!” screamed Phil suddenly, from between us. He slid from the near bed, by the TV, where he’d been sitting, down to the floor, hands over his face. “You can’t leave that guy alone!” he wailed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” Derek Fisher had just drained a long three for the Lakers to send the game into overtime; they kept replaying the shot from different angles in slo-mo. “Fuck this,” he said, “I’m going downstairs to watch. You guys and your lovers’ spat, you’re bringing me down. It’s bad juju.” He grabbed a beer from the minibar and padded his way out the door, letting it slam behind him.

Somehow, with Phil gone, the room felt suddenly tense and unpredictable. Lon looked at me, upset, angry, and scared, as though I might rush him. “Well,” he said, wobbly voiced. “What happens now?”

“Here’s what happens, I think. I’ll tell you. Actually, one of two things.” I was making this up as I went along. “The second thing, what I don’t want, is—we fight. You’re a pretty big dude, and I don’t want to fight you, you’ll probably get some licks in, but I’ll warn you, I’m wily, I know how to inflict damage, and I fight like a cornered animal. But that’s no good for either of us. If you agree to the first thing, we don’t have to go to the second.”

“I can’t shut down the contests,” he said. “I wrote freelance for twelve years. I basically lived out of my car. I’m not going back to that.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s not what I was asking. Here’s what I’m asking.” The room seemed to tilt on its side, and I wondered if my wooziness might be due to a loss of blood. “I’m asking you to drink that bottle of pee, right now,” I said. “Every drop.”

He lifted the bottle close to his face, as though mulling it over. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Why do you want me to drink pee?”

“Everyone leaves your shitty conferences feeling burned. I want you to see what it feels like to get a bad taste in your mouth. A bad taste you’ll never forget.”

“Huh.” He slowly unscrewed the cap off the bottle and bent his head to take a whiff. Deeply revolted, he grimaced and screwed the cap back on. “I would throw up,” he said. “I can’t drink this whole thing.” He took a quick gander around the room, as though sizing up what objects close at hand—a lamp? an ashtray?—could be used as weapons, if things took that sort of turn.

“Drink half, then. Half is enough.” I scowled and took an imposing step closer.

“Oh God,” he said, burying his face in one of his meaty palms. He took a long, staggered breath, and shook his head back and forth.
“Fuuuuuuck.”
It seemed to me that somehow I’d gotten through to him, and that for the first time, whatever regret he must have had for his writing contest scams was finally beginning to surface. As he sat there, head bowed, I felt a burst of quiet satisfaction. But still, I intended to follow through with my improvised punishment. “Go on,” I said. “Bottoms up.”

Lon raised his head and stared at the pile of books I’d pulled from my backpack. “Look,” he said. “Here’s another idea. You want people to read those books so bad? Fine. I’ll read ’em.” Quietly, he went on. “I know I can run these conferences better. It’s just, I’m only one person.”

It rankled me that he was still ducking responsibility by making excuses, but he had a tone of genuine self-reflection that took me by surprise. “What are you saying?” I asked.

“I’m saying I can’t drink this bottle, but if you’ll give me a pass, I’ll make some changes. And I’ll start by reading those books.”

I thought about that for a moment, hesitant to let him off easy. But I wasn’t sure that drinking my pee was going to lead him to any greater epiphanies. “You’ll read every one of these books?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Every one. Hand ’em here.”

“What about all the other books people send you?” I thought of my dad’s essay collection,
Brooklyn Boy
, which had surely been tossed in a Dumpster as soon as his check had been cashed.

Lon nodded. “I’ll make sure they get read. That was the whole idea, from the beginning, to help people get their books out there. Mine, too.” He rubbed his ear.

“Fine,” I said at last. I picked up
Aiden’s Quest
. “You can start with this one. I met the woman who wrote it. She’s here. Downstairs. She entered it in your contest.”

“What did she win?”

“Third place, I think. Historical fiction.”

“Let me see.”

I limped over and passed him the pages. He turned it over in his hands, reading the back cover. “This sounds more like fantasy,” he said. “Historical fiction is more … historical.” He heaved a breath. “All right, I’ll read this one first.”

“Cover to cover.”

“Yeah. Cover to cover.” He gave me a look. “No more pee?”

“No more pee.”

“You’re fuckin’ crazy,” he said, starting to laugh. “Fuckin’ nutjob. Okay, I guess we’ve got a deal. Shit.” He scooted up his bed toward the nightstand, where he’d mashed out a joint, sparked it, took a long hit, blew smoke toward the ceiling, and leaned back on a pile of pillows, fumbled a pair of glasses onto his face, and turned to page one. “Can you turn that TV down?” he said. “I can’t hear myself think.”

I reached for the remote and settled down on the other bed to watch the end of the basketball game.

“You better wash out that cut,” said Lon. “You think you need to get it stitched up?”

“I don’t think so.” But I got up and went to the bathroom to wash it out and wrap it in a fresh cloth. When I came back, Lon was making little interested reading sounds—a
“Huh,”
a
“Hmmm,”
and a chuckle.

I poured myself a nightcap in a plastic disposable cup—Canadian Club over ice—and sat on the edge of the bed, sipping it down, watching the rest of the overtime, while Lon, in his bed, slowly turned through the pages of
Aiden’s Quest
. With thirty seconds to play, Derek Fisher nailed another three to put the Lakers up, and they went on to win by seven, taking a three-games-to-one series lead, effectively crushing the Magic’s hopes of a championship. I thought of Phil, down in the bar, or maybe back in his own room, glumly removing his Turkoglu jersey, and starting to drunkenly prepare for his presentation the next day at Nextel HQ. Sometimes in life things didn’t go the way you hoped and imagined they would, I thought, resting my head back, but still, somehow, it all worked out okay.

I woke up hours later. It was maybe three or four in the morning. The room was dark and quiet, apart from flashes from the TV and the hushed voices of golf announcers. My head was pounding, my hand burned where I’d sliced it, and my ankle ebbed with a low-grade but steady ache. In his bed, turned away, webbed in sheets, hair flopped this way and that, Lon breathed heavily, a half-snore.

I stood up and inspected my hand. The wound had closed and was matted with dried blood, which looked black in the TV’s dark flicker. I headed for the door. Just as I reached for the handle and turned it, a sound startled me from the far side of the room.

“Hey,” Lon whispered in the darkness. “Hey, is that you? Guess what?”

“What?” For some reason, I was whispering, too.

“I finished that book.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s really good.”

“Yeah. Yeah, guess what?”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you something,” Lon said. “I got to tell you. It was pretty good.”

Just past Flagstaff he appeared, a tiny, grizzled man on the shoulder of Highway 64 with his thumb out, wearing a backpack bigger than himself. I pulled over a little ways past him and climbed out of the car and watched him waddle toward me. A tin canteen and a pair of hiking boots with red laces dangled from his pack, clanking together every couple of steps. His short white hair, creased face smudged with dirt, rumpled jeans, and oil-stained sneakers gave him the look of a homeless track coach.

“Young man, thanks for stopping!” he said, thrusting out a hand. “Name’s John Molloy. Where ya headed, where ya headed?”

“The Grand Canyon,” I said.

His eyes sparkled. “Bingo! Me too!”

In the car, headed west again, John told me his story. For thirty-five years he’d worked in a machine shop in Lowell, Massachusetts. But his lifelong dream was to visit the Grand Canyon. He’d read dozens of books about it, studied its geology and its history; he’d even cut out pictures from
National Geographic
and pasted them to the wall above his bed.

A few weeks before, he’d been talking about the Grand Canyon with the guys he worked with, and one of them had said, “For Chrissakes, shut up already! What is it with you? It’s always the Grand Canyon this, the Grand Canyon that. Look, you’ll never make it there, and it’s depressing to hear you go on and on about it every damn day.”

John looked at me with a mischievous glint. “So I said to him, ‘Okay, I quit.’ Turned in my tools and walked out.” He’d scraped together enough money for a Greyhound ticket as far as Amarillo, said goodbye to his mother and his teenage son, who shared his apartment, and hopped on the bus. It had taken him three days to reach Amarillo and three more days to hitchhike six hundred miles to Flagstaff. Now that he’d found a ride—me—to take him the rest of the way, he was shaking with excitement. “I can’t believe we’ll be there in less than two hours,” he said. He clapped his hands. He drummed on the dashboard. He rubbed his eyes and whistled at the sight of each towering cactus we passed. Then he peered at me. “Say, you’re pretty quiet. What you brooding about?”

I told him about my wrecked heart, the girlfriend who’d left me and moved to Scotland, how I hadn’t dated or kissed another girl in two years. And now the girl I’d flown to Arizona to see—captain of the Phoenix Suns dance team—had let me down; when I’d arrived, she’d told me about her new boyfriend, an NFL punter. It was actually the punter who’d suggested I check out the Grand Canyon. “I’ve never been more lost,” I said.

Still, I felt lucky that I was about to witness someone realize their lifelong dream. My own dreams seemed hazier and more impossible. I explained to John that I wanted to be a writer but was so caught up in an unsolvable hurt and ache, I hadn’t written a word in months.

We passed the ranger station at the outer perimeter of the park, and for the next twelve miles, as we rolled closer to the edge of the Grand Canyon, John leaned halfway out his window like a happy dog gulping up the first breezes of spring. His buzzing energy buoyed me and began to tug me from the darkness. At last we reached the first overlook, and John bounded from the car, sprinted toward the edge, and gazed out across the vast chasm for a few seconds, then turned back toward me and shot two fists skyward, eyes wet, face shining. I took a picture of him and laughed out loud, exhilarated myself. We whooped it up for a minute, alone at the top of the world.

The sun hung lower, and we hiked an hour down into the canyon. John, blissed-out and bubbly, pointed out rocks and wildlife, gushing with information. This wasn’t just run-of-the-mill tour-book stuff; it was endless. Not only was I blessed to be with someone in such a radiant state, I was also visiting the Grand Canyon with a guy who had, seriously, transformed himself into one of the world’s top experts on the Grand Canyon. Finally, he fell into a kind of stunned, contented silence, and we made our way back up to the rim. The canyon hummed at our backs.

We found the park campground and pitched a tent in the dark. It began to snow. John passed me his canteen. “Have a sip of this,” he said, grinning. “It ain’t water.”

In the morning, we drove down to the park office to see if we could stir up a job for John working trail maintenance or guiding hiking tours. The head ranger, astonished at his depth of knowledge, hired him on the spot. I bought John a few days of groceries and paid for his campsite through the weekend.

“Look,” John said, “I can’t let you just spend a hundred bucks on me. You got to take these.” He pressed his hiking boots into my hands. Before I could protest, he said, “They don’t fit me. I got the ugliest blisters you ever seen. I’ll do better on the trail in my sneakers. Here, take ’em.” He gave me a hug. “Now get on back to Chicago. I’ll hold the fort down here.”