My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (2 page)

All of a sudden, my little brother, Peter, popped into the room. He sized things up for a second—my mom yammering away into the buzzing receiver. “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.

“Mom thinks she’s talking to Donald Chin’s mom. I had to do it so I could go to Mike Kozura’s house tonight. I’ll kill you if you tell.”

The genius of it made Peter smile. “Then I’m coming, too.”

“You can’t! It’s
my
friends.”

“Want me to tell? I’ll tell.”

My mom, done talking, was passing the phone back to me.

“Okay, fine,” I said to Peter. “But this is bullshit.” I put the phone to my ear and pretended to talk to Mrs. Chin. Then I told my mom that Mrs. Chin suggested I bring Peter along.

“That’s a great idea,” my mom said into the empty phone. “I’ll drop them off in an hour.”

“Wait,” I told my mom, before hanging up. “Mrs. Chin wants to know if you can stop on the way and pick up some Soft Batch chocolate chip cookies.”

*

That was the beginning; it was also the beginning of the end. The phone started “ringing” all the time—Mrs. Chin, hosting another sleepover; a teacher asking me to bring twenty bucks to school the next day for a field trip; an elderly neighbor asking if I could help her move boxes when I was supposed to be doing homework (really I was at the arcade playing Gauntlet). The phone was like a magic wand—every day I was creating new, alternate realities for my mom. I’d been acting as her ears my whole life, and she’d learned to trust me and rely on me. Whatever I told her I was hearing through the phone, she took as the golden truth. The only limits seemed to be the boundaries of my imagination.

But it didn’t last long. My brother Peter took up the game, too, and we began to fight viciously about each other’s technique—we each felt that the other was being too clumsy and over-the-top, and that we’d get found out and our fantastic potion would be gone. Soon enough, our older brother got into the act, and at that point we all kind of went nuts, abusing the phone trick like a stolen credit card you try and max out before it goes dead.

It went dead on my watch. My mom was on the phone, thinking she was talking to my dad, who was visiting his sister in Atlanta. My dad, as I wove it, was trying to convince her to buy me this elastic net from a sports catalog that you could pitch a baseball into, and have the net fling it back to you. “It just doesn’t make sense,” she kept saying to the buzzing receiver. “Honey, it costs
seventy-nine dollars
. He can go to the schoolyard and pitch into the backstop. We just don’t have the money.” But my dad was insistent. He beseeched her to make the purchase. After all, he pointed out in my favor, hadn’t I worked my butt off in school the past year? Hadn’t I worked hard around the house? I deserved a special reward, right? Hadn’t I … hadn’t I …
saved a pink butterfly from cruel hands of evil
?

It was at that exact moment that my dad—my real dad—walked in the front door, home from his trip two days early. The look on my mom’s face was a look of such profound shock and confusion—think Socrates at the San Dimas Mall—that I immediately began to cry. All my feelings of betrayal and shame poured out of me and I spent the next hour and a half in tears, lined up next to my brothers on the floor of the dining room like three broken jailbirds hauled back in after an escape attempt gone rotten. My mom was furious—and maybe at the same time a bit dazzled by the extent of our chutzpah and ingenuity. She slammed us and stretched us until every invented phone call had been dragged out into the light. I even came clean about Mrs. Machida and Dr. Burke. My mom kept putting her head in both hands and moaning, though sometimes it seemed like she was laughing, too.

“You guys are all in more trouble than you’ve ever known,” she said at last. “You’re obviously grounded for the rest of the year. And there’ll be more to it than that. I might need some time to dream up a punishment harsh enough to fit the crime.” She surveyed us. “Is there anything else you need to tell me about? I want to know now. No more surprises.”

Peter’s sad, weary gaze had come to rest on the doorframe between the dining room and the kitchen, where the painted-over doorbell was tucked. He raised his hand and pointed, too deflated to even sign to her.

“Wait!” my dad cried. “Don’t get carried away! You got to leave us something.”

So we kept the doorbell a secret, though our joy at ringing it never felt quite the same. The dog barking, and my mom quizzically staring out the front door, only reminded us of our earlier treacheries. The magic was gone.

*

There’s a funny coda to this story. Twenty years have passed, and I’ve been typing this whole thing at the cabin in the woods where my mom spends her summers these days. I told her I was writing something about what it was like to grow up with a deaf mom, so all day she’s been peeking over my shoulder to see what it’s all about, and reading passages here and there each time I get up to put on another CD or get another beer. Still, I didn’t know how she’d feel when she learned about the doorbell. Would there be something satisfying about the mystery being solved? Or would it be a disappointment? Was there, perhaps, something more powerful and alluring about the mystery itself? She’d always had such a glowing sense of wonder about those phantoms knocking at the door—to reveal the secret just now, a few minutes ago, as she sat close, reading over my shoulder, her eyes focused and glinting, a strange smile on her face, made me feel like an old silent-movie villain crushing a child’s toy.

But here’s what my mom just told me: “I knew. I knew about the doorbell. I knew it was your game. It was your game, but that’s the thing, it was my game, too.”

On February 14, 2000, I took the Greyhound bus from Detroit to Buffalo to visit a girl named Lauren Hill. Not Lauryn Hill the singer, who did that cover of “Killing Me Softly,” but another Lauren Hill, who’d gone to my high school, and now, almost ten years later, was about to become my girlfriend, I hoped. I’d seen her at a party when she was home in Michigan over the holidays, and we’d spent the night talking and dancing. Around four in the morning, when the party closed down, we’d kissed for about twelve minutes out on the street, as thick, heavy snowflakes swept around us, melting on our eyebrows and eyelashes. She’d left town the next morning, and in the six weeks since, we’d traded a few soulful letters and had two very brief, awkward phone conversations. As Valentine’s Day came near, I didn’t know if I should send her flowers, call her, not call her, or what. I thought it might be romantic to just show up at her door and surprise her.

I switched buses in Cleveland, and took a seat next to an ancient-looking black guy who was in a deep sleep. Twenty minutes from Buffalo, when darkness fell, he woke up, offered me a sip of whiskey from his coat pocket, and we started talking. His name was Vernon. He told me that when midnight rolled around, it was going to be his hundred-and-tenth birthday.

“A hundred and ten?”
I squealed, unabashedly skeptical.

Happy to prove it, he showed me a public housing ID card from Little Rock, Arkansas, that listed his birth date as 2/15/90.

“Who was president when—”

“Benjamin Harrison,” he said quickly, cutting me off before I was even done with my question, as though he’d heard it many times before. I had no clue if this was true, but he winked and popped a set of false teeth from his mouth, and in the short moment they glistened in his hand, it seemed suddenly believable that he was a hundred and ten, and not just, like, eighty-nine. His bottom gums, jutting tall, were shaped like the Prudential “Rock” and were the color of raw fish, pink and red with dark-gray speckles. The skin on his face was pulled taut around his cheekbones and eye sockets, as leathery and soft-looking as one of Satchel Paige’s baseball mitts in its display case at Cooperstown.

I found myself telling Vernon all about Lauren Hill and explained how nervous I was to see her—surely he’d have some experience he could draw on to help me out. I told him I thought I was taking a pretty risky gamble by popping up in Buffalo unannounced. Things were either going to be really fucking awesome or really fucking weird, and I figured I’d probably know which within the first couple of minutes I saw her. Vernon, it turned out, was in a vaguely similar situation. After a century-plus of astonishingly robust health, he’d been ailing the past eighteen months, and before he kicked off he wanted to make amends with his great-granddaughter, who he was the closest to out of all of his relatives. But, he admitted, he’d let her down so many times—with the drinking, the drugs, and even stealing her money and kitchen appliances—that she might not be willing to let him past the front door. Twice he used my cell phone to try calling her but nobody answered. So much for sage advice.

We both got quiet and brooded to ourselves as the bus rolled off the freeway ramp and wound its way through empty downtown streets, lined with soot-sprayed mounds of snow and ice. Buffalo in winter is a bleak Hoth-like wasteland, and the only sign of life I saw was a pair of drunks who’d faced off in front of an adult bookstore and begun to fight, staggering like zombies. One of them had a pink stuffed animal and was clubbing the other in the face with it. A steady snow began to fall, and I felt a wave of desperate sorrow crash over me. Whatever blind optimism I’d had about the night and how Lauren Hill might receive me had been lost somewhere along the way (maybe at the rest stop in Erie, Pennsylvania, in the bathroom stall with shit smeared on the walls). The trip, I realized now, was a mistake, but at the same time I knew that the only thing to do was to go ahead with my fucked-up plan anyway and go surprise Lauren, because once you’re sitting there and you’ve got a needle in your hands, what else is there to do but poke your finger and see the blood?

*

At the Greyhound station, a sort-of friend of mine named Chris Henderson was there to pick me up in a shiny black Ford Explorer with only four hundred miles on the odometer but its front end and passenger side bashed to shit. “You get in a rollover?” I asked him, after hopping in up front.

“Naw, I just boosted this bitch yesterday in Rochester, it was already like this. Who’s your friend?”

“This is Vernon. He’s gonna ride with us, if that’s cool. In a few hours it’s gonna be his hundred-and-tenth birthday.”

“No shit?” Chris glanced in the rearview and nodded to Vernon, in the backseat. “Fuck if I make it to twenty-five,” he said, gunning it out of the lot.

Chris was the kind of guy who always made these sorts of claims, hoping, perhaps, to sound tougher, but really he was a sweetheart with a swashbuckler’s twinkle who was rarely in serious danger and probably had decades of fun times ahead of him, if he could stay out of prison. He had pale white skin, a rash of acne on his neck, and his own initials carved into his buzz-cut hair in several places. He looked Canadian and sounded Canadian and was indeed a Canuck—he’d grown up on the meanest street of Hamilton, Ontario, and, as he’d told me more than a few times, he and his older brother had stolen seventy-six cars before finally getting caught when Chris was nineteen. Chris did the time—three years—while his brother skated. Then Chris moved in with an uncle in Charlotte and had gotten a job as an airline reservationist, which was how I’d met him a couple of years before. He had a gregarious nature, and after we’d found ourselves in deep conversation while I was buying tickets over the phone, he’d come to Chicago a few weekends in a row to pursue his dream of becoming a stand-up comic and stayed on my couch. The problem was that he was absolutely sorry as a stand-up comic, just woefully bad. I saw him perform once, at the Improv Olympic at Clark and Addison, and it was one of the hardest, saddest things I’ve ever had to watch—someone’s dream unraveling and being chopped dead with each blast of silence that followed his punch lines. But where I would’ve been destroyed by this, Chris was over it by the next morning, and freshly chipper. He told me the lesson he’d learned was that he needed to focus on his strengths, and he knew himself to be an ace car thief. Before long, he’d moved to Buffalo and was working at his older brother’s “mechanic” shop. When I called and told him I was coming to town, and explained why, he told me he actually knew Lauren Hill, because for a while he’d been a regular at Freighter’s, the bar where she worked, though he doubted she knew him by name, and anyway, he said, he wasn’t allowed in there anymore because he’d left twice without paying when he’d realized at the end of the night that he’d left his cash at home. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “That girl’s beautiful. Every guy who wanders into that damn bar, they leave in love with her.”

Vernon had asked if he could roll with us for a bit while he kept trying to reach his great-granddaughter. If nothing else, he suggested, we could drop him off later at the YMCA and he’d track her down the next morning. He sat quietly in the backseat, looking out the window, while we cruised toward the east side of town, running every sixth light, Chris catching me up on some of his recent escapades, half-shouting to make himself heard over the blare of a modern-rock station out of Niagara Falls, Ontario, that slipped in and out of range. “Hey, check this out,” he said. He reached beneath the driver’s seat and passed me a fat roll of New York Lottery scratch tickets. “You can win like ten grand!” he cried. “Scratch some off if you want.”

“Where’d you get these, man?”

“Get this—they were in the car when I got it! Just sitting in the backseat! I already scratched off some winners, like forty bucks’ worth.” He passed me a tin Buffalo Sabres lighter from his coat pocket, its sharp bottom edge gummed with shavings from the tickets he’d scratched. “Go on,” he said, “make us some money.”

I tore off a long band of tickets and handed them back to Vernon, along with a quarter from the center console, and Chris cranked up the volume until the windows shook and piloted us through his frozen, desolate town toward Lauren Hill’s apartment, singing along to the radio, while me and Vernon scratched away:
“You make me come.
You make me complete.
You make me completely miserable.”
I looked up and saw him grinning at me and nodding his head, as if to ask, “Doesn’t this song fucking rock?” I grinned and nodded back, because yes, in a crazy way it kind of did. A barely perceptible but definitely perceptible drip of hopefulness had started to seep back into the night.