My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (20 page)

EVANGELINE ‘SHADE’ CHRISTIE

June 19, 1977 – December 30, 1999

‘I think of you as watching from a time and space beyond the sky, a place where we might someday come’

‘Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal’

“Sorry,” Maez said softly. “I just thought you might want to see that.”

I felt a gulf of sadness open up in my chest. “How’d she die?” I asked him.

“Had a wreck on Highway 26, out toward Rincon. They added a traffic light there. A little late, though.” He seemed to gauge how affected I was, and rested a hand on my shoulder.

Was Shade Christie the Shade I’d always been searching for? Maybe. Probably. Who knows? I’ve learned more about her, and everything I learn about her makes me think that yes, I would have been crazy about her—I would have married her—I would have loved her for a thousand years. But who knows how she would’ve felt about me? She’d had a boyfriend anyway, a fairly serious one. If she hadn’t died, she probably would have ended up marrying him.

What kills me sometimes is the knowledge that she was there in Deming, still alive, the first time I visited, on my road trip with Eddie in the spring of ’99. Some nights I think about Shade Christie, haunted by the thought that I could’ve found her and we could’ve been together, if only I’d stayed in Deming and told Eddie to continue out to California without me.

These days, it still happens from time to time—I’ll get bowled over by a dizzying love for a girl I’ve only glimpsed: the bartender with tattoos on her neck who fills in some nights at the 8-Ball Saloon, just down the street from my house; a Denny’s waitress in Wheeling, West Virginia, working a mop and bucket in back when her shift is through; a girl with pink hair on the Greyhound bus from Chicago to Detroit, wearing two hoodies and listening to headphones, writing in a journal, taking long sad looks out the window at the passing scenery. Once, I would have tried to talk to each of these girls, made contact in some way, hoping to break through and build something, the way I’d left a note for the girl who worked at that Subway in Tucson. But after the night of the elk, the long drive with Sarah Culkin, and the next morning at the Desert Sky with Officer Maez, that was it for me and Shade. I’ll always love her more than anything, and I can’t help but size up any girl I hang out with and compare her to Shade, but there’s nothing much to be gained by continuing the quest. I won’t find Shade in this lifetime. Shade is dead.

That morning, after spending some time with Shade Christie’s memorial plaque, I headed back out to the parking lot with Officer Maez when he tapped my arm and pointed at something. I followed his gaze and saw, perched on a rusty post twenty feet away, a strange and beautiful owl staring back at me with whirling eyes, tender and probing. In my billowing sadness, just beginning to understand that I would never hold Shade in my arms, I had the odd but persuasive thought that Shade had died and come back to Earth in the form of this owl. I’ll always remember the way that owl looked at me.

NIBBLE, LICK, SUCK, AND FEAST

In May of 2004, a New York publisher put out a book I’d put together called
Found
, based on the annual magazine I produce, which collects love letters, to-do lists, journal entries, photos, and other personal notes and ephemera that folks around the country have plucked off the ground or the street. To help spread the word I bought a van on eBay and hit the road with my little brother for an 8-month, 50-state, 136-city tour. The publisher’s publicity team managed to get me booked on local morning TV shows in most of these cities. How it worked, I’d show up at the station around 6:30 a.m., a producer would clip a little microphone on me, and somewhere between weather and sports, one of the morning-show anchors and I would talk about the book for two to three minutes.

Early on in the tour, I took these gigs pretty seriously. After all, the publicists and TV stations were clearly doing me a huge favor by pimping the book. In Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, I made sure to arrive plenty early, act energized, and be prepared with cool
Found
notes to share. But by the third week of the trip, I was starting to wonder who exactly, if anyone, was watching the local news at 7:00 a.m.? Also, while a couple of the hosts of these shows were real cool and genuinely enthusiastic about the book, most of them didn’t get me, or the whole idea behind
Found
—yet this only increased their chipperness and jaunty dawn enthusiasm. “Those pants are so fun!” they’d say, looking me up and down. “Plaid pants! You’re fun, huh?”

What kept me excited about these TV gigs was getting to meet and hang out with the other folks who were my fellow guests on the morning shows. These were local chefs with recipes-of-the-week, mayoral candidates, a team of Irish dancers, a kid with an eighty-pound pumpkin. In Baltimore, on FOX 5’s
Good Morning Baltimore
, I did my little
Found
song and dance, and then the anchor asked me to stay on her couch while she brought on the next guest—Baltimore’s Best Mom. This was right before Mother’s Day. Baltimore’s Best Mom turned out to be an eighty-seven-year-old woman named Darnelda Cole. She sat next to me on the couch, and on the far side of her sat her fifty-year-old son, Dice. Darnelda had no idea why she’d been asked to come on TV; they’d plotted this as a surprise. The anchor asked Dice Cole to read the letter he’d written nominating his mother for the prize. Darnelda grew weepy. At last, the anchor declared Darnelda Baltimore’s Best Mom and produced an oversized plaque from somewhere and presented it to her, at which point Darnelda fell sobbing into my arms; I gave her a wild bear hug, caught up in the moment. The anchorwoman quickly joined our embrace. Dice, meanwhile, had lit up a cigarette, which an alarmed producer raced over and doused with a splash of sparkling water. Darnelda took this in and began hollering at her son and whacking him with her new plaque—“Dice, you can’t smoke in here. This is TV we’re making, what you thinking, boy! Put that damn thing out!”

There were other high points, and by high points I mean low points for the stations and their guests. In Cleveland, two city parks employees showed off an injured hawk and falcon they’d rescued and rehabilitated. Then the falcon got loose and started flapping about, crapping on everything. The anchors had to forge on through the local news and sports and weather while the falcon continued to dive-bomb them, rationing its poop so it had enough to drip a few drops on them with every sortie. It was fucking amazing. In Chicago, a young soccer champ whom they’d invited on to demonstrate his fancy moves booted a ball off the wall of the set, knocking it over backwards, revealing the fact that we were not actually in the hosts’ living room, as it might appear, but in the middle of a big, dank, concrete hangar. In Phoenix, I was sandwiched on-air between Cedric the Entertainer and the governor of Arizona. Cedric came on right before me, dropped a couple F-bombs, and then sheepishly left, telling his chaperone, “I didn’t mean to say that shit, it just came out, I swear to God!”

Often, my brother and I would do a
Found
event in one city, hit the road for seven hours, taking turns driving all night, and get to the TV station parking lot in Louisville or Milwaukee at around 4:00 a.m. for a couple hours of sleep before it was time for me to unfold myself, clomp inside all rumpled and bleary eyed, and do my thing for ninety seconds on-air. In the wee hours, security guards in the station lots would poke flashlights in our van windows and roust us, and I’d explain that I was going to be a guest on the morning show, and they’d disappear for twenty minutes to check into it, then come back and wake us again to tell us that things had checked out and everything was cool.

In Seattle, after a young security guard played this game with us, I asked him if I could come inside to use the john. We ended up talking for a while. His name was Pico. It turned out that the station was moving soon to brand-new, larger digs, and that Pico was going to be replaced by an automatic gate with a swipe card reader. Pico asked why I was going to be on the morning show and I explained to him the whole idea behind the
Found
book—all notes and letters and photos that people had found and sent in to me, little scraps that gave a glimpse into the lives of strangers. Pico got excited. He told me that earlier that very same night he’d been sifting through boxes that were being tossed out before the station’s big move, just looking for mugs, T-shirts, old calculators—anything of value—and he’d found a bunch of racy notes from the morning show’s old, dour anchorman to a young camerawoman. We galloped out back to the Dumpsters and mucked about until we found the stack of steamy pages. “You should read some of these on the show!” Pico cried. I resisted for a bit, but Pico was vehement. “This guy’s a class-A asshole,” he said. “I’m telling you. He got a janitor fired for throwing out his lucky tie that he left on the bathroom floor. She worked here eight years.”

Three hours later we were on the air, and the anchorman was turning to me with a grumpy look. “So tell me about this book. You collect trash, is that it? You like trash? Trashy trash? One person’s treasure is another’s treasure?” He might very well have been drunk at seven fifteen in the morning.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “People are finding this stuff all over the country, all over the world, really, and sending it in to me. Some of it’s hilarious, some of it’s heartbreaking. It’s amazing how powerfully you can get a sense of someone just from a little ripped piece of paper you pick up off the grass. Like
this one
, for example.” I held his note up high and read it aloud. “‘Stacey, you’ve got a rack on you, now that’s a pair. I will nibble, lick, suck, and feast on them. Quit playing hard-to-get.’”

What an expression that fellow had on his face! Back in the lobby, Pico stood with two janitors by a big TV set, and as I walked past them, out into the bright, blurry morning sun, Pico smiled, gave me a little nod, and said with quiet pleasure, “Good job, man, good job.”

My friend Tim Nordwind is the bass player for the band OK Go, and he’d been invited one Sunday night to DJ at a bar on Sunset Boulevard called Hyde Lounge; since he knew I was visiting L.A., he asked me to come down and hang. I’m usually a dive-bar sort of guy, but I’d heard that Hyde Lounge was L.A.’s fanciest, most exclusive club and I was pretty sure that getting my name on the list at Hyde Lounge would impress Missy Freeze, the beautiful blond-haired girl I’d met earlier in the week. Missy had grown up in rough-and-tumble Youngstown, Ohio, but now lived in Beverly Hills and worked in special promotions for St. Pauli Girl, the beer, which meant that she dressed up as the St. Pauli Girl at conventions, movie premieres, outdoor rock concerts, and other events and served beer to people. I’m always drawn to girls in the service industry—waitresses, baristas, bartenders, concierges, strippers—basically anyone who’s working for tips. I dream of burrowing through their lacquered shell of professional friendliness to investigate the soulful edges I glimpse underneath.

OMG,
Missy texted back instantly.
How’d you get on the list at Hyde???!!!

Her excitement was promising, and at dinner she amazed me with stories of her childhood in Youngstown among hardened pool-hall types with names like Wrench, Smoke, and Burn, but once we were through the doors at Hyde, she saw a guy she recognized, handsome and nattily dressed, and whisked off with him upstairs without a look back. I kicked it briefly with Tim in the DJ booth, but he was busy spinning records, so I left him alone and skulked around the bar for a half hour, sipping a twenty-dollar drink, half-looking for Missy, and soaking up the atmosphere—young Hollywood agents in silver suits mixing it up with waifish models in slinky dresses. At thirty-three, I was probably the oldest person in the room, and I felt myself attracting odd looks, like an old, craggy barfly who’s sure to cause a fight.

In a dark corner, looking equally lonesome, was Pau Gasol, the Spanish basketball star who’d just been traded to the Lakers. I asked if I could join him, and for twenty minutes we chatted amiably about Barcelona (he confessed to bouts of homesickness) and absently watched as his new teammate, Sasha Vujacic, swayed on the dance floor with a girl in high heels he’d apparently just met, relentlessly sucking face. I explained to Pau the term “sucking face” and told him that I’d always hated it because it seemed vulgar, when kissing can be so tender and exquisite. But he argued that in this instance it was fiercely apt. He repeated it a few times, tickled by the expression: “‘Sucking face.’ Wait, is it ‘Sucking
the
face?’”

“No, just ‘sucking face.’”

Finally, Vujacic broke off and headed for the john, and I caught sight of Missy on the dance floor with the guy she’d bumped into, laughing and smiling, tugging at his tie.

“That’s her!” I cried to Pau, pointing.

“Who? The girl you were telling me about? Oh shit, that’s not good.” The guy had pulled her close, and as we looked on, they began to furiously make out. Pau shook his head solemnly. “Sorry, man,” he said, downing the rest of his drink. “Damn. ‘Sucking the face.’”

*

Missy, I figured, could find her own way home. After a couple of shots with Pau, I barged out of Hyde and on the sidewalk out front ran into two black teenagers selling bootlegged hip-hop CDs. We talked for a couple of minutes and they introduced themselves as Tito and Score. Tito was the wilder of the pair, light skinned, with long dreadlocks. He asked if I played an instrument and revealed that he was starting a metal band, though he still needed a drummer, bassist, and guitarist (he would supply all the vocals). Score, dark and gangly, stood shyly behind him, nodding along. They said they’d been drifting around the country and now were headed north, toward Canada. Their next stop, they hoped, was the Bay Area. As it happened, I’d decided in the previous few minutes—as I’d watched Missy swirling tongues with a guy who hadn’t just bought her dinner or gotten her into Hyde Lounge—that L.A. had grown old and it was time to head for San Francisco to check in with some friends up there. I gave Tito and Score my phone number. “Call me tomorrow,” I told them. “You guys can ride with me.”