My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (22 page)

In a way, this was hardly unexpected, and I didn’t so much hurt as feel profoundly tired. Still, I wished I’d ditched Missy at Sparky’s so Hakim could’ve slept on the couch instead, while I curled up on the thick rug across the room. It sucked that he was fending for himself in an unknown city while the St. Pauli Girl soaked her feet in a tub. Weirdly, though, even as I felt burnt and rejected by Missy, my tenderness for her grew. I had the sense that Martin had been the one to break things off with her before, and that by trying to rekindle their romance, she was putting herself in a painful and vulnerable position.

I followed her back to the living room and we arranged ourselves on the sofa, head-to-toe. I clasped her feet in my hands and caressed them and kissed them. They were like warm, polished ivory. She held my feet, too, and caressed them and even kissed them. It was oddly intimate and ecstatic.

I thought about Hakim and his journey north. I wondered if he was still in that booth at Sparky’s, or if he’d left and was roaming the city. I could picture him walking up Market Street as night faded and morning edged in, all the way downtown, while bits of trash and clutter kicked against the curbs and skidded across the sidewalk as though pulled by strings, players in a grand choreography. His wanderings reminded me of my own wanderings, and I hoped and prayed that he would make it to Canada.

He never did.

*

Three years later, I was in Honolulu, loping down a dark beach around midnight with a few drinks in me, feeling sorry for myself for being all alone in such a tropical paradise, when I stumbled upon a sprawling party in the sand: a circle of tiki torches; a hundred kids dancing to old-school hip-hop. Not a tourist vibe, these were locals: artists, college kids, surf rats. Someone handed me a beer, and I stood on the edge of the circle, brooding on things. In the middle of the party, a few lanky guys with dreadlocks stoked a fire. Deeply tanned, bare-legged girls with hoodies over their swimsuits clustered around them, laughing as they passed a couple of joints back and forth. I watched the DJ on the far side, behind his turntables, juke his shoulders and pump his arms, and felt jealous of the guy—it seemed like he’d found his place in the world, while I was as unmoored as ever. The allure of being the DJ finally registered for me—you can be with others and be alone at the same time, and feel good about it. As I continued to watch him, he turned my way with a smile, and his features melted from those of a stranger into those of a friend, and I realized that—unfathomably—it was Hakim. “Hakim!” I rushed over and gave him an insane hug. “What are you doing here?” I shouted in his ear, incredulous.

“Oh, what’s up, Davy,” he said. “Just spinning for another half hour or so. Then I’ll probably get something to eat.” He seemed unfazed by the serendipity of running into each other years after we’d met, a couple thousand miles across the globe.

Later, near the University of Hawaii campus, on the quietest corner of a rowdy intersection, we sat on a curb with falafel sandwiches, while stray dogs and drunk students weaved past, and Hakim caught me up on his journeys. He’d spent his first two months in the Bay living at a homeless shelter for older teens, and then had hit it off with a graphic designer with whom he sometimes played chess in the park. The guy had found him work in his office as a receptionist, which after a few months Hakim managed to parlay into an entry-level design job. It turned out he was a natural. When the company relocated to New York, he’d made the move, too.

Hakim told me about going to visit his dad for the first time in Newark. “I don’t know what I was expecting,” he said. “But this wasn’t it.” His dad had opened the door, stepped outside, spoken with him warily for a minute on the front stoop, and sent him on his way. “He knew who I was, I think. He said he knew who I was. But what kind of guy does that, his own flesh and blood?” Hakim’s voice cracked, even as he claimed not to care. “Well, it’s his life, I could give a fuck.”

Hakim liked being part of a team, and the people at work told him he showed great promise, but life in an office wasn’t for him. About a year ago, he said, he’d come to Hawaii on vacation with a musician friend, and they’d both decided to stay. Hakim found some freelance design work with local businesses, launched a DIY music label, and over the past few months had finally carved out a niche for himself as a DJ, spinning at bars and small clubs all over the island, even flying to Maui for a monthly gig. Not bad at age twenty-two. He had a tight crew of friends and shared a house with twelve of them deep in the mountain jungle, a few miles outside of town. His sister was planning to join him in a few months, once she finished with high school back home in Vegas. Though he’d never reached Canada, his dream of finding community and creative fulfillment seemed—against tall odds—to have been rapturously realized, which gave me a prolonged, satisfying rush. We giggled, thinking back on the night we’d met, and our overnight drive from L.A to the Bay with Missy Freeze.

“You still with that girl?” he asked.

“Never was.” I took a breath. “Well, kissed her feet once.” I languished in the memory’s bittersweetness.

Hakim cocked his head to the side. “You know,” he said, “I still don’t really know what I’m doing, or what life is all about, but, man, I was pretty lost back then, and I’m not as lost now. I keep telling my sister: There’s no key to the universe, you just have to point your way in one direction, keep going, keep going, keep going, and see what happens.”

“Canada or bust,” I said.

Hakim smiled. “That’s right. Canada or bust.”

“Yo, look at that white dude.”

“Dang, he all
naked
!”

I opened my eyes and saw two young teenagers peering at me from a distance of about fifteen feet, their necklace chains dazzling in the blinding morning sun. An instant later, I realized with a jolt that the nude white dude they spoke of was me.

“Watch out, he waking up!” one of them cried, and they tore off out of sight in genuine terror. I sat up hazily and looked around. I was in a tiny park somewhere in New York City—a few wooden benches, some trees, a drinking fountain. Beyond, the world bustled, honked, and shrieked. Whatever extremely drunken notion had inspired me to abandon my clothes the night before, the logic was lost on me as the glamourlessness of my situation slowly dawned. I was completely naked except for a pair of dirty socks—no money, no MetroCard, no cell phone, just a wailing headache.

I cobbled together a plan of action—first, find some clothes; second, figure out where I was; third, find a way back to my friend Seth’s apartment in the East Village, which was home for my six-week stay in the city. But how to find clothes? I sifted glumly through a pair of trash cans at the center of the park—no pants, no sheets, no newspapers, only a giant pizza box. I wrapped the thing around me and ventured out of the park to the crowded sidewalk. Shoppers, students, and businessmen streamed past without even a curious glance. Naked people, I soon discovered, are simply not given much credibility when they appeal for help from strangers on the street.

I stopped an enormous man walking a tiny dog. “Listen,” I said, “I know this sounds crazy, but last night was my birthday—well, today is my birthday, but we celebrated last night—and, well, I’m naked now. Can you help me? I need some pants. Do you live around here?” The guy wheeled spryly past me, dragging his little dog, which began to bark at me furiously as though outraged by my nakedness.

Mutts aside, it was like being given the silent treatment by the whole damn world. Everyone burrowed into their headphones as they passed me and looked dead ahead. I couldn’t even get anyone to stop long enough to explain my predicament; instead, folks clamped cell phones to their ears and said things like, “Wait, I can’t hear you, there’s a weird naked guy trying to talk to me.”

In the peripheral attentions of people rushing from one place to another, I registered no differently than any other skinny, bald hobo dressed in dirty socks and a pizza box, who, if engaged, would probably ask for eight bucks or want to discuss aliens, secret gamma rays, and CIA plots. Speaking calmly and sanely only seems to amplify your deranged vibe when your outfit comes from Sbarro’s.

Shopkeepers shooed me away from their shops. One actually waved a broom. “Go home!” he said, as though I was a stray cat. I tried my luck at the entrance to an office building. “Look,” I said to the security guard, “I’m in a ridiculous situation. If you could fish something out of the Lost and Found for me, I’d be hugely grateful.”

“We’re not in that business,” he said.

“Well, what business are you in?” I shouted. “The business of ruining my life?!” I felt like I was going mad. Soon I’d forget about pants; I’d only be concerned with CIA plots. “Come on,” I pleaded, suddenly desperate, “I’m just a regular person. Okay, a regular person who
happens
to be naked. Man, help me out! It’s my birthday!”

A squad car pulled to the curb and I raced over. The officer on the passenger side rolled his window down about three-quarters of an inch, wary, perhaps, of pee. “We can arrest you or you can get out of here,” he said.

“Please, sir, don’t you have a blanket in your car, an extra towel in the trunk, anything at all? Please help me out.”

I saw then that he was eating a slice of pizza; in the same moment, he took a closer look at what I was wearing—this seemed, somehow, to cause great alarm. His face darkened. “I can arrest you, buddy, that’s all I can do.”

I retreated back to my bench in the park, ashamed, frustrated, and depressed. My self-identity was shifting. I felt like the kind of person who gets drunk and ends up naked in a park with just their socks on, which I now was. I didn’t know what to do. My friends were all at school or at work; I couldn’t barge in to their offices like this. Their cell phone numbers were all stored on my cell phone, I didn’t know any of them by heart. The only numbers I knew were ones like the request line for the crappy alternative rock station I always listened to at home in Michigan, or my grandma. I imagined how that collect call might play out. “Hi, Grandma, no, everything’s fine, I just lost my cell phone. Listen, quick favor. Go to Kinko’s, okay? Kinko’s. It’s a copy shop. Ask them to help you create an e-mail account, I need you to e-mail some of my friends in New York and tell them to come meet me somewhere. Yeah, e-mail. You know? Okay, look, at Kinko’s they’ll know. E-mail. No—‘
E
’! As in ‘Emperor’s New Clothes.’”

Grim reality sank in. The only solution was to somehow make it to Seth’s apartment building and find a way to get in. I was at the lowest tip of Manhattan, a few miles from Thirteenth Street and First Avenue. No cabbie was going to stop for me. The subway felt out of the question. I’d have to hoof it.

It was a long walk. After a dozen blocks, I got sick of holding the pizza box awkwardly around myself and pitched it. The breeze felt good. I started singing out loud a little. No one seemed to notice me or my nakedness. In Ann Arbor, where I grew up, it was a tradition each year after the last day of classes for the college kids to run a nude midnight romp through town called the Naked Mile. For a youngster, the night was always full of marvel—who knew that private parts came in so many different shapes and colors and sizes? But what I loved most was after the race was done, the way naked folks kept milling around town for hours, naked at the ATM, naked going into Taco Bell, naked tossing a frisbee, like it wasn’t no thang. All those naked people made me—the clothed one—feel like an oddball. Clothes, and taboos against nudity, seemed, for a moment each year, absurd. Striding up Broadway, flopping about, nakedness made sense to me. It was my birthday; I’d wear my birthday suit if I goddamn pleased!

At last I made it to Seth’s apartment. After an hour on the front stoop, his upstairs neighbor came home, recognized me, and let me inside the building. Soon I had on a pair of fresh boxers, sweatpants, a T-shirt, and clean socks. It was both a tremendous relief and a strange, fleeting disappointment to be back in the land of the clothed. I ordered a pizza.

Nobody wakes up and thinks,
Today is the day I’m gonna cheat on my girlfriend
(or boyfriend or husband or wife). The shit just kinda happens—a series of small, bad decisions that leads to one larger, pivotal collapse. There are some guys who do it once, and then break down to their girlfriend or spouse in a fit of anguished remorse. Life really sucks for them for a long time after that—nothing is more difficult than trying to recover a broken trust, though I’m told that if you put in enough work the eventual rewards can be worthwhile. Then there are the rest of us, who carry our treacheries in silence for weeks, months, and years at a time, like a low-grade fever, always aware of our own rotten cores, but not too caught up in it all to blunt the joys of everyday life. Still, when you’re cheating on someone, whether it’s now and then or some ongoing affair, it’s hard not to feel shitty about yourself, self-poisoned, and want to do something self-destructive from time to time, like close your eyes on the highway and count to ten, or drink gallons of whiskey at the bar on a Sunday night until you hit the floor.

It was 2002. I’d moved back to Michigan and was living in my folks’ basement, though I was close to thirty years old. Six blocks away was a bar called Brewskie’s, in a drab, frayed strip mall on Packard, crammed between Aladdin’s Market, which sold Middle Eastern food products, and a defunct pet store called Age of Aquarium, where I’d spent hundreds of hours as a kid, watching the old man who owned the place feed spiders and baby mice to the snakes, and peering in at kittens, rabbits, and ferrets stuck in their cages while they peered right back out at me. As kids, me and my friends had no malls to go to within easy reach, no Coney Island (where my dad and his friends had strutted their stuff)—all we had were the dilapidated shops on that sad two-block stretch, each with its own unique, unidentifiably sour odor—DJ’s Pizza, East Ann Arbor Hardware, Orange Panda Chinese Restaurant, G & H Barbers, Video Watch, Mary’s Chicken & Fish. To this day, I’ll meet people who grew up on the southeast part of town, and we’ll go back and forth, gleefully reciting the names of those decrepit stores as if they were old friends (or at least old, friendly neighborhood hobos). What’s weird, though—surprising, unlikely—is that most of those places are still there, including Brewskie’s, the old, windowless bar, which was the one place as kids that we were never allowed inside, and therefore the subject of endless fascination.