My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (26 page)

It’s been my peculiar blessing that every time I see a beautiful girl in an airport, she ends up sitting next to me on the plane. This has led to a number of thrilling flights filled with excited conversation, followed by an exchange of e-mail addresses at baggage claim. But what do you e-mail to a girl who lives in Pensacola, Florida, or Vancouver or Dublin? Ships crossing. It never adds up to much. So it was no surprise but a kind of painful wonder when I got on the plane in Albuquerque and found myself sharing a row with the sweet and limping girl in white. She had the window, I had the aisle. Between us, her purse and my backpack shared a seat and gently caressed.

Our plane rocketed into the sky and the girl stared sadly out the window. I waited for her to glance my way so I could begin the conversation that I guessed would end painfully when we parted ways in San Diego, but she was so lost in her aching and faraway thoughts that she never turned from the window, even when the beverage cart rolled past with pretzels and Coke. To busy myself, and because it was the only other thing on my mind, I pulled out a long story I’d been working on for three weeks and had just finished that morning and printed out, and went through it, making little changes, turning the pages loudly in hopes that the girl would peek over. But my efforts seemed to go unnoticed. Her lips were pursed, her eyes cut at the clouds. In a way, she was too nicely dressed for my taste, but that bland elegance was exotic to me and made me hunger for her more. I looked back at the typed pages in my hands—I was still in that fleeting honeymoon phase you’ll sometimes have with a just-finished story, where for a moment everything about it feels perfect and snugly in place. Finally I said to the girl, “Hey, what’s your name?”

She smiled at me, which was a surprise. Her name was Kara. She was a student in Seattle. I asked about her boyfriend’s interest in planes. Boyfriend? At the check-in. Oh, no, she explained, that was only her cousin; she’d been visiting family in New Mexico. I’d thought her sadness would make conversation lurch and buckle, but everything sailed smooth as could be—she acted oddly grateful to me for the small talk, and she seemed to occasionally hold my gaze for an extra sixteenth note. But how could I parlay this chance meeting and warm chemistry into a lasting love? I told Kara I’d be right back and took the riddle with me to the back of the plane. Among portholes and strange cabinets I stretched my legs and listened to two male flight attendants tease each other about some misadventure involving a motorcycle and a birthday gift. I needed to give Kara something that would keep us in contact, but what? Then I knew at once—I’d give her the story. It would communicate something of me and, more importantly, it would give her something to respond to, a reason to stay in touch.

I glided back down the aisle and took my seat again. Kara laughed. “Wondered if you were coming back.”

“Got held up in traffic,” I said. “Listen, do you like to read?”

“What?”

“Reading, do you like to read?”

She paused and thought about it. Granted, it was a stupid question, but not a complicated one. At last she said, “No.”

“No? You don’t like to read?”

“No,” she said, apologetically. “I hate reading.”

“You hate reading.”

“I just don’t like it.”

“You just don’t like it.” I laughed. She clearly wasn’t kidding. All I could do was repeat after her, like an idiot.

“Sometimes I read magazines,” she offered hopefully. “I like to see what the models are wearing.”

Sadly, shamefully, pathetically, I forced my story on her anyway. I tried to explain what it was about, but the crashing down of my fantasies made me tongue-tied and weary. I wrote my e-mail address and my cell-phone number at the top. “In case you want to let me know what you thought of it,” I said.

Kara smiled brightly and folded the story carefully into her purse, like a drawing given to her by a retarded child. Later, I imagined, she’d rid herself of the thing in the ladies’ room trash can. Still, her eyes seemed to express to me that she wasn’t ruling out the possibility of staying in touch.

In San Diego, I was headed for baggage claim and she was off to catch her connecting flight. We hugged. She had no scent at all. I knew—for that reason, somehow—that I would never hear from her. “Keep in touch,” I said.

“I will,” she said. Then her face took on the dark look she’d had when I’d first seen her. She turned and I stood watching as she shuffled away down the long corridor until at last she disappeared out of sight.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

The morning the World Trade Center towers came down, my friend Maggie Smith was modeling for a drawing class at the University of Michigan School of Art and Design. She was naked, perched on a stool high atop a table in the middle of the room, and trying her best not to move. Without warning, a school administrator burst into the room and called the professor out into the hallway. A couple of minutes later, the professor slipped back in, ghost-faced and shaken. “Okay, listen everyone,” he said. “I’ve got an announcement to make.” He choked up a little. “The United States,” he said with great authority, “has been attacked by China.”

He went on: “New York City’s been completely destroyed. Washington, D.C., too.” A handful of students, apparently those from New York and D.C., began to sob and some fled out the door in hysterics. “Now, listen,” said the professor, his voice rising, “we can all stop what we’re doing and rush out of here and join the madness of the world … or we can stay right here for the next hour and a half and
create art
.” Half the class grabbed their packs and hurried out, but the other half stayed, and Maggie felt compelled to stay, too. Naked and terrified, tears streaming down her face, she held her pose for an hour before the professor finally relented and sent everyone on their way.

*

Meanwhile, one time zone west, I was at my apartment in Chicago, watching the news all day, teary, heartsick, and angry, though not at China. After dialing and redialing his 917 cell number for an hour, I finally reached my friend Seth in the East Village. Dazed, he described standing on the roof of his apartment building and watching the second tower fall. “It absolutely did not feel real,” he said. “I’m on my roof right now, I’m looking at this massive cloud of smoke and dust, and still, I can’t believe any of this is happening.”

I took in about eight hours of live coverage on TV, and at last shut it off and wandered outside with my tape recorder and microphone. I’d just started doing stories for the radio show
This American Life
, hosted by Ira Glass, and talking to people on the street, I imagined, was not only my job in this kind of situation but would also give me a break from the queasy sadness and horror of CNN, watching the planes hit again and again and again. Some of the folks I talked to said, “Let’s bomb ’em back to the Stone Age,” even if they weren’t sure yet who “’em” was; others were already worried about American retaliation and all of the civilians in foreign countries who were sure to suffer the consequences.

Strangely, though, many of the folks in my neighborhood had no idea that an attack had even occurred. I lived in a neighborhood occupied largely by Mexican, Polish, and Ukrainian immigrants who spoke little or no English, and dozens of times I found myself struggling to explain the events of that morning to a pair of old women wrapped in scarves, or to a group of young day laborers, sweaty and worn out from a twelve-hour shift, who all just wanted to go home and didn’t seem to believe my story. It was like trying to convince them that the Loch Ness Monster had just poked its head from the drain in my bathtub. “See, look!” I’d cry, pointing at the sky, which was ominously quiet. “All the planes have been grounded; all the airports are shut down.” But a scruffy white dude with gigantic headphones, waving around a sixteen-inch stick mic and spinning
“The sky is falling”
yarns, held as much interest to them as a discarded cigarette butt; they seemed to suspect I was either mentally ill or trying to get money out of them, or, most likely, both.

Among those who had heard, misinformation was rampant. One woman thought white supremacists were the culprits. A Turkish guy said he’d heard it was the Greeks. A pack of Cuban teenagers told me that Chicago itself had been targeted, and that the Sears Tower had been vaporized. I dragged them a half block down to the intersection of Augusta and Wood, where you could see the whole downtown skyline, and pointed out that everything was still standing. This provoked an ugly argument between them in Spanish and led to some pushing and shoving until a police car rolled by and they all split in separate directions.

When night fell, I got a call from a girl named Susannah Cotton, a sweet, pretty writer from Nashville I’d been hanging out with for the past few weeks and was deeply into but hadn’t yet kissed, and I picked up three cheap bottles of wine and hiked out to Western Avenue to see her. She poured us each a giant glass and lit a bunch of candles and we sat close on her floor as I played her some of the on-the-street interviews I’d recorded earlier in the day, which she found as moving and oddly funny as me. The mood was both somber and sort of lovey-dovey—a few times she started to tear up and I’d put an arm around her. Still, Susannah’s body language seemed to indicate a certain resistance to getting too close. She was recently out of a relationship, and she’d made it clear that she was reluctant to get involved in another anytime soon. But to me there was something meaningful about the fact that she wanted my company on a night like this. At the time, if you remember, no one knew if this was the beginning of a sustained wave of attacks on American soil or the terrorist version of a one-night stand. A frightening, mysterious end-of-days chill hung in the air like a dark mist, and there was the unspoken possibility, however fuzzy and indistinct, that all of us would be dead or colonized by Halloween.

The phone rang and Susannah jumped up to check the caller ID, then answered the cordless, “Hey, you,” and dashed into her bedroom and shut the door. This was her ex-boyfriend, I was sure. It wasn’t the first night he’d called her while I was hanging out at her place. I lay on the couch, swigging wine and listening to her speak in soft tones from her room, though I couldn’t make out the words. My brother Mike called my cell and for a half hour we compared notes on which family members we’d heard from in New York; it seemed that all of our aunts and uncles and cousins, thankfully, were safe. I hung up with Mike just as Susannah emerged from her bedroom.

“Sorry,” she said, “I was just talking to my mom. She’s pretty upset. Who were you talking to?”

I saw her lie and doubled down. “It was Ira Glass,” I said, invoking the name with careful emphasis, since I knew she was a fan. “They want me to go to New York and report on what’s happening.” This slipped out completely spontaneously, and the idea itself was somewhat ridiculous—if
This American Life
wanted folks on the ground to cover one of the biggest news stories in history, they had plenty of veteran reporters already in the area whom they could turn to. I guess at some level the hours I’d spent earlier in the day recording people on the street had lit in me the urge to head east and report from the thick of it all, and it must also have felt like one of the few things I could say in that moment to impress Susannah and get her full attention.

And it worked, kind of. For the rest of the night, she treated me like a soldier headed off to a war zone, doting on me, letting her hand rest on my arm and my shoulder and my knee. By four a.m. she invited me for the first time to stay over at her apartment, and as I lay in her bed, holding her in my arms, she even let me kiss her neck and her left ear and her cheek, but not her lips. That, I imagined, would have to wait until I came back from my phantom reporting assignment. Every fire needs room to breathe, and a week or two away, involved with what Susannah believed to be dangerous and meaningful work, seemed a surefire, unmistakable route to her heart. But with every airport shut down and a car that could barely be relied on to make it down the block, I had to wonder: How would I even get to New York?

*

They say that America was at its best in the days after September 11, but that’s not what I experienced in the late afternoon of September 12 at the Greyhound station at Harrison and Wells in downtown Chicago. People had been stranded everywhere around the country and were far from their families and understandably desperate to get home, but I wasn’t sure what was to be gained by, say, hammering a fist against the Plexiglas window at the ticket counter and shouting, “Just get me to fuckin’ Philly, you dumb motherfucker!”

Outside, arriving buses were subject to even greater abuse as they disgorged a handful of passengers and fresh mobs fought to board like it was the last chopper out of Saigon. After an hour or two caught up in this clusterfuck, I had the idea to catch a bus a few blocks west as it slowed to a stop coming off the I-94 exit ramp. I pounded on the door and when the driver opened it, I scrambled up the stairs and past him, down the aisle to the back of the bus. Once we reached the station, I took a seat vacated by a middle-aged couple, and watched out the window as the driver fended off the hordes hoping to board. A few passengers squeezed on, and a young black woman in a pink track suit took the seat next to me on the aisle and introduced herself as Laquisha.

“How’d you beat them out?” I asked, nodding toward the parking lot throngs.

“I’ve got sharp elbows,” she said. “And I gave the driver forty bucks cash.”

The guy must have been racking it up—he filled every seat and let another half dozen folks on, strewn along the aisle. In the massive rearview mirror, his shaggy beard, scarred, misshapen face, and tattered yet strangely ornate uniform gave him the look of a traveling carnival worker dressed as a pirate captain for Halloween. He eyed us all as he jerked the bus into reverse, then laid a few blasts on the horn, fixed on his side mirror as he backed slowly through the crowd, and at last crunched into low gear and headed for the highway, bound for Cleveland and points east.