My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (30 page)

Bauer kept knocking over his own beers, which meant, according to house rules, that he had to drink a full cup each time as a penalty. He started shouting and swearing at us, at himself, and especially at Tessa. As me and my cousin won game after game, Bauer and Tessa got more and more drunk.

Then, for about ten minutes, they put on a surprising rally. A shot hit the net and dribbled over. Another nicked off the very end of the table, unreturnable. Before long they’d taken a seventeen-to-six lead. Whenever they hit our cup of beer and we had to drink, I took small sips, while my cousin guzzled. “You’re not drunk enough!” he roared, with an affectionate whomp on my shoulders. He explained his theory that in all sports—pool, basketball, beer pong—there was a sweet spot of drunkenness necessary to maximize your skills. Too little drink and you were tentative, indecisive; too much drink and you were popping the cue ball off the table or airballing shots over the backboard. “Down this,” he said, topping off a fresh cup from the keg on the floor. I glugged the whole thing down, and Tessa clapped and smiled and flashed her green eyes at me, her beauty both painful and electrifying.

Me and my cousin began an epic comeback. I found that Bauer couldn’t handle the slightest bit of topspin. He howled at each point we scored and soon his face was pink. Tessa teased an impossible shot off the corner of the table to tie the game at nineteen, but Bauer slapped my next serve into the net and my cousin slammed home a drop shot to give us the win. While we celebrated with a series of emphatic high fives, Bauer and Tessa quietly drank two beers each. Bauer then mashed his empty cups against his face—one to his forehead, one to his jaw, and hauled Tessa close for a kiss on the neck. She spun away. Bauer fixed us with a mean look and said, “You fuckers are going down.”

Finally, after we beat them once more, Bauer whipped his paddle across the table; it whizzed past my ear like a throwing star and took out a chunk of wall behind my head. He lifted the entire table, crashed it onto its side, and stormed away up the stairs. Tessa stared at the table forlornly, as though it were a dying dolphin, then looked up at me and my cousin with wet eyes. In just a couple of hours, I’d fallen powerfully in love with her. I’m pretty sure my cousin was in love with her, too, but he was dating a girl who managed a bar up in Allentown and he split right then to go crash at her place.

Dazed, supremely loaded, and too full of desire for Tessa to say a word to her, I found my way up to the room my cousin and Bauer shared on the third floor of the house and sank into a bed, staring at the walls. On each wall, my cousin and Bauer had painted a giant mural representing one of Philadelphia’s four major sports teams—the Phillies, the Sixers, the Flyers, and the Eagles—complete with team colors and insignias and crudely crafted faces of a dozen of their favorite players. They loomed over me like doctors over a sick infant—Mike Schmidt, Randall Cunningham, Moses Malone.

The door opened. Tessa slipped in. She climbed into bed beside me and without a word pressed her lips to mine. Her breath was hot, salty, and strangely copper-like. For some reason, I pretended to be asleep, and then pretended to be waking from sleep. I kissed her back. My heart blammed like a tommy gun. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

Tessa took hold of my hand and pressed it against her breast. Then she clutched my other hand—like it was a dead thing—and pushed it down her stomach and inside her jeans. “I don’t have a condom,” I squeaked, and she shushed me and pulled her jeans off in one deft move and tossed them into the darkness, knocking bottles off a dresser.

It was another minute or so before Bauer came crashing into the room and things turned ugly. First, though, I said to Tessa, “Wait, I just want to kiss you some more.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have sex for the first time—I did, as badly as I’d ever wanted anything—but kissing her, just kissing her, felt so exquisite, so holy, so unimaginably thrilling, that I wanted to savor it for as long as possible. So we kissed for a few long moments, not like drunks tearing at each other, but with tenderness, longing, and real love.

A strange thing happened as we kissed—I began to replay our rounds of beer pong in my head, and suddenly all these deep truths of the game revealed themselves to me. I understood the shots I should have made, the times I’d held off the ball, waiting for my cousin to make a move when the move was mine to make, and even how I’d been balancing on my heels when I needed to shift more onto my toes. It’s not that I wasn’t present with Tessa, wildly in the moment with her—no, the opposite was true. I was so entirely in the moment that the whole night seemed to bleed together into one pulsing beat. Flashes from my past and from my future strobed through my mind. Everything made sense to me—where I’d been, the mistakes I’d made, and where I wanted to be and what I had to do to get there. Musical prodigies, genius mathematicians, and world-class athletes call this being in the zone. Maybe it’s what Olympic Ping-Pong players feel in the heat of competition, closing in on the medal rounds, this sensation of profound understanding and insight, as close to nirvana as I’ve ever felt.

In the midst of this I felt my entire body jerked upward, like a beached whale in a chopper’s sling, and then I was heaved face first into a wall (the Sixers wall, incidentally), Bauer’s iron elbow pinned to my spine.

“What the fuck is going on right now?” he yelled with anguish and rage. He pulled my right arm behind my back, and my shoulder burned with pain, as though the socket might cave and let my limb loose. I opened my eyes and discovered that my face was pressed directly into the eerie portrait of Sixers point guard Maurice Cheeks. Before I could respond or even cry out, Bauer dumped me out of his room, into the stairwell, and slammed his door shut.

I faced the door; I could hear him shouting on the other side. Then, after a half minute, he settled down, and not long after I heard him and Tessa start fucking. Hollowed out, on the edge of tears, I wandered down the stairs. In the dark living room, a dozen of my cousin’s housemates were passed out on sofas and across the floor like victims of an atomic blast, caught in SportsCenter’s grim flicker. I grabbed a stray cushion, continued on down to the basement, and sat against a wall, sipping on the last third of a beer, lost as an old-timer at the end of the bar. At last I righted the Ping-Pong table, stretched out on top of it with the sofa cushion as a pillow, and fell fast asleep. At dawn, I slipped out of the house before anyone else was up, and a day later I was headed back to Michigan. On the train ride home I wrote Tessa a long love letter that I mailed to her at her parents’ house in Glasgow, Delaware (the registrar’s office gave me the address). I proposed that we run off together out west. I never heard back.

But it’s funny the way one night can shape you. For example, I discovered that night that Ping-Pong tables are oddly comfortable to sleep on. I’ve slept on about thirty in the years since; I will always sleep on a Ping-Pong table if the choice is between a Ping-Pong table and the floor. Also, whenever I’m at the bar and I glance at a TV hanging from the rafters and happen to catch any Philadelphia sports highlights, I still get a strange, hot jolt—those murals in my cousin’s bedroom the night I kissed Tessa, they’re to credit and to blame. I’ll even pass a dude on the street wearing a Phillies jersey and that room comes back to me, Mike Schmidt’s bug-eyed face, the taste of Tessa’s lips.

If I’d known that night, as I sat sipping the last third of a beer in the basement of my cousin’s frat house, that I’d still be in love with Tessa twenty years later, that I’d be spending four nights a week at bars in cities like Mobile, Alabama, and Kansas City and Little Rock, falling in love with Tessas, dying to kiss them, would I have done anything differently? Maybe once a year I get to kiss a Tessa, the other eleven months and change I get tossed out of Bauer’s room and sleep on Ping-Pong tables, but still, if it happens even once a year, all those trips to the bar are worth it. I’ll never be the kind of drinker who drinks to get wild or drinks to get numb; I’ll be the kind of drinker who drinks because that’s what you do at a bar, and I’ll hang out at bars because that’s where you’ll find Tessas.

Tessa, I still love you. Tessa, see what you’ve done?

THE STRONGEST MAN IN THE WORLD

Once a year, maybe every year and a half, I go to visit my friend Byron Case at a sprawling, maximum-security state prison called Crossroads Correctional Center in the town of Cameron, Missouri. Picture me early this morning, driving up I-35 from Kansas City in a soft, warm rain, Byron’s mom, Evelyn, in the passenger seat of my van, telling energetic stories, and in the back, my brother Peter, listening in and looking out the window. It’s November, the week before Thanksgiving, and once we’re through the suburbs, the rain-soaked malls and Best Buys and Outback Steakhouses slide away, and dense patches of woods, filled with black, wet trees, their branches shaken free of leaves, rise up on either side of the highway, beside vast empty fields of yellow wheat and dirt, and an occasional farmhouse or pair of sagging barns slumbering in the distance out on the rolling plains. Crows feasting on a roadkill deer halfway on the shoulder, halfway in the ditch, scatter as we rumble past, and I watch in my rearview mirror as they reconvene. Every time I make this drive, I feel the same heavy combination of emotions—excitement to see my friend, and an unshakable melancholy that another year has passed and Byron is still locked up. In my sadness, the world grows more vivid.

After an hour, Evelyn says, “Okay, it’s this one,” and we coast up an exit ramp, hang a left, then a right, and roll down Cameron’s main commercial drag—a Wal-Mart, a four-screen movie theater, a bowling alley, two pawnshops, a shuttered appliance store, and a guy under a tarp selling tires in the lot of a long-forgotten Dairy Queen. At the end of the stretch, oddly close to town—where you might expect to find the high school instead—a series of low-slung tan brick buildings folds into sight. If it weren’t for the high, chain-link fences and fearsome rolls of razor wire, you could mistake the prison for the campus of an aging, underfunded community college. The lot out front is so full that it’s hard to find a parking space, a reminder of just how many locals the prison employs.

Inside the lobby, we fill Evelyn’s clear change purse with quarters for the vending machines, leave our keys and wallets in a tiny coin locker, show our driver’s licenses to an officer at the desk, and walk through a metal detector and on through two sets of security doors into a Plexiglas antechamber that looks out into the visiting room. Evelyn is buzzing; these visits with her son, she’s told me, are the highlight of her week. She introduces me and Peter to some of the other folks in the waiting room—the parents, spouses, and young kids of other inmates at Crossroads. There’s a compassionate, knowing kindness and friendliness to the small talk—whatever anguish you experience when your son or husband is locked up, it’s nice to be around people who won’t judge you and understand exactly what you’re going through.

Even as she chats freely, Evelyn keeps one eye trained on the visiting room, and when she sees Byron walk in, she cries out with the giddy chirp of a teenage girl, “Here he is! Here’s Byron!” She gives him a friendly, excited wave, and Byron breaks out in a smile and waves back. He’s in his late twenties, pale-skinned with buzz-cut black hair, a wispy goatee, and the open, friendly look of a college kid working the help desk at Barnes & Noble. He smooths out the folds in his gray prison scrubs, waiting for an officer to retrieve us from the waiting room. Once we’re inside, he gives his mom a hug, then turns and wraps a strong hug on me. “It’s great to see you, man!” he says with quiet vigor.

“It’s great to see you, Byron!” We release. “You remember my brother Peter?”

“Of course I do,” says Byron, and when he and Peter share a hug, that, for some reason, is when I start to get teary. “Well,” says Byron, looking out across the room, “let’s find a place to sit down. I believe we’ve got some catching up to do!”

*

Lincoln Cemetery, on the eastern edge of Kansas City, is best known as the burial place of jazz legend Charlie “Bird” Parker. It occupies a large swath of forest and open land on Truman Road just off I-435, opposite a stretch of gas stations, adult bookstores, and seedy motels. On October 23, 1997, around four a.m., a Kansas City cop on routine patrol was rolling a slow loop through the pitch-black graveyard when he saw a teenage girl lying on her back near the road. He figured she was either drunk or passed out, but when he climbed from his squad car and approached her, he found, to his horror, that she’d been shot in the face at close range. Blood had pooled in the grass under her head. She was cool to the touch, as though she’d been dead for hours, her eyes wide open. Her name was Anastasia WitbolsFeugen, an eighteen-year-old college freshman.

The next day, before police had a chance to question him, Anastasia’s boyfriend, Justin Bruton, was found dead behind an abandoned warehouse fifty miles south of town; he’d turned a shotgun on himself. After some investigation, the cops told the local press that they believed it was a murder-suicide, though they lacked conclusive evidence, and soon the case faded from view.

Years later, though, an old friend of Anastasia’s named Kelly Moffett, who was being treated for an addiction to crack cocaine, came to the cops with a different story. She told them she’d witnessed the murder of her friend, and that the killer was not Justin, it was the guy who’d been her own boyfriend at the time—Justin’s best friend, Byron Case. Kelly said Byron and Justin had felt that Anastasia was “annoying” and had decided to kill her, and that Byron had pulled the trigger. Byron was arrested and tried for the crime.

The prosecution had no murder weapon, no crime-scene DNA—in fact, no physical evidence of any kind. Their star witness had a fragile mental state and had spent time on the street strung out on drugs, and there was no one to corroborate her story. Any motive for Byron was murky at best. But the case went forward, and the prosecution found ways to sneak in mentions of Byron’s “goth” lifestyle—the fact that he wore a black trench coat, and that he used antique autopsy pictures, pulled from the Internet, as screensavers on his computer. The Jackson County jurors—blue-collar, churchgoing, and conservative—appeared to be swayed by this testimony, according to the accounts I read. As for Kelly Moffett’s reliability as a witness, the prosecution turned her past as a drug addict on its head—they suggested that she’d gone downhill only because she’d witnessed Anastasia’s death and had been harboring a “horrible secret,” though Byron contends that she’d been unstable and had experimented with drugs long before Anastasia was killed.