My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (7 page)

Shawn glanced at his cell phone. “Ten to midnight.”

“In ten minutes,” I told Lauren, “it’s gonna be Vernon’s hundred-and-tenth birthday!”

“No way!” she said.

“It’s true!” said Darla.

Lauren looked at me with wide, whirling eyes, really taking me in, as beautiful a girl as I’d ever seen in my life. “You were only gone a couple hours,” she said. “This is crazy. This is awesome.” She shivered.

“Let’s go inside and have a drink,” I said.

“Let’s drink!” Chris echoed.

Lauren reached for the door, glowing. “Okay, all of you come on in, I’ll pour a round of birthday shots. Let me tell Greg what’s up.” Then she paused, giving Chris an odd look. She seemed to recall his status on the Freighter’s blacklist. “Except you,” she said, pointing at him. “I’m sorry, but … you just can’t skip out on a tab. Not three or four times. Not here. Not in Buffalo.”

“I just, sometimes I leave my wallet at home,” Chris sputtered.

“I’m sorry,” said Lauren.

“Wait,” said Anthony. “What if we pay off everything he owes? Can he be forgiven then?”

Lauren thought about this. “Not forgiven. But if he pays every dollar he owes, plus a twenty-
five
-percent tip, then he’s allowed back in.”

“Done,” said Shawn.

“All right, then,” Lauren said. She hauled open the door and grasped my hand and led me through. My heart thrummed.

For a moment she leaned close to Greg the bouncer and explained the situation. At last he nodded and Lauren waved everyone past, into the mad melee inside. She squeezed my hand as we swept across the room to the bar and whispered in my ear, so close I could feel her hot breath, “Thank you for being here.” The universe had finally, improbably—almost unbelievably—become perfectly aligned.

Our whole crew stood in a crushed knot against the bar. Lauren ducked under and popped up on the far side. “What’ll it be?” she shouted, spreading out a constellation of shot glasses.

“It’s Vernon’s night,” said Chris.

Vernon peered around, the tallest of us, soaking it all in, like an ancient willow admiring an orchard of saplings. “Knob Creek!” he declared.

Lauren found the bottle and poured nine Knob Creeks, plus a shot of Dr Pepper for Mrs. Liu, who asked for root beer instead, and, at Kandy’s request, a shot of Molson Ice. As Lauren passed them out, I saw Greg, the bouncer, waddling quickly in our direction. I had the gut-shot feeling that everything was about to go from wildly festive to ferociously violent in the next several seconds. But instead, Greg howled, “Let me get in on that!”

Lauren saw the confusion in my face. “Greg loves to be a badass,” she said, “but he’s just a big softie. He goes to those Renaissance fairs. He swings swords around and wears dresses!”

“They’re called kilts!” Greg bellowed, grumpy and happy at the same time. Lauren handed him a shot of whiskey; in his massive paw it looked the size of a thimble.

Lauren slipped under the bar again and pressed herself against me. We all raised our glasses, mashed tightly together, and looked around at each other, everyone’s face filled with a golden glow. Darla and Vernon had their arms around each other, as did Anthony and Kandy, and Chris and Shawn Henderson, and Mr. Liu, Mrs. Liu, and Mary. I put my arm around Lauren’s waist and pulled her close.

Later in the night, much later, I ended up telling Lauren that I loved her, and she told me she loved me, too. And the next afternoon, when we woke up, hung over but in fine spirits, we went for the walk I’d fantasized about, through a city transformed by almost two feet of snow. Every tree, every bush, every fire hydrant, and every garbage can was laced with soft, gentle beauty, like we’d crossed through a portal into some distant, magic land. In a few weeks, of course, Lauren Hill was no longer with me, she was with that dude named Darrell, the other bartender at Freighter’s, and Mr. Liu’s restaurant, I learned, went out of business just a few months after that. Vernon made it to late summer, Darla told me later, then he simply lay down on a park bench in Little Rock and died. But don’t you see, none of that mattered, none of that mattered, none of that mattered. Because you can take away Lauren Hill, you can take away the love we had for each other, but you can’t take away the feeling I had that night at midnight, as I squeezed her hand and looked around at my new, glorious tangle of friends, letting my eyes briefly catch their eyes and linger on each of their faces, the whiskey in each shot glass sparkling like a supernova. If there’s ever been a happier moment in my life, I can’t remember it.

“To Vernon!” I cried at last.

“To Vernon!” they shouted in chorus.

The Knob Creek went down like a furious, molten potion. I turned and looked down at Lauren. She was smiling up at me, sweet, soulful, and open.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I said.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she said.

And we kissed.

WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?

Late one cold wet November night a few years ago, maybe three a.m., I was sitting on my bed in a Motel 6 just south of Austin, Texas, brushing my teeth and watching the closing moments of a college basketball game on ESPN2 that had been played earlier that night but was being rebroadcast and whose outcome was still a mystery to me, when the phone on the night table beside me jangled to life.

Who could possibly be calling? Nobody knew I was there; I’d arrived only an hour earlier. It had to be the old Pakistani guy down in the motel office, I figured, or else my little brother, Peter, who I was traveling with; he’d gone out walking down the I-35 service road, looking for better reception on his cellie so he could call his girlfriend. After the third ring, I picked up. “Hello?”

There was a silence, then a woman’s voice, half whispering. “Hey there.”

“Um … hi.”

“What are you doing?” she asked. This sure wasn’t Peter, and it wasn’t that desk clerk, either. I felt the hairs on my forearms prickle upwards.

“Well,” I said, “I’m watching the Providence-Niagara game. I think it might go into overtime. Who
is
this, by the way?”

“I’m Nicole.” I could hear the push of her breath on the other end of the line, as though her mouth was pressed close to the receiver. I went to the window and peered through the curtains—the parking lot was dark and still. Was this someone’s idea of a joke? Maybe so, but I was just bored and lonely enough to play along.

“Hi, Nicole. My name’s Davy.”

“I like that name,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s a … uh, it’s a good name. Listen, where are you?”

A pause. “I’m in your motel.” The room seemed to slowly whirl backward, like a carnival ride catching speed. “What are you wearing?” she whispered.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got on gray mesh basketball shorts with, let’s see, three thin white stripes down each side, and a Bell’s Pizza T-shirt.” I was quiet for a second, then rushed to fill the silence. “It’s blue. I used to deliver for Bell’s Pizza. We made these shirts for our rec-league basketball team. Hey, I’ve got a question for you. Can I ask you a question? What are
you
wearing?”

“Nuh-thing,” she breathed.

There was a stirring in my gray mesh basketball shorts with the three thin white stripes down each side. Nicole explained that she’d hit the bars all night with her friends, and that now they were drunk and passed out and she was bored. “Pretend you’re here with me,” she said. “I want to tell you what we would do.”

I’d never had phone sex before. Not that I was opposed to it—it was just one of those things that never came up. I guess it had always seemed sort of strange and silly to me. Real sex was so much more appealing. And in times when that was hard to come by, well, the Internet’s tawdrier recesses offered workable substitutes.

“If you were here,” Nicole said, “I’d lick your lips. I’d lick you everywhere.” She moaned a little. “I’m fucking myself right now. Tell me what you’re doing.”

“Umm, touching my privates?” I started touching my privates.

“I’m sucking your dick right now. Oh yeah, I’m sucking you
good
. I want you to fuck my mouth like you’re fucking my pussy.”

Nicole’s dirty talk was both ridiculous and oddly arousing. But a part of me wondered if this was all being recorded, if out in the parking lot, staked out in the back of an ice cream truck that had been pimped into a mobile surveillance unit, friends of mine were listening in, wide-eyed and gleeful, headphones clamped to their ears, having a laugh at my expense. It was hard to be serious. “Nicole,” I said, “I’m grabbing on to your titties! I’m kissing you with reckless abandon! I’m pumping in and out of you, like, well … well, like an oil derrick! Or a piston? I’m the sword, baby, and you’re the scabbard!”

Eventually, I grew less bashful and got into it for real, and a few minutes later we came to a happy ending. Soon after, we said good night. The basketball game on the TV had ended long before, and I had no idea who’d won.

At seven thirty the next morning, the phone rang again, jarring me awake; my brother, too. He lifted his head from the pillow and said, “Who the fuck is calling?”

It was Nicole. “Girl,” I said, “I’m sleeping. Don’t you know what time it is?” I was about to hang up, but then, remembering our little moment of shared bliss a few hours before, I softened. “Look, here’s my cell number. Call me later, okay?”

*

A few months earlier, I’d published a book and hit the road with Peter for an eight-month cross-country tour. At each event, I read from my book and Peter played guitar and sang. We burned from one city to the next in an old Dodge conversion van we’d bought on eBay. Mostly, we crashed on sofas and floors at friends’ houses or stayed with folks we’d met that night at our show, though sometimes we’d take turns driving through till dawn while the other slept in the backseat, which folded down into a bed. It was actually so comfortable, a lot of nights I chose to sleep out in the van rather than on a stranger’s sagging couch. Once a month or so, dusted from the road, we’d splurge on some raggedy hotel, like that Motel 6 on the outskirts of Austin. The night Nicole found me, Peter and I had been on the road for six months; we were about a hundred shows into the tour.

Three nights later, in Oklahoma City, I was getting ready for bed out in the van when my cell phone rang.
PRIVATE CALLER
, it said. It was Nicole. She was still whispering. “What’s up with the whispering?” I asked. She said her roommates were sleeping in the next room. We chatted for a few minutes, then got into the phone sex again. She told me she was tonguing my balls. This time I went Shakespeare: “Oh baby, wherefore art thy labia?” Afterward, she was about to hang up, but I said, “Nicole, that’s so impersonal. If the fantasy is that we’re having sex, I don’t want to just zip up my pants the second we’re done and leave. Can’t we just talk for a bit? You know, cuddle?”

*

I was curious about Nicole. Now that we’d had sex a couple of times, I wanted to know what she was all about—I wanted to know where she worked; I wanted to know what she was into (besides having phone sex with strangers); I wanted to know what kind of person calls hotel rooms to have phone sex with strangers. She told me she’d studied psychology at the University of North Texas and that now she worked as a nurse at an old-age home in Waco; she’d just been down in Austin visiting friends. She also told me that her mother had passed away recently and that she’d been having a tough time with it—they’d been especially close.

The next few times we talked, she was still whispering, which was starting to seem a little suspicious. She claimed her boyfriend was studying just outside her bedroom door. It was hard to place, but something about her whisper sounded almost … husky. I got a little freaked out—was this a
guy
I’d been talking to?

“Nicole, what the fuck?” I said. “Just talk out loud for a second so I can hear your real voice.” She refused. Still, she
seemed
like a girl—there’d been a few times when I thought I’d heard her real voice, times when she laughed, times when she moaned. So I went ahead and had phone sex with her anyway. It wasn’t as good as the real thing, but it was better than getting myself off all alone. Her company was growing on me.

*

Houston, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Tampa—Nicole and I skittered across the South; it was like
Badlands
for the new millennium (less killing, more “anytime minutes”). Every few nights, I’d be out in the van after a show, making my bed in the backseat, when Nicole would call, and we’d get hot and heavy. I was still wary that this was all some crazy prank by my friends and that our calls were being recorded, so during phone sex I kept things tongue-in-cheek, as though hamming it up for an audience. Nicole would be talking dirty, telling me how she wanted to squeeze my dick with her pussy, and I’d just start riffing on some goofy shit: there was NASCAR-themed pillow talk (“Straddle my throttle, Nicole. Take me to the checkered flag!”), and then sometimes I’d do it up in a stiff, upper-crust British accent (“Oh, God save the queen, I’m coming, I’m coming, tea and crumpets for all!”), and then other times, I performed in the voice of a black comedian making fun of the way white people talk, overpronouncing each word (“Oh yes, baby, golly gee, keep licking my penis, that just feels absolutely stupendous!”). Only irony could distance me from the sad truth of what I was really doing: jacking off in the back of my van in a Taco Bell parking lot in Jefferson City, Missouri, while talking on my headset to someone who was possibly a man.

My brother gave me shit for it. “I can’t believe you still talk to that
dude
,” he said.

“It’s not a dude,” I said.

Over the phone, Nicole had more of the resigned spirit of a woman who’d had a lot of attention from guys in high school but then, knocked around by life, had let herself go. She described herself as “pretty enough,” and said guys often hit on her at the bar, but I knew this was no guarantee that if we ever met in person I’d be attracted to her. Ultimately, it seemed to me, phone sex was really about the power of the imagination, and in that case I could imagine her to be whoever I wanted. After I’d first seen, years before, the video for Fiona Apple’s song “Criminal,” Fiona Apple had become the girl who best represented my physical ideal. On those late nights in the back of the van, it wasn’t hard to imagine Nicole as Fiona Apple’s double.