The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (20 page)

“Look,” I say, “you got all my money. Take the car, I don’t even care. Just please don’t take my laptop.”

“Sure man, okay,” he says. I can detect the gears in his mind clicking as he catches himself, switches back into carjacking mode and says, “Where the fuck is it?” I explain that it’s in the backseat; he jumps out and opens the back door, pitches out my laptop and my backpack, which I hug close to my body.

I look over at Steph, beaming. “This could actually work out well,” I say, honestly feeling cheerful. “Now we don’t have to call a tow truck!”

But then the other guy, the more menacing one, storms up from behind and rips these items from my hands, chucks them into his ominous black SUV. And after what seems like the slowest carjacking of all time, they finally pull away, drive away with the rental car and all my belongings.

Steph springs up and bolts into the house, but I stay on the ground, trying but failing to make out their license plate number, watching my own taillights fade down the darkened street.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite films was
The Jerk
with Steve Martin, the story of a good-natured imbecile who stumbles into a huge fortune and then loses it all. I must have watched it half a dozen times; even twenty years later I still quote verbatim from classic Steve Martin lines like “I’m gonna buy you a diamond so big it’ll make you puke” and “You know, you can tell so much about a person from the way they live. Just looking around here I can tell that you’re a genuinely dirty person.” In the opening scene of
The Jerk
, we find Steve Martin dressed in rags and living on the streets; he speaks the first lines directly into the camera: “I once had wealth, power, and the love of a beautiful woman. Now I only have two things: my friends, and … uh … my thermos.”

When the larger carjacker ripped my laptop and backpack from my hands, my own thermos fell out of the mesh side pocket and clanked into the gutter. It’s a fancy new thermos that my mom bought me for Christmas, the super insulated kind that keeps a hot drink hot or a cold drink cold for twenty-four hours. From my prone position on the asphalt, I slowly stand up and amble over to the thermos—my sole possession at the moment, along with an owner’s manual for a 2006 Chrysler Sebring sedan.

I want to share this hilarity with my sister, so I cradle the thermos and stumble into the house.

“I don’t need that car. I don’t need my computer, or my clothes, or my toothbrush, or anything. All I need is this,” I say, doing my best Steve Martin, still clinging to the thermos.

Stephanie’s on the phone with the police, and before I can finish my thermos bit, she puts her finger to her lips and looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.

With this look all the hilarity bleeds right out of me.

I collapse on the couch and begin shivering. And then from out of nowhere I’m being attacked again, headbutted and clawed and screeched at. Steph cups her hand over the phone long enough to explain that they’ve just adopted this new cat from New Orleans, that it is in fact a Hurricane Katrina refugee cat, and that it’s headbutting me like that because it wants
attention
. I’m allergic to cats, which makes it impossible to either give it attention or fend off its aggressive onslaught. And I recognize him for what he is: a fellow trauma survivor.

The shivers turn to shakes, so hard that something shatters inside me—the fragile sense of inner balance that, like the tiny, delicate vestibular bones of the inner ear, has been keeping me just barely upright for the past year. Steph finally gets off the phone and sits down next to me, at which point I nearly lose it, trying to explain between tremors what a bad year I’ve been having in New York. Before I can get very far, the cops arrive with their platitudes. One in particular walks in the door and says, “Not good, not good.” Which is pretty much the most inane thing anyone could say in this situation. His tone implies that it’s our fault for being white people and thinking we can live in places like Five Points or Brooklyn. I want to say
We just got fucking
carjacked,
so we don’t need you to tell us it’s
not good—
we’ve got that part pretty much figured out, you dumb bastard
. But somehow I hold my tongue. And notice how strange it is that I’d felt no immediate aggression toward the carjackers—that I actually kind of
liked
the Hispanic kid who robbed us, especially compared to his older accomplice—but now I want to just go completely ape shit on this white, uniformed officer. Fortunately he exits the scene and a somewhat more couth Officer Johnson arrives, asks me some questions, hands me a card that says
Case #2000618224. Offense: Carjacking
. I’m surprised that not even the police have a better word for it.

The kid who robbed us was maybe seventeen, eighteen tops. The whole thing seemed like a gang initiation, like he was just along for the ride, going through the motions to earn his next gangster merit badge. I’d asked him for my laptop and he actually gave it back, confirming my original Apple diagnosis. I’d worked with kids just like him at New Horizons. I can imagine us sharing a joke, shooting some hoops, practicing headspins in the dining room on a Sunday night. His partner on the other hand seemed like a total Onion. Lucky he didn’t shoot us in the back of the head, which, as the
not good
cop had explained, was exactly what happened to another couple that got carjacked in Denver the year before.

They say that one of the first stages after a life-threatening trauma is the formulation of revenge fantasies. I stay up most of that night reading the owner’s manual, pouring over the syntax, making notations in the margins. My immediate plan is to sue the rental company for giving me a malfunctioning car (and to smear them in the media as
Dis
advantage Rent a Car), or Chrysler for their faulty engineering ideas. A six-figure settlement seems appropriate. My sister’s a lawyer, so hell, maybe we can even score seven figures. I imagine exacting revenge on the automobile industry not only for our troubles, our psychological damage, but also for the way they dismantled the public transportation system back in the early twentieth century, buying up all the street cars and bus systems and rail lines and purposefully running them into the ground, literally paving the way for cars and the ensuing white flight from inner cities—the very thing that created a neighborhood like Five Points in the first place. Not to mention the razing of urban communities by freeways, global warming, oil spills, petro-warfare and the increasing atomization of American society. This isn’t just about me, it’s about
global justice
. Plus, I’ll never have to work again!

Lying there in my sister’s spare bedroom in Five Points, the phrase
set for life
occurs to me. I roll it around on my palate all night, savor it like a sip of excellent coffee on a cold day. They say the best revenge is living well, and not only am I about to join the ranks of the idle rich, but I’m going to score a hell of a lot of laughs with the thermos bit.

After a fitful few hours of sleep, I call Advantage Rent a Car. They transfer me to a “risk assessor” named Rochelle. She never once asks if I’m okay or apologizes for what happened—in fact, she clearly suspects that maybe I’m the culprit, that I’d somehow staged the theft and was pulling some kind of insurance scam. When I explain about the keys, she says that the car was brand-new, fresh off the truck, and that Advantage is in no way liable. I’d purchased the mid range insurance plan that covered the value of the car itself, but unfortunately it doesn’t cover my belongings. I ask if perhaps as a courtesy to me and what I’d been through they’ll at least cover my laptop, but she curtly reiterates that it’s not their fault, that the only thing they can do for me is to charge my credit card only for the first two days’ rental. I’ve never wanted to explode so badly in my life—I want to spit every name in the book at her, including the C-word, which I’ve never called anyone, but I hold back only because calling a risk assessor the C-word won’t help during
my big day in court
.

Noticing my distress after the phone call, Steph takes me out for breakfast at this hip vegetarian place called WaterCourse Foods. Both famished, we score a booth by the window and order breakfast burritos.

“I still can’t believe you tried to make a run for it,” I say, squeezing honey into my tea. “Where did you think you were going?”

“We just landscaped the yard and put down wood chips,” she tells me. “I thought they’d be softer than the pavement.”

“Let me get this straight: we’re getting robbed at gunpoint and you’re busy considering the comfort properties of
garden mulch?
”

We can’t stop laughing.

We can hardly breathe.

It catches the attention of the other diners, who give us concerned looks, unsure if we’re laughing or choking.

Then Steph actually chokes.

“I can’t breathe,” she croaks, waving one hand in front of her face, clamoring for her water glass with the other.

I have to slide in next to her, pat her on the back, hand her napkins to dry her face.

We get ourselves under control, but after half an hour of waiting for our food, we start to get restless.

Finally we flag down our young indie-rock waiter.

“So sorry,” he says, motioning toward some diners who arrived much later than we did, but who are already enjoying two massive breakfast burritos, “but it looks like your orders were
platejacked
on the way from the kitchen.”

Later that day my parents drive down from the mountains to give me moral support and help me make some arrangements. They also drive me to the mall to pick up a new sports coat for the wedding. I ride in the back and my mom rides shotgun, where she plays and sings “What a Wonderful World” on her ukulele. I love her for doing this, for the fact that she plays such a sweet instrument, and that she’s playing in a moving car, clearly just trying to cheer me up. At the same time, I’m angry that she’s singing it, because the world is
not wonderful
, not for me. It’s raining now, the sky wrecked with storm clouds, and somewhere between the mall and the Thai place we went for lunch, I break down in the backseat.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” I say, whispering through salty-damp hands—directing this thought at my parents. At myself. At what feels like an increasingly vacuous universe.

T
he waves at Rockaway look good from four thousand feet.

The plane finishes its carve around the tip of Manhattan, over Queens, and down to LaGuardia, and then, the minute I get home from the airport, I load up my truck and head for the beach, listening to NPR coverage of the Iraq conflict and new revelations about the deceptions that led us to war. I arrive at sunset, long after the lifeguards have gone, and just as most other surfers are packing up their gear and heading back to the city. While unloading my board, I notice my heart punching in my chest when a couple thugs blasting 50 Cent in a lowered Nissan circle around the parking lot.

On their second pass, I check behind the backseat to make sure my tire iron is handy.

When the Nissan finally peels out of the lot, I stretch into my wetsuit and paddle out into the lineup, where I catch a few waves in vanishing light, until it’s too dark to gauge the swell. Then I turn my board east and paddle way out past the breakers, heading toward the blinking oil tankers on the horizon. The previous summer there was a big
Times
article about a couple local Rockaway project kids who swam out at dusk, right here at Beach 90th, getting sucked into a strong undertow and dragged perilously out to sea. A surfer rescued one, but the other disappeared into the drink.

During its long history as a municipal beach, Rockaway’s dangerous currents and riptides have drowned hundreds of New Yorkers.

Floating out in the open ocean now, I turn over on my back to look up at the city-dampened starlight, wondering where I’d end up if I just keep paddling east, if I can reach the oil tankers off in the distance, maybe hitch a ride to Asia or Alaska or Japan. Or maybe I’ll drift into the Gulf Stream, let it sweep me northeast across the Atlantic to England, where I might hop another current south along Africa and around Cape Horn, then up toward the Middle East. I wonder if there are soldiers over there feeling the same longing, perhaps staring out at the oil-poisoned Gulf, wishing for the same ocean-bound deliverance home. If I hold fast, I might make it all the way to the South Seas, now tracing Ahab’s rage-filled path past the Bashee Islands and into the vast Pacific, the mother ocean that Ishmael describes as having “millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds, the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.”

My inner Ahab is pacing the decks of my mind now, laid out on the deck of my surfboard, raging at the world, at President Bush and Dick Cheney and Osama bin Laden—Ahabs, all of them—and at the wannabe Ahabs who robbed me in Denver. It rages at a God in whom my trust and hope is flagging. Most of all, it rages at myself for making a series of choices that brought me to this un manageable point in my life. Out here in the night-roiling sea, I’ve never felt so connected with this dark, masculine, reckless force that pilots so much of the world’s treachery.

Despite the increasing feelings of sinking heaviness, I turn over and start paddling back toward the distant city lights. The hours and hours of surfing, combined with a lack of appetite, have done interesting things to my body. Emotionally I’m in troubled waters, but I’ve never been in better physical shape. The veins in my forearms are ropy and sea green; my neck has thickened; the lateral muscles below my armpits fan out like a pair of meaty wings. My roommate Natalie says she’s never seen someone so emaciated with such a V-shaped torso. It’s the unconscious, bodily wisdom in these muscles that eventually gets me back to the deserted Rockaway shore, where it’s so late that even the cops have gone home to bed.