Turn Around Bright Eyes (4 page)

A couple of months later, in March 2001, the stock market crashed. Magazines started going out of business like going out of business was going out of style. The nineties boom was over. I was backstage at
Saturday Night Live
with Aerosmith, whom I was following around for a cover story; we watched from the greenroom as Tina Fey did Weekend Update. “And in the stock market this week . . .” She pulled a flask from her blazer and took a drink, bursting into tears. “Whyyyy? Why, Lord, oh whyyyy?” We all laughed. Then Aerosmith went out and did “Big Ten Inch Record.” What else was there to do?

Everywhere I went in New York, people went out of their way to be kind and generous to me. This city had more kind people per square foot than any place I’d ever seen. The guy at my local coffee shop always called me “Please,” because he approved of my manners. “
Please
is a good word,” he told me. “You’re not from around here, are you?” I went to a record store in the West Village, Rockit Scientist, and bought a Television live bootleg from 1978. The dude didn’t charge me because the record was scratched. I took it home and played it all night, and of course it played fine, so I went back the next day to pay for it. “Keep it as your ‘Welcome to New York’ present,” the guy told me. “You’re new in town, right?”

People always meant “you’re new here” as praise. They were obviously seeing something human on my surface that made them want to do me favors or give me a break, but it was obviously the trace of that girl who had loved me, molded me, shaped me into whatever I was, the girl who had died. I felt like a fraud traveling under those pretenses. I didn’t want to talk about death, so I tried to avoid the topic of being a widower and dodged the subject of my past. I got so anxious about it coming up that being around people made my head rattle.

That Jim Morrison song gets it all wrong. People
are
strange when you’re a stranger, but it’s not because they ignore you—it’s when they notice you and smile, that’s when you realize you’re alone out here. Their kindness is what makes you notice how weak you are. That’s when you know it’s not the city’s fault, it’s yours. These people are in the same strange town, but they’re not letting the strangeness eat them up and turn them into robots. That’s just you.

In my twenties, I had counted on my wife to make friends for me. She was vivacious and chatty and extroverted; she did the people-finding for both of us and pimped me out for my social life. Now I had to learn on my own, without her to guide me. The powers that be left me here to do the pimping. Connecting to other people was yet another job I didn’t know how to do for myself, tied up with all the decisions I’d always counted on her to make.

I spent so many hours listening to music under the twin towers, but I didn’t take much of that music with me when I left and moved out to Greenpoint. The songs I listened to there were mostly ruined for me, because a chill got into them. At least I did myself a huge favor by not liking the new Radiohead album,
Kid A
, because when I started playing it a few years later, it wasn’t tainted by association. One song struck me as especially bad at the time—“Idioteque,” with those gauche clunky beats straining for significance. I agreed with the negative review in the British music mag
Select
, which singled out “Idioteque” for ridicule: “What do they want for sounding like the Aphex Twin circa 1993, a medal?”

I love that song now. Sometimes I wonder if I would have gotten anything out of it—the high melancholy voice, the awkward beats, the way Thom Yorke yelps “This is really happening”—if I’d tried singing it with my own voice. Maybe that would have helped me hear what they were trying to say. Maybe that would have even helped me hear myself in that song. But I doubt it. I wasn’t really happening.

I was convinced the rest of my life would be a bitter dwindle. I did nothing to suggest I deserved any better. I’d been a depressed teen, but this was different because I was old enough to know better, an adult who had loved and been loved. I was old enough to know what I wanted and to know I wasn’t making things any better for myself. Every day in New York I kept having moments of good luck, but assembling those moments into a new life was my job. All I needed was to go ahead and work it.

8:54 p.m.:

When I had to live by myself, I found out that I could do it. I was surprised, and in a way disappointed, that I was up to the challenge. Living alone wouldn’t ever be my first choice, but I learned to hack it. For me, it entailed a lot of late nights eating microwave soy burgers and watching Lifetime movies. I honestly hope I will never have to live alone again. Because at this point, I have seen all the Lifetime movies that have ever existed and eaten my way through 80 percent of the world’s microwave soy burger supply.

The main difference between the burgers and the movies? Sometimes you take the first bite of a burger and you don’t know how it’s going to end.

One of the things I love about Lifetime movies is that these ladies like slow transitions. The heroines of these movies find life as daunting and complicated as I do, and when they get into a mess, they react the way I tend to react, by not reacting at all. They are resistant to change, to say the least. When the heroine finds out her sorority sister is a machete-wielding killer, as well as the mother of her ex-husband’s stepdaughter’s guidance counselor’s baby, she inevitably says something like “I feel like this might affect our friendship.”

You know
Poison Ivy 3: The New Seduction
? Oh, stop lying, for once in your life: Yes, you do. Well. In the classic
Poison Ivy 3: The New Seduction
, the mild-mannered racquetball champion invites her new best friend, Jaime Pressly, to move into the family mansion, never suspecting Jaime has a few dark secrets. If you’ve ever watched any Lifetime movies, you can guess how that friendship turns out.

Racquetball Girl eventually discovers that Jaime has:

So how does she respond to this discovery? She says, and I quote, “Maybe you should start looking around for another place to stay.”

That’s why I relate. Assertiveness can be a challenge for the doggedly lame ladies of Lifetime. They shy away from conflict. They avoid confrontation. They suck at moving on.

The point is, sometimes we plucky little Lifetime heroines need a shove to embark upon difficult transitions. We need backstabbing, bloodletting vixens, or their philosophical equivalents, to force us to move. We need a strong personality, or a cataclysmic force, kind of like Jennie Garth in
An Unfinished Affair
. You’ve seen that one too—Jennie Garth has an affair with her art professor, Tim Matheson, but the cad goes back to his wife, so Jennie Garth comes up with an elaborate plan to destroy his life. She proceeds to seduce his son, make best friends with his wife, and join the family around the fireplace for a cozy game of Scrabble. While Tim squirms, Jennie spells out her word: “INVIOLATE.” Hey—fifty-two points!

I watched a lot of Lifetime movies when I lived alone, because I was inevitably up all night, gnarled on the couch in a ragged old pair of Priority Records promotional sweatpants I’d gotten in the mail once to celebrate a Snoop Dogg record. Even if I could have gone to sleep, I didn’t see anything I wanted there or any place I belonged. There was nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories. So I killed those nights staring at the ceiling, waiting for a sleepy feeling that usually didn’t say hello till dawn, bad blood pounding in my temples with nowhere to go except down my backbone and back up to my scalp. Sometimes that noise in my head seemed so loud it was echoing off the walls.

I could stay in bed and sweat it out, or I could move to the couch. It’s usually a good idea to get up and find a distraction, something to drown out that noise and change the colors in your brain. Sometimes music works, but sometimes certain songs bring back the same painful memories that got you to this sorry state, so TV is often a safer bet. So what’s on at 2 a.m., 4 a.m., 6 a.m.? There’s always something on Lifetime, and it’s always a movie with a title like
Shattered Trust
or
A Daughter’s Lies
or
It Was Him or Us IV: The Slapping
.

When one of those movies ended, another would begin. Lifetime ladies, they were my people, keeping me company as if we were cycle sisters via the airwaves. These gals took the same pitifully cautious approach to their pitifully cautious tomorrows as I did. When the future looks bad, they stick to the script and hope the future will go away. They’re always surprised when it doesn’t. They ignore all their looming disasters for the better part of two hours—if they noticed danger faster, there wouldn’t be a movie, now would there? The killer sorority sister has to start chasing them down the hall waving the machete before they blink and realize, “Oh wait, this is an
and suddenly
, isn’t it?”

I am not an
and suddenly
person. I am a
gradually, reluctantly, and begrudgingly
person. I look before I leap, count to ten before I pop off, all that stuff. I don’t act on my first instinct, because my first instinct is usually idiotic, so I like to think things over for as long as possible. I distrust flashes of light or moments of clarity. Stealth is my jam and guile is my butter.

How much of this comes from being Catholic? A lot, I suspect. We do not give a lot of extra points to dramatic conversion narratives. The mentality has more to do with the plodding offer-it-up everyday grind, where every day has its saints and every trivial annoyance is a spiritual exercise, giving you the chance to get a few degrees incrementally holier. (When you’re a Catholic kid, the nuns teach you that when something is annoying you, you “offer it up,” as a sacrificial gift, which admittedly is far from terrible advice to high-strung children, even if it’s just an attempt to shut up a rowdy CCD class.) It’s always funny to hear a Catholic congregation sing “Amazing Grace”— nothing could be less emotionally Catholic than “I once was lost but now am found / Was blind but now I see.” I was raised with this sort of implicit idea that there’s something showy about religious experiences that depend on emotional climaxes. I distrust grace when it’s amazing. I like my grace to be drab and ordinary and manageable. And I prefer the universe to be methodical and tedious, making its moves one at a time, with change as something I can see coming in the distance, a slow train round the bend.

In my everyday life, I’ve always been prudent and careful. Talking myself out of half-baked impulses is a specialty. I like to feed myself soothing reminders like “better safe than sorry” or “haste makes waste” or “the reward for patience is patience” or “a no you regret is better than a yes you regret.”

There are upsides to being wired this way: I rarely punch cops, I never kick a hole in my furniture, I am more than capable of chuckling at provocations without taking them personally. So there are upsides. But the downside means sometimes you can let entire months of your life ooze by without eating anything except microwave soy burgers or making human connections or realizing that you are ignoring a few of the
and suddenly
s lurking under your couch. You are becoming inviolate, which is a sad fate for anyone.

So what turned out to be my Jennie Garth? What was the vixen that chased me off the couch and out into the world? What forced me to say “yikes, this is what
and suddenly
looks like” and run for my life? Karaoke.

The first time I sang karaoke, what startled me most was that it turned me into the sleaziest villainess you could ever encounter in any Lifetime movie. It brought out my pushy, slutty, noisy side like nobody’s business. Where does all my good sense go when I sing? Out the window, that’s where. And karaoke rooms don’t even
have
windows. The sensible shoes I wear when I’m walking the line in my mind, they turn into stilettos, kicking holes in the walls I’ve gone to so much trouble building. Within a few songs, I go from being the Lifetime heroine to the Lifetime psycho. I might start out like Josie Bissett in
Deadly Vows
, or Nicolette Sheridan in
The People Next Door
, or even Hilary Swank in
Dying to Belong
. But hand me the microphone and I turn into Rose McGowan in
Devil in the Flesh
.

The first time I made that leap, it was a Tuesday night in the East Village. I was dining with my friends Nils and Jennie at a fancy restaurant, Craft. I wish I remember what I ate, because people always talk about that place, but I have to admit I can’t recall a single thing I ate during the meal, not a single condiment or garnish, yet I remember every Natalie Imbruglia song I sang later that night. (Two of them! Two different Natalie Imbruglia songs! Yes, “Torn” and
another
one! Her second hit, “Wishing I Was There.” Google it, bitches!) Hey, we all have our different relationship to different sensual pleasures, and as much as I enjoyed the dinner, what jumps out of my memory is that we ended up going for karaoke afterward, when someone observed that we were merely a block from a (now-defunct) Japanese karaoke bar.

This place was swanky but no fun—the martinet karaoke drillmaster was just not giving our table any love. We waited for more than an hour for one of us to get a turn, but no matter how many pricey cocktails we ordered, there was no “Piña Colada Song” for us. The tingle of our turn coming up (our song! maybe next!) turned to rancid adrenaline in our stomach. Different karaoke jocks have different ideas about crowd control, but this house style was apparently to make one table sing for twenty minutes at a time, then exhaust another table, instead of bouncing around. It was fun watching the table in the corner do “Good Morning Starshine” and “She’s Not There,” but we didn’t even get thrown a piña-colada-flavored bone.