“EVERYONE SUCKS BUT US.”
New York City to Philly is only a two-hour drive. Compared to the distances I’d been averaging on this trip, it barely qualified as going anywhere. To make up for this unconscionable lack of hardship, as I crossed the Verrazano Bridge into Staten Island, the cranky-looking sky opened up and unleashed a rainstorm of biblical proportions. By the time I got to Jersey it was so bad, I could barely see ten feet in front of me.
Philly and NYC have been rivals ever since Ben Franklin called Manhattan’s whorehouses “substandard” and “unfit for even the vilest strumpet,” but as far as I can tell, the bad blood is primarily fueled by the fact that the two cities are shockingly similar to each other in temperament. Which is to say, both are populated by a high percentage of balls-out maniacs. Case in point: the New Jersey Turnpike between New York City and Philadelphia, where this goddamn monsoon had cut the speed on the packed highway from eighty to seventy.
L.A. people say they don’t need weather because they have traffic. But at the risk of bursting my friends’ bubbles, it’s worth noting that—and stick with me on this—other places have traffic also. And get this: they have weather too! Also seasons, wrinkles, anger, and shame. This is not to say that I remain unwarped by L.A.’s peculiar delusions. My first instinct when the storm started was to compliment the special effects guy. I swear, at one point on the drive I thought about taking a break and stepping out of my car, where I’d find a green screen and a second AD handing me a chai tea latte and a hot towel.
This was no CG guy’s weather porn, though. The storm was down low and furious, the 11 A.M. darkness broken by lightning strikes followed instantly by Carl-rattling thunderclaps. There was probably an inch of running water on the highway. Glances at my fellow road surfers revealed a white-knuckled crew, eyes wide, unnerved, and kicking themselves for not springing the extra fifty bucks for brand-name rain-tread tires. There was a palpable sense that something was about to go horribly, horribly wrong out there, the only question being how many of us were going to go down. That of course is the usual feeling you get on the ribbon that connects our nation’s two most pugnacious cities, but this storm wasn’t doing anything to calm people’s nerves. It felt supernatural. Like at any second, Thor might get jealous of Zeus’s light show and slam down his hammer, splitting the Jersey Turnpike wide open. The thought of being swallowed up, interred forever like a turncoat mobster in the bowels of the Garden State, was almost comforting. It sure would beat driving in this shit, anyway.
None of this was helped, of course, by the acute wine-induced hangover I was enjoying. Despite it being cold outside, the increased levels of acetaldehyde in my system were causing me to sweat profusely. My central nervous system was operating with the approximate efficiency of the 113th Congress, only my organs were being a little nastier to one another. I’d been this banged up behind the wheel on the trip before—Wyoming, for instance—but out there it was all blue skies and open spaces. If you can stay awake and avoid suicidal wildlife, you’ll be okay. Here, though, I was surrounded by minivans piloted by panicky soccer moms, windowless beat-to-shit construction vans, and SUVs that plainly gave no fucks about you or your silly ideas about what constitutes a “lane.”
The key to surviving a particularly acute hangover—say, one precipitated by excessive consumption of Damiani Syrah from the Finger Lakes—is to remain calm and ride it out. If parts of your body claim temporary independence, know that their glorious revolution will be short-lived. Your right eye has its reasons for not opening. Your left hand will almost certainly be able to grasp things tomorrow. In rare instances your guts may go rogue. If so, pray that it is in an upward direction. With luck you might just reach a proper receptacle. If it’s headed south, however, just pray you’re in a hotel room with enough cash in your wallet to properly apologize to housekeeping ($200 is a good place to start), and chalk it up as fodder for your future AA testimonials.
As these thoughts stumbled around my wounded brain, somewhere far away an alarm began to sound. There had been an audible rise in the engine RPM. What the hell would cause that when I’m moving at a steady . . . and slowly, like a sunrise that never seems to arrive and then suddenly blinds you, I knew. Hydroplaning. It explained a lot. Not just the noise, but the gentle rotational movement Carl Vehicle had begun to take on. The world had downshifted into ultraslow motion with infinite space inside of every moment, allowing me to savor every facet of the experience. I told myself to stay calm, but it didn’t work. So I screamed at myself to stay calm. That always works. Then I screamed back at myself to stop goddamn yelling, unless I wanted to die right now. In New Jersey.
That shut me up pretty good. No one wants to die in New Jersey. Even those Jersey Shore knuckleheads. They all want to die in Miami. The hair on my body was standing on end, like a million teenage boners. I opened my mouth because somehow it felt like I should say something, but either I didn’t have anything to say, or I couldn’t hear myself over the rain. Or the radio, which was blasting “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Who’s going to take care of my dog? I’m gonna miss you, Buna. Then I remembered the things on my pretrip to-do list I had biffed. One stood out: make a will. You can do it all online now. Only takes a few minutes. I would have given Buna to Brian.
“I’m dead, asshole,” Brian noted from his cup holder. “Besides, I’m already taking care of your last dog. Piglet says hi, by the way.”
Shit, that’s right. Brian’s dead. Okay, my brother John should get Buna. Brian would get my record collection.
“Still dead!” Brian cackled.
Shit. Okay, then Elizabeth should get the records. We might not be together anymore, but at least she knew how to take care of them.
“You want to give your record collection to your ex?” Brian sputtered, incredulous.
“Sure. It’s not like I’m going to be listening to them.”
“Yeah, but you want her to die in a fire, don’t you?”
“Can you cut me just the tiniest speck of slack, Bri? I have a couple small things on my mind at the moment, not the least of which is the fact that I’m sliding, helplessly, into the lane next to mine.”
Man, people make some funny faces when you lose control of your car next to them in a thunderstorm. I see you shouting, sir, but unfortunately there’s not much I can do about this. My steering wheel is no longer a steering wheel, you see. Just a giant round hunk of metal and plastic that’s about to explode an airbag all over me. You want to talk to someone in charge? Talk to Carl Vehicle. But you can take it from me. No matter how much you shout at him, Carl doesn’t answer. Stoic motherfucker.
“Being dead’s pretty sweet,” Brian interjected, helpfully. “You’ll like it.”
“Why, because you get to come back and annoy the shit out of family members while they’re at their worst?”
“That is one of the perks, yeah,” he replied.
Thunderbolt and lightning very, very frightening me
“Little on the nose, don’t you think?” Brian said.
“I don’t control the playlist, dick. It’s the radio,” I shot back. I was now fully in the next lane over, with no sign of stopping, my lazy fishtail starting to swing back the other way.
“Sure, but you’re the one listening to Classic Rewind all day. This wouldn’t have happened if you’d been listening to The Message.”
“The fucking Christian pop channel? You’re seriously saying that my choice of radio stations is why I’m about to get into a massive traffic pileup on the Jersey Turnpike?”
“Naw, dude. I just like the way your face gets all scrunched up when I say something stupid.”
“Fuck you, Brian. Seriously. Fuck you. I have to deal with this.”
“Deal with what? It’s out of your hands. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. How often do you get to slide across two lanes of traffic at seventy miles an hour?”
“That attitude is exactly what pisses me off about you dead fuckers. You don’t have to deal with anything! Well, guess what? Back here we’re all picking up your shit for you and trying to get over your stupid ass.”
“But that’s what’s so awesome about being dead,” Brian replied. “No responsibilities, no expectations, no bills. Oh, and no spam. We don’t even have phones. It’s awesome.”
Oh shit. When I die, they’re going to clean out my bedroom. That means they’re going to find the Viagra and the butt plugs. Those aren’t even mine! What was that Bill Hicks bit about his parents finding his porn after he died? At least the VCR era is over so I don’t have a bunch of giant tapes hanging around.
“You also don’t have a fuckin’ bedroom,” Brian reminded me.
Okay, notch another point for the smart-ass. He was right. I had moved to Nowhere. The closest thing I had to a bedroom now was Carl Vehicle. Okay, so they’d find fewer butt plugs and more dashboard hula girls. Still mortifying. And now I was clearing the second lane. How’s the shoulder looking? Nice and wide actually, but then it was Guardrail City. America’s second shittiest town, right behind Skokie, Illinois.
“Cheer up, man! Just think of the look on Elizabeth’s face when she hears you’re gone.”
I pictured Elizabeth at my funeral. Jack with his arm around her as she wept behind her sunglasses. Classic L.A. sun streaming down on the . . . but wait, fuck. I was going to die in Jersey. They’d probably have the funeral in Philly, where the family is. Doubtful she’d come out east to bury her ex-boyfriend. Shame. She looked amazing in black.
“Don’t worry, man. You can Ghost her,” Brian offered.
“You mean haunt her?”
“Naw, man, Ghost her! Hang around her house and look longingly at her face and do pottery and shit. Like Kurt Russell!”
“That was Swayze. Kurt doesn’t do that sentimental shit.”
“Yeah, but you do.”
“I do what?
“That sentimental shit.”
If you’d asked me three months prior what my ideal afterlife was, it might have resembled that 1990 cinematic shitsterpiece Ghost. The wistful looks, the flowy shirts, the pottery, “Unchained Melody.” But now, in the super slow-mo realm of pure reaction and total consciousness, it hit me. I didn’t want that stupid sad-sack can’t-move-on crap. Not for Elizabeth. Hell, not for anyone.
I had my life. She had hers. She might have been a dummy for breaking up with me, but that was on her, not me. Or maybe she was smart for breaking up with me. Either way, I was done feeling shitty about her.
“Good! You can finally start feeling shitty about me,” Brian mumbled. “Dick.”
All this talk of shit got me thinking of whether I’d shit myself in the wreckage. Didn’t people do that? Was I even wearing underwear today? Just my luck, they’re going to pull me out of the pileup with a giant stain down my back. And some asshole will pull out his phone and film it because that’s what people do now, and then my final, shitty act on this planet would end up going viral. And that would be what everyone remembered about me. Not the writing. Not the dogs I rescued. Not the radio show, or the time I was on Conan. Not the women I almost married or the kids I never had. Not the charity work I always talked about wanting to do.
“Jesus Christ, let me get a fuckin’ box of tissues,” Brian said.
“You know what, Brian, I didn’t make fun of you while you were dying.”
“Oh, I know. You didn’t do anything. Except sleep, of course. You’re good at that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You don’t think I’d still be alive if you’d come out with me that night?”
“I didn’t want to encourage you. You were drunk.”
“You should have protected me. I was drunk.”
“Is this really the time for us to discuss this? I’m trying to die here.”
“Not hard enough, apparently.”
I must have instinctively eased off the accelerator or hit a dry patch or appeased Thor or Patrick Swayze because just as Carl Vehicle was entering the outskirts of Guardrail City, his wheels found traction on the asphalt again. And whaddya know? He was facing approximately the same direction as he was traveling. Life snapped back to normal speed again and Brian shut up. I had threaded a needle through the gaps between four or five different cars to the far right lane and I could feel the drivers of each of those cars screaming as a wall of adrenaline slammed into my body, making all my muscles contract at once, my thighs aching with flight hormone. Which is why, on the shortest trip of my entire journey, I stopped halfway for a breather. Breathing seemed like a pretty awesome, if undeserved, thing to be doing at that moment.
RAIN RAIN GO AWAY
You know it as a nursery rhyme, but it also serves as a rallying cry for grape growers, who dread precipitation and moisture the way cops fear cell-phone cameras. Grapevines are essentially weeds, after all. They flourish in the gravelly soil and dry conditions that tend to be ruinous for other crops. Of course, zero rain isn’t an option, but too much can be just as disastrous.
If you’ve ever spent any summers in the southern Pennsylvania/New Jersey region, you know they’re right out of Dante: hot and humid with frequent thunderstorms (and occasional appearances by Joe Piscopo). According to South Jersey–born winemaker Daniel Brennan, “that’s not good,” particularly when grapes are plump and soft and not quite ready to harvest.
“If the humidity breaks and you get a huge downpour, the vines might soak up all that water and either dilute the berries or, even worse, cause them to burst,” says Brennan, who moved to New Zealand several years ago to start Decibel Wines.
These days Brennan says places like Jersey have more success with grape growing due to new viticulture techniques. One such practice is to open the canopy (i.e., remove the leaves) around the fruit zone to allow greater airflow (i.e., quicker drying) after rains.
“Then the breeze can blow away all that disease pressure like a moldy fart in the wind,” says Brennan, whose wine tastes far better than his metaphors.
Still, choosing the correct varietals, clones, and rootstock are essential in the unforgiving, humid summers of the Jerz. Growers there have had the most success with thick-skinned varietals such as Cabernet Franc and Viognier.
Brennan is also a big proponent of organically grown grapes, which he says are more resistant to disease pressure caused by rain and humidity. Spraying with pesticides and weed sprays can apparently cause vine health to diminish over time, while robbing free-draining soils of the essential nutrients vines need. Going organic makes it tough to establish a vineyard, but supposedly if you can make it to your second or third year, it’s smoother sailing.
But while Brennan doesn’t miss much about making wine in his home state, he hasn’t gone entirely native in the antipodes. “What I miss most about making wine in Jersey,” says Brennan, “is grabbing some hoagies and a case of beer after work on Friday and heading down the Shore.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him what the Shore was like these days.
The Molly Pitcher Service Area in Middlesex County, New Jersey, offers a fantastic panoply of choices. If, that is, you don’t mind choosing from nineteen varieties of ridiculously inexpensive glop (An entire meal. For a dollar. What’s the catch?) designed to inflict more damage to the human body than Guardrail City. Having already cheated death once that day and therefore having nothing to lose, I went all-in at an establishment I was both delighted and surprised to discover still existed (sorry Nathan’s Hot Dogs and Cinnabon).
When I was a kid, Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips was a regular part of my weekly diet. It’s worth remembering that this was also a period when I regularly ate my own boogers. Every item on the Arthur Treacher’s menu was deep-fried and batter “dip’t.” Even the soda (or at least it tasted that way). Every once in a while you would get a speck of actual fish in your batter. Those were good days. The average meal had an equivalent nutritional value that hovered somewhere between Elmer’s Glue and Play-Doh (the other staples of my diet back then).
After retrieving a “meal” equal parts nostalgic and disgusting, I looked for a seat in Molly Pitcher’s communal dining area. Apparently I wasn’t the only one taking refuge from the End Times weather going on outside. The place looked like I’d lifted an enormous rock and peered underneath to find an ocean of half-formed organisms, wriggling and fishbelly white. I found a spot across from a hairy and spectacularly obese man draped in a tattered Philadelphia Eagles poncho that could double as a four-man tent. He wore a resigned, hangdog look on his face as he polished off a Roy Rogers double cheeseburger and a gallon of fries with the grim efficiency of the back end of a garbage truck. It was clear he did not derive pleasure from the experience. He looked numb, somnambulant, like he might drift off to sleep midchew. A bead of ketchup and melted cheese dripped from the burger onto the poncho/tent, landing just below the eagle’s eye. Either the man didn’t notice or it didn’t bother him. It just sat there, dripping in slow motion, a fast-food tear wept by a once-proud symbol mourning its former glory.
Then, as will happen when you stare at someone for an inappropriately long time, he noticed me. The attention seemed to energize him. He gave a sort of scowl, then his face twitched in what might have been a smile, then the scowl was back again. A moment later, he pointed at me and flashed a thumbs-up. He smiled again, wide, affording me a clear view of neglected teeth and masticated food slop. I quickly averted my gaze, finding sudden fascination in the half-eaten “boat” of deep-fried batter-dip’t fishlike substance in front of me.
I should have known this was coming. Swayze and the Traction Gods didn’t spare anyone for free. Tribute must be paid. I should have just gotten a latte and a protein bar. A wave of nausea swept over me. I could feel my own arteries hardening. I looked up, and the mastodon man gave me another thumbs-up. Why did he keep doing that? He didn’t know me. He couldn’t know me, could he? I did used to live around here, though. Maybe I went to school with him? Or we had beers after a game. It would not be the first time that age and poor food choices had transformed my childhood peers. But come on, man. You gotta keep the ketchup off your tent-poncho. You’re making the eagle cry.
I was suffocating. I wanted to jump up and sprint straight out the doors of the Molly Pitcher Service Area and into the cold, cleansing rain (the secret of New Jersey’s cleansing rain? It’s packed with detergent!), get back on the turnpike and take my chances with the elements, become one with the rain and thunder, offer myself as a sacrifice to Almighty Swayze who would deliver me from the evil of fried “food” and tent ponchos and into a new life of penance and humility and vegan kale smoothies.
Just then, the mastodon hoisted his hulking mass up out of his seat—if I come back as anything in the next life please oh please oh please, let it not be a seat at the Molly Pitcher Service Area—and began waddling toward me. This is it, I thought. This quivering profusion of hirsute flesh and weary bones was coming for me. Coming to squash me for some reason that would probably never be clear to me. Oh, but I knew the reason, didn’t I? There are rules. Staring at someone in a rest stop in Jersey is grounds for assault. Pure and simple. No jury would ever convict. In my defense, it was practically impossible to be in that room and not stare at him. He was just that astronomically ample. Still, my mother always said it’s not nice to stare. Why couldn’t I be nice? Surely this fellow human being deserved better than to be ogled at disparagingly all day long. Hell, there could be any number of reasonable contributing factors to his hippopotamus-like appearance. Genetics. Poor parenting. Maybe he couldn’t afford to eat right. Or maybe he just didn’t give a fat fuck. Whatever. I had no right to judge. And now he was coming for me.
As he got within striking distance his mammoth arm shot out and I recoiled. I also noticed something strange. He had tiny hands. Pink and devoid of any hair. A baby’s hands. They were so incongruous to his galactic proportions that for an instant I forgot I was about to get throttled or shot or at the very least punched in the face. Only one thought was thrumming through my brain, blotting out everything else: it must be really difficult for this guy to wipe his own ass.
Which is when he reached out and touched my head with one of those diminutive digits. Or rather, he touched the brim of the thing I was wearing on my head: a Philadelphia Eagles cap. Until that moment, I’d forgotten it was there. I looked up at him and realized he wasn’t enraged at all. On the contrary, he was smiling. A smile without a trace of burger or fries. He pointed at my cap, then jabbed a thumb at the poncho-tent. Right on the glob of ketchup and cheese, smearing it across the eagle’s eye.
“Go, Birds!” he said. And then he shuffled away.
Indeed, good sir. Go, Birds, go.
PLAIN SPEAKING
Historically, as is true of so many of the places I visited in the middle of the country, the wines of southern New Jersey have traditionally been syrupy, sweet, and so-so. But in recent years folks like Lou Caracciolo of Amalthea Cellars in Atco, have been trying to change the state’s candy-apple reputation by making dry, European-style wines in a place where people tend to pair local wines with cheesecake rather than chateaubriand. Hearteningly, Amalthea’s wines scored nearly as well as Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion in a competition held back in 2012 called, without a trace of irony, the Judgment of Princeton.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, the biggest impediment to selling South Jersey wine is not its quality. Rather, it’s the fact that it’s from South Jersey. The notion that South Jersey’s only exports are pollution and sorrow, while demonstrably untrue, has proven a remarkably resilient idea in the popular consciousness.
So Caracciolo’s wines don’t come from South Jersey. Instead, they come from “The Outer Coastal Plain,” an appellation Caracciolo and a coalition of nearby winemakers came up with in 2009 to rebrand and rehabilitate their growing region. The plan seems to have worked a treat. Sales are up and wine tourism is on the rise. The Outer Coastal Plain sounds like a lovely place for planting vines. South Jersey, on the other hand, sounds like a place where they plant evidence. Allegedly, some say. Probably nothing. Actually, upon further review, forget I said anything. I don’t know nothing about South Jersey. All I know is that I prefer my kneecaps right where they are, thank you very much.
HAVING NARROWLY MISSED TWO CALLS to the great beyond, I emerged from the Molly Pitcher Service Area’s food court to find the storm had passed through, leaving a cool, breezy, sunny day in its wake. Carl Vehicle, though he still wasn’t talking, looked relieved. When I got back in, I realized that in my beflusterment on arrival, I’d left my phone in the car. I missed a call from my cousin Dennis, whom I’d made plans to meet up with that night in Philly. He left a voice mail saying he’d be around for another thirty minutes or so, but after that he “had to run.” I couldn’t tell if his joke was intentional or not, but I laughed anyway, just to be on the safe side.
It never really surprised me that Dennis “lost” his foot, along with a good chunk of his leg. Dennis had been losing things all his life, including things that were larger and more expensive. What was surprising to me, however, was the way he lost it.
If you’d told me it came off in a knife fight, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. Same if it was a motorcycle accident. Or a drunken fall from an electrical tower. Antibiotic-resistant syphilis? Par for the course. Retribution for an unpaid gambling debt, a drug deal gone wrong, or a roll in the hay with another man’s old lady? Vacation in South Jersey? Any one of these things would have been a reasonable, predictable explanation for why Dennis suddenly found himself, at age forty-five, a leg down. Like most of the degenerates we came up with in Philly, throughout his adolescence Dennis had courted disaster like she was the hottest chick in school. Only Dennis married her, had kids, then got caught cheating with Disaster’s sister during a family reunion. Disaster kind of has it in for him at this point.
Still, though. A Christmas tree ornament? It’s just goddamn embarrassing. But there it is. A Christmas tree ornament took my cousin’s leg.
He stepped on it on December 26, 2013. Reilly, the frisky family kitten, had batted the harmless thing off the Christmas tree and it rolled out onto the living room floor to meet its untimely end beneath, as shit luck would have it, Dennis’s bare left foot. It was the one literal misstep in a life full of figurative ones. Dennis, I should note, is a type 2 diabetic, which makes him more susceptible to infections than those of us with normal blood-sugar regulation. Diabetes also inhibits blood flow, which results in decreased sensitivity in the extremities. Decreased sensitivity blocks the body’s primary warning system, pain. So when the bulb broke under his foot, he didn’t feel much of anything. He didn’t much feel the resulting infection, either. It being on the bottom of his heel, he didn’t even see it. It wasn’t long, though, before the smell became hard to ignore. He went to the emergency room and was diagnosed with gangrene with one sniff. Three weeks into the New Year, twenty-seven days after stepping on a sparkly fetish item meant to induce a nostalgia-driven retail orgy, the doctors took Dennis’s left leg, just below the knee.
Dennis doesn’t remember a damn thing about the offending Christmas ornament. When I asked him what it looked like, he barked, “How the fuck would I know?” Which illustrates a clear difference between Dennis and myself. If it were me, and I’d lost a foot to an ornament, I’d know that Christmas ball inside and out. I’d know its date of manufacture and would have memorized its model number. I’d call the company that made it weekly and harangue their poor innocent receptionist, demanding to speak to an ever escalating series of managers and vice presidents. But if you think that Christmas ball haunts Dennis’s dreams, well, then you don’t know Dennis.
Dennis’s apathy is a thing of terrible beauty, a dogged lack of determination exceeded only by his lack of luck. He’s a Rodney Dangerfield joke as told by Mitch Hedberg. A guy who wears his indifference like mirrored sunglasses, a reflective barrier between him and this least of best-possible worlds.
And I understand that these may seem like awfully harsh things to say about a one-legged diabetic cousin, but I assure you, Dennis doesn’t give a shit. Plus, I’m going to leave out the part about how, at the time of his unfortunate Christmas ornament accident, Dennis was also unemployed and sleeping on his mother’s living room sofa, because that would be kicking a man when he’s down. And we’re talking about a man who can’t even kick you back. At least not unless he’s sitting down. Harsh? Again, only if Dennis gave a shit. And I assure you he doesn’t.
Throughout his podectomy, Dennis remained surprisingly upbeat. I should note that Dennis is not in most senses a “downer” kind of guy. Indeed, his defiance is unmatched outside the world of third-party presidential candidates. When I asked him what they did with his foot after they lopped it off, he said they probably put it through a wood chipper to prevent it from reanimating. I’ll admit, I found this ridiculous. Because if the foot is infected, then all those individual, atomized pieces are infected, and all you’re doing messing around with a wood chipper is creating a bigger problem. Soon the conversation had moved to a more productive place with our idea for Attack of the Zombie Legs, the movie Dennis says he’s going to write, that’s PERFECT for Richard Grieco. “Someone get that asshole on the phone,” Dennis shouted. “Tell ’im it’s comeback time!” In other news, Dennis doesn’t have a computer, and the last time he wrote anything was in Sister Mary Flanagan’s eighth-grade English class. A trenchant treatise, titled “Everyone Sucks But Us,” about his beloved Philadelphia Flyers.
When we were trying to build “how I lost my leg” cover stories for use in various social settings, we agreed that under no circumstance should Dennis reveal the humiliating truth about his injury to strangers. Especially in Philly. He’d paid his pound of flesh—with the bone and tendons included it was probably more like ten to twelve pounds—and bought himself some bullshit rights. If history has taught us anything—and by history, I’m referring here specifically to the most memorable scene from Jaws—it’s that few things in life are more compelling than a well-told scar story.
In the end, we settled on a few go-to fabrications:
1. He’s a professional stuntman and lost his leg wrestling an alligator for an upcoming George Clooney film. He doesn’t remember what it’s called.
2. He got stung by a very, very large bee.
3. He tried to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered cycle.
4. Cancer. (Bonus: also explains his baldness.)
5. Cut himself shaving.
6. He was on the USS Indianapolis. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Ship went down in twelve minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen-footer.
7. He was wounded trying to save a kitten from a bear. Stupid kittens.
8. Lost it in a poker game. Trip-ace boat to four twos. Ouch.
9. Stepped on a Saint Patrick’s Day ornament. When they point out that there is no such thing, he says, “Oh, now you tell me!”
Often he tries to scratch his missing foot. Like many recent amputees, Dennis gets phantom feelings in his not-there-no-more limb (the wood-chipper treatment notwithstanding). He compared the sensation to waking up in the morning to go to the office, only to realize it’s Saturday, and you’re like, “Oh, never mind. I don’t have work today.”
Now for a moment I want you to set aside the fact that this is a guy who’s never had an office job or gotten out of bed before 10 A.M., because Dennis’s analogy speaks volumes about his Panglossian outlook on misfortune. Equating the loss of your leg to forgetting that you’re allowed to sleep in is like comparing getting punched in the mouth to being given free orthodontia. Dick that I am, I pressed him on this, and Dennis conceded that he’d rather have the leg than the luxury of not needing to scratch it. But his reflex answer reveals why, despite all the drama and surgery and lack-of-leggedness, he’s probably going to be just fine. Wake up one day and you’re an amputee? That’s one less shoe to worry about. And $10 worth of socks is actually $20 worth of socks if you only have one leg. Score.
Turns out he’s also grown fond of Reilly, the kitty that got the ball rolling toward his leglessness. Just another lesson from The Book of Dennis. To me, that cat would be destined for a burlap sack and a river. But Dennis doesn’t see it that way.
“I don’t know,” he said. Just that. If the Buddha came from Ireland, I know what his name would be.
It’s tempting to think of Nietzsche: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Now Friedrich wasn’t typically one to sugarcoat things, but I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit. Sometimes life kicks you in the balls and instead of making you stronger, the shock makes you sterile, and then you never have kids to pass your misinformed bullshit onto. Allow me to propose a slight edit, mister Ubermensch: what you don’t put behind you makes you its bitch.
No one gets in Dennis’s head but Dennis. Not a gambling debt. Not a jealous husband. Not a drunken fall off an electrical tower. Not a kitten and a Christmas ornament that teamed up to steal his leg. Dennis is not going to solve the unified field theory and he’s not going to fix world hunger. But he honestly doesn’t give a shit about doing those things. Honest being the key word.
Not giving a shit is a skill I’ve never been able to master. For example, I know I’m not Tom Wolfe or Jack Kerouac or any of those genius fuckfaces that changed the world every time they put pen to paper. But instead of not giving a shit, like I should, I take up time and energy being envious instead of working away at things I’m good at, which is to say being an adorable, half-drunk nongenius. Heroes aren’t all in textbooks or on TV imploring us to sweat to the oldies. Sometimes they’re sleeping on their mother’s couch, snuggled up with the cat that took their leg, without a trace of bitterness in their soul.
I was looking forward to seeing Dennis precisely because I knew he didn’t give a shit. He would not be impressed that I was driving around the country, or writing a wine book, or about anything else. I offered to let him read this chapter before publication, so he could see if there was anything in here he wouldn’t want to see in print and he said “sure.” And then he never read a word of it.
THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA LOOKED like Carl Vehicle fresh from the car wash I hadn’t given him in months. The rain had washed away the grime and you could imagine old Ben Franklin himself promenading with his favorite prostitute before retiring to the Hellfire Club for a restorative orgy. What the rain couldn’t wash away, though, was the potholes. You get used to navigating them once you’ve been in Philly awhile, thanks to the city’s spectacularly shitty infrastructure program. The trick is to accept that you are powerless to keep yourself from driving over a pothole. But you do have some small agency over which one. All potholes are not created equal, after all, and keeping your suspension intact while navigating the streets of Philadelphia depends on being able to estimate a given pothole’s depth. However, when the streets are covered in water, all bets are off. Every pothole looks the same. Could be a half-inch deep, could be a sinkhole leading to the center of the earth. Or worse, Danny Bonaduce’s basement.
After rattling my coccyx a few dozen times, the buildings started getting shittier and I started to recognize some landmarks. I was in Northeast Philly. It may not have been home (I am a proud resident of Nowhere after all. Go Nothings!), but it’s where I’m from.