Ellen was wrong. You couldn’t just change things starting now. If your life wasn’t going to work, it wasn’t going to work in a huge, sweeping way. Every little feeler that you sent out to get your new, better self to take root was going to hit a rock or a puddle of toxic waste or just shrivel up all by itself. Ever since I started this program to get a real life, everything I set my sights on as a goal ended up being out of my reach. I was stuck with myself.
I picked up a guitar, as usual, and I started to play. I played a song I’d written a long time ago. There were many problems with the song. It sounded childish, far too simple. Songwriting was another thing that I was bad at.
I just needed to put myself back on my program, that was all, push myself harder. I just needed to force myself forward out of this rut.
I was on my way to Ellen’s on the freeway in my car. There was a little slowdown as I got closer to Mission Valley. I hope there isn’t some game or concert at Qualcomm Stadium that I’ve forgotten about, I was thinking. Then traffic stopped completely, and I was sitting under that enormous bridge that connects the 8 to the 805. How much concrete did it take to build that thing? I was thinking. How long were they working on it? Were there people who had to work under it every single day for months at a time? Personally, I wouldn’t want to do it. In fact, I didn’t want to be sitting here at all. Now my heart started to beat faster, and my hands started to sweat. I looked at the car on my right in which a woman was talking on a phone. She laughed, nodding, and took a sip from a coffee cup. On my left, a gardener’s truck was overloaded with burlap sacks of yard clippings. Two men sat inside staring straight ahead, sipping from Big Gulps. I certainly didn’t want to eat at that moment, I can tell you. I just wanted the car in front of me, a gigantic bronze-colored SUV, to move forward. Even a couple of inches would make me feel better. I couldn’t see through the windows to find out what kind of people were in there. If I had those dark windows, I would feel so boxed in, I would just freak out. In fact, I was freaking out right now anyway, and my windows weren’t even dark. Sweat started to roll down my temples. What if I sat in this traffic so long that I ran out of gas? What would be the fastest way out of here on foot? Would there be any way to climb down off this thing, or would I have to walk a half mile to the exit? I turned around in my seat to look behind me: cars, lots and lots of cars just sitting there, spewing exhaust all over the place. How come the drivers all looked as though nothing was wrong? This was horrible! If you wanted to torture somebody, make them really suffer, this would be the place to put them, right here on the underside of this huge freeway, boxed in by about a million cars, with nowhere to go. If I were having a heart attack right now, could an emergency vehicle come up this way? All the cars would move over just a tiny bit and open up a lane, but would it be enough room?
Now my heart was really thumping. My shirt and face were soaked. There were little puddles on the steering wheel when I released my hands. I can’t stand this,. I was thinking. I am not going to make it, I put my face against the steering wheel and continued to sweat. I took a deep breath. Then I said to myself, You won’t be here forever. Sooner or later, you will move. I lifted my head. The car in front of me had moved one foot. It was still rolling forward. I moved a little. Then we were up to 5 miles an hour with a pretty big space between us, then 10, and before long, I was going a full 23 miles per hour with room enough for a garbage truck between me and the next car.
When I got to Ellens, my shirt was soaked and my hair was stuck to my head.
“Tom?” she said. Her eyebrows dipped toward each other in concern.