One of my classes was Introduction to Philosophy, taught by a little man who looked like he’d just walked out of an R. Crumb cartoon, whom we called “the Instructor.” A generic “INSTRUCTOR” had appeared on the class schedule where his name should have been. It never got corrected, and he never once told us his name. On the first day of class, he simply walked in and asked if we had read any of the assigned texts. Since we had never received a syllabus or a list of required books, several people shook their heads no, while the rest of us just stared blankly. He pulled a pile of barely legible mimeographed course outlines out of his bag, plopped them by the door, and began talking about Socrates. That’s how we started.
The Instructor would rant for an hour about truth, the Federal Reserve System, cinema verité, and Ronald Reagan—and I was transfixed. For the first time in my brief college career, I actually read the assigned texts. Not only did they prime me for whatever mind blowing the Instructor was about to lay down, but they offered the benefit of giving me something brainy to talk about with Laura.
Shortly after I started the class, Laura and I drove up to the Flats in Cleveland to see a band she’d heard on a mix tape, the March Violets. Laura was driving home afterward because (a) she loved to drive but didn’t have a car, and (b) I had shown up at her house so fucked up that I passed out in the three minutes between arriving and her opening the passenger door to jump in. The only thing I remember about the show was that the March Violets were fronted by a woman with huge hair who was not wearing a bra (and really should have been). When I mentioned the bra thing to Laura after the show, she refused to unlock the car door until I took it back.
We continued to argue about the piggishness of my boob observation as we drove out of the Flats and through a neighborhood of empty warehouses overlooking the Cuyahoga River.
“Stop the car!” I yelled, leaning toward the window and fixing my attention on one passing building.
“What? No,” she replied.
“I need you to stop the car right now,” I said.
“Are you sick or something? I’m not going to …”
I reached in between us and pulled up the emergency brake. Luckily, we weren’t going that fast, and we quickly skidded to a dead stop in the middle of West Ninth Street. A car honked and swerved around us.
“What the fuck was that?” she asked.
“We have to go in there!” I shouted back, annoyed that I had to explain my instant obsession.
“Where? There is nothing here.”
“Right there,” I said, grabbing a small flashlight from the glove box, opening the car door, and walking toward a dilapidated warehouse. Laura parked the car and followed. By the time she caught up with me, I had already broken off the padlock from the front door. It was barely held in place by rusty screws embedded in the weather-beaten frame. It came out with about as much effort as it takes to pry a pit out of a ripe peach.
“How are you sure that we aren’t going to get caught?” Laura said.
“I’m not sure we won’t get caught,” I answered, turning on the flashlight, handing it to her, and walking into the cavernous space. I saw a metal staircase off to the side and started to climb four stories to the top. The floor was one large room with a small, cheaply built office against the far wall. The space was flooded with moonlight through six-foot-square windows of small glass panes. It was almost bright enough that we didn’t need the flashlight.
“Why are we here again?” she asked.
“Because I think we should live here,” I said.
“Live here?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “We could move in here and clean it up. It would be amazing.”
“Live here,” she repeated flatly.
“Yeah, together,” I answered.
“We’d live here together? Why would we live together?” she said.
“Don’t you think it would be cool?” I asked.
She paused and looked me in the eye.
“I don’t know,” she said, turning the light away to find the stairway back down.
Once outside again, I grabbed a bottle of cheap wine from the back of the car and we sat on the loading deck of the warehouse. I decided to drop some philosophy on her.
“Well, as you know, Socrates was like Jesus, he didn’t really write anything—it’s all told to us through others,” I said, making it sound like the most obvious thing in the world, even though I had only learned it myself twelve hours earlier. “Plato was just one of them.”
“Really,” Laura said.
“You have to break things down into a series of questions. Then you will find the ultimate truth you seek.”
“Is that so?” she said.
“Socrates felt he’d be better off dead than have to conform to society’s expectations,” I said. “He’d rather die than live on his knees.”
“You try to make that sound so noble,” she said.
“Are you mocking me?”
“Yes.”
As we lazily walked around the warehouse’s loading area, I started quoting the Socrates passages I’d copied into my notebook, reading them to Laura by the light of my Zippo. Passages about the evils of piety, the virtue of sacrifice, and quotes about the gods, beauty, and wrongdoers. I still have that notebook, though for some reason just a few random pages remain in it. It was cheap—more than likely the binding got loose and disintegrated over time.
“No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. And surely it is,” I read.
After that, I stopped reading, mainly because I simply couldn’t read what I’d written. My letters and words started to morph into scribbles and random shapes, less and less legible as they stumbled down the page.
I looked a few pages further into my notebook. All scribbles. Not a single legible word. It went on for at least a dozen pages.
The final few pages contained just wild loops, scratches, and thrashing lines. I had pushed so hard that I’d dug the pen into the page, putting small random tears into the paper. I must have broken the pen, or it had run out of ink, because it just suddenly stopped. Then the writing switched from black ink to blue for one final quotation, one that I’d copied repeatedly over several pages, written neatly and precisely:
“But it is clear to me that it was better for me to die now and to escape from trouble. That is why my divine sign did not oppose me at any point.”
As I stood silently staring at the pages of my journal by the light from the Zippo that was about to burn my fingertips, I realized that I had no recollection at all of writing any of this. Seeing the progressively manic scribbles was just as shocking to me as it would have been to a stranger.
We got into the car to head home. By this time, I was sober enough to drive. As we got onto I-77 and headed out of Cleveland, Laura thumbed through my notebook. She eventually laid her head down in my lap, took my hand, and placed it across her collarbone. We sat there in silence for a few minutes.
“Am I pretty?” Laura asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You know,” she said. “Do you think I’m pretty?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in conventional beauty,” I said. “You are probably the last person I’d ever expect to hear that question from.”
“Just answer it,” she said. “Is that so hard?”
“Yes,” I said, pausing. “I think you are pretty.”
She wrapped her fingers around mine and closed her eyes for a few minutes.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said.
I hesitated.
“Why don’t you want to live in the warehouse?” I asked. “With me.”
Laura slowly sat upright.
“It isn’t that …,” she said.
“What?” I interjected.
“Eric, I have no interest in living in Cleveland,” she said.
I just stayed quiet.
“I mean, is that what you want?” she asked. “Downtown Cleveland? Some rat-filled warehouse?”
“We could clean it up,” I said.
“That isn’t the point. Don’t you want something more?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Eric, there is a whole world out there,” she said. “Don’t you want to be a part of it? Don’t you want to see what’s outside Ohio?”
“In a world full of ignorant fucks who hate you, what difference does it make if they’re in Canton or Amsterdam?”
“You wouldn’t know, would you,” she said.
Laura started paging through my Socrates quotes until she found what she was looking for. “ ‘The most blameworthy ignorance is to believe that one knows what one doesn’t know,’ ” she read.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“You tell me,” she said. “You wrote it in your amazing notebook of truth.
“And what is the deal with this one?” she continued. “You highlighted and underlined it four times: ‘Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god.’ Huh?”
“I guess I thought it was important,” I said.
“Plainly,” she said, leaning her body against the passenger window.
Recently I dug through that weathered journal filled with Socrates quotes, which I’ve managed to hold on to all those years, and my heart almost stopped beating when I came to that quote. I remember reading it for the first time. I remember how clearly it seemed to express my feelings about wanting to end my life. I remember copying it from my textbook and underlining it again and again. I remembered Laura’s reaction to reading it. But none of that is why it affected me so much to look at it again today. I underlined it because I had felt it applied so clearly to my life, when clearly it had applied to hers.
Neither of us said a word for a while. I drove and kept turning up the music. Laura thumbed through the notebook.
I pulled over a few blocks from her house. I turned the lights off on the car and reached for my book bag in the backseat, fishing around for something to write with. I wrote on a blank notebook page, “Don’t you want anything normal out of life?”
She looked at me for a moment, slightly puzzled by why I would write this instead of saying it aloud. She took the pen and notebook from me.
“What do you mean?” she wrote, handing them back.
“You always talk about exploring places and roaming around the world looking for something,” I wrote. “But don’t you want a normal life at some point? Like having a family and stuff?”
She visibly shuddered when she read it.
“I can’t think of anything more repulsive than the thought of having a baby,” she wrote. “The idea of something growing inside me, it’s just … SICK.”
Everything was quiet for a moment, then she grabbed the notebook back from me and continued to write.
“So if you are asking if I want to be happy, and happy means being somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother and somebody’s neighbor or somebody PINNED DOWN to some warehouse because it would be cool … then NO. I guess I don’t want to be happy like that.”
Everything stayed silent for a moment.
“And you are wrong,” she said aloud. “That isn’t happy.”
“I never said that,” I answered. “I just asked if you wanted that.”
“You asked if I wanted normal,” she snapped. “And I don’t have any idea what normal is, though I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t care for it. And I wouldn’t be hanging around with you if I thought you had a clue about normal, either.”
I didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not.
As much as I found myself battling against convention and rules regarding everything else, having a relationship with her was one area where I decidedly longed for “normal.” Perhaps it was because everything else in my life was such chaos, but I wanted to make sure my feelings weren’t in vain. I wanted to know that this one thing in my life was real and had meaning. I wanted to know it was true.
When we reached her house, I slowly leaned over to try to kiss her good night. Laura softly shook her head and reached for the door.
I was spending an increasing amount of time in my car, basically because I had nowhere else to go. I could go home, but that would mean dealing with my parents. I could go to class, but that would mean explaining why I hadn’t attended most of them in weeks. The only place I didn’t feel any pressure to explain myself was work, where few people seemed to notice me at all. But I only worked twenty hours a week, which left me with about a hundred and fifty-odd hours to fill.
So I just drove. Drove around Canton. Drove to my favorite hidden places. Drove nowhere in particular—just around.
One of the best parts of driving was being able to listen to music. I’d added an amplifier to the tape deck in my car, which turned the volume inside the vehicle from loud to obscenely loud. I liked it loud enough in the car that I could feel the music rattle against my body, throb inside my sinuses, and pulse in waves along the hair of my arms.
It isn’t that I loved what I was listening to as much as I loved the way it made me feel. Listening to music that loud has a way of blocking out your other senses. You start to taste music and smell music. It makes you numb to your emotions and the world around you.
A few nights after the March Violets show I was driving around after work, trying to burn off enough time so that I could go home after my parents had gone to bed. I’d just bought some Burger King and was driving up and down Cleveland Avenue, eating fries and listening to Gang of Four.
As I drove, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a dark flash across my rearview mirror. By the time I focused my gaze, it was gone.
Odd, I thought. Probably a bird flying behind the car or a piece of newspaper in the wind or something. Still, I could feel my heartbeat quicken.
I reached under the dash and clicked off the amplifier. Perhaps it was better to be less numb, I thought, and continued down the road munching on my fries.
About ten minutes later I saw it again. The headlights from the car behind me were suddenly blocked by something.
Before I could even turn my glance toward the mirror, I knew what it was.
It was something in the backseat of the car.
It was Her.
I could feel Her there, leaned forward in the seat, sitting perfectly still. Mouth moving silently, blankly gazing at the back of my head. No sound, just presence.
There was no brief flash this time. I didn’t dare look directly into the rearview mirror, but I could see that She was still blocking the headlights. I could feel my chest tighten as confusion turned into panic.
Without stopping the car, I whipped my body around to look.
“What are you waiting for?” I screamed out before I even noticed that the backseat was empty.
No sign of Little Girl. No sign of anything.
“No, no, no!” I yelled, beating my fists against the car seats with every syllable.
I’m shocked at how mercurial my emotions could be back then. Twenty seconds earlier I was complacently eating a French fry. Then I was in a full-blown rage.
I heard a car horn coming toward me, getting louder. I turned back in my seat to face forward and saw two headlights, about forty yards directly in front of me. I’d drifted into the oncoming-traffic lane.
Time seemed to slow. My rage evaporated as quickly as it had risen, leaving me wanting to just shut my eyes to make everything go away. I didn’t lift my foot from the accelerator; I just steadied the steering wheel straight ahead.
No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man.
For a moment I thought I could see the words in front of me, scribbled in my frantic handwriting in the illumination of the headlights. I just wanted everything to stop. I was tired of being alone and confused and overwhelmed and uncertain and out of touch and wishing for things to be better.
But it is clear to me that it was better for me to die now and to escape from trouble.
I shook my head from side to side, making the headlights dance and swirl like the writing in my notebook.
I thought to myself: Let it happen.
I pushed the accelerator down further. I exhaled deeply, letting all my emotions go. For a moment, I felt peaceful.
The horn grew louder. The lights got closer and brighter and then swerved off the side of the road.
I could see the bright brake lights in the rearview mirror as the other car came to a stop.
“You are quite the Humean.”
“Pardon me?” I replied.
“Hume. Your essay. Very interesting,” said the Instructor, pointing a finger toward the essay blue book he’d just slapped down on my desk.
“Cortez,” he called out.
A girl meekly raised her hand.
“Read the book next time,” he stage-whispered, slapping a blue book down in front of her.
While he called out to other classmates, I flipped through my blue book. After the first few pages, my legibly written answer seemed to fade in and out, with drawings, arrows, and scribbles in between. After manically writing, then scribbling out the last page and a half, I ended my essay with a quote from the reading, which I had memorized: “I believe that no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.” The quote was followed by a drawing of a hangman with a happy face.
Below it was written in red, “Provocative. Strong case. B+.”
It was the highest grade of my college career.
The Instructor’s class was the only one on my schedule that I attended regularly—or pretty much at all—anymore. Even though I knew I was looking at a grade card filled with Incompletes and F’s, I still diligently attended the Instructor’s course, read all the material, and did all the assignments and tests.
Our midterm was devoted to the second book in class, David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. In hindsight, I’m sure the Instructor had assigned us Plato and Hume to help us learn the basics of critical thinking. Socratic method. Scientific method. The world seen through empirical skepticism. Come up with a question or idea, then let your experience be your guide to the truth. However, to me, they started to mean something else entirely.
They were Suicide 101.
I knew I’d stumbled onto something big one night when I was struggling my way through the Hume book. I was really excited that the Instructor planned to cover one 125-page book over a month’s time. Then I realized that the work of the Instructor’s favorite eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher wasn’t exactly a page-turner. I spent three weeks attempting to force myself through the main text, though I eventually skipped ahead to a collection of posthumous essays. Late one night when Laura was busy and there was nothing to do, I drove out to Lake O’Dea on my own and started reading the second essay, “Of Suicide,” by the dome light of my car, Public Image’s First Issue in the cassette deck.
“The superstitious man is miserable in every scene, in every incident of life. Even sleep itself, which banishes all other cares of unhappy mortals, affords to him matter of new terror; while he examines his dreams, and finds in those visions of the night prognostications of future calamities.”
I jumped out of the car and started walking toward a streetlight, reading and rereading the passage over and over again, while I felt my stomach sink.
He wrote this about me, I thought.
The dreams. Little Girl. Visions. Everything. Hume was speaking directly to me.
I put the book down just long enough to run back to my car to find a pen and my highlighter, almost as if I had to capture the text immediately or I’d somehow lose it forever. I started to highlight and underline almost everything, turning every page of the essay into a sea of yellow color and bold black strikes.
In the essay, Hume makes the case for providence: that everything happens according to the rules and laws established by God; that these rules govern everything, from the temperature at which water boils to the amount of force you must assert to move a large rock.
Hume then argues that suicide is only a crime if it is a transgression against God, our community, or ourselves, then strips down the case against suicide from each perspective.
I kept reading, highlighting, and scribbling notes as the argument unfolded in front of me.
“Whenever pain or sorrow so far overcome my patience, as to make me tired of life, I may conclude that I am recalled from my station in the clearest and most express terms. Both prudence and courage should engage us to rid ourselves at once of existence, when it becomes a burden.”
Basically, Hume was arguing that if your life sucked or you were contemplating suicide, go for it. If you found yourself questioning whether or not you should die, you were, in his eyes, already checked out—or so far gone that there was no point in turning around. Your fate was already cast, game over.
Many years later I learned that Hume did not believe in God, providence, fate, divine intervention, or divine anything. He just liked to mess with the feeble minds of religious folks. To him, the whole essay was a carefully constructed mind fuck. But back then I accepted it as truth. Genius written down more than two hundred years before I was born. Genius meant to guide me.
Shortly after finishing the essay, I drove to a nearby pay phone and called Andre and Todd’s room at the Traveler’s Inn.
“What the fuck do you want?” Andre bellowed.
“You know those little pills I get from you,” I asked.
“Motherfucker, it is two-thirty in the morning!” he yelled. “Can’t it wait?”
“No, it can’t,” I replied. “Do you have any?”
“Sure, I got a couple.”
“How many?”
“How the fuck am I supposed to know? Ten, maybe.”
“Can you get more?”
“How many more?” Andre asked.
“More,” I replied.
“I don’t know, probably about thirty. They ain’t cheap, though.”
“I want more.”
“More than thirty? What the fuck do you want that many for?”
“What do you care, Andre. I want more.”
“Fifty.”
“Fifty sleeping pills? You know how much that is gonna cost?”
He told me. I immediately consented. Andre told me to stop over tomorrow evening and pick them up.
“And I want cash, motherfucker. Not excuses. Not promises. Cash.”
The next day I cashed my paycheck, drew whatever embarrassingly small amount of money I had in my bank accounts, and cashed two bad checks at grocery stores. On the way, I stopped by a thrift store and picked up a beautiful glass vial, just big enough to hold fifty tablets. After stopping by Andre’s and enduring his questioning and threats about not trying to sell these at any of his regular hangouts, I drove up to Lake O’Dea. I put all the pills in the vial, screwed on the lid, and placed it on the dashboard. I felt an amazing sense of relief, as complete as the day I smashed the stereo.
This vial was my emergency escape plan.
Part of me was resigned to the idea that the only way I could gain control over my life was to end it. The only way to take back the power of the Little Girl and the darkness surrounding me was to end my existence. Part of me finally felt peace, knowing that when things got really bad, I had a way out.
Of all the emotions I felt, despair wasn’t one of them. I had torn apart everything in my life. I knew it. My friends and family knew it. I had turned out to be nothing but a disappointment and a failure. A doped-up, undependable, unpredictable mess who thought he was being followed around by a dead girl he didn’t know. Little Girl wasn’t my problem; Little Girl was a symptom of my problem.
The real problem was me. The only way to fix it was to get rid of me.
It’s obvious to me now that there was a small part of me, a very small part, that didn’t want to give up. I could have very easily opened the vial and swallowed all the pills, right then and there. But I didn’t. Instead, from then on, every moment became a choice.
For example, Laura and I might have had plans or I would have internal discussions with myself along the lines of, “Yeah, I could kill myself on Tuesday night, but then I’ll never know for sure if Greg [one of my fellow WKSC deejays] was right when he argued that Guadalcanal Diary sounded better live than on their record. So maybe I’ll wait until the weekend to overdose on pills. But, wait, there will be a new Iron Man comic out the following Tuesday, so maybe I’ll wait until after that.”
Every time I’d get scared or angry or impatient or someone would start yelling at me for some dipshit thing I’d done, I’d just reach into my coat pocket and brush my fingers against the vial. It was cold. It was real. It was comfort.
It was a choice. My choice: Do it now, or wait awhile longer. A choice I made every time I touched it.
Of course, David Hume would probably have laughed at my little vial of pills and sense of power and control. He’d argue that my fate was already sealed one way or another. All I was doing was acting out the formula. It was only a matter of time. Just as certainly as those pills would cause a chemical reaction in my stomach, I was simply working my way through the stages of a predictable and predestined outline, step by step.
The only thing I could hope for, Hume would say, was an error in the equation. To find something broken and, thus, working against the rules. An exception. A way out.
I had made a feeble effort to make some new replacement friends by seeking out some of the punk kids that took classes at Kent Stark. I’d long ago given up on making friends with normal people, which was good, because they had about the same level of interest in me. Seeking out the company of people who appeared as odd as—or odder than—me felt more like working at my pay grade. Phil and Ben fit perfectly. Between their total lack of initiative, underwhelming delivery on their potential, and love of beer and punk rock, they were complete fuck-ups. Just my kind of guys.
Most of the time we just sat around the cafeteria talking about bands and bitching about classes. On Thursday nights we’d grab a couple of others and go to the Galaxy Niteclub because they served twenty-five-cent drafts and twenty-five-cent hot dogs. We’d gorge on hot dogs and swill, then roam the dance floor, concealing our contempt for our fellow patrons just enough to keep from getting beaten up. Usually the night would end with us slam dancing out in the parking lot at closing time as the frightened drunks stumbled wide around us to avoid a stray arm or bead of sweat.
One night I was at Ben’s for a party when he noticed me staring off into some void in his kitchen. After catching the attention of a few others, he waved his hand in front of my eyes, asking me what I was looking at.
“I hate that motherfucker.”
Pause.
“Who are you talking about?”
“Him,” I said, pointing at the shelf next to the refrigerator. “Cap’n Crunch.
“I hate that mouth-breathing dumb motherfucker,” I said as I walked across the room toward the shelf, picking up the box. “He is basically Mr. Magoo in a sea cap. I always rooted for the Soggies.”
“Umm … what are the Soggies?” Phil asked.
“From the commercial,” I said. “The Soggies. The blobby things on springs?”
Ben and Phil looked at me blankly.
“The fucking Soggies try to ruin the cereal, making it soggy. Then dipshit Cap’n Crunch shows up and scares them away,” I said. “I used to root for the Soggies. I’d just look at this ballsucker and wanted to punch him in that big fucking nose.”
We all have cringe-inducing moments in our lives, moments that when we think back on them make us shudder. It doesn’t matter if it’s a week, a year, or a decade later, we can’t ever get used to the thought of what we’ve done. Of all the stupid things I did during this time in my life, this is the one that still makes me cringe. The more I spoke, the more I felt people staring at me, wondering what I was talking about, wondering if I was ever going to make any sense. The more I struggled to connect, the further I reached. Acting this way was my “Hail Mary” play—either I’d finally be able to make a meaningful connection to people, or my behavior would expand the chasm even further.
“Okay,” Ben said while looking over at some of the other people gathered in the kitchen.
“You want to know what the problem is?!” I yelled, digging my hand through the top of the unopened box. “This shit … this shit that you eat? It looks like fucking macaroni and cheese.” I threw a handful of cereal on the kitchen table.
A few people stepped back, somebody groaned, and others started whispering. They knew what was about to happen. I knew what was about to happen. Nobody could do anything to stop it. It was like some sad, terrible play.
“This shit … it isn’t food!” I screamed, banging the box against the table. “It is Yellow Number Five!”
I smacked the box against the table again, returning it to my face to read again from the label.
“It is thiamin mononitrate.”
With the next smack, cereal started to fly around the kitchen.
“Pyridoxine hydrochloride … mmm, sounds delicious!”
Cereal was spraying around the room.
“And reduced iron! What the fuck is reduced iron? And why are you eating this shit?!” I was now flailing the empty box against the tabletop.
“I fucking hate this motherfucker!”
“Man, you need to calm down,” Phil said.
I threw the box at his head. He started toward me; two guys put their hands on his shoulder to hold him back.
“I will cut out your fucking heart and eat it in front of you,” I said calmly, not moving an inch.
Everyone just stood staring. No one understood the point I was trying to make. I’m not even sure I understood the point I was trying to make. I just remember someone gently grabbing my arm and steering me toward the door.
“You should go,” I heard someone utter.
The next time Laura and I went to Lake O’Dea I told her about the Cap’n Crunch incident.
“What were you thinking?” Laura yelled at me.
“It didn’t mean anything,” I replied.
“What do you mean? You threatened him. Not cool.”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“What do you care?” I added. “What difference does it make to you what I do?”
“It makes a difference.”
“How?” I asked. “You know, I just don’t get you.”
“What is there to get?”
“I mean, what is going on here?” I asked. “What are we?”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I mean you and I. This, between us. What is this?”
“I don’t follow,” she said.
“Our relationship,” I answered. “Are we friends … or are we more than friends?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Because it does make a difference,” I answered.
“It is what it is.”
“That isn’t good enough,” I said. “We hang out together all the time. We talk all the time. Where is this going?”
“I don’t understand why it has to go anywhere,” she said. “Why do you have this sudden need for things to be defined?”
“How come whenever something is important to you, it is important. But when it’s important to me, I’m just boxing you in?”
“I didn’t say that,” she replied. “If you feel the need to define things, you’ll ruin them. I mean, aren’t you happy? What we have, doesn’t that make you happy?”
“Of course I’m happy,” I said immediately.
I don’t know why I said that. Even then I knew it wasn’t true. Or at least it wasn’t entirely true. Yes, being with her did make me happy, but my joy being with her was quickly overwhelmed by the emptiness I felt about everything else. My answer at the time was that I just needed more of her.
“You don’t need a permission slip to do something or be something,” she said. “Stop waiting for it; it isn’t coming. Just let it be what it is.”
“And what is that?”
“You and me,” she said. “Just this moment. Not the moment before, not the moment after.”
While we talked I was nervously rolling a lit cigarette around between my fingers, occasionally holding it close to the underside of my forearm.
“What are you doing?” she asked while I was brushing the burning end of the cigarette so close to my arm that you could see its reflection on my skin. “The cigarette,” she added.
“Nothing, I’m just—”
She thrust her forearm in front of me. “If you need to burn someone,” she said, “burn me.”
She reached out and grabbed my hand.
“What?”
“Burn me,” she said.
I broke away from her grasp, took the cigarette, and held it about an inch from her skin. I looked up and we stared at each other.
“Do it,” she said.
“This is so stupid,” I said.
“Burn me. I want you to do it.”
We kept matching each other’s stare; I could feel her arm tense up and brace for the pain.
“Put it on my arm,” she said softly and calmly.
I slowly dipped the cigarette down and ever so briefly and lightly grazed it against her skin.
She grimaced, then exhaled, turning her breath into a quick sigh of disappointment. Then she scrunched up her face.
“No!” she yelled, reaching her hand toward the cigarette. “If you are going to do it, do it like this.”
She was pulling at my fingers trying to get the cigarette away from me. I fought back. She pried it from my hand and jabbed it into her arm, twisting as she pushed down. Most of the ember had fallen off when she grabbed the cigarette from me.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I said, brushing bits of broken ember and ash away from her and the car seat. She was fine. A tiny little burn, but nothing like what she was trying for.
“Are you attempting to have some kind of fucking crazy contest with me?” I asked. “Because if you are, you will definitely lose.”
“You want answers,” she said. “There is your answer.”
She was staring out the window.
At the time, I just thought she was in a bad mood or something. But in the years since, I often revisit that night. She was in a lot of pain about … something. There was anger in her about … something. I didn’t—and still don’t—have any concrete idea what upset her so much. Perhaps she didn’t either. Maybe that was one reason why she was so evasive all the time. Perhaps she just wasn’t ready to—or couldn’t—face her own darkness. Both of us were obsessed with being different, yet it was obvious that being different caused her a bit of pain as well.
We rode in silence until we got to her house.
No good-night kiss.
I was sitting on the floor against the wall in my parents’ dining room.
“I will handle it!” I yelled. “Just let me take care of it.”
My parents were sitting in their chairs at the dining table. I drew my legs up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my knees, rocking back and forth. They told me they were concerned. They’d noticed that I’d lost a lot of weight and my appearance and hygiene were getting worse.
I was constantly in motion—looking around, scratching, bobbing my head, moving my tongue—anything to keep from being still. They had no idea how bad things were, nor would they have had any idea what to do if they did.
“And your checking account is overdrawn by two hundred ten dollars,” my mother said.
“And a hundred sixty is one check,” my dad added. “Why were you writing checks for a hundred sixty dollars if you didn’t have the money to cover it?”
In truth, I had cashed checks to buy all those sleeping pills I was carrying around, which then had started a daisy chain of bad checks written to cover old bad checks, and they just piled up.
The week before I’d received a postcard from the R.E.M. fan club informing me of a string of tour dates through the Midwest. A few days after that I woke up and impulsively decided that I was going to attend as many as I could. I’d told no one, including Laura, that I was leaving. I hadn’t made any arrangements to be gone from work. By then I really didn’t attend classes anymore. When I took off for the shows and no one knew where I was for days, everyone feared the worst.
I didn’t care. I tried convincing myself that I was having the time of my life. In truth, I knew what I was doing, but that just caused my sense of failure and doom to feed upon itself. I was a fuck-up who was in the midst of fucking up, plain and simple. It felt as natural as breathing.
When I got home, I was honestly surprised that my parents were so upset with me or, frankly, had even noticed that I was gone. It wasn’t like we were really seeking out one another’s company much those days.
“On days when I get the mail, there’s always a returned check notice in there,” my father added. “And I know most days you are getting to the mail before we are.”
“There aren’t any more bad checks; those were the only ones,” I quickly offered, hoping the lie would stick.
“Eric, I can’t believe you,” said my dad, waving his hand across the bank statement he’d opened in that morning’s mail. “We don’t know where you are. You disappear or come in at all hours.”
“I work. I have school.”
“I don’t think Kent has classes at one A.M.,” he said.
“You didn’t answer the question,” my mother said. “Where is this money going?”
“I wrote bad checks to get money to buy pills.”
It spilled out of my mouth before I realized what I’d said. Everyone in my life knew that some bad things were going on, but no one, especially my parents, was allowed to see enough to know how fucked up things had become. I told them lies about my great progress in school. I told them about studying and working on class projects with classmates. I told them about working extra at T.J. Maxx. None of it was true. But this time I had told the truth.
My jacket was thrown over the chair in the corner. The vial was in the pocket. I wanted to run over there and shove the whole vial, still capped, down my throat.
“There was this guy I know,” I added quickly, not ready for any more truth just then. “He had a bag of pills. He told me he was going to sell them at high school basketball games.” I began to tear up. The tears were convenient but real.
“I just couldn’t let him do it,” I cried out. “I had to stop him. So I got out my own money and bought them all.”
“What did you do with them?” my mother asked.
“I flushed them!” I exclaimed.
“Bullshit,” my father said. “You bought them for yourself. This needs to be made right, and fast. If you plan to stay in this house, you need to get straightened out. What are you going to do about all this?”
“I don’t know!” I yelled, standing up to face him across the table.
“I asked a question!” he yelled back. “What are you going to do?”
“I have no fucking clue! Maybe I’ll just die and stop embarrassing you!” I screamed.
“Are you on drugs right now?” my dad asked.
I looked over at the jacket again. My dad seemed to notice my gaze. I jumped across the table and swooped it off the chair. I started to put it on and headed for the back door.
“Eric, come back here!” my mother called out. “Eric, we need to finish talking about this. Eric!” I heard her yell as I headed down the driveway to my car.
Picnic table. Path. Little Girl in a Blue Dress. Wet. Mumbling. Shaking her head. Screaming gibberish.
I wake up. I hear a bump through the wall.
It’s Her.
Earlier that evening I’d quietly snuck into the house after my family were all asleep. Following the dream, I spent the rest of the night trying to calm down after feeling Little Girl. I just sat in my bed and listened for more noises.
I heard the other members of my family get up and start their day. NPR on the radio downstairs. Showers running. One by one they all headed out to their normal lives. The house seemed silent.
Just as I was about to get up, I could sense something standing between my bed and the window.
I opened my eyes and saw my brother, Michael, standing over me. He was holding my old typewriter over his head. As soon as he saw my eyes were open, he threw the typewriter toward my head.
I raised my hands just in time to push the typewriter out of the way and jumped up out of the bed as it crashed to the bedroom floor.
“What the fuck was that about, you fucking troll?” I screamed.
Michael ran out of the room into the hallway and turned back, half hiding behind the door frame.
“You are destroying our family,” he said before dashing down the stairs. “Why don’t you just go away!”
A few years ago I was visiting my parents and decided to pull out some of our dozens of photo albums from growing up. If nothing else, my family was excellent at documenting everything in photographs: every birthday party, Halloween costume, family trip, home-renovation project, and special occasion. But after I got to the few photos I’d allowed to be taken at my high school graduation, I saw there was not another family photo until Christmas a year and a half later. Given my resistance to being photographed, it would make sense that there were none of me. But there were none, period. Of anyone. Of any event. Nothing, for eighteen months. It’s clear now that my problems weren’t just hard on me.
I hurried downstairs and got into my car as my brother ran past me on his way to school. I needed to get to Kent Stark that morning to try to beg my way into taking an exam I’d missed two days earlier, for a class that I hadn’t attended in three weeks.
I pulled down the driveway and stopped at the bottom to switch gears, but then I just sat there in the car and stared at the pavement in front of me.
I didn’t want to go. It wasn’t worth the effort to maintain the façade anymore. I was getting close to done.
Without really putting much more thought into it, I put the car in drive, straightened the wheel toward the house, gunned the gas pedal, and tensed my arms as I felt the car lurch forward.
