If at Birth You Don't Succeed (20 page)

The response from my male friends was surprising too. It seemed that many of them were wrestling with some of the same things I was feeling—isolated, unsure of themselves, waiting for permission to be vulnerable.… If I'm being completely honest with myself now, when I look back, the Olive Garden gift card was just another device that allowed me to dance around the idea of dating without committing to it. In the moment, though, it was a first step toward cutting the bullshit and taking a stab at the type of man I wanted to become. As a result of this note, I went on a slew of one-on-one dinners with classmates and acquaintances I hoped to know better. But I saved the gift card for Holly. She was the closest person to a hot date that I could think of and, after bringing her to the verge of tears on my douche bag flowers day, I figured she'd earned it.

Two weeks later, while Chris, Aaron, and Brad were burrowed in my production studio of an apartment, I was granted a two-hour leave of absence to go to the Olive Garden with Holly. She came up to my door in a red cardigan, with her blond hair done up in a bun, and exchanged brief hellos with the boys' club while I transferred into my manual chair. As we headed down the hallway, Aaron instructed Holly sternly, “You have him home by ten!”

Holly and I didn't talk much on the drive over to the OG. She seemed preoccupied with finding the right music on her iPod, which made me preoccupied with not dying because she paid more attention to her playlist than she did to the road. As we pulled into the parking lot, instead of following the gentlemanly tradition of hopping around the car and opening the door for a lady, my only option was to stay put and listen to Holly curse my wheelchair as she struggled to get it out of her trunk. Setting a romantic scene is tricky when the first thing your date has to do is reminiscent of hauling a sofa up a flight of stairs, but five minutes later, when she finally came around to the door with my wheels, we let the excitement of the Olive Garden whisk us away.

How can you not be enchanted when “Come Fly with Me” is being piped through an outdoor loudspeaker and the aroma of dried Italian herbs and spices hits you like a love potion as soon as you walk through the door? Perhaps the most exciting thing about our dinner together was that Holly and I shared the same unbridled passion for this fine eatery. “I'm gonna get the Three Cheese Ziti,” she exclaimed, “'cause it's my favorite and I always get it!”

As we waited to be seated, we set out our plan of attack for the meal. Holly was a salad fanatic and I was a breadstick junkie. We were both equally committed to making the most of this dinner and keeping our waiter on his toes. “We need to make sure that we ask for more breadsticks before we're out of breadsticks,” I said. “That way there's no gap.” Holly added that even if we didn't feel like we wanted another bowl of bottomless salad when our food arrived, we should order it anyway because we could always take it home. I was impressed with her savviness. Even though I was only three miles from my apartment, I felt like we were stealing away on an adventure.

When our “Your Table Is Ready” vibrator thing buzzed in my crotch (bonus), I gave myself permission to admit that this felt like a date. As she pushed me to our table, Holly just smiled and said, “You make me happy.” The words escaped like a gentle sigh that couldn't be held back. They meant more to me than Holly could possibly know. It felt like hearing someone say “I forgive you.” For years, I'd only been the guy who could make girls laugh or wince. I'd never gotten the impression that I could make a girl happy. Just the smallest acknowledgment that someday I could be the right guy for someone was something I was starving to hear.

That moment passed when we sat down to dinner and Holly told me about her crushes on several of my friends and her complicated relationship with her ex-boyfriend, who she was still sort of seeing at the time. This revelation didn't crush me. In fact, it was probably a relief. I felt like I was off the hook because I wouldn't have to worry about what would happen after dinner, and honestly, dinner alone had taken all my courage.

I just listened intently as the waiter brought basket after basket of breadsticks. I wasn't datable yet. I didn't even know how to flirt. But I was taking the crucial first steps to becoming somebody that a girl could see potential in. It was gonna take a lot more than some fettuccine Alfredo and Michael Bublé for a girl to make that leap, but this dinner was my way of announcing to the world, and admitting to myself, that I wanted to be considered.

For the next hour and a half, Holly and I conversed about nothing in particular, which was everything I'd hoped for. At the other tables there were families with kids in booster seats surrounded by whatever globs of food they'd haphazardly flung to the floor, people on first dates making small talk about what it's like to be a manager at a tanning salon, and elderly couples seeing how many questions they could ask their server before they have to actually order something. Seemingly, one table had very little in common with the next. The only connection among us was that whatever journey had led to this point, we'd all arrived at Olive Garden and were glad to be there.

As a creative person, I often find myself in the mind-set that if something great happened, but I forgot to record it, then I missed my chance to immortalize a moment. But dinners at Olive Garden aren't something you Instagram or rave about on Facebook to make your friends jealous. No journal entry has ever opened with “Dear Diary, you'll never guess what happened to me at the Olive Garden.… I met Sir Ian McKellen and he signed my forehead!” You don't go to the Olive Garden to make memories. You go to the Olive Garden to live life. It's also a great place to commemorate one.

In September 2001, my closest aunt, Bethany, passed away after a ten-year battle with cancer. After the memorial service, while my family was milling aimlessly around the church parking lot, unsure what to do next, it was decided that we should all go out for dinner. At a time when all decisions were difficult, the Olive Garden became the easy and obvious choice. With a menu and setting that was predictable and inoffensive, it was the one place everyone could agree on, if not enthusiastically, then with a shrug.

Sitting at one of the long, dimly lit tables, away from the formality of the church, everyone in the Anner family was suddenly free either to reminisce about Bethany or to distract themselves by having the waiter list all the ingredients in Italian Wedding Soup. While the funeral had been beautiful, the task of summing up my aunt's life had fallen to the pastor, a man who had never met her and could only resort to recounting vague stories he'd heard from various family and friends. What was missing from the service was my aunt's personality—her sense of humor, her resilience, and the fact that every time we got together, I'd laugh so hard that I needed a change of pants. I'd regretted not sharing my memories of her at the church but was able to make up for that at the Olive Garden.

While my uncle Steve scolded my aunt Anne for eating the marinara sauce meant for the breadsticks with a spoon, my family and I shared stories of the vibrant and unstoppable woman we all loved. These tiny little nuances of a life told over lasagna were enough to help us focus not just on the tremendous loss, but on the extraordinary gifts that Bethany had given to all of us. Being at the Olive Garden didn't make those memories any sweeter; it just gave us a place to share them. There's not much else I remember about that dinner, only that it felt necessary.

People's opinions of the Olive Garden range from “I kinda like it” to “I don't really mind it.” Ninety-nine percent of Middle America thinks that the Olive Garden is just fine. That's as high as it gets, “just fine.” In reality, I suspect the Taste of Tuscany means that something is taken out of a freezer in the back, thawed out, and smothered in either marinara or Alfredo sauce, and then they'll grind delicate snowflakes of parmesan cheese onto it, and all you have to do to stop this blizzard is say “When.” Yet somehow, to have this little bit of control is comforting. No matter what you order, the check isn't gonna break you, and it comes with mints. You know what you're gonna get—the friendly waitstaff, with their white shirts and black ties, the same sound track of Frank Sinatra songs (or people who sound exactly like him), and food that's tasty and entirely unremarkable. And, if you're me, you'll down a dozen breadsticks and somehow not feel an ounce of shame.

At the Olive Garden, a hot date might actually turn out to be a warm meal and some pleasant conversation. And you may not go home with the girl at the end of the night, but she'll drop you off at your apartment and make sure that your leftovers make it into the fridge. In between the best meals you've ever had and the worst, there are the ones that give you exactly what you need. In life, unlike in restaurants, you rarely get what you order. But sometimes it's not what's on the plate that makes the meal, it's what you bring to the table.

 

CHAPTER 11

Barking Up the Wrong Tree House

This may not be popular opinion, but when I was eight years old I came to recognize lifeguards as a plague on society. To the untrained eye there was nothing particularly remarkable about our local public pool in Buffalo, just the standard concoction of thousands of gallons of piss mixed with chlorine and a dash of H
2
O for good measure. What set this pool apart was its waterslide. Listening to the muffled laughter and shrieks of delight from the other children, I resolved to make 1993 the summer when I'd finally convince my dad to let me take the plunge. After hearing my impassioned testimony, he carried me up the vertical steps, our laborious ascent interrupting the flow of fifty grumbling kids who could just dash up for their fourth ride like it was no big deal. They didn't understand the enormity of this moment. I remember standing there on the platform, my father holding me up, watching the boy ahead of me prepare to plummet down the tube. As the lifeguard on slide duty saw me approach, the only thing she knew was that there was
something
wrong with me.

I asked her if I could go down backward and on my stomach, thinking it might be more fun to see the next sliders chasing after me, but the lifeguard replied, “No, everyone has to go down the same way. You have to be on your back, keep your legs together, and hold your arms flat against your sides. Can you do that?” “Yeah!” I said enthusiastically, but what I meant was “I'm not sure. I wouldn't count on it!” The lifeguard, who looked like an adult to me at the time, was probably only fourteen, but even then, I think she knew in her heart that I was only masquerading as someone who could keep his limbs together for thirty seconds. I tried crossing them like a dainty woman at a tea party, but they popped open like those spring-loaded cans of novelty peanuts. Still, she took pity on me, and as I stared at the rushing water, turned an inviting brownish hue from the rust, I knew that this was finally my time to experience the unabridged epicness of summer that every kid standing impatiently in line behind me or sliding down carefree in front of me had taken for granted. I just hoped my bathing suit stayed on.

What followed was a singular joy that lived up to everything I'd imagined while looking longingly at that slide so many summers before. Ever since I'd watched Milo and Otis go over that waterfall, I'd wondered what this was like.
1
For the thirty seconds I was racing through the turns of the slide, my legs freely flopping about, I was just another kid, encumbered by nothing. But thirty seconds is all it takes for a dream to splash to Earth. After I plunged into the pool, the first thing I saw was the bare ass of a kid frantically searching for his swimsuit, but my mind was cleared of all thoughts save a single word—
Again!

My dad, not wanting me to have my head smashed in by the next kid barreling down the chute, escorted me to the side of the pool. In between generous gulps of chemically contaminated water, I was able to stave off drowning long enough to tell him, “I want … to go … again!” But as we approached the steps leading out of the pool, I looked up and saw what I would later come to recognize as a Buzzkill Mustache.

As I've gone through life, I've noticed that, more than any badge or title, a man's mustache alone can signify how much he's going to disappoint you. This one was as thick as a scrub brush and gray with speckles of blond that were still fighting time and the idea that a fifty-year-old man should have no business working at a place where most of his colleagues still had their learner's permits and braces. In the half minute I'd spent on the waterslide, this man had decreed from his tiny chair, high in the sky—like Saruman with a suntan and a beer belly—that I would never again go down the waterslide at the pool. He spoke, not with the bellowing oration of a white wizard, but with a familiar Buffalonian disdain for soft vowels.

“He can't ride da slide. If yous guys go down the slide, he could hurt himself or someone else, and dat's too dangerous, dat's MY ass! I'm just lookin' out for yous AND me.”

Whatever he had deduced my condition was—multiple squirrelosis, muscular disastrophy, Lou Reed's disease, Splendabifida—I was no longer just another kid enjoying the summer. I was a liability. Despite our adamant protests, Summer Saruman would not be moved until all the Earth was scorched and every bathing suit was dry. I left that day vowing never to return and my dad even gave me permission to call the mustached man an asshole on the car ride home. In the summers that followed, whenever we'd pass by the pool, I would curse it with obscenities that only a ten-year-old would find offensive.

“Stupid, fart-breath, penis-face pool!” I'd shout out the window.

To this day, if I see it from the highway, I still have the bitter tinge of chlorine in my mouth. It would be two decades before I was introduced to an online community that had a similar distaste for arbitrary gatekeepers.