My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (40 page)

The whole city shut down that afternoon, thinking it was a bomb threat.

He owned up to it, said it was a part of their art piece, but the courts weren't lenient and jailed him for a few months. He was too smart, too soft a guy to endure that, and when he came out, his nerves were shot, his spirit broken, and he could no longer support himself, went home to Michigan.

Inside a year, he stepped in front of a freight train, though his parents cling to the idea it was an accident.

I knew better, and I knew that's where I would be headed if I had to move back home. That's what frightened me the most.
L'appel du vide
.

One early evening at Sarah's house, I was recounting my fears while she listened and told me hers.

It was dark out, and she decided to take the dog horde down to the park for their evening pee: Betty Brown, Jack County, Genevieve, and I think I had Cleo for the weekend. The dogs were delighted to be out, and we walked down the street that ran parallel to Sarah's house, the leg of the triangle that pointed directly to the Christian college campus at the vertex. Dogs trotted and sniffed all around us, and then in front of Jonathan Raban's house, her neighbor a couple doors to her north, and after a bit of quiet, apropos of nothing, Sarah said, “You know what's going to get you out of this, don't you?”

If she had a magic bullet, I was ready for it, because I certainly had no idea what was going to bring up the sunrise on this longest night of my life.

“Nope,” I said, as I
tch-tch
ed for Jack County, who was wandering behind us now, lifting his long, silky Tom Selleck–looking leg on a shrub. A modest dog, he'd then tuck his tail to hide his pongy bits.

“If you have any ideas, now's the time,” I said.

“You're going to have to write your way out of this,” she said, in that distancing, clinical way she has, and then wandered off with the dogs to allow me to think this one through.

My immediate response was, “Pfft. Do you KNOW how difficult it is to get ANY sort of attention in publishing on the West Coast? In Seattle, of all places? And then make enough to live off of?” Seattle, I figured out a bit too late, was not an easy place to launch a literary career. It's where you settle after you've proven yourself in real cities, like Los Angeles or New York or Chicago.

Before all this happened, I would often strut around like a rooster in her kitchen, saying how I wouldn't waste my time with regional workshops and writers' groups or attempt to make a presence known or felt with the local alternative presses and the subsidized “writer's support network” and that sort of shit—
NO
! I told her, “
Fuck that amateur shit!
I'm going big first. I'm going to fail UP, not DOWN! Or wait . . . is it the other way around?”

And Sarah would look at me like, “Oh, honey, you're so interesting to watch in the safety of your unpublished bravado.”

If Sarah felt that this was my only lifeline out of this miasma, then I was in trouble, because I knew the odds against and the impossibility of publishing.

My heart, already sunk, disappeared altogether, hearing this.

“I want you,” she said, continuing her hip-swaying saunter down the dark street, “to go home, clean up your five or six best chapters that illustrate your material, your themes, your writing style, and your wit, and print them out for me.”

“All right,” I responded. “I'll have them, tickety-boo.” I couldn't argue. I didn't have enough energy to pose an argument.

“When you do,” she said, “give me five copies and I will send your samples in an interoffice memo to Mary Karr, buy a bottle of something dark and red for Jonathan Raban here, and send another copy to the chair of the English department at Seattle U.” Mary Karr was in the Jesuit system, Sarah said to me, and would receive her mail. (This actually wasn't correct, we found out later. She's at Syracuse, which is not even Catholic. Sarah blames her mistake on red wine and Buspar.)

As a fellow Texan, and memoirist, I had a deep fondness for Mary Karr. But it was the night that I lay in Sarah's bed, deep one early morning, suffering from a particularly bad spell of anxiety, when Sarah woke up, reached over, and turned on a lamp and then began reading to me from
The Liar's Club
, as I lay on my side and shivered, and she read for hours while Mary Karr and her own family pulled me out of my stall, just for a second, and I was, will be, forever grateful for that moment. So when Sarah said she could get my stuff in front of her, I was hopeful: Mary would understand.

“Hunh,” I said. “You have a deal.”

In the meantime, though, I had a plan to find work.

I couldn't, at all, find the fight in me to compete for a job in my market as a graphic designer. So I resorted to something an old friend once told me, about a secret means to make a stable income that wasn't too competitive: the boutique pizza delivery network.

My old friend, John, who had been my manager at Pagliacci Pizza here in Seattle back when I was nineteen, had since stayed with the company but had become a satellite delivery station manager, then realized he could make much more just delivering the pizza, instead of being a wage earner.

“I made nearly $50,000 last year,” he had said to me, some years back.

Aha
, I thought.
I know the pizza circuit; I'll keep that particular bit of knowledge in my back pocket if ever I need it, methinks
.

Well, this was it, I decided. That's what I'd do to make it through until my mind righted itself and I could figure out my next move.

For now, though, I had to drive out east and deliver the company laptop and peripherals, make a trip of it.

Steph was still in the nursing home, and it had taken a lot for me to see her parents again after feeling robbed like that, but after a few days, I stiffened my lip and returned to our rhythms, though I didn't feel quite as generous as before. Steph's mother had talked the nursing home manager into springing for an enclosed bed to keep Steph from falling again, and when I saw her after, she was now trying to speak, was now speaking in “word salad,” where she'd string a lot of nonsense words together, but with real intention behind them. It had been a surge forward in her recovery.

What word she did say, and clearly, was “Daddy!” whenever she saw her father, or me. It was both entirely warming and creepy. One afternoon, after her mother had to fly back east to be fitted for her new prosthetic, Harold and I were alone in the nursing home with Steph, trying to feed her lunch. She had an uncanny resemblance to an itchy toddler in church, speaking in that husky, whispered word salad and refusing to eat. Harold handed her a chocolate-flavored Ensure with a straw, and she had a look flash across her face, decided to blow through the straw instead of sucking, and the Ensure blew up like a liquid hand grenade for the elderly. We were all covered in chocolate, the lunch ruined, and for a moment, Steph looked at the mess she had made and started smiling big. I thought,
Yup; she's still there
.

Prior to the check fiasco, I had noticed that she'd been trying to focus on people in the room and had this really unsettling habit of closing one eye to get anything into focus, and then I remembered how bad her vision was before the accident, so one day I drove out to her house up north and found her spare glasses.

I brought them in that afternoon, thinking they were going to make all the difference in the world with her recovery (you tell yourself things like this, that there are these “miracle moments”), but they only made us wonder, “What happened to her contacts?”

We asked around and there were no records anywhere of her contacts being removed, so they called an optometrist who gave her an exam, and the hospital finally realized that her contacts had rolled onto the back of her eyeballs and had been festering there for the last three months. They were removed before they could cause any serious damage, but we were all horrified and unsettled at how things that go overlooked can suddenly come around and bite you in the ass, like, say, not asking for a receipt when you pay someone cash for a plane ticket to fly across the country and help her family.

There was a pall in the air during those final months of agonal respiration for Kinesis, the karate school, as we had known it, oddly paralleling my situation with Stephanie in the ICU. Or perhaps that's my solipsism once again, my memory restructuring the external world to fit my internal model, as memoir tends to do. But there was no denying that the glow and charm that I had found when I returned to the karate school of old was in some sort of danger of blighting itself out, and that corresponded entirely with Brenda's participation as the lead black belt, which had become conflicted and erratic, due to personal issues with some of the senior students and the owner of the business, the head of the school, who was now in San Francisco, attempting to penetrate the market there with a new chapter of the school.

At times it was more of a pong than a pall, but it was something that was circulating fast, like a bacterial infection, and building momentum as every elemental personality that consolidated the dynamic core of the school went through some independent personal drama that forced him or her further and further from the fission that kept all of us in love and sweating and participating with the program. And that's what makes a karate school, I've realized: the people participating. It's the personal expression, the unfolding of your real self in a safe re-creation of crisis, exposing your vulnerability and weakness, then feeling a sense of power as you fight your way through it, sometimes with fists and kicks, sometimes with defeat and tears, but you get through it, get off the mat, and shake the gloved hand of the person who just put you there, and you thank them, earnestly, even the stupid fuckers you don't like.

Personally, I couldn't get it together to exercise because I hated going into my head, and exercising, even in a group environment, would put me deep into brain territory. It felt like a maggoty cabbage in there, something lugged about in Patricia Highsmith's legendary handbag. And it's bitter irony that exercise is sometimes the only thing that can help your mental health, but when you're in the grips of something deep and dark, exercise is the last thing you want to do.

The karate school had long been losing its magnetism, even before Steph's accident. Divisions and loyalties were splintering the school and tearing it at its threadbare seams, a karate suit that had already seen more than a few years' blushing long before I returned. Things came to an outright collision when Brenda Brown, as head black belt, rumbled a potential child predator at the school.

He was a new member, some slender slip of a fellow from northern Texas named Dylan who was attending a
shi-shi
arts college nearby.

He was pretty and twinkish, had studied or practiced extreme yoga or some such, pansexual, and didn't mind flirting with both men and women; he was one of these people who slipped, unduly exhibitionist, through their lives banking on their looks and winning, mostly because of the idiots who fall for their cheap coin. Personally, I'm immune to their bewitchery because nothing turns my stomach more than wholesale, indiscriminate flirting as a means of navigating the world. Also, I didn't overlap with this guy so much because he started at the school after I'd been processing out, losing my interest.