It’s the first time I’ve worn track spikes since Pac-10 Championships, since before my injury and the trip to the treatment facility in Arizona, since the man in the blue shirt, the ocean, the letter.
Something is off. I feel it as I run around the pink oval in the bright sun, in front of the line of black-robed students, beneath the crowd of family and well-wishers. I feel hollow. Empty. Like I’ve buried something. Like that’s what I was supposed to learn: take all that shame and lock it away in a room. Track it down and remove any remnants of it from my speech, from any accounting of my life to others. Curate it like the scene at the front of campus.
There is a mask to wear, the all-American white smile and all-American white face in the Stanford track T-shirt sprinting to accept his honors degree. And the plan is to just hold that mask in place for as long as possible.
Sometimes on quiet evenings I am stalked by the feeling that I can never be whole. I can never be honest about myself. I’m preyed upon by the sense that what is real about me is wretched or broken. So I try not to invite the quiet in. I try to keep things loud, to fake it: the smile, the mask, the facade, my own version of the Dream that brought me here, an eye on the past and an eye on the future—smiling, healthy, radiating confidence, baffled and running scared.
CHAPTER 37
THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
Four years later I am driving up a dusty dirt road in an old white sedan packed with my few possessions, clothing, a wrought-iron desk lamp, my college diploma, an old hard drive covered in stickers, a photo album and twenty-five books from the Santa Monica Public Library. Buzzing electric towers stand guard over the valley around me like steel giants guarding a secret. They look down on the fields and ranches in the high desert fifty miles north of Los Angeles. All around me is scrub brush and dust, long chain-link fences and horse barns, abandoned cars sitting in fields of tall grass, rolling brown hills that demarcate a jagged horizon beyond which sits the largest desert in the Western Hemisphere. It’s a good place to hide.
My new home is a double-wide trailer on the edge of a horse pasture at the back of my aunt Jeannie’s ranch. There is an ever-present howl of wind, the occasional yip of a coyote, the rattle of snakes, the buzzing of wasps, fire ants, tarantulas, scorpions, the din of a place empty and wild.
I’ve come here because I didn’t know where else to go, because working square jobs first as a teacher and then as a director of nonprofit programs had become unbearable, because I hated it and found that the mask I had so meticulously crafted in college was not enough, was nowhere near enough. In short, my plan didn’t work.
Aunt Jeannie walks up the hill to greet me, a smile on her rosy cheeks as she throws her arms around me in her plush fleece jacket. “Mickey! I’m so glad you made it.” We’ve agreed that for room and board I will shovel horse manure and feed the horses twice a day. She’s shrunk since she got sick from the diet pills she took. She’d put on weight after getting injured in the line of duty and in order to lose the weight, she tried pills which gave her pulmonary hypertension. It’s eaten away at her energy, at her body, leaving her thin and frail. But there is still a toughness about her, a rugged warmth as she hugs me close, fiercely protective, fiercely committed to beating her illness at all costs. She surveys the valley and the tiny trailer. “It’s not much, but it’s cozy. There’s a heater and a swamp cooler and plenty of water from the well. Are you sure you don’t want to borrow a TV or something? Aren’t you going to get lonely?” She opens the rickety wooden add-on porch door and we walk into a small anteroom in which heavy jackets hang on hooks over mud-caked boots. We kick the mud off our shoes and walk into a room with a kitchenette and a couch, faux-wood paneling and a small bedroom beyond the paper-thin walls. “Welcome to your new home.” She beams at me. “We’re so glad to have you here, but are you sure this is what you want?”
“I think so.”
“Well, okay then. You can always come visit us down at the house if you get lonely sitting up here with all these books.” She nods at the sedan packed to the roof outside the front window.
I’m here to write a novel. At least that’s what I told everyone, that I’m sick of working, sick of trying to make myself capable of being a cog in a machine, so I’m going to the wilderness to write a science fiction novel about a world in which human beings can buy and sell sleep. The economy that results has people losing years of their lives (by sleeping for money). It feels like an appropriate metaphor for the dread I felt working every day, like I was watching my life slip away silently.
But there’s something else. A fear. A new and alarming sense that after a string of failed relationships I may be different somehow, that I can’t do something those around me can, and I know, though I don’t say it, coming to this trailer is a kind of retreat.
I checked the books out in a flurry one afternoon, searching for the titles and authors that I had always wanted to read: Philip Roth, Nabokov, Alice Munro, Kafka and Tolstoy, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Camus. In college, I never read these books, even though I always knew I wanted to become a writer. Somehow reading these books felt like cheating, like I needed to see the world through my own eyes first.
But now, after trying to work, first as a high school English teacher, then as a program director at a YMCA near South Central L.A., after all the restlessness I felt having to go to one place every day, the sense that my time was taken from me, I just want to live in these books like paper houses and learn whatever it is they have to teach me.
There were two girlfriends. Both named Naomi. I dated one right after the other with a three-week gap in between. Despite sharing a name, they couldn’t have been more different. One was a gawky, intellectual, possessive only child with a razor wit, the other a small, artistic, warm, silly, sweet, compassionate younger sister of five older brothers. One was two years older than me, the other three years younger. One was determined to make something of her career and her Columbia education; the other was content to dance around her tiny apartment listening to Modest Mouse while she painted. They became known by Drew and other friends as “the Naomis.” Or sometimes as Naomi 1.0 and Naomi 2.0.
Naomi 1.0 and I had a conversation that began one night at a conference for nonprofit professionals and lasted a year and a half.
Naomi 2.0 and I went camping and hiking, dancing and drinking instead. We stayed up late watching bad reality television. Despite their differences, both relationships ended the same way, with tears and frustration as I left them, then returned, left, then returned, again and again and again, terrified of commitment but afraid of being alone.
In both relationships, every time things seemed to be getting serious, if there was a particularly good trip or a weekend visit with friends, I would find myself scheming to find a way out, worried that the relationship would trap me. There was a sudden palpable sense that I needed to break free, to end things. And so I did. I cataloged reasons and made accusations and found a way out. I would then stay in that state of free fall, feeling numb, for weeks, until suddenly, just as I did with Laura in high school, the truth of her—the tenderness, the shared experiences, the warmth of our friendship—would suddenly come rushing back to me like a wave that toppled me over and I’d crawl back begging for forgiveness.