--So, this, incident, you speak of…
--Yes. We were driving. She was driving.
--The girl.
--Yes. I was sitting in the passenger seat of her car. It was the time right after my parents split up.
--Four, five years ago?
--No. More like ten.
--Really?
--Yes. Is that so long of a time?
--No. It is…it’s not I guess. I just thought, well, that we were talking about something more…recent.
--Maybe I make things seem that way. But, so, I was sitting there, and she’s driving along through the streets. I don’t remember what we were doing, where we were going, things like that. But she was going on about the guy she was dating…
--Going on about. Interesting.
--Yeah. I mean. No. Not like that. It wasn’t like she was being petulant or whining or anything. She was just really upset. And she was talking about all these things, all these bad and sad things that were happening to her.
--What things?
--Well, that’s just the thing. I wasn’t really listening to her. That’s what I’m getting at. I was just sitting there staring out the window, feeling miserable about my own self, my own worries and tribulations.
--Tribulations. You don’t hear people use that word too often.
--
--Go on.
--So I was just so obsessed with my own little world of sorrow that I, like, I don’t know, I couldn’t conceive of hers. I couldn’t make myself care about her problems.
--You had no empathy.
--Yes. No. I don’t know. All I know is that I was just kind of zoning her out. I could hear her voice but the words were meaningless to me. And she caught on. And she says, “You don’t even care about what I’m saying,” or something like that. And she goes on to tell me that she feels like she is just bothering me, that I’m making her feel like her problems are just minuscule, that they are bogus, that they’re nothing, stupid, worthless.
--Interesting. She caught on. Bogus. Go on.
--Ok. So, well, the thing is, I just didn’t say anything. Or I don’t remember saying anything. I mean, we were good friends, close, had talked on the phone every night during high school, gone through all the teenage melodrama and malaise and ennui together. And now here we were, like, separated by miles of emotional distance. I was completely gone. I think I just sat there and like grunted or something. And she maybe started whimpering or crying or something. None of it seemed to matter to me. I just stared ahead all steely eyed and trapped inside my own head.
--So the wall was up again.
--Yeah. This time it seemed palpable. Like I could see the outlines of the bricks, feel their grainy and rough texture, knock my head against them if I wanted to.
--What happened after this?
--I’m not too clear. Like I said, this was about ten years ago. I was about twenty or twenty one at the time. I was a totally different person.
--Really?
--You know what I mean.
--I do?
--Well, I don’t know. I was just thinking about how much everything’s changed. But, I mean, there’s something Steinbeck said once, about growing old…something about years not changing a man, just adding more sorrow to him. Maybe I haven’t really changed at all.
--Hmm.
--So I think she just drove me home. And we didn’t really talk anymore after that. We became like strangers or distant cousins who met once and then went their separate ways. I don’t know what happened. We just reached some kind of breaking point, some kind of…
--Sorry. But just so as we are on the same page here. Is this the incident that you were referring to earlier, the unprecedented lapse in the peripheral structures of time and space that let you see, how did you put it?
--Into the “it” of things.
--Yes. That’s right.
--Well, kind of. It wasn’t until many years later that I spoke to her again. We were living in the same city. I think it was five or six years later, maybe more. She looked me up, as they say, and gave me a call. Her place was only about ten or so blocks from mine, on another hill, the hill right next to mine.
--You both lived on hills?
--Yes. She was married by then, didn’t have any kids though.
--That’s good.
--What? Why is that good?
--I hate children. Don’t you?
--Well, yes, sort of, but…wha…?
--Just go on. We’ll come back to this later when we are discussing your childhood. Now. You are living, um, on the next hill over from her, and…
--And, well, she calls me up and we make plans to get together for a beer or something.
--Just like that? No awkward getting-back-to-knowing-you stuff? No, I don’t know, jitters? Cold-feet type behavior?
--What the hell? Um. No. I mean. We just picked right up were we left off, I mean before the car-ride thing. It was like talking to an old friend.
--It was talking to an old friend.
--I know. But, I mean, it was just normal, you know? We got along fine. Just made normal conversation like normal everyday people make. Chit chat. Shooting the breeze. Where are you working, how’s the folks, that kind of stuff. The changeless weather of day-to-day existence.
--Interesting. Changeless.
--So we make these plans, and I’m of course pretty nervous about the whole thing. And I’m sure she was too. But neither of us were letting on. Just keeping everything…how do they put it? A white elephant in the room?
--Something like that. Go on.
--Okay. So the day comes and I go out to this bar where we are supposed to meet. It’s called Charlie’s. A little divey shack by the waterfront. Just a few drunks at the bar and some wooden tables and stuff like that. They’ve got a dart board. I got there about half an hour early. I wanted to make sure I was the first one there. You know, sit down, have a beer, look calm and at ease and in control. Let her walk in and find me.
--Makes sense.
--So I go in, and I can tell right away something is off. Like, I don’t know, there’s just something in the air. Some kind of imbalance in the atmosphere, like the air pressure is maybe not what it’s supposed to be? I don’t know how else to explain it. It was very strange. I’d never felt anything quite like it before. There were a few greasy looking guys at the bar eating peanuts out of little paper cups and drinking beer from bottles. They looked like maybe they were bikers or some other kind of tough guys. Maybe they’d just escaped from a chain gang or something. I just got a bad feeling about them. They looked angry and kind of gave me a mean look when I walked in. The bartender was a ratty sunburned old geezer with scrawny arms and a giant white mustache. He had really worn out tattoos on his arms, battleships and hearts and World War 2 type of stuff. It looked like somebody had taken an eraser to them…
--As if the were drawn on by a pen you mean?
--Yeah. Like they were fake and had started to wash off I guess. That’s what time will do to you.
--Like getting washed clean of your sins?
--No. Not like that. It’ll just smear them into your skin deeper, so they are more inside than out.
--I don’t think I follow you there.
--He made me think of a retired cowboy for some reason, all worn down from too many summers out on the range.
--On the range?
--Yeah. Rustling cattle or whatever. He didn’t seem to care for me much either. He kind of spit down onto the floor next to him when I came up to the bar. His eyes were like black marbles dug into the deep pits of his skull. They stared right through me. And his eyebrows were actually arching. These big fluffy white eyebrows just arching into an actual V.
--Wow. That really happens?
--It did then. So I got all my courage up and said, unfortunately rather meekly, “Could I get a beer please?”
--You said it like that? To this burly, eyebrow arching, sunburned old character?
--Yeah. It was very unfortunate.
--To say the least.
--So of course this guy wants like absolutely zero to do with me. And he just kind of stares at me, stares right through me really. It was like he could’ve burned a hole in my chest.
--I’ve heard of that. I think.
--So I kind of, of course, became a bit uncomfortable and started kind of hiccupping around and blinking a lot and making tiny imperceptible movements with my fingers, little taps and stuff and snaps and, well, I don’t know, just stupid stuff I do when I get nervous and can’t keep still, probably cracking my neck a lot and maybe even letting out a few yawns too.
--Busy guy.
--All these multitudinous gestures of unease.
--So what’s the barkeep doing?
--That guy. Well, he just keeps standing there and staring at me. He’s a real gnarly old dude. Finally he’s like, “what that?”
--What that?
--Yeah. And I’m like okie.
--Okie? Who are you, Raymond Chandler?
--Okay. So I try to toughen up a bit and kind of snarl a little and say, “Just a Bud there.”
--What an odd thing to say. I mean, if you took that out of context…
--And he stares a little more and then turns around and swings one of his arms down below the bar into a little fridge or something and grabs a Budweiser bottle out of there and sets it down really hard on the bar. I’m surprised the thing didn’t like break apart and explode into a thousand slivers and shards of glass. And it’s like over flowing all over the top. I take it and lay down a five dollar bill. And the guy grabs it and makes some kind of disapproving grunt or some such type of noise. The register is really old, like one of those ones you’d see in a drugstore in an old movie, a soda fountain type of place, you know, like it was made by James Ritty himself. An ancient obtuse contraption with big old levers and keys like on a typewriter. It made all kinds of noise when he hammered on the thing and when he shoved my money in there and closed the drawer it was like a medium-sized earthquake had hit the place. I figured I needed some change and I also figured I wasn’t going to get any. The beer had spilled all over the bar top. I made some kind of feeble motion with my arm like a keep-the-change kind of thing and winked at him.
--You winked at this guy?
--It was a kindly wink.
--I can’t see this guy interpreting a wink.
--No. He was none too happy about it. If I’d had my druthers this would’ve been it for me. I’d have jetted. But I had to wait for this girl, you know?
--I almost forgot about her.
--Me too. I just stood there trying to drink the beer, which was really foamy, and then I thought, shit, I should just go on and sit down at one of these unoccupied tables and start my waiting. So I went back and did just that. The bar tender had stopped noticing me and went back to doing whatever it is bartenders do when they aren’t serving drinks. Maybe taking a towel and wiping out shot glasses. Like, making them really shiny. Mainly nothing I guess. I sat at the table all by myself and drank my beer and looked at the scenery. There were a lot of mirrors with beer advertisements on them. A few fans were spinning slowly on the ceiling where there were a lot of pennants of minor league baseball teams and gonfalons from colleges I’d never heard of and some tacky artifacts from another more joyous and unfettered and freewheeling era of beer drinking for this now defunct mostly desolate place. I just sat there and kind of ruminated on my now precarious position in the world, in this particular tiny corner of the world that I was now calling my own, this lonely and insecure place I called being me, this place that was now being somehow threatened by this unexpected intrusion from my past, like a door I thought I’d locked but hadn’t and that had now let in a thief to try to steal away or intrude on my solitary and woebegone existence.
--So you were not happy about this.
--No. Not at all. Well, not exactly. It wasn’t that I was upset at her. It was more like I was just upset at this sudden turn in events that had now brought me back to this more primordial form of my development as a full fledged member of the human race.
--Put you back into a now ill-fitting past version of your self.
--Yes. Brought me back to this “me” that I thought I’d left behind. And now here I was going to have to face all of this again. And I didn’t want to. At least I didn’t think that I did. Maybe I thought we could just talk around things, get over it, not have to really jump the proverbial hurdle. I didn’t want to go back to all that fear and pain that had been suffocating me way back then when we’d taken that last car ride together.
--Would you describe your pain as existential?
--Then? I don’t think so. I was really in a bad way back then when my dad split. But, at the same time, it was like I was putting up this kind of shield that was deflecting the reality of the situation. A kind of border that I wouldn’t let anything cross. I was inside and untouchable and everything else that could hurt me was outside and couldn’t get in. I made myself safe and unaffected. But at the same time I knew that I really should be feeling bad about the whole thing. About my mom’s nervous breakdown and my father’s perfidiousness and my own bleak moneyless situation and slow march towards alcoholism.
--You were an alcoholic?
--Later. Another time, ok?
--Sure.
--So I just lived inside this bubble, rather carefree I guess. Do people still say fancy-free? That was more like it. I was feigning all of this lugubriousness and madness because I wouldn’t let any of the real thing touch me. But it was there and I knew I should have been feeling sad. So I pretended to feel the way I should have been feeling anyway. But I really wasn’t feeling that way at all. I wouldn’t let any of that stuff inside my sphere of emotional space.
--Sphere of emotional space. Did you just make that up?
--I don’t know. So here I was acting the way I thought I should’ve been acting if I were really feeling the way the things around me were supposed to be making me feel.
--Sounds rather convoluted.
--It’s no way to live. Let me tell you. Existing in the constantly devaluating currency of your own made-up consciousness, and subconscious too for that matter. I had to pretend to have all these subconscious motives for my behaviors.
--That doesn’t really make any sense. You can’t control your own subconscious like that. Then it would no longer be subconscious. It would be a conscious effort to be…um…go on.
--I guess my pain, in a way, was really just existential grief. I was not feeling anything concrete. But at the same time my faked pain was based on real pain, um, it was a pain I felt I should have had, but it wasn’t there. It just wasn’t. I had to make it up to believe in it. I had to play make believe with my own emotional state. It worked though. I tricked everybody around me. Maybe I just wanted people to feel sorry for me and now here I had my chance. I had a reason I could use to make everyone feel bad for me. I had a reason for acting the way I was, for moping around and sitting alone in my room and staring at the walls and going on long walks all night long and into the morning. All of my life I’d always just wanted people to leave me alone, and now, finally, they were, and I guess I was really happy about that. Damn. It was such a mess. Because I was really feeling guilty about that. Imagine sitting up all night and listening to your mother crying herself hoarse and also feeling good about yourself and things in general. I knew I shouldn’t have been feeling that way. But I couldn’t help it. I finally had a reason to feel morose and devastated and I loved it.
--But the guilt was still there.
--Yes. Of course. Because I knew that the way I was feeling was all wrong. So I felt very guilty about what I was doing and I’d get really pissed off at myself and started drinking a lot to numb the pain. But the drinking just made me feel better about my suffering. It gave me a gilt-edged and glorious shining coat of armor to wear around it. I would go off with a bottle of whiskey and break into my old high school, jump the chain-link fence and run around on the football field and baseball diamond. I’d play entire games of baseball all by myself. And I’d lie down on the blacktop of the outdoor basketball courts and stare up drunkenly at the stars, all those damn myriad constellations up there, and the moon too, that big old orange-yellow eye up there staring down at me. I talked to God a lot lying there like that. I’d stretch my arms out and cross my feet pretending that I was Jesus. Those were some good times.
--You seem to get a lot of joy through suffering.
--Is that perverse?
--In your case? I’m not sure.
--Joy through suffering. There’s something to that.
--So what happened with the girl you were meeting at this bar.
--Oh. That. Well, she was rather late. I think I was on my third beer when she finally showed up. They bar tender had warmed up to me a little. I’d put some songs on the jukebox by this point and I was getting a little nostalgic. Music has always had a big effect on me. I’m easily affected by such things. So I was sitting there drinking my beer and feeling good and melancholy and enjoying the sad songs I’d put on the jukebox, existing in my own little world of sorrow. I almost forgot she was coming. And then there she was. It’s odd when you haven’t seen somebody in a really long time and you have this idea of how they look, that isn’t really how they look, or how they ever looked, because you know your memory can do all kinds of things to a face, as if you ever really remember a face anyway, besides just the miracle of recognition, this ineffable thing that makes you attach a person to this set of eyes and ears and teeth and hair and cheeks and mouth and all these other very undifferentiated things about each individual person, things that are really so similar it is amazing that we can tell each other apart.
--Human beings are very good at this I hear. Face recognition.
--It’s incredible when you think about it. Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror for a really long time? Just kind of let your eyes go fuzzy and stare and stare into your own eyes until you don’t know which side of the mirror you’re on? It’s hard to remember what you look like. It’s hard to tell what these things are that make you the person that you are.
--This isn’t going to turn from digression into lecture here, is it?
--Probably not.
--Good. We are limited by time here. Go on.
--So I do recognize her, though she looks different, older, more mature I guess. Like a woman and not a girl. Not the girl I used to know and like so well.
--Oh. Was there some kind of romantic involvement? What type of intimacy are we talking about here?
--What? No. It was a very platonic friendship. Though she was very attractive. Sometimes that happens between two people. You just get to know each other in a different kind of way, as people and not objects? That’s not it. Something like that I guess.
--You know what objects are to Germans?
--People. I know. What I’m saying is we knew each other in a way that was not tinged by any hint of sexuality. We were just, friends.
--Okay. I get it. Nothing like sex to get in the way of companionship and a rich and pure relationship.
--Pure? That’s interesting that you would say that. I guess. So I waved to her and got up and gave her a hug, less self conscious now that I was a little drunk, and we smiled and said how good it was to see each other and all that.
--You seem to have a predisposition for keeping people at a distance. For maybe pushing them away before they get too close.
--You’re quick doc. You had to go to college to figure that kind of stuff out? Why don’t you tell me something I don’t already know?
--
--
--Would you like to continue?
--Isn’t our time almost up?
--Oh. Well. I guess so. So, we can continue next week. If you’d care to.
--Maybe. I’ll think about it.
--Good enough.
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