Zinn

I haven’t posted anything original on here in a long time. It’s partly because I’ve been bound up in grad school, that catch-all for intellectual tunnel vision. I’ve also been silent because the words I want to commit to paper don’t come so readily; there just aren’t bookends for any of it, no way to contextualize or find meaning. I’m more heart than brains these days, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the main reason is that everything I have written in the past few months has seemed too personal, and probably has been, actually, when I think about it. Some things you just can’t share. Still, in some ways it feels like the limp-dicked imperatives of social science have stripped away my passion to personalize or politicize, to say unabashedly what is on my mind, even if that means pounding a fist on the table or calling someone a motherfucker.

And what, then, is the point of any of it? To abandon your own voice amid the dictates of scholarship is to surrender your soul. To teach by rote is to squelch the fires of others’ minds. Lately I haven’t been as willing to shy away from polemics, because sometimes it’s better to burn the see-saw to the ground than try to balance the weight.

I’ve always railed against the emotional outpourings that follow in the wake of a celebrity’s death. Fuck the glitz, the glossiness that enshrouds those predictable displays. Our are lives that hollow? Do those magazine pages promise something we can’t find right in front of us, be it in a good book, a good conversation, the arms and lips of a lover, or a lens turned inward that yields something we never knew was there before?

Joey Ramone died, as did Joe Strummer. Kurt Vonnegut died too. So it goes, as he so famously said.

And, yet, the Howard Zinn death weirds me out in a way. If I want to oversimplify, I can trace the strands of my life in three neat, separate directions. In seventh grade, the Ramones made me want to make music. And I did. During junior year, Aaron Cometbus and Kurt Vonnegut made me want to write. And I did.

Zinn likewise inspired me during my junior year. Besides the punk bands I listened to, it was the first time someone had given voice to the inequities that masqueraded before my eyes. Moreover, I was introduced to a tradition of resistance. Zinn’s rhetoric is one of cautious hope and righteous indignation, something my misanthropic mind needed then and now. Zinn made me care about history, keying me into the currents that whip our world along, the tethers that connect us to the past and shape our reality — a reality that we in turn are capable of molding and shaping for our own purposes, our own visions of a just and equitable society.

I don’t want to be a humorless firebrand. I just want the absurdities of our world to be laid bare, and for people to realize that maybe, just maybe, things can get better.

Rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric.

Zinn’s writings were all about recapturing a spirit of resistance amid consensus and cynicism. Even my father now thrills to the primary source documents Zinn collected in Voices of a People’s History. They speak to his anger, his conviction that the wealthy care only for themselves and will willingly fuck over others and plunge the world into chaos if it means short-term gain for them. “Get mad,” sang the Offenders, an early 80s punk band from Texas. My dad may hate the distorted guitar and the screaming, but the words linger like a pink slip on a kitchen table.

Get mad.

I once dated the most beautiful woman in the world. Down the street from her Los Angeles apartment, at a gay bar in Thai Town, we had a couple drinks after she got off work. An Asian waif came over and massaged my shoulders, so I draped my arm around her to ward off any other interlopers. We ended up talking about history, and she brought up Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. In the tactless manner of a Boy Scout without a badge, I told her how academia tends to discredit Zinn, finding his interpretation far too simplistic, too driven by advocacy. She felt like I was talking down to her, rightfully so, and went outside for a smoke.

But that’s my favorite history book, too, Amanda.

Boots

While looking through some old stuff, I found files from Let There Be Danger #2, the zine I did after Matt died six years ago, and figured I’d post the first story, which I still like. I love and miss that bastard.

1. These Boots Are Made for Walking

Those boots. Those goddamn boots. He never took them off, not even while he was sleeping. Every night that the two of us slept in my landfill of a bedroom, I’d be awoken by a kick in the face. I’d sit up and find Matt lying next to me on top of crumpled papers and dirty plates, his boot-sheathed foot twitching and jerking violently. I’d turn my face away and he’d kick me in the back of my head. I’d reposition myself and he’d kick me in the ribs. There was no escaping those boots. The next morning he’d ask me about the bruises on my face. Bastard. I’m lucky to still have all of my teeth.

Normal people are disgusted by blood sausage and GG Allin. Matt was disgusted by feet. People would take off their shoes and socks in his presence and he would threaten to stab them. Everyone would have a good laugh, and then the people that knew Matt well enough would hurriedly tell the person to put their goddamn shoes shoes back on. Prying a knife out of some shoeless sap’s back wasn’t high on our list of priorities.

His foot was disfigured by multiple surgeries to remove tumors from it. The skin became purplish and rugged. Matt referred to it as his “shark bite” because it literally looked like some creature had taken a bite out of his foot. So his boots stayed on. It didn’t matter if he was sleeping or if it was swelteringly hot, they still stayed on. For all I know he fucked and showered in them.

I saw him a couple of weeks after his first series of operations. It was wintertime and he was crutching over patches of ice and snow on the way through the parking lot of my girlfriend’s apartment complex. He gritted his teeth and sighed in pain, but he wouldn’t make a goddamn complaint. I made a serious offer to carry him up the steps to the third floor. He told me to go fuck myself. As he was gingerly hopping up the stairs on one foot, I told him that I was surprised that the doctors had allowed him to start wearing his boots so soon. “Nah,” he said, “they want me to wear some stupid looking orthopedic shoe. Fuck that.”

A couple days before he passed away, Matt called his younger brother, Mike, into his bedroom. He entered expecting Matt to ask for some medication or a glass of water.

“Mike, get me my boots,” Matt said weakly.

Puzzled as hell, Mike asked, “your boots?”

“Yeah, get me my boots,” Matt insisted.

Mike retrieved the boots, put them on Matt’s feet, and laced them up. Matt laid there in that bed, fighting through the pain, drifting in and out of consciousness, probably feeling more frightened than I’ll ever know, and all he wanted was to wear those goddamn boots one last time.

When I woke up this morning, those boots weren’t looming a few inches from my face. I fell down in the pit at a show the other week, and I didn’t see those boots playfully circling around me, taunting me. I’m grasping for something that acts as a constant reminder, not memories, something tangible, something I can touch. Maybe those boots should’ve knocked out some of my teeth while I was sleeping. Smiling dumbly in the mirror, that’d be Matt’s work, something to remember him by.

I-88

The road alone holds my fate.
Out on I-88 — named, in memoriam,
After a monster — the ice and snow
Seal my secrets, shroud my soul.
White-knuckling past spun out cars,
I cleave westward, unconsoled.

“Don’t Go Far Off, Not Even for a Day” (by Pablo Neruda)

Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because –
because — I don’t know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don’t leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don’t leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you’ll have gone so far
I’ll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Amen

“It is apparent that much that is written today by professional historians…is unreadable to all save those determined few fellow professionals who will doggedly make their way through dense prose for the sake of the data. Bad writing, however, is one thing; it is to a degree an American curse, whose origins can be traced to the elementary schools’ curriculum. The problem is that an unreadable style, when combined with a narrowing of historians’ interests [the tendency to emphasize particularity to the point of myopia instead of allowing for generalization], produces a gap of unprecedented dimension between lay and professional audiences. The historian has just about abdicated his role as public educator, having been replaced by amateurs or scriptwriters. Americans are probably learning about their history from everyone except the historian. And it is not a very sound history that they learn.”

–David J. Rothman, “The Uprooted: Thirty Years Later” in Reviews in American History (Sep., 1982)

Bought Lives

The father probably got his tattoos while in the Navy, maybe while stationed somewhere in the Pacific during World War II. It’s standard fare, anchors and such. His skin is tan, the tattoos slightly faded. Surrounded by their children, he and his wife smile. Did they meet before or after his stint in the service? Did she give birth to their first child, a boy, before he shipped out or sometime later?

The year is 1961. This is the first page.

The boy is now a man. His jaw, square and haughty, is a boxer’s jaw. A red sweater hugs his shoulders. His hair is a finely sculpted monument to pomade. He smiles broadly, deviously, and his wife, her flaxen hair teased up into a gravity-defying beehive, stands beside him beaming while the brown dog nuzzles their legs. The man’s parents smile approvingly in the background, the father’s arms folded across his chest, his tattoos on display.

The priest and nun rarely smile with their teeth. They sit at the kitchen table, flanked by the family. Perhaps they are Irish-Catholic, perhaps from Bridgeport. Between communions, confessions, and midnight Christmas masses, did they jeer or cheer King’s open housing marches through Chicago? Did they hurl rocks or offer words of encouragement? Photos from that conflict sit in archives, people baring their teeth, poised on opposite lines of the divide, attempting to shatter or defend a fracture point as trenchant as any border or battlefront.

Two birthdays are documented each year: one for the stolid, unsmiling grandmother and the other for the dog. They are positioned next to cakes, their years pressed into icing and crowned by corner store party favors. 84, 85, 86. 13, 14, 15. Eventually their birthday celebrations vanish, as do they.

The square-jawed son no longer smiles and his hair is unkempt. He looks uncomfortable on the couch. His wife looks tired. The tattooed father looks on in the background, bored or drunk or both. They are beer drinkers. Their dog is dead. The priest and nun do not smile with their teeth. The years are no longer labeled in careful pencil strokes.

They die or divorce, clean their homes or their lives, and the photo album ends up for sale in a thrift store, their memories affixed with a price tag and branded as kitsch, portending the indignity of our demise.

A Crucible of Quotas

Paddy, of Dillinger Four fame, offered this bit of advice to those in the crowd: “Steal as much as you possibly can. Your boss is fucking you, why not fuck him?” He mulled it over for a second and then amended his words. “Well, not my boss. He’s actually a pretty cool guy. But man, bosses past…”

The worst part about working retail is the way it reduces human interaction to dollar signs, the way it synchronizes your mind and movements with the impossible quotas foisted upon you. Morning pep rallies and condescending glares from shoppers. The hellish glow of fluorescent lights leaching your humanity from you. Celebrate, loyal Americans, the specter of mutated Taylorism! Celebrate downcast, defeated eyes!

There are things that can make even a lousy job tolerable: fun coworkers, a living wage, a sense of purpose, or the sacrifice of bringing home the bacon for your spouse and kids. None of these things apply to me. The spasmodic doors of the toy store look like the gnashing jaws of Hell most days, malfunctioning and attempting to grab me in their vice-like grip. If this seems like an exaggeration, it is because everything about my job is exaggerated: my manufactured, syrupy sweet voice and my spastic motions as I throw toys on shelves, those cheap plastic vessels that burrow into a child’s heart for a few days, weeks, months and then end up in a landfill. Do your job. Stick to the script. A little subterfuge here, a phony ingratiation to the boss there. Busy, busy, busy. For the love of God, look busy. It’s like this for most people, most jobs. Part underpaid actor, part uniformed sociopath. It poisons my soul, almost convinces me to start smoking full-time again just to make the poison palpable. On the worst days it makes me want to abscond to the woods and write manifestos on rock walls in deer blood.

When I first started working at the toy store, hired as a seasonal grunt to unload trucks and stock shelves during the Christmas rush, the doors were locked by the manager each night at 10 p.m. and not opened again until 7 or 8 a.m., when all our work was done or the store inevitably opened for business. There were of course security reasons for this. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that they may as well have shackled us together, a tangled knot of surly humanity marching from aisle to aisle, prodded by the inspiring words, “No one leaves until all this stuff gets put out. C’mon, guys.” For two weekends the company experimented with keeping its doors open twenty-four hours. Who in their right mind, you ask, would possibly need or want to shop for toys at three or four in the morning? Apparently the public asked themselves the same question because I can count on one hand how many people actually came in. I spent my nights hovering near the cash register and idly chatting with the security guard, a racist ex-cop who was getting paid over three times as much as me to sit in a chair with a gun on his hip, sometimes dozing off, sometimes spilling ice cream on his pants.

They offered to keep me on after Christmas and I was desperate enough to say yes. With a relatively meaningless college diploma and a tanking economy framing my options for the next few months, even the bottom of the barrel began to look good. How else would I make payments on the money that funded my meaningless college diploma? Consider it accommodation for a paltry paycheck, sacrifice in order to salvage the part of myself that never truly clocks in. The nature of work has changed since Christmas, though. No longer is it strictly a mad rush to get stuff on shelves. I still unload trucks each week, arriving at 4 a.m., but merchandising is now paramount. The bosses seem to think stocking shelves requires the attention and care of a diamond appraiser, not the indifference of someone getting paid barely above minimum wage. Since I’m also working daylight hours now, when the store is open, they have me jockeying cash registers and foiling the attempts of honest, abiding customers to return faulty merchandise at the service desk: me, the hired asshole, as thin line between waste and profit, a line I care nothing for but must uphold for the sake of my job. Sorry, it’s company policy. Read the fine print. Amazingly, the computers are even set up in such a way that exceptions generally cannot be made.

The worst part is the quotas, which the bosses innocuously call “goals.” When we unload trucks, a physically demanding task in plenty of ways, we are expected, with a skeleton crew not really big enough for the job, to unload 1,300 to 2,000 boxes in less than two hours. One person climbs aboard the truck and sets up a metal conveyor belt. Boxes slide down the conveyor to awaiting workers who sort them based on tags and then load them onto wooden pallets. Stacking boxes is a precarious matter since they come in all shapes and sizes. Imagine Tetris mixed with Jenga, except it really, really sucks when the stack falls. When enough boxes are piled on any given pallet, someone has to stop what they’re doing, grab a pallet jack, and drag the product out to its section of the floor to await spreading. This excursion to the sales floor deprives the line of a sorely needed person and brings the entire process to a halt, boxes getting jammed and backed up on the conveyor, the boss unreasonably bitching even though all of this could have been avoided if they had scheduled an adequate number of people, something the profit margins of course forbid. When all the product and pallets are taken out, we are given a fifteen minute break. Most workers rush outside to suck down two or three cigarettes, and the rest, myself included, stay inside the break room and stare at bottles of soda, often in absolute silence, already tired and wanting to get the hell out of there.

After the break, we grab boxes off of pallets and throw them into the aisles where they belong, prepping them for unpacking; this is called spreading. When that is done, we are expected to individually unpack and shelve thirty boxes an hour, a complete impossibility, especially when it is taken into consideration that entire sections must often be rearranged, metal hooks retrieved, price tags printed out, etc. We work hard but it is never enough. Normally there are multiple pallets we are unable to get out by the 10 a.m. deadline, so we are forced to backstock them, which creates a huge ordeal since the company’s lack of foresight in scheduling enough people extends not only to truck days but to normal operating days. The result is a logjam of tasks assigned to workers over the coming days, tasks they do not have enough time to complete on top of the other things they are expected to do—help customers, run register, etc. It all builds up and overflows into the next week, when we receive another truck and the cycle begins anew, a cumulative snowball effect that ensures we’re always behind. Each week our bosses castigate us for our inefficiency, our failure charted on a large graph by a big red dot that dives below the unwavering blue line mapping acceptable output. I leave each of these “truck days” sweaty, sore, and trailed by the measured belligerence of the bossman.

Running register is no different. We receive a sheet of quotas telling us what we are supposed to sign people up for at the point-of-purchase. In a five hour shift it is not uncommon to be expected to sell $50 worth of batteries, $35 worth of warranties, and to sign up thirty people for a Rewards Card, three people for a credit card, and ten people for the Birthday Club promotion. All of this, too, is impossible. People generally do not want these things, nor do they want to be asked these questions. They want to buy their stuff and get the hell out the door, and yet there I am, standing between them and the exit, asking them question after question.

“Would you like to save 10% on your purchase by signing up for a credit card?”

“May I please have your phone number?”

“Do you have a Rewards Card? Well, would you like to sign up for one?”

“Do you have a son or daughter? Would you like to sign them up for the Birthday Club?”

“If you’re interested, there’s a warranty available for this. $2.99 for fifteen months.”

“Do you need any batteries?”

“Need any gift receipts?”

Many customers can’t take it, rightfully so, and begin to cut me off or yell at me. At the end of my shift, most of my quota categories are big goose eggs. This does not please the bosses.

I’ve always considered myself a reasonably good worker, the type of person who shows up on time and sweats more than need be for the pittance I’m being paid. I’ve never been able to heed the words of Paddy and his ilk, never been able to steal outright from my employer. I worked for two years at Dairy Queen and over five years at Tower Records, never having a problem with management at either job. I aspired to bigger and better things, of course, but I did my job properly, received my paycheck, and they left me alone. It’s different at the toy store. A friend’s sister used to work there, and when she heard that I’d bitten the bullet and agreed to don the douchebag uniform of red polo and black slacks, she said only, “You poor, poor thing.” She knew then what I know now: some companies remain profitable not solely through their business model or market niche but by squeezing as much productivity out of their workers as possible, keeping things understaffed and high-pressure and then looking you over like a puppy who has shit the carpet when your shift’s up. Considering the way things are right now, I should probably feel lucky just to have a job. But that’s a copout. It’s not as simple as that. Take, for example, my coworker Lisa, a thirty-something year old mother who lost her home in a fire and never received the insurance payoff because of a technicality. I work with a lot of people like her—thirty- and forty-somethings trying to support themselves and their kids amid mounting bills. They form a choir of “How the fuck am I supposed to do this? How the fuck am I supposed to do this?” What good is a job if you can’t survive on it?

Mark, an old acquaintance of mine who I haven’t talked to in years, is my all-time retail hero. He got a job at one of the big box stores when he was hard-up for money. Rather than attempt to reconcile his ideals with his shitty environment, he waged a full-scale war of sabotage against the company. While unloading trucks, he would throw entire boxes of perfectly good product into the trash compactor, blow his nose in linens and towels, and smash lamps and dishware for the hell of it. What did any of this amount to? Nothing much, really. But he did manage to cordon off a part of himself that wasn’t for sale. He accepted money from a company whose values disgusted him and in return repaid them with shards of glass and mangled merchandise. He escaped from that crucible of quotas and talk of “team members” with his dignity.

The toy store is not the worst job I’ve ever had, not by a long shot. I was once a telemarketer. Lured by the promise of $12 an hour plus commission, I showed up at an office suite on Route 20 for an interview. The interview consisted of making sure that I was indeed a living, breathing human, and then they showed me to a cubicle and strapped a headset on me. There were no windows at all and I couldn’t see my neighbors over the walls of the cubicle. The boss played really loud techno music. He liked to keep things “high energy.” A script lay in front of me. I would be cold calling people from all over the country and selling magazine subscriptions to them. I heard the words “fuck you” shouted in so many different regional accents that it eventually became a travelogue of malaise—Brooklyn, Midwest, southern California, Southern accents that could’ve been from anywhere. I traveled there in my mind, loosing myself from that basement office suite, curses rammed into my ear like leis being draped around my neck. The only people who bought subscriptions from me were elderly folks, and all they really wanted was someone to talk to. In between hashing out the details of the subscriptions they were being coerced into buying, they’d tell me about sons and daughters who never visited anymore, medical conditions that kept them up nights. I began to feel like a beta fish, boxed in and ready to attack. Give me my reflection and I will butt heads with it; give me a mirror and I will turn my face into rivulets of blood. I sat in that cubicle and contemplated the coming hours, the coming days, the coming weeks, months, years—my life. I got up and left. I was a telemarketer for three hours.

A sacrifice or an accommodation can become a lifetime. A job taken for short-term reasons can become the arena in which the rest of your life plays out. I’m situated at the intersection of downward pull and steady trajectory, the child of a lower-middle/middle-middle class upbringing, warned by my father for as long as I can remember—as far back as 3rd grade—that when I grew up there’d “barely be a middle class anymore.” Everything would be stratified into rich and poor. It may sound like the paranoid ranting of a suburban class warrior, but there’s a nugget of truth to it, and it accounts for my parents’ insistence that I pursue higher education. Become a professional. Become middle-class. Throw yourself into the gears of bureaucracy until they can’t untangle you from the machinery and cast you down with the rest of the dispossessed. Fight your fight so you can fight for others. Cast off the moorings of frivolous things. Become a purposeful, deliberate being. Just as there must be preconditions for a successful revolution, a culture of abundance that does not supplant one form of poverty for another, arguably so too must there be a threshold, a physical and spiritual subsistence from which opportunity flowers, a bare minimum to hinge life’s possibilities on. Could I ever be happy on $10,000 a year? Yes and no, but mostly no, I think. Accumulation, status symbols, planned obsolescence—I want none of it. But give me the means to make a life for myself. Give me shelter, give me health, give me leisure, give me books and paper and pen, give me an allegiance to humanity unencumbered by archaic allegiances to company or state. Give me my demands for a life, my life.

My Heroes Have Always Been Princesses

When I was a little kid, Thriller was my favorite LP. I’d put it on and spin around in my parents’ living room until I felt like I was going to puke. I haven’t learned a single new dance move since then. (Circle pits used to sometimes make me feel like I was going to puke, too.) Now Michael Jackson is dead, and I couldn’t care less.

My indifference has nothing to do with his behavior or the accusations of abuse leveled against him. I’m more weirded out by the cultural tendency to get a massive postmortem boner for dead celebrities. It makes sense to feel some semblance of grief if you truly were or are a huge fan, or if the person’s presence on this earth had innately positive repercussions, both of which I guess might apply to Jackson, since he has millions upon millions of fans and left an indelible mark on pop music. I, too, have felt saddened by the death of celebrities—Joe Strummer and Kurt Vonnegut come to mind. Still, every time a celebrity croaks the public outpouring just seems bizarre and imbued with vacuity, a manufactured grief that speaks to some profound emptiness I can’t quite put my finger on. When Heath Ledger died, I was absolutely stunned by the public’s response and by the response of my friends, very few of whom had ever mentioned a fondness for him. What was the big deal? I made a joke: “Do you think people will be weeping and lighting candles when Gilbert Gottfried dies?”

Like I say, I’m not completely condemning an individual’s feeling of connectedness to celebrities or public personas. It’s unavoidable. There are musicians and writers whose absence will sadden me when their time comes to get shoved down in the dirt. But in the meantime, I’ll continue to be weirded out by the fairweather Jacksonian tidal wave. It’s like when the hometown team makes it to the playoffs and all the people who usually disavow sports are suddenly wearing the colors with pride and talking the loudest at the bar.

Trepan Nation, a good punk band from Sycamore, Illinois, penned a song that I think is particularly resonant. It was written in the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, and it’s called “My Heroes Have Always Been Princesses.” It goes like this:

“Today, a nation mourns. Another media figure’s slipped away in the same fashion as a thousand others everyday. No network news, no motorcade to mark their passing, no one will eulogize them in Time Magazine. No one will ever call them a hero for their pioneering work in flying through a windshield, falling off a horse, or getting shot down like a dog in the street. Maybe I’m just missing something, but what the fuck’s so noble about fucking dying? It’s not like they bought it with a puppy in one arm and an old lady in the other, leaping through a wall of flames to safety. They were famous. Now they’re dead. My adulation is too precious a commodity to waste on them.”

An Accident on the Interstate

We’d been driving non-stop for sixteen hours, leaving the previous night at 9 p.m. after Greg got off work. We were running ragged. My brother and Greg took naps in the backseat in between driving shifts. I, on the other hand, couldn’t sleep in the car, couldn’t sleep in transit in general. I’d tried and failed before on buses and planes and in cars. I can’t sleep until I reach my destination or until I lie in bed, soothingly horizontal, my achy legs unfurled.

We were on our way to Las Vegas, where Greg had booked a room at the Tropicana for thirty bucks. I’d been to Vegas once before with my girlfriend and two of her friends, all three of whom had either grown up or at least attended high school there. We avoided the Strip and instead drank in the old downtown and the Fruit Loop, called so because it’s comprised of gay bars. One bar hosted a weekly Bear Contest. Its winners, burly, hairy, and bound in leather, grinned from photos on the wall. We spent two nights there. When we left, I’d only lost ten bucks at the casinos, smoking with wrinkled retirees at the nickel slots. Vegas epitomizes excess, celebrates the vacuity of glitz and greed; it’s a nightmare city of neon lights and dirty money baking away in 118 degree heat. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t care if I ever returned. But Greg and my brother wanted to go. They’d planned the trip and I’d only been invited along because their friend backed out at the last second.

The plan had initially been to stop briefly in Denver, continue on to the Grand Canyon, circle back toward Vegas, then Los Angeles, and finish by driving thirty hours straight from Los Angeles to Chicago. By the time we left Denver, however, we were tired enough to rent a motel room. I napped for an hour and woke up feeling antsy. Before my brother and Greg bedded down, I made a proposal: “I’ll drive us through the night to the Grand Canyon while you guys sleep, and then you guys can take over.”

“Are you sure you’re not too tired?” my brother asked.

“No, I’m fine,” I said.

We checked out of the motel, which we’d only stayed at for three hours, just long enough to soak in the hot tub, the blisters on my hands and feet opening and disappearing into water jets and grease-laced froth. We got in the car and I lined up my CDs. Three hours into the drive, swerving through treacherous downhill mountain passes while trucks raced around us, I’d had enough. My vision and nerves were shot. At one point I’d flipped off the high beams and accidentally turned off the headlights entirely in the process. We ghosted through the mountains invisible to other drivers and didn’t notice for nearly an hour. It was a miracle we hadn’t been rear ended, possibly killed.

I drove us across the Utah border and gave up. Checking my reflection in a gas station mirror, I saw only tangled webs of red constricting my eyes. My brother took over and drove us through winding gauntlets and out into the steady loll of the flatlands, but the fact of the matter was that none of us had enough energy to make it to the Grand Canyon that night. We needed to pull over and sleep.

“Maybe we can just skip Los Angeles,” Greg said. “We’ll drive to Vegas tomorrow and then to the Grand Canyon the next morning.”

“If you guys are skipping Los Angeles,” I said, “I’ll catch a Greyhound there out of Vegas and find my way back home some other way.”

Eventually we struck a compromise: crash at a motel for a few hours, wake up and drive to Vegas, then to Los Angeles the next day, and stop at the Hoover Dam on the way home. No Grand Canyon.

We got a motel room in Utah, our second in a six hour span, said our goodnights, and then my brother filled the room with his hellish snoring, keeping me up for another two hours.

The next morning, after a few hours of uneasy sleep, we got back on the road. The Utah landscape is beautiful, its canyons and rock faces sometimes revealing hints of purple in the beaming sunlight, its sparse grass poking through the rocky earth like an afterthought. Antelope crossing signs dot the roadside but we never saw one, seeing instead only a pair of disembodied antlers and a red stain.

About a hundred miles from the Arizona border we spotted a cop car parked haphazardly on the shoulder of the road, and, further up, a sign reading ACCIDENT AHEAD, EXPECT DELAYS. Traffic slowed to a standstill. After twenty minutes of immobility, I said, “Want to get out and start walking like in that R.E.M. video?” Indeed, some motorists did exactly that, stretching their legs, walking their dogs, throwing footballs, standing by the lane divider and trying to peer around the bend up ahead and figure out what the hell the hold up was. ACCIDENT AHEAD is vivid and innocuous all at once. Metal met metal, crashing together and likely rendering each car dead and bound for the junkyard. But we imagined no faces, no bodies. I didn’t at least. I only grew irritated. I was in no rush to make it to Vegas, but after a day of driving 80 mph and watching the miles click away, I couldn’t feel comfortable at a standstill. I needed to move, needed to see a blur outside my window and watch my brother struggle in vain to capture state signs in the viewfinder of his camera as we whizzed past. My mind grew venomous: They were probably driving like assholes. Fuck ‘em. Get their cars off the road and let’s get outta here.

Traffic slowly began to move after forty-five minutes. People rushed back to their vehicles, dogs and footballs in tow. After passing the bend in the road, we saw sirens and a MERGE RIGHT sign. An ambulance screamed past on the other side of the road. Then we saw the accident site. The guardrail was smashed completely flat, some of it disappearing into the huge drop off the side of the cliff. A semi-truck foundered on our left, gutted. Its top was partially shorn off. Cops leaned over the side of the cliff taking pictures. Did someone fly over the edge? Did people die? A friend once told me about an interstate accident she saw in Illinois during winter. The snow was stained red, soiled by blood and glistening organs. She felt sick to her stomach thinking of those poor people. She later found out it had been a truck from a slaughterhouse that had capsized, spilling its macabre cargo. No one had died.

“I hope everyone’s okay,” I said, wondering if those people would ever walk out of the hospital, or if they’d even make it there alive in the first place. Seeing the crash site—the violence of velocity made plain by sirens and shorn metal—left a bad taste in my mouth. We carry the entirety of our universe inside fragile armor. Worlds collide, worlds die. Passing the wreckage, I remembered driving with my mother when I was young and encountering a smashed car at an intersection—the same color, make and model as my father’s—and watching her go into hysterics until she read the license plate and realized my father was safe. (But who was in that car? Who among that person’s loved ones received the call from the hospital?) I regretted the hostility I’d felt only minutes earlier. People would have cursed me too if our lightless car had been maimed on the Colorado interstate and held up traffic, I know. But would they have sighed and repented or cast an angry glare in my direction as I lay dying in the back of a speeding ambulance?

By the time we made it to Vegas, I was glad to be off the road, glad to be at a standstill.

Everything is Beautiful from Up Here

Before trash bags full of her possessions mingled with pigeons on my back porch, before a cop cruiser stopped us while walking the drug corridor on Milwaukee Avenue, before she moved back to Washington, I waited for Kaylene at the intersection of Fullerton and Clark for what felt like a first date. She was late and I was reading A Short Introduction to the Russian Revolution because I didn’t have the patience to dig through thousand page tomes. I sang the familiar lament of the dewy-eyed: Oh, Russia, how could so much hope and possibility have resulted in such a mess? Where did you go wrong? Into the furnace of doctrine and control you flung yourself, murderers and mothers, prison guards and poets, those who masqueraded as saints while spilling blood and those who spoke for humanity and lost their lives because of it, all reduced to ash and confined to pages that could never do justice to the conflagrations and silent suffering of those lives. I traced epochs of grief while waiting for Kaylene, my brain fumbling with pronunciations like a pair of clumsy hands attempting to wrangle fish from a stream.

Emerging from an alleyway off of Clark where she shared a studio apartment with a friend, she approached the bench I was sitting on, clad in combat boots and a homemade Descendents t-shirt. Her hair was shaved down to a quarter-inch and bug-eyed sunglasses shrouded half her face. She was high, though I didn’t know that at the time.

“Where to?” she asked.

I stood and shrugged, and we instinctively began walking toward the lake. Once there, we walked toward Navy Pier, swapping stories en route. The lakefront teemed with bicyclists, rollerbladers, and joggers. Boats skidded across the water in the distance, sails swelling with the wind. She told me about growing up in Wenatchee, Washington and her time spent living in Hawaii the year prior, drinking in train tunnels in Washington and skulking through the sketchy night in Hawaii while crackheads leered at her.

At Navy Pier an overzealous clown terrified a crowd of children, sending them into crying fits with his lilting voice and spastic dance moves. We retreated to the railing and watched seaborne birds dive headlong into murky waves and emerge clutching fish in their beaks. Back in fourth grade, our class chartered a boat and took a field trip on the lake. I vividly remember dead fish floating everywhere, accompanied by a rank smell. Lake Michigan’s charms are few, but I liked the view from that railing.

Looking into the distance, Kaylene asked, “Want to ride the Ferris wheel?” She was partly serious, partly teasing.

She’d asked me all about myself one night after work, the two of us drinking in the downstairs bar, wading through the minutiae: I have three siblings; I don’t know what I want to do with my life; I think the first Stiff Little Fingers album is perfect except for the last song; I don’t drink hard liquor straight; I haven’t smoked a cigarette in almost two years; I don’t dance; I’m a dog person.

“What are your fears?” she asked.

“Dying,” I said. ”Getting sick and being in pain and then dying more so. Elevators, too. Any closed in, crowded space, really.” “And heights,” I added.

“So what about roller coasters and stuff like that?” she asked.

“No, no way. I’d rather just eat cotton candy and ride the carousel.”

In the years since then, Kaylene has been skydiving. I’ve seen the photos. She has a parachute strapped to her back and a smile on her face. The plane is in the background. She doesn’t look nervous whatsoever.

We walked down the promenade past vendors selling cotton candy and popcorn, the Ferris wheel looming. Beside the Ferris wheel was a ride with metal cables attached to boards that people laid belly down on, the cables whirring through the night, riders dipping and soaring like Superman. “Maybe we should just go on that instead,” said Kaylene. I shook my head no.

Confronting and overcoming a fear is something usually made possible only through grit and perseverance, focusing single-mindedly on pushing yourself to your limits, either through a gradual process or by taking the leap outright: allowing the tarantula to crawl up your arm, flinging yourself into the ocean, greeting the plane’s takeoff with a stoic sigh. It helps when the possibility of a kiss is dangled out there, as was the case for me. It was Kaylene’s lips, not bravery, that lured me into that line. I stood waiting, my mind rioting, stomach ablaze.

The first Ferris wheel was built in Chicago during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Some believed the cars would come crashing down in wails of grinding steel, their occupants crushed to death, sullying the White City with blood. As luck would have it, Ferris’s design was sound and the steel behemoth and its riders were spared from catastrophe. Instead it was a serial killer by the name of H.H. Holmes who left a crimson mark on the Exposition, extinguishing the lives of fairgoers unlucky enough to lodge in his hotel, a sepulchral structure of trap doors and soundproof rooms, its basement equipped with fire pits and vats of lye. Though the madness of bloodlust and the madness of human ingenuity are not mutually exclusive, knives and gas-filled rooms scream death while a creaking Ferris wheel merely whispers it, issuing forth a languid exhalation for the paranoid and high strung to hang their fears on. But that offered little consolation as the wheel spun us up into the night sky and some dead crooner sang over the loudspeakers about Chicago. Behold the lake, the lights, the lives of millions stretching toward the horizon. Behold me, one of the millions, quaking, nauseous, and ruefully drifting skyward.

“Everything is beautiful from up here,” Kaylene said, smiling.