My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays

by Davy Rothbart

  I switched buses in Cleveland, and took a seat next to an ancient-looking black guy who was in a deep sleep. Twenty minutes from Buffalo, when darkness fell, he woke up, offered me a sip of whiskey from his coat pocket, and we started talking. His name was Vernon. He told me that when midnight rolled around, it was going to be his hundred-and-tenth birthday.

  “A hundred and ten?” I squealed, unabashedly skeptical.

  Happy to prove it, he showed me a public housing ID card from Little Rock, Arkansas, that listed his birth date as 2/15/90.

  “Who was president when—”

  “Benjamin Harrison,” he said quickly, cutting me off before I was even done with my question, as though he’d heard it many times before. I had no clue if this was true, but he winked and popped a set of false teeth from his mouth, and in the short moment they glistened in his hand, it seemed suddenly believable that he was a hundred and ten, and not just, like, eighty-nine. His bottom gums, jutting tall, were shaped like the Prudential “Rock” and were the color of raw fish, pink and red with dark-gray speckles. The skin on his face was pulled taut around his cheekbones and eye sockets, as leathery and soft-looking as one of Satchel Paige’s baseball mitts in its display case at Cooperstown.

  I found myself telling Vernon all about Lauren Hill and explained how nervous I was to see her—surely he’d have some experience he could draw on to help me out. I told him I thought I was taking a pretty risky gamble by popping up in Buffalo unannounced. Things were either going to be really fucking awesome or really fucking weird, and I figured I’d probably know which within the first couple of minutes I saw her. Vernon, it turned out, was in a vaguely similar situation. After a century-plus of astonishingly robust health, he’d been ailing the past eighteen months, and before he kicked off he wanted to make amends with his great-granddaughter, who he was the closest to out of all of his relatives. But, he admitted, he’d let her down so many times—with the drinking, the drugs, and even stealing her money and kitchen appliances—that she might not be willing to let him past the front door. Twice he used my cell phone to try calling her but nobody answered. So much for sage advice.

  We both got quiet and brooded to ourselves as the bus rolled off the freeway ramp and wound its way through empty downtown streets, lined with soot-sprayed mounds of snow and ice. Buffalo in winter is a bleak Hoth-like wasteland, and the only sign of life I saw was a pair of drunks who’d faced off in front of an adult bookstore and begun to fight, staggering like zombies. One of them had a pink stuffed animal and was clubbing the other in the face with it. A steady snow began to fall, and I felt a wave of desperate sorrow crash over me. Whatever blind optimism I’d had about the night and how Lauren Hill might receive me had been lost somewhere along the way (maybe at the rest stop in Erie, Pennsylvania, in the bathroom stall with shit smeared on the walls). The trip, I realized now, was a mistake, but at the same time I knew that the only thing to do was to go ahead with my fucked-up plan anyway and go surprise Lauren, because once you’re sitting there and you’ve got a needle in your hands, what else is there to do but poke your finger and see the blood?

  *

  At the Greyhound station, a sort-of friend of mine named Chris Henderson was there to pick me up in a shiny black Ford Explorer with only four hundred miles on the odometer but its front end and passenger side bashed to shit. “You get in a rollover?” I asked him, after hopping in up front.

  “Naw, I just boosted this bitch yesterday in Rochester, it was already like this. Who’s your friend?”

  “This is Vernon. He’s gonna ride with us, if that’s cool. In a few hours it’s gonna be his hundred-and-tenth birthday.”

  “No shit?” Chris glanced in the rearview and nodded to Vernon, in the backseat. “Fuck if I make it to twenty-five,” he said, gunning it out of the lot.

  Chris was the kind of guy who always made these sorts of claims, hoping, perhaps, to sound tougher, but really he was a sweetheart with a swashbuckler’s twinkle who was rarely in serious danger and probably had decades of fun times ahead of him, if he could stay out of prison. He had pale white skin, a rash of acne on his neck, and his own initials carved into his buzz-cut hair in several places. He looked Canadian and sounded Canadian and was indeed a Canuck—he’d grown up on the meanest street of Hamilton, Ontario, and, as he’d told me more than a few times, he and his older brother had stolen seventy-six cars before finally getting caught when Chris was nineteen. Chris did the time—three years—while his brother skated. Then Chris moved in with an uncle in Charlotte and had gotten a job as an airline reservationist, which was how I’d met him a couple of years before. He had a gregarious nature, and after we’d found ourselves in deep conversation while I was buying tickets over the phone, he’d come to Chicago a few weekends in a row to pursue his dream of becoming a stand-up comic and stayed on my couch. The problem was that he was absolutely sorry as a stand-up comic, just woefully bad. I saw him perform once, at the Improv Olympic at Clark and Addison, and it was one of the hardest, saddest things I’ve ever had to watch—someone’s dream unraveling and being chopped dead with each blast of silence that followed his punch lines. But where I would’ve been destroyed by this, Chris was over it by the next morning, and freshly chipper. He told me the lesson he’d learned was that he needed to focus on his strengths, and he knew himself to be an ace car thief. Before long, he’d moved to Buffalo and was working at his older brother’s “mechanic” shop. When I called and told him I was coming to town, and explained why, he told me he actually knew Lauren Hill, because for a while he’d been a regular at Freighter’s, the bar where she worked, though he doubted she knew him by name, and anyway, he said, he wasn’t allowed in there anymore because he’d left twice without paying when he’d realized at the end of the night that he’d left his cash at home. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “That girl’s beautiful. Every guy who wanders into that damn bar, they leave in love with her.”

  Vernon had asked if he could roll with us for a bit while he kept trying to reach his great-granddaughter. If nothing else, he suggested, we could drop him off later at the YMCA and he’d track her down the next morning. He sat quietly in the backseat, looking out the window, while we cruised toward the east side of town, running every sixth light, Chris catching me up on some of his recent escapades, half-shouting to make himself heard over the blare of a modern-rock station out of Niagara Falls, Ontario, that slipped in and out of range. “Hey, check this out,” he said. He reached beneath the driver’s seat and passed me a fat roll of New York Lottery scratch tickets. “You can win like ten grand!” he cried. “Scratch some off if you want.”

  “Where’d you get these, man?”

  “Get this—they were in the car when I got it! Just sitting in the backseat! I already scratched off some winners, like forty bucks’ worth.” He passed me a tin Buffalo Sabres lighter from his coat pocket, its sharp bottom edge gummed with shavings from the tickets he’d scratched. “Go on,” he said, “make us some money.”

  I tore off a long band of tickets and handed them back to Vernon, along with a quarter from the center console, and Chris cranked up the volume until the windows shook and piloted us through his frozen, desolate town toward Lauren Hill’s apartment, singing along to the radio, while me and Vernon scratched away: “You make me come. You make me complete. You make me completely miserable.” I looked up and saw him grinning at me and nodding his head, as if to ask, “Doesn’t this song fucking rock?” I grinned and nodded back, because yes, in a crazy way it kind of did. A barely perceptible but definitely perceptible drip of hopefulness had started to seep back into the night.

  *

  No one was home at Lauren’s place; in fact, the lights were out in all six apartments in her building even though it was only seven thirty.

  Chris cracked his window and flicked a pile of my losing scratch tickets through like cigarette butts. “She’s probably at the bar,” he said. “She works every night, and she’s there hangin’ out even
when she ain’t workin’. We’ll go find her.” He whipped the Explorer around the corner and we fishtailed a bit in the gathering snow.

  A mile down, five tiny side streets spilled together at a jagged-shaped intersection, and from its farthest corners, two squat and battered bars glared across at each other like warring crabs, panels of wood nailed over the windows and painted to match the outside walls, and one neon beer sign hanging over each door—Yuengling and Budweiser—as though they were the names of the bars.

  Chris pulled over and pointed to the bar with the Yuengling sign. “That’s Freighter’s,” he said. “See if she’s in there. And if she is, see if you can call off the dogs so I can get in there, too—we’ll all have a drink.”

  I jumped out and took a few steps, then had a thought and went back to the truck and asked Vernon if he wanted to come in with me. I was nervous to see Lauren, and afraid she would find something creepy and stalker-like about me taking a Greyhound bus a few hundred miles to make an uninvited appearance on Valentine’s Day. If I rolled in there with Vernon, it seemed to me, his presence might help defuse any initial tension.

  Vernon was a little unsteady on his feet, from either the whiskey he’d been sipping or the quilt of fresh snow lining the street paired with his ludicrously advanced age, so I held him by the arm as we crossed the intersection. A plume of merriment rose in my chest that was six parts the gentle glow of heading into any bar on a cold, snowy night and four parts the wonderful, unpredictable madness of having a hundred-and-ten-year-old man I’d just met on the Greyhound bus as my wingman. I heaved open the heavy door to Freighter’s, letting out a blast of noise and hot, smoky air, and once Vernon shuffled past, I followed him in.

  Inside, it was so dark and hot and loud it took me a few seconds to get my bearings. People shouted over the deafening thump of a jukebox and the thunderous rattle of empty bottles being tossed into a metal drum. Directly overhead, two hockey games roared from a pair of giant TVs. It smelled like someone had puked on a campfire. All of which is to say, just the way I liked it, and just like the 8-Ball Saloon back in Michigan where Lauren had worked before moving to Buffalo for school.

  A hulking, tattooed guy on a stool was asking me and Vernon for our IDs. I flashed him mine, while Vernon pulled out the same fraying ID card he’d showed me earlier. The doorman plucked it from his hand, inspected it, and passed it back, shaking his head. “Nope,” he shouted over the din. “I need a driver’s license or state ID.” At first I laughed, thinking he was just fucking with us, but then I saw he was serious.

  I leaned to his ear and protested, “But he’s a hundred and ten years old! Look at the guy!”

  The doorman shook his head and pointed at the exit. It was useless to try to reason with him over the din, and I figured once I found Lauren, she’d help me get Vernon and Chris in.

  “Wait in the truck,” I shouted in Vernon’s ear. “I’ll come get you guys in a few minutes.”

  He nodded and slipped out into the cold. I took a few steps further in. The place was packed, mostly older, rugged-looking dudes—factory workers, construction workers, bikers, and their equally rugged-looking girlfriends—with a sprinkling of younger indie kids and punk rockers mixed in. All of a sudden I caught sight of Lauren Hill behind the bar and my heart twisted like a wet rag—she had her back turned to me and was getting her shoulders thoroughly massaged by a tall, skinny, dark-haired guy in a sleeveless shirt, dozens of tattoos slathered on his arms. My first thought was to immediately leave, but I also knew that would be silly—this was surely just some guy who worked with her, not a true threat. The guy finished his little rubdown and they both turned back to the bar. Lauren’s beauty made my stomach lurch. She had long straight hair, dyed black, big, expressive eyes, and an enormous, bright smile. I made my way over, feeling stupid for having spent the last eight hours on buses without the foresight to dream up a single witty or romantic thing to say when I greeted her.

  I edged between a few guys at the bar and pulled a ten-dollar bill from my back pocket. When Lauren came close, I called out, “Can I get a Bell’s Amber?”—a local Michigan brew that wasn’t served in Buffalo—my spontaneous, wilted stab at a joke. Even Chris Henderson could’ve conjured up something funnier.

  She looked at me and the smile drained off her face. “Davy? Oh my God, what the hell are you doing here?” There was no way to hug across the bar; instead, Lauren offered what seemed to me a slightly awkward and tepid two-handed high five.

  I slapped her hands and said, “I came here to surprise you,” feeling suddenly lost in space.

  “Oh, that’s so awesome,” she said, sounding possibly genuine. “But what are you doing in Buffalo?”

  “No, I came to Buffalo because I wanted to see you.” I shrugged and heard the next words tumble out of my mouth, even as I instantly regretted them. “Happy Valentine’s Day!”

  Just then, a barback rushing past with a tub full of empty glasses crashed into her, knocking her a couple of feet to the side. Now she was within shouting range of a few guys further along the bar, and they started barking out their drink orders. She leaned back toward me and hollered, “I’m sorry, Monday nights are always like this, and we’re short a guy. Can you come back later? It’ll be less insane.”

  “Sure, no problem,” I said, putting both hands up idiotically for another slap of hands, but she’d already turned and was cranking the caps off a row of Yuengling bottles. I slowly lowered my hands, waited another fifteen seconds or so until she happened to glance my way, and gave her a little wave. She flashed a polite smile in return, and I whirled and slunk out the door, utterly defeated, making a promise to myself not to come back later in the night unless she called my phone in the next few hours and begged me to. It was just past eight o’clock. I’d give her till midnight.

  *

  “Should we come inside?” Chris asked as I climbed in the backseat; Vernon had made it back to the car and was up riding shotgun.

  “It’s kind of busy in there. Let’s get some grub and come back later.”

  “Well, how’d it go?” asked Vernon, once we were moving again.

  “Not too bad. I don’t know. Not too good, either.” I told them what had gone down. They both tried to reassure me that Lauren was probably really excited I was in town, but that it’s always hard when someone pops in to see you and you’re busy at work. I granted them that, but it still seemed like she could’ve maybe flipped me the keys to her apartment, in case I wanted to take a nap or chill out and watch a movie until she got home. Or really done anything to give me the sense that she was happy I’d rolled in.

  “Don’t worry, man,” Vernon said. “Trust me, it’ll be cool.” This from the guy who was now using Chris’s cell phone—and had been the whole time I was in the bar—to try to reach his great-granddaughter, to no avail. He was hoping we could stop by her house, which was on the west side of town, about a twenty-minute drive.

  “I’m down,” I said. “Chris?”

  “Rock ’n’ roll,” said Chris. “We can take the Kensington.” He pumped up the Green Day song on the radio, zoomed through side streets to the on-ramp for an expressway, and looped the Explorer back toward the lights of downtown, slapping the steering wheel along to the music. Vernon tore off a few scratch tickets for himself, passed me the rest of the roll, and we both went to work.

  Each losing ticket I scratched out socked me a little blow to the heart. I couldn’t help but feel that trying to find the right girl was like trying to get rich playing the lottery—both were games for suckers. And why didn’t scratch cards just have a single box that told you if you’d won or not? Why the slow build, all the teasing hoopla of Tic-Tac-Toe game boards and Wheels of Fortune? You kept thinking you were getting close and then, once again: Loser. All of the unanswered questions made my head hurt: Had I blown things by coming to Buffalo and putting unfair pressure on Lauren Hill? Should I have simply come on any day other than Valentine’s Day? Had she meant all of the things she�
�d said in her letters? Some of it? None of it? And what would be the best way to salvage the night when I went back to the bar? (Because, face it, I was headed back there later whether she called me or not.) A small heap of losing tickets gathered at my feet.

  “Holy shit!” cried Vernon from up front. “I think we got a winner!”

  “How much?” said Chris, suddenly alert, punching the radio off.

  “Wait a second. Did I win? Yeah, I did. Ten bucks!”

  “Not bad.” Chris nodded enthusiastically. “That’s yours to keep,” he told Vernon. “You guys just keep on scratching.”

  “You bet your goddamn ass,” said Vernon, still believing a bigger payday was near.

  His minor stroke of glory made me glad, but to me, winning ten bucks instead of ten grand was like getting a drunken kiss on the corner of the mouth from a stranger at the bar that you’ll never see again. What I really wanted was to spend the night in Lauren Hill’s arms, kissing her and holding her tight; to wake up with her at dawn, make love once or twice, and walk hand in hand through the woodsy park I’d glimpsed by her apartment, which by morning, I imagined—if it kept snowing the way it was now—would be transformed into a place of quiet and exquisite majesty. That was my wish. Anything less I’d just as soon chuck out the window.

  *

  From the outside, Vernon’s great-granddaughter’s house looked like a haunted mansion out of Scooby-Doo. It sat on a wide section of an abandoned half-acre lot overgrown with weeds, brambles, and the remaining debris from houses that had been leveled on either side. Across the street, TVs flickered dimly from the windows of a low-rise housing project, and at the end of the block a closed-down liquor store with both doors missing gaped like a sea cave, open to the elements. As we pulled up in front, Vernon looked back at me and said, “Hey, would you come inside with me?” It was my turn to be wingman.