After about ninety minutes of rapid-fire talk, we’d wound our way up the mountains on I-5 just north of the city and were headed down the long decline on the other side into the central California plains. Hakim produced an old Gang Starr CD from his backpack and asked me to put it on, and thirty seconds later he was in a deep sleep.
I kept driving. Missy smiled over at me, the blue, iridescent lights of the dashboard dials casting her in a soft glow. With her large eyes, button nose, and shining teeth, and her childlike kindness and innocence, she reminded me of Ariel from The Little Mermaid. There’s no feeling like gliding down the interstate through the desolate flatlands with a beautiful girl in the passenger seat, especially one you hardly know. The world was ripe and swirling with mystery and possibility.
Missy outlined her schedule for the week: she was working a tech convention at Stanford on Tuesday evening and a UFC match on Thursday at an arena in San Jose—her St. Pauli Girl costume was packed in a small green vintage suitcase way in the back. The folks she worked for had reserved hotel rooms for her from Tuesday night on, she told me, but it wasn’t clear from the way she said it if she was inviting me to spend the whole week with her or not. I was pretty sure that the work on my project in San Fran could be shuffled to the following week, since it had been made up in the first place. When we got to the Bay, I suggested, Missy could crash with me at my friend’s apartment, and I’d roll her down to Palo Alto the next day.
Soon her lids grew heavy and before long she was sleeping, too. I cranked the music up and opened my window to let in some night air, dank with cow dung and fertilizer but blissful nonetheless. We pushed north past Bakersfield. I kept peeking over to watch my passengers sleep. It felt like Missy was my wife and Hakim was our kid, though I’d only known them for five days combined. Still, on a drive like that you get a sense for how joyous it might be to have a family of your own.
*
Around three a.m., at a gas station outside Fresno, I stopped to refill the tank and grab some snacks. Hakim roused awake long enough to request a bottle of water and a granola bar, but by the time I came back out he was already asleep again. It was as if he hadn’t really closed his eyes in six months. After another hour, the highway widened and orange streetlights sprouted along the shoulder and the median, signaling that we were close to Oakland. At the tollbooth for the Bay Bridge, a woman in her fifties blasted soul music on a tiny radio and wailed along, almost oblivious to us as she took a ten-spot from me and passed back the change.
Hakim sat up and rubbed his eyes. We rose up onto the bridge, the whole Bay spread out before us, the buildings of downtown San Francisco clustered slumbering in the dark. Day or night, this vista has always been one of my favorite views of any city anywhere. I turned and said, “Welcome to San Francisco, Hakim.” He nodded, with a look in his eyes that I couldn’t quite identify but took for quiet joy at being one step closer to his destination: Canada.
But what would happen once he reached Canada? Missy and I had talked about it for a bit after he’d first fallen asleep. It’s appealing to imagine that if we can just get that one thing in our life to work out—if we can get the job we want, finish writing that book or making that movie, get the right girl or get to Canada—that everything will be solved, absolved, good to go for good. I slipped into that way of thinking way too often, I admitted to Missy, even though I knew that sometimes in life all of a sudden there you were—standing with your Technics turntables just across the Canadian border, and you’re not a new you, you’re just you, but in Canada.
It seemed, from the way Hakim dreamily talked of it, that Canada, to him, was not so much a place but a sensation he was seeking, a sense of being home. He’d alluded to his mom’s drug problems, told us that he’d come home from school some days to find that she’d hocked his CDs and Sega games at the pawnshop. Before leaving home, he told us, he’d essentially been responsible for taking care of his fourteen-year-old sister—the turntable he’d found on the street and set gingerly in the back of the Jeep was to be a birthday gift to her; she aspired to be a DJ like her older brother. Living on the L.A. streets, while full of adventure and interesting characters, was exhausting. The Canada of his imagination was a place where he could find community, maybe an established DJ to take him under his wing, and, above all, a tranquil home.
Maybe in Canada he’d find what he was looking for, I thought. Surely he would. He was friendly, if a little shy, bright, creative, not caught up in drinking or hard drugs. But it was a bit of a crapshoot—starting fresh in a new place where you know nobody is never easy. I’d helped Hakim get a few hundred miles closer to his destination but couldn’t even provide him with a home for the night. I’d scored a couch for me and Missy from some girls I barely knew, and I didn’t think I could show up at their place at five a.m. with a drifter I’d met the night before. More pertinently, I didn’t want to jeopardize the possibility of sucking face with Missy once we landed.
In the Castro there’s a dingy but always-hoppin’ twenty-four-hour diner called Sparky’s—ten years before, I’d spent some lost, lonely nights there, sipping OJ and reading novels in a corner booth till dawn. I remembered flirting mildly with the guys in neighboring booths, not because I wanted to hook up, but because I just wanted to feel wanted by anybody. It was a lame place to abandon a new friend, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to drop Hakim off.
He grabbed his backpack and his little blue duffel from the back of the truck, and I offered to hold on to the turntable for a while so he wouldn’t have to lug it around with him. I gave him a Found magazine T-shirt and a couple of magazines and the bottle of water and granola bar I’d bought for him at the Roadside 76 station. I felt a sad wave crash over me, like a parent dropping their kid off at college. Hakim assured me he’d be fine. “Get outta here,” he said. “Go on. It’s late. Tell Missy it was fun talkin’ to her.” She was dozing in the passenger seat.
“Call me tomorrow afternoon!” I said.
He smiled. “I will.”
We hugged, and I waited till he went inside and found a seat—at my old corner booth, as it happened—then I hopped back in the truck and drove off through the silence and the stillness of the city, where only a rat scampered across the street and an old man stocked newspaper boxes with the morning edition. At my friends’ apartment in the Mission, me and Missy lurched quietly upstairs and headed for the couch they’d made up for us with fresh sheets and sofa cushions tucked into pillowcases. We sat a couple of feet apart. After a long drive through the night, when you finally sit down the world always feels like it’s still in motion.
I took Missy’s hand in mine, my heart pounding once, heavily, like the drunken wallop of a bass drum. She pulled her hand back a bit and whispered, “I think we should sleep head-to-toe.”
“What’s ‘head-to-toe’?” I whispered back, a sudden sense of dread squeezing my insides.
“You know,” she said sweetly. “Your head’s on one side, your toes down there.” She gestured with her other hand. “My head’s over there, and my toes over here.”
“Okay. Why?” I said. “My feet probably smell bad. Yours are probably worse.” This was me trying to keep things light.
“Then come on,” she said, “let’s go wash them off.”
She pulled me into the bathroom and we sat on the edge of the tub and ran some hot water. While our feet soaked, Missy explained that she was planning on trying to get back together with her ex-boyfriend Martin, and that she wouldn’t feel right sleeping head-to-head, toe-to-toe with me. “I’m afraid of what might happen,” she said, with a mischievous smile.
“What, I might gouge you with my toenails?”
The hot water rose to our ankles. Missy’s feet looked like they could’ve belonged to a porcelain doll; mine looked like they belonged to Bilbo fuckin’ Baggins. There was no real need to ask her why she’d decided to get back with Martin or at what point over the course of our drive she’d made the decision, but I did anyway, t
rying my best to stifle my disappointment.
“It wasn’t even like I decided,” she said. “I just fell asleep while we were driving, and when I woke up, it was like Hakim going to Canada, I just knew.”
In a way, this was hardly unexpected, and I didn’t so much hurt as feel profoundly tired. Still, I wished I’d ditched Missy at Sparky’s so Hakim could’ve slept on the couch instead, while I curled up on the thick rug across the room. It sucked that he was fending for himself in an unknown city while the St. Pauli Girl soaked her feet in a tub. Weirdly, though, even as I felt burnt and rejected by Missy, my tenderness for her grew. I had the sense that Martin had been the one to break things off with her before, and that by trying to rekindle their romance, she was putting herself in a painful and vulnerable position.
I followed her back to the living room and we arranged ourselves on the sofa, head-to-toe. I clasped her feet in my hands and caressed them and kissed them. They were like warm, polished ivory. She held my feet, too, and caressed them and even kissed them. It was oddly intimate and ecstatic.
I thought about Hakim and his journey north. I wondered if he was still in that booth at Sparky’s, or if he’d left and was roaming the city. I could picture him walking up Market Street as night faded and morning edged in, all the way downtown, while bits of trash and clutter kicked against the curbs and skidded across the sidewalk as though pulled by strings, players in a grand choreography. His wanderings reminded me of my own wanderings, and I hoped and prayed that he would make it to Canada.
He never did.
*
Three years later, I was in Honolulu, loping down a dark beach around midnight with a few drinks in me, feeling sorry for myself for being all alone in such a tropical paradise, when I stumbled upon a sprawling party in the sand: a circle of tiki torches; a hundred kids dancing to old-school hip-hop. Not a tourist vibe, these were locals: artists, college kids, surf rats. Someone handed me a beer, and I stood on the edge of the circle, brooding on things. In the middle of the party, a few lanky guys with dreadlocks stoked a fire. Deeply tanned, bare-legged girls with hoodies over their swimsuits clustered around them, laughing as they passed a couple of joints back and forth. I watched the DJ on the far side, behind his turntables, juke his shoulders and pump his arms, and felt jealous of the guy—it seemed like he’d found his place in the world, while I was as unmoored as ever. The allure of being the DJ finally registered for me—you can be with others and be alone at the same time, and feel good about it. As I continued to watch him, he turned my way with a smile, and his features melted from those of a stranger into those of a friend, and I realized that—unfathomably—it was Hakim. “Hakim!” I rushed over and gave him an insane hug. “What are you doing here?” I shouted in his ear, incredulous.
“Oh, what’s up, Davy,” he said. “Just spinning for another half hour or so. Then I’ll probably get something to eat.” He seemed unfazed by the serendipity of running into each other years after we’d met, a couple thousand miles across the globe.
Later, near the University of Hawaii campus, on the quietest corner of a rowdy intersection, we sat on a curb with falafel sandwiches, while stray dogs and drunk students weaved past, and Hakim caught me up on his journeys. He’d spent his first two months in the Bay living at a homeless shelter for older teens, and then had hit it off with a graphic designer with whom he sometimes played chess in the park. The guy had found him work in his office as a receptionist, which after a few months Hakim managed to parlay into an entry-level design job. It turned out he was a natural. When the company relocated to New York, he’d made the move, too.
Hakim told me about going to visit his dad for the first time in Newark. “I don’t know what I was expecting,” he said. “But this wasn’t it.” His dad had opened the door, stepped outside, spoken with him warily for a minute on the front stoop, and sent him on his way. “He knew who I was, I think. He said he knew who I was. But what kind of guy does that, his own flesh and blood?” Hakim’s voice cracked, even as he claimed not to care. “Well, it’s his life, I could give a fuck.”
Hakim liked being part of a team, and the people at work told him he showed great promise, but life in an office wasn’t for him. About a year ago, he said, he’d come to Hawaii on vacation with a musician friend, and they’d both decided to stay. Hakim found some freelance design work with local businesses, launched a DIY music label, and over the past few months had finally carved out a niche for himself as a DJ, spinning at bars and small clubs all over the island, even flying to Maui for a monthly gig. Not bad at age twenty-two. He had a tight crew of friends and shared a house with twelve of them deep in the mountain jungle, a few miles outside of town. His sister was planning to join him in a few months, once she finished with high school back home in Vegas. Though he’d never reached Canada, his dream of finding community and creative fulfillment seemed—against tall odds—to have been rapturously realized, which gave me a prolonged, satisfying rush. We giggled, thinking back on the night we’d met, and our overnight drive from L.A to the Bay with Missy Freeze.
“You still with that girl?” he asked.
“Never was.” I took a breath. “Well, kissed her feet once.” I languished in the memory’s bittersweetness.
Hakim cocked his head to the side. “You know,” he said, “I still don’t really know what I’m doing, or what life is all about, but, man, I was pretty lost back then, and I’m not as lost now. I keep telling my sister: There’s no key to the universe, you just have to point your way in one direction, keep going, keep going, keep going, and see what happens.”
“Canada or bust,” I said.
Hakim smiled. “That’s right. Canada or bust.”
NAKED IN NEW YORK
“Yo, look at that white dude.”
“Dang, he all naked!”
I opened my eyes and saw two young teenagers peering at me from a distance of about fifteen feet, their necklace chains dazzling in the blinding morning sun. An instant later, I realized with a jolt that the nude white dude they spoke of was me.
“Watch out, he waking up!” one of them cried, and they tore off out of sight in genuine terror. I sat up hazily and looked around. I was in a tiny park somewhere in New York City—a few wooden benches, some trees, a drinking fountain. Beyond, the world bustled, honked, and shrieked. Whatever extremely drunken notion had inspired me to abandon my clothes the night before, the logic was lost on me as the glamourlessness of my situation slowly dawned. I was completely naked except for a pair of dirty socks—no money, no MetroCard, no cell phone, just a wailing headache.
I cobbled together a plan of action—first, find some clothes; second, figure out where I was; third, find a way back to my friend Seth’s apartment in the East Village, which was home for my six-week stay in the city. But how to find clothes? I sifted glumly through a pair of trash cans at the center of the park—no pants, no sheets, no newspapers, only a giant pizza box. I wrapped the thing around me and ventured out of the park to the crowded sidewalk. Shoppers, students, and businessmen streamed past without even a curious glance. Naked people, I soon discovered, are simply not given much credibility when they appeal for help from strangers on the street.
I stopped an enormous man walking a tiny dog. “Listen,” I said, “I know this sounds crazy, but last night was my birthday—well, today is my birthday, but we celebrated last night—and, well, I’m naked now. Can you help me? I need some pants. Do you live around here?” The guy wheeled spryly past me, dragging his little dog, which began to bark at me furiously as though outraged by my nakedness.
Mutts aside, it was like being given the silent treatment by the whole damn world. Everyone burrowed into their headphones as they passed me and looked dead ahead. I couldn’t even get anyone to stop long enough to explain my predicament; instead, folks clamped cell phones to their ears and said things like, “Wait, I can’t hear you, there’s a weird naked guy trying to talk to me.”
In the peripheral attentions of peop
le rushing from one place to another, I registered no differently than any other skinny, bald hobo dressed in dirty socks and a pizza box, who, if engaged, would probably ask for eight bucks or want to discuss aliens, secret gamma rays, and CIA plots. Speaking calmly and sanely only seems to amplify your deranged vibe when your outfit comes from Sbarro’s.
Shopkeepers shooed me away from their shops. One actually waved a broom. “Go home!” he said, as though I was a stray cat. I tried my luck at the entrance to an office building. “Look,” I said to the security guard, “I’m in a ridiculous situation. If you could fish something out of the Lost and Found for me, I’d be hugely grateful.”
“We’re not in that business,” he said.
“Well, what business are you in?” I shouted. “The business of ruining my life?!” I felt like I was going mad. Soon I’d forget about pants; I’d only be concerned with CIA plots. “Come on,” I pleaded, suddenly desperate, “I’m just a regular person. Okay, a regular person who happens to be naked. Man, help me out! It’s my birthday!”
A squad car pulled to the curb and I raced over. The officer on the passenger side rolled his window down about three-quarters of an inch, wary, perhaps, of pee. “We can arrest you or you can get out of here,” he said.
“Please, sir, don’t you have a blanket in your car, an extra towel in the trunk, anything at all? Please help me out.”
I saw then that he was eating a slice of pizza; in the same moment, he took a closer look at what I was wearing—this seemed, somehow, to cause great alarm. His face darkened. “I can arrest you, buddy, that’s all I can do.”
I retreated back to my bench in the park, ashamed, frustrated, and depressed. My self-identity was shifting. I felt like the kind of person who gets drunk and ends up naked in a park with just their socks on, which I now was. I didn’t know what to do. My friends were all at school or at work; I couldn’t barge in to their offices like this. Their cell phone numbers were all stored on my cell phone, I didn’t know any of them by heart. The only numbers I knew were ones like the request line for the crappy alternative rock station I always listened to at home in Michigan, or my grandma. I imagined how that collect call might play out. “Hi, Grandma, no, everything’s fine, I just lost my cell phone. Listen, quick favor. Go to Kinko’s, okay? Kinko’s. It’s a copy shop. Ask them to help you create an e-mail account, I need you to e-mail some of my friends in New York and tell them to come meet me somewhere. Yeah, e-mail. You know? Okay, look, at Kinko’s they’ll know. E-mail. No—‘E’! As in ‘Emperor’s New Clothes.’”
My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays Page 17