My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays

by Davy Rothbart

  *

  Meanwhile, one time zone west, I was at my apartment in Chicago, watching the news all day, teary, heartsick, and angry, though not at China. After dialing and redialing his 917 cell number for an hour, I finally reached my friend Seth in the East Village. Dazed, he described standing on the roof of his apartment building and watching the second tower fall. “It absolutely did not feel real,” he said. “I’m on my roof right now, I’m looking at this massive cloud of smoke and dust, and still, I can’t believe any of this is happening.”

  I took in about eight hours of live coverage on TV, and at last shut it off and wandered outside with my tape recorder and microphone. I’d just started doing stories for the radio show This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass, and talking to people on the street, I imagined, was not only my job in this kind of situation but would also give me a break from the queasy sadness and horror of CNN, watching the planes hit again and again and again. Some of the folks I talked to said, “Let’s bomb ’em back to the Stone Age,” even if they weren’t sure yet who “’em” was; others were already worried about American retaliation and all of the civilians in foreign countries who were sure to suffer the consequences.

  Strangely, though, many of the folks in my neighborhood had no idea that an attack had even occurred. I lived in a neighborhood occupied largely by Mexican, Polish, and Ukrainian immigrants who spoke little or no English, and dozens of times I found myself struggling to explain the events of that morning to a pair of old women wrapped in scarves, or to a group of young day laborers, sweaty and worn out from a twelve-hour shift, who all just wanted to go home and didn’t seem to believe my story. It was like trying to convince them that the Loch Ness Monster had just poked its head from the drain in my bathtub. “See, look!” I’d cry, pointing at the sky, which was ominously quiet. “All the planes have been grounded; all the airports are shut down.” But a scruffy white dude with gigantic headphones, waving around a sixteen-inch stick mic and spinning “The sky is falling” yarns, held as much interest to them as a discarded cigarette butt; they seemed to suspect I was either mentally ill or trying to get money out of them, or, most likely, both.

  Among those who had heard, misinformation was rampant. One woman thought white supremacists were the culprits. A Turkish guy said he’d heard it was the Greeks. A pack of Cuban teenagers told me that Chicago itself had been targeted, and that the Sears Tower had been vaporized. I dragged them a half block down to the intersection of Augusta and Wood, where you could see the whole downtown skyline, and pointed out that everything was still standing. This provoked an ugly argument between them in Spanish and led to some pushing and shoving until a police car rolled by and they all split in separate directions.

  When night fell, I got a call from a girl named Susannah Cotton, a sweet, pretty writer from Nashville I’d been hanging out with for the past few weeks and was deeply into but hadn’t yet kissed, and I picked up three cheap bottles of wine and hiked out to Western Avenue to see her. She poured us each a giant glass and lit a bunch of candles and we sat close on her floor as I played her some of the on-the-street interviews I’d recorded earlier in the day, which she found as moving and oddly funny as me. The mood was both somber and sort of lovey-dovey—a few times she started to tear up and I’d put an arm around her. Still, Susannah’s body language seemed to indicate a certain resistance to getting too close. She was recently out of a relationship, and she’d made it clear that she was reluctant to get involved in another anytime soon. But to me there was something meaningful about the fact that she wanted my company on a night like this. At the time, if you remember, no one knew if this was the beginning of a sustained wave of attacks on American soil or the terrorist version of a one-night stand. A frightening, mysterious end-of-days chill hung in the air like a dark mist, and there was the unspoken possibility, however fuzzy and indistinct, that all of us would be dead or colonized by Halloween.

  The phone rang and Susannah jumped up to check the caller ID, then answered the cordless, “Hey, you,” and dashed into her bedroom and shut the door. This was her ex-boyfriend, I was sure. It wasn’t the first night he’d called her while I was hanging out at her place. I lay on the couch, swigging wine and listening to her speak in soft tones from her room, though I couldn’t make out the words. My brother Mike called my cell and for a half hour we compared notes on which family members we’d heard from in New York; it seemed that all of our aunts and uncles and cousins, thankfully, were safe. I hung up with Mike just as Susannah emerged from her bedroom.

  “Sorry,” she said, “I was just talking to my mom. She’s pretty upset. Who were you talking to?”

  I saw her lie and doubled down. “It was Ira Glass,” I said, invoking the name with careful emphasis, since I knew she was a fan. “They want me to go to New York and report on what’s happening.” This slipped out completely spontaneously, and the idea itself was somewhat ridiculous—if This American Life wanted folks on the ground to cover one of the biggest news stories in history, they had plenty of veteran reporters already in the area whom they could turn to. I guess at some level the hours I’d spent earlier in the day recording people on the street had lit in me the urge to head east and report from the thick of it all, and it must also have felt like one of the few things I could say in that moment to impress Susannah and get her full attention.

  And it worked, kind of. For the rest of the night, she treated me like a soldier headed off to a war zone, doting on me, letting her hand rest on my arm and my shoulder and my knee. By four a.m. she invited me for the first time to stay over at her apartment, and as I lay in her bed, holding her in my arms, she even let me kiss her neck and her left ear and her cheek, but not her lips. That, I imagined, would have to wait until I came back from my phantom reporting assignment. Every fire needs room to breathe, and a week or two away, involved with what Susannah believed to be dangerous and meaningful work, seemed a surefire, unmistakable route to her heart. But with every airport shut down and a car that could barely be relied on to make it down the block, I had to wonder: How would I even get to New York?

  *

  They say that America was at its best in the days after September 11, but that’s not what I experienced in the late afternoon of September 12 at the Greyhound station at Harrison and Wells in downtown Chicago. People had been stranded everywhere around the country and were far from their families and understandably desperate to get home, but I wasn’t sure what was to be gained by, say, hammering a fist against the Plexiglas window at the ticket counter and shouting, “Just get me to fuckin’ Philly, you dumb motherfucker!”

  Outside, arriving buses were subject to even greater abuse as they disgorged a handful of passengers and fresh mobs fought to board like it was the last chopper out of Saigon. After an hour or two caught up in this clusterfuck, I had the idea to catch a bus a few blocks west as it slowed to a stop coming off the I-94 exit ramp. I pounded on the door and when the driver opened it, I scrambled up the stairs and past him, down the aisle to the back of the bus. Once we reached the station, I took a seat vacated by a middle-aged couple, and watched out the window as the driver fended off the hordes hoping to board. A few passengers squeezed on, and a young black woman in a pink track suit took the seat next to me on the aisle and introduced herself as Laquisha.

  “How’d you beat them out?” I asked, nodding toward the parking lot throngs.

  “I’ve got sharp elbows,” she said. “And I gave the driver forty bucks cash.”

  The guy must have been racking it up—he filled every seat and let another half dozen folks on, strewn along the aisle. In the massive rearview mirror, his shaggy beard, scarred, misshapen face, and tattered yet strangely ornate uniform gave him the look of a traveling carnival worker dressed as a pirate captain for Halloween. He eyed us all as he jerked the bus into reverse, then laid a few blasts on the horn, fixed on his side mirror as he backed slowly through the crowd, and at last crunched into low gear and headed for the highway, bound
for Cleveland and points east.

  *

  Laquisha was twenty-two. She was from East Harlem, and had come to Chicago to spend a week with a guy she’d met a month before at a club in Lower Manhattan, blocks from the World Trade Center. He’d even paid for her plane ticket. Only after she’d arrived had the truth of his situation become clear—the guy was obviously married. He parked her at a low-rent South Loop hotel and stopped by now and then to have sex with her, on his lunch break and briefly each day after work. Afterwards, he’d invent an excuse to rush off and tell her he’d see her the next day. A massive, diamond-encrusted wedding ring appeared occasionally on his left hand, and when challenged he’d said, “What, this? This is my class ring!” She’d spent the week feeling duped and forlorn, browsing stores for clothes she couldn’t afford, wandering through museums, and watching Jurassic Park III each night at the theater on Navy Pier. After the hijacked planes hit their targets, she never heard from the guy again, and now she just wanted to get back home. “But my life’s boring,” she said with a sigh. “I really don’t get why you’re taping all of this.”

  I was taking my radio assignment seriously, invented or not. A bus full of people headed home to New York in the city’s darkest hour? That seemed like potent stuff to me. Any colossal event is always expressed most poignantly through the experience of a few individuals, and carrying a tape recorder and microphone gives you license to engage with strangers and ask any questions that come to mind, no matter how silly, bleak, or personal they might be. As the sun dipped out of sight and nightfall doused the golden Indiana wheat fields, I roamed up and down the aisle, kneeling here and there to collect stories from other passengers: Where had they been the morning before, when the planes struck? Where were they headed now? What did they think the future held for all of us? There’s something dizzying and intense about interviewing people with a crystal-clear mic and weighty headphones clamped on your ears. All other sound is negated, and the person’s mouth appears to be moving silently, with their voice streamed right into your ears, directly inside your head, as though they’re magically transmitting their thoughts. Your face is within a foot or two of theirs, and as you look into their eyes, you can see individual emotions swirling to life; you’re point-blank on their laughter and their hurt; you can watch a tear begin to form. I swear, I could interview strangers about watery farts and come away feeling moved.

  For the most part, everyone was still in a strange kind of shock, as though they expected to wake from this shared nightmare at any moment and be thrust back into their relieving, pedestrian concerns. They all offered earnest, thoughtful responses to my questions, but for many there was a sense of detachment, like they were talking about a football game that hadn’t gone the way they’d hoped, while for others it was a struggle to lay out their feelings without simply repeating things they’d heard Peter Jennings say, or the plain truth that this was one of the most horrible tragedies they’d ever seen. More interesting to me were the individual details of how they’d each ended up on this bus—the business trip to Denver, the family reunion in Des Moines. As it turned out, few of the passengers were headed to New York City itself. Some lived in Boston, some lived in Connecticut. One hippie couple, an environmental activist in a Mexican poncho and his young, dreadlocked bride, were just hoping to get as close as possible to their home in Halifax, Nova Scotia. About half of the folks on the bus were a group of retirees from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, who’d flown into Vegas on Monday, the tenth, for a six-day casino junket. Tuesday morning, an hour after the World Trade Center buildings had collapsed—while my friend Maggie had continued to pose nude in that university art class, I imagined—they’d boarded this bus, and apart from a few stops for gas and food and to drop off passengers and pick new ones up, it had been a thirty-six-hour straight shot, with at least another twelve to go.

  “What’s your stop?” I asked the white-haired old woman I was kneeling next to.

  “Harrisburg,” she said.

  Her husband, leaning over, cut in, “We’re still trying to work that out.”

  Most of the old folks just wanted to be left alone to sleep and play cards. Laquisha, on the other hand, was down to talk for as long as I wanted, and about anything that I cared to bring up. We compared favorite movies, favorite comedians, and favorite singers. Laquisha told me that for the past six months she’d been working at the Sbarro’s in Times Square, and to learn about new music, she’d made a policy of asking customers what they were listening to on their headphones—if it sounded cool she’d write it down. Often, tourists from Minneapolis, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Berlin had simply popped the CD out of their Discman and passed it to her to keep. Her friends thought she was weird because she listened to indie rock, techno, and opera, and not just hip-hop and R&B.

  Laquisha told me she was taking one class a semester at a community college in the Bronx, and hoped to eventually transfer to a four-year school to study psychology. I learned that back home in New York she was raising a ten-month-old girl, though it wasn’t her baby; the baby actually belonged to her mom. Laquisha’s mom had been in and out of drug rehab for years, and the previous winter had given birth to Laquisha’s baby sister, before disappearing back onto the streets. “She wasn’t even around long enough to give her a name,” Laquisha said with a frown. Laquisha had named the girl Destiny. This sorry, failed trip to Chicago was the longest she’d ever been away from her. I loaned Laquisha my cell phone so she could call the cousin she’d left in charge of her baby sis, and casually eavesdropped as she gave an update on her slow progress toward home.

  Outside of Jamestown, Indiana, the bus driver pulled off the turnpike into a sad-looking truck stop and said in a raspy southern brogue, “Bathroom break. Have a smoke. You’re not back on the bus in fifteen minutes, you get left behind.”

  Hungry, Laquisha and I went inside to poke about, and she revealed that she’d emptied her wallet bribing the bus driver to get aboard. I bought her a microwaveable bacon-and-cheese sandwich and a Diet Mr. Pibb, nabbed a pile of granola bars and dusty fruit for myself, and we sat in the scraggly grass outside, with the Greyhound bus in view, and had ourselves a strange, postapocalyptic picnic, as other drivers pulled into the truck stop and filled their gas tanks, all looking slightly dazed. The midnight air was oddly warm, and a hot, flip-flopping breeze swept Taco Bell wrappers and empty soda cans this way and that across the lot.

  “Did you see that white woman in the front of the bus?” Laquisha asked me. “The one with the black coat and the pink scarf who keeps crying?”

  I knew exactly who she was talking about. She sat directly behind the driver with her face buried in her hands, at times weeping softly, and at times completely still, maybe even asleep. The bus was so full that some people had squeezed three to a row, with a handful seated in the aisle toward the bathroom all the way in back, and yet no one dared to share a seat with the crying woman. I’d thought I might approach her with my tape recorder and my microphone—not solely because the job of a journalist is to intrude on people in their moment of grief, though it is, but because I’d also learned that it sometimes brought comfort to people in pain to have someone to talk to, instead of being shunned. As a rule, if I see someone crying, anywhere, I try to enagage them, or at least see if they want to be engaged, since I know how much I’ve appreciated it when a stranger has done the same for me. But when I got near, and summoned the courage to put a hand on her shoulder, ready to explain myself and ask if I could sit with her and talk, she lifted her head from her hands and stared at me with a look of such utter heartbreak, misery, and revulsion, that I quickly said, “I’m sorry,” and hurried away in retreat, spooked and ashamed.

  “I don’t know if it’s true,” Laquisha said, “but I was talking to this girl at the bus station in Chicago, and she told me she was on the bus with that woman coming in from St. Louis and heard her talking to someone. And I guess what she said was, her son was in the towers. Or that’s what she thinks. He w
as a waiter or a cook or something in that restaurant at the top of the thing. And I guess he’s missing. She still hasn’t heard from him.”

  “Wow. Oh my God.” Naturally I’d suspected that the woman had been affected by the attack in a way that was more personal than, say, the band of retirees from Wilkes-Barre, but still, the specificity was shocking. “That is so fucked up.”

  “Right?” said Laquisha. “I can’t imagine if Destiny was missing and I didn’t know if she was alive or dead or what.” She teared up a bit herself, and when I draped an arm over her shoulders, my tiny gesture of compassion seemed to trigger a greater release. “It’s just all so fucked up and crazy,” she said, her voice breaking as she started to really cry. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Me neither.” I squeezed her shoulder and watched our fellow Greyhound passengers begin to stream out of the truck stop, back onto the bus.

  We sat there for another minute, rocking gently, and then Laquisha sniffled, wiped the tears from her eyes with two fists, and laughed. “This has been the most fucked-up week of my life,” she said.

  “Come on,” I said, standing. “Let’s make sure no one steals our seats.” I pulled her to her feet and followed her back to the bus and up its steep interior staircase, past our buccaneer-looking driver, who closed the doors behind us, flipped the ignition, and brought the engine roaring to life. Spontaneously, as I moved past the woman in the black coat, her head sunken low, I touched her shoulder again. She lifted her head to peer up at me, eerily blank, and I wordlessly offered her a banana and a granola bar in my outstretched hand. For a moment she paused, and then she took both, and managed, in a whisper, “Thank you.”

  I found my window seat, Laquisha took the aisle, and after a few minutes back on the highway, Laquisha, and just about everyone on the bus, it seemed, had fallen into a heavy sleep. I popped a can of Tecate and watched out the window as dark trees, deserted billboards, and the dull lights of sad-sack, forgotten towns trickled past. We crossed into Ohio. I closed my eyes. Over the hum of the engine, the tinny treble of Laquisha’s headphones, and the barely discernible twanging notes of country songs on the driver’s radio, I could hear the woman at the front of the bus wailing softly to herself. It was the world’s saddest sound.