My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays

by Davy Rothbart

  “Okay,” I tell them. “Scram. I’ll get the tab.”

  “Thanks. We’ll see you next time you come through town.”

  I head for the van, crank her up, pound a bottle of water, half of another, snap the radio on, and head for the highway. It’s a long haul to Nebraska, and we’ve got another show the next night. Recently, on the road, I’ve been tuning in to the BBC News Hour’s coverage of the war in Afghanistan. I wonder, with so many young Americans dying cruel deaths overseas, will anyone care about one kid rotting away in prison who’s very likely (but not blatantly) innocent?

  All of a sudden, on the edge of town, I see a sign for the Truman Road exit. I pull off the highway, and at the end of the long ramp find myself stopped at a traffic light—the same light, I realize, where Anastasia leapt out of Justin’s car that night after their fight, twelve years and one month ago. Across the way is the Amoco station where the mechanic worked who’d seen her storm away, toward Lincoln Cemetery. I hang a right and cruise past a row of eerie, run-down motels. Misshapen men in groups of two and three peer back at me from each parking lot. A few blocks down, on the left, I spot a high stone arch over a tiny dirt drive leading up into the graveyard where Anastasia was killed. All these visits to Kansas City, and I’ve never come to check the place out. My heart accelerates into a cantering beat. I’m spooked but drawn in.

  The gravel road winds its way through the cemetery, and somewhere halfway around the loop, I pull over, kill the engine, and climb outside. It’s intensely dark and quiet. The sky has rained itself out, but in the trees above me, raindrops gently patter from leaf to leaf. I pad my way twenty feet from the road, find a seat in the damp grass between a pair of headstones, and lie back, curled in my coat, staring up into the darkness.

  This could be the spot where Anastasia was found, or maybe it was another part of the cemetery close by, it doesn’t really matter. I feel plagued by the mystery of what happened to her that night, ripped up, torn asunder. I mean, it’s the fucking future already. Technology won. There are few mysteries left in the world—we know who’s calling our phone when it rings; we know how to sew a soldier’s leg back on, or Skype with someone in Mozambique, or play with remote-controlled cars on Mars; if I want to, I can text ChaCha and find out how fucking poison-arrow frogs make their fucking poison. Why can’t someone tell me with absolute certainty what happened to Anastasia?

  I find myself a little choked up, not for Byron, not for Evelyn, nor for Justin’s family, or Robert WitbolsFeugen, but for Anastasia herself. She was shot while facing her attacker. She had to know what was coming. Did she hear the sound of it? Did she see the flash of light at the tip of the muzzle? I know what Anastasia’s voice sounds like from the brief, haunting audio clips that her family has posted on her memorial site, and as terrible and disturbing as it is, I can’t help but imagine the sound of her letting out a cry as her killer stepped close. Even if she’d entered a suicide pact with Justin, in the moment before he pulled the trigger, it seems to me, she might have wished for him to call it all off. I think of Justin, or whoever killed her, and how damaged they must have been to have done what they’d done, their cold amazement in the moment after. It’s all too much. I’m shredded, squeezed, incensed, and I feel like screaming from anger and sorrow. In the trees above me, owls hoot in the night.

  A figure steps toward me in the darkness, a shadow in the shadows, accompanied by the sounds of sticks breaking under its feet, and I sit bolt upright and start scrambling backwards, heart clanging, my breath caught in my throat. “Who’s there?” I say sharply, jarred by the fear in my own voice.

  “Dude, what the fuck.” As soon as I hear him speak, I realize right away it’s only Peter, and sag back on my elbows in relief. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he asks. “Don’t you remember, we’ve got a radio thing? We’re supposed to be in Omaha by noon.”

  “Yeah, I know. I just wanted to make a little stop.” I grab hold of a tree trunk, pull myself to my feet, and slap the wet grass and leaves from my pants. My emotional reverie has quickly flared out, and I know it’s time to move on. “Think you can drive for a while?” I ask Peter.

  “I guess. Give me the keys.”

  I settle into the bed in the back of the van and watch out the window as we roll down Truman Road, back onto the interstate, and join the quiet stream of traffic headed west. It starts to rain again. All I can see are dark wet forests, punctuated by the occasional flash of a green highway sign, or the zillion-watt glare of a passing billboard. We could be anywhere in America. After a few minutes, I close my eyes and fall into a dreamless sleep. By the time I wake up, hours later, at some cold gas station, the sky’s already getting light, though the sun’s not up yet, and we’ve left Missouri behind.

  AIN’T THAT AMERICA?

  I was introduced to Anna, the British girl, one April a few years ago at a crowded, upscale bar in West Hollywood called the Village Idiot. She was a friend of a friend, which earned me the chance to chat her up without any of the awkwardness of macking on a stranger. As our conversation blossomed, I could hardly believe my luck—with her wide blue eyes, delicate nose, and genuine, radiant smile, she was easily the most beautiful girl in the room, and though she was only twenty-five, she was also probably the most accomplished. I realized, as I asked her questions about her day and she laughed and talked on in her cheery British accent, that this was the girl my friend had been marveling about and telling me he wanted to introduce me to. She’d published her first novel at nineteen, directed two prize-winning documentaries in her early twenties, and was regarded back home as one of England’s finest young creative talents. She’d come to L.A. for a two-year screenwriting program, and was set to return to London in a few weeks to finish her biography of former prime minister Tony Blair—who was a family friend—and then begin shooting her first narrative feature.

  A part of me was amazed that in this bar, surrounded by a sea of gorgeous, dapper, successful men, she’d locked in with me, the small-town dude in grubby maroon pants and a Rasheed Wallace jersey, just visiting from Michigan. I had no statuettes on my desk, no house in the hills. In fact, I’d slept the last three weeks in a battered recliner on the back porch of a friend’s house near Pico and La Brea, and had been spending my days shooting hoops alone at the park and my nights putting together a zine made of trash found on the street. But she was cool like that—she didn’t seem to notice a single one of those tanned Hollywood heroes, the actors, agents, directors, and producers. And I suppose that when I drink I’ve got the gift of gab, and that can go a long way. It did that night, at least. Before we left the Village Idiot, me in my rented pickup, her with the friend of mine who’d delivered her to me (God bless you, Sam Hansen), she’d agreed to go on a date with me—an ambitious date, really—an overnight trip to Joshua Tree.

  All clean-shaven, spic-and-span, I picked her up at her apartment in Los Feliz the next Friday around two in the afternoon, and we barreled east on I-10 toward Palm Springs, telling long, funny, intricate stories to each other. Anna’s generous laugh and persistent curiosity made me feel like the most interesting guy in the world. And her stories fascinated me—rivalries at school; travels in Laos; family sadnesses; Labour Party political imbroglios—all told with a mix of intelligence, thoughtfulness, and compassion, but not without a certain edge. The sweet, expressive timbre of her voice, along with the endearing accent, diction, and casual Britishisms, made for an intoxicating brew.

  “I love the way you say the word ‘literally,’” I told her. “Lit-trilly.”

  She fumed, playfully defensive. “And how is one supposed to say it?”

  “Lit-er-ull-lee.”

  “Lit-trilly,” she said, and started to laugh. “Damn you, I lit-trilly can’t say it right!”

  Focused on the road, I allowed myself only an occasional sideways glance, and instead let myself fall into the delightful swoops and swirls of her words. It was like falling in love with a stranger over the phone, except she
was right there beside me, in a giant pickup zooming for the desert. This was it! At long last I’d found a soulmate, a kindred spirit, and each new, unsurpassable level of happiness I experienced was surpassed twelve minutes later, as one of us came to the end of a merry, strange, or melancholy tale and we sat in connected silence for a moment, only to be blown past once more eleven minutes later, when the next story had reached its finish. We swung off the interstate onto Highway 62, steep and winding, and ascended into the high desert, through the town of Joshua Tree, as the sun loped along, low in the sky, and radio signals faded. Soon we reached Twentynine Palms, where Anna marveled at the glut of gun stores, tattoo parlors, and barber shops (Stud Cuts, Stud Cuts #2, and Stud Cuts #3) which serviced the local Marine base, and I pointed out each trippy desert mural splashed on the sides of abandoned buildings.

  I can’t say it was the most well-planned move, zipping past the boutique hotel where I’d booked us a bungalow and heading straight for the National Park, but I didn’t feel like playing the percentages and bunting my way onto base, I felt like swinging for the fences. I knew where I wanted to be at sunset, and that was with Anna atop a giant hunk of rock called Ryan Mountain, my favorite spot in the park. We drove through miles of red, dusty terrain and pulled into an empty lot by the roadside trailhead; it was late in the day and any other visitors had long since cleared out. I warned Anna that to reach the peak meant a tough ninety-minute climb. Some girls might’ve been put off by the prospect of such a hike; Anna pranced ahead like a gazelle, noting the subtle shades of beige, green, and purple in the desert rocks and vegetation, while I huffed and puffed a few steps behind her. Along the trail, she told me the story of her parents’ odd courtship, and how a month after their wedding her mom had fled for another man, but then, a year later, had come back home to her dad, without a hiccup in their marriage, remarkably, or any lingering resentments. I shared my own family history, telling stories I’d never told before, maybe because no one had ever asked. Our conversation felt like one continuous spool of lustrous yarn that stretched from the bar the weekend before to the cab of my rental F-150 to the desert mountain switchbacks.

  When we finally reached the top, close to dusk, we both fell into stunned silence at the majestic three-sixty view—the desert floor, far below, rippling gently for miles and miles, distant mountain ranges on three sides, bathed in golden light, and to the south, like a wide, flat gem, the Salton Sea. It was an eagle’s perspective, and the periodic gusts of wind combined with our great height made it feel like we were actually flying. I cracked open two minibottles of white wine I’d carried up the hill in the pouch of my hoodie, and wordlessly we clanked to our good fortune, the glories of nature, and the kickass turns of luck life doles out once in a while if you let it, and are open to adventure. Then I pulled Anna close, and right before we kissed her eyes flashed as they met mine, and then I closed my eyes and we kissed long and hard, and I’ll tell you, from what I’ve heard old-timers say, a moment like that you hold close on dark days, a moment like that you take with you to the grave. Overhead, one by one, the stars marched in.

  *

  No one falls out of love in this story. Nothing sours. Not exactly. That night, back in our elegant hut on the grounds of the Twentynine Palms Inn, I drank so much, in celebration, that I spilled open my mind and let Anna rake through the contents like a kid with a sack of Lego blocks. I told her my every wish and dream, the plots, beat by beat, of all the movies I wanted to one day make, and the details of shit I’d witnessed as a kid that had mystified me or made me sad. She embraced it all with good humor and kindness, listening with an intensity that felt almost inconceivably generous. (She may have been drunk, too.) We had a pillow fight. We made out. We tickled each other. I played her songs by a white Phoenix rapper I’d seen perform in an empty club and had become obsessed with; she sang me ridiculous tunes that she claimed all British kids learn at summer camp. In a way, Anna’s looks and exotic speech reminded me of June Gudmundsdottir, the character played by Greta Scacchi in the Robert Altman movie The Player, who’d defined sexiness for me throughout college. But when I told her that she took offense. “I’ve seen that movie,” she protested. “She shacks up with the guy who killed her boyfriend!” We stepped outside to peek at the stars. The alcohol, combined with my wild, swooning emotions, made me feel like I was flipping on ’shrooms, and the constellations pranced and swayed in a shimmering fresco. “How can the desert be so cold?” asked Anna, tugging me back inside.

  In my backpack, I had a recent issue of The Believer, which contained a sheet of temporary tattoos—a Winnebago, a battle-axe wedged into a heart, a pair of spooning otters, a finely detailed portrait of the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Anna and I didn’t make love that night—I feared that if we did it would seem to her like that was the sole reason I’d lured her to the desert—but perhaps with equal intimacy, we peeled the tattoos loose one at a time from their cellophane sheet in the magazine and licked them and affixed them to each other’s bodies in the softly lit bedroom, and at last, around five a.m., fell asleep, all but naked in each other’s arms.

  *

  The next afternoon, once our hangovers had subsided a bit and we could move again, we piled our things into the Ford pickup and started the drive back toward the city—Anna had to meet with two fellow students who were working with her on a group project due in a couple of days. We’d spent the morning sick, sweating out the booze, but there was something romantic and tender involved; it was like our whole lives had flattened and compressed, and we’d become an old, ailing couple, taking care of each other. We’d pounded Advils, joked around a bit, still drunk, kind of, admiring each other’s tattoos, and then dozed with our arms draped here and there and our hands joined. Around three I snuck out and brought back some French toast and waffles from a diner down the road, which we ate in bed, like a honeymoon couple, before packing up to head for L.A.

  The afternoon sun was scorching, and we closed up the windows and pumped the AC. I decided to take the scenic route and cut through the National Park to I-10 because it didn’t add too many miles and I’d never been down that road before. It felt like driving on an alien planet: we cruised through strange fields of enormous boulders, across plains of twisted red rock, as bizarre, towering cacti that looked stitched together from giant pipe cleaners waved their tentacles at us from the shoulder. Anna kept marveling at how human-like the ubiquitous Joshua trees seemed to be, each one uniquely expressive, its lower limbs extended like a pair of arms, and its third limb, up high, a craned neck, with a head and face screwed on top. We laughed, ascribing them separate human emotions and stories. “That one’s pissed off because you didn’t clean your room,” Anna said. “She’s sending you to bed without dinner!”

  “You’re right!” I cried. “Wait, check out that one with the broken branch. He’s begging his bookie for another week to come up with the money.”

  “And there’s the bookie!” Anna said, pointing down the road. “He’s calling his enforcer to come finish the job.”

  This merriment continued for forty-five minutes. At the far end of the park, we stopped to refill water bottles at a rest area, and then lapsed into silence as we passed the gate at the south entrance and coasted down a long steep hill, where a stream of cars, pickups, and big rigs came into sight, hurtling west along I-10. Somehow the sight of the interstate broke the spell of the past twenty-four hours, and I was struck by a wave of sadness and anxiety, worried that our return to civilization might cause Anna’s affections to taper off. No matter how perfect things go the first night you spend with someone, in those early stages everything is still fragile and precarious, and you never know what surprises lie around the bend. I stole a glance at her: arms crossed, brow furrowed, like something in her had shifted, although her neck and shoulders were still swathed in temporary tattoos, a reminder of the previous night’s adventures. Behind her, the sun settled toward the horizon and the sky filled with a red glow.

 
; “You know,” she began, very quietly, “this is as much fun as I’ve had since I’ve been in the States. It’s like, we get on so well, it’s easy to imagine if you were my boyfriend or something, how things could be, but I’m going home in a few weeks, and how would it really work to be with someone and live on separate continents? I don’t think it could work.”

  Whatever her concerns about distance, her words thrilled me and filled me with glee. I’d been too cautious to say anything of the sort or expect too much from one night in the desert, no matter how magical (though this might also have been the first time I’d been invited to enter a relationship and then booted out of it in the same line of thought). I wasn’t too crushed—any obstacles before us, it seemed, could surely be hurdled. As we rolled down the entrance ramp onto I-10, caught speed, and merged with the flow of traffic, we began to parse the possibilities. Would she be willing to stay on in the U.S.—if not Ann Arbor, maybe L.A. or New York? Not possible, she said. She had to get back to London to finish her book on Tony Blair. After that, she had other projects already in the pipeline with friends in the U.K. Besides, she said, she’d spent the past two years in the States, far from her friends and family, and she was ready to be home.

  So the other option was for me to head to England. “Would you ever consider that?” Anna asked. On the one hand, it seemed crazy to uproot myself and move across the globe for a girl I’d spent one night with; on the other hand, Anna was completely dazzling, and I could picture us leading a life of unbounded happiness and fulfillment—writing books together at her family’s country place in Devon; traveling to exotic corners of the world to shoot documentaries; raising kind, grounded, cosmopolitan children—and it seemed crazy not to. Before I had a chance to respond, though, I felt the truck suddenly drained of its power.