A 52-Hertz Whale
Page 13
Explained everything to Mr. Tedoni while waiting for police. Nice guy for principal. Agreed not press charges long as never saw my face at school again. Still had go downtown because of prior arrest (will tell you later). Paid fine. Sash not happy to interrupt date come get me.
Feeling very sad as result all of above. About entire life. Ruined relationship with girl of dreams. Got fired from only job could get anywhere near industry want to work in. Screwing up pipe-dream documentary. Thought could help you. Sorry couldn’t. Wasn’t good at high school first time. Still not good.
Wish could be more like you. Have purpose, like your whales. At least got some good footage you handing out pamphlets before Coxson mess.
Hope some girl smart enough ask you Turnabout. See you Star Arcade tomorrow at eight.
D
From: craigdavidsmith2016@gmail.com
To: craigdavidsmith2016@gmail.com
Date: March 14, 2013 at 8:27 PM
Subject: One week ago
Dear Me,
Okay, that already sounds dumb. But what am I supposed to write, “Dear Craig”? As if I’m addressing a total stranger? I don’t want to write “Dear Diary” either, because that makes it sound like there’s somebody named Diary, which would also be stupid. Whatever, the point is, this whole thing is stupid and dumb. And so is Dr. Sizemore. Hey, that’s kind of cool to write that since I know he’ll never see it. Dr. Sizemore is a skinny balding idiot with creepy amounts of wrist hair that come past his long sleeves. He talks in this quiet, annoying way because he wants to seem “sensitive,” when in fact all he’s doing is trying to get me to trust him so that I’ll tell him I got molested when I was six or something (in case anyone ever does read this, I wasn’t!) and he can brag to his psychologist buddies about how he cured me.
Anyway, this little email diary was his dumb idea, but I promised my parents I’d try it, so here goes. I’ve got the alert thing set up to send this email to myself a week from today so I will have this record of how I was feeling a week ago. Which now will be in a week from now. It’s like I’m in a really stupid time-travel movie or something.
Anyway, what stupid stuff have I been thinking about lately? Oh yeah, Turnabout is next week, and I’m going with Rebecca Vitello. She’s cool. We’re just friends, so it’ll be pretty chill. I’m going to ride with Charlie and Liza and Doyle and Lissa.
Charlie’s been kind of annoying me lately. First he was like, “Dude, you’re good at Photoshop, you gotta put a blowhole and whale teeth on Turner’s class picture.” So I did that, then he’s like, “Dude, you’re good at research, find out some stuff about whale hunting so I can leave it on the Whale Boy Facebook page.” So I did that. And he never even thanked me. Sometimes I think Charlie lives in a completely Charlie-centric universe and that we’re all just floating in orbit around him. Whatever.
I just think it sucks that he doesn’t appreciate me. Like I have nothing better to do than look up crap about whales and mess with pictures in Photoshop. Same with my parents. It’s like they think it’s easy for me to get a 2.9, play on the soccer team, and have a social life. And I have one little anxiety attack, and now I’ve gotta go see a shrink and write letters to myself, which makes it seem like they’re trying to make me even more crazy.
Okay, well, I was supposed to write this thing for at least ten minutes, and I did, so now I’m going to be done with it so I can start my essay on Invisible Man.
Signing off,
Me
From: ciaosoph@gmail.com
To: saraannblakely@gmail.com
Date: March 14, 2013 at 8:08 AM
Subject: Try Again
Hey Sara,
I’m in first period Italian, and we’re supposed to be listening to this audio book on the computer. But I can’t stop thinking about yesterday. I saw James Turner on the bus this morning and I smiled. He pretended not to see me. I have to do something about the whole Turnabout mess. Soon.
Anyway, last night, I was going to ask you what to do, but your mom picked up your phone and said you were already asleep. I don’t talk to Anna Maria about boy stuff and Mom was busy giving Baby a bath. So I went over to see Nonna. She was asleep on her recliner in front of the TV ( EWTN Global Catholic Network) and some nun was still saying the novena. I felt bad waking her up, but she didn’t seem to mind. Nonna made us caffè d’orzo, this decaffeinated drink that Anna Maria calls imitation coffee, but it’s really not coffee at all—just steamed milk with roasted barley. I’ve loved it since I was a little girl and no one makes it like Nonna. So we sat down at her kitchen table. I was about to start talking about James Turner and the Turnabout debacle when I happened to glance at a picture of me, Anna Maria, Mom, and Dad on the fridge from my seventh grade recital, and the next thing I know, I was talking about Albert and crying.
Nonna looked at me and pulled me to her. She whispered “tesora mia,” “my treasure,” and her breath smelled sweet like the anise seeds she likes to chew on sometimes. She hugged me, her housecoat warm from the caffè d’orzo steam. She’s strong for such a little lady. Then we sat down and she told me how she spent a good portion of her own life living in the past, pretending that the war never came to Abruzzo and that she never had to leave the mountain town she grew up in to come to America. In her mind, everything in her town stayed the same as before she left. The oldest signora in the village still sat on the lip of the fountain in the piazza trading garlic for gossip. The little shrine to the Virgin still occupied the place where a little girl had a vision during a lightning storm. And the chair at her parents’ table was still empty, waiting for her return. But then, Nonna went back to visit the town just a few weeks ago for the first time in years. The old signora was dead, an earthquake had destroyed the shrine, and her parents’ house was occupied by summer vacationers from Germany. She looked at me and said, “Hai capito?” And you know my Italian’s not great, but I got it. I understood everything Nonna said.
Love, Soph
From: saraannblakely@gmail.com
To: ciaosoph@gmail.com
Date: March 14, 2013 at 10:13 AM
Subject: RE: Try again
Soph-
Got txt frm Sam after dr.’s appt. Time 2 book pedicures!
I know what ur g-ma’s saying. I’ll never dance the Sugar Plum Fairy, never go 2 Juilliard. Prbly won’t go 2 college either. Hurts 2 bad when I type. Every skool paper lokz like bad txt.
Luv,
Sara
From: whaleboy4ever@gmail.com
To: the.darren.olmstead@gmail.com
Date: March 14, 2013 at 10:36 PM
Subject: RE: Hola
Dear D-wow,
Did today really happen? Thank goodness the camera was rolling or else I would be left believing it was only my imagination. Did you get the look on my face? (Scratch that, I forgot that I was wearing the yeti costume at the time.) Did you get her on the bike as she turned off of King St. toward Star Arcade? How about the cute way she kind of swung her head from side to side as she pedaled like a little girl with a song stuck in her head?
I have to tell you that I only realized the biker was Sophia Lucca when she got close enough to Star Arcade that I could see the glint of those gold rings she wears. I think I dropped my 30 TOKENS FOR ONE DOLLAR sign. Sophia did some talking. I can’t remember much of what she said.
Something about Herman Whaleville. Something about the poster at lunch. Something about handwriting. Something about Coxson. Maybe you’ve got the transcript?
All I know is that she wants to go to Turnabout with me, and she’s going to wear a violet dress and she wants me to wear a violet cummerbund, and instead of a corsage or boutonniere, she’s going to buy us matching Save-the-Whales bracelets.
I’m sorry that we didn’t get to catch up after the shoot, especially because you seemed kind of down. My mom had pizza in the car and she didn’t want it to get cold. But I wanted to tell you some good news in the hopes that it might improve your day. I saw this cool article
about a whale named Valentina. This whale was caught in a prohibited shark net off the coast of Mexico in a National Wildlife Refuge. The situation was pretty grim. I mean, dire. And yet, with the help of some awesome, caring people, Valentina managed to get freed. And she lobtailed and breached in thanks. Things could’ve ended badly for Valentina like they did for Salt. But they didn’t, not this time.
If I could lobtail for you, D-Dog, I would. Just saying.
Peace,
Jiminy Cricket
From: lwoodward1million@gmail.com
To: the.darren.olmstead@gmail.com
Date: March 14, 2013 at 11:25 PM
Subject: Letter
Yo D,
I was getting home from work yesterday, and I see this girl leaning over the windshield of your car and stuffing something under your windshield wipers. I thought you were getting a ticket or something, but this girl wasn’t in a uniform.
Turns out it was the infamous Corinne. Wow, man. Now I can see why you’ve been so hung up on her. She’s gorgeous. (A little on the granola side for my taste, but that’s just splitting hairs. I mean, the tits . . .) She was leaving a letter for you, but I told her you were out of town and that I’d give it to you when you got back. See you in a couple days.
From: the.darren.olmstead@gmail.com
To: LWoodward@OneTermLife.com
Date: March 15, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Subject: RE: Letter
What?!?!?!?!?!
Dude, no! Overnight it! Wait, no. Forget it. I give you permission to open it. Just call me and read it out loud! Holy crap this is amazing! Fingers shaking. Can’t believe I just admitted that. But I don’t care! Wooo! Call me ASAP! In fact, call me ESTP (Even Sooner Than Possible)! Just make it happen!
Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!
From: the.darren.olmstead@gmail.com
To: whaleboy4ever@gmail.com
Date: March 15, 2013 at 12:31 AM
Subject: All about Turnabout
Hey there Jamestin Turnerlake,
I reviewed some of today’s footage, and as I understand it, Sophia was trying to tell you that it had in fact been her who’d been posting on Salt’s FB page as Herman Whaleville, and that she had in fact penned the poster inviting you to Turnabout. Coxson only laughed when he saw it because he thought one of his buddies had made the entire thing, not just the “slap my tail” part. I had to listen a couple of times to put this together, because she was obviously really nervous about being on camera and was talking a mile a minute. I’ll definitely have to include subtitles during that part. It’s a great moment, though, for you and for the film. I’ll interview you about it tomorrow, and then we can include voice-over of you talking about how you felt at that moment. A great second-act climax.
You were right in intuiting that I was down. Even the sight of you flippy-flopping around the ocean smacking your butt against the waves couldn’t cheer me up now. My life is in that Dark Night of the Soul–type moment, where all has been lost, and the main character’s hope is extinguished. This was brought about by the news that Corinne is moving in with her boyfriend. She wrote me a letter to let me know. She said she didn’t want me to hear it from someone else, but I did anyway because I’m an idiot and had my roommate read it to me over the phone. Which was especially horrible because he tried to read it in a girl voice, like a movie or something where when someone reads a letter, the audience hears a voice-over of the character who wrote the letter. My roommate’s really weird.
Anyway, let’s now look at this rationally:
We haven’t spoken in months.
I’ve been thinking about her less and less. (Really, I swear!)
She is happy. Good for her.
Now let’s look at it entirely irrationally, which is how I’m actually looking at it:
EFF ME!!! Sure, I’ve been thinking about her less—less than ALL THE TIME! That’s not because I miss her any less or want her back any less, it’s out of sheer exhaustion, sheer self-preservation. My mind simply overloaded on thoughts about her. At a certain point, my body couldn’t handle lying awake all night thinking about her, so I began to sleep again. My body couldn’t handle not eating any longer, so it gave me an appetite. My brain couldn’t handle the constant flood of images and thoughts about her, so it came up with some crazy distractions like flying across the country to film a documentary and try out experimental karate moves on teenage jerks. In other words, I never got over her; I just lost the ability to be as obsessed as I was.
Well, I just got it all back. Because you know what I realized? That despite all the evidence—the boyfriend, the trip to Spain, the expressing no desire at all to see me, the brief period where there was a legally enforced buffer between us, which I’ll get to in a moment—I actually still believed, deep down, that we’d just hit a bump in the road. Not that I ever would have admitted that. I secretly figured that eventually she’d realize the error of her ways and come back to me. And to speed up the process, I planned on fixing the errors of my ways.
All of them.
Thus turning myself into an absolutely perfect human being. This perfection would cause her to, quite logically, want to get back together with me. Because who would turn down perfect? I got that crappy job at Testy Snobbin, I started lifting weights and stopped eating gluten, I started reading all the winners of the National Book Award in order. Out of some sense of charity I even started returning the emails of a weird kid who was obsessed with humpback whales.
CHARITY, James. Can you believe the effing arrogance of this? Exchanging emails with you, giving you advice, because I thought helping you out would make me a better person, make me more attractive to Corinne. You were going to be a bullet point on my imaginary perfect-boyfriend resume.
And I just want to promise you that that’s no longer the case, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Now I just think of you as my friend who’s a lot younger. It’s like one of those crappy romantic comedies, where the guy asks out the nerdy girl on a date as part of a bet (sorry, you’re a nerdy girl in this analogy) and ends up falling in love with her. Wait, I’m not in love with you, I just want to make that clear. It was just for comparison’s sake. I just think you’re a cool dude. A very cool dude.
Anyway, the point is that—guess what?—I DIDN’T become perfect. I’m STILL not a god; I still have problems like everyone else, only probably way more. I’m still the same guy who Corinne got a 90-day restraining order against because I climbed in through her window to spread six dozen roses all through her house in an effort to try to get her back and then refused to leave when she arrived home with her grandfather, who she’d been out to dinner with. Old dude was snarling at me like a bulldog, and Corinne was near tears (the only time I ever saw her cry was when she was overcome with joy at a David Grisman concert—who can blame her? His version of “Shady Grove” is amazing ), but I wasn’t going to leave until I’d finished reading my list of seventy-two reasons we should be together (one for each rose). The cops showed up at #52 and dragged me out the door right as I was finishing #64. She said several times that she’d have to call the cops if I didn’t leave, and I had HEARD her, but I hadn’t actually LISTENED to her, which was why she’d broken up with me in the first place. Not listening seems to be a recurring theme in my life (see: my lone attempt at television writing).
I’m still the same guy who violated the order after 89 days because I just had to see if the new dude she was seeing was leaving her place on a weekend morning. I was sitting there in my car peering over a newspaper I was pretending to read, like I was on a stakeout in a cop movie, and she came out of her apartment—alone, fortunately, or things could have been much worse. She saw me before I could hide my face, and that’s how I ended up in court again.
I’m still the same guy who got a killer lawyer (that my dad paid for) who worked closely with a lenient judge who was nice enough to sentence me to community service because I quote
d a Billy Collins poem he liked during my hearing (my bestie from high school, Sash, who I’m staying with, is a poet and got me into Collins). That’s how I ended up in the Resource Room at your school for a semester. Amazing that they let a guy who was practically a stalker work with kids. But my crime was truly a crime of passion, and at the time I really thought I was acting in both of our best interests. I’m lucky they were easy on me.
Anyway, at this point, I don’t know what to do. I’m utterly clueless. And I ask you, James, humbly, because you’re my friend and I honestly look up to you: How do I learn to feel okay about all this?
D
From: whaleboy4ever@gmail.com
To: the.darren.olmstead@gmail.com
Date: March 15, 2013 at 12:57 AM
Subject: Symbiosis
Dear Da-Best:
It’s past lights-out and I’ve already gone over my allotted screen time for today, but I had to respond to your last email posthaste. I have to admit—I didn’t know what to make of what you wrote in your correspondence at first, especially the part about me being the nerdy girl.
Hence, I begin my analysis. At first blush, my gut reaction to your email is that our relationship is symbiotic. In case it has been a while since you’ve been in Bio, basically symbiosis is a relationship between two species where one species benefits at another’s expense, where neither species benefits, or where both benefit. At first, I wondered if our relationship was a type of symbiosis called commensalism where one species benefits and the other is essentially unharmed or receives a bit of protection from the first species. An example of commensalism would be whale lice (also known as cyamid amphipods). These little crabs hitch a ride to feast on the algae slime greasing a right whale’s skin. The lice benefit from a free meal, and the whale is generally no worse for the wear— just a tad bit of damage to the skin (which helps researchers identify one right whale from another). My thought was that if our relationship was commensal, then I, of course, would be the right whale and you, well, you’d be the lice. But that didn’t seem quite right to me.