by Brad Listi
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to wait?”
“No. It’s fresh now.”
“How do you turn this thing on?”
“The green button on the left.”
I found the green button on the left and pressed it. The camera came alive slowly.
“Where’s your buddy Lynch?” Henry said.
“On deadline. He’s working on a three-thousand-word article about Tasers.”
“Tasers?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
“I know.”
“How come I don’t have a job like that?” said Henry.
“I keep asking myself the same question.”
I slid a couple of feet to my left and turned the camera on him, zooming in until his head filled up the entire frame. I pressed record, and the red light went on. Henry was looking out across Tompkins Square Park at nothing in particular. I had him in profile. I cleared my throat loudly and began the interrogation.
So, Henry. Tell me: How are you feeling?
Foggy. Numb. Emotional. Detached. Terrified. Relieved. Gastric. Confused.
So you woke up this morning and—
You need to say the date and time.
I do?
Yeah. Here. I’ll do it. What’s the date today?
July 31st.
Monday, July 31st, the year 2000. 1:47 p.m. Tompkins Square Park. New York, New York.
Okay. You ready?
Yeah. Where were we?
You woke up this morning and—
I didn’t wake up. I never went to sleep. I got in bed at eleven last night and closed my eyes, but I never really slept. It was a very superficial kind of rest at best. The Valium screwed me. It had the opposite of its intended effect; the chemicals manifested differently than I thought they would. They made me think more, not less. And then things got out of hand in an emotional sense, because it was the middle of the night and my perceptions were skewed.
Meaning what?
Meaning I drove myself crazy. Meaning I laid there under the covers and exaggerated everything half to death, cooking up fantastic, doped-up scenarios of massive calamity, over and over again—scenarios involving some kind of emotional breakdown at the restaurant. I worried that I would sob uncontrollably throughout the lunch. I envisioned myself breaking down at the table, bawling my eyes out, blubbering. Then I saw myself having to be escorted to the men’s room by the maître d’ while onlookers stared at me, saddened and stunned. And then from there, I envisioned my mood shifting from one of delirious distress to a furious, irrational kind of anger. I saw myself bursting out of the bathroom, purple-faced, with tearstained eyes, screaming at my biological mother, castigating her savagely for abandoning me and blaming her for the multilayered emotional and psychological impact her decision has had on my existence.
Secondly, I worried that I would get physically ill and puke all over the table.
So what time did you get up?
Sunrise. As soon as I saw light come through the windows, I was out of there. I showered, shaved, brushed my teeth, flossed, clipped my nose hairs, plucked my uni-brow, put on deodorant, and so on. And then I spent about an hour trying to figure out what the fuck to wear. That was another disaster—and completely atypical of my normal behavior. Under normal circumstances, I don’t give a flying fuck what I look like or what I wear, but this morning it was suddenly a monumental quagmire. I must’ve put on six different outfits, staring at myself in the mirror. I couldn’t decide whether to dress up or dress down. At first I wanted to wear a nice button-down shirt, but then I started worrying that I’d sweat through it in the heat. I was also afraid that it would be too dressy and too inauthentic. I felt it made me look unlike myself, like I was trying too hard to impress, because I rarely wear nice button-down shirts. So then I put on a T-shirt, which is what I normally wear, but that didn’t look right either.
What was wrong with it?
It was that T-shirt of mine, the one with the cartoon drawing of the guy standing at a urinal, and then underneath him it says “The Future Is in Your Hand.” (Laughter.) And you felt that would have been inappropriate for a first meeting with your biological mother.
On one level, sure. I mean, it goes without saying that the humor involved is lowbrow and potentially even subconsciously antagonistic. And, of course, for whatever reason, you want to make a good first impression. You don’t want your biological mother to think you’re completely degenerate and crass. But then again, this is the kind of thing I wear without a second thought on an ordinary average day, so part of me was just like, “Fuck her. If she can’t take a joke, then to hell with her. This is who I am. Why am I so worried about impressing the bitch? She wasn’t sufficiently impressed with me from the beginning, so why should I worry about impressing her now?”
So how did you finally settle on your outfit?
(Camera zooms out briefly to reveal Henry’s outfit: a short-sleeved, gray collared shirt, khaki pants, and brown leather shoes.)
I finally just said fuck it and gave up. I snapped. Everything I put on seemed like it didn’t fit, or it wasn’t me, or it looked like shit. Nothing looked good. And this was the last outfit I tried on before I gave up and forced myself to walk out of the fucking apartment. It had to be done. Otherwise, I’d probably still be standing there, wetting my pants over what the fuck to wear. That or I would’ve shaved my head.
Shaved your head?
(Camera zooms back in.)
Yeah. I stare in the mirror sometimes—it’s like this weird old habit of mine. I stand there, staring at myself, trying to figure out what I look like, trying to imagine what I’ll look like in the future, with age. And if I do it for too long, I almost always have this really strong, really strange compulsion to shave my head bald.
Weird.
I’ve come close a few times. I have no idea what it means.
Maybe it means you want to be a monk.
Maybe it means I want to be a skinhead.
(Laughter.) Okay. So back to your day. You’re out of your apartment early, you head out into the city—
I head out into the city and get breakfast at an old restaurant in the neighborhood. I read two newspapers and two awful entertainment magazines, cover to cover. That took up a couple of hours. I must’ve pounded six cups of coffee. I got so wired that I had to go for a walk. I kept telling myself to externalize things, you know? To get my mind on other people, other things, the flowers, the trees, so that I could quit having that goddamn conversation with myself.
What goddamn conversation with yourself?
The one I’d been having all night and all morning. The giant anxiety-riddled conversation about what my mother was going to look like, act like, be like. The giant anxiety-riddled conversation about everything that might go, should go, could go wrong, either by my doing or hers. I just felt I needed to put my attention on things other than myself, because at that point, it was clear—at least with respect to this particular circumstance—that I didn’t have the first fucking clue what to say to myself when I talked to myself. So I figured it was better not to say anything at all.
That’s an interesting way of putting it.
What?
“I didn’t know what to say to myself when I talked to myself.”
That’s how it felt to me. That’s how it still feels to me. Lately, I’ve been confronted with the notion that I pretty much suck at the whole fucking process. When push comes to shove, I have no idea what to say to myself when I talk to myself. I’m not too bright, when it comes right down to it. And if that’s true, and if it’s also true that most human problems are pretty much self-created, it can make for a fairly shitty realization.
I think you’re being a little too hard on yourself. Most people in your shoes would probably be the same way.
“Most people” are irrelevant in this context. So what if the majority would fumble? That doesn’t make it necessary or ri
ght. And it should also be said that some people wouldn’t fumble. They wouldn’t freak out. They would deal with their discomfort and handle the situation with relative aplomb.
Relative aplomb.
Yeah. Relative aplomb.
Pun intended?
No.
I think you’re doing an okay job of handling yourself, all things considered.
I’m drinking a forty-ounce Schlitz at two p.m. on a Monday.
(Laughter.) But at least you have the decency to cover it up with a brown paper bag.
I find no consolation in that.
So. Going backward. You get to the Gandhi Café…
Right. I’d say at this point it was about ten or ten thirty or so. I had about two hours to go. I was way ahead of myself, way early. Something important is gonna happen, something that has me nervous, I almost always show up early. I’m like that with the airport, too. It’s the weirdest goddamn thing…a sickness, almost. Flying makes me a little edgy. Don’t like it. Can’t stand it. But for some reason, the idea of missing a flight is intolerable to me. The thought of it practically sends me off the deep end. Makes no sense. I have to get there early. Have to settle in. Have to walk around, get my bearings, watch the people, eat some food. Airplanes make me nervous to the point of indigestion, but I could wander around a goddamn airport forever, eating overpriced, terrible food.
I like airports too.
We’re a breed.
I’d like to be the guy who drives the crippled and the elderly from concourse to concourse in that beeping golf cart.
Right. Exactly. Just the constant flux of people from all walks of life, migrating in every direction, headed somewhere. I can’t get enough of that shit.
And why is it that no matter how much I’ve eaten that day, I show up at the fucking airport and immediately I’m famished?
And your only option is a piece-of-shit nine-dollar hot dog.
(Laughter.) Exactly.
Right.
Okay. So then there you are at the Gandhi Café…
Yeah. Ninety minutes early or whatever. I find the place, no problem. Stare in the windows. It’s empty, dark. Doesn’t even open until noon. I’ve got time to kill. So I just start walking. No real plan. Walking through the heat. And then it’s just too goddamn hot, so I grab another couple of magazines at another newsstand and duck inside another café.
What magazines did you get?
People and US Weekly.
Really?
Yeah. At that point, those were the only kinds of magazines I could tolerate. They’re like the periodical equivalent of television. I didn’t have the head to be reading anything else. My mind would have exploded. The idea was to stop thinking. Or at the very least, distract myself with static. I needed garbage.
Sure.
What better way to murder forty-five minutes?
Right.
And so then noon arrives. Or approaches, I should say. It still wasn’t noon yet. I blew through both magazines, got up, left the café, and I was still early. I started making my way back toward the Gandhi, and then I get there and the goddamn place is still closed. So I’m standing out front, pacing, and my mind starts going. I start thinking up ways to introduce myself. Will we shake hands? Will we hug? Will I get the door for her? Will I peck her on the cheek? Will I bow? Will I curtsy? All that bullshit. Then I worried that I was going to be standing there, pacing, when she showed up. And I didn’t want that to be her first image of me, so I walked across the street and waited there instead. It was a stakeout, essentially.
Jesus.
My nerves were absolutely fried. Every middle-aged woman that walked by, I was terrified to look at her. Every one of them was her at that point, you know what I mean? Every time I saw a goddamn skirt, my heart skipped a beat. It got to the point where I didn’t even want to look at anything. So I just stood there with my hands in my pockets and stared at my shoes, but that didn’t really do me any good either. Standing still was intolerable too. I felt like I looked too conspicuous, too obvious, that if my mother saw me standing there, she would almost certainly know that I was him, I was her son, and that I was a chickenshit, standing across the street, staring at my shoes, too scared to stand in front of the goddamn restaurant like a grown man. So instead of standing there, I just started walking again, thinking it would be better if I showed up a few minutes late, rather than right on time, which was my original plan. I decided I didn’t want to be the first one there. Too much anxiety involved, too much trouble. I figured it would be better to let her show up first, and then I’d walk in a few minutes late, full of apologies. So I just kind of ambled along with my eyes down, trying to relax myself, trying to keep myself cool.
Waiting for the moment of truth to arrive.
Right.
And so when did you finally get back to the café?
Probably about ten after twelve. The door was open. I walked right in. No hesitation, no second thoughts, no wasted motion, nothing. I made a beeline. I’d been working up to it. That was the plan. Just walk in, be calm, don’t think twice, just do it. I assumed Selma would be there, seated at a table in the middle of the crowded restaurant, and she’d wave me over. But then I walked in, sweating like a motherfucker, and the only person in there was this really old guy with hair coming out of his ears, sitting at a window table, eating naan. And then the owner of the place walks up to me, this short Indian guy with a big gut—Gandhi or whatever—and he’s offering me a menu, smiling at me, asking if I’d like a table for one. And right then the door opens behind me, and boom, I turn around and there she is.
Your mother.
A spitting image of me.
No way!
Dead serious. First time in my whole life I’ve ever seen anyone who actually looks like me. I thought I was going to fall over.
Oh my God.
It was nuts.
So what happened? What did you do?
I have no idea. I remember just kind of standing there, and she immediately moved in and gave me this big hug. I don’t even think we said anything beyond “hello,” and all of a sudden she just plows right into me. And then we’re hugging. And then we’re still hugging. And then I’m thinking, “Jesus Christ, we’re still hugging.” And then I realize that I’ve got tears in my eyes. And I can hear my mother sniffling on my shoulder. And of course there’s this Gandhi guy, standing behind us. And he doesn’t know what the fuck is going on.
Holy shit.
It was bizarre, man. Completely bizarre.
So what’d you have for lunch?
Neither of us ate. We ordered food and didn’t touch it. I got some tandoori, she got the vegetable vindaloo. Neither of us touched a thing.
What did you talk about?
Shit. Who knows? Everything happened so fast. At first it felt kind of formal and awkward. Selma started in right away…it seemed like she had a speech prepared. She wanted me to understand the circumstances of my birth and why she put me up for adoption and so on. Her tone was weird. It was like she was paranoid I was going to attack her.
I don’t find that weird.
She just wanted me to know that I was better off having been adopted. She and my father weren’t married. She was actually one of his patients. They were having an affair. She got pregnant with me at nineteen. Didn’t have any dough. Didn’t have her shit together. She was screwing her gynecologist, a married man. Didn’t know what to do. Was young and confused. At odds with her overbearing parents. Susceptible to crackpot ideology. Moved upstate to this commune. Blah, blah, blah.
So wait. Your biological father was your biological mother’s gynecologist?
Yeah.
That’s fucked up.
Welcome to my world.
Did you know that before?
No. But I don’t really find it all that shocking. It sounds about right to me. Consistent with the rest of my existence. So far, I’m relatively unfazed by the news.
And overall the lunch was cordial?
<
br /> Yeah. It was fine. Once we settled down and Selma got her speech out of the way, we just kind of started shooting the shit. She asked me about my life, where I went to school, and so on. And you want to know something weird?
What?
I started off by telling her about Rose. Right away I just launched into this huge tangent about Rose. Explained the entire fucking relationship, practically…just babbling like a monkey, one thing after another. How we’d met in college, how we didn’t like each other at first, how in love we were, how we used to go for walks down by the creek, our dog, our favorite restaurant, all that little bullshit. And then I started blabbing about the affair. The Internet. The chat room. Everything. Blah, blah, blah. The whole goddamn soap opera.