Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

  * * *

  —

  I remember one time I asked Iris if she was afraid to die. This was when we were trapped in the Man-Pig Pit of Dimension K and it really looked like we might not make it home. Iris said, afraid or not, it didn’t really matter. That the thing about death is that it’s terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when we’re confronted with death we can either be cowardly or we can be brave, but either way we’re going to die, so…

  And I thought, Whoa, that’s dark.

  But here I was, sitting in my childhood bedroom with a guitar. The Up-and-Comers were over and done with and it was just Lizzy and me and it was the afternoon and it was summer in Tulsa and Lizzy was lying on my bed, looking as calm and beautiful as I had ever seen her, and she was asking me to play her something I had written.

  And I thought about how, actually, if you wanted to, you could say the same thing about life. That life is terrifying and overwhelming and it can happen at any moment. And when you’re confronted with life you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you’re going to live.

  So you might as well be brave.

  Move across the country and hope the Sadness won’t find you, won’t follow you like a stray dog from coast to coast. Hope the Sadness isn’t just a fog on a leash, shadowing you always. Hope the Sadness can’t be as fleet as you are, hope the Sadness is more rooted. Perhaps the Sadness has friends, a family, and can’t just pick up and go. Look at all this stuff the Sadness has here in San Jose or Chapel Hill or wherever you’re currently leaving. How’s the Sadness going to survive without all this stuff? Hope this isn’t one of those any-place-I-hang-my-hat-is-home-type situations where the Sadness hangs its hat on you. Hope that you are not the Sadness’s home, anywhere you go, no matter how far, no matter how quickly—the Sadness lives in you. Hope to God it’s not that.

  Move across the country and start a new adventure. Create a brand-new life, buy a new set of furniture, a fresh autumn coat. Fill your days with distraction. Take a class, learn an instrument, visit your local library and crack open one of those Brontë sisters you always meant to get acquainted with, anything to make the days pass faster, to accumulate distance, to get you as far away as possible from the day that you left.

  Move across the country and watch the short yellow lines shoot past you down the pavement. See the city recede in the distance behind the taped-up boxes obstructing your rearview. Settle somewhere fertile, plant a new you and watch you blossom. You can barely remember that old you now, the you who lived in that other place and was Sad. That old you wasn’t you; this is you. This is the you you want to be.

  You have friends now, a routine, a coffee shop where someone, as you saunter in, smiles and says, “The usual?” One night at a bar, late, you pick up a hobby of a person that somehow grows into a habit—a person whose flaws sparkle off yours in glorious coruscating patterns; a person who gets to know not just the you you sometimes show, but the you you truly are; a person who—when you weren’t looking—slipped a naked, wounded heart into the pocket of your jacket with a bow and a note that said, “handle with care.”

  One night, you will wake with a start in this person’s bed, you will discover yourself in this person’s arms, and you will disentangle yourself for the hundredth time and dress yourself for the hundredth time and try to leave this person’s apartment, but when you get to the door there will be a sticky note over the knob that says, “but what if this time you stayed?”

  And you will turn around and get back into that person’s bed, and you will get back into that person’s arms, and you will stay there for a year and a half. And you will learn how to be very, very tender with that person’s naked, wounded heart.

  And when the Sadness catches up, tracks you down—when you return home one day, arms full of groceries, to find the Sadness sitting at the kitchen table, casually reading a paper as if it never left, eating a muffin as if this were all perfectly natural—when the Sadness looks up at you and says, “What did you think, buddy? What did you think was going to happen?”—when the Sadness smirks at you and says with a wry insistence that unravels you in an instant, “This is the real love story here, buddy, you and me”—when the Sadness reiterates that, sure, certain smaller sadnesses dull, but this Sadness, the Sadness, has seen you through it all; this Sadness, the Sadness, has never strayed from your side, not really, and why would you want it to now, this epitome of stability in an inconsistent world?—when that happens, you can put your groceries down and walk back out the door and close the door behind you.

  You can get in your car and drive all night and call your person from the road and say, “I’m sorry.”

  You can keep driving until you hit a HELP WANTED sign dangling off the edge of the opposite coast. You can take the new job and get all your stuff shipped out to you or thrown in the garbage or thrown in the river or burned in a fire or donated to the Goodwill.

  Go for a hike along the water and breathe in the fresh sea air.

  Move across the country and start again someplace new.

  You Want to Know What Plays Are Like?

  YOU WANT TO KNOW

  WHAT PLAYS ARE LIKE?

  Here is my impression of a play:

  Okay, so first you gotta imagine it’s a hotel room, right? Just a normal, boring-looking hotel room, on the nice end of things, as far as hotel rooms go. And the audience is coming in, and they’re taking their seats in this dinky little theater in lower Manhattan, barely bigger than a Winnebago, this theater, with seats that feel like someone just glued down some thin fabric over a block of hard metal. The main thing of a theater—like the whole point of it—is that there’s going to be a lot of sitting in it, so you’d think they would at least consider investing in some comfortable chairs. Word to the wise: if they can’t even get that part right, which absolutely most of the time they cannot, then buckle the fuck up, because I can tell you right now you are in for an ordeal of an evening.

  Anyway, the people are walking down the aisle, trying to find their row, which is pretty much impossible, because even though there are only three rows in the theater, they’re labeled like ROW A, ROW JJ, and ROW 2A AND A HALF, and everyone’s looking at their ticket like, “I’m supposed to be in row twelve. Where the hell is twelve?” But anyway, they’re walking down the aisle—and the carpet has a weird bump in it that everyone needs to be careful not to trip over—and they sit down and they look at the stage and they see a bed and a chair and a minibar, and they say, “Okay, so I guess this play takes place in a hotel room.”

  Half of all plays ever written take place in hotel rooms just about, so it’s not a huge shock, and half of those are about guys on business trips spilling their guts to hookers who, it turns out, are actually really sweet. This play is not about that, but for a second it feels like it could be. Like when the audience comes in and they see the hotel room, they have to check their programs, because it’s like, “Oh shit, is this going to be another one of those plays about a sad guy and a sensitive hooker, and the guy doesn’t even want to have sex with her, he just wants to talk? But then later, they have sex anyway, and she doesn’t even charge him, because it turns out they fell in love? And of course the hooker takes her bra off, right when she’s facing the audience? God, this isn’t going to be one of those plays, is it?”

  So then everyone’s looking at the program, right? To try to figure out whether it’s one of those hooker plays. And they’re reading the notes from the artistic director or whatever, and the cast bios, and it’s like, “Ooh, did you see this actress played a dead body on a Law & Order once?” And there’s a thing in the back about how we need you to donate money to the theater, like how Theater is so Vital and Important, like as if you didn’t spend your money already on a ticket just to be here. Like as if they’re doing you a favor to show you this play. Like as if the play-writer’s parents hadn’
t already spent thousands of dollars to send this guy to a fancy liberal arts college so he could learn how to write plays good.

  As if his big sister didn’t just drive all the way down from Syracuse to be here, leaving the kids with her dirtbag ex-husband, who you just know is going to say some dumb shit that traumatizes them while she’s gone or he’s going to show them a dead cat in the alley or some old wrestling videos or something, and when she gets back she’s going to get a call from the school because her kids won’t stop meat-hooking and pile-driving everybody.

  But anyway, the play. So the lights go down and the fancy play-bellhop comes to the front of the audience to make an announcement. And the announcement is basically: “Hey! Dummies! Turn off your cell phones! You’re at a play!” But then also maybe there’s a part about how this theater company has more plays coming up, and if you like plays, maybe you could buy tickets to see some more of them! And it’s just like Jesus, Play, maybe for one second you could stop trying to sell me on the Concept of Plays; if I want to see more theater I know how to do it, but anyway I don’t even really live here; I’m just trying to be a good older sister to my idiot play-writer brother—who, by the way, couldn’t even get me into this play for free. This is another true fact about plays, which is that on top of everything else, you have to pay for your own ticket, because I guess that’s what being supportive is. Because I guess if you’re not buying a ticket, who is? Mom and Dad? Yeah, right. As the fancy play-bellhop walks back up the aisle (stumbling over the weird bump in the carpet), you look around at your fellow audience members in this half-empty theater and you wonder if the only reason any play is ever successful at all is just on account of friends and family “being supportive.”

  So then the play starts and the first thing that happens is two ladies burst into the hotel room, one after another. These ladies are supposed to be sisters, probably, because when plays aren’t about hookers, ninety percent of the time they’re about sisters. But, of course, because it’s a play, these sisters look nothing alike. For starters, one of them’s like fifty and the other one’s like twenty, because apparently when you’re hiring people for plays, it’s impossible to find two women who are about the same age.

  The older one goes right for the minifridge and pulls out a bottle of white wine, even though since it’s a play, the white wine is actually water, if there’s even something in the bottle at all, which—spoiler alert for all plays—there probably isn’t. The younger lady kicks off her shoes and jumps onto the bed. And they start talking in that very fast, stutter-y I’m-a-character-in-a-play way that guys who write plays think is naturalistic, even though nobody actually talks that way except for people who just tried cocaine for the first time.

  “Okay, okay, but can we— Okay, but can we talk?” says the one on the bed.

  “Drink first, then talk.”

  “Virginia, can we talk, though? Can we talk, Virginia?”

  People are always saying each other’s names in plays. That’s like the number one thing that happens in plays, is people just wedging names into sentences.

  “You think I don’t want to talk, Maggie? I am well aware there are things about which we need to talk.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  “Am I drinking yet?”

  “But she is pretty. You have to give her that.”

  “Well, of course she’s pretty, Maggie. This is Dennis we’re talking about. You think he’s just going to date some old possum that fell off the back of a truck full of boots?”

  This gets a big laugh from the audience, and it’s like: Why? And I’ll tell you why. It’s because the standards for comedy in plays are very low. Like if you heard someone say that in a movie, you’d be like, “Where is the joke?” But I guess because this is a play and, damn it, it’s out there doing the best it can, we’re all just willing to meet it halfway and laugh at some of its words.

  Meanwhile, it is completely unclear how old the sisters are supposed to be, but if you had to guess you’d say they’re probably in their twenties, because apparently the older sister is supposed to be you, and the younger sister is supposed to be Shannon, and so it would be pretty weird if the younger character was any older than twenty-six, because that’s how old Shannon was when she died.

  As soon as you realize the sisters are supposed to be you and Shannon, the bottom of your heart falls out and everything inside your heart spills into the lower half of your body. At first, you think maybe the characters are just inspired by certain aspects of you and Shannon, but the more you watch, the more you realize, no, the older sister is you, cutting and callous and cruel, and the younger sister is Shannon, as Shannon as anyone has been since the real Shannon overdosed six years ago.

  And the “Dennis” the sisters are talking about is your little brother, Dusty, the play-writer, and the “pretty girl” is his ex-fiancée, Tiny, and this play is from when you all went to Niagara for your parents’ anniversary, which, by the way, Dusty did not tell you that’s what the play was about, but to be fair, he did send you a link to a website, and you did not click on the link, so maybe this one’s on you.

  Anyway, “Dennis” enters soon with his girlfriend, “Tracy,” and the whole rest of the play takes place in this one hotel room, because God forbid the theater uses some of the money it’s making off its “proud sponsors” (which is just like a real estate firm where one of the actors’ dads works) to pay for a second set.

  And the character based on you is loud and cynical and the character based on Shannon is sweet and goofy and full of energy. And the character based on Dusty is awkward and neurotic, much more awkward and neurotic than Dusty really is, but the character is neurotic in a cute way, which Dusty is not. Like, for example, it’s cute for someone to be tongue-tied around his own girlfriend because he’s thinking of proposing. It’s not cute for someone to write a play about his family and then not tell his family. It’s not cute to make his sister do the five-hour drive down to New York City and get a room at a hotel (because God knows she’s not sleeping on his filthy couch again) and buy a ticket to see his play and then, SURPRISE—and also, BY THE WAY, the character based on you is an alcoholic. And the character based on Shannon is addicted to pills, which you can tell by the way she keeps taking pills. Like as if it was obvious at the time, like as if any rational person could’ve seen it, could’ve said something—but of course it wasn’t obvious, because if it was obvious, you would have said something, would have done something. Of course you would have.

  And as you watch this weird mirror version of your family trip to Niagara and you hear people around you laughing at the “jokes” and disparagingly murmuring their judgy little murmurs, you begin to feel very, very naked and exposed. You feel like you’re a record store full of strangers; here they go, ambling up your aisles, riffling through your stacks. The Museum of You is now open for business, every piece of you hung up on a wall, laid bare on a table, harshly lit and awkwardly described. It’s like one of those dreams, is what it’s like. You know the kind of dreams I’m talking about? It’s like one of those.

  This is a feeling that happens sometimes when you go to see plays.

  So, anyway, after a full act of that, the lights come up and it’s intermission, so you get to take a quick break before another full act of that, and your brother turns to you and says, “What do you think so far?”

  And you say, “I’m still processing it,” which is a thing you can say about plays, which means “I don’t like it.”

  And Dusty says, “Yeah, I know it’s a lot to process.”

  And you say, “I gotta go pee.”

  You go out to the lobby, and there’s a line for the ladies’ room about a thousand miles long, and it’s like, how is this possible when there is literally almost zero people attending this play? And of course there’s no line for the men’s room, and you would think this is a problem that plays could
have figured out by now, considering this always happens at plays. You decide to just use the men’s room, and if anyone gives you a hard time about it, you can just tell them the play-writer is your brother. If anyone gives you a hard time you can say, “You know the drunk sister? In the play? That’s me.”

  Nobody gives you a hard time.

  After the bathroom, you decide you want a glass of wine and some peanut M&M’s, but the line is long at the bar too, and for a moment you consider cutting to the front and making a big scene—because what are they going to do, kick you out?—but you don’t want to embarrass Dusty like that (even though he clearly has no qualms about embarrassing you), so instead you go outside and call your dirtbag ex-husband.

  “How are the kids?” you say.

  “Kids are great—Cody, put down that blowtorch!”

  You’d roll your eyes if you still had any eye rolls left for this guy—if your five years of marriage hadn’t left your eyes completely depleted of rolls.

  “You’re hilarious, but I’d better get them back with all their fingers.”

  “Sure, sure. And if you’re lucky, maybe I’ll even throw in a couple extra fingers, just because I like you.”

  “You’re not letting them drink soda, are you?”

  Because of course your natural response to affection is criticism. Of course it is. Isn’t that so like your character, after all? Isn’t that what “Virginia” would do?

  You can hear your ex-husband tense up over the phone. There’s a pause just long enough for an implied “Not this again,” and then he says, “How’s the play?”

  Because of course his natural response to criticism is to change the subject.

  “It’s about us,” you say. “The whole thing’s about us.”

  “What, us? You and me?”