It's gotta be the shoes

I should have known it would be coming.  I mean, for a few weeks now, my car had been doing odd things, like doors locking when they shouldn't and alarms not going off when they should.  So, when I went out to my car and the key bipper didn't work, I just chalked it up to more of the same.  And then, when I tried to start it and nothing happened, well.  I have to admit I wasn't surprised at all.

Here's the thing:  I live in the city.  I know my neighbors only a very little.  The guy across the hall from me is never home unless he's having a gigantic party. Upstairs is Cathy, who is just lovely but works all the time.  And then there's Frank, the rock star.  Frank fronts for a band that you've heard on the radio.  When I moved in and saw the name of his band on his mailbox, I thought, good god.  I'm never going to be able to talk to this guy.

But Frank's nice.  And in the end, he's the only one who was home.  I told him what was going on and asked him for a jumpstart.  But here's the other thing about the city: not everybody owns a car.

"But I have an idea," Frank said.  "What if we put your car in neutral, push it, and then see if we can start it that way?"

Really?  I said.  That works?

"Sure," said Frank.  He seemed really excited by the possibility of pushing my car.  I couldn't understand it.  I guess all men, even rock stars, get excited over fixing cars.  "Just let me put on some shoes."

We went downstairs and chatted for a while about his recent show at Ravinia and his new album and the weather and when we got to my car, we realized that we couldn't push it forward because the car in front was too close.  I have to park on the street, you see.  If you ever need an expert parallel parker, I'm your girl.

But Frank wasn't deterred.  "Here's what we'll do," he said.  "Put it in neutral, we'll push it backward, and then we'll push it forward and you try to start it."

Are you serious?  I said.  I was laughing like a madman at this point.  Yes, my car was dead, but come on.  How many people have rockstars offering to push their car?

So I got in the car and put the key in the ignition.  However, when I tried to put the car in gear, I couldn't move the gear shift at all.  My car is relatively new, see, and all this fancy antitheft stuff kicks in just when you want it least.

I got out of the car and Frank and I just kind of stood there, looking at it.  "Maybe you have jumper cables?" he said.  "If you had cables, maybe we could flag somebody down."

I popped the trunk and we both went to study the contents.  My winter coat, which isn't really all that handy in July.  My tap shoes.  The oscillating fan for my classroom.  My schoolbag and laptop.  A cute pair of strappy sandals.  Frank seemed kind of bemused by the contents.  "Maybe in the wheel well?"  I lifted the wheel well.  In there was, well, a wheel.  And the missing piece from my clarinet.  God knows how it got there.

I shut the trunk.  You know, I said to him.  I have to say that you're the best.  You don't even really know me and still you were willing to push my car. 

He laughed and said he was out of ideas.  It was time for a tow.

Yeah, I said.  But you're still the best.

Frank went back upstairs and I looked at my car for a minute before calling Marcus.  Marcus, you see, was the person I was supposed to be meeting.  Um, I said.  I've got a little problem.

Marcus, however, always was on top of things.  He had jumper cables in his trunk, he was on Lake Shore Drive, and he could be there in fifteen minutes.

Great, I said.  I'll wait.

So I just kind of leaned against my car and waited.  A woman came down the street and yelled that she loved my shoes.  I love my shoes, too.  I can't afford the fancy ones, but they're always cute.  Thanks, I yelled back.  A minute or two later, a man drove by and yelled hello hot mama.  I ignored him.  In the time that I was waiting for Marcus, four or five more men drove by and yelled or honked.  Seriously?  I thought.  I was only standing out there for about fifteen minutes.  And here's the thing: I like to dress like a girl.  You don't usually find me knocking around town in jeans and a t-shirt.  You'll find me in a skirt and some cute shoes.  Nothing overtly sexy, but.  I look like a girl.  I consoled myself that at least nobody drove up and asked how much.

Perhaps it was the shoes.

Marcus finally appeared and he did, indeed, have jumper cables.  We popped our hoods and studied the contents.  It had been a long time since I'd done this, and I only half-remembered how.  And also, I'd never done it with my car.  Marcus suggested the owner's manual and we studied the pictures.  Seemed easy enough.  We tried to connect it.  The jumper cables weren't long enough.

Now, you have two choices in this kind of situation. You can either get angry and upset or you can succomb to hilarity.  I chose hilarity.  Marcus was a little less amused.  He closed his trunk, pulled his car closer to mine, and tried again.

We hooked everything up, he started his car, and my car alarm immediately started going off.  Of course, I thought.  I'd used my key to get in because the power was out.  The key worked now, however, and I was able to shut the alarm off. However, when I tried to get into the car, I couldn't.  Marcus's car was too close.  And the passenger door?  Locked.  The keys?  In the ignition.

I can't make this stuff up.  Again, hilarity ensued.  At least you can tell people this story, I told Marcus.  

"Right," he said.  He seemed less convinced.

Marcus had to get back in his car again, move it enough so I could get in, climb across and unlock the passenger door, and move it again so the cables would reach.  Finally, everything was ready. He started his car.  I climbed into the passenger seat of my car and maneuvered into the driver's seat.  You never realize how long your legs are until you have to tuck them in and around a small space.  But I did it.  I've got skills.  I had to kick off my shoes in order to pretzel myself up enough, though.

The dashboard lit up.  Excellent sign, I thought.  However, when I tried to turn the key, nothing happened.  I looked at the console and an alarm indicator showed that the anti-theft system had kicked in.

The good news is that now I know it's incredibly difficult to steal my car.  The bad news is there was no way I was going to get my car started without help.

We got out of our cars and studied them again together.  "I think you have to call for a tow," said Marcus.  It was the second time that evening that a man had told me that, and I wasn't having any of it.

No, I said.  We're going to lock it, get in your car, and go to dinner as planned. I'll take care of the problem in the morning.

I mean, seriously.  No rush.  The car was definitely not going anywhere.  

I got home after midnight and looked through my papers.  My warranty it seemed covered everything because I only had 28,000 miles on it.  I made a phone call.  Honda said that I would need the dealer to fix the problem, so I would have to wait until morning anyway.

I woke up early, made the necessary phone calls, called in sick to work, and went outside to wait for the tow truck.

Things were a little different this morning, however.  There were cars parked in all the empty spots from the night before and people milling around in front of the building across the street.  I looked closer and realized that many of those people had bullet-proof vests on.  Cops.  They had the door to the building open and stood around it, unworried.

A couple of teenage hooligans walked by and shouted, "What did he do?"

Murder, a cop replied, and laughed.  I couldn't tell if he was laughing because he was screwing with us, or if he just really liked pulling a murder case.  I seriously hoped it was not the latter option.

I went back in the house and called my brother Brian, the cop.  Brian works in a different district than I do, but if he's working, chances are he knows the basic details of a murder.  He wasn't working, though, and knew nothing about it.  He had the morning off.

I went back outside and waited for the truck again.  It took much longer than the estimated hour.  It always takes much longer.  This is Chicago.  It can take you an hour to go two miles if traffic hits you the wrong way.

The tow truck finally arrived and I went to meet him.  The driver was this grizzled old man who seemed totally unconcerned that he was blocking an entire lane of traffic.  I explained my issue.  He nodded.  "You don't need the dealership," he said.  "I can fix your problem."

You can?

He nodded.  "First I need to jump you again."  He pulled the truck around and connected the cables.  Of course he got it right the first time.  Then he asked me for my key.  He was going to code the car again, he said.  

Just then a cop walked by and I asked her what was going on.  "We're just checking some things out," she said cryptically.

Now, when I was a child, there was this show called the Bozo show that I watched almost every day.  I was even on the Bozo show once.  I'm sure one of my siblings still has the videotape.  Anyway, on the Bozo show, there was this character called Wizzo the Wizard.  He would cast spells on things with his Magical Stone of Zanzibar by raising the stone above said object and saying the magic words, to wit: "Doo dee doodeedoodeedoodoodoo!"

The tow truck driver was doing a remarkable impression of Wizzo.  He walked around my car, touching my key to certain points around the vehicle and waving it like ... like the Magical Stone of Zanzibar.  All of a sudden, the alarm started going sounding.  He got back in the driver's seat, turned the key, and the car started.  I'm telling you.  It was magic.  I've never seen anything like it.

How did you do that? I asked.

"I was just recoding the car by touching the key to the sensors," he said.  "You know you've done it right when the alarm goes off."

Good to know.

He said I should immediately drive my car to the dealership and make them fix everything that seemed even a little wrong as long as I was still under warranty.

I stopped at Brian & Viv's house first.  Here's the thing: I'm not an idiot.  However, certain men seem to think I'm an idiot, simply because they're wearing a mechanic's uniform and I'm not.  They will suggest things that I don't need and I don't know enough about cars to know that I don't need them.  Turns out I didn't need the support.  Bri stood next to me, but I knew when to say yes and no and when to insist that they look at something again.  

While they were looking at my car, we went shopping.  I bought new shoes.

I also asked Brian about the cops.  "Was there an ambulance?" he asked.

Nope.

"Then he was lying.  If there's a body, no matter how long they're dead, we have to call an ambulance.  Cops aren't allowed to pronounce anybody dead."

Really?

"Really.  Even if we find someone in an advanced state of decomposition, we're not allowed to pronounce somebody dead.  I once responded to a call where a guy had his brains blown out and we still had to call the ambulance."

That was a relief.  So why were they there, do you think?

Bri thought about it for a minute.  "Well.  Maybe there was a body."

You just told me you thought there wasn't.

"There could be, though, especially if they've been dead for a while.  Sometimes the ambulances will drag their feet if they're really busy.  They don't like to deal with dead bodies."

You think?

"The key is crime scene tape.  Was there any?"

Nope.

"Good.  Then it's not a body.  Maybe it's just a suspect who's already disappeared and they're executing a warrant."

That didn't exactly reassure me, either.

They weren't able to fix my car that day, but it was running enough for me to take it home that night.  When I got home, I looked across the street: no crime scene tape.  Okay.  No body.  A suspect, maybe.  In what?  This still bothers me more than a little.  You never can know who your neighbors are.  Not all of them are handsome, kind rock stars.

And even though it took two days, the boys in the service department got my car doing what it was supposed to do.  I guess there were things that never worked right in my car in the first place, even though it was brand new when I bought it.  A nice man Earl took care of me and didn't at all treat me like a girl.

Go figure.  It's gotta be the shoes.

Pee-Nice

I think I must have a freak magnet stapled to my forehead.

So not too long ago, I'm at the bar with the teachers. We'd been out a while, having a good time. Two of us had already gone home, and we had two empty seats. Two empty seats at a table full of women at a bar populated with about a billion men? They didn't stay empty long. Some guy sat down next to me and started talking.

He and his friend ordered beer and wings almost immediately. Clearly, they meant to stay awhile.

So okay. A man sits down next to me, and I'm going to talk to him, especially if I've had a beer or three. This is what I do. I talk to men. Most of them I hate after about five minutes, but still. You've got to try them on a while before you decide. I can't hate everybody, can I? Well, yes.

So this one worked for AT&T and he wanted to see my phone. Then he wanted to know what I do. He has one of the typical reactions to my job ("Oh, what do you do with all those bad kids? Punish them?"), and I'm bored already. But he'd ordered wings, and I was stuck. So I answered his questions. This happens to me a lot. I get cornered by somebody and I get stuck answering questions.

My friends in Brooklyn had a theory about this. "It's because you're from the midwest," they'd say. "A real New Yorker would have told that guy to fuck himself long ago." It's funny -- anything a New Yorker doesn't understand about the conservativism of rest of the country they blame on the midwest. Susan used to tell me that my real problem is I let people make eye contact. Once they make eye contact, they've got an in.

She's probably right.

Ivonne leans over and says she can get rid of these guys for me if I want. But it won't be pleasant. I sort of cringed. One must always be polite, mustn't one? I said I'd deal with it.

Telephone guy tapped me on the elbow. "I've got something to show you," he said. Then he flipped open his cell phone and told me to look at the picture. The picture? A penis. Erect.

Yeah. That was my reaction, too. I mean, what did the guy expect? That I would see the penis picture and say "take me, I'm yours"? I mean, seriously.

I wondered if he ran around showing off his dick to unsuspecting women all the time. We were in the middle of a bar, so of course he couldn't drop his pants. I suppose he chose the next best thing.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened to me.

Once I was walking down the street on my way to the train. This was a few years ago -- I was still living in Brooklyn. So I'm walking in my morning cloud (I'm impossible before nine o'clock in the morning. It's a wonder I can even function) and a man steps out from between two cars and shakes his dick at me.

At first, I didn't even notice. That's how much of a morning person I am not. And to be honest, there wasn't much to notice. When I did see what he was waving at me, I said, "Oh, for chrissakes," and kept walking. When I got to school that day, I told the story. Everyone said they'd have handled it differently. I should have pointed and laughed. I should have taken out my cell phone and called the cops. I should have, I should have, I should have...

It's because I was from the midwest, they said. They really couldn't blame me all that much. He probably sensed I was from the midwest and that's why he waved his dick at me.

But really: does anybody know what to do when that happens? I'm just so bemused by the unreality of the thing that reason escapes me.

Another incident: I was in Paris and I was on a rush hour train with my friend Kari. It was packed, and so when I felt a certain body part rubbing against my rear, I just shifted away. Then it happened again. The train car was packed. Whoever it was, wasn't going to move away without help. I stuck a sharp elbow in him.

We were on our way to the airport, and I had a heavy suitcase with me. The car began to empty out. We were one stop away from Charles de Gaulle when the lone remaining man in the car reached into his pants and pulled out his penis.

Kari and I looked at each other. "Put that away!" we said. In English. He was French. We tried to get out of the car, but when the train is in motion the doors don't open. We were stuck with penis guy. He started rubbing himself.

A minute or two later, the train pulled to a stop: Charles de Gaulle. Kari and I scrambled out and sped up the platform. He'd followed, and was standing there, staring. A few feet up, there was a gendarme. I hurried towards him, then stopped because I realized that I didn't know the French word for penis. Knowing me, I would have said something so convoluted that he'd have arrested me minutes before I was supposed to leave the country.

So I did the only thing I could do. I nodded to him. "Bonjour," I said, as if that was what I'd meant to do all along. And then I left the country.

By the way, the French word for penis? It's pénis. For your future reference.

Anyway, back to the bar. Deus ex machina. My cell phone lit up at that moment with a text from Matt. I grinned when I read it. I had no idea what it meant, but that didn't matter. He'd just given me an out.

"Who's that from?" telephone guy said. "Your boyfriend?"

Yes, I said, feeling absolutely zero guilt about my baldfaced lie. I then turned my back to him and started talking to the girls.

He tried to talk to me again. "Your boyfriend's a lucky man," he said.

But no. I was done being nice. "Listen," I finally said. "You just showed me a picture of your penis. That's just fucking weird."

I turned my back again and eventually he disappeared. I had no idea where he went, and I didn't care.

I don't know why these things happen to me. I really don't.

I've got madd skills, yo

"Yo, Miss," my Brooklyn students often said to me, "I've got madd skills." They always said this when they'd finally figured out something difficult, like subject/verb agreement or the art of using an apostrophe.

Yes, I'd say. You do.

I'm a city girl. I don't belong anywhere else. I've learned this about myself over the years, especially those years I spent in any place with a population under a million. When you grow up outside Chicago and cut your adult teeth in New York City, you stop being afraid of things. Bad things happen. You deal.

I wasn't always this way. As a young girl I had great fear. Common cruelty from other children was something I couldn't brush off. 

I remember one day -- it was the first day of school -- another girl came up to me and said she liked my shoes. I went to Catholic school and because we wore uniforms, the only real differentiator between us girls was our shoes. (And in the winter, our legwarmers.) I hadn't liked these shoes, but picked them because they were the only option available to me. That's why I was so surprised when Lorena said she liked them. Really? I asked her. "Yes," she said. "I used to have shoes exactly like that. But then my dad got a job."

Yeah. More than twenty years later, and I remember that like it was yesterday.  Hey, don't judge.  I told you I internalize things.

I don't remember what I did after that. I probably did what I always do in a situation where someone hurts me: I pretended that it didn't. But when I lay in bed that night, I thought of all kinds of alternate responses like, "Your dad has a job? I couldn't tell."  Or, "Even with a job, your dad couldn't have afforded these shoes."  Or, "Who paid for your haircut?  Your dad?  You should get his money back."  None of these came to me in the moment, of course.

I tell that story to my students all the time and they all want to know if I kicked her ass. Of course I didn't. I spent my entire childhood looking for approval from my peers, and when I didn't have it, I would work and work to convince whoever didn't like me to change their mind. And I'd win, because really, I was a winning kind of kid. Lorena and I eventually became friends. I'd go over to her house, she'd show me her Menudo magazines, and we'd sigh over them together.

Yeah.  I don't know what we were thinking.

It's still incredibly easy to hurt my feelings; I've just gotten much better at hiding it.   You have to have this ability as a teacher because kids will say the meanest stuff to you all. the. time. If you can't look them straight in the eye after they tell you that your platform shoes make you look like the sixth Spice Girl, the one named Teacher Spice, you won't survive more than two weeks in front of a classroom.  (Even I had to admit that one was funny.  But yeesh.  They were new shoes.  And platforms were very in at the time.  I swear.)

Okay, fine.  Yes.  Platforms are only a good idea if you're a Spice Girl.  Shut up.  

So I lived in Brooklyn for a bunch of years and cut my classroom teeth on Brooklyn teenagers and spent my nights out in Manhattan nightclubs and now I'm not afraid to talk to anybody.  

One of my great frustrations since moving back to Chicago is that most of my family and friends still live in the suburbs. It makes sense, I suppose, since that's where I grew up, but it makes me a little crazy how often I have to get in my car if I ever want to see anybody I love. A friend of mine refuses to come to my house at all because she's afraid she'll get jumped.  I want to tell her she's crazy, that the worst things that ever happened to me happened in the suburbs.

The reason I bring all of this up is because every so often, I convince a friend to make the trek into the city with me. Enter Laurie, who is recently divorced and every other weekend has some time on her hands. She wants to go out, she tells me. Good, I say. I'm all about going out.

So I take her to a bar on the north side, a hole-in-the-wall neighborhood joint in Wrigleyville (go Cubs!) called Trader Todd's where they sing bad karaoke every night of the week and it isn't long before she tells me she doesn't like it.  And it's not just because she's a White Sox fan.  I'm a little surprised because I'm feeling rather comfortable at this bar, but she says no.  None of these people are talking to us.

And I get it.  Remember, I really am the sensitive one.  This talking to strangers thing is hard. You have to be prepared for cruelty.  Because really, in a bar, guys can be jerks.  They're looking for someone who's not-you and it's tough not to internalize that rejection.  But here's the thing: we do it, too.  It's the game.  It's all a game, and you have to pretend it doesn't matter when you hear a guy complain to his friend about never getting to talk to the hot one.   On her first night out, neither of us wanted to run into the assholes, so I stop and think and put into words all that I know about the bar scene.  And let me tell you: I've got madd skills, yo.

Of course we'd been sitting at our table having a cozy chat.  So I tell her it's very simple: we simply have to act like we want to be spoken to.  We're not looking friendly.

She's been married for most of her adult life so navigating the bar scene is something new to her.  I take a look around the bar.  There are men here to meet people, I tell her, and there are men here to hang out with friends and/or girlfriends.  You have to be able to tell the difference so you don't even try to approach someone who's not interested.

I look around the bar and see a couple of likely fellows.  Two guys near the bar, both looking around.  There, I tell her.  They want to meet someone.  And indeed some girl walked up to the bar and they pounced immediately.  She shot them down.  I grinned.  

"Jesus," said Laurie.  "She weighs about fifty pounds.  Most of the women in here weigh nothing.  Don't they have regular-sized women on the North Side?"

I told her it didn't matter.  Men like all types, and the type they like the most is the type that smiles and acts interested in what they have to say.   They also especially like the type that will go home with them the same night, but I didn't say that.

The pair we had our eyes on tried the next girl who walked up.  She stopped for a second to chat.  We could try them, I suggested.  "No," Laurie said.  "They look like they're about twelve.  I prefer grown men."  She looked around.  "Like the bald guy over there."  The bald guy was clearly taken, though.  He was hanging on every word that the girl he was with said to him.

"They're just not friendly on the North Side," she insisted, but I wasn't going to accept that.  They're friendly everywhere.  They're men. 

So I told her we could leave and go somewhere else.  This wasn't really a pickup place.  It was a hang-with-your-friends place.  We stopped and talked to the bouncer on the way out, but she was right: he wasn't friendly.  But bald guy was outside smoking with his girl and so I walked up to them and told them my friend thought northsiders weren't friendly.  He proceeded to do his best to prove her wrong.  He and his friend invited us back inside, but we said no, we were going somewhere else.

If there's one thing I know, it's that if you want friendly, you go to a reggae club.  So we go to Wild Hare, the biggest reggae bar I've ever been to.  They've got live music most nights, too.  This night was no exception.  So we get inside, head back to the dance floor and within minutes this guy is trying to dance with me.  He's got a Spike Lee look going, but no: he's not cute.  And anyway, I wasn't out to meet men that night.  I just wanted to dance and have a good time.

Laurie goes to get another drink and when she comes back, she suggests going upstairs.  So we do, and while we're sitting and chatting, this man walks up to me.  I'm half a second from freezing him out when Laurie asks him, "Why are you talking to her and not to me?"

He looks surprised.  "Because you look married," he said.  She didn't look open to the approach, which was exactly what I'd been telling her.  Eye contact, smile, look away.  If they're interested, they'll come.  No need to get out of your seat.  He tries to get me to dance, but I send him away.

"So I have to smile?" she asks.  Yes, I tell her, and you have to do it near the guy you want to talk to.  Or, ask him a question and then walk away.  Men love to help.  If he's interested, he'll find you later.

She looked around.  "I like the bouncer," she said.  I told her to go and ask where the bathroom was.  Fifteen minutes go by before she returns.  She's grinning.  "He was really nice," she said.  And indeed, for the rest of the evening, said bouncer kept coming to check on her.  But the ice had been broken, and several men thought she was approachable.

I was so proud.  I felt like the nightclub pickup guru.  Buddha on the reggaetop.

But then at some point it was crunch time and everybody and their brother was looking for someone to take home and I had to turn into Xena Warrior Princess and send them on their way.  Baby steps.  I wasn't going to let her go to anybody else's home but hers.

We were walking back to my car and a man was standing in the doorway of a bar.  "You're hot," said Laurie (she was more than a little drunk at this point).

"Yeah?"  he said.  "I'd like to ..."

If you know what's good for you, I interrupted, you won't finish that sentence.  I used my teacher voice on him.  He looked me in the eye, saw that I meant it, and backed off. (My teacher stare is even more frightening than my teacher voice.)  I felt like I should be doing kung fu or something.  The streets of Wrigleyville when the bars are about to get out are no place for a drunk girl.  Thank god one of us was sober, because they were coming out of the woodwork and pouncing.  I don't know what they were thinking -- are they really able to just accost a girl on the street and get her to go home with them?  Not on my planet.

I got her to the car and got her home.  Skills, I thought.  Getting everybody home safely takes skills.

A few days later, I was proudly telling my trainer about this part of the night.  "You know what we call girls like you?" he said.  "Cockblockers."

Shut up, I said.  She wasn't going to go home with any of them anyway.

He laughed.  "And anyway, correct me if I'm wrong, but you were working with a beginner.  That doesn't make you an expert.  An expert can go to a bar without a cent in her pocket and walk out fifty dollars richer."

How does she do that?

"She walks up to a guy, smiles at him and talks to him for a while, and when she's got him hooked, offers to get a drink.  Then when he hands her the money, she brings back the drinks but not the change.  A few minutes later, she dumps him and moves on to the next guy.  That's an expert."

Yeah, I said.  Expert whore, maybe.  

"And what were you wearing that made all the guys come up to you?"

I didn't like his tone.  A shirt.  Jeans.  A jacket.  

"Uh-huh.  And how low-cut was that shirt?  Because let me tell you, guys like breasts."

Ha ha, I said.  I know.  I've got them.  But here's the thing: I kept my jacket on and zipped up all night.  They were approaching me because of my beautiful eyes.  

He snorted.

Which, if you think about it, makes me even more expert, because I wasn't dressed like a hoochie mama.

He looked doubtful.  He likes to do this with me, find the holes in my arguments and shoot them down.  I, on the other hand, refuse to lose, especially to him.

He shook his head.  "Nope," he said.  "Unless you walked out richer than you went in, you're no expert.  Better than average, maybe, but not an expert."

Right, I said.  Those are skills I don't need.  For now, I'm like Snapple: happy with #3.

Wisconsin: An Introduction

Some kvetchers have been complaining that I haven’t written anything lately. Well, it’s because I’ve been sad. And sick. And when that happens, I can’t write a word. Not one that anyone wants to read, anyway. I’m going to warn you right now: you may not want to read this. Especially those of you who think that my little notes are something of a trainwreck. This is the trainwreck extraordinaire, methinks. So. Fair warning.

I remember when I was in grad school, I took a class on nonfiction. I was really excited about the class: the whole thing was reading essay after essay and trying to write essays of our own. No research papers. Just nonfiction. I was so pleased. The first class, the professor read my essay out loud. The next class, we had to read an essay that excerpted the book Prozac Nation. I read the essay, and thought, yes. I can write about sadness and depression and drugs and the things they do to your brain.

So I poured my heart into this little essay. I told about Wisconsin and shopping at the Piggly Wiggly and how it made me want to drive my car into the nearest streetlamp. I told about depression and getting treatment and how drugs didn’t really help when the problem was you.

I wrote this thing, I turned it in, and I waited for him to choose me again. Except, this time, he didn’t read my essay. Instead he handed it back with a gigantic B emblazoned on the top with the comment, and I’ll never forget this, Depression just isn’t funny. Find something new to say or move on.

I wanted to kick him. I wanted to take my essay, rip it into 623 pieces, and sprinkle it over his receding hairline. If life were just like the movies, I would have done all of those things. Instead, I did none of these things. The next week, I wrote a new essay. This time it was about being a woman. I talked about my experience with inequality at a job I had with a manly man company and I tried to say something funny. He wanted funny. This time, again he gave me a B. His comment: Don’t get so emotional. It’s just not interesting.

It’s just not interesting.

Now, I wish I could tell you that this man pushed me hard through the rest of the semester to turn out something new and splendiferous, but I can’t tell you that. I wrote a few good essays, I wrote a few mediocre ones. By the end of the semester, his scathing commentary led me to despise him. He was a misogynist, I told myself. He hated depressed people. He hated people from Chicago. He hated me.

Of course he didn’t. He didn’t care about me one way or another. He probably never thought about me for more than the two minutes it took for him to skim over my essays. I was just another writer in a pile of writers who knew how to string a few words together in a readable way but not, unfortunately, in an enjoyable one. It’s taken me a couple of years to realize that I was sitting in a class taught by a curmudgeonly old man who was telling me precisely what any journal’s editor would tell me upon reading my essays. It doesn’t matter if I put my heart into it. It only matters if people want to read it.

And depression just isn’t funny. He’s right, the motherf*cker.

Okay. But. I’ve been in the depths of it. I remember one year when I was supposed to be in college but instead spent all my days sleeping until three o’clock. I failed all my classes but one. When the semester ended and summer started, I lay in wait for the mailman. For months, I hadn’t been able to get out of bed before three, but now I stalked the mailbox from noon until five. And I was victorious. I got my report card. My parents couldn’t understand why they hadn’t seen it. Oh, I said. I got it. I did fine.

I’d turned into a brilliant liar. Or maybe not so brilliant. They wanted to believe me.

Eventually, I dropped out of school and got a job. A few years went by before it hit me that badly again. By then, I’d moved to Wisconsin. Nobody could believe I’d done it. Wisconsin, land of the cheeseheads? Once, not long after I moved there, my friend Tim wrote me an email with the subject line: Cheeses of Nazareth. The message said only, what is this place, the promised land?

No.

But the subject line was funny, and for the next couple of years we kept it. We’d exchange emails two and three times a day and sometimes I couldn’t tell which Cheeses of Nazareth I was answering.

I can always tell when my mood is at its lowest when I start to make Macaroni and Cheese. I once told a roommate of mine in college that it was one of my favorite foods and she said, "You’re kidding. That’s white trash food."

I lived in Wisconsin, and I shopped at the Pig. I spent my days living for Tim’s emails (by this time I’d finally admitted to myself that wife or no wife, I loved him), plotting ways to leave Wisconsin, and finding no way of doing it. I went back to school. This time, I got straight A’s. The only trouble was, I wasn’t sleeping.

Finally I went to my doctor and told her my problem. After much questioning, she decided that before she would prescribe anything, I had to promise to visit a therapist. A therapist?

My therapist was perfect as far as I was concerned. He was an old gay man from California who wore Birkenstocks and had a ready box of tissue every time my stories about my mother got to be too much. His sad green couch and I got to be great friends that summer. He’d nod, tell me that I had to change my behaviors or I’d never emerge from this (he gave it a name: generalized anxiety disorder), and I thought, I can’t believe how needy he makes me.

Then one day, he called and cancelled an appointment. It was as if the new guy I was dating had cancelled a dinner.

A few days later, I got a letter. We regret to inform you, the head doctor in the therapy group, that your doctor is indeed the doctor who was written about in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s expose.

What? I thought. I didn’t live in Milwaukee. I lived in Racine. I hadn’t read the article. So I marched my ass over to the library, found the article in question, and discovered that my goofy gay therapist was in reality an ex-priest who’d been defrocked after pleading guilty to having sex with a minor.

I’m not kidding.

Needless to say, I didn’t go back to him again. Those months became synonymous with the blackest times of my life, so forever after that, whenever I wanted to say that something was truly terrible, I’d say to myself, "It’s like Wisconsin."

And the next time that my depression hit, I used that story as my excuse not to go to therapy. That time, I can trace it to an actual cause: you see, that was the year that Tim died.

I can count on only a few fingers the men who’ve been important in my life. Not even they can compare to Tim. And I never even dated Tim. Insane, right?

He and I started out as email pals. Back in the day when the internet was still something that only people who were in the know could access, I joined a JD Salinger listserv. All the people on it were literary types like me who loved Salinger. Not just The Catcher in the Rye, but his other stories like "The Laughing Man" or "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" or "For Esme, With Love and Squalor," otherwise known in my head as the perfect short story.

Sometimes I think Tim thought he was Holden Caulfield. He was quick to jump on the phonies and he was as New York as it got. How to describe him? If you’ve ever watched Sex and the City, he was very like Steve, Miranda’s boyfriend. It was uncanny, really. He was just like him. I couldn’t watch the show withouth thinking of him, a Brooklyn boy trying to fit into Manhattan and finding that it just didn’t work.

The first time I met him, I’d been corresponding with him for probably five years. We had lunch and I went off and spent the rest of the day with Rich. I always brought other men with me when I went to see Tim. It was because he was in love with his wife and I was in love with him and I didn’t want him to know.

The next time I saw him, I brought Chris along with me. Chris didn’t like him. "He’s kind of weird," Chris told me. That’s just his meds, I explained. They’re not working. Tim, you see, was the king of mental illness. My blackest depression was only dipping its toe in the pond of what Tim fought every day. I worried about him constantly. I wondered if someone would tell me if something ever happened to him.

So I made friends with his wife. By then I’d moved to the city, and was teaching and working so hard that I’d convinced myself that my feelings for him were receding. I could be his friend and her friend and maybe find a way to move on. She and I would meet for coffee and she would try to convince me that she wasn’t the bad guy, that she was just trying to deal with a man whose moods were impossible.

The last time I saw him was the week before I went to Japan. He came out to Brooklyn because he couldn’t stand Manhattan a minute longer, he said. We went to brunch at this little French place that I loved. Then we took the train up to Greenwood Cemetery and stopped by his mother’s grave. Someone had bought the spot right next to it. He touched it. "Damn," he said. "There’s no place here for me."

Then we walked through Prospect Park and he said that he couldn’t stand his life as it was, that his meds were impossible and the headaches were getting worse, that his relationship with his wife was at the point where it wasn’t going to get any better. He said he had three friends and I was one of them. He said that he wanted to leave but didn’t know how. Perhaps he would move to the country. You’re talking like Holden Caulfield, I told him. Do you want a quarter so you can call Jane? That’s not funny, he said. I’ll never find a girl who keeps all her kings in the back row.

And all I could think was, you never even saw me, did you?

Then I went away to Japan. While I was there, I wrote this travelogue that I emailed to my friends and my students. Tim wrote to me: this is beautiful. You should publish this. He also said something about how he’s been messing around with encrypting his email and every word I ever wrote to him was safe. He wanted me to know that.

I can’t remember if I wrote him back. Yes, I did, because the next time I checked my email, there was a response from him. Then, two lines later, there was another email, from another friend, with Tim’s name in the subject.

Somehow, I knew what that email would say. But I didn’t click on it. I clicked on Tim’s email first. So I could pretend. I read it and reread it. It didn’t say anything, really.

Then I opened the other email. The same night Tim wrote me that email, he came home, sat down at his kitchen table to eat some dinner, and died. His wife found him the next morning, but it was too late.

I was in Japan. I couldn’t go to anyone and say, "Excuse me, but there’s a funeral tomorrow that I need to go to." Instead, I went up to my room, cried, and pretended nothing had happened. I made it through the remainder of the trip in a daze (strangely, this was when the John Denver’s head incident happened), and I’m certain that not a single person knew that I was grieving.

When I got back to Brooklyn, I called his wife and explained why I hadn’t been at the funeral. "That’s okay," she said. "But I need you to do me a favor." She’d had Tim cremated, she said, and needed to buy a plot. She knew that his mother was buried somewhere in Brooklyn and wanted me to help her find the place.

I told her I’d meet her at Atlantic Avenue and we could go to Greenwood together. New Yorkers, of course, don’t drive, so taking the train was the only reasonable option. She got off the train toting a giant Barneys New York shopping bag. "What’s in the bag?" I asked.

She kind of shrugged. "I didn’t know what else to do with him."

Good god, I thought. She has Tim in a Barney’s bag.

I couldn’t stop staring at it as we got on the train. It didn’t take long to get up to Greenwood, and the people there knew exactly what to do. It didn’t matter that the plot next to his mother was taken, they said. They could move the mother and then they’d be together.

I helped her pick out his urn and the spot they’d move him to. She said I could come to the interrment if I liked but I said no. That’s for family. Then we left.

A few weeks later, I met her for a movie. She wanted to go out and eat sushi, so we went to this place in midtown where I’d seen Miranda from Sex and the City eating once. There, she told me that she was having trouble with Tim’s life insurance. The autopsy showed that he had too many pills in his system, and they were saying that maybe he’d taken his own life.

I told her no. Definitely not. Not him. Never.

And yet. But I didn’t voice my doubts. I didn’t tell her about how he’d encrypted my emails and how he’d written me a note the night he died telling me how important I’d been to him. I didn’t tell her how he told me he couldn’t live with the things his body was doing to him anymore and how terrible their relationship made him feel. I didn’t tell her that, if I were checking off a list of warning signs for suicide, he probably fit every one.

I didn’t tell her any of that.

Now, if this were a movie, the next scene would show me and her getting through our grieving together, but in reality I couldn’t stand to be around her. No matter how much I’d loved him, supporting her was just too much for me.

I was weak.

And also, if this were a movie, I’d have spent the next few years memorializing him or something. But that’s not what I did. Instead, I jumped into my slut phase, dating multiple men at the same time, sleeping with half of them, and drinking far, far too much.

Other things happened. My dad got sick, my cousin died, my grandfather died, and I decided to move back to Chicago. A big part of my reason for being in New York was gone, you see. And then Chicago was even worse. I had a terrible job at a terrible school and terrible living conditions. I gained forty pounds in those two years. Good god, right?

The cloud is almost lifting. Sylvia Plath described it as a bell-jar: everything you see you see through a haze. I’m seeing far more clearly now than I was a year ago. I am.

I’m sad still, but hey. I’m still standing, right?