“I have dreamed a dream, and now that dream has gone from me.”
— Nebuchadnezzar
My father was a lawyer who traveled to Tokyo several times a year on business, and he would always bring me back a t-shirt. The first one he bought in a Ginza district sports collectibles shop said, "Try your guts!" I wore it beneath my jersey in the baseball playoffs against Redwood; my father couldn't be there, he was in Washington, D.C. to talk about import tariffs. It was just as well. We got drilled, 15-2.
Two days later there was a beautifully wrapped package on my bed, a gift from my father. I opened it to find a t-shirt with the words:
I hate my life.
Every day I polish my revolver and shoot my head.
Like a rock star.
When my father died my mother waited a respectable time then married her high school sweetheart, Mr. Karl, who made a lot of money building retaining walls in Southern California, keeping houses from sliding into the sea, mountains from reclaiming the earth around the swimming pools and patios. Mr. Karl took my mother to visit Hadrian's Wall, Macchu Piccu, The Great Wall, "the only man-made object visible from outer space." The way Mr. Karl spoke made the cliché reassuring. A honeymoon of rock and lost empires, from the ruins a new fortress of love erecting itself. My mother was grateful for the security, as if Mr. Karl's business was a metaphor for her life, as if his syndicate of bulldozers and cement mixers could keep out the fear and the loneliness and the death. She was not a romantic, not like my father who hated his job and hated the arrogance of lawyers and constantly threatened to move to the country and raise dogs. My father wanted to breed mastiffs, giant friendly animals who slobbered a lot and, as my mother pointed out, "left droppings the size of a baby's arm." Better for the flowers, my father would reply. He wanted a simple home in the country surrounded by decrepit orchards and an old pick-up truck that rattled over rutted roads. An antidote, he said, to the airplanes and hotel rooms and taxicabs that dominated his life. Once after he was sick and time was short he told me not to let the bastards run my life. "Get a good dog and find a place to be yourself."
At his funeral were many people I didn't know, even four very formal Japanese men who bowed in front of my mother and laid exquisite wreaths of white blossoms on the casket. As I helped carry the coffin I remember wishing it would rain. But it was a hot day with one maybe two clouds stuck in the sky. I outsmarted the tears by pretending to be Camus in a suit of black wool. Nicotine and the endless sea. Underneath I wore a t-shirt that said: “Surf Hollywood. Wet happiness is my sea explosion.”
Two months later I asked a girl to marry me at the Marin County Fair, beneath the Zipper, a tong-shaped machine that spins victims upside down and sideways at sickening speeds. Her name was Hannah and we smoked a joint and drank grape soda from paper cups and there were screams from inside the Zipper cages. Suddenly I was high, higher than I ever felt before, and blurted out, "Hannah, will you marry me?" She said, "Why Max, that's the nicest thing a boy's ever said to me." Just as my heart leapt like summer into cool quarry waters, she continued, "I do declare, you're going to break this silly girl's heart with all your big talk." She reached over to tousle my hair. I realized she was joking. She thought I'd been joking too, and I laughed to cover it up.
Hannah, if you're out there somewhere, that was a real proposition. For three seconds I wanted to marry you, though I'm certain I didn't understand what I was saying. More I guess it was a feeling of happiness that I hadn't felt in a long time, and I was scared it would end too soon. Later I heard you went to Paris to study fabrics, and the last time I ever saw you was outside the Lark Theater. You were with your mother and your father and you said hi, and that you were late for the show, the movie was starting and you didn't introduce me to your parents — we were never that close, even though I asked you to marry me once, a carnival lights in summer when you're seventeen will do that to you. The funny thing was that I was on my way to the movie too, but as you and your parents went to buy tickets I walked around the corner and told myself the movie probably wasn’t any good anyway, and the silver fog crowning Mt. Tamalpais was dirty and thin and cold, a cheap camera trick for a sentimental story.
Later that night I made a list of all the things I wanted to accomplish in life: I wanted to be rich and famous and I wanted to be surrounded by people who laughed at my jokes. Pretty pedestrian, really. But after writing down a long black car and a beach cottage I wrote that I wanted my father back, only I knew that was impossible, that making fucking lists was for fucking assholes and for people who didn't collect stupid goddamn t-shirts from Japan.
Hannah, it did end too soon. Everything ends too soon. It's true that I wasn't in love with you. How could I be? I barely knew you. But once there was the candy-colored lights of the Ferris Wheel and the dizzy-making machines and the whole world rose up and made my heart a country fair and for three minutes anything was possible, especially you. But after asking you to marry me my dreams became elusive. Every night I’d put on a special t-shirt and say a prayer even though I'm not religious and swallow three NyQuil gel-caps with a glass of Sprite because it doesn't have caffeine and lie in bed and wait for the sleep to come. I don't remember if I had trouble peeing even then, but I do know I was careful to keep my hands and feet from dangling over the mattress so that the monsters that lived beneath couldn't bite me bloody. I was eighteen years old and afraid of the dark. Every night it happens all over again.
Try your guts! Try your guts!
BB
