On Bridges As We Speak

It was a Spring Evening—a long, long time ago— a time that, if I reach far enough into my body, deep into the places of my memory still immune to bitterness, I would call the happiest days of my life.

So on the happiest night of my life—a night within the happiest days of my life, is by extension the happiest night of my life, yeah?— I was wandering alone in an unfamiliar parking lot beside a rustic looking church.We had just attended a boychoir concert, which Taylor’s brother Connor was in. It was his last boychoir concert and he had been in it for about ten years, which was long enough to make it significant for him to leave it. And since he was leaving, what came after the concert was a long series of goodbyes to old friends we might never see again—except I was glad to never see them again. This part I loathed. The performance, you know, the reason I came, was excellent (much clapping), bravo, wonderful! But the rest I wanted nothing to do with.

Because these goodbyes were not just for Connor. No, Taylor knew them too, from the childhood friends to the ex-boyfriends to the ones who wished they could be ex-boyfriends— yeah, you know those ones. They just kept coming up to her, and every time I would fade into the background, pulling out my phone to check the time, as if I hadn’t just checked it ten times. I mean, it was time to say goodbye, time to GET GOING… And of course she saw these thoughts across my face as if I had written them there, so she turned to me and said “Just keep taking your phone out, that’ll help”.

So in what she called Regular Dylan Fashion I looked right at her, and just subtly enough so I could get away with it without being nasty, I turned my phone off out of spite, out of loathing for both my predictability and her comfortableness with the situation. Well, then I was embarrassed. Then I was defenseless. Then I was just this guy standing in the corner, with his hands sleeping in his pockets, looking everyone up and down and up again, and I couldn’t stand it if they ever looked back, because then I’d force a smile and feel fake, fake, fake. I needed a reason to be out of there. So under my breath so nobody but myself could hear, I mentioned I needed to throw something away.

And there it was, something to throw away! In my pocket, a tiny balled up piece of paper, possibly a receipt for a couple 12-packs of Coke from Rainbow, and I felt an overwhelming need to throw it away, as if it were the cause of my social awkwardness. But there was no garbage can. I looked everywhere, roaming around the church like a madman, and when I found none I went outside— my quest had gained momentum, I was now searching for a dumpster! That was how I ended up in the parking lot wandering alone, and I wandered until I found myself behind the church. It was one of them big churches with the giant stained glass windows, it's possible someone saw me throw my receipt into the dumpster—where I didn’t feel a bit different.

I never made it back to the church. They found me, weaving between cars in the parking lot: Taylor, Connor, and the trumpet kid Robert Reeve, who I despised neither secretly nor openly. They had no clue where I went, and couldn’t call me, because of course I had turned my phone off—it was time to be off, to celebrate! 

We held counsel in the parking lot, the four of us plus our respective mothers. Everyone was debating where to celebrate, and the longer we stood there, the bitterness I thought I had thrown away came creeping back to me. I couldn’t explain it if you asked me to, all I knew was that this was not where I wanted to be and when that happens, my eyes shoot fireworks and it doesn’t matter who I’m with or what I’ve got. I just turned to my mom and told her that “Maybe, maybe it would be best if you went home.” And when she asked why I was being so rude, I lied and told her that I “didn’t like her.”

“Clearly.” She believed me. It was at that moment I ran after her. I begged her to come along, and asked if I could ride with her to the place that had been decided: Café Latte. And on our way over there, driving down a dark street I wouldn’t recognize even in my dreams, she pointed out the window, into the blackness, and told me that that house, that tall one right there, was where my Father had lived for nine months after the divorce. Before he had moved to Oregon. And so it was. It looked like a haunted mansion, and it always did. Mom would drop us off there, and we’d follow Dad through the dark hall past a few occupied rooms—it only occurs to me now that he must not have been living alone – and up a tall, carpeted spiral staircase to an alcove in the attic. There were pictures of naked women covering the wall. And Dad used to climb out his window onto the roof, and he would take us up there with him whenever Mom came to pick us up. I think he did that to hurt her.

I was thinking about all this even when we found our table at Café Latte, a real dive place with great stairs leading up to a balcony overlooking the rest of the café, and sitting there with the three of them I couldn’t help feel that something was dreadfully wrong. I felt like this was too good of a place for me to be sitting in, and as this feeling washed over me I ordered a chai tea from the smiling waitress, and pretended to be enjoying my perfectly enjoyable company, but by the time the chai tea came I felt even worse, which isn’t supposed to happen during the best days of your life, and what was worse, I couldn’t understand WHY and so I started drinking my chai tea. But with my nose stuck down the glass touching the rim of that hot gingerbread beverage, I started crying, crying straight into my chai tea, and I was so embarrassed that I couldn't look up so I just kept drinking my tea with my face in the cup. And I couldn’t SEE anything, my glasses had been so fogged up by the warmth of the drink! And I may have been crying for ten seconds or for ten minutes, but someone seemed to notice — Taylor of course —and asked me if I was ALL RIGHT, and of COURSE I was all right, what could be wrong! But I kept crying anyways, and we left the table and walked outside that dive place out onto the dive sidewalk, where people were smoking and making calls and where I was breaking down, and it wasn’t until she asked “What’s wrong?” that I knew what was wrong.

“I’m just an awful son. My father is gone and you know I rarely talk to him, yet here I am alienating my mother for no apparent reason and if I keep this up someday I’ll have no parents.”

And this made sense to me. When you’re down to one from two, you’re only one away from zero. And I did not like the sound of zero.

Then she told me that I was wrong, that I was a wonderful son for caring so much, which sounded okay to me, and I realized that she would always, always be right. So with tears still streaming down my face we hugged outside of Café Latte, and I couldn’t help but feel like a real casino-city bum—because all the homeless in Las Vegas are wearing their finest clothes, after coming to the city with everything and ending up with nothing, nothing, nothing! So they beg for quarters just so they can gamble and drink a little bit more, it’s the riches to rags story of America and I was a part of it, standing in my fancy clothes but with nothing in my pockets but lint!

I’ve only been to Las Vegas twice. The first was on a grand road trip that my mother, brother and I took across the country coming home from California: My whole back was a dark red, peeling and bubbling from the Californian sunburn I had picked up, and I couldn’t think of much else as we walked along the strip.

But the second—I wasn’t 21, but I sure as hell wasn’t six years old, I was THIRTEEN BABY! I was ready to hit the entertainment capital of the world, we were staying in the Monte Carlo on the thirteenth floor, which was a good sign of course that things were going to be crazy, so we ate McDonalds three times a day and floated down the lazy river without a tube, because in Las Vegas you don’t NEED a tube to be lazy, baby!

And so for the mystical three days that we were there, that’s how it would happen. We (my brother and I plus our childhood friend Will Braun, who our friendship with was largely found on our mother’s friendship and our shared interest in video games) would wake up, have breakfast at the McDonalds in the food court, play hard in the currents for hours, until we were hungry. Then we would get some fries and a shake and head back up to our room and play the game of the day which was X-Men Legends II, cool off in the water for a few hours, then eat McDonalds before we headed out for the strip at night. We swore off McDonalds for a few months when we got home.

These days were so relaxing, in fact, and care-free that at times I had completely forgotten why we had even came. Then, “Oh, yes. Mom’s getting married.”

It was an indoor ceremony made to look like it was outside. We were in the shopping district of the Venetian hotel, which had a canal running through it that you could take gondola rides on, and the ceiling was painted and illuminated to resemble a perfect blue sky with perfect white clouds spaced evenly from each other. Gelato stands. Accordion playing some song I don’t recognize while my mother walks down the aisle. I believe my mother went to Italy when I was just a little boy and this was her way of getting married there without ACTUALLY having to go there.

She is a resourceful woman, my mother. Strong too, to raise two boys. Something I never realized while growing up. My mother’s like money. You never understand where it comes from, or how much you’re going to need it one day, until day by day, you start to get it. Even still, I was very proud of how my mother raised me—though this might have more to do with arrogance than pride. I would tell my friends that I’m going to raise my children exactly how she raised me, in the hopes that they would turn out like me. I guess that means I planned to raise them by myself; this was the basic plan. Then she found a guy. And that guy stayed and it became very surprising to me that she ever actually needed another man after my father.

They got married on a bridge arching over the narrow canal, with sixty or so friends and family members watching who had dropped the money to take a vacation in Vegas. And attend the wedding of course. But also take a vacation in Vegas. And on this bridge just a couple feet away from where Miss Andrea Thomas was about to become Mrs Andrea Rockwood, my brother and I were standing shoulder to shoulder waiting for the part of the ceremony where we were needed. We couldn’t hear very much, between the noise of shopping on either side of us along with the fact that my stepdad is a very quiet man, but then we heard our names. We stepped forward as the priest-man held out two silver rings for us to wear. We put the rings on ourselves, as instructed— and on our ring fingers. This was an awfully confusing concept for me, even now, but especially as a thirteen year old. These rings were supposed to mean we were a family— that we were all in this together, etc. But the ring never did much to give this feeling, instead it just sort of got in the way. You know, kids would ask why I had a ring on my ring finger, and I got tired of explaining this family unity thing because they knew as well as I did that it was a load of bullshit, so I just started telling people that I was engaged to a girl named Abby. The ring even got stuck too, after a while, so that we had to go down to the jeweler’s and get it cut off with a saw. There I saw my family unity ring resting on the glass counter in two distinct halves, and I thought “How appropriate.”

So the wedding ended and the vacation came to a sudden close and the rest of my childhood was written out in ink. I gave up trying to figure out whether or not Mom and Derrick actually loved each other: It was none of my business. Derrick built my room. This is the one thing my father never gave me, and that was my very own room. The room where I now hide from everyone and everything, the room where the rest of the world does not exist except for me and my music, because Derrick installed surround sound. And it could be eight o’clock or it could be four in the morning and it would not matter, my lamps burn steady as always in here, and I can write until dawn or pace maniacally as much as I want! And this is exactly what I’ve done for years now.

I was in this very room when just a couple of weeks ago I had gotten a call from someone who I will always answer. Miss Rebecca Hurd was calling me, and before I had even picked up the phone I knew exactly what it was about. There are approximately two things in this world that I am good at: Writing, and rewriting. I’m certainly not the absolute best but I know my way around a sentence and all the stupid rules that govern our strange and wonderful language, so when Rebecca gives me a call I can usually be pretty sure what it’s about. I thought “Ah. She must be writing a college paper.”

And right I was. She just needed help with something, and while I could have easily done it in my room, I knew that was boring and there was a good chance I would have ended up playing Bloodline Champions for hours, unable to stop thinking about how I should be helping my friend because I had nothing better to do. So I grabbed the keys and drove down that familiar 35W, beloved 35W, to her house and set up shop to begin shaping up that Carnegie Mellon supplemental she was working on. And it’s uncertain whose fault exactly this is, but something that should take thirty minutes or an hour always seems to end up taking upwards of FIVE hours with Rebecca. It could be me, since on a Sunday I’ve no doubt spent all weekend holed up, and being somewhere that wasn’t so familiar to me always filled me with a sense of nervous exhilaration; I was like a spider thrown from the web, left to dangle on whatever webs I could conjure in the moment. But it could have just as easily been her fault, since when Rebecca laughs the whole world seems to laugh, and "fuck trying to figure out how to rephrase this sentence, I have an amazing story to tell," and so on it goes until the sun fades altogether from the sun porch and I have possibly overstayed my welcome.

But then Rebecca’s mother came in. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“Absolutely I would, if it’s not too much trouble.”

There would be no real dinner at home. I would have instead had a can of coke and two bags, no more or less, of buttery popcorn. So after a little bit more of tongue chewing over “What do you want to say?” and “What do they want to hear?”, it was dinner time,

And DINNER TIME IT WAS! You should have seen it, there was FOOD on the table! Rebecca was choking on the overpowering smell of yams! And there were four plates, each a different color: green,yellow, red and blue (forgive me, Rebecca, if that’s wrong)! And there were four forks and four knives and four napkins, too, and in fact it looked so perfect I was unsure if I was even supposed to be there, if I was supposed to be in some corner or another! And the food, there was barbecued chicken, and asparagus, and sweet potatoes that looked like miniature footballs! Green is my favorite color so I sat down at that one, and it was just Rebecca, her parents, and myself. Her mother asked if I wanted a big sweet potato, I said “No, thank you” because I hadn’t eaten them all that much, and there she went and dropped the biggest one right on my plate. But why would I complain, I was hungrier than I ever thought I was, so I didn’t leave the table until I had eaten absolutely everything on my plate.

And we talked about all sorts of things, which was an odd experience because talking at my house was most usually reserved for arguing over something trivial, like my brother going for track instead of lacrosse. And it wasn’t important talk, not talk that’ll change the world, but it was talk and that even more than the food made me happy inside. Eventually I was asked how many siblings I had. I could have said two, but the technical answer at that point was three, though the third was about a month old and still living inside my mother. I decided to tell them, and a flurry of excitement kicked up:

“Oh, how exciting!”

“Yeah, it’s pretty exciting news.”

And Rebecca pouts a little to herself, nothing serious, “I want a baby.”

“Are you absolutely thrilled about it?”

“Well, it won’t affect me all that much, I’ll have moved a couple months after she’s born.”

I have the feeling that the baby will be another girl. But of course I was excited, and I let them know this so they didn’t think I was completely detached from the whole ordeal.

“Well, Rebecca and I were just talking about this the other day, but when this baby is 18, I’ll be 36.”

And that is as every bit incredible as it is frightening. 36. My mother is 36. I’m not supposed to tell a woman’s age but what I’m saying is that when I am THAT age I will have children of my own, possibly children that are as old as I am right now. And we were discussing these very ideas at the dinner table on Sunday night: how if my mother had waited just a couple of years to have this baby, and if I had gotten married when my father did and had a baby that incredibly fast, my mother’s grandchild would be older than her child! How amazing would that be? So I said I’d get right on that.

And her mother, jumping in on the joke, "Well, Rebecca wants a baby, you should just step up and have hers!”

Just keep eating sweet potatoes. Just keep eating sweet potatoes. Don’t look at her dad. Let the moment pass. This was one of my first family dinners, the kind that truly felt like a family was eating here; two parents that loved another, a daughter who laughed like her mother. I sat at the table and ate every last bite of my wonderful meal.

Dinner with my father has been no less interesting.

My father lives on the side of a mountain outside of a small town in Southern Oregon, across a field where llamas graze on the yellow grass every morning. He moved out there nine months after they divorced and I was young, though I never remember how old I was. And whenever I go out there, he ends up having to work most of the day cleaning gymnasiums and bowling alleys, so I lie around the house all day watching movies from his extensive DVD collection, wondering WHEN WILL DAD GET HOME?

And one night, I waited an extra long time for him to come back home. I had watched Jackass, Jackass 2, and even Jackass 2.5 wondering when he would pull into the driveway and walk through the door. It was just me and his seven cats, who prowled the house, not as if they owned it but because they owned it. And around eleven o’clock at night, just when I was thinking of curling up on the couch like my feline friends, headlights shone through the kitchen window and out came Dad, in full stride, who immediately went to the grill and fired it up. “We’re having steaks, son!”

Behind him was an old man with white hair I had never seen before. He was obviously very drunk, and my father had taken him back with him because he couldn’t drive. Kim, my father’s girlfriend slash wife slash business partner, pulled up with them too. So while Dad cooked those steaks outside, Kim and I stood in the kitchen stifling giggles at the man who looked like Einstein, nodding off in his seat, completely oblivious to where he was. “Who brought me here?” He would ask.

“Jesus.”

We fucked with Einstein for a good while until dad brought the steaks in. So standing in the kitchen just thirty minutes before midnight, I had my steak and potatoes while everyone had a roaring time; music was blasting in the living room, and I was getting a kick out of ol’ Einstein. I hadn’t even realized that Dad was drunk. It wasn’t the drunk I remembered. It wasn’t the drunk that threw things through my window thinking it was my mother’s. He was silent the whole time. When his meal was consumed, he fell asleep at the table. I, like everything else that my father did, would be soon to follow.

Just a few days after, we were getting ready to drive up North to pick up my brother. You see, Mom doesn’t trust my brother to transfer planes like I had to in order to fly directly into Medford, so he typically had to fly into either San Francisco or Seattle to get to the West Coast, and this summer it happened to be Seattle, my absolute favorite city in the world, though I wouldn’t know it yet.

So in Regular Dad Fashion, we left the house just before midnight, armed with a dozen CDs and a cooler full of Cokes and spine-rattling energy drinks alike. And we hit that road going north in the dark Oregon night, driving past Portland around 2 in the morning, and man does Portland look astounding after midnight, with the water reflecting the soft city lights off it so very gently. And it was our plan that THAT night we were going to make it into Washington, into Washington and then into a hotel. We had a map of course, which had all kinds of little dots and stars and every state had a few medium-sized dots, which we took to meaning decently sized towns that would have a hotel that we could get a few hours of sleep at. So just an hour or so into Washington there was one of these dots called Longview, and that was the destination of the night.

Longview felt like the dark future that you often see in post-apocalyptic science-fiction movies. Driving down what was presumably main street, there were factories looming over either side of us. Factory on the left, factory on the right, smoke billowing out of giant tubes! It was damn spooky all right, like we had just walked right into Mordor (One doesn’t just walk into Mordor but they sure as hell can drive!). And we just kept asking, “Where the hell are all the people?” and the first signs came, the Wal-Mart and the McDonalds and RadioShack and Rainbow, just a full stretch of corporate chains to get all your living needs from, and just after that, a suburban valley full of houses that all looked the same. So that’s where the people are. The whole medium-sized dot town was like a Russian doll, the kind that you keep opening and finding something else inside. But no matter how many damn dolls we opened, there was no hotel. People lived there to work there and to shop there. No need for anybody else in Longview.

So we carried on westward. Seattle was North, but we had a special mission to loop around and visit Kurt Cobain’s hometown before picking up my brother. This was something I was overwhelmingly excited about, mind you. But at the time it was just five am and we were tired, most especially my father who had driven the whole damn night, crazy man, and on a winding backroad headed for the ocean there was not a single hotel. We couldn’t even downgrade to motel. There were none of those either.

We had nearly arrived at the ocean. Disgusted with ourselves and the morning, we decided that heading South towards another medium-sized dot was the best course of action. There’s a dot in the very north-western tip of Oregon, literally right on the ocean, and though it seemed stupid that we were headed in the direction that we had came from, there was something romantic about returning to Oregon just for the night. So we drove.

And there it was. A giant bridge connected Washington and Oregon leading into Astoria, oh shining Astoria, complete with hotels and ocean sounds. And just as were crossing it, the sun began to overtake the ocean horizon, and I smiled wide like I never thought I could smile, I smiled like I meant it! So there we were; behind us was the state of Washington, and to our right was the vast, forgiving ocean, and in front of us was beautiful Astoria, perched on the rock like a Northwest Minas Tirith. I wanted to tell my dad how incredible this moment was, how the greatest moments of our lives didn’t necessarily have to be the happiest ones, and I wanted to say all of this and more. I turned to him and opened my mouth to speak.

And all I got was his answering machine.