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With the help of friends and a step stool, he climbed atop the casket in
his bare feet and somehow, this rail-thin boy danced in a way more graceful than people thought possible, laughing and crying at the same time.
(Beth said no and then I had the four-hundred-mile walk back, my friends laughing. Fortunately, these memories don’t stay with you longer than seventy or eighty years.)
Anyway. I did that for a while. But then I kind of wanted to commit suicide.” “Banking. Who wouldn’t?” “No. I literally wanted to commit suicide.” “Oh.” “I mean, I didn’t have a plan or anything. I was just … run down.”
She shrugged. “I went to a place out in the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts. It was more like a spa, but with mildly crazy people.”
“You take a lot of words to say very little.”
Life went on, whether we wished it to or not.
“In my limited experience, I think we tend to flee pain. It’s natural. Physical pain. Too hot, too cold. We fix it. Mental pain. Same thing. We … drink, take drugs, obsess about sex, about food. Trust me, as a half man. I’ve tried all of it. A smart person once told me to sit with it. To stay in the pain.”
“Why would someone want to do that?” I asked. “Because it’s the only way to make it go away.”
In summer it acts as a kind of Hamptons to the rest of us,
“I don’t think of you as a bro, Tuan.” “I’m most definitely not a brah. A sis, maybe. A Ms. or Madame on my best days. Apparently he’s someone’s son. Some CEO friend of a board member.
In the workplace. Rack. She had a nice rack. Bootylicious. He says these words out loud.”
“I don’t have words for how unraveled your life has become.”
It’s going to feel briefly like you’re being electrocuted. It doesn’t really feel like water.” “But then it gets better?” “No. It gets worse.” “But you adjust at some point?”
“No. You simply go numb, starting in the extremities, arms, legs, restricted movement, and then you drown.” “Fun.”
feels like a good metaphor for life
The Norwegians do it, and they’re healthy and happy. Although come to think of it the suicide rate is pretty high in Norway.
Titan makes a seventeen-hundred-dollar casket called the Going Home. Imagine that job, naming caskets.”
“Some do SoulCycle. They use the word soul. That’s what passes for soul today. Rich white women listening to some asshole who thinks she’s Gandhi while they play Diplo and yell bullshit clichés. You go, girl!”
“Wakes, funerals … They make me feel alive, remind me.” “Of what?” “That this is it.”
“I love this. It’s a pitch for a movie. The obituary writer who was afraid to die.” “I’m not afraid to die.” “Of course you are. Everyone is. Maybe you’re afraid to live too? There’s the movie-poster line. Learning about dying taught him how to live.”
knew my father for my entire life but I can’t say I knew him well.
wow i felt this way about my mother
If it had been up to him, I think he would have spent his days wandering the house and yard, doing odd jobs, repairs, paint touch-ups, reading, making sandwiches, napping, going to the hardware store despite not needing anything at the hardware store. But that did not pay well.
I can see it so clearly, this nothing moment, this core memory. Why? Why remember that when I’ve forgotten so much of my life?
Much later it would dawn on me that he was less of a father and more a man I happened to share a house with.
How is it we never escape family?
that’s terrible advice
We sat for a while, sipping our beer, talking about not much, finding an ancient connection, brothers again, relying
on each other, if only briefly, just as our parents had hoped for a long time ago.
Give me a drunken, middle-aged writer over a millennial any day.”
“What are yours, Bud?” “I don’t think I have any. Maybe he/him/who?”
The bottles are on the credenza over there and I don’t want to assume able-bodiedness, so I will walk over and get you one.” Howard’s head dropped forward, a small death. “You saw him walk in,” Howard mumbled. “Obviously he’s able- bodied.” “I find your tone hostile, Howard,” Buckley said.
i fucking love this
She held up her hand as if she had been badly scalded and said that my attempt to mansplain in the context of my white, cisgender privilege was repugnant to her and that she frankly wasn’t sure that even an immediate apology would erase the trauma my words had caused but that if I wrote an essay asking for forgiveness for my tone-deafness to the LGBTQ community as well as people of color, minorities, and the non-able-bodied, that might be a start.
Beth, after a quick turn to Buckley, a look that said I will harm you, said, “Buckley. For the love of …”
The new ‘Helen’ is a bot that doesn’t bake brownies or talk to you about her grandkids or bring the card around every time it’s someone’s birthday.
No brownies. Guess what? Brownies are bad for you. You want a birthday card? Call your mother. What’s my point?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m a little confused. I’m not dead. Or I am and heaven really sucks.”
wtg america
Buckley, looking at Howard wide-eyed, said, “Your language is violent, Howard.” “Sorry. I should have said ‘epically fucking stupid.’”
Buckley butted back in. “But we are very hopeful that you will be found to be alive.”
“Try out being dead. You seem cut out for it. To be honest, at this point, I’d love to be dead to the system.”
managed to book a trip to the Mayan Riviera. I slept late, swam, read two books. We get better. We heal.
“Where do you see yourself in the hierarchy of humanity?” Tuan asked. “I don’t understand the question,” I said. “As a cisgender white male, I mean. Where do you stand, do you think?”
“But let me start at the top of the social food chain. Lesbians. I see lesbian couples as up here.” He held his long, thin arm straight up. I noticed that the nails of his slim fingers were painted turquoise with small black hearts. “Women are life-givers. They don’t start wars, commit murder. Lesbian couples are almost perfect. Their Achilles heel, of course, is an almost laughable attempt at fashion.
worse, the soul-crushing blandness of, say, greater Westport, Connecticut.”
“How incredibly weird. Like Harold and Maude. If memory serves, Maude took her own life at the end of the film.” “Let’s hope I’m Harold.”
The man in the half penguin outfit stood, grabbed his large penguin head off a chair, and shuffled out. “That could be you in six months,” Tuan said.
“It means you’re super-healthy emotionally.”
“And please don’t mistake this as affection or friendship.” He stared at me, the hint of a smile, then turned and walked away. Which was just as well, as my eyes were tingling and I was finding it difficult to talk.
“You’re just not very good.” He blinked ten times. I blinked ten times back. He grinned.
But I talk to her all the time, so it’s okay.” He stood and put his pen in the spiral metal coil at the top of the reporter’s notebook. “You do?” He nodded. “Oh yeah. She’s always with me. I tell her about everything. She knows about you and Tim. She likes you guys.”
kids man
