28. Stoned Or Not Stoned On The Fauntleroy Express
The Year of Paying Attention
I am a doomed fighter pilot, smoke filling the cockpit as I fall through the sky. Actually, I’m driving over the little red bridge that connects Roosevelt Island to Long Island City in Queens, “check engine” light flashing, the car losing power. I watch in speechless horror as the engine falters and stalls out at the traffic light. Oh god oh god. I restart the engine — “check engine” is still lit up. Then — the warning light blinks off.
An automotive miracle! Has my eight-year-old Subaru Forrester healed itself? I’ll just pretend nothing happened! Head for the Queensborough Bridge, and — the engine stalls out again. I’m hurled into an emotional abyss. I’m a wreck. From the side of the road I call the friend waiting, in vain, for me to help transport boxes from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side. Rather than receive her sympathy, I get the distinct impression that she doesn’t believe me. I apologize, hang up, and wrack my brain for the location of the repair shop where I got a brake job last year. Somehow the car starts up, and I sputter and lurch to a familiar corner, to see the repair shop is closed. Forever. It looks like it’s been closed since the day after my brake job. There’s a sign taped to the metal anti-theft shutters warning me there’s rat poison inside. I think about breaking in to eat it.
One part of my brain is genuinely perplexed by my level of my panic — what’s wrong with you, man? I try to modulate my breathing while searching on my phone for a trustworthy mechanic. People seem to love this guy named Laz. My phone takes over, and takes me to his shop. Laz is behind the clean counter. I explain myself. Tenderly, he takes my car keys. He promises to call. I walk, dazed, into the sun, and call Sarah.
“Cars break down,” she reminds me. “It’s going to cost a thousand dollars, and then it’ll be fine for awhile,” she says. Yes, right, of course. I thank her, and find a place to buy a coffee and a bagel. I walk home, doing my Spanish lesson on the way. I practice saying, “the automatic teller machine has eaten my bank card!” And, “My son is going to Stanford University, which is very expensive. Is there an automatic teller machine nearby?” By the time I get home, I’ve made peace with the inevitable. I’m ready to shell out a thousand clams, ready to trust Laz, already writing my own uptempo online review (“He was calm, reassuring, and I don’t feel bilked, not by a long shot!”).
On the phone, Laz says he doesn’t know what’s wrong with the car. “You may have to bring it back to the Subaru dealership — we were able to retrieve a code from the computer, but we don’t know what it might mean.” I tell Laz I loathe the Subaru dealership. “I know, they’re terrible,” he says with compassion. Then he says that maybe it was just a glitch. Maybe I should drive it around locally for the weekend. “Do some shopping in Queens,” he says, and see if maybe the car was just having a little indigestion. “I noticed you’re overdue for an oil change,” Laz mentions. By all means, change the oil, I say. That will cost less than a thousand dollars.
***
I would trade a year’s worth of car trouble to erase the disastrous lunch I had with Lizzie. My daughter sounded upset on the phone, just back from a vacation trip with her boyfriend. I silently vowed to remain calm no matter what, and heeding my mechanic’s suggestion, I drove my ailing auto to a restaurant in Brooklyn. She arrived. We conversed. She complained. I failed to console. We took umbrage with one another, and my vow went right out the window. Moments later Lizzie was storming out of the eatery, tears flowing, carrying a paper bag with our two lunches now packed “to go.”
When she’s stressed out or angry, Lizzie is not open to suggestions, and becomes quickly enraged. Did I mention we’re a lot alike? So now there’ll be no contact. Am I a terrible father? She confirmed that on her way out the door — I’m unkind, selfish, lacking empathy and compassion. Maybe she’s right. Her unhappiness makes me miserable. Her self-pity enrages me. Her inability to cope with her emotions frightens me. I feel like a worm on a hook, with nothing to do but hold my breath and give it time.
It’s a familiar dynamic from my own childhood. I recall my older sister, so unhappy, tormenting her father and mother, and torturing me. The uncontrolled emotion, the yelling, everyone being dragged by the drama across the burning deck. It feels like a curse, the unhappiness swirling with anger and frustration and despair. It’s the dark opposite of Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion dancing down the road, off to see the Wizard. Lizzie and I are yelling and crying, lurching down the unhappy family road.
I went to bed and woke up thinking, poor Lizzie. When I die in a plane crash in a few days, on my way to the West Coast, she’ll be so sorry we quarreled, but now her father is dead and gone. The sky is blue and nearly cloudless. The pigeons are shitting on the railing of our terrace, despite every defense I’ve mounted. We’re flying west for Sarah’s twin brother’s nuptials, yes indeed another marriage ceremony, but at least we’re leaving my sickly car and angry daughter behind, for a few days anyway.
***
“Let’s go to Washington on our way to the wedding!” Sarah had burbled when her brother Dana invited her to perform the betrothal ceremony in a grove up the road from the Hollywood sign. Sarah has been working on a Visit All Fifty States plan for a long time. She was four states shy of completing the project, so why not? Now there’s just three states to go!
There’s a special kind of batty in Seattle. My last visit was long before legal storefront pot retailers started competing with liquor stores for customers. In under 24 hours we’d had serious pizza at Serious Pizza, hiked to the summit of Capital Hill for Ellen Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream, wandered like the tourists we are through Pike’s Market, and taken a ferry to Bainbridge Island.
We also scoped out the Cinerama Theater where, with any luck, tomorrow’s weather will be crummy enough to justify seeing Wonder Woman, either in 2D or 3D, but definitely not in 4D, despite the puffs of wind, spritzes of water, and a $25 ticket price. Oh, for the enhanced 1981 movie experience of John Waters’s Polyester, filmed in Odorama, the uninflated price of admission including a scratch-n-sniff card with ten scene-specific smells, including flatulence and dirty shoes. Wonder Woman in 4D, my ass.
We’re renting somebody’s apartment as is the modern traveller’s thing, no concierge or room service for us, thank you, and it’s fine, despite the shower curtain rod that’s keeps falling into the tub. Our neighborhood is called Belltown, our digs a block from the urban park where the drug addicts relax, socialize and conduct business. It’s fine. The apartment’s tiny terrace hovers a few stories above a bus stop, where I observed commuters firing up a colorful Glass Spoon Pipe, as they’re called in the pot shop window, as they wait, glassy-eyed, for the Fauntleroy Express. It’s fine.
I’ve been playing the “Stoned or Not Stoned?” game with every pedestrian we pass. Had I not quit pot-smoking a couple of decades ago, I’d surely be nibbling edibles and heading back to Serious Pizza. Over coffee, Sarah and I squinted in the bright morning light into Biscuit Bitch across the street, where a woman was bustling about getting ready to open. We talked about dukkha, a Buddhist term meaning stress, or suffering, or dissatisfaction — scholars say the word isn’t easily translated into English, but I think I can grasp the concept, since I experience it daily.
For example, my inner critic tells me, “ this visit to Seattle — this is not the stuff of a meaningful, productive life, Tim. This is just farting around having a good time, not really caring about those who suffer, not making a contribution.”
We’ve been shopping, buying unnecessary clothes. There’s nothing to feel guilty about. I’m on vacation, even though I don’t have a job. I worked diligently and saved my money and remained lucky, and if I want to eat a pot-less brownie and buy a sports coat I can’t justify other than it’s Helmut Lang and instead of $679 costs $100, and when I tried it on Sarah made the “you look good” face, goddammit, why shouldn’t I?
Ah, dukkha. Situated in Seattle, fresh off the ferry, gentle clouds of pot smoke wafting up from the bus stop, you are my Catholic-guilt-like friend. Liberation and deep inner happiness cannot be found inside a gunmetal-grey summer-weight German designer blazer, but one must experience it, again and again, to finally, perhaps, learn the lesson.
Next week: Have You Tried The Ho’Oponopono Prayer?
