Attempting Normal (19 page)

“You’re going to have to face the fire.”

As if my life was at stake and there was a good chance in the next minute this guy would stab me and take my money and no one would help me. It would take a long time for the cops to come; a nice man would put his jacket under my head while screaming for someone to call an ambulance.

“Call an ambulance! This man is bleeding!”

It would take the ambulance ten minutes. So I was looking at fifteen to twenty minutes with a knife wound, bleeding on the street, before anything was done. The chances of my survival—depending on where I got cut—were low. All of that was going
through my mind while I was walking by this guy. That is what I loaded the cartridge of my head up with.

I looked into his eyes and he looked into mine. Nothing happened.

I think he saw that I knew he was about to stab me and take my money and that I would have trouble getting an ambulance, and he chose not to do it. I’d like to believe that. I also knew from the look in his eyes that he was desperate for something and that he’d been awake for a really long time. It was scary.

Then I realized that he was standing right next to an ATM and there was a woman using the ATM. There weren’t that many people on the street. Despite the fact that what I was thinking might have been fantasy I did linger there a little bit just past the ATM and looked back at him to make sure that he knew there was a witness to whatever he was thinking about doing in that moment when that woman was getting her money.

On some level that makes me a good person. When the woman finished, the dangerous man stepped up to the machine and put his card in … hold on a second …

Hello, kids. Hello, kids. Hi! Who’s hungry? Who’s hungry? Come on, gather around. It’s nice to see you all again. Hello
.

I’m helping people.

  15  

A while back I was going through the stuff that had been left at my house when I bought it. There were two hummingbird feeders in a box of other crap. They were the glass-bottle type with the fake red flowers at the bottom. I decided to clean them up and get them outside. I had nothing better to do. Okay, that’s a lie. I had plenty to do. As a self-employed creative type it is remarkable how many activities I will engage in other than being creative and self-employed: cleaning, scouring, organizing, emailing, tweeting, anything. That day it was refurbishing a couple of hummingbird feeders. I was going to feed the fucking hummingbirds. That was the plan. That was the attitude I had. There was spite in my spirit, not against them, but I needed them to appreciate what I was doing. That was the gratification I was looking for.

When I was sitting there putting together these hummingbird feeders I found myself saying, “They better come. I’m doing this for them. I don’t even know if they are out there, but these little fast-flying fuckers better come and slurp this shit up that I’m putting
out there for them.” I had a lot of expectations and felt like some part of my self was on the line. That’s how insecure I am. The thought of being rejected by hummingbirds was too much for my sensitive artistic ego to deal with given that I was spending all this time putting together these feeders. All this time being about a half hour.

I did some research. Hummingbird feed is just tap water and sugar, a quarter cup of sugar to a cup of water. You have to use tap water for the minerals. You create the mixture and fill up the feeders. The red liquid stuff they sell at pet stores is just a racket.

So I built the feeders, mixed the feed, filled them up, and put them out. Sure enough, the little fast-flying fuckers came. They are fascinating. I’ve actually sat and watched hummingbirds for more than an hour. While working—in my mind—on other more creative things, of course.

Once you spend enough time with hummingbirds you start to see they are vicious little bastards. They are nasty little fuckers. I had no idea. They are unique in the way they move in the air, hover, and flit around. Their wings go so fast they seem to be floating and at first you think it’s so precious. They are pristine and gorgeous, with that whirring sound
zzzzzzz
. But let me tell you something: They’re vicious bastards.

I have feeders hung near the back and the front doors of my home. About a hundred feet down the hill at the back of my house is a large tree. The birds perch in the tree, three or four of them in different parts of it. When they’re hungry, they fly from the tree and dive-bomb into the feeders. When one is at the feeder and another comes up they’ll start dogfighting. There are hummingbird wars. No one talks about the hummingbird wars. Well, I’m going to talk about it. There is a problem in the hummingbird world. These birds are beating the shit out of each other. They are dogfighting and dive-bombing each other. It’s like watching a very small and adorable version of
Top Gun
.

They aren’t really threatened by people, either. A hummingbird stood me down. I walked out into my backyard and he was whizzing and stopping at the feeder. I walked right up to him and he hovered in front of me at eye level, stared right into my face like
Do you have a problem? Maybe you should go
. I had to step back. I didn’t know if he was going to poke my eyes out and suck out my ocular jelly. Who the hell knew with these animals? Vicious little bastards.

It kind of makes me respect them. They have a veneer that says “Look at me how precious and cute and small I am. I’m just a perfect little being,” while underneath they are really “Get the fuck out of the way, I’m doing this.” We developed an understanding: I was their customer. I got to watch them from time to time, but I had to pay up with feed or they’d pluck me blind.

Long after I put the feeders out and the birds and I had settled into our territories and respective roles, I was sitting at my dining room table plinking away on the keys, doing the business. I was probably justifying to myself that social networking is work, even three hours of social networking. And that’s when I heard that sound, the resonating percussive
donk
of a bird hitting the window.

I knew it would happen eventually with those birds out front all the time dive-bombing and dogfighting. When I went out to look, sure enough, sitting on the ground on the front patio was a hummingbird. I knew he was hurt but he was just sitting on the ground looking around. It didn’t look like his neck was broken, but he was just sitting there. When you see a bird just sitting there, not flying, not walking, you think: That bird’s fucked. It’s going to die. What do I do?

My first thought was to put him in a shoe box and bring him to the vet like when I found a dead bird when I was seven, but I would have to have my mom drive me and she lives in Florida. That never panned out even then. It was just my parents’ way of teaching me about death before I knew any humans who died.

I knew not to touch it. I had heard if you touch a bird they’re screwed because apparently they are rejected by the rest of the bird community and then they die alienated in some sort of bird shame Siberia. These hummingbirds seem like violent loners anyway, but I was still worried. What if I touched it and it did fly away—would it ever be able to get laid again? I was so confused. I stopped myself from looking for some kind of hummingbird hotline to call for help. I didn’t want to get involved with the bird equivalent of cat ladies.

Sadly, my next thought was to let my cat LaFonda out and give this bird the ending it deserved. It seemed logical. I’m not abdicating my responsibility to this little creature; I’m just working as nature’s middleman here. I’m going to let LaFonda go out there and take care of this bird. If I were an animal I would want that, to go out like animals go out, fighting for my life.

But this bird was handicapped and what does that make me? A heartless bastard. Let’s just let the predator, LaFonda, the vicious little bitch that she is, go out there and start ripping this thing to shreds. She would probably keep it alive to play with it for two hours, prolonging its suffering as long as possible. Something inside of me said that’s not right.

I have a hard time with dying animals. I get attached to animals. But after a certain point you have to be able to let them go and do the right thing. People who grew up on farms know this.

Years ago I worked in a coffee shop in Harvard Square called the Coffee Connection. It was a pre-Starbucks fancy coffee shop. They were very snobby about their coffee selection there, beans from all over the world. They only served you coffee if you sat down in the restaurant. They’d serve them in French presses and every coffee had special instructions for brewing. It was all very high-end and annoying.

Of course, I worked there with a bunch of artists, or, more accurately, people who spent all their time not doing their art. This wasn’t yet the time of the hipsters; these were just your regular college town young people working in a coffee shop—a lot of big dreams, a lot of big talk, a lot of philosophies and ideas. A lot of people who were pretending that they knew about life but I could tell they didn’t. At least I’d been to Los Angeles, so I already had one experience of being chewed up and spat out by life.

I had a chip on my shoulder. I was that guy. I was the barista who was already bitter at twenty-two.
I used to live in Los Angeles. I used to hang out with Kinison
. Now I was the guy angrily frothing milk, pulling espresso, and washing dishes. I used to open the place and I remember one morning getting there a little late and the whole staff was behind the counter. There was the gay guy—I’m not defining him by his sexuality, but he was demonstrably effeminate. There was Peter, and his girlfriend. Peter was a painter and she was a painter’s girlfriend. There was the odd chef with too much hair who always wore sunglasses. I remember they were all standing in a circle behind the counter when I walked in and asked them what was going on.

They were all huddled together looking at a mouse stuck on a sticky trap. It was splayed out, immobilized and twitching. They were all standing around looking at it saying, “It’s so sad. What do we do? What do we do?”

I don’t know where this came from or what happened to me but I just stepped in and stomped on the mouse with my foot. I smashed it. Then I picked it up and threw it away.

All of them were like “What the fuck? Why would you …?”

That’s what needed to be done. And they never looked at me the same. I was like Colonel Kurtz of the Coffee Connection. I had
done something willful and morally dubious. I had made an example. I had transgressed. I was the killer of mice. But killing that mouse was ultimately an ethical solution. What are the options at that point? Throw it in the garbage and prolong its suffering? I try to find ethical solutions to dealing with the tiny little lives infesting our own, but it’s not always possible. I remember having a conversation with my buddy Jim back in the day. He grew up in Montana or somewhere. At the time, I had this mouse problem in my Queens apartment and wasn’t sure what to do about it. Jim said, “What’s wrong with you? They’re vermin. They’re like bugs. You kill them.”

I said, “No, they’re not. They’re rodents. They are more fun than bugs. Much more expressive. Bugs are disgusting.”

Jim was right, but not for the reason he thought he was. I had slowly come to realize that I had to kill this mouse because it fucked with me and insulted my intelligence. That’s where I draw a line with these things.

The mouse seemed to be hanging out in this one bowl that had a rag in it. It looked like it was sleeping in there when I was asleep, like the bowl was its own little bed, the rag its blanket. Sure, it would shit around the house a bit, but fuck it. I used to like seeing it scurry across the floor. It was my friend. I didn’t name him, but he was hanging out. I felt like I could live with it. We were cohabitating. There was no reason I had to kill the mouse.

Then one morning, I woke up. I went to the fridge, to the freezer to get the coffee out, and saw mouse shit on top of the refrigerator.
How the fuck did a mouse shit on top of the refrigerator?
I swear to God, folks, I sat there and I could not figure out how that mouse had gotten to the top of the refrigerator to shit. It was almost like he was shitting at me. Like, we’re friends but I’m going to push the envelope a little bit.