I Totally Meant to Do That (25 page)

Well, if it wanted me, it got me, coldcocked me on the loo. And just so you know, my … 
curiosity
 … regarding the … 
potentiality
 … of a hex, and my belief in the scientific definitions of human biology need not be mutually exclusive. Who’s to say Snow White didn’t also have low blood sugar?

Obviously, I only believe because I want to. My dad was right: Superstition is attractive. It’s easy and comforting to live in a world in which the rules are already set. I know this because I’m a New Yorker.

Everything has been decided in this city. No fundamental conundrums remain. There are no paths to be cut; they’re all laid out already, flattened and gilted in concrete. Life here is a cinch. Stay on the sidewalk, stop when you see an orange hand, the pigeons don’t bite. That’s basically it. Every New York guidebook is too long by however many pages it is minus one.

Sure, a New Yorker’s life is full of tiny problem-solving opportunities. Should I pick up Thai, Indian, Ethiopian, Peruvian, Polish, or Afghani? To get home I can either take a subway, bus, cable tram, train, ferry, taxi, water taxi, bicycle taxi, or helicopter.

But those only mask the fact that all of the major decisions have already been made. What will I eat? I can either figure out how
to kill that bear or invent agriculture. How will I get to my yurt, especially if I have to drag this bear?

In New York, I don’t need to follow the sun to find my way—which is good considering I can’t see it—because I memorized that rule about traffic flowing north on even-numbered avenues and south on the odds. How is that any different from not needing to prepare for disaster because you know how to knock on wood?

It was easier for me to believe I’d been cursed than to accept the cold, hard-bathroom-tile fact that my lifestyle was slowly destroying me. “You’re burning the candle at both ends,” my mother would say (thanks, Edna St. Vincent Millay).

It’s just that there is so much to do and I want to do it all. If there are that many cuisines available for takeout, imagine the number of events: rock concerts, comedy benefits, book launches, TV wrap parties, art openings, restaurant openings, theater openings, even the opening of my mail is a fete if you add champagne. And of course, there is
always
an after party. You know how you can count rings in a tree trunk to determine its age? If you looked at a slice of my brain in a microscope, you’d be able to tell which weeks were spent outside of New York.

It wasn’t my fault, you see. New York was tempting me. It expected me to participate, always, the way a gregarious person’s friends expect her to always be “on.” The city lures its inhabitants, seduces us; it’s an evil hypnotist, a nefarious prankster, a … uh-oh, this sounds familiar. I’ve mistakenly followed this logic before. New York is
not
a cartoon assassin. It’s not out to get me, and it doesn’t care if I go to its parties. Actually, it’d probably prefer I don’t; my absence could be filled by two, maybe three, models.

I mean, without doubt, the city
is
killing me. But it’s because I’m running into the knife. I’m so quick to blame New York, but it’s never New York’s fault. Waking up on the bathroom floor felt
like being thrown out of a game of Double Dutch I didn’t know I was playing. I stood outside the switching ropes and perceived with incredulity how swiftly they revolved. Had I been moving that fast for that long? I find I am reluctant to hop back in.

I’ve slowed down. I stay home some nights. I drink water and sports drinks and have cut back substantially on sugar and alcohol. And, although half of my muscles are clenched in so doing, I sleep at least nine hours a night. I’m following the medical advice, the truth, the facts—I mean, obviously. It’s not like I’d rely on a wooden knock or lack of ladders. I put no stake in superstition. That doesn’t mean, however, that I’ve discounted the supernatural powers of the metaphor.

And so, whenever I’m riding the subway, waiting in line, or anytime I don’t need to see with precision, I take off my glasses. That way, even if only for a few minutes, the whirring, glowing UFO that is New York City smudges hazily into a more manageable landscape, an impressionist version of itself. The effect is like Xanax for the senses.

Also, I still revere the topaz, but not because it’s magic. I just think it’s beautiful. The question is the stone itself and whether or not it means something is not for the stone to tell.

through the iTunes folder on my laptop. I was making drinks; he’d been tasked with music. A pause followed his dude exclamation while, I deduce in retrospect, he continued to scroll. Then he said “Whoa” again and made that sound that resembles a cough at the start, but ends with a tiny derisive laugh, before adding, “You have a lot of James Taylor albums.”

Seriously? A guest in my home was mocking my music collection? Through lips he later planned to put against mine?! This couldn’t be happening. I put down the half-sliced lime.

“You don’t like James Taylor?” I asked from the kitchen.

“Um,
no
,” he responded as if the answer were obvious, as if I’d asked him, “You don’t eat poop?”

My incredulity no longer stemmed from his brazen disregard for my hospitality. He was laughing at five-time Grammy-award-winning, Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Famer James Taylor. I was being called to crusade against ignorance. I walked into the living room.

“Are you actually familiar with his albums?” I asked, standing over him with the knife still in my hand. “Have you heard anything besides the greatest hits?”

“Well, uh, no.”

“Then consider the possibility that you are wrong.” I walked back into the kitchen, poured the tequila, and shot back over my shoulder, “By the way, I don’t have ‘a lot of James Taylor albums’; I have them all.”

That was a lie. I haven’t bought one since
New Moon Shine
in 1991—the lyric before “Never die young” in his 1988 hit by the same name is “Never grow old”—but I was beyond playing fair.

Don’t hate on James Taylor. Just don’t. My mind raced with what I wanted to say: He is the Prometheus of molasses white-boy blues; you play drums behind some guy who went to Brown. His 1970 album,
Sweet Baby James
, helped define and cement a new wave of singer-songwriters; your band sounds like three others I heard this week. James Taylor’s lyrics are heartfelt and unashamed; your glasses are ironically too big for your face.

My knife split the lime with a thud.

Oh man, I was mad. It surprised even myself. As a Southerner in New York, I am accustomed to enduring slights against all manner of my homeland’s characters and characteristics. Please, I was used to it before I hit puberty. In jokes on TV, film, and in cartoons, Southerners, whether real like Jesse Helms or imagined like Gomer Pyle, are frequently cast as the butt.

It doesn’t faze me anymore. Call me inbred, racist, stupid, flighty, fake, Bible-thumping, backward, or red and I will not bat an
eyelash. I’ll probably play along: “What? God bless you, chile, but you’ll have to speak up—I got the KKK in one ear and my cousin’s tongue in the other.” But take a crack at the man who recorded “Carolina in My Mind” and apparently my insides turn to lava.

“Awesome, you’ve got the Muffs,” he exclaimed and clicked play on the first track of
Happy Birthday to Me
.

Typical
, I thought and delivered his margarita.

After dinner we hit the neighborhood bar scene. I lived in Greenpoint at the time, a traditionally Polish area on the Brooklyn waterfront to which artists, and the hipsters who inevitably follow them, were flocking. The latter two groups acted like warring colonies in the New World; the cool and the trying-to-be-cool were engrossed in a battle for Greenpoint without recognizing the native culture’s stake.

The indie rocker and I reached our destination in a few blocks. The Pencil Factory is Greenpoint’s oldest and most authentic artist-hipster bar. It was packed; it usually is. The bare wooden tables and benches—the place is too cool even for decor—were full of the young and attractive. I noticed the bassist of a semifamous band sitting with friends at the far end of the bar, the teenager equivalent of the back of the bus.

We staked out a spot and I ordered a margarita.

“You don’t like it?” the indie rocker asked, prompted by my pucker.

“No, it’s good. It’s just really tart.” I got the bartender’s attention and asked, “Could I trouble you to make this a little sweeter?”

I knew I’d done something wrong because the indie rocker winced. Then the bartender replied, “Uh, I could put more triple sec in it—if that’s what you
want
.” And then that sound again, that contemptuous laugh masquerading as cough. Do they teach you that in cool school? Besides, when did triple sec become lame? It’s
an orange liqueur, not a film director. It’s not even a brand; it’s a category. You can’t stratify a liquor cabinet like
The Breakfast Club
.

“I’d love a little more triple sec,” I said, smiling. Although the doctored drink was better, it couldn’t eradicate the bitter taste in my mouth.

At the bottom of the glass, I told the indie rocker I had to catch an early flight. Although I did want an escape, I wasn’t lying. The next morning I left LaGuardia Airport and, five hours later—via Charlotte, New Bern, and Highway 70—pulled up to the neighborhood Fourth of July block party my family was hosting in Morehead City.

It was already in full pastel-seashell-sundress effect. I meanwhile wore all black, hadn’t showered, and smelled like diesel fuel. When I opened the door between the air-conditioned car and the sun-surrendered lawn, it made a sucking sound. My hair instantly curled.

The house we share with my dad’s brother and sister is not on the coast proper. Morehead City lines the Bogue Sound, which is part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, a route navigable from Virginia to Florida. The Intracoastal bisects North Carolina’s mainland and the Outer Banks. Across the water, we can see the city of Atlantic Beach and the ocean-seeking tourist hubbub that crowds it. Morehead is more of a community. Today they were showing their pride.

Barbecue smoke rose above the surface of an undulating sea of blond hair, and multiple mayonnaise-enhanced homemade delicacies lurked just beneath. There were about sixty people crowded around a makeshift tent on the empty lot between our house and cousin Millie’s next door. Half were kin, and at least four of them went by Borden as a first name, the youngest of whom was my seven-month-old nephew, currently strapped to the chest of my cousin Nancy.

“Jane!” she screamed, like a riptide. I didn’t take my bags out of the car. I didn’t even go inside to wash my hands. Who knew how long the sun had already warmed those mayonnaise salads? Time was running out.

I hugged Nancy, stole my nephew, held my proverbial nose, and jumped in. My sisters were by the buffet, unsurprising as we’ve always congregated around food. I filled a plastic red-white-and-blue plate with slaw, ham biscuits, and a salad with bacon and broccoli in it, and then also spotted my mother by the side of the house, indulging my other nephew’s fascination with the water spigot. Dad was nowhere in sight.

I took a turn on spigot duty and later revisited the tent to get homemade pimento cheese and a closer look at a neighbor’s matching linen summer suit that involved lime-green culottes. No one had seen my father.

My older nephew tore across the lawn toward Millie’s. Assuming that area to be out of bounds, I gave chase but, upon turning the corner, discovered a new wing to the picnic. Close to twenty more people were under Millie’s porch, including my father, who lingered, I should’ve guessed, by the dessert table.

There were lemon squares, several kinds of pie, pound cakes, rum cakes, and iced cakes, cookies baked with various supermarket candy bars stuffed inside, brownies, blondies, a variety of treats unidentifiable, and fudge. “What’s good?” I asked him.

“Well, I’m partial to the
pea
-can pie,” he said in the rollicking eastern North Carolina accent that returns to him, seeping out like pine sap, whenever he’s with Uncle Donnie. Donnie isn’t really my uncle; he’s my dad’s first cousin and closest friend. In their bachelor days, they had a boat named
The After You Two
. When they double-dated, they’d tell the girls they’d “named a boat after you two.”