My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (15 page)

A year later, when I left Chicago and drove to New Mexico to follow my dreams of being a writer, I was wearing those boots with the red laces. On my dashboard was the picture of John Molloy at the edge of the canyon, fists raised toward the sky.

SHADE

Along I-10’s most dust-torn and barren stretch, in southwest New Mexico, there’s an old truck-stop diner in the sad little town of Deming called the Desert Sky Café, and early one morning in November of 2003, just before dawn, I found myself parked in front of the Desert Sky in a rental Ford, my eyes wet, my hands and my shirt streaked with blood.

After a couple of minutes I pulled myself together and headed inside to get breakfast. The place was completely empty other than a no-nonsense waitress in her fifties rolling silverware at the counter and a grizzled old cook in back scraping the grill. I hopped up on a stool, and when the waitress came over, she looked me up and down and said, “Is that blood?”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“Is that your blood?”

“No.”

“Should I call the police?”

“How ’bout I tell you the story and then you decide?”

She looked at me sternly, considering this. Then she plucked a pad and pen from her apron and said, “Okay. What’ll you have?”

*

This was the second time I’d been inside the Desert Sky Café; the first was in 1999 on a road trip from New York City to Cali with my friend Eddie Faktorovich. But the first time I’d ever laid eyes on the place was years before, in the fall of ’92, in a movie called
Gas, Food, Lodging
, which takes place in the fictional town of Laramie, New Mexico, but was filmed in Deming.

All through high school, I’d gone alone to see movies downtown at the Michigan Theater, and my visits only increased when I started college and moved into a dorm a few blocks away. One night, a month into my first semester, I went to see
Gas, Food, Lodging
, a story about a middle-aged waitress at the Desert Sky who lives in a nearby trailer park with her two teenage daughters, Trudi and Shade. In just an hour and a half, I fell so deeply and powerfully in love with Shade that when I left the theater I felt like a different person—profoundly transformed and filled with a terrible, rapturous heartache. I remember drifting through town like a ghost, lying down in a patch of damp grass, and staring at the moon for hours. I was overjoyed that I’d found my soulmate, but distressed that she was only a character in a movie—I couldn’t exactly leap through the screen and introduce myself. And although it was tempting, I never confused Shade with the actress who played her, Fairuza Balk. I was sure Fairuza Balk was wondrous in her own right, but it was Shade who was my soulmate, it was Shade whom I’d scour the planet to find.

Shade was tough, tender, otherworldly, filled with a bewitching sadness. Her desolate beauty matched the New Mexico landscape, and I dreamed of visiting her town and looking for her there. I went back to the Michigan Theater the next night, my heart torqued and titillated, and then again the night after that. Crushed and giddy, I watched Shade’s eyes and lips and listened to her tiny, delicate voice and the precise way she spoke. In the movie, Shade falls in love with a Mexican boy whose mother is deaf, and I figured my chances with her were increased, since my mom was deaf, too.

In the weeks and months that followed, my desire and longing for her dominated my being. My parents knew something weird had happened to me—they thought maybe I’d undergone a religious conversion since I’d mentioned visiting a mosque with a kid from my dorm. My friends thought I was ’shrooming all the time, though at that point I’d never even smoked weed. The truth was, I was seventeen years old, and I’d found the love of my life. It’s been seventeen years since I came out of that theater, and I still compare every girl I meet to Shade.

*

Roughly three years later—December 3, 1995—at the campus computer center in Angell Hall, a few blocks from the Michigan Theater, I saw a girl sitting fifty feet from me, her boots tucked beneath her in her chair as she stared forlornly at the screen of her Mac, and I knew I’d found Shade at last. I gathered my courage and talked to her and got her name and phone number. This was Maggie Jones.

Maggie had a soft, haunted beauty. We’d lie in our own beds talking over the phone and fall into an intimate and binding silence for ten minutes at a time, watching the stars and the snow out our bedroom windows. Maggie sometimes spoke a sad, affectless sentence that sounded so much like Shade, I’d record it in my notebook. Here’s one: “Trade what, bike for camera?” She’d indulge me when I asked her to repeat my favorite lines of Shade’s from the movie, like, “Where’d you get those rocks?” Even Maggie had to marvel at how similar her voice was to Shade’s.

Miraculously, she fell in love with me, and we had a year together that was entirely blissful, but things ended miserably. Mostly, I was too intense about my love for her, and Maggie seemed to recognize the slivers of my madness. “I’m just me,” she said to me once, trying to get me to ease up. “I’m just a girl.” Finally, during a year abroad in Scotland, Maggie met a French windmill repairman named Gilles and moved to France and eventually married him and had two daughters of her own.

In ’99, driving with Eddie Faktorovich from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, I crossed into New Mexico for the first time, and in the middle of the night, while Eddie slept in the passenger seat, I slid his green Oldsmobile off I-10 and found the ragged old truck stop from
Gas, Food, Lodging
and the adjacent Desert Sky Café. Walking inside, I felt like I was returning to a place I’d visited only in a dream—this was, unbelievably, the same place Shade had been, and to me it was as holy as a cathedral. I sat at a booth in the corner and downed french toast and OJ, studying the place, lost in a quiet, trembling contemplation. Shade’s absence tore at me, and I vowed that one day I would find her and bring her back here with me. I decided to never visit the place again alone.

A year later, still searching for Shade (among other things), I packed up my car and moved to New Mexico. I didn’t know a soul in the whole damn state. I’d planned on moving to Deming, but on the drive from Chicago I detoured through northern New Mexico and swooned for the high desert mountains. I found a place to live outside of Taos in a little town called Valdez, and a few weeks later, at a rave in an abandoned barn, I met Bonnie Carpenter.

Bonnie was sweet and smart and pretty, and behind her friendly laugh was a troubled sadness that reminded me of Shade. She worked the reception desk at an old motel on Highway 2 and lived with her sister in an Earthship house made of rubber tires and mud out on the mesa, across the Rio Grande. Bonnie was from Jacksonville, Arkansas, and was a graduate of Arkansas State University’s satellite campus in Beebe, where her dad was a professor; after college, she’d worked at a Planned Parenthood clinic in downtown Little Rock, an hour away. She’d also been hooked on crack and heroin for four years—her move to New Mexico was a shot at starting a new life and staying clean. We spent a few thrilling weeks together but again my intensity doomed things. Bonnie needed to focus on getting through each day without getting high, and it was a constant struggle—frightening, all-consuming, and hard for me to relate to. She didn’t have enough energy left over to love me back with equal force. When I came back to town after a couple of weeks away, I found out she’d taken up with a guy from her meetings at Narcotics Anonymous, a skinny electrician named Cal. She married Cal a year later, and within two years they’d had their first child. By then I’d already moved back to Chicago and, after a year there, home to Michigan.

Over the years that followed, as I rambled around the country, I briefly wrapped my arms around other Shade-like girls—Liz in Plattsburgh, New York; LeBrie in Portland, Oregon; Lindsey in Houston—all of whom shared Shade’s otherworldliness, bleak beauty, and abiding sadness, but they had all faded from me like morning mist. The problem, friends said, was with my ferocious, unshakable loyalty to the mystical idea of Shade. But this devotion, no matter how unproductive, unhealthy, or stark raving mad, felt spiritual and pure, and despite my loneliness I had little incentive to ditch something that had become so meaningful to me.

By the fall of 2003, eleven years had passed since I’d first seen Shade on the giant screen of the Michigan Theater, and still she was nowhere to be found. Some nights, if I was lucky, I’d dream of her, though waking up from those dreams only tripled my despair.

Then one day, from out of nowhere, came Sarah Culkin.

*

Sarah lived in Tucson, three hours west of Deming. She was twenty-two, a senior at the University of Arizona, and she called to ask me a few questions about
Found
magazine for a piece she was writing for the
Daily Wildcat
. We were scheduled to talk for twenty minutes; the conversation lasted six hours. When we finally said good night, we’d already made plans to talk again the next night. I felt I’d found Shade at last.

Sarah’s voice was angelic. Anytime she let out a tiny peep of laughter, I felt like I was soaring. That first week we talked every night from around midnight until the sun came up. I’d lie in my bed in the darkness, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, Sarah’s voice in my ear, and it was as though she was lying there with me. How do I describe the sweetness, nourishment, and ecstasy of those conversations? Our souls were lacing tight to each other—I was deep in it, swelled with hope and happiness.

We shared every strange, sad subchapter of our life stories and the minute details of each passing day. Sarah lived with her mom, a Wal-Mart clerk, and her mom’s on-again, off-again boyfriend on the south side of Tucson. She worked at an animal hospital on the weekends, and was planning to go to grad school to study literature. One night she divulged a random fun fact: her first cousin was the actor Macauley Culkin, star of the movie
Home Alone
, but she barely knew him, since he was from New York City, where her dad lived, and she’d only been there twice.

Another night her best friend, Ivy, took the phone—“Sarah’s crazy about you,” she whispered fiercely while Sarah was in the other room. “And she’s so
hot
! You’re a lucky guy.” Our future gleamed with promise—she was not battling crack or heroin addictions; she had no interest in moving to France.

Before hanging up the phone each night, we began to say “I love you.” It was thrilling to be in love, while so much of her remained a mystery, still to be discovered. My curiosity about her was insatiable, and learning about even her most ordinary likes and dislikes—food, movies, books—felt revelatory. Every day, I’d go through the routine motions of my life, getting work done, picking up groceries for my Grandma Bobbie across the street, just biding my time before Sarah’s late-night call and the intoxicating ring and rhythm of her voice.

My friends thought I was crazy to be getting so involved with someone I’d never met in person. “You’ve never even seen a picture of her? Oh, her
friend
says she’s hot? Yeah, ‘hot’ as Lyle Alzado!” Sarah knew what I looked like from pictures she’d seen online, but there were none posted of her. She offered to mail me a photo and I told her not to bother—I felt weird asking her to submit to that kind of superficial test. Of course I was curious, but my love for her felt more righteous for being based on who she was, not what she looked like, and I figured we’d see each other soon enough. Maybe a part of me also feared that a picture would pierce the illusion, that she wouldn’t be as pretty as I’d imagined, but my friends’ gentle harassment only served to inoculate me against any doubts I might’ve had.

Before long, talk turned to how and when and where we’d meet up. A plan was hatched—in a month and a half, once I finished putting together the new issue of
Found
, I’d fly to Tucson and we’d rent a car and hit the road for a week. I suggested a visit to my old stomping grounds in Valdez, New Mexico. Along the way, I figured, we could stop by the Desert Sky Café—me and Shade, together in Deming at last, everything wrapped full circle. (Though I’d shared other intimate aspects of myself with Sarah, I saw no reason to explain Shade to her, not yet—that kind of pressure had backfired in the past.)

We made other plans, too, beyond our road trip. The tone of these discussions was somewhat playful, but we both felt so profoundly confident that we’d found our soulmate, we considered every detail seriously. We talked about where we’d move once she graduated the following spring. Part of it depended on where Sarah got into grad school, though she was also considering taking a year off first, which we thought we might spend in San Francisco or even Santiago, Chile, where her friend Ivy wanted to study. We both wanted to have kids, but not for a while. She was cool with the name Orion, my favorite if we had a boy, and I liked the name Antonya, her pick if we had a girl.

Soon the day of my flight to Arizona arrived, and Mike Kozura dropped me off at the airport in Detroit. “Good luck, brother,” he said, slapping two condoms into my hands—it was an ongoing joke between us, ever since we’d seen Dr. Dre hand off a slinky-like strip of condoms to Snoop Dogg in the “Gin and Juice” video, to pass each other condoms in random moments, especially in crowded places, at school, or at work, even in front of each other’s grandparents—anywhere the embarrassment factor would be high. I slipped them into my back pocket and headed for the Southwest Airlines counter.

On my flight, in a hot, emotional daze, I stared out the window at the scrolling rectangles of corn and wheat across central Nebraska, far, far below. I thought back about all the wrong turns and rut-filled detours my search for love—for Shade—had taken me, and it was hard to believe that my journey was finally over, that when I got off the plane, she’d be there waiting for me.

My mom likes to tell the story of her grandfather, who came to live with her family when she was a teenager—he was in his eighties, and his wife had died a decade before. Her grandfather revealed to her that he had a girlfriend in New York City, a two-hour train ride from Philadelphia. On Sunday mornings, he’d leave the house early, take the train to New York, and spend the afternoon with her walking in Central Park, then return home late in the evening, saying he’d been playing cards all day at a friend’s house. He kept the girlfriend secret from my mom’s parents—he didn’t think they’d approve. Only my mom knew.