My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (36 page)

I can’t say it was the most well-planned move, zipping past the boutique hotel where I’d booked us a bungalow and heading straight for the National Park, but I didn’t feel like playing the percentages and bunting my way onto base, I felt like swinging for the fences. I knew where I wanted to be at sunset, and that was with Anna atop a giant hunk of rock called Ryan Mountain, my favorite spot in the park. We drove through miles of red, dusty terrain and pulled into an empty lot by the roadside trailhead; it was late in the day and any other visitors had long since cleared out. I warned Anna that to reach the peak meant a tough ninety-minute climb. Some girls might’ve been put off by the prospect of such a hike; Anna pranced ahead like a gazelle, noting the subtle shades of beige, green, and purple in the desert rocks and vegetation, while I huffed and puffed a few steps behind her. Along the trail, she told me the story of her parents’ odd courtship, and how a month after their wedding her mom had fled for another man, but then, a year later, had come back home to her dad, without a hiccup in their marriage, remarkably, or any lingering resentments. I shared my own family history, telling stories I’d never told before, maybe because no one had ever asked. Our conversation felt like one continuous spool of lustrous yarn that stretched from the bar the weekend before to the cab of my rental F-150 to the desert mountain switchbacks.

When we finally reached the top, close to dusk, we both fell into stunned silence at the majestic three-sixty view—the desert floor, far below, rippling gently for miles and miles, distant mountain ranges on three sides, bathed in golden light, and to the south, like a wide, flat gem, the Salton Sea. It was an eagle’s perspective, and the periodic gusts of wind combined with our great height made it feel like we were actually flying. I cracked open two minibottles of white wine I’d carried up the hill in the pouch of my hoodie, and wordlessly we clanked to our good fortune, the glories of nature, and the kickass turns of luck life doles out once in a while if you let it, and are open to adventure. Then I pulled Anna close, and right before we kissed her eyes flashed as they met mine, and then I closed my eyes and we kissed long and hard, and I’ll tell you, from what I’ve heard old-timers say, a moment like that you hold close on dark days, a moment like that you take with you to the grave. Overhead, one by one, the stars marched in.

*

No one falls out of love in this story. Nothing sours. Not exactly. That night, back in our elegant hut on the grounds of the Twentynine Palms Inn, I drank so much, in celebration, that I spilled open my mind and let Anna rake through the contents like a kid with a sack of Lego blocks. I told her my every wish and dream, the plots, beat by beat, of all the movies I wanted to one day make, and the details of shit I’d witnessed as a kid that had mystified me or made me sad. She embraced it all with good humor and kindness, listening with an intensity that felt almost inconceivably generous. (She may have been drunk, too.) We had a pillow fight. We made out. We tickled each other. I played her songs by a white Phoenix rapper I’d seen perform in an empty club and had become obsessed with; she sang me ridiculous tunes that she claimed all British kids learn at summer camp. In a way, Anna’s looks and exotic speech reminded me of June Gudmundsdottir, the character played by Greta Scacchi in the Robert Altman movie
The Player
, who’d defined sexiness for me throughout college. But when I told her that she took offense. “I’ve seen that movie,” she protested. “She shacks up with the guy who killed her boyfriend!” We stepped outside to peek at the stars. The alcohol, combined with my wild, swooning emotions, made me feel like I was flipping on ’shrooms, and the constellations pranced and swayed in a shimmering fresco. “How can the desert be so cold?” asked Anna, tugging me back inside.

In my backpack, I had a recent issue of
The Believer
, which contained a sheet of temporary tattoos—a Winnebago, a battle-axe wedged into a heart, a pair of spooning otters, a finely detailed portrait of the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Anna and I didn’t make love that night—I feared that if we did it would seem to her like that was the sole reason I’d lured her to the desert—but perhaps with equal intimacy, we peeled the tattoos loose one at a time from their cellophane sheet in the magazine and licked them and affixed them to each other’s bodies in the softly lit bedroom, and at last, around five a.m., fell asleep, all but naked in each other’s arms.

*

The next afternoon, once our hangovers had subsided a bit and we could move again, we piled our things into the Ford pickup and started the drive back toward the city—Anna had to meet with two fellow students who were working with her on a group project due in a couple of days. We’d spent the morning sick, sweating out the booze, but there was something romantic and tender involved; it was like our whole lives had flattened and compressed, and we’d become an old, ailing couple, taking care of each other. We’d pounded Advils, joked around a bit, still drunk, kind of, admiring each other’s tattoos, and then dozed with our arms draped here and there and our hands joined. Around three I snuck out and brought back some French toast and waffles from a diner down the road, which we ate in bed, like a honeymoon couple, before packing up to head for L.A.

The afternoon sun was scorching, and we closed up the windows and pumped the AC. I decided to take the scenic route and cut through the National Park to I-10 because it didn’t add too many miles and I’d never been down that road before. It felt like driving on an alien planet: we cruised through strange fields of enormous boulders, across plains of twisted red rock, as bizarre, towering cacti that looked stitched together from giant pipe cleaners waved their tentacles at us from the shoulder. Anna kept marveling at how human-like the ubiquitous Joshua trees seemed to be, each one uniquely expressive, its lower limbs extended like a pair of arms, and its third limb, up high, a craned neck, with a head and face screwed on top. We laughed, ascribing them separate human emotions and stories. “That one’s pissed off because you didn’t clean your room,” Anna said. “She’s sending you to bed without dinner!”

“You’re right!” I cried. “Wait, check out that one with the broken branch. He’s begging his bookie for another week to come up with the money.”

“And there’s the bookie!” Anna said, pointing down the road. “He’s calling his enforcer to come finish the job.”

This merriment continued for forty-five minutes. At the far end of the park, we stopped to refill water bottles at a rest area, and then lapsed into silence as we passed the gate at the south entrance and coasted down a long steep hill, where a stream of cars, pickups, and big rigs came into sight, hurtling west along I-10. Somehow the sight of the interstate broke the spell of the past twenty-four hours, and I was struck by a wave of sadness and anxiety, worried that our return to civilization might cause Anna’s affections to taper off. No matter how perfect things go the first night you spend with someone, in those early stages everything is still fragile and precarious, and you never know what surprises lie around the bend. I stole a glance at her: arms crossed, brow furrowed, like something in her had shifted, although her neck and shoulders were still swathed in temporary tattoos, a reminder of the previous night’s adventures. Behind her, the sun settled toward the horizon and the sky filled with a red glow.

“You know,” she began, very quietly, “this is as much fun as I’ve had since I’ve been in the States. It’s like, we get on so well, it’s easy to imagine if you were my boyfriend or something, how things could be, but I’m going home in a few weeks, and how would it really work to be with someone and live on separate continents? I don’t think it could work.”

Whatever her concerns about distance, her words thrilled me and filled me with glee. I’d been too cautious to say anything of the sort or expect too much from one night in the desert, no matter how magical (though this might also have been the first time I’d been invited to enter a relationship and then booted out of it in the same line of thought). I wasn’t too crushed—any obstacles before us, it seemed, could surely be hurdled. As we rolled down the entrance ramp onto I-10, caught speed, and merged with the flow of traffic, we began to parse the possibilities. Would she be willing to stay on in the U.S.—if not Ann Arbor, maybe L.A. or New York? Not possible, she said. She had to get back to London to finish her book on Tony Blair. After that, she had other projects already in the pipeline with friends in the U.K. Besides, she said, she’d spent the past two years in the States, far from her friends and family, and she was ready to be home.

So the other option was for me to head to England. “Would you ever consider that?” Anna asked. On the one hand, it seemed crazy to uproot myself and move across the globe for a girl I’d spent one night with; on the other hand, Anna was completely dazzling, and I could picture us leading a life of unbounded happiness and fulfillment—writing books together at her family’s country place in Devon; traveling to exotic corners of the world to shoot documentaries; raising kind, grounded, cosmopolitan children—and it seemed crazy not to. Before I had a chance to respond, though, I felt the truck suddenly drained of its power.

I jammed my foot on the gas pedal, once, twice, and again, to no avail. A quick glance at the gauges, which apparently I’d been blind to, told me all I needed to know: we were out of gas, beyond empty. The engine hadn’t so much thrown its hands up and quit as submitted to an instant, powerful slumber. A trucker in the semi behind us laid on his horn, and I hit the blinkers and guided us off the highway onto the wide shoulder, where we slowly drifted to a stop.

“What’s wrong?” said Anna. Without AC, the desert heat quickly began to flood the cab of our pickup.

“Out of gas,” I said with embarrassment.

I’d always prided myself on being a masterful marathon driver, but I did have the tendency, from time to time, to run a tank dry and find myself stranded. The ramp where we’d gotten on the interstate was only a mile or two back, but it was in the middle of nowhere, and I was sure I hadn’t seen any gas stations. I looked at my phone—no service out here; I couldn’t call for roadside assistance. There was only one thing to do, the same thing I’d done the other half dozen times I’d found myself in this sort of predicament: hitch a ride. It couldn’t be that far to the next exit, I figured, where I could fill a gas can and catch a ride back. But with dusk moving in, and headlights popping on in the opposite lanes, I knew my window of opportunity was closing fast. It’s not so hard, most of the time, to catch a ride in daylight hours; after dark, it’s next to impossible. No sense dillydallying. “Look,” I said to Anna, “I am
so
sorry. I’m a total idiot. Just hang tight, and I’ll be right back.” I jumped down from the truck, faced the oncoming traffic, and stuck out my thumb.

The very first vehicle to pass us was an old black van with dark tinted windows. Its brake lights flashed red, and I watched it swerve onto the shoulder, fishtail a bit on a patch of windblown gravel, and come to a stop about a hundred yards ahead. I took off, jogging after it, and watched two figures emerge from the passenger side and head toward me. We met in the middle, halfway between my truck and their van, a small, wiry man in his forties, nose and cheeks brushed red by the sun, wearing a black T-shirt and a desert-camo baseball cap that said
It’s Miller Time!
and his shy-looking son, shirtless, maybe fourteen years old, with dark, stringy hair and the first wisps of a mustache, only an inch or two shorter than his dad.

“What’s the story?” the man shouted, over the howl of passing semis, a touch of beer on his breath.

“Ran out of gas. Can I get a ride?”

He gave me a quick once-over, taking note, it seemed, of the temporary tattoos clustered around my neck from my chin down, cholo-style, disappearing into the collar of my shirt. “It’s a ways to the next town,” he said. Then he pointed at my neck, with a degree of suspicion. “Who’s that?”

“Which one?” I had no idea which tattoos had ended up where.

“Funny-looking guy with the beard. That your dad or somethin’?”

“Oh, that’s got to be Ai Weiwei. He’s this Chinese artist and political activist. Always under threat of being locked up by the state because of his views.”

He gave me a look. “A rebel, huh? I like that.”

I nodded, not sure if he meant Ai Weiwei or me. Cars went shrieking past, just a few feet away from us. It’s strange how safe it feels to be inside one, rocketing along at eighty-five or ninety miles an hour, and how dangerous it feels to be on the shoulder, changing a flat tire, or hoping a stranger will give you a lift, as traffic whips by.

“Any weapons on ya?” the guy asked. “Pistol? Knife?”

“Nope. Nothing.” I patted myself at the hips:
See? I’m not packin’.

He glanced at his son, rubbed his chin, smiled for the first time, and said, “Well, come on then, let’s hit it,” and hurried back toward the van, his son at his heels. I turned quickly, waved my hand, and flashed Anna a thumbs-up, though from that distance I didn’t know if she could see me, and then whirled after Miller Time and his boy. When we reached the van, the dad hopped in up front, riding shotgun, and the boy popped open the side doors and climbed in. The back of the van, I could see, had been stripped of its seats, and from the darkness, a pack of kids crowded across the floor gaped at me blankly, like a family of raccoons peering from inside a storm drain. Loud country music twanged over the radio. Behind the wheel, a robust middle-aged blond woman sang along. She craned her head around. “You coming or what?” she shouted.

“Danny, give the man a hand and help him up,” said Miller Time.

His son and another boy reached out their hands and hauled me in, and before they’d even closed the doors, I heard the wheels spinning in the gravel and catching hold. I lost my balance and pitched to the floor at the back of the van, and as we shot off westbound, Miller Time cackled with glee, slapped the dashboard, and hollered, “That’s right, boys, the Black Stallion rides again! Giddyap! Giddyap!
C’mon
,
git!
”