My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (9 page)

I was absorbed by Jim’s journal, its honesty, introspection, gallows humor, and insight. This kind of plainspoken, on-the-ground account of life in battle belonged in libraries, I felt, not in a puddle, and though I’d never tried to return a
Found
item before, I resolved to do what I could to track Jim down and reunite him with his journal. I had no idea if he was even still alive, but after visiting a few veterans’ organizations around D.C., I caught a tip that I could likely find Jim pulling the graveyard shift at the Last Firebase—a wooden hutch a hundred yards from the Vietnam Wall that was part POW/MIA vigil and part trinket stand. I biked down a couple of nights later, around midnight.

Inside the Last Firebase stood a man in his mid-fifties, wearing old glasses and a brown leather coat, reading a newspaper by the light of a Coleman lantern, while a talk show’s steady banter sounded from a portable radio on the counter beside him. I held up the journal. “Excuse me, are you Jim Thompson?” I asked.

“Hey, I’ve been looking for that!” he said with astonished glee. “Where on Earth did you find that thing?”

After being consumed with his journal for months, it was thrilling to meet Jim face-to-face. He had big ears, a sparkle in his eyes, and a creased, hangdog demeanor. I’d imagined that someone who’d experienced so many horrible things would be distant and sullen, but Jim was the opposite: a whirlwind of laughter and mischievous energy. In a rich New England accent, a fountain of likable, grandiose stories poured out of him. He had large opinions about everything, and a fondness for outsized pronouncements—his favorite diner was not just a favorite diner, it was “perhaps the greatest diner in the D.C. Metro area, the country, and maybe even the world!”

Jim lived in a tiny ramshackle rooming house in Alexandria, Virginia. On Sundays I started watching football at his place. In his room, he’d stacked three ancient TVs totem-pole style so he could watch two games at once, plus the news. Every few minutes the picture on one set or another conked out, and he’d blast the side of the TV with his open palm to fix it. I’d sit on a folding chair while Jim paced the room, talking, laughing, and adding his own commentary to the games. After a rookie running back scampered into the end zone for a score, Jim would declare him a future Hall of Famer. “Mark my words,” he’d shout. “He’ll be the greatest rusher in the history of Redskins football, and maybe even the NFL!”

Two families of recent Ethiopian immigrants occupied the houses on each side of Jim’s, and he was an enthusiastic neighbor—he patched flat bicycle tires, tinkered on troubled engines, helped the grown-ups navigate the local bus system and fill out government paperwork, and gathered the kids for hours-long football games that sprawled across all three front lawns. The kids called him
Eessuma
, which meant “Uncle” in their native Oromo. Jim, meanwhile, coined an affectionate nickname for me—Sadsack—a moniker I earned for my inability to throw a spiral, and from confessing to him that the only fight I’d ever been in was in sixth grade, when I’d brawled with a third-grader over a bag of Doritos and ended up with a bloody nose. Jim was in the habit of referring to himself in the third person, which inspired me to do the same. He’d emerge from underneath the hood of his old ’63 Mustang and announce, “I got it runnin’ again—Jim Thompson may be the greatest Ford mechanic in the Beltway!” “That’s great,” I’d say. “Then he can give Sadsack a ride to work.”

Beneath Jim’s exuberance, though, was a weary sadness. As our friendship deepened, he began to share more of his past with me. In Vietnam, he’d seen his best friends killed, and he’d killed a couple dozen people himself—with his M16 and even with his hands. After he’d finished his tour of duty and returned home, he’d slowly deteriorated from post-traumatic stress disorder. For fifteen years, he told me, he’d roamed the western U.S. with violent gangs of other veterans, drinking and doing drugs (“self-medicating,” in Jim’s parlance), and terrorizing town after town. Finally, he’d landed in a VA hospital’s psych ward for two years, where he’d been a rare success story: he’d emerged restored, able to piece together a life for himself. Still, there were signs that his experiences in the war continued to wrap him in shadows. One of Jim’s housemates, an old drifter named Chuck, asked me once, “Why do you think a guy as charming and intelligent as Jim is living in this dump with a bunch of weirdos like me? Should be married, a family and all. Working somewhere. But he’s damaged. He’s wounded. He can’t form connections, man. It’s too difficult for him. You’ll see.”

In early November, as the NFL season reached its midpoint, Jim suddenly vanished. I kept stopping by his house and looking for him at his post near the Wall, but he seemed to have disappeared. I ran into Chuck on the street. “Every November, brother,” he told me. “Jim takes off. That Hill 65 time of year, he can’t be around nobody.” Eventually, a couple of weeks later, Jim returned, but he seemed changed, as though he’d been to the darkest of places. The glint in his eyes had been snuffed out, and his wild mile-a-minute stories were replaced by a brooding silence. Sometimes when I came over to watch football, he wouldn’t answer the door, even when I pounded and yelled, “Let me in, Jimmy, I know you’re home!” Finally, during a Thanksgiving visit from his daughter and granddaughter, Jim began to emerge from his funk. “That was probably the best turkey I’ve ever had,” he told me over the phone. “Maybe the best turkey
anyone
has ever had.”

*

Jim may have a self-isolating streak, but a decade later, we’re still tight. When I moved to Chicago, he took an Amtrak train out to visit for a week; we played pool every night and went to punk rock shows. We’ve traveled together to Colorado and New Mexico, and I even visited his hometown of North Conway, New Hampshire, and saw the house he grew up in. Each November he retreats deep within himself, and for a couple of weeks his phone goes straight to voice mail. I get anxious. And then, after a period of troubling silence, there’s a message from him: “Hey, Sadsack, it’s Jim. Learn how to fight yet?”

A couple of years ago, Jim moved to northern Michigan, a few hours from my home in Ann Arbor, and last fall, as November rolled around, I decided that for the first time I’d impose myself on his annual fugue. I drove up I-75 on a bright, cold autumn afternoon, and as evening fell, I wound my way through small towns, already buttoned up for winter’s approach. Flags set out for Veteran’s Day swished from front porches and hardware-store awnings.

It was dark by the time I reached Jim’s trailer deep in the woods. At his door, six-pack in hand, I was about to knock, when from inside I heard a single thunderous bang. My heart froze. I peered through his front window and saw Jim standing in his dark living room, bathed in eerie blue light from a tower of beat-up television sets, a cigarette hanging from his bottom lip. The picture on the top TV was slipping, and Jim delivered another mighty blow to its fake-wood casing. The picture straightened out. Jim took a couple steps back. The sound of the TVs was muffled, but on each set flashed a different network’s evening news, separate but syncopated images of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The light from the TVs washed over Jim’s face and reflected off his wide, hollowed eyes. I felt frozen in place, haunted, oddly transfixed, and for almost five minutes I watched Jim watch TV, standing ten feet from me on the other side of the glass. Then at last he mashed out his cigarette in an ashtray atop the top TV, and somehow that broke the spell. I turned and knocked on his door. “Jimmy, let me in!” I cried. “Sadsack is here. Sadsack brought the beer.”

A part of me was worried that he’d view my visit as an intrusion. But when he opened the door, a smile slowly crept across his face. “Welcome,” he said, throwing an arm over my shoulder. “Come in, come in. Pop a couple of those. Looks like the finest beer in the history of the world!”

NINETY-NINE BOTTLES OF PEE ON THE WALL

The first time I peed in a bottle was in the spring of 2006, at a folk concert in Ann Arbor—my brother Peter’s album release party. I was tending bar in the back of a small art space while Peter played for a packed house of friends, family, and local fans, crammed side by side in metal folding chairs. It’s hard to serve drinks without drinking plenty yourself, and by the middle of the show, I desperately had to take a leak. Peter was singing his most earnest, heartfelt tune, and the place was so full, there was no way I could’ve made it to the bathroom without creating a disturbance.

An empty Orange Mango Nantucket Nectars juice bottle in a bin on the floor called to me. Hidden by the bar, I twisted the cap off, popped my zipper, and as slowly and gently as I could, whizzed into the bottle, all the while standing straight and nodding my head to the music. You know how tinkling against the side of the toilet bowl keeps the sound down? I discovered that peeing against the inside of the bottle did the same. The bottle filled just past the top of the label. I was surprised at how hot my pee felt through the glass. I screwed the cap tightly back on, dropped the bottle in a trash can, and just like that the crisis was averted, a swift and easy victimless act.

Of course, like speeding or shoplifting, once you see how simple it is to get away with something, there’s nothing to stop you from doing it all the time. On our months-long tours, where each night I’d read
Found
notes and stories and Peter would play guitar and sing a few songs, I often preferred sleeping outside in the back of our van while my brother crashed on the couches of friends or hospitable strangers. For me, the problem had always been what to do when I woke up in the van after a night of drinking and really had to pee. What had been an empty street at three a.m. could be alive and bustling at a quarter after seven. Now I began to plan ahead, and before I went to sleep, I’d make sure an empty Nantucket Nectars or Odwalla bottle was handy (wide-mouth bottles required less docking precision). At dawn, crouching in the van behind tinted glass, head pressed to the ceiling, I’d fill a bottle—sometimes two, a couple hours apart—and crash right out again. Before we got on the highway to head for the next town, I’d stop at a gas station or a park and slip the bottles into a garbage can, surreptitiously, like condom wrappers at your girlfriend’s parents’ house, or a vandal’s spent cans of spray paint.

Here and there, I began to pee in bottles even under less urgent circumstances. Sometimes, before our
Found
shows, if there was no bathroom backstage, I’d huddle in the corner and fill an empty water bottle with pee, rather than wade through the crowd, already in their seats waiting for the show to start. The more you do something—even something a bit weird and aberrant—the more normal it becomes to you. Nudists know this, as do bulimics, self-cutters, compulsive hand-washers, scratch-off lottery addicts, and people who masturbate while driving on the interstate. Peter walked in on me a few times backstage, caught me peeing into a bottle, and hissed, “That’s fucking sick, dude,” and I always thought he was the one being unreasonable.

Still, for every bottle I peed in while we were on tour, I took sixty run-of-the-mill leaks in a rest-stop urinal or behind a tree on the side of a country road. Mostly, the bottles were a last resort. And once I got home, I might never have peed in a bottle again if I hadn’t fallen off my friend Mike Kozura’s roof while helping him change out the storm windows for screens. My right ankle was completely shattered, and for a couple of months I was laid up in my bedroom—a hot, sweaty attic lair—feeling like Martin Sheen at the beginning of
Apocalypse Now
, but with only five-eighths the madness.

The staircase to my room was incredibly narrow and steep, and to descend it to take a leak required ten minutes of precarious maneuvering. Instead, I began to pee almost exclusively in bottles. I became an expert at it. I knew, for instance, before I peed how much pee was going to come out of me—I could select the right half-filled bottle and fill it right to the top and be done with it, sending it to pasture on the floor behind the TV stand. Not that I meant to start a collection, but there was no easy way to dispose of them. My housemates were happy to bring a pizza upstairs when I ordered for delivery, but wouldn’t have been as gracious, I didn’t think, about carrying out my sloshing portable urinals. And with my useless, throbbing ankle, the thought of fighting my way downstairs and out to the driveway to dump them in the garbage bins felt overwhelming. The funny thing was, years before, I’d heard a story from a friend about a roommate he’d once had who was so lazy, he’d pee in an empty milk jug in his basement bedroom rather than walk upstairs and use the john. At the time, I’d thought that sounded completely nasty, but now my own pee-filled bottles had outgrown their nest behind the TV and began to line the shelves of the towering bookcase at the foot of my bed. I peed in all kinds of bottles, and developed favorite brands—Odwalla, Naked, SoBe, Fuze, and those small, round, glass bottles of apple juice called Martinelli’s, which, dangerously, looked like they contained apple juice even when filled with pee. I began to hoard empty bottles to have on reserve. When my housemates had parties, I’d creep down from the attic at five a.m. after everyone had cleared out and crawl back upstairs with abandoned forty-ounce screw-top bottles of Miller High Life and St. Ides tucked in my armpits.

July Fourth arrived. From my window, I watched little kids running around freely in the park across the street, waving sparklers, peeing wherever they chose, and I cradled my swollen, misshapen ankle, heartsick—the girl I’d been dating on and off for several years and loved dearly, Sarah Locke, had decided to move to Oakland to live with her new boyfriend, an animator and budding art star she’d met on MySpace named Ghostshrimp.

Sarah was a tiny, beautiful punk rock girl who’d grown up on a Sioux reservation in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She made me soup when I was sick, “answered” bananas like they were a telephone—“Hello? I can’t hear you. Hello?”—and helped me put together each issue of
Found
magazine in my basement. I’d never been involved with someone so closely or for so long. The night before she left, she stopped by my house to say bye and sat at the foot of my bed. We’d already talked through it all plenty of times, and by now the agony had subsided, and we were full of a love for each other that seemed larger than Ghostshrimp and the brokenness of the present. Sarah marveled at the collection of pee-filled bottles I’d amassed. “It’s absolutely incredible,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that.” She sniffed the air. “I can’t believe they don’t smell.” I was ashamed, but also sort of proud, and fascinated with them myself. The range of pee color, in itself, was striking—dark, hornet gold, to pale yellow, to nearly clear. “There must be fifty bottles here,” said Sarah.