Never mind why, but I’m reminded of Melinda, the incredibly beautiful girl who liked me in tenth grade. I was just at that school for one miserable semester, and she was the only person there who ever talked to me. At lunch I used to sit alone at a table meant for twelve. We met in French 1, where she was the best student in class. I was the worst and was flunking French 1 for the second time. She sat at the front of my row and would come by to pick up my tests and quizzes. One time she noticed I was writing something and asked what it was. A poem, I said. Oh really, she said, you write poetry?
After I left I wrote to thank her for being so nice to me. She wrote back that everyone thought I was a narc because a bunch of kids got busted for dealing right after I left. I said, no no no, and then one thing led to another and I took a two-hour train ride to visit her. She said she had crush on me. Or maybe she said that she’d had a crush on me. Probably it was the latter. She confessed to having a friend follow my head as she entered French class. This friend sat directly behind me; the idea was to see if I was watching Melinda. I would of course watch her the whole way because she was easily the most desirable girl in school—so beautiful and smart and freaky (in the good sense of freaky). Anyway nothing happened between us because, basically, I didn’t know what to do, or was too afraid to try. But I hold onto this memory as the time the most beautiful girl in school liked me.
Melinda Mason.
She owned a horse and sometimes wore a t-shirt that said Horse
Feathers.
She liked my poetry.
We sat on her couch and listened to the first Heart album together, Dreamboat Annie.
I don’t know where her parents were.
16 May 2005 | Crash
We had a game we liked to play called Crash. We would play it whenever we went somewhere together. The game made use, in a sense, of Donny’s disability, which had left him with severely limited use of his arms and legs. Among other things, Donny’s disability made it difficult for him to manipulate the joy stick on his motorized wheelchair. Instead of steering with his arm or even his wrist, Donny would grasp the joy stick as firmly as he could and lean forward, or to side, with his whole torso. This is how Donny steered, by leaning.
The idea of Crash was for me to make up stupid jokes so that Donny would laugh and lose control of the wheelchair. I won when this happened; Donny won when it didn’t. I won more times than not because Donny was a sucker for stupid jokes.
Once, as we approached the door to a bank, I sensed some people walking behind us. They were keeping their distance because Donny was in a wheelchair. This happened all the time: people would tip-toe around Donny. I understood why they did this (I had done the same thing in the beginning), but it also pissed me off because Donny was limited as much by the way people treated him as by his own body.
This one time, I stopped about ten feet before the bank door and stood there a while doing nothing. Then I turned to Donny and said in a sarcastic voice loud enough for the people behind us to hear, “I suppose you expect me to get it again.”
Donny fell sideways laughing, and his wheelchair spun around in circles. He nearly hit the guy behind him.
14 May 2005 | Alfred
Did you know that David’s heart stopped for twenty minutes? He almost died. It happened in the hospital, just as the doctors completed some surgery related to his heart. (Not super-serious surgery, but serious enough.) The doctors told him that only five percent of the people this happens to survive with functioning brains. If it had happened just a few minutes later, after they wheeled him into the recovery room, he would have died for sure. What saved him was the fact that they were able to get oxygen to his brain almost immediately, because the machine was right there. (Later the anesthesiologist said that this was the first time this happened to him in twenty-two years. His hands shook the entire time, he said, which I can totally imagine: you take five seconds too long and David ends up a vegetable.)
I saw him last week, and he told me about a radio play he wrote in the hospital called Alfred Saves Himself (except the name wasn’t Alfred but another man’s name; the actual title is a play on the name of a sixteenth century French poet).
The play is almost entirely silence. It lasts five or six hours. Periodically you hear the sounds of different machines. A phone rings, but no one picks it up. Then it rings again, and this time it’s answered. There’s some terse dialogue about Alfred deciding not to come over. At one point you hear the wheels of two janitor carts and distance voices. (Actually, the wheel sounds were my idea. I suggested them after David explained that the voices belong to janitors.)
He’s so close to death now, and I don’t know how to think about it or what to say. I want to say, “What’s it like to be close to death?” but it’s difficult. I know I should, though. It must be lonely.
Looking for something else, I just found an email I wrote to M, nearly three years ago, while she was several states away, breaking up with her live-in boyfriend of five years so she could move to New York and begin a relationship with me which as it turned out lasted exactly thirty days. I wrote my email in response to one by M, the subject line of which was “sorry.” Hers went:
literally dying for you today.
i know it is somehow wrong to say that. my other life continues, strong and real.
but there it is.
i am doubled over with the force of how much i want you.
My response:
Isn’t it amazing that my first thought on reading this is that you don’t mean literally? I imagine being your editor and saying, “You lose the reader’s trust with literally. The reader thinks you’re over-dramatizing. What are you going to tell the reader when you’re literally dying for this man, say, by taking his place in a hostage situation?
That’s where my response ends. I never finished it and never sent it.
