Attempting Normal (22 page)

I didn’t freak out. I knew we might be in for something but was consoled by my new understanding of things: I had no control over what happened. Plus, I had been through turbulence before; it’s survivable. Then, as Cocker reached the song’s crescendo, screaming, “I get high with a little help from my friends, / I get by with a little help from my friends,” the plane lunged downward for a good five seconds.

Now I was out of my head, out of Woodstock, back in the present, gripping my armrests. Nothing gets you in the present like terror. There was another layer of sound entering my head from outside the headset. It was the man behind me screaming, “Oh, no! Oh, God, no!” His shouts were percussive and each outburst came just after a bump or tilt of the plane, which now seemed to be completely out of control.

I did not scream, not yet. I had a series of odd thoughts as adrenaline blasted through my body. “Do I want to die to this song? It’s a good song but do I want to die to it? What song would be a good song to die to? I should make a death playlist for my iPod for when I have time to decide before I die what song I want
to hear. I’m an older guy. I could be on a treadmill and feel a pain shooting down my arm.
Better pick a tune, fast
.” Then I thought, “My girlfriend. I wish she was here. This is something we should be doing together. Dying.” I didn’t want her to miss the terror I was going through. That is a metaphor for every adult relationship I’ve had. “Hey baby, we’re going down. Get in.”

You don’t choose your scream. No one practices it. It is involuntary and spontaneous. You don’t know what will come out of you and you can only hope for the best. The guy behind me had set a pretty low bar. He was whimpering with sporadic outbursts of high-pitched screaming followed by apologies. I didn’t want to be that guy. So when the plane dropped out of the sky again and fell for a few seconds, I am happy to report that what came out of me, at the moment when I was terrified to my core, was a brash, loud “Oh, come on!” I can live with that. I didn’t gloat. I didn’t turn to the guy behind me and say, “That’s how a man screams. You should put a lid on that little girl inside of you and get hold of yourself.” I just stayed seized in my seat hoping to get through it. When the storm started tossing the plane around back and forth I did let out a couple of other grunting yelps. I did scream out an “Are you fucking kidding me!” followed by a “Jesus, not like this!” Which is odd because he’s not even my guy. My people come from the father. The original. But “Jesus” is so catchy. I think I would have gotten some odd looks if I yelled, “Yahweh, no!”

The pilot finally got under the clouds. He made it through the storm. Cleveland was in view. He started to circle the city. I could feel him flying, back in control. It felt like he was having fun. The plane was fairly empty. I was in my own row and the woman across from me was in her own row. The guy behind me was alone as well. As the pilot soared and swung the craft around the city I was relieved.

I hated that pilot, though. In my mind he had gambled with
our lives. In my mind the tower had told him to divert to another city and he said, “Fuck that. I got this.” Then he turned his radio off.

I turned to the woman and said, “He’s taking a victory lap.” She smiled awkwardly. Then I made the mistake of asking, “Was everyone screaming up there?” I had my headphones on and couldn’t really hear anyone but the guy behind me.

She said, “No. Just you two.”

That was a sad moment. Now I had to bond with the guy. We had lived through something. Maybe no one felt the urgency that we did. Maybe they were all numb or in denial, dead inside. Our culture does that to people. I turned around in my seat and said, “You okay, man?” He said, “Yeah, I just can’t handle that shit.” I said, “Yeah, that was as bad as I have ever been through.”

He said, “I’m sorry.”

“No worries,” I said.

He was a balding middle-aged guy with a beard and a tie-dyed shirt on. Looked like the type of guy who made his own ice cream and cried when Jerry Garcia died. This long strange trip that we were on was not a good one.

When the plane finally landed I was shaken up and aggravated and still trying to come down myself; I had not yet landed. I was still in the air and frightened. I kind of wanted the pilot to validate my experience when he got on the mic. I’m not sure what I wanted him to say. “Wow, that was some bullshit, people. We were freaking out up here, too. You guys all good? My copilot shit his pants and is still crying. I don’t think I can go on flying. Sorry.” I didn’t get anything like that. What I got was “Welcome to Cleveland. Local time is twelve-oh-six.” I thought, “Fuck you! You’re not taking that experience away from me. Own it!”

Once we were on the ground the head flight attendant made her way through the cabin asking if everyone was okay. I said, “That was pretty bad, no?”

“The worst I’ve ever been through,” she said.

“How long have you been doing this?” I asked.

“Thirty years.”

“Holy shit!” I thought. It
was
as bad as it felt. We did almost die.

The woman across the aisle had pulled up a Doppler map on her iPhone and said, “Look at this.” I took the phone. There was a storm crescent descending on Cleveland. A big red band of bad with a small break in it, a sliver on the screen. That’s when I realized that our pilot was up there, saw that gap, and said, “Fuck it. We can do this!” I was right! He was a hotdogger.

When we pulled into the gate I knew I had to say something. I was in the back of the plane so I was going to be one of the last to walk out. I didn’t know what I was going to say but I wanted to share my discomfort and angry gratitude for what I had been through. I felt my thoughts congealing into a fist.

When I got up to the open cockpit door and looked in at the pilot and the copilot packing up their special pilot briefcases, this is what came out of my mouth:

“You guys have fun up there?”

It came out a little too angry to be funny. I sounded like an old man reprimanding children.
You have fun up there with your midair shenanigans?
The pilot looked at me squarely, smiled, and said, “Yes, we did!” His came out a little too angry, too.

I really didn’t like him. He was mocking my feelings.

I got my bag and went out to the curb to wait for my car. I saw the screaming man from the plane waiting for a bus. We had a moment. He was clearly still ashamed but relieved, as was I. We looked at each other like we shared a secret hell.
Nam, man. Never forget
. It was as if he was looking at me with that mixture of pleading and trust that this would remain between us with a hint of “take care of yourself, man.”

When I got to the hotel it was 12:30
A.M
. The storm that we had
flown through was just now hitting the city. It was bad: sideways rain, thunder and lightning. I couldn’t sleep. I was jacked. I had almost died. I felt like crying. I was thinking almost-just-died thoughts: I have to be nicer to people, I should be grateful, my life is pretty good, I have a sweet girlfriend, I live in the freest country in the world if you can afford it.

I didn’t know what to do with all that aggravated/elated life energy. I decided to masturbate.

Ninety-nine percent of the time when you masturbate in a hotel alone it is a sad thing. Not that time. That was the 1 percent. It was a celebration.
Of life
. I didn’t watch porn. I didn’t even think about fucking. I jerked off to being alive! I think in the middle of it I grunted, “I’m alive. Goddamnit, I’m alive.”

I want to be honest, even at the risk of alienating some of you. I came right on the floor of my hotel room.

When I finished I called my girlfriend. I told her what had happened. She was upset. She was almost crying. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I just jerked off.”

“That’s good, right?” she asked.

“Yeah, I feel better.”

“Good.”

“Um, I came on the floor of my hotel room.”

“Why did you cum on the floor?” she asked, concerned.

“Because that’s what freedom feels like sometimes. I’m alive.”

  19  

Don’t google “mouth cancer images.” Just don’t do it. I did. It was bad.

I was in a hotel room in Madison, Wisconsin. This is not important. I am in a lot of hotel rooms. But there I was, in a hotel room in Madison, Wisconsin, just sitting there trying to get some work done and looking forward to my lobby waffle. Those of you who travel and stay at a certain kind of hotel understand the beauty of the lobby waffle. When you’re checking in and eyeball a waffle maker in the free-breakfast-buffet nook, some part of you thinks, “How bad could tomorrow be?” I know that at 9:58 the next morning, two minutes before that buffet closes, I will be making my own waffle and it will feel like my birthday for about twenty minutes.

So I’m in the room doing my work. I’m tweeting, updating statuses, emailing, you know, working. Putting in the time to push my slightly damaged, emotionally complicated, inconsistent brand out into the big hungry ether for people to judge and bear witness.
It amazes me that we are all on Twitter and Facebook. By “we” I mean adults. We’re adults, right? But emotionally we’re a culture of seven-year-olds. Have you ever had that moment when you are updating your status and you realize that every status update is just a variation on a single request: “Would someone please acknowledge me?” You post it and you just wait it out. That first thumbs-up appears.
Like!
Yes. All comments are then read as “We see you, Marc. We love you, Marc. We care that you are there, Marc.” Twitter and Facebook are my techno-parents, sating the child in me. But they are not beyond abusing him.

As I worked I was also eating licorice candy compulsively.

I have a short menu of compulsive behaviors now that alcohol and drugs are out of my life, but the key is that something has to be going into my mouth or touching my body every waking second. I can eat compulsively, I can masturbate compulsively, or I can nap compulsively. I know compulsive napping sounds like a contradiction in terms but it is not. I also call them panic naps. A panic nap usually comes on with an exacerbated declaration of:

“Fuck, I gotta … goddamnit … I can’t think about … shit, I’m tired.”

Licorice was the compulsion of the day. It was fancy licorice, from Italy, almost inedible if you don’t have the taste for it but if you do, it’s completely addictive. As I sat and ate and tweeted and plinked away on the keys, my tongue was wandering around my mouth sucking on awful candy and I felt a sore spot in my mouth. I thought, “What is that? Did I bite my lip? Is that a canker sore? What is that?” I went to the bathroom, pushed my face toward the mirror, and pulled my lower lip down to see what the problem was. There in my mouth were three red sores surrounded by a brownish ring. It looked nasty. Out loud I said, “Fuck, is that mouth cancer?”

In about eight minutes I went through all five stages of grief, accompanied by panicky grunts. Denial: “That’s not mouth cancer.
I couldn’t have mouth cancer.” Anger: “Fuck, I have mouth cancer. What else could it be.” Bargaining: “God, I know I don’t really believe in you but please let this not be mouth cancer. I will do anything!” Depression: “I have mouth cancer. It’s over. I wish I could die now.” Then, finally, acceptance: “Maybe I don’t need my mouth.”

I then collapsed into a panic nap. “Fuck, mouth cancer! Goddamnit! Should I go to the hospital now? I’m tired.” I passed out for twenty minutes and woke up possessed with the anxious desire to do research. I had to confirm that what was in my mouth was cancer. I had to google mouth cancer images.

If there is a list of the shittiest ways to spend fifteen minutes, googling mouth cancer has to be right up there. I’m thinking it’s number two after sticking pins in your balls for no reason. Maybe it’s number one, because some people actually like sticking pins in their balls and I don’t want to dismiss the BDSM community just because they are pathologically numb and have to hurt themselves to feel. Who am I to judge? I used to hit myself to get out of my head.

I looked at every mouth cancer image available and in fifteen minutes, I knew what every kind of mouth cancer looked like, but I could not find anything that looked like my mouth cancer. There were a couple of ways to interpret this. I went with “I have the rarest mouth cancer in the world. They don’t even have documentation of my mouth cancer. I should take pictures of it and send it to Google so they can update their image bank, maybe name the cancer after me. Call it Oral Maronoma, it could be my legacy.” I was freaking the fuck out.