Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (10 page)

A bilingual stranger helped me buy a train ticket to Rome, but on the return to Brindisi I had no one but myself to rely on. The man behind the counter offered me three options, and I guess I said yes to the one that meant “No seat for me, thank you. I would like to be packed as tightly as possible alongside people with no access to soap or running water.”

It was a common request, at least among the young and foreign. I heard French, Spanish, German, and a good many languages I couldn’t quite identify. What was it that sounded like English played backward? Dutch? Swedish? If I found the crowd intimidating, it had more to do with my insecurity than with the way anyone treated me. I suppose the others seemed more deserving than I did, with their faded bandannas and goatskin bags sagging with wine. While I was counting the days until I could go back home, they seemed to have a real talent for living.

When I was a young man my hair was dark brown and a lot thicker than it is now. I had one continuous eyebrow instead of two separate ones, and this made me look as though I sometimes rode a donkey. It sounds odd to say it—conceited, even—but I was cute that August when I was twenty-five. I wouldn’t have said so at the time, but reviewing pictures taken by my father in Athens, I think,
That was me? Really?
Looks-wise, I feel that single month constituted my moment, a peak from which the descent has been both swift and merciless.

It’s only three hundred and fifty miles from Rome to Brindisi, but, what with the constant stopping and starting, the train took forever. We left, I believe, at around  eight thirty p.m., and for the first few hours, everyone stood. Then we sat with our legs crossed, folding them in a little bit tighter when one person, and then another, decided to lie down. As my fellow passengers shifted position, I found myself pushed toward the corner, where I brushed up against a fellow named Bashir.

Lebanese, he said he was, en route to a small Italian university, where he planned to get a master’s in engineering. Bashir’s English was excellent, and in a matter of minutes we formed what passes between wayfarers in a foreign country as a kind of automatic friendship. More than a friendship, actually—a romance. Coloring everything was this train, its steady rumble as we passed through the dark Italian countryside. Bashir was—how to describe him? It was as if you had coaxed the eyes out of Bambi and resettled them, half asleep, into a human face. Nothing hard or ruined-looking there; in fact it was just the opposite—angelic, you might call him, pretty.

What was it that he and I talked about so intently? Perhaps the thrill was that we
could
talk, that our tongues, each flabby from lack of exercise, could flap and make sounds in their old familiar way. Three hours into our conversation, he invited me to get off the train in his college town and spend some time, as much as I liked, in the apartment that was waiting for him. It wasn’t the offer you’d make to a backpacker but something closer to a proposal. “Be with me” was the way I interpreted it.

At the end of our train car was a little room, no more than a broom closet, really, with a barred window in it. It must have been four a.m. when two disheveled Germans stepped out, and we moved in to take their place. As would later happen with Johnny Ryan, Bashir and I sat on the floor, the state of which clearly disgusted him. Apart from the fact that we were sober, and were pressed so close that our shoulders touched, the biggest difference was that our attraction was mutual. The moment came when we should have kissed—you could practically hear the surging strings—but I was too shy to make the first move, and so, I guess, was he. Still I could feel this thing between us, not just lust but a kind of immediate love, the sort that, like instant oatmeal, can be realized in a matter of minutes and is just as nutritious as the real thing.
We’ll kiss…now,
I kept thinking. Then,
Okay…now.
And on it went, more torturous by the second.

The sun was rising as we reached his destination, the houses and church spires of this strange city—a city I could make my own—silhouetted against the weak morning sky. “And so?” he asked.

I don’t remember my excuse, but it all came down to cowardice. For what, really, did I have to return to? A job pushing a wheelbarrow on Raleigh construction sites? A dumpy one-bedroom next to the IHOP?

Bashir got off with his three big suitcases and became a perennial lump in my throat, one that rises whenever I hear the word “Lebanon” or see its jittery outline on the evening news.
Is that where you went back to?
I wonder.
Do I ever cross your mind? Are you even still alive?

Given the short amount of time we spent together, it’s silly how often, and how tenderly, I think of him. All the way to Penn Station, hungover from my night with Johnny Ryan, I wondered what might have happened had I taken Bashir up on his offer. I imagined our apartment overlooking a square: the burbling fountain, the drawings of dams and bridges piled neatly on the desk.

When you’re young it’s easy to believe that such an opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one. Instead of a Lebanese guy in Italy it might be a Nigerian one in Belgium, or maybe a Pole in Turkey. You tell yourself that if you traveled alone to Europe this summer, you could surely do the same thing next year, and the year after that. Of course you don’t, though, and the next thing you know you’re an aging, unemployed elf so desperate for love you spend your evening mooning over a straight alcoholic.

The closer we got to New York, the more miserable I became. Then I thought of this guy my friend Lily and I had borrowed a ladder from a few months earlier, someone named Hugh. I’d never really trusted people who went directly from one relationship to the next, so after my train pulled into Penn Station, and after I’d taken the subway home, I’d wait a few hours, or maybe even a full day, before dialing his number and asking if he’d like to hear a joke.

If anything should be bracketed by matching bookends, I suppose it’s an author tour. The ones I’d undertaken in the past had begun in one independent or chain store, and ended, a month or so later, in another. The landscape, though, has changed since then, and it’s telling that on my ’08 tour I started and finished at a Costco.

The first one I went to was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I was spending the weekend with my sister Lisa, gearing up for six weeks of travel, when her husband, Bob, expressed a need for lightbulbs. “Anyone game for a quick ride to Costco?” he asked, and before he could even find his keys I was panting, doglike, beside the front door.

Living in cities, it’s easy to avoid the big-box superstores. Their merciless lighting, their stench of rubber and cheap molded plastic—it’s not the way I normally like to shop. At Costco, though, I’d found these displays of pain relievers: Anacin, Bayer, Tylenol—eight major brands were represented. Pills were paired into single-serving envelopes, then stapled in rows to a bright sheet of poster board. It looked like something you’d see behind the counter at a gas station. There the packets might cost two dollars each, but here the entire display—maybe a hundred and fifty doses—went for just twelve bucks.

At home I’d buy a bottle of Bufferin or ibuprofen and leave it at that, but when I’m on tour it’s packets I need—not for myself but to give as gifts to the people who’ve come to see me. Say it’s someone’s birthday or anniversary: I always offer the shampoos and conditioners taken from my hotels. But they provide only so many, and with a good-size crowd you’re empty-handed before you know it.

Adults get something for special occasions, but the bulk of my presents go to teenagers, who qualify by virtue of their very existence. Real fun is right at their fingertips, but instead of taking bong hits in a stolen car or getting pregnant in a neighbor’s toolshed, they’ve come to a bookstore to hear a middle-aged man read out loud. And for that they deserve a token of my gratitude. The beauty of pain relievers is that they’re light and easy to pack. On top of that, they’re actually useful. “Here you are,” I’ll say to a sixteen-year-old. “Put this in your purse or glove compartment and think of me the next time you get a hangover.”

In ’08, my gifts were pretty paltry. I’d bought eight dozen safety pins in Greece, and while they
were
foreign, they didn’t look much different from what you could get in the States. Ditto the German Band-Aids. So when Bob mentioned Costco I felt that all my problems had been solved.

As with every big-box store in Winston-Salem, it took fifteen minutes to drive there and another fifteen minutes to cross the parking lot. If the building seemed large from the outside, inside it was twice as big, the kind of space that has its own weather. The carts, too were slightly oversize, and made me appear even smaller than I actually am. Pushing one toward the hardware section, my brother-in-law and I looked like a pair of twelve-year-olds, the sort with that disease that speeds up the aging process and leaves them wizened and tragic.

This store didn’t have the lightbulbs Bob wanted, so we trudged on to the drug section, which proved equally disappointing. Pain relievers were in ten-gallon jars rather than packets, so I looked around for another gift that a teenager might appreciate. I wanted something light and individually wrapped, and settled, finally, upon a mess of condoms, which came in a box the size of a cinder block. It was a lot of protection but not a lot of weight, and I liked that. “All right,” I said to Bob. “I think these should do the trick.”

Putting them in the cart, I thought nothing of it, but a moment later, walking down the aisle with my fifty-nine-year-old brother-in-law, I started feeling patently, almost titanically gay. Maybe I was imagining things, but it seemed as if people were staring at us—people in families, mostly, led by thrifty and disapproving parents who looked at what we were buying and narrowed their eyes in judgment.
You homosexuals,
their faces seemed to say.
Is that all you ever think about?

My brother-in-law is around my height, with thick, graying hair, a matching mustache, and squarish wire-rimmed glasses. I’d never imagined him as gay, much less as my boyfriend, but now I couldn’t stop. “We’ve got to get something else in this cart,” I told him.

Bob disappeared into the acreage reserved for produce and returned a minute later with a four-pound box of strawberries. This somehow made us look even gayer. “After anal sex, we like shortcake!” read the cartoon bubble now floating over our heads.

“Something else,” I said. “We’ve got to get something else.”

Bob, oblivious, looked up at the rafters and thought for a moment. “I guess I could use some olive oil.”

“Forget it,” I told him, my voice a bark. “Let’s just pay up and go. Can we do that, please?”

I’d later wonder what the TSA inspectors must have thought. My tour began and every few days, upon arriving in some new city, I’d find a slip of paper in my suitcase, the kind they throw in after going through all your stuff. Five dress shirts, three pairs of pants, underwear, a Dopp kit full of Band-Aids and safety pins, two neckties, and several hundred rubbers—what sort of person does the mind cobble together from these ingredients?

As the weeks passed, my suitcase grew more and more conventional. “I’ve got something for you,” I’d say to a teenager. “It’s nothing huge, just a little something to show I care.”

The kids who went to good schools would roll their eyes. “I can get those in the health room,” they’d tell me.

And, in the voice of a person whose upbringing was so fundamentally different that he might as well have been raised by camel herders, I would say, “Really? For free?”

Unlike a lot of authors I know, I enjoy my book tours—love them, as a matter of fact. That said, I’m in a fortunate position, and have been able to eliminate the parts that don’t agree with me—the picture-taking, for instance. People all have cameras on their cell phones now, and, figuring, I guess, that they might as well aim them at something, they’d ask me to stand and pose a good thirty times a night. This wasn’t an inconvenience so much as an embarrassment. “You can do better than me,” I’d tell them. And when they insisted that they really couldn’t, I’d feel even worse. Thus, at readings, there’s now a notice propped atop my book-signing table. “Sorry,” it announces, “but we don’t allow photos.” This makes it sound like it’s the store’s idea, a standard policy, like no eating fudge in the fine-arts section.

“If it’s their rule, I guess I’ll have to go along with it,” I tell people, sighing as if I were really disappointed.

With the picture-taking out of the way, I’m completely free to enjoy myself, which I generally do—and immensely. Every night, after a reading and a short question-and-answer session, I’ll sit and talk to hundreds of strangers. This fellow, for instance, whom I met in Toronto—I liked his glasses, and, after I asked where he had gotten them, we fell into the topic of corrective surgery. “I hear that you have to remain conscious during the procedure,” he told me, “and that when the laser hits its target, you can actually smell your own eyeball sizzling.”

I thought about this for days, just as I thought of the special-ed teacher I met in Pittsburgh. “You know,” I said, “I hear those words and automatically think,
Handicapped,
or,
Learning disabled.
But aren’t a lot of your students just assholes?”

“You got it,” she said. Then she told me about a kid—last day of class—who wrote on the blackboard, “Mrs. J_____ is a cock master.”

I was impressed because I’d never heard that term before. She was impressed because the boy had spelled it correctly.

For hours each night I would talk to people, asking pretty much whatever I wanted. The trick, of course, is to match the right person with the right question. Take this young woman I met in Boston a few years back. I’d been signing for almost six hours, and when she finally stepped up to the table, my mind went blank. “When, um…when did you last touch a monkey?” I asked.

I expected “Never” or “It’s been years,” but instead she took a step back, saying, “Oh, can you smell it on me?”

The young woman’s name was Jennifer, and it turned out that she worked for Helping Hands, an organization that trains monkeys to toil as slaves for paralyzed people. At her invitation, I visited the facility outside Boston and spent a pleasant afternoon having my pockets picked by some of the cleverer students.

On that tour, my questions were pretty standard: “What was the last reading you attended?” “Who are you going to use this condom on?” “If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?”

Late at night I’d return to my room, scoop up the shampoos and conditioners replaced as part of the turndown service, and record everything that I had learned, not just the stories that people had told me but all the ephemera: The names of local restaurants and hair salons seen from the car window. One hotel with its Martini Tuesdays, another with its Fajita Fridays. In Baton Rouge, a woman asked me to name her donkey. “Stephanie,” I said, and later that night, too tired to sleep, I lay awake and wondered if I’d spoken too quickly.

In 2004, I offered priority signing to smokers, the reason being that, because they didn’t have as long to live, their time was more valuable. Four years later my special treatment was reserved for men who stood five-foot-six and under. “That’s right, my little friends,” I announced. “There’ll be no waiting in line for you.” It seemed unfair to restrict myself to men, so I included any woman with braces on her teeth.

“What about us?” asked the pregnant and the lame. And because it was my show, I told them to wait their fucking turn.

After a month in the United States, I flew to Canada to finish my tour. On my first night in Toronto, I read at a chain store called Indigo. That event ended at midnight, and the next afternoon, following a half dozen radio and print interviews, I was taken to Costco, not to buy pain relievers and condoms but to meet my readers. Or, rather,
not
meet them. My appearance had been advertised by way of flyer and was to last no longer than an hour. Shoppers passed with their enormous carts, most loaded with children who gaped through the bars at this ridiculous nobody, sitting by himself at a folding table. Making it just that much more pathetic was the sign next to me, the big one reading “No Photos, Please.”

It would be my greatest pleasure not to take your picture,
I imagined people thinking.
I mean, really, just who the hell do you think you are?

It’s a question well suited to a cavernous space. There your eyes can roam heavenward, past the signs for frozen food and automotive supplies, past the arrow pointing to the cash registers, and on to that boundless parking lot, which leads, eventually, to home.