The Best American Essays 2013 (19 page)

I’d forgotten that social life could be so easy. I’d forgotten that things most Americans do alone, ordinary things, like watching television or listening to music or sweeping a floor, could also be done in numbers, pleasantly. One night I sat on the floor next to a kid, muscled and tall, rectangularly handsome, who turned out to be a quarterback for UCLA. I learned this from Kim; he’d never bothered to mention it. Too absorbed in the goofy talent show, too busy barbecuing chicken breasts or squirting Hershey’s Syrup on bowls of ice cream, assembly-line style, while someone else stuck spoons in them. At Beverly Zion, that’s how it worked: pitch in, help out, cooperate, cooperate. Divide the labor, pool the fruits. This reflexive communalism went way back in Mormonism and underlay a frontier economic system known as “the United Order.” It had also inspired the early Mormons’ symbol of themselves, the beehive. In Brigham Young’s Utah, where speculative self-enrichment was explicitly discouraged (along with the mining and trading of precious metals, which Young decried as a barren, corrupting enterprise), the direction of the pursuit of happiness was toward the advancement of the common good.

It dawned on me that the purpose of Beverly Zion was not to seal out Hollywood at all, but to provide a setting for the enjoyment of a mutualistic way of life familiar from childhood homes and churches. Well, good enough: It kept me fed. It kept me company when I wasn’t writing and when Amanda, also a writer, was on assignment. It provided me with a car when mine broke down, with a truck when I bought a used sofa and had to fetch it, with laundry supplies when I ran out of them, and with dog-sitters for Amanda’s poodle when we flew to St. Louis to watch the filming of
Up in the Air
. It also provided me, thanks to Bobby’s father, a product designer for a Big Three auto company, with an insider’s discount on a new car that saved me a sweet four thousand bucks. And in repayment for these kindnesses? Nothing. I asked. Just help finish this Jell-O salad.

“I mean it: Are they for real?” Amanda kept asking me. She’d grown up a Roman Catholic in Chicago and felt guilty about accepting favors that she couldn’t instantly return. Beverly Zion soon overwhelmed this attitude.

One ninety-degree afternoon in the backyard, Bobby held a fashion shoot for a publication named
Eliza
run by one of his sister’s pretty friends. (“America’s leading modest fashion magazine” was how Kim described it to Amanda, meaning no short skirts or low-cut tops.) The theme of the shoot was summer athletic wear, and playing a golfer was a slim Korean girl who looked terrific bending over a putter and aimlessly tossing back her long, thick hair. Three weeks later Bobby informed the house that he and the model, a Mormon, were engaged. Soon afterward, they married.

Amanda and I, who’d already been dating longer than Bobby and his bride had known each other, attended the wedding reception, which was held in the gym of a suburban church and reminded me of my adolescent dances. Abundant pink punch, a blend of juice and soda. Cakes and cookies and yet more cookies. A zany mood of juvenile abandon and a prayer at the end for safe trips home.

Afterward, in the car, on a dark freeway, Amanda said, “I give up. I want to join.”

“Don’t give up,” I said. “We aren’t them. We aren’t.”

“Maybe I’m not. You are, though,” she said.

I didn’t argue with her. Much as they had in 1976, when the Kirns lay awake in their broiling house, the Mormons had seen me through an ugly low patch, only this time they’d appeared unbidden. My checks had stopped bouncing. So had my moods. I’d knocked off the Vicodin, flushed away the Ambien, and replaced them with comfort food and group TV nights. I’d met George Clooney but given up trying to be him. When I climbed into bed in the guesthouse after the wedding, I nodded off faster than I had in years, safe behind the walls of Beverly Zion.

Driving home from Los Angeles to Montana recently, I stopped for the night in Salt Lake City with the secret intent of showing Amanda, to whom I’d become engaged a few months earlier, that Utah wasn’t the sensory exclusion zone of late-night comedy legend. We turned off the freeway onto a broad street originally laid out by Brigham Young to accommodate passing teams of horses, looked for a restaurant, saw nothing but KFC (past ten o’clock; too late for anything fancier), and pulled up in front of the Monaco Hotel. Having spent the weekend in Las Vegas flinging money at the roulette wheel and attending saucy cabaret shows, we were exhausted, but only she was sleepy. My easily excited ex-Mormon metabolism was still jazzed from the Strip and two truck-stop energy drinks.

At 1
A.M.
, with no one on the street, I left the hotel and walked up to the temple, a blazingly well lit granite edifice built by stalwart pioneers and completed about 120 years ago, after 40 years of work. I sat on a bench regarding its eastern face and the trumpeting gold angel on its main spire: Moroni, the being who directed Joseph Smith to the spot where the golden Book of Mormon lay buried. I was after something, I realized. A lift, a boost, a spiritual burning in the stomach. I’d never given up chasing that sensation. I tried to force things by praying with closed eyes—or not praying exactly, focusing my willingness. Nothing. The roar of big trucks on I-15, the pounding of my caffeinated pulse. Then I opened my eyes and saw something I’d missed: a simple carved symbol above the temple’s entrance that other religions might not have thought to put there. It told a story, it summed it up in stone. My father’s story. A lot of mine. And, from what I knew, much of theirs—the Mormons.

Nothing mysterious. Nothing cultish. Just a handshake.

KEVIN SAMPSELL

FROM
Salon.com

P
EOPLE USUALLY JUST
ask me where the bathroom is or if we are hiring. Sometimes they ask where they can find the latest Dan Brown novel or “that book they just talked about on NPR.” On this day in late 2007, however, while I worked at the front info desk at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, a frazzled-looking young guy stood silently in front of me.

“Do you need help?” I asked.

He shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “I’m going to go jump off the Burnside Bridge,” he said.

Every cell of my body lit up, but something in my head told me to play it calm.

“Why are you going to do that?” I asked. About fifteen feet in front of me, three cashiers worked a small but steady line of happy book buyers. I leaned in a little, trying to create a private space between us. He was wearing a T-shirt and no coat, not enough clothes for the chilly fall day. He smelled toxic. But I could tell he was handsome. I could picture him in a cheap and earnest suit.

“Nobody needs me,” he said.

“Who’s nobody?” I asked. But then I wondered if that sounded insensitive.

“She won’t let me see my daughter,” he said.

I noticed a customer coming my way for help. “Hey, what’s your name?” I asked him, and he told me it was Chris. “Stay right here, Chris,” I said. “I want to talk to you more.”

All he had to do was walk out the door, take a quick left, walk ten blocks down Burnside, and find a high place to jump. But he stepped back and waited as I helped one, and then another, customer.

When I had finished, I called him back over to the desk. I called him by his name. He told me his girlfriend didn’t want to see him anymore. He told me he’d been up for three straight days, wired on some kind of drug that must have been mixed with something else. He seemed just as surprised about this as I was. “Maybe I should get a book,” he said, and for a second I thought everything was going to be okay, but he grew anxious again. “I gotta go somewhere. I have to lie down or something.”

He took a few steps toward the door. “Wait, Chris. Hey, hold on,” I called out. When he turned toward me, I could see the color drain from his face. He looked like he was already dead, like he had washed up on the banks of the Willamette River with his eyes open and his body bloated. There was something inside him that I couldn’t stop. “Let me call someone that can help you out,” I said. I was fully aware that I sounded like a character in an after-school special. I was using the nonthreatening, sterilized language of the do-gooder. Plus I was saying his name a lot, which I always thought sounded unnatural. (“Hey Chris, can I help you find a book?” “How’s your day going, Chris?”)

I called one of the managers to the front desk and walked over to Chris, standing between him and the door. “I think you need more time to think,” I said. “I’m sure that no one wants you to die.”

He took out his wallet, and I thought he was going to give me something. His ID and credit cards, his money and a pile of tattered Post-it notes. But he took out a photo of his daughter and showed it to me. I was glad he didn’t hand it to me. It meant he still wanted to hold on to things.

At that moment the manager walked up and gently ushered him into the security office to talk. Thirty minutes later, an ambulance arrived, and Chris was carried out on a folded-up stretcher. He was going to be okay, at least for today.

Afterward, I felt such a strange pride about the whole situation. It was an endorphin rush that shook my voice as I told people about it. “I talked a guy out of killing himself today,” I told them. Or, “I saved somebody’s life at work.”

Maybe I was saying these boastful things because it just feels good to help another human being. Or maybe I was saying them because by then my own life was spinning out of control.

I had been with my girlfriend for about five years, and I felt myself becoming more and more unhappy. It was almost like something had physically happened to me—like I had been in a car accident or suffered a concussion from falling down the stairs—and my chemicals had been jarred somehow. I woke up depressed. One morning, while my girlfriend and I were out eating breakfast, I began crying without knowing why. We paid the bill and sat in my car talking about therapy, about help, about what might be buried inside me.

On the day I convinced Chris not to jump off the bridge, I thought maybe I turned a corner, maybe I could embrace positivity again, maybe I could hear the words I had said to him: “I’m sure that no one wants you to die.”

I went to my friend Lynne’s house and told her what had happened. She and I had a complicated history. I’d briefly been close to her at nineteen, but we’d lost touch over the next twenty years. She had recently moved to Portland with her husband, and our connection had rekindled. I thought of Lynne often. We exchanged e-mails almost daily. She told me about problems with her husband, and I confided in her about my own problems and the uncertainty in my life.

The more time I spent with her, the more conflicted I became. I felt a sweet glow of nostalgia with her, and we talked about the small town where we both grew up. I sensed a pull toward her, even though I knew she wasn’t right for me. Not as right as the girlfriend I already had whom I had built a life with and whom I was more compatible with and more attracted to.

As I was telling Lynne the story in her kitchen while she washed dishes, I broke down and cried. Like that morning in the restaurant with my girlfriend, I wasn’t sure why it started. But something broke inside me, and I was gasping for air. I closed my eyes, but tears still poured out. If I shut them tighter, my eyelids would have blown up like water balloons. My whole body shook, and I felt like collapsing.

I felt Lynne’s hands on my shoulders. My arms reached out blindly, wanting to pull her to me, wanting to be held. I felt my knees bend, and then reflexively straighten up. I thought of what it would be like to bend my knees on the ledge of a bridge. Would I actually jump, or would I just lean forward and fall? Would the freefall be scary or thrilling? I could imagine my body twisting and somersaulting until it shattered against the water, but I couldn’t fathom what would be going through my mind.

“You did a good thing,” Lynne said. “You saved a life.” She put her sleeve up to my face, softly brushing away my tears. And then her husband walked in the door, home from work.

I wondered if I would see Chris after that. If he would stop in the store and thank me for saving his life. I wasn’t sure if I wanted him to. I looked through the newspaper more carefully for the next few days, lingering over the obituaries. I never heard a thing.

I split up with my girlfriend shortly after that. We had gone to see a couples counselor who was far away, in an unfamiliar suburb. I felt uncomfortable and confined during the session. On the drive home, on the freeway, I told my girlfriend I was giving up on the relationship. I drove to Powell’s and got out of the car, and she moved to the driver’s seat. We were both crying, barely able to talk. I knew I was being an asshole. I was going back to work, like it was a normal day. I did all this on my lunch break.

We would talk about her moving out, how we would separate stuff, and how we would tell my son, later.

My son. I had a son. He was fourteen when this happened. I told myself that he was resilient. I had broken up with his mother when he was about three, and then I married someone else that same year. Five years later my wife asked for a divorce, and he had an ex-stepmom.

He was a good kid, but I worried I was setting a bad example. Telling your kids about another breakup is wrenching work. It’s like you’re looking at a younger version of yourself and confessing that you are weak at heart, that failure is inevitable, and that sometimes you try so hard and want to seem heroic but you are not. I am weak at heart. I have failed. I am not heroic.

My girlfriend and I told my son, and we could hardly breathe. He sat there with an earnest look of concern. He tried to form a comforting smile on his face. I wasn’t sure if the smile was for us or him. That was probably the saddest moment of my life.

The next day at Powell’s, I was on autopilot. Completely numb. I was in back where we sort through books. A woman I work with whom I barely know put her hand on my shoulder. I think she could sense something was wrong. She asked if I was okay. I said the words, “Not really.” Then I started weeping.