The Best American Essays 2013 (43 page)

Not too much later, I found Ripley was living in a moldy dump in a complex in South Austin. His roommate had been recently released from a penal facility. Ripley had become Dr. Ripley, “the Dark Professor,” he called himself. He wrote school papers for a business that catered to loser students who would pay well for them. He liked literary topics the best. His specialty was to offer original compositions that could never be resold. He could also write a B-range paper upon request—sometimes, he explained, suspicions could be drawn if suddenly a student got too smart. But, he said, he was a doctor of creative writing, and he could write in any voice, any style that was desired. Lately he’d gotten to sounding a little paranoid. Working for one of the athletic programs at UT Austin, he heard that somebody thought he saw Ripley geezing outside, or in the bathroom, something like that. Ripley was worried because maybe they were a little concerned about what he knew and what he did and what he might say if they let him go, how much worse if they didn’t. And so on.

I hadn’t visited him in a long time, but I was making a better-than-average wreck of my own life, an okay time for me to share in his latest troubles. It seemed that the singer Sheryl Crow, living in Los Angeles, was struggling with a song, so to help her out, her producer visited a few used bookstores and bought some poetry books. The producer picked out the same book I’d received back when, the one that had the poem “Fun” in it. She recorded “All I Wanna Do.” Though she placed the setting off Santa Monica Boulevard, Ripley’s name itself remains inside the lyrics with an evaluation of him.

“All I want is to have a little fun

Before I die,” says the man next to me

Out of nowhere, apropos of nothing. He says

His name’s William, but I’m sure he’s Bill

Or Billy or Mac or Buddy; he’s plain ugly to me
,

And I wonder if he’s ever had fun in his life
.

We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday
,

In a bar that faces a giant car wash
.

The good people of the world are washing their cars

On their lunch hours, hosing and scrubbing

As best they can in skirts and suits
.

Ripley was sunk deep into a stuffed couch, books and papers puddled all around, and it was almost as if there was a ’50s detective light on him. His face was liquid and sticky-looking, the Texas sweat had caked but was still moist, his graying hair more afraid to relax than simply uncombed and messy, the
REM
-like flutter of his eyes so quick that human ones like mine took their movement as too slow. His voice was calm, each syllable as distinguishable as the one that preceded and the one that would follow. He’d reached a new dimension of wasted.

“All I Wanna Do” was a hit everywhere, even number one in Germany, as Ripley kept pointing out as dramatic proof of something more. When the rights for the poem were first bought, his excited friend Cooper, Ripley wanted me to believe, offered to pay him half. He wanted to, went his claim, because Cooper always said the poem was Ripley’s too. And Ripley agreed, but because it was only a couple thousand dollars, he wouldn’t take half that. “He was a friend, Dagoberto,” and he wouldn’t take that little bit from a friend. He was happy for him then. But now? Why wouldn’t he give him some now? He didn’t even want half anymore. Just a cut. Fifteen percent was a fair amount, he thought. Cooper refused. He would give nothing. Ripley began to read aloud a too-long and boring letter he had written Cooper, explaining friendship, their friendship, their poem, their agreement according to him. It was a painfully bad letter, the worst Ripley creative writing I’d ever heard.

There was a pounding on the door. Bang, bang, bang. A fist mocking Ripley’s speech pattern. He got up like a weightlifter straining for the record. The visitor was a shady dude whose eyes darted. Ripley went through another door and came back. He had the prettiest
colitas
of marijuana you’d ever seen, all curled cute inside a clear freezer bag. The dude, who did not seem like someone into weed, smelled it and rubbed it between his fingers, bought it. When he left, Ripley plopped back into the stuffed couch. He asked if I wanted or knew anyone who wanted an ounce or two of crystal meth. He didn’t think so, he said, but he had to ask.

We actually heard the song playing on a radio outside an open window. It was impossible not to laugh. He didn’t know what he should do. Ripley said he’d gotten his uncle in Corpus Christi to pursue Cooper. Ripley’s uncle was an intellectual property rights lawyer. At that time I didn’t even know there was such an item, let alone an attorney for it. Then Ripley clutched what I remember—surely wrong—looked to me like a telegram. It was, Ripley told me, from Cooper or his representative, or his uncle, like that, and said that unless he ceased and desisted in his demands, like that, he would be exposed as a drug dealer and heroin addict. Ripley looked at me like I should be as astounded as he was by the charge. “Why would he be this way, Dagoberto? Why would he want to say these things about me?” I shook my head. What could I add but my laughter?

I didn’t keep in touch with Ripley. I have no clue how much fun he had left in him before he died, seven years ago, though he did find a woman and they moved to California. Years passed. Ten more? I got one e-mail from him from there and it was all in caps. It wasn’t really screaming at me, being loud, but the opposite. He said he was happy.

MICHELLE MIRSKY

FROM
McSweeney’s

I
AM CONSUMED
most moments by a feeling of sham adulthood, of profound adolescence. Always a late bloomer, I’m dubious as to whether this re-teenaged state in which I find myself is a function of grief and renewal or whether I’m just now finding my way for the first time, admitting that I was never really all that grown-up. Of one thing I am certain: I am not the person I was before Lev died. Nor am I the person I was at the end of the first year, the 365 collected days of which I was supported, carried, sometimes to the point of feeling suffocated—childlike. I became very nearly the ward of my wider world and filled with some kind of crazy uncharacteristic peace and faith in the universe, never alone by accident and never alone by choice.

In year two, the world went back about its business. Lev’s tiny legend faded. The well-meaning sympathy of acquaintances soured into something like pity. People listened a little less patiently when I talked about sad things; a feeling of otherness crept on me and fogged me all up, shut me down. I stopped talking about Lev so much. I began to make choices when meeting new people, whether to tell them about Lev at all. I need to decide within a few moments of meeting someone if I want to know that person beyond our introduction. And if I do, I must then find the words to explain my loss and how it’s going to be okay. They need to know it’s going to be okay, so I tell them it will be. I can tell the whole story of Lev’s life quickly and without crying, with a smile even. But it doesn’t get easier. It never gets any easier. More often, when meeting new people, I tell them I have just one child (a child with an implied unremarkable medical history). They don’t need to know all about me. Lev gets redacted in the interest of everyone’s comfort.

For five years I’ve shown up to work every day in a beautiful, world-class children’s hospital. I have a unique unicorn of a job advising the hospital on the experience of being a parent of a patient, working with medical professionals at the top of their respective games, people who are the best in their field at healing children. We work together every day to figure out how to build a better mousetrap from the inside out. I work with men and women of all stripes, from housekeepers to hospital executives to doctors and everyone in between. My job was challenging while Lev was living—switching hats between mother and employee, between problem and solution. Talking with the doctors at Lev’s bedside about his heart medication and pacemaker settings and cancer treatment and then meeting those same doctors at boardroom tables to talk about construction projects and hospital policy changes. Sleeping in Lev’s room at night and tumbling bleary down to my office in the morning to host family coffee hours for parents of patients, to learn their stories, to feed them back to the system. I used to tell pieces of my story to help parents contextualize the experience of having a sick baby. I was just like them. With Lev gone, I’m two years into my role as the worst-case scenario. As the mother of a child who couldn’t be saved, I am a constant reminder of what no one likes to remember: you can’t win them all. Like one of the former Soviet republics, the ones whose names you never hear, I’m a casualty of the wider war—a shambled diplomat. I am the ambassador of Deadkidistan. I smile and nod and listen and ask questions. I don’t tell my story to the parents anymore.

In the first year after Lev died, the ladies who worked the cafeteria checkout line would occasionally catch me off-guard by asking how I was holding up, how my parents were doing, or telling me they missed seeing my sweet boy. Once and again they would tell me their own stories of grief and ask my advice in solidarity. I’d feel bad in these moments that I didn’t know all their names. I didn’t know anything about them. But they knew me. And they’d known my son. They knew the sad ending to our story: my son died of cancer and heart disease in a room one floor up from where they serve lunch, one floor down from the gift shop. He died just down the hall from the sunny courtyard where he’d met his brother for the first time three years earlier. He died in a bed a short elevator ride from my office, where I’m about to eat a $4 salad for lunch. Thank you. Have a nice day.

One month to the day before Lev died, I was at a friend’s baby shower in Los Angeles. The hosts of the shower arranged the services of a tarot card reader for the party. The guests were abuzz. When the ersatz soothsayer arrived, she looked to be in costume. Dressed in striped thigh-highs and a tutu, her hair in pigtails, she approximated a stripper version of a circus sideshow gypsy: clownish without winking, a performer. The filmy veil of artifice, an extension of the one that mostly envelops my beloved L.A., made me tired on top of tired. No need to make a party trick of predicting my future. My path was clear. The day before the shower, Lev’s doctors had confirmed a relapse of cancer, and I spent much of that happy day hiding on the sunporch, trying to keep it together, crying dryly on the phone with Lev’s dad. I’d been ruminating on a way out of ruminating. I knew our story had an end, but I didn’t want to see it quite so clearly. At the alarm of the relapse diagnosis, I woke up to what Lev faced. I hadn’t known I was sleeping, but I had been fast asleep, complacent. Facing the universal truth—just because a lot of bad shit happens to a person doesn’t stop more bad shit from coming—helped to put everything in line. The dam between the present and the next place had burst. A river of shit was coming for us harder and faster, nowhere to go but under. I demurred on the tarot reading. I flew back to Austin early the next morning to begin the end run.

After Lev died and the rushing stopped, I took comfort in the idea that life without Lev might be something like filling a cargo ship with experiences, like a treasure hunt, sailing the blue-green ocean of all-things-possible. The image became a totem for me: my life as a boat with Lev as its captain. The first year after Lev’s death, I bobbed along drowsily in this gently waved and salt-scented dream. I wasn’t particularly curious about the future. I was hungry for it, ready for all of it. I took it as it came. I began to write again and I chronicled year one in a bubble of self-reflection and gratitude, reveling in possibility and potential.

The second year was different. Murky. My vessel felt exactly like a spacecraft hurtling though the blackness of infinity, of possibility to the nth degree. Too dark for me to see a way forward, propelled to the next place by physics I didn’t understand, I faced the permanence of the loss I’d experienced. The future was a nebula. A vacuum. The void . . .
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way. And the stars look very different today
.

Two full years out from Lev’s death, I feel lost. Which is to say, I feel like myself again: armored, dukes up. I’m past the year of firsts—first birthdays and holidays and anniversaries post-Lev are all past. Everything is old or brand-new. Nothing has more meaning than it should. Yet nothing about Lev’s absence has lessened for me with the passage of time. I don’t know that I expected my grief to grow smaller, but perhaps I hoped it would grow more manageable. More stable. If anything, living with the pain longer has meant more pain, compounded pain. But one becomes accustomed to the feeling of living with ghosts, gets used to being haunted. I dread the day, soon, when Lev will have been dead longer than he was alive, when I will have lived longer with his ghost than I did with my darling boy.

In the second half of my second year without Lev, I met a woman I’d previously known by reputation and admired, a true renaissance woman, a character and an open book. Event staging! Silversmithing! Painting! Artist modeling! Hunting for (and dealing in!) rare antiques! Officiating weddings!—Angeliska is a woman of all these many talents and more. And yet she manages to be the opposite of intimidating, so warm you feel instantly that you’ve always known her. She and I had met only once in the backyard of a dive bar, and our rambling conversation touched on death and grief and love and grandiosity of all sorts. After we spoke, we corresponded for the better part of a year about various bits and dreams, halfheartedly planning to reconnect, life always intervening. We’d not yet found the time to have coffee or cordials or to gossip over steaks, but we knew we’d meet again. I’d long known that one of her trades was doing tarot card readings in a 1940s Spartanette trailer in the backyard of her rambling house. The inclination to have a reading done for myself had never so much as flickered, until suddenly—with my birthday and Lev’s second deathiversary looming—I found myself seeking clarity with some mounting degree of desperation. Feeling humbled and hopelessly stuck, I was aflame with the need to gain some direction. It was time to close the loop. To feel focused on the future again, instead of always feeling the unrelenting suck of the past, I would face my fortune.