The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (21 page)

Back in Brooklyn I have the first of many insomniac nights, my few hours of sleep disturbed by a recurring dream about captaining a beautiful triple-masted schooner, but watching helplessly as some gangster kids vandalize the ship, leaving nothing but a compacted square box, like an abandoned junkyard car. Waking up hours later in a hot sweat, I skip work and go surfing again, by myself on a Monday afternoon. The summer progresses like this—a blur of insomnia, late nights at Rockaway, crushing feelings of regret and rage, and Iraq War body counts. My productivity at work diminishes, as I can barely muster the concentration to read a few pages, much less the giant stack of manuscripts piling up in my cubicle. My boss calls me in twice to comment on my falling behind and my appearance, the way I’ve grown my hair down between my shoulder blades, my bangs hanging over my face in a shaggier approximation of the Tony Hawk haircut I’d had in eighth grade.

Part of me hopes he’ll go ahead and fire me so I can go live out of my truck in the parking lots at Rockaway and Montauk, where I can wake up before dawn to ride my surfboard instead of the subway.

D
ata:
After returning home to New York from Denver, Client begins to increasingly isolate. He complains of nightmares and sleeplessness; most mornings he wakes up at four in a state of generalized anxiety. He grows obsessed with revenge against Rochelle and Advantage Rent a Car and General Motors; he spends hours on the phone talking to Colorado lawyers, most of whom explain he has no case, that there’s no way to prove any causal relationship between the ignition malfunction and the robbery. Client repeatedly calls his sister to see how “the case” is progressing on her end. He’s baffled when she fails to return any of his messages, even when he just calls to see how she’s doing, to commiserate, to team-tackle their trauma. It’s not just his sister—Client feels an increasing sense that the whole world is screening its calls.

Client experiences life as a series of timed trials—workdays, meetings, subway rides—and he struggles to make it through these minor events. His office phone becomes a source of dread. During important calls, his mind goes completely blank—a harrowing mental blackout that leaves him feeling disoriented and sick.

Everyone explains how lucky Client was to escape the robbery without being shot or killed. But in a mysterious way Client has not entirely escaped the revolver’s aim. Through some dark alchemy, the Five Points revolver now lives permanently inside his head, locked and loaded. When Client feels overwhelmed with regret or self-loathing the revolver transmutes itself into the musculature, bone, and sinew of his right hand. Alone in his cubicle, when no one is looking, he repeatedly puts this “hand gun” to his temple,
Lethal Weapon
style, Clint Eastwood style. Carjacker style.

Assessment:
Something profound happens to Client that summer. For the better part of two years, he’s hated himself for moving to New York, for leaving his girlfriend and his less tangled existence in Colorado, for getting locked into a job he desperately wants to leave. For having, in his opinion, ruined his own life. Living in Brooklyn brings out the worst in him—he’s full of grievances, regret, spite. He is homesick and exhausted by the pace of life in New York, and now the trauma of the carjacking seems to have pushed Client over the edge.

Client’s revenge fantasies are consistent with symptomatic patterns of post-traumatic stress disorder, as are his loss of spiritual faith and suicidal ideation. With no recourse against Advantage Rent a Car or Chrysler, Client turns his quest for revenge inward, against himself, whom he perceives as the cause of all his problems, his own white whale.

Plan:
Swim every day, hard enough to drown your feelings, if only for a few minutes. On the weekends visit the Atlantic Ocean, immerse yourself in salt water, let the waves scour away your troubles. Stay in motion—you need to be in the best shape of your life to survive this battle, to swim clear of this psychological shipwreck. Take yourself daily to recreation, tell yourself jokes, keep away from sharp objects and large bottles of pills, do what you can to keep yourself moving, upright, awake, alive.

I
n Melville’s chapter “Jonah Historically Regarded,” he discusses some of the logical inconsistencies engendered by a literal interpretation of the Book of Jonah. According to the author, certain old-fashioned Bibles contained illustrations of a double-spouted whale devouring Jonah. Herein lies the problem: the only whales with two spouts are right whales—a breed also known for their baleen and mouths much too small to swallow anything as large as a man. Melville counters by quoting Bishop Jebb: “It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale’s belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth.”

While studying an online swell chart, I notice that Long Island is shaped, to quote Polonius, “
very like a whale
.” Take a look at a map: the island runs east to west, the twin forks facing east like giant tail flukes. Apropos its reputation, Fire Island resembles a whale’s impressive phallus. Brooklyn and Queens constitute a battering ram of a head, very nearly bashing the diminutive island of Manhattan. Jamaica Bay is the gaping maw, and the Rockaway peninsula looks remarkably like the long, thin lower jaw of a sperm whale. So every surf trip to Rockaway is also a cool, collected dive into the very mouth of the beast.

T
he situation you find yourself in: late twenties, low-paying job at the local skateshop, six years into a college education, no career prospects, and the only thing you feel you can do with any competence or enthusiasm is roll around on a piece of wood with wheels.

They say you’ve learned a foreign language when you dream in that language. You dream in skateboarding. In your dreams, you roll through indoor shopping malls and ollie entire escalators.

When you aren’t skating you pretend your fingers are two little legs—you fingerskate on everything, you do finger Smith-grinds on the edge of the dinner table at the fancy Italian place your girlfriend likes. You worry that the food’s too expensive, although you always seem to scrounge up enough money for new skate shoes every month or two.

On the ride home Nicole wants to discuss the future of your relationship. It’s raining as you drive, trees dumping leaves in messy piles. She says the problem is that the two of you see different versions of the future. She wants marriage and kids; she’s not sure what it is you want. As she talks you look out the window for skate spots, even though the streets are all washed up with rainwater. You look for banks, slick marble ledges, handrails, old motels that might have empty pools. You notice yourself doing this and it isn’t that you don’t care about the person sitting next to you. She looks out the window and sees houses, yards, families, stasis. You’re seeking something entirely different: the possibility of motion.

You hang out with a seventeen-year-old kid nicknamed Bronco because he used to ride junior rodeo. One day during your skateshop shift he writes the word
scrotum
on the TV screen with black Magic Marker. You put up with these minor annoyances and the fact that he’s ten years younger because he’s one of the few people you know who’s still down to skate at a moment’s notice. He ditches high school whenever you call.

You and Bronco skate through the streets at night. You pay particular attention to the different textures of the roads and sidewalks as you roll: the cracks, rows of brick, tile, asphalt, each with its own vibrational frequency. Sometimes if you skate enough, your mind becomes less like a grease fire and more like a candle flame.

One day you and Bronco skate an empty pool nicknamed Satan’s Armpit. You take a bone-crunching slam and your hip turns purple and black with yellow marbling, like a murky mud puddle with a gasoline rainbow. You can’t afford a visit to the doctor, where you know you’ll pay $200 to have some square tell you to ice it. All you can do is buy a pair of used crutches at the thrift store.

While you’re hurt you sit around the house reading
Thrasher
, complaining to Nicole, and having imaginary conversations with an amorphous middle-aged businessman, a guy with two kids and a mortgage and a high-paying career in the tech industry.

“You’re still skateboarding?” he says, straightening his tie. “You’re almost thirty. Why don’t you do something with your life?”

“Let me ask you something,” you say.

“Shoot,” he says.

“Do you own a car?”

“Of course. An Explorer and a BMW.”

“If you think about it,” you say, “both cars and skateboards have four wheels and two axles. Both roll forward and backward. They’re both modes of transportation invented in America. Except that your mode of transportation has a combustion engine that spews thousands of pounds of pollutants, making the whole planet hotter and dirtier and shittier. And the fact that everyone drives your chosen mode of transportation is the reason a bunch of assholes from Texas struck it rich and bought their way into the White House so they can colonize the Middle East and secure our oil interests. So yeah,” you say, “I still skateboard.”

He looks at you for a moment, clearly unimpressed. “Let me get this straight,” he says, “you don’t own a car?”

You say no, though it’s a bald-faced lie; you’ve owned plenty of cars, including your current pickup, which gets bad gas mileage and needs $500 in muffler and brake work. And you’ve actually had this thought while skateboarding on balmy days in the dead of a Colorado winter:
Maybe global warming isn’t so bad after all
.

You and Nicole break up. It starts in the furniture store, where she wants to purchase a sofa. After a decade this is what puts you over the edge: a $1,900 neo-Victorian couch. You can’t deny that skateboarding has something to do with it. Designer furniture and a wife and kids don’t compute in your head; skateboarding is the only equation you’ve ever been able to decipher.

Nicole packs up and moves out, takes all the silverware but leaves the empty tray. This image sticks in your mind: an empty container, the outlines of knives and spoons and forks. You are the shape of your old self, stripped of all silver. You hang black-and-white skate photos and an old Consolidated deck with Neil Blender graphics on the wall in your bedroom; you do this the very night she leaves. You drape a strand of Christmas lights above the window and this is all you have to keep you going: images of your friends skateboarding and a few tiny points of light.

The friends you used to skateboard with every day now have to make babysitting arrangements a week in advance just to meet you at the skatepark on a Sunday afternoon. You decide to skate by yourself but it starts snowing on the way to the park and it doesn’t stop for a week.

You own a T-shirt that says Skateboarding Saved My Life and another that says Skateboarding Ruined My Life. You wear them on different days, depending on your mood.

In the middle of a bleak January, Bronco finds you sleeping on your living room floor. He says a trip down south is what you need. Two days later you’re driving through a blizzard, snow swirling on the road like ashes. It warms up by the time you hit New Mexico and you skate a few dinky parks filled with pre pubescent kids on Rollerblades who keep asking Bronco, “Are you sponsored? Are you sponsored?” You feel ridiculous, a grown man hanging out with a bunch of kids. You decide not to skate—you sit in the car, trying not to think about how immature it was to let go of a beautiful intelligent woman for this.

When Bronco drives, you read a dog-eared copy of
Moby-Dick
, the story of an old man who held on to something so long that his whole ship sank.

Then: you drive over a mountain pass. On the summit there’s a sign that says Elevation 9,000 Feet. Bronco tells you to pull over. He gets out of the car—you’re not sure what he’s doing. He grabs his skateboard and bombs the hill, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. You watch as he leans into a sharp corner and almost gets hit by an oncoming truck. You drive a half mile down and pick him up. His elbows are dripping blood; he is breathing hard and smiling. He gets back in and the whole truck fills up with energy, like invisible steam. You hope that maybe he is alive enough for both of you.

In Phoenix you sleep on your friend Brian’s living room floor. Tall oleander bushes, palm trees, and sandstone hills surround his house. The evening sky is bold blue. You sit on the porch drinking your post-breakup cocktails: AriZona Iced Tea Rx Stress mixed with crushed up kava kava supplements. You hope you can drink enough to fall asleep and not wake up in the middle of the night gripped with anxiety, regret.

You speed across white Phoenix freeways listening to Hot Snakes, Minor Threat, Modest Mouse. You zip past twenty-foot saguaro cacti and green glass skyscrapers reflecting hazy sunlight. You hang your arm out the window and feel warmth on your hand; you’re almost to a skatepark called Paradise Valley; you have that loose buzzing feeling you only get en route to skate something epic with your friends.

You eat lunch after skating every day at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint called Los Betos. You and Bronco like the bean and cheese burritos so much you consider getting
Los Betos
tattooed on the inside of your biceps.

Bronco has no money and when you offer to buy him dinner at a sit-down restaurant he orders fried ice cream. You explain that fried ice cream is not an entree but he eats it anyway.

On your last day in Phoenix you and Bronco sneak down an alley lined with one-story ranch houses, past a couple Mexican kids jumping on a trampoline. At first you think the backyard trees are filled with big golden Christmas lights, until you realize they’re real life, honest-to-God lemons. You crawl over a cinder-block wall and find a bone-dry swimming pool behind an abandoned HUD house.