Waiting for the Man (2 page)

I was fucking boring.

And I saw this and did nothing.

I dove into my work. I helped on the pitch for an anti-persperant aimed at preteen girls.

I hung out at my bar.

I did nothing different. Because I couldn’t.

I would walk into the office and sit in on meetings and say things like, “We just need to create a compelling backstory” or “How is the consumer going to be engaged by this?” or “I’m not feeling the feeling we want everyone to feel yet” and I would say this seriously and then we would work some more and laugh at some bad jokes or terribly awful ideas and throw wads of paper at each other or end up talking baseball and then we would go home again.

One day I saw what I had scribbled on my notepad and it said, “Stop sleepwalking.”

We ate out and got drunk and came up with brilliant plans.

I turned thirty-six. And then something beyond panic set in. I felt remarkably unhealthy. Sick. Though my health was fine. It was fine because my doctor had told me so. Because I went to see my doctor. Because I was worried. More than that, I felt unhappy. And this was something that went beyond dissatisfaction. This felt like being struck by something big. Like lightning.

I told my parents that I wasn’t happy at my job and my mother said, “But Joe, dear, you have a wonderful job,” and my father said, “Happiness is overrated, you have a mortgage,” and then my mother would offer dessert and she would produce her vanilla panna cotta and that would be that. My father had worked too hard to hear me complain about my work. My unhappiness didn’t even make sense to him. He would talk about the carnage taking place on Wall Street and how many people were losing their jobs and their homes and how there was this army of dead people, of zombies, he called them, walking around and drinking coffee in diners and not even going home because they were lost. He used the term “bloodbath” to describe the economy. He hated when anyone used war terms out of context, but he was using war terms. So, no, it didn’t make sense to him. And I can see how it wouldn’t.

I once told a girl “I want to feel love.” These were the words I used. I must have been drunk. I don’t even remember when I said this, just that I said it once and I’ve remembered it ever since. Because it is and isn’t true. I have felt love. Just not a lasting kind of love and that never bothered me. I never looked nor was I the kind of person who despaired the lack of it. I hated people who looked for relationships. I had friends who needed someone, always, who always needed that companionship, who found the thought of attending a party or a dinner without someone on their arm to be like walking naked. To be unnatural. They needed someone to constantly speak to, to obsess over, to worry about, to fight with. To love, maybe, though I doubt very much any of them were ever truly in love. Even a fleeting relationship, a coupling on fast-forward, was better than nothing. That was their philosophy. It just wasn’t mine.

One night at the bar, I shared a nightcap with Angie, my neighbor. Her father managed my building. And when I moved in, she had helped me with some interior decorating. She told me where my couch should go. She arranged the drawers in my kitchen. She made me dinner.

She had a head of thick auburn hair, with brown eyes and a complexion that was a shade lighter than a latte. Her voice was deep with a lilt that announced her upbringing in deepest Queens. And I was too awestruck by my new status as a New Yorker, by suddenly feeling like I’d arrived somewhere, to ever pursue her. Because I would have. And then I got busy and she was helping her family open up a trattoria in Little Italy and our lives pinballed in different directions. We would meet at the bar at the end of our long days sometimes, and we’d talk and commiserate and get drunk and stumble home and I would say good night to spend my last waking minutes thinking of her.

On this night Angie found me sitting alone at the bar. I was watching the Knicks suffering from egregious badness, and she said, “So I’m noticing.”

I turned to her. I smiled. Or tried to. “Can I buy you a drink?” I asked.

And Alex, the stupidly tall, spiky-haired bartender covered in tattoos — and possibly the gentlest guy in the neighborhood — brought Angie her usual rum and Diet Coke. He didn’t need to be told.

“I would like to discuss your obvious unhappiness,” she said. “Your funk.”

“You have me confused with a banker,” I said.

She put her hand on my back, and I felt I owed her some kind of admission. “I’m not unhappy,” I said. “I’m just in-between.”

She took her hand off my back. “You’ve lost something,” she said. “Spark. You’re not funny. I don’t know. You’re not you.”

She downed her drink and held it out for Alex. “My father thinks I’ve been having a midlife crisis,” I said. “For a year. He thinks I’ve been like this for a year.”

“You’re too young,” she said. She watched Alex make her drink. “We’re not midlife crisis people. That’s just what he’s calling it. That’s generational.”

And I realized I had been diagnosed with something for a year now. “I dislike the whole Boomer thing,” I said.

“Your dad’s not a Boomer.”

“No,” I agreed. “He’s not. But the Boomers, that’s all I think about. Most of the time. At work. And if there’s one thing they’ve done, they’ve allowed us to see what happens when your entire life becomes a midlife crisis.” I finished my beer and Alex gave me another one. He gave Angie her drink and she took a sip.

“You ad people,” she said.

“They’ve shown us how stupid it is to spend your life trying to be something you’re not,” I said.

“And what’s that?” she asked.

“Young,” I said.

Angie laughed then. And she touched me again. “Maybe it is a midlife crisis,” she said. She took another sip of her drink. It seemed to be too late in the evening for sipping. I took a long pull from my beer. “Or maybe you’re in-between, like you say.”

“Maybe,” I said sighing. “Maybe it’s semantics.”

The problem was I didn’t believe anything. I didn’t want to pin my melancholy on age. Because that’s what it was. Melancholy. I was listless. I lived my life without living. Without feeling alive.

And that night alone in bed, regretting what had never been with her, drunk most certainly, I started floating.

And then, more alarmingly, I started having these dreams. I don’t know what else to call them. Visions maybe. Nightmares. This thin black man in a floppy straw hat, dressed right out of the seventies, looking for all the world like a TV pimp. Like Huggy Bear from
Starsky & Hutch
. I never watched that show, it was before my time, but I remembered the character and now he was haunting my dreams. And this man, sometimes, later, would ride in on a white horse, a gigantic white horse with a mane that looked combed and neat and clean. A good-smelling horse. Bathed. It smelled supernaturally clean. And the Man had a smile you couldn’t outrun. It was the size of the world. I fell into it.

I had the dream every night.

In different permutations. We would talk. Sometimes he would watch me. Stare. From across the room. In one dream, he watched me as I sat in the office and listened to a colleague debate the sexiness of his new iPad. One of my colleagues kept repeating that he didn’t need human companionship anymore. His biological imperative had been fulfilled. In another dream, I walked with the Man along the banks of a foul-smelling stream and we debated something archaic, like the reasons behind the British Invasion, or McCarthyism, things I knew little about and cared for even less. Things from another era.

And then I stopped floating. And the dreams came to me at all hours, a bully astride me whenever I closed my eyes. And then, after a week of this, he spoke to me. Or, I stopped speaking to him. He became a kind of monolith. Dressed like a black pimp from the seventies. He was the speaker and I the listener. I absorbed. I saw him walking toward me, slowly, strutting more than walking. I’m sitting on my front steps talking to some neighborhood kids about the inanities of the latest Mets fiasco and I see the Man walking toward me. The kids scatter and he leans close and whispers,
Wait
. And his voice has reverb and echo and sounds vaguely like Isaac Hayes. With that gentle smile, he just tells me to wait. I ask why and he says,
Because
. I could smell the horse on him. I’m not sure I knew what a horse smelled like then, let alone a clean one.

And I kept dreaming. Longer dreams. I touched him. And when I did I felt myself falling into him, being crushed and embraced by this good-smelling man. He told me to wait on my front steps and he would come and things would get better.
Things will get better.
That’s what he said. Better than what? I asked. But he did not hear me. Because our relationship had changed. My role was not to speak.

I lived close enough to the World Trade Center to think he was talking about life in the most general way possible. I didn’t think he was speaking about me. I could see him imparting in me the wisdom for some major civic improvement project. I saw his instruction through the lens of my workspace. Because I never considered my own life. I figured I was living. Even though I knew I wasn’t. But that WTC thing, with all the fighting and the politics. I mean, the site was still a tourist attraction. My neighborhood had been through a lot. I breathed in that dust. Somewhere inside of me, I could still taste the burning embers of those buildings and everyone and everything inside of them. That dust lives on in all of us. And through the crazy times on Wall Street right to the crash, that dust lingered, never changing, resilient in its own sad way. I didn’t think I needed anything better. I hated my job but everyone hated their job. No. In the dream’s promise, I saw something larger than myself.

The next night I had another dream. And then the night after that I had it again. And for another week I had this strange dream of the Man walking up to me and telling me to wait for him. Promising a better world. And one night I was working late, alone in the office, trying to finesse the overall theme for a series of ads for a car company out of China launching an ambitious but poorly planned invasion of America, and I heard the Man’s voice. Over the office intercom. I walked around the empty space. Past the light boxes with the black and white photos of the staff. The whiteness of the space. The glassed-in conference room. The rows of blank, humming computers. It was after midnight. And then I heard it again, as clear as if he was sitting across the desk from me. And again, it told me to wait by the steps. It commanded me. Over the office intercom the gentleness of the dream had been usurped by a tone of authority. And the next day, as I lay in bed wondering if I should hit the snooze button for the seventh time, he came again, not in a dream but as a voice that seemed to come in through my window, carried by the wind.

And at that point I became obsessed. I pondered therapy. I started to lose the desire for sleep. Sometimes I’d stay at the bar drinking by myself so I wouldn’t have to go home. I became superficial. Even with Angie. How could I explain this? One of my neighbors gave me pills to help keep me awake. Because sleep meant the dream and the dream was a road paved with the outrageous. I couldn’t share it with anyone. I didn’t dare. Who wants to share their most intimate forms of lunacy? And I heard the Man’s voice everywhere around me. Every creak in my apartment building, every kid yelling on the street, every time the wind blew in off the river, everything, every noise I heard was the sound of the Man saying
Wait
. His voice had become the soundtrack to my life.

And then one night, overtired, stressed about selling Chinese cars in America, about making Americans feel the need to own a Chinese car, I realized the Man was talking about me. Because I was alone in my office and I was lobbing crumpled pieces of paper at a wastebasket and pretending I was LeBron, and I was stupid. And instead of seeing these dreams as something deep inside telling me to confront my unhappiness, my little crisis, I took the Man at his word. And being a man of words, I cringed. I saw the Man as someone who was going to help me. I saw the Man and his horse and his mission. He was promising something. Courage maybe. He was asking of me the kind of action that my inactivity had been demanding. He came to me again. I was in mid-jump, sinking the paper ball into the wastebasket, and he said,
The floating stops. Now
.

And that night, I woke from a fitful sleep. And I was crying. I hadn’t cried in years, since I had been a boy, and tears were streaming down my face. I was blubbering like a soap opera diva. I went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. I put my head under the tap. The Man was sitting at my kitchen table.
What are you waiting for?
he asked.

You told me wait, I said. But wait for what?

And the Man stood up then and hugged me. He squeezed me until I had trouble breathing. I struggled under the power of his embrace.
You’re waiting for me
, he said. And then he was gone.

And I felt beaten. It was something I just felt. In the shoulders.

I gave up. Maybe it was more like giving in. I think there’s a difference. I gave in to the voice, the message of this Man, the constant voice I was hearing, the word that drowned out everything else. I decided I was going to wait. For him. For word. Not because it suddenly made sense, or because the world was both confusing and maddeningly predictable at the same time, or the Mets had opened spring training or my parents were not speaking to each other once again. No. I was tired. I ate breakfast and I took a long, hot shower and I sat down on the steps to my building and that was that. I started to wait.

So here I am, I said. I’m waiting for you.

And the voice came to me and it was pleased. And by the time night rolled around, my course of action seemed to be the most rational, the most logical action I had ever taken. I wasn’t going to work for a while, I knew that. I was thirty-six. I was in advertising. I was successful. My parents were proud of me. I had disposable income. The economy sucked. My stocks had been hammered. That loss made me feel adult. I had savings. And I felt an unease about what I did to make all of this possible. I felt dirty doing what I did. Perhaps it was a lack of maturity. Or perhaps I was hindered by excessive amounts of shame. Or at least a certain amount of self-consciousness.