A few years ago a lot of my friends got married just as my long time girlfriend was leaving me. It was a time of unbearable solitude and I wondered how I could physically survive it. Not that I sat around staring contemplatively at razor blades or sleeping pills; it literally felt like my body would cease functioning, that I would collapse mid-stride onto the streets of Brooklyn and join the taxi-crushed pigeons like the animal I was.
Remarkably, my heart and surrounding organs continued to function.
Coping.
Years later, many of those same people are getting divorced or breaking up and now they turn to me for some kind of advice, or worse, solace. My old college friend Lisa IM’ed me last week. She had left her long time boyfriend and asked me what she had to look forward to. I dated my ex, Reni, for six years and, as I told Lisa, after the break up I thought about her every single day for two years. It was midday and I had caught Lisa in a rare moment of sobriety. She emitted a low groan, “Fuuuuuck.”
And in that vein, my solitary piece of advice to Lisa or anyone else limping through the streets of Splitsville would be: music. I made countless break up mixes for Reni which I never sent her. They just sat in an ever-expanding iTunes playlist. S0 here they are, for the world, lumped together as one. Yes, it’s Mike Lavoie’s Stupid Break Up Playlist. Because at the end of those days when you go home to nothing and nobody, when the tales of the trials and successes of your day rot in your brain, when a pillow is the only thing that holds your weight, the only words that matter are the ones with a soundtrack.
This February I lost my favorite winter hat on the F train. I put it on my lap at Carroll Street and forgot about by the time I got to 23rd. Greeted by the arctic conditions of 6th Avenue, I found nothing but Trident wrappers in my pocket. The horrible, freezing cold truth exploded in my brain. I had lost not only the warmest winter hat I’d ever had but it was also the only hat of mine that had ever acquired sentimental value. Val, my latest relationship catastrophe, used to steal it from me at bars and wear it home and then to bed. Making out, I would pull it down over her eyes and kiss her all over her face. We both enjoyed this little game immensely and I would smell her Monday and Tuesday whenever I put on the hat. By Wednesday she wore off. Weeks after we fell apart, a dirty blond remainder would caress my face now and then that had wormed its way into the fabric but now wanted to escape.
Two weeks after losing my hat, it came back into my life, or at least my subway car. I spotted it perched atop a Chinese gentleman on the F. Not a hat like mine. My hat. I am sure of it like Jesus freaks are sure of Jesus. I have never seen anyone else wearing a Mountain Hardwear Dome Perignon hat. Ever. Logically, surely someone in Brooklyn owns a Mountain Hardwear Dome Perignon hat, but it is an unlikelihood approaching impossibility that I would lose mine and then one of the exact same color and model would appear some 14 days later on the very subway line I lost mine. I took two photos on the sly to document the occasion for historians.
Ninja photo!
Ninja photo 2!
Five days later, I saw this same gentleman, again with my hat, coming out of Vinny’s pizza on Court Street. I didn’t have the heart or gall or what have you to strike up a conversation about the hat. I don’t even want the hat back. It just feels strange that some guy has my favoritest hat of all time and I can’t remark on it in any way. I wish it were socially acceptable to say, “Hey, I used to own that hat! No, that exact hat! You found it on the F train, right?” but I guess wouldn’t want some guy coming into my living room and saying, “Hey! I threw out that coffee table last fall! Yeah, the one you tell everyone you bought from Ikea but actually found on Smith Street and just 409′ed a lot!”
At the end of the day, however, I am glad that a nice human is getting use from my old hat. I just hope his girlfriend isn’t finding blonde hairs on his pillow.
I went on vacation with my 15-year-old step sister to visit my (now our) Grandmother. She wanted to play pool but I told her I had to write a screenplay. Twenty minutes later, she asked me if I was done. I told her I was not.
“Set your scene, start your first line and just roll with it. I don’t know why it’s taking you so long.”
I sighed and told her I was writing that down for my blog.
“You write down too much of what I say. That’s why you haven’t gotten very far.” And she stalked off.
I moved out of my Bond Street apartment in Brooklyn for four months so that my landlord could refurbish. On January 6, 2009 I moved back in with my friend James. A week later, between two packed boxes we found this:
The note appears to say:
Let’s get rid of them.
We keep the $.
I have an idea.
Neither James nor I claims ownership or knowledge of the Creepy Mystery Note. We are both scam artists and artful dodgers so we agreed to submit writing samples to each other. We wrote samples with both hands, a little lesson we learned from Zodiac. Sadly, we don’t know and can’t afford a handwriting expert, but in our non-professional opinion, neither of us wrote the note.
Me (R), James (L).
We interviewed all “the friends” we had over the house in that first week, eight in total. They all denied scheming against James and I. Of course, actual schemerswould say that. As usual, it’s hard to tell where the friends end and the back stabbing bastards begin.
Thinking back further, the guys who moved us in seemed like nice fellows but they very well could have been planning a robbery/murder. In fact, they were black and so is James and their on-site supervisor was white and so am I, so James and the movers (”US”) could have been hatching a “rob and kill whitey” scheme against me and the supervisor (”THEM”) but that’s probably a little unlikely. Even the KKK would have a hard time finding reasonable cause in that scenario.
I guess James and I will keep on living here on Bond Street in utter ignorance of what was already taken from us or just blithely awaiting the day when these mystery persons’ grand plot is sprung and we shake out heads and wonder how we didn’t see it coming.
Your thoughts and conspiracy theories would be appreciated.
My “friend” James. To be used as evidence in the event of my death/disappearance/dismemberment.
By the end of week two we were a well oiled machine, the 23 of us knew the drill, the procedure, what slows down procedure, how to avoid that, and toward the end, we were able to close out cases in about 20 minutes. Week two was mostly conflict free except for one instance when a man was found in a deli, with keys to the deli. He was not the owner and he did not live or work there. Police found 45 zips of cocaine hidden behind a vending machine in the deli. Some jurors argued that he had access to the drugs but had no intent to sell. I countered that he didn’t have 45 zips of coke with intent to juggle. This convinced no one. We voted 12-11 to dismiss that charge. So it goes. Maybe he learned a cheap lesson. Maybe he was totally innocent. The facts don’t really matter. It’s all about the perception and credibility. Those and a decent lawyer…
A few terms I forgot to include last week:
Pedigree information: height, weight, fingerprints. All vital information collected upon arrest
NYSID #: New York State Identification Number issued from Albany. They are generated from fingerprints ergo no two numbers are the same.
The Baskerville charge (the coolest sounding charge): If you have are hiding something in your pocket or a bag and pretending it is a gun, even if it just a toothbrush or your fingers, even if it looks nothing like a gun, you can be indicted of this charge.
“The block’s on fire” - criminal slang for “there is a high police presence on the street.” One of my favorites.
And I guess that’s about it. Now I’m free for 8-10 years in the county of Kings. Of course if I change states or even if I just move to Astoria, I’m back on the roster like everyone else. It was pretty fun and I highly recommend doing it, if for nothing more than civic duty.
Also: I opened up the Village Voice and saw an article written on of one of my fellow jurors. Apparently his name is Andrew D’Angelo and he is a Jazzbo. I have no idea what a Jazzbo is, but he has a fascinating story about having most of his brain removed due to a tumor. Check it out if you are into tumors or Jazzbos.
On Friday January 30th in the county of Kings, city of New York, state of New York, I was selected at random for two weeks worth of grand jury duty. I knew nothing of grand jury proceedings and was not looking forward to it. It’s actually pretty interesting. Here are some lessons learned.
Grand juries decide which cases will go to trial; they do not decide on the guilt or innocence of the accused. Their job is to consider two questions:
• Was a crime committed?
• Could the accused have committed the crime?
If the answer to either of these questions is “No,” they are compelled to vote for a dismissal.
If they answer to both of these questions is “Yes,” they are compelled to vote for a “True Bill,” or an indictment.
There are 23 jurors. There must be a vote of 12 either way, for True Bill or dismissal. If there are less than 12 votes in either direction, it is a called a “no answer” and I don’t know what happens then. We had one of those this week.
I am prohibited by law from revealing the details of cases so I’ll have to write in generalities. If I overstep my bounds, I’m sure I’ll be contacted by The Man, fined and jailed.
Procedure
The foreman sits where the judge usually sits. The foreman position is filled by a jury member; the jury is supposed to vote who this is before we begin (as I later learned in the yellow handbook they gave us) but our foreman was just told he was the foreman by the court official who welcomed us on Monday. The court official just selected the foreman to be foreman because he was Juror #1. He is Juror #1 because his last name comes first alphabetically, not because of his SAT score. An ideal foreman should be attentive, focused, not easily confused and, since it is he who swears in all witnesses and tallies the votes at the end, he should have a solid grasp of the English language. Ours is none of these things. Although he has no more power than the rest of us he still can make a mess of the proceedings by the simple virtue that he is our focal point. We look to him for guidance but he just looks back with enormous deer-in-headlight eyes. You can tell he wants to lead, he just doesn’t know how.
Jurors 2 and 3 sit at the “prosecution table” (the one on the left, near the jury box). Juror 2 is the assistant foreperson and would take over should Juror 1 be absent. Juror 2 is an odd duck who doesn’t talk much and has developed the custom of escorting the Assistant District Attorneys (ADAs) out of the courtroom and waiting outside until the next ADA enters. We call him “The Mayor.” If our foreperson was absent and The Mayor had to take over, it would be anarchy. I think he would be despotic.
Juror 3 is the secretary. The rest of us are in the jury box, 4-13 in the front row, 14-23 in the back row. I’m #13, far right, first row, closest to the witness box. This has no strategic advantage, I just get to watch everyone at once, like James Stewart in Rear Window.
One ADA comes in at a time and presents his or her case. If they are good, they can knock these out in under 30 minutes. If they are new, incompetent or just unprepared it can take over an hour. We have one ADA (who will remain, legally, nameless) who is a consummate professional. He is clear, concise, he gets the story he needs out of the witness and gets them the hell out of there. We call him “The Closer.”
We only had two defendants come to court to plead their case. One was, in my opinion, laughable guilty; we indicted the hell out of him. The other was very credible but had the Holy Bible with him, as a prop, in my opinion. But twelve people bought it, despite the fact that everything he said flew in direct contradiction to the arresting officer. Some people, specifically some of the people of this jury of my peers, just hate cops. They want to believe that the NYPD is full of evidence planting pigs. These people watch too much CSI.
Maybe the young man learned a cheap lesson and will walk the line from now on. Or maybe he’s free to commit worse crimes. Or maybe he was just reading the good book in the lobby with his pals when the NYPD framed him. We will never know. God bless this mess.
As Sartre famously wrote, “Hell is other people,” and it is no different in the seemingly exitless courtroom environment. Invariably, the same two or three jurors will have an additional question for the witness that is completely irrelevant to the case, but the ADA is compelled to bring the witness back into the courtroom. So the ADA exits, brings the witness plodding back in, the foreman reminds the witness he is still sworn in, the ADA asks the foreman (for the record) if the witness has been reminded that he is still under oath, the foreman says “Yes,” the ADA says “Let the record so reflect,” asks the witness the irrelevant question, gets an answer, excuses the witness from the stand, waits until the witness has plodded out of the courtroom and asks the jury if we have any additional questions. Often we do. Sometimes this happens three or four times per witness.
Worse still, some jurors will ask the ADA to refresh their memory about details about the case that they should have written down. We are allowed to take notes in green notebooks that we must leave at the court every day, but only a few of us actually do. Every single time a juror asks a question of the ADA, the ADA must say this:
“Nothing I say constitutes evidence or has probative value – it is your recollection that controls and not mine. That being said, it is my recollection that …”
Sometimes the ADA fields 10 questions from us per case. Last week we had about 30 cases. Those words started making their way into my dreams on Wednesday night.
I can tell this frustrates the ADAs, but it is their job to get a True Bill out of us and if they have to re-spoon feed us facts, dates, and testimony mere minutes after we heard them, by God, then that is what they are going to do. It is Hell for them too. At least I am not alone.
Sexy Court Terminology
• “Hard” = street slang for crack cocaine
• “Rocas” = Spanish for “rocks,” Spanish street slang for crack cocaine
• To Voucher – when a police officer confiscates an item from a crime scene he “vouchers” it, putting it in evidence. A voucher number takes this form: P-######.
• Zips – bags which drugs come in. A fellow jury member described the size to me as a dime or nickel bag worth of weed. Cops will testify to finding “30 zips of a white powdery substance on the suspect.”
• Cops cannot say they found drugs on the defendant, since they did not technically know what was in the zip. Thus we hear a lot of “white powdery substance” (coke), “white rocky substance” (crack), and “white milky substance” (methadone, which is sold in a bottle)
• Pre-recorded buy money: US currency that is used in the drug buy. The serial numbers are photocopied beforehand by the police.
Elements of a “Buy and Bust”
One of the most popular types of cases we have had to vote on is called a “Buy and Bust.” It’s pretty straightforward and is hard not to vote True Bill. This is what happens:
• An Undercover agent (UC) slips in through the back door of the courtroom and is put under oath
• He testifies that on such a date and time he approached this type of male wearing this and that and asked him for some “hard”
• He receives a white powdery substance in exchange for pre-recorded buy money
• He leaves the scene and does a field test, which is 99.95% accurate
• He calls in his field team which makes the arrest on this type of male wearing this and that.
• He vouchers the evidence and sends it to Albany for testing
• The UC leaves the court and the arresting officer enters and is sworn in
• The arresting officer says on such and such a date and time he got a radio communication from the UC and arrested this type of male wearing this and that and recovered X amount of Y and Z dollars, usually including the pre-recorded buy money
• The ADA submits the lab tests from Albany as evidence, confirming the contents of the zips to be some controlled substance
• Then we are “charged,” which means we hear the charges and we have to vote on each charge. The ADA and stenographer exit.
• To streamline operations we started doing a blanket vote for all charges for open and shut cases like this. As long 12 jurors want to vote True Bill on all charges, it doesn’t matter if some jurors would have voted to dismiss on one or two charges.
More adventures next week!
*** Post Scriptum ***
Two of the female ADAs are extremely attractive, which is mildly distracting but I would never let this sway my vote or affect in any way my impartial nature. For the record, one is a younger, hotter version of Sarah Palin (accent included!!) and another is a younger, hotter version of Sarah Silverman. I’ll have to Facebook them when I’m done with my civic duty.
Everyone has a stupid break up story.
Here’s mine.
Remembering Reni
[ part one ]
*****
September 2008
This is the time of year I met her.
And this is the time of year I lost her.
I guess it’s only appropriate
that she’s in my thoughts now more than ever.
*****
In the summer of 2006, I was entering the sixth year of monogamous relations with my then girlfriend, Reni. That summer we were invited to four weddings. No funerals. We were 26.
At the time people said, “Wow, six years a crazy long time to be in a relationship, especially at this time of your life.” But it did not feel crazy at all, despite the fact that 6 years is almost 25% of a 26 year old’s life. We met each other on moving in day our freshman year of college. We were in the elevator, Reni with her dad, me with my mom. She lived four doors down. We became friends. We cultivated the same enemies and mocked them behind their backs. We studied across the table from one another. I ordered her a vanilla iced coffee and a muffin when her head fell into her Endocrinology textbook. She ordered me a mocha with whipped cream and a chocolate croissant when I started drooling on Henry V’s St. Crispen’s Day speech. I tripped her and she fell flat on her face in front of a group of touring high schoolers. We watched football and ate day-old ice cream cake for breakfast. We had dinner. My credit card bounced. She paid. We got drunk. We wrestled. We made out. We made love. We met each other’s families. She did not give me a reason to not want her around all the time and, for many years, I returned the favor.
We were in love. What else could we have done?
Our junior year, a few weeks after 9-11, I broke up with Reni. Not because I wanted to do something as heroic or selfless as join the army but just because I was, as they say, “young, dumb, and full of come.” I figured, as all men do at some point, “Why have sex with one beautiful woman, when I could be having sex with onehundred beautiful women?” Sound reasoning. But the weeks of single life that ensued didn’t appeal to me at all; they were filled with cheap beer and long hours with likes of the very people Reni and I loathed. Each night I took to bed a festering, bottomless loneliness. I just wanted to hang out with Reni again. Which I did as often as possible. Which confused the both of us. Drastic measures had to be taken.
So one night late December back in 2001, six weeks single, I was set up by my roommate Tony with Trisha Stankowitz, a fake blonde theater student who had a real bad habit of dating “complete douche-satchels.” Enter Mike Lavoie. As a member of the campus improvisational comedy troupe, I was only peripherally associated with “theater people” like Trisha who only had sex with each other off stage but made equally obscene sounds and faces on stage for everyone else. Now it was my turn to step into the spotlight.
Trisha and I spent the evening together at Rhinos, if you can call shouting incomprehensibly over techno remixes of the Ace of Base discography “spending the evening together.” Rhinos was a popular dive where students of all ages could turn themselves into alcoholic shitshows for fifteen bucks. After a few hours of shots of some nameless, tasteless, intensely effective clear liquid and a few Bud Ices, Trish invited me to her place. We fulfilled the tacit contract we signed when we walked into Rhinos by stopping to make out every few blocks on our way and then all the way up her stairway; falling down, making out some more and then standing up and groping each other in that wild, iconic, young and drunk collegiate way. If I tried any of those late night stairway shenanigans now, I would throw out my back.
Upstairs, the door to her room was closed. Trisha stopped dead and held her hands in front of her, palms out, fingers up, like she was trying to stop the walls from caving in. It was a dramatic moment she had incorporated into her life from movies and TV shows. “What the FUCK?” She stormed into her room and slammed the door. She repeated this question to her now-awake roommate. They did not speak quietly. Apparently her roommate’s boyfriend had broken up with her so she had stayed home with expensive ice cream and a cheap Malbec. I bobbed in the hallway like a buoy, wishing the floor would stop undulating and wondered if Reni was eating Ben and Jerry’s too.
“FINE. Well I’m playing BRITNEY. And it’s going to be FUCKING LOUD.” Trisha exited her room, slammed the door and walked past me.
I followed her into the living room. Instead of a couch there were three yellow beanbag chairs clumped in front of a TV and stereo. I sat awkwardly in one as she went to the bathroom. I was worried I’d have to make cogent conversation or field questions about improv theory when she returned but her reemergence eliminated any lingering concerns that more information needed to be exchanged before we got to business again. She pushed me to the floor, straddled me and took off her tank top. Since iPods did not exist then, she took a few moments to reach over me to insert the latest Britney Spears CD and press play. As promised, it was fucking loud. The first piano chords hit and she squealed like a pig getting slop.
Trisha’s favorite track was “Oops, I Did it Again.” It was either her favorite track or she was a masochist because it was the only track she played during the entire hour that we were on the floor. Too drunk to either find the repeat button or remember its existence, she had to lean over me for the stereo every time the song came to an end. This ensured I would see her cleavage in wonderful 3-D at least every three minutes and thirty three seconds. She attempted to keep up with the lyrics whenever her tongue was not flopping around my mouth like a trout on the dock and now and then she would sit upright on me and sing the chorus while she ground her crotch into mine and touched her chest, face and stomach. She was a flurry of activity. I was mesmerized. I just lay there, wondering if this how the other 99 members of my impending sex posse would treat me. If so, dumping Reni was the best idea ever. I was a genius.
Trisha asked me to sleepover but I had to work in the morning. I told her next time I’d stay the night. She told me she couldn’t wait. We kissed goodnight; it was long and slow and full of promises. I woke up invigorated that I had had my first post-Reni engagement but by the end of breakfast I felt strangely hollow. It was fun regaling Tony with my exploits and he and my other roomies encouraged me to rendezvous with Trisha again and impose on her the gamut of sex acts that she was probably accustomed to, courtesy her stable of douche-satchels. I told them I would call her after work. Then I said I’d call her after class. Then I said I’d call after Christmas break.
I did not call Trisha after work, class or Christmas break. And she did not call me. And to this day not one word has passed between us since that night late December back in 2001. Our last words were “Get home safe, Mikey” and “Thanks, I’ll try.” I only saw Trisha twice again, once my senior year at a Business Frat party, grinding her beautiful ass into the crotch of a lacrosse player named J.J. Trust and then a few weeks ago on a rerun of the television show House. She didn’t think her little brother needed surgery and did not appreciate House checking out her beautiful ass. She wasn’t half bad.
A year before she broke up with me, and eight months before she fell out of love with me, Reni asked if I wanted to visit Yellowstone National Park and I said “Um, sure, why not?” This came as a surprise, even to myself. I am lazy and sedentary by nature despite the fact that I complain I don’t have enough adventure. In college, leaving my bed to pee at three AM was such a chore I tried to sleep through it. When a CNN.com article suggested doing so leads to bladder cancer, I bought a large potted plant, simultaneously eliminating the need to stray further than two feet from my bed and allowing me to donate my unused nutrients to a good cause.
My mother works for Johnson & Johnson. This has turned her into a world traveler; she hands out Cleanpaste dental floss and Q-Tips to the poor or unhygenic and brings back kabuki fans from Tokyo, olivewood crucifixes from Tel Aviv, and most recently, from Mumbai, a marble, talismanic, S-shaped elephant penis, thinking it was a mortarless pestle. I much prefer the confines of America, where there is a significantly lower incidence of decapitation by extremists, gang mugging by gypsies, or the accidental acquisition of a bewitched phallus. When I told my mother as much, she sighed. “You sound exactly like your father.”
My father is an hypochondriacal psychotherapist for the criminally insane. He drives his Volvo C30 hatchback via backroads one half mile to the hospital, where he tries to fashion logic from the fantasies of the unrepentantly disturbed, which is one half mile from Bunicu’s Apothecary, where he purchases his weekly battery of ginseng, omega 3’s, vitamins and purifying bath oils, which is one half mile from the supermarket, where he gets frozen vegetables, orzo and Grape Nuts, which is one half mile from his home, where he can clean, clean, clean and sleep. On GoogleMaps, his daily travel route looks like an adorable flux capacitor. When I told him about my plans for Yellowstone, he sighed. “You are your mother’s son.”
Yellowstone seemed like a domestic adventure that would satisfy everyone, but instead I failed them both. Were they a happily married duo of either adventurers or recluses, they could have coordinated their disapproval of me and molded me into a disciple of whichever life paradigm they agreed on. Divorced, they tossed me back and forth like a lump of Play-Doh, each making shapes from me the other found obscene. When thrown back, they hacked away at the unsightly appendages I acquired that represented the values they despised in each other and I became something new entirely.
At least Reni was happy.
Yellowstone was her idea, as most of our excursions were. She hated that she was the one who made plans for us and that I just went along with whatever. If I had a great time, everything was cool, but if I happened to have a miserable time I would subconsciously blame it on her because she was the one who dragged me out from underneath my covers in the first place. It made me look childish and thoughtless. “Childish” I can accept, but thoughtless is a stretch. I have thoughts all the time. Exhilarating daydreams are the landscape, population, and stormy climate of my waking mind. I just space out when people talk about their family and job and hopes and dreams and stuff. I’m not thoughtless, I’m just irrevocably egomaniacal. Eight months later, Reni would make this perfectly clear to me. But that’s the next story.
In preparation for Yellowstone, I did some Internet research, which is the kind of follow-through I’m capable of since it easily segues into checking the latest celebrity gossip. The U.S. National Park Service webpage said:
Yellowstone! Wyoming, Montana & Idaho!
But when I GoogleMapped Yellowstone, I learned that Montana and Idaho are almost completely fraudulent partners in the Yellowstone National Park enterprise. The park is a green stamp placed on the upper left corner of Wyoming which overflows the state by a few miles north and west. Idaho is the more egregious offender, claiming only a few square miles of the western overlapping. I’m assuming Idaho just wants to be known for something besides potatoes, “I da ho!” shirts, and the fact that the whole state looks like a falling stock market report.
The website contained photography featuring elk, buffalo, and colorful hotsprings. These all seemed like impressive creations that I could brag about seeing first hand. Plus, starting a story with, “When I went to Yellowstone National Park…” would make me seem traveled and sexy despite the fact I used to urinate in my houseplants.
We arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah without incident. I say without incident because insane things that are rarely my fault tend to happen to me and it’s important to note that I did not have a run in with local authorities or angry Mormons. SLC is small and scary-clean. We took pictures of the Latter Day Saints HQ, bought some CDs, rented a car, and got the hell out of there.
Late Registration got us to the Utah/Idaho border (including multiple replays of Gold Digger and Diamonds From Sierra Leone Remix), Guerro got us to Pocatello, I-20 was almost entirely Demon Days, and Erin McKeown’s We Will Become Like Birds took us clear through the park and to the front door of our cabin. We arrived at sunset. The clouds were explosions of color. A huge elk walked by car. I bought a winter hat since I had packed poorly, we had dinner, and went to bed.
*****
Yellowstone is a truly magical place and I took 600 hundred pictures of animals and geysers and other subjects of unspeakable majesty. I show these to people now and they think I am well traveled and sexy. I had never been on a major trip with Reni before and we got along famously. We ate well, drank well, took our first horse ride together, hiked, photographed the feces of various creatures, woke up to the barking of bull elk, made love every day, and I did not murder any wildlife while disregarding park speed limits. Our final morning, I lazed nakedly under the covers and watched the foggy reflection of Reni get dressed through the cracked bathroom door. I was in love and surrounded by the most glorious of God’s creations. What could possibly go wrong?
I’d fallen asleep and when Reni ripped the sheets off of me. She was all packed. It was early, we had a plane to catch in Utah and we had planned to see Old Faithful erupt before we left. I’d slept through shower time and grudgingly put on clean clothes over yesterday’s skin, speed packed, got in the car and drove out the pearly gates.
An hour later, we passed by a huge lodge that looked way too much like the one in The Shining. This was the Old Faithful greeting center, full of Yellowstone memorabilia and park rules. I did not read them and we walked out to the geyser, scheduled to erupt in fifteen minutes.
A small crowd of late-season tourists began to meander into the amphitheater around the geyser; light rain misted around us. I closed my eyes, tilted my head heavenward, and let the heavy air settle onto my face. A quiet murmur drifted in on the wind and I expected it drift away when the gust subsided but it did not. I turned and saw a little Native American girl in a wheelchair. She nodded her head rhythmically to her own quiet language. I couldn’t see her eyes so it was hard to tell if anybody was at home; the impression that she was forming actual words was vague at best.
She was flanked by her white mother and her white father, who must have been her adopted parents, barring some freak Native American milkman accidental impregnation scenario.
She was dressed in the exact same outfit as her white father: jeans with elastic ankles and a matching jean jacket with a fluorescent green shirt underneath. Fluorescent green, I think, so that in case the girl was abducted or got lost in a snowstorm she would be visible by helicopter. The mother wore something else entirely and I wondered if she had mutinied against the family dress code.
I began daydreaming about a world in which I was the only person who could understand her and how I would serve as her personal interpreter. She and I would go on tour together, appear in science and nature magazines, Letterman, the Daily Show, I could help her compose symphonies she’d been banging around in her head, write some fanmail to George Clooney, who would naturally invite us to his place on Lake Cuomo. Next thing you know, she’s on a Jet Ski with Matt Damon and I’m making out with Sandra Bullock.
But as Sandy B feeding me grapes cross-faded back to reality, the girl was not only looking at me, but pointing right at me. And just as I thought she might be pointing to my hat, something blocked her from my view. This something said, “What the fuck are you looking at?”
This something was her father. Apparently, he thought her mumbling signified some sort of discomfort on her part, the source of which, she appeared to point out, was a scruffy 20-something that he caught staring at his wheelchair-ridden adopted Native American daughter. I stared at the father for several seconds as I rewound the previous moments in my mind, searching the frames for any offense that I may have perpetrated. It’s like when someone refers to your actions or comments from the previous night of heavy drinking, except it’s like that for me all the time.
So I’m sitting there getting up to speed and he’s standing there misinterpreting my silent cogitations for guilty quietude.
ANGRY FATHER
Do you have any god damn idea how rude it is to stare like that?
MIKE
Oh…no.
(Pause. I meant to disagree, but I answered his question, and not in the way Angry Father wanted. I attempted to self-correct.)
MIKE (cont’d)
I mean. That’s not –
(Pause. I am usually adept at covering for stupid things said but it is still early and I had had no coffee. I must say something, and quick. Remarkably, the truth is the only thing that comes to mind.)
MIKE (cont’d)
I think she likes my hat.
ANGRY FATHER
Well. I think you should MYOB.
(The truth rarely works.)
MIKE
Listen man. If she wants to point at my hat, I think that OUR business, ok?
At this point Reni stood up and left. That’s her little way of telling me that I’ve probably taken things one step too far again and she will stand by with first aid.
“Your business,” he chuckled, as if the idea of her and I having any sort of legitimate connection were an utter impossibility. He found it so absurd he said it again.
ANGRY FATHER
Your business! Do you see what your “business” has done to my little girl?”
And with that he swung his arm around to show me what I had wrought. For some reason, she was now crying, but it was clear to me that this grandiose gesture was just to get the crowd involved, inviting the late season tourists to enter their judgment into this developing drama. About 15 people started to watch and a Russian guy began filming me. I became acutely aware that anything insane I did in next few minutes would probably end up on YouTube and could seriously jeopardize my fledgling acting career. I’d come back to New York and meet with Ingrid French and she’d be like, “Yeah, you’re great! …But aren’t you the guy who went apeshit at Yellowstone?”
So I just sat there, handcuffed by outrageous misfortune, the Hamlet of Old Faithful. The crowd continued to stare at me, waiting for an apology or an explanation or even better, some violence. I looked around for a little help but none came. Reni had abandoned me. The old people in the crowd thought I was a troublemaker. The 30-somethings remembered themselves as 20-somethings; smoking pot and tormenting the retarded, and I’m sure they figured I was getting my just desserts. A concerned park ranger passed nearby and he could tell I was the epicenter of some minor sociological earthquake. I could feel his eyes looking me over for Yellowstone contraband; weapons, drugs, maybe a smuggled pine cone or two; anything so he could swoop in and take me to the lodge for a good tongue lashing or maybe even a $25 fine.
Ordinarily I would have apologized to the father and slunk away, but for some reason, this had become larger than myself. It had turned into bizarre test of wills; after all, what had I done? I felt blameless under the circumstances but I also understood and even appreciated this white man’s rage. Confrontations like this one are so rare in my life that when they do come up I need to focus my energies, take my time and make it right so that when God plays back the tape at the end of all things, He will pat me on my back with his giant hand and say, “Nice work, Mike Lavoie.”
So I did not apologize. I did not shout or cry or even tell him to go shove something inside himself, his wife or another man. I simply said nothing, and sat there absorbing his venomous glare while trying to radiate a sense of benign martyrdom. The blood slowly drained from the giant hard-on this moment had become and the audience seemed disappointed by the anticlimax. We had given them a great deal of foreplay and then fell asleep. Old Faithful began to come to life, the crowd turned its attention away from us, and the father returned to his family without a glance back. I heard Reni’s camera firing away behind me before she sat down on my lap. I knew I would have to give her the blow by blow later and I wondered if I could purchase the video from the Russian and save myself the trouble.
I dared a final glance at the girl; she had stopped crying and was watching Old Faithful with a wide-eyed fascination. I sat there for a moment and tried to enjoy this majestic landscape that my forefathers had appropriated from hers. But I wasn’t sure if her father would come back to administer some better rehearsed lectures, so I slid Reener onto the bench and ambled off.
Inside the car I consoled myself with some glove compartment dark chocolate and tried to figure out how I could blame this on Reni. In the distance I saw a buffalo eat some grass and then take a shit and I wished my life could be as simple as that. Where did all my well-meaning human intentions get me? Sequestered in a Honda. As reclined my seat all the way down, so I could hide from anyone who might try to find me, I closed my eyes and hoped that spirits of the girl’s ancestors had been watching. I figured if anyone could empathize with a kind but tragically misunderstood soul like mine, it’s probably them.
