BRIGHT AND SHINY OBJECTS

I click the seat belt and ignite the engine of my SUV, filled to the limit with loneliness and gasoline. I’ve prepared for my solo commute back to L.A.: water bottle, cell phone, jumbo Starbucks, an eat-in-the car protein-bar breakfast. It was a five pound weekend, I think. I’m dressed in business casual, and the clothes are too tight. My puffed up flesh pulls at the seams of the slacks, the starched shirt, the gray cashmere sweater that zips up the front. I’m at the beached whale stage of my weight cycle.

The car windows are filthy and the dashboard is layered with weeks of dust. Outside, ugly tract houses alternate with scrubby desert lots, oddly vacant, untouched by the appetites of the subdividers. Sandy says it’s the Indian land, that Palm Springs is a checkerboard because developers don’t want to build where the Indians won’t sell.

Thank God for Sandy, he’s rescued me. Come spend Thanksgiving, there’s room in my little casita, he said. We’ll hang out and do Turkey Day, then drive up the mountain to the men’s retreat on Friday.

I see immense mountains on my left as I merge onto the freeway ramp. It’s too early in the day for the deep purple shadows they cast across the valley floor. The low morning sun glints off the hood of the car in front of me. I catch one hazel eye in the rear-view mirror, and I wink at myself. My eye smiles. I am smiling at the part of me that loves the open road, the freedom and the freshness. The other part of me, a deeper part, dreads these roads. Growing up, they signified yet another move, another social dismemberment disguised as adventure.

This is, I think, the central metaphor of my life, an Army brat’s uprootedness, the pathos of never fitting in, the lurching back and forth between desperately wanting to know you and not even wanting to try. It is my story and it bores me. I want exciting stories, I want to tell them, I want to write them down, I want to be known as someone who does. Saturday night I stood on stage at the talent show and read a piece about Internet dating. It was funny, they laughed. It was funny.

The NPR theme music pulls me out of my reverie, and I hear the announcer delivering one of those heart-warming little yarns they have, right before getting into the news of war and death and money. This one is about a woman who decides to Google her husband’s name, only to discover that he’d won the lottery years before. Surprise, surprise, he’d forgotten to mention it. Maybe I’ll work with this story, maybe there’s something here for me, I think, and suddenly, with the wide expanse of striped concrete ahead, the terrifying choreography of hurling cars and lumbering semi’s around me, I remember my writing. I am a writer. I tell people that I’m a writer. I attend a writing class. This week, however, I’m a writer who didn’t write.

I can’t decide if I care about the anonymous radio couple, the lying husband, the bamboozled wife. Perhaps she was cheating on him, stealing his money. Maybe they shared a secret from the past that justified this sort of retribution. I like to adopt characters and the shards of stories that I can work with, I have a list. Should I add them to my to my collection of real-life stories, my hoard? They move me, these stories. Maybe they’ll move my readers someday, whoever they turn out to be. Maybe.

The pleasure comes in taking out a gem from the trove, cutting it, polishing it. Nature provides to the diamond cutter whose eye and skills create the value. An average person would not recognize anything precious in the raw and forlorn lumps over which so many lives have been lost, so many made.

At a party, my host Daniel and I chat with Rob.

“Surely you remember her,” Rob says to Daniel, “she was my next door neighbor until she married that rich guy.”

“Oh, is she the one whose husband ran her down with the jet ski?” asks Daniel.
“He tried to murder her?” I say.

“Well,” says Rob, sipping his wine. “She decided to believe him when he told that her he had frozen up, that he had panicked, and simply frozen up. She said she believed him, only now, he’s in a coma. She’ll be very rich when he dies.”
I think of Hitchcock and revenge as I drive. I take a sip of coffee. I notice a kid in the back of a station wagon on my right, a red ball cap on his head. As I pull even with the driver I glance over. A woman with streaked hair is applying eyeliner, the rear-view mirror angled so that she can see her face. I see a red ball cap on the pavement.

Then there’s the one about the woman who faked being a 9-11 survivor. Evidently, she so believable that the other survivors elected her to chair their committee. She testified before Congress. Even after being unmasked as a fraud, she stuck to her original story. There was no evidence that she was even in New York when the planes hit the towers. She was from Belgium, actually.

I met this guy on Saturday at the retreat, married for 25 years. He’s a massage therapist, and a sexologist — his actual word — a sexologist. He provides therapeutic erotic encounters, mostly for clients who are also married men. They’ve never been touched like I touch them, he tells me. Women can’t do that, you know. I wonder about the wives.

Sandy and I are gossiping about the weekend on Sunday night, curled up on his bed after we drove back down the mountain. He lobs me one, wham! — about a guy he had sex with called Sammy, athletic and good looking, forty-something. I smirk, Sandy goes on. Most of the details follow the normal script, seduction, acceleration, release.

Then he says, “It’s the weirdest thing, he brought his son to the retreat, you know, that cute blond lad.”

I’d met the kid, went by the name of Hank, eighteen and gay, definitely chicken in a group where 35 was considered young. I had wondered how he found us.
“When did he come out to his kid, anyway?” I ask.

“He said he came out to Hank when he was five years old, and that Hank replied, ‘Oh dad, of course I knew that.’” Same words my mother used when I came out to her.

My driving is on autopilot, the characters and stories pulling me through my theta-waving mind. Then, boom, back in the real world, a cop car whooshes past me, zig-zagging the traffic to a dead stop. Up ahead there are four or five more black-and-whites. San Bernardino Police, it says on the door of the one closest to me. More cop cars pull in and block all the lanes.

My cell phone rings and I click the bluetooth button on my steering wheel. “Hi Nick, it’s Ron.” It’s my AA sponsee, calling in with the download from his Thanksgiving. I listen, another real-life story. He’s asking his mother what he was like as a child, and he hates the answer. He’s biting his tongue when his Republican brother praises Bush, and he wonders why everyone in his family seems so angry. The holiday season is upon us, I offer: it’s our national pageant of pain.

In front of me, I see a clutch of uniformed police officers cuffing two black kids with baggy jeans and white T-shirts draping down to the middle of their thighs. One cop has his gun out. They drag the kids into the back seat of the police cruiser.

Real life is seductive. Other peoples’ stories pull me in with their authenticity, their potential to go deep into the human heart. People caught at a crossroads. When they make the turn, they will never be the same again.

Bright shiny objects. Shiny and distracting. They distract me, they make me look away, they help me look away from my own pain, run away from my own story.
Aging gay man, fat, alone and depressed about his aloneness—-no, not the third person, have some balls, use the first.

I’m binge eating again and I can’t stop. I can’t bring myself to exercise. I’m willful and angry and ashamed. Still, I pretend I’m OK. I pretend this is not depression, I pretend that I am not depressed because I turn sixty in June and I’m still alone. I pretend I don’t mind being alone. I take refuge under the covers, where my dreams lie. Stay away from me. I don’t need you, I’ll be OK. Just get away and let me write.

The police blockade unravels as the car with the perps in the back seat speeds towards the exit, and the other black-and-whites follow. A cop drives a PT Cruiser, the perps’ car, I suppose. The red Chevy Malibu in front of me pulls away. I hit the gas and fiddle with the radio dial, trying to get a clearer signal.