Life is Good
It happens in front of the pizza shop. The pizza shop where you met your ex-wife back when you were freshmen in highschool. Back when, over sixth-period lunch, she’d read aloud to you passages from Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters — mostly the parts that talked about masturbating, what she and Judy called, the power. This, well before you’d ever felt the inside of a woman.
That was sixteen years ago. A whole lifetime if you consider that you were only fourteen then. And yet you can still replay, beat by beat, the first time you spied her cool approach: her jet black bangs, dyed to match her sense of humor, pasted over one eye as if to suggest that any view of the world unmitigated by self-restraint would be…unwise. Dangerous even. Like looking directly into the sun.
With only slight prompting you can resurrect that whole scene. You can reinsert yourself like an old cassette back into that sticky, patent-leather booth: You — undersized, a boy among (what seemed to you then) men, gazing out from behind the pizza shop’s steamed glass window. And her — approaching from the other side, sharp, cutting a direct path through everyone else’s meandering. She seemed so worldly to you then. So confident. So sure she had something everyone else wanted but didn’t have the guts or the audacity to reach out and take. You didn’t know precisely what that thing was. You realize now that she didn’t either. But you felt drawn to her. You remember thinking that just being in her proximity was a step in the right direction, that being close to her was that much closer to possessing that mysterious, unidentified something.
Presently though, a whole sixteen years in the future, it’s just after dusk. The last rays of an August sun — the tumescent violets, the streaks of fiery peach — have been swept away, chased off by night like a gaggle of loitering teens. Midtown, with its wide arterial road, is placid and subdued, anesthetized under the sterile beams of the street-lamp’s LED bulbs.
Driving down that familiar corridor you pass a thousand monuments to your youth. You pass the hospital where thirty years prior you were born, six weeks early: a small pink blob with a full head of hair, impatient to get started with the whole business of living. Opposite the hospital, you pass the highschool, St. Anthony’s, the consecrated grounds where that same proclivity to resist containment reached peak exhibition. Where you once led a group of students, fists raised in protest, shouting “FREE-DOM” as you dashed across the classroom and leapt out its second-story window.
Every building, every square inch of town, is the setting for some story, played some role, however minor, in the formation of your being. There’s the elk’s lodge where Jackie G had her sweet sixteen party. Where you smoked a joint in the woods out back but didn’t know it was laced with ecstasy. Next to the lodge, the Old Dutch Church, where Spanish Mike taught you to skateboard. Where the two of you would grind across the waxed front stair until an angry, red-faced man of the cloth would emerge to threaten you with eternal damnation and immediate physical harm.
Each place speaks to you like that. Each place, a groove on your personal record, reverberating with the melodies and the lyrics, the tracks of your life’s songs. You pass the tattoo parlor and hear your mother’s pleas not to mar your body. You pass the ice cream parlor, your first paying job, and hear Trista L. whisper from the stockroom that it’s her first time. You hear yourself say, me too, and even now, all these years later, you cringe at the lie. On the corner of Staples Street and Broadway, from the field beyond a sorry lot of salt-rusted used cars for sale, you hear your little league baseball Coach, Coach Burkey, tell you that, if you work hard enough, you can make it.
You tell yourself that there are good and bad things about living in the town where you grew up. What’s good, you say, is that you never need directions. You know which neighborhoods to avoid after dark, and where to get authentic two dollar tacos instead of gringo tacos for double the price. What’s bad, you say, is that it’s like living in a graveyard. Everywhere you look you’re surrounded by tombstones. Everywhere you look you’re surrounded by the legacy of your past, all your deeds and misdeeds, all your wins and losses and forfeits and draws, tacked up like numbers on a scoreboard, always on display, always right there to remind you of your worst mistakes. It’s the opposite, you say, of today’s digital world, of relative anonymity. Home is a place where you can’t just change your preferences. Home is a place where you can’t clear your history with the mere click of a button.
You drive along that way: indulging, sometimes reluctantly, in an autobiographical trip down memory lane, passing by the familiar sites the same way you flip through the scrapbooks of newspaper clippings detailing the highlights of your amateur baseball career — not to discover anything new, but to confirm what you already know. That’s when you see the pizza shop’s familiar neon glow — the pizza shop where your ex-wife used to read YA smut to you when you were a teenager. DENUNZIO’S, the sign reads, THE BEST IN TOWN. For once, you think, the hyperbole of advertising is true. Back when you were in college, when you’d come home for spring break or thanksgiving, you’d always head straight to Nunzi’s, even before seeing your parents. Somehow, Nunzi’s always felt more home than home.
The car in front of you, a Jeep, is unremarkable, except that it has one of those horrible slip covers over the mounted spare. LIFE IS GOOD, it says in juvenile, lowercase letters. You try in vain not to imagine the birkenstocks on the drivers feet, or the twenty minute, rambling Phish song you know is blaring on the stereo. You try not to hate him, to detest him and his chill vibes.
You and Jeep are cruising along, going faster than the posted speed limit of fifteen (it being a school zone), but you’re not worried about getting pulled over, it being summer and night. You’re headed to a friend’s place down on the rondout, with a six pack in tow, and you just smoked a whole joint to yourself.
You’re higher than you bargained for. You feel a bit zonked, a bit out-there. You try to relax. You try to ease your shoulders down from around your ears, let the high wash over you, let it bathe you in it’s pulsing, liquid energy. Driving along, cruising simultaneously through past and present, you feel inseparable from it all — inseparable from the memories, from the warm summer air, from the streets, from the store windows that have changed hands five times in five years, from the sidewalks that were too uneven to ride your skateboard on. You recognize the smallest of details, the shade trees, the individual branches that you tried to jump up and touch as you passed beneath them. But your flirtation with nirvana — the serene oneness you feel with your small, familiar bit of universe — is cut short. It’s interrupted by the sudden illumination of the Jeep’s brake lights: two demonic red eyes piercing the night.
You fishtail. You come to a screeching halt, within inches of Jeep, within inches of your life. You don’t know how you didn’t crash, how you and Jeep didn’t meet in a deadly embrace of twisted metal. You don’t believe in angels. You chalk it up to chance, to random dumb-luck and good reflexes and precision mechanical-engineering. Having answered how, you shift to why.
Why is a cat. An underfed tabby that flashed out from the direction of Nunzi’s like a bolt of errant lightning. It ran straight into the road. Straight into the jeep’s path — as if on a dare.
You rewind. You replay what happened. You recall how the cat seemed to instantly realize her mistake. You recall how she tried to reverse course, to dart back to safety, to demonstrate her namesake, cat-like reflexes, and an ability to pivot that would make a silicon valley CEO wet for days. But she couldn’t. Despite her heroic efforts, she couldn’t overcome momentum. Or perhaps it was fate she couldn’t overcome. She got clipped. Not by the Jeep’s front wheels, but by the back, so that she had dodged death once, but not twice. You wonder what happened to her other seven lives.
You come back to the present. You see Cat, gutter-bound in more ways than one. She flips end-over-end. She spasms involuntarily, defies gravity in a breakdance routine that looks like a macabre audition for So You Think You Can Dance: Animal Edition. But gravity wins. Cat goes reluctantly horizontal. She settles onto the pavement, still retching, but growing more and more subdued. You think she looks like one of those plastic wind-up toys, the ones they kept on display in front of the toy store at the mall to lure in curious children, the kind that can backflip but more often than not end up toppling over, lying prone with their little mechanical feet clicking impotently at the air.
You take no pleasure in watching. But nor do you look away. The whole thing feels surreal, staged even, though you know it isn’t. You can’t fake that kind of agony, that death dance, that swan song.
You know there is only one decent thing to do. You take inventory of the truck. You don’t see anything labeled, instrument of death. You’re wearing boots, but that thought is too gruesome. You could use a rock, you think, but first you’d have to find one. And what if you missed? What if you didn’t miss but only caused Cat more suffering? What if Cat got splattered? Or what if you got cat-splattered? What if neither one of you could be cleaned up, physically or emotionally? You worry that whatever you do, it will be misinterpreted. That for anyone driving by they would seem only to bear witness to some psychopath doing what psychopath’s do before they graduate to humans. You don’t think you can adequately explain euthanasia to a vehicle traveling by at twenty miles per hour. You suppose you could scream out “MERCY” as you deliver the final blow, but you decide that that would only make you look more crazy, that it would be an odd, much delayed sequel to your yelling “FREEDOM” and jumping out the classroom window all those years ago.
While you contemplate the moral thing to do, Cat does what all animals do. Cat crawls away. Cat finds some private, dark place to die, on her own terms, with no need of an audience. You also feel drawn to solitude. You get back in your truck and drive past the turn-off for your friend’s place, forsaking company, allowing that the beers in tow, if they arrive at all, will arrive warm. Instead you drive further downtown, to the end of the road, to the municipal parking lot that looks out on the creek, where you can see Dock Island and the old Wurts Street Bridge.
The creek is still. The ducks that normally perforate the water’s surface have gone elsewhere for the night, desperate to burn off the day’s excess of cheap carbohydrates: hot dog buns and stale bread — modernity’s charity. The water sits undisturbed, reflecting that which floats above it. Upon it’s dark, glassy sheen you can make out the red and green buoys that signal the various depths of the creek’s channels, the routes for safe passage, the dangers and impediments hidden below. Why isn’t life like that, you wonder. Why aren’t the obstacles and the pitfalls labeled, illuminated by bright flashing lights that shout: STAY AWAY. AVOID ME. TOO DANGEROUS OVER HERE. Why didn’t anyone warn you about all the treacherous paths that lead to pain, to heartbreak, to annihilation…
Boats are parked along the marina. So many of them look vacant and forlorn, still winterized, still shrink-wrapped in blue tarps, their fluids and their cabins empty, drained of liquid and of life. There are a few, though, that look active. Those that do have their chrome railings festooned with tea lights, with fake tropical leaves and tiki torches and machine painted signs that say “life is better when you’re on a boat.” On the surface of the water those tea lights twinkle. They blend into the night sky. For you they become stars, stars from an alternate universe, a universe where events unfolded differently, a universe where you are still married and Cat is still alive.
Despite the signs of occupancy from those decorated boats, there is little noise you’d call human. There is only the low rumble of cars making their way across the nearby bridge’s rusty span — evidence of a constant flow of obscure arrivals, and even more obscure departures. Something about Cat has shaken you, has driven you down to the water — to stillness and reflection. Was it an omen, you wonder. You ask yourself if you believe in omens, in astrology, in the significance of the position of the moon and the planets at the exact moment when your mother’s cervix first dilated, or your father shot his load. No. Of course you don’t. But you question whether that makes it all meaningless, just random manifestations of probability and chaos. So you don’t subscribe to the world of angels, to the world of sacred trinities or chakras or mula bandhas. Does that make you a nihilist? Cat died right in front of you for Christ’s sake. Right in front of the very pizza shop where you met and eventually abandoned your wife. Surely that means something. Surely it’s more than coincidence.
You tell yourself this because you can’t imagine a more perfect metaphor for your failed marriage. You and Cat, so much the same. You list the ways, you who darted out from the safety of your sheltered youth with the same recklessness. You who made your own mad dash into the street, into maturity, as if on a dare, as if propelled by the goadings of those who said you weren’t ready, that you should wait, that you should sow your wild oats, should build a career, should establish good credit before you dared to get married, to have kids, to settle down.
Yes, you think. Perhaps they were right. You see that now. You see that you were impulsive. You see that you were cocky and overconfident and naive. But you thought you could do it. You thought you could do anything. You believed Coach Burkey when he said that if you just worked hard enough you could make it. You believed Judy too. You believed that the power was real and that the two of you had it, that you knew how to please yourselves and each other. You believed you were fast enough, and agile enough to weave between traffic, between the obstacles and impediments to your will. You thought you were as invincible as Cat — a younger Cat who had yet to exchange any of her nine lives.
But you were wrong. You see that now. You were wrong just as Cat had been wrong. The world and the objects moving around inside it are so much faster than you imagined. And they’re far less forgiving.
By design or default, Cat becomes another tombstone. Another groove in the record. Another tick on the scoreboard under losses, a painful reminder of the flash-in-the-pan marriage that started and ended right where it began — at DeNunzio’s: the place where Cat got flattened under the wheel of a Jeep who’s false claim that LIFE IS GOOD had once more proved itself a cruel joke. At DeNunzios: the place where, over two slices of cheese, you confessed to your one time crush, your one time highschool girlfriend, your one time wife, that you just couldn’t do it anymore, that your well of compassion had run dry, that whatever stuff was needed to get through life’s trials — to get safely from one side of the road to the other — you didn’t have enough of it. Or maybe you never had it at all. Maybe you’d only ever been close to it, felt its presence, longed to be near it — like with her all those years ago.
Above the creek, the bridge resounds with the passing of cars: more cars coming into and going out of existence. Alone, in the ebbing tide of your past, you mourn Cat. You mourn your former love. You mourn your youth and the mystery you once sought. Down by the water, where the line between what is above and what is below is obscure, where you can be fooled by what is truly present and what is only a distorted reflection, something occurs to you. All those places you passed along the drive, all those places with their memories that spoke to you, that sang their graveyard songs — all those tombstones — they are all echoes of a single truth, a joint chorus with one morbid refrain: the world is a place where you lose as much as you gain. At first, that thought is unsettling. But then you see that there’s a neatness to it, a pleasing symmetry. The world is more orderly than you imagined, its equations, balanced. You feel a sense of relief. There is nothing to get close to, you tell yourself, without moving further from where you are. There is nothing to acquire, without giving up some of what you already have.
On the drive home, with the windows rolled down, with the warm summer air blowing through your hair, you make your peace with the score. You remind yourself that when the game ends the board resets to zero, the slate gets cleaned. You drive down that wide, familiar corridor, under the sterile beams of the streetlights, and you listen to the record, to the melodies, to the rambling tunes from the tombstones that are, and all the tombstones that will be. Listening, you hum along:
The cats of the world will get run over.
The people will die.
All the world’s stones will be overturned,
After we say goodbye.
But baby,
Life is Good.
Yea baby,
Life is Good.
