What’s the Big Deal

[This post is an excerpt from Diary of a Heretic, the novel. Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

And afterwards Carlos was the one who lay too gaga to move.  His mouth gaped, his eyes rolled back.  Newly fortified, hyper awake, I showered and shaved while Carlos slipped from a daze into sleep.  Freshly dressed in soft new clothes (courtesy of Maggie’s shopping compulsion), I lifted Carlos tenderly off the floor, and carried him, skinny, brown, floppy with sleep, to the enormous, tightly made bed.

*

At Sammy’s, I ate a bacon cheeseburger and drank a few beers.  I lingered over my notebook as the bartender conspired with a lively gray haired woman drinking Drambuie and holding a fluffy white kitten in her arms.  The only other customers were two couples sporting drastic face piercings.  As I packed up my notebook and laid down my money, all six people converged on me.

“You’re him,” said a girl with seven safety pins through her cheek. 

“Who?”

“You know,” said a man with fabulously enlarged earlobes.

“The guy.”

They asked for my autograph. I signed a bunch of cocktail napkins and shook their hands.  The bartender set my dishes on a shelf as if for display but the gray haired woman waved for him to take them back down.  As I left, they were dabbing their fingers in my leftover ketchup-smeared grease.

And—it didn’t bother me!

I walked away amazed.  This whole night the scales did not fall from my eyes so much as gradually dissolve.  I mean, really, what’s the big deal?  I prance on stage telling everyone I do not have the answers; we ask the wrong questions, because we’re compelled to ask the wrong questions; it’s human nature.  The feeling comes and goes, but I walked out of Sammy’s with the dawning of a realization.  The RWR nothing new!

Nothing I say or do is. But if a few people think I give them hope, well, maybe I do.  Maybe ultimately I’m laying the foundation.  Because everyone should ask for faith:  Not for a heartbeat should anyone take anything for granted.

At four am, I sauntered out of the bar where a lifetime ago Colin and I drank vodka Collinses.  And I was less weary, less frightened than I can ever remember being.  Sated with food and drink, I headed toward Lake Michigan to watch the sun rise. I walked for miles along the shore, balancing on huge, jagged rocks as waves splashed over my sneakers. I teetered and slid, arms open to the wind.  If people want to give me money, why should I subject myself to every conceivable misery in response?  If Carlos and his high-stakes portfolio bring in more money, more bakeries, more infomercials, why not enjoy the ride?  You could even make the case that I’m obligated to enjoy it.  Just as you could argue the semi-opposite—that I must alleviate a cubic foot of someone’s personal anguish for every dollar we accept.  Either way.  Whatever comes.  One is just as impossible as the other.  In the grainy shadows of gray before daybreak, I walked along the rocks in rhythm, step as the relentless cold wave pulled, land as it hit.  My legs and feet were numb; the rest of me rose up.  The waves pounded all around me, and I lifted my arms, tilted my face, held my breath—hoping, aching—for what?  The boy Tyler?  Colin?  The chance to go back and undo my worst mistakes?  The waves crashed and churned.  The magic words, the lost prayer, the boys’ promise sprayed up from the rip tide.
Eventually the sun came up in a dirty sky.  I turned around to trudge sopping wet along Randolph Street.  A sidewalk vendor sold me a pair of Chinese slippers.  I trashed my soggy Cons, walked four blocks, then crouched on the museum steps until it opened.

(Click here to read the next  episode.)