Giving Up the Ghost (16 page)

I grabbed David Bowie’s
Lodger
album from my bin, pulled the needle off the Flipper record, dropped the needle in the middle of the first track, and walked out of the deejay booth toward Red Boots and her friends.

I jumped up onto the table and began stomping up and down and dancing along with Bowie. A flurry of books and beverage cups flew off the table. I kicked the remaining items off the table and across the room.

There’s no doubt that Red Boots brought a little drama to the situation, but none of it justified what I was doing. It wasn’t like I used her behavior as an excuse, but as license to let go. Rather than take the upper road, I felt compelled to take a lower road. I knew this situation would not end well, so I decided to let my rage flow. Why work so hard to contain myself when it felt so good to just let go?

“I am a DJ,”
I sang along with the record.
“I am what I play.”

“Get off my table, you crazy motherfucker!” Red Boots screamed. I could tell she wanted to reach up and smack me or swat me away. For some reason, she restrained herself. It was more self-control than I think I could ever muster about anything. No one would have blamed her for hitting me over the head with a ketchup bottle, but Red Boots just stood there shaking her head.

I picked up some discarded Styrofoam coffee cups off the next table and started heaving them at the wall in time with the song, splattering small amounts of backwash against the brick wall. Then I turned back to Red Boots and her friends and started to dance around in front of them, suggestively wrapping my fingers around my belt as if I was about to strip.

They, and the rest of the cafeteria’s occupants, just stood or sat there, staring at me. I remember one of the food servers stood with her mouth open holding a full spoon of oatmeal.

I knew that what I was doing was an overreaction. I really didn’t care that it was an overreaction. I knew that in a few minutes I’d regret everything I was doing and feel horrible for scaring them. But the feeling became like trying to hold back an orgasm. The tidal wave of hate-fed euphoria was just too tempting, too overwhelming. I just had to let myself go, even though I knew the chaos that it would create.

“I am a DJ, I am what I play,”
I sang.
“I got believers, believing me!”

I jumped down and returned to the ’KSC booth, locked the door, threw the Bowie disc back into my bin, grabbed my
Music for Airports
tape, slammed it into the ancient player, hit Play, and slumped down into the chair. The loud, distorted
etherealness of
Music for Airports
seemed to confuse people more. Most just got up and filed out of the cafeteria.

I played the tape because I wanted the situation to melt away.
Music for Airports
always made me feel calm. It reminded me of feeling peaceful. It reminded me of sitting in the car late at night with Laura. I wanted to let
Music for Airports
pour over everyone there and have the same effect on them. Just let this situation I’d created wash away.

I felt like a fool. Not for behaving so badly, but for taking it out on Red Boots and her friends. They were probably scared—and how could you blame them? They just asked that I turn down the music. The next thing they knew, some idiot was kicking coffee around the room while dancing like a lunatic on top of their table. I was an asshole for sucking them into my bullshit.

A few minutes later a campus policeman showed up and told me to turn off the tape and leave the station.

When I came out of the booth, Red Boots launched into how much of an asshole I was.

I started to scream nonsense, partially because I wanted to freak her out, but mostly because I was overwhelmed by the torrent of rage and anger that I felt. If you had sat me down at the time and asked what was making me so upset, I probably would have spouted off about how much work I’d put into my playlists and how I was doing this for free and how if she didn’t “get it” then that was her fault and how dare she complain and ruin something that was so important to me.

In truth, that would have just been a cover—something to shroud my confusion at how quickly I’d given over control to my darkness. Whenever something, anything, happened in my life that could possibly justify being pissed off, I ran with it.
Every time it happened, my fuse just got shorter and shorter. It shocks and embarrasses me to think back to how quickly I could be overwhelmed by life, leaving me feeling like I had little control over myself—almost as if I went into a trance and became only a witness to my own emotions and actions.

I stood there and screamed. I wanted to smash things up. I wanted everyone else to feel as horrible as I did. Red Boots, the cop, the cafeteria worker—I wanted them all to know how angry I felt and how simple shit like this was just too much. I couldn’t take any more. When my rant ran out of steam, my face was red and had snot and tears running down it. No one seemed to know what to do or say, including me.

I picked up my crate of records and walked out the door.

When I next picked up Laura for a trip out to Lake O’Dea, at first I didn’t mention anything to her about getting kicked out of the radio station. I would have done whatever I could to keep the conversation away from anything in my real life. Instead, I baited her into an argument.

We’d argue about anything—just for fun. We’d argue about Bruce Springsteen or telekinesis or architecture or some other subject that, often, we knew little about. Most times we ended up passionately defending ideas that we really didn’t believe. It felt good to let out the rip cord and be overtly animated and passionate about
something
.

If Laura was mildly impressed or entertained by my zealous argument for, say, everyone in the Western world abandoning their own language and speaking Latin, the evening might end with a short kiss.

It became the big moment of truth between us after the nights we spent together: the kiss attempt. I tried to kiss her at the end of every evening we spent together, sometimes in the middle of an evening we were spending together. Sometimes
she kissed me back, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes it was a deep kiss. Sometimes it was just a peck. Sometimes she’d stop me from even trying to get close. I always tried to guess what was coming, tried to find some rhythm or pattern. There was a formula for everything, I always reminded myself. From the combustion inside my car engine to a guitar amplifier to how the bricks and mortar were held together in a building foundation to an egg frying in a skillet to a kiss from a girl—everything happened based on an equation. I believed nothing happened by chance—it was all just simple math. Variables and constants were combined to achieve a predestined outcome.

This time, while I was in the middle of making some point about something, Laura turned in her seat and slowly climbed into my lap. She reached for my cheek and started to kiss me.

In that moment, everything—Little Girl, work, school, my family, Red Boots, everything that pissed me off or upset me—just vanished into the warm softness of her mouth. It seemed like a frozen moment, like everything around us simply stopped.

I didn’t want it to end, but soon enough she stopped, turned herself back around into her seat, smiled without looking at me, opened the door, and left without saying a word.

The next morning, I just kept thinking about that kiss. I kept thinking about the smile on her face as she got out of the car.

The problem was, everything horrible in my life came rushing back as soon as she closed the car door, trying to drown out the memory of that kiss. I didn’t want to let it go, but felt I had to.

Every time I thought of that kiss, I thought that I didn’t deserve to feel good. Rather than comfort me, the kiss just reminded me how far from normal and good my life really was.

I even tried to take some of Todd and Andre’s little blue pills. All I did was fall asleep, waking a few hours later to a world just as fucked up as it was before. The kiss stung. The kiss made it worse.

I needed to remove the memory of that kiss.

As soon as Northeast Electronics opened that morning, I walked in and asked to see stereo receivers. I picked out the most beautiful Sony model they had and paid with a check. Five inputs; 120 watts per channel.

It cost almost three hundred dollars. That was more than I brought home in a month of cleaning toilets and taking out trash at T.J. Maxx. I had less than twenty dollars in my checking account. I wrote a check anyway.

After walking out the door with the receiver, I drove back to Lake O’Dea, where Laura and I had hung out the night before. I opened up the carton, unpacked the receiver, and set it up on top of its cardboard box in the middle of the road. Then I went into my trunk and got a crowbar.

I took a long look at the receiver. This thing wasn’t built for what was about to happen to it. It was built to look beautiful in some rich guy’s house and fill his parties with loud shitty music that made him feel cool. The guy’s friends were supposed to look at this stereo with envy, hoping that if they put up with idiots like him long enough, they might be able to squeak their way up high enough to be able to afford something like this someday, too. To be honest, I wanted it too. It was a symbol of success and wealth that I would never have.

I took the crowbar and dragged it across the metal top, leaving a deep, long scratch. There was no turning back at this point. It took three strikes before the front broke off. Then I started swinging at the insides, bits of plastic and circuit board flying everywhere.

I’d needed to balance out warm feelings before, of course. In the past, I’d just throw some bottles across an empty parking lot. I’d slam my fist into stacks of cardboard boxes in the backroom of T.J. Maxx. I’d dig my fingers into the side of my chest until I drew blood. This was different. That kiss needed a greater response. For a brief moment, that simple passionate gesture had made me feel wanted, like I’d actually succeeded in bringing some joy to someone. In the moment, it made me happy. A new kind of momentary happiness called for a new kind of sabotage. There was only one thing to do with that stereo: Make it into an offering.

Within four minutes, the receiver was reduced to a pile of broken plastic and metal. There were pieces of it stuck in my hair. I felt an almost orgasmic wave of relief. For just a moment, I felt calm.

In three days the check I’d used to buy the stereo would bounce, then bounce again, then Northeast Electronics would start calling me, and eventually threaten to send the check over to the authorities. They’d tell me writing a bad check for that amount could be a felony. I would create all kinds of chaos and drama and scrape together just enough cash and make just enough excuses and get just enough leeway to pay them their money and fees hours before they turned the check in to the police department. Everyone involved would treat me like a fuck-up.

When I think back to that time in my life, I remember saying that I never wanted to have any regrets. I wanted to follow my instincts regardless of the consequences or outcome—to ignore convention and expectation and pressure. To be free. But I was actually doing the opposite. Eliminating options, creating chaos, and reinforcing the idea that my life was irreconcilable.

Standing in the sun on the road behind Lake O’Dea, I looked at the pile. Black plastic shards, scratched and twisted metal, cracked circuit boards, and stray letters from a chrome logo. Scattered. It matched me, a broken machine. No purpose. No future. Nothing more than fodder for chaos yet to come.

Eighteen-year-olds were supposed to have bright futures. They weren’t supposed to be broken. They weren’t supposed to be haunted by dead girls. They weren’t supposed to feel so much anger and pain with no reason why.

I knew I needed to leave. If I looked at those pieces for another moment, I knew I would pick them up and start digging them into my arms, neck, and eyes. As I started walking toward the car, I didn’t feel regret or fear or sadness. I felt nothing.

Exactly as I’d hoped.

One of my classes was Introduction to Philosophy, taught by a little man who looked like he’d just walked out of an R. Crumb cartoon, whom we called “the Instructor.” A generic “INSTRUCTOR” had appeared on the class schedule where his name should have been. It never got corrected, and he never once told us his name. On the first day of class, he simply walked in and asked if we had read any of the assigned texts. Since we had never received a syllabus or a list of required books, several people shook their heads no, while the rest of us just stared blankly. He pulled a pile of barely legible mimeographed course outlines out of his bag, plopped them by the door, and began talking about Socrates. That’s how we started.

The Instructor would rant for an hour about truth, the Federal Reserve System, cinema verité, and Ronald Reagan—and I was transfixed. For the first time in my brief college career, I actually read the assigned texts. Not only did they prime me for whatever mind blowing the Instructor was about to lay down, but they offered the benefit of giving me something brainy to talk about with Laura.