Giving Up the Ghost (18 page)

As I drove, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a dark flash across my rearview mirror. By the time I focused my gaze, it was gone.

Odd, I thought. Probably a bird flying behind the car or a piece of newspaper in the wind or something. Still, I could feel my heartbeat quicken.

I reached under the dash and clicked off the amplifier. Perhaps it was better to be less numb, I thought, and continued down the road munching on my fries.

About ten minutes later I saw it again. The headlights from the car behind me were suddenly blocked by something.

Before I could even turn my glance toward the mirror, I knew what it was.

It was something in the backseat of the car.

It was Her.

I could feel Her there, leaned forward in the seat, sitting perfectly still. Mouth moving silently, blankly gazing at the back of my head. No sound, just presence.

There was no brief flash this time. I didn’t dare look directly into the rearview mirror, but I could see that She was still blocking the headlights. I could feel my chest tighten as confusion turned into panic.

Without stopping the car, I whipped my body around to look.

“What are you waiting for?” I screamed out before I even noticed that the backseat was empty.

No sign of Little Girl. No sign of anything.

“No, no, no!” I yelled, beating my fists against the car seats with every syllable.

I’m shocked at how mercurial my emotions could be back then. Twenty seconds earlier I was complacently eating a French fry. Then I was in a full-blown rage.

I heard a car horn coming toward me, getting louder. I turned back in my seat to face forward and saw two headlights, about forty yards directly in front of me. I’d drifted into the oncoming-traffic lane.

Time seemed to slow. My rage evaporated as quickly as it had risen, leaving me wanting to just shut my eyes to make everything go away. I didn’t lift my foot from the accelerator; I just steadied the steering wheel straight ahead.

For a moment I thought I could see the words in front of me, scribbled in my frantic handwriting in the illumination of the headlights. I just wanted everything to stop. I was tired of being alone and confused and overwhelmed and uncertain and out of touch and wishing for things to be better.

I shook my head from side to side, making the headlights dance and swirl like the writing in my notebook.

I thought to myself: Let it happen.

I pushed the accelerator down further. I exhaled deeply, letting all my emotions go. For a moment, I felt peaceful.

The horn grew louder. The lights got closer and brighter and then swerved off the side of the road.

I could see the bright brake lights in the rearview mirror as the other car came to a stop.

“You are quite the Humean.”

“Pardon me?” I replied.

“Hume. Your essay. Very interesting,” said the Instructor, pointing a finger toward the essay blue book he’d just slapped down on my desk.

“Cortez,” he called out.

A girl meekly raised her hand.

“Read the book next time,” he stage-whispered, slapping a blue book down in front of her.

While he called out to other classmates, I flipped through my blue book. After the first few pages, my legibly written answer seemed to fade in and out, with drawings, arrows, and scribbles in between. After manically writing, then scribbling
out the last page and a half, I ended my essay with a quote from the reading, which I had memorized: “I believe that no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.” The quote was followed by a drawing of a hangman with a happy face.

Below it was written in red, “Provocative. Strong case. B+.”

It was the highest grade of my college career.

The Instructor’s class was the only one on my schedule that I attended regularly—or pretty much at all—anymore. Even though I knew I was looking at a grade card filled with Incompletes and F’s, I still diligently attended the Instructor’s course, read all the material, and did all the assignments and tests.

Our midterm was devoted to the second book in class, David Hume’s
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
. In hindsight, I’m sure the Instructor had assigned us Plato and Hume to help us learn the basics of critical thinking. Socratic method. Scientific method. The world seen through empirical skepticism. Come up with a question or idea, then let your experience be your guide to the truth. However, to me, they started to mean something else entirely.

They were Suicide 101.

I knew I’d stumbled onto something big one night when I was struggling my way through the Hume book. I was really excited that the Instructor planned to cover one 125-page book over a month’s time. Then I realized that the work of the Instructor’s favorite eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher wasn’t exactly a page-turner. I spent three weeks attempting to force myself through the main text, though I eventually skipped ahead to a collection of posthumous essays. Late one night when Laura was busy and there was nothing to do, I drove out to Lake O’Dea on my own and started reading the second essay, “Of Suicide,” by the dome light of my car, Public Image’s
First Issue
in the cassette deck.

“The superstitious man is miserable in every scene, in every incident of life. Even sleep itself, which banishes all other cares of unhappy mortals, affords to him matter of new terror; while he examines his dreams, and finds in those visions of the night prognostications of future calamities.”

I jumped out of the car and started walking toward a streetlight, reading and rereading the passage over and over again, while I felt my stomach sink.

He wrote this about me
, I thought.

The dreams. Little Girl. Visions. Everything. Hume was speaking directly to me.

I put the book down just long enough to run back to my car to find a pen and my highlighter, almost as if I had to capture the text immediately or I’d somehow lose it forever. I started to highlight and underline almost everything, turning every page of the essay into a sea of yellow color and bold black strikes.

In the essay, Hume makes the case for providence: that everything happens according to the rules and laws established by God; that these rules govern everything, from the temperature at which water boils to the amount of force you must assert to move a large rock.

Hume then argues that suicide is only a crime if it is a transgression against God, our community, or ourselves, then strips down the case against suicide from each perspective.

I kept reading, highlighting, and scribbling notes as the argument unfolded in front of me.

“Whenever pain or sorrow so far overcome my patience, as to make me tired of life, I may conclude that I am recalled from my station in the clearest and most express terms. Both prudence and courage should engage us to rid ourselves at once of existence, when it becomes a burden.”

Basically, Hume was arguing that if your life sucked or you were contemplating suicide, go for it. If you found yourself questioning whether or not you should die, you were, in his eyes, already checked out—or so far gone that there was no point in turning around. Your fate was already cast, game over.

Many years later I learned that Hume did not believe in God, providence, fate, divine intervention, or divine anything. He just liked to mess with the feeble minds of religious folks. To him, the whole essay was a carefully constructed mind fuck. But back then I accepted it as truth. Genius written down more than two hundred years before I was born. Genius meant to guide me.

Shortly after finishing the essay, I drove to a nearby pay phone and called Andre and Todd’s room at the Traveler’s Inn.

“What the fuck do you want?” Andre bellowed.

“You know those little pills I get from you,” I asked.

“Motherfucker, it is two-thirty in the morning!” he yelled. “Can’t it wait?”

“No, it can’t,” I replied. “Do you have any?”

“Sure, I got a couple.”

“How many?”

“How the fuck am I supposed to know? Ten, maybe.”

“Can you get more?”

“How many more?” Andre asked.

“More,” I replied.

“I don’t know, probably about thirty. They ain’t cheap, though.”

“I want more.”

“More than thirty? What the fuck do you want that many for?”

“What do you care, Andre. I want more.”

“How many more?”

“Fifty.”

“Fifty sleeping pills? You know how much that is gonna cost?”

He told me. I immediately consented. Andre told me to stop over tomorrow evening and pick them up.

“And I want cash, motherfucker. Not excuses. Not promises. Cash.”

The next day I cashed my paycheck, drew whatever embarrassingly small amount of money I had in my bank accounts, and cashed two bad checks at grocery stores. On the way, I stopped by a thrift store and picked up a beautiful glass vial, just big enough to hold fifty tablets. After stopping by Andre’s and enduring his questioning and threats about not trying to sell these at any of his regular hangouts, I drove up to Lake O’Dea. I put all the pills in the vial, screwed on the lid, and placed it on the dashboard. I felt an amazing sense of relief, as complete as the day I smashed the stereo.

This vial was my emergency escape plan.

Part of me was resigned to the idea that the only way I could gain control over my life was to end it. The only way to take back the power of the Little Girl and the darkness surrounding me was to end my existence. Part of me finally felt peace, knowing that when things got really bad, I had a way out.

Of all the emotions I felt, despair wasn’t one of them. I had torn apart everything in my life. I knew it. My friends and family knew it. I had turned out to be nothing but a disappointment and a failure. A doped-up, undependable, unpredictable mess who thought he was being followed around by a dead girl he didn’t know. Little Girl wasn’t my problem; Little Girl was a symptom of my problem.

The real problem was me. The only way to fix it was to get rid of me.

It’s obvious to me now that there was a small part of me, a very small part, that didn’t want to give up. I could have very easily opened the vial and swallowed all the pills, right then and there. But I didn’t. Instead, from then on, every moment became a choice.

For example, Laura and I might have had plans or I would have internal discussions with myself along the lines of, “Yeah, I could kill myself on Tuesday night, but then I’ll never know for sure if Greg [one of my fellow WKSC deejays] was right when he argued that Guadalcanal Diary sounded better live than on their record. So maybe I’ll wait until the weekend to overdose on pills. But, wait, there will be a new Iron Man comic out the following Tuesday, so maybe I’ll wait until after that.”

Every time I’d get scared or angry or impatient or someone would start yelling at me for some dipshit thing I’d done, I’d just reach into my coat pocket and brush my fingers against the vial. It was cold. It was real. It was comfort.

It was a choice. My choice: Do it now, or wait awhile longer. A choice I made every time I touched it.

Of course, David Hume would probably have laughed at my little vial of pills and sense of power and control. He’d argue that my fate was already sealed one way or another. All I was doing was acting out the formula. It was only a matter of time. Just as certainly as those pills would cause a chemical reaction in my stomach, I was simply working my way through the stages of a predictable and predestined outline, step by step.

The only thing I could hope for, Hume would say, was an error in the equation. To find something broken and, thus, working against the rules. An exception. A way out.

•  •  •

I had made a feeble effort to make some new replacement friends by seeking out some of the punk kids that took classes at Kent Stark. I’d long ago given up on making friends with normal people, which was good, because they had about the same level of interest in me. Seeking out the company of people who appeared as odd as—or odder than—me felt more like working at my pay grade. Phil and Ben fit perfectly. Between their total lack of initiative, underwhelming delivery on their potential, and love of beer and punk rock, they were complete fuck-ups. Just my kind of guys.

Most of the time we just sat around the cafeteria talking about bands and bitching about classes. On Thursday nights we’d grab a couple of others and go to the Galaxy Niteclub because they served twenty-five-cent drafts and twenty-five-cent hot dogs. We’d gorge on hot dogs and swill, then roam the dance floor, concealing our contempt for our fellow patrons just enough to keep from getting beaten up. Usually the night would end with us slam dancing out in the parking lot at closing time as the frightened drunks stumbled wide around us to avoid a stray arm or bead of sweat.

One night I was at Ben’s for a party when he noticed me staring off into some void in his kitchen. After catching the attention of a few others, he waved his hand in front of my eyes, asking me what I was looking at.

“I hate that motherfucker.”

Pause
.

“Who are you talking about?”

“Him,” I said, pointing at the shelf next to the refrigerator. “Cap’n Crunch.

“I hate that mouth-breathing dumb motherfucker,” I said as I walked across the room toward the shelf, picking up the box. “He is basically Mr. Magoo in a sea cap. I always rooted for the Soggies.”

“Umm … what are the Soggies?” Phil asked.

“From the commercial,” I said. “The Soggies. The blobby things on springs?”

Ben and Phil looked at me blankly.

“The fucking Soggies try to ruin the cereal, making it soggy. Then dipshit Cap’n Crunch shows up and scares them away,” I said. “I used to root for the Soggies. I’d just look at this ballsucker and wanted to punch him in that big fucking nose.”

We all have cringe-inducing moments in our lives, moments that when we think back on them make us shudder. It doesn’t matter if it’s a week, a year, or a decade later, we can’t ever get used to the thought of what we’ve done. Of all the stupid things I did during this time in my life, this is the one that still makes me cringe. The more I spoke, the more I felt people staring at me, wondering what I was talking about, wondering if I was ever going to make any sense. The more I struggled to connect, the further I reached. Acting this way was my “Hail Mary” play—either I’d finally be able to make a meaningful connection to people, or my behavior would expand the chasm even further.