Waiting for the Man (3 page)

There were practical matters to sort out. How long would I wait? What would I do if it rained? What would I do for food? And this: was I quitting my job? Or was I going to use up my bank of vacation days? What was the plan? Asking these questions, and considering their implications, I understood this: I had given in to the voice. I surrendered. It had me. The grip of its logic, or the message at least, finally overcame me. In a place where stunned ex-bankers and stock guys still wearing their suspenders walked the streets eating slices of pizza, vacant-eyed, alone; in a world where the bow tie made a comeback; where skanks from the Jersey Shore could become TV stars; and where I wrote ads for a dying media, assailed by technology and the power of a people both numb to their anger and buoyed by it; in this kind of place, giving in seemed logical.

The voice didn’t vanish but it wasn’t a constant. It wasn’t something I could feel all around me. And though I could still feel the Man, I was plagued by an uncertainty that never left my side. And I also realized this: he was waiting, too.

I was stuck someplace, the kind of place that takes the meaning out of things. Wherever I was, joy was being sucked out of me, leeched out. I had to acknowledge that. If everyone around me could feel it, I should, too.

My job was to make people feel unique enough to purchase products everyone else was buying. To create desire where once there was none. Is that even fair?

A day later, I was noticed. A neighborhood kid, a boy who lived across the street, noticed. He asked. Within a few hours, the neighborhood caught on. And I told them, “I’m waiting for the Man.” This is New York. This kind of statement just caused a shrug. Angie gave me blankets for the night when I convinced her I wasn’t going inside. It was spring and the nights were still cold. She was the only one who tried to talk some sense into me, but I wouldn’t listen. She was adorably Italian this way, sexy and motherly and crass and smiling through the rainiest of days. She worried for me. She said so. She said, “You worry me.” She was beautiful in that way that all the women in Italian films are beautiful and her worry made her all the more so.

By the next day, I was a fixture. People started to hang out around me. Kids would sit on the steps after school to keep me company. Some would look out for the Man with me, but mostly I just became a place to hang out. I was geography. The old men got their coffees and hung out. Unemployed hipsters came by and texted their friends, who came by, too. And I was the subject of conversation, of debate, the crux of a battery of meaning. Symbolism. The source of something no one understood, but you never knew. Something might happen. I was the subject of impressive conjecture. And the Man zoomed in and out of my consciousness.
Keep at it
, he’d say. And then he’d leave. Sometimes I would smell the horse and know he was around. Watching me. Evaluating.

By the third night, women were handing me leftovers from last night’s dinner. They’d say, “Just hang on to the Tupperware, Joe,” and they’d leave me alone. Angie would bring me food from the trattoria. Nights I would see her walking toward me, doggie bag in hand. She’d bring me cakes, pasta, paninis, whatever didn’t sell. Her chef always seemed overly optimistic about the fish. People were caring for me and not really questioning what I was doing. The world believes, or needs to believe, that New Yorkers are rude and brusque. They need to believe this because they have seen this version on TV and in the movies. But they’ve never lived here. Not after a snowstorm or during a fierce rain shower or when you show signs of distress. They did not see our strength when the crazies from the other side of the world flew our planes into our buildings. We are a tribe, us New Yorkers, and we can be as civil as anybody. Sometimes more so.

I lost track of time. It got to the point that when someone would ask me how long I’d been sitting on the steps, I’d just have to shrug. The difference between night and day was a question of light and perception. When I slept, the Man would talk to me in my dreams about things like destiny and loyalty. He told me my loyalty would be rewarded. He told me I was doing the right thing and because of this he would do right by me. During the day I would sometimes see him in the small crowd, watching. He drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. He would not sit by me. Not while I was awake.

One night Angie sat down next to me and we talked. She said she was getting worried about me. “This was cute and now I’m not so sure.”

“Me neither,” I said. “But this is something to do.” She touched my forehead. “I’m not sick,” I told her, backing away.

“You’re not crazy, right?” she asked.

She was persistent. She was being a mother without being my mother. She was relentless with concern. And she asked me more and more questions and finally I wanted them to end. I could only handle one type of oppression at a time. “I haven’t thought this through,” I said. I may have yelled. “I admit it. And admittedly, this is strange and stupid and completely fucked. It’s not normal. Yes. I’m conversing with someone in my head. I don’t know why I’m sitting here.” And then I was yelling for sure. “I’m waiting for a figment of my imagination to come whisk me away. I don’t fucking know anything. Isn’t that obvious?”

The stupidity of my situation, the trap I had constructed for myself had become obvious to me. And it did feel oddly like a trap. The Man’s gaze was like a cage. Forget the logic argument. I had already changed my mind. The confusion, and anger, that would reign over me for so long had set in like a bad storm. Angie cared. She had always cared about me. Angie was a road not taken. That’s what laziness does to you. It obliterates possibilities.

Angie left me alone and I thought, Great, I was getting real used to her doggie bags, and I realized that I couldn’t alienate people by jumping all over them for asking simple questions. I apologized to her the next day and she kept bringing me food, but there was no real conversation after that. She wouldn’t soon forgive me. She was the first person I hurt in all of this. This whole mess. This thing that brought me here.

IN A BIG COUNTRY

I walked here.

And here is nowhere even by Montana standards. That’s not to be insulting. It’s just true. It’s not New York. And that’s a part of this place’s charm. It’s a selling point. If the concepts of “somewhere” and “nowhere” are human constructs, or at least must be considered in relation to human activity, then this is, indeed, nowhere. Or irrelevant. We’d be considered off the grid if we didn’t have electricity. But the power lines come here. They reach this place, webs to a civilization far beyond. In the literal sense, we are very much on the grid. In many other senses, too.

Here is a luxury guest ranch. A five-star spa. In the midst of sky and mountains playing host to wealthy people with a nostalgia for the Old West that only goes as deep as their rooftop plunge pools. Where just running out to go to the store means hopping in a car, or a pickup truck more like it, and hoping your tank has enough fuel to drive a little while. The idea of walking to anything isn’t stupid, it’s impractical. There’s nowhere to walk to.

I didn’t walk
all
the way here from New York. Let’s get real.

But I walked
here
.

I spent three days walking here and despite my Grizzly Adams appearance, or maybe because of it, I don’t know, and my smell and the dirt on my clothes and my shit-covered hair and even though I admitted to walking here, which should have made someone nervous, I managed to talk myself into a job in the kitchen. I found myself a simple job. Peeling. Apples, potatoes, onions, carrots. Edible flora that need peeling. That was my job.

And they gave me a room, next to the bathroom, in a long stainless steel tube full of identical rooms. A trailer of sorts, standing on concrete pillars. And here, the kitchen and waitstaff sleep and fuck and drink and write bad poems and play music and fight and huddle to stay warm during summer nights that always seem to threaten winter. I’m told I’ll be receiving new accommodations soon. We’ve all been told that. We’re overcrowded. The difference in the amount of space between the outside and the inside is a kind of cruel irony. Though no one seems to mind. Because there is, here, a general kind of happiness, an odd feeling of being separate from the world’s troubles. Of simplicity. Listening to the sounds emanating from the three staff trailers at night is to acknowledge an odd kind of joy. Of freedom.

Not that I felt that joy immediately. I ignored everyone my first few days and nights here, ignored the obvious questions (“So where’d you walk from?”), not talking, not making eye contact, peeling my apples and carrots, eating a lot of fruit and vegetables, taking one shower after the other. Like I was trying to shed my skin. That’s what someone said. Had I been more social then I would have told them I was just trying to get clean. I was obsessed by the thought that I was dirty. I couldn’t get clean enough. I had much to erase.

When I got here, I would lie in bed in my narrow room, feet propped up on the faux-wood paneled walls, thinking about things like: God. The nature of dreams. The unconscious. The idea of the vision. Immutable things. How could I speak to strangers with these kinds of thoughts and not make them recoil? I was a freak. Self-aware, perhaps, but a freak nonetheless.

I didn’t choose this place. Finding it was like stumbling upon a hundred dollar bill. Or, better, winning the lottery. I was anonymous here, just as the land was anonymous to me. So before I became social, I had to do some thinking. Absorb the realities of my life. Assimilate some facts. And then I would go out, smile, be social. Sell myself.

And confront my own happiness. This was something I felt here quickly and it surprised me. My anonymity was reassuring. I smiled. I was a loner who didn’t speak to anyone and smiled for no reason. And yet they let me stay.

My station here afforded me a freedom that was hard to describe. After months of living before the world, of scrutiny, of feeling
owned
by others, of being both a construct and a victim of the media, of suffering under the tyranny of something I still have trouble defining, anonymity was like a gift, a return to being me. The joy of being ignored was a joy I had never even imagined. It was a green light to get on with my life, to live again and write new endings to stories unknown.

It wasn’t as if these people didn’t have access to my story. There were, there are, televisions here. The ranch is hooked up to satellite television. The place is wired. There’s Wi-Fi. The media reaches here. It comes in. This place isn’t disconnected from the world in that sense. The only thing lacking is standard cell phone reception and they have built this into the PR as a way of selling the place, a “stress-free” environment where the real world need not intrude. Given its proximity to nothing but mountains and tall grass, I imagine the ranch will be “stress-free” for quite a while yet.

I arrived here feeling like a failure. Worse, I felt a comic failure. And I asked myself, got bogged down by this question: is comic failure the true definition of tragedy?

Because I had let people down. People I knew and didn’t know. I had disappointed my family. I had spent a summer running toward something but also from something and I had strung the world along. Through no fault of my own. I want to be clear. I didn’t ask for the attention. But there are people wandering around, perhaps even close to this place, and I am a possible enabler to their disappointment. This was a fear. Now, after some thought, it’s just a worry. A worry I can handle.

And once my fears became worries, once I had started to let things go, I started to socialize. Because I realized, finally, something about happiness. I understood parts of the equation that make up our lives. That freedom from worry, from trepidation, from want, equals happiness. It sounds silly to say, but I had not been a happy man. Only now do I realize how unhappy I was. With the discovery of my happiness, I greeted my coworkers. I became flirtatious. When my fears became mere worries, I began to feel human again. I began to speak. I began to trust people again.

And so this place, the ridiculousness of it, works for me. The Big K Ranch and Spa. Thirty-four rooms, each with a plasma screen TV, stocked minibar, Swiss shower, Jacuzzi, plunge pool, fireplace. Horseback riding, hikes, yoga, full spa with aroma and massotherapy. A lecture series with a guest speaker list that reads like the media guide to a big city PBS station. The head chef published a well-received cookbook. This is the kind of place that generates buzz thousands of miles away. It is a literal oasis, an artfully contrived piece of luxury surround by nothing more than earth and sky.

Guests receive a Stetson upon arrival. Reservations include questions about hat size. The Stetsons are custom-made in Helena. Guests tend to leave with a lighter wallet but buttery skin and a moderately optimistic outlook on life.

I like the idea of optimism.

My most superficial worry, right now, is winter. I’ve heard about the winters here, about how the wind runs down from the Arctic like a rabid wolf, about how people have lost the use of their facial muscles because they were outside for twenty minutes. I’ve heard that sometimes it snows here in the middle of August, something I don’t want to believe.

And I’m worried about winter because I can’t imagine I’m going to leave. And this worry was, is, annoying. How can I assimilate the past if I’m worried about the future? About the weather? This is trivial, isn’t it? Had I come all this way to worry about trivia? I had been trivia. I knew from trivia. I already know that I’m going to end up as an answer to some incredibly snarky comments on late night television. Maybe it’s happened already. I’m OK with that. A legacy is a legacy. We can’t control our stories. No matter how hard we try.

I need to get on with my life. I think I am. This is what I’m thinking: I’ve decided to be optimistic. And this place breeds optimism. There’s something very American about it.

When the sun sets over the mountains, the sky becomes a royal shade of purple. And then the sky turns pink. And the sun is transformed into a dazzling orange producing the sweetest juice. And then the light that covers the peaks is like hearing last call when you haven’t had time to finish your first beer. And finally, as the disappointment dies away, you find yourself inside an all-encompassing darkness. Movie theater dark. In every direction the horizon is nothing but a rumor, an imagined place where the dark land meets the dark sky.

You realize how threatening the darkness can be, especially if you’ve come from the city.

And then suddenly you notice the stars, and the amount of them is enough to make you feel the weight of the universe, the insignificance people have felt since people could think about these things. The horizon is transformed once again and becomes a shadowy line between the star-filled sky and the dark, empty land and you realize it is the sky that looks full of life, full of stuff, in a way so beautiful that it hides its true nature from us, hides the fact that one day the sky will explode and swallow the earth.

This is our setting and it’s enough to leave you hurting to breathe. It is a setting where any human emotion has to be understood in the context of the grandeur of the place.

In the city, one never notices the stars. Or the sky. You just don’t look. The landscape is not dependent on looking up past the ends of the skyscrapers. In New York, the sky has been obliterated and you don’t even notice that it’s gone. There’s nothing to see.

When I was a kid, we were close enough to New York’s electric glow that the sky never really turned black. It was the color of electricity, of a far-off light. And then here, I finally noticed how big it is.

The property sits on one hundred and fifty acres surrounded by grasslands that take you right to the mountains, one of those spots that makes you feel special and lucky and small all at once. It is primitive and primordial and the dichotomy created by the luxury of the place is the point of the whole enterprise.

That’s what they’re selling. The specialness of being human. Even here.

Thirty-four guesthouses surround a central lodge done up in timbers and whitewash. Inside the lodge, another six suites, two dining rooms, a bar, the administrative offices, a small staff lounge. A library with a fireplace. Off the north end of the lodge, a large barn houses the ranch’s horses and behind them, the workers’ quarters. One hundred and fifty of us work here.

South of the lodge, between the main gate and the first of the guesthouses, the spa, a large two-story adobe structure with lap pools on the roof. Behind the spa, a fifty-meter outdoor pool. There’s another one inside the spa. Further south, five private tents, the most luxurious accommodations on the property. King size beds, claw foot bathtubs, mahogany dressers, dining tables. No televisions. No stereos. All covered in cream-colored canvas. Personal butler. And behind each tent, surrounded by brush for privacy, open-air showers, a Jacuzzi for two, and a common sitting area where “campers” can enjoy an end-of-day cocktail and munch on popcorn with truffle butter. And off in all directions, but mostly heading toward the mountains, trails leave the ranch like the arms of octopi. Jogging trails, horse trails, hiking trails. One for ATVs. The horses hate the sound of those and a debate has raged about eliminating them. The Japanese love off-roading. They can’t get enough of the ATVs. It is part of the irony of this place, the silliness of building a brand and then tearing it down all at once. It is conforming to people’s expectations and not the other way around. The brand is confused and so the offer to the customer is as well. Even with the economy in the tank in so many places, the people come. The ranch does well. There’s an endless desire for what this place offers. The nightly rates can top $1,000 during the summer. The tents start at $5,000 a night. But now that I’ve been here a while, I can see it could be more.

Sitting by a campfire near the trailers, you can hear the horses if the wind is blowing right. The breeze is a constant here. It never stops. And I wonder how far the breeze has had to travel. How much further does a wind travel before it lies down in some field to die? Where must it go, what force must it meet, to die? Does it die gently? Or is it eternal? Does my breath end up somewhere, up in the jet stream, to become the eternal wind?

I have taken to whistling. Especially in the darkness. I walk back to the trailer at night and I whistle. If only to confirm my existence.