FRESH YARN presents: It Feels Worse...by John Levenstein

FRESH YARN presents:

It Feels Worse
By John Levenstein

I should have known life after college wasn't going to go smoothly when my grandmother took a hat in the eye. It was the end of my graduation ceremony, and the dean called out merrily, "Now look out! Here come the hats!" Later, when my grandmother was trying to collect from the insurance company to pay for an operation, the dean claimed to have said, "Now some of the students may choose to throw their hats up in the air, so cover yourselves, for fear of injury." This doesn't have the ring of truth. Anyway, most of us just shrugged and tossed the mortar boards half heartedly, catching them on the way down. These were rentals, we had to return them to get our deposits back. But a few of the students, in high spirits, wound up, flung their mortar boards, like Frisbees, into the crowd…and Grandma went down like a sack of potatoes.

Now if you think this sounds funny in retrospect, well, you can really only imagine how funny it was at the time. But my life was pretty great right then, and there wasn't a lot that was going to bring me down. I'd carved out a niche for myself in college, putting on a comedy revue every semester with my best friend and writing partner, Mike. I had my first serious girlfriend, the long suffering Edith. And I'd even decided to try my hand at writing as a career. So I said good-bye to Edith, who still had a year to go, and would have to stay behind, ever faithful, to one day be reunited, and Mike and I headed out to Los Angeles, in a blaze of glory, to seek fame and fortune.

Six months later, eating shit, feeling like failures and frauds, with no money and no prospects, Mike and I took action. We made a batch of pot brownies, put together some mixed tapes, and took off to drive cross country, back to the site of our greatest triumphs.

Sometimes I wonder how the trip might have been different if Mike had made the tapes, and I had made the brownies. Mike was a big guy, about six foot four, two hundred forty pounds. A man of enormous appetites, he'd failed all three of his roommates out of college. Any attempt to keep up with Mike was folly. Was he a giant? Let's not get carried away. But there was something larger than life about him. A brownie for Mike made for a pleasant driving experience. A brownie for me made for imaginary hazards on the road. For some reason, it was mainly a problem when Mike was at the wheel. "Look out!" I'd suddenly scream. Or "Whaa-nooo---never mind." Mike was pissed. "Don't do that, man." I of course was indignant. Given that I was seeing phantoms, did he really expect me to remain silent? Yes, it would be more convenient if I weren't hallucinating the silhouette of a deer in the middle of the highway, but, since those were the cards I'd been dealt, it seemed to me that I had a responsibility to warn him.

Mike was unmoved. But the tapes would invariably bring us back together. They were compilations of our favorite songs from college, with bits of comic relief mixed in, mainly from this old forty-five Mike had that covered the entire history of baseball in ten incomprehensible minutes. It opened up with James Stewart narrating ("It begins in the spring, every spring, for a hundred springs…"), then cut to a couple of kids running outside ("Hey, Ma, the kids are playing baseball!") We all remember Lou Gehrig's noble good-bye, but this record included Babe Ruth's less graceful exit ten years later, when, dying of throat cancer, he addressed the adoring Yankee Stadium crowd: "You know how my voice sounds? Well, it feeeels worrssse." Mike and I thought this was hilarious. And as we crossed the Rocky Mountains, putting behind the bullshit Hollywood value system that hadn't recognized our genius for five long months…we almost didn't notice the three men in the pick-up truck chasing us.

Mike studied the rear view mirror. "I think the guy behind us is flipping me off." I strained to see. The driver nodded, pointed as if to say, "Yes, you," then emphatically gave us the finger. There could be no mistake. Fuck us.

The guy gestured for us to pull over. Mike and I debated the pros and cons. We drove like this for a while. Fuck you. Yeah you. Pull over. Mike and I hoped the driving and venting would somehow mellow them out, but when we finally decided to pull into a gas station to face our accusers, they jumped out of the pick-up truck, furious. Curiously, the extra driving had only served to further enrage them. "I don't know how you drive in California, but you're in Colorado. You cut off a buddy of mine back at the pass, and he CBed to tell us what you done. I don't know how you drive in California--I know how you drive in California, I was stationed at Camp Pendleton--but that's not how we drive here in Colorado."

I immediately sold Mike out. "I was in the passenger seat, I don't even know what's going on." Mike stepped forward, shaking hands like he was running for mayor, apologizing profusely, and the men seemed to settle down a bit. "It's just that you cut off a buddy of mine back at the pass, and he CBed me. And that buddy of mine…is my Daddy." At which point Daddy pulls up, gets out of his car, "God damn, I don't know how you drive in California," and it starts all over again. The other men try to calm him down, Mike offers his most sincere don't-hit-me-Daddy apology, and the man gives him a long hard look. "If you were a little bit bigger, I'd eat you for breakfast."

Now to me the genius of the men who chased us across Colorado has always been the use of the narrative device of withholding the piece of information that the buddy was Daddy. Did they actually plan this plot twist, while they were chasing us, blinded by rage, or was it a purely intuitive, uniquely American storytelling style? Here's where I weigh in: I have to think it took a conscious effort, each time, to say "this buddy of mine" instead of "my father." That it was a plot point intentionally withheld for dramatic effect. Kind of like the fact that Edith had never had an orgasm, and I was going back East determined to give her one.

Yes. Edith. The long-suffering, ever faithful, painfully shy girlfriend, wasting away awaiting my return. We'd come so close my senior year, that was part of the frustration, she always thought she was on the precipice. Like a lost child looking for her house. "That's my house! That's my house!" None of them are your house, Edith. And if my twenty-two year-old bucking and thrusting from a whole host of angles wasn't enough to get her there, well then it's hard to imagine what was.

Here was the plan. Mike and I had secured a house in East Hampton for Thanksgiving that belonged to a friend of my family's. Our best friends from college, including all the roommates Mike had failed out, were going to congregate there and rage. Like the Big Chill, except no one died and very little time had passed. Edith was a bit disappointed at having to share me with so many people, but Mike's girlfriend Julie would only come if it sounded like a party. Julie had to be cajoled into being in a relationship with Mike, and he would happily oblige, feeding the deer as he called it, looking away so she would feel safe to approach and eat from his hand. Julie was wildly orgasmic.

But the closer we got to the East Coast, the more people started to drop out. They all pretty much said the same thing: "It's Thanksgiving." Yes, it was Thanksgiving, it was always going to be Thanksgiving, but our college friends were somehow taken by surprise, blindsided by family obligations, leaving me, Mike, Edith, and Julie. Until Julie found out it wasn't a party. Maybe Mike looked her in the eye when he told her, or moved a little too suddenly, but she got skittish and bolted into the woods.

Mike took it well. But then Mike takes everything well. I've never known him to admit he's going through a hard time until at least six months after the fact. "I had a rocky September," he'll say, come June. Or summer was a bitch, but never until winter. "Julie won't be making it," he said, stoically, and we proceeded to East Hampton, where Thanksgiving awaited, and, for Edith, the orgasm of a lifetime.

Edith and I got to work. I gave her one of Mike's pot brownies--you use whatever tools are at your disposal-put on a tape (this sex was going to be loud!), and began to buck and thrust from a whole host of angles. She was getting close, or so she thought. "That's my house, that's my house." It's not your house. I went down on her, which I'd do from time to time, more as a sign of good faith than anything else, but this was going to be different. Edith was going to see God. I was an instrument of God. And then, suddenly, coming down, as if from the heavens, there it was: "It begins in the spring, every spring, for a hundred springs. Hey Ma, the kids are playing baseball." Shit. The tape. Edith, long suffering, ever faithful, painfully shy, was also, needless to say, very finely calibrated. The moment was lost.

We spent the rest of the weekend walking along the deserted beach, running out of things to say. Edith started a small collection of smooth black stones. That's all she would pick up. Smooth black stones. What was wrong with this woman? I'd never had the experience before of growing disenchanted with a girlfriend who I'd once been so crazy about. I'd never fallen out of love. It would be another year before I'd identified it, named it, catalogued it, and was ready to get the hell out. In the meantime, we had a lot of conversations where we assured each other that everything was fine. We just kept saying the words.

It's hard to exit gracefully. Mike and I had left college like Lou Gehrig, with a hint of nobility, at the top of our game, safely in control of our own myth. But we'd gone back to the well one too many times, like an old broken down Babe Ruth. "You know how my voice sounds, well it feels worrrssse."

I should have known when my grandmother took the hat in the eye. But when life serves you up a big dumb metaphor, and you look the other way, sometimes it gives you an even bigger dumber one. Life plays to the cheap seats. Our return from New York was delayed a day by the unveiling of my grandfather's tomb. Mike and I tried to weasel out of it, but without us there was no minion, so we went to the cemetery, watched them dump some dirt on my grandfather's grave, as my grandmother looked on gamely out of her one good eye, then set out for Los Angeles, straight from the grave, never to look back. The car broke down in Pennsylvania on the first day of hunting season. We checked into a motel, I went into the bathroom and cried for everything I'd lost. Six months later Mike told me it was the worst week of his life.