I didn’t want to wake up this morning. I was tucked under a big purple comforter on a small, firm bed in Pearland, TX, having a dream in which I was convinced I was going to die on the plane home. Normally I would want to wake up from a dream where a message came so loudly and clearly, but my desire to stay asleep, to prolong my trip, was even stronger. Upstairs, throughout the night, Jeffrey and Emily talked for the first time in five years. The three of us had an impromptu slumber party at Jeffrey’s house, and his mom, bless her, was awake at 1 AM and gave us all pajamas. And so I slept, cradled in my own warmth, not wanting to wake up, not wanting my weekend to end, afraid of coming back to Pittsburgh after having been so thoroughly shattered.
Pearland is a small town just south of Houston. I never quite figured out where the city of Houston started or stopped, so I can’t say for certain, but Pearland feels like a suburb, or something that I would call a suburb. The new excitement was that they’d just gotten a Chili’s restaurant, which is pretty exciting if you love boneless buffalo wings (which I do). It was flat like Florida, its streets wide like Florida, and I finally understood what Jeffrey meant when he said the trick to navigating Pittsburgh was to constantly turn left.
I went to Pearland, TX, to visit Emily DePrang. She runs an amazing blog called Pigeon in the Sun (http://pigeoninthesun.blogspot.com) and was Jeffrey’s girlfriend back when we lived in Florida, attending film school together. I only met her twice, the two times she came to Florida to visit Jeffrey, but we were natural friends and wrote to each other often, sometimes long, involved letters, all of which I’ve lost save for the memory of them.
Emily is a big reason why I survived Florida.
I haven’t talked about Florida here on the Captain’s Blog. It was a long time ago, now. I was in film school from October 2000 to November 2001, fresh out of high school, at a place called Full Sail. It was a high-tech VoTech, a technical school for filmmaking, in Orlando, FL. My guidance counselor suggested it when I told her I didn’t want to go to college (which was true at the time). The benefit and curse of a high school like Mt. Lebanon is that it didn’t get a good reputation by letting students not go to college, so as long as I went somewhere, the guidance counselor would be pacified. I had never been apart from my family for any meaningful length of time. I was 18, indecisive, and only made up my mind to go when my mom said, “You either go to Full Sail or you work at Wal-Mart. Those are your options.”
The only things I really learned at Full Sail were about myself: how I prefer a rear-wheel-drive car, how to write a good e-mail, how to kiss a girl, how much I love editing, how to hug a man, how to fall meaningfully in love, how much I hate feeling dumb, how any lamp that involves a naked lady is pretentious, how glass surfaces are bad at covering up weaknesses of character, how to say no and yes to sex, how to buy a pregnancy test, why to take with a grain of salt the certitude of anyone who is under the age of 25 including myself, how to abuse a credit card, how to get fat, how to self-destruct, how to shave my head, how to drink, how to smoke weed. The list goes and goes, stretching into the distance like the sky out the airplane window, far past the blinking red lights.
Jeffrey was my only friend in Florida, save for a fencer named Sahar and a few fair-weather people who blinked in and out. I met him on the first day of classes. I entered the large conference room with its 150 chairs and scanned, looking for someone who didn’t look like they’d just scraped themselves off the floor of the bathroom. I spotted a seat next to a handsome, boyish guy towards the front of the room, and sat down next to him.
Last night, in the living room of his house, which I finally got to visit, Jeffrey described his own perception, the image of this large guy in a vest and glasses walking towards him, the hope that he was normal and not scary. He reminded me of the first words I spoke to him seven years ago. Hearing them in his voice was like swimming through clear water, like walking through that room in Hook with all the destroyed clocks. “Hi,” I said. “My name is Martin. Do you like Star Wars?”
So, obviously, I haven’t changed all that much in seven years.
Florida was a deserted island for me, and I spent most of my time there desperate for attention and affection. Jeffrey was my Wilson, and when he floated back to Texas I lost a huge part of myself. Had I not met Jeffrey, and later Emily and Vicky; had I not had the hope of Jessie and the love of my family; had I not had any number of vital handholds I would be dead right now. In a ditch. A swampy ditch with old tires in it. I say that in gratitude, because that is what I feel when I think back on it now. Grateful. Thankful.
It took me seven years to get to Pearland, and I have never felt a stronger sense of destiny or place than I did this weekend. There were no accidents, no details that were wasted or unrelated. Every single thread of the web was ringing the entire time I was there, every fiber deliberate and meaningful and sacred. I don’t know enough words to describe that feeling, that incredible feeling of place, of destiny. If it were a movie, it would be the moment that you became conscious of the screenwriter, the thread-weaver, and start to wonder what big thing is about to happen because shit doesn’t happen like that unless change is a comin’.
I’m not a huge fan of flying. This is the first trip where I haven’t been completely paralyzed by fear the whole time. It’s a control thing for me. If I was the one flying the plane, I would feel better. I realized that an airplane is a lot like an operating room. You have all these people in uniforms milling around, talking about “cross check” and “departure check,” and you’re under fluorescent lights, mildly uncomfortable and probably cold, surrounded by strangers and feeling totally in the hands of other human beings. They even have the oxygen masks.
I arrived at Houston airport on Friday night around 7:30 PM. I didn’t realize at the time how apropos it was that I was setting my watch back in time [I made a ritual of it today, on the plane, to turn it forward slowly and deliberately.] It is a small airport and I was grateful I wouldn’t have to spend any real time there. It was cool in Houston but not chilly, and I waited outside baggage claim for Emily to come pick me up.
She arrived moments later in a wine-colored Saturn named Bessie, which she described as “1998 and completely unremarkable.” I was nervous. Very nervous. What do you say to someone you haven’t seen in five years? Someone whom you only met twice, and briefly? We had talked often via e-mail in Florida, unofficial pen-pals, but a relationship in word and a relationship in person are two very different things. She pulled up and waved, turned on her windshield wipers so I would know it was her. I kissed her hello and climbed in. “Old hat?” she said.
“Old hat.”
We stopped first at her dad’s house. It was a beautiful space, a large, open living room with deep wood floors and a brick hearth in the center. Emily’s parents split a little over a year ago and it was equally as traumatic as if had happened when she was a kid. The pain was still palpable at her father’s house. There was laughter, too. They have a dog named “Patches” with the curious and insatiable desire to be spanked. I’m serious. This dog climbed on her dad’s lap and moaned and whined until he spanked her. “Oh you like that,” he said, “you like that, don’t you.”
Her dad and I immediately connected over technology. He has a new tube amp for his stereo system, which is about as high-end as home audio gets. We listened to Aja, loudly and satisfyingly, and I let the sound wash over me, fellow musicians dreaming the same dream, quickly realizing the weekend was going to be a sensory experience.
Afterwards we went out with Emily’s friend Jon to a restaurant named Carraba’s, an Italian joint in sight of the city, and I had delicious “Texas Bryan” chicken and alfredo pasta. Yum. This was after a few rum-and-cokes, a running theme of the weekend. After dinner we went to a dive called Walter’s on Washington and heard a punk band. Emily danced and smoked. I sat and drank. The music was kind of hilarious, though eventually enjoyable once I gave myself to the sound. At least the lyrics were honest. Swear to God, the first song they sang was, “I say the same thing over and over/ I say the same thing over and over/ I say the same thing over and over.” During the refrain, the lead singer beat the microphone against his head. I did not blame him.
We headed back to Emily’s mom’s, talked for an hour on her bed, and then fell to sleep, she on the couch, me on the bed upstairs. I slept long into the morning, dreaming of green places.
I awoke to the sizzle of fresh bacon and French toast. Emily’s mother, Cynthia, was cooking a late breakfast, and within moments I came to adore the halo of sanity that surrounded her. She was tall, blonde, a professional pianist with long, pretty fingers, and some of the best moments of the weekend were spent talking music and listening to her perform for church and a Frank Sinatra tribute-show, “My Way.” It was hard not to feel at home – her condo had high ceilings and a cozy fireplace, and I curled up in front of it any chance I got, its heat lapping kindly against my skin.
She gave Emily the job of entertaining me, which is harder than I like to think it should be. We milled around for a few minutes. I skated back and forth on the kitchen floor in my socks, something I haven’t done in 15 years. Out of the blue Emily proposed a trip to Galveston, a beach town on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. It was raining outside, grey and overcast, but the lure of the water was too strong to resist and we hopped in Bessie and headed off in the rain towards the coast, grateful for something to do.
I smoked my first cigarette on the way to Galveston. I was nervous, smoking in the car – it was kind of like kissing, the way you have to learn to breathe and use your mouth at the same time. When Jessie and I started kissing, I remember holding my breath as our lips touched, not knowing how to manage the air anymore. So cute were those first few kisses, learning each other, feeling her hot breath against my neck. I don’t mean to cheapen that by comparing it to smoking – seeing as they’re diametrically opposed in just about every way – but the awkwardness of breath was familiar, and I stared at the red tip of the cigarette, careful to keep its embers from falling in Emily’s car.
I don’t know what we talked about. It was only a 45-minute trip but, like the rest of the trip, Saturn could have circled the sun and new stars could have been born and died in the moments between Friday and Monday. We reached the water, and the sky stretched out dark and grey across the foaming, cresting waves. Emily said that each wave was a life, how it built and crested and receded back, and I knew she was right, watching as the wind whipped the water like breath across the surface of her mother’s French-pressed coffee.
Our first stop was a shanty on stilts called “Woody’s.” We had it in mind to catch a bite to eat and Emily, in her worldly, throaty voice, said to look for the places the biker’s haunt. Sure enough Woody’s had motorcycles tucked underneath its wooden deck. We wound our way up the wooden ramp that snaked around the stilts, paused to feel the wind against our faces, and watched a fisherman in the distance pull up a cage, the waters roaring behind him.
Here's a pic of Emily in front of Woody's:
It turned out that Woody’s was a bar with no food. Emily, sensing a potentially awkward moment, asked if we needed reservations, and the motherly bartender laughed, offered us a seat, and we ordered beer and shared the invisible sunset with the regulars, talking for an hour about, well, everything.
Most relationships you can tune in to a shared interest, a shared endeavor or belief. Some resonate sexually, others spiritually. Most are a mixture. It’s not a measure of the quality of the relationship, just the kind. With Emily, I feel like I’m talking to a shard of my soul, and so my relationship with her is inherently as complicated as my relationship with myself. We are on such a similar frequency that we amplify each other like the tubes on her father’s amp: The sea was that much more beautiful, the sky that much more haunting, and so was the darkness that much darker. We could talk about everything. We always talked about everything. There was no in-between, no awkward silences or pauses, every misstep quickly noticed, forgiven, and released; the intensity was intoxicating, electrifying, and exhausting. If you have ever spent an hour in close proximity to truth, you know how exhausting it can be. But finding someone who will go with you makes the trip bearable, and this was the first time I felt strong enough to venture inside myself since, well, I’d last seen her.
We headed east and found a little seafood restaurant named Miller’s where I ordered shrimp, half-fried and half-grilled. I am one of those people who order Diet Coke with their quarter-pounder at McDonalds , so as long as there were some grilled shrimp next to the fried ones, I could feel good enjoying myself.
We headed to a gay bar, my first time. It was close to Miller’s and it seemed in keeping with the weekend, so we went in, had a few beers, and played pool. I didn’t think my first gay bar experience would be in Texas – I thought gays in the south were some kind of plains animal that burrowed in the dirt and only came out when the rednecks were asleep - but there I was at Le Cabaret playing pool with a girl and checking out the bartender, who had rosy cheeks and jeans tight enough to make his eyes bulge out.
My whole life I’d grown up with a sense of gay people as some kind of roughly Aryan race: to apply, one must be blonde, blue-eyed, strikingly thin, and able to wear tight jeans. But this bar, the bartender notwithstanding, was filled with people you would see at a church raffle: fat, skinny, bald, wearing plaid, craggy. Normal men. Normal women. I know it sounds dumb to make into some kind of revelation, but it was just that for me. “You mean gay people are just people?” I know. Horribly non-PC. But all of a sudden it wasn’t something to be afraid of anymore. Emily told me stories about how people had treated some of her gay friends, how they’d refused to help them accomplish the most basic of human decencies because they looked gay, and I came to understand how important a refuge was, a safe place where people could just be themselves, unabashed.
In the corner a man was dancing on a small, lighted stage. His body shimmered under the dim white lights, his shaved head and muscled body moving but unconvincingly. He was making love to the air, and I think the air was unimpressed. He could have been buying groceries. He was professional, though. Dutiful. I found myself regarding him, wholly unattracted and yet my attention rapt by the openness of it. I could never do that, I found myself thinking, and then, Why not? Was I really better than him, or he better than me? He had a job. And abs. And those two little lines that make the arrow pointing to the you-know-what. I wondered what other things I could accomplish in this world if I had abs like that.
I can’t remember if this monologue was internal or not. Emily has a way of hearing my internal monologue, so I might as well have been speaking out loud. “Give me a dollar,” she said, and took it up to the dancing man, smiled at him and spoke something soft, and he smiled back. She stuffed the dollar along his waistband and came back to the table, smiling. “He smells like baby oil,” she said, and lit another cigarette.
“I wondered why he was so shiny,” I said, lighting one for myself. Next to us, two couples sat down at a table, laughing and taking pictures of each other. The bar had imperceptibly filled up, the air thick with conversation and smoke. Emily grabbed us another round. I lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, glad to have something to do while she was at the bar.
The dancer disappeared behind a curtain for a costume change and reappeared in a leopard-print thong that left absolutely nothing to our combined imagination and so, needing a stronger drink, we ordered a 5th round. Or maybe it was the 7th. Whatever it was, I needed it, and before long we were drunk and in each other’s faces, the thin veneer around my carefully constructed self washed away by the alcohol. “I love being drunk,” Emily said. Her right arm rested on the table, a cigarette clasped effortlessly between her fingers. “I can feel the truth when I’m drunk.”
She pulled out her cell phone and started dialing. “Hello, Audrey?” I heard her say. “This is Emily DePrang.” She had called Jeffrey’s house. Not just Jeffrey’s house, but Jeffrey’s mom. At 11PM. For the first time in 5 years. She held my hand as she dialed the number his mom gave her, and when Jeffrey answered she spoke to him in desperate, beautiful honesty, apologizing, asking forgiveness. His phone cut out half-way through and she worried that he’d hung up on her, but I knew he hadn’t. I hugged her, and we sat in silence. Finally, I spoke, though the wrong words came out.
“I hate you,” I told her through the smoke, and she regarded me slowly, waiting. I put my head in my hands, pulling at my cheeks, feeling a rising sickness inside me. “I hate you because I know this is what is coming for me,” I said, my voice desperate and cracking. Outside, waves crashed themselves against the sand. Tendrils of smoke from Emily’s cigarette curled around her fingers and across her face. In the movie the dancer would stop dancing, or the whole rest of the room would go into slow motion. “I am angry all the time,” I said, beginning to cry, ashamed. I took a long draw off of my own cigarette, the tar and benzene snaking its way to my stomach and turning it over. “All the time. I don’t want to be like you. I don’t want to have to get drunk to tell the truth!”
I muttered something else, incoherent in my memory, but to the effect of how for the past four years I have felt constantly inadequate, constantly guilty, constantly broken. She listened, watching me. I couldn’t look her in the eyes but I know she was looking at me, wanting to confirm me, to make it okay to hate her. I finally got the strength to look, and she met my gaze firmly.
“Thank you,” she said, warmly. Stately. “Thank you for telling me the truth. I love you for telling me the truth.”
I wiped my eyes and told her I needed some air. Stumbling from the booze and sick on the smoke, I wandered across the road and took the steps down to the water.
I stood there for a long time on the beach. Laughing. Crying. Wanting to hurl myself into the water. I sat down on an embankment and took off my shoes and socks, placing them carefully on the ground like a nurse in a hospital.
The sand was cool and moist. I ran it through my fingers, dug my toes in. I stared at a branch for a long time, realizing how every illusion I had worked to maintain was like the branch in the sand, sturdy only until the water comes. The air had whipped the waves close, the sand packed and sturdy under me, and I waded into the water, felt its cold embrace snaking up my legs. In the movie I would wade up to my waist, but in actuality I was only up to my shins. Even crazy, my fear of dark water was intact, but it felt risky, daring, coming publicly undone like that.
Earlier in the day, as we drove by the waves, Emily said that each wave was like a life: It swells, it crests, it breaks upon the shore, it recedes. I thought about how much I wanted to throw myself in, to let a wave come and carry me out to the deep waters. I wanted to be home in bed, to have Jessie appear over the ridge and rescue me. I wanted to throw up.
Some dim part of me realized Emily was waiting in the bar. I dressed and stumbled back, my stomach cringing as soon as I smelled the smoke. “I need to get out of here,” I said.
“Don’t ever be gone that long again,” she said, grasping a glass of water. “I looked for you. Let me close the tab.”
We drove back to Houston, the oil fires of Galveston burning on the horizon, laughing at, in Emily’s words, the “pathetic Nothing that comes over people who ask too many questions.” I asked her to say my name. Martin. Martin Spitznagel. No one in my world calls me by my real name. It felt so good to hear it spoken aloud, to have it stated clearly somewhere in the universe. We made it home, had a glass of water, and fell fast asleep, silently promising never to go back to Galveston, Texas.
The next day we went to church. Emily climbed a tree. We saw her mother’s show, “My Way,” a tribute to Frank Sinatra. Audrey had invited Emily and I over to their house in the evening on Sunday. We pulled into the driveway, nervous. An old lady with silvered hair was getting out of a Lincoln. “Hello?” she said, making her way to the door of the house. “Who are you?”
“I’m Emily,” Emily replied. “Emily DePrang? This is Martin.”
“Oh! From Florida?”
I nodded, and she smiled, coming a little closer.
“Oh, Audrey always said how she wished you lived closer. You were Jeffrey’s favorite friend.”
Emily and I held hands entering the house. Jeffrey and I hadn’t spoken in months, Emily and Jeffrey in years, and here we were, entering the lion’s den with Jeffrey’s grandmother. Anything, absolutely anything could have awaited us: a huge fight, tears, anger, resentment. We had no idea what awaited us inside that house.
Within moments, after seeing Jeffrey, it became clear that there would be no tears, no fights, no anger. We had crashed his 27th birthday party. His mom handed us strawberry pie, and we ate and laughed and, even though I had never been to their house, it seemed like old times. Old hat. Comfortable as a pair of well-worn sneakers.
Like I said. No loose threads,
The three of us spent the rest of the night together, hanging out, eating Vietnamese food, getting sundaes at the Busy Bee. We slept at Jeffrey’s house – he had work early in the morning but Emily and I convinced to him to stay up. We sat around his Dad’s computer and watched clips from my movie and told Emily stories from production, filling in the details for each other, remembering the fun and the challenge. At 2 AM I reluctantly pulled myself to bed downstairs. Jeffrey and Emily stayed up talking throughout the night. I slept well knowing they were upstairs. Earlier that night Emily had called us the ‘Three Musketeers’ and I lay awake coming up with ways to combine our names: Marffremily. Jeffremiltin. Emileffreytin. Three shards of the same soul finally together again.
I flew home the next day. Emily and I listened to KT Tunstall on the way to the airport, rocking out to “Suddenly I See” and “Black Horse and a Cherry Tree.” I thought of Jessie, thought of how those songs had become the soundtrack for the past month of my life. Emily and I hugged and kissed. I told her to love herself gently.
“Take care of my Martin,” she said, hugging me tight, the kind of hug that regretted seeing me go but also knew it was time to leave. Proximity to truth is exhausting, like I said. I left Pearland feeling… more. Stronger. More courageous, and as Emily drove away and I ate a Harlon’s barbeque sandwich, I knew I would return with more to give and more to learn. I thought of the ocean, how the waves crest and recede, of the branch sticking out of the sand, and for the first time in my life I was okay not knowing when the wave would come to wash me away. I was there, in the moment, existing and breathing and seeing. That was the gift of Galveston, the gift from the water and the gay bar and the girl named Emily.
Suddenly I saw myself, washed away, and it was okay. I was enough.
-m
