horizontal with elephant at pranam yoga shala in Omaha, Nebraska
It was almost mid-October. Chicago, IL to Omaha, Nebraska. Seven and a half hours.
I arrive in the home of my college friend Thom, and it is filled with babies. I manage. Two of the three babies leave after an hour or two, and only Thom’s toddler remains. (Remember how I said that this trip was rife with two year-olds?) I hadn’t seen Thom in about five years and now he has a wife a and a toddler and a house and a woodshop and a whole different life. Just as it was when I witnessed my high school friend Joe dadding, it felt like seeing what should be, finally having come to pass. Thom was meant to be a Dad. Just like Joe. He has spent most of his life without one. It’s as though he is righting the course of his ancestry — that’s the nearest I can come to describing the feeling I have when I witness him fathering.
In Omaha, I tried to record a quickie with Thom. Since I’ve known Thom, he has always been an expressive, talented actor, full of dangerous ideas and deviant tales. But when we got horizontal, and he was telling a story of his own rather than interpreting the story of another mind, he turned into an overly careful storyteller, protective, generalized. He wound up spinning a swiss cheese sort of story, one with most of the guts holed out. He felt that his stories, because they involved others, weren’t his to fully tell. I understand his perspective, respect the care for other people that was evident behind his reticence, and also, for myself, disagree.
I come back to Anne Lamott’s words like a touchstone, “You own everything that happened to you.” She went on to write, “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
horizontal with Thom in Omaha, Nebraska
In this case, Thom wasn’t particularly concerned about exposing someone’s ugliness, but about exposing them in general, without permission. And I get it. Yet still.
I want to be able to tell all my stories. They happened to me. They belong to me. They will never be an unbiased perspective. They cannot be. It isn’t possible. I am not an omniscient narrator. I am authoring in the first person. My stories can only ever be told by me through my lens. Colored by the way that I’ve made meaning of my experience. They can only be narrated by me, as the subject of my own life. And the way that I tell them will change over time, as I forget certain things and my vantage point shifts. But other people exist in my stories, of course, when their trajectories overlap with mine. When I tell about them, it may be sticky. The thing is that we talk about the people in our lives all the time, privately. And if these stories weren’t private, I think they would contribute to a society with much less shame and stigma. And much less loneliness. That is what I want. I want to inoculate myself and others against loneliness and shame. More than almost anything.
I suppose I should warn you now. If we have a history or a future, you may be part of the story I tell.
Then I got to record with Kennedy, Thom’s young wife. At first, Kennedy seemed reserved around me and I wasn’t sure if she was open to my warmth or friendship. Maybe she didn’t like me. I sometimes feel this way around very pretty women. Now I realize that she may have had a similar concern about me, because of the reaction of many of Thom’s friends to their marriage. I imagine she was worried that I, too, might not take to her, might not be kind to her. (This mutual wariness probably happens far more often than I even realize, and stymies so much potential care and regard.)
horizontal with Kennedy in Omaha, Nebraska
By the time we got horizontal together, she was no longer reserved, however.
She spoke candidly, intelligently, and vulnerably about big subjects that I’d never broached on the podcast before: marrying a much older man, the process of childbirth, young motherhood, motherhood before self-actualization, sexual harassment, and #metoo (the American social media campaign to raise awareness of the staggering number of female-identifying people who have been sexually harassed and assaulted).
The people I’ve recorded with who have been least in the public eye have shared in the most inspiringly brave way. (Like in my most recent episodes, 15a and 15b, with my housemate Zed.) These recordings embody what I aim for this podcast to be — an opportunity for listeners to eavesdrop on a private conversation, to bear aural witness to genuine intimacy.
Omaha, NB to Rapid City, SD. Eight hours.
I thought I would be in Portland by October 16th, my birthday, but I very much wasn’t.
I woke up in South Dakota, where, by the grace of my friend’s mother, I had a couch to sleep on. I couldn’t shake this fixed idea though. I was supposed to be in Portland on my 35th birthday, taking myself out on the best date ever. I was not supposed to be in South Dakota. I didn’t want to be in South Dakota. Poor South Dakota.
I could have done nearly everything I had planned to do on this date with myself, in South Dakota. Right there in Rapid City! I could have taken a yoga class, gotten a massage, outlandishly dressed up and taken myself to see Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (I later saw the film – twice!), gone for a lovely meal, poked around shops, bought myself something pretty to commemorate the day, etc. etc. I could have done other things, too. I could have driven up to Spearfish Canyon and felt the capacious awe of Nature! Checked out a roadside attraction! Explored a cavern!
Instead, I was so annoyed at myself for miscalculating my itinerary and not being in Portland as I intended, that I made the whole day about rejecting what is in favor of what I thought it should be.
Hot damn, I really thought I had learned that lesson by now.
The terrible, no good, very bad 35th birthday:
I woke up and decided that if I couldn’t be in Portland, I at the very least wanted to be in Montana. Then I’d get to see Big Sky Country on my birthday. I’d never been to Montana. Completely missed it on my last cross-country trip. By the grace of a friend of the lover of my former housemate of mine (say that three times fast), I had a place to stay in Billings, Montana, five and a half hours away.
I wouldn’t let myself leave yet though, because it was a Monday and I was committed to releasing the episodes on Mondays and I hadn’t finished editing this one and I’d managed to get an episode out every Monday since I launched and I wanted to be consistent and if I didn’t edit it right then, there was zero chance that Owen would be able to mix and master it in time. But if I did finish it, there was a 50/50 chance, even though it was past our mutually agreed-upon deadline.
So I spent five more hours editing the episode. I tried to send it to Owen. WeTransfer wasn’t working. I thought it was the internet at my friend’s mother’s house, so I went to the lovely cafe in town and tried to send it again. No go. Frustrate.
At least the intense-eyed barista gave me my kombucha cider for free.
“It’s your birthday,” he said. “I’ve got to buy you a drink, right?”
This was the highlight of my day.
During the highlight of my 35th birthday, I sat inside this VW bus inside Harriet & Oak in Rapid City, SD, and drank an adult beverage.
SEND. FILE. Come ON!
No go.
I knew I had at least five more hours of driving ahead. I know that Driving While Hangry is dangerous for Lila. I saw signs for Deadwood and, in the hopes that it will look like the TV show that I loved so well, I decide to stop for dinner.
I hate to break it to you.
It’s a sparsely populated strip of mostly casinos. I asked a not entirely friendly shop proprietor where I could get a decent dinner and she pointed me to the Deadwood Social Club, (though she warned me that it was spendy) which is housed above a casino in an old brothel. I am so excited. Eating dinner in an old brothel in Deadwood, now that sounds like a proper birthday experience to me! I’m hoping for brassy corseted characters, loquacious bartenders, immersive theatre, fainting couches, and a boudoir.
There is nothing remotely brothel-y about this joint. Nor social. Nor theatrical. It’s just a downtrodden restaurant. It’s so poorly furnished that they have PAINTED striped curtains on the walls. Think about that for a moment. Not curtains with paint on them. A wall. Painted — entirely inexpertly — with a motif of striped curtains. The food is expensive and my dietary restrictions make it a rather boring repast.
A Romanian waitress at the Deadwood Social Club is also celebrating her birthday. Her 22nd birthday. She’s working in this joint. She comes over to tell me this. She’s so sweet and friendly. She is tickled that we share the same birthday. She invites me to Romania. She wants to bring me a slice of cake, buy me a drink. But I can’t eat the cake, and I’m driving. She settles for hugging me again. No one has touched me all day. This is the second highlight of my day.
By the time I left Deadwood it was dark, and I could not actually see Spearfish Canyon when I passed it. Poor planning, I think to myself. Poor show, Lila. I’m getting tired. Really tired. I lost cell phone service for four hours. At one point, the “highway” became a dirt road and at these speeds, it’s pretty much a dust storm. I slowed way down. At another point, it seemed that I was to be forced off the main road by construction on a roundabout, so I turned left and drove a few blocks into reservation territory. It was flat and desolate and dark. A ghost town. Even the gas station was closed. I see no creatures, except … two young men who were roaming the streets at an ambling pace. Are the doors locked? The gas station is closed. It was closed the last time you looked. No other soul around. There’s a truck with beer in it, I think, but no driver.
I looked at Google Maps and it informed me that there are no other remotely large roads anywhere nearby. Or at least, that’s what the piece of the map that has loaded onto my phone is showing me. I feel contracted and taut. I don’t want to spend the night in the car here, without my bearings. I don’t know what those two guys are getting into. I went back to the roundabout and learned from a construction worker, to my relief, that I could actually continue on the highway all along. I just had to go round the roundabout.
A couple more hours of driving and I was starting to get droopy. I heard Billy’s voice in my head again, saying, “Don’t drive drowsy!”
The only person around was a middle-aged guy parked by the gas pump, fiddling with his truck. I pulled into the parking lot and waited for him to leave. He didn’t leave. I waited ten minutes and then pulled around to another spot, where he couldn’t see me but I could see him. He then appeared to be pumping gas. Oh good, I thought. But then he didn’t leave. I can’t sleep if he’s here, dammit. It’s like that Tom Waits song that goes, “What is he doing in there?” Maybe he was spooked by me too, but I didn’t consider that at the time. So I moved on, cursing him and my tiredness and the night and my fixed idea.
After another hour, I saw lights. Finally, a place where I felt safe enough to pull over! It was a casino parking lot. There were enough cars there and enough light and enough activity for me to feel secure enough to sleep, so I pulled over, reclined the driver’s seat, burrowed under my mini blanket and napped — for 30 minutes on my left side and 30 minutes on my right side. Glory in the highest! Praise be! Sleep, delicious sleep!
I made it to Billings, Montana right around 2am. My cell service didn’t kick in until I was right inside the city borders and I’m just lucky that my host was a night owl who plays video games for a living and didn’t mind that I showed up on his doorstep in the middle of the night. He was worried about me, though. He’s a fuzzy one.
Knowing that it was my birthday and that I couldn’t eat gluten or dairy, he put candles in a cabbage and presented it to me, saying gruffly, “I don’t know what the fuck you eat so I got you a birthday cabbage,” and a hairy pink birthday card that sang to me and a copy of The Tao of Pooh. I was so moved, I cried a little. Not sure if he noticed. That might have embarrassed him a little, the big ol’ bear.
Then, mercifully, I slept.
The next morning I drove into Missoula, without knowing a soul or having a place to stay. But that’s a much happier story…
I could say that it was one of the worst birthdays I’ve ever had. I could say that. Except, now I have this. In the future, when a fixed idea is getting in my way of enjoying the reality of the given moment, I can say to myself, “Self. Don’t make this like your 35th birthday!”
I hope you won’t, either.
Lila
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