He was a post-high school boyfriend. We were both 19. It was 1976, long enough ago now that it’s another life entirely. Dave and I were romantically involved for only 2 years, but we’d been friends, part of a whole group of friends from high school, for 48 years, so boyfriend Dave was dwarfed by the version of him as a friend, one of about ten of us who’d stayed tight since senior year, Ridgewood High, Ridgewood New Jersey.
Sometimes we referred to our group as just “The Gang,” (so original). I mostly referred to the group as the “New Jersey Boyz,” because everyone was male except for me. And most of them had stayed in the northeast (Vermont, Boston, Jersey, New York, D.C.) while I had never been from there and would soon leave. I’d been a transplant from New Orleans at age 16, when a job my dad was offered required relocating. So I lived there for a five-year slice of time, before moving to Austin.
The day had begun with an inability to sleep, a pattern that had developed over the few days since Dave’s suicide. Dave’s suicide. This actually happened. After three hours of sleep and two of thrashing about like a caught fish, I finally got up 30 minutes before the alarm, just to end the waiting. I would try to sleep on the plane. I was headed to a family reunion in Texas.
Just two days prior, the day after learning Dave was dead, I had questioned going on this trip to Rockport, TX, to see most of my siblings and some of my nieces/nephews and their kids. I would be bad company; I would wish I was at home; no one would get how jarring and incomprehensible this was. But there was the non-refundable ticket, the non-refundable Airbnb, the expectation of my siblings that I would be there. Rather than cancel last minute, I’d emailed them as a group, saying that I’d just learned that Dave had taken his own life, and that I was shocked and sad and fragile. I’m still coming to Rockport, I said. I just ask you to be kind. It’s strange to think one would have to ask that, but large families have weird dynamics. Given how effective my request was, I will ask this more often.
After a two-hour shuttle from Prescott, the bathroom at the Phoenix airport was my first stop. I wheeled my luggage into the first stall. Not till I was leaning forward, squatting over the bowl, did I see that someone else’s urine was puddled on the floor. The soles of my shoes were in it; the wheels of my roller bag, in it.
When I exited the stall, my shoes left wet prints on the dry floor and my luggage left its own wet track.
Throughout this long travel day, in three airports—Phoenix, Houston, and Corpus Christi—I experienced the opposite of my usual annoyance with the general public. Each person I passed, observed, had eye contact with, I felt something like awe, and respect. Here we all were, caring enough to go somewhere, enduring delays, jogging to last minute gate changes, managing squalling offspring. I was struck by how willing we all were, how engaged.
I passed a woman on her way in and my way out of the restroom. In my brief glance at her face, I saw strength, beauty, and purpose. Whether that sense of purpose was to take a pee, or to do something necessary in the town she was flying to, or something larger than that, she was here, participating, all in, for better or worse.
Compassion for Dave that I could no longer direct his way, was gushing out of me. Which stranger whose path I was crossing might be at wit’s end?
I used to wonder if people could tell you were smiling when the lower half of your face was hidden by a mask. I was smiling randomly at everyone—a woman whose toddler was giving her fits, a woman next to me in line for boarding, a woman across the aisle on the plane. And they all smiled back. It turns out we smile with our eyes, too.
A Native American guy a few seats away from me at the gate nearly lost his salad. As he went to shut his backpack, the open plastic container with his salad slid down the slanted seat. Just in time, he caught it, looked up and saw that I had seen. A close call witnessed together. We smiled: A shared human moment.
On the plane, a guy a few rows ahead of me was hoisting his bag into the overhead compartment when the water bottle in his bag, now on its side, briefly doused the woman in the seat below. He apologized; she laughed it off. “It’s only water,” she said. People being kind and gracious.
In Houston I had nearly three hours to kill before the flight to Corpus—I would have lunch somewhere. Pappadeaux’s was packed but I like their gumbo, so I waited in a small line. The hostess showed me to a high, long table for people dining solo, and seated me across from a man, also solo, who was ordering a double vodka. I busied myself with the menu, but once I’d ordered, where were he and I supposed to look? Most of the single diners pulled out their phones; I took out a book.
The restaurant was loud with blasting music and ambient noise. When my food arrived—a cup of gumbo and a side of mac & cheese—I went to stir the mac & cheese, to cool it down, and a piece of pasta catapulted from my fork down to my crotch. I could see the creamy mess it left on my jeans, but couldn’t locate the piece of pasta. As I shifted on my high bar stool to locate the errant rotini, I felt it squish under me—warm. It was now spreading its cheese sauce from my crotch, which it had grazed in flight, to my butt. With one of my two paper napkins, I went fishing for it in between my legs. Trying to be discrete, I wet a corner of the napkin in my water glass and tried to wipe off the mess from my jeans. Then I wet another corner and used it to wipe off the stool under me, and then put the soiled napkin up next to my plate. Later, I mistook that napkin for the other one, and wiped my mouth with it—the same soggy thing that had wiped the stool, where many before me had perched.
I finished my lunch, paid the check, and then extricated myself from the barstool, walking away knowing that I had mac and cheese on my behind. Despite this, I tried to walk to the restroom confidently, as though nothing was amiss.
In the bathroom, I pulled out half a dozen brown paper towels and wet them all at the sink. In the privacy of the stall I pulled my right leg out of the jeans so I could get a look at the backside. As suspected, a big smear of yellowish smudge, now dried into the fabric of the dark denim. Wet, brown towel after wet, brown towel, I scrubbed. And the towels disintegrated. Finally I put the pants back on and what remained was mostly a wet spot. If I’d wanted to dry this spot under the hot-air hand-dryers, well, you can imagine the position I would’ve had to assume. I left it wet.
There are times when such airport woes and mishaps could make you vow to never travel again. What exactly were the things that piled up for Dave, that made him know he was done?
What was the final straw? And when did he know he was going to do what he did? Did he know the day we’d spoken on the phone, ten days earlier? Or the conversation we’d had two weeks before that one? He had begun to feel a paralyzing paranoia. And as he told me about it, he admitted he knew it sounded crazy, but said I just had to believe him: there were bad guys watching his house. They were waiting for him to leave so they could steal things from Dave’s garage. So Dave had stopped going anywhere, stopped taking his dog for walks, stopped feeling safe in his own home.
About four years earlier, Dave had gone through valve replacement surgery and the long recovery, combined with some complications, compromised his quality of life. He was uncomfortable. He was having to wear compression socks. He got C-diff, and when trying to help his gut recover, he’d had to give up alcohol. Dave wasn’t partnered, had never married. I imagine that aside from his beloved dog, he wasn’t feeling there was much left to live for.
I still had hours ahead of me, one more flight, one more airport, and one car ride. I’d started the day fragile and rarified—odd—from my friend’s decision to leave life. In my grief state, I’d been avoiding anything social. But now, surrounded by strangers, I was inspired by humankind, proud of us for sticking it out, taking the blows, from pasta cream on crotches to tired toddler’s tantrums to losses large and small. How very alive we all were.
The lunch fiasco would make a good story. Before I’d even left Pappadeaux’s, I was deciding how I’d spin it—going for the humiliating, the comedic. 65-year-old woman seen swabbing repeatedly at her crotch.
It was a story Dave would’ve enjoyed. Even now, I can hear his low chuckle.
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