and rubbed my eyes. My mother made a face and told me that I looked like I needed some rest. I nodded in agreement. I hadn’t been sleeping well. I’d been waking up frequently in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling. All I could think about was Amanda waking up in the middle of the night, staring at the ceiling. I thought about Amanda tiptoeing down the stairs. I thought about Amanda at the abortion clinic. I thought about Amanda and me, watching those fireworks on that hillside in Marin.
I thought about Amanda sitting there behind the wheel, lost and broken with the engine running, waiting in the dead of night.
Late April, the arbitrary year 2000. Four months after Amanda’s death. Winter had melted into spring in methodical fashion. Twelve weeks flew by in the blink of an eye.
This was when the bubble burst and the dot-com boom met its brutal, inglorious end. In one shocking week, the stock market indexes all dropped dramatically. Carnage on Wall Street. Bloodletting. Dying IPOs. Hyperventilation. Investors worldwide were in a massive panic. Horvak called me up to tell me he had lost more than $90,000 in a three-hour span of time.
“I think it’s going to rebound,” he said. “I’m going to make some adjustments, restrategize, and decide how to ride it out.” His voice was cracking.
After the holidays, I’d gone back to Boulder with the intention of quitting my job and taking it easy for a while, but it didn’t wind up working out that way. When push came to shove, I couldn’t go through with it. I realized that I didn’t want to quit my job, at least not right away. I realized that I didn’t know how to take it easy for a while. Sitting around contemplating didn’t seem like a good idea. I’d tried it a few times. It didn’t work out too well.
In consequence, I had continued to deliver pizza throughout the winter and spring. The work routine kept me busy, and it was simple and predictable. The people opened their front doors and handed me cash; I handed them food and smiled. They said thank you; I told them they were welcome. Then they shut the door. Then I walked away. It was a gestalt exercise, essentially. You wound up getting a little vignette of their world, a snapshot of their life. If your eyes were open, you’d see it: a bass guitar, red-checkered curtains, the smell of Windex, Architectural Digest, a Jack Russell terrier, three Frisbees, a Big Bertha driver, a poster of Charles Mingus in a silver frame on the wall, a yellow pack of American Spirits, and a cactus on the windowsill.
You could learn pretty much everything you needed to know about someone based on that information.
Personally, I was beginning to think that this was an excellent way to interact with people. Insofar as human exchanges go, it seemed pretty tough to top. Provided I showed up on time and they tipped me, everyone walked away satisfied and unharmed.
But then, nothing much was risked in this arrangement. And risk, I’d heard, was everything. That was what the mental health experts were always saying.
“Without risk,” they’d say, “you cannot get The Magic.”
The Magic.
Another fact worth mentioning: I didn’t feel much like having sex just then. My interest in meeting pretty girls was essentially nonexistent, which was odd. Normally, I existed in a constant state of wanting to have sex with pretty girls. But now I really didn’t. I seemed to have lost my taste for the thrill of the hunt. I didn’t really care about getting laid. Getting laid was dangerous. I wasn’t in the mood.
At the same time, I kept thinking about actually being in love. In the wake of Amanda’s suicide, it had struck me that I’d never actually been in love. While it was true that I’d loved Amanda, it was clear to me now that I’d never actually been in love with her.
It was never whole, never fully functional or mature—not on my part, anyway. It was young love, fleeting and unpredictable, sometimes even dumb. It lacked the depth of understanding and selflessness of real love. It wasn’t the genuine article, it wasn’t the real thing. If it had been real love, then the relationship wouldn’t have ended the way that it did—and the blame for that circumstance lay wholly with me. The fact of the matter was, I’d never been in love before. Didn’t have what it took. Didn’t have the guts. I wasn’t able to manage it with Amanda, and I hadn’t been able to manage it with anyone else. I hadn’t realized that before, but I realized that now. People fell in love every day, all over the world, and I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t understand what it meant, and I didn’t know how it was done.
This worried me.
In mid-May, I finally made my exit from Fatty Jay’s. After much deliberation, I decided to ditch Boulder and go traveling for a spell. The timing seemed right for an adventure. I figured I would willfully disorient myself in hopes that it might help me to discover some kind of valuable new perspective.
A few weeks earlier, I’d purchased a ticket to Cancún, where I would be attending the wedding of my good friends A.B. and Jenny. They were getting hitched on the beach in Playa del Carmen, a picturesque village on the Mayan Riviera.
A.B. was four years older than I was, a friend I’d made during college, and he had asked me to be a groomsman. Naturally, I’d accepted.
Cancún, I had decided, seemed like a logical starting point for my wanderings. After the wedding, I planned to fly to Havana, Cuba.
After that, I didn’t know what I was going to do.
It was up in the air.
My mentor at Fatty Jay’s was a guy named Jim Hogan. Hogan was the owner and general manager. He was a large man in his midforties, twice divorced, misogynistic, and bitter. He had a potbelly and a mullet. He didn’t flinch when I told him I was quitting. He was used to this kind of thing. The pizza business tends to see a lot of turnover.
Hogan knew all about my recent travails, all about Amanda and the funeral and the aborted child. I’d told him the whole story one night after closing up shop. We were in the walk-in freezer at 3:00 a.m., shivering and smoking pot. At that point, he was the only person I had confided in.
A few days before my departure, Hogan insisted on taking me out for drinks at the Bust Stop, a strip club at the north end of Boulder, one of his favorite local hangouts. He was adamant about it.
“You need some naked girls in your life,” he reasoned. “You’ve had a shitty run of luck with chicks. No reason for it. No good explanation. Sometimes you just need to go out and say ‘fuck it.’”
One of Hogan’s ex-wives was a stripper. Her stage name was Evangeline. Her real name was Margaret. She had divorced him in 1984. Packed up her things and left, with very little explanation.
In 1989, she died in a boating accident in Tampa Bay.
Point
