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That was the crazy 48-hour period that ended when I suspended my disdain for social media and its corrosive effect on civilization. Fucking gave up and knelt down before my new phone. Took a big fat bite of the Blue Pill.
New York we changed planes and when our ship leveled off over the ocean they brought the cart around. I bought drinks for my new seatmates, emptied my plastic cup quick and rattled the ice like Yahtzee dice. Recycled the same schmaltz I’d spread heavy riding center seat from EUG to DEN, DEN to LAG and inquired whether anyone among our economy-row trio possessed special talents that might prove vital to our survival, if things got weird and we found ourselves in some kind of “LOST” situation.
Stupid but it always gets a laugh. Never comes across all nosy like asking What’s your name? What do you do? Data like that will be rendered useless once all the wrong planets line up in just the right way to send your budget flight slipping buttfuck-sideways through spacetime to crash-land on a spooky island in another dimension.
When you wake up flat on your back in a patch of bamboo to find the plane you boarded is now broken up and scattered across some beach? That’s the moment your job title, your place on a company org chart, your socio-commercial standing all wither and drop like the useless wings of an earthbound ant who will never be queen.
Now you’re on the starting blocks competing against every other survivor for excellence in a new economy of individual worth proven by contribution and performance. Running a race to transcend self-motivated participation and achieve true cooperation.
You used to be Phoebe, the pretty one with all the friends? Now you’re the tan one who’s really good at spearfishing.
You were the fat guy in Accounting hunched over a keyboard packed full of fast-food crumbs. Now you’re the genius who fashioned a novelty belt buckle into a cutting tool and built the best shelter on the island.
Or maybe you’ll wash out because no matter where you go, you’re always the one who can’t cope. Maybe you’ll wrap two slashed life jackets full of stones around your neck and stroll into the surf because your brand is hollow and you can’t generate a corporeal stream of subsistence income based upon you.
That’s why it’s a waste of time giving a shit about somebody’s day-to-day background. You have to keep it casual but discreetly focused when mining data to rank fellow travelers according to the arbitrarily assigned and untested metrics of my alternate universe slash desert island slash human resources scale of assessment.
I recommend you gather information linked to hard-wired and hard-won traits to discover valuable outliers versed in dark arts. Sniff out those oddballs abundant in legitimate gifts and practical goods. Inspect each subject’s timeline for an asterisk, a temporal scab or scar marking evidence of upheaval or catastrophe. Something warm that got too hot and bubbled over, made a real fucking mess. A poignant or painful meridian crossed over, then scrabbled back from. A great smoking crater marking a significant Before and After. That should give you a good head start on determining which members of your wacky castaway population are worth sucking up to, and maybe flag a few you should-oughta steer clear of.
Definitely do your homework. You want to get in the car with the Professor, not Gilligan. Gilligan was a jack-off artist, a confirmed and certain liability.
I was seated between a couple of good sports. Spirited travelers capable of maintaining conversational volume in a confined space. Devoted practitioners of oral hygiene. No grumps, crazies or religious kooks. My fellow passengers repaid my round, kept up a solid standard of discourse and tipped the help proper.
Lady on the aisle wanted vodka tonic and when they cleared our dinner trash she pulled out her phone. Showed me pictures of grandchildren shrieking at the edge of a hotel pool. Then fat little Dachshunds, then a shot of her late husband sunburned in a tropical shirt holding down a pai gow table at some Reno casino.
"We went every year for our anniversary," she said. "Have you been? It’s a shorter trip than going clear to Las Vegas and the buffets are just as good."
The veins in her hand ran like basic wiring, forked circuits of blue filament strung under wet paper skin.
Clearly this was Mrs. Howell. Her widow wealth would be useless to me unless we were rescued, but her patronage and support might prove valuable in some kind of conch-based provisional system of government if the elderly were allowed suffrage.
She flicked gold-ringed fingers toward the black glass phone on my folding tray.
"So let’s see who’s back home missing you."
Her face avalanched into this bad-news frown when I told her I didn’t have any photos like that.
"No, it’s okay," I said. "New phone."
The Atlantic underneath us went from gray to black and blended with the moonless sky.
Guy in the window finished his third Crown and Coke, put his temple to the bulkhead and fell asleep. His brick-thick hands were scarred specimens from a horror film with pieces missing like they’d been hacked off and fed to something hungry. His remaining fingers ended in broken stone-tool edges embedded with dirt dense as pigment. This was no Gilligan. Fucking Skipper for sure.
I resisted, then caved and checked our YouTube hits again.
Take the validation of one gummed gold star and tie a shot of heroin to it. That’s how half a million hits feel, and that’s the moment I swallowed the last of the Blue Pill. And I’m not saying I’ve done heroin. I haven’t but I’ll sure suck the scabs off a sailor’s cock if you’re handing out gold stars.
I had long despised the cellphone for killing off all the quiet places. Ruining libraries cafes and restaurants, weaponizing careless drivers and defiling the unwritten sanctity of movie manners. I’d instantly abhorred social media for corrupting, schizo-affecting the power of the Internet to amplify the things I most dislike about other people. And I hated the motherfuckers who breathed life into the whole sick system by being empty, needy enough to click and pretend to belong to something they thought was true.
Yet my mind bobbled in place as I understood the fact that a bunch of morons’ mouseclicks and germy screenswipes had rescued me from unemployment and a basement bunk, put me in this airline seat with money in my pocket and sent me winging toward fifty-five engagements over sixty-five days across Europe and the United Kingdom as a warm-up act for an aging British boy band’s reunion tour. Not quite as dramatic as children clapping their little mitts raw to resurrect Tinker Bell but I did not hesitate to sell out and join the merry zombie mob online.
That morning at the airport was the first time I’d drank since the day I was fired. I’d gone almost one week without a drop living at Carl’s house, helping care for his mom until the morning Margaret tracked me down.
I was deep in a dream. A single frame of it remained when I awoke, the last flash of a coin flipped into a dark wishing well: a tall building, long and sandy gray. Green grass meeting stacked blocks of stone.
I rolled to one side in a saggy hammock of giggling springs to find Margaret standing over me.
"Vincent. I need your passport."
Her face was empty of anything that could be interpreted as expression, positive or negative. I scooted back and made sure I could see both of Margaret’s hands.
She dumped my backpack, found my passport and photographed it with her phone, snapped it into her purse. Flatly rejected giving me a moment to get cleaned up, wouldn’t consider going someplace to talk over coffee and refused to wait while I got dressed.
"This won’t take long," she said.
Margaret dragged a steel folding chair to my bedside, wiped it down with one of my socks. A fluffy surfline of lint and dust tumbled over the edge of the seat and fell to the carpet in slow motion. She sat in a whirling plume of dust motes lit by boxy blocks of sunlight from the basement windows. Held her purse on her lap with both hands like someone riding a crowded bus through a bad neighborhood.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
My brain’s buoyancy changed and it tipped, lifted free of the muddy bottom and rose slowly to the surface. Bobbed and rolled over and I heard her say:
"I need you to listen. Can you do that? Shut your mouth and really listen to me?"
I sat up and nodded, wrapped in my blanket, a wide-eyed survivor on the bumper of an ambulance at the scene of a disaster. Got my back burner lit, started warming up an apology and focused my remaining attention on the space between Margaret’s eyes. Put my listening face on and braced for the new demands, her latest terms. If I could get through this speech without interrupting, if I didn’t further fuck things up, then there was a good chance I was going home today.
"This is business, Vincent."
She held up my new phone. Tapped the screen, played a video.
It was the two of us opening for Turner Cody in Chicago, maybe 2011. The Recession had eaten us alive by that point. We’d lost the house and sold the car to pay off bills and buy Margaret’s new MicroKORG, gambling that the short engagement might become the big break we dreamed about.
"Look at the hits," she said. "All the comments. This one from Brady Miles?"
She pointed to an icon of a kid with gold teeth. Fingerpaint-thick tattoos on his face and hair styled like a hunchbacked crow doing something indecent to a lavender mop head.
"Brady’s the lead singer of Five Ways. See this post? Two days ago he shared “Owen” with all his followers. That’s thirty-one million people, Vincent."
Margaret handed me the phone.
"Here’s the deal Vincent. Are you listening? Okay. So their supporting act backed out and Five Ways have invited us on tour with them as special guests. They’re sending pre-paid per diem cards, Vincent. Nobody gets perks like that, okay? They really like us, just from that one video and they want us. We have representation, she’s new to the industry but she’s honest. She gets our sound and we got great terms. I just need your signature on this paperwork. Right now because we fly out tomorrow."
I scrolled through the comments. Refreshed the screen and when I saw the six-figure view count my skull was rocked by powerful waves. Sensations like physical blows. My ears crackled and my tinnitus roared.
Margaret opened her purse, held out forms for me to sign while she brought me up to speed.
The edges of my vision flickered and I did my best to keep up. Over and over my printed name hung under broad black lines flagged with arrow-shaped SIGN HERE stickers. Each instance of my signature was an improvised glyph, errata from an unknown equation. I questioned the spelling of simple four-letter words. Felt the frustration of a half-dressed man with a brain injury trying to tie a full Windsor in a funhouse mirror.
Dull disbelief gnawed a hole through the week’s worth of waxy opioid rind insulating the soft cheese of my brain, allowing some light of reason to leak in. There were only a few moving parts in this concept for me to track and master but nothing made a moment of sense to me. I could barely authenticate myself in the video. Didn’t remember playing that day or making that song sound so good. Couldn’t recall standing that close to Margaret, seeing her looking so happy.
I was further unable to reconcile the effect this three-minute performance was having on my destiny. It was fucking ridiculous. Lottery-lucky dumb.
Margaret pushed a twine-handled shopping bag across the floor with her foot.
"I brought your good shoes," she said. "And your suit. The charger and stuff for your new phone and there’s money for a haircut. We’ll have those debit cards tomorrow morning and I can drop yours off here but then I’m busy. The airport shuttle leaves the transit center at noon. Can you manage that?"
I was dehydrated from the pills. My dusty voice croaked, broke up a bit when I told her:
"I won’t let you down."
Margaret huffed. Curled her lip and looked past me. Stood and nodded toward no one, cocked her knee and tugged her skirt straight. Brushed the palm of one hand across her backside and sent a shower of particles boiling sideways and they rose like pixie dust in the warm sunlight.
She drew a deep breath. Closed her eyes as she exhaled, then spoke with a firm and final measure of patience:
"I want you to get yourself a haircut. Pack a bag and be on that shuttle. And don’t lose that phone. I bought it on my plan."
Margaret’s 1940s style was working well for her, lace-collared shirt and a long gray skirt, wild hair stomped flat in braids against her head. Her hips had this real good sixgun swing to them as she tapped, clapped the worn fir treads with hobbled steps and twisted up out of Carl’s basement.
I heard Margaret’s heels peck and pop across the hardwood overhead and out the front door. Rolled over in bed and watched the video a second time. Read the comments, counted the hits and watched it again. Held my phone at arm’s length when the video went out of focus and my field of view was choked to a ragged aperture, gray growing in from the edges. My organs felt like someone was pouring a kettle of boiling water over them from a great height and poaching them inside me.
Did I just describe a panic attack? Then that’s what that was. I had my first fucking panic attack in my drummer’s mom’s basement and I’ll never again roll my eyes when someone says they’ve had one.
My mind conjured charging elephants and familiar faces from the textured plaster ceiling while I got myself through the scary part. Soon I was breathing without thinking about it, but it was an hour before I could stand and get dressed to head upstairs and tell Carl what happened, and ask for an upgrade in my medication.
The cabin lights dimmed and Mrs. Howell fell asleep under a satin mask. I snapped my overhead light on and dug Margaret’s contract from my bag.
She was slumped up front in a window seat, braids combed out, brown curls poking from a wad of fun-sized airline pillows stuffed against the bulkhead. Two of her own pink pillows from home corked in the middle of the mix illustrated Margaret’s habit of packing backups for her backups, carrying spares for her spares, some OCD blend of Girl Scout preparation and sailor’s superstition.
Back when we still had the house and money was good I put an engraver in her Christmas stocking. Before the new year came she’d gouged her initials into everything she owned. Put mine on every tool in my rollaway chest, branded every possession in the garage.
Then Margaret bought a second engraver for the singular purpose of putting her initials on the first one.
When I found the new engraver in the kitchen junk drawer I teased her without mercy for needing to achieve that level of parity and perfection. Hiring a barber to cut the barber’s hair.
She told me to shut up then, flushed devil red and came within six inches of being truly pissed off when I pushed it too far. Her jaw hardened into an unforgiving edge and she firmly told me:
"I have a fetish for backup plans."
Margaret’s contract began with a lengthy preamble structured like a point-by-point autopsy of our years together. Then a gory, harshly lit cracking of ribs followed by a clunky juggling and unceremonious assessment of all the precious things I had abused and turned toxic. Neglected and allowed to fail. It was a fair, entirely accurate and reasoned review. Really fucking thorough.
I skimmed over written accounts of the things I could remember. Harder to absorb and endure were the mention of landmark offenses I’d certainly committed but could not recall. These read like ancient battles, obscure crimes of war written in footnote and unimaginatively referenced by a place-name or geographic feature, an intimate event or the coincidence of a holiday.
The community theater fundraiser where I made false offers to spark a bidding war over an heirloom quilt.
The time at her company Christmas party when I deeply offended a Wiccan and cost Margaret multiple friendships and professional connections.
Miscellaneous events, hosted-bar weddings and warm-weather gatherings, each ending with someone discreetly pulling Margaret aside, then politely asking me to leave.
The process inside me meant to verify and authenticate genuine promises was long ago corrupted and well out of order, replaced now by a false mechanism willing to look the other way as I said or signed anything to keep on doing to myself, doing to Margaret whatever the fuck it was I’d been doing all these years. I nodded through those pages, eager to arrive at Margaret’s finest point and make note of buzzwords and key phrases in case I were confronted with them later. Souvenirs that would prove I had paid attention.
I saw no ultimatums, no storm warnings about my drinking, no if-then statements or threatened outcomes. And there was no mention of us, not as a going concern, not as a myth or a maybe or even a rumor, no hint of reconciliation or future association beyond our gigs together as Citizen Samurai.
The remainder of Margaret’s document was a series of reasonable expectations for our musical partnership. A primer on attendance and punctuality, and then one strange compliment that read like a comment in a grade-school report card:
Your good manners toward strangers are unfailing.
I looked at my hands. Turned them over and wondered at their current capability, estimated the value of their contributions to date. Considered the road before me and wondered how many days I would last on tour before I was ushered into a small trailer, cashed out of the organization and marched off the grounds.
It was the same feeling that came over me on the first day of each new job during my a la carte career life.
I’d be shown the workplace, my desk, the copier and the breakroom and I’d wonder, How many days before I’m handing in my notice? How long until the conference room where I was interviewed will see those same people reconvene as a forum who will engage in muttering and judgement before someone holds up a check and invites me to seek other opportunities?
I remembered Margaret’s words at the airport that morning. Held my breath and said it out loud, softly to myself as I exhaled:
"This is business."
Looked at the final page. Saw no signature line across the bottom, only a yellow Post-it:
surprise me
surprise yourself
take this chance
start your life again
and a smiley face.
My vision went shiny at the edges and flooded shaky silver. I pushed a damp cocktail napkin into the corner of each eye. Took deep breaths until my skull filled with autumn-orange showers of sparks that faded to digital clouds in blue.
I’d crossed a line of demarcation. Etched another asterisk on my timeline, cold-chiseled a coda into granite and closed a set of data like the date of death on a tombstone.
That was when it sank in. The moment I realized I was no longer in on the joke. I was its crooked center.
Motherfucker.
If I were a Disney princess, then right there? That was the part where I would have looked up at the stars and sang a song about all the shit my heart truly wants.