Laying It All Out There

Chapter Three: Lights Out

Chapter Three

Lights Out

I don’t hang out with jerks or jackasses, so the people I know tend to be incredible somehow or other. My own social skills are inconsistent: parties are so exhausting I have to lay down the day after going to one. Instead of going out in the evenings, I read books. I hate to drive at night, find that most people get on my nerves, and that stupidity is infuriating. I’ve never made lots of friends, but the ones I do make, I keep.

Here’s where it gets strange: My friends are all more successful than me in various ways: smarter than me, more highly promoted than me, doing various types of volunteer work, gorgeous, warmer, more engaging than me, married with children, single with children, single without children but having more s*x than I will ever catch up on. More focused and self-disciplined, or more unfocused and creative, they light up the room; others gravitate to them, find them welcoming and open, or find them lofty and mysterious. My friends are richer, taller, energetic, closer to God, closer to Buddha, closer to atheism, closer to their family, slightly famous, slightly infamous, very infamous but still doing volunteer work on the weekends under supervision, more balanced, more crazy but okay with that, no longer taking Prozac for that, no longer under investigation for that, more comfortable with themselves, more comfortable with others, great with pets.

My friends all have some common traits. None are dumb, none are mean, all want the best for human beings throughout the world. And all, except Mitch, drive like maniacs, which is something I don’t understand. My friends speed, tailgate, go around slower drivers. Nolan denies tailgating. Several of the others say flat out, “They should get out of my way.” Two of those friends are deeply religious; one cursed another driver to hell. None has caused accidents, but I’m a cautious driver and can’t figure out how I’m repeatedly connected to people so different from me in that one specific way. Also, my friends tend to be popular; they have lots of friends, which makes sense if you think that someone like me would probably only end up with friends who make vast numbers of friends. My anger management books refer to friends as ‘contact circles.’

This book is an ode to my parents, who managed to get out of rustic Arkansas, earn multiple degrees, travel the world, and buy a house in Texas. They raised daughters who did not have to grow up in the ‘hollah’ at the base of a mountain in Hot Springs. And since my family was stationed in Germany when I was a child, my big sister Tessa and I saw the half of Europe that was not in the Soviet sphere. My parents persevered through all the crap life threw at them; they’re both out of their minds now, but I can understand why. That’s what your thirties are for: realizing why your parents are the way they are and getting over it.

When I showed this book to friends and asked them to choose their own fake names, two of them asked about the book’s title. Decades ago, when I was working on my Master’s thesis, my University of Southern California writing professor, Tom Maslin, said that the thing about writing, real writing that’s actually worth anything, is that you’ve gotta risk something. You have to put yourself right out there, expose what you don’t want to expose, reveal what you’re afraid to reveal. Otherwise, there’s nothing new and it’s no good. Tom fought in World War Two and brought a war bride back from the Pacific. He was an alcoholic, wrote TV shows for Hollywood, stopped drinking, and became a popular professor. He had an honesty that was hard to believe until you witnessed it: when you get old, he said, you stop talking around reality and just face it head-on because you learn that hiding your inner life is a waste.

It had taken war, alcoholism, and decades of life for Tom to decide there was no point to pretense. He’d had cancer for years even before he was supervising my graduate project. After I graduated and moved back to Texas, I wrote him every few months, supposedly to ask his advice about my writing or my life plans, but really just to keep in touch. I loved him; he always wrote back. The responses were never more than a page long, banged out on his old manual typewriter, but they were sincere and encouraging. Eventually, one letter let me know he was in the final stages; he was dying.

Okay, so here’s how my social skills are cringable. I wrote him back, asking if he had anything, a doctor’s prescription so that he would not be in terrible pain, so he would not have to suffer. I had no business asking that, but I did and then realized I shouldn’t have, but the letter was already sent. The next letter came from his wife; she told me Tom never read my last letter. He died before he could. She did not mention if she read it, and I hope no one ever did.

Tom said that to be a writer, you have to lay it all out there. He did not say if you have to lay your friends all out there too. And he didn’t say whether your family would still talk to you after. So, here we go.

*

Even with my parents’ help, I owed thousands of dollars in student loans after grad school—I still love you USC. I struggled, living in Los Angeles for a couple of years, then moved home so I could pay off loans and save money. It took over a decade to become a tenured, full-time professor and earn enough to wipe out all my debt and buy a new car. By 2016, my days are a formula: Work, grocery, home. Work, library, home. Work, gym, home. Or work, work late, home. And when I get home, I change into a t-shirt and shorts and flop on the bed, too tired to move. One night, when the PBS News Hour is half over, I prop my head up during an interview with Ted Koppel.

We’re doomed, he says, but not in those words. Instead, he says ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’ and talks about what will happen when the electrical grid in the U.S. goes down due to a cyber-attack, which Russia and China already have the capacity to launch, and Isis, North Korea, plus numerous disgruntled individuals are developing. Calmly, he mentions the lack of government preparedness and the subsequent consequences of an attack, such as the inability to run water, treat sewage, distribute food, or run air conditioning, heat, elevators, or respirators. A few million will die.

In passing, Koppel notes the need to have three to six months of food and water stockpiled and finishes up with an eighty percent estimate that within a decade, the grid will go down. Gwen Ifill thanks him for the interview. They smile. I see him on three other shows that week, order his book, read it in one weekend, then wish I hadn’t because of the anxiety it gives me.

His book talks about ‘preppers,’ people who prepare for the end-of-the-world, not spiritually, but practically by stockpiling food, water, medical supplies and board games. Preppers are different from ‘survivalists’ who stockpile bullets and conspiracy theories. In the weeks that follow, I read Survival Mom: How to Prepare Your Family for Everyday Disasters because the reviews say it’s written for people who don’t know anything about prepping, and it has easy to follow lists of what to buy for the end of the world. Lists and retail: two things that I do understand.

I read a couple more prepper books, watch Emergency Preparedness: Awareness and Survival and Season Two of Doomsday Preppers. Then I make a list of supplies for a bug-out-bag, which is the Sterilite tote full of stuff you either throw in the trunk of your car as you flee before the zombie hordes, or hunker down with in your safe room when fleeing is not an option. I am woefully un-preppered—I don’t even have the tote—and decide that I’ll put together my supplies in the summer once the semester ends and I have the time. According to the prepper books, I am already doing one thing right, for a completely wrong reason: I’m growing food—not to get ready for the grid-goes-down apocalypse, but because I like pesto.

Basil costs $2.50 for a cellophane package that’s barely a handful of leaves, and really good pesto takes three packages, so one spring, I threw some seeds in an old pot on the patio that had dried out dirt in it. Seed. Dirt. Water. How hard could it be?

Harder than that; nothing grew. So I got a bag of decent potting soil, tried again and ended up with more basil than I could use and pesto whenever I wanted. The next year I added oregano, parsley, thyme and sage, and two years after that, I had two dozen herbs stretched across the back of the patio. Alongside recipes and growing tips, my herbology books touted the health benefits of each plant: French thyme for coughs, red clover for hot flashes, basil for anxiety, garlic for just about everything.

The one herb the books never mentioned was w**d.