The Launch

The Launch

                The drive from Chapel Hill to New York contained one hiccup—an hour-plus delay due to some graffiti over the highway in Washington D.C.  Someone had spray-painted some kind of message that I don’t remember, and all of the drivers had rubbernecked on the graffiti.  I had been listening to the traffic report on the radio and anticipating the site for a while, and it was rather underwhelming.  After that the traffic moved smoothly.

                On my way into New York I called my friend Gabe and asked if I could get an ounce off of him.  He said he could make that happen and I stopped at an ATM in an oasis along the New Jersey Turnpike to take out a few hundred dollars for the purchase.  An hour later I was on Manhattan in my car and parking it in the East Village.  This was the second time I had my car with me in the city—the first time being a little over two years before, when I had driven my sister to school in New Hampshire, and had visited my friend Sycamore up in Maine, and had driven down to New York and parked it in a garage because it was the convenient and easy thing to do. 

                I walked up to Gabe’s apartment and he measured out an ounce for me and I gave him $360.  I would find out a day or so later that I had bought the ounce immediately following a famous child star who had recently enrolled at NYU, and who had also bought an ounce.  No, not the Olsen twins—though they had enrolled in the same school within NYU as me, and we had actually attended for one shared semester—but Haley Joel Osment.  I thought this was wonderful good luck as I prepared to make my way towards Hollywood.

 Shirtless Joe Jordan arrived, named as such because he always walked around New York with no shirt.  Once he had been a finalist on the MTV show Yo Mama which contained infinite variations on “Yo Mama’s so fat…” jokes.  We smoked some and I had planned to stay with Wendy that evening.  I told Gabe and Joe that my car, with all of the stuff packed in it, was on the street, and they started making me paranoid that someone would break into it and rob me.  This had happened to a friend several years before—he had his guitar stolen out of his car after leaving it parked around 30^th St. overnight.  I made sure it was okay to go over to Wendy’s apartment, even though I had very little idea how to get there. 

                I got in my car and drove over the Williamsburg Bridge.   After some nervousness, I found Wendy’s place in Greenpoint.  She was waiting outside for me.  I parked right near the front of her building and came out and hugged her tight.  We went inside and I don’t remember much about the night except I am assuming we smoked and then I remember this awkward moment where I begged her just to hold me, or to let me hold her, and she sat stricken on the side of her couch, clearly not wanting to acquiesce to my demands, but doing so half-heartedly. 

When I woke up in the morning and went to my car, I found a parking ticket.  If I had moved it at 7:30 AM I could have avoided it.  My own stupidity—not paying close enough attention to the sign above the sidewalk.  Upset, I drove into Manhattan and found parking on University Place and went to my friend Mike’s apartment where I would stay for the next couple of days.  Let me say that I do not remember much at all about my trip to New York this time.  I remember finding that excellent spot on University Place, where it would remain for three days without any kind of parking restrictions, no attempted theft, and secure comfort.  The Fall semester at NYU had just started and thousands of students paraded up and down that primary artery of campus.  I would later go into the NYU bookstore and get and NYU bumper sticker for my car, as well as a New York University tank-top that was probably one size too small.  With the bumper sticker on it there, it felt even safer.  This would not be the case (in my own suspicious mind) three months later, but for now, all was happy and perfect.  I had spent a lot of money since starting my trip—a couple thousand dollars, at least.  But I still had a sizable amount remaining--$18,000 or so—and my car was parked on University Place, one of the happiest areas of New York City, and I was staying at my friend’s luxurious loft apartment on 12^th St. between University and Broadway, not three or four short city blocks to my car.

I went around and visited everyone I could in New York, but the specific experiences are always muddled in my mind.  New York is a state of mind and the events enjoyed there never really differ from what was done before.  Walk around the village, get some slices, go to Pluck-U at least once, get some 40’s, go to see some friend’s band that is playing that weekend, take the subway into Brooklyn, visit a friend who happens to be moving into a new apartment at the time.  None of it particularly revelatory or worth writing about—just comforting in its sameness, only less and less so as we grow older and our carefree college mentalities slip further and further into the past. 

Adam, my roommate for two years in college, had moved into a new place near TriBeCa, and I went to go visit him and met his new roommate, who had once slept on our freshman year dorm room floor and who I barely remembered.  I met Adam’s girlfriend, Chloe, who would not be going out with him much longer.  Though she was very sweet, I remember.  I sat outside on his concrete deck, where one month later he would host a party that I would also be able to attend.

I took the train into Brooklyn and met up with Wendy again and went to Eric’s birthday party, which was in a weird location of Williamsburg—behind some pizzeria—but we found it eventually.  There I saw the majority of people who had also been at my Pitchfork Party a month and a half before.

I also saw Charlotte, who had been one of my last great crushes of college, and who had become an assistant to a literary agent at the William Morris Agency, and who had agreed to take a look at my first novel, Daylight Savings Time, back that previous June, the last time I had been in New York.  We had met up at a bar near Union Square and she had talked with me for an hour or two—she had been very generous with her time—and told me that it was not up to the standards that she would want to represent.  I had not finished the novel yet at that point—I would finish it just a few days before August 21—but it made writing the ending feel a bit meaningless, though I do believe the last chapter was the strongest piece of the entire work.  Over the last year or so, I’ve come to feel that my first novel is good enough to publish if only the market were not so unfriendly to fairly unconventional work.  With that in mind, I wrote my second novel, Self-Mutilation, and I would love to be able to submit it to someone at the William Morris Agency, except Charlotte has recently begun her first year of studies at Harvard Law School.  Regardless I should still ask her if she might have a contact who would listen a little more closely to me than if I played my usual role of the anonymous, desperate, unpublished, querying writer.

The party at Eric’s was a great time.  That was probably the single happiest time I had on that particular trip to New York.  But I was focused on the road trip—better times were about to come, and I would be back in New York a month from then for a wedding.  (As a fun side-note on the present, I’ve recently made plans to attend my second wedding in New York a little over a month from now—some times prescience is divine.)

I talked to Sam on the phone and he told me to meet him in Larchmont, NY on the morning of August 27, and we would drive from Kelly’s parent’s house there up to his Mom’s house in Meriden, CT, which would take about an hour and a half or so, if that.  I found this annoying, but after he explained it, I realized it had to be done.  He also gave me an Adderall pill which made the extra side-trip a lot more fun.  We picked up the stuff from his house and found his brother Todd there.  I am always intimidated by Todd but this time I found him more mature than previous times and he did not make as many offensive attacks on my person.  We packed everything into my car, which I worried about more than I should have, and we headed back to Larchmont. 

There, parked in Kelly’s parent’s driveway, I received the phone call.  My Dad.  He had recently called when I was on my way from Chapel Hill to New York, somewhere in Virginia, to tell me that their basement had flooded, and all of my stuff that I had brought back from my apartment had been ruined.  I started to get upset, but then felt like there was nothing that I could do about it, but then he told me he was kidding.  Their floor was destroyed, but they had acted quickly enough to get my CDs and books and various items out of there before any damage could occur.  My mom wasn’t at the house then, she had been in Boulder, CO, helping my younger brother get settled.  I think she returned to Chicago on August 25, or August 26.

“Dad, what’s up?”

“Well, we have had a very serious tragedy occur here.”

“What!  What do you mean?”

“Before I say anything, I just want you to know that everyone is O.K.  We had a very serious incident, but thankfully it is going to be alright in the end.”

“What happened?”

“Your brother, Michael, was stabbed in the neck this morning on the CU Boulder campus.”

“Oh my God,” I said, not knowing how to react to something like that.

“He’s fine, he went into the emergency room and had stitches put in.  The doctors said that if it were just another centimeter away in either direction, he would be dead.”

“That’s insane.”

“Everything is fine, he’s okay.  It was this crazy man on the sidewalk.  He was screaming something about it being the end of the world.  And Michael walked past, and he grabbed him, and stabbed him in the neck, and then he started stabbing himself.”

“Jesus!”

“And a bunch of other students saw it occur, and they thought it was some kind of staged performance!  They thought Michael and this guy were acting it out for some kind of school theater thing!”

“This is so awful.”

“I know, but it’s okay.  We’re about to get on a plane to Boulder right now.  Call us in a few hours and we’ll update you on the situation.” 

I hung up the phone and told Sam and he also responded with shock.  It was the first of many times I would tell my friends about this occurrence and know beforehand that I would get to see the look of shock and sympathy and horror on their faces.  We unloaded the car and put all of our stuff together.  I thought this might throw the road trip a bit off, but we still re-packed the car to make everything fit.  We went to the garage and looked at Sam’s new bike that he and Kelly would be riding across the country.  I sat outside by Kelly’s parent’s pool and dozed for a few minutes on a bench there.  Then I called my Mom and talked to her and received more information and gradually began to feel more comfortable about the reality of what had just occurred.  I thought this would change everything forever.  No longer would I, the middle-child, inarguably the most depressed and fucked-up member of our family, carry all of the sympathetic attention.  No, now it would be my younger brother, who had been attacked, assaulted—a true victim—unlike me, who had everything handed to him on silver platter and still managed to ruin my life and everyone’s I touched. 

We went inside the house and I told Kelly’s parents about what had happened and they responded similarly in kind.  I was a random kid that showed up at their house, the friend of their daughter’s boyfriend, and immediately after meeting them, had one of the most shocking incidents of my family’s history to deal with.  They were very kind people.  We ended up watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in the upstairs den, and I got into the show more than I ever did before.  Then, my brother Michael called me himself, and told me that he was fine, it was a really scary thing, but he was fine.  I didn’t ask him any direct questions about the incident, and I still don’t really think I have, more than a year later.  He told me it was fine though, and that I should just meet him in Boulder, continue with my road trip as planned.  I thanked him for being so understanding and selfless.  I told Sam and Kelly and we decided we would leave the next day.  Before we went to bed, we snuck out into the backyard at night and smoked a blunt.  Sam loved rolling blunts; I loved taking bong rips.  We went swimming in their pool after smoking and it was great.  We all went to bed and woke up early the next day.

We started off around 9 AM and found ourselves a few minutes later on the George Washington Bridge, proceeding at a slow crawl.  Sam had to walk his bike all the way across the bridge, I remember seeing.  Kelly was behind him on the bike, swaying back and forth in ecstasy to the music they were blasting, I remember seeing.