There is this picture I used to carry in my wallet,
back when I used to carry a wallet. A very old picture of me
kneeling on a New York City street holding my niece who looks
tired and aggravated. The lady behind the camera was my mother
and the girl standing behind me, cropped off here, was my
sister. It was my high school graduation and what struck me
about the photo was the little girl’s expression but,
additionally, my own. It took me about a half hour to find this
photo, looking through bunches of old photos while being
hammered by phone calls I’ve yet to return and emails I’ve yet
to write. It occurred to me, digging through Yesterday, that in
none of those photos did I appear to be happy. None of them. I’m
not terribly photogenic and have never enjoyed having my picture
taken, but also, I’m not quite sure that I’ve ever been happy.
“Happy” seems kind of relative, and we each define happiness in
different ways.
I like to leave my house around 5:30 and chase the sunrise down
a winding country road populated mostly by
alpaca and bunny rabbits. I don’t have a real bike, I ride
something that looks like a $25 hundred racing bike but is
actually a pretty cheap Schwinn. But it gets the job done. I am
perhaps the happiest when I’m out there, in the middle of
nowhere, just me and the roadkill watching the sunrise and
sucking down crisp mountain air. I don’t think I’ve ever truly
adjusted to the altitude here, so uphill can be a real
challenge. Still, a day without riding is, for me, like root
canal, as I know the rest of the day will be about ringing
phones and deadlines and emails. So that’s my little worship time
with the alpaca: a time when I can ponder things like what is
happiness, and does anyone actually have it.
The most striking thing about those old photos wasn’t that I
looked unhappy but that nobody else in the photo seemed to
notice. I think we live life in phases: childhood, where we’re
too stupid to realize our parents are insane and our lives are
horrible, young adulthood where we’re incredibly arrogant,
rejecting everything mama taught us and making a mess of our
lives, and then you have that 40-60 range where you’re the
busboy clearing away piles of dirty dishes your first twenty
years of adult life left behind. Cigarette put out in the
scrambled eggs. Looking at the photos, I had a visceral memory.
I didn’t just look unhappy, I was unhappy. I was flat-out
miserable. But nobody seemed to notice or care, so long as I was
where they wanted me to be and I was doing what they wanted me
to do. This is likely the plot of the next novel in a line of
novels I’ll probably never publish: an examination of this
phenomena, of people choosing not to see how utterly miserable
you are.
I had no intention of going to my high school graduation. I
didn’t see the point. I wasn’t there a whole lot. By senior year
I was interning at Marvel and only showed up for school
occasionally. I'm not in the yearbook. I skipped the prom. I had maybe one or two friends and Sabrina Galen,
the very tall girl I used to call “Fred,” whom I had a huge
crush on. The only reasons I even went to graduation was because
I was the only kid in school who (admitted he) could play piano,
and my music teacher threatened to fail me if I didn’t come to
the ceremony and play the school song. If I’d had my way, I’d
have played the stupid song and headed for the subway. They
could mail me the diploma. The ceremony had nothing to do with
me. It was for my mother. My wedding had nothing, not one thing,
to do with me. Weddings are for the bride. I was just the guy
who showed up. There were any number of other guys there,
wearing the exact same suit, who could have stood in for me if I
got tied up in traffic.
Stronger Than Paxil:: My morning ride.
For most of my adult life I have done things I didn’t want to do
and gone places I didn’t want to be because of some date on a
calendar or some tribal ritual or another. I’m at these places,
with these people, and I look exactly as I do above. I am
absolutely miserable. And these people who insisted I be there
don’t notice or care. Which makes me wonder why these people
would want me around. I obviously don’t want to be there, I’m
not having a good time. Or I am faking having a good time
because I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. But my idea of
a good time is to be completely and utterly alone, out here with
the alpaca. If these folks actually knew me they’d know that.
Going to parties or receptions is an absolute nightmare. Having
people in my house, gasp, in my house? Why not just waterboard
me. I’d tell Rumsfeld anything he wanted to know if he just
camped out n my living room for a week.
Back then, there really wasn’t language for this business, but
today we call it “Social Anxiety Disorder,” (click
to play audio) which is just
lipstick on the pig Depression. I suffer from depression.
Sometimes I get overwhelmed by people and just can’t be around
them. A side effect of this disorder is people being mad at me
all the time because I don’t call or I don’t write or I don’t
come to their party. Because the paraplegic won't go bowling
with you. My in-laws seemed offended and my wife
routinely upset because they were all extremely social and they
assumed I didn’t like them. I liked them just fine. I have a
disease.
CLICK TO PLAY VIDEO ABOVE
I never received love from those people. I received tolerance.
They kind of put up with me for her sake. But, in all the years
we were together, I never, not once, received a
phone call from anyone in that large family. Not one "How ya doin'?" not one invite out for
coffee. It wasn’t even that they didn’t like me. They didn’t
know me. They didn’t care to know me. They weren’t trying. We
were just stuck there, like that awkward pause at the checkout
waiting for your card to go through. No one, not my family, not
hers, ever once stopped to notice how miserable I was. Nobody,
even once, bothered to ask if anything was wrong.
It’s not the end of the world, I’m functional, I get up
and comb my hair. But my idea of happy involves quiet and
wide-open spaces. I have six TVs in the house but rarely turn
them on. I have a telephone but only out of protest. People see
me eating alone at a restaurant and park themselves and their
noisy kids right next to me. Thirty empty tables, but The
Flintstones pitch a tent at the next booth over. I prefer eating
alone. If I wanted company I am blessed with more friends here
in town than I can count. I am not on Facebook. I don't own a smartphone. I am not LinkedIn. I can be around
people, but I can’t stay at their house and Lord knows they
can’t stay at mine. I need my own hotel room and a fast Internet
connection. For every hour I have to endure the crush of family
and friends, I need two hours absolutely alone.
Robert DeNiro had this great line in the film Heat, where
he said, “I am alone, I am not lonely.” And I’m not. For reasons
I can’t explain, I have lots of friends. I have no idea, none,
why they like me. I never invite them over. People think I’m gay
or a reprobate preacher, got me a girl stashed down here.
There’s nobody down here but the squirrels who keep chewing
their way into the eaves and keep me up nights. And they’re on my list.
This sadness is like luggage you carry around without realizing
it. You don’t even notice it until one day you look around and
realize you haven’t spoken to your girlfriend in two years and
there’s dust covering everything in the house. It’s one of those
things you don’t even notice until you start flipping through a
photo album and it just leaps out at you. How did people not
notice? Couldn’t they see it? Didn’t they care? I was so
miserable. I hated being there, having my picture taken. Making
a record of my being dragged to this place or that event and, so
long as I showed up, everybody was happy. But me.
An Actual Smile:: Chris, age 13, in the Adirondacks with Stephanie, 1974.
I don’t know if I’m happy now, but I feel like I am, at least, eligible to be happy. I am, at least, a lot less miserable. After the marriage, I gave myself permission to stop going places I didn’t want to go and stop doing things I didn’t want to do. This is an intrinsically selfish way to live, I suppose, but I know of many guys, married guys most especially, who would much rather be anywhere else but the in-laws making small talk. My Thanksgiving ritual involves lounging in my underwear watching a Star Trek marathon and eating an entire Pepperidge Farm chocolate layer cake with my bare hands. Things Men Do. Or what they would do if the sisters weren’t always making us go somewhere and do something.
Christopher J. Priest
19 September 2011
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