I. Bluest Year
The first time I forgot to breathe. Trader Joe’s. Hyperion Ave. Silver Lake. And I didn’t even notice. Coconut milk, coconut milk, coconut milk. That’s what I kept saying to myself. I scanned the shelves, refrigerators, those end-of-the-aisle holiday displays. Two cans needed for Thai yellow curry and I couldn’t find one. I wanted to Control+F the store. You should be able to Control+F, I mean, we’ve been to the moon. But I was too proud to ask anyone who worked there. I was thirty-six, an adult man. You can find a can.
“Excuse me, sir, but are you alright?” a young man asked. He was the local news weatherman, Dick Daley. His tagline was, “Remember folks: The sun’s always shining somewhere.” He had a baby on his hip. “You’re turning really blue.” It’s when I answered that I took a breath and the pink returned to my cheeks. I felt it warm—my body. The oxygen loaded my lungs, my organs.
“I’m fine,” I said. You’re fine. “Thank you.” That was spring.
When I told my newish boyfriend, Dan, the following night at Bar Stella, he asked if I was speaking metaphorically. “Like you know how you do that,” he said.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Like how you’re always on a rollercoaster of emotions. Or under a tidal wave of work.”
“I have never once said either of those things.”
“Well, okay, what did it feel like?”
“I guess I felt light-headed. I don’t really remember. I’m thankful Dick Daley was there. He sort of saved my life.”
“Because you would have just kept on not breathing?” Dan asked. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was folding and refolding a cocktail napkin. I shrugged.
“Maybe,” I said.
“That’s not the way it works,” he said and presented the bartender with a tiny rose. He smiled at his creation. “Lighten the fuck up.”
He moved in that weekend.
That summer I fell in love with God. I walked by a tabernacle in East Hollywood. Tenants of Entirety. The air inside was light and teeming with pizzazz. Hands in the air. Dancing like palm fronds. They always had Krispy Kreme and coffee and pupusas. Sunday to Sunday. I could have lived there. I thought that often. I pointed out places to sleep. The fourth pew from the bathroom. The purple chair near the organ. Beneath the altar. Atop the altar. The altar. The softness of everything.
Dan would have hated it. He kept our home like a tailgate, bottles and bottles and broken bottles. He served tables at Buffalo Wild Wings and sold men’s shaving kits on social media. He was always coughing and spitting, in the shower, on the couch, anywhere public, as though he too had something, deep inside, he needed to expel.
“We love having you,” Georgina said. She was old. She helped with Tenants service setup and teardown. She refilled the napkins and plates and cups. No one there needed a reason.
“There’s this dull ache I have,” I said. I felt it this time. I pointed to the center of my ribcage. I looked at the votive wall. A stained window of Mary, her palms pressed together in praise.
“It’s your hosanna in the highest,” Georgina said. She wiped at my eyes and then put her hand on my chest. “If you name it, you give it less power.”
“My hosanna in the highest,” I repeated. “But why me?”
“We all feel this way from time to time,” she said and started the vacuum. She zoomed around the room holding the cord like a handbag. “Your face.” She looked panicked and I knew what it was: I was blue. That was the second time. I confessed my sins, officially, each day after, hoping my hosanna would lift and that my breath would continue, uninterrupted.
By fall, Dan racked up thirty thousand subscribers on his YouNow channel. People paid to watch him play video games, the virtual ones. An Oculus and a microphone and live broadcasting. He needed me. On the couch beside him, he’d scream, “Bite!” and I’d hold a sandwich to his mouth. Or “Beer me!” and I’d raise the bottle to his lips. It wasn’t like I couldn’t move. I moved. I bought new clothes when you’re supposed to. I got my haircut. At my high school reunion, everyone said I looked the same. And not even that, exactly the same. Like a mosquito set in amber. Dan just hung out near the open bar telling people he was famous. I felt okay with that. We snuck away and fucked in the dark of the cafeteria. He covered my mouth for whatever reason.
Georgina died in winter.
On the way to my parents’ house in Topanga Canyon for Christmas, Dan dumped me. “You bring out the worst in me,” he said, picking his nose.
“But you’re about to meet my entire family,” I said.
“And I’m going to charm the fuck out of them,” he said and wiped a booger on my dashboard.
When we arrived, my father shook Dan’s hand and looked him in the eye. “So you’re the cocksucker we’ve been hearing so much about?” he said. There was a pause, the kind that can adjust your posture. And then they both burst out in laughter. My father shuffled Dan into the house by the neck. I scurried behind. “You a whiskey man?” he asked. And without waiting for an answer: “Get him the Macallan,” he said to my mother.
“Your father hates the holidays,” she said and hugged me.
At dinner, I told my parents about Georgina and explained to them what Tenants of Entirety was.
“That sounds lovely,” my mother said.
“Sounds like a cult,” my father said.
“Not far off,” Dan said. They oorah’ed together like marines. He winked at me.
After dessert, I went looking for my mother. The evening was warm and unseasonable. I found her on the back patio among the lemon trees and bird feeders. She was sitting on a cast-iron bench, still, like a Buddha, her face turning sapphire, her arms and legs cerulean. She held her hand to her chest. I expected to shout her name, to tell her to look up. It’s me! But I too became static, hopelessly alive, the color of a lighted moon.
II. New Age
The morning the new BoomBerry FroYo opened up on Barrington, my mother said, There goes the neighborhood, with true disdain, as though the clientele wouldn’t look exactly like her and her pack of post-menopausal, post-yoga, post-Oprah Super Soul Sunday friends.
“Not on my watch,” she said.
“Another crusade? Jesus, I’m still cleaning dead bees out of my trunk.”
“Honey, bees are what make life worth living.”
“Not the dead ones,” I said.
Last Mother’s Day, she insisted on taking me and her cousin Milly on one of those luxury Airbnb experiences to a beekeeper’s home in Malibu. While me and Milly were inside sampling royal jelly, Mom was out front sliding wooden hives into the back of my Lexus. She later released the bees into the vast of Topanga Canyon.
“There,” she said as she unloaded the last hive onto the forest floor. “Now we brunch.”
The thing she could never say aloud was that she was lonely. It was a huge loneliness, and it swallowed her like a fucking ocean. After my father shot himself in our basement with a Glock 17, she got her breasts done. Then her chin, her dimples, her earlobes. She took up Black Light Yoga, Bokwa, Jukari, Orangetheory. She tried all types of diets: rice wine vinegar, cabbage soup, alkaline, carb cycling, and even shocked her body into ketosis. But sometimes, in the early morning when I’d get up to pee, I’d see her smoking a cigarette in the laundry room, near the only window that was painted shut.
That afternoon, she invited Milly and a few other ladies from the club over for some sign-making and sangria. The plan was to art as she called it, break for some rosemary baguettes, then head down to the BoomBerry to picket. I grabbed a gold Sharpie and wrote FML in large, loopy letters and held it up for her to see.
“Honey,” she said. “Your secret language is exhausting.”
After lunch, they clattered down the street like garbage trucks. Cartier bangles, Tiffany anklets, Van Cleef & Arpels necklaces, Manolo Blahniks, Jimmy Choos. I saw Mr. Steinbach run out of his garage with his hands on his head, and together we watched them disappear into the tree line. It was maybe twenty minutes before my mom and Milly returned, sweaty and carrying their heels.
“BoomBerry grand opening is next Sunday,” Milly said.
“Oh well,” my mother sighed and handed Milly her sign. She took off her bracelets and rings and shut her eyes as she rubbed small circles into the soles of her feet.
The thing she could never say aloud was that she was tired. Tired of the sounds in her brain and the pills that stilled them. Of the vinegar and the rose quartz and the Tony Robbins. How every morning she’d wake and wish it was night.
Later, when my mother and Milly were pre-dinner napping, I swiped some of her jewelry and ran down to BoomBerry. I managed a pair of handcuffs out of bangles and bracelets and attached myself to the latch on the front door. I didn’t know how long I’d be there, but I knew she’d be proud of me. I was trying something new. Taking a risk. Jumping into the abyss.