Runaway Horses

The other night I had one of those anxiety attacks where I got stuck in my head and there was no way out. Pacing in the backyard, on the cold grass, with my bare feet, shaking my fingers and my hands and my arms relentlessly, to keep the blood flowing, the blood I needed to keep flowing to my brain, to keep me awake, and present. I thought about Travis Kelce in the Super Bowl yelling — no, imploring — over to Kadarius Toney, during the now-famous “corndog” play, on the slick field that made so many players slip and fall down, to be “under control.” Touchdown. Six points. And every time I get stuck in these anxiety fits I forget that I’ve been here before, and I always make it out.

I shook my fingers and my hands and my arms some more; I don’t know if it works or anything, but I learned in physiology class during my senior year to do that shit because we did this exercise where we got into groups and one of the people in each group had to extend each arm with a book in each hand until they felt the lactic acid build up in their arms and the teacher said if you start to feel light-headed to give up. I saw it as a competition, so I wanted to be the last one standing with a book in each hand and my arms extended. So I stood there, silently, stoic, as one kid after another dropped their arms and capitulated. Winning was the only option. Then after a few seconds I woke up with my teacher patting me on my chest telling me I’m all right because I had just fallen and blacked out. “I won, right?” Those were the first words I said when I woke up. Kids laughed. It was worth it. When I got up he told me to wiggle my fingers and shake out my arms to get my blood flowing, so that’s what I did and that’s what I always do when I am on the verge of a panic attack or in the middle of one.

I paced around some more and my feet got all wet from the grass and my steps became a little more disoriented. Four beers and some weed were passing through my system in a hellish sort of way and I told myself that I wasn’t going to throw up but then I realized fairly quickly that throwing up was going to be my only way out of this. I was waiting for it, ready. My brain told my legs to get the rest of my body off-balance so that’s what I did every time I took a step. Then I keeled over and released the bitter concoction of beer that had been swirling and splashing around in my guts for the better part of the last two hours. I saw once when I was a boy watching a show on HBO called “Autopsy,” or some shit, that a young woman died from accidentally swallowing her own throw-up, so ever since then I remain cognizant of spitting all that goddamn filth out and not so much as allowing my mouth to taste the disgusting remnants that my body decided were not fit to pass through onto the other side.

When I came to, I thought about my best friend from kindergarten. His name was Jeremy Perez. I have not thought about him in like 28 years. I don’t know why this memory made its way into my brain in that exact moment, but it was there and I remembered everything for an instant. I remembered my mom dropping me off at his house to play with him one day, and he lived in a really nice house. His parents were pretty obviously well-to-do, but I didn’t think so much about that back then because I was just thinking wow this house is so much nicer than mine and all the toys he has are way cooler than mine. Then a week or two later his mom dropped him off at my parents’ house and he was going to spend the night, which was cool as fucking shit at that age. My parents had no money back then because my dad was out of work and we had to move to the fucking projects of San Bernardino, but still my mom went to McDonalds that night because fast food always tasted better as a five year-old, especially since my family did not have the money to get fast food whenever they wanted. But that night Jeremy got a Big Mac and ended up throwing up. My mom called his mom, on the landline, because people in 1995 used to call one another from house phones, and Jeremy’s mom came over and picked Jeremy up and took him home. I was so disappointed that he couldn’t stay the night that night, because Jeremy was my best friend when I was five. We probably didn’t know each other very long. A few weeks maybe. But it was easy to make friends at that age. A month or two later Jeremy’s family moved away and I never saw him again.

I was now awake. I was awake again, I should say. Anxiety sort of rears its face and all that is really worth considering is how to survive, how to stay upright, and if it’s worthwhile to make some peace with god or whoever the fuck is listening. Probably no one. But then again the only reason I ever go through any anxiety is when my mind is telling me that I cannot continue putting off the only things that are worth addressing. I can push, and push, and squash down all these feelings and emotions and I spend the better part of every day of my life doing just that, yet still there is no fooling the critic that resides inside. He stays there, sometimes more quiet than others, but he is always there.

And then I started crying. It was the strangest thing. I do not cry. That is not my thing, even if sometimes I am driven to the point where I tell myself it would be a good time to cry or that this would be a moment where crying is warranted. I just can’t bring myself to do it. But then I did, because I was thinking about Jeremy Perez. I was thinking about how impressionable kids are, wondering if maybe all of my problems really do stem from being such a small boy and not understanding what abandonment was all about. I was thinking about the excessively short list of people in my life who have ever known me, who have ever took the time to get to know me, who accepted me for who I am, who love(d) me for who I am, who have been there with me, and for me, in the trenches, who understand that I am not perfect, that I am condescending and arrogant and sarcastic almost as a rule, who don’t put me down for it, who let me be myself. And I have lost all of them. They have left, or I have left. But they are gone.

Jeremy Perez could never understand any of this, because he does not matter. He does not know who I am. He knew me as a five year-old who liked baseball and playing with toys. I had not yet developed the capacity to be arrogant or condescending or sarcastic. I allowed my childhood and the movies I watched and the family I lived in and the friends I had and the relative success I showed and proved over and over again to turn myself into who I am right this second as I write this. Jeremy, therefore, was more like the starting end of the wick that gets lit and inevitably goes boom.

Bill Burr once had this joke, or whatever you call it, about his dog. This dog of his, he was dying. He was about to get put down. And the whole story was really about the difference in how men and women deal with their emotions, in this case about a dog they loved. He talked about his wife, about how in the last week before they put the dog down she would cry a little bit, privately, in the restroom. And Bill Burr thought that was so stupid. Why cry over a dog? he thought. But then the day finally came and the dog needed to be put down and he went down the stairs into the living room and the dog jumped into his arms and he bawled like a fucking child and he wouldn’t stop crying because he knew that would be the last day he saw his dog. It broke his heart because he loved this particular dog. And he realized that his wife dealt with it the way she did, and that he dealt with it the way he did.

And that’s me, honestly. I hate that I have to be this way, but this is the way I am. I deal with everything, every day. I put the mask on and I go through with the business of making everyone around me, coworkers and customers, feel good. Laughter is my oxygen. My style of not giving a goddamn fuck about anyone or anything is the lifeblood that people know and understand and appreciate about me. And so I go through with it because that is what is expected of me and that is how I like to portray myself. And I eat just a little bit of shit every day for it. I don’t feel one way or another about it. I don’t dwell on it. But it’s there. It has always been there. I love myself, but what I love more is making everyone else happy. That’s on me.

And that is what has made me something like a ticking time bomb. Not in the sense that I am going to go ballistic and fuck off and do some shit that is going to make the news. That is not me. It’s more to say that, privately, in my private moments, the chickens are going to come home to roost. The vig is going to have to get paid. I am the lender, I am the beneficiary, and I am the one that will have to reconcile all at the same time.