40. Too Tough to Die

Airports are excellent places for reflection and self-analysis. They are liminal places, places where people are literally in between. People in airports have shrugged off their day-to-day identities but haven’t yet donned who they’ll be when they reach their destinations. There are only very broad categories of people in airports: businesspeople, tourists, terrorists; the details of their specific stories are unknown, their next chapters waiting to be written when the plane touches down.

If this were a movie⁵⁵, 82 minutes that required a neat summation of what my experience in Moscow meant, the airport would be an excellent place to stage this scene. I could sit in a chair and watch the people pass by and meditate on the transient nature of life and experience. Better still, I could stand in the airport bathroom and stare solemnly at my reflection in the mirror. My voice would play over the static tableau, detailing my many epiphanies.

“My story, which began as a tale of societal collapse, was really about my own personal disintegration,” my voice would say. “And that’s when I realized. The two – the individual and her community – are inseparable. The only way to insure your own sanity is to help create a sane community. Far from being a story about collapse, mine was a story about learning to build something meaningful.”

Or maybe:

“My story, which ended with me trying and failing to cope with life in Russia, was not really about my own strengths and weaknesses. And that’s when I realized. Part of growing up, part of surviving, is having the wisdom and sanity to recognize when the environment around you – despite your best efforts – is wrong for you. Far from being a story about giving up, mine was a story about learning when to fight.”

Or even:

“My story, which was ostensibly about living in Moscow, was not about living in Moscow at all. And that’s when I realized. Until my internal landscape became somewhere I could comfortably dwell, it wouldn’t matter what city I lived in. I’d never find home. Far from being a story about living in Moscow, mine was a story about learning to live in the world.”

But this story is not yet a movie, and back then I was way too young and way too tired and way too freaked out to derive any coherent meaning from the city I was waiting to fly out of. The only thing I knew back then was that I was nowhere near as tough as I’d thought. Moscow had chewed me up and spat me out. All I thought about was getting home to Florida. I didn’t want to go home, and considered doing so a terrible defeat. I had no idea what I’d do there. But the events with Yuri had shaken me so deeply that I no longer trusted my judgment. Sure, I was trying to put my life back in order and was having some tiny successes. But my experience with madness was too recent and unsettling to easily forget, my grip on sanity too tenuous. I feared that anything or nothing at all could shove me back into that dark room, and I doubted I’d have the energy to get myself out of it a second time.

These were the very last things I wanted to think about as I sat at the dingy gate in Sheremetyevo Airport waiting for my plane to come in, however. So instead, I thought about my mother. She did not know that I was on my way home, and though there was almost nothing good about the circumstances under which I was leaving, showing up unexpectedly on my mother’s doorstep would be good. I would be like the prodigal daughter, back from years of wandering the wastelands. She would be so glad to see me, I knew, and I her. We would sit down together and I would ask her the question that, according to her, was the first question I’d ever asked: “what’s gonna happen next, mom?” I’d been asking her that question incessantly since I could remember, and although I rarely took her up on her suggestions, she was the very best person I knew to help me find an answer. She knew me better than anyone and had provided me with a kind of internal compass that, though sometimes prone to serious magnetic disturbances, had not failed me yet. And right now that compass was pointing straight to home, straight to her.

My plane landed 11 hours later in Miami, Florida. When I’d bought my one-way ticket at the airport, Miami was the closest I could get to my final destination of Jacksonville. Of course I knew that Miami is in fact 400 miles away from Jacksonville, but, relatively speaking, that’s still pretty close. I had no plan for what I would do when I got to Miami, but I also totally didn’t care. I’d walk if I had to. I’d been through worse.

Finally, I decided to take a bus from Miami to Jacksonville. The recording when I’d called the downtown station told me I’d have a long wait; the next bus to Jax left 5 hours from then, at 6am. I resolved to settle down at the airport and wait out the night, but after an hour of sitting propped up against a wall I changed my plans. I was exhausted from jet lag and months of very little rest, and I was afraid that if I stopped moving I’d fall asleep and sleep forever. I’d miss my bus, my luggage would be stolen, I’d be arrested for vagrancy – anything could happen. So I dragged my heavy suitcase out of the airport and into the humid Miami night, and hailed a cab downtown.

One day many years from then I’d move to Miami and thus would understand the lunacy of deciding to walk around downtown by myself at 1am, and while dragging a suitcase, no less. But in the state I was in then, the homeless people and derelicts eying me from their doorways as I walked down Highway 1 were merely friendly fellow Floridians. There was no way they could hurt me! Didn’t they know what all I’d just been through, where I’d just come from?

There is a phrase to describe the kind of carelessness that overtakes people who are coming to the ends of their journeys. It’s called “barn shy,” and it’s your certainty that you are this close, almost there, that causes you to let your guard down and makes you vulnerable. That night in Miami, gawking at the abandoned Freedom Tower and the glittering black bay, I was definitely barn shy. “Listen,” I’d tell anyone who tried to mess with me, “You and your little ‘give me your wallet’ routine are pretty weak sauce after what I’ve just experienced. What is this, amateur night?”

I was not tough enough for Moscow, that was for sure, but on that night I was feeling tough enough for downtown Miami. I had made it back to America, my feet were on my home soil, and damn right I was tough. Too tough to die.

After a few hours of ambling unmolested around downtown, I was worn out and sweating profusely in the thick summer air. I hauled my suitcase back to the deserted bus station, sat down on it (my suitcase, not the bus station), and lit a cigarette. I had two hours to wait. Finally, the sky began to lighten and people began to trickle up to the station. Like most Greyhound bus passengers, we were a motley assortment. Black people, white people, Latinos; drunk people, sort of drunk people, extremely drunk people; people wearing embroidered trucker hats, people wearing airbrushed ones – the only quality we shared was that we all looked rode hard and put up wet. As I walked down the aisle of the mostly empty bus, I spied the one exception, a very neat-looking black man dressed sharply in a crisp Navy uniform. He nodded at me politely as I sat down next to him. As the bus rumbled onto Highway 1 for its 12-hour trip to Jacksonville, I made my move.

“Excuse me, please,” I said to the man, having to concentrate hard to say this in English, “Where are you going?”

“Waycross,” he said, “to visit my mother.”

“Well. I wonder if I might ask you, if it is not too much trouble. I have got to go to sleep. Right now. If I go lie down back there (I pointed over my shoulder towards the bus’ empty back), will you make sure nobody jumps me? And would you wake me up when we get to Jacksonville? I am sorry to ask you this, but I have got to go to sleep. Right now.”

The man looked surprised. “OK,” he said finally, “sure.”

Twelve hours later, I felt a gentle poke on my shoulder. It was the Navy guy, keeping his promise. I walked out of the bus station and into the empty downtown. I squinted up at the windows of the office buildings, reflecting red in the late-afternoon sun. The carless street sat quietly in the buildings’ shadow, the rows of traffic lights spanning it ignored, unnecessary. The smell of frying grease from the Krystal’s next door, the only shop open on the whole street, pervaded everything. I sighed. I was home.

*

An hour later I stood on top of the airconditioning unit, hot air blowing up my pants cuff, trying to pry open the garage window. Far from showing up at the house and being absorbed into the bosom of my family, I’d arrived to find the house dark and locked up tight, the car missing from the garage. “Well, hell,” I thought as I walked through the stuffy, vacant house, “This is anti-climactic.”

For the first two days, I did almost nothing but sleep. I’d sleep all night, wake up in the late morning and find some food, and then go immediately back to bed and sleep for most of the rest of the day. In the evening, I’d sit in the lush backyard for an hour or so, smoking and watching the sun set behind the live oaks. Then I’d go back into the quiet house I’d grown up in and sleep for the rest of the night. I wondered from time to time where my parents had gone and when they’d come back, but only very vaguely. It didn’t really matter if they were there or not, I realized. All I ever planned to do again was sleep.

But on the third day, I woke up in the morning and began to think seriously about the situation. I was alone in the house. I was disoriented and confused by the disappearance of my family. I drifted through the darkened rooms like a shade, saying and thinking nothing. There was very little food in the house since my parents, wherever they were, had eaten everything up before they left on what was apparently a long trip. I ate a half a box of Wheat Thins, most of a jar of olives, a slice of American cheese. Soon, if I didn’t leave the house to get more, I would run out of food. The isolation, the empty house, the odd, aimless hours, the confusion, the scant supplies -- this was sort of like Moscow, I realized, only with cable.

My most urgent problem, though, was that I had run out of cigarettes. And, as I thought about how to solve this problem, I realized that here in Jacksonville in my present circumstances I was way less capable of acquiring the basics than I’d been in Moscow. I had no car, and in my suburban area you had to have a car to get anywhere. Though I had walked for miles each day in Moscow, sometimes through howling blizzards, the idea of walking anywhere in this American city seemed ridiculous. Walk? Where would I walk to? It simply wasn’t done.

Nonetheless, I needed cigarettes, so I ate a few spoonfuls of extra crunchy peanut butter and set off through my residential neighborhood. It was probably two miles to the convenience store on the highway that ran past our neighborhood, no distance at all. But there were no sidewalks, no other pedestrians. This town was not configured for walking. I trudged along the side of the busy, deadly highway, stepping over the trash people had thrown from their car windows and the carcasses of unlucky possums and raccoons. I could see the 7-11 shimmering in the distance, through a miasma of car fumes and July heat and road-kill stink. Finally, I made it. I bought my pack and walked back to the house.

Three days later, I had again run out of cigarettes. This time, I called the one person I knew who I thought might still be in town in spite of the fact that he was now grown up and free to go anywhere. My friend Mark Hilpert was both a fantastic photographer and a devout Pentecostal. He spent all of his time thinking about f-stops and the Rapture, and thus rarely made concrete future plans. He was one of my closest friends; I had no doubt he would help me. After a few rings, his slow, sleepy voice said, “Hello?”

“Mark!” I shouted into the phone, “It’s me! Robin! I’ve just come back from Russia.” There was a long silence while Mark waited for me to continue. “Um, do you think you could bring me a pack of cigarettes?”

*

Thirty minutes later I was sitting outside of an art gallery in 5 Points, waiting for Mark to disassemble the art installation he’d recently shown there. When I’d left, this area had been run-down and empty, with the storefronts either abandoned or inhabited by cheap Chinese restaurants and sad-looking drugstores. Now, as I sat in the relentless sun at a café table watching Mark wrestle two large ceramic pigs into the front seat of his car, I was perplexed. What had happened while I was gone? The decaying movie theater was now some kind of night club; a trendy boutique lived next to the liquor store that was now proudly touting its selection of artisanal wines. The intermittent bums that had dotted the streets the last time I was here had been replaced by teenagers with facial piercings and young professionals sporting strollers and cell phones. Well, I wondered as I smoked and sweated, how did I get here?

Finally, Mark had loaded up the last of his pigs and was ready to go. I squeezed myself into the backseat of his car and we putted through the suburbs towards my neighborhood. This time when we pulled up in front of my house, there was a car in the open garage; a car my parents were in the process of getting out of.

I watched from the backseat as my mother looked at Mark, whom she had known as long as I had, and registered who it was. She started across the lawn as I fought to disentangle myself from the art in the backseat, a look of surprise and alarm on her face. She was nearly to the car when I squeezed out of it and stood up. She stopped dead in her tracks and we stood looking at each other for a beat and a half. Then she bolted the rest of the way across the yard and grabbed me up in a huge, crushing hug.

“You’re home!” she sobbed.

I hugged her back, burying my face in her shoulder as I cried. After a minute, she stepped away from me and held me at arm’s length, her hands on my shoulders. We were both still crying and she looked at me expectantly, waiting for some kind of explanation.

But I had no answer for anything, only a question. I looked at her, wiping my eyes as Mark bustled around us, unloading and rearranging his car.

“What’s gonna happen next, mom? What’s gonna happen next?”

Home.

NOTES

55. And if this were a movie, I’d want Iggy Pop to play me. Loyal reader in Universal City, CA, perhaps you could make a few phone calls? Continue reading post.