I went back the next day. And the next. And the next. I started going every day. It was at Robby’s, where I decided that I needed to find a new job. Cliché as fuck, but it was there where I finally admitted that I needed to find myself. Or if not find myself, at least acknowledge myself. Accept myself. My spiritual core was perhaps more instantly satiated at Robby’s than any other place, and it made me want to feel like I did there, everywhere. I think it was the view of the water. Maybe something was in the coffee. Or in the souls of the spirits who called Robby’s home. I didn’t care what it was. I just wanted more of that foreign feeling.
At Robby’s, I first understood the difference between fitting in and belonging. Fitting in requires giving up some small piece of yourself to become similar enough to others so as not to stand out. Over time, if you fitted in too much, or tried too hard to fit in, you lost yourself. You. Lost. Your. Self. You gave up so much of yourself that you became reflections of others or who they wanted you to be. Or worse, what you thought they wanted you to be. You no longer actually reflected yourself. I once read a book that appropriately described the ability to fit in seamlessly as a curse. I cried in my car when I read that.
But belonging was altogether different. It was magical. Belonging meant finding the people who accepted you. The places that accepted you. Wholly. You could be weird, and that was fine. It was wonderful. Nobody stared. Nobody judged. Better yet, they celebrated. Belonging meant that your quirks were just that and nothing more. I belonged at Robby’s. Just like I did at The Gym. It had taken some time, but I was finally starting to feel like I could belong in these places and, more importantly, on this planet.
I never had a kid, but if I did, I would have wanted to leave him or her with this lesson—one of my “Dad always said” lessons. Go where you belong. Period. Don’t waste time trying to fit in. It’s way too painful in the long run.
Robby’s wasn’t a big place. There were maybe twenty or thirty mismatched chairs scattered about. Three old, ripped couches that would have been at home in a dorm or frat house were pushed together in a back corner. Tables were set wherever they were. There was no plan there. Nothing was permanently set anywhere. You grabbed a seat, you grabbed your table, and you moved it wherever you wanted it. Still, I always sat in the same spot on one of the couches. It was crusty brown leather. Ripped like an old convertible Mustang left out in the sun for too long. Duct tape “fixed” the bigger rips, but most of the scars in the couch were left exposed and each told a story.
The small tear on the round, oversized armrest where I sat was my doing. When I first discovered Robby’s, I worked in finance. Every morning was spent trying to decompress from the previous day and simultaneously will myself to start the current one. I hated my job. I hated my life. And, after receiving yet another overtly passive-aggressive email from my Teflon boss, I unconsciously took it out on the couch with a butter knife. I was cutting without even realizing it. I hated myself.
Coffee service was self-serve, and payment was the honor system. If you wanted more than just the coffee, Val would take your order and Mo would cook it for you. Together for more than fifty years, Mo and Val met when they were just in junior high. In their early sixties, they took advantage of their right to marry as soon as it became legal in California.
Mo and Val’s wedding was held at Robby’s, and it was maybe the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. It was also where I met Jess. Or thought I did. Jess seemed vaguely familiar when I saw her at the wedding, but I didn’t know why, when, or from where. All I knew was that I was done. Transfixed. While the other guests chatted with one another, I just watched her float about the room. Giving people hugs. Giving people gentle kisses on their cheeks. Every move she made seemed to have a kind of grace to it. She was completely present with every person she approached. As though it were only the two of them in the room. She’d take a hand or two in hers, lock eyes, and the rest of the room disappeared. She was hypnotizing. It was as if I were watching a play, and she was always in the spotlight. Only the spotlight was the sun. I couldn’t look away.
Then, I lost contact for a split second. As I strained to find her, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Looking for me?” I tried to stammer a lame response, but I was caught, and, for once, I just relaxed my shoulders and, with a kind of vulnerability that I hadn’t known before, admitted that I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I told her that I was sure we had met, and I was desperate to figure it out. She laughed and said, “I love that.” She was interested and interesting as she peppered me with questions in our quest to discover our origins. She was compassionate and empathetic. A helper and healer. I suspected my eyes told a story of much pain.
She told me that she was an artist working primarily in mixed media. Colored paper. In a previous life, she had tried her hand at marketing, working for the big tech companies, but it just wasn’t the way her soul wanted to go. She said that one day, she just quit and never looked back.
“How did you do that?” I genuinely wanted to know, as it was the very action I had wanted to take for years. Forever. She explained how she had learned to trust herself by jumping out of an airplane. I’ll never forget this. She said, “I needed to overcome my fear of heights to overcome my fear of life.” Whoa.
Jumping out of an airplane never had any pull for me, but overcoming fear of life certainly did. I was just about to tell her this when I figured out who she was, and I just blurted it out: “Oh, my God! I know who you are!”
A couple of years earlier, in that same soul-sucking job that led me to first-degree assault on the couch, a woman was walking the company halls with a kind of insane energy. I could feel it. She had a tape measure and was making pencil marks all over the walls. Wearing jeans and a flowy top, her hair bounced with every step. As this mystery artist glided past my office, I nodded and offered a comment meant to be charming, but I was a bumbling teenage boy on the inside. I’m sure whatever I said sounded like gibberish. I asked my assistant who the woman was with the hope that she was a new hire.
“She’s hanging art,” was all I got back. My co-worker never even looked up from her computer.
I told my assistant, “I could marry her.” I meant it, but she just snickered and made a snide comment about my inability to get married. Then the artist was gone.
I was nearly in tears. I had no idea where they were coming from. She looked straight into my soul, took my hand, and never let go. I took a deep breath. Maybe because we met before or because we both agreed that we felt like we had known each other forever, I asked her to move in with me before the night was over. It’s silly to even think about doing something like that. It was perhaps made sillier by the fact that she said, “Yes.” What did she know that I didn’t?
Jess taught me to speak up for myself. She taught me that being me was okay. She taught me that the mistakes I had made and the hurt I had caused needn’t always weigh on me. “The past is the past,” she said. She didn’t want or need the masks—yet understood when I hurried to put them on.
I loved being lost in time. A nonlinear look at life that, from this view, looked like art. An abstract painting. Lost in a daydream about Jess, inside a daydream about Robby’s and my perfect day.
A car honked and startled me back into “real-time.” I jumped. Like being woken up during one of those super real dreams. You’re just about to get a promotion, score the winning shot, fuck the girl of your dreams, or in my case, start writing what will become a bestseller, and . . . the alarm goes off. You wake up sad. Damn, it was just a dream. Even though you could have sworn it was real. That horn was as much a bummer as any 6:00 a.m. buzzer. I wasn’t at Robby’s. I wasn’t with Jess. I wasn’t writing. I was across the street from The Gym. And I was dead. Still dead.
I saw my friends walking into The Gym. One after another. Steve. Adam. Scotty. Jason. Kevin. Rob. Joe. John. Sandy. Andy. Max. Dan. Jacob. Chris. Doug. Andrew. Pete. The Pauls. Kareem. And Timmy. One thing I had become particularly proud of was the circle of men with whom I surrounded myself. Solid men. Vulnerable men. Funny, off-color men. None of them were afraid of their feelings, and none were afraid of toeing the line of political correctness. They were all fucking smart; they were all fucking offensive; they were all fucking beautiful. And now they were all strolling into The Gym, our dive bar straight out of central casting. Old TVs lined the walls. The few of them that worked framed the latest Warriors win. The rest needed repairs—for the past decade.
An old-school neon sign let passersby know that the place was called “Jimmy’s.” Named for its original owner, Jimmy’s was more Vegas than Vegas. What happened in Vegas never really stayed in Vegas. What happened in Jimmy’s was locked in the vault. Just as every local bar earns a nickname over time, Jimmy’s became known as “The Jim,” which gave way to “The Gym.” Someone had stolen a poster from an actual gym about the importance of staying hydrated, and it was proudly displayed behind the bar.
The long bar stretching from the front wall to the back was original, and anyone who ever spent more than one night in this place knew better than to place bare skin against it. It was a kind of sticky that defied definition. It could tear flesh. It was a science experiment. Coasters weren’t meant to protect the bar. They protected the pint glasses. The men’s room didn’t have a door, and the women’s room wasn’t necessary as no woman dared use it. The felt on the pool table was ripped; the neon flickered in the window; the drinks were stiff; and the beer was cold. The Gym was a dive. A dive’s dive. Our dive. The Gym was fucking perfect.
I watched from my corner spot in the bar as Timmy ordered a round of Jager shots. Timmy asked the bartender, dressed in her regular uniform of a perfectly plain white T-shirt and perfectly plain jeans that perfectly showed off her not-so-plain, perfectly curvy body, if she believed in fate. One word, “Jendoyoubelieveinfate?” Although Timmy lived several hundred miles away, we had spent enough time there together that he was considered a regular. He had never once seriously hit on Jen, and she wanted to make sure this wasn’t going to be the first time. She knew this evening could be different. She knew he was in pain. Pouring his shots, she responded with care: “I do, honey.” Always “honey.” Everyone was “honey.”
Laughing, Timmy found his way back to our group of friends. All of my guys around a table covered by pints of beer, glasses of whiskey, and shots of tequila filled with varying levels of optimism and pessimism. One by one, they raised their glasses to me.
“To Skippy!”
“To Bernie!”
“To Bernsie!”
One by one. All my nicknames were called out.
I smiled from the corner as each took turns roasting me and sharing stories that were never meant to be shared. And most involving one sexual conquest or another. Doug told of my extensive video research project with his just-barely-of-age cousins at his first wedding. “In his defense,” giving me the out, “they both looked twenty-five.” Every story was followed by ceremonial hoots, high fives . . . and awkward silence. There was always awkward silence. Until the next guy started: “Remember the time . . . ?”
Then, the stories ran out. There was only silence. Nobody wanted to leave. Leaving meant saying goodbye. Truly saying goodbye. The days between the shock of a death and the service were difficult, but there was single-minded focus during this time. Mourning became all-encompassing. Real life was put on hold. Time stood still. No distractions. There were phone calls. Support. Arrangements to be made. In a way, it was easier, as there was only one thing to do: grieve. But following the service began a time when mourning was forced to integrate with the reality of a new normal.
Everything was the same, and it was completely different. This was so much harder. People were expected to be productive, but the pain hadn’t lessened. It was all still so fresh. Too fresh. Too soon. And they were supposed to move on?
Impossible.
If they remained in The Gym, they could remain in denial. Outside, reality was waiting for each of them, slowly pacing back and forth in front of the doors and probably chain-smoking a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. It wouldn’t rest until they were all gone. One by one, on their way out, they stepped to the bar and asked for a shot glass filled with water. It took a while, but they learned to honor the fact that I had stopped drinking. Like finding Temple Beth Am, it was just something I needed to do.
Truth is, before I stopped drinking, I felt totally out of control. Anxious. The world felt like noise. Billboards weren’t two-dimensional; they screamed at me. I could hear them. I felt like Jim Carrey when he played God in Bruce Almighty. I needed to quiet my mind. I needed to do something that felt drastic. Something bigger than journaling every day. Something that required real sacrifice. Bigger than eating well or exercising. I started meditating and then settled on not drinking. That’s the thing about finding any kind of true inner peace—if you’re not being 100 percent honest with yourself, you’ll simply just find the next thing and the next thing to mask the real pain. Not drinking wasn’t going to fix me, but I was convinced that I could curb my anxiety that way. My friends feigned being pissed. But these guys were the best, and when they understood that I wasn’t fucking around, they protected me from myself. On occasion, when I’d try to order a shot of bourbon, they’d take it away. I fucking loved these guys. I was going to miss them. I wondered how long they would miss me.
One by one, they ordered their water shots and placed them in front of my corner seat. And left.
“Goodbye, Skip. Love you, brother.”
“Peace, Bernie.”
“Much love, Bernsie.”
“Bern on.”
And finally, Timmy. For the second time that day, he called me by my name.
