The Senile Teenager Blues The Senile Teenager Blues Theres ...
There's a picture of me from early summer 1990: in my mid-20s, on Sedgwick Ave., a month after quitting a dead-end advertising job. I was in the best shape of my life, running four miles through the Bronx every morning and biking 10 miles on afternoons when there wasn't any temp work, which was most. My last big purchase before quitting was a hulking chin-up/dip contraption that I'd use for an hour every other day in my cramped room.
If I was going broke, I was going to look good doing it.
And I do look good in that picture? happy, fit, tan. In reality, I was going through teenage senility. A lot of people in their mid-20s complain about feeling "old." They are, compared to a teenager. What they mean is their "outlaw" teenage worldview no longer applies, and their prescribed, rigid time periods and stances are vanishing. The 100-yard dashes of youth fade into the marathon of adulthood.
So I began that summer running like hell. At that job, I'd been plagued by a severe case of blue balls for a snotty art director with daddy issues and too many Cure cassettes in her collection. I should have known things were off when I started teasing her like a fourth grader, and she liked it. She was "seeing someone else" but didn't mind dangling me along while I made every mistake possible. This woman was my Waterloo, referring more to the ABBA song than Napoleon's defeat?that one relationship in which the white flag of sanity went up early in the war and bombs of self-respect kept dropping.
There were many important things I didn't know about life then, and one of them involved drinking fountains in Central Park. I now picture homeless people using them as bidets. Back when I was naive, I went on a bike ride in tar-melting heat, ending in the park, where I gorged myself at a fountain. I came home to find that the ad agency wanted me back for a two-week project. The prospect of making money and seeing my dream girl again elated me, even though she had taken to sighing, "What do you want" whenever I called. Without irony.
I'd never projectile vomited before?doing so that night was a shock. The Exorcist is accurate?I hit the mirror on my dresser five feet away. This was Technicolor screaming, the onset of a mild case of dysentery that would dog me for two weeks. I developed chronic nostalgia for solid, silent bowel movements. The ones I had sounded like drag races and finished faster. Knowing that anything I ate would make a Sherman's March for either exit, I limited my diet to water and yogurt.
Like Captain Cook returning to Hawaii only to have angry natives kick him in the nuts, I received a chilly welcome from the dream girl. It made for a miserable two weeks, so I was relieved to eventually get back to my exercise regimen and unreturned phone calls to temp counselors, whose typical response was, "Bill Who?"
One of them with the bearing of a smarmy British headmaster took a shine to me. About twice a week, I'd get crank calls from a mystery man offering oral sex. It was unmistakably the counselor employing a baritone register and a sock over the mouthpiece. I could see him in his office, door closed, motionless, gazing out his window. It was strangely reassuring to know that someone out there wanted to blow me.
The summer rolled by in a haze of fitness and impending doom. In July, I was riding my bike on my normal route, along Broadway in northern Manhattan, down to the hospital in the 160s, where I'd switch over to Riverside Dr., riding it to the end at 72nd St. By this point, I was pretty good on the bike and entertaining thoughts of ditching office work for bicycle messengering, a la Kevin Bacon in Quicksilver.
It was late afternoon, and I decided to take Broadway all the way down. At the intersection at 125th, I broke into a sprint to beat a yellow light, only to have a gypsy cab pull out in front of me. That side of Broadway tends to be black with oil drippings from the bus stop, and someone had thrown sand over the oil spots. While this may be great for pedestrians, it's lethal for a bicyclist braking at high speed.
I remember the bike sliding out from under me and my right knee bashing the street. I could hear tires screeching. My right leg slid up behind me so that my ankle touched my shoulder. The back of my head slammed the street, and everything went black.
I came around on the southwest corner of the intersection. A bunch of Puerto Rican kids on the sidewalk were laughing, and a black man was standing over me, asking if I was okay. He explained that he had seen me go down, had stopped his car and pulled me to safety. Life was going on around us, save that I was crouching there with my bike, which looked unscathed. I thanked the man for helping me. He simply nodded, got back in his car and left, as did the kids.
I could see why they were laughing. Because I had slid on oil-coated road, the right half of my body was black, which was better than skinned. My shorts were torn up to my ass cheek. My tank top was caked with sand and oil. I felt a small knot on the back of my head. I stood up and felt a stiffness in my right knee, but I could walk. I got on my bike and pedaled back home. It was rough going, but I made it.
The next day, I got up and fell down. My right knee was purple and swollen to the size of a grapefruit. I'd be doing nothing more than hobbling in the coming days, but since there was no work coming in, this wasn't a grave issue. It allowed me more quality time to dwell on my dwindling bank account and doomed romance.
A week later, I had my health back. The knock-out punch came from the dream girl when I phoned her at work in August. She threatened to "leave me," so I offered the "you can't fire me, I quit" speech and hung up on her. It was over... until she phoned me on the night we bombed Iraq the following January. I came back, but round two found me distancing myself from her after a few months, which made her pursue me. We had another phone call the following summer, in which I simply called it off for good, in full recognition that we had both been assholes and should just let it go.
That fall, I stumbled into a freelance ad agency assignment that turned into steady work for the next few years. I look back on that summer not so much as a learning experience, but as a sign that the gods were trying to tell me something, and it sounded suspiciously like, "Fuck you."