I could be that guy, you know. I could be that guy who goes about his business quietly, without distinction, without attracting attention, the guy of whom the reporter writes later (if the guy gets lucky and gets a reporter later) that “…We’ll never know just what happened. But something became the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Maybe later, after the initial revulsion has worn off, but before the general public has forgotten about him entirely and moved on to its next curiosity, somebody sells pieces of the guy’s life, and one or two of those pieces become a reality movie of the week, and the writer and director fashion those pieces into a design made of little things that pile on, one on top of another, until they become a chain of inevitability. We see the guy look behind the mirror and into the medicine cabinet one morning and say to himself, “That hydrogen peroxide looks good enough to drink,” and so he offers it to his bride for breakfast, on ice, with her poached eggs. And it isn’t any one thing that gets him. It’s the piling on: the “Oh, by the way, could you just …” that leaps on top of “I’ll just have a bite of yours.” The end comes when he sees that nothing is just, and that he has nowhere to hide, nobody to protect him, and no home.
Home is where they get his jokes, whether or not they actually laugh at them. Home is where he can relax, be stupid, burp and fart and not have to apologize. Home is where he can feel safe about it all, where he’s not on guard all the time about his illusions. The end comes when he is confronted with the Truth in upper case, that home itself is an illusion, and once we are confronted with the Truth in upper case, what else is there? Some of us freeze, paralyzed for the rest of our lives, looking at it like a field mouse facing a cobra. Some of us are lucky enough or medicated enough to forget about it intermittently. Some of us have to walk away from it quickly and forever. Some of us have to try to keep moving in the face of it.
I could be that guy. I could be the guy who is the barometer for human suffering over insignificant truth, the lower-case truth composed of events that the thoughtlessly superior call ‘bumps in the road’ or ‘reality checks.’ Instead of a crash test dummy, I’d be the pothole dummy, the gauge for the amount of shaking someone can take before his buttons pop and his guts fall out. Maybe somebody, the writer, perhaps, before the producer gets hold of the script, would try to make an honest list of the little things, the miniscule things, that made the guy finally fall apart. And they wouldn’t add up. They couldn’t possibly add up, except with the help of a good director, and even with sympathetic guidance, sensitive camera angles, and clever editing, they would amount to “Too bad, Jack.” At worst, they would look like “The final chickenshit act of a chickenshit life.” And if those aren’t two compelling reasons NOT to be that guy, I don’t know what are. So I won’t be that guy, although it may itself be chickenshit to be moved in your actions by the opinions of others (which is likely to be one of the weaknesses that gets one into these positions to begin with). But I could be that guy.
I could be that guy. I could be the guy who gets so scared of everything that is possible (probable?) in this fatal world that I can’t force myself to leave the house, that I keep my windows covered with blankets and tin foil, horror rising dark and acid from my belly when I consider a ride in the car, hell, when I consider walking to the car. I could be that guy. I could be the guy who can’t bear it, who can’t bear any of it, who wants to – no – must keep it all out. I could be the guy who can’t order Chinese over the phone, the guy who can’t answer the phone at all. I could be the guy who hides in the bathroom and holds his breath when he hears a knock at the door. I could be that guy. But that, too, would be chickenshit. It wouldn’t be fair not to try, at least, to take the worst the world has to offer in hopes of becoming eligible for its best.
And I could be the guy who forgets who he is and becomes the hero in some mad cartoon, anticipating and savoring each exploding frame, accumulating deadly props until the day he introduces his character to an innocent, undeserving public. I could be that guy, retching out a spot of mustard that has festered undigested in my psyche until its shape becomes the shape of my shadow, and I become its reflection. I could be that guy.
But for today, for right now, be thankful. Thank your lucky stars that I’m not that guy. No one knows how lucky they are that I’m not that guy. But let me remind you that you don’t know me. To you, I’m a series of symbols, a design made of arcane marks that become a chain on a page that you interpret as is your training or your mood at the moment. So be careful. Be careful the next time you consider being a justified jackass – the next time you push someone just that little bit farther to get that inconsequential thing that you want. You could want that thing, but it could be that moment, and I could be that guy.