Best Laid Plans

Essays

Sep 24

Some mornings you wake up expecting to absolutely crush the day. Then your kid is sick, your dog barfs on your shoe, your cat gets out, and your boss reminds you that you said you would be in early today, and early is in forty minutes, so you throw an Eggo into the toaster, and it shorts out. But your partner comes in, handles all the home psychosis, and lets you rush out the door so you don’t get fired. You get to the corner and realize you forgot your wallet, so you try a risky U-turn to hurry up. You hit the curb, pop your tire, and have to call a tow truck. Also, your phone didn’t charge and is now out of battery.

I triple-checked that a girl in middle school would say yes if I asked her out. I went upstairs in my friend Bill Frank’s house and had Jason Gonor on the line, too, while I made the call to Kate. Kate and I are still friends to this day, notwithstanding what I am about to tell you. I mumble-mouthed my way through a parent to get to Kate. This is what we used to have to do in the old days when we called someone’s house. I asked. She said no. There was silence on the carpeted floors that reverberated off of Bill’s waterbed.

I knew it was supposed to rain, and I had to drive back to Westchester from the Hamptons on a summer Sunday in the late-80s. This wasn’t the time to drive back in those days. It was a catastrophic deluge of cats and dogs. Dark, windy, blustery, and foreboding, and I had a cat in a cat carrier in my car. She shat in the crate in the first hour, and it was bumper-to-bumper for five hours, with aggravated meows hammering my eardrums like a construction worker with a jackhammer at 6:13 AM on a Sunday.

I stayed up late working one night, then shuffled upstairs and into my bedroom around 2 AM. I had a low bed at the time. I went to get into bed for a short night’s sleep, and my back went out to an extreme I didn’t think existed. I was sure I was paralyzed as the hot water radiated through my spine like a Zotz candy in your mouth with a gulp of Coke. We had to call 911. It took them 65 minutes to arrive, and when they did, it was a makeshift crew of volunteers who had to put me on a board and get me down my narrow stairs and into an ambulance. They almost dropped me on the stairs. I was in the hospital for 40 hours.

I planned to take my wife to our favorite sushi place for her birthday. I wanted it to be a surprise. When she saw we were almost there, she was disappointed that I was taking her to the same place we always go. There was nothing planned when we got there. I was, in fact, taking her to the same place we always go to. It was ridiculously unspecial, even though I told myself that I was so busy at work I didn’t have time to really think of anything. We got in an argument and went home without eating. I really didn’t understand women, or people, at that time.

I used to drop water balloons out of my second-floor window at 136 Hicks Street in Brooklyn Heights. There was a door buzzer, so you couldn’t get inside the apartment building without a key or a buzz. I was a smart kid. I waited for people to come into view, then dropped the balloon and tried to hit them on the head with it. Sometimes, I went out of the larger living room window, and sometimes out of the small bathroom window when I wanted more of a challenge. I was always home alone. People would yell, and I would shimmy back from the window and crouch next to the radiator. I know this was a bad thing to do, and that I ruined people’s days, but I don’t think I have ever laughed harder as an only child, all alone in an apartment. No one ever found me out.