A Little Background

I was living in Iowa City, where I broke up with my girlfriend. We were still friends, but no longer living together. I had to move into a crummy little place on the outskirts of town, near the highway, that looked like a cheap motel but rented by the month. I worked at a telemarketing company part-time and made barely enough money to get by—well, not at all enough. I was borrowing more and more money on credit cards. This was the start of the time when the more you borrowed on your credit card, the more credit they would give you and the more new credit cards they would offer. And indeed, the telemarketing place where I worked was in that very business, soliciting for large banks, offering credit cards to people over the phone. I realized then, seeing who got credit cards and who didn't, that all you had to do is tell them you were making $40,000 a year and they would approve your new card.

So I was kind of starting a new life there, though what I suppose I should have done was move out of town. But I wasn’t ready to move yet. I was drinking a lot and felt kind of lost. The summer was the hottest one I can remember, along with heavy rains. Every morning it would rain and then stop and the sun would come out and it would quickly heat up, causing steam to rise from the wet ground. There always seemed to be a haze in the air, and that, together with my heavy drinking, gave the time a soft-focus, magical quality, or sometimes a nightmarish quality, depending on the cards dealt to me that day by my advancing alcoholism. A beautiful, mystical world filled with love and hope and possibility on Monday, followed by a crushing depressing, bugs crawling on my skin, the roots of my hair growing inward, choking my brain, on Tuesday.

The weeks were long and short, but heat and the rain seemed eternal. By Friday or Saturday I would allow myself a breakfast at the Hamburg Inn #2 where I had a crush on a waitress, I’m embarrassed to say now. That is a world that I've long since left behind, the having a crush on the waitress at the diner world. Or maybe that’s what I’m embarrassed to admit—being over that. OR sad to realize. It’s over, it’s all over. But, really, when I look back on that time, I wonder how much of that I really felt, and how much was a lie I was telling myself. I was manufacturing a crush to fill a void. That was all I was doing. Maybe it’s not so different than the fantasy about the movie star. You don’t REALLY think anything will come of it, or that there is a chance in HELL of even having a cup of coffee or even a genuine exchange of niceties with the person. Of course I knew this at the time, as well, right? I knew that it wasn’t a real crush, it was a fictional world, myself as a story—not necessarily to make a happy ending—more, just as a desperate attempt to imagine a world worth living in. But I knew the difference, right? Of course I knew the difference between my manufactured crush and the real world of love and obsession. I may not have known if the bugs crawling on my skin were real or not, but I think I knew the difference between fantasy and real love.

Okay, then came the event that really shaped my life during this time period. I was trying to cut down on drinking, and so I started running, even though the heat was ungodly. I measured out some courses through the suburbs and tried to get out early, just after the rain stopped, for a run. It was on one of these early morning, nearly delirious from a hangover and the heat, runs—through the kind of magical, misty morning suburbs—from the top of a hill with a romantic, idealized vista—that I saw the pool.