The Year of Yes

  I held out my hand to the homeless man. I invited him to come and have a falafel with me. Yes, I was asking him out, but he’d spoken to me first, and I decided that counted.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “James.”

  “Maria. Nice to meet you.”

  “I’m only going with you because I’ve got nothing to do for an hour.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I’m a busy person.”

  “We’ll get a sandwich, and then you can go do whatever you want.”

  “I’m gonna let you in on a secret,” he said. “I have to play a gig, but we’re trying to keep the press from jumping on it.”

  That was the end of my fantasy that he was just sitting on the street because of bad luck in employment or, at worst, laziness. Vic had a particular dislike of young people with Starbucks grande begging cups and expensive tattoos. There was, apparently, a large population of hipster homeless in New Orleans, where she spent most of her summers, and they pissed her off. She had a menial job, she said, why couldn’t they? They were able-bodied. They were young. Come on, she said. Begging was easier than working, and maybe that was true, in warm weather, in a city where margaritas could be gotten to-go.

  That wasn’t really true in New York City. Giuliani had cracked down on the homeless shortly before I’d moved there, and the indigent had mostly been routed to the outer boroughs as part of a “personal responsibility” campaign. The prevailing attitude toward the homeless during my time there was contempt. Legitimate living in New York was so hard that people became furious when someone seemed to be getting by without doing their part. The city had become pretty unkind in that way, though certainly there were plenty who opposed Giuliani’s attitude.

  Before I’d moved to New York, it hadn’t really occurred to me to be contemptuous of homeless people. I hadn’t seen all that many, for one thing, and the ones I’d seen had so clearly had something wrong with them, that I felt much more like I wanted to give them sandwiches than like I wanted to kick them. For all the glories of New York City, for all the things it had done to open my heart, to make me stronger and more willing, living there had also made me harder than I had been when I’d arrived. My first week in New York, a woman with a baby had asked me for money and I’d given her everything I had. Maybe I’d been a sucker. Certainly, lots of people had told me so, and I’d been embarrassed and changed my ways. Now I had much more of a tendency to suspect homeless people of being scam artists. I’d become someone who practiced selective deafness. I wouldn’t have talked to this guy, for all my openness, for all my professed love for the city, if I hadn’t tripped over him.

  “Where’s your gig?”

  “Let’s just say you’ve heard of me.”

  But he wouldn’t tell me who he thought he was. He wanted me to guess and was definitely offended that I didn’t recognize him, although he eventually proclaimed it to be a relief.

  “Give you a hint,” he said, and then he sang the first few bars of something unmistakable. ‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky…

  “Really?” I said. Hendrix, huh? I don’t know what I’d hoped for. Hard luck, maybe. Just hard luck. But hard luck had side effects.

  “Well, fuck, I try to keep a low profile,” he said, “but when a bird like you walks by, you know, you gotta say something.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I mean, how do you ignore it, when someone might be exactly what you were always waiting for?”

  That pretty much said it all. I was once again ashamed of myself. My default was to think I knew everything about everything. The bottom line was that the world was still entirely surprising. That, of course, was what was wonderful about it. You could have a conversation with a homeless man sitting on a street corner in New York City, and it could change your life. For the better, I should clarify. The thought that a street corner prophet could teach me something vital was, despite my own unprivileged upbringing, somewhat foreign. It was funny. All my life had been spent reading about revelations, and a revelation was what I’d set out to have. I’d been going for a more acceptable revelation, that of falling in love. The revelations I was experiencing as a result of my Yes Year were not necessarily romantic ones, but they were preparing me nonetheless to live a better life. Every person that was wrong for me gave me a little more of the story of what a human being could be.

  The Rockstar put on a pair of sunglasses, minus one lens. He stuck out his arm. I took it. We walked down the street together, and the man who thought he was Jimi Hendrix let me sing backup. Rather, he let me sing the guitar part. Which I didn’t know. I just made a miscellany of high-pitched noises, and he thumped me on the back and grinned, and told me I’d learn.

  MAMOUN’S FALAFEL SHOP was in the West Village. I’d practically lived there my first year at NYU. It was a tiny little hole in the wall, with drippy falafels and friendly employees. We cut through Washington Square Park to get there.

  It was still hot out, and the park was full of everything the park was always full of: kids with backpacks, breakdancers with boomboxes and impervious skulls, waddling pigeons and the old men and women who fed them entire loaves of bread. Also the slew of dudes crouched down on the sides of the paths, whispering, “Smoke, smoke, weed, weed…” just in case you wanted to buy. According to my friends who’d fallen for it, the product was pretty much entirely oregano. Today, walking with the Rockstar, who was humming a disparate and hyper tune as we walked, I could see the usual coterie of weed guys looking at me with new eyes.

  One of them popped his head up as we passed, and said, “What the fuck, girl?”

  “I know,” I said, trying to preempt him. “I know.”

  Every time I’d walked through the park, since I’d moved to New York, this guy had given me the same offer as I passed him, shaking my head no to the dime bags, “Smoke, smoke, weed, weed, ME?”

  The only reason I hadn’t ended up going out with him since my yessing had begun was that I’d carefully avoided the park. Otherwise, I’d have had to say yes. I did feel that exceptions might be made for those who’d potentially get me arrested. Washington Square Park also boasted a revolving circuit of New York’s Finest, who let the park drug dealers alone, unless they caught them selling to NYU students. Hence the oregano. They figured most of us didn’t know the difference, and they were right.

  “You get down with him, but not me?” asked the drug dealer.

  The Rockstar stared at him for a moment. “You’re a loser,” he said. “You think a girl like this would go out with you?”

  The drug dealer stood up, aggravated. “You seen you lately, motherfucker?”

  I had to forcibly persuade the Rockstar to come with me.

  “Man,” he said, definitely reluctant to leave the confrontation. “I just want some peace and quiet. The press, man, they’re out of control. Leave a guy alone. Fuckers. I just want to walk with a girl somewhere, and they’re all up on me.”

  He flipped the dealer off as we walked away. Brilliant move. The drug dealer, though, didn’t want to attract the cops, and so he pursued us a few steps, bellowing, and then sat back down, the embodiment of affront.

  “They’re gone now,” I said. But his eyes were flickering around, paranoid. “They’re gone. Come on. We have to feed you so that you can sing, right?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked at me like I was the one that was irrational.

  “That’s what you said.”

  “Well, if I said it.”

  It took most of my strength to keep him beside me. And I wasn’t even sure why I wanted to. What experience did I think I had? How did I think that I could just give him my love, and that that would be enough to fix anything? I didn’t even love him, not for himself, anyway.

  Any love I had for this stranger had been allocated from my dad, from my Hitchhiker, from the variety of messed-up people in my history that I hadn’t managed to save. Although, it was occurring to me, this was probably the patte
rn for plenty of relationships. Pick up a stranger, apply your issues, and call it love. Maybe your issues would match up enough that, for a while, no one would notice that you’d never managed to get to know each other.

  Here was the reality: I’d tripped over the Rockstar while in a state of stress over my crazy father. The Rockstar was crazy. Voilà! I’d applied my savior complex to him, as swiftly as possible. My father, on the other hand, was left in Idaho, unsaved. Even then, I knew it wouldn’t end well. I’d known it wouldn’t end well since I was a small child, and my dad had walked me to the end of the driveway and said, with a rather glorious gesture encompassing everything around us, “One day, I’m going to set this all on fire.”

  “All what?” I’d asked, uneasy.

  “The trees, the house, the sagebrush, the dogs, and me. If you’re here, don’t come looking for me. Go down the road to the neighbors’ and get them to call the fire department.”

  Not exactly what a seven-year-old wants to hear her father say. The nearest neighbors were half a mile away. I imagined myself walking away from an inferno containing my dad. I imagined other things. My cats burning to death. My dad had already had a couple of incidents involving fire, once setting his workshop aflame, and once the entire sagebrush-covered area in front of the house. It had only been by miracle that he’d managed to put it out. We were seven miles out of town, and a fire truck would have done no good at all.

  “I don’t want you to burn yourself,” I’d said, trying to maintain calm.

  “Now, don’t cry. I’ll shoot myself, once I’ve set everything on fire. The heat won’t hurt me. Don’t worry, sweetie. Why are you so slow? I don’t know why you’re always so slow when it’s you that wanted to go for a walk.”

  I had planted my feet. He was going to set himself on fire? Fine. I was going to cry a flood of snot.

  “Want gorp?” Gorp was his patented traveler’s energy mix. It had both jerky and M&M’s in it. I’d never liked the fact that meat and candy cohabitated in the gorp Baggies, and so I typically busied myself with picking the M&M’s out, one by one, and hiding them in my pocket. This particular gorp Baggie was mostly jerky and cashews. Disgusting.

  “No,” I’d sniffled.

  “Suit yourself.”

  I’d promptly, purposefully tripped, twisted my ankle, and prevailed upon my father to carry me home on his back. If he was going to refuse to be a dad, that was just too bad. I’d force him. In subsequent years, after my parents had split up, my mom’s mantra in regard to my dad was: At least, no matter what, he really loves you.

  This was true. It was just that he loved me in his own peculiar, self-destructive way. If love was the most important thing, and if this was love, then I didn’t want it. Love did not mean that you could stop the fire. Love meant that you’d be the sucker with the vacuum, cleaning up the ashes. Maybe this was half of my problem with men. I didn’t really want to love them. And if they loved me, I got worried. I didn’t like the responsibility.

  Why was everything always about father issues? I’d been reading Electra in my Classic Drama class. Electra, and then Oedipus. Now everything seemed trite. I felt as though I had several complexes based on Greek tragedies, and it was all I could do not to burst into melodramatic verse. No, I didn’t want to date my dad. In fact, most of my idea of the kind of man I wanted was based on what my dad wasn’t. Certainly, I’d met girls who’d told me that their fathers were the perfect man. Bizarre, I thought, imagining my parents’ relationship. It hadn’t been until junior high, when I’d gone over to a classmate’s house, that I’d realized that other people’s parents actually had conversations. I’d had an idea that all marriages were like my parents’, massively ill-matched. Yes, my parents had loved each other, in a kind of blind, whammo, this-is-your-life kind of way, but they hadn’t liked each other very much. And then there was the crazy factor to consider. Once I’d discovered that people actually managed to be married and not destroy each other, I’d been dedicated to finding a relationship that was the exact opposite of my parents’. My mom had spent half my teenage years warning me away from men like my dad, wild-eyed, talented to no purpose, and rebellious.

  What was the Rockstar? Worse than my dad, actually, considering my dad hadn’t been obviously crazy when my parents had met. He hadn’t become externally crazy until after she’d had three children with him. What was I doing with this guy? The guys at the falafel place wondered the same thing.

  “You are okay?” asked one of them, about sixteen, aproned, and heavily accented. “You need help?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You want to be with him?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.” And I did. That was the thing that surprised me.

  I bought him his falafel. He waited for me to open mine before he even looked at his. We sat down together, at one of Mamoun’s tiny tables, and ate from our drippy tin foil packets until nothing was left. We sipped lemon-tinged water through our straws. The Rockstar looked at me across the table. He smiled, like a kid waking up from a pleasant dream, in a pleasant bed, onto a pleasant day. He smiled like someone who’d never had a nightmare.

  THE ROCKSTAR HAD a lot of belongings, mostly contained in an army-issue olive drab backpack. Some of the belongings were wadded-up newspapers. He had, for some reason, a drink-and-wet doll, which he brought out for only a moment before hiding her away again. He had a Bible. Most important, he had a record album. Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? No record. Just the sleeve. He showed it to me proudly.

  “Not bad, right?” he said.

  “That’s a great record.”

  “I know, I made it.”

  He vacillated between Hendrix and himself, whoever himself actually was. He’d grown up in Seattle. That much seemed to apply to both him and his rockstar alter ego. Then it diverged. He’d gone to Alaska after high school and started working in a cannery, which, according to him, had been hell on earth. Somewhere in there, “the bastards” had come and found him, and he’d gotten halfway home, then hopped a freight train in Vancouver and taken it all the way to somewhere near Toronto. He’d walked from there, and come across at Niagara Falls, still American, if a little bit lost. Hitchhiked to New York City, because he had a friend, but the friend had disappeared, and now, here he was, eating falafel with me on a sunny day in September, and things were good. Even as I tried to ask questions, he said something about Bob Dylan—not a normal something, but a “when Bob was over at my house” something. And then he started to sing.

  Somewhere a queen is weeping

  Somewhere a king has no wife

  And the wind, it cries, Mary.

  “No, no, no, wait,” he said. “The wind, it cries, Maria.” He sang it a couple more times. “That’s better,” he said. “Maybe I’ll change the song.”

  It wasn’t all so poetic. He also gave me a long monologue about the size of his cock, and didn’t look even mildly ashamed of himself.

  “You ever been with a black man?” he asked loudly, very loudly, in the middle of MacDougal Street. “Because, you don’t look like you know about that. You don’t look like you know about the size. You’re probably a virgin, right? Virgin white girl. Grew up with a million dollars, and never met a black guy, right? Never fucked one, right? I get what you are, right?”

  A few other people checked into our conversation, apparently to see what my opinions were on the subject. I could see heads turning.

  “Yes,” I said. “I have. So you don’t really need to tell me about it, okay?”

  “Whoo! Don’t tell your mama!” he said.

  “I need to go,” I said, trying to be gentle, but then he turned and looked me straight in the eyes.

  “Hey,” he said. “I don’t mean to offend you. Maybe I’m a little rough.”

  “Maybe you are,” I said, “but I’ve probably seen worse than you. Just cool it on the cock stuff, okay?”

  “No problem, Maria, Maria, Miss Madame Maria. Want me to sing your song again??
??

  We sat on a bench, and looked out over the fall. Leaves still green, fountain still running. Things not too bad, though Bob Dylan wasn’t coming to my house.

  “What do you think, Jimi?” I said.

  “About what specifically? I think lots about lots.”

  “Living happily. Like, are you happy?” Even though he was living on the street, even though he thought he was Hendrix, and even though Hendrix was dead, I meant. Even though he was out of his mind, I hoped that maybe being out of your mind didn’t feel too awful. Maybe he didn’t even know he was gone.

  “Happy is relative. Happy, I’ll tell you exactly one thing about happy.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Happy’s a choice. You can be fucked-up over the shit the bastards do to you, or you can decide to get over it.”

  He didn’t look like he’d gotten over it, but what did I know? Maybe he would have been much worse without his happiness policy. Maybe he wouldn’t have survived.

  “All you can do is give out your love,” said the Rockstar. “And hope that somebody can take it for what it is.”

  I looked at him. I smiled, but he was gone again, gone as fast as he’d put his finger on exactly what my question was.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you know shit you don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Fuck that,” he said.