The Blindness of Strangers
Lately, I can’t drive on the highway.
I grew up in a sprawling metropolis of interconnected suburbs, which meant daily trips on the freeway. At sixteen, my driver’s test included a stretch on a gridlocked section of Interstate 5 in central California. The I-5 spans from Mexico to Canada, and becomes an eighty-mile-an-hour free-for-all when you’re in a major city. Driving on the highway has always been no big deal.
I live in metropolitan New Orleans now, where a trip to the suburbs by highway used to be a necessary evil—to be embarked upon begrudgingly, not fearfully. Before The Storm I was able to get most of what I needed within a square mile radius. But, if there was some guilty-pleasure of a popcorn movie playing on the west bank of the Mississippi, or I really needed to go to Target, I would make the trek. And, if I needed something really special that you can’t get in New Orleans, I’d save up and fly somewhere that has beaches and mountains, or good experimental theater and nightly literary events. But, sometimes, lately--since The Storm--there are no onions at the French Quarter A&P.
* *
The first time Robert [1] walked into the bar he looked like your average, lonely, middle-aged, heavy drinker. I was surprised I had never seen him before. He looked so at home there, on the other side of the bar. We chatted, it being the slow, opening hour. Our conversation felt like it was reconvening, not like it had just begun. He told me that he had been moved by a production company to New Orleans to be a supervising, make-up artist in the newly booming, local, film industry, and that he had been doing hair and makeup for about thirty-five years. He said that he had been discovered in LA around thirty years ago. He described wandering New York City in the seventies, having three-martini lunches with famous people, and all kinds of other fabulousness. Robert quickly endeared himself to me, as well as to the other young women who work at the bar. He called us The Quinteta (there are five of us) with The Trifecta (beauty, brains and sex appeal).
Over the course of our late afternoon chats, Robert got to know some things about me. He learned that I have a degree in Film and Digital Media production. And, although I had told him that I had forsaken a possible career in the film industry for the solitary pleasures of writing, he insisted he could get me sort of cushy internship. We swapped numbers. And, like most plans made in bars, they never materialized.
* *
The highway has always been second nature to me. I go on autopilot. I used to give it as much thought as I gave brushing my teeth, or nuking a Lean Cuisine. I’m one of those people who can “do it.” If someone says, “I don’t know how” or “I’m scared,” I am the type of person who steps in and seizes the reins and says, “Here. Let me.” As much as I like to think of myself as a bon vivant, I have the undeniable, genetic memory of the wide-hipped, ruddy-faced, capable, farmer stock from which I descend. At times I have envied the more ethereal, less capable people around me. I have known so many self-defined artists who parade their inabilities like so many badges. I’ve known people who claim they can’t go to grocery stores, are physically incapable of cleaning their own homes, and who go into hysterics at the sight of bills or tax forms. And to all this I have rolled my eyes. As much as I have lamented it, I am someone who is hopelessly capable. I have an innate ability to budget, prioritize, navigate and plan.
* *
One day, maybe a couple of months after we met, Robert appeared in the bar with a huge, gauze patch taped over one eye. His other eye looked goopy and strangely reflective, like a cat’s eyes at night. It was later than he usually came in, and I was busy, so I couldn’t really stop and have a conversation with him. For a moment, I thought I had been wrong about him. Maybe he was not as stable as I had presumed. The patch over his eye reminded me of so many other bar regulars, who, especially lately—since The Storm—would intermittently show up with black eyes, crutches and other symptoms of the hazards that come with their preferred method of coping. Quickly though, I realized that he hadn’t been in a fight or an accident. He must have had some sort of procedure. Oh, right, I thought. Lasik surgery. I remembered what that looks like. I’d had a friend have the procedure and I recalled that, at first, the eyes look strange.
* *
It was early the other day—“early” to me meaning: I had only been up for an hour. I was on the highway, heading for a New Orleans suburb, hoping to get an oil change at a roadside station I had spied the day before. I used to go to another oil change place—a place at which you don’t have to leave your car while it’s being serviced— but it had been flooded out of existence. I was on the freeway, had just left Orleans Parish and was entering the suburbs, when I somehow left my body and all rational apprehension of time, space and proportion.
* *
I thought about Robert. For years, I have met hundreds of people a month, and had meaningful conversations with them. I imagine, for most people, having casual, but highly personal, interactions with total strangers is a relatively unique experience. But, to me, it’s all part of the job, and I rarely take it home. Coming home and actually mentioning something about a customer to my boyfriend is, well, rare. I liked Robert, but what really made me think about him so frequently was something else: I envied him. Robert was someone who had decided to do what he loved—which was to make women look gorgeous—and just did it. Then, one day someone came along and plucked him out of obscurity, and he went from anonymous hairdresser to international jet setter. Over the last twelve years that I have spent serving people—while all the time pursuing a creative life—I have daydreamt that, one day, some glamorous person would walk through the door and ask me “What are you doing here? Come with me, your destiny awaits.” This happens to other people. This had happened to Robert. And, for a brief moment, I thought that, perhaps, Robert was the person who would pluck me out of obscurity. But, I never called, and he never called. And, when he came into the bar again, we resumed our usual conversation. Sighing, I poured him a beer, and myself, a glass of wine.
* *
Others have assured me that all the dreadful psychoses, like paranoid schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder, strike by the time one is in her early twenties. As I am in my late twenties I am not—according to them—going stark raving mad. Though, that morning on the highway, it felt that way. I suddenly had a heightened sense of awareness of what was going on. People in steel carriages were hurtling along at incredibly high speeds—most of the carriages being significantly larger than mine—and all that was keeping this horrid, potential disaster from happening were painted white lines, mere suggestions. People were entering the road so quickly and I had no idea how adept their reflexes, or sound their minds. I could have, so easily, just veered off that arbitrary path and ended my life or anyone else’s. Oh Jesus, I am the insane one, I thought. I have to get off, now. Now! And there, in an instant, everything became nonsense. The pattern of the road. The rhythm of the traffic. I pulled off before my exit, and parked in someone’s suburban driveway. I put my head between my knees, as it started pouring rain. I breathed for a moment, and then called my boyfriend. And I am not someone who calls for help.
* *
Over the ensuing couple of months, I noticed that Robert’s eyes didn’t look, well, right. One day he came in, sans bandages. It was early, and I had ordered a little food, which I was preparing to eat before the Happy Hour rush started. Robert sat down, and we started to talk. I noticed that in the corners of both eyes he had the most copious eye gunk I had ever seen. I literally lost my appetite. I thought about mentioning it. I had always appreciated it when someone, discreetly, did the same for me, when I had food between my teeth or something like that. But, as I looked at him, the problem seemed so chronic that I felt it would be mean and pointless to say anything. I suspected that, if he flushed his eyes, the deposits would be back immediately. I felt nauseated, but it wasn’t simply because his eyes looked icky. It had been a while since the procedure, and he wasn’t healing. I didn’t remember it taking my friend--the one who had had the same surgery--so long to heal. Something was definitely wrong. I didn’t have the courage to broach the subject, and neither did he.
* *
I have driven across the country several times and, occasionally, made dangerous choices. Once, sleep-deprived and desperate, I drove from Bangor, Maine to Denver in one haul, hallucinating intricate overpasses in the flat expanse of I-80, until I realized there were no such structures, and finally decided it would be best to pull over and sleep on the side of the road. After a week of benevolent debauchery at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, I drove all night to California and, honestly, think I fell asleep for part of it. I have driven quite drunk, slowly negotiating my way through short, surface-street distances, in the wee hours. When I should have been afraid, the highway never intimidated me.
* *
It was the day before Valentine’s Day, and my boyfriend decided to send me flowers at work. It actually made perfect sense, as I thought about it. He was indulging my ever-increasing desire for conventional gestures of romance, while at the same time remaining his contrary self. I was contemplating what all this meant in terms of our relationship, breathing in the aroma of this gorgeous bouquet, when Robert walked in. My stomach dropped as I noticed that his hands were shaking. I wanted to hide my flowers. I almost knew what he was going to say before he said it. Without a word, I went to get him his usual drink. As I retrieved the bottle, I tried to tell myself that maybe he had lost his job, or someone close to him had died. But, I knew.
* *
I could blame it on the guys who drive big trucks up to the side of my little car and make lurid noises at me. It’s the goddam Wild West. As much as I laughed in the face of Manifest Destiny, and left the West for the Deep South, the outlaw, boomtown ethos has followed me. New Orleans is now filled with storm chasers and migrant workers--and they are lonely and horny. The guys in trucks attempt to intimidate me and I—depending on my mood—ignore them or flip them the bird. I am desperate and raw and wondering if my city is crumbling and dying, but they have no way of knowing that. No one naturally assumes what it must feel like to be someone else to whom they have no perceived connection. That kind of preemptory empathy is reserved for saints, imagined, benevolent aliens, oh, and service industry workers. I am simply a desired commodity, sitting there in my vulnerable, fuel-efficient sedan. To them, I am much like the wares I, myself, desire at the suburb’s superstores. But, it’s not really them that I fear. I’m afraid that the overpass above my car is going to fall and squash me like a cockroach.
* *
Robert was wearing dark glasses. I could see his eyes through the lenses if I leaned in very close to him. Before uttering a word, I reached out and grabbed his trembling hands. He was fighting back tears. His voice came out choked and cracking; he was trying to swallow the lump. A similar blockage started to form in my throat.
"What is it?” I asked.
“I’m going blind,” he forced out through his nose and mouth, chest heaving.
“What?!” My tears started forming.
“I’ve lost eighty-five percent of my sight already. You’re in negative right now.”
“Who is this f***ing doctor?”
“I went to another doctor today. A woman. He sent me to her. She told me he pierced my optic nerve. I screamed there on the table. And the f***er did it again. Again! He did it twice. She started crying. The doctor did. She said there was nothing she could do. Can you believe that?”
People started coming into the bar.
“I didn’t mean to make you cry, sweetheart,” he said to me, crying himself. I was suddenly glad I had not eaten yet. I felt like I was going to vomit, but there was nothing inside of me. I gave an Oscar-worthy performance of cheeriness for the other customers and then returned to Robert.
“My career is over.” He was sobbing, quietly. People started looking at us. In my periphery, I saw two friends of mine enter the bar and sit down. I ignored them, and kept holding Robert’s hands. “I’m going to sell all my art. I know how much it’s worth. I’m not going to let anybody rob me.” He’s already accepting this, making plans, I thought. If I were he, I would probably be at the bottom of The River by now. He started to weep again, “But, I’m thinking, you know, sculpture. I can touch people’s faces, and make something with my hands…I’m suing that f***er for everything…Maybe a quiet town in Costa Rica or The Dominican Republic.”
The physiological symptoms of grief were so familiar. My mind jumped to the last time my body had felt that way: the image of my city under water, old people dying in the makeshift triage at the airport. My heart was literally aching, nausea, rapid feeling of exhaustion, complete loss of appetite. Then, I was suddenly a kid again, abandoned by the person I loved most in the world. That day, in childhood, I learned that life is undeniably and horribly unfair. It took me years to believe in some sort of cosmic justice again. Then The Storm happened, and now… Life really is a miserable, random crapshoot, I thought. At some point during all this, my boyfriend had walked into the bar. He had take-out for me. “You got your flowers?” he beamed. My heart was broken.
* *
There are people that actually engineer things, heal people, protect nations—they awe someone like me. How can people have that much faith in their abilities? I can’t imagine being the sort of person who wakes up every day to the pressure of having to save lives, or create infrastructure. And, as I get older, the prospect of that sort of responsibility seems even more unthinkable. Growing up, and then older, is partly a process of letting go the idea of one’s invincibility. And, as I cope with realizing my own limitations, other people’s fallibility becomes increasingly clear to me, too.
Sometimes engineers make miscalculations, and levees break. Sometimes doctors misjudge distances by millimeters, and blind people. Sometimes overpasses collapse. Bridges fail. Sometimes people fall asleep at the wheel, and cause horrible, fatal, highway accidents. Sometimes, lately, boarding the I-10 takes a sum of faith in humankind I can’t seem to muster.
* *
Update: I originally wrote this essay for a writing workshop led by Randy Bates, which was held in the flooded remains of The University of New Orleans in the spring of 2006. I still live in New Orleans, where I am now happily married to “the boyfriend.” And, through extensive cognitive behavioral therapy, I can now drive on the highway.
One day, shortly after I had finished writing this essay, Robert told me he was moving to Israel to be with family, and I never saw him again.
Meghann McCracken
[1] Name changed
Meghann McCracken is a writer who lives in New Orleans. Her full-length stage play, Arts and Crafts had readings at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis and Southern Rep in New Orleans. Her short play HMO: Hospital Mechanics Opus was a finalist, and received full production, at Southern Rep's 2011 New Play Bacchanal. Her one-act play Girls Who Drew Horses is being workshopped in the Spring 2011 MFA Directing program at Tulane University.
Originally from Sacramento, California, she has a degree in Film and Digital Media Production from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She moved to New Orleans in 2000. Meghann and her, now, husband bought their home in the historic Bywater neighborhood ten days before Hurricane Katrina, and had not yet moved into it when they evacuated. The house is in the twenty percent of the city that did not flood, but it sustained some wind damage. They have been living in it since January 2006.
