Letter to the Last Human on Earth

[opening essay in The Unabridged Index of My Mistakes]

I never should have explained the rules of Penis Chicken.

The name suggests something much more scandalous than a simple and benign shouting game. Penis chicken, best played when unplanned, unannounced, and in a public setting, is initiated when any player says the word “penis.” It is preferred, but not required to begin the game at a low volume. Any one who hears it (and who has at least a rudimentary understanding of the rules) is now a player. Turns proceed in sequence, with each player required to repeat the word “penis” at a volume louder than any utterance in a previously completed turn. A player may choose to forfeit their turn by conceding, eliminating themselves from the game (but not from the public embarrassment or the glowering scowls of passerby non-players).

Play concludes in one of two ways. Most commonly, turns continue until only one player remains. In this case, the winner is the one who has successfully escalated the volume to a point where no other player dares to match it. An alternative, less common ending, is with two players unrelentingly screaming the word “penis” as loud as they are physically able to. In this scenario, turns are to continue until one or more of the eliminated players successfully pleads for a draw.

I never played a single game against my friend John that I was able to win outright. We’d be walking through an outdoor mall and John would look over at me, wink, and kick off the game with the first “penis” at a volume just above a whisper. His girlfriend would inevitably roll her eyes and cover her face.

When I heard that John had died in a freak car accident, I immediately thought of standing in line to buy movie tickets with him almost 20 years ago, screaming “penis” in the lobby of a south Lincoln Cinemark. In a moment of unchecked or ill-advised nostalgia, I recounted the story to my kids, who loved it (and began playing the game) immediately.

With the painters coming in two days, we needed to clear out space in the living room. I spent the morning carefully moving furniture, packing everything into the front room. The brown couch (on its side) reached up toward the ceiling at a precarious angle. A pile of cushions was stacked against it. The empty dog crate was draped with a beach towel, so it did not scratch the leather. The mature monstera in its clean, white pot was discovering a new source of sunlight from the front window. The TV stand was there, as was the Knockoff Eames lounge chair, and the cabinet where we keep all the dog toys and the drawing paper.

A slow-paced game of Penis Chicken was safely initiated after my wife left for work and continued for the better part of an hour. I, well into my mid-40s, had a leg up on my competitors (7 and 12), and concluded the placement of each additional piece of furniture with a “penis” so loud that the boys took to covering their ears with their palms.

The furniture stacks grew. I tossed in a few extra throw pillows and my youngest, just seven, crawled into the soft, twisting maze. His small head popped up near the front window, opposite from where he entered the labyrinth, then dropped back down to where I couldn’t see him.

He emerged again at my feet, then ran off to his room. He would return with every soft thing he could get his hands on. We tossed a blanket over the narrow crawling path to make it into a cave. He crawled into the maze with a pillow, then back out to grab another one. The comforter from his bed was draped over the piano bench and the ottoman (upside down, resting on top of an end table) to create a doorway.

The oldest came into the room and paused near the pile. He looked at me and pantomimed a push against the top of the couch.

“No,” I told him.

The youngest, in a thin and small voice, asked for his book about Minecraft characters who go to junior high. In exchange for this small errand, the oldest tried to negotiate. “OK, can we put a TV in there?”

“No screens please,” I said.

“Well then can I go inside?” He asked.

“Get his Minecraft book for him?”

In my favorite poem, Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” there is a moment where he seems to look up at me over the poem’s page, which is already heavy with dancing birds and digging in the earth and rowdy botany. Ross sees me wondering where all of this is headed. “Put your feet up. Here’s a light blanket, / a pillow, dear one, / for I can feel this is going to be long.” Then, a few lines later, “Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it.”

This moment, when my boys are able to establish a fragile peace, is that looking up over the poem’s page. I watched the second set of legs disappear into the labyrinth, just past the piano bench doorway and thought to myself, this is a cup of tea with honey in it. You have to take this unexpected rest where you can get it.

I returned to my stool at the kitchen counter, where I was pretending to read or sort of half-reading a Neil Young autobiography and trying to think of something smart to write or say about John. We completely fell out of touch after school and the accident and funeral were a couple years ago. Whatever it was that I found to say, I wouldn’t get a chance to actually say it, but we all have our own method to cut the thorns away from grief. This is mine.

A long, long time ago, I think we were just halfway through our freshman year in college, we woke up and Jenna had died. We were too young, we thought, to have dead friends. We didn’t even know the logistics. How many days pass between a death and the services? Who is responsible to say what? We fumbled our way through blunt articulations, in phone calls. “Just hadn’t talked to you since graduation” we’d say, and then we eased our way into saying her name, and maybe, if we were feeling really bold, repeating what we knew we were supposed to say about peace and rest and heaven.

On another day, we woke up and Ben was gone. Everyone who posted about it on social media kept saying “if you’re dealing with depression, please get help,” which was just another way of saying, “I don’t need help,” which was a lie for all of us.

On another day, we heard that Drew had said he was tired, laid down on the couch in his mother’s home, and never got up again. He was four days younger than me. No one knew what to say. A lot of us didn’t say anything.

On other days, we woke up and Shannon and Chris and Sean and Ben (a different Ben) and Elliot were gone. They each deserved a book of poems. Especially Elliot.

I have never known what to say. None of us do. It’s because this particular way of saying is one-sided. The only person who I want to read or hear these paragraphs about the one time the two of us argued outside a coffee shop in Vermillion, South Dakota for almost an hour, shivering in the cold, is dead. I was so arrogant back then, and he was the only friend I had both kind and bold enough to call me out on my bullshit, because it absolutely was some bullshit, even if I can’t say the word “bullshit” at a funeral.

The day Justin, my sophomore year college roommate died, I got cut off in traffic and, alone in my car, I screamed at a Kia Sorento for 6 miles on the freeway. Exhausted, I found Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s duet “Salt Peanuts” on Spotify (which Justin had introduced me to, sitting intently and facing his stereo, lifting his hands and pointing up in the air in time every time Gillespie interrupted the music to shout “Salt pea-nuts! Salt pea-nuts!”), and I put it on the car stereo at an unhealthy volume. By the time I parked and walked toward the front door, I was paper-thin and hollow, the tightness from my fists extending all the way up into my neck and chest. Somehow in this whole litany of loss, in this extended list of dead friends, Justin is the only one where I feel like I said what I needed to say.

There’s an essay I love, “Baby Yeah” by Anthony Veasna So, about losing someone close to you. About halfway through Anthony, talking about the way he felt about the loss says, “I’m sorry about the vagueness, the abstract language” and then, in the next paragraph, “OK, fine, a concrete anecdote.” That’s exactly the negotiation. Every time I say with some accuracy what this discovery of a new hollow cavern is, what this anger is, I feel even more adrift. I try to locate myself in some more tactile, specific memory. Which is to say, me too, Anthony. Me too.

When Steph died, I found her Facebook profile and a hundred pictures of her. That included one of the mustache tattoo she got on the inside of her index finger so she could hold her finger up under her nose and it would appear there, on her upper lip — a playful, small, curled mustache. I wonder if the two of us ever sat at the lunch table together in elementary school, drawing mustaches onto our fingers, trying to get the whole thing symmetrical, annoyed at the ballpoint pen’s sudden inability to work, and maybe abandoning the whole endeavor to try and negotiate a trade — a ziploc bag of Cheetos for a HoHo.

Shit. I get lost in it. An attempt to start up another round of Penis Chicken pulled me back into the room. “OK. Come on, boys.”

I turned back to the book, realizing I had just been turning pages without taking any of it in. Neil Young was really getting into a whole thing about old cars and Lionel trains and music equipment. “Hurricane” might have made my top 5 songs of all time list, and tried to play back in my mind that weird intro melody, with unison notes on the G and E strings that almost sound like a reverse delay guitar effect. It was hard for me to reconcile the guy who wrote and played that song with the guy in this book, who carefully places a small painted character next to the toy train track so that it looks like he’s waving at the engineer. I think when I picked this up I just wanted to find out if Neil had any idea what it’s like to hear that song.

The boys ignored my pleading for calm and quiet. Their subdued pushing and wrestling, buried in some secret corner of the labyrinth, was betrayed by the swaying of the tall tower of couch cushions.

My voice, lower and sharper now, cut into the room. “Stop now or you both get out.” I waited for a second, noting that the only evidence of them being in the maze at all, the movement of the blankets and cushions, had stopped. I added, “Did you hear me?”

Two voices. “Yes.”

It would be another five or ten minutes before the peace crumbled again. I am too often begging them (in futility) to untangle themselves from this cycle. They reminded me of that clip of young Werner Herzog talking about the jungle. I love the way he says the word “overwhelming” as “ova-whelmink.” I could almost hear it. Werner standing there in a short sleeved khaki colored shirt, speaking directly to the camera. How did it go again? I reached for my phone and searched “Herzog Jungle.”

There he was. I tapped play on the video and it was somehow even more Herzog-esque than I remembered it.

“There is some sort of harmony. It is the harmony of… ova-whelmink and collective murder.”

I have a younger brother. That’s the sort of harmony we had. Not literal murder, but damn close sometimes. Herzog was so young here. I turned up the volume a couple of times and leaned back in my chair. What was the thing with his lead actor? How had I originally come across this? Wasn’t there some sort of terrible fight with one of them trying to hire someone to kill the other one?

Herzog’s thin voice pushed out of the phone’s small speaker. “We, in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel. A cheap novel. We have to become humble.”

Obviously we were not putting any of that into any sort of funeral speech about the dead friend.

A small voice (the seven-year old) came from inside the pile of blankets. “Overwhelming murder.”

“Shush,” I told him, and then, rethinking it, “Or at least get the accent right. It’s ova-whelmink.”

“Like this? Ova-whelmink murder?”

“Perfect”

And then the older brother sounded off, “Ova-whelmink… PENIS!”

I wouldn’t lose.

We escalated quickly to the highest volumes we were individually capable of. We played dozens of rounds at that volume, sucking in as much air as we could, letting it out from the diaphragm, really trying to shake the walls with it. All three of us began to go hoarse, our throats raw from screaming. Coughing and wheezing with dry tongues, there were requests for water that went ignored as the game dragged on.

John would have loved this shit.

I passed a pair of juice boxes into the doorway of the maze. “Well done,” I said. “Co-champions.”

A new quiet settled in. I slouched in the chair. Closed the book and finger drummed at the edge of its spine. Still with half a cup of coffee and the rest of the morning and still enticed (as I always am) by the notion that I might write something, and thinking about Neil, who is getting up there in years, and me still drawing an outline around the shape of grief and loss. I began to wonder what would be said about me. And then what will be said about any of us and who that falls to. The survivors? I kept following it, until I arrived finally at the last surviving person on earth, which there will be at some point. And that person, presumably, should be responsible for saying something about all of us (to the no one who is left).

I reached for my work laptop, still resting where I had left it at the end of a long day. I opened it, found my way to a new blank Google doc, and typed

Letter to the Last Human on Earth

in bold typeface at the top. I felt a surge of unearned confidence. I hit the return key twice and then “I imagine you on a hilltop somewhere in Scandinavia.”

The words arrived quickly. It was a prescriptive guide for what to say about the rest of us who were not standing on that Scandinavian hilltop. The short bit about Vermillion, South Dakota appeared. Steph’s tattoo of a mustache arrived. More than anything, I wanted LH, as I was calling him by the end of the second paragraph, to know that even in this strange new responsibility he was not alone. A thousand (a hundred? less?) years ago, I also understood loss and how hard it can be to say something to someone who isn’t there to hear it.

As soon as the next paragraph, the third one, did not arrive with that interesting sense of urgency, I closed the laptop and stood up. I settled down onto the ground on my hands and knees. “I’m coming in there,” I said, twisting my body a bit to get past the corner of the end table, then discovering two bare feet in front of me. I lifted the blanket that was wrapped around the boy’s legs and covered his toes. “There you go.” I found a space on the inside of the couch’s arm rest where I could push my hips, turn onto my side, and lie down.. A blanket draped above us blocked out the light, but I felt a warm body squirming and twisting its way into me. The weight of a head pressed into the soft of my shoulder. Another small hand discovered my face and explored the shape of my glasses. I reached up and held that hand against my cheek and could feel it, warm and damp and perfect.

We only stayed like that, a tangled knot of bodies in the dark, for five minutes or a thousand years. Some part of me never left.

The painters came and went. The pillow maze was disassembled. The fragile peace of brotherhood was built and destroyed a dozen times or more. The doors were left open to get the acrid smell of paint out of the house. The new paint color itself ceased to feel new and then ceased to feel interesting. All that was left was an inarticulate, incomplete draft in my Google drive folder, the memory of a strange stack of furniture from whence the idea emerged.

For weeks I was tangled up in trying to pull off that letter to LH with the resounding profundity in which I initially imagined it. Someone better than me could have. Cormac McCarthy could have, for example. Dostoevsky. Kundera. Didion. Morrison. If there ever is a last human alone on a hill in Scandinavia, I hope he just sits down on a soft bed of pine needles and reads Beloved.

I almost never live up to what I had hoped I’d be able to put down. I still haven’t said what I want about the furniture labyrinth, or even what it means to live with the phrase “harmony of overwhelming and collective murder” in your head for a few decades. I think about the guitar solo in “Hurricane” where it sounds like Neil is just kicking the amplifier, sending the reverb tank springs into a microphonic cacophony, and how it’s both a complete disaster and it’s perfect at the same time. I still don’t know what to say about Jenna, who came up with the best jokes about her brain shunt, a small tube that drained excess cerebrospinal fluid out of her skull and into a bag, tucked somewhere behind her in the wheelchair. Mostly I think about how Jenna’s ability to laugh is what allowed us to let go of our fear and grieve. I don’t understand the math of it. I’ve lived with this gap between my intention and my ability for so long. On my best days, I’m just kicking the amplifier.

I used to think of competency and skill in communication or writing (or art-making) as correlated to the author’s ability to execute on intention with efficiency. I believed in the mythology of the writer as a sort of puppet master, who knows and understands the script and has a finger coiled around every string, so that no movement happens without his deliberate desire. I measured a writer’s greatness in their ability to conform and control.

That’s problematic for a few reasons, but primarily it’s less interesting since the artist has nothing to discover through the act of making. Nothing wrong with showing up with one sort of intention or another, but I almost always have to let go of it as something more interesting emerges. Milan Kundera called it “vertigo”. I sit with some intention at the top of the piece and lean over the edge. What would happen if I were to let go? There is a distinctive “voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us.” What I’m saying is you never get the “Hurricane” guitar solo with a dogmatic adherence to your original intentions. You certainly don’t get a small cup of tea with honey spooned into it.

And then sometimes I will trade that misconception for the one about everything needing to come from pain. In the song “Art is Hard,” Tim Kasher sings “If at first you don’t, you don’t succeed,/ you gotta recreate your misery/ cause we all know art is hard./ Young artists have gotta starve.” I carried this with me for years, unable to imagine successful art coming from somewhere other than trauma. James Baldwin talked about the artist needing to “to vomit the anguish up” and I took that quote by itself, ignoring the preceding “tell the whole story.”

The whole story should include joy, shouldn’t it? Brene Brown calls joy “the most vulnerable emotion we experience.” No shit. Anger and chaos is easy. Joy is tough. It’s fleeting and fragile, but if you can make it into the dark labyrinth and find it, then isn’t that something?

I have this one perfect memory of sitting at my grandmother’s dining room table. She came in and lifted the glasses from my face and cleaned them. She wiped my hands and forehead with a hot, damp cloth. She carefully set my glasses back in place. Same ritual every time I visited.

I was in my 40s when she passed. I know she didn’t take my glasses and wiped my forehead the last time I visited her, but I feel like she did. It was a small but deeply meaningful action, especially for a kid who felt invisible. I don’t sit with that memory often enough. Or if I do, I paint it with how we lost her, or my busted heart from spending how many years of that childhood 5,000 miles away from that table and that warm cloth and that soft touch.

Resentment is easy.

I intended, early in the writing of The Unabridged Index of My Mistakes, to be in control, and to make sure I said everything I was afraid to say about heartache and regret. I believed this collection would be a drawing of the lines of my childhood as the oldest son of deeply religious parents in a single, dark color, and with thick, unmistakable lines.

But where is there room in that collection for a Steph’s tattoo of a mustache on her index finger. Where is there room for asking Jenna if that clear colorless liquid was actually just everything she knew about the mitochondria or how to spell Czechoslovakia, falling out of her brain because let’s be honest, what use is any of that information? The last thing I remember of her is laughter. Where is the room for Drew stealing a couch out of my unlocked dorm room and bolting a pair of Goodwill-bought skis to it? We drove it to the top of a snowy hill in Pioneer Park and it was Drew’s idea to lift our friend Mikey, quadriplegic since his early childhood, out of his powered wheelchair and set him down on that couch with us. And can I just say, holy shit a couch strapped to a pair of skis, carrying six dudes and their quardiplegic friend, can really haul ass down a hill. I think Mikey was still screaming with glee when we carefully repositioned him and pushed him (still on the couch) back up the hill.

Ringing in my ears is the voice of my dear friend George, who used to sing-talk the line from Walt Whitman’s poem, “Happiness, not in another place but this place.”

Oh George. What a patient and bottomless well of kindness you are (“Here is a cup of tea. I have spooned honey into it.”). I think of you often while writing, because your empathy invokes honesty, and why bother saying anything if it is not honest. So I’ll admit to you, George, that I don’t know where this is going. But I also know that honesty requires the whole story, including the joy, and that I cannot make it there by putting a hand on the wheel. This is the central paradox of autobiographical writing: I am so desperate to let you see me, but oh so terrified of what you will see.

Please forgive, even before we have begun, for my first failed attempt, the first entry in the index, and for the inadequacy of my language. Of all language.

I think that I have arrived finally at what I would like to say to the boys hidden in the labyrinth of couch cushions, holding onto a fragile peace. I know what I would like to say to those of us left, still 25 years later mourning the loss of Jenna, Ben, Drew, Shannon, Chris, Sean, Stephanie and Dan and David and Jeff and Ben (again) and Elliot, holding onto a delicate pain. Perhaps even what I would like to say to my lost friends. I know what I would like to say to the last human, standing at the mouth of the fjord, holding the last, frail, dimming light of the entire species against a cold wind. Or even to myself, holding onto this miniscule but perfect memory of George singing Whitman, or holding the notion of a perfect articulation of what I mean and how I am and how much I love.

It is overwhelming.

No.

It is ova-whelmink.

There’s this one line in the film “The Price of the Ticket.” James Baldwin has just told us about the death of his father, who Baldwin says could not bend and was therefore broken. The narrative pauses for a moment and there are a few shots in black and white meant to convey simply “black poverty in the city.” The film transitions seamlessly to archival footage of a young James Baldwin sitting on the front steps of a modest city home, clutching a small notebook in his hands, turning through its pages. We hear James’ voice again, deliberate and calm, reading from his early essays. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

Let’s take a moment.

Let’s take a few moments.

Let me lift the glasses from your face and clean them. Let me wipe your hands and forehead with a hot, damp cloth. Let me carefully set your glasses back in place. What an unbridled honor it is to behold and to be held. What a privilege to negotiate across this gap between us, and to call out across the chasm and ask “you as well?” As a professor of mine once said, “from my life I write to you in yours.” Creating this collection felt at times like casting orbs of light out into an infinite darkness. Perhaps this one will allow me to see you. I’m desperate to see you. To behold and to be held. To witness and be witnessed wholly, in all of our pain and contradiction and failure. As Anthony Veasna So put it, we are “hungry for connection, a constant state of ‘being-with.’” That’s all there is.

I don’t mean to be arrogant, but you don’t spend 20 years as the reigning Penis Chicken champion without a deep understanding of embarrassment and shame, both in yourself and others. The joy of this game is specific, and only achievable by breaking through the embarrassment, only to realize it was a mirage in the first place. Then you invite others in to see the mirage. The antidote to shame is not being tucked away somewhere invisible, and besides, the painters are gone, our labyrinth is disassembled. There is nowhere left to hide.

If we arrived with some thought of what we’d like to say, let’s abandon that as well. We can let go of this long list of intentions (to speak about grief and loss, about fatherhood, to memorialize lost friends, to write with precision or profundity or efficiency or beauty). Even the careful re-assembly of the living room, with everything in its right place, blankets folded and throw pillows, cannot stop the body from remembering the dark maze and a round, bony joint pressing into the soft between the hip and ribs. A hand that discovers my face. Fingertips that move across the stubble of my cheeks, then come to rest on my neck.

What staggering vertigo.

Kick the fucking amp.