40 Fear Blvd

My biggest and longest running nightmare was meticulously served with golden amber ambient lighting, rustic décor and a side of Otis Rush. The New Orleans inspired eatery dripped out the blues at an audible yet moderate level, as hand crafted taps of yesteryear poured incessantly; occasionally spilling on the quartz countertops. The servers, all with suspenders and beards save one, moved smoothly to and fro almost attune to the music. It was, regrettably, my birthday. Again. I was now at an age that, if I’m honest, I never really expected to see. At least not like this. Unfortunately, I kept waking up in the morning. I’ve only had one fear for most of my life and this was it. I’d Ironically, or ineluctably, been gifted the book Walden by Thoreau as a present. I wondered if the beautiful vixen was aware that the song in my throat that would die with me.

I should warn you ahead of time, as I feel it my duty, there is no happy ending to this story. No calvary coming over the hill, no last-minute twist of fate or chance. I needed, as do you if you wish to continue, to accept that I would die in this particular fox hole and no films of glory will be written when I do so.

I tried my best to avoid this terrifying reality. Today I was meant to have something other than surviving a year to celebrate. For over twenty-four months I worked on a plan to filter money through assets of my father's estate that I leveraged after his passing. Money I could use to begin my new life and business. To stave off the scene playing out in front of me. There was only one problem: the funds needed to pass through my mother. I figured the mutual benefits of the arrangements would be obvious. I take all the of the expenses and the responsibility, she collects a monthly stipend. However, to do this, she still had to relinquish control to someone she has told, on more than one occasion, isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is. My mother’s grim opinion of me came out fairly early and blatantly. I was in an accelerated program to test out of high school at fifteen years old, at a time when the average graduating age was eighteen. When I began the program, against her groans, she said ‘I'll be happy when you fail miserably so you can see you’re not nearly as smart as you think you are. The failure will help you realize you’re just like everyone else.’ It produced no more than a grunt from her when I proudly donned my 97th percentile results at the end of the program. No apology, no ‘proud of you, son,' just a grunt and a nod.

Nearly thirty years later I would think things have changed. I made it out the backwater southern town of good ol’ boys and traveled the world. Three dozen countries and counting. I started a life in Soho in Downtown Manhattan. One of my favorite neighborhoods in the world outside of the 3rd in Paris and a little known group of blocks in Madrid. My escape from small town purgatory meant nothing to her. And for very different reasons, it meant very little to me. I was forty years old, and I’d arranged a deal that broke my only cardinal rule: depending on someone else. I've had many confirmations of philosophies in my life. Things you’re taught as a child but don’t see the accuracy of until adulthood. But there’s only one thing I learned completely on my own: Never depend on anyone. It was the only lesson worth learning. And it was the lesson would eventually gift wrap my greatest nightmare and present it to me here on the bar, between the oysters and the champagne.

For as long as I could remember I only ever really wanted one thing. Only had one dream. To be free. Free from the spirit crushing, capitalist grind. Free from the circular nature of consumer and earner. Free from the limitations that everyone around me seemed to accept as normal. I took a long look around again. The smiling faces of the middle and upper middle class looked back. How do you make a prison inescapable? Convince people that it doesn’t exist. Call it a dream. No. Call it the ‘American Dream’. Yes, much better. My problem was that I knew. Which conversely made my imprisonment all the more unbearable. And although I loathe spiders with a fiery passion and I am as apprehensive about death as the next man, my greatest fear, for as long as I can remember was this. Waking up one day being forty years old, with 1.5 cars, 2.5 kids, a white picket fence and 6 figures income to match the 6 figures of debt between the mortgage and university loans. My greatest fear was being average. Just another number. Another failed dreamer, beaten into submission.

It was exceedingly difficult to explain this to anyone. Coming from where I did, I had already surpassed my fair share of odds. And per the national income average, I had done more than most in the country. Which, in capitalist utopia, meant I should be happy. Yet, most of my thoughts oscillated between combining the high payout of my life insurance policy with the steak knife in front me and knowing how mentally devastating it would be for the kids to grow up without me. In the end the kids won, as they tend to do at that age. So, I continued through my nightmare. Unable to change it and unable to end it.

Survival was by far my greatest talent. It was the actual thing we were celebrating today. I played no role in my birth, but I orchestrated my survival with stubborn aggression. Surviving the South. Surviving the tragedies that shaped my life. Surviving my demons that grew larger the longer I spent fighting them. Surviving the emptiness. Surviving the system built and maintained to do only one thing. Trap me into struggling mightily, with my head just barely above water. John Rockefeller said once, ‘I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.’ He then went on to found the General Board of Education. And was, I kid you not, praised for it. Such is life. There was always something so violently unsettling about mediocrity to me. About the thought that nothing I had done meant anything. About the fact that I was already exhausted with the struggle and statistically I was a little less than halfway through. Perhaps that’s what made it a nightmare, the fact that no one could see it but me. That everyone smiled and was happy with average love, average success, average life and a fondly remembered but quickly forgotten death. I felt the smiles around growing to physically impossible lengths. The corners of the grins reaching above their ears to reveal the blackened and rotten teeth that existed just beyond the whitened and straightened perfect ones for show. I felt them closing in on me, urging me to join them. My mother, with the biggest smile of them all, whispering at the rear, leading them all directly to me.

My mother’s betrayal had left me with more going out than coming in, I would need to get another job just to stay afloat, but by doing that I would never have time to thrive. Never have time to tunnel my way out. Her prophecy would be right: I would die just like everyone else. I wasn’t special. Not that I ever thought I was. If my own mother believes that I’m mediocre, who am I to argue. Even if every cell in my body raged against it, didn’t she know best? The steak knife reminded me that there was another way out. One quick thrust and my kids would be millionaires overnight, instantly changing the fate of my father’s last name. Giving them the opportunity to turn Millions into billions in a couple of generations times. Maybe even join the General Board of Education so as to steward the creation of more workers that they would trap in debt and mediocrity. Brainwashing them into being satisfied by working for their companies with their head just barely above water. But by that time, would anyone remember my sacrifice? Would they know that it was me who changed their fate a hundred years ago on my fortieth birthday with just a steak knife and cast-iron nerves? Most nightmares you can wake up from. This one presented no such option. Stop it all or live it. Those were my choices.

On the upside though, my nightmare had absinthe, the American version but even still, desperate times and all. Throwing things down my throat, up my nose, or in my brain to numb the pain was the only thing keeping the monsters at bay these days. The drink and the kids. The weak glue I created to keep it all together. That and the litany of responsibilities that made the treadmill of life to fast to even slow down, never mind stop.

The kindhearted debutant seated next to me could never really know. Even when I told her. She understood but couldn’t know. She couldn’t see or feel the pressure that fell on me from the moment I opened my eyes. It was almost indescribable. In her eyes I was a beautiful and inspiring soul. But as Bruce Lee once famously said: ‘Souls don't buy Yachts" or maybe it was ‘Heavy bags don't hit back’, don't quote me on that.

She told me the tip of her tongue was numbing. It amused me. The taste wasn't my favorite, but the effects were first rate. I ordered another bottle and tried my usual techniques to elude the void growing around me. Gratitude for one. I had much to be grateful for. I was fairly healthy, if I could stay sober. I was loved. I was employed. I had a beautiful home, healthy and intelligent children. I was supported and celebrated. Even this dinner was for my benefit. I’m sure if I went around the room no one would be able find anything that would justify the panic attack that I woke up to in the predawn morning. Sure, the deficit that my mother had created by pocketing the money was substantial but not insurmountable. I would probably only have to work a side gig for ten months or so to erase it.

Then in the fog of absinthe and champagne it came to me: A great thought. Or more precisely a great question. If I were to leave the kids, who would show my son the prison he was born into? How would he know to fight it? How would he even see it? Who would stop my daughter from attaching herself to a partner who was comfortable in the cell? Thus leaving her doubly miserable. Without me, the diabolical smiles in the room would take them. Swallow them whole. They’d have no one to fight for them. And after all I was right, the first half of my life has been in this nightmare, but I have a whole other half to climb out and bring them with me. I would die covered in feces and dirt, but I would do it once I got on the outside and they would grow old not understanding how anyone could live in the prison that I came from. They would not understand how anyone could accept it. And maybe, just maybe, the people will quote me after I’m dead and gone, and my last name will live on as an outlier. An exception. Not the rule of common.

I smiled. It wasn’t as full and sinister as everyone else’s, but it was a smile. Enough to satisfy the horrifying hoard, and pull their attention away from me. I looked to rear of the pack and my mother wasn’t there. Appropriate, seeing that she lived a few thousand miles away. I cheered my date and ordered more oysters. Once again stubbornly aggressive in my path.

You, of course, might be thinking that I lied earlier, when I told you that there would be no happy ending. But if you look closer, you’ll see there isn’t. That feeling that I share with you now isn’t happiness, its hope. The most dangerous of all emotions, and one that I was blessed with an overwhelming and irrational amount of. Hope, fueling my survival for another year. The unlikely and unreasonable belief that next year I won’t be sitting in another bar, with the same problem. My greatest talent was propped up by my greatest illusion. The fact remains, one day the hope will run out. The kids will lose the argument. The knife will find its way to my neck, the home it always belonged to.