An Account of Crying 2.0

Here is a revision to a story I posted earlier. This one is much better. I am going to try to submit this to some literary journals. Any thoughts? I'd love your comments.


P.S. Although this is loosely based on various autobiographical events of my life, a great deal of it is entirely made up. So it is a piece of fiction.

An Account of Crying

By Patrick Knott

Mary and I hadn’t spoken in about two hours. We were silently packing boxes, taping them, and moving them into a pile in the far corner of the emptying living room. There really was nothing more to say, I was moving out, and when I set my mind to something that is it. Mary couldn’t handle the thought of living in the house without me, and couldn’t really afford it anyway, so we were going to pack it up together, and that would be that.

“Why is it always your way or the highway!” she had screamed at me earlier that day.

I said nothing. Mary stared intently at me for several seconds, turned around, walked into the kitchen and out of my view, and then returned moments later with the potted cactus I had given her on her 24^th birthday. She held it and we stared at each other a while longer, neither of us moving. Suddenly, perhaps to break the silence without actually having to speak, she took the pot in one petite hand and, like a shot-putter, flung it at my head. I ducked, and it crashed against the hallway wall, scattering broken shards of tan porcelain, and clumps of black soil across the hardwood floor. The cactus itself fell with a thump, its roots tangled and exposed, its prickly green arms stretching out in despair. I quietly grabbed the broom from a closet in the kitchen and began cleaning it up. After that she knew there was nothing she could say to save us.

Mary was the first one to break the silence at about 6pm. These silences were like a game between us, and I always won.

“I ordered a pizza, it should be here in about thirty minutes, you can have some if you’re hungry”. I looked up from my crouched position and saw she had been crying, her makeup was a mess and she had hastily tried to fix it. She looked ashamed.

“Ok, thanks” I said, and after a moment, “I’ll give you some money”.

“It’s ok,” she said.

The rest of the night we didn’t say much else, just more packing, taping, cleaning. By 9pm we were finished. We had moved everything either to the dumpster, or to the U-Haul truck I had rented. Mary was flying on a red-eye that night to Tennessee to spend a month with her brother. This meant I would have to take her share of our things and put them in a storage unit for her, but I didn't really mind that. I wanted to be as compliant as possible. I wanted things to be smooth.

          Standing at the back of the open trailer I set the last box onto the silvery metal floor of the truck. I reached up with both hands and grabbed the black rubber handle of the back gate and jumped down to the street, letting gravity pull my body down to close truck. The gate rattled loudly and I intentionally slammed it down hard so that the metal latch clanged aggressively into the locked position.

         “What the hell?” Mary said in an aggravated whisper?

         “What?” I replied, “do you need to go back inside and get anything or are you ready to go now?” Mary turned without responding and walked back into the house to get her bags. I waited by the car and smoked a cigarette. It was late September in Portland so the days were getting longer, colder, and wetter. I shivered a bit in the breeze and observed the orange haze of low-lying clouds visible through the light of a street-lamp. It began to rain. I covered my cigarette with my free hand but did nothing to shelter my head. I felt my shaggy hair growing heavier with each drop and after a minute or two my saturated scalp allowed the pooled up water to pour down my cheeks and run into the corners of my mouth.

         Mary scurried out of the house, one hand covering her head with a newspaper and the other tightly grasping her bag that was pulling her down like a great magnet drawn to the earth.

         “A little help?” she said. I casually threw my cigarette on the ground, stomped it out, and opened the back hatch of the decades-old, brown Volvo station wagon. I made a genuine attempt to intercept her before she made it to the car and grab the bag for her, but I was too slow and she loaded it herself.

         “What time is your flight?” I asked as I slammed the hatch shut. She was peeved at my repeated slamming.

         “Why are we standing in the rain?” She asked, and walked around to enter the passenger side door.

         “What times is your flight?” I asked again after we settled in the car.

         “11.” She said.

The car ride was peaceful in the kind of way that the cabin of a ship might be in a storm. The winds outside are howling but inside there is just soft rolling, the creak of wood being stressed, and the subtle scrape of objects sliding to and fro on their shelves. When we arrived at the terminal, I pulled over and opened the door. Like exiting the cabin of the ship we were met with a chaotic cacophony of honking car horns, police whistles, and the intermittent rumble of aircraft overhead. I thought about parking and walking her inside, but I wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible. As I stepped from the car to help with the bags, Mary broke the silence again but I couldn’t hear her. I leaned my head back in and she repeated,

“Aren’t you going to cry?” Her tone was sorrowful and it turned my stomach because I knew I couldn’t possibly feel what she was feeling. Her green eyes met mine; streaks of black mascara now shamelessly tainting her powdered cheeks. I contemplated my response. Volumes of emotion were flitting through my mind like an automatic Rolodex on the fritz.

“Probably not” I said.

***

When I got home I wasn’t ready to walk back into the empty house alone. I only had one more night to stay, and I was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the hardwoods. It was just too depressing to face sober, so I walked to the closest bar to lubricate my sorrows a little bit. I sat silent at the bar, staring into my beer and the bartender let me be. There was hardly anybody there, but a good bartender knows when a person needs some old fashioned cheering up and when someone needs to be left to alone. This was a good bartender.

“You need a refill?” he’d suggest every ten minutes or so when I was nearing the end of my drink. I’d nod and he’d refill.

At about 1:15am, when the lines between the poly-coated chestnut bar-top and the vacant space beyond it began to blur, when my foot kept slipping off the barstool and I’d slosh some beer out of my clear glass mug and onto my hand, when the lemons and limes in the garnish tray all looked the same, I walked back home in the drizzling rain. When I entered I kept the lights off. It seemed darker than usual. The unfamiliarity of the house caused by the lack of furniture mixed with my inebriation made it difficult to navigate through in the dark, so I kept my hands along the walls. I closed my eyes to complete the darkness and in that void made my way to the back of the house. I staggered into the room that Mary and I used to share. Turning on the light made me wince and I noticed tiny specks of dust floating around in the air. I closed the door and watched the heavy wood panel slide shut from left to right and the unexpected sweeping sound it made was shocking in a way. It was upsetting how the echoes bounced around the room. I wondered how, after a year of struggle with that door, I managed to get it closed with ease this time. One of the screws holding the track to the floor was partially up and stripped beyond repair. Usually it required the right leverage on the top of the inverted handle that would cause the bottom of the door to slide smoothly over, but I always seemed to forget and would get frustrated when it jammed. I was thinking about how lucky I was for a little while but it was probably only a moment. Time is pretty irrelevant in general, especially when you are nowhere, doing nothing.

            I stripped down into just my underwear. I walked over to the outlet below the windowsill and plugged my phone into its charger, and the response was an old familiar vibration in my palm. I laid out the sleeping bag and crawled inside. It occurred to me that I had neglected to leave a pillow behind so I awkwardly inch-wormed my way to my pile of clothes and bound them up below my head.

            On normal occasions my brain would have just worked itself to sleep and then the dreams would come and then the morning. Not this night though. Something profound happened. Something that I still don’t fully understand. What happened was my head exploded. Or at least that is what it felt like. Finally, in the privacy of this empty space, I rambled to myself so fast that like an eclipse of the brain, everything went black. My fractured words bounced around the room and re-entered my ears. Somewhere in the depths of my brain I tried to get a hold of myself and stop this but I had lost all agency. I had reached the end of the line. I felt a bubble in my chest. It started subtly but picking up speed it settled just at the top of my throat. I held my breath to keep it in. Then, with pressure building, it burst forth into the world. 25 years of anxiety and emotion called out to the night, filling all of Oregon with its soft sobbing song.

            I cried for a about twenty minutes. Blurting out half sentences in utter despair. I did that kind of crying that children often do when they are actually upset, as opposed to that fake crying they do when they can tell you noticed they fell down and they want the attention. The sort of crying that makes your breathing come out in short, wheezing bursts. I did this and was surprised at how much my nose ran. I thought to myself “Is this what happens? How do people deal with all of this? Do regular people just carry tissues around all the time in case this happens?” I was reluctant to go get toilet paper from the bathroom for my nose because I was afraid the echoing of my pathetic sobbing would wake up the neighbors. I was terrified of being vulnerable even to strangers. Instead, I just wiped my nose with the legs of the pants that I had bundled under my head.

I cried off and on for about an hour. I had taken the curtains down earlier that day and when all the crying was done, I noticed that the moon was in full view and everything was illuminated in its glow. It occurred to me that the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared, and after that I didn’t cry again.

            I laid awake a little while longer and thought about my father. I wondered if he had felt the same nostalgic terror when he spent his last night in our home back when I was 8. That night that he told my sister and me that he was divorcing my mother. I remembered that he cried then too, right in front of us, unashamed and raw.

The next morning I was awoken by the sounds of piano coming from the apartment upstairs. It was a warm and wandering sound and the notes floated around in my ears. I got up and in the light of day looked out the 2^nd story window at the cars on Burnside St. I imagined myself floating on those piano notes, slowly over the bungalow homes, swirling up the Willamette River and East through the Columbia Gorge. I saw myself riding that music across the dense wilderness of the Hood National Forest and up above those snow-capped peaks. I joined the circles of black birds that swirl and swoop around an old brick chimney in autumn. I saw myself high above the continent and then returned to alight on a park bench atop Mt. Tabor and looked down on Portland as it woke for the day. It yawned and opened its eyes, and so did I.

Settles Bridge

Settles Bridge

This is Settles Bridge at its inauguration in 1896.

This is the bridge when I knew it in the early 2000’s. It was abandoned in the 1950’s when the wood rotted away.

I have always been fascinated with bridges. When I was a boy I had this wooden train set that could easily be put together in an unlimited variety of configurations. I would build the bridges up really high and then I would stack books up to lift the wooden pieces up even higher and make bridges over bridges. Sometimes I would pull two tables together over my double decker bridge and run a third bridge over the top to make a three tier marvel. I would call my mother into the room to behold my creation and then with all the spontaneity of an 8 year old, I would throw my body fully into it, sending the pieces all across the family room. My mom would put her hands on her hips and shake her head saying “oh Patrick, what am I going to do with you?”She still says this to me all the time.

When I was a little older my mother would sometimes take my sisters and I to the library, where I would spend an hour staring at the VHS tapes about earthquakes. We would take them home and I would sit directly in front of the television, my face right up next to the screen, and I would watch the parts of the videos where the bridges would collapse onto each other or into rivers. I would stare at them with a reverent fear and awe. I still get a little nervous whenever I cross the Willamette River on one of the many bridge in my current hometown of Portland, OR. I stare over the side and I imagine those tapes, my face inches from the screen, and the bridges twisting and writhing as invisible waves magically tear them to pieces.

There are a few bridges that I have encountered in my life that have had a lasting impact on me. The Steele Bridge in Portland, The Williamsburg Bridge in New York City, The Krog Tunnel Bridge in Atlanta, Georgia with all of its incredible graffiti art. None of these have had the impact on the person I am today as Settles Bridge though.

I discovered Settles Bridge in the summer between 8^th and 9^th grade. That was a strange year for me because I had just switched from a small private school to a large public school, my parents’ divorce was still an impact on the family, and my mother was still recovering from a nearly fatal brain tumor a few years prior. I was at the far end of the transition from boy to teenager and in that time my life had gone from a sheltered, over-protected childhood to having all the freedom I could want due to forces that nobody would have wished for or expected. During those years I felt a lot of pressure to be strong, to not let my anxieties add to the stress of my family, and so I internalized my fears. I was lost, and scared, and felt very alone.

Scottie Miller was a new friend of mine that summer. He had recently dyed his hair blue and it swooped freely across his forehead, while standing spiked in the back. In hind sight he looked like an alien who was a big Flock of Seagulls fan in the 80s and had not quite gotten with the changing of times, but we both thought it was “punk”. Scottie was tall for 15, fair skinned with freckles, and always in cut off shorts with a belt that had spikes on it. I looked more or less the same, minus the freckles. My hair was dyed green, and I kept it short and un-styled.

We lived in the town of Suwanee, Georgia, which is about 30 miles northeast of Atlanta. My family moved to the area in 1990 and at that time it was a small rural community. The town was split by a railroad track and filled with quaint, Victorian era homes and speckled with small cornfields and horse pastures. If you go there today you will find that the old used bookstore is now a Wal-Mart, the narrow roads widened to twice the size they were, and the old shack that once got destroyed by a tornado and sat derelict for years is now an elaborate town square, complete with an amphitheater and surrounded by subdivisions as far as the eye can see.

In July of 2000, when Scottie told me he had heard about this tall bridge where you could jump into the Chattahoochee River, Suwanee was somewhere in the middle of that transition. We were skateboarding at a little gazebo; probably practicing kick flips off the side and trying to stay aboard as we landed on the gray cobblestones.

“Who told you about it?” I asked, somewhat self-conscious about his abundance of friends compared to my lack.

“ I was watching John Addington and Mark Walker have band practice yesterday and they told me they used to jump off of it sometimes. He said it is really scary, like 80 feet high.” Scottie said, emphasizing the fact that he had been hanging out with older and much cooler guys.

“Oh,” I said, ignoring the obvious jab at my pride. “So how do we get there”I asked.

“Well you know that neighborhood way down Suwanee Dam Road? The one where Nick Kreps weird girlfriend lives?”

“Yeah,” I responded, as I kicked my skateboard up and leaned it against the white lattice siding of the gazebo.

“So apparently at the very back of that neighborhood there is a dirt road, about 2 miles long. You have to drive to the end of that and then walk down a trail about another half mile and then you are there.”Scottie said.

It was a hot day. The summers in Georgia often stay in the upper 90s or lower 100s for weeks at a time, on good days the air is more dry and thick with pollen, on bad days it is humid beyond belief and the sweat drips down your arms and legs leaving your skin sticky and your clothes stained. This was one of the bad days. It was still the early afternoon and the sun was close to its pinnacle. We had exhausted ourselves skating and were ready to not only wash ourselves in the cool river, but to a larger extent, go exploring.

We convinced Scottie’s dad to drop us off at the back of the neighborhood. He wanted to come with us down the trail but he could tell from our very facial expressions that it was not going to happen. We insisted that we would be safe and that we would call him to pick us up when we were done. He was hesitant but Scottie’s father has always had a sort of boyish quality about him and I think he knew that he shouldn’t stifle the independence of a 15 year old.

 “Are you sure it is down here? I mean, what if Mark was just messing with you, those guys do that kind of stuff all the time” I said, as we marched down the winding gravel road, the trees casting tall shadows around us on both sides.

“They don’t lie to me,” Scottie sounded offended “they are my friends.”

“No, I am your friend” I said, taking on the tone of an instructor as I often did when I felt threatened “those guys just make you feel good about yourself because they are 20 and know that kids like you and I will look up to them and that makes them feel better about themselves.”

“Or maybe they just like me” Scottie said, defiantly.

“Or maybe they just don’t have any friends their own age.” I said, beginning to feel a mix bag of emotions rising up inside me.

Scottie sat silent for several paces, looking down at his feet, “This is taking forever, lets race to the end, readysetgo!” he said, taking of in a cloud of dust from the loose gravel below his feet. Scottie could never handle conflict very well. He would stand stubborn as a mule leading up to the conflict but the second the argument hit full on, he would run away as fast as he could, sometimes literally.

I sat back in the cloud of dust, never adjusting my speed at all. I wanted to race him, I hated losing, but I knew he was faster. “I don’t want to race,” I said out loud, but he was too far away to hear me. I walked the rest of the way down the road in silence. There was a mockingbird in the trees. A robin would call out “cheep cheep, cheep cheep” and the lower voiced mocking bird would respond “cheep cheep, cheep cheep”. Then from behind me an old swallow would sing “twirlooo twirlooo” and again the mocking bird would reply, the little liar in the woods.

 We reconvened at the end of the dirt road. It opened into a sort of cul-de-sac and there were tire marks from where cars had been, but it was vacant that day. Scottie had already gone ahead of me and scouted the trail. “Its way less than a half mile to the end,” he said as we jogged down the dirt trail over roots and under branches, “it only took me like a minute to get down there, listen you can hear the river from here”.

Once we got to the bottom of the trail, we found a small riverside beach. The sand was soft and the sun shone right onto it, radiating the whole area like a natural oven. We set our bags on a fallen tree to keep them out of the sand and stripped down to just our bathing suits. A few paces upstream from the outlet of the trail was the bridge. I later learned that it was abandoned in the 1950’s and the woods had long since reclaimed any roads leading to it on either side. At one time it was black iron, but the elements had rusted it fully so that it was a rich, dark red that matched the Georgia clay in which it was planted.

To get to the top we had to climb a precarious pillar of interwoven metal rods. Scottie went ahead of me and I followed the handholds and foot grips that he found as he went up. “I heard that a 10^th grader died out here last summer.” Scottie said as he felt his way up the creaking, metal structure “Mark said that a couple of times a day the Buford Dam will let a bunch of water from Lake Lanier out into the river and it comes rushing down really quick. He said that this kid jumped just as the water was rushing in and he was swept downstream.”

It sounded like a myth to me, but I couldn’t help but wonder about it as I pulled myself up to the top, stretching my arms out to gain my balance before proceeding a two foot wide beam for a length of about 20 feet. Scottie skipped across like a gymnast, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he had done a handspring on his way. I was less agile, stopping here and there to readjust my footing, and finally taking the last four feet in a desperate jump to the safety of the much wider stone pillar that Scottie now stood on.

“Do you think that is true?” I asked as we sidled along the two thin beams that made up the bottom of the bridge. Our hands were behind our backs, holding on to thick cables that ran parallel to the beams our feet were on.

“Do I think what is true?” Scottie asked

“The thing about that guy drowning out here. I mean, do you think that the dam really lets out sometimes and floods the river like that?” I said, as the realization of what I was about to do crept up in my mind.

“It is probably true,” Scottie said “but I think there is a sound when it happens. Like a horn blows or something. I am pretty sure we would know if it was happening.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed him or not but I knew that if I was going to jump, I had to do it quickly or else I would never do it at all. Scottie and I were fearless back then, though perhaps it was our youth that made us unaware of our mortality, or perhaps it was just our way of spitting in the face of a universe that at the time seemed to be out to get us. I stared down at the flowing river thirty-five feet below me; I felt a soft breeze rustle through the trees. I looked at Scottie and he looked back at me, and without warning I jumped. I clenched my teeth and as my feet left the platform I felt suspended in time for just a moment. Somehow my life was a snapshot and I knew that I needed to remember that picture. There was no ground beneath my feet and the chaos felt like the only thing that made sense. It felt like freedom. Then my body splashed into the icy cold water and I began instinctually swimming against the current toward the shore. Simultaneously laughing and shivering and nearly drowning I crawled onto the sandy shore and let beads of water sizzle off my body in the 100 degree summer heat.

Once I regained my composure, I noticed that Scottie’s hooting and hollering had stopped. For a second I thought he had jumped too but then I noticed he was climbing up the poles that led to the very top of the bridge. Scottie was never one to be outdone by me. Before long he was standing at the top, with nothing to hold on to. He was staring down at almost 60 feet of open space between him and the water. He was too far away for me to see his face but I could imagine he was giving me a mischievous grin and then he was off. Arms flailing in the air, silent until the last second when he allowed a single “uuggh!” just as his body submerged into the flowing Chattahoochee.

Word spread quickly among our friends about the bridge. I am sure that people have been jumping off of it pretty much since it was built but for Scottie and I we were pioneers of our generation. Before long, it seemed, Settles Bridge became a crowded place where the after school politics of teenage life were played out. We would find our friends there as well as our enemies. We would bring girls there so we could look brave in front of them as we jumped off. One time in the 11^th grade we went down to the bridge on a foggy night after sneaking out of our house and we brought our friend’s younger brother, Mike with us. He was in 8^th grade and the same age as we were when we discovered the place. We enjoyed, it must be said, the respect and gratitude we got from hanging out with someone much younger than ourselves. Mike climbed up into fog that was so thick that we could not see him on the bridge, nor could he see the water below him from where he was standing. All we heard was a splash. It is hard for an 8^th grader to impress an 11^th grader but I will always consider that one of the bravest things I have ever witnessed somebody do.

Life was hard in high school. Being a teenager is complicated and overwhelming. I haven’t been a teenager for almost 10 years but the memories of the anxiety and depression that I felt for much of those years is still palpable. I am not sure anybody even knew how messed up I felt back then because I always did my best to hide it and stay as stoic as possible. Things were always different when I was on the bridge though. I felt like I belonged up there. Climbing up the poles and balancing across the beams, my life literally in the balance, never bothered me. All day at school, during the warm months, I would daydream about when I would be out there on the river and I could feel my toes on that rusty iron again. The only thing that seemed to make sense and make me feel like I belonged in the universe was when I was floating in midair, arms stretched out to grasp at nothing.