2.
The first time I saw him
was in the summer when I was thirteen years old, ninety miles north of Fresno
in the Sierra National Forest.
We
were on a family vacation to visit my father’s half-brother, Gregory, a
successful San Francisco-based actuary. A week before we were scheduled to
arrive, Uncle Greg decided that a lively – but mostly silent – hiking excursion
in the middle of nowhere would be preferable to discussing the particulars of
his latest divorce – Aunt Margo had left him for a t’ai-chi instructor named Lotus
or something similarly floral – or subjecting us to his undecorated condo with
eggshell-colored walls that reeked of the desolation inherent in unforeseen,
late-middle-aged bachelordom. I was just happy to get away from Andrea, my
first crush, who had recently dumped me over instant messenger in a savage
proto-emoji assault.
Today
I probably wouldn’t be able to pick Uncle Greg out of a police lineup of pale, foie-gras-livered
insurance executives, but I’ll never forget the visual details of that trip: wandering
through dense, pine and oak-covered foothills and wildflower-strewn meadows,
watching Chinook salmon break water in the Merced River, climbing up to the
sparse, chilly tundra. And arguing with my little brother, Gordon (who was
still talking at this point), about whose turn it was to use one of the three single-use
cameras we’d been allotted.
On
the second-to-last day of hiking, we were descending the western slope of a
smallish peak, heading back to civilization. Gordy, as usual, was being a ten-year-old
shithead, wasting the last of our Kodaks to snap away aimlessly at the dense
vegetation on either side of us, creating splatter-pieces that would, once they
were developed, probably make Basquiat look like a Dutch master. Around a sharp
bend in the trail, I noticed a cool multi-colored rock pile that someone had
built to resemble a pyramid. Knowing that there probably only two or three
exposures left on the camera, I snatched it from Gordy’s sausage-link fingers
and aimed it at the rocks.
“You
stupid dingleberry!” he screeched at me in that weird, wavy voice that never
ended up dropping to the octave it should have. He scampered away to find my
parents, muttering a few more PG-13 curses along the way.
The
adults in our party were farther along the trail, out of sight, having what I
imagined was a very somber discussion about the three empty bottles of
navy-strength gin that had tumbled out of Uncle Greg’s sleeping bag when we’d
been packing up camp the previous morning. I had at least a few seconds to
myself before Gordy tattled. I squinted into the Kodak’s viewfinder, turned the
flash on, and aimed at the rocks.
Before
I was ready to snap the picture, I heard rustling in the woods, maybe thirty yards
from where I was crouching. Whatever it was, it sounded big, way bigger than
the bobcat my dad had spotted scaling a red fir a couple days earlier. I crept
into the forest to get a closer shot, my free hand reaching into the pocket of
my cargo shorts for the canister of bear mace that my mom had made me promise
not to use on my brother.
I
wasn’t quiet enough. A massive head and torso emerged from behind a moss-colored
log. He was covered in reddish-brown fur, had a wide, simian nose and dark,
brooding eyes that pierced me with a combination of curiosity and mild
annoyance as he munched on some leaves with teeth the size of wheat crackers.
He was standing upright, must have been at least eight feet tall. And even
though I couldn’t be sure of his actual gender – “He” just seemed to have some
really strong, stoic masculine vibes going on – his species was obvious.
I
snapped the last three exposures on the camera’s roll as fast as I could. The
Bigfoot stood motionless, silently chewing and pondering the situation, probing
the depths of my early-teen soul with a gaze that felt decidedly empathetic.
Time suddenly seemed to slow down. To my adrenaline-addled mind, I had found a
hairy father figure, one who would understand the pain Andrea’s endless streams
of digital frowny faces had caused, and wouldn’t just tell me to suck it up and
to disconnect the modem because he needed to use the phone.
As
weird as it sounds, we were having a moment.
Until
the shrill sounds of Gordy’s increasingly louder whining broke the forest’s
silence. I swiveled for a couple seconds to glare back in the direction of the
trail. When I turned around, Bigfoot was gone.
Before
we left California, my parents took the Kodak to a one-hour-photo place near
the airport, just so I’d shut up about what I’d thought I’d seen. I tore open the envelope that contained the
developed pictures while were waiting to check our bags. The first picture I’d
taken looked like one of Gordy’s: a chaotic sludge of green and brown streaks.
The second was only a little better, you could see a blurry but somewhat
defined figure that was clearly mammalian, in that it might have resembled
anything from a gorilla to a Rottweiler, depending on the viewer’s perspective.
The
third picture was a keeper. It wasn’t the clearest shot, the creature seemed a
little farther away than I remembered, but you could plainly see the details of
his hair, nose, teeth, and, most importantly, his eyes.
“Bear,”
my dad said, looking over my shoulder as he handed me my plane ticket.
“Definitely
a bear, hon,” my mom said, giving me another half-hearted scolding for leaving
the trail before returning to rummaging the confines of a carry-on bag for her
in-flight vampire romance novel.
Gordy
cupped his hand around my ear and craned his head in my direction. “I believe
you, Vance,” he whispered defiantly, which almost made me stop hating him for
breaking the bond Bigfoot and I had so briefly shared.
The
lukewarm response to the photograph did little to quiet my manic enthusiasm.
When we got back home to Connecticut, I sent photocopies of the picture to the
zoology departments of all the local colleges and a handful of promising-sounding
“research” organizations – the North American Bigfoot Alliance, the Sasquatch Exploration
Society, et cetera. I got their addresses from a mulleted thirtysomething named
Todd who played Magic: The Gathering at the local library (until a couple
months later when a custodian found the cameras he’d been hiding in the
bathrooms near the children’s section).
Though
the colleges never got back to me, the non-academic response was more than anything
I expected. Not only did the higher-ups at the organizations I’d contacted
believe me, they wanted to know more. Was I able to collect any hair or stool
samples? Had I heard any distinct vocalizations prior to making visual contact?
Did I know the exact GPS coordinates of the sighting?
Unfortunately
the picture was the only tangible thing I had to offer, but nevertheless, I was
asked to be interviewed, invited to join online chat forums and to attend
biannual gatherings, and offered the chance to go on an all-expenses-paid
scientific expedition, retracing the hike I’d taken through the Sierra National
Forest with a rogue primatologist who called himself Abominable Andy. For the
first time I felt like I was part of something special, a community, albeit one
that seemed to contain more than a few greasy basement-dwellers, the type of men
who, like Todd, probably had pictures of a much different variety hidden on
secret hard drives somewhere.
This
was also right around the time that Gordy stopped talking. One day he came home
from school and walked upstairs without his daily ritual of begging for a
forbidden pre-dinner Pudding Pop, which was strange, but not an immediate cause
for concern. For the next five hours he sat on his bed staring at nothing,
totally emotionless, an activity that would become his preferred pastime for
the better part of three decades.
Initially
the consensus was that he was faking it, that the zombie routine was just
another baby-of-the-family cry for attention, that it would run its course. The
first few days followed a similar routine. Gordy would get sent home from
school early for insubordination, he’d go up to his room and sit there while
one or both of my parents would threaten, then plead, then beg for him to stop
messing around, that the joke or the protest or whatever it was had gone on
long enough.
I
tried a more aggressive approach. About a week into his silence, I walked into
Gordy’s room and jacked him between his stomach rolls, hard, a gut-shot that
normally would have caused a five-alarm screeching session. He made a quiet
whooshing noise and hunched over a little, but that was it. I opened his
dresser and pulled out a handful of his sacred comics. I held Captain America #443 in front of his
face and slowly tore the cover in half, followed by the rest of the pages in
the book. No response. I crushed Venom
#1, Gordy’s all-time favorite, into a ball and whipped it at his head, hitting
him square between the eyes. He didn’t flinch.
He
wasn’t faking anything.
It’s
not like he became a full-on vegetable. He would sit at the dining room table
and slowly shove food into his mouth, staring at his plate the entire time. He
would turn on the TV and plop down in front of it, cross-legged, but you
couldn’t tell if he was looking at the screen or something beyond it that the
rest of us couldn’t see. It was quickly decided that going to school would be
an impossibility for him, but Gordy didn’t seem to mind my parents dragging him
to an ever increasing number of appointments with psychologists, neurologists,
hypnotherapists, and any other –ist that might offer up something better than
“I don’t know.”
Instead
of deflating them, my brother’s condition seemed to energize my parents. They
joined committees, attended symposiums, organized charity bicycle rides, and
contemplated the merits of rubbing shoulders with the anti-vaxxer crowd. They
cocooned themselves in a constant stream of questions – Where was he on the
spectrum? Which spectrum? Would the medication help? Would the medication hurt?
What about a third opinion? A fourth? – that were asked with the steadfastness
of caregivers who had accepted their reality and were choosing to thrive in it.
My
own reality was more complicated. What good was being a perfectly healthy son
to parents who had suddenly transformed themselves into bleeding-heart
champions of the disabled? What good was being an older brother if you couldn’t
even protect your younger sibling from himself?
I
didn’t want to look for answers. Instead, I retreated deeper into a world that
was far beyond the scope of what stuffy science types and the doctors who
probed my brother would consider possible, a world that the picture I’d taken
in California proved was the real deal.
I
expanded my Bigfoot research to include every unsubstantiated creature I could
get information about, from the Loch Ness Monster and Jersey Devil to the
Man-eating Tree of Madagascar and Iceland’s Lagarfljót Worm. I subscribed to
every unconventional magazine I could afford, planned unfeasible multi-continental
excursions, and spent countless hours scouring internet chat rooms and message
boards with the focus of a monk pouring over scriptures. I understood how lucky
I’d been on the hike; I don’t think that I ever really believed it would happen
again, that I’d come face to face with a Nessie slowly emerging from the lake
in all its scaly glory, or hear the notoriously chilling shrieks of the Honey
Island Swamp Monster. But the idea of something like that being possible awoke
a hopefulness in me that I couldn’t find anywhere else, a feeling that died a
little whenever I saw Gordy strapped onto an examination chair with spider webs
of nodes crisscrossing his skull and tubes coming out of his bruised arms that
already looked like a junkie’s. A feeling that stayed with me once I stopped
going to the doctors’ offices.
My
budding career as a cryptozoologist was short-lived, however. High school (and
puberty) came and I learned early on that lecturing about the alleged human
menstrual blood involved in Chupacabra mating rituals or the impressive length
of a recently discovered Yeti turd wouldn’t get you into Maggie Furman’s jeans
or get you invited to your first raid of an unguarded liquor cabinet. There
were plenty of discoveries to be made that didn’t involve trekking through malaria-ridden
jungles or holding sonar equipment over the side of a flimsy canoe for hours at
a time. You only had to have a decent excuse to borrow Mom’s Subaru, and a
knowledge of whose parents were out of town for the weekend and/or who had the pot
with the least amount of seeds in it. Information that was easy to come by for
someone with as much well-honed online communication experience as myself.
By
the time I finished my first semester at a well-known hipster haven in Upstate
New York, the (mostly) legendary monsters of my pre-adolescence had almost
disappeared from my memory, replaced by a steady, pseudo-spiritual diet of Beat
poets, the Tao of Whoever, and abundant helpings of LSD and mushrooms. I found
myself tapped into a mysterious, invisible world that existed everywhere, even among
the growing piles of Taco Bell wrappers and bong-water stains of my dorm room.
One that could be accessed easily if you knew the right combination of
substances to introduce to your bloodstream. The real adventure is in your mind, bro! No, wait, the adventure IS
your mind!
The
only problem with college is that it ends. Your brain, even when it’s hopped up
on enough acid to make Antiques Roadshow tolerable, doesn’t have the ability to
instantly vaporize thousands of dollars of student loan debt. I graduated and
moved to Manhattan, got a job doing PR and marketing for a swanky art gallery
in the Financial District frequented by generations of moneyed douches and
their trout-lipped better halves. I was paying my bills and helping to rip off the corrupt corporate overlords. Win-win
situation!
But this was early 2008, which meant that in a
few months the economy would collapse, and every suit on Wall Street would be
far more concerned about saving his own ass than about which Haring print would
best complement his collection of coke mirrors. I would be laid-off, faced with
the very real possibility of moving back into my parents’ house, of spending
the foreseeable future sharing a bathroom with my conversationally challenged
brother.
Luckily,
it didn’t come to that.
The
owner of Fat Frank’s, a crusty Upper West Side pub where I was rapidly spending
my unemployment checks took pity on me, offering to make me his new apprentice
bartender. What I thought would be a stop-gap gig was only the first in what
would become a decade-long trudge through the recession-proof (but not
pain-free) world of booze-slinging.
Many
people who have spent any significant time working in a fast food restaurant
will tell you that the aroma of deeply fried chemical-meats becomes intolerable
after a while, that they’d rather swallow roach poison than eat a Big Mac.
Bartending isn’t like that, at least it wasn’t for me. After-shift beers
quickly turned into before-and-after-shift-beers, which turned into Jameson
shots whenever I felt like it, or whenever Mr. Francis (the bar’s owner) and
the neighborhood bar flies who congregated around him felt like it. Which was
pretty much constantly.
Weeks
became months and then years, and I became a dive bar all-star. I got to know
most of the regulars and the semi-frequent drunks better than my own family. If
I couldn’t remember your name, I’d still remember your drink of choice, and I’d
have it ready for you before you took your seat. I could pour up to six beers at
once while reciting the recipes for an entire pantheon of disgustingly sugary
shooters, from Buttery Nipples and Redheaded Sluts to Kamikazes and Russian Woo
Woos. My efficiency had nothing to do with trying to get better tips. The less
time it took me to interact with people meant more time to sip my own
Jack-and-gingers, to fiddle with the music playlist, or to sneak a glance at
the Yankees or Knicks game beaming above my head. The customers I should have
been so eager to please were little more than minor pests on the periphery of
my vision, annoying but brief pauses in the whiskey-tinged party I was having
mostly with myself.
Fat
Frank’s became such an extension of my being that I stopped noticing the
casualties: the former classmates who were initially so pumped to be friends
with someone who had the power to douse them in free drinks, the girl I’d been
dating off and on since graduation, the girls I went home with after work who
I’d never see again. They all became ghosts, abandoned by an attention span
that lasted as long as it took me to pour another shitty domestic draft, or to
slug another shot.
The
lifestyle was antisocial and viciously unhealthy, but it was steady money if
you had the stomach for it. Which I did, as long as I didn’t have to get up
before two-thirty or work anything resembling a sober shift.
During the afternoons, when the hangover demons were
spitting shards of fire into the deepest parts of my dehydrated brain matter,
when crawling from my bed to the toilet seemed like an impossible, Odyssean
journey, I would occasionally curse my position in life. How had things gotten
to this point? I’d come to New York with a promising career, a healthy social
life, and something vaguely resembling hope for the future, only to have it all
swept out from under me.
The government and the banks were obvious scumbags, sure,
but I couldn’t help but think that something bigger was going on, something
that went beyond a few Washington, D.C. lobbyists, beyond the interest rates
and subprime mortgages that the talking heads kept harping on. Starting the
research was as easy as a few keystrokes on the crud-stained laptop that lived
on the floor next to my bed. The internet had grown exponentially since my days
as a monster junkie in the late nineties; there were countless alternative news
and history sites dedicated to secret worlds that went far deeper than anything
CNN or the BBC had ever reported, narratives that were far crazier than
anything my alcohol-dulled mind could concoct on its own. I pored over alleged
evidence of systematic fluoride poisoning, the Vatican’s knowledge of ancient
aliens, libido-altering chemicals infused into meat products, mysterious
experiments and underwater pyramids in the Bermuda Triangle, secret Nazi bases
in Antarctica, staged moon landings, thousands of false flag operations,
underground fake news factories in rural Virginia, centuries-old elitist cabals
ruled by reptilian humanoids from the Alpha Draconis star system who had
orchestrated everything from the fall of Rome to 9/11. All that I’d taken for
granted about history and my own daily life now seemed to ripple with sinister
undertones, the feeling that I was a tiny, unwitting cog in a machine I could
barely comprehend.
I’d wanted something, anything, to break the monotony of
my literally and figuratively wasted days and nights, and I’d found it in a big
way. But what did it all mean? Where was the White Rabbit (my search engine)
taking me?
The longer I spent trying to untangle the Great
Conspiracy Mindfuck Rubik Cube, the more I kept coming back to the same date:
December 21, 2012. It marked the end of a 5,126-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar,
but its significance didn’t end with a few star-obsessed Mayan priests trying
to make sense of the heavens. There were New Agers who thought that the winter
solstice would bring a major physical and spiritual change to the Earth, that
we would all be ushered into a new, ostensibly trippier age. Ancient astronaut
theorists spoke enthusiastically about the Independence
Day-style return of the Annunaki, an alien race worshipped as gods by the
Sumerians, who now lived on a seldom-appearing planet called Nibiru. Proof of
the End Times could be found just about everywhere, from the writings of
Nostradamus to patterns of mass extinctions supposedly observed in the fossil
record. A retired tour guide in Arizona announced that he would jump off a
cliff near his house and into an intergalactically aligned portal that would
open at exactly midnight on the twenty-first, saving him from whatever
catastrophe might befall our doomed civilization.
Something
was coming. I didn’t know what it was, but I would be ready for it.
I
whittled my drinking down to a minimum, started taking Krav Maga lessons in
Brooklyn and urban survival classes in Central Park, did pushups until my palms
bled. I filled my apartment and a nearby storage unit with camping gear, fire
starters, first-aid kits, gallons of bottled water, machetes I bought on eBay,
throwing stars I found in Chinatown, and enough cans of Spam, tuna fish, and
baked beans to feed me through at least three apocalypses. I spent the quieter
hours at work glued to my phone, studying evacuation routes and off-grid living
strategies. I took practice escape hikes through the Bronx and over the George
Washington Bridge, cruising the wilds of northern New Jersey and Westchester
County until my feet blistered and peeled.
The
closer it got to The Big Day, the more prepared I felt. I barely recognized the
confident, chiseled human who stared back at me through the bathroom mirror
every morning, and neither did the patrons of Fat Frank’s. I was handed more
napkins and credit card receipts with phone numbers scribbled on them in the
first four months of 2012 than in the previous four years combined.
The
attention did little to break my focus. Whenever I was asked about my improved
physique and stoic, non-bleary-eyed demeanor, I’d mumble something about training
for a half-marathon and quickly change the subject. I wasn’t dumb enough to
share my beliefs with people who thought that the Military-Industrial Complex
was the name of an electronic music festival, and it wasn’t like I could bring
any prospective hookup back to a fifth-floor walk-up that now looked like the
ideal bunker in a doomsday prepper’s wet dream.
I
had one goal: witness some wild, world-changing shit – whatever that might be –
and figure out how to survive it. Nothing else mattered.
As
September, October, and November rolled by, I stayed quiet, kept my head down,
and finished my preparations. Every afternoon when I came home from the gym, I
cleaned and catalogued my growing weapons and food stockpiles. When I wasn’t doing
Yoga or tinkering with homemade squirrel traps, I kept my eyes glued to every form
of media available. But besides the occasional rehashed History Channel “documentary”
or someone claiming on their blog that they’d seen a massive dark object enter
the solar system through their hobby telescope, there wasn’t much new information
to be gleaned.
The calm before the storm,
I told myself.
December
twentieth was a Thursday, but Fat Frank’s was oddly quiet, even during happy
hour. Which was fine by me. I set up my laptop, two tablets and my phone behind
the bar, each one tuned to a different obscure message board or subreddit. I
turned three of the TVs to mainstream news networks of various sociopolitical
persuasions. My bug-out bag was parked next to my feet, stuffed with enough
supplies to weather society’s collapse, or at least get me out of New York.
The
hours went by and I focused on the screens, unconsciously pouring drinks and
not caring if anyone paid for them. The main news stories on the TVs were about
health care legislation, an increase in botched plastic surgeries, and a
decrease in teen smoking rates. The conspiracy sites were maddeningly quiet. A small
sliver of anxiety rose from my stomach, then another, building until I felt
like the kid who spends all night working on a history paper and wakes up realizing
she forgot about her first-period calculus test. Or maybe school had been
cancelled and I was the only one who didn’t know about it.
Then
it was midnight.
A
newscaster made a joke about putting his “survival ark” on eBay. A live feed of
the retiree in Arizona showed him peering over the edge of cliff, shrugging and
walking off-screen, past several of his clearly disappointed followers. Someone
on a preppers forum posted an apology for mistaking a Nutella smudge on his
laptop screen as a fiery gateway to the underworld enveloping his Google Earth
maps.
Outside,
a snarling bum pressed his bare chest against one of the bar’s windows, manipulating
it seductively in a counter-clockwise motion.
Nothing
happened.
I
frantically studied the monitors for a few more minutes, my anxiety at
full-throttle, before looking up to scan the room I’d been neglecting. There
was Mina, the heavily tattooed waitress from the Asian tapas place across the
street, a trio of flush-cheeked finance bros, and a scrawny, asthmatic ecstasy
peddler named Big Rickey. They stared mindlessly at their phones or at the
basketball game I’d left on one of the TVs. Their spirits hadn’t suddenly
ascended to a higher level of consciousness. They were the same boring,
willfully ignorant sheep they’d always been. But that made them smarter than
me. They hadn’t spent the last several years suckered into the false belief
that anything truly interesting could ever happen. And they definitely hadn’t
spent the better part of a week comparing deer urine and crossbow prices on Amazon.
I
sighed, grabbed two bottles from the well and placed them on the bar.
“Who’s
trying to get fucked up?” I asked, rhetorically, before taking a monstrous slug
of cheap tequila that my now-healed liver was only too happy to accommodate.
The
next two or three hours were a collection of blurry snapshots: handing out shots
of whiskey, shots of rum, shots of vodka, shots of whatever was left on the
quickly dwindling shelves behind the bar. Pretending to be Tom Cruise in Cocktail by flipping bottles behind my
back, then watching those bottles shatter on the floor in slow motion.
Mistaking Mina’s enthusiasm for my antics as an invitation to make out. Rickey
and two of the bros going into the bathroom and staying there for a long time.
New people coming and going, faceless and unimportant. Someone cutting me off
mid-sentence and saying, “At least with Y2K there was some credible evidence,” and me half-heartedly trying to stab his
or her hand with a wine opener.
I took the last bottle of Jameson off the shelf, poured a
glassful, and disappeared into it.
