Moodswing - A reason to live

I was driving along that cruddy butt smear of a freeway section south of Freedom Parkway, the part where the number of lanes swell and contract like a big, constipated boa constrictor and where — almost every day — you see some poor schleppo on the shoulder standing dazed next to his dented car wondering where that truck came from, and I was thinking about life in general and how it would be nice not to die that day in particular.
I’ve had days, of course, when I felt differently. Nothing major. It’s just that there were times when I got out of bed completely burdened with the fact that I was still breathing, having missed a perfectly good opportunity to croak in my sleep. On those days I’d call Lary.
“I’m on the ledge,” I’d bleat. “I’m gonna jump.”
“Well,” he’d say in a way that always saves me, “WHAT’S STOPPIN’ YA?”
“I meant figuratively, you fuck!” I’d shriek, and shrieking at Lary always provides me with a reason to live. Soon I’d be chirping into the phone, “Why do you keep bags of cat litter in your dishwasher? I mean, what’s the reason for that?”
But Lary’s redeeming quality is his complete comfort with the lack of reason. For example, a few years ago the four of us — Daniel, Grant, Lary and I — traveled to Prague, and I thought I’d be the tour guide, considering the fact that I am, after all, an official foreign-language interpreter. I don’t speak Czech specifically, but on the average, I’d traveled to Europe more in one month than these three plebeians had in their whole lifetimes, so I assumed they would all sit at my knee enthralled with my knowledge the whole time, letting me explain the reasons for things.
“Wanna know why you should keep your head at armrest level when evacuating a smoke-filled aircraft?” I’d tweet smugly during the safety demonstration. “It’s because smoke rises while noxious chemical fumes sink, so the safest air is in between.”
Out of the perfect pureness of friendship, Daniel and Grant were prepared to ruin their vacation and provide me with a constant audience, but once in Prague, Lary kept ditching us only to reappear later with absorbing stories of peg-legged whores and bald cab drivers with boils on their heads and stuff.
So soon, even I had to admit — after a spitting fit of jealousy in which I hit Lary with a plastic jar of Vaseline — that we’d have more fun if we just followed Lary around. After that we stuck to him like putty and, as a reward, were given a fascinating tour through the human sewage pipe of Prague. At one point we found ourselves in a sweaty underground gay bar belting shots of Ouzo. Grant, who at that time was still an acting straight man (it was a bad act, but still), noticed that the walls along the dance floor were outfitted with rows of toilet-paper dispensers.
“What’s the reason for that?” he asked.
But Grant is another who feels no need to search for reason, so he simply resumed his practice of allowing the world to unfurl its surprises. The fact that he’s gay isn’t one of them. We all knew that before he did, or before he chose to tell us, since, of course, on some level he always knew. Since then he has lived completely unfettered by expectations. “I have no hopes, no dreams, no prospects,” he likes to say. “In fact, I’m the happiest man alive.”
Daniel and I wish we could be that way. In contrast we are always searching, and we don’t even know for what. “Why do I do this?” Daniel says sometimes, referring to his art. Usually it’s after a bad newspaper review or an unsuccessful meeting at a New York gallery. Once we both found ourselves in a slough of despond at his place, drinking wine while he colored in lips on the faces of his hand-drawn exhibit announcements. That was back when he did faces. “What’s the point?” he grieved while methodically brushing each envelope with a red crayon. There were hundreds of envelopes. “I should just give up.”
“Right,” I slobbered. I was there seeking solace myself because the editor who’d greenlighted my article at Esquire had just been fired, pulling the chair out from under the biggest milestone of my career. So I wasn’t jolly full of fun, either, but still I perked slightly when I saw that Daniel accidentally skipped an envelope. “You missed one,” I said, handing him the culprit that escaped his crayon.
“Well,” Daniel said, stopping to correct the error, “there’s no reason for leaving the house without lips, now is there?” Then I helped him resume his task, because right then I realized there’s no time for seeking reasons to live when there are stacks of envelopes to be colored.