Suicide Note #1… by Pam Houston

1. Georgetown, Great Exuma.

Two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in the Chat and Chill Bar on Stocking Island. KB, the Bahamian who owns the place, is looking for an argument and can’t find one. Mandela versus Boutelayzee, University of Chicago versus Harvard, chanterelles versus portabellas. Even Mushroom John, who brought his wife, Sandy, down here from their tuber farm in Pennsylvania for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, says the rule is to each his own. Down the beach Junior is making the best conch salad on the island, conch so fresh it is still wiggling when he puts it down in front of us. I drink two Goombay smashes to Cory’s five Kalik beers, and after some critical mass of mosquito bites we tumble outside to hit the blue, blue water. I told Cory there was no blue like Exuma blue before we came, and now he says, “It’s so pretty, it’s corny.”

They call this archipelago the friendly islands, 365 Exumas, one, they like to say, for every day of the year, and it’s true, even the teenage boys with their skullcaps and their hooded eyes feel compelled to say hello when they pass us on the street. At the Peace and Plenty Hotel, Kaliks cost three dollars, but there is a reggae band at Eddie’s Edgewater club on Fridays, and if you go to the kitchen door and smile politely, old Mrs. Beatrice Goodnight will give you fried chicken and peas and rice wrapped in the Sunday paper with salt.

Every Sunday at the Chat and Chill, KB roasts a pig, we can smell it where we’re floating, you can smell it all over the island when the wind is onshore. A stingray floats across the white sand below our floating bodies, and a little school of sergeant majors mistake the yellow in my bathing suit for one of their own. The floating is so effortless, the sun so soft and warm, I’m almost asleep when Junior hollers that the conch fritters are ready, and we swim to shore and eat them, roll them around in the red sauce that has just the right amount of kick to it, get in one more swim before it’s time to eat the pig.

2. Davis, California.

Early morning on the greenbelt. Walking with Lucy, while Audrey leaps between furrowed, fallow fields. Everyone we know calls Lucy Audrey and Audrey Lucy, which is strange since Lucy is a thirty-five-year-old woman, and Audrey is a German shorthaired pointer, but when you see the way they look at each other, you begin to understand. Lucy has her sister’s name ‘Emily’ tattooed across her bicep. Last month, Emily tried to kill herself, succeeded, temporarily, was gone, in almost every way that counts, for more than two whole days. Then she came back from the dead.

Last night I heard a nightingale imitating a car alarm in a jacaranda tree. This morning, a white heron teases Audrey with a touch-and-go pattern along the creek. I remember the day last fall when Murray and Melinda and I walked on Limantour Beach after the storm and watched the pelicans. The storm had brought out all the animals, tule elk, fallow deer, and three coyotes who ran and leapt and did the kinds of things coyotes do in Native American sand paintings, while we watched, open-mouthed, from the side of the road. We saw so much wildlife that day Murray finally asked if I’d sent a guy ahead of us to push animals out of boxes. We were each locked inside our individual sorrows, didn’t know each other well enough to share, but we agreed, out loud, that like moose, pelicans were surely put on earth to act as suicide preventers, agreed we’d never kill ourselves within the sight of one.

3. Ozona, Texas.

Nine o’clock on a Thursday night, the bar full of Halliburton guys in their red all-in-one suits, roughnecks in from the oil fields for preseason football, hunting stories, and beer. It is just dumb luck that I’ve worn my camo miniskirt, and I take the best seat in the house for watching the Patriots beat up on the Redskins, until the bartender comes over and tells us we’ve entered a private club. Cory rises to leave. He recognizes enemy territory, knows that poets and Halliburton guys shouldn’t drink together, especially not in Texas. “In that case,” I say, “I’ll take two memberships and two double shots of Patr”n Silver and a Coca-Cola back.”

We can mark this down as my last fearless moment because even though I’ve already seen the Albanian’s pictures in the glove box, I haven’t really let her sink in. She’s married to a high-ranking political official. Every time Cory goes over there to visit her, someone comes up to him in a trench coat and says, “You know the price of a man in Albania is one hundred dollars U.S.”

I tell him with a straight face that the Albanian’s essential unavailability denies me all my magical qualities; then I ask him for money for the jukebox. He gives me three dollars, and I play every antiwar song I can find wedged in between Clint Black and the If You Don’t Believe in Freedom We’ll Kick Your Fuckin’ Ass Quintet: “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” and “Imagine,” and “War, Good God, ya’ll, what is it good for, absolutely nothing, say it again.” By the third round of Silver we’ve won the bartender over, we can tell because the tequila starts coming in tumblers.

Cory says, “You might be the first woman to ever drink in this bar,” and I say, “You might be the first poet.” Later, in the parking lot of the Best Western, I pick up both our heavy suitcases and make a beeline for the stairs. Cory says, “No! Pam, no!” which makes me lift the bags higher and run for it, and when I get to the top I laugh so hard I pee.

4. Juneau, Alaska.

They said we wouldn’t see any orcas. They said the humpbacks were in and when the humpbacks were in you didn’t see the orcas, because the orcas are predators and the humpbacks are prey. It’s been a long day. We’ve been all the way up Tracy Arm to the glaciers, and everyone but the captain and I are sleeping when a report comes over the radio: orcas in Shearwater Cove.

By the time we get there, there’s nothing stirring. A couple of humpbacks out in the main channel a sure sign that the orcas are gone. The captain is worried about the hour, worried about the fuel he’s got left, worried about his daughter, who’s got magenta hair and a T-shirt that says THIS is what a feminist looks like, who is back from somewhere like Reed College working on his boat this summer, selling sodas to the tourists through a permanent scowl. There is a flash of fin on the other side of the channel, distant, but unmistakable. Orca. Male.

The captain says, “that’s four miles across this channel, minimum.” I show him the silver charm around my neck, remind him that it’s my last day in Alaska, promise to swim for shore if we run out of gas.

”Don’t lose that fin,” he says, turning the bow into the sunset, but I couldn’t lose it if I tried, the water of Stephen’s Passage backlit, a million diamonds rushing toward me in the sun, and one black fin, impossibly tall, absurdly geometric, the accompanying blast of whale breath above it, superimposed onto the patterns of light.

Spotting whales at sea is not so different than spotting deer in the woods. For hours you see nothing, and then you see one, and suddenly you realize you are surrounded. This pod has twenty-five, by my best counting, the one male, who keeps his distance, and twenty-four females, all of them running steadily west. We get out in front, and the captain shuts down the engines. Every time the big male’s fin turns itself up and over and back down under the surface of the water, I can’t help myself, I gasp.

We are directly in the path of one of the females. Every time she surfaces we can hear her breathing, every time she surfaces I can see the spot of white at her heart, the patch on an orca that takes a black whale and turns it into something else. Twenty years ago, on my first trip to Alaska, I bought a string of white heart trade beads, and for this trip I tore the house apart to find them.

In three more dives she’ll be under the boat. I touch the beads at my neck and try to guess which side of the boat will get me the closest. The others are stirring, crowding the port side, watching her approach. I choose starboard, she dives one last time, and I start counting, at five she rises right under my hand. The breath from her blowhole is cold on my face. If I dared I could reach down and touch her on her white spot. Someone behind me screams, maybe the captain’s daughter, but the whale is already diving, already resurfacing a few yards farther on. I listen to the sweep of her fin, the puff of her breathing, until she disappears into the disappearing diamonds. When the male’s big fin is the only thing visible, a speck on the horizon, we turn the boat north and head for home.

5. Good Hope, Jamaica.

The sun is high above the cockpit country, and Marc and I are getting stoned at the pool. I am way too old to smoke pot, but Marc isn’t, and he convinces me, you wouldn’t go to Italy and not drink the coffee, you don’t go to Jamaica without smoking the weed. And he’s right. This pot is so potent that every time the sun reemerges from behind the cotton-ball clouds, I think a cartoon character I’ve invented called Big Mister Sunshine is caressing my arms with baby-powdered hands.

Marc’s brother died in a car accident when Marc was eighteen. Four months later he was the one to walk in on the body of his mother. Four months later his father went to jail. For the five years after that Marc played Division I hockey, turned his entire focus toward protecting the 4' x 6' space behind him, dodging the pucks that were continually flying at his head. Then his goalie knees gave out, and the next logical thing was to try to become a writer.

Good Hope is a papaya plantation that for a few weeks a year turns itself over to the making of art. Last night the ceramicists pulled an all-nighter to fire up the big wooden kiln, and the writers decided to stay up with them. It was quite a party, writers throwing pots, potters writing pantoums, the big clay figures glowing crimson inside the house-sized kiln like bodies, the oncologist from Santa Fe unable to resist a recitation of ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’.

Marc’s been on a tear around the world this year, Iceland, Finland, Amsterdam, Jamaica. After this he is supposed to go see his brother’s grave for the first time since his family blew up–his expression–and even to talk about it makes him shake in his chair. “You don’t have to do that if you aren’t ready,” I tell him. “Your brother is with you every second; it doesn’t make any difference to him whether or not you stand at his grave.” The sun moves out of the clouds again, turning the flowers a purple I thought existed only in coral reefs and crayons.

”You’re right,” he says. “Thank you,” though we don’t fool each other for a second, and that’s how we know we are friends.

6. Creede, Colorado.

The first snow fell on the peaks today. An edgy wind brought clouds that looked like thunderheads, but when they cleared, just before sunset, everything above eleven thousand feet was blanketed, not in white, but in chrome. Cory is in Tampa this balmy midnight, sitting on his front porch surrounded by chirping lizards, writing a poem by the glow of a string of Christmas lights, the paper curling at the edges, his hand damp where he holds the pen. I have only recently come back to this place of ice-colored stars strewn across ink dark sky, where frost on the wooden walkway is likely every night of the year–and heavy tonight–where I scare up a barn owl traveling the short hundred yards between my door and my car, and his wing beat is the loudest sound for ten square miles. The owl stops me in my tracks, makes me take a breath of the cold night air, and when I do, I think, I am breathing in the stars.

Yesterday I walked with six of the best women I know up above Spring Creek Pass to the twelve-thousand-foot flat top called Jarosa Mesa. Our ages span twenty years, 34–54, and what we have in common is a love of the world so fierce it makes us edgy. The aspens near the pass are holding their breath this week, hints of yellow and crimson, the meadow grasses high after August’s monsoon. We talk about Myanmar, Cuba, and New Orleans. We talk about stepchildren, wind pants, Italian food, sex. We snack on the season’s first good clementines and raspberry Fig Newman’s. To the west of the mesa the 14ers lay themselves out before us, a multi-colored kingdom of stone: Handies Peak, Sunshine Peak, Redstone Peak, The Wetterhorn, and Uncompaghre.

If I died tonight it would be with every single thing unfinished (like, I suppose, any other night), and yet, what a gift to die on the verge of tears. I have spent my life trying to understand the way this rock and this ache go together, why a granite peak is more dramatic half dressed in clouds (like a woman), why sunlight under fog is better than the sum of its parts, why my best days and my worst days are always the same days, why (often) leaving seems like the only solution to the predicament of loving (each other) the world.

It’s hard to know whether the bigger problem is space or time. The forty-three years I didn’t get to miss him, the unlimited rent-a-car miles between Tampa and anywhere he could really see the stars. All the way across the I-10 last month, the sky kept making him offers: thunderclouds over Flagstaff, a double rainbow near Tucumcari, and Mars, the closest to the earth in fifty thousand years, burning candy-apple red and following the moon from Albuquerque to Gallup, and we went the other way ’the wrong way, any given star would tell you’ hurtling west to east.

7. Vancouver, British Columbia.

The bipolar halibut fisherman from Kodiak with ocean eyes and biceps like something right out of Michelangelo. He’s spent ten years in Jo-burg, ten years in Bangkok, ten years back and forth between Kodiak and B.C. As a result, his mouth does crazy things to the letter o, the letter h, and anything with a lot of r’s in it.

He tells me he doesn’t like to throw around words like CIA and Special Forces. He tells me we’ve been put on earth to crack each other open, and then to stick around long enough to watch the thing that, having been cracked open, suddenly shines. He says he knows there is only a thin wall between himself and all that shining, but sometimes he forgets how thin the wall is, because somebody came along when he wasn’t looking, and painted the damn thing black. He tells me he has tried three different times, but he just can’t stick with the lithium. Even when he talks about not wanting to use his powers for world domination, even when he uses the phrase dark arts, he looks like a little boy who wants more than anything to catch a fish.

When I tell my friend Fenton about him, Fenton hears Kodiak, hears fisherman, hears bi and polar and asks if maybe we can share him. When I remind Fenton about Cory, he reminds me about the Albanian in the glove box. “Love gets bigger after forty,” Fenton tells me. “After forty, love says, ‘Come one, come all.’”

8. Laramie, Wyoming.

In the summer, the trains come through town more than once an hour, and Cory and I, locked all night in the bookstore like a fantasy left over from clumsy childhood, pulling books off whatever shelves we want to and reading to each other–poems first, and then settling into stories–on the old purple couch. We’d come down that day from Walden, Moose Capital of Colorado. I was sure we would find some marker on the fence where Matthew Shepard had been tied.

Later, when we had turned out all the lights in the bookstore and thrown the mattress on the floor in the back room, the cowboy band across the street tried to play “Free Bird” as an encore, and I watched his face above me change color with the flashing light. He took my hand and made me feel the place we came together.

“Holy,” he said, not believing in God.

9. Tucson, Arizona.

Drinking espresso on the patio of Raging Sage, waiting for the phone to ring. Tami had her needle biopsy last Thursday, is expecting results today. She is the same age now that her mother was when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer.

After the news, good or bad, we are going to the spa for Watsu, where a large and beautiful woman named Shannon will float us around a pool one at a time, twist us and turn us, all the time supporting us, pull us tight against her shoulder, her arms snug under our butts, and rock us into something like sleep.

In the car on the way home, after the first Watsu, Tami said, “so did that kind of freak you out when she held you like a baby?” and we laughed so hard she had to pull to the side of the road. Now we can’t get enough of Shannon and the way she holds us like a baby. Both of our mothers have been dead a long time.

The only good thing about finding the Albanian in the glove box was looking forward to telling Tami that in the ensuing fight I had referenced my own magical qualities. I told her what Cory told me, that after sex in the missionary position–the Albanian won’t let Cory do anything her husband doesn’t do–the Albanian runs around the hotel room screaming, I’m a motel whore, I’m a motel whore. That’s when Tami started calling him the stupid fucking poet who won’t get out of his own stupid fucking way. “sFP,” Tami said, “like sunscreen, after forty-five it’s all the same.”

Bluetail lizards chase each other back and forth across the patio.

I say, “What was the best piece of advice your mother ever gave you?”

Tami thinks a minute, and reddens. “It was when Dixon and I had our first big fight,” she says. “Valentine’s Day, 1994. I didn’t think we were going to make it. I called Mom out of desperation. ‘Honey,’ she said, ‘can I just ask you one question? You know when you are having your period? Are you giving Dixon enough blow jobs during those times?’”

Tami’s cell phone rings, and we both stare at it a minute before she answers. She picks it up, and I start counting inside my head, and when I get to seven, relief breaks across Tami’s face like sunshine. I realize with some surprise that I am paralyzed with gratitude. If this building were on fire, I could not use my legs to move away.

10. Gulfport, Mississippi.

Cory and I walk out on the pier to watch the pelicans dive. On the way back we pass a young man in a wheelchair. He is smoking a cigarette, taking long pulls off a bottle inside of a paper bag. He is sunken in on himself in the particular way of the dying, but has a look of such despair on his face I know that in that way, at least, he is still very much alive.

Cory doesn’t notice his ball cap, brown corduroy, the word Worthy embroidered in cursive, in gold. It takes us ten minutes to gather the courage to go back up the pier and talk to him. From a hundred yards away, he watches us in our deliberations. Cory and I can never decide anything, where to go to dinner, whether or not to stay together, what to do about the Albanian in the glove box. By the time we get the courage to go to him, to ask him in quiet nervous voices if there is anything we can do for him, he feels equally sorry for us.

11. Madison, Wisconsin.

Saturday morning, middle of October. Good strong coffee from Michelangelo’s. Last night Cory sang “You Can Close Your Eyes” to my voicemail, and I did, and for the first time this week, slept for six hours straight. This morning on State Street a little blond girl–maybe three–threw the kind of temper tantrum we’d all like to throw, long and loud, and almost entirely artificial. “Jessica,” her mother said, in a perfectly reasonable tone, “Jessica, I’m going to have to ask you for your complete cooperation . . .”

Fenton called to say he has come up with the perfect book for us to write together, Pam and Fenton’s Tales of Failed Love and Romance. Chapter one, mine, called I Can’t Believe I Slept with a Poet, followed by chapter two, his, I Can’t Believe I Slept with a Priest.

Everything I know about Wisconsin can fit in one paragraph. It is the home of the Butter Burger. It is the state where, on the day that his father died, Brett Farve had the game of his life.

On Thursday I gave my class this assignment: write your own suicide note. There was half a beat where they all looked at me, and then each other. “No problem,” Murray finally said. “I’ll just go to computer and call one up.”

12. Tampa, Florida.

Eight o’clock on a Friday night, and downtown is rolled up tight. Half a block from the old Tampa Theater, lights, voices, and the slow roll of reggae spilling out into the street. Cory and I have been having a hard time finding fun in Tampa, and the Jamaicans at the Jerk Hut seem to be having some. It has the feel of a private party, and no one else there is white, but the bouncer says five bucks a person cover, twelve for a bucket of Red Stripes, you can get yourself some food in the back.

We fill a plate with jerk chicken and fried bananas, open two beers, and settle in on the perimeter. The band is talented, everyone in the place knows the words and sings along, and even though Cory keeps trying to bend the lyrics political, all the lines I catch are about love and sex and girls. Cory is not a dancer, but the beat is irresistible, so I compromise, as others do, by swaying in my chair. When we are not ignored entirely, we are looked at with pleasant curiosity.

Earlier that day, I was trying to buy some grouper somewhere other than a supermarket, and the woman at the Born Again Produce stand sent me to the Fresh Fish Market in the projects. “It’s crazy,” she said. “Water, water everywhere, but that’s the only one there is.”

The Fresh Fish Market is in a strip mall. Next door at the Joyful Noise Holiness Tabernacle of Jesus Christ, teenage girls in white and purple robes holding hymnals were lining up to go inside. There was only one grouper fillet left in the case, and the woman behind me in line said she wanted to arm-wrestle me for it, before she broke into a smile so wide it showered the dingy market walls with light. ‘sister got lost on the way to the Publix,” she said.

Back at the Jerk Hut, the band is on break, and Cory says, “We might be the only white people to ever drink in this bar.” And I say, “And you might be the only poet.”

I’m finally beginning to understand, that when we want to kill ourselves, it is not because we are lonely, but because we are trying to break up with the world before the world breaks up with us.

When the band comes back, a waitress named Shaila with beaded dreadlocks and bright green pumps takes both my hands and pulls me to the dance floor. She says, “We are going to get everybody dancing tonight.” Two songs later she says, “I’m going back to get the Mister,” and I know Cory won’t be able to resist her invitation. She brings him to me on the dance floor, and two songs later, Shaila gets her wish. Every single person–even the bouncer, even the kitchen ladies–are dancing, joyful, to the beat.