The Sheila Variations

my right foot

I was in a huge amphitheatre. Kind of like Great Woods (New Englanders, you will know of which I speak - I REFUSE to call it by its new name The Tweeter Center.) There were rows of seats going up, up, up, on a huge incline. The place was packed, and I was there by myself. I was so excited that I could barely keep myself in my seat. I was there to see him. He didn't know that I was there, and that made it even more exciting. I was sitting at the edge of one of the seat sections, with a railing in front of me. Directly below me was a walkway, going down underneath the seats, like you have in baseball stadiums. Suddenly, he appeared on that walkway, coming from within the stadium, and there he was.... I couldn't restrain myself. I stood up, leaned over the railing, and shouted his name, ecstatically. He turned, looked up, and saw me. His face! When he saw mine! There was this warmth there, this beautiful warmth ... he was excited to see me, of course, and also very surprised that I was there, how did I get there? Where had I come from? But more than all of that - was warmth. We couldn't get to each other, because of the railing, and the far drop down to the walkway ... but he walked directly below me, and reached up, up, up - he had to be way up on his tiptoes, and he's a very tall man ... and grabbed hold of my right foot, the closest thing he could grab ... the only thing he could reach. And he just held on to my right foot, squeezing it, as though it were my hand ... and I was leaning over the balcony, reaching down to him, but my arms couldn't reach. It didn't matter. It was this intense and warm connection flowing between our faces, love beaming out of us, and his hand holding on to my right foot for dear life.

Okay, so that didn't really happen. That was a dream I had.

I woke up from the dream, and it was dark in my room, and I was overwhelmed by a sensation of deep well-being, a feeling of "It's okay. Everything's okay." I could still feel, like a phantom, his hand grasping my right foot. The dream was so real, and so un-dreamlike, that I wondered if he had also dreamt the same thing, across the miles. It didn't feel like a dream. It felt like a visit. Like we had decided to visit one another on some other plane of existence. But I had no way of asking him, no way of contacting him. It had been a year since I had seen him, since we said good-bye on my porch, under the wind chimes. I remember that there was a wet spot on his blue T-shirt from my tears. The last thing he said to me was, and I remember him holding onto my arms, firmly: "Now listen to me, Sheila - I want you to listen. There are going to be times when you feel lonely and alone out there. But when that happens, I want you to stop, wherever you are, on the sidewalk, whereever - and just know that I am out here, and I love you. I'm serious - promise me that if you ever feel alone, you'll take a second and think of me, and just know that I will probably be thinking of you, and I am loving you. You're loved, Sheila. You are loved." More tears on the blue T-shirt but he made me promise. He wouldn't let me get away with not promising. He shook me, gently, "Promise me!" Wind chimes ... I promised. I now lived halfway across the country from him. I didn't know his phone number or his address. Life goes on. Life moves on. I was more in love with him than I have ever been with anybody else, but in the end: none of that matters: life does indeed go on.

The "holding my foot" dream felt like a message from him. We had always communicated in strange ESP-ish ways. Not a lot ever needed to be said. We didn't do a lot of talking. Or - scratch that - that's ALL we did was talk, but not about 'what's going on', or 'our feelings'. We talked about movies and books and food and music and what we did that week, and we told each other funny stories, and we made each other mix tapes. So when the whole thing ended, I wondered at times: what the hell was that? Did it add up to anything? What can I point to to say: "Yes. This happened."? But communication doesn't always have to be conventional, and you don't have to communicate in the way the books tell you to. The message was always clear, between he and I. It was just love. That's all. Your basic garden-variety love. No reinventing the wheel here. We just flat out loved each other. We never spoke of it, because it was like the blue sky, or like a solid object you can take a picture of. It just WAS. So to me, the vivid feeling of his hand on my right foot was a message across the space-time continuum from him: "Hey ... I'm still out here ... I remember you ... I remember you ..." It was him keeping his end of the promise from under the wind chimes. He was still out there, and he loved me.

I wrote out the dream to him in a letter, and put it away, adding it to the small pile. I didn't have his address, but occasionally I would write him a letter - in the same way I would write in my journal. If I saw something that reminded me of him, or if I read a book that he had once told me, "OH YOU HAVE TO READ IT" then I would write him a letter telling him I had finally read it, and all of my responses to it. Just because a thing ends doesn't mean that you lose the desire to communicate with that person. In a way, it was great that I didn't have his address or his phone number. If I did, it might have been much harder to move on. As it was, I needed to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and this thing that I had with him became more and more subconscious, more and more like a river flowing beneath the earth, something I could rely on, something I could tap into, but nothing that really existed in the clear light of day. The whole thing started feeling like a dream.

And then, I saw him again. For real. Not in a dream. I was back in Chicago, and I went to see him. Unannounced. I had no way of letting him know I would be at his show that night, but that was okay. Through a series of coincidental circumstances, we ended up having two hours to talk before his show. This was unprecedented. He had been milling about before his show, there were a ton of people there, and I stood in the back, watching him from afar, with an enormous jackass smile on my face. I watched him mingle, I watched him circulate ... and all the time, he had no idea that Sheila was in the house! It was just a matter of time before he saw me ... Now, he didn't "see" me, in any conventional way (of course not). At least I didn't notice him see me, and I had my eagle eyes fastened on him like a laser beam ... But here's what I saw: I saw him mingling. He's a star, everyone wants a piece of him, so I saw him trying to move through the crowd, and one person would stop him, or then another person would stop him to talk ... It was impossible to get from Point A to Point B. I hung back, just watching ... I knew it wouldn't be right for me to be just one of that crowd, trying to intercept him as he moved across the room. That was never my role in his life. I'm about to sound very new-agey (or ... shall I say ... MORE new-agey, since I already spoke about he and I communicating over the space-time continuum - sheesh, shut up, Sheila) - but at some point, during his stop-start crossing of the room, I knew that he had seen me. We didn't make eye contact, he didn't glimpse me through the throngs, or at least I didn't see him glimpse me ... that's not how I knew I had been spotted. I knew because his entire essence changed, and I could feel it from across the space. There was a sudden urgency, a purpose, his essence became electrified, and I watched him get rid of the intercepters with dispatch - I could see him saying, urgently, "Can't talk right now ... hang on ... can't talk ..." His whole body language changed, and I knew, watching all this: "Okay. He's seen me. He's trying to get to me."

And I was right. Then suddenly, there he was - charging at me - literally - hands stretched out to me, his face intense and excited, "What are you doing here????" I grabbed his hands. I jumped up and down, like a little kid, saying, "I'm here to surprise you!" He burst out laughing, and said, still holding onto my hands, "Well, it worked - I am very surprised!" We didn't hug. In the entire time I've known him, we've probably hugged 4 or 5 times. It's not our thing. But he gripped my hands, and I jumped up and down, and that was our way of saying "Hi!!"

He then said, "Let's get the hell out of here - " and yanked at my hand. He led me through the crowd, completely ignoring all the people who wanted a piece of him. Saying to them, "Not now ... not now ... not now ..." We made a beeline for the exit.

Because of circumstances beyond his control, he had a free two hours before his show - a scheduling snafu which was annoying for him, but ended up working so much to our favor. It was a godsend. We stood outside for two hours, and blabbed our heads off. Again: we didn't talk about our feelings, we didn't speak of that raging underwater river flowing beneath us ... No. We talked about books we had read, movies we had seen, we talked about actors we liked, we talked about nothing. I loved that. I loved talking about nothing with him ... It felt almost over-indulgent. I thought that I would get maybe 15 minutes of face-time, because he had a show to do ... and I wasn't there to try to buttonhole him into some big conversation. I was basically there to say hi, lay eyes on his face, and watch his show, something I had always loved. But there we were, with 2 hours to hang out. Yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap ...

I hadn't seen him since the dark-spot-on-T-shirt-wind-chimes night. But so much had happened since then. It had been almost a year. Our lives were already completely different. But the underwater river was still there.

At the end of the night, after his show, we went outside again, to say goodbye. There was, suddenly, so much to say, and no time to say it. It was another big goodbye. The final goodbye. For various and sundry reasons I won't go into. This was it. And I had the small pile of letters I had been writing to him, in my bag, just in case I felt like giving them to him. I felt kind of stupid about it, and I wasn't completely sold on the idea ... because it seemed kind of pathetic. I wondered if he would judge me, or if he would get cold and distant, like: wow, you're really pathetic, you've been writing me letters and not sending them ... damn girl, get a life.

How little I knew him, even then.

We stood outside, awkward now, not touching, not speaking. We just stood there. And then, fuck it, I took the leap. "I've been writing you letters this whole past year, but I didn't know where to send them."

There was a long silence. He didn't look at me. He was looking down at his feet. I scanned his face worriedly. What was his expression? There didn't seem to be much there. I read all kinds of things into it ... I thought that maybe he was thinking to himself, "That is so sad, Sheila is so pathetic ..." I waited for his response, anxious.

Then he said, still looking down, "Do you have them with you?"

I felt a jolt, a small explosion of warmth in my stomach, he wants them, he wants them ... and I said, "Yeah. I have them."

I took out the small packet and gave it to him. He looked down at it, again with not too much going on on his face. But the fact that there wasn't too much going on visibly didn't matter at all. I could feel what he was feeling. I'm not exaggerating. I was inside of him, in that moment. And I knew that words could never express what he was going through. He said, calmly, still looking down at the packet, "Thanks." He was never a big show-his-emotions type guy. He didn't need to be. I pretty much always got the message.

I kept it cool, and light. "No problem. I just ... you know, there's stuff I felt like telling you sometimes. Not big serious stuff - just movies I'd seen. Stuff like that. So there it all is."

Then came the good-bye, which I'll skip over.

A year passed.

I didn't write him any more letters. That need was somehow over. I had a lot else going on in my life, busy busy busy.

Then, I was back in Chicago during a week-break I had. I stayed with Mitchell. It was March, and it was absolutely freezing. I met up with old friends, I hung out with Mitchell, we took some absolutely hilarious pictures down by the ice-drenched lake shore ... all in all, a marvelous vacation.

And again, I went to see him. Unannounced. It's become a tradition. It still is. hahahaha But the craziest part of this, the weirdest part ... was that while I was in Chicago, he was not playing a show in his normal venues. (There's a website, online, with his show schedule, so this is how I knew where he would be.) But even though he wasn't playing at any Chicago club, he WAS playing a show at a tiny Christian college in Wisconsin, not too far from Chicago (which is hysterically ironic - if you knew this guy's antipathy towards organized religion). Strangely enough, my dear friend Ann and I took a small road-trip there once, to see him play. And it was absolutely riotous. Ann, remember? We sat in the student union, drinking Cokes (no alcohol on premises, if I recall) - waiting for him to show up, and laughing so hard at our own behavior that tears streamed down our faces. We saw him come in the door, and we hid behind our menus, literally shaking with guffaws. He saw us, and the expression on his face! He got this blank "You guys are completely nuts" look on his face, and we laughed even harder. So I had already been there, and knew the way. More than anything, I thought it would just be a hysterical GOOF for me to randomly show up at a Christian college, in the middle of nowhere, when I was supposed to be halfway across the country. It would be too good a goof to pass up.

So I borrowed a friend's car and drove off into the frigid night. Laughing out loud, on occasion, at my own behavior. But I knew that in our little lexicon - it all would make sense. He wouldn't catch sight of me in the student union in the Christian college and feel a bolt of alarm like: "Oh my God, she's stalking me." No. He would immediately get the humor. He would also be really happy to see me.

It wasn't too long a drive, and eventually - I pulled onto the campus, which was deserted. There was an enormous church at the entrance, with stained glass windows lit from within, gleaming the colors out into the night. I forgot where the union was, so I pulled over to ask some students - they pointed me in the right direction. I parked the car. I laughed out loud randomly. I made my way to the student union, and remembered it, suddenly, from that trip I had taken there with Ann Marie. Ah yes, I remember this now ... I remember this lobby ... this public area ... When I walked into the union, I heard him immediately. The show had already begun, in the restaurant/pub area down a flight of stairs, and his voice floated up to me, eerily, as I walked through the deserted student union. A poignant weird moment ... hearing him before I saw him, in that out-of-the-way place. I descended the stairs, again almost bursting out laughing at my own lunacy. He had no idea I was approaching. This was going to be hysterical. I was going to be completely out of context for him.

The place was in darkness, except for the spotlight on him, and it was packed. Like always. He always packs it in. He couldn't see me, obviously - the audience was in darkness to him. I felt, suddenly, like a crazy wraith, a creature from another level, like I was a ghost, coming back from the dead. I truly felt like I couldn't be seen. By anyone. I took a place at the bar and ordered a soda.

I had a blast, watching him perform. I had even more of a blast because he had no idea I was in the house. The best. goof. ever.

Now, there was one weird moment during the show ... which I will do my best to describe - but I already know it will be a challenge. I'll just stick with the facts, and see where that gets me.

He has a song where one of the bits has to do with going through the alphabet. Not ABCD, not like that - but words that start with each letter. But the bit also is: the word has to start with the SOUND of the letter that starts the word. For example: "apple" would not do, because the "a" sound of "apple" does not match the sound of the letter "A" itself. But "A-frame" would be perfect. Or "Amos" ("Andy" would, in comparison, not work). For "b" - "Brendan Fraser" would not work. But "Bea Arthur" would be perfect. Get the game? Oh, and if the SOUND was the same as the letter, even if it didn't begin with that specific letter, that would be okay too. For example: Sea Monkeys would be perfect for the letter "C". Elle Macpherson would be perfect for the letter "L". [I never said the guy was high-brow. That was why I loved him. The goofiness, the open goofiness.] So he goes through the entire alphabet this way.

He makes it seem spontaneous - as though he's thinking up each one on the spot, but the truth of the matter is: the whole thing is planned. But still: it's funny and stupid and pointless (in a great way) every single time I've seen him do it.

So. I'm perched on my bar stool at the Christian College and I am completely out of context to everyone there, and therefore I am invisible. He is up on stage performing. The crowd around me know all his lyrics, they scream out requests, they laugh, they shout, they clap ... It's like I've been planted down in the middle of this, unrecognized and unperceived by any of them. In a weird way, I get the feeling that time has stood still. It's been a year since I saw that man ... our paths have WAY diverged ... but here I am, tapping into that underground river again ... I am revisiting it, and things are exactly the same. A strange feeling. Comforting. Kind of melancholy too, but mostly comforting. There is something eternal about senses of humor. If you click with someone on a humor level - it is next to impossible to change that. He and I always - always - laughed at the same things. From our first conversation. We clicked on every level possible, but what is the most lasting? What is the one that I know will never change? The sense of humor level. So I sat in the back, invisible, loving first of all: the joke of my being there, knowing he would get the joke. And loving all the jokes he was making on stage.

So he begins the alphabet song, which is one of his crowd pleasers. Everyone knows all the words. Then he got to the listing part of the song, and he launches into it.

"The A Team [blah blah blah] ... Bea Arthur [blah blah blah] ... Sea of Tranquility [blah blah blah] ... Dee Snider [blah blah blah] Email [blah blah blah] ..."

Then he came to "F", and there was a split-second pause. We're talking split-second. If memory serves, I believe he normally used "Ephraim Zimbalist Jr." for "F". (hahahahahahaha So stupid!!) But there was a pause - and I knew he had, rarely for him, forgotten what "F" was. In that split-second (and of course - if I hadn't done what I did, he would have come up with something in the next moment - but I couldn't contain myself), I shouted out from my invisible spot in the back: "F. MURRAY ABRAHAM!" There was an enormous burst of laughter - from the crowd, and from him - and he went right back into the song, laughing, shouting, with gusto: "F. Murray Abraham!!!" I wondered if he had recognized my voice. It didn't look like he did. He didn't stop, and squint out into the darkness or anything like that. He just took my helping hand in that split-second of indecision that he had ... not knowing that it was MY helping hand he had taken. So amazing. But apparently, his sound guy - a good friend of mine - had completely recognized my voice - as out of context as it was - and he told me later that he immediately stood up, from his corner by the soundboard, scanning the crowd for me. Hahahaha Like: Holy crap, is she here? That couldn't have been her voice ... could it????

And in the following moments, as the song went on, as he kept plowing through the alphabet (ones I can remember: G-spot, H&R Block, Aye carumba, J Crew, KY Jelly, Elle Macpherson, Emma Thompson, Enya, Peewee Herman, R2D2, SS Minnow, T Rex, U2, VH1, WWF, X files, YMCA, Xena Warrior ...) - I got the strangest sensation. Again, I'll try to just stick with the facts, even though it's hard in this bizarre story of dreams with right feet and letters written in a vacuum and wind chimes and communication through body language and invisible signals ...

But as the song went on, I almost had an out-of-body experience. I started floating above the events, it felt either like he was zooming towards me at warp speed, OR we were zooming away from each other at warp speed, OR I was shooting across the universe at him at warp speed, OR we were on different planes of existence and suddenly we were hurtling through a worm hole towards each other (like in Contact) ... I almost had to hold on to the bar to keep from flying through the air. You think I'm being hyperbolic? I'm not. I got this sensation of rushing air, of movement ... I couldn't tell where he began and I ended.

I had no business being there. I was out of context even for myself. He had no idea I was there. The last time I saw him, or spoke with him, or communicated with him, had been a year before when I gave him the letters. No contact. None. But - and here's where the rushing warp speed sensation came in - the connection remained strong as ever. Just like he had promised under the wind chimes. At times it was hard to remember that, because we were so far away from each other, and we didn't keep in touch. Where does a relationship exist? On paper? In phone calls? Sure. But it also exists on an invisible level, and doesn't need outward signs to validate its life. And in that moment - when I shouted out F Murray Abraham, in the student union of a Christian college on the frigid shores of Lake Michigan - when he took that suggestion and ran with it - not knowing it was from me - I really GOT that we were connected. Forever. Whether or not anyone could ever point to it and say: "There it is. There is the relationship."

I could have left right then - without him even knowing it was me who shouted out that suggestion - and I would have still known that our connection was forever. It didn't need to be acknowledged, validated, made outward or visible. HE didn't even need to know I was there. I WAS there. And the same was true in my life. I could be walking down the sidewalk, 1500 miles away, and yet ... if I just stopped for a second and thought about him ... he would be with me. And I'm not just talking about me thinking about him. I'm speaking quite literally: If I thought about him - there he would be - right there by my side. And so I never was alone. He had spoken the truth, those years before.

And I had never really gotten that, not on a gut level, until the weird warp-speed moment during his alphabet song.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it ... does it make a sound? I feel like on some other level, not a literal level, not a sound-wave level - yes, it does make a sound.

After the show - the lights came up, amid general mayhem. I hung back, watching him again, from afar - talking to people in the crowd. I waited for the right moment, which - I had no idea what it would be beforehand - I just knew I would know the right moment when it presented itself. I saw the sound guy, staring right at me from across the room, laughing out loud and pointing at me. I laughed back, and waved. Then came the moment - the crowd had dispersed a tiny bit - leaving an opening - so I approached. He saw me and stopped dead. So did I. And then we both just started howling with laughter. And then, no word of a lie, he did the only thing which could possibly have been deemed appropriate at that moment: he riverdanced across the room to me. Let me make something clear: the man cannot riverdance. It is only his idea of a riverdance. He is also about 10 feet tall. So his riverdance is one of the funniest goofiest stupidest most endearing thing I have ever seen in my life. He jammed his arms down, kept his body poker straight, and riverdanced through the wormhole at warp speed. I laughed so hard tears streamed down my face.

Laughing, shouting at each other, as though we were in a high wind. Funny thing: even though crowds of his fans had been milling about waiting to talk to him, when they saw him RIVERDANCE towards the strange redhead in the leather jacket - and then start shouting questions at her ... they all began to disperse, silently. Realizing: Uhm, we kind of don't want to interrupt THAT.

"What the HELL are you doing here?"

"Oh you know. I was just in the neighborhood."

Bursts of laughter.

"You are nuts."

"Yeah, I'm takin' some classes here."

"Why aren't you in New York? You are so INSANE!"

"Hahahahahahaha"

Then he pounced, realizing something: "Was that you who shouted F Murray Abraham?"

"Yes! That was me!"

"It's so weird - for a second after you shouted it, I thought to myself, 'Was that ...' and then thought: 'Nooooo, it couldn't be.'"

"It was me!"

More guffaws of laughter. How weird the whole thing was. Best. Goof. Ever.

There were things we didn't mention. Things are still unmentionable. But we started talking about what we love to talk about: books we've read, movies we've seen ... We didn't bring up the packet of letters. He didn't mention reading them, or his response to them. He didn't need to. Plenty of stuff goes beyond words, and we are okay with leaving it at that.

It was enough to just be there. It was enough to have twenty minutes catching up with him. We were floating above the tick-tock of the clock, lost in conversation, voracious, in the moment.

He went to walk me back to my car. The college is on the shores of Lake Michigan, so the wind was icy and intense. As we walked through the deserted campus, we both laughed occasionally, like: Uhm ... where the hell are we?

He kept reiterating, "You are so nuts. It is so funny to see you here."

"I'm pretty pleased with myself, I have to say. Sitting in the back, with all those college students around me ... it was hilarious."

We got into my car, I was going to drive him back to the student union. But we sat there for a minute, and I turned on the heat so we could shake off the icy wind. I felt like we were the only two people on the planet. The whole thing had a very unreal quality to it ... and I wouldn't have been surprised if I had woken up from the whole thing, to find that it had been a dream.

Like the dream where I showed up at the amphitheatre unannounced ... and he looked at me across the space with warmth and excitement.

It was exactly like that, only it was real.

We didn't really talk in the car. We sat there, warming ourselves, and occasionally (of course) starting to laugh.

Then I drove him back, and before he got out ... we sat in silence, not looking at each other, not doing anything ... it was like we were trembling on a tightrope wire. Equilibrium. Silence. What to say, really, you know? Nothing to say. Nothing needed to be said.

But a gesture was called for. A gesture is always called for - it's just a matter of finding the right gesture. It was always difficult for us to find the right gesture. That's why we don't hug. A hug was never the right gesture for us.

And in the next moment, he silently found the right gesture.

He sat in the passenger seat, and suddenly he leaned over, reaching down, and he grabbed onto my right foot, and held it tight. He didn't let go.

At first, I had no idea what he was doing. I had forgotten the dream. I had also forgotten that the story of my dream was in that little packet of letters I had given to him a year before.

But he remembered.

I said to him, glancing down at his face which was nearly in my lap because he was reaching down to get my foot: "Uhm ... what are you doing?"

He grinned, still holding on. "Your right foot."

Then I remembered.

Some moments are not meant to be described in words. They're too cosmic.

Yes. Across the space, his hand is on my right foot. He cannot reach my hands ... we're too far away from each other... he cannot reach my body ... we're too far away from each other ... but he can reach my right foot. That is how we are connected, unconventional as it might be, unconventional as it always has been for us ... Across the space, his hand is on my right foot. It's there right now.

Posted by sheila