The list of people I wanted to go see a dumb show with who were also in New York City was … zero people long. That actually hurt. I could ask Jason, my roommate and podcast cohost and literally my only close friend left in the city. But, also, Jason would laugh loudly and unkindly if I told him I had two tickets to STOMP and wanted him to come see it with me.
So I sat in Tompkins Square Park and I tried to think of someone … anyone who I knew.
When I first started getting requests to speak at universities, I asked our little crew whether they thought I should do it, and Maya said something I might as well have tattooed on the back of my hand: “Can you tell them something that will make them feel better?”
I’d like to say that it became my mantra solely because I just wanted to make people feel better, but also it felt like the only thing that would work. I wasn’t really me—famous people never are. I had to be what people expected, the sad, smart, nerdy guy who had lost his famous and charismatic best friend. I needed a brand that aligned with that.
And, to some extent, it was working. It wasn’t the way to get the most Twitter followers, but universities wanted people to give talks that were constructive. People were searching for some authority to tell them anything that made even a little bit of sense. As the grieving best friend of the missing emissary to the aliens, I guess I was an authority, and Maya’s advice gave me the angle I needed.
But being a professional grieving friend didn’t lend itself to new friendships. I also didn’t need much outside validation. A lot of the reason we look to friends is because they’re a source of meaning. If you’re getting meaning in other ways, it’s easy to let your friendships wither. That’s one reason success can be isolating. I learned that from an expert.
At least I was smart enough to not go get a fancy apartment by myself. I kept my roommate because I wanted to keep some ties to my former life. That was a tremendously good decision. Jason is irreverent, hilarious, deeply nerdy, and surprisingly unambitious. He is delighted that my fame has made our dumb podcast more successful, but I don’t think the thought has ever crossed his mind that I might be doing him a favor by not abandoning it. Slainspotting (our podcast about TV and movie deaths) is a thing I signed up to do that I like doing and that keeps me connected to something that existed before April died, before I was famous, and before there were aliens.
Basically, thank God for Jason, but I was not going to go see STOMP with him.
And that was where I was at, feeling like I had been barely saved from complete isolation by the nerdiest guy in New York, when I walked into Subway and asked Becky if she would like to go see STOMP with me.
“That was very weird and fun, Andy,” she said afterward as we were walking to the train.
“Is it Rebecca or Becky? I’m sorry I didn’t ask that sooner.”
She laughed lightly. “Either, honestly, but almost everyone except my parents and my manager calls me Bex.” The name popped out of her mouth in a way that seemed natural. It seemed like her.
“I like that. Bex, like with an x?”
“Like with an x,” she confirmed, before adding, “Are you ever going to tell me why you invited me to go see STOMP?”
“Are you going to tell me why you said yes?”
She laughed again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I felt like a total douche asking out someone who is literally paid to be nice to me, and I honestly can’t believe I did it.”
“Fair, but I’m not going to tell you why I said yes.” I couldn’t decide whether that sounded flirtatious or menacing. “So why did you ask me?”
“I told you, my friend bought tickets and couldn’t get a refund. There were two tickets and I didn’t want to go alone.”
“But it’s a big city, Andy, and you’re a famous rich guy. There are other people besides Rebecca from Subway.”
“I don’t know many people,” I replied.
“That cannot possibly be true.” There was some formality to her speech that I assumed was part of her accent or dialect but may have been her signaling to me that she was being respectful toward me as a public figure, and not knowing for sure made me worry that she wasn’t seeing me as an equal.
“I …”
“You don’t have to explain,” she said seriously.
“No.” I stopped walking. The sun was down, but the sidewalks were still full, so we pulled off to stand under the awning of a bodega. “I don’t know anyone anymore. I have a roommate, he’s my only friend. All of April’s friends left the city after she … Afterward. I haven’t spent much time in the same place since I started doing speaking gigs. Lots of people want to talk to me, but I always feel like they want something. You seemed like … like a person, a funny and nice person.” I didn’t say, “And cute,” because that seemed like way too much.
“This is a shitty thing to whine about, but, like, every time I walk up to someone, I know that they’re probably going to remember that interaction for the rest of their life. It’s too much fucking pressure. I go to these fancy places and meet fancy people, and we work very hard to impress each other, and then I go to a hotel room by myself and try not to feel as alone as I am. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun. The food is amazing. The drinks are free. It’s fucking cool. But still, you’re the first person besides my roommate who I’ve spent more than an hour with in months.”
She rolled her eyes just a little, like she was accepting something but not totally happy about it, and asked, “Do you want to get a drink?”
Like a complete dork I came back with “I’m not trying to hook up with anyone right now.”
Now she really rolled her eyes.
“Look, boy,” she said, but it didn’t feel diminishing when she said it, “it sounds like you have a lot of stuff you’d like to talk about, and I think your life sounds interesting. You took me to see that dumb show, so let me buy you a drink. I need to be home in an hour anyway, so I can’t stay out. You can tell me about your week and I’ll tell you about mine, and then we’ll probably both feel better about our lives.”
I had a seemingly sentient book in my bag that I wanted very much to take back to my apartment and read. A book that could predict the future and knew things about my maybe-not-dead best friend. But instead, I let Bex buy me a drink.
We talked for an hour, and I learned that she was born in America but her parents were from Trinidad and Tobago. Turns out that there is a small but significant Chinese population there, which she told me all about. Then somehow we got on the subject of student loans and she whipped out a pen and calculated, by hand, the total cost of her education with her working at Subway and without. I was shocked at the difference, and also at her math skills. She told me about her brothers and I told her about my constant sawing anxiety—the ever-present feeling that I was doing both too much and not enough. I explained that I felt like I never had independent thoughts of my own, I just took what other people said and applied it to new situations or meshed it with other ideas I’d heard. And then I told her that I felt like most other people weren’t really having unique thoughts either, they were all doing the same thing as me … but then somehow new ideas did keep happening, which made me feel like I wasn’t an individual, just a brain cell in a massive species-wide consciousness. I’d never even thought about any of those things before I started talking to her, and I felt like I was being a little self-indulgent by talking about myself so much, but it really did help.