The Elevator

The remnants of Hurricane Isaac are making their way through the Midsouth right now.  It’s dark and drizzly and there’s an almost constant tropical breeze – very atmospheric.  I love weather like this.  It makes the world seem just a little bit creepier, but in a good way.

I work in a multi-story building and park in a parking garage that has me entering on the third floor, from which I take the elevator up to my floor.  This morning, I walked into the building, hit the elevator button, and from the depths of the building, I heard a voice traveling up through the elevator shaft, wailing, “Please!  PLEASE!  SOMEBODY HELP ME! ”

Now, hearing someone in such a state of distress would send a shiver down my spine under the best of circumstances, but with this Wuthering Heights weather and me being dramatic by nature anyway, standing alone in the hallway and listening to a distressed woman scream about being stuck in an elevator somewhere beneath my feet chilled me straight to the bone.

And then suddenly I wasn’t alone in the hallway.

And then suddenly the elevator was opening.

And in the elevator was a maintenance man, and walking up beside me was a man who works on the same floor as me, and up through the elevator shaft came the woman’s voice again.

“HELP ME!  I NEED HELP!”

I literally had goosebumps by this time because she sounded like she was one yell from fainting dead away from fear.  I looked at the maintenance guy, who seemed to be hearing her for the first time, and watched as he…well…as he rolled his eyes.

“What floor are you on?” he yelled down.

“PLEASE HELP ME!”

“Ma’am!  Ma’am, tell me which elevator you’re stuck in.”

[unintelligible] “I’M TRAPPED!  I NEED HELP!”

The man next to me chuckled a little, the maintenance guy grinned and motioned for us to come in, and then we, you know, just took the elevator like normal people to our respective floors like nothing unusual was going on.  The man from my floor did at one point say, “I guess there’s a woman stuck in the elevator,” and then the maintenance man said, “I should probably call security.”  And all I could come up with was a forceful, “That’d be a terrible way to start the day!” though I could have just as easily been selfishly describing my own reaction as that of the woman who was stuck.

I got to my office and turned on all the lights and got situated, but then I had to go back down to the lobby to pick up the mail and newspaper for the day.  The thought of getting back on the elevator wasn’t particularly enticing, but when I got on, I wasn’t alone.  There was a woman on board who said as soon as she saw me, “Did you hear the woman stuck in the elevator?!”

So we talked about hearing her otherworldly cries for help and speculated on whether or not she’d been rescued until we were deposited on the ground floor and went our separate ways.

I sometimes go whole days without riding the elevator with anyone, and whole weeks without talking to anyone I do happen to ride with, so after all the earlier conversation, I was surprised that when I got back on the elevator to go up, after getting the newspaper and mail, I was joined by a young man who said to me, “Hello!  How are you?”

It’s just so incredibly rare for anyone to initiate small talk…so I said to him, “I’m fine.  But did you hear about the woman who got stuck in the elevator?”

He had not, but he had himself once been stuck in the elevator, but managed to force his fingers between the doors and claw his way out.

“That is so creepy,” I said to him.  He agreed, and then disappeared as the door closed behind me and the elevator took him to a higher floor.

And that was why today was the most interesting elevator day I’ve ever had.

85 Things That I Hated in 2006

(From a handwritten list, titled "Things I Don't Like [no order]," dated 2006.  I was twenty-four...and a brat.  Punctuation and parentheses original.)

1.  Republicans
2.  The Pussycat Dolls

3.  Friends
4.  Julia Roberts
5.  Brangelina (word and entity)
6.  being bored
7.  The Lion King
8.  religious proselytizing
9.  waking up in the morning
10.  Mariah Carey!!
11.  J. Lo movies (shudder)
12.  The Dave Matthews Band
13.  George W. Bush
14.  those "W:  The President" stickers
15.  writing on people's Facebook and MySpace pages and not getting a reply
16.  American Idol (though I can't deny my affection for Kelly Clarkson)
17.  making phone calls at work
18.  corruption in corporate America
19.  the movie Crash
20.  most '80s music
21.  acne
22.  being called "weird"
23.  spending money on non-fun things
24.  being the object of an unwanted and unsolicited crush
25.  heartburn
26.  "lol"
27.  compliance departments
28.  snot
29.  ER promos
30.  Donald Trump
31.  Texas state pride (too much!)
32.  making my lunch
33.  people who hate cats
34.  people who mistake their dogs for children
35.  paparazzi
36.  Rush Limbaugh
37.  pronouncing coupon "coo-pon"
38.  feeling lonely
39.  most McDonald's ads
40.  Yoko Ono
41.  nausea
42.  ringworm
43.  being called "honey" by someone who isn't a loved one
44.  "springing forward" time-wise
45.  liars
46.  humid days (for hair purposes)
47.  gore in movies
48.  my overbite
49.  not knowing what I was to "be" when I "grow up"
50.  growing up
51.  people who irrationally hate/fear/kill snakes
52.  going up a jean size

53.  dry lips
54.  jazz
55.  The Simple Life!!!
56.  pain in my neck
57.  going to the gynecologist
58.  having to wait on people
59.  dress codes
60.  buying gasoline (too expensive!)
61.  much of classical literature
62.  reading out loud
63.  public speaking
64.  snoring!
65.  gum that gets rock hard after you chew it a while
66.  feeling inferior
67.  tornado sirens
68.  lack of turn signal use
69.  guns
70.  war
71.  gory horror movies
72.  morning breath
73.  stubbing my toe
74.  dogs barking at night
75.  feeling powerless
76.  Ryan Seacrest
77.  cold feet
78.  indecisiveness
79.  not being able to see a movie because my friends are LAME!
80.  songs stuck in my head
81.  people not coming through
82.  Starbucks
83.  long commercial breaks
84.  the smell of sewage
85.  London licorice

(Yes, there is a complementary list of things I do like; thankfully, it's almost twice as long.  Funny how the older I've gotten, the more like and the less I don't...)

Tom Denniss: Circumnavigator

This past Monday night, I had the privilege of meeting someone who is in the middle of a pretty remarkable journey.

Tom Denniss, native of Sydney, Australia, is trying to become the first person to run around the world by Guinness World Record standards.  This is a man who has been running almost nonstop since December 31, 2011, and has clocked 10,000 kilometers already.  He's got about 19,000 more kilometers to go, and he's ticking that number downward by putting in an average of 50 kilometers a day.

He met me and a bunch of the Breakaway folks downtown for the Salty Dogs run that leaves from Bardog Tavern here in Memphis every Monday night.  He didn't run (no one expected him to) and I was happy to skip the run myself to socialize because I'd put in 16 miles in the previous two days.  I was "tired."

This man runs twice that - 32 miles - EVERY FREAKING DAY, seven days a week.  And he's committed to doing this for the almost two years it's going to take him to complete his journey.

And no one seems to know that he's doing it!  So I'm going to tell you he's doing it, because an accomplishment of that caliber is something so unfathomable I can't even wrap my head around it; I have nothing but admiration and awe for what he's doing.

Check out his website HERE, his blog entry about Monday night HERE (not only does he run an ultramarathon every single day, he also blogs every single day...that's almost more grueling for me to think about than the running), and if you're a member of the Memphis Runners Track Club, watch for my article about him in next month's magazine.

Pretty damn amazing, if you ask me...

A Poet from Hollywood - My (Mostly!) Spoiler-Free Response

On page 37 of I'm Stalking Jake!, in the middle of a chapter called "The Saga of Stephen, Father of Jake," there is a footnote alerting readers to the fact that there's an alternate version of the story they're reading:  A Poet from Hollywood, by Cantara Christopher.  I offered no commentary on Cantara's take because at the time of publication, I didn't know what Cantara's take was.  None of us did, actually, until a couple of weeks ago, when Cantara herself started to circulate an advance PDF copy of A Poet from Hollywood, having at long last finished it.

If you've read I'm Stalking Jake!, you undoubtedly already have an opinion of Cantara herself.  She is a character if ever there was one, and my relationship with her has had so many ups and downs in the last six years that I've lost count.  As I finished reading A Poet from Hollywood last week, I wondered how best to comment on it.  At first I thought perhaps a short review here.  Then I thought maybe just a private e-mail to Cantara.  I compromised with what's below:

Cantara,
As someone who knows full well the cathartic release of writing a book to work through the complex aftermath of expending emotional energy on a male member of the Gyllenhaal family, I hope that you feel the relief that I did once my story was written down and out in the world.

It was somewhat surreal for me to read your book. It was a little less than six years ago that I walked into a poetry bar in New York City and learned one of the biggest lessons of my burgeoning adulthood: that fame is hollow, and so is the act of admiring it.

Optimistic art from my pre-Babygate self.

I remember that night a little differently than you do (my meticulously detailed account of that weekend in New York and its immediate consequences takes up three lengthy chapters in my own book) and I don’t recall the conversation with me that you recount from months after… I was so angry about it all. Angry at Stephen.  Angry at you. Angry at myself for giving the two of you enough power over me to invoke anger in the first place…

But where we don’t differ in our accounts is in the honest acknowledgment that emotions were running very high in October of 2006. You were at that reading for one Gyllenhaal and I was there for another. That Jake was supposedly outside the poetry bar, waiting with his mother, was a detail you offered casually, but it amounted to probably the biggest shock of the entire book for me. If true, what a tragic miss for my 24-year-old self. Maybe more tragic, even, than my miss the following night. I have never felt more invisible than I did on a cold sidewalk in New York City, bundled in a ratty coat and ripped jeans, while a movie star in a tuxedo turned his back to me and kept walking as I yelled his name.

No, wait. I take that back. There was a time when I felt more invisible. Ten minutes later, when the movie star’s father, who had dressed me down at length at his poetry reading less than 24 hours earlier, caught my eye and looked away again without the slightest hint of recognition. Nothing.

For the longest time, I took that as a reflection on me, an indication of my memorable-ness and worth. It’s hard to believe, thinking back on it, that there was ever a time in my life when I would have cared that much what he thought, or (and I say this without any hostility) what you thought. I truly believed you guys had it figured out – you, the Gyllenhaals – and if I could just prove to you that I was worthy, you’d let me into your club, and I could have it figured out too…

Yes, the 24-year-old me would have fallen all over herself had she seen Jake Gyllenhaal standing with his mom in the shadows outside that poetry bar…

A couple of troublemakers.

By my own recollection, Stephen listed Jake’s whereabouts as Martha’s Vineyard that night. Although with the portrait you paint, it’s difficult to know whether or not Stephen ever really knew what the hell he was talking about, so I guess that one will remain a mystery. What isn’t a mystery is the inaccuracy of my initial perception of all of you, the misguided outcome of youthful naiveté. Of course you didn’t have it all figured out. No one has it all figured out. And I applaud you for so openly laying out the faults of the characters in your book.

There were parts of the book that made me sad, because they reminded me of the lost potential of that era. They reminded me that as late as 2008, I cared enough to slog through all 332 pages of the grim, disturbing mess that is Stephen's unpublished novel, Liquid Motel. And they reminded me that it wasn’t until March of this year (less than six months ago!) that I posted a final entry on I’m Stalking Jake!, the blog I wrote in the spirit of Jake Watch to promote the book of the same name. Writing that blog almost broke me. Putting on my “Prophecy Girl” costume and trotting out cutesy one-liners required putting aside all the hard-won peace I’d gotten from writing my book. While I waited for it to be published, I had to pretend. Pretend to value fame.  Pretend I still cared about Jake. Pretend I wasn’t bitter that after all I’d accomplished with my writing, I was reduced to selling myself in order to sell a few books, because despite all the traveling to New York for poetry readings, instead of connections, I’d walked away from Jake Watch with nothing but dead ends.

But here I am now. And it’s been a long, slow, but oh-so-rewarding process to move past all of it. None of it has any power over me anymore. Everything that I wanted to say about that era of my life has been written down and released into the world. Both literally and figuratively, the end of my book - and its blog - meant I could let it go.

Stephen infamously once told me that “it’s all about learning,” and over the years, I’ve hijacked that phrase for my own personal use; I like the sentiment behind it. I don’t know what he learned, if anything, from the many failed creative ventures you detail in your book. I think what I learned while reading was just how distant my past has become.

And as for you, Cantara, I hope that you now feel the unique freedom that comes from having told your story the way you want it told – having given it life outside of yourself. We don't remember it the same way, in some cases not at all, but a common theme in our two stories is the two men with the same last name who never quite managed to live up to our expectations. Wrapped up as they were in their own lives, they failed to see the bigger picture.

Their loss…
Becky

I CARE ABOUT SWIMMING.

Every four years, I develop an irrational 16-day crush on America’s man-fish, Michael Phelps.

Earlier this year, I indicated to my friend Kathryn that I wasn’t sure what this Olympics would bring; I was willing to entertain the notion that it was dreamboat Ryan Lochte’s turn in the spotlight, both in the pool and in my heart.

But the second Michael clinched that 19th medal, reacting and reflecting with a calm maturity that brought a mist to my eyes and a wistful sigh to my melodramatic lungs, I knew that my heart lay where it always had:  with the man with the abnormally floppy feet.  By the time he won his 22nd medal, the last of his career and a gold to boot, Michael Phelps had me – and rest of the world – feeling guilty we had ever looked at another swimmer…

Michael, however, has apparently not had any guilt about a roaming eye.  Now that he’s finished doing the honorable thing by the American public, winning his weight in medals for our country and giving us all a reason to celebrate the chlorine industry, he’s all like, “AH WAIT, I HAS A GRRRRRLFRIEND, Y’ALL.”  And because we’re only on Day 11 of my current 16-day crush cycle, from now until the Closing Ceremonies, I’m morally obligated to care.  (Afterward, I won’t care at all.  This is the magic of the Olympics.)

My problem here is this:  This woman is reminding the rest of us that Michael Phelps is human, and no one wants to think about Michael Phelps being human.  The dude spiraled into massive not-giving-a-fuck-ed-ness after Beijing, and he still managed to pull it together and do what no human on Earth has ever done before, or maybe will ever do again.  He’s part of a generation (my generation!) that has already been written off by the generations before us as lost and unproductive, but even at his lowest, he worked harder than most humans ever will at anything.  HE IS NOT LIKE THE REST OF US.

But his girlfriend, as witnessed by her Twitter feed, is.

“This probably will get lost in your tweets but since i cant text i miss you and cant wait to spend time with you for real xo."

What?  Can a bitch get some capital letters for the greatest Olympian of all time?!

Also [pausing for a moment to close my eyes, shake my head, and lift a hand to my forehead in feigned dismay], if he’s going to unveil a secret girlfriend, I just…I want it to be someone who’s different than those people who fill up my Facebook feed with cloying digital PDA directed at their patiently tolerant boyfriends.

No, the conclusion here is as inescapable as it is tragic:  Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympic athlete in history, really is just a 27-year-old boy.

The Olympics are awesome.  Twitter, not so much...

The Obligatory Olympics Blog

Originally published four years ago, on August 11, 2008...

I remember the moment when my Olympic dreams died.

I screamed in protest, crying as I ran out of the gym.  I had just stepped outside when my gymnastics coach appeared in the doorway, having chased me, and angrily yelled, "You step out of this gym and you're leaving gymnastics behind!  I don't think you want that!"

I was nine.  I had been doing gymnastics for only a few months.  And she was wrong.  I did want that. Seventeen years later, I have yet to regret my decision to walk out of that gym.

Despite being as inept at (and interested in) school gym activities as the next pre-pubescent female, I discovered a surprising talent for tumbling when my parents enrolled me in gymnastics in the third grade.  I did an aerial cartwheel without a spot on my second lesson.  I had mastered the round-off back-handspring by my fourth.

The owner of the gym used to give me private lessons after my regular lessons, something I went along with because it meant more tumbling; his ulterior motives soared right over my 9-year-old head. He also kept moving me into more difficult classes, and at an alarmingly fast pace.  The gym taught up to level 8 ("Elite") and I was in level 4 ("Pre-Team") within a month of starting.

But level 4 was where I got stuck.  Though I could do more handstand pirouettes than anyone on the Elite team ("Did she just do eight?!" I remember a coach screaming.  "Keep going!" he yelled.  And I did), I couldn't do the splits, or a cartwheel on anything higher than a low beam, or propel myself over a vault if my life depended on it.  My first level 4 class was four weeks after my very first lesson, and some of the girls I trained with had been doing gymnastics for years.  None of them could do aerial cartwheels...

All of them could do the splits. 

What no one told me at the time was that the owner of the gym and a couple of his coaches had talked to my parents about fast-tracking my training to get me into contention for the Olympics.  Sometimes, when I get on one of my existential kicks, I think about the multiverse theory, and wonder if there's a Becky Heineke out there who's 5'2" and has an Olympic gold tacked on her wall...

But I kind of don't think so.

Over in this 'verse, I quit before my first competition (practicing for which was the source of the tantrum that ultimately ended my gymnastics career).  I didn't want to compete.  I've never wanted to compete.  If my coach had yelled, "Fine!  We'll put you back with the level 1 people and let you do cartwheels all day!" I'd probably still be doing gymnastics.  But she didn't.  She mistakenly assumed that I had a drive for athletic competition when, in reality, all I really had was a lack of fear of falling on my head.

And so ended my bid for Olympic glory.  Which I didn't even know about at the time.  It wasn't until years later that my mom mentioned the Olympics to me...and it wasn't a dream of my own making, but the dream of the well-meaning but ultimately overly-excitable coaches at River City Gymnastics.

At regular four-year intervals, I watch the women's gymnastics team during the Summer Olympics in honor of the competition I so desperately wanted to avoid in elementary school.  And I notice how gymnasts never smile or look happy until after a routine is over.
 
But I must admit, the tumbling still looks fun...