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Hit the Road, Quack

“Do you think about killing yourself?” she asked.

Every time I cut carbs, I thought.

I credit my dad for conditioning me to slice intimate encounters in half by treating earnest questions as setups for distracting punch lines or gags, leveraging droll sarcasm, predictable quips, and the occasional spit take should my mouth be filled with wine.

But today, I bit my lip. Too bushed to stage my act. A rueful, long-running, one-person farce performed behind thick layers of self-deprecation, like a paint-caked wino working overtime in a circus dunk tank.

I cranked out raw material since learning to speak. Eager to test the latest in front of friends, strangers, and my unimpressed reflection in the bathroom mirror. But the woman questioning me now deserved better.

According to cocktail gossip, she graded out as the town’s top psychiatrist. I estimated the bulk of her income came from my friends and acquaintances endorsing her. And since everyone in my circle carried on like merry crackpots, I expected little beyond my intake file getting rubber-stamped with whatever diagnosis represented her best guess.

Despite this, I elbowed my way into her oversold appointment book for an emergency session and handed her $350 for an hour of her time to uncover the reasons why mine ran out. I arrived at her office driving the straight-talk express. Because I couldn’t live like this any longer.

So, I removed the shell protecting my afflicted sense of trust and coaxed this long-silent part of me to recap the curious details related to my morning jog.

Earlier, I pounded through a five-mile run. At the halfway point, I stopped. Not to catch my breath but to give suicide the considerable focus ending my life deserved.

On a familiar route, a pedestrian bridge draws over a busy highway. I rambled across this overpass countless times, always in the early dark of morning, on another fiendish hunt for a runner’s buzz, driven mad to capture the immediate rush on the other side of the run’s protective walls. And, in matters no less pressing, to sweat down the indicative red swells on my face expanding by the hour like super mutating tomatoes concocted in a lab.

But today, in the middle of the skyway, I slowed my grinder’s pace down to a contemplative stroll, immersing myself in the eerie sights and sounds interrelated to observing perfect strangers getting on with their day. An infinite swarm of cars whizzing and zooming beneath my feet, disrupting the isolation I sought. A nomadic menagerie of glassy-eyed motorists, hollowed out by dread’s sharp edges, all dashing like mad to a place or job they hated, to engage in demeaning activities with other folks also lacking the zeal required to slide out of bed unforced.

I came to a complete stop. My heart pounded against my ribs, beating faster than usual. I locked into the gradual slowing down of its tempo until the thump fell into a rhythm sounding measured and hypnotic. But far from calming. More evocative and lurid. Warlike and determined, audibly approaching like an unstoppable tank.

I visualized this killing machine rumbling toward my village, grinding up the road and flaming every creature and structure nearby into smoldering black soot. Each strike of my heart provoked thoughts related to cannon fire as the steady cadence and escalating volume of the discharges served to mock my inevitable doom. This, or a bummed-out boomer was burning down a joint in a car parked nearby, blaring “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac.

A phantom boom left me deaf, standing in frozen silence, petrified. The air thickened, clotting into a murky syrup, now less breathable than bathwater. I gasped in all I could from the shock of wanting to fly off the bridge. A risky thing to lust for, primarily because my response to feverish itches, over time, evolved into an involuntary reflex I couldn’t control—like a spasm, as impossible for me to stop as blinking, breathing, or extending my middle finger at whoever honked their horn.

I scanned the bridge for a suitable spot for a swan dive, but I called off the search. Too distracted by a sudden flash of brilliant colors streaking across the sky, like God himself opted to drybrush today’s sunrise with atomic orange paint.

The abrupt urge to jump lost steam, deflating down to impotent shiftlessness, or what a groveling hack might describe as whole and earnest. Whatever I experienced transitioned me into a pacified state, comparable to being submerged in a volcanic ash mud bath at a spa east of San Luis Obispo.

Then a headlong burst yanked me out of the restorative slop like a pulled weed, chucking my body into an alternate existence. Now vibrant, brimming with conviction, and weightless, in full command of an inexplicably acquired set of superpowers, beckoning me to do the unimaginable. Move mountains. Fly around the sun. Or forgive Matt Damon and Ben Affleck for becoming overnight stars on the heels of a screenplay they contributed less writing to than the clerk at Kinko’s who helped them print the first incomprehensible draft.

Before I doled out any miracles, I got shoved back into the sluggish reality of waking life. The place responsible for stripping me down into a vague shadow, now too detached to fear my upcoming flight. Finally, after three decades of unrelenting pursuit, the warmongers of my consciousness succeeded in corralling me, pinning me to the edge of my grim world’s abyss. For once, I didn’t bother with tap dancing.

Instead, I imagined the flight down. I visualized myself hovering, a brief pause before roundhouse-kicking Keanu Reeves’s unresponsive face in The Matrix before accelerating downward like a shopping cart from Home Depot overstuffed with buckets of red paint.

I considered channeling the moxie circulating through a cliff diver’s brass balls to execute a breathtaking twisting flip. What about mimicking something random and absurd? Like the robot. Or the first few choreographed movements of the Macarena. My parting gift to the listless commuters beneath me, somehow still hoisting themselves back on the hamster wheel for another go-around, desperate to find cause for cracking a smile, or, in the dreariest cases, to blink.

Would I die fast? Or worse, survive, hurling myself smack in the middle of another one of my life’s cringe-worthy moments, which numbered in the billions? Only this time, I exceeded the embarrassment from the time I chatted up Jennifer Aniston at a bar in LA. I had her chuckling and blushing, right until I suggested we split and head to her place. “Um, yeah. No, thanks.”

As a rule, Texas requires tobacco-chewing hicks driving massive, customized pickup trucks outfitted with grill guards weighing two tons and made of bone-crushing steel to exceed posted speed limits by twenty miles per hour.

It’s a solid guess my last sight on earth would be an indestructible bumper welded to the front end of a broncobuster’s hopped-up Dodge Ram. I pictured the childish truck bearing down on me like a screaming meteor before splattering my body into a cloud of red mist like a disfigured beet farmer’s colostomy bag repurposed into a piñata.

The hayseed driving the truck might swerve, an upright citizen of God-fearing character, determined to miss what he mistook for a prized deer or a cold keg of Coors Light. As a result, his beloved truck would flip end over end at least ten times, causing one of those forty-car pileups I used to marvel at as a kid living in California watching CHiPs on TV after school. Not optimal.

But what if I somehow shirked death and survived? How would I handle losing the ability to walk, shower, or spoon-feed myself mashed bananas without the care provided by a maniac nurse found on the community corkboard at Whole Foods?

According to 60 Minutes, nurses trolling for degrading caretaker jobs using pink flyers and thumbtacks do so because every hospital they worked for chased them off using pitchforks and torches. Now they’re hell-bent on delivering a toxic dose of vigilante healthcare to a world plagued with rational assumptions regarding medical assistance. In terms of headspace, one mishandled bedpan is plenty to provoke the most unruffled self-advertised nurse into flavoring their sweetest patient’s grilled cheese smoothie with strychnine before setting off on a nationwide killing spree.

Although once I calculated the physics of my situation (the height of the bridge, the speed of the traffic, and the extra twenty pounds of fat I packed on since Thanksgiving), the disagreeable care provided by an unhinged nurse crossed out as a nonissue since my immediate death added up to a mathematical certainty.

How would the news spread once I croaked? I didn’t carry a license, only my phone, used for playing motivational songs to supercharge my toiling resolve. (Time to rethink my playlist?) So, let’s assume the grisly aftermath correlated to a Siberian prison’s mess hall after the inmates ran the chef through the meat grinder because he knocked over the week’s only cauldron of borscht. How long until authorities identified me from the scattered bits and chunks of my flavorless corpse?

Of course, my family would flip out. I suspect a touch more than the day we found our pet goldfish, Floaty, on the kitchen floor below its bowl, locked in King Pigeon pose, stiffer than a lag bolt. But what dark, hellish road would my death send their lives racing down? Or, without me in the picture, would their lives improve? The way skin tends to mend after a boil gets...