More Happy Than Not

“How is that even possible?” he asks.

“No one ever taught me. My mom doesn’t know how to either, and my dad was going to but never got around to it.”

“I’ll have to teach you then. It’s a basic life skill, like swimming and masturbating.”

The sky is dark now.

The quality of Jaws is really poor since a) the movie is old, and b) we’re watching it on a brick wall. But I wouldn’t trade in this experience for a perfectly clear DVD on a big-screen TV.

It’s getting chilly, but I can’t pull myself away to get my shirt because I’m too concerned about the girl running into the ocean like she doesn’t know she’s in a shark movie. “How many times have you seen this?”

“Lost count,” he says. “More than War Horse, less than Jurassic Park.”

After some serious “Oh shit!” moments where the shark eats more people and the survivors’ boat blows the hell up, we put our shirts back on, pack up the projector, and carefully go down the fire escape—even though the roof door is open.

“Ma should be sleeping by now so we need to be quiet,” Thomas says, opening the window and climbing through.

His room smells like clean laundry and pencil shavings. The walls are green and decorated with posters of movies and pictures of his favorite directors. I step over the balled-up socks on the floor and see the toy basketball hoop fixed to the door where he must play when he’s bored. Drawn all over the door are deadlocked games of tic-tac-toe, quotes from Steven Spielberg movies, doodles of dinosaurs, a spot-on drawing of E.T., and lots of randomness I can’t make out.

His bed isn’t made but it looks comfortable, unlike mine. My bed is basically one level better than a cot. He even has his own desk, wher

eas the only surface I can sketch on is a textbook on my lap. There’s an open notebook on the desk where it looks like he crossed out some music notes he was composing in favor of a screenplay he hasn’t gotten very far with.

Thomas opens his closet door—something else I don’t have—and starts throwing some shirts on his bed. “Come find something to sleep in, Stretch.”

I check out the shirts. Most are too baggy, too tight, too childish, too geriatric, and, I shit you not, too extraterrestrial. It turns out the last shirt was a gift from his aunt’s visit to Roswell, New Mexico. I settle on a white T-shirt and quickly change into it. In the corner of the room behind his laundry basket is a board with a pie chart and several notes thumbtacked to it. It reads: LIFE CHART.

“What’s this? Old school project?”

“That’s what I’ve been working on the past couple of days,” Thomas says, changing into his Snoopy pajamas and a tank top. “I decided I would direct myself on the course of life I want to take. You know, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, except not something that will make me so obsessed to figure out every last detail.”

I have no idea who this Maslow guy is, but Thomas’s chart seems plenty obsessive. Thomas carries the board across the room and props it against his dresser. We sit down in front of it. The categories in this pie chart are divided by school/work, health, self-actualization, and relationships.

“I think I’m doing okay with health. I eat right and work out. I’m struggling a bit with financial security because I can’t seem to find a job I love. The money in my savings account can’t even buy me a movie ticket.”

At least he has a savings account, something that might suggest he once had enough money worth putting away. If I get birthday or Christmas money, I usually slip almost all of it inside Mom’s purse since she knows where we need it most. It sucks paying for a home you don’t love living in, but it beats the alternative. See? Silver linings.

“I’m finding my biggest struggles are with love and purpose,” Thomas continues. This chart is the work of a madman who wants his happy ending; I should imitate his insanity. “It might’ve been a blow to my self-esteem after breaking up with Sara. But chilling with you kept me from falling into a black hole about it, I think.”

“You’re welcome,” I say. My phone vibrates inside my pocket and I see it’s Genevieve. I screen it. I’ll hit her up before bed.

“I’m serious. You gave me something. Whatever it is, I can’t get it from my missing father, overworked mother, or ex-girlfriend. So maybe you have to help me figure out my true potential.”

I study his room for a moment. This place belongs to someone who lives as many lives as possible. There are unfinished sheets of music, movie scripts. (Later I learn that there’s even an abandoned musical in his closet about a robot that time-travels back to the Mesozoic era to study dinosaurs while singing about surviving without technology.) There are boxes of Legos stacked in the corner, a colorful tower from when he wanted to be an architect and set designer.

It’s like when you’re a kid, and you want to be an astronaut before accepting it might be impossible—even though everyone says nothing’s impossible, and they go so far to pinpoint moments from history to make you feel stupid. But you move on anyway. You know your capabilities and circumstances, so you start thinking that maybe being a boxer would be cool even though you’re too skinny. No problem, you can bulk up. But that all changes when you want to write for the newspaper and dream of having your own column, so you start doing that. And one day when you’re writing someone advice on how to be more organized, you think about piloting a ship into space again.

This is how Thomas lives his life, one misfired dream after the other. That journey may stretch for a lifetime, but even if he doesn’t discover that spark until he’s an old man, Thomas will die with wrinkles he earned and a smile on his face.

“If you help me stay happy so I don’t end up like my dad, you got a deal,” I say.

“Deal.”

9

BEYOND DEAD ENDS

The only thing that sucked about last night was that I never got a chance to call Genevieve back. It’s the first thing I think of when I wake up.