Lucky Man

Mostly I watch movies, all kinds. But something Scranton branch manager, Michael Scott, said onetime when I was watching regular TV struck a nerve. He said, “I’m not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.” 

“Me too. Me too!” I nodded back excitedly at the screen in agreement. I’ve been a little stitious since I was twenty-three years old, long before Michael Scott ever said it. And my little stitious has been simmering quietly, just below the surface of my otherwise pristine sanity since then, forever waiting for it to happen.

When I was twenty-three, I had the nightmare. It was so exhausting, so emotionally tolling, that, when I awoke from it, I could barely extend a feeble arm to reach the phone by the bed to call out sick from work that day. I lay in bed all that day, unable to move, and I even called out sick again the next day. An intense overwhelming depression paralyzed me for two days; I just lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.

The dream had gone on, it seemed to me, all night, but you can never tell how long they really are. In almost all of my epic dreams that I remember, I’m being pursued throughout, by bad people who have intent to kill me or cause me serious bodily harm. But I also am always aware that I’m dreaming. And since early childhood, I’ve known that I could change things in my dreams - whenever I want to - in order to help myself escape my pursuers.  And I also know that, if all else fails, I can make the arduous, always changing, journey to “the field of deer” in my dreams, an imaginary, very serene, safe place hidden deep in my mind where no one can ever pursue or find me. It’s just that, by my own design, it’s a very difficult journey to get there, and sometimes, I can’t even find it!

This particular dream was unusually protracted, and abnormally scary and violent, but it followed the same old pattern -with me trying to escape from inside a house-of-horrors home life, just to go to school. The escape from home was traumatic; I had to hide constantly in creative places from abusive and sadistic parents, whose faces were fuzzy and unfamiliar to me, and carefully plan an escape for when the usually securely-locked doors where inadvertently left open for a few seconds. That day, I watched secretly and quietly, unnoticed from on top of a large bookshelf in the living room, fairly close to the front door, while the monster parents searched around the house for me, looking to inflict pain, stomping around in frustration all the while that they couldn’t find me. 

When my moment came, with the door left momentarily ajar, I leaped down from the book case and darted out the door in an instant. Out of the farthest reaches of peripheral vision, I could see them behind me, both whirling their attention around towards the front door at the same time. As I ran out of the front yard, they threw rocks at me. One hit the back of my head hard, and I felt a momentary buckling in my knees- but I kept running, and then darted into some neighbors’ back yards because my faceless parents were already driving around the otherwise normal suburban neighborhood looking for me. The streets were quiet and very wide and spacious– a lot like a distant memory of a middle class residential neighborhood in Corsicana, Texas, circa 1968, near the Collins Street Bakery. I hid behind cars and bushes, advancing strategically towards the school, little by little, while dodging the pursuing parents’ furtive drive-bys.  I felt like if I could just make it to school, I could change my life for the better.  Indeed, it seemed to me that my goal, all these years, had been to escape that Hell house, and simply go to school, sort of like a violent, R-rated Matilda, directed by David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino.

Escaping my house was like running from bees after having disturbed their hive – after a while, they just sort of gave up and turned back, and, so, eventually, I arrived at the big gray school high school building. But, to my dismay, school turned out to be a savage cross between The Hunger Games and The Purge, with survival, rather than education, being the only goal. There were bodies all around on the school grounds, and I saw students get shot as they emerged from school bus doorways, like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, when the landing craft ramps came down and the soldiers couldn’t even make it off the craft before being machine-gunned. 

I was determined to get into the school building, although, once I did, I found it wasn’t any different from the grounds outside. There were some classes that seemed normal, but for the most part, it was violent chaos in the halls and common areas. As usual, I found myself trying to get away from killers who were relentlessly chasing me. I ran in the halls, lunchrooms, athletic fields and gyms, and from classroom to classroom.  Sometimes, I would even sit down in one seemingly calm, normal class room - and even take notes for a few minutes - before jumping up and escaping again as my pursuers entered the back of the class looking for me – while the teacher continued teaching the other students as though nothing were amiss. I remember I had already been shot once, in the lower right abdomen, around my appendix, but I was able to still limp around holding pressure on the wound with my right hand. It had happened in the lunchroom. Now, I was trying to make it to an elevator to get off of the fourth floor of the building before whoever was pursuing me found me, and finished me off. 

But I was panicking badly in this dream because, in all my life, as far back as I could remember, I had never actually been shot, or even hurt, in any dream! Plenty of people had tried, but none had succeeded, because I simply wouldn’t allow it to happen.  I was like “Anthony” in the Twilight Zone, petulantly wishing away adults to the cornfield whenever I wanted, and before any of them could ever harm me. If, for example, someone in a dream aimed a gun at my head at point blank range, as he pulled the trigger- I would simply make the gun jam in his hand – or even make it backfire and explode in his face. I would even cause the explosion of the back-firing gun to kill or blind the killer, allowing me to escape another close call. 

But this time, my own subconscious had somehow ambushed me in the lunchroom with two shooters, from two different angles - and I didn’t change things quickly enough in the dream to account for two shooters– and, so, although I had easily dodged the first shooter’s shot - the second pursuer actually shot me while I was distracted by the first! It was never supposed to happen to me in my dreams, because I usually can control everything. And, so, this time, I was profoundly frightened in my dream.

I finally found the elevator, and, by that time, I had two terrified, unarmed classmates with me, two girls I was trying to take to safety with me. We clamored into the elevator together, hitting the close door button frantically until it started to close. But just as the door was almost closed, they found me! – a hand holding a gun reached into the closing doors at the last second before they completely closed, and fired twice – both shots hitting me in the exact same spot I had already been shot!  The hand with the gun, then immediately withdrew, and the doors closed.  I doubled over to the floor in horrible pain, blood from the fresh gunshot wounds warm and sticky on my hand. The elevator started descending slowly. I let out a deep breath and lay back against the wall of the elevator. I slowly got weaker as the elevator kept going down floor by floor. The two girls were weeping for me, “please don’t die!” they sobbed, “please don’t die!” I tried to reassure them, “it’s ok, I’m fine; it’ll be ok”. But, in my mind, I knew I was slipping away quickly and only had a minute or two left; no time left to even try to retreat to the field of deer, and too late, anyway, since the damage was already done and I was too injured to even make the journey. Meanwhile, the elevator just kept descending slowly, slowly, past the first floor, to the basements, and it didn’t even hurt anymore; I was feeling peaceful and very sleepy.  I remember thinking, “this is what it’s really like to die by gunshots to abdomen:  you just gently go to sleep as you bleed out.” And that probably would’ve been alright because of the serenity that seemed to be enveloping me, like a warm blanket.

But there was something else. 

It was vaguely beginning to alarm me that the elevator just kept on descending and descending, by now seemingly deep underground, well below any sub-basements, underground parking, or sewer lines, or ancient tunnels, catacombs, caves. And, worse yet, I became aware of a dusty old-fashioned vent fan, strangely familiar, up on the wall, near the ceiling of the elevator car. And, Oh, God – I recognized it! It was the symbolic electric fan from Angel Heart, emerging to haunt me in my last few seconds - the fan blades were spinning slowly, backwards, in the wrong direction; I was Mickey Rourke in the descending Angel Heart elevator! I only had a few breaths left.  I looked at the girls, they were now pale, listless, blank-faced, tear-streaked, resigned - they had read my mind – they knew exactly where we would all be when the elevator finally stopped.

The timing at the very end of the downward elevator ride, whether by my own design, or that of the diabolical subconscious that had high-jacked my dream and ambushed me with a second shooter, was, nonetheless, exquisite. All at the same time, I exhaled my life’s last breath, just as the elevators doors to Hell began to open – and I died in that dream at the exact same instant that I abruptly woke up from the dream – AND before I could glimpse what was beyond the doors; before it could be my very last seen image. To this day, it remains a very important detail to me that my fertile imagination did not let me catch even a peek at what Hell looks like - or of Him. 

I woke up in my bed with a single big gasp for air, not so much paralyzed like by nerve damage, as unable to move at all under a giant, hot crushing invisible weight. It was a long time, well over an hour, before I could just barely move my arm enough to reach gingerly for the phone by my bed. My gunshot wounds ached and throbbed. But, of course, there were no gunshot wounds, no bloody sheets. Was my appendix bursting? Is that why in my dream I kept getting shot right there? I slowly returned to near normal after nearly two full days. I can’t remember any other time being so impacted by a dream.

Because the pain in my lower right side eventually went away, I didn’t ever go to the doctor to see if it was a kidney stone or appendicitis. Instead, I gradually became obsessed that it was my destiny to be shot, right there in my appendix, sometime in the future. I imagined it over and over again, frame by frame, in sepia-tinted detail. I always pictured it happening in a public place with crowds around. You know? Like Jack Ruby shooting Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan shooting Bobby Kennedy, like Arthur Bremer shooting George Wallace in the Maryland mall parking lot?  The assailant, whom I don’t recognize, walks right up and fires three times, point blank, into my appendix. My knees would buckle and I would collapse, with panicked and screaming bystanders trying to catch me as I fell to ease me gently to the ground, like in the movies.

About ten years later, with the dream no longer in the forefront of my mind, but still simmering quietly below the surface of my otherwise pristine sanity, I happened to read a brief story in the news in the D.C. Metro area, where I was living. I was busy working full-time as an environmental scientist during the day, a part-time bartender at night, and even taking night classes at the University of Maryland on nights I didn’t tend bar. I hardly had any time to watch movies or read the newspaper, so I can’t imagine how I happened to see this particular story. But I did, by dumb, crazy luck, I guess.  

The small local news story told an almost unbelievable tale about a lucky man. This lucky man, somewhere in his fifties, somewhere in Northern Virginia, every single day, for years, had bought a large stack of lottery tickets at the same convenience store. He played the same numbers every day. The stack of tickets was like an inch thick. He always pinched one side of the stack with his right hand fingers, while flipping through the other side of the stack with his left thumb, said goodnight to the store clerk, then put the tickets in his left shirt pocket, before walking out the door to amble back to his nearby home.

After years and years of never winning, thousands and thousands of dollars spent, he was walking home from the store as usual - when out of the dark - a young, cold thug ran up to him, eyes glistening, and pointed a gun. “I don’t have any money!” the lucky man tried to say quickly. But, spitefully, the thug fired a single shot point blank at his chest anyway. The man collapsed to the ground, no longer lucky. The thug, after quickly rifling through his pockets and taking nothing -the man had been honest, there was no money to take - ran off into the evening as quickly as he had appeared. 

A long time later, after the shock had worn off, the man sat up, very sore - but unharmed. He had finally won the lottery! The bullet had struck exactly on the thick stack of lottery tickets in his pocket, directly over his heart, and been stopped by the stack of tickets like a kevlar vest. Ooooh, what a lucky man, he was!  In fact, he was even luckier than the man in the song - who had everything, white horses, ladies by the score, a gold covered mattress - and then bled to death on the battlefield after being shot in the chest, no lottery tickets in his pocket, because he was already very wealthy and didn’t need to play the lottery. But this real life lucky man’s true story resonated with me, haunting me. What did it mean? Why was his story important to me?

About another five years after that, I found out. Now out of law school, I was serving on a Legal Education Fund Board of Directors. Each year we were in charge of putting together a scholarship banquet, reviewing applications and awarding scholarships to deserving law students at local law schools. I had actually won one of these scholarships, when I was a student - and serving on the Board was a way of giving back, I thought. After the successful October banquet, the Board President that year, in thanks for our service, had given a gift to each of her fellow board members. She gave us each a shiny, stain-less steel business card holder. And when I first slipped it into my right suit coat pocket – it hung exactly over my appendix, like a shield. 

It all became clear to me then; I had an M. Night Shyamalan moment, as they say - or, as I say, anyway. 

From that day forward, even to this very day, whenever I wear a suit or sports coat, I always keep that metal business card holder in the jacket’s right, inner pocket. And that business card holder stands watch, for thirty years now, dutifully protecting me from that when-you-least-expect-it day in the gray, dismal future, when that unknown shiny-eyed assailant runs up anonymously - and shoots me three quick times in the appendix. And when that day does come -and I know it will -  I’ll be wearing a suit or sports coat, with my steel business card holder in the right pocket. And on that day, ooooh, what a Lucky Man, I’ll be!  Because I won’t be taking the Angel Heart elevator ride that day. Instead, I’ll win the lottery – and live happily ever after to a ripe, quiet old age, just like in the movies. So, while I might not be superstitious, I certainly am a little stitious – and, in my thinking, justifiably so. Because my life depends on it.