This trip down south, it was Andy’s idea. A chance to listen to music and talk, a chance to reconnect and get away from everything. And in some obvious way, it was also like Andy planning his farewell tour, acknowledging what seemed to be the beginning of the end of his fifteen minutes of fame.
As it was, Craig needed a vacation too. All those long hours at the firm, so he was overdue for some time off. Plus, he had a car, made enough money to park it in a Manhattan garage and everything. When he picked it up he said it was covered in this thick layer of dust.
“Someone wrote ‘clean me’ on one window, and then on the other window, it said ‘drive me.’” he told us as we packed our stuff into the trunk. “Cute.”
Craig’s girlfriend was annoyed that he was spending his first chunk of time-off in months by traveling with his friends instead of with her. She had wanted them to go on a resort vacation, some place like Cancun or Acapulco.
“Whatever, I see her all the time. There’re plenty of nice beaches on Long Island anyway. We don’t need to get all complicated about it.”
I had been planning on doing something a bit more exotic myself, saving up my vacation days to head off to Australia or India. Russia was also a possibility. But it just didn’t feel right to deny Andy, so I stayed Stateside. Who knows, in the end I probably wouldn’t have left the country anyway, probably would have found a reason why I couldn’t or shouldn’t go, whether because of cost or the loneliness that I would have felt from traveling on my own.
Last stop – New Orleans. Seems sort of fitting in a morbid way, although I guess it depends on how you look at it. This is very much still a land of ghosts, even with all the noise in the French Quarter. The hotel where we decide to stay for the night is, in all of our estimations, “classic” New Orleans. The outside has balconies with wrought metal railing, like the ones you see people standing on during Mardis Gras. It’s one of those shabby establishments, with a single lobby attendant, an older gentleman with a thick, white, Santa Claus beard and a charming accent. I imagine him in overalls and a straw hat when he’s not behind the counter, rolling around in some pick-up truck, a golden retriever sticking its head out of the passenger-side window.
“Do you recognize him?” Craig asks the attendant after we’ve checked in. He smiles broadly.
“That young gentleman?” He points to Andy, who’s standing by the door.
“Yeah, this guy over here.”
Andy looks away and nervously runs his hand through his thinning hair, absent-mindedly letting it linger over one spot which has grown particularly sparse in the last couple of years.
“Do you know who he is?” continues Craig.
The attendant peers at Andy’s profile. He squints, like its going to help him figure it out. “No, can’t say that I do.”
“Oh well.”
“Should I?” asks the attendant, getting a little excited about the interaction. “Is he famous?”
Craig shrugs. “Depends on who you ask.”
---
Andy is something of a celebrity, or at least he used to be. Or maybe these days you never really cease being a celebrity once you’re name is out there. Google Andy and all of these random links pop up. It’s like the Web has permanently absorbed his persona, crunched his being into algorithms. So even when nobody knows who the heck Andy is or what he did, even, maybe, when he’s dead and gone, somewhere locked in the circuitry of some super-computer sitting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on some monstrous glacier of a floating server farm, his identity will forever be reconstituted in the form of binary zeros and ones, coded for eternity.
About eight months ago, Andy got this really unoriginal idea in his head – he was going to become a YouTube sensation. Unemployment was losing its appeal, and though the money wasn’t so bad, he was getting bored with the late wake-ups and the endless job searches, the mid-afternoon coffee shops filled with stay-at-home moms, trust fund kids, and mildly successful writers, artists, filmmakers, web designers.
“Blah,” he said. “These people make me sick. They’re all so smug.”
He had to make his statement, break out of the mold that made everything ordinary and gray. He’d probably never have more free time for the rest of his life, and a return to the day-in/day-out cycle of work – which loomed at some nondescript point in the future – terrified his creative sensibilities. Like so many of the rest of us, he never really liked what he did, felt as if it was already too late to start over from scratch. And even if he was ready to throw career and experience into the wind, he didn’t know what he would do with himself anyway.
“What do I care about?” he asked. “Like what do I really care about? If I had to find something totally new, I mean. Sometimes it feels like I’m just searching for what I hate the least.” We were at a tightly packed West Village café and he glanced over to the girl with headphones at the table next to us. She was flipping through printouts and highlighting the pages. “God, I wish I was still in school.”
And then, out of nowhere, came this YouTube idea.
“I want to make people think,” he told us, “I want to give them something real.”
We laughed at first. It all sounded a bit ridiculous, especially since we didn’t really understand what Andy had in mind, and in any case, we didn’t see how a YouTube clip was going to help him accomplish it.
“What’s it about?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what’s going to happen in this video?”
“I’m not totally sure, but I have a couple of things in mind.”
“Please tell me you’re not going to do something stupid just to get attention.”
In the end, Andy just talked, plain and simple. No fancy acrobatics or kitschy gags or floundering attempts to get a laugh at his own expense. He stared into his FlipCam and got all serious, went on a rant about his life, about being a guy in his late 20s without a job, without any sort of direction or idea for what he wanted to do with himself. Even had a moment at the end where he stood up, walked out of the frame, and turned the thing off. It looked totally unprofessional. But for him it wasn’t about what it looked like, but rather, what he was trying to say.
“It’s the words man,” I remember him saying, all Zen. We were making fun of him for how slip-shod the whole thing looked.
“There’s like some buzzing in the background,” I said. “Were they doing construction in your building or something?”
Andy just shrugged it off. “You didn’t listen to anything. Fuck the noise.”
The words man, the words. The content. That’s what mattered to him.
If you know Andy, you watch this thing and you might get a little emotional about it. There’s something about it that’s very real – just as he said he wanted it to be – but it also has this underlying tinge of desperation and sadness to it. I think that’s the part that gets me the most.
And then the most unusual part of it all was that people ended up loving the video, passed it around the Internet so that it became one of those things you just had to see. Ten million, twenty million hits? I can’t remember. Andy was, of course, ecstatic.
When people recognize him, which happens less now than it did for the first two or three months after the video came out, they always try to repeat some of his lines to him, imitate the way he speaks in this kind of high-pitched voice. Except they never get it right. When they mess up they’re quick to turn the attention back to him – “You do it!”
Andy will smile bashfully, as if he’s embarrassed to be recognized, embarrassed to do his shtick for a public audience. But he actually loves it, craves the attention, even while he might not actually understand why he’s getting it.
“I’ve never felt anything like this before,” he once said after a run-in with a “fan,” his breathing all elevated, pulse quickened, excitement showing in the increased blood flow to his face, cheeks and forehead glowing warmly. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know, it makes me feel alive, like everything before was just this muted existence. I see that now. I’m on the cusp of something man. I’m affecting people, I’m shaking them up, tapping into some higher collective consciousness, into some core of humanity. It’s intense.” He exhaled and shook his head. “I wish you could know what this feels like.”
Like being in love, I thought. Or getting into a fight back at school, when the air would leak out of my lungs and I’d get all teary-eyed and jittery. Maybe it was like that. Maybe I’d never know.
---
“Food?” I suggest after twenty minutes of us walking in silence. An odd mix of blue grass, jazz, and hip-hop music boxes our ears, but isn’t enough to rouse us into conversation.
“I’m not hungry,” says Craig, glaring at Andy.
“Yeah, neither am I,” says Andy, looking sullen. He seems very small to me, in a child-like sort of way, a kid who has been disciplined, told to stand quietly in the corner.
“What do you guys want to do?” I ask, getting frustrated. “Let’s at least go into a bar. It’s annoying just walking around and tripping over beads.” Strings of the stuff, shimmery purple and green and yellow, are all over the sidewalk, swept onto sewer grates and sprawled across streets. More keep falling from the balconies, convulsing in the air on their way towards pavement or into someone’s hand.
And it’s so hot outside. It smells like beer and sweat. Fucking Bourbon Street. Who thought this was a good idea?
“Well?” I ask when I haven’t gotten a response from either of them. Craig, instinctively, pulls out his Blackberry and checks his messages. He does this whenever he doesn’t want to deal with something.
A group of red-faced fratty-looking guys pass us, leggy blondes precariously hanging onto their arms. The blondes, who are tripping over themselves and constantly tugging down on their skirts, look southern, with their small, upturned noses and thin lips. They survey us.
Andy has a moment where he seems to rise out of himself, where his eyes become pleading beams. But the blondes turn away and pass without consequence.
Craig, still looking at his Blackberry, shakes his head. “What a mess.”
I decide not to wait for an answer and force them to follow me into one of the many indistinguishable places lined up along either side of the street. A mustiness takes over and I feel a little lightheaded, but I walk deeper into the bar and go over to order a drink.
“What do you guys want? On me,” I offer, trying to make amends, trying to bring us back to the happy center of friendship I thought we had at the beginning of these two weeks, before we started on this steadily degenerating trajectory.
The guys lighten up a bit and by the time we’re sipping our drinks and trying to speak over the noise, we’re throwing arms over shoulders and leaning in for secretive whispers and furtive glances at the people in the place.
“You looking forward to getting back home?” I ask Craig without thinking.
Craig has been the most agitated one of us in the last few days and inevitably I wonder what it’s all about, whether he’s feeling antsy about getting back to his life, to his job and his apartment and his girlfriend. Or whether it’s something else, like maybe he can’t stand how needy Andy seems lately, even to me, how inauthentic it has all become. Of course it could be something totally different, something I don’t see or understand. Craig isn’t really the sort of guy who talks about how he feels.
“Sure, why not?” he answers. “We’ve been gone a while.”
“You missing your Saturday morning jogs in the park? Not getting your full daily serving of fiber at the road-side diners?” Andy laughs.
Craig ignores him. “I mean sure, if I had nothing else to do, I wouldn’t mind being away a little longer. But even then,” he turns to Andy, “eventually you have to go back. Right?”
“Or you can stay gone forever.” Andy smiles and raises his glass. “Up in the clouds.”
“Yeah, well, some of us have lives to return to.”
“Good for ‘some of us,’” answers Andy, totally nonplused. This might be the alcohol speaking, liquid confidence.
Just then a girl walks up to us. She looks really young, like she might still need a fake ID to get into places. She’s wearing a low-cut jean skirt and a tight Abercrombie t-shirt that’s fashionably ripped down the middle, forming a tattered v-neck. Her brown hair is viciously straightened, frizzing at individual strands that jut out perpendicular from the sides of her head.
“Sorry,” she starts, and then loses the words. She passes her hand behind her ear to keep some of her hair from falling onto her face.
Andy is used to this by now.
“You’re that guy right?” she asks eventually. “The one from the computer?”
Andy nods, all nonchalant, as if he hasn’t really been searching for this exact type of interaction since we left New York.
“That video was amazing!”
My skin crawls when she says it, it all sounds so fake. I guess this is what we’ve come to.
“Thanks,” says Andy. He’s keeping from smiling, from acknowledging any sort of emotional response to her. He has become a master at these interactions, usually at the cost of being himself.
“I knew it was you!” says the girl. “I told my friends, ‘that’s the guy!’ but they didn’t believe me.”
“Where are you from?” asks Andy without changing the tone of his voice.
“Savannah. Georgia. There’s a whole group of us here, just in the back.” She points to the part of the bar that opens up into an inner courtyard with a small fountain. It’s packed with alma mater-attire-clad kids, school names and logos emblazoned along sleeves and across chests and in the center of hats. They all seem so much taller than us Northeasterners.“Be back in a few,” Andy tells us as he follows her.
“Nice to meet you,” shouts Craig after them, his voice swallowed by the noise from the speakers. He throws them a mock wave.
---
“What the heck am I supposed to do when I get back home?” asks Andy. He’s staring out the window of the mom-and-pop waffle house we’ve stopped at just over the Mississippi border on our way to Louisiana. A half-eaten egg-over-easy sits at an angle on his plate, tilted by a mound of shaved potato strips congealed together with oil, onions, and paprika. Everything has cooled, stiffened into one mass of underappreciated consumerism.
“Maybe start looking for a job again?” I look out onto the parking lot. Craig is pacing on the grassy divide between the lot and the road. One hand is in his pocket while the other holds his Blackberry to his ear. Probably a call from work, something he might have forgotten to do, or more likely a question they have, because often he’s the only person who knows how to do something. Maybe it’s his girlfriend, although the vehemence with which he’s talking into the phone tells me it’s probably not.
“That’s fucking terrifying.”
“What? Finding a job?”
“No, it’s just…” Andy’s eyes track Craig’s movements. I realize he would never be bringing this up if Craig was in the room. “I can’t imagine everything going back to normal again, like nothing ever happened.”
Did something really happen, I wonder. Everything has gone so quickly. All of that “higher collective consciousness” stuff Andy used to talk about, it’s coming to an end, if it was even there to begin with. Instead it’s this same union of human minds and experiences that has, collectively, chewed on Andy, processed him, and regurgitated him back out, replaced him once more into the world of unemployment checks and overdue rent and credit card bills and collection notices.
“Andy, you’ve been had,” I’ve wanted to say for a long time, even before we’re in that bar on Bourbon Street with the girl from Savannah and it’s completely obvious. “Dude they played you. They made you feel important as long as they found you entertaining. And then they stopped, and that’s it.”
But I don’t say any of that, I don’t want to rub it in the way Craig does. I know Craig doesn’t mean anything bad by it; he’s not trying to be mean, he’s just a realist. And life, by default, always seems to return to what we’ve decided to call reality. There’s the gravity, the seriousness. There are the things we might aspire to and the limitations. There’s the glass ceiling. There’s Andy who took off and ran with something and made it work in his own way. And there’s Craig, with his calls in the parking lot and his girlfriend who wants to go on vacation and his dusty car.
With Andy off in the bathroom or sleeping in the back during portions of the trip, Craig keeps talking about him.
“He needs to grow up,” he’ll say to me in a whisper. I’ll bite my lip and look at Andy in the rearview, try to gauge whether his breathing tells me he’s actually asleep or just pretending so he can listen to what we’re saying. “He’s ordinary. We’re all ordinary. Those few milli-seconds he had when people recognized him, it didn’t change that.”
“He’s just having a hard time with everything. It’s probably weird for him to think about going back to an office, having a routine.”
“But what does he expect is going to happen? Does he really think he’s going to start making self-help videos or something? He’s going to write a book? Become the next Oprah? He’s kidding himself.”
“Give him some time, he’ll come around.”
I feel shitty almost as soon as I say it, because it means that Craig is right and that all Andy has to look forward to in the next few weeks and months is becoming resocialized to the way things are. Strap him down to a table, let the cravings pass, force him to go cold turkey, and eventually he’ll wake up and be content with not being special, yet again.
With the blur of green farmland all around us and the blank stares of brown and white cows along the road, I have this sudden urge to set Andy free, to pull over, hand him a few twenties and leave him.
“Run. Just take this and get out of here, before it’s too late, before we take you back.”
“You know?” Andy looks at me from behind his plate of drying food, his stack of uneaten toast with the soggy middle of butter shining translucent. He shifts his hands and sends a knife clattering against the side of his plate, that all-American sound of metal on porcelain that’s probably echoing, at this exact moment, in hundreds of diners around the country. Maybe we’re always part of something bigger, just not in a way that we allow ourselves to pay attention to.
“Yeah,” I say, really meaning it this time. “I do.”
---
Andy doesn’t come back to join us at the bar. He goes off with the girl from Savannah and we don’t see him again that evening. After a while we walk around the place, ask a couple of people if they know what happened to him.
“Shortish guy,” describes Craig, holding out his hand at about nose level, “maybe yay tall. Slightly balding. Wearing a blue polo.”
No luck.
I send some texts. I call his phone a couple of times, leave a few messages. No answer, no response, just Andy’s uninformative voice telling me he’s not there and asking me to leave my contact information so he can get back to me as soon as possible. Thank you.
Craig and I continue to walk around, staring down random people on the street in the hope that we’ll come across Andy and the Savannah girl, casually entering or exiting another bar. As I’m doing it, as I’m forcing eye contact, I think that this must be how Andy feels, expectantly widening his eyes for the satisfaction of recognition. There’s a moment when my heart pounds faster, there’s a sense of excitement mixed with anxiety, and the two of you are convinced that you know each other, that at some point in time you shared a beer or a cab, maybe a kiss.
But it’s not them. It’s never the people I think it is, that I want it to be. That second of contact on the street, it’s quickly replaced by quick blinks of separation. We look away, we continue on, and Andy is nowhere to be found in this mess of drunken stumblers.
We stop to get some Creole food which is too spicy for our tastes. I keep sensing a phantom vibration coming from my phone but Andy isn’t getting back to us. Craig is definitely not worried.
“Whatever, he’s probably getting laid,” he says between gulps of water. He sticks out his tongue and waves his hand at it. “Shit, this is ridiculous. How do people eat this stuff?”
Eventually we go back to our hotel. The attendant is asleep behind the front desk with his chair leaning back against the wall and his feet propped up on the counter. He stirs a little when we open the front door, but only enough to peer out at us from behind narrowed lids.
In the room, Craig moves Andy’s stuff from one of the beds to the cot.
“If he’s not here, he doesn’t get a bed.”
I’m asleep when the front door of our room opens at some point in the middle of the night. I look out at the glow from the hallway and the hunched figure that walks in.
“Craig took your bed,” I whisper.
Andy doesn’t answer. I hear him knock against the sofa and then fall onto one of its cushions.
“Where were you?”
Andy breaths in a way that seems loud. But it’s probably just in my head, just the general silence, the rousing from sleep, the dark that amplifies every sound.
“I don’t really know. Somewhere nearby.”
“You were with that girl?”
“Which girl?”
“From the bar. The blonde one.”
“Stacy?”
“I don’t know, I guess. Whoever she was.” The name makes sense in my mind.
“We hung out for a bit.”
“Did you sleep with her?” I yawn.
Andy pauses and I see the blackened silhouette of his head turn to the side.
“I think so,” there’s humor in his voice. “I don’t really remember. Man I was so drunk.”
“So what happened?”
“I just know that at one point I was at the place she was staying, and then I was walking around somewhere, totally confused.”
“You blacked out?”
“I can’t remember how I got there.”
Andy seems far away, like he’s starting to drift down a tunnel. I realize I’m beginning to nod off and don’t want to keep talking anymore.
“I took a cab,” he continues, even though I haven’t asked. “It’s strange, it feels like I’m still there.” I have the impression that he’s just staring straight ahead, away towards the glass balcony doors and thin beige curtains at the other end of the room.
“What do you mean?” I ask, my eyes already closed, the words coming as an automatic question.
“Everything smelled of bleach. I still have the scent in my nose.”
---
That evening, I have this dream that we’re driving around New Orleans, looking for the highway but stuck out in the suburbs somewhere. There’s this feeling that we’ve been driving for hours, circling the same blocks, heading up and down the same streets, totally lost.
Andy’s behind the wheel, insisting that he knows the way out, but he’s just winding us around the same cul-de-sacs and into the same dead ends. My anxiety is mounting, there’s no one around, no one to ask for directions.
Andy twists the car around a potholed corner and takes us alongside a fenced-off field, grass interspersed with pockets of mud and sprouting dandelions. An end-zone goalpost leans precariously off to one side, tilting down towards a fading dotted line of white-frosted grass.
I’m surprised when I look out the window and see a kid come running out onto the road after a red ball that has found its way into the crosswalk. Andy brakes sharply and I lurch in my seat.
The kid grabs the ball and returns to the small yard of his house. In the sloped driveway sits a 70s-style trailer, white with mud stains along its concave shutter ridges, propped up on cinder blocks at the front end to balance out the decline. I see the trailer’s windows decorated with floral-print curtains that lie straight and plastic stiff, completely unresponsive to the wind that whips up the kid’s floppy hair. The porch of the adjacent house is an arranged line of kitchen appliances, dresser, and disintegrating couch. I see the outline of the front door peeking out from behind the refrigerator and a flurry of spray painted red “X” marks form an odd neo-modern art design above the hot plate.
“Why don’t you ask her for directions?” asks Craig. I hear him but I don’t know where he is. I look around in the car but it’s just his sound that I sense, no physical presence. “Otherwise we’ll be stuck here for-fucking-ever.”
A woman surveys us with a harried and tired expression. She holds a steaming pot in one hand and lets the other hang loose on the other side of her billowing form, all curves and folds and dips that have become one confused mass of body. She warns the boy – sternly, but not with any real anger – to not run blindly into streets.
Andy lowers the window.
“Excuse me.” He seems to shout but his voice is muted, shut down as soon as it passes out of the car. The wind has picked up and carries off the sound. “Excuse me,” he tries again, straining his throat, yelling louder. The woman’s eyes respond. “Miss, do you know how to get back to the highway?”
The woman, the muscles of her face tense and relax, as if she’s about to respond to Andy’s question. But she doesn’t say anything. She just turns her head and focuses her attention down the road. Then, from behind her body, she lifts her obscured hand, and it’s just a blackened branch of a limb, all decay and absence. She extends a crooked finger that collapses under its own exertion, drooping at the first knuckle, and tries to point in the direction our car is facing, in the direction we’ve been going all along.
My heart begins racing and I think I’m shouting at Andy, telling him to get us out of here. But my voice feels trapped in my own head, there’s no volume. He smiles and thanks the woman and we roll smoothly away from the house.
I panic, I’m convinced that she’s trying to trick us, that we can’t listen to her and head in the direction she has indicated.
“This is wrong,” I hear myself saying, or trying to say. “Andy turn around.”
We just keep moving.
“We need to go the other way.”
Andy adjusts his grip on the steering wheel and doesn’t respond.
We continue to lace our way down streets narrowed by storage crates and construction equipment, steel canisters filled with jutting dry wall and contorted aluminum metal casings and rods. Everywhere, nestled quietly between the homes, are the white trailers. Suddenly, that’s all I can see, a maze of crisscrossing streets and white trailers, and everywhere, the spray-painted markings.
We’re picking up speed, the same of everything passes by more quickly, but we’re not heading towards any highway, we’re just burying ourselves deeper in this eerie, silent world. I don’t know what else to do, so I calmly open the door to the car, glance at the blur of blacktop underneath me, and throw myself into the arms of the wind.
---
I wake up in our hotel room, drenched in sweat under the massive down comforter that’s twisted around my body. I see Craig in the bathroom, alternating between flossing and picking at his teeth. He leans into the mirror and tries to get a closer look at one particular spot of his gums.
Off to the side, by the balcony door, I see Andy, facedown on the cot.
Craig flushes his floss down the toilet and steps out into the room.
“Are we going?” he asks, his voice at a volume that’s purposely loud enough to wake up Andy. “We’re going to need to drive at least twelve hours today if we want to be back sometime tomorrow.”
I groan, still too disoriented to adequately respond.
“What the hell happened to you? You look like crap.”
After Craig leaves me alone and gets to packing, I finally lift myself out of bed and head to take a shower. At some point, while I’m running the water over my bowed head and watching it drip towards my feet, it suddenly goes cold and turns rust brown and grainy. I shout and jump back from the shower head, letting the water splash against the white porcelain and swirl its way into the drain. It only happens for a moment, and then it’s normal again, clear and warm against the edges of my toes.
“Had some trouble?” asks Craig after I’ve emerged back in the bedroom with a towel wrapped around my waist. “Did it go rust on you too?”
“Yeah. Freaked me out.”
“This place is a shit hole, what did you expect? They try to cover everything up by throwing some clean sheets on the bed and hanging these fancy curtains.”
“Should we get him up?”
Craig laughs. “Don’t think I haven’t already tried. Dude is a log.”
It takes us a good thirty minutes to wake Andy. We shake him, shout his name, watch him open his eyes and promise to get up, only to fall back asleep. Eventually he’s up and getting ready. I recline on the bed and watch CNN while Craig stays busy with his Blackberry. Andy moves painstakingly slowly. There’s a confused air about his movements and a tinge of sadness in his expression.
“I never got a souvenir,” he says as he’s stuffing some toiletries into the side pocket of his bag. “You think we’ll have time to stop somewhere so I can get a shot glass or t-shirt or something?”
“Sure Andy,” I say from the bed, solemnly. Then there’s the sound from the TV again, the sound of Craig’s typing. “We’ll get some breakfast and you can pick something up at one of those tourist shops.”
Andy ends up buying one of the most ordinary shirts you can get. All it says is “Bourbon Street, New Orleans” in a script that, I guess, is meant to give it a French or Creole feel. There’s also a lone string of purple beads hanging off the capital “N.” He throws himself into the back seat of the car and places the plastic bag with the shirt right next to him, his hand possessively gripping the handle even after we’ve started moving.
Craig insists on being the one behind the wheel. He’s particularly psyched about getting back home in record time and I get the impression that he doesn’t trust me to be as efficient as him.
“Just plot our route and tell me where to go.”
I enter the information in the Blackberry and tell him what streets to take to leave the City.
“Andy,” I say, intending to ask him something. When he doesn’t respond I turn in my seat and find him asleep, snoring. I have the sudden idea to grab his Flipcam and record him passed out. He might enjoy seeing it later.
I think the better of it. I let him sleep undisturbed.
I look back towards the road.
“This is going to take forever,” groans Craig.
As it was, Craig needed a vacation too. All those long hours at the firm, so he was overdue for some time off. Plus, he had a car, made enough money to park it in a Manhattan garage and everything. When he picked it up he said it was covered in this thick layer of dust.
“Someone wrote ‘clean me’ on one window, and then on the other window, it said ‘drive me.’” he told us as we packed our stuff into the trunk. “Cute.”
Craig’s girlfriend was annoyed that he was spending his first chunk of time-off in months by traveling with his friends instead of with her. She had wanted them to go on a resort vacation, some place like Cancun or Acapulco.
“Whatever, I see her all the time. There’re plenty of nice beaches on Long Island anyway. We don’t need to get all complicated about it.”
I had been planning on doing something a bit more exotic myself, saving up my vacation days to head off to Australia or India. Russia was also a possibility. But it just didn’t feel right to deny Andy, so I stayed Stateside. Who knows, in the end I probably wouldn’t have left the country anyway, probably would have found a reason why I couldn’t or shouldn’t go, whether because of cost or the loneliness that I would have felt from traveling on my own.
Last stop – New Orleans. Seems sort of fitting in a morbid way, although I guess it depends on how you look at it. This is very much still a land of ghosts, even with all the noise in the French Quarter. The hotel where we decide to stay for the night is, in all of our estimations, “classic” New Orleans. The outside has balconies with wrought metal railing, like the ones you see people standing on during Mardis Gras. It’s one of those shabby establishments, with a single lobby attendant, an older gentleman with a thick, white, Santa Claus beard and a charming accent. I imagine him in overalls and a straw hat when he’s not behind the counter, rolling around in some pick-up truck, a golden retriever sticking its head out of the passenger-side window.
“Do you recognize him?” Craig asks the attendant after we’ve checked in. He smiles broadly.
“That young gentleman?” He points to Andy, who’s standing by the door.
“Yeah, this guy over here.”
Andy looks away and nervously runs his hand through his thinning hair, absent-mindedly letting it linger over one spot which has grown particularly sparse in the last couple of years.
“Do you know who he is?” continues Craig.
The attendant peers at Andy’s profile. He squints, like its going to help him figure it out. “No, can’t say that I do.”
“Oh well.”
“Should I?” asks the attendant, getting a little excited about the interaction. “Is he famous?”
Craig shrugs. “Depends on who you ask.”
---
Andy is something of a celebrity, or at least he used to be. Or maybe these days you never really cease being a celebrity once you’re name is out there. Google Andy and all of these random links pop up. It’s like the Web has permanently absorbed his persona, crunched his being into algorithms. So even when nobody knows who the heck Andy is or what he did, even, maybe, when he’s dead and gone, somewhere locked in the circuitry of some super-computer sitting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on some monstrous glacier of a floating server farm, his identity will forever be reconstituted in the form of binary zeros and ones, coded for eternity.
About eight months ago, Andy got this really unoriginal idea in his head – he was going to become a YouTube sensation. Unemployment was losing its appeal, and though the money wasn’t so bad, he was getting bored with the late wake-ups and the endless job searches, the mid-afternoon coffee shops filled with stay-at-home moms, trust fund kids, and mildly successful writers, artists, filmmakers, web designers.
“Blah,” he said. “These people make me sick. They’re all so smug.”
He had to make his statement, break out of the mold that made everything ordinary and gray. He’d probably never have more free time for the rest of his life, and a return to the day-in/day-out cycle of work – which loomed at some nondescript point in the future – terrified his creative sensibilities. Like so many of the rest of us, he never really liked what he did, felt as if it was already too late to start over from scratch. And even if he was ready to throw career and experience into the wind, he didn’t know what he would do with himself anyway.
“What do I care about?” he asked. “Like what do I really care about? If I had to find something totally new, I mean. Sometimes it feels like I’m just searching for what I hate the least.” We were at a tightly packed West Village café and he glanced over to the girl with headphones at the table next to us. She was flipping through printouts and highlighting the pages. “God, I wish I was still in school.”
And then, out of nowhere, came this YouTube idea.
“I want to make people think,” he told us, “I want to give them something real.”
We laughed at first. It all sounded a bit ridiculous, especially since we didn’t really understand what Andy had in mind, and in any case, we didn’t see how a YouTube clip was going to help him accomplish it.
“What’s it about?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what’s going to happen in this video?”
“I’m not totally sure, but I have a couple of things in mind.”
“Please tell me you’re not going to do something stupid just to get attention.”
In the end, Andy just talked, plain and simple. No fancy acrobatics or kitschy gags or floundering attempts to get a laugh at his own expense. He stared into his FlipCam and got all serious, went on a rant about his life, about being a guy in his late 20s without a job, without any sort of direction or idea for what he wanted to do with himself. Even had a moment at the end where he stood up, walked out of the frame, and turned the thing off. It looked totally unprofessional. But for him it wasn’t about what it looked like, but rather, what he was trying to say.
“It’s the words man,” I remember him saying, all Zen. We were making fun of him for how slip-shod the whole thing looked.
“There’s like some buzzing in the background,” I said. “Were they doing construction in your building or something?”
Andy just shrugged it off. “You didn’t listen to anything. Fuck the noise.”
The words man, the words. The content. That’s what mattered to him.
If you know Andy, you watch this thing and you might get a little emotional about it. There’s something about it that’s very real – just as he said he wanted it to be – but it also has this underlying tinge of desperation and sadness to it. I think that’s the part that gets me the most.
And then the most unusual part of it all was that people ended up loving the video, passed it around the Internet so that it became one of those things you just had to see. Ten million, twenty million hits? I can’t remember. Andy was, of course, ecstatic.
When people recognize him, which happens less now than it did for the first two or three months after the video came out, they always try to repeat some of his lines to him, imitate the way he speaks in this kind of high-pitched voice. Except they never get it right. When they mess up they’re quick to turn the attention back to him – “You do it!”
Andy will smile bashfully, as if he’s embarrassed to be recognized, embarrassed to do his shtick for a public audience. But he actually loves it, craves the attention, even while he might not actually understand why he’s getting it.
“I’ve never felt anything like this before,” he once said after a run-in with a “fan,” his breathing all elevated, pulse quickened, excitement showing in the increased blood flow to his face, cheeks and forehead glowing warmly. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know, it makes me feel alive, like everything before was just this muted existence. I see that now. I’m on the cusp of something man. I’m affecting people, I’m shaking them up, tapping into some higher collective consciousness, into some core of humanity. It’s intense.” He exhaled and shook his head. “I wish you could know what this feels like.”
Like being in love, I thought. Or getting into a fight back at school, when the air would leak out of my lungs and I’d get all teary-eyed and jittery. Maybe it was like that. Maybe I’d never know.
---
“Food?” I suggest after twenty minutes of us walking in silence. An odd mix of blue grass, jazz, and hip-hop music boxes our ears, but isn’t enough to rouse us into conversation.
“I’m not hungry,” says Craig, glaring at Andy.
“Yeah, neither am I,” says Andy, looking sullen. He seems very small to me, in a child-like sort of way, a kid who has been disciplined, told to stand quietly in the corner.
“What do you guys want to do?” I ask, getting frustrated. “Let’s at least go into a bar. It’s annoying just walking around and tripping over beads.” Strings of the stuff, shimmery purple and green and yellow, are all over the sidewalk, swept onto sewer grates and sprawled across streets. More keep falling from the balconies, convulsing in the air on their way towards pavement or into someone’s hand.
And it’s so hot outside. It smells like beer and sweat. Fucking Bourbon Street. Who thought this was a good idea?
“Well?” I ask when I haven’t gotten a response from either of them. Craig, instinctively, pulls out his Blackberry and checks his messages. He does this whenever he doesn’t want to deal with something.
A group of red-faced fratty-looking guys pass us, leggy blondes precariously hanging onto their arms. The blondes, who are tripping over themselves and constantly tugging down on their skirts, look southern, with their small, upturned noses and thin lips. They survey us.
Andy has a moment where he seems to rise out of himself, where his eyes become pleading beams. But the blondes turn away and pass without consequence.
Craig, still looking at his Blackberry, shakes his head. “What a mess.”
I decide not to wait for an answer and force them to follow me into one of the many indistinguishable places lined up along either side of the street. A mustiness takes over and I feel a little lightheaded, but I walk deeper into the bar and go over to order a drink.
“What do you guys want? On me,” I offer, trying to make amends, trying to bring us back to the happy center of friendship I thought we had at the beginning of these two weeks, before we started on this steadily degenerating trajectory.
The guys lighten up a bit and by the time we’re sipping our drinks and trying to speak over the noise, we’re throwing arms over shoulders and leaning in for secretive whispers and furtive glances at the people in the place.
“You looking forward to getting back home?” I ask Craig without thinking.
Craig has been the most agitated one of us in the last few days and inevitably I wonder what it’s all about, whether he’s feeling antsy about getting back to his life, to his job and his apartment and his girlfriend. Or whether it’s something else, like maybe he can’t stand how needy Andy seems lately, even to me, how inauthentic it has all become. Of course it could be something totally different, something I don’t see or understand. Craig isn’t really the sort of guy who talks about how he feels.
“Sure, why not?” he answers. “We’ve been gone a while.”
“You missing your Saturday morning jogs in the park? Not getting your full daily serving of fiber at the road-side diners?” Andy laughs.
Craig ignores him. “I mean sure, if I had nothing else to do, I wouldn’t mind being away a little longer. But even then,” he turns to Andy, “eventually you have to go back. Right?”
“Or you can stay gone forever.” Andy smiles and raises his glass. “Up in the clouds.”
“Yeah, well, some of us have lives to return to.”
“Good for ‘some of us,’” answers Andy, totally nonplused. This might be the alcohol speaking, liquid confidence.
Just then a girl walks up to us. She looks really young, like she might still need a fake ID to get into places. She’s wearing a low-cut jean skirt and a tight Abercrombie t-shirt that’s fashionably ripped down the middle, forming a tattered v-neck. Her brown hair is viciously straightened, frizzing at individual strands that jut out perpendicular from the sides of her head.
“Sorry,” she starts, and then loses the words. She passes her hand behind her ear to keep some of her hair from falling onto her face.
Andy is used to this by now.
“You’re that guy right?” she asks eventually. “The one from the computer?”
Andy nods, all nonchalant, as if he hasn’t really been searching for this exact type of interaction since we left New York.
“That video was amazing!”
My skin crawls when she says it, it all sounds so fake. I guess this is what we’ve come to.
“Thanks,” says Andy. He’s keeping from smiling, from acknowledging any sort of emotional response to her. He has become a master at these interactions, usually at the cost of being himself.
“I knew it was you!” says the girl. “I told my friends, ‘that’s the guy!’ but they didn’t believe me.”
“Where are you from?” asks Andy without changing the tone of his voice.
“Savannah. Georgia. There’s a whole group of us here, just in the back.” She points to the part of the bar that opens up into an inner courtyard with a small fountain. It’s packed with alma mater-attire-clad kids, school names and logos emblazoned along sleeves and across chests and in the center of hats. They all seem so much taller than us Northeasterners.“Be back in a few,” Andy tells us as he follows her.
“Nice to meet you,” shouts Craig after them, his voice swallowed by the noise from the speakers. He throws them a mock wave.
---
“What the heck am I supposed to do when I get back home?” asks Andy. He’s staring out the window of the mom-and-pop waffle house we’ve stopped at just over the Mississippi border on our way to Louisiana. A half-eaten egg-over-easy sits at an angle on his plate, tilted by a mound of shaved potato strips congealed together with oil, onions, and paprika. Everything has cooled, stiffened into one mass of underappreciated consumerism.
“Maybe start looking for a job again?” I look out onto the parking lot. Craig is pacing on the grassy divide between the lot and the road. One hand is in his pocket while the other holds his Blackberry to his ear. Probably a call from work, something he might have forgotten to do, or more likely a question they have, because often he’s the only person who knows how to do something. Maybe it’s his girlfriend, although the vehemence with which he’s talking into the phone tells me it’s probably not.
“That’s fucking terrifying.”
“What? Finding a job?”
“No, it’s just…” Andy’s eyes track Craig’s movements. I realize he would never be bringing this up if Craig was in the room. “I can’t imagine everything going back to normal again, like nothing ever happened.”
Did something really happen, I wonder. Everything has gone so quickly. All of that “higher collective consciousness” stuff Andy used to talk about, it’s coming to an end, if it was even there to begin with. Instead it’s this same union of human minds and experiences that has, collectively, chewed on Andy, processed him, and regurgitated him back out, replaced him once more into the world of unemployment checks and overdue rent and credit card bills and collection notices.
“Andy, you’ve been had,” I’ve wanted to say for a long time, even before we’re in that bar on Bourbon Street with the girl from Savannah and it’s completely obvious. “Dude they played you. They made you feel important as long as they found you entertaining. And then they stopped, and that’s it.”
But I don’t say any of that, I don’t want to rub it in the way Craig does. I know Craig doesn’t mean anything bad by it; he’s not trying to be mean, he’s just a realist. And life, by default, always seems to return to what we’ve decided to call reality. There’s the gravity, the seriousness. There are the things we might aspire to and the limitations. There’s the glass ceiling. There’s Andy who took off and ran with something and made it work in his own way. And there’s Craig, with his calls in the parking lot and his girlfriend who wants to go on vacation and his dusty car.
With Andy off in the bathroom or sleeping in the back during portions of the trip, Craig keeps talking about him.
“He needs to grow up,” he’ll say to me in a whisper. I’ll bite my lip and look at Andy in the rearview, try to gauge whether his breathing tells me he’s actually asleep or just pretending so he can listen to what we’re saying. “He’s ordinary. We’re all ordinary. Those few milli-seconds he had when people recognized him, it didn’t change that.”
“He’s just having a hard time with everything. It’s probably weird for him to think about going back to an office, having a routine.”
“But what does he expect is going to happen? Does he really think he’s going to start making self-help videos or something? He’s going to write a book? Become the next Oprah? He’s kidding himself.”
“Give him some time, he’ll come around.”
I feel shitty almost as soon as I say it, because it means that Craig is right and that all Andy has to look forward to in the next few weeks and months is becoming resocialized to the way things are. Strap him down to a table, let the cravings pass, force him to go cold turkey, and eventually he’ll wake up and be content with not being special, yet again.
With the blur of green farmland all around us and the blank stares of brown and white cows along the road, I have this sudden urge to set Andy free, to pull over, hand him a few twenties and leave him.
“Run. Just take this and get out of here, before it’s too late, before we take you back.”
“You know?” Andy looks at me from behind his plate of drying food, his stack of uneaten toast with the soggy middle of butter shining translucent. He shifts his hands and sends a knife clattering against the side of his plate, that all-American sound of metal on porcelain that’s probably echoing, at this exact moment, in hundreds of diners around the country. Maybe we’re always part of something bigger, just not in a way that we allow ourselves to pay attention to.
“Yeah,” I say, really meaning it this time. “I do.”
---
Andy doesn’t come back to join us at the bar. He goes off with the girl from Savannah and we don’t see him again that evening. After a while we walk around the place, ask a couple of people if they know what happened to him.
“Shortish guy,” describes Craig, holding out his hand at about nose level, “maybe yay tall. Slightly balding. Wearing a blue polo.”
No luck.
I send some texts. I call his phone a couple of times, leave a few messages. No answer, no response, just Andy’s uninformative voice telling me he’s not there and asking me to leave my contact information so he can get back to me as soon as possible. Thank you.
Craig and I continue to walk around, staring down random people on the street in the hope that we’ll come across Andy and the Savannah girl, casually entering or exiting another bar. As I’m doing it, as I’m forcing eye contact, I think that this must be how Andy feels, expectantly widening his eyes for the satisfaction of recognition. There’s a moment when my heart pounds faster, there’s a sense of excitement mixed with anxiety, and the two of you are convinced that you know each other, that at some point in time you shared a beer or a cab, maybe a kiss.
But it’s not them. It’s never the people I think it is, that I want it to be. That second of contact on the street, it’s quickly replaced by quick blinks of separation. We look away, we continue on, and Andy is nowhere to be found in this mess of drunken stumblers.
We stop to get some Creole food which is too spicy for our tastes. I keep sensing a phantom vibration coming from my phone but Andy isn’t getting back to us. Craig is definitely not worried.
“Whatever, he’s probably getting laid,” he says between gulps of water. He sticks out his tongue and waves his hand at it. “Shit, this is ridiculous. How do people eat this stuff?”
Eventually we go back to our hotel. The attendant is asleep behind the front desk with his chair leaning back against the wall and his feet propped up on the counter. He stirs a little when we open the front door, but only enough to peer out at us from behind narrowed lids.
In the room, Craig moves Andy’s stuff from one of the beds to the cot.
“If he’s not here, he doesn’t get a bed.”
I’m asleep when the front door of our room opens at some point in the middle of the night. I look out at the glow from the hallway and the hunched figure that walks in.
“Craig took your bed,” I whisper.
Andy doesn’t answer. I hear him knock against the sofa and then fall onto one of its cushions.
“Where were you?”
Andy breaths in a way that seems loud. But it’s probably just in my head, just the general silence, the rousing from sleep, the dark that amplifies every sound.
“I don’t really know. Somewhere nearby.”
“You were with that girl?”
“Which girl?”
“From the bar. The blonde one.”
“Stacy?”
“I don’t know, I guess. Whoever she was.” The name makes sense in my mind.
“We hung out for a bit.”
“Did you sleep with her?” I yawn.
Andy pauses and I see the blackened silhouette of his head turn to the side.
“I think so,” there’s humor in his voice. “I don’t really remember. Man I was so drunk.”
“So what happened?”
“I just know that at one point I was at the place she was staying, and then I was walking around somewhere, totally confused.”
“You blacked out?”
“I can’t remember how I got there.”
Andy seems far away, like he’s starting to drift down a tunnel. I realize I’m beginning to nod off and don’t want to keep talking anymore.
“I took a cab,” he continues, even though I haven’t asked. “It’s strange, it feels like I’m still there.” I have the impression that he’s just staring straight ahead, away towards the glass balcony doors and thin beige curtains at the other end of the room.
“What do you mean?” I ask, my eyes already closed, the words coming as an automatic question.
“Everything smelled of bleach. I still have the scent in my nose.”
---
That evening, I have this dream that we’re driving around New Orleans, looking for the highway but stuck out in the suburbs somewhere. There’s this feeling that we’ve been driving for hours, circling the same blocks, heading up and down the same streets, totally lost.
Andy’s behind the wheel, insisting that he knows the way out, but he’s just winding us around the same cul-de-sacs and into the same dead ends. My anxiety is mounting, there’s no one around, no one to ask for directions.
Andy twists the car around a potholed corner and takes us alongside a fenced-off field, grass interspersed with pockets of mud and sprouting dandelions. An end-zone goalpost leans precariously off to one side, tilting down towards a fading dotted line of white-frosted grass.
I’m surprised when I look out the window and see a kid come running out onto the road after a red ball that has found its way into the crosswalk. Andy brakes sharply and I lurch in my seat.
The kid grabs the ball and returns to the small yard of his house. In the sloped driveway sits a 70s-style trailer, white with mud stains along its concave shutter ridges, propped up on cinder blocks at the front end to balance out the decline. I see the trailer’s windows decorated with floral-print curtains that lie straight and plastic stiff, completely unresponsive to the wind that whips up the kid’s floppy hair. The porch of the adjacent house is an arranged line of kitchen appliances, dresser, and disintegrating couch. I see the outline of the front door peeking out from behind the refrigerator and a flurry of spray painted red “X” marks form an odd neo-modern art design above the hot plate.
“Why don’t you ask her for directions?” asks Craig. I hear him but I don’t know where he is. I look around in the car but it’s just his sound that I sense, no physical presence. “Otherwise we’ll be stuck here for-fucking-ever.”
A woman surveys us with a harried and tired expression. She holds a steaming pot in one hand and lets the other hang loose on the other side of her billowing form, all curves and folds and dips that have become one confused mass of body. She warns the boy – sternly, but not with any real anger – to not run blindly into streets.
Andy lowers the window.
“Excuse me.” He seems to shout but his voice is muted, shut down as soon as it passes out of the car. The wind has picked up and carries off the sound. “Excuse me,” he tries again, straining his throat, yelling louder. The woman’s eyes respond. “Miss, do you know how to get back to the highway?”
The woman, the muscles of her face tense and relax, as if she’s about to respond to Andy’s question. But she doesn’t say anything. She just turns her head and focuses her attention down the road. Then, from behind her body, she lifts her obscured hand, and it’s just a blackened branch of a limb, all decay and absence. She extends a crooked finger that collapses under its own exertion, drooping at the first knuckle, and tries to point in the direction our car is facing, in the direction we’ve been going all along.
My heart begins racing and I think I’m shouting at Andy, telling him to get us out of here. But my voice feels trapped in my own head, there’s no volume. He smiles and thanks the woman and we roll smoothly away from the house.
I panic, I’m convinced that she’s trying to trick us, that we can’t listen to her and head in the direction she has indicated.
“This is wrong,” I hear myself saying, or trying to say. “Andy turn around.”
We just keep moving.
“We need to go the other way.”
Andy adjusts his grip on the steering wheel and doesn’t respond.
We continue to lace our way down streets narrowed by storage crates and construction equipment, steel canisters filled with jutting dry wall and contorted aluminum metal casings and rods. Everywhere, nestled quietly between the homes, are the white trailers. Suddenly, that’s all I can see, a maze of crisscrossing streets and white trailers, and everywhere, the spray-painted markings.
We’re picking up speed, the same of everything passes by more quickly, but we’re not heading towards any highway, we’re just burying ourselves deeper in this eerie, silent world. I don’t know what else to do, so I calmly open the door to the car, glance at the blur of blacktop underneath me, and throw myself into the arms of the wind.
---
I wake up in our hotel room, drenched in sweat under the massive down comforter that’s twisted around my body. I see Craig in the bathroom, alternating between flossing and picking at his teeth. He leans into the mirror and tries to get a closer look at one particular spot of his gums.
Off to the side, by the balcony door, I see Andy, facedown on the cot.
Craig flushes his floss down the toilet and steps out into the room.
“Are we going?” he asks, his voice at a volume that’s purposely loud enough to wake up Andy. “We’re going to need to drive at least twelve hours today if we want to be back sometime tomorrow.”
I groan, still too disoriented to adequately respond.
“What the hell happened to you? You look like crap.”
After Craig leaves me alone and gets to packing, I finally lift myself out of bed and head to take a shower. At some point, while I’m running the water over my bowed head and watching it drip towards my feet, it suddenly goes cold and turns rust brown and grainy. I shout and jump back from the shower head, letting the water splash against the white porcelain and swirl its way into the drain. It only happens for a moment, and then it’s normal again, clear and warm against the edges of my toes.
“Had some trouble?” asks Craig after I’ve emerged back in the bedroom with a towel wrapped around my waist. “Did it go rust on you too?”
“Yeah. Freaked me out.”
“This place is a shit hole, what did you expect? They try to cover everything up by throwing some clean sheets on the bed and hanging these fancy curtains.”
“Should we get him up?”
Craig laughs. “Don’t think I haven’t already tried. Dude is a log.”
It takes us a good thirty minutes to wake Andy. We shake him, shout his name, watch him open his eyes and promise to get up, only to fall back asleep. Eventually he’s up and getting ready. I recline on the bed and watch CNN while Craig stays busy with his Blackberry. Andy moves painstakingly slowly. There’s a confused air about his movements and a tinge of sadness in his expression.
“I never got a souvenir,” he says as he’s stuffing some toiletries into the side pocket of his bag. “You think we’ll have time to stop somewhere so I can get a shot glass or t-shirt or something?”
“Sure Andy,” I say from the bed, solemnly. Then there’s the sound from the TV again, the sound of Craig’s typing. “We’ll get some breakfast and you can pick something up at one of those tourist shops.”
Andy ends up buying one of the most ordinary shirts you can get. All it says is “Bourbon Street, New Orleans” in a script that, I guess, is meant to give it a French or Creole feel. There’s also a lone string of purple beads hanging off the capital “N.” He throws himself into the back seat of the car and places the plastic bag with the shirt right next to him, his hand possessively gripping the handle even after we’ve started moving.
Craig insists on being the one behind the wheel. He’s particularly psyched about getting back home in record time and I get the impression that he doesn’t trust me to be as efficient as him.
“Just plot our route and tell me where to go.”
I enter the information in the Blackberry and tell him what streets to take to leave the City.
“Andy,” I say, intending to ask him something. When he doesn’t respond I turn in my seat and find him asleep, snoring. I have the sudden idea to grab his Flipcam and record him passed out. He might enjoy seeing it later.
I think the better of it. I let him sleep undisturbed.
I look back towards the road.
“This is going to take forever,” groans Craig.
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