All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [37]
In just a few days, I’m packing again, back at the airport, boarding a plane to Houston. I’m suddenly exhausted from traveling, going through the motions, looking over my shoulder, nervous. I want to be home, but I don’t want to be home alone.
In Texas, I’m doing a prison story. At a coffee shop I meet an ex-con, the kind with tattooed tears by his eyes for the number of people he’s killed, and have to take notes as fast as I can to keep him from seeing how my hand is shaking. I pretend I need a third cup of coffee just so I don’t have to walk out with him, then wait until his pickup truck is a speck in the distance before I leave, driving in the other direction. In the rental car, I get disoriented and panicky and have to pull over several times to check the map and breathe.
I head to Huntsville, sweltering in the brick red heat, to interview a prisoner. Waiting outside the watchtower with its rolls of razor wire, getting buzzed in and inspected, I know I’m probably safer here than anywhere else, but still. They always make you sign that clause saying it’s not their fault if you’re held hostage and they won’t do anything to help you if you are. When I sit down to interview a young man, in for murder for a hate crime, he is behind a mesh screen, which makes it even more unsettling. The only way to look at him, to make any contact, is to look directly into his pupils, the tiny area inside the screen mesh, which is too intense. I spend my entire time in Texas apprehensive and afraid. It’s unlike me; I’ve been to prisons before, I’ve interviewed someone with Charles Manson sitting at the next table over and kept my cool.
Barely home again, I go to Kansas City, the home of Hallmark Cards, and stay at a chain hotel, as bland and benign a place as you can imagine, to report a story about a divorcée in her fifties who became HIV-positive the first time she slept with another man after twenty-five years of marriage. She was faithful all those years, and the first time she had a fling after her divorce, her first taste of freedom, she paid for it dearly. She’s a former reporter herself, upbeat and intelligent, telling a brave tale, but she is also lonely and frightened. After we have dinner, it occurs to me back in the hotel room that I don’t have anyone to call at home, the phone would just ring.
Her story fills me with another kind of anxiety, and by the time I touch down in San Francisco, I’m fretting that I could be HIV-positive or have some other disease. I call around, frantic, until I find a clinic that can take me right away to be tested and drive to a far suburb for an exam. When I explain out loud to the nurse practitioner why I need all the tests, the memory of it hits me and I feel queasy. She reassures me and says I’m probably fine (which turns out to be the case). I am relieved that at least I will know. I stop off at a mall on the way back home and buy an expensive pair of Italian sunglasses to replace the ones I lost. I put them on, and things start to look a little better again.
AT HOME I feel more urgency than ever to have someone near me, to feel settled. For the first time in my life, I feel that I need, not just want, someone who can look out for me. I am nervous on my own, even walking in the evening around the Haight Ashbury, where I have lived, safely, without incident, for twenty years. Now all of a sudden the homeless people who have been panhandling me for years seem menacing, and the Goths and punks look more threatening than just kids playing dress-up. I take to riding my bicycle more because it’s faster than walking.
I’m annoyed that I feel so fragile. I’ve always imagined myself invulnerable, as though I’ve had a feisty little guardian angel on my shoulder, and now she’s flown off. I may not be as tough as I appear—my eyes glisten while interviewing people who have a difficult story to tell, when I ought