Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,85

is a type of parole, Noodle. You need to put in one year of good behavior to guarantee against a lifetime of recidivism. If you give in to all your mixed-up feelings now, you might never find your way back home.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. What do you want me to do, Uncle Tom? Tell me what to do.”

I was practically begging him, glancing around my living room, taking in the view—my car keys were on the coffee table, my blue jeans were on the floor, my shirt was hanging over the front of the TV set, books were strewn everywhere, my jacket was flung over the back of the sofa.

“It’s simple,” Uncle Tom was saying somewhere in the background. “I want you to put away your dancing shoes for a while. Concentrate on walking. Just put one foot ahead of the other until it becomes automatic. Start delivering the mail.”

As part of my punishment, I had to perform two hundred hours of community service. I was almost happy about the idea of doing something worthwhile for a change; making amends seemed like something I should be doing. Smashing up the car was the last straw, but I couldn’t quite figure out what to do, and then I remembered that a friend of mine, working on his doctorate in psychology, ran a suicide prevention clinic at the university.

I’d never had any kind of real job—my résumé was a little thin unless you count perfume testing and the tennis club. After I aced the two-week training course, my buddy reluctantly agreed to let me volunteer as a counselor.

“Just stick to the script,” he said. “No improvisation.”

My first shift, I was so excited by my enforced quest for goodness that every time the phone rang I pounced as if it were a game-show buzzer and I were in competition with the other volunteers. It was a slow night. Most of the calls were wrong numbers or personal.

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” said the guy sitting across from me. “Cheer up. There’s a full moon coming—that brings out all the crazies.”

He was right. The next night, the phone ringing like an alarm bell, I took a call from this guy who was so agitated that he insisted he was going to hang himself. He was crying, panicking, he kept dropping the phone and running around in circles. I could hear his frenzied footsteps in the background, it felt like bedlam on the other end of the line. I could hardly understand him—I talked a long time on the phone with him, trying not to sound like Pop or Uncle Tom.

It was an interesting personal exercise given recent events, me finding myself in the position of persuading some stranger that life was worth living. I don’t think I said much of value, but whatever I did it seemed to work. He calmed down and told me he was going to think things over.

The next night, the same guy called again, only this time he asked to speak to me. I spent two hours with him. It was pretty intense. Jerry’s statistics were alarming. He was in his midthirties, had no money, no job, no girlfriend, no friends, no education, and no prospects, was overweight, was bald, had only one testicle, was living with his parents, and had accumulated thousands of dollars in credit card debt and gambling.

“The worst part is that I used my parents’ credit cards. They never use them, they don’t believe in credit. They just keep them around in case of an emergency. They have no idea.”

“How much do you owe?” I asked him.

“Fifteen thousand dollars,” he said. “Oh, my God, I’m going to kill myself. My parents will lose everything.”

“If you kill yourself, then they really will lose everything,” I said, wincing at my sudden appreciation for clichés.

“You don’t get it. My old man will kill me anyway when he finds out what I’ve done. I’ve been hiding the bills and using one credit card to pay off another credit card. . . . What’s the use? I’m going to throw myself off a cliff.”

This went on for about a week—him calling and threatening to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or swallow antifreeze. I even had to talk him out of lowering himself into the polar bear exhibit at the zoo, at which point he said he was going to douse himself in lighter fluid and strike a match. Sometimes he’d call two or three times a night, always with a