Moodswing - My outstretched hand

I woke up last Saturday fairly comfortable in my own mediocrity, not at all knowing what was in store for me at my friend Jim’s Christmas party.
For starters, Jim should know not to invite me anywhere. It wasn’t that long ago when I showed up drunk and in my underwear (practically) at a party thrown by the Democratic Leadership Convention in New Orleans during Jazz Fest. There because he invited me, I danced until my hair unfurled in a lacquer-matted cascade, threw myself at a few men — including, I think, the governor of Indiana — then left clutching a tropical cocktail and a fist full of those little quiches some poor server was offering from a platter. I remember little else of that night except that Jim didn’t seem embarrassed by me. To back that up, he keeps inviting me places. What is wrong with that man?
Like why didn’t he warn me that Peter Gabriel was coming to his party? How could he let me walk right into his house not even knowing I was about to shake hands with a dapper-looking man whose face I didn’t immediately place and whose name I didn’t immediately hear but to whom I nodded my greeting anyway only to discover, mid-handshake, that this was PETER GABRIEL!!!! PETER GABRIEL, Jesus God!, standing right there at the end of my outstretched hand, smiling at me like he has any business at all being flesh and bone.
“Peter Gabriel?” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“Salsbury Hill?”
“Yes.”
Let me just give you some background. When I was a kid I wasn’t a music junkie. On the contrary, there was just the one song, and I didn’t hole myself up with my headphones and rebel against my parents and lament over the big tub of turd the world was turning out to be. Instead I was confused and timid, and I pretty much had the personality of a cornered rat. My father was a charming and largely jobless alcoholic with big dreams and even bigger fears, and my mother was a missile scientist who took night classes in cosmetology because her own dreams were conversely simple, and she really would have preferred perming people’s hair to building bombs.
To me, while growing up, our household seemed like a sad dungeon for their faltered hopes and you couldn’t sit there very long without hearing these broken aspirations flap around the room like trapped bats. It was unbearable to a budding romantic like myself, so to escape I’d go sit in my sister’s rusty Celica and play Gabriel’s “Salsbury Hill” over and over on her car stereo, running down her battery and getting the crap beat out of me because of it. But it was worth the reprieve, because when you’re young like that, and sad, you have your hand outstretched, metaphorically speaking, and you’re searching for a string to pull you through. And for reasons more corny than the importance I’m placing on it now, my hand found that song. Does that make sense?
Then later, after my parents’ inevitable divorce, I moved to Zurich with my mother, and it was there that I realized the true frailty of her health. During the day she seemed like a perfectly normal weapons specialist with a hankering for beef jerky and Benson & Hedges, but at night she was crippled by coughing fits, barely able to keep from drowning in the pools of fluid forming in her own lungs. Unable to sleep, I spent the nights watching obscure music videos, like the one with Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel clutching each other and singing “Don’t Give Up.”
“Don’t give up,” I’d mentally implore as I sat outside my mother’s bedroom door and waited for her suffering to subside. But the day came when I realized that, in this case, the not giving up wasn’t up to me, and it was there in Europe that I was hit with the certainty of two things about my mother: One, that she would be dead soon unless she quit smoking, and two, she would never quit smoking.
A year later, after she died in my arms, it was one of those times I could have given up but didn’t. I was rescued, I guess, by the safety net I’d woven over time with the threads I’d collected from when I had my hand outstretched, metaphorically speaking, searching for a down payment on the possibility that life might not be such a basket of crap after all. So the least Jim could have done is let me prepare. I mean, Peter Gabriel, Jesus God! There was Peter Gabriel, at Jim’s party, on the end of my hand — my outstretched hand. “You, you, you ... ” I blathered to him, but then the woman who brought him extricated him from my grasp and led him away. I continued to sputter even though he was gone.
“You helped pull me through,” I finally finished.