110 - One Hundred Ten

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

Dear Harry, 

I’m goddamn sick of speaking to you already. At least with Birdie, there was some kind of response. And maybe you are responding. Maybe you’re somehow hearing this and shouting into your radio, trying to get me to hear you. 

That’s sort of a funny image, actually. Finally, I’m frustrating you as much as you frustrate me. 

Do you remember my last birthday? The bottle of wine and the game of Clue? Of course you do, you remember everything. Every shortcoming, every perceived slight, 

This is the first birthday I’ve spent alone since my sixteenth. Isn’t that strange. 

And that birthday…it snuck up on me. My dad had died so recently and—well, anyway, you know most of this already. Know more about my teen years than anyone in the world. We had to have something to talk about for all those years. The times before we knew each other always seemed like safe territory. 

Even before I got to New York, before I made any kind of friend, I would at least try to celebrate in a bar, or a diner, or somewhere with people around. And then there were those years where I did have friends, even if they were fair weather ones, and then there was you and it’s hard to have a birthday party and not invite the person you live with and sometimes I think—well, we had fun sometimes, right? Celebrating things?

Anyway, it’s strange to be alone now. Stranger today than all the other days, though I can’t really explain why. There’s no difference in this day, not really. 

I’m not sure what I expected in choosing Vegas to spend my birthday. It isn’t like I can play any of the games on my own or catch a show or go to a steakhouse. But it seemed…festive. 

I keep thinking about what Birdie said when we talked. That I was wrong when I said my choices didn’t change the world. Maybe I misunderstood them, maybe they were messing with me, I don’t know but…

Sitting here, in a casino at the Sands, in Dean’s suit, drinking champagne that I’m fairly certain costs several hundred dollars a bottle, and looking out on an empty hall of chance, I… 

Chance and choice. The only forces in the universe. 

I have made a series of choices that have brought me here. You made a series of choices that pushed me here. Looking around…well, we — both of us — decided to spin the roulette wheel, if you want to put it that way. But we don’t decide where the ball lands. We have free will, but everything is a game of chance at the end of the day. 

So why…why should I feel guilty over that? Why should you? I mean, there are other reasons you should feel guilty, but not for that. I know what you’d say—that it wasn’t chance that steered our hands, but choice. And I’d say that the choice to die or not die isn’t much of a choice at all.

Choice brought me to Vegas but chance drove me to the Sands and to Dean Martin’s suit and this bottle of champagne. Chance led to both of these things being ultimately valueless, except for the value they provide to me. It doesn’t matter what happened in ’68, what kind of choices people made, there isn’t any choice a single person could’ve made that led to all this. There’s some other force at play here, something bigger than me or you or anyone. Something bigger maybe even than chance. 

Happy Birthday to me. 

[click, static]

[a voice almost cuts through the static]

[beeps]

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Happy Birthday