I saw my old friend Commander Gomez marching toward me from across the Lincoln Center plaza. Gomez is the lead singer in a heavy metal band that, according to him, has been “a bass player away from superstardom” since the late 1990’s. He was wearing his customary black leather jacket. Friday night at The Met be dammed. His head was shaved close to the scalp in what could easily be mistaken for the neo-Nazi tradition. His tattoos were creeping up past his collar on his neck. He was walking fast - too fast. I could tell from fifty feet away he was wired out of his mind on drugs. I had half a flask of whiskey in my jacket. The other half was winding its way through my veins. We were there to see Die Walkure, the second of the four operas that make up Wagner’s cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. It’s long been one of Gomez's favorites. I was just there for the kicks.
We ordered two glasses of water at the bar. I dumped the water into a plant and filled the glasses with whiskey. A little kid wearing a bowtie watched us. Gomez cursed the kid a busybody and said he wanted to smash his skull in. The small talk ended there. He launched into a detailed account of a psychological breakdown he suffered a few years back while studying existential philosophy and discovering that Free Will is an illusion. The notion that we our not the conscious authors of our own thoughts and motives, combined with enormous amounts of illegal drugs, pushed The Commander’s nervous system to the brink. He lapsed into an alter ego who called himself The Karaoke Navy Seal. The Karaoke Navy Seal would perform flawlessly executed “karaoke missions” around New York City. He had the sleeves cut off his heavy metal concert T-shirts by a professional tailor at thirty-five bucks per alteration. He added a few more tattoos to his already cluttered arms and back. He was ready to work. After he kicked ass on the karaoke stage the KNS would accost everyone in the bar insisting that they play bass in his band. Somehow, it was during one of these “karaoke missions” that he met his future wife. She, combined with enormous amount of legal drugs, cured him of his Free Will panic to the point where he could start going outside again.
“I just read a book by Sam Harris about Free Will.” I said cheerfully. “Don’t tell me anything about it!” Gomez ordered. “That shit makes me nuts.” “Free Will doesn’t exist.” I said. “Total illusion. The facts are in. It’s as close to settled as a matter can be.” Gomez covered his ears and sang War Pigs by Black Sabbath at the top of his lungs as I explained the facts. Now everyone was staring at us. “What about quantum indeterminacy?” Gomez said once he calmed down. “There’s room for Free Will in quantum mechanics! A lot of smart people think so!” His eyes were desperate. He was pleading with me now. I laughed hard in his face. Quantum indeterminacy is the last stronghold for the serious Free Will fanatics. It’s a dead end street like all the rest. I explained it to him thoroughly. “Quantum indeterminacy is bullshit.” I said. He shot down his whisky and I shot down mine. He took a small amount of white powder out of a little container and snorted it right in front of everyone. He put the container back in his bag and took out two pairs of opera glasses. He handed me mine. “Do. Not. Fucking. Break them!” he said. We went to find our seats.
The Met's production of Die Walkure is dominated by an enormous set “machine” made up of twenty-four movable planks that, with the help of video projections, can twist and bend to form a number of spectacular visual designs. The first act opens with Siegmund, a fat man, fleeing through an eerie gray forest. Exhausted, he enters a strange house and collapses near the fireplace. Sieglinde, also fat, enters her kitchen and finds the unconscious stranger. She revives him and offers him a cup of water. Siegmund refuses the water out of some misguided principle. She tells him to just please take the water. He tells her he feels as though he really shouldn’t take the water. These two continue to go in circles over this cup of water for the bulk of the first act. Eventually, sanity prevails, he drinks the water, and something masquerading as dramatic tension is released.
Toward the end of the first act Gomez leaned over and told me everything he thought the director was doing wrong. He said the singers, thanks in large part to “the Machine,” were missing a lot of the best sound spots on the stage. Placing the singers behind the planks was garbling the acoustics, he said. He said the costumes were cartoonish, but an improvement over the down right silliness of the costuming in Das Rheingold. He also said he was having major problems with the “stupid old cunt” to his left who was putting her elbow on his armrest. I was having my own ordeal with the pretentious opera buff to my right. The entire performance he couldn't contain his opera seria ecstasy. He was enraptured with every note. With his hands clasped over his heart, he sat edged out on his seat, almost genuflecting; his anguished whispers never stopped: Wonderful! Wonderful! Simply splendid! Bravo! BRAVO!
"Look at this bitch!" Gomez whispered. "Her elbow is all over my rest!"
"Don't tell me your problems!" I said. "The guy next to me is a raving psychotic."
"Should I do something?" he asked.
"Yes," I lied.
He knocked her arm off the armrest and I heard him whisper loudly, “That one’s yours, this one’s mine!” It was drugs talking, but the drugs happened to be right. The first act curtain came down and we shouted “coming through” as we fought our way back toward the bar.
This time we didn’t even bother with emptying water glasses. We just drank right from the flask in the middle of the lobby. You’ve never seen so many heads shake. I was just about to subject The Commander to a little more Free Will torture when two security guards approached us. A complaint had been filed that Gomez assaulted an elderly woman in the audience. Gomez explained that he accidentally knocked the woman’s elbow off his armrest, but that was it. I corrected him. “It was no accident.” I said. “But, the woman did have her arm on his armrest, so it’s a bit of a gray area. Very complicated.” The security guard pointed at the flask in my hand. “What’s in that?”
“Juice.” I said.
He nodded and radioed for back up.
We were brought down to the security office and detained in a small meeting room. Now I had Gomez right where I wanted him. I explained some of the latest experiments neuroscientists have conducted demonstrating that there’s no Free Will and that life is a horrifying nightmare. Harris' book is full of them. The physiologist Benjamin Libet used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex is detectable 300 hundred milliseconds before a subject “feels” he has decided to move. A different lab built on Libet’s research using FMRI. The researchers were able to predict which button a subject would push a full 7 to 10 seconds before the subject claimed to have “chosen” which button he would choose. The case is closed. We aren’t free to make choices. Choices are made for us in a place in our brain that our conscious minds cannot reach. After our brain decides on our next move, our “conscious minds” are informed of what that move is. Even if you then “decide” not to make that move, the decision not to move sprung into your mind in exactly the same way the previous decision to move did. “You” were not the author of either choice. In other words, if your life were a book, "you" are just reading it, you’re not writing it. Gomez was shaking like a drugged up leaf.
They kept us in the room for what seemed like a long time. Gomez said he was hopeful that we could get everything straightened out by the start of the third act so that we wouldn’t miss the famous Ride of the Valkyrie scene. A minute later one of the guards came in and told us we were kicked out and couldn’t come back to The Met for a year. The Commander started to protest, but I shot him one of those looks that clearly means if these people search you and find the ‘with intent to distribute’ amount of drugs you’re holding then we’ll really have problems. He nodded in agreement and three guards escorted us out. They were sort of joking with us about being thrown out of the Opera. Not bad guys. They opened a set of heavy double doors to the outside. They said they just had to watch us leave the property. We walked through the plaza. It’s about fifty yards to the street. We could hear Ride of the Valkyrie booming behind us. When we hit the sidewalk I turned and waved to them. I couldn’t resist. “You guys can go fuck yourselves!” I yelled. They were the final three shaking heads of the evening. They slammed the doors and went back inside. Gomez was a little annoyed with me. “Those guys were alright. Why’d you do that?” He asked. I gave him a few seconds to regret the question.
“Who knows?” I smiled.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” He said.
