VIII - STRENGTH
The summer of 2007 had passed its zenith and I settled into a comfortable situation at Bernstein Media while Irina invigorated me with the fullness of love. I thought I’d found the woman I’d been seeking and the material success I so desired.
At the beginning of August Bernstein Media was bought buy another large agency anxious to spend the venture capital money they’d recently been infused with. Bernstein, Winde, Barry and Saperstein all got million dollar payoffs with Bernstein of course taking the lion share of the sixty million dollars. We all knew that things would begin to change but I’d become so accustomed to upheavals that it almost didn’t phase me. The owners planned a big celebration and rented out a trendy roof top bar for the event. While for those not cashing in their chips it wasn’t so much a celebration as pre-going away party, we all reveled in eating and drinking to our heart’s content on Bernstein’s dime. After the main party a lot of folks from the agency headed to another bar but I could tell the Irina was getting bored.
“Let’s get out of here. I’ll meet you at the subway stop in five minutes, okay?” I told her.
“Yes, please, I’m a bit tired.”
I met her on a bench near the subway station and she seemed annoyed not just at the Bernstein crowd but at me as well. I was in an animated mood and probably should have just stayed at the party and let her leave alone. I gave her a long kiss, then began laughing about the drunken antics of our colleagues when she yawned openly in my face. It triggered something in me, jolting me angrily. “If I’m boring you, maybe we should leave.” She took it combatively.
“Look, I’m not some animal. I have to wake up early tomorrow; I don’t live fifteen minutes from work like you do.”
“Why don’t you just stay at my place?”
“I don’t want to; I need some privacy, some time alone. I just want to be alone.” We walked in silence to the subway stop where she gave me a forced smile as she walked down the stairway and I headed home angry. I stopped in a place I’d rarely gone to on 28th Street and had a few more drinks. I was angry at Irina and at myself for letting her get under my skin.
I felt nothing for her though I was sure that at some point all the passion would come rushing back. I just wanted peace somewhere beyond Bernstein’s money and Irina’s fickleness. It rolled over me like a wave of anger and rebellion against myself, what I did, and who I was with. I paid the tab and in a sudden rage I tossed my cigarettes into a garbage can and stormed out onto the street gazing at the bars, taxis, and skyscrapers- I wanted nothing to do with any of it.
The next morning I awoke with the same feeling, afraid to see Irina because I wasn’t sure how I would react to her. It was as if something had overtaken me and I was terrified that it would pass and I would wind up heartbroken. She came into my office with a long, sad expression as if I had done something terrible to her but I hadn’t a drop of repentance in my body and I realized I should calm down and keep it light. We went over some excels until I finally broke the shop talk.
“So what’s up? Any good gossip from last night? Barry usually gets a little excited after a few drinks and chases down one of the girlies.”
“No, nothing much. I’m just looking over the Met opera schedule for this fall; Oksana and I are getting a ten opera package.” It wasn’t her style to offer.
“Good, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Okay, got a make call, talk to you later.” I was now wound up; it wasn’t going to be good day. A few minutes later the customer service manager, Leyla, a small, pesky girl who had been a real stick in my side from day one came into my office.
“Arthur, let’s go have a cigarette.” She had never asked me to have a cigarette and I was left wondering what she was up to.
“I quit.”
“When?”
“Last night”
“Come with me then, I want to talk to you about something.” We talked about the party as we walked to the elevator and as soon as the doors closed she gave me a serious look.
“You and Irina have to be careful.”
“What do you mean? Careful about what?” What I was really worried about were the lead deals because as customer service manager she could have detected something in the lead distribution that might have implicated Rudy, Ryan and myself. Once I heard her mention Irina, I relaxed just a bit.
“I saw you two at the subway station hugging.”
“I gave her a hug goodnight, we were a little drunk. I don’t think it is such a big deal.”
“Well, I saw more than a hug; you were sitting on a bench kissing each other.” I was sure the whole office would know within hours and this could give Winde the chance to bump me off. Leyla was famous for gossiping and intrigues so there was little doubt as to her intentions. Fortunately, I’d heard her best friend, a sales girl, had gotten tossed by Barry while Winde was doing lines in front of Ryan.
“Well, at least I didn’t have sex with Emma in the limo or do lines in front of my media buyers.” I just wanted to make sure she knew that I knew what the score was before she ran to Winde with the news in hope of some lamentable boon.
“What? Are you serious?” She did her best to look incredulous.
“Of course, everyone saw it, they’re all talking about it this morning. I would really appreciate it if you kept this between you and me.”
“No problem, that’s why I brought you down her to talk about it.” I was feeling thoroughly disgusted with myself, the office and Irina but it was Friday and I wanted to do my best to clear things up with her before the weekend. She came into my office to tell me something about work and I asked her how she was feeling.
“Tired.”
“You seem a bit tired of me, too.”
“Maybe.” That was enough as I was in no mood to grovel or be around her apparent misery. I’d just bought a trip for two to Martha’s Vineyard for Memorial Day Weekend which was probably nonrefundable, but I took a hard swallow and decided to go alone and not mention it to her.
“Okay, understood.” I said
“Okay.” She didn’t seem the slightest bit fazed and I was left with an empty feeling that scared me mostly because I really didn’t care. It was as if some light had broken through into the cave and I was ready to finally exit my dark hole but I a lurking remorse still haunted me. I called Wild Bill and told him I was seriously thinking about the idea of quitting drinking. I hadn’t smoked all morning and while I was getting waves of withdrawal, I was also enjoying being free from the slavery to the cigarettes. I hadn’t drunk any coffee either and I had an immense desire to fall into bed and sleep
I had never been to an AA meeting and walking into the Uptown Episcopal Church was intimidating. I didn’t feel like an alcoholic, but on the other hand it was difficult to imagine a life without bars and booze. Wild Bill had assured me that I wouldn’t have to speak and that I could just sit in the back and listen. The speaker talked about kicking a drinking and cocaine problem and then folks told personal stories related to what the speaker had said. The meeting left me shaken and all I could think about was getting to the nearest bar and watching a baseball game, but afterwards Wild Bill invited me to a Greek diner with some of the other folks from the meeting. They seemed like they were from a different planet and the idea of having to keep up that battle for years, as Wild Bill had, made me shudder.
After the dinner I felt like walking and Wild Bill offered to accompany me downtown. “Wow, that Russian broad really threw you for a loop.” He began.
“She sure did. But now I’m just plain confused, everything seems absurd, my life, the job, her, this city. I have no idea what I’m doing here.”
“Look, see what happens, take it slowly. Don’t make any radical changes for a while. Stay sober, wait for the booze goggles to fade away and see what’s left. Like I told you, the first year is just getting off the sauce and then you’ll figure out which way is up. I don’t want to pepper you with AA st
uff, just take it slowly.”
“Sure, but I was just thinking about what we talked about when we were on the boat, about how things really are. When you take a good look at what we do, why we do it, and who we do it for, it’s no wonder the bars are packed.”
He nodded pensively. “Have you ever done any writing? I remember you studied history. That’s a good way to let off steam and I can pass along your articles to some people I know. Just do it under a pseudonym like I do; it’s a good way to put a lot of that nervous energy to good use. You can make a blog, a Facebook account, a Twitter account, it’s fun. You can become a whole other person, create an alter ego. It helped me a lot and you seem to have more than enough ideas.” Becoming someone else caught my imagination.
“That could be interesting, a change of pace. Funny to think about college though, how much of what they taught us was pure bunk? Seems like we spend half of our lives learning, and the other half unlearning, what an enormous waste of time. I should have been a carpenter.”
“A carpenter? Wow, from internet guru to carpenter. I think you might be having a massive midlife crisis. Just take it slowly brother, all will become clear after a while. Just stay off the booze. If you have a really bad urge, just promise me you’ll call me, okay?”
“Sure, thanks. But did you ever get that feeling that we’re all just spinning our wheels, and that if we ever just stopped and watched, the whole thing would collapse and stop working?” Something about not smoking and drinking gave time a strange vibration. People seemed be moving in a slow, surreal theatre. I was sure I wasn’t making any sense but Wild Bill seemed to light up.
“Oh man, I’ve spent my whole life with that feeling. It’s like waking up with the horrors from drinking. Everything seems absurd and scary at the same time. Look, the whole thing is built on lies. The more you scratch the bigger and bigger the lies become. Take all the wars, I mean, all of them. You know, I’ve been reading like crazy, about all kinds of stuff, but when you start reading about the bankers and the first World War, and the Second, Korea, Vietnam and so on and so on you see it’s all about the bankers shenanigans to get entire countries paying them interest on money they created out of thin air, it’s all a scam. But from the cradle they teach us to jump up and down when we see a flag, or when they play some stupid patriotic song. I feel like grabbing people and saying, ‘Wise up and follow the money!’ But people are fast asleep, walking zombies.” He was waving his hands around and talking loudly as we walked down 3rd Ave. People looked at his big body as he threw his arms in the air. “Then you start getting into the religion, that’s another crock of shit, oh boy, don’t get me started on that one. Look Arthur, you’ve been around and seen a lot of this world, a lot more than I have. There are two paths, the sleeping zombie path that all these people are on, my brother and his family for example, and then there are a few, a very few people who have woken up. You’re waking up; just don’t start drinking again or you’ll wind up back with the zombies.”
“I’ll do my best Billy Boy, thanks for hanging out.” And we said goodbye at the subway stop.
Once I got home I threw out all the booze and cigarette paraphernalia and made a plan for the next day. My head was light and I felt strange, as if in another world. There were moments when I thought of Irina, who she was with and what she was doing. But as the images came I fought them off and pushed forward desperately looking for something new to grab onto. Without drinking I knew I would need some kind of order or I would wind up stewing about her and end up in a bar. I didn’t really feel like an alcoholic but I knew I needed to give myself a break, go up to the surface and get some air to clear my head. I wanted to see if there was anything more to life than money and women, but I knew I would never find out if I stayed on the path I was on.
Wild Bill’s suggestion about starting a blog felt like something I could get my teeth into. I scoured social media sites in search of an alter ego and I finally found him. He looked something like me, but more Teutonic and with sharper features. I played around with coloring in the picture in PhotoShop until he was sufficiently unrecognizable. I spent all night creating a blog, finding paintings, links to music, poems, and writing a short bio very loosely based on me for my alter ego, who I named Parker the Barker.
The next day I woke up as if in a daze. I bought some food and cooked for the first time in a while and then went to a book store and bought a few things to keep me occupied before heading home and starting to write. I hadn’t written anything in years but it came out quickly, almost violently. I wrote my first article on America’s relationship to Israel and why the special relationship was a major blunder that only benefited a small special interest that had got us involved in the Iraq war as well as provoking 9/11. It was the first time I had done something creative in years. At Wild Bills urging I went to the gym in my building, which I had been paying for anyway, but had never used. I did a light workout then spent some time in the wet and dry sauna. That evening he came over and we ate a pizza on the roof and talked about politics and blogging.
That Sunday I had another inspiration. For along time I had been thinking about a social media site that would be culturally driven. It had become a minor obsession and I had even pitched it to Bernstein who gave it two yawns and a ‘will see’. It was to be a site where people would connect by their political affiliations, interests in books, films, religion- a Facebook of culture. I decided to write up a business plan and spent half the day coming up with a site description, marketing plan, and even an excel sheet for funding needs.
The dog days of August were sprouting all sorts of new ventures and ideas as I continued faithfully going to AA meetings with Bill but without ever speaking. I just sat and listened then I would head home and read and write and work on the blog. Finally, after one of the meetings Wild Bill told me it would be a good idea to maybe say something, just talk a bit about what was going on. It terrified me. I was never afraid to speak in public, in fact, I enjoyed an audience. However, talking about my drinking in public was not something I looked forward too but Bill had been a big help and I didn’t want to let him down. I could vent to him about Irina or politics, it didn’t matter, he always listened.
That first week, watching Irina operate as if nothing had ever happened between us was starting to get to me. More than once I called Bill to talk about it and he listened patiently. I felt like I owed it to him and the other folks at the meetings to make the effort and tell them my story. The meetings themselves left me ambivalent. There was a lot of dogmatic fervor that turned me off but they really made me think about what I was doing with my life and left me wondering how free I really was, so I promised myself that at the next meeting I would speak up.
The next day at the meeting I settled in, but much more nervous than before. They had invited a person to speak, a medical doctor. She talked about how a seemingly innocent couple of glasses of wine in the evening became a bottle and then some prescription pills got tossed in and without any major fireworks she realized she had a big problem. She was understated, calm, and not too dogmatic. What moved me about her story was how she had become a slave to the booze and pills; they had become her life and the rest was simply fill. I was impressed how she could discuss very intimate details about herself yet remain dignified.
The moderator of the meeting began speaking after she finished, and after asking for any special anniversaries, he asked about newbies. As soon as I raised my hand the blood rushed to my head and I felt terrified; it was as bad as I imagined it would be.
“Hi, my name is Arthur, and I’m an alcoholic, it’s been fifteen days since I had a drink.” It didn’t seem right not to say the alcoholic part, even if I wasn’t convinced. “I wanted to thank the folks here, as I have been coming now for a while but this is the first time I’ve spoken up. The meetings have helped a lot, especially to really think about what I have been prioritizing in my lif
e, and maybe what I have been missing out on. I suppose I have known for a long time that my drinking wasn’t normal. It’s been an everyday affair for years but I just kept putting it into the back of my mind, again and again. After a good patch, things recently have taken a turn for the worse and I was pretty confused. I have really no idea how I wound up in New York, why I came or why I was with the girl I was with. It all seems to have happened in a big drunken fog and now that I am starting to sober up, the prospect of looking back at all of this and sorting it out is a bit scary. On the other hand, I’m not getting any younger, so, I feel like I need to do this now.
I suppose in the last three years my drinking has really accelerated. Before that, I tried not to drink every day, but about three years ago I started living alone again and I was drinking a bottle of wine a night, plus a few Bourbons after. Since I got to the city, I drink in bars, not at home so much, but the trend is the same. Something had to give. So I am just trying to stick to the plan and put some distance between myself and the drinking. Thanks.”
Until then I had been a spectator but by getting my hands dirty I could feel a bond develop. Everyone who spoke after me welcomed me to the group and a few even told some stories that paralleled mine, making me feel like I was part of something.
My whole lifestyle had changed. Now, after work I would go straight to a meeting then walk home, buy some food then work out a bit and finally do some cooking while listening to lectures. I didn’t have a television but I had gotten into the habit of downloading talks from the Internet. I was listening to Stephan Hoeller, the famous Gnostic teacher in LA, discuss Gnosticism, the Tarot, Kabbalah and Jung, and I was also listening to a lot of Terence McKenna and finally I would do some reading before bed, usually on esoteric topics.
One of the really bad things about having gotten off the booze was that I really had a hard time concentrating at work. I was spending most of my time writing and re-writing the Israel article for the blog. I got into the habit of delegating to Perlini and Irina and strangely enough, Perlini and I were getting along better as I wasn’t so worried about him stabbing me in the back because I really didn’t care much about the job anyway. I tried hard to put a buffer between Irina and myself and it seemed to be working, maybe working too well. Memorial Day weekend was a few weeks away and listening to all the Terence McKenna lectures I decided to bring a heavy dose of mushrooms with me to Martha’s Vineyard. I didn’t consider it going off the wagon though I didn’t tell Bill about it. Ryan scored me ten grams of dried shrooms and the thought of being able to escape lifted my spirits.
Another weekend rolled around and while I was still in a bit of a haze, at least I felt as if I was making progress. I kept working on the business plan and funding schedule for the cultural media site and even had one of the guys at Bernstein Media do a little work for me on the side by making some designs to show what the featured parts of the site would look like. I finished the project but had no idea who to present it to.
I finally finished the Israel article and published in on my new blog and posted it to Twitter and Facebook where I had collected a few hundred contacts for my Parker the Barker alter ego. The one thing I couldn’t work on was what I should have been working on, the brokerage deal. This deal was very big and was my ticket up the food chain. Two old colleagues from out West, Greg and Chip, had cooked up a plan for us to join the stock brokerage firm that Harry Scott had met at the NYMEX and really grow the business in exchange for an equity stake. We had a three pronged approach: Greg would handle educational content, Chip would work the business development side and I would do the online marketing. In exchange, we would ask for equity with bonuses paid for in more equity if we were able to reach certain goals. Closing this deal would mean actually becoming an owner of something and having the opportunity to cash in big once the firm was bought out. The only problem was I couldn’t seem to work on the project. While I was drinking it was very easy to motivate myself to focus on these types of things but now all I could do was write my articles and business plans that no one would read and explore the esoteric world that no one seemed to care about. After three hysterical phone calls from Chip I finally got the presentation and spreadsheets ready for the trip to the Toronto Money Show where we would meet the owners of the brokerage firm.
The city seemed more and more absurd the farther away from drinking I got. When I talked to Bill about this he was very insistent that I not make any changes until I had been off drinking for at least a year. That advice made sense to me when I considered my latest fantasy to pack up and head to Alaska.
I turned on the computer after coming up to the apartment on a Saturday evening after a workout and checked the stats for my blog. I had left some comments on the NYTimes.com, The Washington Post website, The Economist, and a few others and I was enjoying seeing how the comments were generating visits. I had gotten my first one-hundred visit day and I was quite pleased, already hard at work on a new article on Ali Mohammed, the close associate of Bin Laden and ex-Green Beret who had been handled by the CIA for many years. After a few hours writing and researching I checked again my web stats and I was shocked to see that I had over two-thousand visits in just the last few hours. I checked the source of the traffic and it was Infowars.com. It turned out Bill had gotten them to publish my article. There, on the home page of Infowars, was my alter-ego. It was very strange to see my homunculus actually receiving comments, as well as people adding him as a friend to their Facebook pages by the hundreds. The visits and comments kept rolling in and the article was quickly picked up by many other alternative media sites giving it tens of thousands of page views. There was certainly something of ego inflation. I stared out the window and wondered what I was doing working in advertising and began to think about giving it all up and dedicating myself to the cause.
Something had given me a clear sense of purpose and the will to realize it. I was discovering that sober I was very different person. I was much less patient with people, my demeanor was tougher and more direct and seeing those changes in me made me wonder if I had been like that before I had started drinking. I was more focused on myself and my projects and much less interested in long conversations. Slowly Irina began warming up to me again as she did one afternoon in my office when she brought up our trip to Madrid. While I was still physically attracted to her, another side of me began to see something sadistic in her fickleness. When I didn’t engage her in talk about Madrid I could observe how she physically transformed and became more and more sensual, like she was testing the limits of my new found power sure she could break me. She was repulsing me and attracting me at the same time and I was convinced that she had no feelings for me whatsoever; it was nothing more than a game for her. She wanted blood and I knew that at some level I wanted part of her game, something in her dark quest excited me.
I was sure that meeting Irina had done something to me and that it would be a turning point, but I wasn’t sure at all where it would take me. I saw one future quite clearly- close the brokerage deal, get some equity, marry Irina and plow out a life. I was very conscious of the fact that at my age there wasn’t a lot of time left to settle down, especially when I considered how difficult it was for me to find women that I was interested in. It was a long shot, but it was there floating in my mind and I knew her Scorpionic heart would never turn its nose up at the possibility of that kind of money. I was too afraid to seriously consider the other option, following that feeling I got after publishing my article and just letting it take me where it pleased.