We travelled extensively, needless to say. For me, it meant five schools in seven years, which in theory should have made me sophisticated and worldly-wise, given me an array of experiences of life and culture. My father thought he was doing me a favour with all this travelling, giving me an exotic gift I’d remember for the rest of my life, something that would make me a fuller, more interesting being. “The only way to get the feel of the country is to become part of it,” he advised. “Learn the language, interact, expand. Bloom where you’re planted.” But I did not expand or bloom; I shrank and shrivelled, withdrawing into myself. With the help of five nannies I learned five languages, not to socialize or learn local customs, but because I liked breaking codes. I collected and remembered phrases the way I collected and remembered stamps.
In Europe for six years and Asia for one we wandered, my father penetrating into the real life of nations, me skimming over it, shut up in boarding schools or the pages of stamp albums. I withdrew from people like someone backing out of a swamp he had stumbled into accidentally. I was beginning to feel that I was suited to solitude, that the presence of others blurred me in some way, that a monk’s cell or the desert would be ideal for me.
My father didn’t encourage me to follow in his footsteps, but when I expressed an interest in medicine he got me into the Broussais-Hôtel-Dieu in Paris. After a year and a half there I’d come to the conclusion that I wasn’t meant to be a physician, and I had reason to think that my instructors had come to the same conclusion. You need a predisposition that begins at birth that I didn’t have. You need a sympathy toward your fellow creatures—a belief they are worth saving—that I didn’t have either.
So I changed directions, checking myself into the Hôpital Marmottan, a drying-out facility on rue d’Armaillé in the 17th. My father was more relieved than upset, saying that I was “error-prone, accident-prone and addiction-prone,” that I was “not the sort of man who was good in an emergency or particularly endowed with courage.” It was not the first or last time he would say this.
Here’s my entry:
Drugs allow us the illusion that it’s better to be alive than dead, said a voice inside me at an ATM near the Prudential Center in Newark. It was a warm Hallowe’en night, well past the trick-or-treating hour, and my mind was spitting out overs: overpopulation, overproduction, overmarketing, overconsumption, overexpansion, overagression, overmedication … And overspending, I added to the list after failing to draw money from a sub-zero account.
The machine in the wall was next to a club called Homo Erectus, which had a stainless-steel door secured with great looping chains and huge flat padlocks shaped like hearts. I sat down on a sticky curb out front, head bent, and removed my father’s fedora. Emptied my life savings into it. Three crumpled fives, four ones and … one two three four five six cents.
You’re living on borrowed time. You owe more money than the government of Gabon. If you don’t end up in the slam, you’ll be eating dog food till you die. A quirk of mine was to speak softly but audibly to myself in the second person.
I was interrupted by a shuffling passer-by, a barefoot man in a buttonless coat with flies buzzing close. My doppelgänger, my future come calling?
“How’s it hangin’?” he asked. Boston accent. From beneath his coat he produced a short wooden stick, like a policeman’s truncheon.
Madmen have always been attracted to me, come bounding up to me, shouting out nonsense, wrapping their arms around me or grabbing me by the throat. And I’ve always been attracted to them, to their blazing minds. Birds of a feather and all that. “Straight down the middle,” I replied, which didn’t appear to be the right answer because the man began tapping the bar against the palm of his hand. I now got a closer look at it. It was a miniature baseball bat, the kind used by Little Leaguers. The kind I used on a team sponsored by the Philatelic Institute of New Jersey. “A hard yard,” I tried, which caused the man to grin, drop the bat onto the sidewalk and root around in several pockets. He dropped a quarter, a dime and penny into my hat before shuffling on. Nineteen dollars and … forty-two cents.
In terms of strungoutedness, this might’ve been the moment I hit rock-bottom. It was either then or a few hours before, when I tried to go to a Rangers-Devils game and paid a guy two hundred bucks for a Newark bus transfer.
A chemical reagent began to form in my brain, helping me to see how the pieces of my life fit together. Although it had forever been murky and mystifying, surrounded by icebergs and dense fog, my entire life now acquired perfect clarity, made perfect sense. And the sense it made was that it was totally, unreservedly pointless. Pointless desperation followed by pointless hope followed by pointless recollections. You might as well have hibernated in a cave your entire life. Or been shrink-wrapped and stored in a freezer.
I lurched down the sidewalk, then the gutter, then the middle of the street, straining to make it appear that I was sauntering. Drivers blasted their horns and cursed at me as I wove my way to the other sidewalk. In behind two cool Japanese dudes with pompadours and pointed shoes, to a panhandler sitting on a curb. His head was bent and he was wearing a black Borsalino fedora—as I was earlier, uncannily. The hat appeared to be mine, stolen from me, which was impossible because I could feel mine on my head. Next to him was a piece of cardboard with scrawled words on it. As I approached, he looked up at me. It was the man with the mini-bat who gave me thirty-six cents. The smell of fermented pee now steamed off of him. His sign said:
NEED MONEY FOR BEER, DRUGS, HOOKER.
HEY, AT LEAST I’M NOT SHITTIN’ YOU.
He took off his fedora and I dropped various items into it: three fives, four ones, six pennies. And a stray button. I kept the money he’d given me, the quarter, dime and cent, because it would’ve been rude to give it back.
After an unknown period of time, minutes or hours, I stumbled upon my car. Strange, because I wasn’t looking for it. It was double parked with the keys in the ignition. There was a piece of paper on the windshield, not a traffic ticket, containing one word: DUMBASS. I remember scratching my head at this, thinking it should have been two words, or at least hyphenated. Otherwise, you pronounce the “b.”
I drove back to Neptune whacked, wasted, past two state troopers who did not give chase. Inside my apartment—or “oubliette,” as my father called it since it was a sunless hole—I locked all the doors and windows and spiralled into the deepest and darkest dysphoria of my life. Which is saying something. Concentric circles expanding above my head, the black dragon with its scaly skin and spiked tail hovering over me, making me afraid of … well, everything. Fire and flood and earthquake and God knows what to come.
And things did come, in a cluster bomb that hit me from the blindside in the span of a month: my father died of deep-vein thrombosis; the New Jersey State Police charged me with road rage and impaired driving; my ex accused me of child abduction; a French writer was suing me for … I can’t remember the term. One of these alone would have sent me into a weeklong bender, but together they put me in a state of motor and mental stupor. I did not leave my apartment for weeks, not for alcohol, not for tobacco, not for drugs, steeping in my withdrawal like a festering tea bag. Living on credit pizza and Chinese, the stinking boxes piling up beside my bed like … like stinking boxes. Mail piling up outside, neighbours ringing to see if I was still alive.
I began to have trouble telling time, or rather understanding what clock times actually signified. I had trouble telling the difference between five minutes and five days. I had a peculiar feeling that every day was neither weekend nor weekday, but some eighth day of the week.
The smallest tasks—filling a glass with water, brushing my teeth—took an enormous amount of gearing up. Clothing, no matter how much I put on, would not keep me warm. Cold sweats made me think my waterbed was leaking. But I didn’t have a waterbed. Bathing was near impossible: even warm water shocked my skin and even the softest towel felt like steel wool. I was abrim with filth and my hair sto
od up boy-band style, not with gel but with grime. I was constantly dropping things, as if my hands had been exchanged for paws. I did not walk so much as waddle, as if my feet were webbed. I did not recognize myself in the mirror. Was I turning into another species? Something non-human? With the exception of elephants, apes and dolphins, non-human animals do not recognize themselves in the mirror. Was it now official? Was I certifiable? Or rather, recertifiable?
In a panic I increased my intake of antidepressants, tossing them back like M&Ms. They seemed to be working, putting me to sleep for 23/24ths of the day. And the only side effects, in the hour I was awake, were blurred vision, vertigo, itchy feet, thickened tongue, nosebleed, breathlessness, and cloudy urine.
One drizzly morning I heard a voice inside my head-—someone else’s—that summoned me back to the real world. It sounded a bit like my mother when she had a cold. Never one to spring out of bed, I did so on this occasion. Threw a heavy winter coat over my long johns and bathrobe, and baseball shoes over wool socks (all my other shoes seemed to be missing the left or right). From the floor of my hall closet, which was so shallow that the coat hangers hung at a slant, I scooped up sheaves of legal documents. Stuffed nearly all of them into two large padded envelopes, addressed them to someone who would know what to do with them. Got into my Delage Lynx, which was bleeding from the gut and nearly dead, and crawled painfully to the post office on Neptune Avenue. From there down to Woodland Avenue, to the family manse in Avon. Or Avon-by-the-Sea, as it’s officially called. About fifty miles south of Newark-by-the-Smell.
I parked in the garage beside my father’s car and removed one thing from the glovebox: Brooklyn’s plastic .38. Ascended the sixteen steps as quietly as possible, lest any sounds draw the neighbours on either side. Not easy in spiked shoes. Leaned my head against the door’s cool plane, listening. For what? Ghosts? Turned the key, a thick Medeco I hadn’t used in so long I wasn’t sure it would fit the hole. The lock’s tumbling sounded like a gunshot.
To stop the squawking alarm I punched in 1906—my grandfather’s year of birth—then entered the sunken dining room. It had been repainted in Chinese red, but not reappointed: it still looked like a reception room in an embassy, with furniture one mustn’t sit on, either frail from age or upholstered in silk or velvet that a hand or foot could easily mar. The maid had obviously been in, while Dad was dying in a French hospital, because it was as ruthlessly clean as ever. It smelled of Lemon Pledge and Brasso. I walked through it, seeing childhood images of glass plates with melting brie, pungent bleu de Bresse, Roquefort veined like marble, halves of browning pears … Past a stretch of tall plants and a conservatory through which sound could not penetrate, to the winding white staircase that led to my room.
It too was frozen in time, a reminder for my father of an era when his scion was a good obedient boy from a good loving family, before he went “off the rails.” The room had pneumatic furniture and a waterbed, along with several posters of French actresses. My old baseball trophies and plaques were also on display—a shock because I hadn’t seen them in decades. My father must have hauled them down from the attic, along with a framed picture of me wearing a cap from my Little League team, the Rhinos. I looked from photo to mirror and shook my head at the sad gulf.
At least put some clothes on. I riffled through closets and drawers, ending up with black narrow-legged pants (pantalon cigarette), a black leather belt with studs, and pointed black boots with a complex crosshatch of straps and buckles. All acquired at Camden Lock. I had no problem with the fit: bucking the American trend, I had grown thinner with age. Black. You were happy when you wore black. You shall wear black from now on.
How could I not be happy, coming back to America for two years of high school with an English accent at the crest of the British New Wave? The girls mistook me for a rockstar.
I switched on my Dual turntable and set the needle onto an EP which, unless my father or the maid had been listening to it, had been sitting there for years.
My intent was to start tossing things out, but my heart wasn’t in it. I pulled a folded green garbage bag from its pack, but that’s as far as I got. How could one throw out vintage music and apparel from the ’80s? Or movie posters torn from walls on Boulevard St-Michel in the ’70s, one of Isabelle Adjani in Possession, the other of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion? The magnetism of mad women: it drew me early.
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” ended so I put it on again. From a tottering mound of sleeveless records I plucked a Psychedelic Furs EP (“Heaven”) that wouldn’t play because it was covered with candle wax. Don’t remember that night. “In a Big Country” was next, then “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” The 45! Which I cranked. It wasn’t until the next day, in the big country of Canada, that I made the connection. Three songs: two singer suicides and a suicide anthem.
I looked for Abbey Road and The White Album to test out the aural pareidolia Dr. Neefe had mentioned—I buried Paul and Turn me on, dead man—but couldn’t find either. So I moved on, down the long hallway to my father’s office. On one side it looked over a garden, with its pillared porch and gazebo and widow’s walk; the other side looked over the ocean. The room was surprisingly congested for a chronic minimalist: a long row of filing cabinets containing a half-century’s worth of tax junk; a massive desk from Thessaloníki that I’d always coveted; an antique jade box from Carcassonne containing items I’d always scorned, like diamond cufflinks, gold tie clips and Cartier pens; and a large wooden chest from Inverness with souvenirs from around the world. I opened the latter’s lid and found three things that belonged to me: a Stanley Gibbons Improved Postage Stamp Album, a leather-bound 1001 Poems, and an empty black book with a silver lock and pen entitled Mon journal intime—all lost gifts from my mother. Why do I love the things Mom gave me, I wondered, and feel indifferent to the things I give myself? I sat down on a sage-green chair I’d never seen before, and turned each item over in my hands.
Paris and London in the eighties: my real home was in the past, I’d always thought, but I was forced to live in the present. But now I backed off from this view. It was not the lands of lost content that I yearned to revisit. My homesickness, I came to realize, was for no place in particular but for some universal place I had never known. I examined my image—intently, as one examines a stranger—in a full-length mirror from Barcelona. My father was a great one for mirrors. I was with him when he bought it, bickering with a salesman on Las Ramblas. “I won’t haggle like a whore,” he said in Spanish, pretending to walk away. His angry eyes lay across mine like a mask.
In the blurred background was a daybed covered with a green and white early-American quilt, homespun by a weaver in New Hampshire. My mother was a great one for quilts. I could see her reclining on it, gazing sadly into a hand mirror. In just over a year, I paused to calculate, I would see changes in my face that she had not lived to see in hers.
I closed my eyes. A holiday, you need a holiday. About twenty years would do you. Not to the past—you’ve tried that before and failed—but to somewhere new, in the future. A holiday to end all holidays, a holiday to die for. My head began filling like a suitcase.
Maybe not a holiday exactly—you can’t take a holiday from doing nothing—so much as a permanent relocation, to an impossible-to-find place where life was quieter, slower. I would leave the confusion and clamour of the city, the oxygen-poor air poisoned by industry and cars, for the calming, anchoring bedrock of nature. Where older, more natural processes were at work. Like Euripides, who moved to a cave by the sea because cities had become insufferable. Or Saint Anthony, a wealthy Egyptian who did the same after giving all his money away.
“Death is dwelling in the past,” my father said inside me. “Or in any one place too long.” Northward I would go, then, toward some old dream, some new darkness. Melt into a Canadian backwater not found in any atlas, restart my life where no one knew me, live as an anchorite on some lake isle.
I will arise and go now to Canada
> And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made …
I left Jersey, as the expression goes, under a cloud. I packed not a scrap of food or much in the way of clothing or essentials. I packed several unessentials, though, including my philatelic gear: albums, tongs, magnifying glass, perforation gauge, stock books, glassine envelopes, mounts, hinges, drying book, watermark fluid and tray. Jammed them into my uncle’s canvas AWOL bag, along with my leather-bound anthology of poems.
And I shall have some peace there …
I drove my dad’s BMW a block and a half before hanging a U, back to the house for his survival kit and leather valise. And knapsack, into which I placed three bottles of his finest Scotch from Skye. I couldn’t help it, I really couldn’t.
Then on to the Central Jersey Bank, the West Sylvania branch, where I cleaned out, with the manager’s assistance, one of my father’s lesser accounts. I ranged the packets of twenties in his Halliburton valise, durable and waterproof, the kind favoured by criminals to haul cash.
Along Ocean Avenue, weaving in and out of traffic, engine thrumming, in a very powerful car. North on I-87 as darkness fell. I shut my eyes against the winding chain of taillights ahead and opened them again. The inside of the car glowed with precise, confident signal lights—including a radar detector—telling me everything was running optimally. With my teeth I opened a bottle of Talisker, took a quick slug. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand with a drunkard’s gesture that I caught in the rear-view. Along with something else: a semi, the tyrannosaurus of the freeway, an eighteen-wheeler, which honked fiercely as it passed. I honked back. Then pressed the down button on the window, the passenger side by mistake, and unfastened my watch. It was heavy and gold, a Nightingale family relic. I tossed it out the window and watched it in the mirror as it slid across the hazard lane. Repeated the procedure with the car’s cellphone. Discarding the technology, I’d read somewhere, sharpens the senses, leads to deeper awareness. From my front pocket I pulled out four folded sheets of paper and spread them over the steering wheel. Turned on the dome light.