by Rob Spillman
“It’s an experience,” I said.
“Fuck experience,” Elissa said. “I want some real pizza.”
“That’s your problem,” I said. “This is real.”
“Reality?” Elissa said. “Seriously? Coming from you?”
Hank methodically, stoically ate the corn slice, and when Ralf declined the peach slice, Hank ate it as well, while I grimaced my way through my relentlessly plastic-tasting slice.
“You need to eat,” I said to Elissa.
“I need a lot of things,” Elissa said, not touching the necessary nourishment in front of her.
But before I could say anything, she turned to the young man next to her and pointed to his eyebrow piercing, a silver hoop through scabbed skin. “Does it hurt?” she asked, and the burly kid blushed at her attention and said, “Nein, und das?” and pointed to her nose ring.
“Not really. But this . . .” Elissa pointed to the top of her ear, and the raw place where a piercing, despite being nearly a year old, had yet to heal.
Maybe she doesn’t need food. Maybe she can just exist on stories, I thought, amazed, once again, by the openness of Prenzlauer Berg.
Elissa seemed fine, so I turned to Ralf. “I’m wondering if . . . well . . .” I fumbled for the right words to ask how this collective exuberance and possibility were going to survive the Western Anschluss known as reunification.
“Yes?” Ralf said, but I suddenly felt uncomfortable. The man across the table, a large, bearded man sitting next to Ralf, moved his knight, then stared hard at me, contemplating me as if I were some kind of exotic animal seen in the flesh for the first time. Maybe I had misjudged how much joy we were bringing to the people.
“American?” he asked, pronouncing it with incredulity, as if he were asking if I was an echidna.
“Ja,” I answered.
The man’s eyes opened wide, and I braced myself for a punch. Instead of punching me, the man leapt onto the picnic table, his scuffed black boots scattering beer bottles. He took off his floppy black hat, clutched it to his breast, then shouted down to me: “Oh, lovely American! How you grace us with your presence. Oh, my poetry is not worthy of you, but I must give you a poem nonetheless.” The man paused and swept his hat to take in the entire room.
I glanced to Hank, whose smile belied that his right hand was hovering over the bowie knife in his sock. I would have been terrified except that when I looked to Ralf, he appeared unconcerned, just annoyed; and only half the room was paying attention, the scene apparently familiar; and Elissa was still talking to the scabby punk. I didn’t want her to miss this experience, whatever it was, but when I returned my gaze to the poet, he screwed up his face in mock seriousness, then stuck out his tongue with an accompanying loud raspberry, spraying the chessboard below with spittle.
The poet continued to glare at me, his eyes sparkling, challenging, but with a hint of friendliness, as if his raspberry was a dismissal of where I was coming from but also a welcome into his world, on his terms.
“Thank you so much,” I said. The man nodded as if I had passed his test, bowed to the smattering of applause and jeers from the rest of the bar, then stepped back down, his opponent never having lifted his gaze from the chessboard.
“Please, Hermann is not so bad,” Ralf said, pained on my behalf.
“Don’t sweat it,” I said, meaning it.
“But, I want to . . . how do you . . .” Ralf’s English was failing him.
“It’s okay. Auf Deutsch, I’ll translate,” I said.
Ralf rattled off a quick explanation and I turned to translate for Hank, Elissa’s back squarely to us as she leaned in to hear the scabby kid’s broken English. “Ralf wants us to know that Hermann,” I said, “is not an Arschloch—an asshole. He is a real poet. Hermann believes that the Americans are going to pave over East Berlin and build another Disneyland, where he and all the other poets will have to work in mouse costumes.”
“I feel like a prisoner in Disneyland!” Hermann shouted to the chessboard.
Ralf whipped around on Hermann and started hurling compound-noun constructions at him.
“What? What!” Hank asked.
“He’s telling Hermann, I think, to at least insult us in his own words, not Peter Handke’s. And now Herman called Ralf an Altkämpfer.”
“A what?” Hank asked.
“A name for Hitler’s cronies who were at the Beer Hall Putsch in the twenties, the drunks who tried to take over the country by seizing a tavern. They thought the masses would flock to them.”
Ralf and Hermann went back and forth, Ralf, angrier than I’d ever seen him before, finally yelling, “Handke’s not even German! He’s Austrian, you pompous twit!”
56
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
—Pablo Picasso
Soundtrack: Meat Puppets, “Lake of Fire,” 1984
“WAKE UP, ROB.”
“Mom?”
“Get up, your car’s been found.”
“Mom?” I tried again, my alarm clock blinking red, 8 A.M.
“Your car,” my mother repeated. She was looking at me like I was a hideous insect. I was still in my black jeans and Joy Division T-shirt, my black Converse high-tops unlaced but still on. I reeked of whiskey and beer.
“Really?” I said, trying to muster some surprise out of my gonging head.
“Did you lend your car to one of your friends?”
“What? No. I was with Jack,” I said, and got to my feet. “Where is it?” I asked.
“The police found it crashed in Fell’s Point,” she said.
“Crap,” I said. My mother searched my face for clues, and I ducked down to tie my laces.
“We need to go to the police pound,” my mother said, and I followed her downstairs and out to her Camry.
Blocks blurred by, my vision not quite right. Jail? Or worse, my mom finding out the truth about me. The police lot, chockablock with banged-up cars. I couldn’t think, couldn’t find words to say to the bored cop with the clipboard who signed us in. What the hell was I going to say to my mother? I couldn’t look at her. Then, suddenly, we were standing in front of my brutalized vehicle.
“Wow,” my mother said, taking in the paint job.
“Yeah, wow,” I said, trying to match her shocked tone.
While the cop circled the car, making marks on his clipboard, my mother whispered, “When did you do that?” She knows. She fucking knows. Everything. All the drinking and drugs and women. She knows what a fuckup I am. She knows.
I turned to her and said, “I didn’t do that.” I lied like I meant it, because I was a damn good actor. “Whoever stole it must have vandalized it.”
My mother opened her mouth, hesitated. She knew the truth. She thought she knew me, but she wasn’t sure. At that moment, did she want to know the real me? The cop looked inside the car, made a few more notations.
My mother closed her mouth.
The cop walked back to us and said, “This is yours, right?”
“Oh, my poor car,” I said with what I hoped was the right amount of pathos.
“No signs of forced entry or hot-wiring.”
“Really?” I said. I hadn’t thought about that, but then again . . . “If it wasn’t hot-wired, then how’d they take it?”
“Good question,” the cop said, and for the first time looked up from his clipboard at me, perhaps accusingly, perhaps not accusingly.
“He must’ve been really hurt in the crash,” I followed. “Look how far the steering wheel moved.”
“Surprised there wasn’t any blood,” the cop said, genuinely curious.
There was an inch gap on the trunk’s lip, right where I had put red spray-paint handprints. I pried it open enough to gather the handful of Kelmscott books and my 1976 Putt-Putt Junior Championship Libert
y Bell putter. I held my breath as I signed the cop’s forms and didn’t exhale until I was back in my mother’s Camry.
My mother slowly drove us back uptown, not saying a word, her eyes fixed straight ahead. My father was already halfway there from Rochester. In a few hours we would drive to Aspen for the summer. He’d take me out of Baltimore for the last time, and I vowed, not for the first time, that I’d never, ever set foot in Baltimore again.
But I was still present, in my mother’s car, heading home along Calvert Street. Past North Avenue, I rolled down the window, willing my guts to hold back the vomit. I looked over at my mother, her jaw set, both hands on the wheel. The finality of my leaving struck me full force. What had I put her through? Not just this morning, but the last ten years, all of the shit. Screw these artificial barriers we’d erected between us. Now was the time to tell her that I was sorry for being a fuckup, for making her worry about me, for not letting her parent me, for not letting her into my life, for being distant, for being like my father, for being a coward. Now was the time to tell her that I loved her. Ten blocks from home, where to begin? Why couldn’t I just break the ice? Please, I silently begged her, try one more time. Ask me again about the car. I’ll tell you the truth. Ask me how I’m feeling. Ask me anything. I’ll tell you everything.
The lights were green the rest of the way up Calvert, and my mother found a convenient parking spot in front of our house. I went upstairs and finished packing. By three, I was gone.
57
“I think life is far too short to concentrate on your past. I’d rather look into the future.”
—Lou Reed
Soundtrack: Lou Reed, “Perfect Day,” 1972
ELISSA AND I HAVE BEEN DANCING for hours to the nonstop music, the DJs putting together an enveloping sonic tapestry. I still can’t believe that we are at a rave, in Berlin—and not just in Berlin, but under the Wall. All night young East and West Germans have found their way underground and now the abandoned subway station is packed with dancers. I hold on to my wife, both of us disoriented by the relentless strobe lights, her back slick with sweat. The drum-and-bass-heavy music too loud for us to talk, I mouth, I love you. Elissa signs the same. This is all that I have ever wanted.
58
“Rock ’n’ Roll: The most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.”
—Frank Sinatra
Soundtrack: The Smiths, “How Soon Is Now?,” 1985
“THIS IS HELL, ISN’T IT?” I said to the petite girl in all black with the shock of white hair as we crushed into a crowded stairwell on a cool October afternoon, Penn Station roasting, the Friday postwork crowd cranky and pushy as we plunged down to the Amtrak platform.
“The absolute worst,” she said. I followed her onto the train and I casually took the aisle seat opposite her, avoiding eye contact, instead taking out Francis Steegmuller’s biography of Jean Cocteau and ostentatiously angling it toward her. I was going to play it cool, let her come to me. I stared at the word “ambulance” for a few seconds and glanced across the aisle and Jesus H. Christ I had to talk to her this very moment or I would spontaneously combust. I started talking. About anything, everything. I told her that I was a writer, that I’d dropped out of grad school, that I’d come to New York with $150 in my pocket, the thrift store Harris Tweed coat on my back and a duffel bag of books, that I was working in an art-postcard factory and showed her my bookmark, a postcard of Allen Ginsberg’s 1953 photo of a brooding Jack Kerouac smoking on a Lower East Side fire escape.
She seemed impressed and told me she’d grown up in Delaware, was living on the Upper East Side in an illegal sublet with two other girls and was incredibly hungover at the moment. She stared at me with her big green eyes as I rambled on about The Banquet Years and she went on about her recent Gertrude Stein jag, and the easy back-and-forth was exhilarating, but I dialed back my hopes after I told her I was going to visit my old friend Jack in Baltimore and she said she was going to see her “old friend” in D.C., not saying whether the friend was male or female.
She had also recently moved to New York to work in publishing and had landed a job on the floor of Tiffany’s, selling obscenely expensive jewelry. She’d chat up the customers and whenever she discovered one with a connection to the publishing business, she said, “I pounced on them,” eventually snagging a job as the junior books editor at Woman’s Day magazine, which meant she fueled her literary aspirations by screening unsolicited odes to Alan Alda and typing and retyping her bosses’ letters—“I’m a terrible typist”—and writing stories on the magazine’s letterhead.
The train was held up in Philly by signal problems, so we shared a handful of tiny vodkas from the café car. Before I stepped off in Baltimore, I told her my friend Carlos was planning on driving to New York City, I offered her a ride with us, and she accepted. I gave her Jack’s number on the back of another postcard, Brassai’s Lovers in a Café. The plan fell through, but when she called me at Jack’s she and I decided to buy return Amtrak tickets together.
We agreed to meet the next night at Downtown Beirut, the East Village dive bar, for a proper first date. By that night I had convinced myself that she had been a delusion, that she wasn’t going to materialize, so to keep me company when she stood me up I brought along my postcard factory friend Jim, who was writing intense, experimental novels.
But Elissa did appear, dashing in an hour late, flushed and disheveled as if she had already been to a fabulous party (she would later tell me that she had accidentally gone next door, to the Village Idiot, a mirror-image dive bar, having planned to meet me a respectable half-hour late, but then had had to slam her highball of Pernod on ice and rush next door). When she saw Jim, she gave me a curt nod, but kissed Jim on the lips, then gave me a look that said, “Don’t ever make this mistake again.”
After a few drinks I offered to take her to the movies the next night to try once more to have a proper date. “We’ll see,” Elissa said, but the next afternoon when I called, she agreed. The last date I’d taken to the movies was a ridiculously hot decathlete. We’d seen Brazil, which blew my mind, but confused my date. “It’s like Monty Python meets 1984,” I said by way of explanation. “Monty who? And what does the year 1984 have to do with anything?” Her hotness didn’t compensate for her cluelessness.
I was already falling for Elissa, so why not see what she made of? I took her to IFC to see Godfrey Reggio’s documentary Koyaanisqatsi, a beautiful and bleak spectacle of man’s disregard for the earth, with a propulsive Philip Glass score. I kept stealing looks at her. I thought at one point she was crying.
“Soul-killing, though in the best way,” she said afterward. “But how depressing.”
“If you think that’s depressing,” I said, “you should see Atlantic City.”
“I’ve never been,” she said. “Let’s go. Let’s go now.”
Any doubts that I was hopelessly in love vanished.
We borrowed a composer friend’s crappy Datsun and drove to Atlantic City, which was indeed as bleak as the movie, the money-laundering palaces dwarfing the surrounding slums.
The next afternoon, a Saturday, when I woke up, I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to go for a long, hard run. Then I remembered. I bent my achy, puffy left knee. No chance. Three months before I had been running ninety-plus miles a week, harder than ever. At the beginning of the summer, my father thought that it would be our last drive from Baltimore to Aspen, so he planned an epic route across Canada to Vancouver and then down to San Diego and then to the Grand Canyon, with built-in stops for crazy adventure runs. Near the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border we passed a man who was pushing a giant cross on a roller, shortly after we’d witnessed a house burn down in a town of twenty houses, all of the citizens clustered around the fire, helpless. A cop stopped us in the middle of nowhere Saskatchewan simply to see what New Yorkers were doing out there. From Vancouve
r we drove the length of the West Coast on Route 1, all the way to San Diego. Trying to run a trail into the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, I was cut up by overgrown blackberry brambles. On the last day of May I ran thirteen miles into Redwood National Park to a stand of the world’s tallest trees, where my father was supposed to meet me. I was spent and dehydrated when I reached the end of the rugged and challenging trail. The parking lot and ranger station were deserted. The road wasn’t open until June 1, so my father had to find a ranger to escort him into the park to get me, but not before I thought I would have to run another thirteen miles to get out. We then looped back to Colorado via the Grand Canyon. There I ran from the North Rim to the South Rim, twenty-three miles with an elevation drop and gain of eight thousand feet, in five hours, faster than my father drove around the park. When he finally pulled up to the trailhead, he was relieved to see me, knowing that the extremity of this run far exceeded the others.
As we drove up and over Independence Pass toward Aspen, I wanted it to feel different now that I was a college graduate. But it didn’t. I again worked at the gas station, again drank, and again ran, for myself and after women. The only difference was that I seriously trained for the New York Marathon. Now that I didn’t have to compete in cross-country races, I could devote myself to what I felt was my natural competitive distance. I wasn’t particularly fast—my fastest mile was 4:24—but I could sustain a painful pace, clicking out five-minute miles forever. I was still running ninety miles per week. Six of those days I ran twice a day, and on Sundays I ran thirteen to eighteen miles on challenging trails that invariably rose over the tree line.
On a mid-July Sunday, I ran to the end of the Conundrum Valley, where the Conundrum Hot Springs bubbled in pools ringed by jagged, snowcapped peaks—a hard, grinding eight- and-a-half miles, starting at nine thousand feet elevation and ending at over twelve thousand feet. At the top, I took a break for a quick soak, then bombed back down the valley. A half mile from the end of the trail, I felt a pop on the outside of my left knee. I immediately knew it was bad; how bad, I didn’t know. My knee swelled and looked like a lumpy grapefruit. At first, rage. Then a quick slide into depression. I had gone four-and-a-half years without missing a day. Now it hurt to walk. I drank to mask the pain. I tested it every few days in Aspen, and then in Tucson, at grad school. I had always been able to run through any pain, but my iliotibial band was damaged, and most likely permanently.
