by Rob Spillman
When I ran, I didn’t think. Now all I could do was think. Frustration at not being able to run quickly turned into frustration with my entire life. What the hell was I doing? I looked around and realized that I was on a giant state-school campus studying the psychology of sports. How had I let my life drift off into the desert?
I knew that I had to run, but run to a place where the artists and writers were. New York. Immediately. I knew that I could assemble artists and outsiders, and had inchoate ideas about making this a central part of my life. I fantasized about starting a magazine, something unclassifiable that captured the energy and unpredictability of my critical-mass experiments. I didn’t have a clue how to do this. All I knew was that it wasn’t going to happen in the desert.
A month into grad school, I called my parents to tell them that I was quitting and moving to New York. My father said that he always wondered when I would wind up there. My mother said that she was worried about the sudden decision, but wired me $500 so that I could buy a one-way ticket out.
I jumped on a red-eye with $150 in my pocket, resolved to finally find my tribe and chase creativity and engagement. I slept on my pianist friend Tom’s Upper West Side couch for the first few nights in New York, while looking for my own place. I picked up the Village Voice and went straight for the cheapest apartment listing, which was for a $270 three-bedroom share on Staten Island (yes, my share was $90).
Using my threadbare Harris Tweed coat for a blanket, I slept on the floor of my eight-by-ten-foot room on the second floor of a falling-down Victorian in one of the few rough neighborhoods of Staten Island, a tiny dark blight in a sea of suburbia. I looked in the want ads for publishing jobs, but there were none, so I answered a listening for a waiter gig in the bowels of the Time-Life Building.
Reading the Voice en route to my first day of work, I saw another listing, this one in a SoHo art-postcard factory, so instead of going to midtown, I took the subway to Prince Street and started at Fotofolio immediately, spending the day sorting postcards for shops and museums, getting filthy and sweaty moving around boxes of iconic images of my heroes—Cocteau, Satie, Wilde, van Gogh. With my first paycheck I bought a futon, which left me with two dollars, enough for the ferry, the subway, and a bagel.
Within a week of working at Fotofolio, my coworker Jim and I had conspired to start a magazine called Moogomboo, which would open with a manifesto to rip up East Village streets and plant flowers. We’d publish only revolutionary, genius work, by whomever—prisoners, the insane and homeless, junkies. We were going to get inside the machine and blow it up. It would be Erik Satie crossed with Hunter Thompson, whimsy and beauty meet riotous rage. We wrote up dozens of impractical ideas, and then with hubristic certainty declared that our fantasy circulation numbers to sustain such an unsustainable project were 15,000—10,000 from newsstand sales, 5,000 from subscriptions. Of course, we had no money and no access to money, but I was determined to start this magazine one way or another.
I also planned to be at the center of every sexual scandal in literary New York. But, then, Elissa. It was two weeks after our first date, and we hadn’t spent a night apart since. We’d tried, but during a late-night phone call one of us would break down and say, “I’ll be there in an hour.” Usually it was her coming to me. Because her place was an illegal sublet—she couldn’t even get mail there—the doorman looked at me funny. It didn’t help that her roommates thought I was scum. On those nights when she came to me I’d meet her at the ferry station with my newly acquired beater bike and double her back in the dark through the slum to my room.
Some nights when we were partying late in the city we’d crash with Jim, who lived in a fifth-floor walkup on St. Mark’s Place between Second and Third Avenues, a genuine artist on a strip of fakery.
Elissa started keeping a stash of clothes—all of it black—in her filing cabinet at work, along with some expensive silk scarves to fashion an office outfit.
I kept waiting for her to say, Enough. But she said, More.
She pushed books on me, at first when we were showing off to each other, then with novels and poems that told me she saw me—The Waves and Orlando, Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, and The Sun Also Rises. We went to noir double features at St. Mark’s Cinema and Film Forum. Literature and Film and Art—all of it was so urgent, immediate. But she wouldn’t have sex with me for a month, and it drove me insane.
Still, this impatience and frustration were nothing compared with my lingering rage—rage at my past, rage at my inability to express myself, rage at all the inequities in the world, rage at being hobbled, rage at my white privilege. Elissa, on the other hand, was filled with a rage to live, to express everything that “good girls” were not supposed to say out loud. Here was the bravest, most intense person I had ever been around. I felt like an utter phony and kept waiting for her to see through me and leave. Instead, she moved in with me.
I resented falling immediately in love with Elissa. I had come to New York with artistic pipe dreams and libertine intentions, but after four months in the city I was living with someone who wouldn’t let me get away with my usual gambits of sulking and fleeing. One day she saw me holding a letter from my mother’s mother. “It’s okay, cry,” she said, not waiting to hear what was in the letter. She could just tell.
After I sobbed, I collected myself and showed her the letter, with its shaky poststroke handwriting. The contents weren’t emotional or revealing—it was a mundane letter asking if I was having an okay time in school. Elissa patiently unpacked my feelings, eventually getting to the crux. What had crushed me was that my grandmother thought of me in any kind of positive manner, while I had always hated her from afar and borne a grudge against her for her sins against my mother, because if my grandmother hadn’t been so steely to her daughter, my mother might have known how to be warmer to me when I was growing up.
When Elissa moved into my tiny room, there was barely enough space for the futon on the floor. After she woke up cranky the first morning with an imprint of The New York Times on her ass, I started building a mini-loft, the room’s bare-bulb light precariously close to the bed. We spray-painted the walls with angels and slogans, including Hunter Thompson’s “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” During the day we worked, at night we saw bands or we went home and wrote, candles burning, the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat blasting, the Pernod straight on ice.
I started writing in earnest, page after page. It was earnest. It was crap. “Don’t worry about it,” Jim said. “You have to write a million words before you write anything decent.” This was like running—common wisdom was that you needed to run hard for ten years before you had the base to really run hard.
Elissa, writing, and drinking had replaced running. I channeled my leftover energy into staying up all night walking the city. I went from ninety hard miles a week to zero. My stretched iliotibial band made it painful to walk, much less run. But every few weeks I hobbled around the crack-vial-littered neighborhood park and came back with my knee painfully swollen, Elissa waiting with two cans of Foster’s, one to drink, the other to use as an icepack. No matter how much it hurt, I wouldn’t stop trying. I kept telling myself it had to heal. It just had to.
When training for races, I could see tangible progress and measurable results, but with my novice writing efforts I could see no progress or results. The learning curve seemed insurmountably steep—much like the learning curve of how to be in a real romantic relationship. Elissa had to tell me to buy a birthday present for her. My family didn’t do presents. Elissa was actually excited to go home to Delaware for the holidays. I scoffed when she said I was going, but quickly changed my tune.
How does one behave around a normal, nuclear, happy family? Disconcertingly, after only a few minutes with them in their warm, comfortable house that her father had built right after Elissa was born, I could tell that they were smart and charming and funny and
obviously loved each other. They were generous and welcoming to me. It was completely disorienting. I spent the entire first day clinging to their new Siamese kitten, carrying it around as if it were a shield. But Elissa wouldn’t let me hide from her family. If I loved her, I would have to love her family. Which was surprisingly easy. I had no baggage with them, and as long as I loved their daughter, they would treat me as family.
For both of my parents, Elissa was like truth serum—they felt compelled to talk to her like they never spoke to me, and I finally was able to fill in some of the gaps from childhood, like how and when my mother found out my father was gay and why she had decided to leave me in Berlin. This knowledge clarified the picture, but didn’t mollify my anger. In the picture I was still confused and scared. Why didn’t they talk to me like they had talked to Elissa?
At New Year’s, we again borrowed my composer friend’s Datsun, this time to drive to a party in Baltimore. Halfway there, I said, “I don’t really like New Year’s parties.”
“Well, sure, they’re kind of amateur hour.”
“Totally,” I said.
“Then why are we driving three hours to get to one?”
“Let’s drive to San Francisco and back,” I said, tossing the idea in the air like a coin, not caring if it landed on heads or tails.
“We have time?” Elissa asked, not missing a beat.
“Six thousand miles,” I said thrilled, surprised, and suddenly daunted. “It’s five days and ten hours before we have to be back to work. Let’s see—that’s a hundred and thirty hours. Figuring sixty miles an hour average, that’s a hundred hours of driving round-trip, so we’d have thirty hours for sleep and sightseeing.”
Elissa smiled. “I’m game if you’re game.”
After two thousand miles, my friend’s crappy little Datsun died in a snowstorm near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, forty miles down-valley from Aspen. A road crew dug the car out and towed us to a garage, which replaced our battery. Having lost a day, we abandoned our goal of making it all the way to San Francisco and instead drove through Aspen, which was buried in ice and snow. I didn’t try to find any of my former friends, and instead continued on past Buena Vista, where a vast valley opened up and a hard, cold, winter sunset lit the leafless and snow-covered aspens. Black cows dotted the snow across the valley. The hillside opposite glowed a cool red, like a fading coal. And then it was a thirty-hour blur back to New York in time for a shower before the ferry to work.
That’s how we rolled. Hunter Thompson would have been proud.
59
“Write naked. Write from exile. Write in blood.”
—Denis Johnson
Soundtrack: Talking Heads, “Take Me to the River,” 1978
THE SKY IS A SICKLY PREDAWN GREEN as Elissa and I leave the rave. Even though I haven’t felt this physically spent since my last real run, if Elissa gives the nod I’ll rally and dance for a dozen more hours. She’s jazzed, looks like she could keep dancing, but says, “Let’s go home.”
I grab her hand and we follow three young Easterners who I’m guessing are heading back toward Prenzlauer Berg. The streets are dark and silent, and we carefully make our way through the strewn paving stones until we reach a nearly impassable intersection. Cobblestones are piled high on one side, and on the other there’s a massive hole that’s swallowed up a Trabant and a Wartburg. You couldn’t drive a tank through this intersection. Yet there is still a working streetlight. The three Germans in front of us stop at the red light and wait. So deeply engrained is their sense of order they can’t walk through the red light, even though we’re the only people out on the street. We walk past.
“C’mon, you can do it,” Elissa says, waving to the Germans. They hesitate, then laugh along and follow.
Fifteen minutes later, the Germans now ahead of us, we’re back in our neighborhood. I speed up, but Elissa suddenly stops.
“What?”
“I feel unwell,” she says in a funny flat voice, veering toward a park bench, where she flops down.
“We’re only a block from home,” I say, impatient, then notice that her face is ashen.
“Elissa?” Her eyes are all pupil. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”
She opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. She’s not drunk—this is something else. Her eyes are unfocused; her breathing is constricted, coming in short, wheezy gasps.
“Let’s get you home.” I grab her under her arms and she stands stiffly, leaning against me, and lets me guide her toward our building. It takes forever to get her up the stairs, her legs stiff, her steps herky-jerky.
“You okay?” I ask as I tuck her in on the smaller of the two sofas, Hank passed out on the bigger one.
She opens her mouth, but again no sound comes out. Her pupils bounce around the room but don’t appear to be focusing on anything. “You’re okay,” I say as much to reassure myself as her. She raises her right arm slightly, as if she is in school and wants to ask a question. Is she joking? This isn’t funny. “Yes?” But she doesn’t answer. I take ahold of her hand and she clutches mine fiercely. Slowly I try to lower it, but it won’t go, her arm rigid. “It’s okay, you’re going to be okay, I’m right here,” I say over and over, and then she is asleep, her arm still raised.
Through the windows, the sky is lightening. I want to throw up, to punch the walls, to do something, anything. I feel utterly helpless. I could lie down next to her, wrap her in my arms, but I’m too worked up. I pace in front of the three huge windows, first with them on my left, now on my right, now on my left. What the hell am I going to do? Wake Hank? But what can he do? I have to deal with this myself. Get her to a hospital? Did she take something at the rave? The kid with the hoop through his eyebrow that she was talking to. Everyone was hopped up on something. But she would have told me. I walk back to her, gently push her arm down, and it finally yields. What the hell could cause that? She’ll be fine in the morning. This is exhaustion, just exhaustion. When was the last time she ate? Or maybe I should get her to a hospital. What if she’s having some kind of bad drug reaction? Shit, shit, shit! This isn’t happening. Shit, shit, shit, get on my shoes. Shoes. That’s it. Put on my running shoes. Run. Yes, go for a run. Elissa is out cold and a run will clear my head.
I race up Dunckerstrasse and past the park, the treetops bright with the first light. This is good. This is right. My lungs burn but I don’t feel my legs. I run past the warehouses and the rave. I wonder if it is still going on. And then I’m right up on the Wall, fully ablaze with the early sun. I run over toppled slabs, golden ramps, into No-Man’s-Land. I am a blur of pain but I’m going to outrun it. In no time I’m on the outskirts of the city. I run harder. I could be anywhere—on the mountain trails of Colorado, on the streets of Baltimore; this rush is universal, the feeling of flight and freedom, of getting away from everything and into myself. I’m not living in the future or past. I’m here, now.
Miles melt away until I run up on the small village where we had seen the boy chipping at the Wall. The hole has widened in the last two weeks, enough for me to put my leg through and straddle the Wall, then pull the rest of me through. On the Western side, away from the Wall about a hundred yards, is another village, a cluster of modest, well-tended houses, a modest white church spire. There’s a smell of baking bread. I wonder if I can find the bakery? What’s going to happen to the two villages once they are reunited? Looking back to the East, I see the second floor of the boy’s house. Growing up, he could peer over to the Western village. Did he have friends on this side?
I try to catch my breath, sweat stinging my eyes. I focus on my racing pulse, try to slow it down, but it is throbbing in my knee. Pain radiates upward. My knee hurts. Really hurts. What the hell am I doing here? What the hell am I doing running at a moment like this?
Elissa.
My knee screaming, my heart feeling like it’s going to explode out of my chest,
I race back to Prenzlauer Berg in minutes, charge up the stairs three at a time. Elissa isn’t on the sofa where I left her. I look around frantically, then see her sleeping on the foot-wide ledge of the window. Hank is nowhere to be seen. How did she get from the sofa to the ledge?
I’m afraid of surprising her, afraid of waking her, afraid that she’ll fall out of the window. I’m afraid of everything. Carefully I approach her, wrap my arms tight around her, and drag her inside. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” I whisper in her ear as I carry her back to the sofa and cover her with blankets.
“So tired,” Elissa mumbles.
“It’s okay,” I say, and stroke her brow. “I’m going to get you to a hospital.”
“No hospital,” she says, her right arm once again raised.
“Okay, okay, no hospital,” I say, and take her hand, her arm lowering more easily this time.
“Rest. I need to rest,” she mutters. “Zambi. Take me back. I promise I’ll be better.”
An hour later Hank walks in, sketch pad in hand, and freezes. I’m sitting next to Elissa, who is asleep on the sofa. I don’t have to tell him that something is terribly wrong.
“What do we need to do?” he asks me, looking at Elissa.
