by Rob Spillman
“Drive,” I say.
“You got it, Chief,” Hank says.
Of course he’ll come through. Hank at his best—the fixer who mends things to show his love.
We pack our clothes quickly, take some small tokens—graffitied pieces of the Wall we smashed off with a piece of rebar, the front plate of a radio with only East Bloc names, the hood ornament of a Wartburg, Communist pins and patches, a modest string of amber beads that is nothing like the old couple’s wedding necklace. The apartment still looks like a home, lived in: the fabulous furniture we have accumulated surrounded by piles of books, framed paintings, and photographs of Lenin, Marx, and the cosmonauts.
As I load up Dusty, I wonder: If I don’t take these objects with me, will I still have been here? Things. Do any of these things matter? Will any of these things save Elissa? Will any of these things save me?
With the scavenged blankets, we make a nest for Elissa in the backseat. She crawls in, curls up.
Back upstairs for one last check of the apartment, words flood me, but they are not mine. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” the last two stanzas: disaster and disaster.
When I moved to the States I defined myself as being from Berlin. I was a Berliner removed from Berlin, and I would return home. What the hell was I thinking? Berlin is an idea. It isn’t my home. Elissa is my home. I’ll lose these things, this stuff, this room, this flat, Ralf and the other East German friends, the CV, Prenzlauer, Berlin—it isn’t that hard—but I won’t lose Elissa.
60
“When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.”
—James Baldwin
Soundtrack: LCD Soundsystem, “Losing My Edge,” 2002
HISTORICAL AND ARTISTIC EPOCHS are usually named and codified after the fact. Yet even Parisian artists at the turn of the twentieth century knew they were in the middle of a unique confluence of economic, geopolitical, and artistic forces that were responsible for a cross-cultural creative explosion. New York, 1986, was experiencing not an explosion, but an implosion. King Heroin, rising rents, and AIDS were squeezing the Lower East Side like an anaconda. Tompkins Square Park, a few years earlier the epicenter of cutting-edge artistic Lower East Side, was now a homeless camp, covered in lean-tos like the slums of Rio or Kingston. The art world was gripped in a reactionary capitalist frenzy, the street energy of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat giving way to Mark Kostabi’s assembly line paintings and Julian Schnabel’s bombastic creations. The New York writing scene was dominated by the drug-fueled “Brat Pack” led by Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney.
I had moved to New York with visions of going to the Cedar Tavern to see the modern-day Frank O’Haras and Allen Ginsbergs stomping around like drunken giants, throwing punches over the emotional truth of a poem. Instead the visible scene was about limos, drugs, parties, writers fighting over invites to fashion events at Club MK. Sure, there was the lit mag Between C & D, which published edgy, grungy fiction and was printed on dot-matrix paper and sold in Ziploc baggies as if it were heroin. The work was annihilating, a negation of everything. Was there nothing to live for?
Or so it appeared to my impatient self, someone who was chasing past versions of bohemia and artistic revolutions. These, of course, are recognized only after the current work has been upturned. At the time I wasn’t doing anything to contribute to any kind of new creativity, or engaging in the anti-gentrification battles of our neighborhood, but instead was whining about the lack of a “real scene.”
In this toxic sludge, I was at least able to see that one artistic life form was thriving—noisy postpunk bands like Sonic Youth. Throughout the long, grim winter Elissa and I trooped from club to club, CBGB’s to the Ritz to the Pyramid, catching Sonic Youth, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Ball, and all the other spine-scraping bands.
Even though I had a job, an apartment, and a live-in girlfriend, I still felt like I was missing the cultural boat, a hard drinker with a bum leg, the same lucky loser who had walked away from three near-fatal car crashes. I wanted out of the black hole. My perception of what New York should be had contrasted so dramatically with what I perceived it to be that I couldn’t understand how I had ever wanted to live there. If New York was truly dead, my logic went, why not live and write someplace beautiful like Hunter Thompson did? If there was no collective creative force to tap into, why not tap into natural beauty: unspoiled snowcapped mountains, fields of wildflowers, pine forests big enough to get lost in. It was a simple thought. And with Elissa being my sole tether, it was easy to cut ties and jump into the wilderness. All I had to do was ask her if she wanted to try living in Colorado, and if she said yes, we’d go, jettisoning what little baggage we had.
Elissa had, indeed, been open to adventure. After her stable, rooted upbringing and four years of college, she was ready to risk, to run off with me. Especially if what I promised—time and space to write, and in a beautiful place—was true. When we got there, she was happily surprised that I hadn’t lied.
But we were writing in a void. An artistic movement isn’t two people creating with no one to share their work with. Thompson frequently left his secluded ranch to engage full force with the world. It took us four months to figure this out. And that we should get married and get the hell back to New York.
In Boulder, we used the last of our money to buy a Siamese kitten (fifty bucks) and a 1965 Volvo 122S (five hundred bucks). We piled what little we had into the bulbous ruster and drove it to New York. The Volvo had been sitting in a hippie’s garage for five years with a full tank of gas, so the fuel system was filled with rust and we had to stop every ten or twenty miles to blow chunks of corroded metal out of the clogged fuel filter. If we didn’t keep the car topped off, it would stall out, which is what happened at three in the morning crossing the Mississippi. As a policeman pushed us off the bridge with his cruiser, I was sure that I was finally going to get arrested, having gone four years driving without a license. Yet, instead of asking for my ID, he said, “Don’t stay on this side of the bridge for too long—we’ve had some sniper incidents in this part of East St. Louis.”
When we returned from Colorado, I wasn’t quite ready to kiss the sidewalk, but I was close. I begged New York’s forgiveness. I vowed that I would open my eyes, see it in the here and now versus the sepia postcard images I was projecting onto the back of my brain. It was intoxicating to be around intelligent, creative people, the fall cultural season in full swing with gallery openings and bands playing everywhere.
It wasn’t long before I landed my first job in publishing. Even though it was an entry-level job in the Random House publicity department, I felt that I had snuck through the scullery window of the publishing citadel. From in there, anything was possible.
The publicity department was on the Random House editorial floor, which was filled with legendary old-timers. I spent hours in Joe Fox’s office playing chess and listening to Fox talk about what it was like being Truman Capote’s editor, about the out-of-body experience of reading In Cold Blood in manuscript. The first book I had anything to do with was Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, a passionate rendering of an emblematic Vietnam commander written by the journalist who had secured the Pentagon Papers. The second book was Pete Dexter’s gritty novel Paris Trout. Both Dexter and Sheehan were kind and generous, and appreciated anything that was done for them. Sheehan had spent seventeen years working on his book; Dexter had lost the first 110 pages to an early computer virus and when he punched the wall in anger he broke his hand, delaying the restart of the novel.
That year Sheehan won the National Book Award for nonfiction and Dexter the National Book Award for fiction. Here were actual role models, normal, hardworking men who had made their own way.
Before we even left Boulder, Elissa had landed a job at Spy magazine. As a reporter for the new satirical monthly, she was paid (not much) to make crank phone calls and get shots in the ass
from quack doctors. Surrounded by brilliant off-kilter writers and editors, she was very much in her element. There was a pervasive recklessness among the staff, most thinking that no one in straight publishing would hire them after Spy, since the magazine had devoted hundreds of column inches to bashing all the powerful people in straight publishing.
After I’d worked on the Sheehan and Dexter books, my boss came to me and said, “Rob, I’d like you to help out on one of the lead titles for next season.”
“Great. Which one?”
“Thin Thighs in Thirty Days. It’s going to be huge, and we’re pulling out all the stops to publicize it,” my boss said with heartfelt enthusiasm.
Maybe I wasn’t cut out for publicity after all.
Rather than pledge my allegiance to Thin Thighs, I left Random House and freelanced as a fact-checker for Spy, which led to gigs at Rolling Stone and Connoisseur. I started writing book reviews and author profiles, and the occasional feature for places like Sports Illustrated and Vogue. Both Elissa and I were now safely inside the publishing-industrial complex. We were surprised by how small this complex was, and how everyone knew each other, and how lateral movement between various magazines and publishing houses was easy and expected.
While I loved being inside the fortress, and was happy to be surrounded by other young, creative people who were trying to figure themselves out, I still felt like I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I still resisted any place that would accept me as one of its own. This is no Berlin, I told myself. Of course, this was another projected delusion, yet another way for me not to settle into myself and my life. This unsettling delusion was further stoked by seeing Wings of Desire at Film Forum. Angels in Berlin, in black and white, with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds making a cameo. This was a much grittier, more cosmopolitan place. My restless, deluded self was convinced that New York wasn’t as real as Berlin.
Yet our tiny East Village walk-up on Eighth Street between B and C had become a shelter for an unruly and ever-expanding circle of hard-drinking artistic friends. We were the one married couple anyone knew, so our place became a default hangout for our single friends, and most weekend mornings there were bodies on our sofa or floor.
Amazingly, we were doing what we had set out to do—move to New York and work in publishing. We were surrounded by actively engaged artists, and we went to shows and galleries. But we were struggling as creative writers. We were both trying to write fiction, and finding it hard to do while also writing journalism. I still believed that it was a problem of place (New York) rather than one of personality (mine). I also couldn’t shake the idea that there was something wrong with happiness, or at least contentedness. Artists were never supposed to be content.
61
“To thine own self be true.”
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Soundtrack: My Bloody Valentine, “Soon,” 1991
AS HANK AND I PUT THE LAST FEW THINGS in the back of Dusty, Elissa sleeps, showing a sliver of consciousness when I tell her it is time to go.
“Elissa, we’re going to get you back to Zambi, okay?”
“Thank you,” she says, then falls back asleep.
It is a forty-straight-hour, clearer-than-clear hallucination of narrow roads, oncoming yellow fog lights, bland European pop music leaking from the radio, two dusks, two dawns, and countless espressos back to Zambujeira. We alternate driving, Hank channeling the rally driver he’s always wanted to be. When one drives, the other sleeps, though I don’t really sleep. Elissa is mute. She’s never fully awake or asleep. She sleeps fitfully. When awake, she stares out the window blankly.
She’s going to be okay once we get to Zambi.
Or not.
I should find a hospital.
She’s going to be okay.
Drive faster.
Focus.
I feel like a retreating army, fleeing the city I was certain I would capture. I’m running. But I’m not running away. I’m running toward life with Elissa. Hour after hour I replay all the stupidity in my life, all of the wasted time chasing and not being present. I want nothing more than to be present, to be with Elissa, to create. I want to leave the darkness and rage behind. Yet all of the crap I’d been running from is still looming on the horizon.
Hank snores while I drive across the hot, dry Spanish border. Elissa looks peaceful in her nest, still asleep. We’re near Pamplona. I don’t recognize who I was there. I pull over to pee. I try, once again, to rearrange behind my seat, my backpack jamming into my lower back. I pull out the backpack, open it up, grab the three yellow legal pads that contain Coffee and Absinthe. I don’t need to look at them to know that there isn’t a true word or feeling on those pages. I throw them into the ditch. The backpack fits better now. I wonder if someone will find the notebooks. I hope they will be of use, like the poet’s pages in La Bohème, good for starting a fire.
Strange how long drives all blur into one. For a second I am not in Spain but in Oklahoma, with my father, this high blue summer sky melding with that one, a black wall suddenly appearing on the horizon, maybe sixty or seventy miles off to the west, and as we drive closer the front looming larger and larger, the radio issuing tornado warnings, my father calmly joining other cars stopped under an overpass to wait out the moving wall.
All of my selfish blackness is swirling ahead of me. I keep the car pointed straight at it.
62
“Sweet is the memory of past troubles.”
—Cicero
Soundtrack: The Merseybeats, “Sorrow,” 1966
I DRIVE THROUGH my second straight dawn, over the Spanish border into Portugal, static childhood memories flickering. A large living room filled with people, laughing and smoking and drinking. I am waist-high to them, carrying trays of drinks. It’s our living room, but I can’t picture my parents there, especially not together. My mother lighting candles clipped to the branches of a small Christmas tree. Shrimp swimming between my toes by the Danish docks where my father and I will catch a ferry across the North Sea. My father eats raw shrimp from the baskets stacked on the deck. We sleep folded up in our tiny European car. In these fragments there are no families, no couples.
What if Elissa and I had had a child with us in Berlin? We wouldn’t have been so cavalier, right? A child would have made us more serious about our art. Like my parents. How did they do it? How did they try to make meaningful creative lives for themselves while simultaneously being parents? At the height of the Cold War, four thousand miles away from home? My God they were crazy. And brave. They must have been terrified all of the time. Especially once they split. Why has it taken me so long to realize this?
Outside of Zambujeira, salt air mixed with red dust is blowing into the open windows. I drive straight to Xica’s bar.
Elissa hops out and hugs Xica. “How was Berlin?” Xica asks.
“Surreal,” Elissa says, and something else which I miss because I am stunned she’s talking. She hasn’t said anything—nothing—during the entire forty-hour drive from Berlin to Zambujeira.
“Elissa,” I say, and she looks at me with what I’m guessing is supposed to be a reassuring smile, though her eyes are still unfocused. “You think you will be okay here?”
“Of course,” Elissa says, sounding weirdly chipper. My head feels like it is going to fall off; I could lie down right here in the road. I want to feel relief. I want nothing more in this world than to believe that she is okay and that we can stay in our happy little fishing village and that she will miraculously recover by breathing in this familiar salt air. But she doesn’t look the least bit okay. She looks like a poorly put-together doll—arms and legs slightly spastic, her eyes not tracking.
Down the coast the cliffs are purple, the sun plunging into the lavender-tipped waves. Absinthe hour. That’s what I used to believe in—the absinthe hour, history, books, stories, adventure points, outrunning my past
.
I cross the square to the phone booth. I ask the operator to patch me through to a U.S. operator, who patches me through to Elissa’s parents’ house.
“Mom,” I say to Elissa’s mother. I’m going to throw up.
“What’s wrong?” She knows that something bad has happened. She knows that I’ve failed to protect her daughter.
“Elissa is . . .”
“Is she hurt?”
“No. She’s exhausted and I think she’s had some kind of a seizure in Berlin. She’s okay but really disoriented.”
The line crackles with static. I fight the urge to apologize, to explain, to beg for forgiveness.
“Does she need to go to a hospital?” Elissa’s mom asks, forcibly calm, all focused on the logistics of caretaking.
“No, home,” I reply.
“I’ll call the travel agent right away and get you to New York—”
“She needs to come home.”
“Home?” Elissa’s mom asks. “Here?”
“Yes, home to Delaware.”
63
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
—Pablo Picasso
Soundtrack: Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Helplessly Hoping,” 1969
HOME. Not New York, but Delaware, Elissa’s childhood home. Her father, as usual, has the stereo cranked up, Crosby, Stills & Nash filling the warm house with familiar music. Elissa’s father and mother built this house, their home. Fieldstones and brick; orchids filling the greenhouse; goldfish and frogs in the pond. But it isn’t the physical thing that matters; it is the feel of the place. There is no other way to put it than to say that this house is built out of love. This is what you do if you love someone—together you build psychic sanctuaries and within these spaces you share a life.
Or this is what you should do. Or what I should have done.
