by Ken Grimes
I can think of no really good reason why he was in Iowa. I can think of a lot of reasons he shouldn’t have been, not least of which is that for a college freshman, a thousand miles from home is a long, long way (even for those who valiantly assert that no distance is quite far enough).
The reason he went to Iowa was that I went there.
I think I saw Ken, in my mind’s eye, sitting in that circle of writers, showing off his superb poetry or short story (where did that come from?), bonding with fame. I think I was trying to relive it all through him. This I might say was the real reason, but for an alcoholic, no reason is clear enough to be the real reason. It’s funny how long you view a scene through a cocktail glass before you realize you’re at very watery definitions.
It occurred to me too late, as too many things do, that I wasn’t at Iowa as an undergraduate, and that’s a qualitative, not a quantitative, difference. Undergraduates and grad students? Apples and oranges, not apples and bigger apples. Those are different worlds. And I was a teaching assistant, even farther from the tree.
I had applied for teaching positions at several universities (back in the days when a person could not only get a job but actually choose the job she wanted). I went for several interviews: Colorado, Iowa, and some college in New England. I chose Iowa. I’m not sure why—I was impressed by the person who interviewed me, by the campus, by the teaching load.
I found a small apartment in Iowa City of which I was quite proud. There was an icebox in the kitchen, the ancient kind with a door on the outside into which a turn-of-the-century iceman shoved a block he had hacked from a bigger block. It seems mythical to me now. I put big packages of ice cubes in it for parties. Of which there were many, and a large number of fellow teachers and graduate students to host or attend them.
For a housewarming, I held a painting party. We painted the living room red and the small foyer black. Picture that.
We loved it.
We were poets.
We were drunk.
Rather, they were poets; I was drunk.
I had never written poetry or anything else. But given that my friends were poets, I applied and was admitted to the poetry workshop, probably because they were in it. Not just anybody could get into Iowa’s poetry and fiction workshops. I wrote a few lukewarm poems, which, to my surprise, some of the others liked.
I can’t envision a lovelier tableau: the best writing workshop in the country and wonderful friends, talented friends. These poets were very serious about it and very good. A handful even then were well known, and others were on the cusp of fame: Don Justice, Philip Levine, Bob Mezey, Peter Everwine, Theodore Holmes, Henri Coulette, Knute Skinner. Fifty years later, lines of their poems, even whole poems, run through my head. They were that memorable.
The intellectual milieu was dizzying. And the parties and the bourbon and the gin. It was at times the stereotype of a bunch of young writers on the MGM lot. It was almost A Moveable Feast, for who needed Paris when we had Iowa City? Midwestern, staid, dry except for beer, but we always had Rock Island, Illinois, if we wanted to drink.
Even as I write this, I know I’ve misremembered. The wholesale exuberance should be a clue; the stereotype of the Young Writer, especially the Young Poet, should be another.
We were intense, we were talented, we were talk talk talk.
• • •
It was no place to send a kid who’d shown signs of poor judgment, one being graduation night from his favorite school and its back woods.
Naturally, there was a party.
Naturally, there were beer, pot, cocaine.
Naturally, there were police.
This time they called me.
Here was yet another telephone stare, another moment of impossibility, another of life’s scariest moments, another call to my brother. I wouldn’t have called, but I needed transport to the police station, since I’d let Ken have the car for the graduation party. Lucky car. It was being held, too.
He was being held not just for ingestion of an illegal substance but also for distribution. The idea was ludicrous, but I wasn’t laughing at the duty sergeant who delivered the news. I could just hear his self-satisfaction thrum, as if no news were more delightful to unload than bad news about a stoned or drunk teenager. Had the substance ingested been air, they’d have made it stick. So there came another of life’s impossible, dreamlike, this-can’t-be-happening moments.
Driving back with my brother and sister-in-law in their car, I wondered what had happened. Not very productive, perhaps, but I couldn’t help it. There were recriminations coming from the front seat. I wasn’t really into that, sitting in the backseat with Ken, who was as silent as stone.
I think at such times it sweeps over a parent, any parent: What happened? A rush of memories of that little person at two and five and eight, wreathed in smiles, in little-guy joy, now sitting in big-guy misery and silence.
All of us could be flinging blame right and left, maybe because that makes us feel more secure in some weird way—the idea that there is blame to bestow. My question was, was it somehow inevitable that this happen? My answer was yes. Not this, precisely, but something like it, less or more, but something. There’s no way to sidestep it or explain it. I could blame me, blame him, blame the woods behind the school, blame his pot-smoking, party-loving friends, but it’s nothing like that, or it’s everything like that. Say the parents, say society, say everything.
It’s impossible.
14
KG
The Flimflam Man: How Shakespeare Saved My Life
I admired crooks and liars as a kid. They knew what they wanted, and they took it. As a kid watching the musical Oliver!, I identified with the Artful Dodger and Fagin, not Oliver. I lied a lot growing up, and the more I lied, the more convincing I became. I quickly learned that I had to lie to party the way I wanted to.
Money was scarce when I went to college. My father made a modest salary and couldn’t contribute much to my college education. So my mother ended up footing most of the bill, and she assumed that when I asked for tuition money, it would be spent on tuition. I had no idea how much money I needed or how to budget or pay bills. I was always running out because I spent it all on drinking.
My favorite T-shirt in college said, “What Do You Mean I Ran Out of Money? I Still Have Checks Left.” I wrote checks for anything and to everyone, including my dealers. How stupid is that? This behavior couldn’t be more different than what my mother and father did. My mother put herself through college by working for the federal government and as a teaching assistant at the University of Maryland. My father borrowed from relatives and took out loans. Not me. I couldn’t have cared less.
Early in my freshman year, I found myself without any cash and desperate to fill my weed and beer habit. So I did what generations of college kids have done. I called my mother and asked her for money—fifty dollars, wired immediately. When she asked why I needed the money so quickly, I said I had to buy books and talked her into going to Western Union that day.
For the promise of free beer and weed, my friend Stan volunteered to take me to Western Union. We jumped into his green Plymouth Barracuda and peeled out of the dorm parking lot while huffing a joint. Stan dropped me off and kept the engine running while I rolled up to the counter at Western Union.
“Hi, my name is Ken Grimes, and I’m here to pick up a wire in my name.”
The kind midwestern woman behind the counter said, “Yes, let me check.”
She went to a room in the back and emerged with an envelope. “Here it is—a wire for five hundred dollars.”
My mind began to race. I coughed, cleared my throat, and said, “What was that? Five hundred dollars?”
She looked quizzical. “Yes, isn’t that correct?”
“Ah, that’s right.” I reached out to take the envelope stuffed with twenty-dollar bills. Trying to control my smile, I walked slowly out the door and then ran to the car. “Quick,” I said to Stan, “let’s get
the hell out of here before they figure it out.” We felt victorious and couldn’t wait to start bingeing as soon as possible.
A semilogical mind might have followed this whole sequence: My mother had wired fifty dollars; Western Union gave me five hundred dollars; Western Union was out four hundred and fifty dollars, and they would want it back. But I needed money for booze. For me, that was the end of the story.
Western Union eventually figured it out. They contacted my mother and demanded payment. For a teacher earning twenty-eight grand a year, merely sending me to college was hard work. To receive a bill for an added five hundred was too much.
When I came home for spring break, my mother accosted me about the money. “Ken, what were you thinking? How did you do it? Where did you think the money was going to come from?”
As usual in these situations, I mumbled a reply, flailing wildly and turning the tables to make it her fault. “I don’t know, I mean, I thought you said you were going to send fifty dollars, that’s what I thought. It’s Western Union’s fault—they had the money order for fifty dollars but gave me five hundred!”
We fought, with me bobbing and weaving back and forth faster than Muhammad Ali. We came to no conclusion because I couldn’t pay her back, I had no money. She threatened that I would have to get a job at school, something I fought tooth and nail to avoid. I wanted to party and get fucked up, not work like my mother, father, uncle, and practically everyone else from my parents’ generation.
I had worked enough when I was a kid, from my first job at age eight, selling greeting cards door-to-door to all of the five A.M. paper routes; mowing and raking the neighbors’ yards; summers spent painting houses; teenage years working all manner of odd jobs. I just wouldn’t do it anymore.
Working would cut into my drinking time, and that was sacrosanct.
• • •
The first day of classes in my sophomore year (I can’t remember which class, since I dropped it shortly thereafter), the teacher decided to do one of those fake-intimacy exercises where we sat in a circle and introduced ourselves, then revealed one thing we wanted most out of the class and college in general.
I had a vicious hangover. I knew I was going to hate this class and my classmates. After a full round of pious statements, one student said, “I want to learn the most I can in the class and really learn something about life.”
It was finally my turn. I looked blankly at them and said, “My goal is survival.”
The teacher and the rest of the students stared at me. In that one moment, I had actually meant what I said. I was so depressed that survival was all I could hope for, and they knew I was telling the truth.
I remember my college girlfriends and some of our drunken revelry. After I broke up with one girl whom I had met at a party, she said, “You know, Ken, all those months we were together? We were drunk every single time we went home.”
I just nodded and drank some beer out of my cup and played it off. I knew there was something wrong with that. I just didn’t want to think about it.
I laughed and drank in the company of my friends, drank even more in the company of strangers, and drank depressed and alone more than I care to remember. I was one of T. S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” with a headful of straw. I was wasted, wasting my time, with no direction and no hope.
I knew my life would go out with a motherfucking bang, not a whimper.
• • •
Two years later, in the fall of my senior year, I was reading Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, and I realized that I, too, could make it out of the college bars and taverns, the endless keg parties, the depressing exchanges with drunken teenagers. I sat in the smoking section of the college library and puffed one Marlboro Light after another. Suddenly, I felt a sense of hope. If Prince Hal could forswear Falstaff—and who in his right mind could resist Falstaff?—then maybe I could resist the nonstop boozing and waking up with no idea where I had been or what I had done.
I decided to improve my grades and get out of this shithole college town with a grade-point average that might get me a job. In a black spiral notebook, I created a chart of how many times I smoked cigarettes, smoked pot, drank beer, went to class, how many hours I studied, and all of it in a secret code in case one of my friends read it. I was terrified of being ridiculed. I noticed that when I went to class, studied, and didn’t drink too much during the week, my grades improved. In my senior year, I pulled off a 3.6 GPA, made the dean’s list, and ended up with an overall 3.01 GPA.
Years later, I was in the wedding party of one of my few college friends. We started talking about old times, and one of the gang reminded me that as a senior, I had schooled him—a piddling sophomore—on how to party correctly. As we sat at this college-reunion bender masquerading as a wedding, my only defense against everyone else’s constant consumption of vodka, beer, and pot was the smoke from my cigars (I ended up smoking so many that I made myself sick).
My ex-sophomore friend—nicknamed “Hospital Balloon” for some forgotten reason that indicated a prodigious appetite for alcohol and drugs—said, “Yeah, man, don’t you remember? You told me that night in the library: ‘This is how it’s done. You go to your classes—at least most of them. You come in here every night after class and study for two hours. Then you go out and rage on the weekends!’ ”
I had no recollection of that conversation. Once sober, I couldn’t remember most of those years. I’m envious when my wife gets together with her college friends and they reminisce about their time at the University of Virginia. Occasionally, they drank too much; sometimes they went to football games; they attended sorority and fraternity parties, chased boys, went to class, and had a good time. My wife’s friends went on to study in graduate school and work and find husbands and have productive lives. No guarantee of happiness but a decent shot at it.
In my college years, there were many times when I would lose my voice from twelve hours of smoking and drinking. First it would get raspy, then I could barely speak. This happened to many of my friends during binges. My best friend from college, my main man, now lives a shadow life. We were such good friends in college that we could end each other’s sentences. We each knew what would make the other laugh—even if he wasn’t around—and would save up stories to tell each other later.
Five years ago, he nearly died of congestive heart failure at forty-one. Now he suffers from Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a form of wet brain that has left him unable to work. He has peripheral-vision problems and difficulty following linear thought patterns. Another friend destroyed his marriage and moved to Las Vegas, where he works as a bill collector. Some others are stumbling through their forties in an alcoholic haze. A few of them made it out alive.
I vaguely remember Big 10 football games where we stormed the field after big wins or wrestled one another in the stands to grab the “peace pipe” of pot whenever it stopped circulating because someone was hogging it. Or coming home from the games to take a “football nap” so we could go out to the bars and party until one A.M., then come home to drink until four A.M. The next morning I would find bruises on my body that I couldn’t explain. I ate so much goddamned late-night pizza that, to this day, I hate pizza. I stopped playing Ultimate Frisbee or engaging in any other form of exercise and gained too much weight.
I wasn’t alone. There were thousands of teenagers doing the same thing any given night. Some of them were alcoholics in the making, but most of them were not. They didn’t leave a fun party in the living room to hide and snort coke in the back room. They didn’t look out the window at nine A.M. on a Sunday, after a twenty-four-hour jag, to see people going to church and wonder what it would feel like to be normal.
At the end of senior year, my gang went on a weeklong bender to celebrate graduation. My mother and father and other relatives made the trek out to the Midwest for my special day. I graduated with the worst hangover I ever had in my life and was desperate for the ceremony to be over and for them to leave so I could start pa
rtying again. College was another crowning achievement in my life ruined by alcohol and drugs. Somehow I got out with a degree. Through my mother’s editor, I got a job in book publishing in New York City.
Then the real fun began.
15
MG
Double Double Indemnity
“Straight down the line, Walter.”
Another member of our group is leaving. He’s standing before us, giving reasons for his decision to stop coming to the clinic. They’re pretty much the same reasons. Or reason: He has his drinking under control now.
Straight down the line, Walter.
That’s more or less what I want to say to him. It’s what Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) says to Walter (Fred MacMurray) in that great film noir Double Indemnity.
In any well-constructed mystery, there is a sense of inevitability. In most cases, the reader realizes it only after the last page is turned: Of course, how could it have been otherwise? Double Indemnity ratchets forward like a bullet out of a gun. You can’t squeeze it back in; you can’t turn it or dodge it. The target will be struck. And the target is them.
The movie begins with a gorgeous romance into which is interjected something chancy and dangerous, thereby making the romance even more glamorous. Then they do the dangerous thing together, and it’s all downhill from there. What’s especially damning is the corrosive agent in their love. What’s eating at them is not so much guilt as the awareness that, having committed this crime, they’re stuck with each other.
I’ve watched Double Indemnity so many times that I think it’s leaking out of my pores as slowly as my last drink. It’s such a beautiful piece of chiaroscuro; the lighting should be distilled and drunk neat. There’s the scene at the end where she’s sitting in her living room, waiting for him with a gun; his shadow is thrown on the wall as he stands in the doorway with a gun. They didn’t go all the way together; they stopped and shot each other. Crash.
