Double Double

by Ken Grimes

  I’m a big believer in self-transcendence. I think everyone, at some time, for brief moments, attains self-transcendence. I remember once, driving in downtown D.C., I saw a row of ducklings crossing F Street. Traffic stopped, pedestrians stopped, everyone stopped to make sure those ducklings made it to the other side. And I bet everyone had a moment of transcendence when those ducklings were more important than their daily cares and worries. Everyone has moments—

  KG: Uh-huh. Where nirvana is within reach.

  MG: In drinking, that’s what people are after.

  KG: Carl Jung stated that alcoholics are engaged in a low-level search for spirituality.

  MG: I wouldn’t disagree with that at all.

  KG: One way of looking at it is that alcoholics are seekers. Seeking something beyond the satisfactions of daily living. They want to dream greater dreams, climb greater heights . . .

  MG: Come on, now. Don’t you think this is true of most people? I’d be surprised if I found anyone who didn’t want something beyond the material world—and its goods.

  KG: Yeah, I agree, but the difference is, nonalcoholics don’t look to get their freak on just because they had a bad day at the office. They come home, yell at their wives or kick their dog, turn on the TV, and tune out.

  That’s not enough for guys like me.

  We’re out for revenge. And revenge means oblivion, oblivion for ourselves, and oblivious to everyone else.

  21

  MG

  Memory

  I was twenty-four or twenty-five and working for the government in order to pull together enough money for graduate school. I took a night course at American University from a professor who was brilliant, intimidating, and enthralling. The subject was American literature, though I’m not certain of that; I seem to remember Emma Bovary creeping into a lecture. I have a recollection of one or more novels by Henry James. I do remember Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. And Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.

  This class was three hours long. Professor von Abele talked for the entire three hours. I cannot recall his ever referring to a note either in his hand or on the lectern. It was all in his head. Nor was it a class in which discussion was encouraged. Once in a great while, one of us (not I) would ask a question rather timidly. It would be answered and the lecture resumed. I got the impression that Dr. von Abele had so much to say that he didn’t want to waste time answering questions.

  Three hours, no notes, no breaks. Three straight hours, and that didn’t seem to faze him. My mind skims over the course, recalling some of it, but mostly him and his presentation.

  I do remember being impressed by something in a poem of Robert Penn Warren’s. Not the whole poem, not much of it, except one line. The poem was “Original Sin,” something about Harvard Yard. I have a clear remembrance of one metaphor. Not the subject of the metaphor, only the comparison, the “like” part. This was: “Like a mother who rises at night to seek a childhood picture.”

  That line has remained printed on my mind for half a century. Strange, but I have never gone back to the poem to see what the other half of the metaphor was. I don’t know why. Back then I reacted oddly to it. Why would a mother do that? Why on earth would anyone get out of bed to go and find a childhood picture? Rather than just kick the line aside, indifferently, I felt hostile. It irritated me that I couldn’t understand the action. I read the poem several times for the class, and each time I’d stumble over that line as if it were a barrier to something, a tree across my path. There was a gap between me and it that I didn’t understand, and it made me unreasonably angry.

  It’s been a long time since I took that course and read that poem. It seems impossible that I can think of my life in that long season. A few years later, I was in Iowa City, teaching at the university and winding up in the writers’ workshop and writing poetry. Ten years later, I got married. It was a disastrous marriage, not just because my husband and I were both alcoholics but because we were supremely unsuited. We acted like kids and argued and drank.

  I knew before, during, and after that this marriage was a mistake of monumental proportions, and yet I did nothing to stop it or end it for years. Five years elapsed before I left. (Today, alas, five years were more like five days. Then, five years were more like fifty.) There must be a psychological equivalent of locked-in syndrome wherein you know, see, and hear everything that’s going on; you just can’t bring yourself to do anything about it. Or perhaps that is another example of denial.

  That’s a short voyage ’round my marriage. Except for its conversational excellence (we were both good talkers), it was not all that interesting, but it was embalmed for the ages.

  Tolstoy’s paradigm of family disposition—that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way—I very much doubt. If you lined up ten teenagers and asked why they were unhappy with their parents, do you really think one of them wouldn’t say, “I can’t talk to them”? (Not that we’re done with Tolstoy—has anyone ever been done with him?—for he was probably talking about the truths behind unhappiness; I’m talking only about our vacuous understanding of it.) I think all marriages are unhappy in the way of all others. There are bigger helpings of unhappiness on the plate, but it’s still the same food.

  So a child named Ken was born into this one. Fortunately, the baby was made to share this cauldron of eye of newt and tail of toad only for a little while, and he threw it on the floor anyway. Perhaps babies soak up unhappiness like sponges; if so, this baby squeezed it out again in smiles. I know it sounds like window dressing and overly fond recollection, but I swear he never woke me with crying; he was always smiling in the morning. You could put him anywhere—in a crib, in a playpen, in a closet (no, I didn’t)—and he was happy.

  There was something about him. He was neither grasping nor greedy. It always surprised me that we could go into the local Toys “R” Us in search of a present for a friend’s birthday party, and Ken would help pick it out yet never ask for anything for himself. Where did he learn this graceful attitude with parents who were neither generous nor graceful?

  I remember many library trips and many books, from Gone Is Gone and The Wind in the Willows to Edward Gorey and the dreadful fates that overtook the Gashleycrumb Tinies. Ken loved that book and would insist that his grandmother read it to him. She thought it entirely too macabre for a child: “ ‘B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.’ How dreadful!” “There’s Neville,” I argued. “ ‘N is for Neville, who died of ennui.’ That’s not so bad.” My mother had come to stay with us for a little while to help take care of Ken while I worked.

  We lived in a trailer then, in Morgantown, West Virginia. That trailer. It was old, with two small bedrooms, a kitchen, a bath, and a little living room. I rented it from a nice couple who lived across the road. It had a porch where Ken liked to sit. I have a snapshot of him sitting with a big rabbit, a huge inflated thing that rose way above him.

  I worked as a secretary for a man who did some sort of consulting for the University of West Virginia. He informed me one day when the paychecks rolled in that his withholding tax was more than my salary. I thanked him for sharing.

  We were poor. I can’t remember if there was money for vodka or wine. I doubt it, yet I can’t imagine I wasn’t drinking then, having drunk my way through five years of marriage. Since I’d gotten out of the marriage, though, it’s possible that I didn’t need to be propping myself up so much with alcohol.

  Where we lived, there were few houses, so I don’t know where the children came from that Halloween. Ken loved the trick-or-treaters. Halloween is his birthday, and he thought they had all dressed up just for him. I didn’t tell him otherwise. It was pretty wonderful.

  I’m thinking of a poem I wrote back in the poetry days of Iowa City called “Haunted Autumn,” about a lot of little kids who go trick-or-treating. They tell the adults they know about a dark house with ghosts and witches, and they’re going there to disappear. Then the poem gets larded up with growing up but
not getting any wiser. It was published, but it wasn’t very good, except for the kids who were going to that house to disappear.

  I don’t understand some of my poetry. There are a lot of houses in my poems: I’m obsessed with houses. There are a lot of children: I’m obsessed with children. “In a dark wood, the dark leaves fall / Around the darkest house of all.” Apparently that is where the children are, but it also says that is where they want to be. “Only children / Carry within them the dead weight of houses.” That was another poem about children and houses; if I understood that poem, I think I would understand a lot.

  • • •

  We left the trailer and went back to Washington. Then came the apartment in Silver Spring, the little house in Greenbelt, the larger house in Takoma Park. And the years of the Washington Waldorf School, that divine adjunct to childhood on the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral. I remember so well the headmaster, Dr. Kaufmann. If ever a person was born to teach, it had to be him. (I’ll bet he had firsthand acquaintance with ghosts and witches and dark houses.)

  I’m glossing over the surrealism of adolescence. What I want to know is, what happened? What happened to the little boy of two or three, that he came to feel life was so uncertain and chancy, so dangerous, that he had to go looking for safety in booze? It must have been a lack, a lack of love, support, something. Did he fear he was falling and looked for a safety net?

  The story of parents and children is one of tragic implications. Its success depends on separation. It’s as if, between the shutting and opening of a door, or turning away and turning back, everything changes. You wonder about a child: Where did you go?

  What happened in these forty-odd years that wrought such volcanic changes? I don’t think it was pot and beer and gin, or not wholly. It’s something else, an inevitable downward spiral. The trouble is, we can’t keep our hands on anything; things change at the slightest touch, even wood, even stone. We can’t hold on to anything; it’s like running our hands through water.

  Yet there must be something. I wonder if Proust was right. I wonder if it’s memory.

  • • •

  Sometimes I think there’s a CEO somewhere in his office, successful and rich, kids grown up. His son is a surgeon, so much in demand that they barely have occasions to talk; his daughter is a painter of strange and unpredictable forms. His wife is still looking good because she can afford to. Trips to Europe, a ski chalet in the Swiss Alps; a summer house on Mount Desert Island. Dinner tonight with friends at the Four Seasons.

  This CEO sits after all the other working stiffs have gone, sits in the dim nickel-plated light in his office overlooking Central Park, or Boston Common, or the Golden Gate Bridge. He’s thinking about a trailer. He’d like to go back to it.

  A sentimental fantasy. A cliché. But I have to tell myself stories.

  I get up from my desk and walk aimlessly in air that looks almost dusty with the light of early October. I am no longer poor. Where I live now is a far cry from that trailer in Morgantown. Only it did have a porch, and I don’t have one here. And Ken sat on the porch with a big rabbit. And the trick-or-treaters came.

  It’s nearly Halloween now.

  I walk aimlessly, picking things up, putting them down, a small brass elephant, an ornament, a book . . .

  Like a mother who rises at night to seek a childhood picture.

  22

  MG

  A Lamp and a Menu

  I’m sitting in a cabin in the woods outside of Frostburg, Maryland, thinking about dinner at the lodge. A menu has been left in the cabin, and the food, I understand, is very good, haute cuisine, indeed, which one wouldn’t expect in the woods.

  It’s seven P.M., and at this time back in the day (as they say), I’d be working on my third martini (and that’s a conservative guess). Instead, I’m only thinking of a martini. What I notice most in my mind’s eye is the mist clinging to the glass like a rained-on window in which you might trace a heart.

  If I could manage to get this description precise enough, if I could cut with a scalpel’s precision, I swear I could drink the words straight up.

  But I’m not drinking. Right now I’m thinking of stealing that lamp on the table over there. It’s quite remarkable. The base is a wooden fish leaping from carved water. I thought the shade was marbled gold until I turned on the light and the whole panoramic fish scene sprang to life in silhouette. There is one fisherman with a net and another, farther around the shade, in a boat. Amid black pines, fish jump from painted water, black ducks move on the horizon, pigeons nosedive from the sepia sky or, as the incomparable Wallace Stevens put it, sink “downward to darkness, on extended wings.”

  If I could write a line like that, I would never, ever need to think about, much less drink, a martini.

  They were both fishermen, my father and my brother, my father dead long ago, my brother a few years, though now that seems long ago, too. Time has a way of thinning out, like water over rocks.

  My father had a cabin in the woods on an island in the Georgian Bay, the cabin reachable only by water. Although I wasn’t there when my father was alive, I did go there when my brother was. It would be hard to beat that scene: sitting around a fireplace, talking and drinking before a supper of freshly caught trout and fried onions and potatoes. The air was so clear, it had a weight to it. There are fishermen who go up there alone. For some, isolation is a thing they can drink in.

  I’m told that fishing requires patience. But everything requires patience—writing requires patience, standing in line at the supermarket requires it, waiting for the coffeemaker requires it. If we had the patience required of us, we’d be halfway to a peaceful life. Drinking, at least until the arc moves downward, gives the illusion of peace.

  This cabin I occupy for a few days has a porch where I sit, rocking and looking up at the windswept treetops, congratulating myself on getting up out of the heat of D.C. on a whim (since I usually have to plan out a trip to CVS before I make it), patting myself on the back for leaving behind computers and television. I have a cell phone that I don’t use often; I don’t like e-mail, so I don’t check it often. Basically, I live offline, but I look for distractions just like anybody.

  I’ve never been to the MacDowell Colony or Yaddo, those writers’ colonies that have proved a godsend for writers and artists who couldn’t otherwise find the time or place to work. Your breakfast and lunch are delivered, and except for joining your fellow writers and artists for dinner, you are left on your own.

  Here, at this lodge, the same thing: They bring your breakfast in a box and place it on the porch. They do lunch this way, too, if asked. Dinner has one going to the lodge a quarter mile or so down the dirt road. We could be a bunch of writers and artists gathering for a social evening and a meal after a day of isolation.

  When I’m at home, rarely does an entire uninterrupted day happen. All writers, if asked, would claim this is what they long for. Me, I don’t know. I have a suspicion I would be a total failure at living for a month or six weeks at a writers’ colony (where some writers stay, I think, as long as six months). I think to be successful in such a place must require a rigorous exercise of will.

  I like to think I want only uninterrupted pieces of time to write; after all, I define myself that way—writing. Then again, I could be a fraud. Maybe I don’t want that at all. Maybe I just want to shuffle ahead in bits and pieces, writing for a few minutes or hours. A blank page of time affects me, well, like a blank page. A threat. Do you think you can fill me up? it says. You?

  The threat was much worse when I was drinking. I kept stumbling over writer’s block. The inability to write for, say, fifteen whole minutes convinced me that I was washed up. I had absolutely no faith in my ability to pick myself up and go on.

  The cabin-in-the-woods illusion goes skipping right along with the cottage by the sea, or the small house “of clay and wattles made.” Such domains are for those souls who are just this side of living in hermitages and who don’t
need a Barnes & Noble on one side and a coffee shop on the other. I have always kidded myself about the cabin in the woods, when I wasn’t looking at real estate photos in Country Life of ruined castle keeps in Scotland. Like the good little writer I am, I see myself in a house overlooking miles of wheat fields, or in a bayou with the alligators breaking the surface, and me, writing, writing, writing uninterruptedly all day long. The stuff of nightmares.

  So I sit on the porch rocking, and looking at the treetops, and getting bored, and siding with Woody Allen: “Nature and I are two.”

  Inside, I’m stranded between a menu and a lamp. I’m thinking that this food deserves wine. Actually, I deserve wine, but I’ll hold the food responsible.

  A glass of wine. I stopped going to the clinic the first time after several months because I disliked my recovery group and its self-satisfied air. Within a couple of weeks of leaving, I had a glass of wine. I drank wine for a while, a few weeks or perhaps months, then, eventually and predictably, started in on the martinis again.

  I get up to turn the lamp off and on again, so the dark images appear as if by magic. The fish leap out of parchment water; the fishermen cast their lines.

  I wish they’d come back, my father and my brother, with their rods and reels.

  I’m either going to have a glass of wine or steal that lamp.

  Hello, my name is Martha, and I’m an alcoholic. Or a thief.

  23

  KG

  Anger Management

  One of the first things I heard when I got sober that I didn’t understand until later was “Alcoholics are people whose lives get worse after they stop drinking.”

  In my third week of sobriety, my neck suddenly froze. I couldn’t turn it to the left or right. I panicked and told a coworker that I was in pain. She directed me to Dr. John Sarno, an MD at New York University who had developed a theory and treatment for neck and back pain named tension myositis syndrome.