by Ken Grimes
Ask any poet.
27
MG
Reading Robert Parker
I’m reading Robert B. Parker’s latest book. His dialogue is a lesson in economy and precision. No sentence is left unsharpened.
Spenser, Parker’s favorite character, and a lady friend are sitting in a bar with a great view. She orders a lemon-drop martini. I don’t know what that is.
“Smooths out a day,” she says, taking a sip.
I do know what that is.
She drinks her lemon-drop martini, and Spenser drinks beer.
And I drink nothing.
I bought this book for somebody else, a big Spenser fan, and picked it up because I wanted to escape a Sunday sadness.
It’s not much of an escape, because I want to crawl into Robert B. Parker’s pages, into this lounge, and join Spenser and the woman sipping the lemon-drop martini.
It occurs to me that Robert Parker might have been a drinker, not necessarily of notable proportions, but a man who might have stopped drinking once or twice and then gone back to it. I wonder, Why can’t I do that? I’m old enough to be dead, so why am I not old enough to hang out in a cocktail lounge? Why can’t I join these people, or no people, in a bar and have a martini? Even a lemon-drop one, which sounds more fey than good, but who cares? It’s what the lemon drop is dropped in.
You think I’m going to come up with a really good reason for not joining Spenser and his friend? Sorry to disappoint, but I’m not. I don’t have a really good reason. That, you might think, is pretty unsettling, pretty lame, considering all the pages I’ve inked up with reasons not to drink.
I can’t come up with a better one at the moment other than that I don’t have any vodka in the house. But that’s no problem, is it, since a bottle of Grey Goose is as easily acquired in D.C. as a handgun.
It’s easy enough to pop out to the liquor store, easier still to walk into any of the thousand restaurants in revitalized Bethesda, plunk myself down, and have drinks before dinner (I think that’s what Spenser and the blonde are doing).
“A martini—wait, make that a double, on the rocks.” Hold the lemon drops.
Nearly every alcoholic who stops goes back to it at least once and probably several times. So why can’t I join Spenser? Why can’t I be part of this larger, looser, lusher life? Sit in a restaurant with a martini before dinner? Or join my friends down at Swill’s, or the neighbors at a Friday-evening cocktail party? Or the serene and padded lounge patronized by Spenser? Places where you can get down; you can unwind; you can be yourself, escape the feeling of exclusion and separateness.
Or can you?
I thought you could until I read an article in The New Yorker about what happens to the sense of exclusion that, sober, you feel so painfully. Drinking excludes you even more. You become less, not more, yourself; you become more, not less, isolated. The sense of dissolving boundaries is an illusion.
But I’m compelled to drink, so I construct a narrative to dress up the compulsion. The narrative spins out of the glass; the narrative is “connection.”
E. M. Forster said: “Only connect.” I find that writing will sometimes do it, give me that sense of connection with the world. Hauling a little kid out of a burning building might do it. Climbing the north face of the Eiger might do it. Meditation might do it. These things erase or at least soften the boundaries between us and the world outside.
I always thought taking a drink would do it.
That, though, is probably the illusion of all illusions. It’s also the only thing in the list above that requires no effort. None at all. Could that be a telling point when it comes to connecting?
I have a wardrobe of illusions. I’m sure, hanging in some closet, there is one that embraces British pubs. Pubs always seemed to me the quintessential drinking places. If you visit a particular pub most nights, you’ll see the same faces. There is a feeling of homeyness, and for good reason: Pubs are extensions of home.
Dr. Kolodner once said it was interesting (meaning suspicious) that I named my books after pubs. I said that I could never think up a title more interesting than a pub called The Man with a Load of Mischief or Help the Poor Struggler.
Ha ha. He didn’t say that, but it’s probably what he was thinking. After I stopped drinking, I found it awfully hard to go into pubs and sit with a glass of San Pellegrino where once I sat with a glass of Guinness.
Pubs, I said to Dr. Kolodner, are far more than places in which to drink. There’s atmosphere; there’s history . . .
Ha ha, he didn’t say.
But he was probably (ha ha) right: my fascination with pubs had to do with more than the names, or the pub’s place in the social scheme of British life. I liked pubs because I could drink in them. The mismatched tables and chairs, the accents of the voices, the stuff on the walls—old churches, old villages, old dogs—the drink in my hand.
The drink in my hand.
The rest of it was a romantic construct, essentially an illusion.
Why, then, can’t I join Spenser in a drink?
There is an answer both literal and metaphorical.
Because he isn’t there.
28
KG
The Child of the Writer’s Life
One of the most powerful memories I have is of my mother at her desk, typing furiously at eighty words a minute, while taking flight in a world of her own making. I can recall watching her drink tea while she read Henry James and Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and listening to her groan while grading her students’ papers. But it was looking at her writing that I remember most vividly. The smell of the fresh paper, the ink ribbons, her hair moving as her hands flew across the keys. It was hypnotic. I was there with her, but she was very far away, someplace else, where I couldn’t be.
Growing up with a writer, or any artist, is different. The passion she feels for her art creates a distance that often can’t be breached. My mother wasn’t rejecting me, though many times I couldn’t pierce the zone of impenetrability that surrounded her and her writing. I was amazed by how smart she was, and I desperately tried to keep up with her; I knew she wasn’t like the other moms in kitchens making dinner, or in parlors dusting furniture, or coming back from the store with a carload of groceries. My mother did all those things while keeping up a nonstop stream of commentary that made me constantly laugh out loud. She was much funnier than those other moms, and her moods were harder to read.
It was like a carousel spun out of control. She was trying to teach her underachieving college students while writing, shuttling me from one school to another, with the single parent’s constant financial pressure. I rode this carousel, uncertain what might make her angry or frustrated.
I had no brothers or sisters and saw my father sporadically, so my mother was all I had. My dependence on her increased when we moved from one house or state or country to another. I remember once in England, when I was ten, devising cunning tape-and-water-tray traps in front of doors to capture her because she spent so many hours writing and reading Jane Austen and Henry James.
My mother had friends but was a very private person, and we spent much of our time alone. I enjoyed being by myself sometimes (and still do), but as I grew older, I became outgoing and focused on being popular. I realize now that much of my self-worth was derived by what other kids (and, later, adults) thought of me.
After Christmas 1974, we moved from suburban Washington, D.C., to Denmead, a tiny village near Portsmouth in Hampshire, England. There wasn’t much to do in the village, and there was no one to play with. It was here, when I was ten, that I fell in love with books and used them to escape into a fantasy world. I read and reread Lewis Carroll, Greek mythology, and scores of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries.
We arrived after Christmas, and my mother decided I would finish fourth grade in Denmead. We walked into the headmaster’s office in the beginning of January, and I registered as a student. Why, halfway through the school year, they took a kid from Am
erica whose mother was renting a house in the village, I never could understand.
The school was an ordinary elementary school on the edge of our ordinary English village with its High Street, where I would buy comic books at the tobacconist. The architecture was post–World War II redbrick buildings, and the fields around the school were lush and green. With the cloudy skies and the chilly spring weather, Denmead was the epitome of Englishness.
There were about two hundred village kids who largely ignored my arrival. The teachers made no special effort for me. The greatest interest shown in me was one day the principal eyed me suspiciously and pulled me into his office, demanding that I stop a “funny walk” I was using in the hallways. I had no idea what he was talking about.
I dutifully went to class and did my work and tried my best to understand the metric system. I had to grit my teeth during sports when the football (soccer) coach kept referring to me as “Mr. Nixon” in front of the whole class, eliciting sniggers from the fourth-grade boys. The English think they’re funny, wry, witty, and like to “take the piss” out of people, particularly foreigners. What really bothered me was that during the daily football class, they didn’t try to teach us how to play through drills. The coach just assumed that by age ten, all of the kids knew the rules and knew how to play. Since I had never played football, they immediately put me in the goal, where I could do no damage. Rarely was a ball launched my way, and I quickly understood that I had been given the loser position. I would lean against the metal-frame goalpost and watch the other kids pass the ball in the middle of the field, far in the distance on the regulation-sized pitch.
One day when I came home from school, I told my mother how much I hated it there. As she drank her tea, I blurted out everything about the school that I didn’t like. There was nothing to be done—I had to finish up the fourth grade in England.
This was the beginning of a pattern that continues to this day. I would let things build and not talk at all about what was happening to me, hopeless that anything would change. Sometimes my unhappiness would spill out, but more often I kept it to myself. A hallmark of alcoholism is the refusal to share your real feelings of loneliness with anyone.
The situation at school did not improve. The English are not known for their warmth or kindness to strangers, and most of the kids stared at me and kept their distance. I made a few friends. I read and stared at my mother’s back as she attacked her typewriter and finished her first novel.
My mother had switched from writing poetry to short stories and then novels. I didn’t understand why she made me switch, but I really enjoyed her first novel. Perhaps this was because I could understand it; her poetry was too hard for me. I could appreciate the adventures of her character Leonard, an English teacher who hooks up with a bunch of misfits and turns thief. It was something I could sink my teeth into.
Our cottage was a classic two-bedroom with a thatched roof and plaster walls. In my tiny bedroom, where the typewriter was set up, my mother would loudly bang out words at an exhilarating pace, then hand the pages to me to read as I sat behind her.
How could my mom be here in front of me but in a world of her imagination? How could she come up with all of these characters? How could she be so funny? She seemed happy when she was writing, happier than when she stepped away from the typewriter and back to the drudgery of washing clothes, making dinner, and being responsible for me with no help. How could I ever measure up to her talent and patience and perseverance? And how could I ever stand to be alone long enough to create a work of fiction?
The answer is, I couldn’t.
29
MG
Things Lurk
I think people enjoy believing writers are alcoholics; it makes the whole idea of writing for a living even edgier, more daring, and hence, more romantic.
I could almost say I drank the way I wrote: determinedly. Persistently. I was a maintenance drinker. Nothing flashy, nothing flamboyant. (I have a suspicion that Hemingway and Fitzgerald were not maintenance drinkers.)
When I started in publishing, it felt like a cottage industry; there was a smallness to it, a sense of fraternity, of family. It was spoken of as a gentlemen’s industry. I’m sure there are still gentlemen, and there’s still something personal about it, but that’s hard to find under the weight of German, Dutch, and French conglomerates, huge chain bookstores, and Amazon (what a fitting name).
I taught in college and wrote at the same time. That was in the late 1970s, when people at publishing houses read unsolicited manuscripts (those unrepresented by an agent). It was also a time when the terms “memoir” and “debut novel” were missing from the lexicon (a blessing, but there went half the playing field).
I sent my first manuscript to one publisher at a time and waited until it came back (with its rejection slip) before sending it to another. On and on. What I remember most was my persistence. Dogged determination. Did I know the book would be published? Of course not. Why would I need to be doggedly determined if I knew that?
The trouble is, no matter what you endeavor to do, what plan you undertake, down that road you’re going, things lurk: to distract you, to scare you, to convince you that you’re useless or at best on the wrong road—get off!
Things always lurk. Behind the tree, squatting in the bushes, on the edge of the field or the lake.
If writing is the road you want to go, you need only two things: persistence and the desire to tell a story. You don’t have to believe you’re talented or even very smart. You don’t have to think you’re a good person or devoted to anything. You don’t have to be anything but conscious and determined.
Right here, as I’m concentrating hard, three lawn mowers have started up. It sounds like a bullet train is bearing down, and I shoot out of my chair, blood in my eye. I’m going to kill Roberto, the gardener who’s popped up from the bushes.
You can say, Oh, poor you; I wish I had a big enough lot to need three lawn mowers. Now, in addition to the lost concentration, I’m feeling guilty because I have a huge lot. I am stopped cold by this, and now I’ll have to rev myself up all over again to get the concentration back, to get to that point on the road where I can write.
Don’t think, when this happens, that you can complain to others about the interruption, because they won’t know what you’re talking about. (After all, it didn’t do me any good to complain to you, did it?) If you think life is set against you, that it’s a giant computer screen with stuff you don’t want to see popping up all over, competing for your attention—you’re absolutely right.
Here is where the fabled cabin in the woods looks grand. It makes a drink look grand, too. (Who am I kidding? Anything could make a drink look grand.) There will always be an excuse for not writing, just as there will always be an excuse for drinking. I can’t write until I can get away to that cabin in the woods, that shack by the sea, that retreat, that sanctuary. that escape from distraction . . .
Here comes Max in his monster suit. Remember Max? He got put to bed early for misbehaving. After a while, his mom relents and brings him a steaming bowl of soup.
Max is not interested in soup. He wants control over everything, like a king. Max cannot control his mom, so he takes himself off to the land of the Wild Things. Hideous (sort of) monsters. Max, who has his monster suit on, becomes one of them and controls them. They have a great time together, Max and the monsters. They want him to stay forever, but Max thinks it’s time for him to be heading home.
Max conjures all of this up within a few minutes; you know it’s only minutes, because when he returns home and to bed, his soup is still hot.
Max did all that in minutes.
You can’t seem to get down a sentence? Yes, things lurk, like: I don’t have enough talent for this . . . Spelling, my spelling has always been terrible . . . Time for dinner; I haven’t cooked it . . . Who am I kidding, thinking I can write a book? . . . There go the lawn mowers again . . . I need a drink, boy, but do I ever need a drink! . . .
How do you get an agent? . . . Maybe if I had an agent . . . The kids are fighting . . . How am I supposed to concentrate with those damned lawn mowers going? It’s impossible to write around here! I need to get off somewhere; I need a cabin in the woods . . .
There will always be monsters.
You be Max.
30
MG
Idiot’s Delite
How many drunks does it take to change the bulb in your ceiling fixture?” asks my witty building manager on Capitol Hill.
“I don’t know,” I unwittily say. “How many?”
“Depends how many could balance on the chair with you.”
(Very funny, Chris.) “Did the people downstairs say something?” I’m a bit anxious about this.
Chris looks at the ceiling. “Not much. Just that they thought a big fight was going on. Things crashing, shouts. That kinda thing.” Big crocodile smile.
“Well, yes, I guess the chair did tip over. I’d hardly describe it like they did.”
“So you were changing the lightbulb.”
“Sure. It burned out when I was fixing dinner.”
“At three A.M.”
“Well, I tend to eat late.”
“Next time invite me. I’m taller. That way, it’d only take one drunk to change the lightbulb.”
• • •
This little tableau suggested itself because I was thinking over the several times I’d made the statement in and out of clinic meetings that I couldn’t remember doing anything drunk-y. I never had blackouts, never forgot anything that happened the night before, never said things that made me cringe in the morning. Rarely had hangovers.
Ah, then the routine with the lightbulb at three A.M. came back to me like a bit of Proust’s involuntary memory. That memory accomplished, I dredged around for some more drunken moments. Perhaps there were other curious incidents like the bulb in the nighttime.
