It’s the first time I’ve worn track spikes since Pac-10 Championships, since before my injury and the trip to the treatment facility in Arizona, since the man in the blue shirt, the ocean, the letter.
Something is off. I feel it as I run around the pink oval in the bright sun, in front of the line of black-robed students, beneath the crowd of family and well-wishers. I feel hollow. Empty. Like I’ve buried something. Like that’s what I was supposed to learn: take all that shame and lock it away in a room. Track it down and remove any remnants of it from my speech, from any accounting of my life to others. Curate it like the scene at the front of campus.
There is a mask to wear, the all-American white smile and all-American white face in the Stanford track T-shirt sprinting to accept his honors degree. And the plan is to just hold that mask in place for as long as possible.
Sometimes on quiet evenings I am stalked by the feeling that I can never be whole. I can never be honest about myself. I’m preyed upon by the sense that what is real about me is wretched or broken. So I try not to invite the quiet in. I try to keep things loud, to fake it: the smile, the mask, the facade, my own version of the Dream that brought me here, an eye on the past and an eye on the future—smiling, healthy, radiating confidence, baffled and running scared.
CHAPTER 37
THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
Four years later I am driving up a dusty dirt road in an old white sedan packed with my few possessions, clothing, a wrought-iron desk lamp, my college diploma, an old hard drive covered in stickers, a photo album and twenty-five books from the Santa Monica Public Library. Buzzing electric towers stand guard over the valley around me like steel giants guarding a secret. They look down on the fields and ranches in the high desert fifty miles north of Los Angeles. All around me is scrub brush and dust, long chain-link fences and horse barns, abandoned cars sitting in fields of tall grass, rolling brown hills that demarcate a jagged horizon beyond which sits the largest desert in the Western Hemisphere. It’s a good place to hide.
My new home is a double-wide trailer on the edge of a horse pasture at the back of my aunt Jeannie’s ranch. There is an ever-present howl of wind, the occasional yip of a coyote, the rattle of snakes, the buzzing of wasps, fire ants, tarantulas, scorpions, the din of a place empty and wild.
I’ve come here because I didn’t know where else to go, because working square jobs first as a teacher and then as a director of nonprofit programs had become unbearable, because I hated it and found that the mask I had so meticulously crafted in college was not enough, was nowhere near enough. In short, my plan didn’t work.
Aunt Jeannie walks up the hill to greet me, a smile on her rosy cheeks as she throws her arms around me in her plush fleece jacket. “Mickey! I’m so glad you made it.” We’ve agreed that for room and board I will shovel horse manure and feed the horses twice a day. She’s shrunk since she got sick from the diet pills she took. She’d put on weight after getting injured in the line of duty and in order to lose the weight, she tried pills which gave her pulmonary hypertension. It’s eaten away at her energy, at her body, leaving her thin and frail. But there is still a toughness about her, a rugged warmth as she hugs me close, fiercely protective, fiercely committed to beating her illness at all costs. She surveys the valley and the tiny trailer. “It’s not much, but it’s cozy. There’s a heater and a swamp cooler and plenty of water from the well. Are you sure you don’t want to borrow a TV or something? Aren’t you going to get lonely?” She opens the rickety wooden add-on porch door and we walk into a small anteroom in which heavy jackets hang on hooks over mud-caked boots. We kick the mud off our shoes and walk into a room with a kitchenette and a couch, faux-wood paneling and a small bedroom beyond the paper-thin walls. “Welcome to your new home.” She beams at me. “We’re so glad to have you here, but are you sure this is what you want?”
“I think so.”
“Well, okay then. You can always come visit us down at the house if you get lonely sitting up here with all these books.” She nods at the sedan packed to the roof outside the front window.
I’m here to write a novel. At least that’s what I told everyone, that I’m sick of working, sick of trying to make myself capable of being a cog in a machine, so I’m going to the wilderness to write a science fiction novel about a world in which human beings can buy and sell sleep. The economy that results has people losing years of their lives (by sleeping for money). It feels like an appropriate metaphor for the dread I felt working every day, like I was watching my life slip away silently.
But there’s something else. A fear. A new and alarming sense that after a string of failed relationships I may be different somehow, that I can’t do something those around me can, and I know, though I don’t say it, coming to this trailer is a kind of retreat.
I checked the books out in a flurry one afternoon, searching for the titles and authors that I had always wanted to read: Philip Roth, Nabokov, Alice Munro, Kafka and Tolstoy, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Camus. In college, I never read these books, even though I always knew I wanted to become a writer. Somehow reading these books felt like cheating, like I needed to see the world through my own eyes first.
But now, after trying to work, first as a high school English teacher, then as a program director at a YMCA near South Central L.A., after all the restlessness I felt having to go to one place every day, the sense that my time was taken from me, I just want to live in these books like paper houses and learn whatever it is they have to teach me.
There were two girlfriends. Both named Naomi. I dated one right after the other with a three-week gap in between. Despite sharing a name, they couldn’t have been more different. One was a gawky, intellectual, possessive only child with a razor wit, the other a small, artistic, warm, silly, sweet, compassionate younger sister of five older brothers. One was two years older than me, the other three years younger. One was determined to make something of her career and her Columbia education; the other was content to dance around her tiny apartment listening to Modest Mouse while she painted. They became known by Drew and other friends as “the Naomis.” Or sometimes as Naomi 1.0 and Naomi 2.0.
Naomi 1.0 and I had a conversation that began one night at a conference for nonprofit professionals and lasted a year and a half.
Naomi 2.0 and I went camping and hiking, dancing and drinking instead. We stayed up late watching bad reality television. Despite their differences, both relationships ended the same way, with tears and frustration as I left them, then returned, left, then returned, again and again and again, terrified of commitment but afraid of being alone.
In both relationships, every time things seemed to be getting serious, if there was a particularly good trip or a weekend visit with friends, I would find myself scheming to find a way out, worried that the relationship would trap me. There was a sudden palpable sense that I needed to break free, to end things. And so I did. I cataloged reasons and made accusations and found a way out. I would then stay in that state of free fall, feeling numb, for weeks, until suddenly, just as I did with Laura in high school, the truth of her—the tenderness, the shared experiences, the warmth of our friendship—would suddenly come rushing back to me like a wave that toppled me over and I’d crawl back begging for forgiveness.
I knew it was what Anne, my Stanford TA, called an attachment disorder, that my early experience as a kind of orphan kept me in a perpetual state of unease about becoming close to someone. I knew I seemed crazy to them at times. Flighty. Confusing. Dramatic. I seemed that way to myself. It was more like a reflex than a decision, a strange one for someone so constantly accused of being a “serial monogamist.”
The fear filled my senses, replaced my entire emotional world with a new one in which all I could feel was a suffocation, a feeling like being trapped under glass. The minute I was free, a new kind of panic would set in, the age-old fear of abandonment. Except it wasn’t the fear of being a single adult man in a dating world. It was the fear of a child
left alone. Even then I knew it was out of place, inappropriate, amplified to an extreme that didn’t match the ending of an adult relationship.
So it was confusing to live between these two extremes: fearing closeness, then obsessively needing the comfort it provided, to be forever like a Ping-Pong ball going back and forth between the two.
It’s an odd feeling to be so bewildered by one’s own actions, to look in the mirror and see the face of a stranger.
I watched with increasing alarm as friends got engaged, some married, others comfortably coupled off without going through the wild histrionics I put my relationships through. I didn’t know exactly what was happening. Only that I was different, that I couldn’t do something others could. Something vital.
It was an unsettling thought, that sense that here was something else wrong with me. And so it became important to hide it, which I was used to doing anyway. To wave a white flag and retreat. To come to a place where less was expected of me. To come here to this trailer at the edge of civilization. To simply give up on the whole thing.
There will be no white wedding. There will be no “nice girl but we’re taking it slow, you’ll like her when you meet her.” No picket fence and kids and shared jokes under covers on quiet Sunday mornings. It’s just not for me. I’ll become something else instead. Something daring and romantic. Someone who takes all this pain and anguish and tries to create something useful with it, something beautiful if I can. An artist.
I had some short stories I’d started that were more like a series of halfhearted gestures, sketches of scenes or characters that began and went nowhere. I had hundreds of songs no one had ever heard and a lump in my throat when I thought about how badly I wanted to sing them for someone, to just be out at night with a microphone and an audience. If only I had a voice. If only I knew how. How does one even begin to imagine such a thing? Do these people even exist in the real world? It’s like deciding to become a mermaid.
Chuck Dederich, the Old Man, the founder of Synanon, once famously said, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” That might have been the one thing he got right. The future is a blank canvas if you just decide to let it be one.
Dad was more blunt about it when I told him about my decision. “Makes sense to me,” he said. “Situations get too difficult sometimes and so it’s better to just move on down the road. See what’s down there, because whatever it is, it’s got to be better than what you’re living with.”
That was my reasoning. Life isn’t working out? Okay. Pack the car with as many books as you can carry, bring a guitar and an old keyboard, fill your empty pages with lyrics and stories. Read the books, the ones you always wondered about. Swallow your pride and because you can’t do anything else, hold a job or maintain a relationship with another human being, move to a tiny trailer at the edge of the world and just get on with it. Write.
* * *
IT’S LONELY AT night in a trailer on the edge of a canyon listening to a pack of coyotes howl and yip at the moon. I have no cell reception, no phone, no television, nothing but the books and my empty screen, the cursor blinking at me like some kind of challenge. There’s nothing to do but read and smoke, anxiously pluck out some writing five hours a day, then sing songs to the nervous horses in the pasture next to the trailer. To shovel horse shit twice a day, five hours a day, four hours a night.
In between writing binges and songwriting sessions, when I’m driven mad by the loneliness and isolation, when I need to hear a voice or do something besides stare at a computer screen or scribble lyrics in some dog-eared notebook, I go down to the city to visit my brother. He lives alone now in a small apartment near the beach in Playa del Rey. After Tiffany left, he and his son moved from Salem back to Los Angeles to be closer to Dad and Bonnie. Fatherhood turned out to be too much for him to take: he was just too young, too wild, too much the Dope Fiend he was born to be. Mom offered to take his son for a few months, just to let Tony “catch his breath.” It was supposed to be a short visit. But a few months became a year, a year became a few years, and eventually it became a permanent living arrangement.
Mom has a new husband now; though they aren’t married yet, that’s how I always think of him. He’s a tall, bald, goofy black man named Darwin whom she met through her new church in Tucson. He has deep-set eyes and a slight slouch to his walk. I like him. It’s hard not to like him when I go to visit them so I can take Tony’s son camping. Darwin is odd but kind, singing to himself as he slowly cooks dinner, tending to various home-improvement tasks around the house in the warm, slow, steady way of his. He tells old stories about his time as a civil rights activist and he seems like a gentle soul. He makes corny dad jokes with his son, who also lives with them, a sweet kid in rainbow Converse who likes Weird Al and taking apart old radios. He’s the same age as Tony’s son, which makes them something like brothers. They don’t get along, except when they do, also like brothers.
It’s easy to be an uncle, to show up with a baseball glove or a mix CD, to unpack it and ask Tony’s son about fourth grade. I visit three or four times a year and we hike the local trails or sit and plan for a camping trip, going over lists of gear and cold-weather clothing, keeping things simple, instructional, tactile. He needs so many things I have, has so many questions I can answer. I don’t try to be his dad. I can’t be his dad. I know that. I just want to take him fishing or hiking, to ride roller coasters with him, to let him know I love him but also that I like him. I don’t know why that seems so important.
He reminds me so much of Tony, the same guarded blue eyes, the same blond hair, the same attachment to his possessions, his pocketknife and compass, his markers and paper, as if they are guardians or friends, companions in a life spent in between so many different worlds.
He asks me about his dad sometimes, on long car trips to the Grand Canyon or Yosemite. He never speaks to him anymore, so I can feel him searching my face for answers I don’t have as I try to concentrate on the highway. He wants to know little things, like did he play baseball or does he like the same music as me? Does he have big feet? Is he left-handed? What is his favorite food? He doesn’t know his mother, who disappeared years ago, and I know the questions are all really one question: Why? Why did they let me go? Why am I alone here? Did I do something wrong?
I know this question well.
I don’t know how to answer him. I feel protective of Tony and protective of his son. How do I tell him that his father is a good person but he’s sick? It’s a family disease, after all.
So instead we hike and cook and pitch tents and listen to the Cure and Modest Mouse on long car trips through the mountains. We walk through the rain in the White Mountains in northern Arizona and camp in the red dirt in Bryce Canyon, throwing a rope over a branch to make a bear hang above our makeshift campsite. We stand in line for the roller coasters at Magic Mountain or Disneyland, we toast our slushees and devour junk food at lunch. We run through the waves on the shore during long beach days, letting the cold salt water soak our shoes, and when it’s time to leave, when I give him a hug to say goodbye, I feel the sense like a string being pulled to a breaking point. I see the sad, quizzical expression on his face as I pack my things to head back to my trailer at the edge of the world. I know we are supposed to stick together, we children of the universe.
It breaks my heart to see Tony’s son being treated the way we were treated as kids, like his feelings don’t matter. He seems ignored, almost captive. At one point, after listening to Mom berate him coldly for wanting a snack, I call Bonnie in a panic: “He’s living there like some kind of stranger. There’s no love in this house. I’m so sad for him.” It seems like he isn’t really part of a family so much as a person who is merely tolerated, like there is no affection for him, no joy taken in him.
I hardly spoke to Mom in the years between the college letter and the trips to see Tony’s son. It was easier that way. Words are not easy. I’m still uncomfortable in her presence. I still have the ever-present
feeling that my space is being invaded, my person discounted. Like at my college graduation, we make small talk and I try to keep the conversation light. But it inevitably turns serious in the desert home she built with the money Grandma and Grandpa left her when they died. We discuss trips to the beach in Oregon and AA campouts. It’s easier to pretend that’s all it was. She has an explanation for everything, what couldn’t be helped, what unfairness befell her, a way of bringing the conversation back to all the ways she is a victim, always a victim.
When the subject turns to Doug, she tells me it’s my fault he left. I remind her he had a mistress and I was eleven when I moved, that he hit me and left her four times before they got married. This registers momentarily. I can see it like a puzzle on her face, like she’s trying to solve a complex math problem in her head. But she soon forgets and returns to her talking points. It’s like running through cobwebs, this endless web of illusions and half-truths. She still thinks I owe her something for leaving. It feels crazy and I am angry with myself for trying to explain madness to madness.
I brought my guitar for the camping trip and decide to play her a song to lighten the mood. I sing a song I wrote based on a short story by Irwin Shaw called “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” She listens politely and when it’s over tells me, “Hmm. Well. That is one way to play music. It’s not exactly folk music. It doesn’t really have a message. Someday you might learn to write songs with a message.” I tell her it’s not really supposed to have one, at least not in any moralizing way. It’s based on a piece of literature, so writing it felt like writing a short story, like I’m trying to capture the contradictions in the story. “Maybe you should just stick to writing!” She laughs in that mocking way of hers, full throated, her head tilted back to reveal her yellowing teeth and metal crowns.
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