Long Past Stopping

by Oran Canfield

  “I’m sorry, Oran. I’m not saying this to be condescending or patronizing,” he continued. “I’ve been there, and I know how hard it is, but I just don’t think there’s anything we can do. If you can think of anything, I’m all ears.”

  I couldn’t think of anything. I had tried it all so many times that I figured the best thing I could do now was just try to accept that I was doomed to failure.

  “Thanks anyway,” I said, getting up to leave.

  “Sit down a minute,” he directed me. “I want you to call this woman, Dr. Mash, in Miami. She’s running a program out on a Caribbean island with an experimental hallucinogen called ibogaine. Her work appears to be having positive results.”

  He handed me a number copied out of his Rolodex.

  “Give her a call and find out when the next session is. In the meantime, try to take it easy on yourself and let us know if there’s anything we can do to help.”

  I gave the woman a call. Her secretary said they had a session coming up in three weeks and gave me a list of things I needed to do if I wanted to take part. First I had to convince my trust administrators to pay twelve thousand dollars for the treatment and fly me to the Caribbean so I could take this highly illegal drug. I also had to go through another physical and get my heart checked out because there had been a couple of deaths related to this drug. On the off chance that I could get all that shit together, I needed a passport. Last but not least, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get any of this done if I was dope sick. That’s what I told the rehab psychiatrist anyway, and he gave me a prescription for a month’s supply of methadone. I took it straight to the pharmacy, where my co-pay was a shocking eleven dollars. I’d been going about this whole thing wrong from the start.

  AS IF TO AFFIRM what a complete fuckup I was, I waited till the day before I was supposed to leave for the Caribbean to go to the passport office. I stood at the counter, stunned, as the passport clerk told me there was no way she could verify my information that quickly.

  “Listen, lady. I’m in a whole lot of trouble, and I need to get on that plane,” I said as calmly as I could.

  I had given them all the paperwork, which included a letter from Dr. Mash explaining that I was going to be a test subject in a drug rehabilitation experiment. Even without the paperwork, one look at me should have conveyed a lot. I was sweating profusely, smelled awful, and was back to my regular active-addiction weight of a hundred and twenty-five pounds.

  The clerk looked at me, then looked at the paperwork and said, “Come back tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. You should still be able to make your plane.”

  twenty-seven

  In which the boy sets out to become a man, but does a terrible job of it

  COLLEGE DIDN’T REALLY agree with me. I picked what was possibly the worst school at which to be a controversial artist. It was hard to get attention at the San Francisco Art Institute, without either threatening your own life or someone else’s.

  Even getting naked had lost its shock value and was considered a legitimate genre. I saw naked people yelling at their parents. Naked people rubbing themselves with meat. Naked people sewing their fingers together. Naked people laughing…crying…masturbating…giving birth to Hello Kitty dolls…Anything you could do while naked that hadn’t been done before. At first it made me uncomfortable, but when that wore off, I found myself annoyed at how predictable it all was.

  Because I had zero interest in getting naked or threatening people, I decided the next best thing might be to actually learn how to draw and paint. My technical skills were extremely limited, but when I asked for help, my teachers were hesitant to offer it.

  “Is there a trick to drawing hands I don’t know about?” I asked my drawing teacher while I struggled with a sketch of what appeared to be the offspring of a squid and a lobster claw, coming out of a shirt cuff.

  “There are techniques, but if I showed them to you, your hands would look like everyone else’s. Now, what makes your drawing so amazing is that I can guarantee you will never see another hand like that. I could show you how to draw a hand, but I think it would be more valuable to keep following your own path,” he said, moving on to the next student.

  Fucking lazy bastard, I thought to myself.

  With few exceptions, I encountered the same attitude among most of the teachers.

  “What I find most intriguing about these paintings is that none of the subjects are showing their hands,” my painting teacher said to me during a critique. “All of them are hiding them in their pockets, behind their back, or off the canvas, which raises an intriguing question. What are they trying to hide?”

  “That I can’t paint hands,” I answered.

  “Perfect. Does everyone see how Oran was able to use his limitations to make an otherwise uninteresting portrait a work of art?” she asked. As far as I could tell, the only thing they were teaching us was the art of the underhanded compliment.

  FOR THE FIRST couple of years, I lived in Berkeley with Eli and some other friends, and commuted to San Francisco at six in the morning to sweep up the school halls for ten dollars a day. At night I delivered pizza, or drove a limousine, often not making it back home till two or three to get a few hours of sleep, then waking up to do it again. Jack was helping me out with eight hundred bucks a month, but tired of the painting instructors, I had switched over to photography and film, which used up all of the money he sent me.

  What little free time I had between work and school was spent messing around on a drum set that one of Eli’s coworkers had donated to the house along with an electric bass. On the occasion that Eli and I were home at the same time, we would attempt to make something resembling music. Playing the drums was the only respite I got from the endless running back and forth between work and school.

  At school, I mostly kept to myself, talking only to Aaron and only if there wasn’t anyone else within earshot. I would have liked to make some new friends, but I had no idea how to go about it. I had been hanging out with the same group of people for so long that we almost had our own language.

  Aaron wasn’t very good at this business of meeting people either, but he was better than me. Through his efforts, we collectively made one new friend, Sam. According to Sam, who was from Baltimore, he had been a full-blown alcoholic since he was twelve. We met him when he was trying to cut down on his drinking by taking acid every day. He was basically an eighteen-year-old white version of Redd Foxx, and, like me, he didn’t need to use big words when critiquing art.

  “That shit is wack,” he’d say, looking at yet another self-portrait of some kid glamorously shooting heroin.

  “Yup, that shit sucks,” I agreed. Sam and I understood each other just fine without using didactic, juxtaposition, tension, balance, referential, color temperature…. Like Sam said, the shit was fucking wack.

  After getting into an irreparable argument with one of my roommates in Berkeley over my inability to do the dishes, Sam and I started living together in San Francisco. If Sam was Redd Foxx, then I was an eighteen-year-old Walter Matthau, and our apartment was like a spinoff show of The Odd Couple and Sanford and Son. Sam hung a couple of pieces of cardboard from the ceiling of the living room to give himself the feel of having some personal space, and I took the room in back with no windows.

  Living with Sam, who was far more of a mess than I ever was, turned me into more of the Jack Lemmon character. I was constantly nagging at Sam to do the dishes, clean his room, stop drinking so much, and eat something besides ramen and Cheetos. I’d never seen real alcoholism before, and I hadn’t read much into the fact that Sam had turned down three much nicer apartments because the corner stores had carded him.

  Partly to set an example for Sam, and partly because I was so broke I was eating oatmeal three times a day, I rarely drank. The limousine company I was working for was shut down by the city for operating illegally, and I was lucky I hadn’t been arrested myself. The boss rented out the cars for seventy dollars a night, and we would drive arou
nd the city trying to lure customers by offering them a bottle of wine, or by under-cutting the cabs. The penalty if caught was a two-thousand-dollar fine, and two months in jail. Eli found the job first and warned me of the possible consequences, but when I made three hundred and fifty bucks my first night on the job, I decided it was worth the risk. Unfortunately, that night had been a fluke, and afterward I rarely came away with more than forty or fifty dollars. When that ended, I was so exhausted from hustling all the time that I decided to stop working and went down to the welfare office and got on food stamps. To cut down on art supplies, I invested in a pair of bolt cutters and started breaking into the Fotomat Dumpsters, where I found far stranger pictures than I could have ever come up with on my own.

  At this point, Jack had just bought a three-million-dollar mansion. I took a perverse pride in the fact that I was now technically a welfare recipient, and I relished the irony that my dad’s books were not only on the bestseller list for almost two years running, but that they were in the self-help category.

  Chronic destitution didn’t agree with me, and I became a depressed hermit, spending days at a time in my windowless room. My only human interactions were nagging Sam to get his shit together.

  The hermit’s life came to an abrupt end when summer came and I was cut off from Jack’s money. Instead of looking for work, I usually let Eli do the job hunting and then I would use him as a reference. This time I followed him to a little building downtown where they handed me a walkie-talkie, a bright orange helmet, and a moped, and sent me around the city delivering packages. It was demeaning work since we got shit on by everyone, from the doormen to the mail clerks to our dispatchers, even the bike messengers treated us with disdain. The moped they assigned to me was so loud that it set off every car alarm I passed, and at least two times a week I would get pulled over and handed tickets for noise pollution.

  The bike messengers did seem a lot cooler than us, and after a few months I bought an old Schwinn cruiser, which wasn’t very functional as a means of taking packages around the city, but it was hipper than the moped. For the first six weeks I rode my bike nine hours a day, slept for twelve, and woke up so sore I could barely move. After getting through that, I found that I had more than enough energy to work, practice my drums afterward, and go out drinking till two in the morning, which I could now afford. I hadn’t done anything in the way of physical exercise since I was thirteen and was amazed at how much it helped my mood.

  Eli was now living in a gigantic loft space in the Mission District with a bunch of artists and musicians who didn’t mind if we played music there. We picked up where we had left off with our funk jams, and a couple of his roommates decided to join in. Before I had any business performing for an audience, these guys set up a show at a café and I found myself playing in front of a few hundred people. The show was much more fun than any art opening I had been to, and I met twice as many people as I had in the, by now, two years I’d attended art school.

  That band ended after only one more show, but Eli and I found two guitar players and started doing a weekly Sunday-afternoon gig at a bar called the Chameleon. The two other guys were virtuosos, and Eli was a quick learner, but I was out of my league and began losing interest in school, as my focus shifted to practicing drums. We went by a different band name every week until settling on Sparkle Cock. Our shows were always hit or miss, since the concept was that we didn’t write songs or rehearse. We also asked other musicians to sit in with us, including my mom, who had no idea what she was in for when she came to check us out. Mom, who had started playing piano again, was enrolled in classes at a community college in Oakland with Pharoah Sanders, who had played with John Coltrane back in the day.

  “You mean he’s teaching the class?” I asked her when she told me about it on the phone.

  “No. He’s a student. You’ve got to get down here, man. I mean, how often do you get to see your mom play with Pharoah Sanders?”

  When I went to her next class, I was surprised to see that the drummer was a kid named Tre Cool, whom I had gone to hippie camp with. He was now playing in stadiums with his band Green Day. It was pretty impressive watching my mom keep up with those guys, so I knew she wouldn’t have a problem keeping up with us.

  “Are you kidding? What do you expect me to do up there?” she asked when I told her she was going to join us for the second set.

  “You know. Do that Cecil Taylor shit. Go nuts,” I told her.

  “But I hate that stuff. Anyone can do it,” she responded.

  “Then do it,” I said, grabbing her by the hand and leading her up to the stage.

  Before we even had a chance to start, she began banging on the Chameleon’s decrepit, upright piano as hard as she could with her fists. When we joined in, she moved on to using her forearms and knees, and by the end of the set, she had climbed up on the piano and was jumping up and down on the keyboard.

  DEPENDING ON HOW one looked at it, I either had amazing or terrible luck with girls. Considering I never approached them and ran away whenever they tried to talk to me, it was something of a miracle that I got laid at all. Of course, it had only happened once in the three years since I’d been in high school. Just like the first time, the girl took all the initiative, and I had been drinking enough to go along with it. That ended after our second date, when she locked herself in my bathroom and was screaming at the top of her lungs that she was going to slit her wrists. I had just worked my first day as a bike messenger and, exhausted, kept falling asleep while we were messing around in my room. The next thing I knew, Sam was shaking me awake, and she was yelling and crying from the bathroom. We had moved from our basement apartment to a second-floor flat in the Mission. After failing to reason with her, I climbed out on the fire escape and scaled the side of the building to see if I needed to call 911, but she had apparently just done the whole thing to get my attention. If anything, that experience only made me more afraid of women, and I continued avoiding them for a while after that.

  There were, however, two girls I was able to talk to. Joan, whom I had been roommates with in Berkeley, was nonthreatening because she had a boyfriend. The other was Joan’s friend Jibz, the first girl I had ever had a crush on, when I was at summer camp. The first time I saw Jibz again I recognized her immediately. She looked almost exactly the same as she had when we were kids, except that she was two and a half feet taller. I had tagged along with Joan, who was going to meet her for coffee. I had barely managed to introduce myself when she said, “I remember you! You were that amazing juggler kid who was too cool to talk to anyone else.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Just seeing her again made me so anxious I couldn’t think straight, so I just nodded dumbly and asked her if she still kept in touch with any of our old camp mates. It was amazing to see how little I had changed since I was nine, at least when it came to interacting with girls. I was still attracted to the same one, and I was still hiding my nervousness by acting too cool and aloof to talk to her. My side of the conversation was so forced and awkward that I assumed she must have thought I was an idiot, and probably hated me.

  “Well. Hey, it’s good to run into you,” I said as we were leaving.

  “Yeah. It’s really great to see you again. We should hang out again soon,” she said.

  “Sure” was all I managed.

  Unfortunately, I was only able to get over my fear of talking to her after she started dating Eli, at which point she no longer seemed as scary. When she broke up with Eli a year or so later, I got nervous again, until she started seeing another guy. By that time I had convinced her she should go to the Art Institute, so we were hanging out almost every day. When she broke up with that boyfriend, I decided that for the first time in my life, I was going to take some initiative.

  I just didn’t know what taking initiative meant. I had been told as a kid that opening doors for women was sexist. That pulling out chairs, waiting for them to get out of elevators, and paying for dinner were all
sexist customs. From these lessons I inferred that asking a girl on a date or even having sexual thoughts was sexist, and I believed that if I so much as touched a girl, let alone leaned in for a kiss, she would produce a whistle out of nowhere and I would be branded as a predator for the rest of my life. It was a tricky situation, and the only option I could think of was to win her over with reason.

  “You know, we both have a similar sense of humor, and we’re interested in the same stuff,” I told her awkwardly after class one day. “And, well, I’ve been into you ever since I first met you, and just the fact that I’m still into you…well, it feels like it’s meant to be,” I continued before realizing that what I was saying was a thousand times creepier than simply asking her to go to the movies. “Uh, what I mean is that…after ten years, it’s amazing that we both ended up doing the same kinds of things, you know?”

  Remarkably, after all that, she agreed to give it a try. I was ecstatic. She was the one thing missing in my life, and now everything would be perfect. That was my thinking anyway. I didn’t realize that, without some kind of hopeless desperation over a girl, I had no idea who I was. And when I started dating Jibz, a central part of my identity just disappeared.

  By now, I had moved out of my apartment with Sam, and into a much nicer place down the street with a guy I knew from school, and his friend Suzy. Whenever Jibz came over to hang out, I found that I was just as nervous around her as I ever had been before, and I couldn’t come up with anything to talk about. Jibz seemed nervous, too, which was rare, and her visits were always extremely awkward until I pressed the play button on my VCR, giving us an hour and a half of relief.

  That didn’t stop me from being devastated when I didn’t hear from her for three days. God forbid I call her and possibly give the impression that I was obsessed. When I saw her walking down the street at two thirty in the morning while on my way home from a bar, I was instantly struck sober. I noticed an almost imperceptible pause when she saw me, like she’d been caught. I knew in that moment that it was over, that it probably had been for three days.