Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails

by Anthony Swofford

  I left the RV and went to the hotel pool. By now it must have been over 110 degrees out. There were no vehicles other than my father’s RV in the parking lot, and I assumed no employees would leave the air-conditioned comfort of the hotel. I took off my clothes and stepped into the pool. I floated belly-up for as long as I could take the sun burning my body.

  I thought, So that’s it? I have assumed for all these years that my father wanted me to fail, but in fact he did not want me to fail? And so now I have failed, in order to give him what he wanted, but it is not what he wanted?

  From the pool I watched my father moving around in his RV. He lived alone in Fairfield and he mostly traveled alone in the RV. I knew that this solitary life he had created for himself fit in well with his fantasies of being a Clint Eastwood character from a western—the epic wanderer, the stoic, the man who lives on canned beans and shoe leather and the hard-bought realities of the road. But wouldn’t my father have been happier if he were in love with a woman and living in a clean and tidy house? I loved my father, and I understood the allure of this iconic western fantasy, but the possibility that I might end up like my father—old, alone, and dying—scared the shit out of me as I floated naked on my back in the hotel pool west of Houston.

  It frightened me so intensely that back in the RV I told my father that I needed to return to New York ASAP to take care of some things. We made it to Lockhart that afternoon and ate BBQ at Kreuz Market. We made it into Austin and drank a few beers at a bar and my father glared with passion at the college girls who served us. So did I. In the morning I flew home.

  11

  The Girl from Tarawa Terrace II

  I don’t remember much of August. Friends in the city threw a party for my fortieth birthday.

  And then it was September. I counted my money. I thought of moving to Los Angeles, where a friend was shooting a movie, or to Phnom Penh, where from god knew I’d never return.

  I DIDN’T WANT to go to the reading in Rhinecliff. I wanted to spend my Sunday afternoon watching NFL football in Phoenicia with construction workers and bikers. But a good friend of mine was reading from some anthology or another, and my landlords, old-time country musicians, happened to be the band for the occasion, and I lived upstate and I had no social life other than driving down to Phoenicia and watching NFL football with construction workers and bikers and eating a burger and drinking a few beers. In other words, I needed to get out.

  I drove across the river to Rhinecliff from Mount Tremper. I stopped somewhere along the way and checked the score. The Jets were up. I arrived early for the reading.

  I drank a few glasses of cheap white wine and ran into Betsy, an acquaintance from the city. She was cute, and used to work for a nonprofit but had recently moved upstate to find meaning or find a project, or find a man, who knew.

  She answered me the same way I answered people who asked me why I’d moved upstate, evasively and with a bit of cunning: I needed a change; it’s just for the summer; I love the Catskills, it was either the Hudson or the Amazon.

  For me this would have been the only true answer: After seven years of a completely deviant and ridiculously expensive life in Manhattan I ran out of money and nerves, at about the same moment. I didn’t have the balls to move to Cambodia or Ecuador so I took the baby step up the Hudson, incubator for lost city souls. When I figure out what I want to do with my life, I will move somewhere else. The only thing I really want to do with my life is write books and fall in love with a talented and beautiful woman, but how realistic is that? And I want to hold on to her, and make a life with her, have a family. This is no midlife crisis: I have already plowed through women and wrecked a sports car. This is the reverse midlife crisis: I want a wife and a family and a station wagon.

  When Betsy asked me why I had moved up from the city, I said: I needed a change; it’s just for the summer; I love the Catskills, it was either the Hudson or the Mekong; I feel a strong magnetic pull from these mountains.

  She didn’t believe any of it and that was the point.

  After the reading we exchanged numbers and said goodbye and I assumed I’d never see her again, or I’d see her in another five years at a horrible party in the city.

  And then a week later she called and said, “You should meet my friend and me for dinner tonight. She’s up from Brooklyn. I think you will like her.”

  We met at the cheap Mexican place in Tivoli. I hadn’t been since my unfortunate evening involving the police nearly four years earlier. Just as then, the chicken something I ordered was so-so and the margarita was weak, but when I first met Christa I knew that she would be in my life for a long time, perhaps forever.

  She wore a short skirt and a flirty, blowsy top and cowboy boots. Here at the end of summer she was dark but I could tell that in winter her skin would turn a luxurious white. She said funny, unflattering things about hippies and monks and yoga masters, and every time she had a chance she showed off her legs or her brilliant smile. Occasionally she played with her dark hair.

  She’d gone to Bard in the late nineties and one semester she’d worked at this Mexican restaurant. When she said this I must have stared at her both stupidly and longingly: after a decade of dating and once marrying and twice engaging and unengaging myself to women who were doctors or lawyers or the daughters of doctors or lawyers or academics or wealthy bankers I’d decided earlier in the summer that the next woman I was with would need to have been a waitress at some point in her life, not for “fun and experience” but in order to make the rent, or if she hadn’t been a waitress her mother needed to have been one in order to feed and clothe her children.

  Not only had Christa been a waitress at this Mexican restaurant, her mother had once been a waitress at the Officers’ Club on Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune. And as a child she’d lived on Camp Lejeune, in base housing in a development called Tarawa Terrace II. Tarawa was the bloodiest battle of World War II. Upon my joining the Marine Corps twenty-two years earlier this fact had been drilled into my head. Some nights I still had nightmares wherein a drill instructor yelled to a room of recruits, Tarawa! And the recruits, me included, standing and straining in some stress position or another involving a rifle and a heavy rucksack, replied, Sir! Tarawa, bloodiest battle of World War Two, sir!

  This smart and engaging and beautiful woman had heard of Tarawa, a small and now inconsequential island in the Pacific that in my mind was still soaked with the sanctified blood of marines. Most beautiful women from New York City would have guessed that Tarawa was a kind of chutney or a new method for removing pubic hair.

  She’d been student council president at her school in Tarawa Terrace II in Camp Lejeune, and each morning she and the secretary were responsible for running the US and Marine Corps flags up the flagpole and then announcing over the PA system the names of the children bound for detention that afternoon.

  She hinted at an adult darkness: a car wreck or two, some off-prescription dabbling in psychotropics, a failed early marriage that had infidelity written all over it, a recently terminated volatile relationship with a Viagra-popping old man.

  But she’d spent this summer alone in the woods writing a book and taking pictures and meditating at a Zen monastery that happened to be on my road in Mount Tremper: the days of wild-haired glory and abandon were over, it was time for her to settle down, or so she said.

  She asked me why all my most important belongings, my library and my kitchen, were in storage in Brooklyn, and why I lived alone in a cabin in the woods. I answered stoically, I looked away, I said I’d had work to do, that Manhattan and its people had begun to bore and depress me: the bubble city had become difficult to breathe in.

  She knew that what I meant was: That place nearly killed me; it was a children’s zoo and play park and I had had many a turn on all the rides, and there was no longer any joy in standing in line with a bunch of morons waiting to spend many hundreds of dollars on dinner and oblivion every night of the week. What I was saying was: I need t
o build a nest and I need a lover who won’t drive me crazy.

  Betsy sat at the table with us but she wasn’t really there, or rather, Christa and I paid her no mind: she was the fairy dust that had brought us together but otherwise totally irrelevant.

  We talked about Christa’s photography and the novel I was working on, and we talked about the weather, and the best swimming holes in the Catskills, and the best pancakes, and we talked about traveling to foreign countries, and slow-cooking short ribs in red wine and braising leeks and preparing salmon poached in champagne, but really, what we were asking each other was: Are you possibly the one or is this all another hoax?

  Betsy ended the dinner abruptly and awkwardly with an urgent outburst about needing to feed her cat. I wanted to ask Christa if she would travel across the river and have a drink with me and then stay awhile. But of course I didn’t. We hugged and said goodbye.

  There are many moments that I could point to in our quick courtship and say, That is when I knew she was good. But the first moment occurred when we said goodbye that night on the sidewalk in Tivoli: she nearly jumped as she hugged me, and she wrapped her arms all the way around my neck and she hung from me for the briefest moment; she hung from me and we floated together in space; with her body she said, I already trust you, please do not injure my heart, and she squeezed me deep and hard with her thin little bird arms and I knew she was good.

  On my drive home I realized that I hadn’t even asked for her last name.

  IT HAPPENS A few times in a man’s life that as soon as he meets a woman and shakes her hand an electric current rushes through his body that sends the signal: someday soon, possibly even within hours, you will sleep with this woman. If I were to be honest I would say that that electrical current had coursed through my body about a dozen times in my life, but it had always settled in my crotch and stayed there. It is, indeed, an enjoyable sensation, full of the promise and potential of one’s manhood and the easy procurement of sex with attractive women. I have never ingested a drug that produced anything nearly as satisfying.

  But with Christa the sensation bounced around my head for a few hours, and then a few days: I saw her visiting me in my cabin; I saw us on the rocks at the Big Blue swimming hole; I saw us eating a meal I’d prepared, perhaps those slow-cooked short ribs with a Volnay to wash it all down. Yes, I saw sex, I saw us giving each other our bodies without remorse or keeping score.

  This was a crazy, sexy, perhaps irresponsible waking dream: I began to see her next to me in our family car, and the blurry outline of a child in the backseat and then another. And I saw sports games and badly performed children’s plays and hiking in the woods, and family dinners, holidays, the wonder.

  We did not waste any time falling in love. We had one date in the city and one in the country, and then we were never apart. We walked into each other so completely it was as if we’d known each other for decades. And really, we had. I knew that if I was ever going to be in a relationship that lasted it would have to be with a woman who didn’t care about my past, who wouldn’t ask me how many women I’d slept with, and who didn’t care because she was so totally confident in herself and the love she was capable of giving and receiving.

  The woman would also have to be otherworldly talented. I’d tried dating a few bad artists and dilettantes and it was worse than being with a woman who was bad in bed.

  By November we were engaged and living between her Fort Greene apartment and Mount Tremper.

  I guess word spread. The Rich Girl/BoHo Artist texted me: I hear you are engaged! You move fast! I never responded.

  The Hedge-Funder texted me: You ruined my life! I never responded.

  The Physician e-mailed me: Anthony, please can we have dinner? I responded: I’m getting married. I never heard back.

  We decided to get married at City Hall when my friend Oren and her friend Amanda were both in New York. We chose the twenty-seventh of December.

  A few days before Christmas I was wandering around the East Village after taking a steam at the Turkish and Russian Baths on Tenth Street. I bought Christa a Christmas present at a dressmaker on Seventh Street near Cooper Square. I popped in next door at McSorley’s for a burger and a beer.

  It took me a while to realize that I had trouble in mind.

  I had lived in Chelsea for years but a majority of my debauchery had gone down in the East Village and the Lower East Side. I knew three drug dealers within a five-minute walk of where I stood. There were a dozen women I’d slept with a hop, a skip, and a buzzer away. The sun had set.

  Christa was out with friends and didn’t expect me back in Brooklyn for many hours, midnight or later, whenever. I felt the old twinge, the cheater’s twinge and the casual drug user’s twinge. Christa would not tolerate cheating or drug use. But those phone calls are so easy to make.

  I walked to First Avenue and stepped into Tile Bar. I knew she’d be there: the Comedian. On a stool. She jumped up and gave me a hug. She was high as a kite. And she looked good.

  She said, “You shopping for me?”

  “Of course,” I said. I hugged her close and I thought I could smell the drugs sweating out of her body.

  “I heard you were, like, getting married?”

  “Maybe.” I smiled and sat down and ordered a double bourbon.

  She rubbed my leg. “Oh, Tony. You’re back! I’m so happy!”

  She handed me a few pills in the sly practiced way of someone who passes and receives illicit drugs all day. And I took them with the same sly expertise.

  She said, “Let’s buy some coke. My guy can be here in twenty minutes. Let’s go back to my apartment and get high and fuck and watch Celebrity Rehab!”

  She turned to her friend at the bar, some wasted chick she must have been passing pills to all day, or all week. I drank my bourbon. I thought about the dozens, no, the hundreds of times I’d cheated on women with this exact protocol. I knew how to do it without getting caught. I was so fucking good at it. Who on Earth could fly two women to the same hotel in Tokyo, from two different continents, and have sex with them both for an entire week without getting caught? I could! I had done that! Who could go out at midnight in Madrid while his girlfriend was asleep in their hotel room and meet a British girl in a bar and take her back to the same hotel and get blown in a broom closet? I could! I was a Zen master of infidelity. I was untouchable. I spoke a language no one else had ever even heard of.

  I drank my bourbon. I was about to get married, but I wasn’t married yet. The pills were beginning to melt in my hand. I needed to swallow them and get this thing rolling. The Comedian’s friend was pretty and thin. I could have them both. Isn’t that the way to go out just before getting married? I’d have my own private bachelor party with two women and pills and blow, and Christa would never know.

  I thought of Christa. I thought of the family we talked about raising one day. I thought about my children respecting their father.

  I ordered an ice water.

  I dropped the pills on the floor and crushed them with my boot. I crushed them and crushed with them everything I hated about my past and myself.

  I said to the Comedian, “I’ll be back in fifteen. Gotta run an errand.”

  CHRISTA’S FRIENDS HAD canceled on her and she was home. We talked about our marriage plans. We trimmed our Christmas tree and talked about the rest of our lives together.

  A MASSIVE SNOWSTORM hit the night of the twenty-sixth and shut much of the city down. But Mayor Bloomberg knew that marriage was good revenue for the city and the show at the Marriage Bureau went on on the morning of the twenty-seventh.

  I wore a black pin-striped suit, a white shirt, and a pink tie. Christa wore a cream dress and she looked like a fierce pale bird. When I said yes, I knew that I would be married to this woman forever. We were married. We had a wedding lunch at Lupa with friends and family. We walked around the West Village together in the snow. We bought champagne on Seventh Avenue and walked around the city, drinking champagne f
rom the bottle, married.

  It is that simple.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, on New Year’s Eve, up in the cabin in Mount Tremper, I made short ribs for dinner. A little before midnight I stepped out to grab some firewood and to pull in a bottle of champagne that I’d buried in the snow. When I reentered the cabin, Christa was sitting on the couch. She had a surprised and delighted and terrified look on her face. She stood up and walked toward me, holding what looked like a thermometer in one hand.

  She said, “Sweetheart, I think I’m pregnant.”

  I said, no; I screamed, “Amazing!”

  She began to cry sweetly and she fell into my arms and she said, “Oh my god, baby, we are going to be parents. We’re going to have a beautiful baby.”

  My body shook, my entire body shook, and I held Christa close, and I said, “You will be a beautiful mommy. You will be the best mommy in the world. That will be our lucky baby.”

  THE NEXT DAY we went to see a movie. We were still in shock, but after having tried three more tests the night before, we were pretty certain that she was pregnant. But just in case, Christa took another one in the bathroom at the theater. It, too, was positive. We watched The Fighter.

  12

  Fairfield to Aspen, Getting the Venom Out, March 2011

  My father’s home is a mess, not in terms of clutter or food waste, or dust, for he has a cleaning lady he employs occasionally to bring the place up to an acceptable level of cleanliness and even neatness. The home is a structural mess. It is a ranch home from the 1960s, and he bought it for less than one hundred thousand dollars in the nineties, and at the zenith of the 2000s housing bubble bankers and appraisers told him that it was worth many times what he paid for it, and he borrowed their money on that lie, and he kept borrowing, the way many people did back then. But what made my father a special case was that he was convinced he would never live to pay the money back. He considered these offers free money, and really, that’s exactly what they should have been to a man in his mid-sixties with chronic lung failure who could not walk more than ten feet without using an oxygen tank. If the banks had been paying attention to the people they were loaning money to they would have looked at my father and said, “Wait, this man will never live to pay us back.” But the beauty and stupidity of that money meant they did not look at dying men prior to loaning them large unrecoverable sums.