Thirty Rooms To Hide In

by Sullivan, Luke

  Kip, in the Millstone’s dining room, home from college for the first time.

  MELTDOWN IN WEST PALM BEACH

  In Alcoholics Anonymous, they have a phrase for it: “hitting rock bottom.”

  Few alcoholics recover without reaching this place, one that A.A. describes as a point of “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.” By now Roger had racked up quite a few excellent candidates for rock bottom – publicly accusing his best friend of sleeping with his wife, jail time for a DUI, a fistfight with his son.

  Getting just one of these wake-up calls would be enough to make most people tilt their heads and say, “I did what?” But to be noticed over the day-to-day insanity of an addiction, a rock-bottom usually requires the kind of debauchery that would get you kicked out of the Rolling Stones. (Cut to Keith Richards goin’, “Get outta here, you bloody fucking LUNATIC! And leave the guitar!”) But Roger’s candidates for rock-bottom came and went, came and went, and still he plowed on.

  One of the last bottoms occurred in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he’d gone looking for a job. He’d had something like an offer from an old medical school chum, made back in the days when he was one of the Clinic’s Bright Boys. (“You ever get tired of Minnesota winters, you come on down to West Palm Beach.”) Though it was more of an off-hand compliment than an offer, it was all Roger had.

  “Even though I knew the trip would be futile,” Myra remembers, “I went with him. And it was humiliating from the start.”

  The man who’d made the offer, Dr. Phil Greenbaum, was downwind from the stink of Roger’s career and had heard plenty about his being shit-canned at Mayo. Too much of a gentlemen to rescind the ancient invitation, Phil met with Roger and after the interview offered him a salary less than half what the Clinic paid, and a contract that my mother noted, “might have suited a beginning intern. Phil certainly expected him to turn it down, but I’m not sure your father even realized how insulting the offer was.”

  After the interview was over the Greenbaum’s abandoned their role of gracious host. They suggested Roger visit other clinics in Florida before making a decision and then they simply left, disappearing for the weekend.

  “I’m certain to avoid our company,” remembers Myra. “Understanding how awkward and horrible they must’ve felt, I don’t blame them.”

  The car was barely out of the driveway when whatever civilized veneer Roger had managed to maintain crumbled away. He looted the Greenbaum’s liquor cabinet and stayed cave-man drunk for the next two days.

  Myra, today

  Two nightmarish days. No day, no night. No time for me to eat or sleep. Just one long 48-hour struggle to keep him from wrecking the Greenbaum’s house. I left him asleep once, while I went to get food. Before I got back he’d managed to set fire to a corner of the bed in the guest room with a cigarette. He was simply gone. He babbled witlessly. He couldn’t walk without falling against furniture. Occasionally he collapsed on the bed but never to sleep deeply. He’d lie there, muttering, fingering the bed-clothes like a dying old man. He was gone. That’s the only word I have to describe him – gone. Nothing in his eyes. No recognition of me nor his whereabouts. He was like a dog that’s been run over, kicking around in the ditch, not quite yet dead.

  When the Greenbaums returned Sunday, Myra met them at the door, humiliated. Suitcase packed, head down, she quietly asked Phil to please take her to the nearest bus station right away; to let her just go. With the Bourbon Zombie lurching about in the background, Phil quickly took in the situation, said he understood, and that he’d handle it from there. My mother fled north to her parents’ apartment in Jacksonville.

  Myra, today

  I dropped the whole miserable disgusting seamy story on the shoulders of my sorrowing mother and father and left for Minnesota the next morning. We didn’t see Roger many times after that. The disintegration from then till July 3rd was rapid and probably irreversible.

  Grandpa’s letters to Mom, June 3, 1966

  It doesn’t seem possible. Were you really here, right in our little apartment this very week? All your Mama and I can talk about is our visit with you, and we go over it again and again. … Suddenly it was all over – our first visit with our daughter since 1962. When will the next be? We do not know. I refer again to my favorite Tennyson line: “And yet we trust that good will fall. At last far off, at last to all. And every winter change to spring.”

  You may know that Roger called us mid-morning, June 1st. Your mother talked briefly with him. He said he “thought” he was in Norfolk, Virginia.

  THE FAMOUS FINAL SCENE

  The addict loves drama.

  “I’ll show them,” thinks the drunk as he leans over the bridge and looks into the swirling waters below. In the movie playing in his head, he writes The Famous Final Scene. It will be a scene so touching, audiences everywhere will weep and as they cry, they’ll blame themselves. “How could we not have known?” An usher comes down the aisle handing out packs of Kleenex and still the people keen, “Oh, Tortured Arteest! Please come back. Come back and explain again how your burdens were heavier than ours, your sadness deeper. We’ll mix your favorite drink … and we’ll really listen this time.”

  The addict loves drama. His whole life has been drama. Did he not have the Hardest Job in the World? Did he not have The Meanest Boss Ever? And so at last he comes to the Famous Final Scene and it too must be The Most Dramatic Ever. Let the camera pull wide, let the music swell, and let our hero fall nobly into the swirling waters below.

  But there is no bridge; no camera pulling wide; no music. And if there are swirling waters here at the end, it is a flushing toilet. The metaphor, though unpleasant, better captures the final horrible weeks of June, 1966 – a toilet – where the swirling waters go round and round in ever smaller circles, and in them all the sordid horrible stinking crap that floats in the wake of every narcissist and addict – the emotional debris of broken promises, of neediness, of poor-me poor-me, all of it orbiting the empty void at the middle of the craving heart and, in its final hour all the careless words and selfish acts of the reckless life take their last lap, going round and round pulled into the addict’s dark star and his life ends not in the hoped-for bang, not even a whimper, but in a gurgle of plumbing.

  * * *

  Mom, writing eight days after my father’s death, July 11th, 1966

  Roger did not come directly home. … He went to St. Paul and was there nearly a week. There he stayed, doing nothing, calling many times a day. … When he did come back, he spent most of the day in the bedroom with the curtains drawn, sleeping most of the time because of the drugs and the liquor.

  On June 1st, Kip flew in to Rochester’s tiny airport, having completed his freshman year at Pomona. It felt good to have our top lieutenant back in the trenches with us and before he could even set foot in the Millstone, Kip was neck-deep in the same insanity of the summer before. “The minute I got inside car,” he wrote in his diary, “all the brothers hit me with bad news. Mom says Dad hadn’t resigned – more like fired. So we may not be able to afford Pomona next year. Family’s gonna have to move out of Millstone. Shit!!”

  The summer of ’66 was all set to out-crazy the fist-fighting summer of ’65. Where we once lived with the proverbial Elephant in the Room that no one talked about, now we had the Retarded Zombie in the Room who did stuff so crazy there was nothing to do but talk about it. One of these scenes was reported to us by a neighbor, Mrs. Hallenbeck. She told us she’d come by the Millstone to see Mom and lend what support she could. We were out at the time and she found herself standing in the doorway of the master bedroom. Roger was sitting at the end of the bed, disheveled and insane.

  “He was talking just pure nonsense and then he started to curse at me,” she told brother Jeff. “He actually thought I was Myra and continued to curse me. I tried to orient him, to tell him who I was, but I gave up and left feeling very scared.”

  It was as if the teeth had been removed the monster. He still
prowled the hallways, still growled, but his ability to frighten was gone. We gathered nightly to snicker at Dad’s latest stunts and marvel at how far from reality he had meandered. Noted Kip in his diary, “He denied drinking even when I showed him the Coke bottle he came in with had the smell of whiskey in it.”

  By now, Roger probably had some vague sense his life was going down the toilet. He knew Mom was seeing a lawyer; knew she was going to have a “separate maintenance” order served on him. But even as he circled the drain, he lived in denial, making new travel plans to find a job that didn’t exist. He packed for a trip south on June 28th, and before he left called his old friend, Dr. Tony Lund.

  “We met at that place across from St. Mary’s,” recalled Tony in a phone conversation. “I didn’t know at the time he was drinking again or that he’d run into trouble with the Clinic. It was an emotional meeting. I remember his eyes filling with tears when told me, ‘What a good friend you’ve been over the years.’ Near the end of our lunch, Roger told me he was going south … ‘to a convention’.”

  I ask, “Did you get the feeling he was saying goodbye forever?”

  “Well, I’ve thought about that many times since,” Tony said, “and maybe, conceivably he was. But at the time? No, I didn’t have that feeling. But he was very sketchy about that trip though.”

  Kip’s diary, June 30, 1966

  Dad phoned. From somewhere, I forget. Says now he’s going to Georgia.

  The Cozy Room at the Millstone in a happier hour. Just over Myra’s shoulder is the phone that rang 17 times.

  PHONE CALLS FROM THE DEAD

  JULY 2, 1966, SATURDAY

  Mom, writing eight days after my father’s death, July 11th, 1966

  The last time I saw him was the morning I took him to the airport, June 28th. Roger leaned in the car window to kiss me goodbye and heaven must have been watching over me, for my last sight of him was one which filled me with tenderness and the old love.

  His first stop was Newport News. Mark Coventry phoned later that first week to say the Newport News doctors had called to say Roger was arriving for interviews intoxicated and irrational. A three-way effort was made by Mark, me, and the doctors in Virginia to get him to come home or go back to Hartford. But the expected result was an intensified, hysterical denunciation of all of us – Mark for following him across the country to “give him the axe,” me for my willingness to believe everybody but him, the Newport News doctors for being s.o.b.’s he wouldn’t work with anyway.

  So he went on to New Orleans – with much the same result: arriving full of confidence, leaving because the men there were discourteous or incompetent. During this time I was in a constant state of confusion and distress. The money was draining away fast – with hotel bills, transportation, and constant phone calls. I was getting too much advice – Mark saying, “You’ll have to start commitment proceedings,” Dick Steinhilber saying it couldn’t be done, Tony pressing me to get funds frozen, the lawyer protesting his inability to do much till Roger’s return.

  In the midst of all this, Tony and Mark Coventry were pushing to have the Clinic put Roger on a disability basis, which resulted in me getting phone calls from the Board of Governors, from the head of Psychiatric Department, Clinic insurance men, and the Orthopedic section heads. Even brother Jimmy called me during that last week – till my head was finally spinning.

  Conversation with Dr. Tony Bianco, today

  Mark Coventry and I went to the Board of Governors and said, “Please, you can’t fire Roger. He’s sick.” We asked that he not be fired, that he be reinstated so he could be committed and then put on full disability. And the Board was very agreeable; they said yes. So we were ready to commit him when he returned – even against his wishes if necessary.

  Mom’s July 11, 1966 letter

  Whenever the phone rang I was braced for bad news. Through all this was the dread certainty that doom was near. I feared he would meet with a fatal accident – or involve himself with the law since he always rented a car wherever he was. The Thursday and Friday and Saturday nights of July 1st through the 3rd were horrible. He phoned as many as eight times in one day – usually to berate me with all the old vituperation.

  I finally told him Friday night not to call again – that I’d hang up the moment I knew it was he. Those were my last words to him – a knowledge that will haunt me for a long time.

  Kip, today

  I remember Dad calling home from Georgia late the night he died.

  I answered the phone. His voice was weak and drunk. It pissed me off to hear it. I made small talk with him but only for his benefit. He asked to speak to Mom. She was upstairs and said no she didn’t want to talk to him. I told him this and tried to end the conversation. When I said goodbye I wasn’t sure he said goodbye back. So I waited a second, said goodbye again and hung up. That was less than an hour before he died.

  Mom’s July 11, 1966, letter

  At 12:45 a.m. I heard the phone ring. Kip and Jeff were down in the study and they answered it. He spent ten minutes complaining to them about what was wrong with me. Kip says Roger fell silent many times and they had to speak to him several times before he began again. Then he drifted away and didn’t even answer when they said goodbye. Kip came upstairs to tell me about it – and the phone began ringing again. “Let it ring,” I told him. “You managed to be pleasant last time – don’t let him antagonize you into a nasty answer.”

  Jeff, today

  The phone was on the desktop to my right. We were watching TV in Dad’s study. I was sitting on the big chair in the corner. At 12:45 or so, it began to ring again. I recall counting the number of times it rang – 17, before it finally stopped. We all kept our eyes on the TV. No one said anything.

  Mom’s July 11, 1966, letter

  So we let it ring – and that sound will echo in my ears forever I fear. Rationally I know that had we answered it, we’d have been subjected to the same accusations and perhaps have been goaded into angry retorts we’d have regretted even more. We’ll never know. Unhappily, the medical report places the time of death at 1:00 a.m. This moment of time obviously is bothering me. I have been several days on this last page to you – unable to write all I’m thinking – equally unable to leave it and move on. This is a fact I must deal with. It is not easy.

  ZEE TORTURED ARTEEST

  Myra’s letters home, 1958

  [At a Mayo Clinic cocktail party, Mom had been introduced to a famous British surgeon.] According to legend he operates all day, spends the night at the Club drinking seven or eight double-scotches, and beats everybody to the hospital the next morning.

  Back in May of 1961, Mom was at the sink peeling potatoes when she saw Ernest Hemingway walk by the road out in front of the Millstone wearing his trademark turtleneck sweater and knitted cap. For a woman whose library included copies of the famous writer’s best works, seeing one of the century’s acknowledged literary masters stroll by her back window was worth a phone call to her best friend.

  “I thought that was him,” JoAnn Bianco confirmed. “He passed down here just a few minutes ago.” The phone lines buzzed a few times around the neighborhood until it was established Myra had indeed seen Hemingway. He had checked into Rochester’s St. Mary’s Hospital back in December of 1960 under the name of his personal physician, Dr. George Saviers, ostensibly for treatment of high blood pressure and unofficially for psychiatric care of depression. After two months of sometimes twice-weekly electro-shock therapy he was released in January but was readmitted in April.

  “He was friends with the Kjerners,” Mom tells me, “who lived right across from the Biancos.” She saw his short, stocky figure pass the Millstone’s gates maybe ten more times that spring until he was released at the end of June, a week before he committed suicide in his cabin in Idaho. Like most alcoholics under traditional medical care, Hemingway charmed and bullshitted his doctors into releasing him; an assessment his wife Mary shared.

  “The name’s very mention
brings to mind bullfights,” reads one laudatory website, “barroom brawls, deep-sea fishing and daiquiri parties, big-game hunting and booze binges; it is a legend as steeped in alcohol as it is in adventure.” That sentence on the Hemingway mystique is full of the same kind of misguided admiration as my mother’s letter about the British surgeon she met at the Clinic party – the one who’d had “seven or eight double-scotches and beats everyone to the hospital the next morning.” Oh, marvelous. The doctor who is standing over you – with a scalpel and a hangover – arrived to work on time. Well, that’s fucking great.