I recalled my teaching days before exile, those soggy days. I had written a book that made money, and then a second one, and then I could write no more and teach no more because teaching and writing cut into drinking and wallowing in the river. And so writing and teaching had to go, and then I wrote a third book, an alcoholic book, and then self-exile began because I had begun to believe the world was flat and the Whiskey River was nearing the edge of a cosmic waterfall and would deposit me into the infinite space of the universe.
There was no momentous moment, no Joyce-like epiphany, no snow falling poetically all over Ireland, though I always loved that part of the story. Instead there was a gradual dog-paddling toward a distant, unseen shore, toward oxygen, toward a shore shrouded in fog, but it was there, the shore, and I knew it—I felt it more than I knew it. I was like a wild animal swimming to shore with no more thought than it’s shore that must be reached, that if I kept struggling in that direction I might avoid drowning and have a chance to breathe again.
There came an abrupt thaw of several days, the sun a faint yellow yolk in the sky. The sun brightened a bit more each day, and snow melted and water ran off the roof in shiny rivulets, and several times I heard chunks of ice break loose and fall against the side of the house before shattering on the driveway, which looked good and clear thanks to the thaw. Black Kitty sat by the glass door to the deck and watched streams of melting snow rush down the windowpane. He delighted in trying to smack the water as it raced to the bottom of the glass. I made a breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast and treated Black Kitty to more of the beloved tuna from a can.
The thaw, which I knew was temporary—the forecast called for more snow and colder temperatures—woke up the bird community in my backyard, and sparrows, bluebirds, and cardinals sang insistently and flitted about in the trees along the bony dead branches. Sparrows huddled as always on power lines, but appeared cheerier, peppier. Often they ruffled their feathers and puffed themselves up like cartoon birds, and then flew off in swift flights of two or three to scour newly exposed yards. After a while there were nearly a dozen crows, or perhaps exactly a dozen—had I chosen to keep a meticulous tally—perched at various levels of the tree whose branches hung over the deck. They all looked defiant and dark and even a little menacing, and I laughed at the thought of a tree full of crows.
I was sure that one of the crows was the defiant one who often sat alone on a branch of that tree, eyeing me coldly, or perhaps regarding itself warmly. I knew I would never quite know which emotion it was, but I was sure one of birds was that crow, and eventually I decided it was the one who sat highest among the crows, as though on a throne for a crow leader, a flight leader. When that one flew away, they all erupted into flight and followed it in a frenzy toward the frozen lake. With the sliding door open a crack, I could hear the collective voices of a dozen, or near-dozen, cackling crows.
The thaw was pushed aside by more snow—light, wet, lake-effect snow—and soon all was again coated in white and submerged in a freeze. Black Kitty curled up against me on the sofa and we watched snow fall and accumulate. But I took it as progress, or at least as promising, that I began to think of the Whiskey River not as a river at all—or as having the qualities of fluid life or being alive in any way—but rather simply as a disease, as death, as a diseased shape-shifter that could alter its appearance to seem warm and fluid and appear to be flowing and glowing and comforting. It was an alcohol Jacuzzi, all the while disguising creeping death and misery and slowly drowning its victims.
I had not drowned, though I supposed it was a near thing at that, and having been washed ashore, saturated, groggy, I might as well have been living by an actual river in a house so close to the river that the crisp flow could be heard, and the snap of rapids slapping the banks could be felt and seen as well, and from every window the river was there, unavoidable, intrusive, demanding, preening, flowing past with the promise of menace and disaster. It flowed and never ran out. It was circular—yes, the Whiskey River was circular—and when a section of it flowed past it did not disappear forever downstream, but circled back, always looking for the chance to jump its banks and engulf its victims.
* * *
The river was not quite done with me, I learned. One day as snow was intermittent and light, my pulse raced and my heart quickened and I began to sweat and feel sick to my stomach. Walking it off didn’t help, and I drank water, and then orange juice, and paced a bit more throughout the house. But the symptoms persisted, and soon Black Kitty was pacing with me and rubbing against my legs. I was a moving target and yet Black Kitty kept up with me and seemed to insist on keeping up with me. I tried to focus on something, anything—a book on a shelf, the blank TV screen—to calm myself down. Finally, abruptly, I attempted to sit on the floor by the glass door to the deck and ended up landing a bit hard. There I sat, my face pressed awkwardly against the cold glass, Black Kitty draped across my legs as though all was quite normal.
After a time I pulled my legs up and managed a sitting position as I rubbed the cold spot on my forehead from leaning too long against the glass. I thought maybe I was feeling better, less queasy, but my pulse quickened again, and my throat was dry and my stomach churned. Black Kitty’s tail flicked across my face. Outside I saw the defiant crow—a crow if not the crow—high up in the tree nearest the deck, looking down toward me. But with crows, who knows what they truly are looking at, and what they are really aware of, what they care about? I felt like throwing up for a moment, then that passed, and soon the feeling returned and I did finally throw up, mostly saliva. As I wiped the corners of my mouth with the back of my hand, the crow lifted off slowly from the branch, as if in slow-motion—although maybe it only seemed like slow motion to me, and for the crow it was normal flight and speed—and flew lazily in a circle above the backyard before darting over the trees toward the lake.
I managed to grab a pillow from the sofa behind me and slip it under my head. I sagged heavily against the pillow, which sagged against the side of the sofa, and Black Kitty sagged against me, his tail again flicking at my face like a furry and cool flame that teased and tickled and comforted instead of burned. I lay there a long time, rubbing Black Kitty behind the ears, hearing Black Kitty purr, and soon I really felt as though the last vile dregs of the Whiskey River were emptying out of me and cascading off me and splashing across the floor to the deck door, pooling briefly before finding an exit, and then seeping under the door and onto the deck, flowing off and freezing and turning the backyard into a skating rink.
Chapter 6: Beyond the Whiskey River
From the very start of exile, my ability to think had been almost exclusively restricted to the present, not much beyond the hour, certainly not beyond the day, and with the frigid burial of Whiskey River, the past opened up to me again. A vivid kaleidoscope, at first. Even a tad overwhelming and too bright and rapid and kinetic for me to maintain focus and make sense of any one thing. It all sped by in a blur: faces and events coming into focus momentarily before disappearing back into the swirl of images and colors and sounds, and even smells, that formed a river of history. I worried, at first, about the prospect of another river running through me, but then time slowed down, and I began to truly see things for the first time in a long while.
Soon I was able to follow random images and isolate them, zoom in, fix them for inspection, analyze them. I recalled a night before exile began, a night of drinking for no more reason than a bottle and a glass existed, and my ability to pour the glass full many times was unimpeded, and my ability to raise my arm and glass to my mouth worked perfectly and naturally. Alcohol was the wondrous giant killer I accepted and relied on—the Whiskey River—and I welcomed the disease, opened my house to it, opened my mouth to it, left a light on for it, longed and pined for it like a neglected lover, though I did not then know it was a disease, and instead looked upon it as a friend, my good and dear friend.
As with all good friends, it was natural to want to have fun with it, t
o do things together, to see things together, to go places together—to share and enhance the love and intensify the love with shared experiences—and so I introduced Whiskey River to Exile on Main Street, the great Stones album. Much later I would understand that Whiskey River knew Exile on Main Street, knew all the great albums, and all the great songs, because they were among the countless artifacts, the infinite multitudes of artifacts and devices that a Whiskey River absorbed on its course through the human vessel.
But it was Exile on Main Street that I was recalling so well, and as Whiskey River jumped its banks that night and filled me up and swept me away—swept me off my feet—I floated and drifted and felt no pain and could recall no morality, had no regrets. I marveled at the songs—“All Down the Line,” “Happy,” “Tumbling Dice,” and “Sweet Virginia,” but the next morning, when I could barely function before coffee and food, and not much better after those things, when all the regrets and morality rushed back into me like roaring tide, filling me up so much differently than Whiskey River had, other song titles from Exile on Main Street came to me. Those titles were like ominous Burma-Shave signs alongside a foggy road full of twists and turns, and song titles like “Turd on the Run,” “Soul Survivor,” “Torn and Frayed,” “Rip This Joint,” and “Stop Breaking Down,” rushed toward me. They battered themselves against me, and somehow those titles became like voices that succeeded in breaking through the tidal wave of Whiskey River for just a moment, but just long enough. Like the Stones holed up in the basement of a house in southern France to make that classic album, I realized I would have to hole up in my house and become an exile, too.
* * *
There was a girl, and there’s always a love interest, if a story or a life is interesting at all. This girl was also a student, my student—not Elsa, but a former student, which is an important distinction to make because it was risky and even dangerous to have an affair with a student, which, of course, only intensified the experience and stoked our desires—made them more feverish—and made the girl even more desirable. There was desire enough, and the spark between us had been real enough, despite the years between us.
The girl’s name was Marla. The first time I saw her, as she slipped past me through the door into class, I had only a fleeting glance at her face, at her raven hair thick and unruly on her head and shoulders, and I rather thought she might be part Asian, vaguely Polynesian, perhaps. She turned out to be merely Irish, Catholic, and Republican, but with a glow about her, an aura. When we were in sight of each other, it was as though gravity intensified and somehow pulled us together instead of merely keeping us planted on the ground. Gravity kept us from flying off into space and instead we flew into each other. We merged. And at first, gravity was enough. Later, it just made it harder for us to float apart.
Marla was always late, no matter the occasion. I learned to add two hours to any time she had agreed to as her time to materialize. And always, despite the two extra hours, I was excited when she finally appeared and my frustration melted away immediately. She would smile, tell me how wonderful I was, and I would have waited for as long as it took. She was a woman of twenty-two, but a girl nonetheless, because despite the glow, the aura of promise and spirit, she proved unable to fly, and she was instead the butterfly that sat on a purple flower perpetually flexing fragile wings of yellow and black. She never revealed me to her mother, and when she called her mother to say she would be spending a night in Kalamazoo, she lied, saying she would be with friends. Marla couldn’t make decisive moves to advance her life. I often wondered why the flirtation happened at all and why it ever blossomed into something much more. I concluded, years later, that fate had created the flirtation—a test, I suppose, a trial for me to endure and survive and perhaps even gain strength from, to gain some sort of perspective on relationships and the flirtatious capriciousness of love. After Marla, I was courted by Whiskey River, seduced by Whiskey River, honeymooned with Whiskey River.
My second book was about Marla, disguised as best as I could as fiction. It apparently fooled enough people, but it was not as good as my first book, and in the end I was the real fool because she left me. That sounds dramatic, but the reality was less so. In our final conversation, on the sidewalk in front of the college library, we spoke reasonably.
“You were always there,” Marla said.
“Where else would I be?” I said.
Then she turned, slowly, sadly, and my last look at her, seared deeply into my memory and soul, was of her back and long dark hair as she disappeared into a sunset created by fate.
* * *
I had entered exile with short hair, though not a crewcut or one of those concentration camp looks so popular among metrosexual men determined to extinguish individuality, and at first I didn’t think much at all about my hair, which was still mostly brown and thick. As it grew and I acquired bangs, and the growing hair dusted the collars of shirts and beyond, I rather enjoyed a glimpse of myself in a mirror, slightly unkempt, disheveled, but not quite in Aqualung album territory, either. I supposed I had begun to look like a hippie of sorts, which also pleased and amused me, because unlike the men I went to high school with—who now had graying hair or the balding pates befitting the insurance agents they had become—I could still imagine Woodstock Nation as a viable replacement to capitalism.
The growing hair required a bit of maintenance. My sister commented playfully on my new shampoo and conditioner needs. As my hair grew longer, I began to envision how soon enough the snow would disappear and the grass would grow, too, and all through the neighborhood those men who had become insurance agents, or subservient middle-management flunkies, would obsessively cut that growing grass as though letting it get out of hand was to be avoided at all costs. They saw close-cropped lawns as desirable alternatives to actual nature, while I saw them for what they really were—symbols of the taming of unruly nature—because the men mowing the lawns had traded in their own unruly natures years earlier in favor of uniformity, and they resented anything that contradicted their world view.
* * *
As my hair grew, I joked to Black Kitty that I could imagine getting honorary membership in what was left of The Allman Brothers Band. I realized that some trimming was in order. That was a task I could do, I supposed—with minimum confidence—but perhaps not well. I worried that having self-cut hair would give me the look of a man in a cave, so my main concern was how to get it done without doing it myself, or violating exile. I ran all these considerations by my sister on the phone. She arranged for a friend who cut hair out of her house to come by, which sounded good until I realized she would be the first stranger to set foot in my house in months. Perhaps some brushing up on my people skills was in order. I had to make a good run through the house’s first floor to make sure it appeared clean enough, especially the kitchen, where I imagined we would perform the transformation, creating a more refined look for an old would-be hippie who didn’t think he was all that old or truly a hippie. Hippiedom, I always believed, had died not long after Woodstock, at Altamont, but I knew my sister called me a hippie sometimes just to give me some semi-good-natured grief—I say “semi,” because at least a slice of it didn’t come off as all that good-natured. After I straightened up the house I had the brilliant idea for a trial run at being in the same room with a stranger.
I waited by the side door, and when the chirpy letter carrier approached with my mail, I smiled and thanked her and assured her that I would clean up the thin coat of snow on the driveway, and she assured me that it was no impediment at all, that it looked more like a coat of white paint than snow. Abruptly I suggested she come in for a blueberry muffin—an idea I’d had once before—and she said she had a schedule. I asked where she was at on that schedule, and she looked at her watch and said she was actually ahead of schedule. After looking down at her black shoes for a moment, she came in and we sat down at the kitchen table with blueberry muffins and coffee.
She checked her watch as she munche
d the muffin, which she said was quite tasty, and all I could think of was how odd it seemed to have a stranger in my house. Soon Black Kitty jumped up on the table. I apologized for the breach of manners and shooed Black Kitty off to the floor and the letter carrier said that was common at her house because she had four cats. She told me their names and personality traits, and then finished her muffin and we stared awkwardly at each other for a long moment. She got up and said she had to get back on schedule. At the door she thanked me, and we even shook hands. I watched her walk down the block, and even though we had not really conversed beyond the merits of blueberry muffins and a house full of cats, I felt it had been a good trial run at re-uniting with reality.
* * *
The day after the trial run—blueberry muffins with the chirpy letter carrier—my sister’s hair stylist friend arrived. She was a bright-eyed and perpetually smiling woman of about thirty-five, attractive in a slightly too much hair coloring and slightly too much blue eye shadow sort of way that avoided sliding fully into trashy. Nonetheless, she was attractive and friendly. Her name was Sherilynn, and she was tall—almost as tall as I am at around five-ten or so—and wispy thin but not emaciated. There appeared to be a good and lean figure under the red sweater and faded jeans. I tried to gauge the lines of her body without getting caught, and although I wasn’t sure I accomplished that, I figured she likely got her share of looks and was used to it. She took command and positioned me on a stool at the kitchen sink and washed my hair slowly, lovingly, massaging the shampoo and then conditioner firmly into my scalp. She was very careful to assess the warmth of the water before rinsing, and through it all we chatted about how much snow the winter had brought as Black Kitty sat on a window sill on the other side of the kitchen.
Exile on Kalamazoo Street Page 6
