Me and the Devil: A Novel

by Nick Tosches

  And look at her. She was as bright as the sun in the sky, eating like it was going out of style, audibly enjoying it, seeming to be without a care in the world. Was this how a suicide started the day?

  If I were drinking, I told myself, I would have no trouble at all asking her outright. Drinking did that. It washed away all the halting doubts, all the reservations, all the cowardices that beset and prevented communication. Liquor let the words flow freely. The trouble was that the tributaries of that river were the rivers of lies and of truth, and their influxes merged and were indistinguishable in the free-flowing current into which they poured. But a simple question like this, a simple honest question like this: liquor would loose it from the mouth and bring forth an answer in the time it took to raise or set down a glass.

  What if she was seeking help? What if I could give her that help, or at least support her in her seeking it? All because I could not in this moment bring myself to ask.

  How might she react to such a question? Would it strike her as condescending and presumptuous? As a felling revelation of how little I knew her, how little I esteemed her? As controverting evidence that all my talk of her possessing the nature and powers of a goddess was but cruel and idle entertainment at her expense? Might she berate me and feel violated? I did not know if such a question would bring us closer or send us headlong into estrangement. So I did not ask it.

  I had feared that I might kill her through bloodletting. Now, obstructed by the constraining trepidations of my newfound sobriety, I feared I might kill her by a failure to inflict truth-letting. There could be little doubt, I felt, that my sobriety was endangering her, that it might very well be standing in the way of my saving her life.

  The coffee in my cup was getting cold. I lit a cigarette. Melissa asked me if I minded putting on some music. She still seemed bright as the morning sun. I asked her what she wanted to hear.

  “That Island of the Dead thing or whatever it is.”

  There was whiskey in the cupboard. There was beer in the refrigerator. We drink / or break open / our veins solely / to know. Just one glass of whiskey. Or just a few bottles of beer. And I would ask. And I would know.

  About fifteen minutes into Rachmaninoff’s thanatopsis—just as the august processional cadences gave way to a rising, swirling storm of ambiguous emotion, then ebbed to silence and then a single plaintive violin—Melissa put on her thick cable-knit sweater, fleece-lined ranch coat, cashmere watch cap, scarf, and gloves, then slung her bag over her shoulder and was off to school, as all good little schoolgirls should be.

  We kissed long and warmly at the door. Her eyes, which seemed to have taken on the golden sun and clear blue sky of the day, seemed also to express hints of the inexpressible.

  I had read a biography of Cleopatra, out of which I retained lush descriptions of the rich colors of the sea beyond the city of Alexandria. They could not have presented an accurate picture of a sea that can be seen and known now only after two thousand years of dire sludging pollution, muck, and sullage, but they were well wrought and captivating in their evocative imaginativeness. Looking into Melissa’s eyes was like looking into the magical beauty of the colors of that sea that may or may never have been.

  When she was gone, I put away Rachmaninoff and blasted Chicago Jimmy Rogers’s “Sloppy Drunk.” I lit a cigarette. I stared at the knuckles of my right hand, as if expecting augury. I looked away, toward nothing: shelves and shelves of books that had been unopened in years, their contents dead and forgotten. I should have long ago disposed of most of them. It was not too late. They should be disposed of now, most of them, including most of the ones that I had written.

  There was whiskey in the cupboard, I thought again. There was beer in the refrigerator. Just one glass of whiskey, I thought again, or just a few bottles of beer. And I would know, I thought again; yes, I would know. I was no longer thinking of Melissa, no longer thinking of what a difference a day makes. I was thinking only of my thirst. It was, I told myself, a thirst for knowing.

  There are things that enter our minds that we wish never had. So deep-rooted is the opprobrium of them that we never reveal them, so that it might be to all but ourselves that they never occurred, that we would be incapable of such thoughts. And they never slip out, for our secreting of them is so very strong and the opprobrium beneath which we bury them alive is so heavy that they can never escape, and we are the only ones who can hear their desperate clawings and cries for freedom. So vile are they to us that we actually believe that they “enter our minds” and we are unable to see that it was our minds that gave them birth. Our minds are not the random innocent victims of a breaking and entry by assailing demons in flight. Our minds are the wombs from which the demons seek the escape we disallow them. Their vagitus, the vagitus of what is within us, the unspeakable and the inadmissible things that “enter our minds,” is what we keep from being heard at any cost.

  As I ground out my cigarette, I realized that if my goddess turned out to be a stupid little bitch, so stupid as to entertain taking her own life, I did not care. Fuck her. The only thing I did care about was that if she was going to kill herself, she didn’t do it in my apartment. I simply didn’t want the trouble. And reporting a teenage stiff—a fucking suicide, no less—in my home meant a lot of trouble.

  I loved her. But if I was loving a girl who was suicidal, then I was making a mistake, and shame on me. And if she or anybody else saw me as a part of, or a symptom of, or a participant in her fucking self-ordained end, I wasn’t buying in to that psychological bullshit for a single fucking instant. I was pro-choice. She wanted to off herself, so be it. Just not in my joint.

  And I would just come out and ask her. “Do you ever think of killing yourself?” I would say. If she said yes, I would talk with her. I would do what I could. If she said no, I would say, “Then what are you doing with that Mickey Mouse bullshit in your bag? ‘What a difference a day makes.’ It’s a stupid shit song and it makes for a stupid shit advertising slogan. So why are you carrying it around?” If she asked me how I knew about it, I would just tell her that that didn’t have anything to do with anything. And it would be the truth.

  As I say, I loved her. I wanted to have her for whatever remained to me of forever. But you got right down to it, there were other goddesses out there, other beautiful, magical young broads to have and to hold, and who would let me drink their blood full measure from their tender fucking thighs.

  I would have a drink. Fuck everything. Have a drink? What did that mean to me? It meant I would get drunk. It meant I would likely stay drunk. Yes, fuck everything. But did I want that? Did I really want that? No. Fuck it. I would go to a meeting.

  As soon as I stepped outdoors, I felt different. It was barely above freezing, but the cold did not bother me. With the passing of the years and the dwindling of my weight and substance, I had grown more harshly affected by the cold, which set me to trembling and tightening into myself. But on this morning I did not even feel the chill entering me. I did not even feel it to be cold, really, but instead found the wintry air to be brisk and refreshingly bracing. I drew deep breaths of it into me, feeling calmer and more clear with every vigorous inhalation.

  It went beyond the pleasant invigoration of the cold that only a month or so before would have stricken my frail body like an icy lashing, a punishment that would have reduced me to shallow breath and numb shivering. I felt physically strong and hale in the cold of this day. I felt as I had felt in the seasons of my youth: impervious to the elements, enjoying them, thrilling at the sensations brought by their extremes, moving through them as if I were intrinsic to them and they to me.

  I felt great, not only strong but with a sense of heightened awareness of which I became more and more conscious as I strode the winter streets. A sparrow lighted on the stark branch of a nearby tree, and I heard it—the almost soundless flutter of its little wings—before I saw it. To my ears came the sound of an easy wind rounding a corner almost half a block away, newsp
aper rustling by in the gutter across the street, the all but weightless sound of its movement crisply distinct amid the louder noise of the street’s traffic. I could see greater distances, more sharply, more clearly. When I flicked a cigarette butt, it flew more than two yards against the breeze to strike the moving car at which I had aimed it. I descended the steep stairs of the Franklin Street subway station with sureness and alacrity, making no use of the side-rail.

  I was sure that all of this, or most of it, was the effect of the blood-passion of the previous night. I relished the memory as I flexed musculature in my calves that seemed not to have been there, except as atrophied and weak tissue in wrinkled skin, a few weeks before.

  A middle-aged black man in a cheap suit, bowtie, derby, and overcoat approached me on the subway and presented me with a leaflet. I glanced at it and was surprised that I could make out what it said without my reading glasses. The man looked at me a moment, as if he were awaiting a gratuity or a knowing response, then ambled off as if on his solemn way to a cheap snazzy funeral, handing out his leaflets on the way.

  THE END OF THE

  WORLD IS ALMOST

  HERE!

  HOLY GOD

  WILL BRING

  JUDGMENT DAY ON

  MAY 21

  JUDGMENT DAY is feared by the world and is the day that God will destroy the world because of the sins of mankind. The world is correct in believing that Judgment Day will come. The Bible gives us the correct and accurate information about that Day.

  The Bible is the Holy Book written by Holy God who is the creator of this beautiful world. The Holy Bible is without question a very ancient book….

  The fucking thing unfolded to eight pages and went on for fucking ever. Who published this thing? I turned to the last page, where there was a listing of fourteen states and the call letters and frequencies of the radio stations in them where Family Radio could be heard, and the note that “Family Radio is a Bible-based Christian broadcasting ministry with no church affiliation.” The local station that carried Family Radio was WFME, 94.7 on my FM dial.

  “Why didn’t you let me know before I paid my taxes?” I wanted to ask him, to see if the features of his face were motile, but he had already passed on to the next car.

  I got off the subway at Sheridan Square and walked west to Perry Street.

  Rachmaninoff’s gloomy roving tone poem was in my head. It was the music we had listened to on the night when I first tasted her blood. And she had wanted to hear it again this morning. When was that night, that holy night, when I first brought her to my bed? I could not remember, other than that it was not long ago. The full wolf moon had just begun to wane. And the full crow moon was now a few days off. Less than a month. Yet it seemed that we had lived through long seasons of the heart in those few weeks—new and different seasons from any we had ever known or imagined. Had she wanted to hear the Rachmaninoff this morning because of the first-month anniversary, just two or three days away, of that night when these new and mysterious seasons began? Could that mystical ferrying to the Isle of the Dead have been for her not an evocation of the deathward tide of timeless night, but an evocation of romance, a sea-lapped stone in moonlight that marked the memory and celebration of that romance?

  And what of that suicide-prevention brochure in her bag? I myself was now walking down the street with the end of the world in my inside coat pocket. Had suicide been handed to her on a subway car by a derby-hatted negro of fixed features, as Judgment Day had been handed to me?

  I was seeing, thinking, and feeling lucidly now. I had put myself through all that torment about being unable to ask her because it was a way of working up to drinking. Alkies are the most ingenious and expertly devious people in the world. The simple truth is that they never apply these qualities to anything worth a damn, and, worse, can’t even tell when these ingrained traits are working independently of them, and against them.

  It was nice going to Perry Street. I liked the morning meetings there. I liked the quiet little corner of the Village where the room was, and had been for over half a century. I liked many of those who attended the meetings there, a varied bunch of characters who seemed unconcerned about the presence of any good-book God, loving or otherwise. I liked the venerable age and history of the place. I liked the tales that were told about the guy who confessed to a murder, was ratted out by a few who heard him and broke the bond of confidentiality (“what’s said in these rooms stays in these rooms”) so integral to A.A., then had his manslaughter verdict overturned on the grounds that his confession had been part of a constitutionally protected religious activity and could not be used against him. I liked the tales that were told of the so-called treasurer, the guy entrusted with the gathering, tallying, and banking of the donations given at each meeting, who one day cleared out the room’s little account and rode off into the sunset, giving rise to the enduring and instructive Perry Street apothegm “a sober thief is still a thief.” Yes, I liked the meetings there, when the morning light still lent promise to the day to come. And when I didn’t like one of those meetings, I could, as at any meeting anywhere, simply get up and leave.

  I felt like sharing this morning. Sharing. That’s what they called it. A very big A.A. word. As if unloading your bullshit was a gift unto others. Then again, if it inspired somebody else to do the same, maybe it was. I wanted to tell of how, earlier that morning, I had woven myself with tortuous knots of circumpressure in a camouflaged attempt to cogitate myself into drinking without even knowing what I was doing. This was how insidiously the alcoholic mind worked. It was like the snake in the fable of the Garden of Eden. That snake was so good at what he did, such a consummate master of deceit, that few even noticed his coup de grâce of transferring the blame for the fall of man from himself to Eve. You could talk about Satan all you wanted. But that snake shot straight out of an alky’s skull.

  When I thought of Eve, I thought of Melissa, upon whom I indirectly laid the blame for the fall I myself had very nearly brought about. I got ready to raise my hand. The chair of the meeting acknowledged another raised hand. Then I heard him, before I even saw him. “Hi,” he said, drawing out this simple syllable into a lofty arc of the longest possible duration. “My name’s Peter and I’m an alcoholic and a sex addict.”

  Shit. The little cocksucker had not succumbed to AIDS or age. Fuck him and fuck this. I wasn’t going to sit here and listen to him and the gumdrops of self-pity that he dispensed while adjusting himself as if heeding the requests of a photographer but careful always to keep intact the curl of his prissy, shit-eating Chessy-cat grin. And I wasn’t going to talk to an audience that included him. Better a bunch of filthy, stinking, sick and contagious bums who had come in off the street just to escape the cold. I got up, put a cigarette in my mouth, walked out, and let the door slam behind me. I had already once today barely escaped driving myself to drink. I wasn’t about to risk being driven to drink again, not by somebody else, and surely not by someone like him.

  I walked over to Patisserie Claude on West Fourth Street. That was another thing, the proximity to this little place, I liked about the morning meetings on Perry Street. Claude made the best, maybe the only real, croissants in downtown Manhattan. Rich, soft, buttery, flaky, hot from the oven. I got two to go and a cappuccino. I crossed Sheridan Square to the downtown station.

  Sometimes I made it to a meeting just in time. Sometimes I escaped a meeting just in time. Today I did both. And I still felt as great as I had felt when I first stepped outdoors this morning. With every breath, in fact, I felt better, stronger, more perceptive. And now I had in one hand a couple of hot croissants in a little bag and in my other a cup of hot cappuccino. I could smell the butter in the pastries, the thick froth in the coffee. I could smell them as if I were tasting them. Never before, in fact, were the scents of such simple pleasures so full and satisfying that I could only wonder with anticipation at the possible new heights I might experience when actually tasting them. I descended the subway sta
irs with greater agility than I had earlier; adroitly juggled the bag and the coffee, and swiped my card through the turnstile without a thought or a moment’s hesitation as to the movements involved.

  The coffee and croissants were still hot when I bounded from the Franklin Street station, quickly walked the two short blocks to my place, and set them down. Three subway stops, some wintry air, and they were still hot and the spume on the cappuccino had subsided a bit but was still thick and foamy. I had been eating Claude’s croissants for twenty, maybe twenty-five years, and they were always good. But now, as I bit into the first of them, my taste buds bloomed as never before, and my tongue discerned everything in that croissant, the traces of milk, egg, sugar, and especially butter, individually and in sublime concert. I remembered walking most mornings to one of two bakeries not far from where I lived in Paris, on rue du Dragon. These two bakeries sold the best croissants I had ever tasted, and I knew precisely when they came out of the oven. I could not remember those croissants tasting as good as the soft delicious croissant that I stood in my kitchen eating right now, washing down mouthfuls with coffee as if they were the savorous consecrated elements of an unimagined Eucharist of earthly delight.

  I thought of the movement of the sparrow’s wings, the faint faraway wind, the flimsy sheet of newspaper in the gutter across the street. I thought of the cold that did not enter me except through deep pleasant breath, the assured musculature in my legs as I moved nimbly, the natural ease of my maneuverings. These croissants, I then realized, were not special. In fact they were, they had to be, inferior to what they had been when I purchased them, and almost certainly not as fine as those superb morning croissants fresh from the ovens of the two patisseries I favored in the sixth arrondissement. The magnificence of these croissants, good as they were, was not in them. It was in me. As I could hear the near-silence of the unseen sparrow’s subdued fluttering wings, the hushed murmur of a wind I could not feel, the faint, almost soundless stirring of newspaper in a gutter not near to me; as I could see and read clearly without my eyeglasses—so I now could taste, relish, and discern the morsels and draughts of what pleased the tongue with a new acuity that raised the mundane pleasure of these simple croissants and coffee to the sensuous Eucharistic delight I was experiencing.