Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  I stumbled off in the pale-blue early waking city chill of morn, hungover, broke, sick to my guts. I had acquaintances so lonesome sometimes they let me stay over on cat-piss-reeking floors matted with filth and dust, in quarters that stank so bad you had to fight the urge to gag. It was out of the rain, a reprieve from the hard pavement, the all-night wind exposure, and a damp chill that burrowed deep into your bones, stayed there. Hugging a bottle, pretending interest in their oddball, hopeless prattle and talentless writing; invited to opine on their work, I lied, raved about how good it was. Anything to buy one more night that I wouldn’t have to use the moon for a pillow.

  The night was hard, its iron sometimes too fierce to withstand, its dark too menacing, and you just knew in your bones that were you to stay out in it tonight it would kill you—stab you as you lay blacked out or abduct and torture you in some basement or set you afire or kick you to death. At such times your nerves became so bad that the touch of a crawling fly on your skin made you cry out for your mother.

  Despite this, I kept up my commitment to the Spoken Word scene. Clung to it for life and meaning. Was all that stood between me and the abyss. The women and men who were each day founding the conditions for a new literature to exist didn’t know at the time that they were not just fostering a revolutionary cultural direction but fashioning, reading by reading, event by event, book by book, a new reason for me to stay alive.

  47

  ONE NIGHT AT THE NUYORICAN POETS CAFÉ, MET an Australian woman named Bernadette, petite, with long red hair and sly blue sundowner eyes. She was an associate of the San Francisco poets, the Babarians, in for a few days to make the New York scene. Our attraction was immediate, strong. We were each in our own way gutter pirates, prowling life’s open seas, targeting other people like so many merchant ships for the having, our roguish smiles nakedly exploitive, and we liked that about each other. Neither of us had real hopes for the future, so we were willing to stake everything on a good time had now.

  I talked my friend Tom Weiss of the UpFront Muse performance space into letting us crash over at his place. Naively, he agreed. Bernadette and I took over his bedroom and were soon working our way through his pot stash and liquor hoard.

  At first, annoyed but amused, he acceded, and then, as one night passed into several, made indignant speeches about our impertinence, which only made us want to hit his well-stocked larder that much more. We laughed, Bernadette and I, continuously drank, smoked pot, cigarettes, and made love. She had a small, pert, compact form that I wanted to hold firmly between my hands, penetrate, and plunder. We wrote poems to each other, read them aloud.

  “You should come to San Francisco,” she said. “Get the hell out of New York. You don’t belong in the streets. Stay with me!”

  Told me about the readings at Café Babar, Paradise Lounge, and the bookstore, City Lights, home of the Beats. Beat yet lived in the city streets, she said, a bohemian sprawl over North Beach, the Mission District, the Western Addition, the Haight-Ashbury.

  When she left, Weiss, angry at the way I’d treated his generosity, wanted nothing more to do with me. I understood. I returned to street life. If I had anything like an address, it was Tompkins Square Park, a kind of outdoor commune for the damned, where I colonized a bench facing the Christodora, the Yuppie Condo high-rise.

  Returning to my park bench from the Nuyorican Poets Café one night, I spotted a café regular entering the park, bearing a beer quart and a broken umbrella. Sauntered over in the charcoal gloom.

  “I recognize you from the Nuyorican.”

  “Yeah? What? You want to keep me company? So, sit.”

  I sat.

  “What brings you here?” he asked. “Can’t sleep?”

  “This be my current forwarding address.”

  “Oh yeah? Any mail come so far?”

  “Yeah. Part of a newspaper. Used it as a pillow. It blew right up against my bench. Like a message.”

  “Well, you know what Kerouac said.”

  “What’s that?

  “Fame is like yesterday’s newspaper blowing down Bleecker Street at dawn.”

  We both laughed.

  “Here,” he said, passing the bottle. “I know thirst when I see it. Thirst first.”

  I drew some, sighed, drank more. “Thanks. Goddamned needed that.”

  He nodded. “You’re welcome. Got a name?”

  I said it and saw him flip it through a mental index. No match turned up.

  “Jim Brodey,” he said.

  I knew who that was. “You’re in Anne Waldman’s Angel Hair antho.” He nodded, pleased.

  “You were with the New York poets.”

  “I stand accused.”

  “You mean honored. You’re a famous guy.”

  “To who?”

  “Me. And other poets I know. I’ve read your stuff. Great work! You’re not that regular at the Poets Café, though. I see you there just now and then.”

  “There, no. Here, often.”

  “I never saw you here before.”

  “Usually I’m on the other side of the Park. Near Life Café.”

  “So, how’s a guy with your rep end up here?”

  “How’d you end up here?”

  “Me? I’m nobody. Just this, that, and the other.”

  “Yeah, me too.” He held up the bottle. “This is my ‘this.’ ” Then lifted his arm and let the unbuttoned sliding shirtsleeve reveal a poppy field of abscessed needle tracks. “That is my ‘that.’ My ‘other’ is I’ve got AIDS.”

  “With me, it’s just this,” I said, nodding at the bottle. “The AIDS thing, I understand that’s not so good.”

  “No, not so good.” He pulled on the quart. “Lucky healthy you,” he said. Held up the beer. “But this shit, bro, and the harder stuff, they will kill you over time just as dead.”

  “I feel like I’m dying inside.”

  Brodey drank, wiped his mouth, said: “In which part of you?”

  “Every part,” I said. And added: “My heart especially.” Then I explained and Jim listened patiently to the whole litany of my complaints, the beatings from my mother, my early schoolyard soul-murders at the hands of molesters and my conversion to thuggish violence, my catastrophic failure to realize my gifts as a writer, my disillusioning experiences as a soldier, my disastrous inability to find love with a woman, especially my betrayal of true love with Anna, my ruined Ivy League career, my blackout bride and abandoned baby daughter. I spoke at length about Isadora.

  When I was done, he said, simply: “That’s not it.”

  “What d’ya mean?”

  “I mean all that you just said, that’s not why you’re out here ‘dying inside.’”

  “No?” I laughed angrily. “Well, then, what the hell is it?”

  “It’s this,” he said, hoisting the bottle. “This and nothing else but this. And this,”—surveying the park with his eyes—“here in hell is what ‘this’ gets you.” Then added: “Gets us.”

  It began to rain. He snapped opened the umbrella. The bat-wing flaps hung broken-necked. We huddled for protection.

  “Quick! Lift your feet!”

  A soaked rat the size of a cat charged under, rain streaming from its coat.

  “Yeah. That’s very beautiful,” said Brodey, shaking his head. “Fuggin’ New York City.”

  Quietly we sat and drank, listening to the rain.

  “It’s weird to hear you say that,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You know, about booze doing this. When I was at Columbia there was a reception for this visiting writer who came to give a talk to us grovelings. And I got, you know, totally sloshed.”

  “As usual,” said Brodey.

  “Right! I was sprawled out on this sofa with a dumb grin, cradling a bottle, and as he exited he passed me, looked, stopped, and said: ‘I hear you’re a pretty good writer.’ And I said: ‘Yeah? So?’ You know: like a real wise guy. And he said, pointing at the wine, ‘But that is gonna get in your
way.’ I forgot about that until just now. I mean, you’re the second writer with rep to point to the booze.”

  “Sounds to me like someone’s trying to tell you something. But will you listen?”

  I shrugged.

  “That’s called: denial. And you know what they say about it?”

  “Pass the beer.”

  He did. I took a long defiant pull, gasped, handed it back.

  “They say that denial is not a river in Egypt.”

  “Looks to me,” I said, “like I don’t give a shit.”

  Brodey nodded that he understood. “You do. But you ignore dire warnings. I do too. But then something happens to make you think. Like you get AIDS. And what about that little girl of yours? Who’re you kidding? You care about her.”

  I hung my head, broken-necked, like the umbrella. “Yeah. But I don’t know what to do about that.”

  “Look. It’s way too late for me, man. I got AIDS. But I figure, what’s the point of saving yourself if you’re gonna die anyway? It’s too late for me. But it’s not too late for you.”

  I didn’t know much about AIDS at that time, no one did, and wondered as he spoke if it was catching, the infection crawling from his shirt to mine, huddled as we were in the rain, rubbing shoulders. And I was moved. Despite his fatal illness, despite that we sat with rats running under our feet, still something mattered to him, and it wasn’t himself, not his fading fame or his ending life or the regrets that I saw eroding the light in his eyes: it was me.

  “Save yourself,” he said—so earnestly, with such intensity. I couldn’t grasp why he would care. “It’s too late for me. But not for you. You still can make it.”

  I felt something inside. Didn’t know what. An Emotion. There was no self-pity in him. He cared about something more than his own plight. How could that be? I peered hard at the soaked paper bag, the brown bottle glass that would soon shatter on the pavement in shards, turning razor-sharp teeth to the moon.

  “I’m telling you, man, you got a chance,” he said. “To get out of these streets. Outta this park. You’re not a true street person, you’re a person in the streets who don’t know how you got here. But there’s still hope for you. You can do it.”

  “But I have nothing left inside me, man. Nothing.”

  “You got you. You got that little girl. Get into recovery.”

  I had never heard the word used in this way, as though it were some enterprise you embarked upon, some determined undertaking.

  “Go to twelve-step meetings. Live one day at a time. Don’t drink. Get help. Reach out. That sorta thing.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—what’s twelve steps? Is that like ‘How to Be a Millionaire in Six E-Z Lessons?’ typa shit?”

  He laughed. “No, man. No! Not like that. Look, I’m no great example. I keep going out. But maybe it will be different for you. So I’ll tell you what I know.”

  And he did. In the rain, he told me everything he knew about recovery.

  48

  THE NEXT MORNING, I STUMBLED BACK TO TOM’S loft, drenched to the bone, with the inexplicable notion that I wanted to live, save myself, just because Jim Brodey, a poet I had heard of, thought that I deserved a chance. And I still don’t quite get what happened next. Weiss let me back in. That alone was a miracle. Left me there with all his booze and stash, but I told him I didn’t want it and somehow he believed me. For no reason that I will ever understand, I then phoned, out of the blue, a former classmate from Columbia University named Philip, who had last seen me with a published book, the departmental star in a London Fog, and now found myself telling him that I was a homeless drunk, near death and needing help.

  Why had I not called sooner? he wanted to know, given his deep regard for me. “I’m going to put Jackie, my wife, on the phone. She wants to talk with you.”

  In no uncertain terms, Jackie told me to get in a cab and come to their Brooklyn Heights brownstone right away. She’d pay the fare.

  I did as told, though it took a few cabs passing before one stopped. After sleeping in gutters, I didn’t look so well.

  They were out on their front steps, waiting. And from the shock in their eyes, I knew: I looked far worse than they’d imagined.

  Jackie, pretty, blonde, in her early thirties, was very pregnant. Philip, a gifted screenwriter, tried to hide the pain in his eyes; smiled, shook my hand, and paid the cab as Jackie hugged me. I sort of cringed when she drew near, put her arms around me. Didn’t want her or the baby in proximity, had just passed the night in the streets with a junkie’s abscesses, drenched rats. But I let her. I was so tired.

  Their mahogany-paneled home was tastefully furnished. In their kitchen, I sat down.

  Jackie looked at Philip. “We’ll be all right. I’d like a word alone with Alan.”

  “Of course,” he said, grinning shyly. Told me: “I’m so happy to see you!”

  “How goes the screenwriting?” I asked.

  He mentioned the name of a director, one of the most famous in Hollywood, for whom he was writing under contract a new screenplay to a film I’d heard about.

  “That’s terrific, buddy! I’m glad one of us made it.”

  He smiled and left the room.

  Jackie said: “He’s so thrilled to see you. He admires you very much, you know.”

  “Undeserved admiration can be quite painful.”

  “It’s not up to us to choose who appreciates us,” she said.

  “That’s true.”

  She sat down, facing me. “Alan, I have something really important to say.”

  I leaned forward to better position myself to receive her confidence. My eyes grew unfocused. She began to recede, grew smaller. My hands shook, my head filled with bat-winged demons. I glanced around the table, checking for knives or forks. A rising sense of panic lurked just beneath my ribs. A warning. She was coming close. I badly needed a drink to kill the echolalia of a screaming mother in my head. Her voice reverberated through the cavern walls of my dead soul.

  “Yes, Jackie?”

  “Alan, I’m an alcoholic.”

  I sat back in my chair to get a better view of her. Wondered why she was telling me this. Wondered if I could yet get out, walk out of here with a few bucks of their goodwill in my pocket, acquire some vodka, just a little to kill the shakes.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that.” My voice dropped, struck a soap-opera note of confidentiality. “Does Philip know?”

  She laughed. “Of course he knows. I haven’t had a drink in five years. We’re both very proud of that.”

  She looked gravely at me, all business. “Have you ever considered that you might be an alcoholic yourself?”

  “Sure.” I nodded somberly. “I drink all the time.”

  “That’s not what makes one an alcoholic,” she said. “Plenty of folks drink all the time but are not drunks. An alcoholic drinks because he or she can’t not drink. The alcoholic has to, even when they don’t want to.”

  As she said this, I recalled what Jim Brodey had said, that so many times his brain had begged NO! as the needle slammed into his vein. Recalled times when my own mind had protested even as my hand tilted the bottle and poured the poison in—when another being seemed to possess me, drive me to drink, whether or not I wanted to.

  “That’s me exactly. The weak man.”

  “No. No, not weak, Alan! Have you ever considered what alcoholism really is? What you suffer from is not a moral failing but an actual disease. You have an illness, like diabetes or muscular dystrophy. You don’t stop because you can’t stop: it’s impossible for an alcoholic to stay stopped for any amount of time. The world is divided into normal people and us drunks. And you’re a drunk like me. You have a mental obsession combined with an allergy of the body. You’re allergic to alcohol and obsessed with it at the same time. The combination is fatal and unstoppable. Once booze hits your system, the jig’s up: you must drink. It’s not the normal drinkers who end up in the park, it’s not them who die in the gutter. It�
�s us, with a condition that is recognized by the American Medical Association as incurable, and Alan, it’s killing you.”

  I swallowed hard. “I never thought of anything like that.”

  She nodded. “Neither had I until I first came to recovery.”

  She told me drinking tales that made my hair quiver. Could not imagine that a pretty young woman could survive all that yet come out looking so well.

  “There’s a solution,” she said. “I am proof.”

  “But Jackie, not for a hopeless nut like me. I know me like nobody’s business. Trust me: don’t waste your time. Nothing works on this blockhead.” I tapped my skull with my forefinger. “It’s like a wall. Good ideas just don’t get through.”

  “But that’s exactly the kind of case that recovery works best for. The more hopeless, the better. Since you have nothing to lose, you might be willing to gamble everything on getting free, which is exactly what’s needed for this to work.”

  She repeated, in depth, things that Brodey had told me about 12-step meetings, where groups of drunks help each other stay sober one day at a time. How recovering drunks show up for you until you can show up for others. It all sounded very nice but it was flimsy stuff. The only thing that could stand between me and a drink would be handcuffing me to a bed and armed guards, 24/7. Besides, why would anyone invest more than a couple of hours’ time in my type? A day, perhaps, a week. But longer? How long was needed to get this thing? A month? Year? A lifetime? Who could bear me for that long? I could barely stand myself.

  “Why would anyone help me?”

  “Because that’s what keeps them sober.”

  I didn’t quite grasp this. “And the twelve steps. What’s that? Some religious thing?”

  “No! Not religion. Spirituality. A commonsense, concrete way that gutter drunks like us connect to our spirits and to a Higher Power, whether you call it God or the Universe or whatever you like. It’s what helps us to live comfortably in our own skin and stay sober.”