There was a knock on the door. “C’mon in!” I called cheerfully.
It was Mark, the apartment manager. “Mind if I have a word, Alan?”
“Not at all,” I said, smiling, knowing he was here to throw me out. I’d make it easy on him. “Come on in, bub. Sorry there’s no place to sit. She took it all.”
He nodded.
“What can I do you for, Mark?”
“Well,” said Mark, “you see, I’m getting married.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Why, that’s damned wonderful! Congratulations!”
“Hey, thanks.” He smiled. “And I, well, this job, apartment manager, I can’t keep it now. And, well, I know that you’re kind of strapped. And I just wondered if, maybe, well, Alan, would you consider taking over as manager here? I know this is short notice. It’s free rent plus a monthly stipend to cover incidentals, food and such.” To which he added: “I mean, you’re the sanest guy in this place.”
Which goes far to show just what sort of place it was.
I lay there, nonplussed, blew a smoke ring, and said: “Yeah, sure. Why not?”
“Oh, thank you! Thank you! That gets me off the hook. I gotta leave right away. You’ll take over tomorrow. Is that okay? Here’s the keys. I’ve left instructions on the kitchen table.”
“I got your back, bro. Have a great honeymoon!”
When he left, I called Carl, half out of my mind. “You won’t believe what just happened! It’s a fugging miracle!” I shouted.
“But Little Brother. Why so surprised? Your Higher Power is always watching out for you.”
I had the back room to myself, with a little porch overlooking a patchwork of bedraggled and abandoned backyards with big rusting chunks of junk metal recumbent in the sun. Soot-covered hole-punctured deteriorated bedsheets that had been left out for years hung uncollected on rotting clotheslines, and across the way was a row of houses fronting on the Webster Street Projects. Every so often as I sat out there with eyes shut, dragging on a cigarette, the warm sun on my face, I heard piercing shrieks: someone being tortured by the drug gang that ruled over this hood.
These were “bitch snitches” or two-timing street soldiers who had gone somehow awry. Recall one who, though horribly hurt, seemed somehow, more than others, to retain a semblance of control through his ordeal. His pleas formed a kind of melodic refrain: “DON’T…DO…THAT!” endlessly repeated, before his amplifying howls became flat-out animal screams.
Otherwise, it was pleasant back there. Orange-breasted robins scavenged about in the trash and an occasional red-crested woodpecker beat out mysterious Morse on the old rotting cruciform telephone poles that ran along the alleys.
In my room was a mattress covered by a sheet and a neatly folded blanket and pillow. On a small wooden table lay a marbled composition notebook and two blue-ink Bic pens—the same writing tools that I had first used as a schoolboy. In them I wrote three poems per week to read at Café Babar on Thursday nights and on Sunday nights at Paradise Lounge—the major open mikes in town.
On the windowsill were sunglasses, a few recovery books, and a schedule for 12-step meetings. On the floor, a small hippie shoulder bag I’d fished from the Tuesday morning trash collection, my main wardrobe source. I still wore the same pale-blue collarless India shirt and blue jeans, and my indestructible Durangos still had nails stabbing my heels as I walked, drawing blood—a sensation I actually relished, as some sort of penitent self-chastisement.
I was a heavy smoker and could afford to buy my own, but old habits die hard and I still mainly picked up my tobacco quota off the streets, where butts were plentiful. As I walked down Haight Street, nails stabbing my heels and Dylan on the earphones, my eyes scanned the sidewalk for butts, which I would pounce on and keep stashed in a plastic ziplock in my shoulder bag.
I didn’t even own a jacket, though I badly needed one for the chameleon San Francisco weather. Not only could it change instantly from cold to tropical, but this is one of the few cities in the world, I ventured, that has multiple seasons simultaneously: if it’s springlike in the Lower Haight, it can be wintry in the Sunset but tropically warm in the Mission, even as it’s autumnal downtown. Couldn’t begin to guess what season might prevail up on windy Twin Peaks, where a gigantic satanic-looking communications tower glared down with one red blinking Cyclopean eye burning jewellike in the center of its forehead.
I kept a lightweight fishing knife tucked in my boot, just in case, and my fear du jour revolved from day to day, like the colors in a child’s prismatic kaleidoscope. On a given day, as I kicked down Haight Street en route to a meeting, a tattooed and toothless old street wino might glance at me with maniacal glee that triggered me to think he was a plant, a ploy, intentionally signaling the presence of innumerable agents in the vicinity—a revelation meant to throw me off my game, spark a panicked response that would precipitate wrong decisions.
In 12-step meetings I found reprieve from this sense of constant threat, could sit for an hour or so and relax, blend into the room of anonymous faces whose names, for the most part, I didn’t know. Between the long stretches of panic were lucid intervals when I realized that I was completely insane. This, in turn, both terrified and depressed me: a development I was quick to report to my new sponsor, Eugene.
“I think I may be completely off my rocker. I don’t know what to do! Oh, God! What if I really am insane? And don’t even know it!”
“Well,” said Eugene, “let me put your mind at ease on that particular point once and for all. You are completely insane. In fact, I’ve never met anyone loonier. So you might as well stop fighting it. Just give up, since you’re powerless over it.”
This is the same sponsor who said, when we began working together on the 12 steps: “Just one thing. I want you to know that it’s not in my power to get you sober, or for that matter in the power of anyone in a twelve-step program.”
“Well, what can keep me sober, then?”
He looked at me hard. “Only God can keep you sober.”
I gaped back at him, outraged. “God! You gotta be kidding! I can’t bring myself to really believe in that crap! If that’s what it takes, then I’m fucked!”
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. You’re fucked.”
I often lunched in the soup kitchens, too mentally disheveled to contemplate enrolling in the General Assistance welfare program—a step that Eugene strongly advised me to take, as a way to augment my small income.
“It wouldn’t hurt you to eat regular meals,” he said. “What do you eat? One or two meals a day?”
I shrugged. “Yeah. Like that.”
“Not enough. You’re a big guy. What are you? Six two? Two ten?”
“That’s right.”
“You need food. Protein. Vegetables. Fruit. What did you eat this morning for breakfast?”
Was ashamed to say. Breakfast usually consisted of whatever kinds of cookies were offered up at my regular 12-step meetings, plus endless cups of coffee spiked with big helpings of white granulated sugar. But that morning someone had brought to the meeting two cartons of green-frosted Teenage Mutant Ninja Custard Pies. Knowing that rigorous honesty at all times was a mandatory precondition of remaining sober, I said, embarrassed: “Well, this morning someone brought a couple of boxes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Custard Pies and I had me a couple.”
I couldn’t look him in the eyes as I said this.
“Uh-huh,” he said, voice flatlined in that tone I’d come to recognize when he was struggling especially hard to remain neutral and nonjudgmental in the face of some of my just plain outright imbecilities. “Uh-huh. And how many of these Ninja pies did you have?”
I winced. “Three.” And before he could respond, corrected: “Four.”
“Uh-huh. And how much sugar you figure might be in one of these Turtle Pies?”
I pursed my lips thoughtfully. “You mean on average?”
“Yes. Your best guesstimate.”
<
br /> “Well, a lot.”
“Uh-huh. And you also like to put a lot of sugar in your coffee, right?”
Grimly, I nodded.
“Well, no wonder you’re nuts. You’re crazy enough without all that. But the way you eat sugar, you’re ramping it up into full-blown psychosis.”
“Oh,” I said.
The rate and even the severity of my delusions decreased with improved diet, but not enough yet to permit me to sign up for General Assistance and food stamps. For now, that must wait. I felt too frail. Ate on the wing and lived off the cuff, smoking sidewalk butts and crisscrossing San Francisco on foot, notebook along, going from one recovery meeting to the next, sitting on park benches and building stoops, or on the steps of friendly-looking Victorians, writing poems to read at the open mikes—which Eugene had more or less ordered me to do.
Carl Little Crow had been the first to say that he thought, given my history, that I had no choice but to become a poet or else return to drinking. To this Eugene added an additional proviso. “There’s no question that you want to be a writer, but you’ve betrayed your gift by not really making a serious try. You can never do that again. Or, as your Carl indicated, you’re sure to drink.”
“But I’m such a loser,” I said. “I’ve got no books to my name except for that out-of-print anthology. I’m thirty-seven years old and feel like it’s too late for me.”
“You’re right,” he said. “For the man you were, it’s too late. But it’s not too late for the man you are becoming, as far as God is concerned. If you stay sober and write with discipline, someday you’ll have a shelf or two of books printed with your name.”
“You think?” I said hopefully.
“Yes,” he said firmly. “I do.”
My heart soared. “Okay,” I said excitedly. “What do I do?”
“Go to meetings and write,” he said.
“Write what?”
“Poems.”
“But I really want to be a prose writer.”
“Well, that’s fine. But right now you’ve got the attention span of a flea. Write poems. They’re short and you can probably do it fast. Bring me three a week.”
The next week, I showed him three poems. He barely glanced at them. “That’s fine. Put them in a folder and next week bring me three more.”
“But aren’t you going to read them?” I asked, offended at such scant attention paid.
“What for?” said the Philistine. “I hate poetry. Write three more. Bring them next week.”
Months later, I had several poems that I felt quite proud of and that were well received at the open mikes. Jack Hirschman, a well-known poet then in his late fifties, came up to me after I’d read two of them one Sunday afternoon in North Beach, leaned his big walrus mustache close to my face, and said, “You write one hell of a poem. I haven’t seen you before. Who are you?”
I told him that I was newly arrived from New York. Recognizing something in his accent, asked: “Are you by any chance from the Bronx?”
“Why, yes, I am, originally. For sure.” We exchanged Bronx credentials and it turned out that we had both attended DeWitt Clinton High School, though twenty years apart.
“Look,” he said. “You ever publish a book, let me know.”
“Would you write an intro for it?”
“If they’re as good as those two poems you read today, it will be my pleasure.”
At this same reading, David Lerner, co-ringleader of the group of underground poets who congregated at Café Babar and called themselves the Babarians, stood next to me, his immense shaggy buffalo body quivering with nervous intellect as he puffed existentially from a cigarette held in a clenched fist—and said in his humorous, deep-throated, velvety voice: “Zeitgeist Press might consider doing a book of those. Are there more?”
“I’ve got twelve that I respect.”
“All that good?”
I nodded.
“The two you read need editing.”
“Why?”
“Show me one.”
I showed him a poem titled “On Reading Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ at One O’clock in the Morning.” Lerner patted the pocket of his loud tropical shirt, fumbled out a pencil stub, and, peering at the poem with a look of frenzied concentration, snorting and huffing like a giant beast, went through it in about three minutes, drawing neat lines through words as he went and making professional proofreading symbols. He handed it back. I read it over, twice. It was perfect.
“That’s amazing!” I said. “I didn’t think it could be improved.”
“Everything can be improved. I just cut repetitious statements, changed polysyllabic words to monosyllabic ones where possible, and inserted stanza breaks to give the eye some rest. Simple stuff. And you see what I did here? You use the word democratic twice in the same stanza. That’s called an ‘echo.’ Unless you have good reason to repeat words for effect, like Hemingway or Gertrude Stein, don’t.”
“Those are rules of poetics?”
“We don’t do ‘poetics’ at Café Babar,” he sneered. “Those are rules that journalists like Jimmy Breslin and Hunter Thompson might use on tabloid prose. So, why not on poetry?”
59
AMERICAN CRUISER CAME OUT UNDER THE Zeitgeist imprint, as a slender volume with an introduction by Jack Hirschman. Two hundred were printed, and I sold them at three bucks apiece in the cafés around San Francisco. The additional income from books and my interface with pretty women at café tables emboldened me to approach my sponsor one day and announce: “I’m ready for a relationship.”
He looked at me. “With what?”
“A woman!”
“You mean an actual animate one? No, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. You’re not ready.”
“But I’m lonely,” I said. “You say that my loneliness is alcoholism and that the only real relief is to help other drunks, which I try to do, and sure, it helps, but I have a simple human need to get laid.”
“Do you want to get laid or have a relationship? They’re not the same.”
I thought. “Well, to be truthful, yeah, I want a relationship. You know. Be with the same woman over days and weeks. Something steady. Love.”
His squinty eyes got all flinty. “You haven’t yet learned what real love is. Your idea of it is sick. You know what they say about love in early sobriety. It’s like putting Miracle-Gro on your character defects. You’ll be in bad pain in no time. And that’ll get you drunk. I suggest that you wait until you’ve got at least a year sober.”
“I’m desperate.”
He studied me. “So, what I’m hearing is that you want to be in a relationship with something that’s not your own mind.”
A sweet little light of profound relief blossomed in my chest. “That’s right.” I smiled.
“Well, that’s different. Hell, why, that even falls under the category of sane. You’re having a healthy urge to be in communion with something other than your own mind. Congratulations!”
Shyly, I said: “Thanks.”
“It’s just a question of what is small enough, primitive enough, that you could safely have a relationship with it, because you are a selfish, delusional, paranoid, clean-and-sober horse thief who doesn’t care about anything or anyone but himself.”
“That’s it exactly,” I said.
“Well, I’d start you out with some tiny organism like an amoeba or protozoan and say start with that. They’re kind of self-sustaining and self-replicating, so they wouldn’t need you, which is perfect for where you are. But without the right equipment, the high-powered microscopes and expensive petri dishes and whatnot necessary to commune with a pet amoeba, I guess it won’t work.”
“No, I don’t suppose it would.”
“What about a cactus plant? They’re tough. You could piss on it once a year and that would be enough to keep it going. That’s a task about equal to your skill set in matters of responsibility.”
I grimaced. “I’m not really the plant typ
e.”
“They say that people talk to them, that plants can hear. And the plants don’t talk back. That’d be perfect for you, wouldn’t it? Isn’t your problem with women that they have personalities of their own that occasionally force them to have needs and even talk back?”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not. I’m dead serious. Isn’t that part of your problem? The women have minds and needs. They talk back. You can’t control them. When it’s too much, you drink yourself into a blackout to kill the pain of the sheer impossibility for you of coexisting in the same space with a woman with a mind of her own.”
I didn’t need to think hard about that to admit that he was right.
“Then I suggest that if you want to stay sober, you set aside women for now and try for something simple. How about a bird? A parrot?” He thought. “No. They might talk back and you’ll get bent out of shape and drink.”
He looked up. “I’ve got it! A goldfish! They’re easy. You just change out the water now and then. And feed them a pinch of food each day. They don’t talk back. In fact, they don’t talk at all. Since you’re still hearing voices and having paranoid delusions of persecution, you might think the fish is talking to you, but at some point you’ll realize that you’re just nuts, and you’ll be okay.”
One day, after a meeting, I stepped outside with Willie Deuce, an addict whose crack implosion not only cost him whatever cachet he’d had in the world of bikers, his backseat momma, his colors, and any last trace of self-respect he’d ever had, but now the teeth were rotted from his head and he lived in a cockroach-infested Tenderloin room with a TV and an ashtray. He passed me a cigarette and we stood gazing out at the Golden Gate Park tree line across Stanyan Street. It was one of those hot blue San Francisco early-autumn days that are like an Indian summer’s Indian summer but that at any moment might turn cold as the fog grayed over everything.
Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Page 23
