Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  Swung my legs off the cot, rose, found her food, removed a big flake, and dropped it in. As it floated to the bottom she swam to it, took a big bite, and cut a lazy graceful happy diagonal, nibbling the flake, tiny trapped air pockets bubbling to the water’s surface.

  “You really are a sweet little fish, aren’t you? Huh! I’m surprised how much I like you.”

  But as I continued to watch her, and talk, open up more about myself, how I felt, something occurred that worried me. Immediately, I called my sponsor.

  “I just want to ask you something. It’s weird, but you said that no matter how weird I shouldn’t hesitate to share it with you if I feel truly disturbed.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Well, I find myself truly disturbed.”

  “By what?”

  I hesitated. But knew that rigorous honesty was absolutely crucial to my sobriety. So.

  “I’m having sexual feelings for the fish.”

  After a pause, my sponsor said: “Okay. So, what’s the problem?”

  “Isn’t that sorta sick?”

  “No. Feeling sexual is sane.”

  “But for a goldfish? One named after my brother’s wife?”

  “My guess is, it’s more complicated than that.”

  “How so?”

  “Probably you’re projecting feelings onto Deb. I mean, Debra the fish, not your brother’s wife. Feelings, all feelings, have some sort of sexual component. You haven’t felt anything in years, so it might be a little confusing to you. Some of your wires got crossed. Anyway, why worry about it? You’re not going to screw the fish, right? Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t. So, enjoy the feelings. It’ll all work out in the end. You’ll see. My guess is, you’re bonding with Deb. And there might be some sensual component to the feeling that makes you uncomfortable. You probably have mixed or confused feelings about sensuality. But also, you’re taking an emotional risk by bonding with her. Because it means the possibility of loss.”

  “You mean she might run off with someone else.”

  “Just let the bonding with her continue.”

  “Check out Freud of the Fishes.” I laughed.

  He didn’t. “You mustn’t let yourself get Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. HALT. Take care of those. Everything will work out. Did you eat?”

  “Not really.”

  “Eat something. Are you tired?”

  “A little, yeah.”

  “Angry?”

  “No. Not at the moment.”

  “Lonely?”

  “A little.”

  “Tell it to Deb. She’ll listen.”

  She did. Not just that night but every night, I poured out my soul to Debra. And came to believe in time that the little goldfish not only heard but understood everything I told her. Knew about my fearsome delusions of being stalked by death squads, my feeling of failure as a writer, my anger to find myself in my mid-thirties so utterly defeated, my sense of betrayal and mourning for alcohol, my constant low-grade grief for Isadora, whom I feared I would never see again. And as the months passed, each time I came home I called out: “Hi, Deb! I’m home!” and she swam to whatever side of the bowl I was on and hovered there, as though to greet me. In time I came to identify my feeling for her as love.

  “Can you love a fish?” I asked my sponsor. “Because I love Deb. No ifs or buts about it. She’s such a great little sweetheart of a fish and there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for her.”

  By this time I had obtained for her a big bowl that I lined with colored gravel, marbles, and pretty plants to oxygenate the water, where she could hide among the soft, furry leaves, make it a home. And I loved watching her safely nestled and resting, content. Some days, I came rushing through the door, couldn’t wait to see her. Set the clock next to her bowl on a chair and watched it ticking off clean-and-sober time. Deb, first member of my new sobriety family, happily circled her watery living room. To this happy scene I hoped someday to add my daughter, a girlfriend, a dog, male friends, numerous acquaintances, and literary colleagues, fellow writers who believed in my work and wished me well.

  Returning from a meeting one afternoon on the 71–Haight bus, I watched a scrawny man in rags with a Civil War–length beard jump aboard through the exit door without paying. He walked up and down the aisle, thrusting a carpenter’s tool bag into people’s faces, shaking it to make the metal parts clink, and asked in a loud, slurred, hectic voice: “You wanna buy? I’m selling cheap.”

  He thrust the bag at me. Our eyes met. I knew this man. His eyes shrank back.

  “Charles?” I said, shocked.

  “Alan,” he said. “Alan, Alan, Alan. How you been, man? You wanna buy these?” He held the bag out. “I’m broke. Need money bad.”

  “I don’t want those. But tell me: what happened?”

  “Alan, Alan, man. I went out, man. Somebody offered me a beer at work. Screwed up! The next day, a joint. By the end of the week I was smoking crack. Went on a run and when I came back, everything was gone.”

  “What happened to the dog?”

  “It warn’t mine. Belonged to that chick you saw me with. She dumped me, man. Bitch!”

  “And the car?”

  “Hers.”

  “And the job’s gone?”

  “Gone, man, Alan, all gone.”

  “You better come to a meeting. Let’s get you back to recovery right now. C’mon, I’ll take you.”

  He recoiled. “Can’t do that. Not yet. Got important business first. These tools is just to hold me over till my big check comes in. Any day now.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you know where to find me.”

  “Yeah, man! Later!”

  One day, I came home running through the door, tired and happy from a long fruitful afternoon during which I had attended two meetings, composed new poems, and hung out with sober friends at All You Knead, talking about lit, politics, spirituality, sobriety, and then went kicking down Haight Street through one of those ineffable orange-pink San Francisco sunsets that look like a Sixties rock album cover—so grateful to be sober, to have Deb to come home to. By now felt sure that she couldn’t wait each day to see me.

  “Deb!” I laughed as I entered the kitchen, threw on the lights, set down my backpack.

  Deb lay afloat on her side in a terrible stillness. I ran to her, scooped her out. She was barely alive. Some horrible illness sickened her sweet eye. She peered at me with a sidelong look of resignation, fins expanding and deflating, mouth puffing out slow asphyxiated breaths.

  I don’t know why I thought running fresh tap water over her as she floated in a cup would make it better. I was nearly hysterical, a child desperate to believe in good fairies. I stood at the sink, splashing water over Deb and praying aloud: “Hang in there, Deb! Don’t die, Deb! Please breathe, baby, breathe! I know you can do it!”

  But she couldn’t. She couldn’t make it.

  Gently, coldly, softly, the light in her eye went out.

  And then Deb was no more.

  I don’t know how long I sat struck numb in a chair, or who came or went as Deb lay in a little matchbox on the dinette table. For a period of time that could have been minutes or hours—couldn’t tell—I poked and prodded her, bringing my ear close, my eye up to hers, holding her up, turning her this way, that. It didn’t seem possible that she was dead. Couldn’t bear the thought that her reddish-gold skin would rot, her doe eyes shrivel, her flesh disintegrate. Brought my mouth close, breathed on her, to warm her, or maybe, like God, bring her inanimate matter to life. I’m not God. It didn’t work. Nothing would.

  And when I knew this in my bones, it was dusk. I brought her to my room, placed her on the chair, lay down, stared at her lifeless form for two days: lay there, sometimes slept. When I woke, read from the stack of library books at my bedside—Brassaï’s Picasso and Company. Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jewry. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls—books to pass the time while my heart lay down like a tired animal in the cave of its grief.
I did not once think of God or pray or blame Him for this. In my bones, knew: this death was not malevolent, an angry thing, but the gateway to silence so profound that it is beyond all blame, all remembrance, an elegiac stillness that narrates itself in a void.

  Two days later, I rose and moved around my room with a great sense of purpose. I assembled a bigger box, ribbon, paints, a paper and pen, and plastic wrap. First, I painted the matchbox into a beautiful coffin, and then put pen to page and wrote a secret note to Deb in which I said that I would always love her and thanked her for all the love she showed for me, the happiness she brought to my life. I sealed the note in plastic wrap and laid it in the coffin, inserted over it a tissue-paper bed, and on this bed of words and soft white I laid Deb. Tied the coffin closed with ribbon. Put it in my pocket, left the house. I rode the 22–Fillmore bus to the Marina and walked out to the water.

  When I had found what I thought was an ideal spot, one with a view of Angel Island, I clasped the coffin between both hands, closed my eyes, and said: “God, who watches over me, over all things, I give to you the body of my friend Deb, a goldfish who showed me that I am capable of love and that even when that which you love dies, still love remains in the heart, the heart that cannot bear not to love. Thank you, God, for sending Deb, your little golden messenger, to me.”

  And with that, I put her in the water. I returned her to the sea.

  BOOK EIGHT

  61

  AT A YEAR SOBER, I BEGAN TO FEEL AS THOUGH A big foot was crushing my chest. Couldn’t properly breathe, had no drive. Days on end, stretched on my cot, smoking cigarette after cigarette, piling ashtrays with butts, the room dense with smoke.

  Thought I must be depressed. In the meetings, heard some speak of the onset of vicious blues. Asked them what they thought. Go on meds, they said, or jog or stop to smell the flowers. Yet another told me to get in touch with my Inner Child, listen to John Bradshaw tapes. I even invited my good old Columbia University bud the poet John Lane, now moved to Berkeley with his wife Kevi, to sit witness as I watched a Bradshaw video and bawled “cleansing tears” of Inner Childishness. Appalled, not knowing what to say or do, he sat there as I sobbed and gagged about God knows what.

  When I reported back to the Bradshaw enthusiast that nothing had changed, she suggested I fondle cheap Walgreens baby toys to satisfy my Inner Child. “Buy yourself a rattler and shake it,” this person said, smiling with New Age luminescence. I did. Sat there at the dinette table, shaking a Walgreens baby rattle and smoking endless Marlboros, face haggard, energy level still minus zero, until my displeased Inner Child smashed the rattle underfoot and ground a Durango boot heel into the pieces. Concluded that I don’t got an Inner Child: it’s an Inner Hit Man.

  The depression continued. Asked for more suggestions. Fly a kite. Walk barefoot in grass. Go to Ocean Beach and shout “FUCK YOU!” at the waves. Finally, one old-timer said: “Why don’t you ask your sponsor what he thinks”—the last thing I would have thought to do, since his answer is always the last thing I want to hear and usually what no one else on earth would have the guts to tell me to my face.

  Eugene didn’t hesitate; looked at the cigarette burning down in my hand and said: “It looks to me like the Marlboro man’s gotten between you and your Higher Power.”

  “What, this?” I said, holding up the last vice in the world that still made me feel alive.

  “Uh-huh,” said the smug know-it-all son of a bitch.

  “Well, what do you suggest I do?”

  “Quit.”

  “Completely?”

  “You know what recovery says about things done in half measures, how it avails nothing.”

  My heart sank. He couldn’t be serious.

  Of course he was.

  What does he know? I told myself. Prayed for an answer, and smoked. Lost more energy. It got so bad I couldn’t be bothered to answer the door if someone knocked. Pretended not to be at home. One day, Eugene came by, knocked. When I didn’t answer he gently pushed open the door with fingertips and stood there as dense smoke and rancid air washed over his self-satisfied face. Wore that smile he’d get when confronting the obvious. Looked down at the overflowing ashtrays, my grayish lifeless face, and immobilized, corpselike form stretched on the cot, incapacitated, and said: “So, how’s goes it? Are we happy, joyous, and free today?”

  “Screw you,” I said.

  He just laughed and said: “Well, try to get to a meeting, okay? And don’t drink, no matter what.”

  He left, chuckling to himself.

  Knew I was in trouble when I tried, later, severely depressed, to get to a meeting but couldn’t rise from the cot, not due to any particular “issues” but because I had smoked myself comatose. Cigarettes, my second-oldest friend and consolation after alcohol, had turned on me, just as booze once had.

  Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Was in a state of living death, which is the condition that addictions always seem to reduce me to en route to actual death. I called Eugene.

  “All right,” I hissed. “I give up. Cigarettes have kicked my ass. What now?”

  “Get help.”

  He informed me that just as there are 12-step programs for people to stay off booze or drugs, there are programs to stay off cigarettes.

  The first one I attended was held in a small hospital conference room adjoining the cafeteria. I arrived early. A woman in a hospital gown, nose clipped to a portable oxygen tank, shuffled in, and, seating herself, informed me her name was Carol and inquired if this was my first meeting. Sullenly, I nodded that it was. Hers too. She was ten years sober and had thought that that would be enough. “No one in the meetings for alcoholics ever talked about cigarettes.” She had smoked to her heart’s content, even when it sapped her energy, even when she could no longer feel the presence of a Higher Power in her life; things began to fall apart and nothing felt good anymore.

  By then, she knew that she was running her life on self-will alone. “I didn’t drink,” she said. “Figured that was good enough. It wasn’t.” Now she had emphysema, was back in the hospital being tested for lung cancer. “I’m scared,” she said.

  Now so was I. And then a well-known North Beach Beat poet walked in. Why was it that well-known poets always seemed to appear at important junctures in my recovery? Couldn’t believe he was there. He recognized me, a little embarrassed, spoke in a hoarse whisper.

  “You got a problem with the coffin nails too, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “They’re killing me,” he whispered.

  Needed no more convincing that I was on the right path. Don’t recall what was said at that meeting, but remember the sound of anxious fingers drumming angrily on tabletops, the pneumatic shaking of nervous legs, the surface clawing and excavating fingernails, and jaws chewing gum so hard you heard teeth grind.

  For six months I attended those meetings once a week. As with alcohol, it required all my focus to kick cigarettes. I took it a minute, sometimes a second at a time. My throat clenched hungrily for a whiff of smoke. Muscles crawled under my skin like bugs, rummaging through my veins for one last trace of nicotine. One night I lay in bed sucking on my thumb. Didn’t care. My brain ceased to function. Would never write again. So be it. How sad, I thought, that a literary career that was an abortion to start with should end at the point of a stubbed-out cigarette.

  Told this to Eugene, who always paused before responding and did so now. Then: “Well, let me ask you this. Your desire to be a writer, where did that come from?”

  “What do you mean?” I bristled, annoyed, my fuse a millimeter long.

  “Well,” he said. “Take me, for example. I have no desire to write. I never write if I don’t have to. I find it difficult, unrewarding. But writing seems to make you feel alive and gives you a purpose. You seem to be good at it, too. You’ve been published. You’re the only published writer I’ve ever met. I’ve met a lot of wannabes but never one that somebody else thought good enough to publish. So, you must be th
e real thing. I can’t say if you’re a great writer or a good writer or a fair writer. But I’d say you’re a writer. Well, it seems that God put that in you, both the desire to be a writer and the ability to do it. He didn’t put it in me or anyone else I know. So, I guess God made you a writer.”

  “That’s what Carl Little Crow told me too.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I can see why. So, let me ask you this. Why would God make you a writer and then create a circumstance that makes it impossible for you to write?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Maybe God is removing cigarettes from your life to make you write better and open doors for you that have stayed shut until now.”

  “But I’ve always smoked and written. The two go hand in hand.”

  “Well, you always feel that you should have gone farther as a writer. Maybe the smokes are what held you back, like the booze. We don’t know what God intends. We only try to find out to the best of our ability and act in accordance. Looks to me like He’s removing tobacco addiction from your life.”

  I just couldn’t imagine such a thing. To my mind, it made no sense, but in my heart lurked a suspicion that he might after all be right.

  “I got an idea,” he said.

  “What?” I said forlornly.

  “Writers often write from their own experience, huh? Why don’t you write about what it’s like to stop smoking?”

  “Okay,” I said, always more or less ready to try a sponsor’s suggestion, even if with a brooding sense of futility.

  “Remember,” he said. “God didn’t get you sober to fuck you over.”

  “Nice rhyme,” I said wryly.

  Sat down at my twenty-dollar thrift-shop Smith Corona and in one sitting banged out a ranting freestyle performance poem titled “Last Emphysema Gasp of the Marlboro Man,” which that Thursday night at Café Babar I read with vehement fury. As I read, a camera flashed again and again. The audience howled with laughter at my expiation of the cigarette demon and applauded and banged their feet appreciatively against the grandstand-style seats.