Double Double (23 page)

When I started in publishing, it felt like a cottage industry; there was a smallness to it, a sense of fraternity, of family. It was spoken of as a gentlemen's industry. I'm sure there are still gentlemen, and there's still something personal about it, but that's hard to find under the weight of German, Dutch, and French conglomerates, huge chain bookstores, and Amazon (what a fitting name).

I taught in college and wrote at the same time. That was in the late 1970s, when people at publishing houses read unsolicited
manuscripts (those unrepresented by an agent). It was also a time when the terms “memoir” and “debut novel” were missing from the lexicon (a blessing, but there went half the playing field).

I sent my first manuscript to one publisher at a time and waited until it came back (with its rejection slip) before sending it to another. On and on. What I remember most was my persistence. Dogged determination. Did I know the book would be published? Of course not. Why would I need to be doggedly determined if I knew that?

The trouble is, no matter what you endeavor to do, what plan you undertake, down that road you're going, things lurk: to distract you, to scare you, to convince you that you're useless or at best on the wrong road—get off!

Things always lurk. Behind the tree, squatting in the bushes, on the edge of the field or the lake.

If writing is the road you want to go, you need only two things: persistence and the desire to tell a story. You don't have to believe you're talented or even very smart. You don't have to think you're a good person or devoted to anything. You don't have to be anything but conscious and determined.

Right here, as I'm concentrating hard, three lawn mowers have started up. It sounds like a bullet train is bearing down, and I shoot out of my chair, blood in my eye. I'm going to kill Roberto, the gardener who's popped up from the bushes.

You can say, Oh, poor you; I wish I had a big enough lot to need three lawn mowers. Now, in addition to the lost concentration, I'm feeling guilty because I have a huge lot. I am stopped cold by this, and now I'll have to rev myself up all over again to get the concentration back, to get to that point on the road where I can write.

Don't think, when this happens, that you can complain to others about the interruption, because they won't know what you're talking about. (After all, it didn't do me any good to complain to you, did it?) If you think life is set against you, that it's a giant computer screen with stuff you don't want to see popping up all over, competing for your attention—you're absolutely right.

Here is where the fabled cabin in the woods looks grand. It makes a drink look grand, too. (Who am I kidding? Anything could make a drink look grand.) There will always be an excuse for not writing, just as there will always be an excuse for drinking.
I can't write until I can get away to that cabin in the woods, that shack by the sea, that retreat, that sanctuary. that escape from distraction
 . . .

Here comes Max in his monster suit. Remember Max? He got put to bed early for misbehaving. After a while, his mom relents and brings him a steaming bowl of soup.

Max is not interested in soup. He wants control over everything, like a king. Max cannot control his mom, so he takes himself off to the land of the Wild Things. Hideous (sort of) monsters. Max, who has his monster suit on, becomes one of them and controls them. They have a great time together, Max and the monsters. They want him to stay forever, but Max thinks it's time for him to be heading home.

Max conjures all of this up within a few minutes; you know it's only minutes, because when he returns home and to bed, his soup is still hot.

Max did all that in minutes.

You can't seem to get down a sentence? Yes, things lurk, like:
I don't have enough talent for this . . . Spelling, my spelling has always been terrible . . . Time for dinner; I haven't cooked it . . . Who am I kidding, thinking I can write a book? . . . There go the lawn mowers again . . .
I need a drink, boy, but do I ever need a drink! . . . How do you get an agent? . . . Maybe if I had an agent . . . The kids are fighting . . . How am I supposed to concentrate with those damned lawn mowers going? It's impossible to write around here! I need to get off somewhere; I need a cabin in the woods . . .

There will always be monsters.

You be Max.

H
ow many drunks does it take to change the bulb in your ceiling fixture?” asks my witty building manager on Capitol Hill.

“I don't know,” I unwittily say. “How many?”

“Depends how many could balance on the chair with you.”

(Very funny, Chris.) “Did the people downstairs say something?” I'm a bit anxious about this.

Chris looks at the ceiling. “Not much. Just that they thought a big fight was going on. Things crashing, shouts. That kinda thing.” Big crocodile smile.

“Well, yes, I guess the chair did tip over. I'd hardly describe it like they did.”

“So you were changing the lightbulb.”

“Sure. It burned out when I was fixing dinner.”

“At three
A.M.
”

“Well, I tend to eat late.”

“Next time invite me. I'm taller. That way, it'd only take one drunk to change the lightbulb.”

 • • • 

This little tableau suggested itself because I was thinking over the several times I'd made the statement in and out of clinic meetings that I couldn't remember doing anything drunk-y. I never had blackouts, never forgot anything that happened the night before, never said things that made me cringe in the morning. Rarely had hangovers.

Ah, then the routine with the lightbulb at three
A.M.
came back to me like a bit of Proust's involuntary memory. That memory accomplished, I dredged around for some more drunken moments. Perhaps there were other curious incidents like the bulb in the nighttime.

As if by magic, I recalled the pie-shaped stairs of the narrow staircase in my house in Bucks County. I'm quite sure I missed my footing once and fell partway down that sinister staircase. Did I spill the martini?

Try as I might (and granted, I'm not trying awfully hard), I can remember no other alcoholic missteps. Then how can you trust me to report correctly? I think it's safe to say I was not a drunk of monumental proportions, like a few writers whose talent I couldn't get within shouting distance of: Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker.

And then there was the great Raymond Carver.

Raymond Carver was, as he himself said, a “full-time drunk” whose writing got in the way of his drinking. He was in and out
of rehabs over a large part of his life. Finally, he was told by his doctor that if he continued drinking, he'd die. Soon. He kept right on drinking.

And then one day Carver decided to stop, and he did.

When asked about his accomplishments, Raymond Carver, one of the greatest short-story writers who ever lived, said that the accomplishment of which he was most proud was that he'd stopped drinking. In an interview in the
Paris Review,
he said, “I'm prouder of that, that I quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life.”

If that isn't a testament to sobriety, God knows what is.

T
he most desolate place I've ever seen is off the coast of Ireland in the Aran Islands. It's called the Wormhole, and it's an image I've been drawn to over and over again.

My mother and I traveled to Ireland the summer I was ten years old, and for a boy my age, there was nothing to do. I couldn't ride a bike that well (I had learned how only a short time before). There were no toys, no shops, only a tiny village with a small boardinghouse run by a Gestapo-like owner who barely tolerated children.

The beach wasn't what I was used to in the United States. There was no sand, only rocks; no waves, only chilly, flat water going out to the horizon. It wasn't warm enough to lie in the sun. The far-off, cold, turgid, gray North Sea was something you stared at for its wild beauty.

Time had stopped on the island. It was 1974 but easily could have been 1874.

I was left to explore with two older kids on holiday with their parents. One day we worked our way across the fields of heather toward the ocean and came across the Wormhole. Carved out of the solid rock of the coast, the sea had formed a vast square hole about fifty feet across and forty feet deep. I stood, staring down into the sea, listening to the waves roar against the rocky walls, the swells of the ocean pouring in, wishing I could throw myself down into the waters. The cry of the seagulls and the kids on either side pulled me out of my reverie. The Wormhole has stayed with me to this day—I still feel its downward pull from time to time.

One way to resist that pull is by sheer propulsion.
“Allons-y!”
(“Let's go”) is one of my favorite expressions to use with my sons. It expresses determination and hopefulness that the next thing we'll do will be an unforgettable experience. Like my mother taking me to see
2001: A Space Odyssey
when I was nine years old. Or
Gone With the Wind
when I was eight (and again when I was eleven). Or
Richard II
at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon when I was eleven. These experiences and many others, like traveling to Prague a few years after the 1968 revolution, or driving across Ireland to see the castles became transcendent in the Isle of Sky light. How could the boredom of everyday suburban living compete?

I'm convinced that boredom, or even the fear of boredom, is a big part of my alcoholism. There is a Ph.D. dissertation to be written about boredom's role in drinking, gambling, and womanizing. For me and many drunks, a regular life, as described by Robert De Niro in the film
Heat,
is boring. He says, “If you mean life as ball games and barbecues? I don't think so.”

I'm still an excitement junkie. When I moved from New York City back to suburban Maryland, it took me five years to detox
from Manhattan and gradually come down from the adrenaline rush of living there.

Recovery is composed of many things. One is simple behavior modification. “Stay away from people, places, and things” you encountered when you were drinking is the advice in recovery. You can't stay sober if you're around the same people, doing the same things in the same places—the combination is too powerful and goads you to drink.

My mother and I would be considered “high bottom” drunks, in the parlance of recovery: I had a job (if barely), and she still had a home. “Low bottom” drunks usually have lost everything and become homeless or imprisoned. My mother's experiences and mine were very different, but the suffering and doubt were enough to make us both want to get sober.

The pull downward represented by the image of the Wormhole has become the polar opposite of my relationship with a Higher Power. The Wormhole is hard to understand, mysterious and remote. My Higher Power is equally mysterious.

Six months before I got sober, I found myself on my knees at the Quaker meetinghouse in New York City. I didn't know why I was there, because I had never believed in God. When the leaders of the meeting asked for visitors to identify themselves, I stood up and said it was my first Quaker meeting in eight years. I went to the coffee hour, and the people seemed polite, but no one showed any interest in why I was there. In my alcoholic grandiosity, they should have been crowding around me, giving me phone numbers and welcoming me. I eventually found that when I finally went to twelve-step meetings, I left discouraged and went home.

The Quakers meet in silence and meditation, looking for the spirit to move them. They attend meeting, not church. It's an
inward-looking religion, not a lecture by a religious authority figure. All of the members are equal. If moved to speak, they can stand and share anything they like. I've attended Quaker meeting on and off for many years, volunteered in their homeless shelters, and continued meditating on my own. Little did I know when I went to a Quaker high school and blew off silent worship to get high in the woods that I would end up attending twelve-step meetings that are similar to Quaker meetings: All the members are equal, no one criticizes you, and you get to choose what you want to talk about. I've finally agreed with what I heard from an old Irishman in recovery years ago: The answer to my unhappiness is a conscious contact with a power greater than myself whom I choose to call God—“because that's His fucking name.”

The image of the Wormhole finally faded from my life a few years ago, when my wife and kids and I were in Florida visiting my mother. I decided to charter a boat to go fishing with my family. My uncle had taken me out fishing a few times and taught me the rudiments, and I had taken my boys fishing in South Carolina a few times. In the beginning, I wrestled with my own incompetence with the rods, reels, fishing lines, and tackle boxes, while trying not to lose my temper as the kids constantly asked for help. It occurred to me that hiring a professional might help, and a chartered fishing trip on the Gulf Coast might be just what we needed to amp up our skill level.

On a beautiful breezy Florida morning, we pushed off with Captain Tom, an amiable man with the fishing captain's requisite shades, FSU cap, and plug of chew in his bottom lip. He talked to us on our way out to the Gulf, pointed out the shore birds flying by, and regaled us with stories about the mighty marlins and grouper he had caught and the kinds of fish we would see.

Captain Tom explained to my seven- and five-year-old boys some very basic rules. We are catch-and-release fishermen—my sons are vegetarians—and Captain Tom laid down the rules. “After you catch the fish, never pull it into the boat. If you have lost your bait, never reel the line all the way in so the hook gets jammed in the rod. Always look behind you when you cast, so a hook doesn't snag someone in the head. And be careful on the boat when you're moving around so you don't fall into the water.”