Double Double (8 page)

I think sometimes alcoholics feel they've vaulted onto some other plane, clearing the high bar of time and circumstance. We're extremely self-absorbed. We're all wrapped up in a sort of alcohol aesthetic that sees the simple picture as impossibly naive. Alcoholics like to say “Keep It Simple,” and this is all too true of the simple instruction: “Stop.” Despite the bumper-sticker slogans that arise
from keeping it simple, alcoholism, or the defeat of it, becomes a truly complex business.

Couldn't the circumstances that my mother found herself in have kept her safe from addiction? One striking difference between her and Mrs. D. was that one worked and one didn't. Or at least for Mrs. D., work never interfered with drinking. Cocktail party? Out the door.

I'm not talking about the kind of work that leaves one hand free (like writing) to pick up a glass but the kind of work my mother did, ten hours a day or more, seven days a week. I can still see her, walking down the long second-floor hallway, white apron wound about her. At six
A.M.
, heading for the kitchen to make the Parker House rolls for a dinner party that evening.

Time and circumstance. Maybe she really didn't have time to be an alcoholic.

I wonder if my mother felt excluded from the back-office brawls and how she explained the exclusion to herself. Or if her answer was to imagine the dinner party—the pastry still cooking in the kitchen, the poached pears, the crème anglaise. The mint sauce that she needed for the lamb. I wonder if work was as close to salvation as she could get.

Why didn't I learn to be a good cook instead of a good drunk?

Why didn't I spend my postprandial hours in the kitchen instead of the back office?

I recall once when I was in my twenties and in England, writing my mother a letter of apology for things I had done that made her unhappy. It was a long letter full of self-pity and sorrow. She never mentioned the letter when I came back. Finally, I asked her what she thought about it. She said she'd never received it.

Sometime later, she asked me to search out something from
her dresser drawers. In looking, I found the letter down in a corner of the drawer, buried beneath blouses and slips.

Another instance of this failure to acknowledge emotions occurred after an interview for the
Washington Post Magazine
years ago. The interviewer was with me for some hours, up until the entrance of my brother and his second wife. We were going out to dinner. We hung out for a while with the journalist, had a drink. In the published piece, the writer said that I changed the minute my brother walked in. I became another person.

This surprised me, although I was conscious of sometimes retreating around my brother, who had, to say the least, an entertainer's personality. What surprised me more was that I heard nothing from him. No call, no question, like “What in hell does this mean?” No response. The question buried, like my mother's letter, in a bottom drawer.

Burying emotion exacts terrible consequences. Thus are psychiatrists called into play. A psychiatrist can do a lot, but only as much as the patient can stand. And there it stops.

Buried emotions, especially anger. You know how brutal the anger you're conscious of can be. Imagine the brutality of the anger you've buried. Rage can be terrifying, for it seems endless, limitless. Probably it is. There is no bottom to the cauldron. It doesn't appear to have what T. S. Eliot called an objective correlative: an object that can be identified as a reason for an emotion. (Eliot's prime example is Hamlet; nothing in the play adequately explains his inability to kill Claudius.)

I think this was the problem with Mrs. D. and me. That I didn't know what the reason was for her anger became almost a metaphor. Because even when I thought I knew, I didn't know. Neither did she.

She poured alcohol on it. I did, too, to a lesser degree. That got the anger down to embers, but it still burned, and after not too long, the flames shot up again.

Because nobody knew what caused it. Except that we caused it, a kind of double arson.

Double, double toil and trouble,

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

I wonder if there are things that, if acknowledged, would sink us faster than any fifth of gin. I wonder if there are ways of behaving that we simply cannot manage, like a tearful goodbye, or even a tearful hello.

My father died when I was five. I remember my mother telling me about his death and adding, “Don't cry.” I might have looked at that injunction throughout my life as bearing more weight than it merited. “Don't cry” is so often a knee-jerk response to a situation, doing little more than marking the other person's responses. It's a breathing space while you think of something that might be more comforting. “Now, don't cry.” “Be good.” “Be quiet.” Phrases that are the mere ghosts of meaning.

Given half a chance, put a foot wrong, and we're all capable of going down. We know we're standing at the edge—and what does a good stiff drink do? Pulls us back just in time.

Hello. Goodbye.

Don't cry.

If I think on all of this too long, I will be overcome by lack of purpose, failure, or nostalgia.

Nostalgia, someone once said, is the death of hope.

I guess I won't drink to that.

T
o paraphrase Joseph Heller's
Catch-22,
some alcoholics are born, some alcoholics are made, and some have alcoholism thrust upon them. I earned an A in all three categories. My experiences when I was eleven and twelve living in Hawaii would be in the “made” category. Trying to escape from my life through books no longer worked. Having to fend off the bullies at a new school, followed by the loneliness of being by myself six hours a day in the college library at the University of Hawaii where my mother taught English, was the harbinger of what I would embrace in high school.

During the bicentennial summer of 1976, we rented our gray shingle home in middle-class suburban Washington, D.C., and temporarily moved into a rental in the Ilikai hotel in Oahu. Situated in downtown Waikiki, it was famous as one of the locations for the filming of
Hawaii Five-O
. I even appeared as an extra in one
episode, striding confidently behind Jack Lord as he hurried by the swimming pool on the way to meet Danno.

Summer was over too soon. I had to stop spending hours alone at the pool and the beach where I gazed at the girls. In Washington, D.C., I was lucky to attend a small, relatively inexpensive private school based on the philosophies of German philosopher Rudolf Steiner. I was used to small classes. No bad behavior was tolerated, the teachers were completely devoted to their students, and the students were expected to obey their teachers.

Here in the middle of a verdant paradise, my new junior high school campus was old and dirty. The palm trees drooped as if tired from the years of bearing the weight of children. The grounds were worn, the grass a dull green, and the school buildings like Quonset huts from World War II.

I hated going to the school's bathroom. Located in a small building separate from the main school building, it was small and smelly. Several of the older Hawaiian boys seemed to spend most of their time in there. When I went in on the first day of school, they grinned at me and said, “Hey, brah, want to buy a joint? Only a quarter.”

I didn't know what they were talking about, but the fear coursed through me as I washed my hands. “No, thanks.”

“C'mon, you don't want to get high wit' us?”

They all laughed as I dried my hands and fled. My radar to the outside world signaled “Don't hurt me.” Teenagers can sense weakness and how to exploit it.

The next day on my way to class, I was startled to find one of the local Hawaiian kids falling in beside me. “So, what's your name?” he said in a friendly tone.

“Ken.”

“Ken, I don't have no lunch money. C'n you give me some?”

I put my hand in my pocket and felt the quarters. “No,” I said cautiously. I could feel the shame flooding my body, because he knew, and I knew, that I couldn't stop him. I was too scared to fight.

“Well, brah, see, that's gonna be a problem, because if you don't give it to me, I'm gonna have to take it.” He smiled.

Walking quickly, I reached into my pocket and gave him four quarters.

“Yah, thanks, Ken. I really 'preciate it. I won't bother you again.” We both knew that this was just the beginning. He was going to take my lunch money every day.

The idea of going to a teacher was laughable. The teachers were terrible. In many of the classes, they didn't bother to give lessons. They just handed out workbooks with questions to answer. Math class was the most painful, because although I was good at math, I didn't retain it well over the summer and needed a little help at the beginning of the year to remember the basics. This math teacher started giving out problems, then testing us during the first week of class. I couldn't remember how to solve the problems. I started crying quietly, the tears burning. I rubbed my eyes so no one could see, and tried to figure out the different equations. I was ashamed that I couldn't provide the answers.

By the third week of school, my mother complained to the principal about the bully constantly stealing my lunch money. The principal was a nice man but ineffective. “We asked the other boy, and he said he didn't do anything. So there's nothing we can do. It's his word against your son's.”

A hopeless situation.

We moved to Pearl City, near Pearl Harbor, to live in a two-bedroom
in a high-rise condo building with a swimming pool. Instead of school, it was studying alone at the University of Hawaii's library while my mother taught.

Here, in the most beautiful place in the world, my mother sat in her room and typed, and typed, and typed. The result was her first Richard Jury mystery. A novel set and steeped in rainy England, written in balmy, fragrant Hawaii.

I was into science fiction then: I read all of Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov. The main branch library in the old part of downtown Honolulu is famous for its beauty. I spent many hours there, marveling at the quiet, at the statuesque banyan trees by the entrance, the palm trees rising above the chairs in the open courtyard, the sweet-smelling air with hints of flowers and the sea. We didn't have a car when we lived there. I rode the bus everywhere around the island. I read
Catch-22
on those buses, and Frank Herbert's
Dune
.

But I could read only so much. It was here that the painful parts of adolescence took over. The desperate longing I experienced in looking at yet barely being able to speak to some of the most beautiful girls in the world—all of them older and with nothing to say to a twelve-year-old—drove me crazy. I began to have nightmares like the ones I'd had when I was little of people trying to kill me, and several times I experienced a druglike disembodiment in our elevator, a sensation that I was looking down on myself from above.

My loneliness became more acute. Like any twelve-year-old, I wanted to distance myself from my mother, to make friends. I was the new guy, the stranger, and younger than most of the kids there. My first month at the condo complex, I tried to befriend some teenagers.

One day they realized I was afraid to swim in the deep end of the pool. “What's a matta with you, boy?” they said to me in their mock-Hawaiian accents as I was splashing in the shallow end. They were all sons of navy men and were intimidating. They teased me relentlessly when they saw me mooning over a beautiful thirteen-year-old girl.

“Don't tell us you can't swim!”

“Well, no,” I admitted. “I don't know how to swim.”

“Don't know how? Ah, c'mon, we'll teach ya,” one said, and they all smiled at one another.

I walked from the shallow end of the pool to the deep end, and one of them shoved me in. I plunged into the water, my feet not touching the bottom, and came gasping to the surface. I dog-paddled to the wall and looked up at the ring of smiling teenage boys.

“See, you know how to swim!”

 • • • 

It was in Oahu, riding the buses by myself, that I developed a neurosis I have to this day—a terrible fear of getting lost. I dream about it constantly, being on a bus or a train, not being in control and not knowing where I'm going, the surroundings familiar but somehow backward, like a tape playing in reverse. When I'm driving and I lose my way, panic takes over; my chest tightens, anxiety ripples through my body, and I speed up to outrace my fear.

I asked the bus drivers in Oahu repeatedly, “Is this my stop? This one? You won't forget to tell me?” Though the bus drivers patiently answered my questions, my fear remained.

Not long after I was thrown in the deep end of the swimming pool, I went to the surfing beach Waimea Bay. With stands of coral and booming surf, Waimea is famed for its tubelike waves. The
beach was largely deserted on a weekday. I didn't know about the wicked undertow that drowns even accomplished swimmers.

I went into the ocean, fascinated with the tall, graceful waves, how they thundered against the large coral ledge to my left. I kept dog-paddling out to the point where I could see down the vast cylinder tube that a wave would create. It seemed as if I could see fifty feet down the tube before the wave curled down and crashed into the surf.

Suddenly, I was caught in the undertow. I flailed and “swam” as hard as I could but got no closer to shore. I kept at it for what felt like hours but couldn't have been longer than ten minutes. Finally, I crawled to shore and flopped down, terrified and exhausted. A kindly man asked if I was okay, and I gasped out some kind of reply. When I went home, I didn't tell my mother.

As the year progressed, I studied in the college campus library every day. I've spent so much time in so many libraries that whenever I visit one, it brings back a flood of childhood memories. Books were my friends. When I'm in libraries or bookstores now, looking at the shelves of books, hundreds of books, thousands of books, I feel reassured, content.