Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (19 page)

For a time, sat watching blood pour out with a sense of disbelief. Was that from me? Looked around. Was I really to die? What had I done? Blood everywhere. Unsteadily rising to my feet, wrists pressed tight against my shirt, I staggered to the bathroom, wrapped white towels around the bloody wounds, and with a sense of exhilaration, called 911.

POLICE ARRIVED, TWO PATROLMEN, ONE BURLY, one thin, sharp-edged. Boris was snoozing in his room. They looked around. The thin cop eyeballed my wrists as I explained to his partner that I had just cut them with a razor, intending to end my life.

“I tried to kill myself,” I said with tingling joy.

“Uh-huh,” said the burly cop, as if I'd just explained that I wasn't really a human being but an aardvark awakened somehow in a human body and trying to get back to aardvark world.

“It was,” I said, “ a suicide attempt.”

When I said this, the thin cop winced and the burly cop seemed lost in calculations of some sort. Neither appeared to relish having to take me to the hospital.

“Are you going to call for an ambulance? I'm bleeding pretty bad.”

“Well.” Burly sighed. “I guess.” Looked at his partner. “You want?”

Thin looked at me. “We'll take him in the squad car. But, uh, look, pal, don't get blood on the backseat, okay?”

“I won't.”

In the squad car, I had a view of the backs of Thin and Burly's thinning wet-look razor cuts. Relaxed, heaved a relieved sigh: nothing more for me to decide. The authorities in charge now, me free to be as sick as I am and no excuse about it. I'd get help now. Proudly, sat up straight, held my towel-wrapped wrists flat against my abdomen, already the good patient, keeping my blood away from the black vinyl seat, bleeding all over myself.

“Officers. Which hospital are you taking me to?”

“St. Luke's,” said Thin.

“That's a very good one,” I said.

Burly and Thin glanced at each other. Then Burly, who drove, motioned to Thin with an up-and-down motion of his head and said: “Hey, uh…whatsit? Alan.”

“Yes, officer.”

“Listen, Alan. When you get there, um, they're gonna ask, like, in the intake, you know, how in the world, uh, you know—what happened? Where'd you get them cuts?”

“Yeah, they're gonna ask,” Thin concurred, as though this was the worst possible development.

“When they ask,” Burly continued, “If you tell them suicide—” Thin spun around in his seat with a loud creaking of jacket leather and his eyes bored into mine: “You know what's gonna happen?”

“Tell 'im,” said Burly. “Tell 'im what'll happen.”

“It's gonna be a mess, okay? A mess. They're gonna have us
and
you there all night. They're gonna keep you for observation.”

“All night we'll be there,” said Burly. “Tell him why.”

“I hate to say this, but legally, what you done is considered a sort
of crime. Possibly a misdemeanor. No one'll call it that. But I heard of judges out there who want it brought to trial! Can you believe
that
?”

“Fuggin' psycho judges,” confirmed Burly.

“But the likelihood is slim to none,” said Thin.

“Slim to none,” said Burly.

“But us there filling out the paperwork all night and having to hang out with you,
that
is real. That will happen.”

“As real as it gets,” confirmed Burly. “All night with the forms, and tell him what then.”

“Book you, baby. Fingerprints. Mug shot. The whole shebang. You wanna be like John Dillinger?”

“Not just John Dillinger. Like a psycho John Dillinger. You tell'em you tried to kill yourself, you got a record, forget about getting hired, forget about renting apartments, forget about meeting a nice girl and getting married. You're an official nutcase criminal for the rest of your life. Shit follows you around everywhere. They'll put you under locked observation. They'll use it against you in divorce court. You're an official bridge jumper, state certified. Watch how much alimony you end up paying. Child support?”

“HA!” laughed Thin.

“Fuggin' forget it!” said Burly. “And the paperwork. Whatsit? Alex?”

“Alan.”

“The whole night.”

“All night is right,” confirmed Thin.

After a long pause in which I felt a hand tug murderously at the small frail hope that had taken root inside me, I asked: “So, what'll I do?”

They didn't answer right off. Pretended to consider. But I sensed that it was an answer they gave to every attempted suicide who was
ambulatory. “Call it an accident,” said Thin.

Both pretended to be excited by this, as though it were a sudden inspired revelation.

“Hell, yeah!” Burly enthused. “Tell 'em you had an accident!”

“There ya go!” said Thin with pleasure. “And you know what the beauty of it is? Nothing they can do about it. They gotta stitch you up and out you go. Home free! Long as no one uses the S word in that place, it never occurred.”

“Never happened,” Burly concurred.

“We don't even use the S word around the intake nurse. Or the go-get-'em intern that's gonna practice his stitches on you. We don't use that effin' S word nohow, no ways. Under any circumstance. And the beauty of it is—”

“Tell 'im! This is beautiful!” crowed Burly.

“We go our way, you go yours.”

“And we'll all meet on the Great Highway,” sang Burly.

“So whaddaya say?” said Thin.

Thin and Burly's little snapshot seminar on the protocols of municipal response to attempted suicide left me thirsting desperately for a drink. A drink that surely could not be had under psychiatric observation.

“Okay,” I said.

At which Thin shifted, turned around, and faced the windshield. “Tell 'em you cut yourself by accident.”

“Freak accident,” said Burly.

“Capeesh?” said Thin.

“Capeesh,” I said.

And neither said a word more until we pulled into the ambulance bay with the squad car lights spinning and Burly helped me out; leaning over, whispered: “No S word!”

I nodded that I understood.

As Thin and Burly stood by with encouraging winks, the intake nurse, a no-nonsense black woman in a winged white cap, inspected my wrists and asked: “What happened?”

I looked over at Thin and Burly.

“Go ahead. Tell her about it. Craziest thing,” said Thin.

“Freaky one in a million,” said Burly.

“I was up cutting a steak with this big butcher knife and it slipped, first this way, then that, and both my wrists got cut.”

The nurse stared at me. “Both.”

“Like you see.”

She glanced up at the two officers.

“I couldn't hardly believe it myself when I heard. But he's telling the truth,” said Burly.

“Wild,” concurred Thin.

The nurse said: “That's what you want me to write?”

“Yes,” I said.

She glanced inquiringly at the cops.

“His call,” said Thin.

“Free country,” said Burly.

She wrote it down.

“You're bleeding badly,” she said. “We'll take you right in.”

 

After the stitches and with big bandages taped around my wrists, marking me as an unmistakable failed suicide, I called Jeff Goodell, who came and got me from the hospital, though it was only 6:00 a.m. We returned to his place, where I had some wine and beer. From there we walked to John and Kevi's apartment. They took me in; let me lie on their floor with an ashtray, a bottle of whiskey, and a pack of cigarettes. I cried and got drunker and they tried to care for me with patient listening and offers of food, but I pushed it all away and blind drunk went stumbling out to look for Carolyn.

Talked my way past her anxious roommate, barged into Carolyn's room. Gone.

“Where is she?” I raged.

The mousey roommate stood there terrified, afraid to speak back to my six foot two inches tall, two hundred pounds of drunken bloodshot meanness with suicide bandages, my fist gripping a whiskey bottle.

“Where, goddammit?” I snarled.

She told me. Before I left, I jerked covers off Carolyn's bed, threw her clothes out of drawers, and scrawled obscenities in massive Magic Markered words over her bedroom's nice beige walls I rushed to the Columbia campus, where an English department reception for incoming teaching assistants was under way. Blew past the check-in desk, where a row of seated student registration aides all came to their feet, calling excitedly, “Wait! Stop!” as I entered the hall, swaggering like a nightmarish border rider come down out of the hills on a mission from hell, brimming with Byronic delusion and driven insane by loneliness. Scanned the room for Carolyn, saw her freeze as I approached. Two male grad school heroes blocked my path. I knocked them both down easily, first one, then the other. A hand tried to grab my wrist. My fist found its owner's face. More heroes appeared as I continued to advance through a gauntlet of bespectacled future literary critics, blowing by them easily, bobbing and weaving in the ring with Foucault and Derrida, connecting with jaws, eyes, taking an occasional solid shot on the side of the head or in the ribs from a postmodernist, reeling but never ceasing to advance, shouting “HERE I AM!” until standing directly before her, into her flinching, battered face I ranted: “I was gonna save you from him! HIM! The jerk who hit you! You wanted me to help you! And I did! I was willing to risk EVEN FUGGING DEATH!!!! And this is
how you repay me? By going back to your batterer?”

She started to speak.

“WHORE!” I shrieked and belted her, once, hard, across the face.

Thereafter, I don't remember much. An army of hands laid hold of me, voices, men and women, screaming and raging, pushing my mannequin limpness out a door, down a hall, into the quad. I rode the hurricane of their outrage like a three-legged chair, a piece of broken furniture. In all this, never once lost my grip on the scotch bottle. Not a drop lost.

 

A week or so later, was called into Robert Towers's office, asked to sit. He was behind his desk, hands folded, strange smile on his lips as he observed me over glasses perched on the end of his inflamed nose.

“We have got a problem,” he said. “And I think you must know what I'm referring to…”

I nodded.

“It's not only a problem of seriously violated house rules but a political one too. No one here in the Writing Division admires what you've done. We do not strike each other here. We do not do violence. We are writers, not thugs. But to strike a woman is especially onerous. We deplore it, and condemn it, each and every one. And I want you to know that.” He let his unflinching blue eyes rest on me for a while to underscore this point. I felt it. My eyes dropped, ashamed.

“Your writing has its admirers among the faculty. You organized that amazing series of readings at La MaMa Theatre for our entire department, for which we are grateful. And you now have a book whose pub date is fast approaching. That book stands for everything that the Writing Division here at Columbia seeks to
promote. And I anticipate, given the prominence of the publisher, Anchor/Doubleday, and that it's a book whose time has come, and that it has an introduction from John Knowles, it will earn you much prestige and honor this department, and all the writing programs involved.”

Again I nodded.

“So, you represent us, in a sense. You see the problem?”

I nodded, ashamed.

“Look. I'm not trying to dig at you. We are writers here. We are different than others. Artists sometimes do crazy things. Literature is filled with crazy folks. Our social embarrassments are legend. But a student who, failing at suicide, goes with bandaged wrists and a whiskey bottle and in front of two hundred teaching assistants, and a considerable portion of the English Department faculty, screams obscenities, knocks people down, and then strikes a fellow student writer, a married woman, in the face…”

He leaned forward, brought his face as close as possible. “This is not an image of ourselves that we want to go public.”

I nodded.

“And there's politics. The English Department, where you performed your actions, is this department's enemy. They feel that we divert important funds away from their coffers. That we are an unserious program and don't deserve autonomy. That we ought to be scaled down and folded into the English Department. They want you gone because they want us gone. And behind them stands the Student Senate, which also wants you out.”

He leaned back, lifted a pencil, dropped it, sank down low in his swivel chair, studied my face. “It's a pickle. A real pickle.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“I say it is a pickle.”

“It is a pickle, sir.”

MacShane wants you to stay. Solotaroff thinks you have promise. So do I. Look—”

He came forward again. “No one here—we're writers. We're not distinguished for our mental health or social aptitude. Eccentricity—it's a given. But what you've done is an actual crime. We must draw the line at crime.”

I nodded.

He fell back in his chair. Lifted the pencil. Dropped it.

“If Carolyn doesn't press charges, it's no crime. But it's still grounds for dismissal from Columbia. Is that clear? Do you understand why?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why, then? Let me hear it from you.”

“Because we can't have our women students live in fear of violence from their fellow writers.”