Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (31 page)

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?”

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 type.”

“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.

“What now?” he said. Looked old, faded, his face torn up. Couldn't seem to get more than a week or two sober before hitting the pipe, getting into even worse predicaments, and crawling back into recovery beaten to a pulp, flat broke, discredited, on hands and knees. This last time, he'd been diagnosed with hep C and his liver was giving out. Now he had about four days back, his denim still bore fresh-looking blood and puke stains. The bottoms of his eyes were green bags of disease.

“You eat yet today?” I asked.

He shook his head no, dragged so hard on a smoke his collapsed cheekbones drysucked his face into a granny look.

“Well, how about we go get some grub?”

“You got dough? Or you thinking Fort Hamilton?”

“No. But I know this,” I said. “I ain't eatin' one more salad of fresh-mown lawn grass and tomato rings at the Fort Hamilton Church Free Lunch.”

“Getting particular, huh?”

“Tell you what. There's an open mike in North Beach that runs every Wednesday afternoon. Starts at three and runs to five. What say me and you hoof it across town, I'll read, sell some books, and we'll blow what we make on big plates of beef lo mein down in old Chinatown?”

“Bet.”

It was a couple of miles, but we had nothing else to do and just sauntered along, slowly, to conserve our strength. He hadn't eaten in over sixteen hours, I in about ten, and those hadn't been spectacular feedings. So we both felt light-headed and paused frequently to rest, sitting hunched on the sidewalk, shoulder to shoulder, passing a cigarette back and forth. At least the weather held.

“I feel like a butterfly nailed to a wall,” he said, adjusting sunglasses with a tap from a grubby fingernail.

“Why do you say that? Don't you like being sober?”

“Do you?” he asked skeptically.

“It's better than the gutter, man.”

Willie Deuces looked incredulous. “What do you call this?” he said, pointing to the pavement holding up our tired hungry asses.

“I call this grooving on Haight Street in the weekday sun, with nothing to do but go read poems and maybe stuff our faces with Chinese chow.”

“Man, you're on Pink Cloud Number Nine,” he said.

“Just practicing gratitude. It works, you know. Everything starts to look better. The world gets its shine back.”

“Who's your sponsor?”

“Eugene.”

“He's a good one. Hard-ass, I hear.”

“He keeps it real.”

“You look a lot better than when you walked in. You were pretty torn up. And nuts. I can see whatever you're doing is working.”

“I go to a meeting every day, man. Sometimes two, three, or four. Meet my sponsor every week. Pray to this thing I don't even believe in completely yet, though I'm starting to. There is something. I don't know what it is. But it's not me or you and it's there when I need it. Some kind of Higher Power.”

“At least you're staying with it. I can't seem to get a month clean. Keep going out at one week, two weeks. Three weeks. Three days! Three hours!” He shook his head. “I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. I don't know why I can't seem to get this thing.”

We stood to our feet and shuffled along some more down the hot sidewalk, keeping one eye on the sky, checking for shifts in the wind, hints of gray, but it stayed blue and we ogled and grinned at
the pretty San Francisco girls in their hippie dresses and Bettie Page haircuts and sweet tattoos of she-devils and swallows.

“So what makes you feel like a butterfly nailed to a wall?”

“I don't really want to be in sobriety, okay? I'm not even court ordered. I don't much like sober life.”

“So what makes you keep trying to get this?”

He didn't answer right off. Face withdrew into sadness. Then said: “I once spat up a piece of my lung when I was hitting the pipe. And I got so desperate when I ran out of crack that I figured the piece I'd spat up must have crack residue on it, so I put it in the pipe and smoked it. I guess when you smoke your own lung it's time to quit. What do you think?”

I grinned. “I'm trying to think of a name for that. How about Addictive Respiratory Autocannibalism.”

“I want to fly free, man. But my wing's nailed to the wall. All I can do is flap around and look better and better, but when do I get to fly?”

I didn't try to answer, though I knew just what he meant. But to me, this sobriety thing was limitless. To me, the blue sky above our heads was a miracle. Passing clean-and-sober time together was a miracle. That I didn't have a ball-peen hammer of a hangover smashing my brain was a miracle. That my body did not groan and scream with pain was a miracle. That I did not crave alcohol was sheer science fiction. That I could just walk around breathing and being and talking and doing without a black sucking abyss on my insides demanding more booze was more happiness than I had ever known. There was no dense wall of impenetrable glass dividing me from Willie Deuce and every other human being on planet Earth. His presence resonated in me, fed a part of me that craved companionship. I didn't know his real name or anything about him, but it didn't matter. There was no separation. We were recovering
alcoholics kicking it on Haight Street, alive when we should have been dead, disporting in a kind of living afterlife, since whatever we once had been was to all intents and purposes gone. We were both new in the city—he came from Southern Cal—and for me the city still held wonders, a sense of magic. You felt it not just on Haight Street but in the Mission, North Beach, even the Tenderloin, where what had gone down in the Fifties and Sixties revolutions, the ghosts of old bands and countercultural legends—Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Richard Brautigan, Charlie Parker, the Dead, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Sonny Barger and the Hells Angels, Hunter Thompson, Kesey's Merry Pranksters, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Diane Di Prima—arose like specters from the sidewalks, beckoning to new unknowns with an electrifying thrill that charged the clear blue air with a sense of purpose and possibility.

My virgin nerve endings, which had lain dormant for years blacked out on vodka, tingled now with a sense of joyous freedom. And what was freedom? First, freedom from addiction. No longer a slave to my thoughts or impulses, or to chemical dependency, I could dance beneath the open sky with one hand waving free! That was huge. I grasped that recovery from alcohol and all substances must serve as the baseline for freedom's pursuit. But once that was solidly in place, the possibilities were limitless. Political freedom. Sexual freedom. Personal freedom. Artistic freedom. Spiritual freedom. Were they all one and the same? Did one find freedom in all these ways through the diligent pursuit of a single freedom? I didn't know.

Was desperate to find out. And that little voice of the whispering Angel said:
When you have become what you wish for through your own experience, then you will truly be free
.

But what should I wish to be? On this, the Angel was mute.