Impossible Vacation (29 page)

H
OW STRANGELY
familiar it all was, like an old recurring dream, to be gathering things to take to Provincetown, only this time it was not my father’s meat or Mom’s Metrecal. It was just a yoga mat for the back of the van and a sleeping bag. I loaded up the next morning and was at last off on my trip to the tip of the mighty Cape.

As soon as I got on the road I fell into a perpetual-motion trance and was saved from time by motion. I drove as if on automatic through Fall River, past New Bedford to the open Cape highway, until the bright green van was rolling along like some pure and simple storybook creation.

In no time at all a uniform row of white bungalows flashed along on my left, marking the entrance to the old Provincetown highway. I could see the mighty arm of the Cape curl around into a fist which sheltered the beautiful harbor. And Provincetown was visible, an old fishing town in the distance; but as soon as I got close to the town it got thick and ugly with traffic and people all walking and gawking. There was a great line of Winnebagos, jeeps and overheating station wagons. The whole thing looked like a giant
Mad
magazine. It was disgusting, and the worst of it was, it was swallowing me up and causing me to feel like one of the horde. Just because I drove a green Dodge van, this did not absolve me from contributing to this piggish confusion. It was a classic lemming situation. The sea had drawn all these people to drive to it, only to be overwhelmed and end up circling in confusion. Around and around the town they drove, holding up traffic while they parked and ejected squads of little monsters to devour hot dogs, clam rolls, and saltwater taffy.

As soon as I got there I wanted to leave; but I had to see the sea first. It was late afternoon, and after sitting in traffic mumbling to myself a compulsive list of regrets—I could be in Amsterdam, Nepal, Ireland, or India now—I made it to the public beach and found a parking place; but much as I wanted to be in the ocean, I couldn’t seem to leave the van. I was frantic-manic by now and I kept circling it, catching wide-angle views of myself in the hubcaps. Then I would kick the tires and mumble lists of places I’d rather be and then get back in the van and sit, and then get out and walk around it again. This pattern got tighter and faster and more and more like an old-time movie being played over and over. I became more and more like those automatic Amish automatons I had seen in my fevered sleep the day I arrived home from Mexico, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I was a full-blown, out-of-control compulsion on the loose.

What finally jerked me out of it was the arrival of the local police, who pulled up in a cruiser beside me. Two of them jumped out of their car and got me up against my van and said, “Hold still, boy.” That word “boy” made me hostile. “What’s up?” the big fat one asked. “Can’t make up your mind today or what?”

They studied the pupils of my eyes and then let me go with a warning. “Don’t let me see you out here looking at your hubcaps like that again. Never again.”

I drove into town, found a metered parking space on the pier, and headed down that crowded main street. When I got in front of the town hall I decided to beg. Just like that. It came to me like a voice saying, “Why not beg for your money?” so I went back to my van to fetch my Tibetan prayer cymbals. I had been carrying them around with me to act as a calming agent. At night I would strike them and follow the sound into silence, which was the only prayer I could conceive of then.

Once I got the cymbals, I sat cross-legged on the sidewalk in front of the town hall. I folded one of my pastel-pink Indian T-shirts into a neat square in front of me and I began to ring the cymbals and chant and to my instant amazement people started dropping money onto my T-shirt. I was absolutely amazed how quickly people responded; but what they were responding to I didn’t know. A few people even put down dollar bills. Everything was going fine until those same damned
cops came along and busted me. They said one more time and they would lock me up. But I got to keep the money. I headed off to a local bar to celebrate the fact that I was able to pass for a real beggar.

I went to an old fisherman’s bar for drinks, but there weren’t any fishermen there, only tourists. I drank draft beers and ate peanuts in the shell. Those beers calmed me down. They always did. They were, I thought, still my cozy ally.

After enough beer to relax me and put me on the edge of drunkenness, I went out in search of food. I went to the foot-long-hot-dog stand on the main pier. I wanted to buy a lobster roll, but they were too expensive, so I went for two foot-longs with everything on them. While I was waiting for the woman to bring them I tucked my shirt in. All I did was unbutton the top of my pants and tuck my shirt in and then I buttoned right up again. But when the woman brought me my two foot-longs she acted real strange and real put-off, like I smelled bad or something.

Just as I was taking my first bite out of one of the foot-longs that damn police car pulled up again and the big fat one said, “Get in the car.” He was real pissed, and I didn’t know why until they took me to the police station and locked me up for exposing myself to the foot-long lady. That was their charge—exposing myself. I was incredulous, and once I was all booked and behind bars I started yelling, “She’s out of her mind. She’s been handling those foot-longs too long. She needs a rest.” But they were gone.

In the morning they gave me back my wallet and keys and told me to get out of town forever.

W
HEN I GOT BACK
to New York City the other side of my manicness set in. That fearful depressive state I’d been warned about, combined with the August heat, just did me in. I fell into a dreamless, Rip Van Winkle sleep. I can’t say it was a relief, because it was so unconscious. It was just nothing. It was what I suppose death is finally like: a giant absence of
me, an end to all memory. It was only a relief in relation to the panic I felt when I woke up and realized I had been asleep for sixteen hours. I couldn’t bear the fact that I’d been unconscious all that time. Meg tried to help me accept it as part of some sort of healing process. Although she didn’t say it, I’m sure it was a great relief to her to have me asleep.

I slept like Rip Van Winkle through the month of August, only waking up to eat a little something and then pass out again. In no time it was September, which meant that Meg and I could move back into our apartment, provided Barney and Meg could keep me awake long enough to get me over there. Meg was sure that the return to our nest would completely heal me. As for herself, she couldn’t wait to get there. She was a real nester and had been living out of a suitcase way too long.

Meg was ecstatic to be back in our apartment and busied herself with puttering and cleaning and unpacking and putting everything in order as she sang that Ezio Pinza song “Welcome home said the door” over and over again. She laid down her Kashmir rugs and raved to me about them while I nodded off again like some A-train junkie.

The world was now a soft blur around me, like it was in my old childhood days when I’d pretend to be sick and stay home, dozing to the radio soap operas “Ma Perkins” and “Stella Dallas,” the distant sounds from my grade school playground seeping into my sleep.

It would go like this: I would wake up and try to act as though I was a normal sort of guy, facing another normal day, and Meg would fix breakfast and I would eat it, and then after a few cups of coffee I’d say, “Well, I’m just going to lie down for a minute and take a little rest.” Then in no time at all I’d wake up to the evening news, have a bite of dinner, watch as much of “The Honeymooners” reruns as I could stay awake for, then conk out again, not even making it to bed. I’d just fall asleep right on the couch.

Meg was very patient with all of this and kept encouraging me to sleep as much as I felt I needed, but I was very frightened and tried to combat the sleep by undertaking meaningful activities like going shopping at the Grand Union. I’d end up nodding out while waiting in the checkout line, so I pretty much stayed indoors. Any outside input was too much, too terrifying. It kept reminding me that the
world was constantly going on without me, that I could sleep for sixteen hours and not even be missed. It made me feel expendable.

During my three or four waking hours I was doing a lot of groaning and letting out little shouts and crazy sounds, like I had a giant nervous tic in my diaphragm. Those sounds were disturbing to some people in the streets, not to mention in the Grand Union, but on the whole I noticed that most of the people ignored me. They just treated me like another crazy New Yorker.

After a while it began to occur to me that this behavior might be the new condition of my life, a permanent condition, and I began to think about suicide as an alternative. Up until then I had never contemplated suicide, except for that silly time in the summer when I was young and I told Coleman I was going to jump out the window like Milton Berle’s wife. I had always felt that my mom had made a giant mistake by doing herself in, but now I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps it was the only way out of this endless sleep and those waking states that were so painful, except for when I watched “The Honeymooners.” Those nightly reruns on Channel Eleven (which was then nicknamed “Eleven Alive”) were my only thirty minutes of graceful pleasure, and somewhere I knew that if I could still respond to Ralph, Norton, Alice, and Trixie, I would not kill myself. They even made me laugh once or twice. They were all I lived for, and that was also terrifying, because I knew that if I lost interest in “The Honeymooners,” or if they went off the air, I would surely die.

Then one day, while shouting and groaning my way up West Broadway to buy some chicken hearts at the Grand Union, I ran into an old friend who asked me how I was. I just turned to her and said, “Crazy! I’m crazy!” and then I went on shouting my way up the street. Well, this friend, Helen, who was a dancer and into all sorts of New Age diets and healing stuff like that, called Meg and suggested that I take a glucose tolerance test to find out if I was hypoglycemic. “Hypo
what?
” I groaned. “I never heard of such a thing.” Meg explained that it was a condition of low blood sugar and could make people act crazy. Meg tried to get me to go for the test, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stay awake long enough to go through it. It was supposed to be something like six hours long, so I kept putting it off. I had good
intentions. I wanted to take the test, but I kept falling asleep before I could get out of the house.

Other friends also tried to be helpful and gave me books to read about depression, but I got depressed reading them or fell asleep with them over my face. I remember one called
From Sad to Glad
, which was just the right weight and size to keep cracked over my face while I slept. The weight and smell of that book were very comforting.

The content, however, was not. I was able to get up to page 9, where the author writes, “There are a host of symptoms that help us identify the affliction. Not all of these symptoms are found in every case, but together they make up a classic syndrome. Please note that it is unusual for all of them to be present in a particular case.” And then came the horrible list:

To my horror I realized that I had every symptom but insomnia. I had the classic syndrome. I
was
the classic syndrome, and recognizing that, I suddenly experienced fifteen out of sixteen symptoms and passed out
again on the couch with
From Sad to Glad
over my face, glaring at Meg all day like some insane advertisement.

Things were definitely not going well, and I think the only reason I didn’t try to kill myself was that I simply was not awake long enough to do it. I also knew, somewhere in the back of my addled, panicked mind, that I was very lucky to have Meg as a nurse and that she cared for me deeply and was watching over me as I slept. It was in her eyes that I continued to exist.

With Meg’s help, I was finally able to stay awake long enough to take that dreadful glucose tolerance test, and it showed that I was extremely hypoglycemic. This led me into the megavitamin therapy program at the Fryer Research Center, where I went once a week for giant syringe doses of vitamin B complex and niacin. I also had to take large doses of liquid vitamin B and liquid niacin at home. I was told to immediately give up all sugar, alcohol, and caffeine, which was an enormous shock to my already depressed system. I was put on a very strict, very boring protein diet. I had to eat five small protein meals a day in order to keep my blood sugar stable and stop my body’s overproduction of adrenaline, which had been going off like a fire alarm ever since India. This, the doctors told me, had kept me in my perpetual hyper state, which had finally reversed itself into all that sleeping.