Me and the Devil: A Novel (4 page)

Though published almost fifty years apart, Jellinek’s book and Ameisen’s book are companions on my shelf, along with two older books, Jack London’s self-described “alcoholic memoirs”
John Barleycorn
and Charles Jackson’s
The Lost Weekend.
(I was very late to discover Jackson’s masterpiece, so stupid was the moving picture that prejudiced me against this book on which it allegedly was based.) Others, like Hans Fallada’s
The Drinker,
I have read with some interest and at times admiration, then discarded. I like scary drunk tales, and the disparate three to be found together on my shelf are to me the best of them, each in its way. I blame it on myself that, alone or together, they did not scare me enough to effect a change in me. But it was very much to the contrary. I derived vicarious delight from reading in these tales during my fleeting periods of sobriety. I did not now draw down one of these volumes, but searched out my
hefty little blue A.A. book, which I kept in a closet, separate from the others.

I had no trouble feeling the presence of, and believing in, powers greater than myself—the sea, the wind, certain sacred breezes that seemed to bear the lingering powers of old gods and old wisdom—but I knew that none of these powers gave a fuck whether I drank or did not drink. Only I did. It was up to me, only me, and my will—mine, not thine.

That Saturday afternoon I walked to the meeting in the basement of the Municipal Union Building on Barclay Street. “The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.” I had read those words posted on meeting-room walls many times, and every time I read them I reflected that I did not belong, that I failed to meet this sole requirement for being there; for I knew in the back of my mind that I was intent on drinking again. I had brought men and women to these rooms who had fared far better in them, and in the program, than I. But I knew that this time was different. I had a desire, a very deep and real desire, to stop drinking for good. I felt that I belonged.

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I always loved these words: the mystery of their origin, the power and beauty inherent in them. Plain, straightforward, they invited no interpretation. Here, as often encountered in A.A., shorn of the God who was called on to do the granting when A.A. first appropriated it, and who remains when these words appear in the sanctioned literature of A.A., as do the closing words “Thy will, not mine, be done,” was a prayer not only for drunkards but for every mortal soul. These words felt good coming from within me, my voice one with the voices of the others.

Her eyes, so sad, were the first thing I noticed. I watched after her as she hesitated then wandered slowly, alone, from the room.
She wore a skirt or a dress under her gray woolen coat, and under that, dark patterned tights. Her legs were shapely, very shapely. I imagined ripping open those tights, baring her thigh, and hearing her utter what wild and exquisite cries she might. I breathed the air through which she had moved.

I
N THE COMING DAYS
I
DEVOTED MYSELF TO EASY INDUSTRY,
shopping for groceries, cooking, paying bills, replying to correspondence, taking care of business, such as it was.

A woman named Irene at a publishing house called Errata Naturae Editores in Madrid had inquired about putting out an edition of one of my works.

“We do assure you,” she wrote, “that we are fascinated with your text and that it will be carefully translated and printed into a beautiful book.”

I fell for the line about her intention to produce a beautiful book, and offered to let her license the Spanish rights for a five-year period at an extremely modest price. I regretted my generosity immediately, but my word was my bond. But my price, she claimed, was all of two hundred dollars beyond her means.

“Unfortunately,” she wrote, “Spain is a small country, with not that many readers.”

The indignation I felt turned to laughter, and I dismissed the matter without another word to her. Maybe the name of the house—Errata Naturae translates from the Latin as “errors of nature”—should have served as warning from the start.

No wonder I didn’t write anymore. To quote Tennessee Williams, from his final stage play: “Fuck it!” Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s creditors.

So in my newfound sobriety I continued not to write. At least
not consciously. Then early one morning something gave me start. I was sitting on the couch with my coffee when, from the corner of my eye, I noticed there was a pen on my desk, and beneath the pen was a scrap of paper. I was sure that these had not been there the night before. I went to the desk, looked at the paper, saw hurried-seeming words. My pulse quickened. The light and sounds of morning through my windows seemed to vanish.

It was my written-in-the-dark scrawl, but I did not remember writing it. In fact, I felt certain that I had not, and that these words were not mine. But the handwriting attested otherwise. Had I written this while sleepwalking, or in a semiconscious state? What did it mean? I did not believe in reincarnation. But had I felt a sense of reincarnation when I wrote the lines I now beheld? Did my unconscious know what my conscious mind denied? Had something from within, or a voice from somewhere, spoken through me? What was I to make of this eerie incantation of everlasting life?

I read the words again, whispering them aloud to myself this time. I placed the pen in the center drawer of the desk with my other pens, and I folded and placed the scrap of paper in the drawer to the right. Something in me wanted it out of sight. I wanted to put it out of mind as well, but I could not.

These words were strange to me, yet at times uncannily familiar, as if they might be speaking to, or from, atavistic memories that were hidden, vague and veiled, unknown and unarticulated, in me. The phrase “bowering shade” meant nothing to me. But I have always loved and felt a deep affinity for leopards.

T
HE COLDEST MONTH OF THAT WINTER PASSED SLOWLY.
Even the wolf moon when it arrived seemed frozen in the sky as I gazed at it through my kitchen window. It was there, to the west, looming high and big over the river, at four o’clock in the morning, and it was still there, seeming not to have moved, more than three hours later, after seven, when I went back to bed. The winds howled to gusts of fifty-five miles an hour in the wake of that moon.

More snow and frigid sleet came down upon the city. I took a taxi to the Lower East Side, telling the driver to let me off at the corner of Tenth Street and Avenue B. Leslie would be tending bar at the Lakeside Lounge that night, and I knew that she would accept, perhaps even be happy to see, that I was not drinking.

I liked Leslie a lot, and it was good to see her. She had a smile that always worked on me like mellow medicine, even when I encountered it through barely seeing narrowed eyes. But I was there for another reason. Whatever strays were out on a desolate night such as this, I figured, belonged to nights such as this.

“What brings you out?”

Leslie was one of the few people who ask this and elicit a thoughtful answer. It was the way she asked it.

“I feel like sucking a damsel’s blood,” I told her. She smiled that smile of hers, and I saw that she thought I was being merely glib and playful. “I’m serious,” I said.

It was no use. I did better when I lied than when I told the truth, it seemed. She asked me what I was having, and I told her that all I wanted was a club soda with a piece of lemon. She brought it and pushed my money back to me. I looked around. It was dark, and it took a while to make out the animated or torpid forms at the bar. It felt good to be sober, to see and think clearly amid the slurred mutterings and the wailed descants of misery, complaint, and lunacy.

Leslie was talking across the bar to a girl several seats down to my left. When the girl laughed, I saw that she was quite pretty. She was alone and had a full drink in front of her.

I felt slightly demonic. It was a not unpleasant feeling. Old Nick or Nicholas the Ancient. Wasn’t that it? No, no, no. Old Scratch or Nicholas the Ancient. And
ancient
was spelled in a peculiar, antiquated way. What was it?
Antient.
Yes, that was it. Old Scratch or Nicholas the Antient. Where had I found that? Something British, no? Seventeenth century, eighteenth century?

Maybe that explained the words on that scrap of paper. Maybe I had read them somewhere, and somehow they had come back to me when I was half asleep, and I had set them down and not recalled doing so. Or maybe I had written them long ago, completely forgotten them, and, yes, somehow they had come back to me when I was half asleep, and I had set them down and not recalled doing so. Memory and the subconscious could be very tricky.

But as I told myself these things, I did not believe them. I wanted only to solve that piece of paper and the words on it, to be rid of the uneasy strangeness they had left me with.

“Who’s she?” I asked Leslie. “The girl you were talking to.” Without turning I gave a toss of my head in the direction of the girl down the bar. Leslie followed my gesture with her glance.

“Oh. Melissa. I don’t really know her. She seems like a nice kid.”

“Give her a drink on me.”

“She just got one.”

“Back her up.”

She went over, said something to her. They both looked my way. Leslie lightly rapped the bar in front of her.

Old Scratch or Nicholas the Antient. A leopard in the bowering shade.

I shook loose these words from my mind.

The girl finished her drink. Leslie set another before her and took money from me. The girl raised the drink to me, then drank.

I wasn’t about to approach her. That was something that foolish young men did. I too may have once done such a thing. But I was a foolish old man now, and my folly was not without dignity. At the same time, I knew that she was not likely to approach me. I found myself walking toward her. After a few steps I decided to keep walking, to walk past her, as if I were barely aware of her, and to go outside and have a smoke. An inspired move. I made as if to be preoccupied and not to notice the curiosity in her eyes as I passed.

The awful cold and winds seemed not only to have rid the streets of people but also to have rid the sky of clouds. The moon had waned to a delicate falcated sliver, and stars were visible. As a child I had seen many stars in these night skies, but now it was rare to see one. Tens of billions of planets, suns, and moons in the Milky Way, and we had disconnected ourselves from them all.

Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.

I flicked my cigarette butt at a parked car and saw the wind take it, red embers flying and vanishing.

I wish I may, I wish I might.

“So, Melissa, tell me. Can you control the tides by crossing and uncrossing your legs?”

She looked at me awkwardly.

“Do you like to drink strong drink, go mad, and dance with the apparition of freedom?”

She seemed about to say something but giggled instead.

“Do you like to watch old men masturbate and know that they too once were young?”

“Who
are
you?”

“I was asking myself that just the other day.”

“Leslie says you write books.”

“I used to.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’m retired. I enjoy the fruits of my past labors and contemplate the pains of hell. What about you?”

“I’m a student. I go to school.”

“What do you study?”

“History.”

“How do you plan to make a living off that?”