The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (11 page)

“No,” I say, “but I’ll get right on it.”

“You really should,” he says. “All those manuscripts he had to read and reject—the hordes of good writers who go unpublished—the way he describes it is devastating.”

“Yeah,” I say, “devastating. I know all about it.”

Steven perks up at my little self-deprecating admission. He’s already decided I work in a shabby industry, and now here’s another way for him to feel superior. “So you’ve never been published?”

“I’ve been published,” I say, feeling defensive. “It’s the manuscript part I’m talking about. I spend a lot of time reading and rejecting them. It gets old.”

“I can only imagine,” Steven says.

I scan the room, searching for some conversational escape route.

“I’m a corporate lawyer,” Steven volunteers, “with Goldman Sachs.” There’s a patronizing tone to his voice, indicating not only his perceived sense of occupational superiority, but also my lack of social grace for failing to inquire.

Now that he’s said it, I hope maybe he’ll take my silence as a hint that I want to put him in a firm headlock and stuff his face in the coffee cake.

Fortunately, a girl in cardigan sweater walks up and says hello.

Forgoing any pleasantries, Goldman Sachs says, “Hey, Lillian, did you hear? I just bought an apartment.”

She squeals and gives him a warm congratulatory hug, then holds him at arm’s distance and speaks earnestly, one eyebrow raised. “You have to go tell Brady. We’ve been looking for the past three months and he’s starting to lose heart.” Before excusing himself, Goldman Sachs introduces me to Lillian, who’s genuinely charming. Unfortunately, I’m too rattled by the first conversation to pay much attention to the second.

This is when I spot him in the corner of the All Souls basement—an old man with winter in his coarse, chest-length beard. He sits alone, straight-backed, legs crossed, regarding the congregation with his deep-set Spanish eyes. Eyes that reveal a sense of pride verging on arrogance. But also a brokenness with the gravitational pull of a black hole.

Melville spent most of his childhood living a privileged life in New York City. His social-climbing father, Allan, moved the family into a series of increasingly opulent homes, staffed by servants. Allan was a vain man—an importer of French fineries—who severely over-leveraged himself to attain all the trappings of success. When young Herman was only eleven, his father’s business went bankrupt. The family fled to Albany, where, without money for a carriage, and in the midst of a nervous breakdown, Allan contracted pneumonia after crossing a frozen river in his thin-soled French boots.

For several days before his death, he lapsed into a state of raving psychosis.

Witness to this unspeakable trauma, Herman then had to drop out of school and find work to support his demanding mother. He never went to college. A whaling vessel was his—like Ishmael’s—“Yale college and [his] Harvard.” He later settled in the Berkshires, where he found a creative and spiritual community with neighbors like Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But after the collapse of his writing career, Melville had to move his family from Arrowhead back to New York City—a reverse version of his father’s descent. Like many New York churches, All Souls for a time actually charged rent for pew space. Rumor has it that Melville often couldn’t pay for his family’s pew, so heavy were his financial burdens.

He turns his head, observes me with his sunken eyes, and it’s clear from his expression that he’s not comfortable surrounded by such a wealthy lot of seekers. That there’s no connection here, not for us.

Feeling uneasy, I get out of All Souls and walk to Central Park, where I have the uncanny sense of being followed.

I try calling Karissa from the Belvedere Castle observation deck, but I’m sent straight to voicemail. I walk around aimlessly, nowhere in particular to go and no one to see on a Sunday afternoon. I walk past picnickers, couples holding hands, families of Eastern European tourists in their uncomfortable shoes. I wander down through the Ramble, where I spot three cardinals bunkering up for the winter. He hangs back in the shadows, just out of sight, but close enough that I can sense a similar heaviness in the heart, the same aching isolation. I walk over a wooden bridge where couples float around in paddleboats and spot, off in the distance, the Dakota building where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived. I walk through the zoo and past the park bench where Karissa and I ate hot dogs during a weekend trip, in the more carefree days before I lived here. I walk for hours, not even stopping for lunch, covering nearly the entire perimeter of the park before he finally leaves me. I keep walking, alone now as late-afternoon shadows lurk slowly toward the Upper East Side.

O
n a Monday, I get a phone call from an old college roommate, Drew, whom I haven’t spoken with for maybe ten years. He tells me that another of our friends, James, has taken his own life. Like me, James aspired to be an English professor. Drew explains that he was instead working as a bartender in San Francisco, where he struggled with alcoholism, so severe that it developed into Korsakoff’s syndrome.

Drew relates the details of this disease: the hallucinations, memory loss, confabulation, borderline psychosis.

Drew tells me that James used a shotgun.

After hanging up, I mourn for my friend, whom I last remember at twenty-one, dancing and shadow boxing on a bed in Boulder, Colorado, completely wasted, a Charlatans UK song on full blast—
everyone’s been down before, everybody knows the pain
.

Later, I call another friend to see if he’s heard. At the end of our conversation, this friend gives me an additional piece of unwelcome news.

Nicole’s engaged to be married, the wedding just a few months away.

Ragged genomes from these two pathogenic messages splice together and begin replicating, attacking my already-weakened defenses. Back in school, James and Drew were deep into drugs and this second-wave British invasion music that I mostly hated. Even more than James, Drew seemed like he was on a bad path. Once, at a party, he approached Nicole and me, almost in tears, told us how solid he thought we were together, how someday he hoped for that kind of relationship. A year after graduation, Nicole saw him wandering the streets at nine or ten in the morning, wearing only one shoe, so whacked out he even didn’t recognize her.

Now, in our thirties, it feels like things have somehow flipped. I’m not into substances, but I’m clinging to an undergraduate lifestyle, living with roommates still in their twenties, in an apartment that my friend—the same one who gave me the news about Nicole—sarcastically calls the “adult dorms.” On the other hand, Drew completely pulled himself together. He’s a doctor now, married to a woman he met back in college; they own a house and have a baby on the way.

And two years after the dissolution of our ten-year relationship, I’m still not over Nicole. Or maybe I’m not over the idea of what I could’ve had with her—
safety, comfort, hearthstone
. Maybe this is why I came to New York, why I left Karissa—
to get over it
. But now I’m hung up on Karissa, too.
Multiple pathogens:
I had a job as a university English instructor but gave it up to write children’s books, deliver Indian food, send rejection letters from the Pit.

Though it was mostly my fault, some dark side of me wants revenge against Nicole for those ten years—the whole of my twenties—and for where I’ve ended up now. Which is to say I want revenge on myself:
beware of thyself, old man
.

That night I drive to the ocean. There are no waves, so I put on my wetsuit, walk out into the water, swim alone at dusk at a beach known for strong rip currents.

M
y first full-time job out of college was at a residential treatment center for teenage criminals and addicts. On Friday nights, we drove them in unmarked white vans to an AA meeting at a local church—a calming activity in what was otherwise a very stressful position. When I was growing up, some of my stepsiblings had addiction issues, and then as an adult I’d read
Infinite Jest
, so I had some second hand knowledge of twelve-step programs, both the light and the dark, the profound and the inane aspects of the recovery movement. These particular Friday-night gatherings were “speaker meetings,” meaning that one person would stand up and tell their story: the depths to which they’d previously sank, how they got better, where they are now. I sometimes felt embarrassed for them, or bored, but as an aspiring writer I was mostly riveted. In my undergraduate creative writing classes there was a lot of abstract discussion of “character development,” but rarely do you see this concept play out so dramatically as in twelve-step programs.

I didn’t really have a problem with alcohol or drugs; I enjoyed the occasional beer or two, and had my share of youthful benders, but anything more than a couple drinks just puts me to sleep. Still, the more I went to AA meetings, the more I felt that I somehow belonged there. One night a gentleman told a story about fixing his kitchen sink. He detached the drainpipe, put a bucket beneath to catch the leaking water. After a few minutes the bucket began overflowing; out of habit he dumped it into the sink—forgetting the detached drainpipe, sending a dirty tide of water across the floor. When the bucket filled up again, he emptied it back into the sink—and being half-cocked on whiskey, he did this not once or twice but
five
times.

“It was the very definition of insanity,” he said, “doing the same thing over and over, but expecting different results.”

This story in particular stuck with me. Nicole and I were living together at the time, and both being basically decent, caring people, we were doing okay and taking pretty good care of one another, though in our hearts we knew we weren’t right for each other. It was the togetherness phase of a pattern we acted and reenacted for the better part of a decade.

Knowing it wasn’t right between us, we’d break up. But being codependent, I couldn’t handle life without her. It felt exactly the way I imagined coming down off drugs must feel like—
the blackness of darkness
—which for me meant intense obsession coupled with depression, panic attacks, phobias, even a kind of agoraphobia where I began to fear the world outside my apartment. It probably had a lot to do with the fact that I’d been through three divorces by the age of fifteen, or that my father’s third marriage had some very similar on-again, off-again patterns. And that, partly as a result of my vulnerable, latchkey-kid status after my original parents’ divorce, I suffered a particularly traumatic form of abuse at the hands of a seventeen-year-old neighbor, after which, at age seven or eight, I had my first series of shame-induced anxiety attacks.

After my breakups with Nicole, I remember typing “Relationships Anonymous” and “relationship addiction” into a search engine, but nothing came up. Not wanting to face all the overwhelming feelings alone—or more accurately, not thinking myself capable without some kind of lightning-strike miracle—I’d come crawling back to Nicole, beg her to take me back. And for whatever reason, she would, and we’d swallow and inject one another back into our bloodstreams with the most intense, though always ephemeral, sense of relief and elation. It sounds like a prosaic soap opera plot, but for us it was debilitating, isolating, soul-suffocating. This is not to say that we didn’t love each other on a basic level—we spent a lot of good years together—but the pattern’s end result never changed. We were always just pouring more water down a disconnected drain.

Three years later, in Brooklyn, Asa Ellis calls me up, tells me he’s having some problems, feeling depressed, and would it be okay if he talks it out with me? He tells me about his mother and her heavy drinking, and about his last relationship, which had gone sour, and how he’s having a terrible time getting over it—something to which I can definitely relate.

“I’m scared this shit’s getting the upper hand on me,” he says. “To be honest, I think I might be suicidal.”

I give him as much support as I can, check to make sure he’s seeing a therapist, then share some of my own issues. We talk for a solid hour, until we both feel a little better. I’m worried for him, but also glad for the conversation, for the way it briefly erases my own isolation.

A month or two later, he calls back, invites me to a twelve-step meeting he found out about through Al-Anon. But this is not Al-Anon, he explains; it’s a meeting for men struggling with relationships and codependency.

The following Wednesday I take the subway up north, to 116th Street, where I meet Asa in front of a Catholic church, and together we descend into the basement, to a room with low ceilings and bad fluorescent lighting. That the meeting is held below ground—requiring a literal descent—is not lost on me. Sitting in concentric rings of folding chairs are men, forty or fifty of them, enough to crew a large ship. This is a speaker meeting, and the speaker, David, seems like a decent, middle-aged man. He relates an honest story about a shameful sexual experience he had as a kid; he tells us how his entire adult life has been categorized by longing for unattainable women, how it consumes him.

I connect with David’s story, but then the meeting chair says, “Let’s give it up,” and suddenly everyone’s standing up, hugging each other, crowding the room with loud conversation, laughter. Once every one settles in again, the chair opens up the room for sharing, and twenty or thirty hands shoot up all at once. And then they come, one after another—three-minute tales centering mostly around sex: casual sex with women, casual sex with men, anonymous sex with women and men at the same time.

One gentleman mentions how, in addition to this one, he’s working four other programs: AA, OA, DA, and MA. That’s a total of
five
programs, I think to myself. I wonder where he finds the time. And I don’t know what OA, DA, or MA stand for, though I think maybe the latter should be Meta Anonymous, for people hooked on twelve-step programs.