The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (17 page)

D
awn and I drive to Rockaway on a warm September evening, taking the freeway route past the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and down near Coney Island. During the trip she tells me she was on the diving team in high school and college, then worked summers as a lifeguard at Barton Springs in Austin. After college she moved to San Francisco, where she lived with her boyfriend, a BMW-driving yuppie. Along with working in finance, he dealt a little Ecstasy on the side to support his lifestyle. Dawn did what she could to fit into his world—she wore diamond earrings, clipped her hair back, pretended to read the
Wall Street Journal
with him in the breakfast nook of their condo. But the whole thing went sour, and now, maybe as a result of feeling so burned, she spends all her time with skaters and surfers—people with whom she doesn’t have to pretend to be anything she’s not.

We arrive at the beach around dusk. No one else around, we paddle out to the prime position just off the jetty. It’s hard to see in the fading light, and we get rolled by a cleanup set, something that might freak me out if I was by myself, but being out with Dawn makes me feel safe, although she claims that she was possibly the worst lifeguard in history.

We both get some good waves, and though it’s almost dark now, we keep paddling back for more. I catch a long ride, hanging on all the way to the shallows. Wading back out in the near-dark, I push my board carelessly in front of me. Just then a swell heaves up and pitches the board back at my face, the thick rail nailing me right in the teeth.

Immediately there is the salty taste of what I hope is seawater, but that I know in truth to be blood.

My teeth are already fucked up; I should’ve had braces as a kid but didn’t—and I can feel with my tongue that getting drilled by my surfboard has knocked my left front tooth another millimeter out of alignment.

Dawn helps me out of the water and onto the beach, where I spit blood and have to resist reaching up to touch my mouth with sandy hands. We make it up to my truck, where, in the rearview mirror, I see matching incisions on the inside and outside of my lower lip. Dawn takes a look but can’t tell if my tooth has pierced all the way through the skin.

We luck out and find an ambulance parked next to the boardwalk. Two young EMTs invite me inside, where I swear I smell pot smoke, and where the younger one—a surfer himself—takes a look at my lip.

The verdict is, fortunately, that the tooth didn’t go all the way through. I don’t need stitches.

The EMT gives me an ice pack. Asks if I need anything for the pain, while making the international sign for smoking a joint. I tell him I’m cool, thanks, and then hold the ice pack to my swollen lips while Dawn drives us back to the city.

A
t a Wednesday-night meeting, my new friend Carlos tells his story. He grew up in Puerto Rico, in a clapboard shack with his mother and four siblings. His father was just a man who came by on Saturdays to sleep with his mom. Hoping for a better life, his mother moved them all to the South Bronx in the seventies. Because his family could only afford to buy him Zips sneakers, and not Keds, Carlos was endlessly taunted and bullied by neighborhood kids—
Zips have soles that slip
.

As a teenager, Carlos grew his hair out long, started smoking pot and hanging out with his high school art teacher, who introduced him to abstract expressionism, took him to the Guggenheim and the Met. One day in Central Park, she leaned over and kissed him. He ran away from home to live with her in a tiny East Village studio. It lasted a few months, until she got depressed and kicked him out. He found work in Manhattan restaurants, where he was introduced to harder drugs—cocaine and eventually heroin. He developed a taste for both, eventually began mixing the two in a dangerous cocktail known as a speedball. This was the eighties, when my Brooklyn neighborhood was one of the worst slums in the city:
El Barrio, Sugartown
. Carlos spent a lot of time there and in the East Village, standing in long lines, sometimes wrapping around the entire block, not just homeless junkies but secretaries, men in business suits, all of them waiting to cop. By then homeless himself, he slept sitting up on the 6 train.

One night in the subway he got robbed, had his front teeth bashed out with a lead pipe.

“That was my life for three or four years,” Carlos tells us. “When I finally decided to kick, a doctor prescribed me heavy doses of Prozac, Wellbutrin, and Valium. I had to take all that plus drink half a gallon of wine every day. But by the grace of God, I came through. I’ve been sober for fifteen years now. I got my teeth fixed and I have a good job. Every day I’m just grateful to be alive, to help others get through what I did. Right now it feels like I’m walking on this pink cloud.”

He goes on to tell us that for him, this group is like graduate school. Because the problem now is that he’s hooked on this Russian woman—a person who will sleep with him but won’t commit to any kind of emotional relationship, won’t let him move in with her, but demands that he help pay her rent.

“It’s ridiculous,” he tells us. “I’m thirty thousand dollars in debt, but here I am, putting her rent on my credit card, just so I can get laid. I know I need to stop, but I’m confident that my higher power will lift it from me when I’m ready. I’ll tell you what—I used to be the biggest junkie in the city, but this love stuff is just as powerful as heroin.”

Afterward, we all go out for dinner—“fellowshipping” is what everyone calls it. We eat at an authentic Mexican place I love, where Carlos speaks Spanish with the owners. Then Carlos and I get to talking about how we both did stints in San Diego. It’s about the only thing I feel I have in common with him at first, but he’s got charisma, a presence that lights up everyone around him. After dinner he hands me a laminated prayer card with the image of a radiant heart, the words
La Luz del Mundo
inscribed beneath.

Carlos and I exchange numbers, and then one afternoon in November we take the subway down to his new apartment in Ditmas Park, where I help him move a heavy dresser.

On the train, he shows me a yoga book he’s been reading, with diagrams of the chakra systems.

“Wait, I thought you were Catholic?” I say.

“What made you think that?”

“The prayer card you gave me at dinner.
La Luz del Mundo
.”

“Just something I picked up,” he says, then points to the lower chakras on the diagram. “This is the place I lived from as a young person. I was ruled by my animal instinct, my insatiable appetites. In Hindu terms it meant I was unevolved, that I needed to progress upward. That’s what recovery’s been all about for me, living more from my heart. With this Russian woman, I know I’m still halfway stuck down in the lower chakras, but I have faith. I know I’m moving forward, upward.”

I tell him about my
Moby-Dick
obsession, about how the chakra system reminds me of the Nekyia—this idea that all spiritual development begins with a necessary descent to the lower regions.

Carlos likes this idea. “I think the whole world’s going through that right now,” he says. “Look what’s happening over in Afghanistan, Iraq. Or right here in this country. The way we act—the way we treat the planet—we’re like a nation of addicts.”

T
he next Wednesday, a middle-aged man named Henry tells his story. He grew up in the South with an alcoholic father and a long-suffering mother. When Henry came out as gay, his father kicked him out of the house. He moved to New York, where, in his twenties, he got heavily into the party scene.

Henry is a tall man, with close-cropped graying hair and a ruggedly handsome but kind face. Unlike some other guys in the group, he doesn’t relish telling his “war stories.” Just bringing them up seems to cause him pain, and this gives him an air of authenticity, wisdom.

“Suffice it to say,” he tells us, “I went down into some really dark places. That’s where I spent my time, down in the dungeons.”

He leaves it at that, making me wonder if he’s talking about real or metaphorical dungeons.

“I was completely unhappy with my life, basically getting nowhere in my career. But, at the time, I didn’t see any connection between my extracurricular activities and my work.”

He goes on to explain that through recovery, he came to find God, which he envisions not as a supernatural being, but as “Good Orderly Direction.”

“And thanks to that direction,” he says, “I’ve finally been able to put down all my preoccupations with romantic intrigue, sex. I’ve been thinking a lot about this word,
preoccupation
. It’s all the things distracting you from your occupation, your true calling. Instead of chasing the next hit, I turned inward, and by doing so attracted more of what I wanted in my life and my career. This past year has been the most prosperous of my life.”

I rush up to talk with him afterward, tell him how much I appreciate his share. After we exchange numbers, I give him a hug—in this meeting hugs are like handshakes—but notice it seems to cause him pain, not because he’s cold, but because maybe it triggers him a little.

A few nights later I call him. I tell him how much pain I’m in over Karissa—over this recurring pattern in my life. And how this pattern has seeped into my work life and I can’t seem to break away.

“If I’ve learned anything in this program,” he says, “it’s to trust pain when it arises. Addiction is all about running from pain, or trying to substitute pain with some other substance or person or behavior. So trust the pain. Pain is the taproot from which all healing arises.”

I’ve never heard this word before,
taproot
. After hanging up I find my dictionary:
a straight tapering root growing vertically downward and forming the center from which subsidiary rootlets spring
.

T
he second or third time I surf Rockaway with Asa, we drive over to the Lower East Side to pick up his friend Maria. There’s something exhilarating about rolling with a truck full of surfboards through this storied Manhattan neighborhood, with its narrow streets, brick tenements turned condos, bodegas and upscale ethnic restaurants. Maria has lived here for something like fifteen years, in a rent-controlled apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. The bathroom used to be out in the hall, until she broke through a brick wall with a sledgehammer, creating a grotto-like passageway from her bedroom to the toilet. She’s an artist and a surfer girl, six feet tall with dirty-blond hair and nice skin. Listens to reggae on vinyl, but has long since given up any substances in exchange for a higher power.

Rockaway’s flat—no waves at all—so the three of us lounge on the boardwalk and talk. Like Sadie, Maria works as a teacher. She spends half her summer vacation in her family’s Vermont cabin, the other half surfing. When I tell her about my history with teaching, she mentions a potential job opening at the private Quaker school where she works, a position she thinks might be good for me.

Maria and I become surf buddies. Weekends we venture out to Long Beach or a spot called Gilgo, and then always get lost on the drive home, wandering around in the dense tangle of highways and overpasses in interurban Long Island.

Months later, Maria emails me with the official job listing for the school’s community service director position. Attiq warns me again about trying to change my outer circumstances, but I fantasize that working at a Quaker school, with its focus on inner silence and social action, might restore a sense of meaning to my life.

In other words, it might help me claw my way out of the Pit.

Along with my résumé, I send in a children’s book I’d published about community service. Maybe for this reason, my application rises to the top of the two-hundred-résumé-high pile. The first interview goes very well, maybe as a result of the breathing exercises I do beforehand, or my phone call to Henry, who tells me, in his self-possessed voice, that I should
lead with my feelings
.

“Just after they ask you the initial interview question,” he says, “take a minute to first tell them how you’re feeling about the job, why you’re excited about it. Look them all in the eye. Then you can proceed with your regular response.”

So I do this—I look all six or seven panelists directly in the eye, tell them all how excited I am by the idea of working at their school, how grateful I am they called me in.

And I totally nail the interview.

Afterward I meet up with Carlos at Veselka, a Ukrainian diner in the East Village, where he buys me a celebratory slice of apple pie.

“You did good,” he tells me. “You made some phone calls before the interview, you did some breathing, you took care of yourself. It’s all about small steps toward change.”

Two days later I receive an email informing me that I’ve been chosen for a final interview, that they’ve narrowed it down to me and one other applicant. They ask me to spend an entire day at the school, where I can sit in on classes, meet students and faculty members, and have several more interviews, including a final meeting with the headmaster.

I don’t have any spare vacation time, so I have to call in sick the day of the big interview, on Good Friday. On the Thursday beforehand, I schedule a massage and do everything I can to relax. Unfortunately, my bedroom faces a small basement recording studio operated by a shady guy from New Jersey, who brings in a bunch of unpromising indie and punk bands from across the river. One group plays the same shoegazer ballad, over and over, every night for two months. I wear rifle-range mufflers over silicon earplugs, but the repetitive bass lines and formulaic post punk drumbeats literally shake my bed. I had to pound on their door a bunch of times, ask them to shut it down, until finally I got the owner to agree to a 10:00 p.m. moratorium.

When I walk by the night before my big interview, there’s a band playing in the studio, so I poke my head in, explain my situation—that I have an important job interview the next day, and I’d appreciate if they could stop playing a little early, at, say, 9:30. They look to be eighteen or nineteen, tops. One of them, curiously, has a poorly executed tattoo of the Quaker Oats man on his upper bicep. They grudgingly agree to quit early.