The Great Good Thing (5 page)

That was why, or one of the reasons why, I got into so many fistfights. A lot of fistfights, all through elementary school and into junior high. It didn't occur to me until much later how bizarre it was that I should have fought so much. I lived in an affluent Long Island suburb of Manhattan. I wasn't a roughneck. It wasn't a roughneck town. And yet I always seemed to be slugging it out with somebody, and often it was somebody who was a lot bigger than I was. Sometimes I was in the right and sometimes in the wrong and sometimes there wasn't much to choose between one argument and the other. Once or twice, I was the aggressor and a bully, occasions that make me ashamed to this day. But more often than not, I was just standing my ground in a situation where another boy would have yielded to the intractable boy logic of big and small. Some older kids would try to chase me off a field and I
wouldn't go. Or one of the school thugs would pick on a little kid or on a girl and I'd step in. Sometimes I got beaten up. Sometimes I dusted the guy. A lot of times it ended with nothing more than some big talk and posturing. But because of my dreams, because I had to live up to the image of myself in my dreams, I could never back down or run away. And if another kid and I agreed to meet somewhere after school and punch out our differences, I could never fail to keep the appointment. I had to be there.

By the time I was in fifth grade, my reputation was such that when my teachers sent a really bad kid to the principal's office for discipline, they would assign me to escort him, my hand on his elbow, as if I were the law of the land. One of these tough guys once elbowed me in the stomach and ran for it, trying to escape. I had to chase him across the playground and tackle him. It was like a scene out of a cop movie—except we were ten years old!

I remember a touch football game I played in summer camp once. I was on the line. A much older boy, fifteen or sixteen at least, a head taller than I was and a real muscle man, was positioned opposite me. Each time the ball was snapped, the kid would run straight into me, smack me around, trample me. It was not the usual touch football roughhousing. It was elbows to the face and fists to the stomach and when he knocked me over he'd step on me where I lay. I told him to cut it out. He refused. I complained to the ref. But the thug wouldn't listen to the ref either. Pretty soon, I was crying. Blood and snot were running down my face. The ref told me
to line up somewhere else, but I wouldn't do it. A teammate pulled me aside and told me we'd get revenge later. We'd put something slimy in the guy's bed at night. I wouldn't do it. I purposely placed myself smack in front of the thug every play. Every play, he came barreling into me, hell bent on destruction. Crying, bleeding, drooling blood, I went back to the line. I made the thug run over me again and then again. I made him elbow me again in my streaked and grimy face. I made him kick me when I was down again and then I got up for the next play, and, again, I lined up in front of him.

I wore him out. I wore him down to the level of his conscience, even his. Toward the end of the game, he stopped throwing elbows. He stopped knocking me over. Finally,
he
started to avoid
me
, to move
his
position, and to run around me whenever he could. When I'd plant myself in front of him, he wouldn't meet my eyes. He'd attack the guy next to me or he'd go after the ball carrier as he was supposed to. When the game was over, he approached me. He squeezed my shoulder with his hand. He told me I was a tough little guy. I sneered at him. I didn't care what he thought. I despised him. But I felt I'd beaten him in the only way I could.

It was because of my dreams. It was because I was a hero in my daydreams, and I wanted to be what I pretended to be. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” as the poet Yeats said, and the responsibility not to fall short of my own illusions weighed on me constantly. My fantastic self-image rode on my shoulders, a burden that only added to my general feeling of dread. It is not fun to get punched. It is the opposite of fun. When you have
been punched, you do not want to be punched again, not ever. I haven't been in a fistfight for more than forty years, and yet people who have been in fistfights, people who have punched people and been punched, read the fight scenes in my novels and say to me, “You've been in fistfights too. You've punched people and have been punched too.” It's not an experience you forget. The fights and the threat of fighting and the appointments to fight and waiting to keep the appointments—all of it was a source of anxiety for me. And to escape that anxiety, I dreamed.

I dreamed away long hours of every day. At night in bed, before I went to sleep, I would review my collection of completed dreams, the ones that didn't need any more work, the ones that made sense and were ready to be imagined. I would picture a strip of movie film, complete with sprockets. I would picture it running frame by frame through a viewer, the sort of hand-cranked viewer my dad had in his basement darkroom. On each frame of the film strip there would be a picture of a dream, a different picture, a different dream on each—atom man, boy genius, cowboy, whatever. I would select one and close my eyes and the story would begin to play out in my mind. The dream would soothe me and relax me like reading a book until finally I could sleep.

All that dreaming and making dreams: it was good practice for a someday novelist, I guess, especially a novelist of adventure and suspense. But it wasn't a very healthy way to spend a boyhood. Even I knew that, or came to realize it after a while. I was dreaming more and more and becoming less
and less aware of the reality around me. I was seven or eight years old, and I was losing the knack for direct experience. I could feel the tactile sense of the world's immediacy slipping from my fingertips. I could see the light of the present moment dimming into darkness.

If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like
Revolutionary Road
, the stories of John Cheever, movies like
Pleasantville
and
American Beauty
, television series like
Mad Men
: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There's bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying.

But me, I kind of liked it there. As a little boy anyway. What was wrong with it? You had your trees, you had your sidewalks, you had your birds and squirrels and moms and dads. Kids played in the street through the afternoons and went home past warmly lighted windows in the evenings. There were summer barbecues and baseball games. There were high piles of autumn leaves that you could hurl yourself into. In winter, there were snows so deep you could dig long tunnels underneath the drifts. In spring, there was a flavor to the air that made you yearn for you-didn't-know-what. If the
suburban ideal of the sitcom was false, so are the elite attacks on a way of life that most citizens of the earth would have sold their souls for. Were people miserable there? Maybe, but the truth is people can be miserable anywhere. You can find hypocrites, drunks, and adulterers anywhere you find humanity. Why not live somewhere with some peace and quiet and open spaces and a twenty-minute commute to the city?

But this world—this suburban world I really did love, this world for which I felt a sentimental, almost nostalgic, affection even as a child—it was sinking away from me, sinking to the bottom of a sea of dreams, visible now only distantly through the wavery undercurrent. I would walk to school and find when I arrived that I could remember not one moment of the journey, not one piece of scenery, not one face or car or incident, only my dreams. I would take long bike rides and come to myself on some strange road, hardly knowing how I got there. Even during games, even during conversations, I would sometimes mentally absent myself to go on some imagined adventure, and come back only half aware of what we had been doing or saying while my mind was gone.

I hardly even saw the trees anymore. I had always—have always—had a sort of mystic fondness for trees. To this day, my mind is nowhere more at peace than in a forest. As a boy, I would lie under this one particular maple in our backyard. I would lace my fingers behind my head and watch the pattern of leaves against the sky. It was one of my favorite pastimes, no kidding. There was an apple tree I liked to climb in our front yard near the street. I would hide in the branches for hours
sometimes, watching people pass and cars go by. The autumn change of colors all over town, the whisper of breezes in high parkland pines, the weirdness of weeping willows at the roadside, the boy squirrels chasing girl squirrels up the trunks of oaks in crazy spirals like squirrels in a cartoon, the rare scarlet cardinal meditating in the deep foliage. As an aspiring tough guy, I was embarrassed by how much these things delighted me. They were secret pleasures I did not discuss with anyone.

But over time I found that, whenever I was among the trees, I wasn't really there at all anymore; I was dreaming. I would make special trips to the backyard to lie beneath the maple. I would try to recapture the sensation of watching its branches against the sky. I would try to concentrate on the patterns and colors that had once fascinated me. But my mind would drift away into dreams.

It bothered me. I missed the trees. I missed the walk to school. I missed my friends and my games and the weather and the whole wide world—not just the facts of them but the presence and awareness of them, the being there with them. It was all dreams for me now. Nothing but dreams.

I had reached that stage in an addiction when you notice that the pleasure of the thing is gone. You didn't really want that last cigarette or drink. You didn't really enjoy it. You just had to have it. With me, the boy me, it was fantasy. Fantasy like mist—mist like ivy—twining around me, enclosing me. I didn't like it anymore. I just couldn't make it stop.

So I did what most addicts do at that juncture. I resolved to break the habit. From now on, I decided, I was going to
pay
attention
. Maybe not to everything, maybe not all the time. I would begin with something small, something manageable. The walk to school, say. Yes, that would do it. I would pay full attention during the walk to school. No more daydreams. I would focus on what I saw. I would listen to the sounds—the birds, the breezes, the passing cars. I would smell the air. I would live in the experience of the moment.

I was eight years old.

I began the project on a Monday morning in autumn. I banged through the front-door screen with my books beneath my arm and marched off to school resolutely alert.

Now, anyone who has ever practiced any of the Eastern-style mindfulness techniques, zen or yoga or tai chi or suchlike, knows just how incredibly difficult it is to do what I was trying to do. To be aware, to be present in the moment, to silence your own interior jibbering and face life naked-minded is, as I would later learn, the entire goal of some spiritual enterprises, the very essence of enlightenment. No wonder too. It's hard. Most of the time we can't even unglue our noses from our screens and devices long enough to pay attention to our internal dialogue, let alone break out of that dialogue into pure existence. Try it. Try it for sixty seconds. Complete inner silence. Not one word of thought. Utter awareness. It's hard.

But I tried. I walked along. I focused diligently on the tremulous green lobes of the neighbor's pachysandra. I wondered if I'd forgotten to bring my math book. No, I had it. Now where was I? Back to awareness. The lofty clouds billowing over the sky above the ghost house. Would there be kickball at recess? I
liked kickball. I could see myself sending a solid shot over the heads of the outfielders. No, no, that's no good. Focus, focus. Look at the texture of the Macadam where it meets the stone curb. Ah, now, I'm doing it! My mind is clear. That's amazing! It's as if I've invented a whole new way of thinking. I'll become the first truly enlightened child. Aliens will come to earth searching for our wisest human and discover, through their advanced brain scans, that it's me. They'll implant their alien powers in me, powers that will allow me to govern the world. With my mind so clear, so focused, I'll be able to use those powers more wisely even than the president . . .

And then I was at school and could not remember how I had gotten there.

Total failure. I'd hardly paid attention for more than a consecutive couple of seconds before the dreams overtook me. But I was not yet discouraged. I tried again a second day. Again, I couldn't get more than three or four steps before my concentration was broken by a random thought and the thought became a chain and the chain became a dream and I was gone, gone, gone.

It was dispiriting. It was even disturbing. Was my whole life going to be strangled by a clinging ivy-mist of dreams?

Then, on the third day: a breakthrough.

I was walking on the longest straightaway of the journey, the stretch of Piccadilly Road that ran from the ghost house to where you turned up Devon to the school. I was passing lawn after sloping lawn and leaf-hidden home after home, psychically trying to claw the tendrils of fantasy from my mind so I
could see clearly. There'd be moments of awareness, seconds of naked reality. And then a drifting thought. And the tendrils would twine back around me, thicker than before.

I was about two-thirds of the way to the corner, almost out of time, frustrated to the point where I was beginning to consider abandoning the entire experiment. Then suddenly I spotted a high tree branch off in the distance against the backdrop of the September sky.