Last night I got drunk and I slept on a friend’s couch in the Atlantic Highlands. This morning I am on a ferry that will take me back across the Lower Bay. The sky is gray and the currents are in chaos. In the distance, I can see the city’s monoliths. The Freedom Tower, and then the Empire State, with the Chrysler Building peeking out just to the right of them. The woman who is sitting next to me appears to be scrolling through her phone. “A storm’s coming,” she declares to no one, or maybe me; it’s tough to say. Regardless, I am reminded of the opening scene from Shutter Island: Am I an inmate who is on a slow boat back to the asylum, or am I a detective, preparing to break the case wide open? It’s a question that is not without its relevance, particularly given that I am a middle-aged man who has struggled to maintain any true sense of identity. I tend to drift, to avoid getting too attached for fear of commitment, or abandonment, or something. When I was a teenager, I made a break from my hometown, and soon after, I made a break from the Catholic church. I would get into relationships, and then I would get out of them. I have lifelong friendships, despite not having a lot of familial connections. I have savings, but not investments. I have a college degree despite an utter lack of any real career path. I leave no footprint. I come and I go.
I don’t like that I am this hungover in public. It does not feel dignified. On a day like today, when I am struggling to get from A to B, it seems like a given that I will spend the rest of the afternoon in bed. I will rush the liquids and I will eat fast food. Around twilight, a sudden wave of paranoia will settle over me. And while the whole of this might seem unremarkable, it should be mentioned that tomorrow I will wake up and I will put on a pot of coffee and then without delay, I will set my pen to paper (a kind of ricochet effect). At the outset, I might feel like Don Draper, the summer man, intent on journaling his way through a sea of emotions. But the wind will shift, and when it does, I will begin to account for the way I have been behaving. For inspiration, I might look to Elizabeth Wurtzel, confronting her one-night stand of an existence (via New York Magazine in January of 2013). I have revisited Wurtzel’s essay on a number of occasions, and I continue to do so because I admire how effectively she argues that convention is what gives life meaning, and that a lack of convention is what launches people into crisis. Wurtzel was by no means an exemplary human being. She was erratic, a whirlwind, and she died of complications from breast cancer exactly seven years and one day after that essay was first published. Wurtzel was 52 when she died, and I turned 52 this past November.
On the week of my 52nd birthday, I had a houseguest, Laura. Laura is Italian, and she lives in Rome. Laura and I first met in 2004, when she had traveled to the US to spend some time with her relatives. The two of us were introduced at a bar in Atlantic City, where we danced until the lights came up. A few nights later, we danced some more. After that, Laura flew back to Italy, but the two of us remained in touch, and she returned to visit me a few years later … and then again a few years after that. During one of those visits (i.e., December of 2009), Laura and I fell in love, or at the very least, we were experiencing a moment. It is easy to fall in love when it is Christmastime in New York City, and even easier when a couple’s entire relationship has been predicated upon periodic visits that are filled with nightlife, sex, and culture. We dove right in, which was not prudent, especially given that the two of us had grown accustomed to communicating by way of broken English. We stuck to the basics, and if something did not translate well, we were content just to avoid it. That is until this past November. On the second night that Laura was staying with me, she asked if I would be open to the two of us getting married. It could work, Laura insisted. Her family had money, and the two of us could go in on an apartment together in one of the five boroughs. I had no interest in the idea, but I kept struggling with how to articulate as much without seeming hurtful. “I think that you should not move to New York City,” is the best I could come up with. The room was dark. The two of us had been lying in bed throughout this conversation, and after I made that comment, we did not speak again until the morning.
When that visit was over, I felt as if I owed Laura an apology. I thought about writing to her, or calling, or leaving her a voicemail, if for no other reason than to acknowledge that I could have been a better person. I should have done that, but I didn’t, and within a few weeks of her leaving, a lot of my focus had shifted. My father was in the hospital. His heart rate kept spiking, and he was not responding well to any treatment. At one point he had developed an infection, and after that it was just one thing after another after another until, eventually, my father passed away at the age of 81. That happened back in January, and yet the shock of it has still not hit me. I mean, I was there, and I moved through a requisite mourning period, but in the wake of the funeral, I found that I was not thinking about my father nearly as often as I believed a son should. I tended to fixate more on my mother, and the lasting image of her perched along his bedside. I could feel entire galaxies collapsing in the space between them … sixty years’ worth of solidarity, a shared history, all of it abbreviated as they faced into those final moments, the falling curtain.
My mother came to rely more on her support system after my father’s death. She had her faith, and her children, and she had several friends who she was meeting for lunch on a regular basis. While those things helped, there was still no getting around the fact that my mother was on her own, and that her heart hurt, and that she had become plagued by an emptiness that rose up to meet her sure as the twilight. Attachment is to suffering as isolation is to longing. You can believe that. Take it from a person who has spent more than a decade disappearing into his own headspace. Whenever I set to work on a new project, I tend to banish anything that has the potential to derail me. I become more disciplined. I lean toward exercise and meditation. I take pills, but never drugs; I drink coffee, but never soda. The writing functions as my refuge, and I do my utmost to respect that. The act of writing is hard, and it is tedious, and more often than not, one ends up spending hours (or even days) just trying to wrestle all of the words into their intended order. On the best of nights, the craft can feel like lucid dreaming. But you can lose yourself attempting to chase that glow, and that is what concerns me on this marine-gray morning: To what extent have I become a captive of my own escape mechanism?
For good or for ill, the writing is always with me these days. It was there when Laura came to visit me this past November, and it was there when my father passed away less than a week into the new year. I write daily, once in the morning and once in the evening. I fill in the downtime with running and reading, with visiting museums or engaging with culture. It would be an understatement to say that I enjoy the writing, and it would be an overstatement to suggest that the writing consumes me. Simply put, I feed the beast, and I gravitate toward any activities that can support that. Whenever I am in a writing cycle, I maintain a strict focus, and because of that, I tend to treat every interruption as if it were an imposition; I tend to treat every invite as if it were an hourglass in need of turning. Would I have been more receptive to Laura’s proposal under different circumstances? I would not have. Nor do I believe that I would have dedicated more time to reflecting on my father’s death if all of the arrows had not been pointing inward. And that is where the fault lies, in that I have become less empathetic, if not detached from the emotional pull of several people who had at one time determined the shape of my orbit.
I feel a change coming on. I want to travel more. I want to visit Vietnam, and Transylvania; I want to watch the sun go down along the Nile. I want my world to open up again, a great deal wider than it has before. I am reminded, and quite often, of Hunter Thompson, all bloated and defiant, an aging icon, forever trapped inside of his saturnalian persona. Gone were the sixties, and the Hell’s Angels, the Haight-Ashbury, the Nixon Era, Freak Power and Fat City; gone were the fear and the loathing, gone were the days of Raoul Duke and Gonzo Journalism. Meanwhile, Thompson was still out there rattling his saber, ever the worse for decorum. A case in point. One night during the mid-nineties, a 59-year-old Thompson went out barhopping with Johnny Depp and John Cusack, both of whom were approximately thirty years his junior. The three of them were spotted along the Sunset Strip in a BMW convertible with Thompson in the passenger seat, the lower half of an inflatable sex doll draped across his lap; the upper half battling the wind outside his window. There is footage of this, and toward the end of that footage, Thompson slaps the doll across the back of its head a few seconds prior to hurling it in the direct path of a moving vehicle. A bad look, a look that causes one to consider how much of Thompson’s latter-day drug use was performative, a look that further causes one to consider how matters might have played out had Thompson gotten sober—as a way of reinventing himself—during his forties.
Anyway, I am rambling now, and this ferry is getting ready to pull into port. By the time that you are reading this, I will have added considerable depth to what has—up until just recently—only existed as a loose configuration of my thoughts. The writing happens everywhere, and it sometimes happens when I least expect it, although I had good reason to assume that it would be accompanying me aboard this ferry. Today feels like a reset, if not an opportunity for reassessing how I approach things. When I write, I tend to be more accountable. I know my purpose. And, sure, the sky outside might be dreary, and this boat might be experiencing a bit of turbulence, but the clouds will pass, and so too will the ill effects of my hangover. I don’t stay down long, at least not anymore. There is so much in this world that interests me. I am up, and I am down, and I am barely just arriving. I rue the day I wake up fully formed.
