I thought I’d change it up here, get with the “persons” in the title of this Substack column. I started the column with “The Fireman,” the opening chapter of my memoir in the making. What follows is an excerpt from another chapter, where I describe one of the several exits I’ve made from an old self, this one pretty late in life. Since moving to NYC, I’ve written three books, and am embarked on another (The Intellectual Earthquake: How Pragmatism Changed the World, 1898-2008). The memoir is kind of a hobby, a sidebar, a pastime that occupies the idle hours of my mind, when it wanders at will through a memory that somehow stays in the present tense. I guess it’s almost finished--once I figure out who the hell I am and what I’m doing on this planet, I mean.
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I
I left home in May 2008, escaping my third marriage and, with it, the failed state known as New Jersey. Matt F., a graduate student at Rutgers, was one of the two close friends who helped me move into the apartment I had rented in Harlem, a short block up from 555 Edgecombe Avenue, the residence, once upon a time, of Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, and Count Basie, among others. The curriculum that connected us was composed of songs, not books—Matt and I played guitars in my suburban basement, then in his Jersey City apartment, an affordable hovel he decorated with keyboards, cat hair, computers, and dirty towels.
The day I moved, Matt said, “Dude, you live like a graduate student.” He pointed to the straw witch on a wooden stake—a Halloween relic—which I had placed very carefully behind the TV, as a decorative accent. I said, “Jesus, Matt, you are a fucking graduate student, better not go there,” resisting the impulse to comment on the cat litter box next to the toilet in his apartment. No effect. He looked around the one-bedroom apartment, shook his head, lowered his voice. “You have no furniture, man,” he said, “it took us a half hour to get all your shit into this place.” I was 58 years old and a full professor.
When I had called two months before about the rental in Harlem, it was 10:00 in the morning and I was already drunk. I made the call from the kitchen of my four-bedroom, five-bathroom house with the finished basement, where I spent most of my time holed up with my guitars and my own private refrigerator. No need to drink the beer in the basement at that unseemly hour, though, because my wife and son were at work, and my daughter lived on campus across the river.
When I made the call, my marriage was the moving life of the dead. My wife and I were worse than zombies because we were the people who are dead to the world they have themselves made. After 25 years of cohabitation, neither one of us had a speck of interest in what the other was doing, not even “So how was your day, honey?”
We didn’t trust each other, either, because we didn’t need to: we were there “for the kids,” not ourselves. I was, anyway, since for ten years I got them to school, supervised the homework, attended the extracurricular events, and cooked the dinners while my wife pursued a publishing career in the city. Yeah, Mr. Mom.
But then I was also the one who’d torn up the shallow roots of marital trust by having an affair with my neighbor’s wife, a woman married to a colleague who happened to be a good friend, for God’s sake, as if I could bring myself back to life by retracing the itinerary of a lousy Updike novel, becoming another suburban cliché.
The marriage didn’t end when the affair was discovered. My wife refused to consider a divorce—because it would be embarrassing—and my guilt was enough to stitch us back together on her terms. When we went to counseling and the therapist pressed her to explain her role in our marital estrangement, I told him loudly that he was “blaming the victim” and walked out with my wife in tow. We stayed together for another seven years, until the kids were in their twenties.
But the emotional armor of the alcohol eventually wore thin. Where it had once protected me, let me feel less than zero, now it somehow fueled unwanted extremes of fear and its consequence, anger. Flights of fancy turned to malevolent urges, dumb ideas became blueprints for bad behavior. When trying to start fights in bars again became a hobby—by this time the affair had also been rekindled—I knew I was finally a self-made man: I had reinvented myself as someone with no loyalty to anything except his own destruction.
So it was a residual instinct for self-preservation that let me call the guy with the rental in Harlem. Either Dr. Jekyll left town or Mr. Hyde killed him off—that’s how it felt. Either I spent the rest of my shrunken life in the darkness of that basement, just another underground man with a musical instrument, or I climbed back into the spiritual daylight of the present by leaving the marriage and escaping New Jersey.II
II
I escaped, I moved to Harlem. In that place I hoped among other things to finish a stalled book I’d started three years before, and to shed the guilt I’d accumulated over the meandering years of an on-again, off-again affair. I also hoped Mr. Hyde would stay in New Jersey. He didn’t. It never occurred to me to stop drinking that summer, not until the end of August. By then I’d finished the book, but I couldn’t yet stand up to the super-ego that had sent me into exile and saved my life. Dr. Jekyll had become the Grand Inquisitor, and he knew I was Mr. Hyde.
My kids visited me once in Harlem. Their mother and I were still on friendly terms, and they were curious about my new life. “Nice bachelor pad,” my daughter said. That confused me because I didn’t know I was a bachelor. I thought I was a refugee.
I didn’t know I was out of control, either. Then one morning I woke up in my truck holding a baseball bat. The passenger side window was shattered, there was dried blood on the seat, on the bat, and on the back of my swollen right hand. The knuckles on both hands were skinless, I couldn’t make a fist. What had I done to myself, or to someone else? I can’t say. Back then my morning routine was to open a beer as I made coffee and shaved, have another as I ate breakfast standing up at the kitchen counter, then at least another five before lunch. I can’t tell you how many I’d drunk by the time I went to bed. Whatever the number, I couldn’t read after sundown, with or without a blackout.
I finally called an alcoholic friend I had met in Havana, of all places, who steered me toward a meeting in my neighborhood. AA was a revelation. I expected dogma and do-gooders, but what I found were old souls, all ravaged, each intact. I wanted to be like them. They could bear their guilt, I thought, because they were making amends.
As I got sober, I made amends by trying to reconcile with my wife, trying to restore the family I had evacuated. This effort intrigued my wife and daughter (by then my son had become a Marine, and, as such, he would land in Iraq in September of 2008). They could see that I was reloading the guilt that had kept me in my place all those years. We all assumed I was headed home.
On Christmas Eve, I decided to visit my brother in Chicago. I’d make amends there, too, among relatives who believed my wife’s version of events was the obvious truth: I was the problem, not her, she had played no part in the unmaking of her own marriage. As I drove through a blizzard that stretched from Ohio to Illinois, I realized that this was also my version of events, and, in a literary mood, having just read a terrifying short story by George Saunders, I started wondering whether I was a reliable narrator.
III
By then I was running two weekly AA meetings. The Monday noon meeting on 168th was crowded with quiet, precise, articulate people wearing ID badges from the huge hospital down the street. Except for Paul the junkie, who told the same story every week as if rehearsing it for a larger audience, they spoke of former lives from an emotional distance that seemed God-like in its global compass. They lived in the past tense.
The Tuesday night meeting at a rehab center in Hell’s Kitchen, on 10th Avenue and 57th, was different. Here the constituency was homeless black men on Medicaid who’d been herded into the fluorescent common room where the TV was bolted to the ceiling. Attendance at the AA meeting was the price they paid for a week of shelter from the streets.
I ran that meeting because no one else would. I knew I had nothing in common with these men, nothing to teach them, and they knew it, too. The present tense was all they had. The only bond between us was the stories we told of the damage we had done, but this narrative drawbridge was pulled up every week when I left. That’s how AA works. The curative effect of your confession lasts only as long as you keep coming back.
My confession changed on January 27th, 2009, as I walked up 57th Street from the A Train, on my way to the Tuesday meeting. I had spent most of the weekend with my wife, though without sleeping over. As we said goodbye—we touched for the first time in a year—she urged me to move back into the house in New Jersey. There it was, we were reconciled.
It was snowing that night, so I had my head down against the wind rising from the river as I neared 9th Avenue, at 6:50 PM. Then I heard quick footsteps and a familiar voice behind me. “Jimmy!” Who could be chasing me up this street, calling my name? I stopped and turned to see who it was.
It was me. He—I—was breathing hard but grinning, laughing, wearing only a scarf over a sport coat on a winter’s night like this. He didn’t say anything more, he just shrugged, then he cocked his head across 57th street, toward Kennedy’s, a bar just off 9th Ave, and he kept grinning. I tried to speak—would this be an answer?—but I couldn’t find a sound because I had finally been silenced by a real fear of my own self. I finally saw myself as others did. I turned away and ran toward the meeting, my legs churning slowly, uselessly, as they do in dreams, knowing I’d never touch my wife again.
After the ceremonial preliminaries of an AA meeting, the recitation of the Twelve Steps and all, the floor is open. That night I started with my ghost story. When I got to the end I said, “The thing is, I wanted to go with him, me, whoever it was. I still do, I want to go have a shot and a beer at Kennedy’s. “ A young man in a chair tilted back against the wall—he called himself Chris—said, “Well if you so eager to get a drink, maybe you shouldn’t be runnin’ this meeting.”
“You’re right,” I said, “Maybe I shouldn’t . . . ”
But an old man in the front row—he called himself Benjamin—said, “Ain’t none of us don’t wanna go with you down the street to that bar, we here because we know you will if we don’t stop you. You understand what I’m sayin’, we in your way, and that’s why you here with us. Stay here.”
“Jesus, is that why I’m here?” I said, out loud. “Fuck me,” I muttered, as the meeting went on cordially, with even young Chris joining in again. The old man was right, of course, as long as you’re “in the rooms,” as AA veterans say, as long as you keep going to meetings, you’re safe, because your comrades will keep reminding you of where you’ve been—and what you are. Once you’re “out,” there’s nobody to get in your way, to stand between you and Kennedy’s.
When I got home that night, the first thing I did was send an email to my neighbor’s wife. The next day I asked mine for a divorce. Soon after, I was drinking again.
Outstanding.
That's quite a story. With a very hard ending. But that's not the ending, is it?