by Tod A
Night after claustrophobic night I banged away at my grandfather’s Hermes. I left my room only to score beer and cheap cocaine from the corner bodega. In the morning I’d take the J train into Manhattan to stagger through long days at the copy shop, my eyes bleary from lack of sleep.
When I needed to blow off steam I’d go catch a show at CBGB or the Pyramid and steal drinks off the bar. I was a real class-A prick in those days: poverty was just my pretext. It took the best part of a year, but my misanthropic lifestyle finally paid off in a batch of stories: sad-luck tales from the New York streets.
Frisco Steve had transferred to Columbia and was living the high life, shacked up with some art heiress on the Upper West Side. Out on a bender one night, the three of us ran into a friend of hers—a Frenchman with a kink for totalitarian propaganda. It turned into a long night.
We bitched and moaned about our collective sad state of affairs, how impossible it was to get published or shown or even noticed in New York. The gallery scene, the fashion world, the publishing business—they were all secret societies that kept real art sequestered away. We wanted to get our work out onto the streets, into people’s faces.
We decided to start a free paper—photocopied like the punk fanzines that were ubiquitous in those days—and settled on the name Free Underground Kulture Klash, FUKK for short. Frisco Steve would write about underground music. His girlfriend would cover art and avant-garde fashion. The Frenchman would be in charge of design and promotion. I would be editor, and print the paper at the copy shop, after hours.
I had found fellow soldiers in my fight. FUKK would be a slap in the face to all the closed circles that refused to admit us— and we’d subvert the elites by giving it away. For me, it was a way to get my stories out there. And maybe, somehow, something would come of it.
The Frenchman designed an arresting poster for FUKK’s first issue. Under the image of a cop being forcibly penetrated by two leather-clad bikers, the caption read, ‘FUKK: Take it from Us.’ We wheat-pasted it all over the Lower East Side, sticking some up around the publishing district for good measure. We handed out our ‘zine outside punk shows and record shops. All we had going for us was attitude. But in New York, attitude can go a long way.
We began to get noticed. They name-checked us in the Village Voice and Warhol’s Interview. Even The New Yorker gave FUKK a begrudging nod. Though it was the Frenchman’s graphic shock tactics that turned people’s heads, it was my writing that garnered the most praise—probably because it was the only thing critics could relate to in a publication which delighted in spewing bile and vitriol. Love it or hate it, the old guard had to admit FUKK was a force to be reckoned with.
I’m sure my writing was weak. But there’s no substitute for good buzz—people can convince themselves of the merits of almost anything if they are worried about appearing obsolete. After a shock piece in the NY Post (“Trash Talk from the Gutter”), and a small feature in Rolling Stone (“Flowers in the Dustbin”), we were well on the way to believing our own hype.
It was around this time I met Blake.
The staff of FUKK had decided to crash a Granta party. Frisco Steve’s girlfriend knew one of the writers being fêted from her boarding school days—a drug-addled character named Bob Ringham. The heir to a newspaper fortune, Ringham had slummed it for a while in Cambodia as the editor of the Phnom Penh Post. He returned to the states with a small collection of short stories and a sizable heroin habit. Ringham represented everything we were against: privilege and the old boys’ network. Our plan was to get as drunk as possible, behave outrageously, and offend whoever we could. The Frenchman had printed all of us matching FUKK T-shirts. Frisco Steve’s girl blagged us past the doorman.
I spotted Blake at the open bar, ordering a glass of champagne.
“And just who are you trying to impress?” she asked, looking at my T-shirt.
I had no suspicion then that her upper-crust English accent had been studiously acquired.
“What if I said, you?”
“Then I would say you’re going about it in entirely the wrong way.”
“What way would you suggest?”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t suggest behaving like a juvenile in a room full of geriatrics.”
Here was a woman who could slice you with her tongue. I probably fell for her then and there. It was a perfect partnership: up-and-coming literary agent meets hip-and-hungry writer. We went back to her place that night. We married four months later.
Blake spun the hype around FUKK into a substantial publishing deal for me—one novel, with options for two more—along with a healthy commission for her. My advance for the first book was more than my parents had paid for their house. In the face of all that cash, my lofty ideals quickly went by the wayside.
You rarely get more than one shot in life, and anyone who tells you different is either lucky or a liar. My debut novel, XXX, got glowing reviews but tanked in the shops. The literati I had spurned took their revenge with gusto. Within nine months of the street date I was widely regarded as an over-amped flash in the pan. My second book was not optioned by the publisher. My compatriots at FUKK—pissed off at being passed over during my brief rise—cold-shouldered me after my fall. Twenty-four months later my advance was spent. I was facing the grim prospect of writing copy for clothing catalogs. In a grim coda, Bob Ringham was found dead of an overdose.
My commercial failure hobbled me creatively. I couldn’t seem to string three sentences together. Despite my rebel posturing, I found I really did care what people thought of my work. The market had already spoken.
Blake’s career continued to blossom. As she sailed from success to success, I grew increasingly bitter about the younger authors she signed whose books sold far better than mine. She’d drag me out to cocktail parties, trying to will me from my funk. But while Blake was something that glittered, I was the unfashionable accessory—last year’s handbag tossed into the corner. Amazingly our marriage limped along for another eight years.
I’d stay up late into the night, poring over a handful of fan letters, drinking myself into a stupor. Certainly ours had been a marriage of convenience, but beyond the book business there had been real love between us. I guess somewhere along the way Blake just grew weary of waking up to find me passed out on the floor.
Every divorce is a different sort of disaster. Ours was the slow and painful kind. There were no children to fight over, no great spoils to divide. There was no violence, no climactic deluge—only a kind of creeping desiccation. Our marriage ended not in a flood of tears, but in a drought of feeling. The dearth of this vital element brought on our dissolution.
It wasn’t until the Twin Towers fell that both of us knew it was really over. Beyond the brute symbolism of seeing a soaring monument reduced to rubble, came the realization that at any moment your future could simply implode and be swept away like so much toxic dust. From out of a clear blue sky the hand of fate could deal a savage blow that laid all of your elegant plans to waste. On a beautiful autumn morning, without any drum roll or dramatic cue, you could simply vaporize.
It was impossible to witness hundreds of office workers leaping from their desks to their deaths without undergoing a radical change in perspective. A lot of people talked about living in the moment—after that day a lot more of them started doing it. If life could be snuffed out at any second, did you want to meet your maker by the fax machine? I certainly didn’t want my final breath to be wasted in a screaming match with my wife. And I couldn’t blame Blake for wanting more than I could offer.
Once upon a time I’d been a fighter. But somewhere along the way most of the fight had been knocked out of me. I had given up on being the master of my own destiny—that was for better and bolder men. These days I settled for mere subsistence, steering clear of shit-storms, grasping at any opportunity that floated by. I left it to the captains of hubris to lead and to c
onquer. All I asked of the world was to leave me alone to drink in peace. But today even that seemed to be too much to ask. I had gone to see Dr Fang that morning.
“Mr Mark, if you want to kill yourself, there are quicker ways,” he said, glowering over my printout. “But your method so far proving quite effective.”
I had gone to Raj’s doctor a few days before to have him look at the sore on my knee. When I mentioned the pain under my ribs, Fang talked me into a full physical. This morning he’d given me the results.
“You mean the drinking, I guess.”
“Of course I mean the drinking. Tests indicate severe yin deficiency in liver and kidney. Also pancreas and spleen. In fact, your entire system extremely out of balance.”
“So, what does that mean, exactly?” I asked. “In Western terms.”
“In Western terms? I tell you exactly what it means. Extremely enlarged fatty liver is what it means. Liver cysts expanding unchecked, is what it means. You understand me? In addition, your stool sample exhibiting clear symptoms of pancreatic insufficiency. This is not good, is what it means!”
“Come on, Dr Fang,” I laughed. “I feel fine. Well, I feel okay. It can’t be that bad.”
“Ja, it’s pretty bad, O’Kane. You look in the mirror lately?”
“I hate mirrors.”
“I believe it. You look like crap! You turning yellow, Sir. That’s jaundice. You keep taking alcohol at this rate you going to die, Mr O’Kane. Soon!”
“Soon?” I said. “How soon?”
“A year, tops. You need to stop drinking. Now.”
A few moto-rickshaw drivers were gathered around the bamboo shack, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. I sat down and ordered an Oh-Cha. It had been a shitty morning.
Before I could take a sip, a small furry animal clambered out of the bushes and into my lap—an Asian black bear cub. At first I thought the bear was just being friendly. But as he began to sniff and paw at my beer I realized that what he really wanted was a drink. I elbowed the cub to the ground. Soon he was pestering the drivers. One smiled and surrendered his Oh-Cha. Within a few seconds the bear had sucked down the contents of the can and was begging for another. Everyone laughed.
I walked to the edge of the hill and looked out over the city. From up here, Joro was just a concrete stain upon the landscape. Dark steam churned in the west, as though the sea itself were slowly coming to a boil. The sun wavered, engorged and distended. The clouds deepened from charcoal grey to black. I spotted the grass roof of Cooney’s bar by the lagoon and remembered that my birthday was only a few days away. I was alone and about to turn thirty-seven.
Thirty-seven: the age Van Gogh blew his brains out in a wheat field, and Rimbaud died of cancer in a drafty Marseilles hospital. Elvis had clocked up fifteen gold records before he was twenty-five. At thirty, Alexander the Great had already conquered half the known world. Schubert and Mozart were both pushing up the daisies before blowing out thirty-seven candles.
I had already outlived Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Jesus. What did I have to show for my time upon the planet? One thin novel and an empty bank account. When you’re young you think you own the world. It’s only later you learn you have to pay.
There was one other thing. Buster and I shared a birthday.And Buster had died at thirty-seven.
Back at the bamboo stand the bear was rolling in a pile of cans as the drivers cheered him on. A baby bear with a taste for booze might be amusing. But today he was only a few months old and weighed about twenty pounds. As I watched the cub devour another Oh-Cha, I couldn’t help envisioning where he’d be a few years from now. An adult Asian black bear can top three hundred pounds.
Alcoholism is a progressively degenerative disease. At first the symptoms can be oddly endearing, but over time things only get worse. In the end, life with an alcoholic invariably turns ugly—especially if the addict in question is a 300 pound carnivore.
I envisioned the full-grown bear on the tail-end of a drinking binge. The image wasn’t pretty. Hot and dehydrated, he would scour the park for some booze to take the edge off his raging hangover. Finding no solace, the bear would turn surly. I feared for the safety of his keepers. But I worried more about the bear. He would probably wind up locked in a filthy cage, deeply depressed, another lonely alcoholic.
{ 7 }
Sea Change
The big day finally arrived: my last few hours as a drunk. Of course I was going to spend it at Cooney’s—what the hell else was I going to do? After wrapping up work I headed for the bar.
I was drawn from the cheerless jungle track toward the sanguine light of the paddy. As I navigated its network of elevated mud paths, farmers opened sluice gates to drain the water from the fields. Rice stalks nodded in the breeze, tinged with tiny gold-white flowers. Birds launched furtive raids from the trees to feed on the grain. A pack of dogs was out hunting paddy rats, trotting single file down an adjacent path. Only their tails were visible, sticking up like shark fins from the sea of yellow-green.
Dogs were everywhere on Madu. They came in three classes: the Owned, the Tolerated, and the Pariah. The Owned were imported breeds purchased from the trendy pet shops, lapdogs boasting belled collars to mark their privileged status. (Pet food was a recent and confusing addition to the market shelves, its packaging apparently promising canned dog and cat.) The Tolerated filled a tenuous role between pet and Pariah. They were sustained collectively by the neighborhood, earning their keep by warning of strangers, holding the rats at bay, and driving off any strange dogs trying to muscle in on their turf. The Pariahs were the truly sorry specimens. These, for one reason or another, had been unable to ingratiate themselves with anyone. They panted in the shadows, dragging themselves through the dust to beg for food, inevitably winding up outside the temples where the priests would keep them from starving.
Tripod was one of the Tolerated, a beach dog living off her charm and wits. As a fellow stray, I felt for her. Had I been more certain of my own future I might have adopted her. But as I had no clear destination a dependent was out of the question. I assuaged my guilt by buying her a belled collar, and throwing her my daily leftovers. She came jingling whenever she caught my scent. Limited options breed lowered expectations. I had learned this the hard way.
By the time I arrived at Cooney’s the sun had disappeared behind the black clouds congealing over Java. The boys showed up to wish me well. Any pretext for a piss-up—even impending sobriety. At midnight I would officially go on the wagon. I hated the very idea of it. But after what Dr Fang had told me, I knew I had to try.
“It was bloody disgusting,” Cooney said. “You’ve never smelled a worse fucking pong in your life.”
He was telling the story of a dead whale that washed up in the lagoon.
“I remember,” Raj said. “It truly was the most horrific odor. Rife for miles around.”
“Had to close down the bar for a week. You couldn’t come near the thing without retching.”
“Except the Filipinos,” Monty said. “They were onto that carcass like ants, down there in the water, hacking out whopping great hunks of blubber.”
Kubu wrinkled his nose.
“The entire thing had gone rotten!” Cooney said. “Fuck knows what they did with the stuff.”
“Fed it to their dogs, I suspect.”
“And you know what becomes of them dogs,” Cooney said. “Anyway, lucky for me there was a storm a few days later and the whole bloody mess washed back out to sea. If it had sat there much longer I would have gone out of business.”
Soon it was midnight. The boys had pitched in to buy me a cowboy hat. Fresh drinks were ordered and everyone toasted my health. I had prepared a little speech in honor of my imminent sobriety. I stood up, held the hat over my heart, and cleared my throat.
“When I was a kid, I had an uncle named Buster,” I began. “Whenever someone woul
d ask him when he was going to quit smoking, he’d look them in the eye and say, ‘Ma didn’t raise no quitters.’ And then he would light up another cigarette. It always used to make me laugh. But then a couple years later he was diagnosed with cancer, and before I knew it he was dead.”
Nobody spoke but the crickets.
“At least he stuck to his guns,” Cooney finally muttered.
“Anyway, whenever somebody would ask me when I was going to stop drinking so much, I’d whip out the Buster line, and it would usually get a laugh. Then I’d open another beer. But tonight I am a quitter.”
Everyone cheered.
“Now, I know you haven’t known me long, but you may have noticed that I’m what you might call a real drinking enthusiast.”
“You’re what you might call a drunk,” Cooney said.
“Such an unkind word,” Monty said. “In my youth they called one a lush, a far friendlier term. Of course those were more civilized times. A man could still smoke where he pleased.”
“These days, they’d call me an alcoholic.”
Monty shook his head. “Lush has a much more affable ring, like some cheerful fellow you encounter around the holidays.”
“No, Cooney’s right,” I said. “I’m a drunk. But least I’ve been a happy drunk.”
I had never been the chair-breaking, wife-beating type. I drank to be happy.
“Hear, hear,” Monty said. “Here’s to happiness.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Raj.
“That doesn’t mean I’m a happy person,” I went on. “It just means I am much, much happier with a beer in my hand.”
“Oh, here we go,” Cooney said.