Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

by Bill Clegg

  This will be just before or just after the night he meets Noah. Certainly it is before he tells Nell he has to leave her, before he’s introducing Noah to his mother, who tells him he must not tell Kim, or anyone else in the family who might tell her, because the news might cause her to lose the twins she’s recently become pregnant with. Before he introduces Noah to his boss, his friends, and the writers he works with. It is before Noah is known to his world, but which came first—the night he met Noah, the night with Fitz—will never be clear. It was a time when everything seemed like a beginning.

  Family Reunion

  Noah is the first thing I see when I step out of the elevator at the Maritime Hotel. Half crouched, on one knee, bearded and shaky, he appears both on the verge of sprinting and holding up his hands to protect himself from attack. And there’s something else—as if he’s been caught at something, as if somehow he is the guilty party. I haven’t seen him since the night at the Carlyle three days ago.

  I sprint past him toward the lobby’s door. He calls and I don’t pause.

  From somewhere else I hear: Billy!

  Billy?

  No one calls me Billy—no one but my family, friends from college, and people I grew up with—and I hear the name now as if it’s shouted across a dinner table from childhood.

  Billy!

  It’s my little sister, Lisa. I don’t see her but know it’s her voice. She’s twenty-five but already has a voice—smoke-choked and sad-shattered—that should have taken another twenty years to earn. It’s the kind of voice that to some sounds like a good time.

  I scan the lobby as I move toward the main door, and there they are. My father. Kim. Lisa. My family. My family minus my mother and little brother, Sean. I can’t believe they’re here. My father would have had to come down from the hills of New Hampshire where he lives alone; my sister, Kim, from her husband and twin boys in Maine; Lisa from Boston.

  I slow for a moment to make sure that the little man in the bright blue Windbreaker and gray New Balance running shoes, standing in the chic, dimly lit lobby of the Maritime Hotel, is actually my father. He has never once, in the twelve years I’ve lived in New York, stood on the island of Manhattan. He has never once seen where I’ve lived or the offices where I’ve worked. And, until now, he’s never met Noah. I wonder if I am hallucinating.

  Willie, c’mon, the man stammers in a tight Boston accent.

  It’s him. Looking like J. D. Salinger hauled out of rural seclusion and dropped into a big-city setting that could not appear less comfortable.

  I can’t get out of there fast enough. As I reach the door, Lisa grabs at my jacket. I can smell her perfume and cigarette smoke as I shake her off and run toward Ninth Avenue. She follows fast behind, screaming at me to come back. A cab jerks up to the curb. I get in and yell, Go! which, thank God, it does. The sun blazes off the chrome and glass of oncoming traffic and I have to squint to see Lisa run into the street, hail a cab that barely stops as she yanks the door open and jumps in.

  As I shout to the driver not to let the cab behind us follow, I cringe in shame at how cartoonishly awful the situation has become. Like so many other moments, this one feels lifted from an after-school special or Bright Lights, Big City. The cabdriver plays his part—rolls his eyes, drives on. Through the rear window, I can see my family and Noah scatter onto the street. It is midday in the city and the world rushes on around them. I am struck by how small they are, this is. How swiftly these unseen little urban dramas are done and gone. Doors click shut, motors roar, taxis squeal away, people disperse. Through the window, I watch them recede to dots. Light flashes from everything and I can barely see.

  In the Clear

  After three years in remission, my mother’s breast cancer has returned. The literary agency Kate and I have started has been open for a few months and we finally have phone lines. I am determined to have a 212 area code and, against the advice of several friends, pick ATT as our carrier because it is the only one that won’t saddle us with a 646 or, worse, 347 prefix. This matters to me. Many delays and snafus follow, and I come to find out that Verizon controls the equipment in Manhattan, and ATT is their client, so the glitch in our line has to be dealt with through Verizon but mediated by an ATT troubleshooter in Florida. These phone calls take hours each day. At several points during the first weeks of doing business on cell phones, it is made clear that we can easily have phone service if we just give up and go with Verizon. I refuse, again and again, and hold out for the 212 area code. I even instruct the printer to go ahead and print all the stationery before it’s clear we’ll be able to use those beautiful 212 numbers ATT assigned us months ago.

  During this time I sell more books than I had expected to; with Kate’s help, staff the agency with assistants and a foreign-rights director; show up for lunches with publishers and authors; and talk to my sister and mother several times a day. My mother is going to a breast cancer clinic in Boston, driving three hours each way from Connecticut to see a doctor who has laid out a course of treatment. After a few weeks it is decided that she will have a double-radical mastectomy and, on the same day, reconstructive surgery. It means she will be in the operating room for eight or nine hours, but she won’t have to go back under if all goes well.

  I have started seeing a therapist. This one is not the first. The first one was five years before, a balding, wiry man near Gramercy Park named Dr. Dave. Dave is the guy I see when I am twenty-five and still living with Nell, when the once faint, unobtrusive recognition of male beauty begins to bully its way into something more urgent. At that point, my sexual history with men amounts to a urinal skirmish in a train station bathroom in college and a few makeout sessions with an oncology resident who lives near my first apartment in New York. I chalk these up to curiosity and push them from my mind. But toward the end of my relationship with Nell, before meeting Noah, I become preoccupied with men—their bodies, their voices, their smell. I begin trying to remember what it was like kissing Ron, the oncologist, and am only able to recall the thrill of stubble against my face and the smell of his clean, pressed shirts. I call a phone line a few times, advertised in The Village Voice for men cruising for sex, and when Nell is away I meet up with a few of them. Nothing will be as exciting as I remember those first moments with Ron, but I am still drawn back to that phone line—listening to what I imagine as lonely, desolate men trawling the night for sex. I think if I go to a shrink and talk it through, I can make that need, that new urgency, go away, or at least recede to a place where I won’t need to act on it.

  Without going into the reasons, I ask my boss and several friends for names of therapists and psychiatrists. I see five or six, two of them twice, and finally decide on Dr. Dave. He’s $175 an hour—down from his usual $250 because I don’t make much money—and he wants to see me twice a week. It takes three or four sessions of examining my attraction to men before we get to my boyhood friends—Kenny, Adam, Michael—and whether or not I had sexual feelings for them. I don’t think so, and he presses for memories of seeing their penises and whether or not they saw mine. At one point I say, matter-of-factly, that no one would have seen my penis. When Dr. Dave reminds me that I described seeing Michael’s several times as we fly-fished on the Housatonic River, I say, again matter-of-factly, that I never peed in the river but instead always went to shore and into the woods.

  Why? he asks.

  I don’t know, I answer.

  Were you ashamed or embarrassed by your penis? he continues.

  No, I don’t think so.

  Then, why?

  Why? he repeats.

  And then. There I am. Eleven or twelve. In the woods, behind some tangle of branches, thrashing and jumping and manhandling my dick as if it’s on fire and I’m trying to put it out. And with that one memory, all at once a million memories. I don’t believe them at first, but there is some physical sensation, some old bodily recognition, then and after, that keeps me from dismissing them as crossed wires in my mind.


  Dr. Dave and I spend a year and a half remembering all of it—the nurse’s bathroom, the blood-spotted underwear, my father. We spend a lot of time on him. What he said, how he said it, how it made me feel. All that. And then, after I meet Noah and we move in together six months later, I grow weary of reoccupying my boyhood struggles and stop seeing Dr. Dave. One day I just don’t go. He leaves a few messages, but I pay his bill and don’t return his call. I don’t say anything about what I remembered to anyone, and after a while I begin again to wonder if I had made it all up. Eventually it recedes and, for the most part, fades from my thoughts.

  Now, three years later, I’m thirty years old, and I have left the job I’ve been in for seven years, the only job I’ve had in New York, to start an agency with a friend. I have met Noah by now—on a night when Nell is out of town and I call one of those phone lines. He walks into the entryway of my apartment and without speaking we kiss. We talk all night. He is manly but silly, too, and warm, and I tell him I am a year younger than I am, that I went to Harvard, and that my father grew up on Marlborough Street in Boston. I correct the first two lies before morning but leave the last one untouched. It will be my father, years later, when they meet for the first and last time, who will tell Noah that he grew up in Dedham, Mass., a middle-class bedroom town just outside Boston.

  We tell everyone that we met at a birthday party in Brooklyn for a client of mine who is an old schoolmate of Noah’s. This is the first secret we keep together.

  I drink too much, and I can’t keep from dialing dealers and staying out until all hours. I’m a crack addict, I know this, Noah knows this, but to everyone else I am a dependable, decent guy with a promising new company and a great boyfriend. We live in a beautiful apartment that Noah’s grandmother paid cash for, and we’ve filled it with vintage photographs and furniture and expensive Persian rugs. From a distance, it looks like an enviable life. Up close, it’s partly what it looks like: I’m in love with Noah, but beyond the drug-related infidelities, I’ve had two affairs—one with a man and another with a woman. It is my firm belief that he has been faithful to me throughout the relationship. We’re proud of the apartment, the things we’ve carefully arranged there, but we both call it One Fifth instead of home.

  It feels as if each week, there is some lunch or some dinner or some phone call that is going to blow my cover, reveal that I am not nearly as bright or well read or business savvy or connected as I think people imagine me to be. My bank account is always empty, and when I look at the ledgers at the agency, I wonder how we will pay our employees, the rent, the phone bill, without Kate writing another check to float us. Noah is covering my expenses at home, but we are keeping a tally so that I will pay him back once the money from commissions starts coming into the agency. I remember the lines from a Merwin poem I used to read to Nell all the time, I have been a poor man living in a rich man’s house, and cringe each time. I often wish it all felt the way it looked, that I could actually be living the life everyone thinks they see. But it feels like a rigged show, one loose cable away from collapse.

  Noah is making trips to L.A. and Memphis to rustle up producers and cast and money for the film he has been working on for years. When he is away, I call Rico or Happy or go see Julio, a guy I meet through another guy I met at Fitz’s place on the second and last time I went there. This guy, a twenty-year-old Hispanic kid with gray teeth, will invite me to Julio’s, and I will end up going there for years. People come to Julio’s and he lets them do drugs and have sex, as long as they share both. These nights were once few and far between—every two or three months—but now they are every other week, and while they would once end around one, they are now creeping closer and closer toward dawn.

  After another rough morning, after Noah has begged me to get help, I agree to see a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction issues. We get a name from a college friend of Noah’s and I go. His office is in his very large, very elegant Riverside Drive apartment. It’s a short meeting. He asks why I’m there. I tell him about my drug use and how I want to stop but can’t seem to and he asks about my drinking. My drinking? I ask, as if he’s suddenly mentioned the weather in Peru or the price of IBM stock. He says I need to stop drinking before he will agree to see me and I politely excuse myself and leave.

  Half a year later, after another string of bad nights, there is another name, another therapist, recommended by some other friend. This one is different, calls himself a Harm Reduction Counselor, which is another way of saying someone who helps you plan your alcohol and drug use, to get it under control. I go to this person once. He is a very attractive man in his early forties with a chic apartment-like office in Chelsea. We make an elaborate plan—this number of drinks a night, that number of times I will smoke crack a month—and I’m excited that my drinking and drug use are now doctor approved. Within a week I exceed the limits we’ve established and then miss the second appointment because of staying up all night the night before. I never return.

  Months later: another rough morning, another name from a friend of Noah’s. This time it’s Gary, and he’s gentle and sweet and his office is a few blocks from the agency. Gary asks why I have come to see him and I tell him. He pokes around about the childhood stuff, we talk about the peeing, the hard father, the frightened mother. How they met when he was a pilot for TWA and she was a young, pretty stewardess. When we get to the part about my father, he asks what my mother said at the dinner table when things got rough. I describe how cruel he was to her, how poor she was growing up in Youngstown, how much younger she is than my father, how her own father died when she was a teenager. He says, Fine fine fine, but what did she say? Where was she?

  Amazing, the power of three words. These will open up such a can of worms. I will sit there and think about all the sessions with Dr. Dave, when I went through, blow by blow, how my father was during that time—how he sounded, what he said—and realize that we never talked about her. Not once. She was one of us, I think, and maybe even say. He was awful to her. Criticized her cooking, her clothes, her intelligence, her interests, her friends. Just as he did with me and with Kim and, to a lesser extent, Lisa and Sean. But I can’t remember my mother beyond this shared circumstance. Can’t remember her saying anything to me about my problem. Acknowledging it, even. Can’t remember a word of comfort or concern about any of it. Broken legs, yes. Mean teachers, you bet. But this, never. Nor can I even see her at those dinner tables when guests were over, when my father would get tipsy and begin his taunting and threatening. It’s as if that whole corridor of my growing up held only me and my father, and while it happened in the same rooms, with everyone else, no one else saw or heard what was going on. I suddenly feel very tired.

  About six months later my mother calls to say that her mammogram has come back with bad news, that her cancer has returned and she’s going to Boston for more tests. I have called her only rarely over the past months. The sessions with Gary are like removing all the photographs of my mother from the family album and replacing them with someone who resembles her but is clearly someone else, someone I am only now beginning to see. She has been confused and hurt by my spare contact, as we used to speak several times a week. She complains to Kim, and Kim asks me what’s going on. I tell her it’s been incredibly busy at work.

  After the call about the bad mammogram, I am in touch more. It takes a few weeks, but the seriousness of what’s going on sinks in. Soon she is scheduled for surgery and the doctors tell us that it’s a long shot that they’ll be able to remove all of the cancer, and, if they do, an even longer shot that it won’t return, even after an aggressive course of chemotherapy.

  Kim and I go over our mother’s finances. There are piles of credit-card bills, and she’s still digging out from the mountain of legal fees that came with divorcing my father a few years before. It has been a long and messy divorce, and at one point she asks me to fly up to New Hampshire, where they are living, to testify in court on her behalf—to uphold a restraining order a
gainst my father. I fly up, though before I do, the judge says I don’t have to, that he will uphold the restraining order without my testimony. I’m relieved but still feel ashamed as I see my father, briefly and without words, in the lobby of the courthouse.

  Insurance is covering most of my mother’s treatment, but there are ancillary bills adding up and she hasn’t been able to paint any of the murals or portraits she’s been commissioned to paint, which is how she supports herself; nor will she be able to for a long time after the surgery. We talk seriously about what our roles will need to be, financially, and I pretend I am not worried and that money has begun to flow into the agency. My family thinks of me as a success, and I don’t want to tarnish that image. Kim tells me that our mother has decided I should be executor of her will and that papers to that effect will need to be signed. She may not make it, Kim says, and the words just hang there.

  This is the spring of 2001. My mother’s surgery is in May, and I fly to Boston. Kim has been there all week with my little sister, Lisa, who lives nearby. Sean is now nineteen and sullenly haunts the halls and rooms around the hospital. The surgery is successful and when we’re allowed to go in and see her, our mother appears half her usual size and weight—withered and weak and swimming in the hospital gown that falls off her shoulders. I have not seen her for months, and as she speaks, her eyes tear and it seems that her words are too difficult to craft and propel into the world. When I go to the hall and call Noah, I break down and start cying, out of control and awkwardly. Everything—the business, the late nights, the worry about money, the feeling of not being able to live this life I’ve constructed—seems overwhelming, and now suddenly my mother, whom I haven’t spoken to for more than a few minutes at a time over the last six months and who looks like she’s dying and I’ve messed it all up and won’t be able to make it right. Through the shaky phone line Noah tells me not to worry, that everything will be okay. I eventually stop sobbing, and as we say good-bye it feels as if he is very far away.