Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

by Bill Clegg

  Just Here

  Noah and I are heading out the door for a few weeks of vacation in Cambridge, Mass. I call my friend Robert, whose lymphoma has recently gone into remission, to check in, see how he’s doing. He sounds great. His voice is a cross between Truman Capote’s and Charles Nelson Reilly’s. He is one of the first editors in publishing who called me when I was a young agent and asked me to lunch. He’s in his forties, clearly gay, very smart, and wickedly funny. After that lunch we spoke a few times a week about work, authors we had in common, publishing gossip. Robert’s references—professional and literary—often went over my head and I would pretend to understand. If he knew, which I’m sure he did, he never let on.

  Robert tells me on the phone that he has to head back into the hospital for something having to do with his lungs. No big deal, he says, not to worry. I startle for a moment and when I ask him again, he reassures me that it’s nothing, that it’s routine.

  We go up to Cambridge. Noah and I read, go to movies at the Brattle, drink lots of coffee, and walk around and look at Harvard and the great houses spread out on all sides of the campus. What we always do. And then one morning one of Robert’s colleagues calls to say that he is dead, that he went into the hospital and it turned out he had pneumonia.

  I’ve known Robert for four or five years, see him every two or three months, and we speak on the phone regularly, but I can’t say we are close. He is a part of my work life, and a consistently bright part. His battle with lymphoma has gone on, as far as I know, for a few years. He has been, with me anyway, always vague about the details. His treatment had gotten rough for a while, he left work for several months, but the remission seemed strong. He flew to Europe to go to the opera and dove back into publishing. He was back to normal.

  I hang up the phone and after a few stunned, still moments, I start sobbing. I cry for days and can’t stop. At dinner, during walks around Cambridge, in the shower, at the gym. I cry uncontrollably. The last time I can remember crying was at the hospital with my mother three or four months before. Eventually the tears stop, but the hard fact of never seeing or hearing Robert again plunks down somewhere in my chest and does not leave.

  We come back to New York over Labor Day weekend. There is a memorial service for Robert scheduled on September 10 at the University Club. A writer I represent flies to New York from Chicago on the ninth. Robert edited and adored his novel, which is just about to be published. We go to the memorial service and listen to the writers Robert edited tell stories of how brilliantly he edited their work. How well he took care of them. How much fun he was. Their words make me feel alone, lonely. We go to L’acajou and I start drinking right away. Glass after glass, I drink it like water, and my face prickles with the heat of too much alcohol in my blood. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and call Julio and tell him to call his dealer, that I’m coming over, with cash. Later, after paying the bill, I say my good-byes, get in a cab, run into Julio’s building, and pace the elevator as it crawls to his floor.

  That night will go by in a flash. I make it home sometime before eight, but after Noah has left for the day. There is no note on the bar. I have a vague memory of a foreign publisher—German? Dutch? I don’t remember—who is scheduled to come into the office. I shower and dress and walk up Fifth Avenue to the office, and my head pounds from all the vodka the night before, and the sky is the most extraordinary cloudless blue I have ever seen. North of 14th Street, I see a young editor I know run across Fifth Avenue in a bright white shirt. I wonder why he’s running so fast.

  When I walk into the agency, everyone is there. A friend calls just then and says that the Twin Towers have been attacked. Almost immediately the office, the people from the other offices on our floor, people calling, are hysterical, and there is an image on CNN.com of one of the towers billowing with smoke. Rumors escalate and the atmosphere is chaotic and frightened. Noah calls. He is crying. He asks if I am okay, does not mention the night before, and says that he is watching the towers from his office window in SoHo. We arrange to meet at the apartment later.

  I suddenly remember that the appointment I have is to get my hair cut by Seth. I call to see if he is open. He says to come over. My hair is shaggy, and with my bloodshot eyes and pasty skin, I think it’s more obvious than usual that I’ve been out all night. Getting my hair shampooed and cut can’t hurt, I think, as I grab my wallet and head out the door. My assistant asks me where I am going, and when I tell her, To get my hair cut, she stares at me, speechless.

  As I walk west across 25th Street, a jet flies low enough that the buildings all around me rumble and I crouch on the sidewalk and cover my head with my arms. It will be the only moment of that day that won’t feel numb. The rest will be surreal and far away, as if I am watching them on a screen or through a thick lens.

  Both towers are still standing when I reach Sixth Avenue. I linger there for a second or two before heading across 22nd Street to Seth’s. Everywhere people are quiet. Everywhere people move gently, slowly. They are careful with one another.

  Seth’s place is empty and we listen to the radio as he washes my hair and slowly cuts it. I wonder if he can tell how polluted I am, how strung out from the night before. Unlike when we engage in our usual chatter of gossip, we barely talk and are silent as the report of the first tower falling comes over the radio. Seth’s phone rings but he lets it go on and on until the machine picks up. It takes over an hour for him to cut my hair, and I think it is because he doesn’t want to be alone. I am grateful to be here, in this seat, safe.

  I leave Seth’s and walk back to Sixth Avenue, where a throng of people on the corner are all looking south. Something feels off balance and I have a brief flash of vertigo as I follow their gazes downtown to the now bland tumble of buildings there. The towers have fallen. An hour ago they stood there, on fire, billowing with smoke, and now they are gone. They were just here, someone says as I try to locate where exactly in the skyline they used to rise from. But in the cloud of soot and smoke that hangs above the blur of buildings that could be any city now, I can’t remember where they once were, what it all looked like. I have already forgotten.

  Where

  When Noah is away: Home.

  When Noah is home: Mark’s or Julio’s or any satellite thereof. Hotels.

  If between home and elsewhere: Back of cabs; bathroom in the lobby of One Fifth; stairwell landing between fifth and sixth floors of One Fifth; video booth at porn store on 14th between Sixth and Seventh and the one at 44th and Eighth, near Orso; bathroom at L’acajou; bathroom at LensCrafters on Fifth Avenue; bathroom at McDonald’s on Seventh below 14th Street; desk at my office; bathroom at my office; stairwell of office building; in Central Park behind trees and in bathroom stall by Delacorte Theatre; Westside Highway under shrubs; in basements of buildings under construction, behind Dumpsters, in Dumpsters, anywhere.

  In London: Charlotte Street Hotel, back of hired cars (not black cabs), behind hedges at the top of Highbury Fields.

  In Paris: On bench in the Place des Vosges, on bed in brothel; in back of a cab driven by guy who gives you a free bag of hash; in stairwell of apartment building; café bathrooms.

  BEAR IN MIND

  In transit, let stem cool before shoving it in pocket or it will burn through your pants.

  The Jesus Year

  This is the year of the most nights out. The most notes left on the bar, the most shattered mornings, the most broken promises to drink only two vodkas at dinner, the most abandoned resolutions to stop calling Rico and Happy and Mark and Julio and anyone else who can lead me to getting high, the most calls to my assistant to say I am sick, the most lies.

  It’s more than three years after my mother’s surgery, a year after she stops chemo, and the year Noah makes his movie in Memphis. The agency is doing well. We’re turning a profit, and a number of books that I am selling are not only the subject of heated bidding wars among book publishers but go on to be excerpted in places like The New Yorker and rev
iewed well everywhere, and in one case on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. And there will be one, a cherished one, that appears like a winking miracle of enchanted audacity which becomes a finalist for the National Book Award.

  Before the nomination, before the publication, there will be a lunch given at La Grenouille, a French restaurant in the East 50s. I ask an acquaintance, an almost-friend, Jean, to come. Jean who never goes to lunch. Jean whom I met in the lobby of the Frankfurter Hof hotel when I was twenty-five and who, for years after, invited me to book parties and other gatherings at her terraced penthouse overlooking the East River. Jean’s parties always have a funny mix of staggering accomplishment, fame, wealth, political passion, and genuine strangeness. Sometimes there are small dinners and sometimes seats at benefit tables. But as years pass, there is always a seat at the table. And every time feels like the last. The one where I will say the thing that will correct whatever mistaken illusion she has of me and reveal the fraudulent imbecile that I am.

  So I invite Jean to the lunch at La Grenouille. I invite her because the book she wrote about the gritty-fabulous rise and fall of a Wasp princess is a favorite of the author of the Winking Miracle. I invite her because of her literary glamour, because she matters to the author, and because she is also a friend of the author’s Legendary Editor. For all these reasons, and because she has invited me to so much, and because when she is around I feel, strange and unlikely as it seems, loved, I ask her to come. Impossibly, she agrees, and I am excited for the rare energy she will bring to the event, the likes of which are organized purely to generate energy to launch whatever new literary rocket into orbit. Months go into getting this lunch together. There is a generous friend of the author’s who has agreed to sponsor it, and because of the elegance of the restaurant and the influence of the author’s Legendary Editor, and the hustling on everyone’s part, there is an unusually august group of literary lights scheduled to attend.

  Why do certain things shimmer on the horizon with fairy dust and others not? This lunch, on the calendar for months, sparkles in blue ink every time I open that page to pencil something else in on either side. I flush with excitement when anything associated with it crosses my mind or my desk—the book, Jean, La Grenouille, the Legendary Editor—all of it, folded together into a shiny promise of something blessed.

  I need a suit, and in a burst of recklessness I go to Saks and pick out a slim black/navy lightly striped Gucci suit that costs over $3,000. The most money I’ve ever spent on any one piece of clothing. In it, in the dressing room, I look for a moment like someone I don’t recognize. Someone who has dozens of suits, dozens of pairs of shoes to go with them, and money to afford them all. Not recognizing yourself in the mirror is like seeing a photo that someone takes of you at a party and having your jealous eye drawn to the unfettered, attractive, someone-who-belongs-everywhere person gazing through the photograph over an impassable distance between their world and yours; you see that lucky bastard who you imagine has never had an uncomfortable, insecure, unadored moment in his life and you despise his ease instantly. And then you find out it’s you. It can’t be, you’re sure it’s not you. But when you see that he has your clothes on and, yes, Jesus, yes, he has the same large ear that sticks out and the other, smaller one that lies flat to his head; when you see that it’s you, you think for a second: Is it possible that someone might make the same mistaken assumptions about the you who is not you? It shakes you for a moment and you decide that in some essential way, the person staring back through the photograph is actually someone else. Or rather, he doesn’t exist. The angle of the photograph and the lie it achieves are like the suit. So if you’re standing in a dressing room, looking in the mirror, and see someone who looks like the person in that photograph, you buy the suit, because if that person can’t actually exist, it might as well look as if he does.

  Two nights before the lunch, I’m at a dinner. I can’t remember which one or with whom but a few things can be counted on. I’m at l’acajou. I drink vodka. The waiters and waitresses top off my glass through the night. A gentle calm spreads into my chest with each glass and, gradually, the symphony of usual worries dies down. As those instruments still, and after the brief patch of ease begins to ebb, other sounds rise up from the pit. Agitated strings. Bullying horns. The pesky, restless want that feels like need. As I talk and listen and eat and laugh, I am waving my conducting wand, commanding the instruments to quiet. But as I wave more, I drink more, and as I drink, the sounds rise, become more insistent, and I excuse myself and go to the bathroom and call a number. This time it’s Mark’s and I arrange to go to his place after dinner. I worry a moment that the lunch for the author of the Winking Miracle is two days away and I need to be in top shape for that. But it’s two whole days, I reason. Even if I stay up most of the night, I’ll still have a full twenty-four hours to regain my footing.

  I go to Mark’s and there is a blur of smoke and flesh and other people, and in the morning, this time, I don’t want it to end. The lunch is the next day, but still, somehow, it feels far away. A whole day and night and morning between now and then. It will work out. It always does. But this is the first night that wants to be two. Why this one and not the others? I look at the calendar from that time and it is graffitied with ink. Scribbled notes about lunch meetings, coffee dates, phone dates, drinks dates, trips to London, L.A., Frankfurt. Weddings, birthdays, benefits, plays, operas, book parties, screenings. So much to show up for, so much to camouflage for, to worry over. There is no busier period than that year when I am thirty-two and thirty-three. The sunstruck runup to the Jesus year. Someone—was it Marie?—always joked about thirty-three being the Jesus year—how it marked the end of one life and the beginning of another, the end of youth and the beginning of the undebatable status of adulthood. But I was twenty-four when she turned thirty-three, and adulthood seemed a world away.

  Why was that the night that became three? Why did all the things that to anyone else, even to me, looked lucky, enviable, feel like burdens? It was the year I got tired, the year I began to give up. It was when the conducting wand broke and the sounds from the pit overwhelmed the conductor and drowned the hall.

  I leave Mark’s by midday and check into a small hotel around the corner from the agency. It’s a cheap tourist hotel, one step up from a hostel, and I go there because Mark’s place is too sloppy, too smoke-charred, too exposed. The jittery paranoia I have seen in most of the crack smokers I have known has, during the last three or four times getting high, started to afflict me. This time it’s the most nagging, most persistent, and when I am at Mark’s, I find myself at the window, seeing what I think are unmarked police cars parked in front of his building. By morning I need to get out of there. I have Rico’s number, and I am pretty sure I can get him to deliver more in the afternoon. And so he does, and I stay up all night, alone and with reruns of the dingy and dated cable-access Robin Byrd Show, where rough-around-the-edges go-go boys and girls strip and let Robin perform oral sex on them. When this is over, I leave the station on all night. It runs low-tech ads for 1-900 numbers, with naked and half-naked men and women wooing the camera with talk of raunchy phone sex. The hotel room looks out onto an alley, and I lean out and look up at the panels of light reflected from other hotel rooms. Occasionally there will be a silhouette of a man or woman flickering across the brick, and I imagine a million scenarios. Sometimes a sound—a low crack, a muffled scraping, a window slamming shut—will echo through the alley, and a few times I call out, Hello.

  Morning comes on fast, and by ten o’clock I realize I need to get home to fetch my suit for the lunch at La Grenouille. Noah has left dozens of messages, and beyond one phone call two nights before, saying I was alive and fine and not to worry, I have not called him. I still have a large bag from the night before and it gives me some comfort as I begin to face the day ahead. I reserve the hotel room again and take a cab to One Fifth to get my suit. Thankfully, Noah is not there, so I grab the suit, black shoes
, and socks and haul out of the apartment, back into a cab and to the hotel room. It is noon by now and the lunch is at one. I can’t believe I’ve disappeared for two nights and a full day. Noah must be out of his mind with worry. But as much as I know this, I don’t call him, don’t track him down to let him know I am okay. I left a message on the voice mail for my assistant at eight a.m. to say that I would be going straight to the lunch, so that base is, for now, covered. But the lunch! Oh, Jesus, how can I go in this shape? I sit on the bed, pack the burnt, oily stem from the night before with a large rock, and inhale. My terror over the lunch, Noah, my office, and everything else vanishes like a flame suddenly cut off from oxygen. I roll up in the bedspread and let the flash of warm lightning race through my system. I lie on the bed for what seems like only a few minutes, but when I sit up again, it is five after one. The lunch. The glittering happy event that has sung its siren call for months has already begun, and I am strung out, unshowered, unshaven, and skinny from not eating. I take another hit and rush into the shower. It is almost two by the time I get out of the hotel and into a cab. After a shave and shower and the suit, I look in the mirror and, God help me, I convince myself that I look good. A little gaunt and shaky, but the suit, not to mention the bag and pipe and lighter I have in the breast pocket, gives me a shred of hope that I will be able to wing my way through the next few hours.

  I get there and go straight to the bar and down a huge vodka. The lunch is on the second floor in a private dining room outside of which is a small bathroom. I duck into the gilded little toilet stall and scramble to pack the stem. My hands are shaking, as it’s been over twenty minutes since I took my last hit at the hotel and I can barely keep the flame steady. I inhale and hold it until my lungs sting and cough out the smoke. I wash my hands and rinse my mouth with soap to hide the smell and blow on the stem to cool it before wrapping it in toilet paper and putting it in my suit pocket.