Sketchtasy

by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

  And that’s what hits me. Because I always end up feeling dead inside. At home I flip through the pages of the Big Book to find moments of temptation, escape from disaster, midnight, cynicism, dividends, guidance, the defects, stirring spiritual experience, treatment, the medical profession, determination, money, desperation, a dozen bottles, a mild bender, coffee, Florida sunshine, inconsiderate habits, withdrawal, a position to be hurt, belligerent denial, a glass of beer, a friendly taxicab driver, absolute proof, reformers, skilled guidance, Easter Sunday, a duplex, post-operative day, Christ’s injunction, a one-way street, the asylum, a real stinker, Good Samaritans, New Delhi, people in Akron, gay young Bohemians, optimism, central heating, my marriage, completely blacked out, a domestic standpoint, God’s hands, the Eighteenth Amendment, a reformer, obsession, proper respect, floating away, a drugstore, mail-order business, that midget, desperation, emphasizing alcoholism, sneaking my drinks, dollar hotels, a skull, waste, a jackrabbit, a Cleveland group, daily living, my drinking career, Uncle Sam, a dandy, that sanitarium, closed meetings, inner freedom, a vigorous campaign, spirits recharged, the pokey, eighteen years, our crowd, your husband, psychologists, a daily reprieve, the Spirit, Ku Klux Klan, interpretation, a Sunday supplement, resentment, professional men, Ohio Edison Building, $5,000, scandalous gossip, a rabbi, a technical education, reality, spring of 1939, blacking out, heartsickness, apprenticeship, the wreckage, your wife, his Creator, the head cook, Vietnam, a fine Christian mother, a psycho ward, Beverly Hills, John Barleycorn, spiritual hunger, the Navy, that first drink, my son’s illness, a teaspoon of brandy, restitution, merry-go-round, DuPont, ruinous slander, Champlain Street Station, bitterly-hated business rival, my children, a minister, character removed, school publications, a gangster’s moll, ribaldry, this bare room, Texas, sneaking drinks, a heel, mutual trust, the Kingdom, to swallow me, mechanical drawing, Suez Canal, that hospital bed, blame, outsiders, volume, old sweet selves, the bums, Dr. Bob, Jekyll-and-Hyde, bottle after bottle, PTA, mere cessation, a rummage sale, another six months, Christian Science, bootleggers, helping other alcoholics, God goes deep, the New Land, we never apologize, Bridge of Reason, a grim jest, fleshpots of Egypt, Boozeville, the West Coast, Venus, an upset stomach, YMCA, the Commanding Officer, the theater, mental twists, boyhood, Hitler’s war, our marriage, a Midas touch, two girls hitchhiking, law school, Prohibition, Atlantic City, Mother’s Day, a goner, the Chicago area, wisecracking sneerer, my sponsor, incapacitated father, foolish decisions, a nut, a stickler, design for living, alcoholics field, pagan mystic, a happy childhood, early July, God’s handiwork, a two-fisted drinker, the South, the first Christmas, a telephone booth, grammar school, morning coffee, borrowed sum, the strange hospital, belligerent denial, a psychiatrist, John D. Rockefeller, non-meeting nights, Priscilla, my husband, a cocker spaniel, the water wagon, San Diego, commercial banks, the cocktail hour, hard knocks, my wash day, a fashionable suburb, popping pills, my relatives, lost time, every alcoholic, the Mount, he’s a sissy, a salesman, poison, a loaf of bread, a big potted plant, her house, shocking things, another principle, untold grief, seed, an ambulance, a mattress, nothingness, a mental fog, an early morning truck, pneumonia, Boxer Rebellion, Tijuana, Washington State, the mirror, wet canteens, Tall Man, Pittsburgh, two drinking societies, necessary escapism, the clergy, the rugs, hilarious life, basis of love, Heavenly Father, indispensable, we cannot subscribe, lack of control, simple cornerstone, emotional disturbances, cancer, crack-pot, take it easy, now about sex, my associates, a quart, fashion design, vicissitude, insanity, fatal illness, agnostics, permanent brain injury, heartening success, the dishes, a churchgoing wallflower, Nevada City, corn liquor, radio broadcasts, Detroit, elderberry blossom wine, membership, a corker, nurses, hooch, wild oats, my sick ego, a tough Irishman, reformers, 8th and L, reputation, Serenity Prayer, humiliation, moonshine, material goods, Alsations, saloons, foolish martyr, Boss Universal, the Far East, high road, the vacuum, a new freedom, this dry spell, outside, splinters.

  And here I am again, I still can’t believe I’m here but I’m here. Apparently today’s the day when people celebrate anniversaries: thirty days, sixty days, ninety, six months, nine months, one year, eighteen months—twenty-four hours? There are a lot of cheers, and everyone gets chips—I’m not sure what you do with these chips.

  Today is a speaker’s meeting, which I guess means the speaker takes as long as he wants. He says he grew up in the suburbs, went to Catholic school and hated it—Catholicism was a huge part of my family, he says, we all lived together in the same neighborhood. And eventually I did learn from the Catholic Church: I learned how to lie. I knew I wouldn’t be supported if anyone found out I was gay—I was not a popular kid. The first time I got drunk it was Grand Marnier and I got really sick and vomited and I never tried that again. But I remembered that warm wash all over me.

  That warm wash all over me—this guy’s actually a good speaker.

  He says: I went to high school in the late sixties and early seventies and those were the counterculture days but you wouldn’t have known it in the community where I grew up—alcohol and drugs became a means to escape. I looked for the others who were like me—there was another guy in my high school and we started venturing out to the big discotheque in Boston at the time. It was magical—I almost couldn’t believe all the beauty and excitement there. But there was a lie woven in with that magic, the lie of so much shame and self-hatred covered up by drugs and alcohol. Like the Pet Shop Boys say, “Some are here, and some are missing.”

  The Pet Shop Boys. It’s funny that he’s quoting the Pet Shop Boys to talk about the seventies.

  I developed all these relationships with older gay men after I was kicked out of my house. It was like one of those scenes in a movie where everyone found out I was gay in less than five minutes, and I’d like to tell you that story sometime so feel free to ask me about it but I don’t want to get off track. Let’s just say it was a catastrophe, and these older gay men plucked me off the streets and nurtured me. I really owe everything to them.

  Sometimes it was a secret mentorship, like when I lived in Central Square in a big old Victorian with eight other gay men and they told me that the kind of drinking I did, it couldn’t go on in the house. But I didn’t listen. The men in that household were some of the first people on my list for amends. It seems like this went on for a while—I witnessed the sexual revolution as it unfolded, it was like people suddenly came out of their shells and blossomed. Sex was everywhere, and it still felt so magical to connect in this way. I had relationships that lasted a week, and relationships that lasted years. And it felt like an idyllic life until somewhere around 1982, when there were the first rumblings about a gay cancer and suddenly I found that idyllic life unraveling.

  Eventually I had to stop going to funerals because it was too depressing. I still had the ability to use drugs to shut off everything around me, in fact I was getting better and better—I was taking every pill and powder and substance available. But I started a love affair with Scotch, that secret embrace. I would go to the bar before and after work, and I always had a bottle at home.

  I moved to Orlando for two years for work—to open a hotel at Disney World, and I hated it. Everyone had a tan and the sun was always setting and it was so hot and grimy, even the prettiest things had a slime underneath. And I was the one who kept the party going, I was the one who made it pretty on the outside. A lot of you don’t know this, but I was a DJ all up and down the East Coast. I was always in demand. But eventually the hemorrhaging of pain and despair started impacting my health. I kept moving from house to house, but I wasn’t ready to look at my addiction.

  When I first got back to Boston, I was selling coke on the side, and I got a call from my housemate that the feds were arriving in twenty-four hours and I had to get everything out of the house. Then my partner died, he killed himself because he didn’t want AIDS to kill him. I went on a bender—drunkenness became a sport, a way to pick on people, I
thought I was smarter than everyone, I would get in fights and say I bet I know how to make you cry. And then I would do it, I would make people cry, and I would laugh so hard—I felt like I was better than everyone.

  Eventually I ended up in the hospital, all the doctors were wearing hazmat suits, I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say I was near death. And you know how people talk about spiritual experiences, I had a spiritual experience in that hospital. I called a former drug dealer friend of mine who was working at Fenway Community Health, and he came right over. Actually he came to the hospital room every day for the next six months. He gave me so much nurturing, compassion, empathy, love, immense courage and strength. And that’s where I began my long road of recovery.

  I entered a one-year program, there were twenty-six of us at the beginning and I was in so much pain I had to lie on pillows on the floor. At the end of the program, only two of us were left: everyone else was dead. I don’t know why I’m still here, unless it’s to speak to you here in this room still alive. Disease has affected my community in so many ways, but my pain has become a great motivator to help others. Pain, and trauma—because I experienced such huge amounts of trauma growing up. We’re all experiencing that trauma again now, the trauma of losing so many people we care about, and who’s next—it could be me. Or you.

  I didn’t come to twelve-step meetings for a year. I thought it was a cult. I had so much contempt for you in this room, in all of these rooms, meeting in such dark and unattractive places. Although when you think about it, don’t we often meet in dark and unattractive places?

  It might sound funny, but I always say that the most important people in my recovery are the quiet ones who hide within our rooms, who dart in and out, who sit in the corner and don’t have the courage or strength to participate fully. Those are the people I’m drawn to. I wanted to read some excerpts from the Big Book, but I’m aware that I’m running out of time and I want to hear some of the newcomers speak. Let me just quote from Quentin Crisp, who says: “Your profession is being.”

  And just like that, we’re out of time. Someone’s reading the promises, and now we stand for the serenity prayer.

  I rush over to talk to Sammy, that the speaker’s name. I say I always thought AA was a cult too, I mean I never imagined I’d be here except as a joke—I’ve always been suspicious of mentors, and no one has ever reached out to me anyway but if they did I probably would have laughed at them. Anyway, I just wanted to thank you for being so honest. My name’s Alexa.

  Alexa? What a beautiful name. Do you want to go to coffee?

  What a beautiful name—no one ever says that. I go to coffee, and I’m hooked.

  CAMERA’S READY

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s starts with “Moon River” and a taxi ride in the morning in New York—I guess that must be Audrey Hepburn getting out of the cab in a black Givenchy gown, we know it’s Givenchy because they played the credits first.

  Oh, hilarious—she’s eating a pastry out of a paper bag, with black evening gloves, coffee in a to-go cup, this is much better than I thought. Especially those costume jewelry pearls with a huge fake diamond clasp, I wouldn’t mind an accessory like that.

  But what is this horrible Asian landlord stereotype—the whole audience bursts out laughing. Luckily I’m in the aisle, should I just leave? I could tell the AA girls that the movie was hurting my eyes. Maybe I’ll go on a walk and come back for the ending.

  I don’t know what to do, so I end up walking through the Urban Outfitters mall, and how could there be this many college sweatshirts in the world? Not just Harvard or MIT or BU or Tufts, but Worcester Polytechnic. Amherst. Johns Hopkins. Cornell. Stanford—are you kidding? Is it really that exciting to go to Au Bon Pain and a few bad Indian restaurants and then wander around on the fake cobblestone sidewalks, looking for the best jock bar—I don’t get it.

  I end up sitting in Harvard Square, staring at the punk kids staring at me. My hair is better, just admit it. Maybe I’ll go to that thrift store where I found the checkered polyester pants, that was a good thrift store. But I can’t find it.

  Eventually I’m back in the theater. Audrey’s sitting on a white sofa made out of a bathtub, with magenta pillows—I’ll take that sofa, Nate doesn’t have one of those yet. Now Audrey’s at Tiffany with her new boyfriend, and she says: “Nothing bad could ever happen to you in a place like this.” So I’m waiting for something really bad to happen.

  But this isn’t that kind of movie—eventually Audrey gets busted for drugs so then she’s smoking in the entrance of the police station as the paparazzi conduct interviews. An organized crime kingpin is on the phone saying: “She’s a phony. But she’s a real phony.” I guess that’s where that line comes from.

  Her not-quite-boyfriend pronounces his love in the taxi, tells her that no matter where she runs, she’ll just end up running into herself. Sounds like something from AA. Then the two lovebirds are getting drenched by the rain machine in matching trench coats, kind of like the coat Joey used to wear, maybe this was where she got the idea.

  Everything started with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, that’s what Allen said at our last AA coffee so then we ended up here. But I guess now she notices this wasn’t exactly my type of entertainment, because afterward she asks me about my favorite movie. I don’t have a favorite movie. Well, pick one, she says, and we’ll all go over Mama Cass’s and watch it together.

  So here we are, three days later, chez Mama Cass—it’s like a cross between the Thirteen Colonies and Marie Antoinette’s spare cottage—there’s so much going on in that wallpaper that it could be an entire magazine spread. Of course Cass collects dolls—everywhere, dolls in glass cases. Decaying wooden dolls with scraggly hair, Cabbage Patch Kids, Barbies, geisha dolls, Hollywood celebrities, even papier-mâché dolls.

  We’re watching Poison—right at the beginning a seven-year-old shoots his abusive father and then flies away. Richie Beacon, gotta love that name—did I see this movie before or after I remembered about my father? It must have been before, that’s why I don’t remember this part.

  Dr Nancy Olson, from Boston, arrives to assist Dr Graves, who has captured the sex drive in liquid form in some campy laboratory, and Allen starts clapping and laughing and then she delivers one of her favorite phrases: I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers. I say what movie is that from again, but Bud says shh.

  Dr Nancy Olson, from Boston, Allen says in her exaggerated Woburn accent even though Nancy Olson’s accent is more blue-blood than Boston realness.

  Dr Graves drinks the potion when Nancy leaves, he’s watching her walk away with lust in his eyes and then he’s a monster. The movie shifts from black-and-white noir to 1980s pastel kitsch as Richie Beacon’s mother is being interviewed, she says his father hit him, just like any other kid.

  Back to Dr Graves in black and white with sores all over his face, sores that transfer to the woman he kisses in a bar, and Cass says: That’ll definitely keep me from drinking.

  And we all laugh—it’s fun to watch this movie here.

  And then McGovern’s Bar: LEPER SEX KILLER ON THE LOOSE, Nancy sees the headline after kissing Dr Graves—why didn’t you tell me you’re contagious?

  Blue light, this is the part I remember best: John Broom, the smaller guy, reaching out to touch Jack Bolton’s broad chest while he’s sleeping. They use last names because they’re in prison, and Broom’s hand creeps along Bolton’s skin, down to his crotch. Bud gulps, and Allen says wow, full frontal, can you believe that?

  A doctor who treated young Richie, saying he was suspicious because Richie had an infectious discharge—a six-year-old with an STD, but still this doctor didn’t intervene. I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d gotten an STD when I was six.

  Nancy dies in Dr Graves’s arms, and I don’t remember this part being so sad before, is it because I’m watching it now with Allen, who names her KS lesions, and Sammy, whose T cells are plummeting again? Dr Graves tries to run from
society and persecution and then Richie’s mother is back in color saying: “My child was an angel of judgment.”

  Broom provokes a fight so he can get closer to Bolton, and I’m thinking about that Barbara Kruger poster about how men create intricate rituals to touch one another’s skin. In this case the ritual is rape as Broom fucks Bolton from behind and we see him bobbing up and down—even though Bolton is crying, we still focus on Broom. I focus on Broom. Watching this scene was when I first realized I wanted to get fucked—I didn’t know why then but I do now.

  At the end of the movie Dr Graves is outside, sores covering his face, and I’m thinking about that drawing in Memories That Smell Like Gasoline. Dr Graves jumps from his window onto the screaming crowd outside—people back away and he falls to the ground. We watch his whole face disintegrate in the hospital as he dies. Broom listens to Bolton getting shot while trying to escape prison, and Richie’s mother says her husband was beating her and she thought she was going to die. Until Richie shot him. Before jumping out the window. And flying away.

  Cass refills our mocktails, and says baby doll, we know there’s a lot going on in your head if that’s your favorite movie. And then it’s one of those nights: I wake up, which should be good news because that means I was sleeping, right? But I didn’t even notice—in my dream I was still trying to fall asleep. And then that feeling in the room, a shaking in my breath, an extra dimension of fear—he’s here somewhere, my father, is he here? This is so old, this panic, why now?

  Maybe I sleep and maybe I don’t, but somehow I make it back to a meeting. K-Street is so much better than those churches, I can’t believe I ever went to those churches—at K-Street there’s no cross in sight, and we sit in a circle, lounging on sofas. I guess I’m early, so I go outside, and there’s Joanna. Now her hair has grown out and she basically looks like your average Red Sox fan. I can tell she’s shocked to see me here, but then she holds out her arms for a big hug, and I realize how much she still means to me. She says oh, I miss you, I really miss you, I’m so glad you’re here, is that why you’re here? Oh—I’m so glad. I’m going to smoke, and I’ll see you inside.