Riding with the Ghost

by Justin Taylor

From his position of utter helplessness he tyrannized us, and because we were hardly two years out from the suicide attempt, we decided—me, my mom, my sister, his sisters, and Michael—to give in. I said that I would go to Nashville, sort through all the Stuff. I’d do it all while I was on the phone with him. I would be his eyes and ears. We’d go through every box, every piece of paper. I promised this to him. He estimated, grudgingly, that we could get the forty boxes down to twenty. Mom found a shipping company willing to take a small order. They had extra room on a truck. I booked my flight. Mom rented a U-Haul van.

  * * *

  —

  There wasn’t room to open the boxes at the storage place so we spent the whole first day emptying the unit. Dad couldn’t believe it when I told him that everything fit into one vanload. We had a fight on the phone because he insisted that he’d had a 10 × 12 unit and I told him—I was standing in it—that the unit was 5 × 8. He immediately suspected that Mom had downsized without telling him, that half his Stuff was already gone. It took a long time to talk him down: The unit number was the one he’d given me; his directions through the labyrinthine corridors brought me to where he’d said they would. His key turning in his lock, turned by my obedient hand.

  When the U-Haul was full, Mom drove it home (it was rented in her name) and I followed in her boyfriend’s Tesla, the nicest car I’ve ever driven or ever expect to drive. She took the highway but I took local roads to buy a little extra alone time. I bluetoothed my phone into the stereo, cranked the volume high. That whole drive was one long moment of feeling supremely my father’s son. More than that, I felt like I was him, the healthy part of him, the good, sane part, which I knew was still buried inside him somewhere. It was like he was already gone and here was his ghost come back to ride with me over these low green rolling hills. I wouldn’t have minded if that drive lasted forever. But then I took the turn onto Mom’s street and it was time to park the car, cut the music, get my broke, sick, half-mad father on the phone, and spend the rest of the day trying to get permission to throw away as much of his precious garbage as I possibly could.

  * * *

  —

  That day in 2013 when Dad went missing his death became real to me in a new way. It is right, I think, to say that I began to grieve for him then and that my grieving did not stop when I learned that he was still alive.

  The grieving ends two years later, as I sit in a gravel driveway sorting through the Stuff for hours, box by box and page by page, just like I promised. Doing all the things I would do if he had died, and knowing that eventually I’ll do it all again, and that when I do I will think about having already done it once before. It is an eerie, almost dissociative feeling: anticipation of a future déjà vu.

  I fill so many garbage bags.

  Sorting through a box of old documents, most of them destined for the shredder, I find the records of their divorce proceeding. There are stern, terse letters from Mom’s attorney demanding various signatures, and Dad’s five- and ten-page replies thereto.

  I find a poem. A poem? Yes. Handwritten on a legal pad, the same kind of legal pads I favor, a page of lumbering AABB rhymed verse. Addressed to a “you” that is transparently my mother, the poem speaks intensely but opaquely of the speaker’s failures, frustrations, and sorrows, as well as the various things for which he holds “you” accountable. It feels wrong to make a copy of this, so I don’t, but there are two fragments I will always remember. The first refers to an imminent future time when “I won’t be around to spoil your fun.” The second refers to “forty-five summers,” which is what tips me off that it isn’t part of the divorce era at all. My father turned forty-five in 1997; I was fifteen and my sister was nine.

  I try to figure out what might have driven him to write a poem, because as far as I know he never wrote another. I can’t figure it out. I could ask Mom but I don’t. (Hell, I could ask him and he’d probably tell me, which is perhaps what I’m most afraid of.) I could also destroy it, whatever it is, and the rest of these papers as well. I could shred them along with the rest of the garbage and play dumb if it comes up later, which it probably won’t. But “probably” has proven many times over to be a dangerous word to use with regard to Dad; every time up to now that I’ve banked on his forgetting about something or letting it go, I have been wrong. That’s why I’m sitting in this driveway now. I place the legal pad back in the box where I found it, along with the divorce papers and whatever else might be in there that, if I were to see it, I wouldn’t be able to unsee. I tape the box shut, put it with the rest of what we’re shipping.

  I grieve two years for my father, his life and his death, everything that was said and everything that was left unsaid. I grieve two years for my father and when it is over I lay his ghost to rest, release myself. The long war ends on a warm fall day in Nashville. The only catch is that he is alive when I begin to grieve and he is still alive when I finish, indeed is on the phone with me, live in stereo headphones, ticked off because I’ve just confessed to having earlier that day thrown away a DVD player that I’d thought he said was broken but which, he now says, works fine and he wanted to keep it. And I would know that, he scolds, if I’d been more careful, if I’d taken the time to test the device, if I’d paid closer attention to the checklist that we’ve been working from. All you had to do was listen to me, he says.

  My Back Pages

  I moved to New York City (the first time) in 2004, for an internship with The Nation. It was a full-time job that paid $150 per week. I came to the city—and, more to the point, to New York media culture—after four years of anarchist squalor in Gainesville, Florida. My admission to this internship program was, to be honest, a fluke. I would never have known such a program existed, or thought to apply to it, if a creative writing professor (and ex–New Yorker) had not suggested it to me. I had come by Jill Ciment’s office during my last semester of senior year, basically to ask her what to do with my life. I told her all about how my mother had relocated to Nashville a year ago, and now my father and sister were joining her, and I thought I ought to go there and help them out. I figured, I told her, that I could get hired at a Best Buy, since I’d worked at one throughout high school. “Listen,” Jill told me. “You cannot save your family. You need to run away.”

  As soon as she said it, I knew she was right, but if not for her push toward New York, I’d have probably stayed right where I was. My rent was $300 a month, I was getting by on part-time work at a sandwich shop, and I had plenty of friends in town. It would have been easy (too easy) to spend the next two or three or ten years there.

  Jill suggested The Nation specifically because she knew I was interested in politics, and because she had an old friend who wrote for them. She offered to write one of the two letters of recommendation that the application required. For the second letter, I turned to my other mentor, Dr. Terry Harpold, an English professor under whose direction I was at that time writing an honors thesis, a Foucauldian reading of H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. (Sure, why not?) In one of the stranger twists of fate my life has ever taken, Dr. Harpold told me that one of the magazine’s senior editors was one of his oldest friends. And so, on paper if in no other way (and it really was in no other way), I went from being some nobody from nowhere to being a strong candidate with powerful friends on the inside. I left Gainesville in May 2004, spent the summer in Tennessee, and was in New York by the first of September.

  All the other interns in my group were from elite schools in the Northeast, and for most of them this was a second or third internship. They knew each other from Harvard, from Choate, from previous jobs in media. I, on the other hand, had a résumé that—at Dad’s insistence—listed the number of words I could type per minute under “skills.” The other two pieces of advice Dad gave me: (1) Always take your full lunch hour, and don’t work at your desk while you eat. (2) If you’re going to go to the East Village, don’t go any farth
er than First Avenue, it simply isn’t safe.

  Dad, of course, had not spent any significant amount of time in the city since the ’60s, and even then he’d been a teenager taking the train in from Long Island. Still, having no other advice to go on, I dutifully followed his, at least until experience proved how obsolete it was. I had never before felt like such a rube as I did those first few months in New York.

  I should say here too that none of this would have been possible without my cousin Michael. He was then in his mid-thirties, around the age I am now, working grueling hours as an attorney and living in an apartment just off Times Square. My family could not have bankrolled my excursus into the Narnia of New York media, and I would have needed a second full-time job if I’d had to rent a room. Michael’s place was a one-bedroom that couldn’t have cracked four hundred square feet, but he bought me an air mattress and pushed the coffee table against the far wall and I lived in his living room, gratis, for four months. Without his generosity, which I now understand he must have done at least in part to pay forward what my father did for him when he was young, I would never have made it to New York.

  Working at The Nation taught me that having political opinions was not the same thing as having an aptitude for political journalism, or for the clubby culture of the media world. I had, after all, switched my major from journalism to English all of a month into my freshman year of college, and then spent the next four years taking as many creative writing workshops as I could. But if the media world wasn’t right for me, it turned out that New York was.

  I loved the energy and chaos of it, the fact that you didn’t need a car to get anywhere, and that there were always readings to go to: the KGB Bar, Housing Works Bookstore Café, public events at universities, random open mics in cramped basement bars. My favorite part of working at The Nation was poring through the shelves of galleys that were always arriving at the office. It blew my mind that there were people who had access to new books months before the rest of the world—and for free! I took as many of those books as I could carry, as often as my bosses would let me take them. I used the stash to pitch and publish my first book reviews, which is ironic to think about now, because the role of a critic is typically to demonstrate authority and render judgment, and the main thing that those books taught me was that I still had a lot to learn.

  Two galleys ended up playing small but crucial roles in the path my life took. The first was Europe Central, an eight-hundred-page historical novel-in-stories by William T. Vollmann; the other was Milk, a strange, spare novella by Darcey Steinke. I’d been a fan of Steinke’s since chancing on a copy of her novel Jesus Saves at a Borders while in high school (the title far more scandalous, in my Jewish community, than the sex and violence depicted within its pages). Vollmann’s baroque maximalism had been a major influence on my undergraduate fiction. I thought of both writers as semi-mythical figures; they might as well have been Kerouac or Rimbaud. But it turned out that they were both real: Vollmann was soon to give a reading at the New School, where it turned out that Darcey Steinke was a professor. I went to the reading and two days later was back on campus for their MFA program’s open house, where I learned that they didn’t require a GRE (which I wouldn’t have had time to take) and that they didn’t require my parents to co-sign my loans (which would, again, have been a prohibitive condition). It was the only place I applied.

  I hung around the city after the internship ended for as long as I could, but in January 2005, I moved to Portland, Oregon (for the first time), to reunite with some friends from college who had gone out there. In Portland I spent a few more months sleeping in a living room and writing and reading every day. In March, the New School accepted me to their program. I left Portland in May, spent another long summer in Tennessee, and returned to the city to start graduate school in September. I ended up staying for ten years.

  I loved every minute of my New York life: the fun parts and the hard parts; every triumph and every setback; every bit of luck and dumb mistake. (I even love my regrets, insofar as one can.) It was in New York that I learned that I could actually have the life I’d always dreamed of having—a writer’s life—even as I learned that what that meant, in practical terms, was something far less romantic and far more precarious than I had imagined. Notice, however, that I don’t say “than I might have hoped,” because the trade-off has always seemed to me like a fair one. Other people have more money, more consistency, more security, more of whatever else people have. Me? I pretty much do what I want all day. I read what I want to read and I think about what I want to think about and I make up whatever I feel like making up, and only after the fact do I stop to wonder whether the world will evince any interest in what I’ve made. It’s a kind of freedom that few people ever know, and fewer still are able to maintain as they get older. (My parents, certainly, never knew anything like it; I’m sure most parents don’t.) So it didn’t surprise or offend me that such great privilege came at a price, namely, financial security and material comfort.

  My parents supported my decisions, even when they didn’t understand them, or when they wished I would have chosen a more clearly defined path. For my father, my self-confidence and ambition were a source of particular pride. It made him feel that he had succeeded in doing for me what his own parents had refused to do for him: instilling in your kid the belief that his dreams are worth pursuing. At the same time, it was a source of constant pain for him that he was not in a position to offer financial support. He loved that I was willing to be a struggling artist but hated that I actually had to struggle.

  * * *

  —

  I met Amanda in early September 2010, through a mutual friend. She worked in publishing, but didn’t love being stuck in an office (she and a friend of hers often spoke of their “cubicle escape plan”) and before long left to become a bookseller. My first book had come out in February, and it had gotten some generous notices, which had in turn opened some doors for me in terms of my nascent academic career. I was making most of my living teaching undergraduate composition at Rutgers–New Brunswick, but now I had a class in the Columbia MFA program as well. My second book was coming out in the new year. (It would be slaughtered by critics, but I didn’t know that yet.) It was a time when it felt like anything was possible.

  Amanda and I had our first date at a Park Slope bar called Commonwealth. There had been a tornado in Brooklyn earlier that day and I had been worried that she’d cancel. She didn’t. I remember walking up to the bar from the Fourth Avenue/Ninth Street subway stop and seeing downed tree limbs. One of those tall vertical BAR signs had been ripped from the building it hung on and was twisted like pipe cleaner, fixed to the brickwork by a single metal thread.

  Amanda had arrived first and ordered her own first round. (Her standard first-date practice, she told me later.) We both took our bourbon on the rocks. We talked about books and music. I mentioned that I had tickets to see one of the Pavement reunion shows in Central Park later that month, and she said she didn’t really know anything about Pavement but wasn’t their lead singer that guy who used to be in the Silver Jews?

  Reader, I married her.

  The first trip she and I took together was in January 2011, to New Bedford, Massachusetts, to see the annual marathon reading of Moby-Dick that takes place at the whaling museum. When she told her mother of the plan, all Lisa could think to say was, “I’m glad you found someone who thinks that’s fun.” This became the motto of our relationship.

  We’d been dating about a year when Amanda’s roommate situation broke up, so she moved into my rat-hole four-bedroom apartment in Bushwick, and for three months we lived five people to one bathroom while we looked for our own place. In early 2012 we found a 1.5 bedroom in a thirty-unit building in South Park Slope. The half bedroom was an office just big enough to fit a desk for each of us. A piece of metal sticking out of the wall in the bathroom seemed to be connected to the water heate
r in some way (it got terrifically hot), and you had to sort of edge around it to use the toilet or the shower, which were themselves so close to each other that you could put your feet in the tub while sitting on the toilet. You could seat four in the “eat-in” kitchen, but only if you stuck the table in the middle of the room, leaving one person blocked in between the stove and counter and the person opposite sitting in the doorway, while the people on each side sat tucked between the table and the wall like bookmarks slipped into books. That apartment was no more than five hundred square feet, but laid out in such a way that, despite everything I just said, it felt bigger. The office and the bedroom were on opposite sides of the place. We were on the third floor and our window faced the interior of the block, so there was no street noise. At just under $1,800 a month, it was a stretch for us but a bargain for the neighborhood. We moved into that apartment just before my thirtieth birthday and I told anyone who’d listen that I expected to turn forty, maybe fifty, still living there.

  In February 2013 our one-year lease was up and the owner offered us the option to renew for two years instead of one. We jumped at the chance. A month later, we got a letter informing us of the sale of the building to a Manhattan-based real-estate company, a professional gentrification engine whose formal structure was an inscrutable nest of LLCs.

  These vampires immediately set about flipping all the units in the building. Anyone out of lease got a rent hike so steep it sent them packing. Everyone else got buyout offers, the amounts differing based on things like length of tenancy and whether the unit had rent control.

  The first few times they called to ask about a buyout, I told them we weren’t interested. Weeks went by and the calls kept coming, but their tone changed. Now they were talking about the endless construction they had planned, the rat infestation that would come from that, the plumbing problems they anticipated, and how hard it would be for us to get our heat repaired if, y’know, it just happened to go out in the dead of winter.