by AnonYMous
In addition, I informed him that I was at the age where I was thinking about getting married. There followed a long moment of silence which could be satisfactorily explained by him punching the air in triumph and straightening his clothes before continuing. He began to talk like someone I'd known for years, dropping all use of the conditional tense in favor of the future.
My future.
The headhunter called on Monday.
“Graham warmed to you quite a bit,” she said, then started using words like “visa” and “resign,” which I welcomed. This all took place with my copywriter sitting right in front of me. I had taken to sticking my head, complete with phone, out the window to get some privacy.
It wasn't long before I'd resigned and found myself sitting in my London flat, waiting for work permits to be approved. I was to work freelance from the flat until I was official.
But I needed to vacate the flat to let it. So I was living in a hotel in London with my own flat only fifteen minutes away with two strangers living in it and the ink not yet dry on a six-month tenancy agreement and me still without any sign of an approved work permit for the United States. This unsettled state was to become the norm for the next five years.
If I'd known what was about to unfold, I would have stopped everything and gone home to live with my mother. But I had also just signed a new lease of life thanks to AA and I was determined to use it. After all, what was the point in getting sober if I wasn’t going to do something with it? And there was the newcomer to think of. A crazy bastard like me heading off to the States for a new career gave the new AA member hope. Or so my sponsor said.
I did find myself at home in Kilkenny for a few days before flying from Dublin to the States. My parents were excited for me but sad for themselves. Since I'd stopped drinking, they really did like having me around. I bought them a Dictaphone and convinced them and myself that we'd exchange taped messages across the Atlantic. Never happened.
My dad had a rather nasty bubbly cough when he was driving me to the railway station. A month into my new job, in my new country, in my new city, in my new house, I got a call from my mother asking the most ridiculous question.
“Are you sitting down?”
I knew immediately that my dad was dead. Only, he wasn't. She said he was doing poorly and that I should expect to come back at any moment. My new bosses were very understanding and even helped me book a flight. You only get a cheaper flight if you can prove you have a relative who is seriously ill. You have to give them the hospital phone number. So I flew back and I'm guilty still over the fact that I hoped my father would die within the week I had allotted for my quality time at home.
Ever the gentleman, he obliged. He was dusted, dead and buried with a day to spare and, to my shame, I was back at work the Monday after. Well, I was under pressure, wasn't I? I needed to impress my new boss and my old ones in London. I wanted to show them that they'd made a big mistake by not treating me better. Truth is they hadn’t treated me that badly. It just felt convenient to dislike them. The real reason I needed to get away from London was that I hated my creative partner. Obsessively so.
I remember one day standing with one of those big long bevelled-edged rulers they use for cutting card with a scalpel. It’s basically a blunt sword. He was standing there to my left. Suddenly, I felt faint. I didn’t fall over or anything. I just checked out for a few seconds. I saw a kind of yellow mist.
When I came back, I was terrified that I was going to look down at the ground and see him lying there with his head smashed in. That was the day I stuck my head out the window and called the headhunters. I was afraid of what I might do if I stayed working with him and it was going to be better to leave the country than worry about meeting him in the bitchy streets of London. Or maybe I just needed a change.
Newly arrived in my new country, my new city, I wasn't interested in girls. Not in the least. When I think about the chances I missed, I just want to sob. A foreigner like me in the Midwest really stands out. Mind you, I did ask one gorgeous girl out, but she said she was going steady so I thought fuck it if I can't have a beaut, then I'm not playing. The other thing was, of course, that I didn't want to get stranded there with two kids and a dog. I knew from the moment I landed that I'd have to get out.
I thought a year would do it. I was wrong. I bought a house, but that was just to convince them I was serious. A house was easy to sell in a buoyant market. And if I played my cards right I'd make some money on the fucker…and anyway when was I ever going to be able to afford a Victorian house with hardwood floors and a cute swing seat on the verandah like the house in The Waltons? The agency talked to the bank to help me get it.
The house was great for about a month.
In the meantime, I was getting to know the insides of airports pretty well. In America, taking a flight is like taking a bus in England. You get on a plane for a meeting. Especially if you are based in St Lacroix, Minnesota. The first job they put me on was a huge project overseeing the commercials for the car company BNV link-up with the Shane Pond movie Tomorrow Forever Cries.
Their new model, the 9T, was being featured in the movie as was their new motorbike, the T2600 Surfer. They wanted to make three commercials and three print ads to announce this highly attractive association of icons.
It was a pain in the arse. You had to feature the car prominently and show clips from the movie. Very difficult task. Very difficult to get a nice clean idea while having to include all those separate elements. Then, on top of that, we had to deal with three different clients, BNV North America, BNV Germany and DGR Pictures. It took nearly nine months and three times as many flights to get the bastard finished.
In my office on the thirty-second floor of this green-glass skyscraper looking out on the flatness of the Midwest, which stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction, I might just as well have arrived on the moon.
It reminded me of a sci-fi programme on BBC called Space 1999. There were a lot of similarities to the year in which I arrived. The interiors of the moon base were all clean lines and hi-tech and the views out the windows were barren and stark. The inhabitants of the base were all handpicked and highly civilized and, above all, disciplined. This was a big thing at Killallon Fitzpatrick. The ability to smile while under duress. They loved that. They liked you to suffer quietly.
And I got pretty good at it. I was five years sober. This was what I stopped drinking for. This was the kind of thing I would never have been able to do. I mean on paper it was great. House. Job. Money. Move to the States. When I was drinking there was no way I would ever have been offered this kind of situation. And I congratulated myself that I hadn't fallen into the trap of having a girlfriend, because I would never have been able to go if I had. I resolved to resist any advances by any girl from anywhere in the Midwestern region. I was no fool. I was not going to let myself get stranded there for the rest of my life with some gorgeous wife and blonde kids as Killallon Fitzpatrick slowly turned up the heat until I cracked like Spring-ice.
I got myself hooked up with the local AA groups, which were great. I began to feel better. St Lacroix is the capital of rehab. They have more rehab centres than anywhere else in the States. This was one of the reasons I felt so comfortable about a move there in the first place. In fact, on the grounds of the “Pentagon of Treatment Centres,” better known as Hazleton, there is a bar.
Yes, that’s right, a bar that sells alcoholic beverages. In that bar there is a sign on the wall. It says, “AA Chips Exchanged.” For every year you stay sober, you receive a little metallic coin called a chip. This bar offers free booze for one night to any lapsed member of AA willing to spend his chip. The wall behind the bar was covered with chips.
As long as I didn't drink and didn't get into a relationship, I'd be able to get back to London and resume life and look back on this whole period as an interesting lapse in concentration. Either way, I was looking out my window after having been flown over and paid quite a bit - I was
making $150,000 a year. My ego had been fluffed to the point of ejaculation. My favourite pieces of furniture had been carefully packed and shipped, my mother had been sent a huge bouquet of flowers sympathizing with the loss of her husband, my father. The unspoken, unwritten expectation hung over me.
Okay, big shot, let's go.
That was pretty freaky, but I didn't mind because I was in a good position. If I fucked up it didn't really matter, I was in a foreign country. If I did well it just meant their trust was well placed. And of course, I'd make sure the "folks back in London, England" knew all about it.
So I came home to my big Victorian house in the evenings, after my AA meeting, and I liked the fact that I hardly had any furniture. It appealed to me to be living in a house with just a few bits of furniture. The scarcity reminded me of a Deep Purple album cover I used to have, the one that showed pictures of a huge country house in France, with recording equipment and wires and cool-looking fuckers strewn everywhere. This was the effect I strove for.
But no one else appreciated the irony of a mostly empty house owned by a shaven-headed Irishman who didn’t seem responsible enough to have been given a mortgage. This amused me. It would not have seemed unnatural if someone had kicked in my door one day and said, “There’s been a mistake. Get out.” I would have left quietly because I really didn’t think I deserved such good fortune.
This was linked with feelings of guilt and shame over what I had been doing to people when I was drinking. This need to hurt was lessened when I stopped drinking. Maybe it was replaced with a need to hurt myself.
My neighbors tried to welcome me, but they didn’t understand that I could never be seen with them voluntarily. It was okay if someone knocked on my door or invited me over for a beer, which quickly became a Coke. Irony could be achieved under these conditions. Fine until I was forced to borrow a lawn mower.
American lawns are loaded with social and political meaning. There is a law somewhere that says you have to maintain your lawn or the neighbours can force you to. I knew nothing of this and immediately revelled in the possibility of allowing my front and back gardens to return to nature. A polite knock on my front door changed all that.
The polite knock has a lot to answer for in this world. There he was, frown on forehead, hand on heart, leaflet in hand. The State of Minnesota personified.
“Mornin’.”
“Oh hi…” I said, feigning surprise after watching the fat fuck trespass his way to my front door.
“I was noticin’ how you were havin’ some trouble with your lawn care and well I think you might find this leaflet interestin’.”
The lazy pronunciation of words like interestin’ is code for informality. Saying interest-in instead of interest-ing is their way of announcin’ they are just regular guys.
“Oh thank you very much that’s really very kind of you,” I said, drawing on the ten years of Britishness that lay in reserve for moments like these.
Very humbling though.
The lawn mower I borrowed from yet another neighbour had a full tank of gas and even I knew that it would need to be returned full. Such a task would entail conversation with a petrol-pump-assistant.
“You’re not from around here, are ya?”
Every time.
I’d change my accent. Flatten it a little. I could pretend I was from New York or Los Angeles. At least they wouldn't feel as if they'd landed such a catch.
If you said you were Irish but from London, it was as if one had performed a method of fellatio so bizarre, their eyes would glaze over and a little happy smile would bend the momentarily speechless mouth.
Then the thanking would start. I represented every postcard, movie or rumour that had ever emanated from Europe. And everybody knows ambassadors need to be diplomatic. I'd just pick up whatever I'd been trying to buy and leave. I hated them. Forgive me, but I fucking hated them. When I got back to Ireland for a break at Christmas I couldn't even look at a McDonald's sign without wanting to spit. I'm all right now because I live in New York. Thank you God for New York.
But the Midwest is something else.
My boss used to point at girls who had just joined the agency and whisper, “She's single.” I couldn't believe it. He actively encouraged me to go out with girls who worked for the agency. The theory being, of course, that if I married within the company, then the company would live forever. And then I might even have kids.
Or he’d say, “You come in on the bus, don’t you?”
“That's right.”
“I met my wife on the bus.”
For fuck's sake.
He was a decent enough sort of guy. I don't think he did it cynically. He just seemed to have bought the whole package. Advertising is false. Once you know that, you've got a chance. But he believed the hype. The wife/the house/the kids/the dog. I think he was good at what he did and a great boss, he just didn't have enough suspicion.
I am of course aware that reading this you could conclude that any unhappiness I experienced was homemade. That my suspicion of my boss’s good intentions was in itself the problem. But it's what I do. I suspect. It's the other stuff I find hard. Like trusting people. Foreign concept. Just ask any of the billions of girls I haven't dated.
So the boss had his motives and I had mine. I just wanted to get Killallon, Fitzpatrick on my CV for one year. That was it. A year. I was panicking after three months. If I hadn't just moved into the house, I'd have left right then and there. So, I suppose it worked out for the best.
Anyway, it took almost two years before I got out, but that's not what I want to talk about. I only mention all that stuff about advertising to give you a background against which to project the rest of my story. The real point is to tell you how I purged myself of my sins against women and, indeed, against myself. They say you're not punished for your sins, you're punished by them.
Also, I'm completely paranoid. I mean, seriously paranoid. Not just mildly interested in the fact that there may be people who don't necessarily have my best interests at heart. No. The word is paranoid. Another word is self-centered. I don't like that one as much, though. Doesn't sound medical enough.
The paranoia is worth mentioning because it sometimes fuels my crazy thinking. Like when I thought Pen was paying people to follow me. Why she was doing this was not totally clear. My paranoia only gives me broad scenarios. It’s too lazy to go into details. I believed that people, ordinary people on the street, were operatives in her employ. Their mission was to disrupt me psychologically. Every time I left my basement flat in Camberwell, an old lady or a man with his daughter became enemies I had to avoid.
I would wear an expression, which in my poor confused mind exuded the following statement, “I know who you all are. I'm going to give you the impression that I don't know just so we can keep this charade going, but in truth I know. So don't push it.”
You may wonder what this expression might look like. I'll tell you. Cocky anger. A snarl with a slight smile, imperceptible, but there. I know you know I know recurring to infinity. Of course, the fact that I've told you all of the above does slightly dent my credibility concerning the below, but my only obligation here is to relate what happened.
This is my therapy. I'm too fucked up to go and see a therapist and to be honest, I wouldn’t trust him anyway, would I? I mean it’s not as if my paranoia is going to clock off for an hour a week. And I've got enough on my plate, having to be a genius during the day and at AA leading light at night. I heard someone say, somewhere, that it's possible to write the sickness out of yourself. And, who knows, maybe someone will benefit.
Anyway as I said, I live in New York now. Much happier, and even though the way I got here wasn't exactly graceful, I love it here now. It is amazing to me that I do. The first two months I spent in Manhattan were the nearest I ever got to suicide. It was funny how it came to me. The thought of killing myself.
It’d only been a week since Aisling rejected me in Fanelli’s and somehow during that
period I was able to do a decent impersonation of myself. You’d think it would have been easier considering I’d been my own understudy for years.
Taking breaks to go outside and cry helped.
So, I found myself looking out the window on the seventh floor of the New York branch of the same agency I worked for in St Lacroix. It was around the end of March and very humid. Nothing like as bad as it gets in July but humid nonetheless, and much worse, because they don't turn on the air-conditioning until then.
So there I was gasping for air, a waft, a ripple of merciful breeze when I looked down on the cement below. It was the back of the building so I was looking down on those weird fans they always have in New York. Fuck knows what they are. But there was a little rectangular clearing of combed concrete in the centre. Gently it came to me. Gently now. Not like some crazed jump-cut that makes you blink.
Calmly, I saw myself lying as if in REM sleep, perfectly framed in that rectangular area. Left leg bent, right leg straight, left arm bent with the palm of the left hand down. Right arm straight down by my side. My head turned sideways on my left hand, as though asleep on a pillow. Just above my head, and under my left hand, there appeared to be a very neatly arranged abstract area of red. Like a big flattened flower upon which my head rested. Rested. I looked peaceful. Beyond pain.
I was in a lot of pain, you see. But it had been caused by an abstract blade. What I mean is, the pain was physical, the cause wasn't. I suppose some people would say I was suffering from a broken heart. Or you might say it’s just life. Or maybe it’s alcoholism minus the alcohol. After all, I’m five years sober at this point.
True, but something else was going on. How do I know? I don't. I just can't believe that my emotional state could be explained by such an adolescent term as Broken Heart. I'm willing to be wrong, but I don't know how anyone will ever be able to prove it, so I'm safe enough. That's another thing you'll learn about me as we go on. I don't like to take risks. I'll only offer you the possibility that I'm wrong, if I'm fairly sure I'm right.