The Bird Market of Paris

  Then I abandoned altogether the idea that drinking before a certain time of day designated someone as real alcoholic. I woke up for the classes I taught and fixed myself breakfast: a tall glass of Kahlúa topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream—for the calcium, of course. My perk-up strategy was called “feed a hangover.” I ate two bananas, a can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli, cold and out of the can, and drank some “hair of the dog,” alcohol from the night before. The hangover relented most of the time, though I gained thirty pounds in a few months.

  As liquor eroded my central nervous system, I became paranoid. I installed hook-and-eye locks on the outside of my closet doors. If the doors were unlocked, that meant a marauder hid inside the closet, waiting to rape and kill me. While blacked-out drunk, I often forgot to replace the hook inside of the eye, and then I’d call my classmates and whisper into the phone that they had to come over and investigate my closet and look under my bed. Eventually, those friends stopped coming over when I called them about the marauders, so I called 911 instead and the cops would show up with their guns unholstered. They’d parade through the house waving their flashlights, shouting at the phantom burglars.

  My classmates soon stopped inviting me to parties.

  No matter.

  I landed a German boyfriend who was in Bloomington on a Fulbright scholarship. He liked birds, and we did our own thing, mostly drinking, drinking, and more drinking. He liked a voluptuous girl, despite him being a lean, muscular boxer. That worked for me as I continued with a diet of burritos, ice cream, beer, and vodka.

  And I wrote. If I had one poem due, I wrote eleven. I had little to do but drink and write, which is what my German boyfriend did, too. We held poetry writing competitions in my bedroom, where we’d give each other a first line and twenty minutes to compose a poem. He taught me to concoct German mulled wine, Glühwein, traditionally made for the winter holidays, though I made it all the time. He prevented me from drunk driving, even when I became violent, pushing him away from the car and trying to slap his face.

  When he was in class, I wrote for hours, hunched over a giant sketchpad, scribbling chained haikus, sonnets, and epic long-form poems, a bottle of wine or cream sherry next to me. I liked drinking alone.

  When his visa ran out, my German returned to Berlin. Two weeks later he sent me a six-page breakup letter; he’d found someone else.

  Another reason to dive into a magnum bottle of … whatever.

  One afternoon in the spring of my second year in Indiana, an editor called me from Howell Book House in New York City, a division of the publishing giant Macmillan. My editor at Bird Talk had given her my number because she needed a bird book edited. She had liked my work and appreciated that I had turned it in before deadline, so she wanted to interview me for a position editing pet books.

  After seven fortifying martinis in the airport bar, I flew from Indianapolis to New York and scored the editorial job. The writing program at Indiana University allowed me to complete my third year from a distance—all I had to do was turn in my thesis, a manuscript of poems. So I moved back to my adopted home, the land of bars and liquor stores open on Sunday, a pedestrian-friendly town where I didn’t have to drive drunk.

  * * *

  My 350-square-foot first-floor tenement apartment in Hell’s Kitchen was four blocks from my new job at 1616 Broadway, close to Times Square. I had my own office, complete with a window and a view of the marquee for CATS, the musical, playing at the Winter Garden Theater. Wasn’t it a promising sign that my favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, had written the poems inspiring the play?

  My hands shook if I didn’t drink a little bit in the morning. I didn’t think the tremors were a big deal, and I didn’t realize that hangovers were a physical symptom of alcohol abuse. I felt normal hungover.

  I liked my boss and my colleagues and edited books on everything from birds to rabbits to grooming poodles. I was a good editor, but soon I was embarking on long liquid lunches. One martini at first, and I’d come back to the office on time. Then two martinis. Then three. After three, I’d close the door to my office and lay my head on the desk and sleep.

  The paranoia that began in Bloomington amplified in New York. I scuttled down the sidewalks studying my feet, hurrying to my destination. I felt invisible—not metaphorically; I believed people actually couldn’t see me, that my physical form had disappeared. I’d aim for people on the sidewalk and if they bumped into me it was proof of my invisibility, proof that I wasn’t “crazy.”

  I had no friends in New York, not even from my NYU days. The only person who chatted with me about non-work-related things was the assistant at work, a comedian/receptionist who didn’t want to be there but needed a day job.

  Another publishing company, Wiley, the creators of the For Dummies series, bought our company, and the other editors quit or were fired. All their projects fell to me, over sixty books at once.

  And I drank. I rolled in at eleven in the morning instead of at nine, disheveled and still half-drunk from the night before.

  Most afternoons, I crawled under my desk at work and rocked back and forth and cried. Every hour or so, I’d wipe off my face, grab a few file folders, and walk around the office with purpose. Sometimes I’d even photocopy a meaningless document. Then I’d crawl back under the desk and rock some more. Somehow, I still managed to complete my edits.

  One day my boss called me into her office, shut the door, and told me that we had a big meeting with the salespeople in an hour. Could I go to the bathroom and try to make myself presentable?

  At home, I’d slide under my home desk, next to the trashcan, and rock back and forth, crying. And there I’d talk out loud, saying, “Please God, please God, please God, please God,” over and over, asking for something, but not knowing what. We didn’t chat often, God and I, but I hoped He hadn’t abandoned me, even though I deserved it. The more I drank, the deeper my psyche buried the idea of “alcoholism” within a shiny form of denial I wore like an emblem. Sure, alcoholics drank a lot, like I did, but my problems were way more advanced than any snap diagnosis and –ism word bandied around on sitcoms. I was falling off the edge of the world. Alcohol alone couldn’t do that, could it?

  I taped tinfoil over my one window and hung heavy dark curtains over it. Light hurt. I’d cry myself to sleep on the hardwood floor most nights, always drunk. I wrote dozens of suicide notes while drunk, reading them in the morning after a blackout, recognizing the handwriting but wondering who’d written them.

  After a night of drinking, as the sun rose and people powered to work in their suits, I might be staggering home from a bar. I’d look into their bright faces, coffee cups in their hands, and feel so unlike them, more like an animal sitting in a cave banging two rocks together, begging for help, but all anyone could hear was “clack, clack, clack.”

  I called in sick most Mondays and Fridays. My boss pulled me aside to show me on the calendar the days I’d missed, and I felt embarrassed—not that the drinking caused me to be absent, but that someone had noticed my pattern.

  One early Monday morning, after staggering home from a Sunday night drunk, I tried to let myself into my building and the key didn’t work. I grumbled and cursed the lock. The building’s super crept up behind me.

  “Estúpida,” he said. I knew the word meant “stupid” in Spanish. I kept trying the lock.

  “Estúpida,” he said again. I glanced at him and willed the key to turn.

  “Estúpida,” he said for a third time.

  “Estúpida what?” I barked, exasperated. “Did you change the lock?”

  “Estúpida, you don’t live here,” he said.

  I had been trying to enter into the building next door.

  Bonk was approaching twelve years old, and lovebirds aren’t supposed to live much longer than that. I didn’t feel right about forcing Bonk and Sweetie to ride out another cold winter in New York City, and I couldn’t endure having anything I loved that much rely on me when I couldn’t even rely on my
self. I took the birds back to Florida on a quick trip home, but kept Jesse, the Meyer’s parrot. I didn’t want to be entirely without a bird, and Jesse was a hardy little guy, my only company, sitting on my shoulder and preening his wings as I drank my Kahlúa milkshake in the mornings.

  Chapter 18

  One hot August day in New York City, hungover, the humidity clinging to every strand of my hair, I rolled out of bed at two p.m. and headed to the liquor store wearing pajama shorts, an oversized T-shirt, and fuzzy slippers. My complexion resembled the color of the sidewalk, the whites of my eyes a shade of watered-down urine, and the bags under them too big for the stowaway compartment.

  I didn’t look into the faces of the people on the street. Strangers had become furniture to be stepped around. I envisioned my life as a movie, and I didn’t think of other people as having lives—they were actors in the big motion picture of my life, and when those actors walked out of the scene, they ceased to exist. They reappeared when it was time for their lines again.

  I stared at my fuzzy slippers as I entered the liquor store on Ninth Avenue. I chose a bottle of Lillet and two bottles of cream sherry. I pushed my money to a disembodied hand; the hand took the money and gave me change. I never said hello or good-bye to anyone behind the counter, in any store, ever. I was too afraid they’d see how sick I was. The hand deposited my bottles into paper bags, placed the paper bags into black plastic bags, and pushed them to me over the counter.

  I was more chipper on the way home, bottles in hand, looking up, when a man walked toward me with a Jardine’s parrot on his shoulder. This was a rare sight, especially in New York City. Pet stores don’t sell Jardine’s parrots. You have to go out of your way to find this little African bird with its big beak and scalloped green feathers. I also had a member of the Poicephalus genus: Jesse.

  The guy almost passed me, but I grabbed the edge of his sleeve. He turned and I said, “I have a parrot like that.”

  He stopped and smiled. “You do?”

  “That’s a Jardine’s, a Poicephalus, an African species. Latin name, Poicephalus gulielmi. I have a Meyer’s, Poicephalus meyeri.”

  “No one ever knows what Guthrie is,” the man said, impressed.

  “You want to come meet Jesse?” I asked the stranger. He could have been a serial killer, but I waged he wasn’t. He liked birds.

  The man’s name was Walden. He was a masseur/songwriter. He admired Jesse and we had a long talk about African avian species. I felt human for the first time in months. Walden lived a block away. We exchanged numbers, and he left.

  The next afternoon, someone knocked on my window. I peeled back the tinfoil. Walden had brought his girlfriend to meet Jesse. I was three-quarters into a bottle of cream sherry, which I had been drinking from the bottle for lunch.

  “You want a drink?” I said, pouring Walden a glass before he could answer. He waved both of his hands in front of his chest and declined.

  “No need to be polite, I have plenty,” I said, pushing the glass at him.

  “Really, it’s fine, I don’t want any,” he said. He gave his girlfriend an awkward glance. Had I done something wrong? I tried to give her the glass, but she wouldn’t take it, either, so I drained it in one draught.

  “Can you meet me at the garden tomorrow?” Walden said. “You can bring Jesse and I’ll bring Guthrie.” I lived next door to the Clinton Community Garden on Forty-Eighth Street, a plot of land about the size of a tenement building’s footprint, lushly planted with seasonal flowers by members of the community, complete with an apple tree, grape-vined trellis, and beehive.

  Of course I would, I told him. I’d made a new friend.

  The next day Jesse and I found Walden at the garden sitting on a picnic blanket, Guthrie on his shoulder. We talked about birds for a few minutes before he changed the subject.

  “Do you always drink like that?” he asked.

  “Drink like what?”

  “It was the middle of the day and you were drunk.”

  “Oh, yeah, that. Pretty much.” Jesse hopped off my shoulder into the grass and started treading toward Walden’s leg.

  “Do you get in trouble when you’re drunk?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Do you miss work because of drinking?”

  “Yeah, sometimes.” I plucked Jesse off Walden’s knee and put him back onto my shoulder.

  “Does drinking affect your relationships?”

  “What relationships?”

  Walden paused and scratched Guthrie’s neck. “Do you drink every day?”

  “Are you psychic?” I asked him. I thought he was reading my mind. How else would he know these things about me?

  “No, I’m an alcoholic,” he said, laughing. “There’s this place I go where we talk about alcohol and it’s pretty awesome. There’s a lot of nice people and I think you’d like it.”

  I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t find my voice.

  “You should come with me. There’s a meeting starting in ten minutes right around the corner. It’s fun. You’ll love it.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “You have a problem with alcohol. It’s not my place to diagnose you as an alcoholic, but the signs are there.”

  “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

  “It can kill you,” he said.

  “Maybe I’m an alcoholic,” I told him. “But I’m not the bad kind.” Who was I kidding? Sure, I wasn’t the bad kind—I was the worst kind.

  Walden stood up and brushed himself off. “I’m going to the meeting now.”

  “You’re taking Guthrie with you?”

  “They don’t mind. It’s a nice bunch of people. You’re welcome to come with me, or we can go another time. Call me if you want to talk about these things.”

  Walden walked away and I shuffled home, feeling exposed. What had just happened?

  Walden and I met at the park often with Guthrie and Jesse to give them some sun and chat about his fun alcohol meetings and all the friendly people there. I told him I was happy he had a place to go to talk about his issues. It wasn’t for me.

  As the months passed, Walden became a bit of a nag, all happy and ebullient about this special anti-alcohol club, trying to lure me there with the promise of coffee and cookies, so I told him I’d stopped drinking. He saw me once through the plate glass window of my corner bar, knocked on the glass, smiled and shook his finger, but he didn’t judge.

  I had no friends in New York except Walden. Even my closest friend from Miami, Richard Blanco, who had visited me a few months before, told me he couldn’t speak to me anymore. Richard had made appointments with people in New York and had included me in his plans, and I had made him late for every meeting, crying because I was too fat and ugly to leave the house, drinking from a bottle of vodka as I stripped to my underwear, over and over, standing ankle-deep in a puddle of wrinkled secondhand pants and dresses, unable to find an outfit I wasn’t embarrassed to wear. Once, he left for dinner without me. He needed space, he said, and then he disappeared from my world.

  I blacked out nightly, waking to find my towel rack broken; my teapot melted on a hot stove; my cheap coffee table missing a leg; silk flowers plucked of their petals, strewn across the apartment in a tempest of pinks and reds; my hair cut with office scissors into an uneven bob—never knowing how any of it had happened. I drunk-dialed Walden one night to tell him I was naked except for my vomit-soaked socks, and that I was invisible, begging him to make me real again.

  The next evening, he sat on my couch and told me he didn’t want me calling him in the middle of the night anymore. I wept and told him about the blackouts: waking to find my futon stabbed with kitchen shears, bleeding cotton fluff; finding knives under my pillow and the phone in the toilet; the unanswered drunken prayers to end my misery uttered before passing out on my hardwood floor.

  Walden sat quietly for a long time.

  “You sure you don’t want to go to a meeting with me?” he said. “It
can get worse than this, and this is pretty bad.”

  His meetings would mean the end of my drinking. I needed to drink, and was positive the people in the meetings wouldn’t understand what alcohol meant for me: pain management. Physical pain, psychic pain, I had it all, and alcohol usually took it away, though, lately, alcohol had amplified the pain, too, and I needed more booze to scrub the widening stain of discomfort and isolation it created. Alcohol had turned on me, pulled a bait-and-switch routine, roped me into a cruel shell game where there was no pea under any of the walnuts.

  Walden observed Jesse strutting around on the top of his cage.

  “I like Jesse,” he said, pointing to the little parrot. “Do you think he and Guthrie could be roommates? They love each other and I’ll take good care of him.”

  “Take him,” I said.

  “Are you sure? You can have him back any time.”

  Jesse furiously clanged one of his bell toys, stretched his head toward the ceiling, and whistled. I didn’t deserve to have anything around that loved me. I picked Jesse up and kissed him. He stepped dutifully from my hand onto Walden’s shoulder.

  With Jesse clinging to the back of Walden’s shirt, we rolled his metal birdcage from my apartment into the breezeless summer dusk. The wheels rattled over Hell’s Kitchen’s uneven sidewalks as we passed a couple of high-heeled working girls, who nodded as we struggled the block and a half to Walden’s walk-up.

  We began the awkward ascent up three flights of stairs, stopping at each landing to breathe and swab sweat from our faces. The wooden tenement stairs had been painted blue many years ago, each step worn and concave in the middle, where millions of footfalls had landed since the nineteenth century.

  As Walden keyed into the apartment, Guthrie watched us from a large cage in the corner. He was a gentlemanly bird, quiet, somewhat docile. Jesse had more bite in him: a miniature Napoléon, always placing one zygodactyl foot in front of the other in a deliberate march, searching for books to chew and demanding that someone scratch his head.

  Walden placed Jesse onto the play stand on the top of the cage. Jesse perched at the edge and leaned precariously toward me, uttering his typical earsplitting complaint. I turned away.