by Peter Orner
There’s a line of William James’s I came across years ago. I’ve never been able to find it again, but the gist of it (I think) is: if you tried to take into account all the heartbreak behind the lighted windows of a single city on a single night, your head would explode clean off your neck. Even if I’ve muddled the line beyond recognition, which I’m sure is the case, you get the point. I think of it every time I remember that night in the cab with Len. And in Chicago, even at four in the morning, there are more lighted windows than you could possibly imagine.
Nights I’d watch him sleep. He’d finally begin to calm down a little, and we were able to move him from the intake room with its strappable bed to the dorm. And look, I wasn’t the only one gaga over Dominic—the whole place, the other patients, the nurses, even the doctors. Everybody was doing him favors. Some people just have that magnetic force, you know, you can’t help it, you just get reeled into them. The lights were always on in the dorms, but they were dimmed at night per the rules. I go over to his bed, I just want to touch his cheek while he sleeps, and I do it, and he grabs my wrist so hard I think he’s going to pull it off my hand. And then Dom slowly, almost gently, but still with that iron grip, guides my hand down beneath the sheets. I’m watching a spot on the wall where there used to be one of Dorothea’s beautiful windows, and I’m telling you, I don’t even know what I’m telling you, because you go from zero to sixty, from wanting to touch somebody’s cheek to the whole enchilada, things get—
“Enchilada?”
“You’d like me to be crass? What about your virginal heterosexual ears?”
“Who’s Dorothea?”
“Dorothea Dix, the great reformer. She wanted asylums to be asylums. An oasis, a tranquil idyll where the disturbed of mind could listen to the birds.”
Years ago, in my zeal to prove (to myself) that I was working diligently on my Len novel, I did some research on Dorothea Dix in the basement of the Boston Public Library. This is what novelists do; they swim through libraries, pore over old texts. Look busy. My scattered pre-internet notes are in the manila folder. She was a woman (I noted) of great accomplishment and incessant activity. One of her assistants called Dorothea “a short woman, incapable of whispering. When Dorothea confessed her sins in church you could hear her two towns over.” Of the site at Northampton where she hoped the state would build an asylum, Dix recorded this exhortation in her diary: “It is, without a doubt, the single most beautiful pitch of land in the Commonwealth. It is not a question of if I shall have it, only when!”
Dix believed that asylums should be at higher elevations in order to provide patients with the cleanest possible air and serenest possible views. Hence, she ordered the architect of Northampton State to ensure that from every upper-story window it would be possible to see either Mount Tom or the Connecticut River Valley. After the asylum opened in 1858, an orchestra played at every meal from the upper balcony of the dining hall, and the tables were laid with white linen and silver.
—gorgeous flaxen hoodlum, but no dummy, you don’t build up a file that needs rubber bands if you’re a dummy. No, he had a certain genius, Dom did. Moments of tenderness? Absofuckinglutely. There were lightning-fast kisses nobody would have seen if they’d been looking, and most didn’t look, didn’t care. On the ward, like everywhere, people have their own problems. Let the hippie orderly stop by Dom’s bed every night, what’s it to us? And we were surrounded by people, but we were also alone, dead alone, in the middle of that dorm. One night Dom pried open the light box and cut all of the lights on the ward, and that allowed us a few minutes, and holy cow you sleeping motherfuck—
“I’m awake,” I said, “I’m awake. He’s using you, Len, can’t you even see—”
Len stops the cab. I’ve got no idea where we were. Somewhere off Milwaukee Avenue. It’s getting a little light. The snow’s let up. There’s that after-snow stillness. Only snow can truly quiet Chicago. Every block becomes unrecognizably beautiful. It’s been called a somber city. The only time I’ve felt this to be true is after snow. More and more lights are coming on in the apartments. Len’s staring at me in a way that makes me remember my first summer on staff. Two weeks in, Len had summoned me into the shack for what he called shits and giggles. He handed over the bottle, and I took a healthy swig of bourbon. He watched me swallow and then looked me over. It might have gone on three or four minutes, just Len studying my face. I went on drinking the free hooch.
“How’s Kevin Friedlander doing?” Len asked me.
“The kid wets the bed.”
“What else?”
“He’s from Shaker Heights. No, Bloomfield Hills.”
“Even a dipshit not paying attention would know that Kevin Friedlander only likes Ping-Pong, that he hardly eats any lunch, and that he flunked archery.”
“How do you flunk archery?”
“And that his mother—” Len paused. He dug his hand around in his hair as if he were searching for something alive in there. “You ready to hear this?”
“Sure.”
“His mother fell down the stairs, hit her head. Few too many. In the off-season. The kid was the only one home. Poor woman hemorrhaged to death in Kevin’s arms.”
A month later, parents’ weekend, I met Kevin Friedlander’s mom, and she was alive and intact, but to this day she died drunk in Kevin’s arms, which explained not only why he wet the bed but also why he flunked archery. It’s from Len that I picked up the habit of taking one look at someone and trying to imagine the worst thing that’s ever happened to them.
In the cab, Len’s old voice breaks through, and he howls, “Of course I know he’s using me to get the hell out of there. Why do you think I’m pinching pennies—and, yes, stealing from the other patients, stealing! Oh, hallelujah, did I steal from those inmates! And soon I bought a little Plymouth, and when the night came—” Len stops himself short. “It’s like I’m telling someone else’s life. You ever feel that way?”
“On a good day.”
“I’m history,” Len says. “And here I am telling someone else’s.”
Time went by, lots of time, and I made excuses. Every couple of years, I’d take out the manila folder and give it another try. Eventually, though, I lacked the patience, the persistence, the talent, the ambition, the everything—I convinced myself that Len simply couldn’t be contained by a novel. Novels, by nature, end, and Len doesn’t end. Ah, but—it occurred to me only just the other day—what about a story? The whole time it’s been stories. Stories about everything and everybody while “saving” Len for the whole enchilada waiting for me beneath the sheets. All hail Chekhov. If done right, he tells us, a story never ends. A story: lurks. A story, a good story, is just out of reach, always. Wake up in an unfamiliar darkness, in a room you don’t seem to recognize. Flip on the light. Nothing there. It’s your room again. But didn’t you feel a presence in the dark? The presence of someone you once knew? Someone you once loved? All these years I’ve been deluding myself, carrying around this folder as if one day it would grow covers and a binding. So simple, Len’s a story.
Dear Little, Brown and Company:
You say stories don’t sell, and God knows I have no reason to doubt you (I’ve seen the numbers on my story collections and they aren’t pretty; I know I’m basically a charity case), but don’t you see? It’s what Chekhov teaches. The last period of the last sentence of a story isn’t a full stop; it’s a horizon. It’s not about word count or pages. That’s a smothered way of thinking. We’re talking about the quest for infinity here. Horizons can’t ever be reached no matter how many words you lard on a novel. The attempt at closure is inherently dishonest. But a story! One that ends but doesn’t end, that’s infinity, immortality, right there—and listen, my old buddy Len was this totally amazing, inspiring guy. You should have seen him on Hatfield and McCoy Day dressed as Charles Manson dressed up like Will Rogers. He’s dead but not dead, see, he lives, he’s still talking and the only way—
—and okay it w
asn’t even necessary, but I dressed up Dom in an orderly’s uniform, light blue scrubs, and we jumped out a first-floor window. I’d cut a hole in the fence. Jumped in the car like Bonnie and Clyde. Bernie and Clyde! Drove straight to the New York border in the corner of Massachusetts and then just kept going until we ran out of gas near Utica. Some motel. First thing Dom did was dig his face in the carpet like he’d never seen carpet before. And we both couldn’t stop laughing. And I know I said to myself that if I never see the kid again after today—but even at that moment, I knew I was full of shit—and so I said, Dom, let’s travel, you and me. Italy! Dom shouted. The motherland! And I said, We’ll do it, I’ll find the dough, Italy, the motherland! Is it Sicily, Dom, is that where your people—and Dom turned over on his side and said, My people? And I said, Yeah, your people, isn’t Sicily where—and I’ve never been able to figure out what set him off, but he stood up and walked right out the door of the room. It wasn’t like I hadn’t known it was going to happen soon enough, but I wasn’t ready, I just wasn’t—anyway, he just starts walking across the motel parking lot and down the highway and I’m standing in the doorway, watching—
A few years ago, I was in Fall River, Massachusetts, for the funeral of an aunt. After we buried Aunt Josephine, who’d been so old for so long everybody thought she’d already died, I drove my rented car clear across the state to Northampton. More notes for my manila folder. And there it was. On a hill above Smith College. They’d closed the asylum for good in 1986. I have no idea what I was hoping to gain by looking at a few old brick buildings through a chain-link fence. I desperately wanted the place to mean something. It was, though, a beautiful spot amid the tall trees and Mount Tom and the Connecticut River Valley in the background. Dorothea Dix was no dope. Maybe she figured she’d ride out her influence as long as she had it. She had to have known even then that nobody, not even her richest patrons, was going to pay for an orchestra to play for a horde of psychotics indefinitely.
On an otherwise empty page, I wrote: “Three Adirondack chairs, one broken.”
Or maybe the failure of my manila folder, besides patience, talent, etc., etc., has nothing to do with form, long, short, or in between. Maybe it’s just a true love story, and like all such stories it will always mean less to the person listening (more or less listening) than it does to the teller. How could it not? Forgive me, Len. How to say this? As I think back on us creeping along those newly blanketed Chicago streets in the cab, I can’t help but remember something an old girlfriend used to say to me—no, it wasn’t an old girlfriend, it was my ex-wife. It was my ex-wife who used to say it. She’d say that what I sought, what I ached for, what I breathed for, was true love. Except she pronounced it twew, like Elmer Fudd would say it. Twewlove. She said I was pie in the sky, that my search would never amount to anything because the only twewlove that would ever mean anything to me was—by nature—unrequited. I wanted to pine, not love. Twewlove, my ex-wife said, isn’t love at all.
“And you know what else?” she said.
“What?”
“It’s boring as shit.”
“What about Chekhov?” I shouted.
“Chekhov died in love,” my ex-wife said. “And loved. Olga Knipper loved him back. It was fucking mutual. Nothing twew about it.”
“But his stories! His stories—”
“He wasn’t celebrating unrequited love, he was practically begging his characters, and his dopey readers, to see the stupidity, to understand that their own failure to love was because they loved nobody but themselves. How can you read and read and still not have any idea what he’s saying?”
—but I thought, Fuck it, and I ran after him down the highway, and when I reached him, I said, “Dom,” and when he didn’t answer I tackled his ass. And we were rolling around in the cold dead grass by the side of the road. Whether it was day or night by that point, I no longer remember. All I know is that I started to punch him and he laughed—not like the way he’d laughed on the carpet, a laugh like not only didn’t he give a shit now, he’d never give a shit ever—and so I punched harder—
“Hello? Hello? You present? Accounted for?”
“Mmmm.”
“This is the climax, cabbie.”
“Right, Len, right—”
Or maybe it’s even more basic. Len’s life beyond camp. Aside from this one story and a few stray details, I know very little about it. I never asked. I’m not entirely to blame for this because in camp theology one simply doesn’t exist outside of camp. Since Len was a high priest, it makes a certain amount of sense that the rest of his life would be inaccessible to my imagination. A form of sacrilege to try to conjure him beyond the Big House, the Little House, the lake, the tennis courts, the point, the upper diamond, the sand dunes, the casino in Bad River. What we call the off-season is a netherworld you endured in a kind of fog in order to make it back to June, July, and August.
June, July, August.
That’s our calendar. Even if you no longer make it up, even if you haven’t set foot on camp’s grounds in years, the calendar remains June, July, August, because you believe, will always believe, that the time will come when you will return and slide back into history repeating itself as if you never left and a stoned JC from Kansas City is about to hand you a joint. So why the cab ride in the snow? Because he knew he’d been expelled. For good. From June, July, and August. And he needed to speak, to somebody, didn’t matter that it was me; he just needed to speak to somebody, anybody from June, July, and August. If only the ride had been longer. Maybe I’d know more about all the heartache, the decades of heartache that must have followed Dominic, who in the end probably didn’t mean all that much compared with the others Len met later, those friends and lovers who, like Len himself, died too young. Dominic was only the story he chose to tell me that night.
Who’s the sucker now—but he still laughed and so I started to beat the shit out of him. I was a little bigger than Dom to begin with, though I’m sure he could have killed me if he wanted to, but he only laughed, bloody teeth laughing, and I just kept hitting—pummeling that face, kissing it, that Christ face, and I can’t tell you how satisfying it was to pummel—
A man is walking down the middle of the street, which is what you do in Chicago when the sidewalks are buried by a blizzard. One set of footprints through the untouched snow. We follow slowly behind for a while, as if the man is now the one leading us, somewhere, anywhere. At some point the man stops. Len pulls up beside him and rolls down the window. The man is outlined by snow. He’s like a walking chalk drawing. No hat. Ledges of snow over his eyebrows. He’s wearing only a thin tweed jacket, with the flaps of his collar up.
“You a cab?” the man says.
“What’s it look like?”
“Says Iowa.”
“Is Iowa not a state in the Union with full faith and credit?”
The guy gets into the back of the cab.
Len leans over me and flips on the meter. “You’re out late,” he says. “Or early. Which is it? Late or early?”
The man shrugs and snow cascades from his shoulders. Some nut job from Iowa wants to give him a ride, what’s it to him?
III
Crimes of
Opportunity;
or, The 1980s
Turn left by the old house that used
to be there before it burned down.
—Robert Creeley, “Reflections
on Whitman in Age”
Speech at the Urinal,
Drake Hotel, Chicago, December 1980
The urinals, five of them, marble coffins standing upright. I hunched beside my father as we pissed into the fruit and ice. The men’s-room attendant my father knew by name—Evening, Henry. Greet Mr. Henry, Son, and always look a gentleman in the eye—stood behind us, waiting, steamed towels draped over his forearm.
I no longer remember the exact content of the speech. But I know it was an ode to the faded grandeur of that old stuffed-shirt hotel, that pompous men’s room, to Mr
. Henry and his flour-white hair and his warmed-up towels, and, above all, to those mighty urinals where generations of Chicago manhood had come to deliver of themselves. To my father the Drake Hotel was a buttress against all that was encroaching after a decadent decade. The ’70s disgusted him. People spitting right on the sidewalk, public nudity (not that my father had any trouble with it in the flesh and in fact quite enjoyed it; it was the principle of nudity being acceptable that took all the fun out of it), women lawyers. Women lawyers, my father said, among other contrary attributes, are far too excitable for the law. The law must needs be as fixed, as immovable, as stony faced, as these pharaonic toilets. A longish piss into the crackling ice, into the sliced melon and grapefruit and strawberries, and my father discoursed and I stood there, long out of piss myself, and listened. Chicago was still his city. There may be a lady mayor now (and if there’s going to be a lady mayor, let her be a chick as brassy as Jane Byrne), but by God the Drake is still the Drake and the fruit in the men’s room urinals is still so fresh you could eat it. This is style, this is grace, and this kind of style, this kind of grace, can’t be bought, not with money, new money, anyway, though this doesn’t mean you should ever find yourself without money, old, new, borrowed, stolen, embezzled, conned—no greater dishonor in this city, or anywhere else for that matter. Better to be rich and in jail. Better to be rich and dead, are you hearing me? Is this getting across?