The evening meals I shared with my parents that summer in Minnesota were funereal, as was only appropriate. To speak was to invite the possibility of invoking his name, and his name was just then unutterable, though he was always in our thoughts. In the beginning those thoughts focused on the last time we saw him, the last time we spoke to him; we hunted for clues we should have seen and didn’t, or we tried ourselves on the charge of failing to love him sufficiently, a trial that couldn’t help but end in a verdict of guilt. My sister, with whom I’d always been able to speak freely on any subject, was deep inside the drama that would result in a brief, failed marriage, and therefore unavailable for sibling heart-to-hearts. I knew better than to hope that my mother and father would look deep into each other’s souls, reaffirm their vows of fidelity in the face of tragedy, and draw me into the safe, warm bosom of their loving embrace. Never having been the kind of people who spoke freely—or even elliptically—about their innermost feelings, they weren’t about to start now, when the stakes were so much higher. My father soon devised a mantra—life was too short to dwell on a death he could not undo—that baffled me with what I took to be its refusal to feel a legitimate sadness; my mother’s devastation revealed itself wordlessly, with an expression of almost complete vacancy in her eyes, as if she’d gone somewhere in her mind from which she would never return. Their estrangement from each other’s experience of grief was too painful for me to contemplate it for more than a moment, so I turned away from them, turned inward—a strategy that became a habit, a habit that became a posture, a posture that solidified into an all-encompassing personality, that of a man shrouded in almost total self-regard.
The ambiguity I preserved in the story of his death was already on its way to becoming the story of my life. He was my silent partner, my all-purpose excuse, my left-hand man, and depending on my whim I was sometimes calculating, sometimes impulsive, one minute attentive and the next minute aloof, one day hungry for intimacy and the next day desperate for freedom. By remaining enigmatic—by refusing to be any one way or any one thing—I honored him. He would remain forever unfinished, and so would I.
PART TWO
Fax Boy
My address was the movie house, downtown Missoula, on the banks of the Clark Fork. The yellow marquee glowed outside my bedroom window, and night after night an early and a late show played through the wall of the balcony across the hall. I read novels till dawn, slept till noon, napped around seven each evening with plugs in my ears to keep the movies muted. I walked the river paths after dark. I lurked in AA meetings in order to hear people talk honestly about terrible things. I drank coffee in one of three coffee shops each afternoon, whiskey in one of five bars most nights. I went months without having a conversation lasting more than three minutes. I swam through time like it was motor oil. I made one promise to myself. I would not buy a gun.
I took a semester off and returned to New York on borrowed money, my first cash advance on my first credit card. I sublet an apartment in Queens whose occupant, an Italian man in his thirties, was laid up in the hospital with two broken legs. I didn’t ask why.
I completed my aborted internship at the Nation—a year and a half later than originally planned—for the sum of one hundred bucks a week, a willingly indentured servant at a magazine founded by abolitionists. I spent my days fact-checking articles on how to reinvigorate the labor movement, a staple of Nation reportage whose frequency and desperation of tone increased as union membership declined. During lulls between deadlines I gathered specious research for a contrarian columnist on what he called the hoax of global warming.
Back in Missoula, I worked on my pool game at Flipper’s, my drinking game at Al’s & Vic’s. One day I received a piece of paper in the mail saying that I’d earned a bachelor’s degree. I couldn’t have begun to tell you how.
Lacking immediate prospects after graduation, I stayed on in Montana. There was no urgency to make anything of my life, and Missoula was as fine a place as any to hide out from postgrad choices. Besides, the place was too beautiful to leave in summertime, and I couldn’t bear to give up an apartment that cost $180 a month and placed me within easy walking distance of so many quality bars. On summer days fishermen cast their flies upstream from the Higgins Avenue Bridge, a hundred yards from my room above the Wilma, while a bagpiper went through his mournful musical paces, using the bridge abutments as acoustic enhancement. I eked out a living baking bread in the early morning hours alongside a failed novelist who’d mastered the texture of the baguette, though not the art of fiction, during two years in Paris in the 1970s. Afternoons in my apartment, with the windows thrown open to the breeze off the black cottonwoods along the river, I worked halfheartedly on what I hoped would become my own first novel, a doomed imitation of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy that stalled forever at page forty with the impossible scenario of a man tailing the ghost of himself after digging up his own grave and finding nothing in it. I felt authentically bohemian as I pounded on my manual typewriter, earplugs in place, while the muffled soundtrack of the week’s feature film pulsed and droned through the wall. One of the theater employees was a daytime drinker who liked to stop by my room in the late afternoons and slyly proposition me, vodka fumes on his breath. He probably did so with all the bachelor boys, but I was vain enough, and lonely enough, to take it as a compliment. The building’s manual elevator, one of the few of its kind still in operation west of the Mississippi, was staffed in part by a woman who’d never abandoned the apartment upstairs where her husband had shot himself a decade earlier, or so the rumor went. Riding the lift with her after a night out drinking, I fantasized about holding her hand in mine and telling her she was not alone. More than once I heard another rumor that David Lynch had spent some time around the place, long enough to use it as a model for the apartment building in Blue Velvet. Once you’d lived there awhile, the story had the ring of plausibility, though of course it turned out to be a fabrication.
Every so often, when I felt myself slipping into a neurasthenic funk, I’d walk to the Orange Street entrance ramp on I-90 and hitchhike to Seattle to visit my uncle, hoping a brush with danger would snap me back to reality. Nothing very interesting happened on those trips, except for the time I was aggressively solicited to proffer my cock so my driver could fondle it with his right hand while steering with his left. He claimed all he wanted was to touch my cock for awhile, then pull off the road and finish the job with his mouth. For this he’d drive me all the way to Seattle from the Idaho border. When I demurred, he stuck his thumb in his mouth and removed his dentures, allowing them to dangle in the space between us. He said, with real conviction, It’ll be the best damn blow job you ever had.
For a time I convinced myself that I’d given up on journalism. Life was too weird for journalism. I wanted to devote myself to art, to a bleak and eccentric vision along the lines of David Lynch. But the fact was I’d borrowed twenty-five grand to pay for an education in print journalism, so I had little choice but to pursue a career in print journalism, in order to pay off the twenty-five grand. Baking bread for six bucks an hour in Missoula, Montana, was not going to cut it, and there was nothing else I was any good at.
New York beckoned once more.
My first apartment in the city was a Hell’s Kitchen sublet arranged on my behalf by a friend. An actress owned the apartment; she’d gone to some backwater city in the American South to appear in a Shakespeare festival. I covered her co-op payments and looked after her cats while she was away. There were four of them. Three had come off the streets, and their ways had rubbed off on the fourth, so that all were now at least part feral. Perhaps they felt abandoned by their owner, perhaps they just didn’t like me, but they ceased to use their litter box, or rather they made the entire apartment their litter box. I chased them around with a broom, tried to frighten them into behaving, but that only provoked them to new outrages. I came home one night and found they’d torn apart my pillow, now just a cloudscape of synthetic stuf
fing floating across the bedroom floor. From then on I made my home away from home at McHale’s, a bar off the west edge of Times Square, four blocks from my apartment.
The hamburger at McHale’s was the best in the city, the bartenders—all of them female and all of them comely—poured spirits with a heavy hand, and the stools felt as if they’d been designed by ergonomic specialists devoted to the comfort of the human rump. Soft orange lamps burned dimly through the cigarette haze, and ceiling fans spun languidly in the sepia-toned light. I went there more than once in the daytime, but it was a bar built for the needs of the night. It was a hangout for off-duty cops and neighborhood residents and people who worked in the theater district, grips and lighting people and understudies and even the occasional name actor. It had the feel of a place that had been in the family for a very long time, as I later learned it had: half a century, to be precise. Ticket scalpers used it as a drop-off point, so there was a lot of traffic in and out, people leaning over the bar and offering their names, leaving with envelopes slipped in purses and pockets, a trade that gave the place a casually illicit flavor. I liked it in part because the help had a masterful sense for the balance of friendliness and discretion. The one thing they felt a need to know about you was your name. All the rest unfolded in conversation if you felt like talking. If you didn’t, that was fine too. No one there knew my story, which was just as well. Nobody could vouch for me, or badmouth me, as long as I avoided romantic entanglements with the regulars. For a while, avoiding romantic entanglements became my highest priority, next to finding a job.
I sent my résumé to two dozen magazines and a handful of newspapers. I was summoned for an interview just once, a courtesy I was granted because I knew someone who knew someone who worked at the magazine. It was called Civilization and was affiliated with the Library of Congress. A secretary guided me to the office of the editor, Nelson Aldrich, who asked me about my internships. I told him of the meticulous fact-checking I’d done at the Nation, the intrepid street-level reporting I’d done during my summer at the Fargo Forum, the many things I’d learned about the ways of the world while staring into the abyss of an impending deadline. I must have gone too far with the self-marketing, because Nelson Aldrich said I was overqualified. He was looking for an editorial assistant—a gofer, essentially. I told him I really wanted the job, wanted the chance to be part of an organ of substantive journalism, even if only as a gofer. He said I’d probably find the work boring and he didn’t want a bored assistant moping around the office. I told him it wasn’t my style to mope in the workplace. He told me the pay was poor and I could almost certainly find something better. I told him I’d already been looking for two months and didn’t share his optimism. We spent most of the interview in this way—me begging in an unseemly manner for the job, him trying to talk me out of wanting it.
After I left his office I never saw him again.
I may have had to leave the city a failure if I hadn’t called the head of the journalism department at the University of Montana. Before retreating to academia, Frank Allen had worked at the Wall Street Journal, so I figured he knew some people in New York who could lend me a hand. He’d been kind to me as a transfer student, helping me match classes I’d already taken with a new curriculum, and now he gave me the name of an editor at the Journal, told me I should call her and ask her to coffee. The thinking was that she might know someone who was willing to take a chance on a hungry young journalist from the northern plains.
Francine Schwadel oversaw the paper’s legal-affairs coverage. We met on the mezzanine level of the paper’s home building at 200 Liberty Street, just across West Street from the World Trade Center towers. Sitting at a tiny table with a faux-marble surface, a paper cup of coffee in her hand, Francine Schwadel said, in her gravelly Brooklyn accent, that Frank Allen had hired her when he was chief of the Philadelphia Bureau of the Wall Street Journal, and for that she was eternally grateful. There was no longer a Philadelphia Bureau of the Wall Street Journal, and about that she was sad.
She asked me a few questions about my experience, my goals, and then she said, Well, young man, my time is short, but your timing is awfully good. I’ve just been given clearance to hire a news assistant. Would you be interested in the job?
Yes, I said. Of course.
She told me to send her a résumé, cover letter, and six samples of my writing by the end of the week.
When I left the interview, which I hadn’t even known was going to be an interview—I thought she’d give me the names of some people she knew, and I’d have coffee with them too, and they’d give me the names of other people with whom I’d have coffee, and I’d follow the chain of connections until someone offered me a job—I was conflicted. All of a sudden I had a chance for a job at a paper that considered itself the world’s most important publication, but I didn’t want to work at the world’s most important publication. Journalism had appealed to me, in the beginning, because I’d been told by one of my professors that it was among the surest means of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. To an idealistic undergrad with socialist inclinations, that chestnut made journalism sound both noble and fun, but of all the places for a young man on the make to pursue a career in journalism, the Wall Street Journal seemed about the least compatible with a desire to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
I had a problem, though, and it wasn’t politics, which had begun to matter a lot less than the growing balance on my credit card. The legal-affairs editor wanted to see six samples of my writing, but I had only four, maybe five good ones from my days as an intern at North Dakota’s largest daily newspaper. I didn’t want to fall back on clips from my student newspaper days. The piece of which I was fondest was an essay I had written for the Nation about a proposed open-pit gold mine on the Blackfoot River in western Montana. In a throwaway line about a logging company whose clear-cuts of healthy forest had fouled the river with silt and killed untold numbers of fish, I’d written the following: “Even a newspaper as sympathetic to corporate plunder as the Wall Street Journal once called Plum Creek the ‘Darth Vader of the timber industry.’” I doubted the legal-affairs editor thought of her employer as sympathetic to corporate plunder. And I very much doubted she would hire me if she discovered I’d written such a thing.
I suppose I could have laughed it off as a youthful indiscretion with the English language if she asked but I didn’t want to take that chance. I had an acquaintance I trusted at the Nation and I called him, explained my situation, and asked if he’d do me a giant favor. Would he open the electronic archive of the magazine, touch up my article that said unkind things about the Wall Street Journal, and then print for me a copy of the doctored article, which would no longer say unkind things? At first he was reluctant. He didn’t want to tinker with the historic record of the magazine. I told him he should of course change back my wording before saving and closing the file.
Not exactly the sort of thing I’d been taught in J-school, but he complied.
Shortly afterward, I was hired.
I showed up for my first day of work wearing a starched white shirt and a sober red tie, wanting to make a good impression. The first order of business was to get my picture taken and affixed to a magnetic pass card. When waved in front of a beam of discerning red light, the pass card unlocked security doors in the paper’s austere corridors. Later I would learn that before the paper moved to the World Financial Center it did not have locked doors in its hallways, and one day a senior executive had returned from his lunch to find a sample of human feces on his desk chair. When the paper moved to its new headquarters, the executive insisted on the installation of locked doors that could only be unlocked with special pass cards. In theory a security measure, the pass cards also allowed the paper to track the movements of individual employees as they circulated through the hallways, thereby discouraging anyone who might have had a hankering to leave a malodorous turd on an executive’s desk chair.
As a news assistant, I mainly fetched faxes and replenished empty water coolers. I spent most of each day standing over a squadron of fax machines, collating and stapling press releases and court documents, then delivering them to reporters who covered corporate law, telecommunications, and the various health care industries. I performed this task with actuarial efficiency, the paper a blur in my hand like a magician’s trick; I served the reporters their faxes with the cordial discretion of a headwaiter in an uptown restaurant. The best means I had of telling good days from bad was by noting, at the end of my shift, whether or not I’d avoided a paper cut.
I’d spent my late teens and early twenties working dismal jobs—donut fryer, bartender, UPS package unloader—and borrowing heavily to pay for a college education that qualified me for a job that was already obsolete. People didn’t need to send faxes anymore. They could send email. I thought about mentioning this to Francine Schwadel. Could we not encourage people to send their documents electronically, thereby saving the world lots of paper and me lots of time? But then I wondered whether that would result, a little too efficiently, in my own obsolescence. So I kept my mouth shut, sorted and stapled the faxes, and every two weeks cashed my paycheck, which still came quaintly on paper, despite the advent of direct deposit.
One day my phone rang at work. It was my friend Mary, who’d put me in touch with the actress sublessor, she of the feline-occupied apartment. Mary was feeling a little chagrined about the cats and wanted to make things right. She said she had a lead on another apartment. A friend of hers was moving to New York from Detroit. The friend from Detroit had recently visited the city and, while staying with people she knew in Brooklyn, was shown a lovely old brownstone apartment. The landlord, being bisexual and living on the premises, sought tenants who were gay, bisexual, or gay-friendly. The woman from Detroit happened to be a lesbian; being a homo-friendly straight guy, I was deemed a suitable candidate to be her roommate, at least by Mary’s reckoning.
All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found Page 3