The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld

by Justin Hocking

  “Look,” he says, “you’re a surfer, right? You have to just let this wash over you, like a wave. You can’t let it bring you down. Pretend you’re out there in the water, in some tough conditions. You just have to flow with it.”

  And Attiq reminds me how he had to work in the same office for years with his ex-girlfriend, his “qualifier,” to use program language, and how miserable it made him, but he recognizes it now as a necessary condition for his recovery. He also suggests that I avoid any major life decisions during my first year in recovery.

  “Rather than trying to change anything in your outer environment,” he says, “you need to transform your own inner patterns.”

  Ignoring all this good advice, I decide to quit anyway. I line up a freelance gig proofreading scholastic exam-prep materials for the Princeton Review. The work itself doesn’t sound particularly engaging, but the pay is decent, enough that I can work just three or four days a week, giving me more time to write and surf. And SAT prep books, while tedious, are the least romantic genre I can imagine—not a single pale mound of fragrant flesh to be found amid all the geometry sets and synonyms. My therapist seems skeptical—I’ll be giving up a full-time job with benefits—but I decide to go ahead and give my two weeks’ notice. It’s not easy, as my boss has been really good to me, and I can tell he’s disappointed.

  “Well, I understand your choice,” he says. “But you’ll be hard to replace.”

  The next day, he calls me back into his office.

  “I’ve been talking with Sharon,” he says. “We think you’re a good editor and employee. So we want to know what it would take to have you stay.”

  This catches me off guard, but he gives me a couple days to think it over.

  I talk with my therapist, who suggests I ask for a very significant raise, with the stipulation that I won’t work on romance.

  “I doubt they’ll go for that,” I say.

  “If they don’t, then you move on. To get anywhere in this world, you have to ask for what you want.”

  So I meet with my boss, tell him my terms. He looks surprised by the amount of money I ask for, but says he’ll run it by Sharon. As opposed to our last romance conversation, I feel like I have the upper hand here, because I’m so close to just walking anyway.

  He calls me in again the next day.

  “Sharon almost choked when I told her your terms,” he says. “That’s nearly the amount we pay senior editors. So I’m sad to say it, but I’m really going to miss you.”

  I walk out feeling mostly at peace with it, ready to escape the Pit, but also a little hurt that they didn’t meet me in the middle with the salary offer. It’s a matter of a few thousand dollars a year, a fraction of the amount I see Sharon throw weekly at half-assed bloggers turned novelists and mid list romance writers.

  But as my impending last day approaches, I start to seriously doubt my decision. I’m giving up my health insurance. A caring, supportive boss. And along with the romance, some interesting editing projects.

  At night, alone, my doubt turns into panic. I’m single in New York, and work has become a major source of security in my somewhat rootless life—my current partner in yet another love/hate relationship.

  My final week on the job I have two nearly sleepless nights in a row. I wake in the middle of the night feeling adrift, a castaway like Melville’s character Pip, a cabin boy who despite being told not to, jumps from a whaleboat, only to find himself left behind in the ocean’s immensity.

  The next day, I call my therapist, schedule an emergency appointment. I end up in his office, literally shaking.

  I tell him that I don’t think I can go through with this, that I’m in no shape to start a new job.

  “Justin,” he says, trying to snap me out of it. “You can’t go back now. You already made your decision; you’re doing this because you want more time to write, remember? Take some deep breaths, get yourself some lunch, and go finish packing up your things.”

  “I think I’m having a nervous breakdown,” I say.

  He doesn’t respond immediately, not wanting to confirm what for me feels self-evident.

  “There’s no medical diagnosis of ‘nervous breakdown’—it’s an antiquated term. You’re having some generalized anxiety now, but that’s to be expected during a career change.”

  On my last day of work, a Friday, I can’t stand it anymore. I go back to my boss’s office, sit down, and ask if he’s found anyone to take my job.

  “Like I said, you’re hard to replace. I’ve done a couple interviews, but nothing too promising.”

  “So you haven’t found anyone you really want?”

  “Why do you ask?” he says, tilting his head. “Am I getting the sense you want to stay?”

  I lean forward in my chair, clasp my hands together. “I’ve been thinking about it, and yes, I really do. I’ll do whatever it takes—I’ll work on romance. If you’ll have me, I want to stay.”

  “Well of course you can stay,” he says, breaking into a wide smile and leaning back in his chair. “Now I can put all these résumés aside and get back to work.”

  Sitting there across from him, being welcomed back so warmly, I feel myself lifted completely from all the stress and anxiety, as if he’s reached a hand down and pulled me back into the life raft. I thank him, over and over, tell him what a great job I’ll do from here on out, and then I float back to my cubicle, feeling such relief, such elation, like I’m back in the arms of my lover, home again in her warm, romantic embrace.

  It feels so wonderful, so intoxicating that I barely notice how pathetic my coworkers think I am, the same way my friends thought it was pathetic when Nicole and I got back together after the sixth or seventh breakup.

  A woman in the office known as the Romance Maven tells me that she’s glad I’m staying.

  “But Jesus, kid,” she says, “don’t ever do that again.”

  Another coworker, a kind, graying man in his late forties, who started off his career in theater but is now stuck in the Pit, welcomes me back.

  “I just hope you don’t regret it,” he says.

  SHARKY

  One sweltering afternoon in July, just after my quitting fiasco, Natalie and Paul and I all escape down to Rockaway. While we’re circling the parking lot, we spot a cute, tan woman walking barefoot across the blacktop, a tank of a longboard tucked under her arm. It’s my friend Sadie, a friend of Andy Kessler’s whom I’d met at a book release party.

  I roll down my window and say hello.

  “Oh my God, I have to tell you the craziest thing,” she says, rushing right up to the car. “I got out here just after dawn. I was the only one out in the water—and I saw a shark! A shark, right here at Rockaway!” She turns around and points to the spot where she’d seen it, just beyond the jetty, the exact place we’re about to surf. That the shark could have eaten her leg off apparently hasn’t crossed her mind. And the story freaks Natalie out so much that she won’t go near the water that day. She thinks Sadie is completely nuts and from then on refers to her as “your friend Sharky.”

  Sadie is far from nuts, though. She’s an instructor at the Harbor School, where she teaches inner-city youth about ocean biology and ecology, the curriculum centered on the relationship between humans and water. She’s a shark fanatic; for her, Animal Planet’s Shark Week is more exciting than the Super Bowl. During a future trip to Portland, my friend Dan will tattoo a great white shark, surrounded by roses, on the inside of Sadie’s bicep. Sharks don’t faze her at all; the only aquatic life at Rockaway that causes Sadie serious consternation are the jellyfish. Another day on the beach she explains the problem: jellyfish are like cockroaches of the sea. As the ocean becomes less and less biodiverse—as humans kill off large predators like sharks and swordfish, and as global warming heats up the entire planet—jellyfish populations continue to explode. During the four or five years I’ve known Sadie, at any given point she’s always reading one book or another about the ocean; this particu
lar summer she’s reading one about the devolution of the sea.

  “If we don’t change our habits,” she tells me, “the ocean will become more and more acidified and swamp-like, filled with nothing but algae and jellyfish and trash. Did you know there’s a massive island of discarded plastic swirling around the Pacific? And giant jelly fish swarms all over the world. They had to shut down the beach at Waikiki for a while because of them. Waikiki! That’s where surfing was practically invented.”

  As Sadie explains, certain jellyfish are like barometers of the sea—they go where it’s warm. During dog-day summer afternoons at Rockaway, the water warms up to bath tub temperatures, drawing in swarms of jellyfish. The Rockaway specimens aren’t the stinging kind, fortunately, but they are annoying and sort of disgusting. Oval shaped and hollowed out on the top, they look like translucent ashtrays or discarded diaphragms. When it gets really bad, you can feel several brushing against your arms with every paddle stroke; it’s like surfing in a warm bowl of tapioca. Combined with all the plastic bags and assorted detritus in the water—including “Coney Island white fish,” a.k.a. used condoms—it’s enough to make you reconsider ever surfing again at Rockaway.

  But Sadie is undeterred. She has summers off from teaching—a fact that causes me no small amount of jealousy—and takes the A train to Rockaway almost every morning. She’s like a punk-rock, street-smart Gidget, except in her case she catches the surf bug and then never returns to conventional life, not really. And she’s seriously heartened by her shark sighting; she talks about it all summer. Whereas it scares the hell out of Natalie, for Sadie a dorsal fin just off the beach in New York City is a little sign of hope in an otherwise damaged environment.

  One of the few perks of my job is that we get alternating Fridays off during the summer months. We work longer hours other days of the week, but it’s definitely worth it. On a Friday a couple weeks after her shark sighting, I pick Sadie up at her place and then drive down to Rockaway.

  Arriving just after nine, we score a parking spot and a fun swell, mostly just the two of us, trading wave after sun-silvered wave, cheering each other on, splash-fighting between sets, trying to identify different sea birds and keeping our eyes out for dorsal fins on the horizon. Afterward we hang out on the beach, eating deli sandwiches before Sadie gets immersed in her ocean ecology book and I read a few Moby-Dick chapters, all of this followed by a long, totally satisfying nap. Nothing really happens—and that’s just it. Back in the city, the stress of commuting and working full time in Midtown, along with my recovery, are taking a toll. And my coworker was right—my post-breakup honeymoon with work lasts all of two weeks.

  On the drive home that evening, I can already feel the weekend slipping away. I tell Sadie how I’ve been struggling with work, how I tried to leave but couldn’t. How I’m considering just up and quitting until I can find a teaching job.

  “Maybe you just need a girlfriend,” she says. “I mean, look at you. Why the hell don’t you have a girlfriend?”

  “That’s kind of a long story,” I say. “But I’m serious about the job thing. I really miss teaching.”

  “You can’t just quit your job,” she says, sounding alarmed.

  “I know. But it’s making me depressed. Surfing’s the only thing that seems to help.”

  “I can relate,” she says. “Not sure if you knew, but my dad passed away last year.” I had heard this from someone—Dawn or Teagan. But I didn’t know all the details.

  “He actually took his own life,” she says.

  “Oh my God,” I say. “I had no idea, I’m—”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “You don’t have to say anything.”

  But I feel ridiculous now, having gone on so long about my petty career woes.

  “I’ve dealt with it. I mean, I’m dealing with it. The way I do that is by coming down here to Rockaway, every day I can. Especially at first, it was one of the only things that kept me going. Being in the ocean—communing with something so vast—definitely does something. So whatever you need to do, I’m with you, you know? I understand. Just promise me you’ll get something lined up before you quit. Because while surfing is great, being unemployed is not.”

  CIRCLES

  Most evenings after work and a long subway commute, I don’t have time to hit the beach or even the Autumn Bowl. But being an intensely physical person, I need daily exercise, especially here in New York, where, without serious cardiovascular exertion, I’ll cross over from neurosis to complete incapacitation. So along with swimming laps, I start running on the McCarren Park track. Sprinting ten or twenty laps on the spongy surface, while Mexican and Dominican guys play soccer in the center field, sufficiently wears me out. But running around in circles by myself—circumambulating the city—tends to stir up my ruminative mental processes, my spiraling obsession with Karissa.

  So during my cool-down laps, I typically make some calls on my cell phone, most often to Asa or Attiq. Program calls is how everyone refers to them, and in those first white-knuckle months of my withdrawal period, I make hundreds.

  Not long after starting the program, I call Attiq, tell him what I’m thinking—that I’m in a codependent relationship with my work, and I think I need to leave New York entirely, that I definitely don’t want to spend the rest of my life here. And how I want to move to Portland, where life will be easier, and where I can maybe make things right with Karissa before she gets serious about this guy.

  Attiq listens patiently as always.

  “Look,” he says, “it’s fine that you recognize New York isn’t right for you in the long term. But the fact is, you’re here right now. You might not realize it, but this work you’re doing in the program is important—much more so than your regular, moneymaking work. This doesn’t mean you can’t leave New York eventually. Think of Brooklyn as a temporary apartment, where you reside while you rebuild the entire foundation of your house. You’re down in the mud and ashes right now, and I know it’s uncomfortable, but it’s exactly where you need to be. It’s a holy place, a sacred place; the lotus grows up from that mud.”

  THE TOOTH

  Dawn and I drive to Rockaway on a warm September evening, taking the freeway route past the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and down near Coney Island. During the trip she tells me she was on the diving team in high school and college, then worked summers as a lifeguard at Barton Springs in Austin. After college she moved to San Francisco, where she lived with her boyfriend, a BMW-driving yuppie. Along with working in finance, he dealt a little Ecstasy on the side to support his lifestyle. Dawn did what she could to fit into his world—she wore diamond earrings, clipped her hair back, pretended to read the Wall Street Journal with him in the breakfast nook of their condo. But the whole thing went sour, and now, maybe as a result of feeling so burned, she spends all her time with skaters and surfers—people with whom she doesn’t have to pretend to be anything she’s not.

  We arrive at the beach around dusk. No one else around, we paddle out to the prime position just off the jetty. It’s hard to see in the fading light, and we get rolled by a cleanup set, something that might freak me out if I was by myself, but being out with Dawn makes me feel safe, although she claims that she was possibly the worst lifeguard in history.

  We both get some good waves, and though it’s almost dark now, we keep paddling back for more. I catch a long ride, hanging on all the way to the shallows. Wading back out in the near-dark, I push my board carelessly in front of me. Just then a swell heaves up and pitches the board back at my face, the thick rail nailing me right in the teeth.

  Immediately there is the salty taste of what I hope is seawater, but that I know in truth to be blood.

  My teeth are already fucked up; I should’ve had braces as a kid but didn’t—and I can feel with my tongue that getting drilled by my surfboard has knocked my left front tooth another millimeter out of alignment.

  Dawn helps me out of the water and onto the beach, where I spit blood and have to resist reac
hing up to touch my mouth with sandy hands. We make it up to my truck, where, in the rearview mirror, I see matching incisions on the inside and outside of my lower lip. Dawn takes a look but can’t tell if my tooth has pierced all the way through the skin.

  We luck out and find an ambulance parked next to the boardwalk. Two young EMTs invite me inside, where I swear I smell pot smoke, and where the younger one—a surfer himself—takes a look at my lip.

  The verdict is, fortunately, that the tooth didn’t go all the way through. I don’t need stitches.

  The EMT gives me an ice pack. Asks if I need anything for the pain, while making the international sign for smoking a joint. I tell him I’m cool, thanks, and then hold the ice pack to my swollen lips while Dawn drives us back to the city.

  HEROIN

  At a Wednesday-night meeting, my new friend Carlos tells his story. He grew up in Puerto Rico, in a clapboard shack with his mother and four siblings. His father was just a man who came by on Saturdays to sleep with his mom. Hoping for a better life, his mother moved them all to the South Bronx in the seventies. Because his family could only afford to buy him Zips sneakers, and not Keds, Carlos was endlessly taunted and bullied by neighborhood kids—Zips have soles that slip.

  As a teenager, Carlos grew his hair out long, started smoking pot and hanging out with his high school art teacher, who introduced him to abstract expressionism, took him to the Guggenheim and the Met. One day in Central Park, she leaned over and kissed him. He ran away from home to live with her in a tiny East Village studio. It lasted a few months, until she got depressed and kicked him out. He found work in Manhattan restaurants, where he was introduced to harder drugs—cocaine and eventually heroin. He developed a taste for both, eventually began mixing the two in a dangerous cocktail known as a speedball. This was the eighties, when my Brooklyn neighborhood was one of the worst slums in the city: El Barrio, Sugartown. Carlos spent a lot of time there and in the East Village, standing in long lines, sometimes wrapping around the entire block, not just homeless junkies but secretaries, men in business suits, all of them waiting to cop. By then homeless himself, he slept sitting up on the 6 train.