The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld

by Justin Hocking

  One night in the subway he got robbed, had his front teeth bashed out with a lead pipe.

  “That was my life for three or four years,” Carlos tells us. “When I finally decided to kick, a doctor prescribed me heavy doses of Prozac, Wellbutrin, and Valium. I had to take all that plus drink half a gallon of wine every day. But by the grace of God, I came through. I’ve been sober for fifteen years now. I got my teeth fixed and I have a good job. Every day I’m just grateful to be alive, to help others get through what I did. Right now it feels like I’m walking on this pink cloud.”

  He goes on to tell us that for him, this group is like graduate school. Because the problem now is that he’s hooked on this Russian woman—a person who will sleep with him but won’t commit to any kind of emotional relationship, won’t let him move in with her, but demands that he help pay her rent.

  “It’s ridiculous,” he tells us. “I’m thirty thousand dollars in debt, but here I am, putting her rent on my credit card, just so I can get laid. I know I need to stop, but I’m confident that my higher power will lift it from me when I’m ready. I’ll tell you what—I used to be the biggest junkie in the city, but this love stuff is just as powerful as heroin.”

  Afterward, we all go out for dinner—“fellowshipping” is what everyone calls it. We eat at an authentic Mexican place I love, where Carlos speaks Spanish with the owners. Then Carlos and I get to talking about how we both did stints in San Diego. It’s about the only thing I feel I have in common with him at first, but he’s got charisma, a presence that lights up everyone around him. After dinner he hands me a laminated prayer card with the image of a radiant heart, the words La Luz del Mundo inscribed beneath.

  Carlos and I exchange numbers, and then one afternoon in November we take the subway down to his new apartment in Ditmas Park, where I help him move a heavy dresser.

  On the train, he shows me a yoga book he’s been reading, with diagrams of the chakra systems.

  “Wait, I thought you were Catholic?” I say.

  “What made you think that?”

  “The prayer card you gave me at dinner. La Luz del Mundo.”

  “Just something I picked up,” he says, then points to the lower chakras on the diagram. “This is the place I lived from as a young person. I was ruled by my animal instinct, my insatiable appetites. In Hindu terms it meant I was unevolved, that I needed to progress upward. That’s what recovery’s been all about for me, living more from my heart. With this Russian woman, I know I’m still halfway stuck down in the lower chakras, but I have faith. I know I’m moving forward, upward.”

  I tell him about my Moby-Dick obsession, about how the chakra system reminds me of the Nekyia—this idea that all spiritual development begins with a necessary descent to the lower regions.

  Carlos likes this idea. “I think the whole world’s going through that right now,” he says. “Look what’s happening over in Afghanistan, Iraq. Or right here in this country. The way we act—the way we treat the planet—we’re like a nation of addicts.”

  THE TAPROOT

  The next Wednesday, a middle-aged man named Henry tells his story. He grew up in the South with an alcoholic father and a long-suffering mother. When Henry came out as gay, his father kicked him out of the house. He moved to New York, where, in his twenties, he got heavily into the party scene.

  Henry is a tall man, with close-cropped graying hair and a ruggedly handsome but kind face. Unlike some other guys in the group, he doesn’t relish telling his “war stories.” Just bringing them up seems to cause him pain, and this gives him an air of authenticity, wisdom.

  “Suffice it to say,” he tells us, “I went down into some really dark places. That’s where I spent my time, down in the dungeons.”

  He leaves it at that, making me wonder if he’s talking about real or metaphorical dungeons.

  “I was completely unhappy with my life, basically getting nowhere in my career. But, at the time, I didn’t see any connection between my extracurricular activities and my work.”

  He goes on to explain that through recovery, he came to find God, which he envisions not as a supernatural being, but as “Good Orderly Direction.”

  “And thanks to that direction,” he says, “I’ve finally been able to put down all my preoccupations with romantic intrigue, sex. I’ve been thinking a lot about this word, preoccupation. It’s all the things distracting you from your occupation, your true calling. Instead of chasing the next hit, I turned inward, and by doing so attracted more of what I wanted in my life and my career. This past year has been the most prosperous of my life.”

  I rush up to talk with him afterward, tell him how much I appreciate his share. After we exchange numbers, I give him a hug—in this meeting hugs are like handshakes—but notice it seems to cause him pain, not because he’s cold, but because maybe it triggers him a little.

  A few nights later I call him. I tell him how much pain I’m in over Karissa—over this recurring pattern in my life. And how this pattern has seeped into my work life and I can’t seem to break away.

  “If I’ve learned anything in this program,” he says, “it’s to trust pain when it arises. Addiction is all about running from pain, or trying to substitute pain with some other substance or person or behavior. So trust the pain. Pain is the taproot from which all healing arises.”

  I’ve never heard this word before, taproot. After hanging up I find my dictionary: a straight tapering root growing vertically downward and forming the center from which subsidiary rootlets spring.

  GOOD FRIDAY

  The second or third time I surf Rockaway with Asa, we drive over to the Lower East Side to pick up his friend Maria. There’s something exhilarating about rolling with a truck full of surfboards through this storied Manhattan neighborhood, with its narrow streets, brick tenements turned condos, bodegas and upscale ethnic restaurants. Maria has lived here for something like fifteen years, in a rent-controlled apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. The bathroom used to be out in the hall, until she broke through a brick wall with a sledgehammer, creating a grotto-like passageway from her bedroom to the toilet. She’s an artist and a surfer girl, six feet tall with dirty-blond hair and nice skin. Listens to reggae on vinyl, but has long since given up any substances in exchange for a higher power.

  Rockaway’s flat—no waves at all—so the three of us lounge on the boardwalk and talk. Like Sadie, Maria works as a teacher. She spends half her summer vacation in her family’s Vermont cabin, the other half surfing. When I tell her about my history with teaching, she mentions a potential job opening at the private Quaker school where she works, a position she thinks might be good for me.

  Maria and I become surf buddies. Weekends we venture out to Long Beach or a spot called Gilgo, and then always get lost on the drive home, wandering around in the dense tangle of highways and overpasses in interurban Long Island.

  Months later, Maria emails me with the official job listing for the school’s community service director position. Attiq warns me again about trying to change my outer circumstances, but I fantasize that working at a Quaker school, with its focus on inner silence and social action, might restore a sense of meaning to my life.

  In other words, it might help me claw my way out of the Pit.

  Along with my résumé, I send in a children’s book I’d published about community service. Maybe for this reason, my application rises to the top of the two-hundred-résumé-high pile. The first interview goes very well, maybe as a result of the breathing exercises I do beforehand, or my phone call to Henry, who tells me, in his self-possessed voice, that I should lead with my feelings.

  “Just after they ask you the initial interview question,” he says, “take a minute to first tell them how you’re feeling about the job, why you’re excited about it. Look them all in the eye. Then you can proceed with your regular response.”

  So I do this—I look all six or seven panelists directly in the eye, tell them all how excited I am by the idea of
working at their school, how grateful I am they called me in.

  And I totally nail the interview.

  Afterward I meet up with Carlos at Veselka, a Ukrainian diner in the East Village, where he buys me a celebratory slice of apple pie.

  “You did good,” he tells me. “You made some phone calls before the interview, you did some breathing, you took care of yourself. It’s all about small steps toward change.”

  Two days later I receive an email informing me that I’ve been chosen for a final interview, that they’ve narrowed it down to me and one other applicant. They ask me to spend an entire day at the school, where I can sit in on classes, meet students and faculty members, and have several more interviews, including a final meeting with the headmaster.

  I don’t have any spare vacation time, so I have to call in sick the day of the big interview, on Good Friday. On the Thursday beforehand, I schedule a massage and do everything I can to relax. Unfortunately, my bedroom faces a small basement recording studio operated by a shady guy from New Jersey, who brings in a bunch of unpromising indie and punk bands from across the river. One group plays the same shoegazer ballad, over and over, every night for two months. I wear rifle-range mufflers over silicon earplugs, but the repetitive bass lines and formulaic post punk drumbeats literally shake my bed. I had to pound on their door a bunch of times, ask them to shut it down, until finally I got the owner to agree to a 10:00 p.m. moratorium.

  When I walk by the night before my big interview, there’s a band playing in the studio, so I poke my head in, explain my situation—that I have an important job interview the next day, and I’d appreciate if they could stop playing a little early, at, say, 9:30. They look to be eighteen or nineteen, tops. One of them, curiously, has a poorly executed tattoo of the Quaker Oats man on his upper bicep. They grudgingly agree to quit early.

  But when I go to bed at 9:45, they’re still playing. I lie there with my earplugs in and a pillow over my head, praying they’ll stop.

  I drift into sleep, until a cymbal crash kicks me awake. I look at the clock: 10:45.

  The last thing I want is to get dressed, go downstairs, and confront them, because I know then I’ll never get back to sleep. But when they’re still playing at 11:00, I don’t really have a choice.

  It takes a solid few minutes of pounding on the metal roll-down door before they hear me, put down their instruments.

  The Quaker tattoo kid opens the door.

  “What the fuck?” he says. “You just ruined our track.”

  “I asked you guys nicely,” I say. “It’s now 11:00 p.m. I have the most important job interview of my life in the morning. I’m sorry I ruined your track, but unless you want to ruin my entire life, please quit playing, right fucking now.”

  They all glance at each other, smirking, still wondering who this square is that crashed their session.

  I go back upstairs, get into bed.

  The music begins again.

  In my head: I put on a pair of jeans but no shirt, storm downstairs, bash down the door, sock the Quaker kid square in the face, kick a hole in the bass drum, crash the cymbals over, swinging and thrashing, taking on all three little fucks at the same time, a feral display of my not-dead-yet punk-rock roots.

  I imagine myself at the interview the next morning, trying to explain a black eye and bloody knuckles to a bunch of Quakers.

  The other option is to call the police, but I know this will involve several hours of conversations, reports. And my guess is they’ll finish playing once they lay down the track I’ve just interrupted.

  The studio finally goes quiet at 12:15. By this point, though, I’m so full of rage I can’t sleep.

  Around 1:30 a.m., rage morphs into anxiety.

  I try breathing exercises, seated meditation, counting backward from five hundred, but nothing works. By 3:30, I feel panicked, drifting around in this hazy sea of non sleep, wondering how I’ll get through a daylong interview without any rest.

  At 5:00, garbage trucks circle the neighborhood.

  I finally fall asleep at 6:05 a.m.

  Ten minutes before my alarm goes off.

  An hour later, in the subway, I recall the way so many commuters had ashen crosses smeared on their foreheads two days earlier, on Ash Wednesday. This seems appropriate now—after a sleepless night, I feel like walking death, hot ash blowing through my veins.

  I sleepwalk through the Quaker school, which itself is a kind of fantastic maze—all these hidden passageways and stairwells leading to computer labs filled with sparkling white Macs, a huge art room with a skylight, rooftop basketball courts, a private yoga studio, and a library filled with reading nooks, all of it like something from The Royal Tenenbaums. Semi-invisible workers in school uniforms cater our interviews with fresh fruit, water crackers and Brie, bottled mineral water.

  When Maria and I meet for lunch in the cafeteria, I ask her about this.

  “It’s not really catering,” she tells me. “It’s just cafeteria workers bringing food up for meetings.”

  “That’s pretty much the definition of catering,” I say, taking a bite of a freshly tossed garden salad. “The cafeteria at my high school served mainly microwave burritos. And the lunch ladies sure as hell didn’t deliver.”

  Maria laughs. “Considering Susan Sarandon’s kids go here, I guess it’s not such a surprise.”

  It’s good to see her, to have a break in the never-ending onslaught of interview questions. Despite how tired I feel, she tells me I look great.

  But things decline steadily from this point. In a fourth-period history class, I feel shredded with exhaustion, as if my bloodstream is coursing with sewing needles and heavy sedatives.

  Just before the final interview with the headmaster, I find myself starting to tremble again, like I did the first time I tried to leave my job, so I step out into the park and make an emergency call to my therapist.

  “I think I might reschedule,” I say. “I’m sure I can come back and meet the headmaster next week.”

  The phone goes silent while he considers this idea.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” he says. “You’ve made it this far. You just need to marshal all your resources,” he says, this being advice he gives me often, the marshaling of all my resources, “and go back in there. I really think you’ll do just fine. In fact, I know it.”

  Taking his advice, I go back in and meet with the headmaster—a smartly dressed, balding man with a patrician southern accent. But despite my most intense efforts, I can’t do it, can’t marshal my resources. Instead, my resources, still enraged about getting no sleep at all, organize a mutiny against me. They hold me captive, lash my powers of locution to the mainmast, so that I can’t seem to answer even the most basic questions.

  I devolve into a blubbering, stuttering mess.

  Hearing that I can hardly form a sentence, the headmaster lobs me a softball inquiry, asks how I found out about the position.

  I tell him I know Maria.

  “We’re surfin’ buddies,” I say, my old California accent slipping out here, lazily dropping the g off surfing—a word that should never, ever be mentioned during a job interview anywhere in the borough of Manhattan.

  The headmaster looks entirely perplexed. He remains cordial and tries to help me limp through his final questions. But judging by his expression, he’s wondering how I made it this far in the interview process, or what the hell I’m even doing in his office. Or maybe this is a practical joke, and I’m just some wily tenth-grader posing as the interviewee.

  I drag myself home, collapse into coma-sleep. The next day, thankfully, is a Saturday, so I drive out to Long Island to visit Kyle Grodin.

  By myself on the Long Island Expressway, I fly into a rage, slam my fist into the steering wheel, over and over, inadvertently blasting the horn.

  The other motorists give me a wide berth.

  It feels good to get it all out. To get myself out of the city.

  I’m in pretty bad shape by the time
I arrive, but Kyle seems to be doing great. He’s in unusually good spirits, and when I offer him a sugar-free, natural fruit juice–sweetened cookie that I’ve brought him from the city, he turns it over and reads the ingredients, something I’ve never seen him do.

  “There’s no refined sugar,” I tell him. “But they taste great.”

  “It’s not the sugar I’m worried about,” he says. “This thing has like three hundred calories.”

  It takes me a minute to register: I’ve just witnessed Kyle fucking Grodin not only hesitate before eating a baked good, but actually engage in calorie counting.

  He explains that he and Anka went to the doctor, where they found his blood pressure and cholesterol astronomically high for someone in his midthirties.

  “Dude, I could’ve told you that,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, they said I need to change my eating habits or I’m headed straight for heart attack city.”

  He leads me to the refrigerator, shows me the spoils of a recent shopping spree at the health food store—drawers of fresh produce, low-fat milk, tofu, and tempeh. He opens the cupboards, where all the boxes of sugared cereal and cookies have been replaced with granola and rice patties.

  I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

  Kyle stands there grinning.

  “Holy shit, Grodin,” I say. “This is maybe the most dramatic reversal of character I’ve ever witnessed.”

  The next morning, Easter Sunday, Kyle wakes me up early. Another reversal: usually I’m the one to wake him up, sometimes well past noon, after I’ve already gone jogging or surfing or both. But Kyle’s feeling great—a result of his new diet—plus he checked the surf report and the waves look good.

  Down at Ditch Plains, mist shrouds the ocean’s surface, obscuring the horizon and the surrounding sea cliffs. A handful of locals in the water, their figures veiled in fog. The night before, Kyle donated his old four-millimeter wetsuit to my surfing cause. Standing now on cold sand, I slip into the oversized suit, then follow him down to the break. Clean, mid size waves, a mild offshore breeze scooping them out, holding up their spoon-shaped faces. I’ve never surfed this early in the spring, and without booties my feet go numb. Ignoring the pain, I stay out for a solid hour, catching wave after wave as the sun evaporates the fog, impressing myself, even impressing Kyle—just slightly.