Two weeks after I finish editing Sheehan’s introduction, some old friends from Colorado, Andy and his fiancée, Allison, come for a visit. They stay in our apartment a couple nights, during which I have another bout of serious insomnia. On a Friday, after a sleepless night, I call in sick, even though I’m scheduled to present Johnny Got His Gun during an important meeting with our sales department. Though I’d rather be out having fun in the city with old friends, I spend most of the day in bed, trying to catch up on sleep. That evening, before taking the subway to the airport for an overnight flight, Allison pulls me aside, looks me straight in my sunken eyes. She tells me that she’s worried about me, that she and Andy talked about it and they’d be happy to have me stay with them.
“We have a nice spare bedroom,” she says. “We just want our old Justin back.”
I’d like to just pack up and go home. I could probably do some adjunct teaching at the university, see a lot more of my old friends and family. But the other person I’d see is Nicole, and I’m not sure I could handle limping back to Colorado, single and broke, just in time for her wedding.
Plus, though I have a love/hate relationship with New York, the biggest sticking point is this: there’s no ocean in Colorado.
THE CASTAWAY
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths…. Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects…. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.
∼ HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
Despite his intense fear of the ocean, in 1996 David Foster Wallace went on assignment for Harper’s to take a six-day, seven-night Celebrity Cruise through the Caribbean, where he encountered sundry wonders, including a thirteen-year-old boy in a toupee and a woman in a gold lamé dress projectile-vomiting in a glass elevator. Reading the piece after Wallace’s suicide, you understand that the agoraphobia he alludes to in the essay—a fear of leaving his cabin—was real and not just a literary device. Likewise, if you’ve ever experienced agoraphobia you understand that this voyage must have caused him serious distress. It’s also telling that, in the essay, Wallace mentions a suicide that happened just a couple weeks before his own cruise, when “a sixteen-year-old male did a brody off the upper deck of the Megaship.” Wallace then ponders the cause of this suicide in a way that hits very close to home:
There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir—especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased—I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture—a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.
Then there are the shark attack statistics—as a kid Wallace kept an exhaustive mental catalog of history’s most gruesome shark attacks, including “the USS Indianapolis smorgasboard off the Philippines in 1945.” To drive home his aquaphobia, Wallace mentions how in college he wrote three different papers about the “Castaway” section of Moby-Dick, wherein the young cabin boy, Pip, jumps from a whaleboat and is left floating for an hour or more out in the open ocean. The sheer terror of bobbing in the infinite, inhuman sea cracks his mind, transforms him into a holy fool.
Based on his experience of despair, Wallace formulates a philosophical theory regarding the cruise ship experience. The Celebrity Cruise ethos is all about pampering; in his lacerating deconstruction of the Celebrity promotional brochure, he notes that the word pamper is used fifteen times. He thinks it’s no accident that pamper is also the brand name of a certain type of disposable garment for infants. His theory, then, is that the cruise ship experience is designed to give fearful, despairing people a return to the pre conscious, pre choice, and thus pre-adult-regrets womb, where all our needs are met automatically, umbillically.
After reading his essay for the fourth or fifth time, I can’t help but wonder if my obsession with the ocean and surfing is like my own attempt to crawl back into the womb, to a place where I don’t have any adult responsibilities or choices or regrets. Maybe I’m just trying to lose myself in another female presence—in this case the feminine sea, the mother ocean.
But the experience of surfing is often more like the pain of birth than the solace of the womb. There’s a lot of thrashing around, intense physical straining. The ocean holds you under and you come up gasping for air like a newborn. There’s not a lot of pampering going on during your typical session at Rockaway; even if you’re careful, it’s likely that with each paddle out you’ll instead get spanked by a wave at least once. And unlike on a cruise ship, you’re down sharing the very same water with sharks, a fact that my friend Sadie has confirmed for us all.
THE ATHEIST
A word concerning the 1945 shark massacre. This is the same massacre that the old, Ahab-like captain details in the film Jaws. This fictional captain was in the Navy; he witnessed the whole bloody, horrific scene—he tells Roy Scheider all about it just hours before Jaws swallows him whole.
My stepfather volunteers as a hospice chaplin, ministering to the sick and dying during the last few weeks of their life. If the patients are Jewish, he’ll read from the Torah; if they’re Christian, he’ll read from the Bible; if they’re atheist, he’ll read from whatever secular book they request, avoiding any talk of God. One of his most memorable patients fell squarely in the latter category. He’d grown up Catholic but was in the Navy and witnessed firsthand the 1945 USS Indianapolis tragedy. The Indianapolis was a naval cruiser that delivered parts for the Little Boy atomic bomb—which was eventually dropped on Hiroshima—to Guam. On the covert return journey through the Philippine Sea, the Indianapolis was attacked and sunk by a Japanese submarine. Of the nearly nine hundred men who went into the drink without lifeboats, only three hundred survived. Most died from dehydration and exposure, but many were killed by sharks—in fact, it’s known as one of the worst shark attacks in human history.
After witnessing this, my stepfather’s patient lost his faith in a benevolent God.
THE CITY SWELL
Forecast for Long Beach: East swell, 2–3 foot waves at 10 seconds. Winds from the south at 7 mph. Water temp 59, air temp 67. Surf: knee to waist high and fair conditions.
In May of 2005, Asa and I check out the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. Back in the late nineties I’d seen the biopic Basquiat; in one scene another painter tells Basquiat that his audience hasn’t even been born yet. Looking at three entire museum floors filled with his paintings, I get the sense of how prescient his work was back in the 1980s, how much it influenced the street art scene that’s so much in vogue in 2005, with other self-taught artists like Mark Gonzales, Swoon, and Banksy as direct descendants of Basquiat. Basquiat was just as much a DJ as an artist; he sampled and repeated words, phrases, and motifs to create something entirely new and visionary. My favorite pieces were executed on found materials—wooden fence planks, cabinets, dressers, and doors, all nailed together like scrappy altars to Grandmaster Flash, Malcolm X, Miles Davis, and Joe Louis. And as a writer, I dig the textuality of his work, the way many of his paintings read like jumbled essays or inspired, furious poems.
A few months earlier, at a Chelsea gallery show called “In Word Alone,” I’d seen another of his pieces in which he’d simply copied the table of contents of Moby-Dick across nine sheets of white paper—the titles of all 135 chapters written in
black crayon. The center page on the bottom row reads “threadbare in coat, heart, body, brain,” followed by one of Basquiat’s © symbols. There’s also a trademark sign after the phrase “Call me Ishmael.” I like this idea, that Basquiat was taking a classic work and reclaiming the copyright, making it his own. He was poking fun at Melville as a member of the mostly white literary canon, but also acknowledging his kinship—they were both highly political, anticolonialist, anti-imperialist artists. Both experienced poverty in their young adulthood; many of Basquiat’s paintings are haunted with spike-headed ghosts of slavery and destitution, or grimacing figures crowned with Byzantine halos. There’s a pervading darkness in Basquiat’s work, coupled with a grasping toward the sacred—a kind of street-smart chiaroscuro that’s reminiscent of Melville’s own nightshade vision of America.
You don’t really get a true sense of Basquiat’s paintings until you’re surrounded by them, and then both the darkness and the halo shine seep into your bloodstream, exciting and provoking you the way some jazz and hip-hop does—and for me these alternating currents hum with the noise and chaos and electric allure of New York City life. Maybe it’s for that reason, paired with the fact that it’s sunny out as we leave the museum, that Asa and I make the spontaneous decision to escape to the coast. It’s just like I imagined the first time I witnessed a surfer emerge from a West Village subway station: in New York it’s possible to see great works of art and go surfing, all in the same afternoon.
We pack up my truck and drive to Asa’s favorite surf spot at Long Beach. The water’s still wetsuit temperature, but the swells are small and clean and fun, and we’re the only ones out, trading wave after wave.
“You think you’ll ever move back to the West Coast?” I ask Asa between sets.
“Hard to say. I like New York; I like how real people are here. And where else can you take the subway to the beach? I think this is one of the best-kept secrets in the surf world. The waves are better in California, but the breaks are packed.”
“That’s part of the reason I never surfed much in San Diego,” I say. “And it’s why I still think about moving to Oregon all the time.” I’m always bringing up Oregon with Asa, telling him how much I’d like to relocate, reminiscing about our old times there.
“I lived in Portland for three years; I had a great time. But I can’t really see myself there now. That’s the thing: I try to be present with whatever place I’m in,” he says, then catches a nice left-hand peeler, working every section of it, cross-stepping up to the nose—making it all look so natural and effortless.
Forecast for North Shore Oahu: North swell 12 feet at 15 seconds. Winds from the south at 12 mph. Water temp 72, air temp 85. Surf: solid overhead and hollow; excellent conditions.
Early in the film Basquiat, the eponymous young artist has a kind of ecstatic visual hallucination in which he envisions a giant surfer superimposed above a New York City skyline, trimming backside down the face of a sun-shimmering, double-overhead wave. At the time, Basquiat is living in a cardboard box, writing “Samo” graffiti and selling street art for a couple dollars a pop. But the surfing vision indicates awareness of his imminent ascent—it’s a fairly obvious but nonetheless bitchin’ metaphor for his real-life slash across an overblown swell of 1980s art-world fame and fortune. According to the film’s creator, Julian Schnabel, the Manhattan skyline surfer was “a barometer of his [Basquiat’s] emotional state—in the beginning, optimistic, sparkling, exuberant. As things get more problematic, the sea becomes more ominous.” In the end they get severely problematic: the skyline surfer takes a harrowing wipeout just as Basquiat begins his own terminal plunge into heroin addiction.
Basquiat the man wasn’t necessarily a surfing devotee, but he visited Hawaii a handful of times, and like so many mainlanders he fantasized about moving to Oahu or Maui. Just before his fatal overdose in 1988, he chose the remote, idyllic town of Hana on Maui as a clean, quiet spot to kick heroin. Rumor has it that while in Hana he slept in a fruit stand and spent his days painting on a friend’s kitchen cabinets.1 It’s unlikely that Basquiat ever actually rode a surfboard, especially while going through the DTs. In fact, there wouldn’t be any surfing in Basquiat if it wasn’t for Schnabel, himself a painter and lifelong surfer.2 The story goes that a fledgling filmmaker came to interview Schnabel about his friendship with Basquiat, in hope of making a feature film about the deceased artist. Sensing that the filmmaker was a tourist who’d turn the nuanced story into one big art-world cliché, Schnabel snaked the cinematic wave and directed the picture himself, effectively launching a second career in film. More than a few critics complained that Basquiat the movie has a little too much Schnabel in it, that the story was remade in the artist’s own notoriously outsized image (Schnabel was once quoted as saying, “I’m the closest thing to Picasso that you’ll see in this fucking life.”) But any of Schnabel’s artistic indulgences3 are mostly made up for by his painterly sense of scene and by understated performances from one of the best casts ever: Gary Oldman,4 David Bowie,5 Jeffrey Wright, Dennis Hopper, Willem Dafoe, Parker Posey, Christopher Walken, Benecio del Toro,6 and the luminous Claire Forlani.
Critics also griped that the New York City skyline surfing imagery was at once lowbrow and heavy-handed. To his credit, Schnabel made the film on a relatively tiny budget, using the surfing footage in lieu of shooting on location in Hawaii to capture some of Basquiat’s important final days.7 And though I first saw the film circa 1997, it was the surfing imagery more than any other aspect that stayed with me over the years—in fact, I’d had my own versions of Basquiat’s surfing vision when I stepped off a few of my first subway rides into the churning center of a city that was now home. Mostly in spite of myself I imagined the surfer up there above Union Square; the idea of it gave me a sparkling sense of exhilaration and, for lack of a better word—stoke. For anyone who grew up in the West or the Midwest or anywhere small and pastoral, or even a city like San Diego, your first few days as an actual New York City resident feel a lot like the awkward, euphoric self-consciousness you get the first time you ride a wave: I’m in New York City! I’m doing this! I’m totally doing it! In the beginning I was able to focus on that ride, on the excitement of living in the big city with its infinite cultural amenities and beautiful women and subway-accessible coastline, and kept the memory of the skyline surfer and Basquiat’s inevitable wipe out deep down in my subconscious. But it doesn’t take long to realize how hard and heavy a city like New York can come crashing down on you. And so it’s strange and oddly synchronistic when, a few years later, during a weekend surf trip to Montauk—and just before pretty much the biggest symbolic bail of my own lifetime—I wind up at Julian Schnabel’s beach house in Montauk.
Forecast for Montauk: Northeast swell 5–7 feet at 13 seconds. Winds from the south at 10 mph. Water temp 64, air temp 66. Surf: clean, head-high waves from the north with offshore winds; good to excellent conditions.
On a Friday afternoon in early September 2006, just a month after my thirty-third birthday, I receive an important phone call. It’s from a nonprofit literary organization in Portland, Oregon, a place called the Independent Publishing Resource Center, and after several rounds of phone interviews, they offer me the executive director position. I tell them I need the weekend to think it over, but I’m already celebrating on the inside—Portland’s my dream city, where my stepbrother and my best friend live with their families—a place I always hoped I’d end up. I’ll be taking a serious pay cut, but it’s a rare non corporate job in the field of writing and publishing, and the cost of living in Portland is a fraction of what it is in New York. I’d taken the call on my cell phone in Paley Park; after hanging up I consider going back in and quitting my publishing job on the spot—forgoing the whole two-weeks-notice thing and instead taking those two weeks to surf out at Montauk before heading back west. I fire off a text to Dawn—Holy shit, I think I’m moving to Portland—then call my dad and tell him the good news.
I curb my G
eneration X meets Endless Summer quitting fantasy, but later that evening I do drive out to Montauk to spend the weekend at Grodin’s. A crisp fall night, a few dim stars, light traffic on the Long Island Expressway. I listen to the Rolling Stones, hammering out euphoric air-drum solos and fantasizing about my upcoming cross-country road trip.
The house is dark when I arrive—it’s past eleven and everyone’s out at the bars or already asleep. I spread my sleeping bag on the couch and switch off the lamp. As I lie there in the dark and contemplate the move, powerful waves of anxiety start roiling around in my stomach. Small at first, but soon they’re jacking up way overhead, scaring the hell out of me, threatening to swell into another tidal wave of generalized anxiety, the kind that nearly drowned me the first time I tried to leave my job. What the hell am I getting myself into? I’m in a precarious emotional state just a few months after the robbery; getting out of bed every morning is a challenge, and here I am faced with moving three thousand miles across the country, finding a place to live, surfing in a new ocean—completely reinventing my life in a notoriously rainy city. I finally have an escape route out of the Pit, but it’s cluttered with so many uncertainties. My biggest fear is that I’ll move to Portland and have some sort of meltdown, the kind requiring ambulances and those weird foamy hospital slippers and heavy rounds of pharmaceuticals. This is the beginning of a crippling cycle of regret and indecision, and my celebratory mood is quickly erased and reprogrammed with a kind of relentless binary code, my mind infected by an endless, almost computational shifting between zero and one, New York and Portland.
After a shaky night of sleep I wake to dark skies, intermittent rain, rolling thunderstorms. There’s an objective correlative–style storm brewing off the coast, very conveniently accentuating this new wave of anxiety and gloom. I text Dawn and Kessler; we agree to meet at a diner in Montauk, just up the street from the Memory Motel—the namesake of the Rolling Stones song about Annie Leibovitz.
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Page 17