by David Rakoff
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
IN NEW ENGLAND EVERYONE CALLS YOU DAVE
ARISE, YE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH
LUSH LIFE
BEFORE & AFTER SCIENCE
INCLUDING ONE CALLED HELL
LATHER, RINSE, REPEAT
HIDDEN PEOPLE
EXTRAORDINARY ALIEN
THE BEST MEDICINE
CHRISTMAS FREUD
I’LL TAKE THE LOW ROAD
WE CALL IT AUSTRALIA
BACK TO THE GARDEN
TOKYO STORY
I USED TO BANK HERE, BUT THAT
WAS LONG, LONG AGO
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
for
Simon Sutcliffe
and
Del Gordon
and
My Family
“You’re maudlin and full of self-pity. You’re magnificent.”
—Addison De Witt
IN NEW ENGLAND
EVERYONE CALLS YOU DAVE
I do not go outdoors. Not more than I have to. As far as I’m concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach.
Paradoxically, I am about to climb a mountain on Christmas Day with a man named Larry Davis. Larry has climbed Mount Monadnock in southwestern New Hampshire every day for the last five-plus years. I will join him on ascent #2,065.
The trip up to New Hampshire will involve a tiny plane from Boston. I tear my medicine cabinet apart like Billie Holliday and still only uncover one Xanax. The hiking boots the outdoor adventure magazine sent me to buy—large, ungainly potatolike things that I have been trying to break in for the past four days—cut into my feet and draw blood as if they were lined with cheese graters. I have come to hate these Timberlands with a fervor I usually reserve for people. Just think, the shoes I wouldn’t be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in.
I tell everyone about the trip, my voice singsongy with counterphobic false bravado: “Guess what idiotic thing I’m doing this Christmas!” I’m like Cloris Leachman in Kiss Me Deadly, trying to ward off her certain demise by telling the astonishingly talent-free Ralph Meeker to please, please remember her. Of course, things don’t work out terribly well for her, and the very next time we see her she is being tortured to death.
It bears mentioning here that Monadnock is not Everest. It is three thousand feet high and the most climbed mountain in the world. It’s not even a real mountain, so it would be freakish and abject in the extreme were I even to twist an ankle, to say nothing of actually dying on Monadnock. I would probably deserve it if either came to pass.
But I do not let this sway me from my worrying. I have other reasons for concern. For starters, I am only playing at reporter. I have never been sent anywhere on someone else’s dime, relying up to this point upon my relentlessly jokey, glib, runny-mouthed logorrhea and the unwarranted good graces of magazine editors who just let me make stuff up. It takes all my strength not to call my editor and tell him that the jig is finally up, that I cannot do this piece. It seems too bad that the jig has to be up so far from my home in New York with its excitement, bright lights, and major teaching hospitals. The central drama of my life is about being a fraud, alas. That’s a complete lie, really; the central drama of my life is actually about being lonely, and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play.
The connecting airline at the Boston airport has a fleet of maybe ten planes, all of them tiny, all of them serving rural New England. On the wall by the ticket window is a Season’s Greetings poster that is a collage of photos of the twenty-odd employees. They might as well be yearbook snapshots of the wrestling team of the high school I never went to. To a man and woman, they are healthy blondes in shorts and polo shirts, jostling playfully in the pictures, posed antically on a baggage carousel.
I sit, the only dark-haired person among the broad-faced butter eaters, wondering if my outdoors journalist drag—flannel shirt, jeans, most hated boots of Satan’s workshop, down jacket—is fooling anyone. Across the aisle of the waiting area sits a fourteen-year-old girl, her face a somnolent mask of misery and hatred for the parents who sit nearby. Is my fakery as apparent as her anguish? She is outfitted in the teen Goth uniform: black jeans held together with safety pins, a torn black tank top, a black shirt over that. She has a tattoo of a small blue tear at the corner of her right eye—which should prove very helpful at job interviews in ten years’ time. She could be a poster child for adolescent self-loathing, aside from the jarring fact that she is reading Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.
I break off half a Xanax and place it under my tongue, and magically, the brief flight to the town of Keene in an aluminum cigar tube of a plane is reduced to nothing more than a hazy, placid glide over snow-covered piney hills.
Although the Keene airport is not much bigger than a school cafeteria—and is of a similar, low-ceilinged, painted cinder-block style—there are no fewer than two signs that read “Attention! Any remarks regarding bombs, knives, firearms, and hijackings are taken seriously, as they are considered a federal offense.” The slightest perusal of the airfield, essentially a large parking lot filled with tiny Cessnas and the like, makes it abundantly clear that poor Keene International (I guess flights from Canada are counted) must get a lot of precisely this kind of good-natured belittling humor; the aviation equivalent of shrieking in mock horror at a four-year-old in a monster mask who shows up at your door demanding candy.
I am disheartened to learn that the place where I will be staying is a bed-and-breakfast, not a hotel. My heart sinks. That means there is probably neither television nor phone in my room. And I have very little patience for what is generally labeled “charming.” In particular Country Charm. I have an intense dislike of flowered wallpaper; ditto jam of all sorts. The former is in all-too-abundant evidence when I enter the inn, and the latter, I’m sure, lies in wait somewhere in the cheery kitchen. There is a knotty pine bar off the entrance hall with a settee with several embroidered pillows: “I’d rather be golfing.” “On the eighth day, God created golf.” “Golfers have sex in some humorous, golf-related manner,” etc. On the windowsill above, a ginger cat is bothering a stained-glass butterfly ornament as the sunlight streams through the leaded panes. It is all I can do not to cry.
The proprietress is the kind of tall, stalwart woman of a certain age that used to be called “handsome.” She is approximately nine feet tall. Her jaw is a feat of architecture, her eyes bright and resolute, her faithful dog Blue at her side. She smiles at me warmly and introduces herself as Hannah, extending a hand the size of a frying pan. “You must be Dave,” she says. (In New England everyone calls you “Dave” regardless of however many times you might introduce yourself as David. I am reminded of those fanatically religious homophobes who stand on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during Gay Pride, holding signs that say “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” I have always wanted to go up to them and say, “Well, of course not Adam and Steve. Never Adam and Steve. It’s Adam and Steven.”)
“You’re in room three,” she continues. “Why don’t you go into the dining room and have some lunch and then we’ll talk some. Come on, Old Blue Dog.” In spite of myself, I am charmed. She puts on a dark green slicker and knee-high Wellingtons and is out the door, presumably to chop the ice off the pond, deliver a calf, or raise a barn.
I eat a club sandwich and drink some coffee to try to eradicate my Xanax buzz. I’m trying to appear legitimate, masculine, adult. Like I deserve to be there. Somehow it comes up that the waitress is going to Katmandu for the Peace Corps the following spring.
“Nepal. Golly,” I hear myself say. (Who says “golly”? I think to
myself. I’ll tell you who. Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story and aging chorus boys in bellhop uniforms, walking through hotel lobbies with huge boxes of flowers.)
Larry Davis stops by the inn. I introduce myself and shake his hand in a hearty “hail fellow well met” manner. In return he gives me dispensation to climb the next day in my twenty-dollar plastic Payless shoes. I realize I have done almost no research for this trip, so I walk into downtown Jaffrey to check things out. This seems to me to smack of journalistic realness, a kind of topography-as-destiny-New-Journalism-Joan-Didion opening, perhaps. Perhaps I should do the WPA thing, go among the folks and observe their authentic and simple ways. Or maybe I’ll try on a William Holden/Gregory Peck Paladin of the First Amendment type—all about the People’s Right to Know—cracking open the festering lies of the town, controlled as it is by the despotic factory owner with the beautiful, virtuous daughter. “Things were fine in this town before that writer showed up!”
I am, as always, overwhelmed with movie fantasies. I think of that old standby, the star buildup where the camera wends its way through a crowded ballroom as the collectively murmured “Where is the Contessa?” plays on the lips of all assembled. Finally the camera stops on a woman, facing the other way, her creamy nape and lush hair. “Contessa,” someone says. She turns around—it’s Her!—her first close-up. “Yes?” she answers, unmindful of her own compelling presence. Or the boy version, where our hero walks into town and the whispered buzz of intrigue thrills through the passersby. Lace curtains are discreetly pulled away from windows, and everyone wonders, “Who is the stranger?”
But it is Christmas Eve day as I walk into Jaffrey, and there is no one around to question my presence in their midst. I pass by All in Good Taste Gifts, Roy’s Bike Shop, and the Jaffrey Bible House, which sells Christian gifts and, perplexingly, “supplies.” The town is boarded up and deserted. I turn around and start to walk the two miles back to the inn.
Jaffrey is astonishingly pretty, particularly in the dusky Magic Hour of Christmas Eve. All clapboard houses nestled against snowy hillocks. I am taking notes by speaking into a little tape recorder. Perhaps that is what attracts attention. Or perhaps it is that there is not another living creature out at five P.M. on Christmas Eve, because a car passes and immediately circles back. The driver rolls down his window and asks me if I want a lift. I don’t, but, How nice, I think. He drives on.
I am charmed by the congeniality of this interchange; how friendly, how uncreepy. I speak too soon. He circles back. He hands me a rectangular package in tartan wrapping paper. “Take this. It’s the most watched video in the world,” he says. (This man is giving me a copy of Forrest Gump?) “It’s the life of Jesus.” I beg off politely, claiming Hebraic immunity. He drives on. I make note of a copse of trees to my right. I will run and hide there until nightfall if he circles back a third time.
Here’s an interrupting thought: If your therapist calls to reschedule your appointment—as mine just this moment did as I finished writing the above—and you make him laugh (as always), and if, in wrapping up, you say, “Well, I’ll see you on Wednesday at twelve-thirty, then,” and he responds, “I’m looking forward to it,” is that bad?
I return to the inn, now wreathed in the kind of Christmas-in-New-England-Warm-Hearthed-Cheery verisimilitude that Ralph Lauren would burn down a synagogue to achieve. Nat King Cole’s Christmas album plays at tooth-loosening decibels. I go upstairs and continue reading the new Truman Capote biography. I’m just at the point where Capote has started to dismantle his prodigious talent in favor of devoting his life to the two most completely nongenerative things in this world: gossip and the company of the too rich and too thin. Socialite Nan Kempner is quoted, apropos of God knows what: “I’ve painted my bathroom pink, because it helps in the morning not to have a white bathroom. Try painting your bathroom pink. It’s amazing what it does to your skin tone. Don’t do anything tomorrow that you can do today. Rush and get pink paint. It’ll change your life.” Oh, Nan, how true! I shan’t put off things till tomorrow. I think wistfully of my own off-white bathroom far, far away, as my reflection gradually takes shape in the glass of the darkening windows of my phoneless, TV-less room.
The inn starts to fill up with families and couples who have come for Christmas Eve dinner. Alone and awash in unkind thoughts about Christmas and the countryside as I am, I stay out of sight for the most part. I can hear general revelry and prandial merriment coming from the dining room.
I go directly into the Bar of Golf Pillows. Hannah is there with a couple (“Merry Christmas, Dave”), as is a retired airline pilot who sits at the bar enjoying a decidedly un–New England cocktail with an orange slice, maraschino cherry, and pineapple spear crowding the glass. The bartender is a woman in a sweater knit with a portrait of a nuclear family of snowpeople. The wife of the couple also wears a sweater knit with a smiling, holly-festooned teddy bear. The husband presents Hannah with a very well rendered framed watercolor of a largemouth bass. It’s really good, and I say so. “Well, we’ll put it here to keep you company,” says Hannah, propping up the frame on the barstool next to mine. I make sure to look at it attentively, my face frozen into the Art Appreciation rictus, until Hannah and the couple go into the dining room. Uncricking my neck, I order a steak and a red wine.
“Are you the Writer?” the bartender asks me.
The Writer. Finally. Despite the fact, or precisely because this is just what I wanted, I reply, my voice far too bright, “Oh God, no. I’m a complete idiot.”
She doesn’t entirely know how to take this. She gives me the careful half smile one levels at a very large, possibly erratic dog.
The pilot is the anti-me. A man so utterly comfortable with himself that he can drink a cocktail with no fewer than three different pieces of fruit in it and still seem the very picture of adulthood. He talks a while about fixing up houses. It’s what he does in his retirement. Most pilots, he tells us, die within two years of retirement, it’s such a comedown after all that barreling through the ether at hundreds of miles an hour. His voice is velvet soft and Atticus Finch authoritative, but there’s a sad whiff of mortality—a smell of old leaves underneath everything he speaks of: the solitude of retirement, the nomadic life of the career renovator, the trial and test of faith that is building a butcher block island with sink, work area, and recessed halogen light fixtures. It’s a bit like watching This Old House hosted by Baudelaire.
He leaves fairly early in the evening. I hope he has somewhere to go. Then again, I think, I don’t have anywhere to go, why am I so concerned with the imagined loneliness of a total stranger? Then again again, I actually am somewhere. I am sitting in a bar of a New England inn on Christmas Eve. I am the Writer, eating a steak, drinking alone, talking to the bartender. And even though I loathe animals, I lazily toss bits of popcorn to Blue as he sits at the foot of my barstool.
It’s just me and the bartender and my faithful dawg. Plus my date the largemouth bass, whom I’ve been ignoring. I fairly drip with authenticity now. I have let go of my paranoia. I feel completely comfortable. So comfortable, in fact that, inexplicably, I find myself asking the bartender if there’s either a synagogue or a gay bar in Jaffrey. I clearly feel the need to out myself to her in every possible way. Why stop there, I wonder, and not just go ahead and ask if there’s a Canadian consulate nearby?
She keeps refilling my wineglass as we talk. She cuts me an enormous piece of baklava. More popcorn for the dog. I have a mountain to climb in the morning, dammit.
My reverie is undone by the strange series of glottal kecks and surds coming from below. I look down to Blue, whose neck is arching forward and back in an ominously regular, reverse peristaltic fashion. I find the words, as my voice Dopplers up to a fairly effeminate and vaguely hysterical pitch: “I think this dog might be getting sick. . . . This dog is getting sick. The dogissick. . . . OHMIGODTHEDOGISSICK!!!”
Blue vomits out a small, viscous puddle for which, from my quick and quea
sy perusal, I am largely responsible. The bartender cleans it up without a second glance. Thoroughly unmasked, I settle up for dinner and take myself upstairs to sleep. And to all a good night.
The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone. Talking to someone is not always a bad thing—a great deal of viable human contact demands it—but if, for example, one were getting ready to climb a mountain of a drizzly, gray Christmas morning, with a fine mist of freezing rain falling, and no one has really either set up a breakfast table or made it clear where the cups were stored, conversation might not be at the forefront of one’s mind. Rather, conversation that doesn’t begin with the amusing gambit “Where’s the fucking coffee?” might not be at the forefront of one’s mind.
There are two women, mother and daughter, seated at the only table that has any semblance of being set. There is also an older fellow in a flannel shirt with suspenders. His hair is as white as the china. If he is related to the mother and daughter, it is not by blood. More likely he’s a peripheral member of their group, someone else’s father-in-law, because his ceaseless joking would not be tolerated by someone who knew him better. (And it is ceaseless. Moreover, it’s the kind of joking that stops all conversation stone cold dead: “Good morning.” “Now, are you sure about that? That it’s a good morning? Maybe it’s only a fair morning.” His eyes dancing with what he clearly thinks is merry, elfin delight. After a slight pause, and a small, diplomatic smile, the mother says, “Oh, now. You’re just a joker, aren’t you?” like a weary waitress being relentlessly flirted with by a mildly annoying, but ultimately paying, customer.)
The mother is in her mid- to late forties. It is evident even now that she was once Beauty Pageant beautiful and is not unattractive now, but a mild Parkinsonian shuddering has rendered her tremulous and self-conscious. Her daughter is twenty and, to give her her due, well spoken and quite cute—her pores are tiny—but she is intoxicated by her own allure. And, unlike her mother, she doesn’t have the bone structure to carry off that whole Mitford girl thing she has going on: all high spirits, pluck, and verbiage. When she hears what I’m about to do, she says, “Why, I was in a bar in St. Albans, Vermont, just the other night, and the subject of the Man Who Climbs the Mountain Every Day came up. All the way up in St. Albans. Imagine that.” She says “bar in St. Albans, Vermont,” as if she were saying “Les Deux Magots.”