I had locked myself away from the rest of the world in Riley’s name. Speck had been great—salty, tender, insightful. We could have been happy, had I let her in. Shannon had been jealous and paranoid and insecure . . . but maybe she wouldn’t have been had I not been writing songs for Riley during every waking moment, even mumbling her name in my sleep. And Allison . . . God, I had a real woman, a real person, real love waiting for me patiently at home. She deserved better than me at my best. She certainly didn’t deserve this.
I went into the bathroom of the country store. The stack of Polaroids felt heavy in my pocket, like a folded flick knife with blood on the blade. I sat on the toilet and took the pictures out.
I hadn’t wanted pictures. I didn’t want a single one. I wanted Riley as she had been, not as she was now. Too late, I realized I had loved her absence, not her presence. But the Polaroids were repellent to me not because I wanted to continue my worship of Riley’s ghost but because they were concrete proof of my weakness. In my infidelity, it had finally become clear: I loved Allison, Allison in my head and Allison in the flesh, her and only her. I was free of Riley forever. And all I had to do to win my freedom was betray the one woman I loved, the woman who truly loved me.
I forced myself to take in each and every picture. Grainy, out of focus, Riley’s speckled flesh harsh white in the flash, our genitals red and inflamed, all else in dark shadow like child pornography or a snuff film. Still, I felt sick desire growing in me. I threw the pictures on the floor. I put my head between my legs and cried.
I could never tell Allison about this. I could never tell anyone. I would just have to hold in my heart the knowledge that I had done a horrible, horrible thing. God, to do something like this sober . . . it proved that you had evil in your heart.
I collected the Polaroids from the floor, tore them up, and dumped them in the trash. Then I walked out to wait for my sister.
Walking home after work at Luxx one night, I thought again of my father and the neglected acoustic guitar in its case under his bed: the strings slowly tarnishing, then rusting, as he didn’t learn to play and didn’t learn to play and didn’t learn to play. One day, the rust would eat all the way through. Those strings would finally break.
When I was a small child, I told my mother I wanted to be “a wandering minstrel,” just traveling town to town, playing my songs. Other dreams had moved me temporarily over the years, but that dream had never left. I had moved to New York to naively chase my dreams of being a musician and a writer and putting some kind of mark on the world. I had wanted a big, rambling, rambunctious life, but my life here in New York had been more circumscribed than anywhere else.
I decided to buy a van, put all my shit in storage, abandon my loving girlfriend, and hit the road, touring the country nonstop for a year. I felt sure the road would transform me. My fearlessness and devotion would win me a deal with a small label and a small (okay, medium-sized) advance. Of course I would drink—it would be impossible to do without drinking—but that was incidental. With the advance from the record label, I could buy an RV, and Allison would join me, singing backup, playing Wurlitzer and harmonica. I could almost see her, curled up in a sunlit corner of the tiny breakfast nook, playing one of the harmonicas I’d bought her, working her way through another song.
A year later, I came back to New York, broke, unemployed, and exhausted, with nothing to show for my efforts. I’d gotten discouraged trying to book shows, then fallen behind schedule, then found myself just begging my way onto bills on the night of a show, lucky to sell one CD or cadge a few free drinks for my troubles. Sure, I had padded my press kit, but there was still no one at the shows. Yes, In Music We Trust, a record label in Portland had expressed interest in hearing a full-length album, but “record label interest” and two bucks will only get you a slice of pizza. I moved in with Allison and only made my first month’s rent because my van got hit by a drunk driver, a young princess in a colossal, gleaming white boat of an SUV, who gaily wrote me a big check and asked for a signed copy of my CD.
Eben, my old boss from Luxx, got me a job as a night manager at the legendary music venue The Knitting Factory. I saved every penny I could, borrowed money from my uncle, and diligently set about making the record I was sure would rescue me from obscurity.
But the man I’d become on the road—depressed, resentful, self-obsessed, leering at women, convinced both that he was utterly worthless and that the dimwitted world had ungraciously failed to recognize his genius, eager to do any depraved thing to escape the eternal present of the drunk—well, he was unwilling to retreat back into the darkness from whence he’d come. I thought up a name for this asshole: Narsissyphus, from Narcissus, the legendary hunter so enamored of his own image that he starved to death staring at his reflection in a pool, and Sisyphus, the hubristic king damned to roll a huge boulder to the top of a steep hill in Hades, only to have the stone tumble back just before he reached the summit, forcing him to begin anew, over and over again for all eternity. Narsissyphus incorporated the worst of both characters: he was a man erotically transfixed by his own repeated, myopic failures. Probably not someone you want as a roommate, let alone boyfriend.
I went out on a ten-day tour and drunkenly cheated on Allison. That first night back, I felt physically sick with guilt. Allison knew something was up. I have always been horrible at concealing the truth.
It was late, and I was exhausted, so we just ate and called it a night. We got into bed and turned out the light, trying to ignore the silence hulking between us. We lay there for a moment in the dark. I could almost see my infidelity, writhing obscenely above us in the night. It was okay, though. We were just going to fall asleep. When we woke up, it would be gone. I would never do it again, and we could go on with our life together.
“Did . . . did you cheat on me?” Allison said, her voice trembling out of the darkness.
Allison loved me, and I loved her. I knew that she didn’t want to believe that I had betrayed her. I knew that I could lie to her face, that I could tell her, no, I hadn’t, and how could she think that? I knew I could manipulate her, that I could partly force her and partly trick her into believing that something she knew to be true was a lie. And I knew that to make her believe a lie would be an evil thing to do to someone you loved.
“Yes,” I said, “and I’m so sorry.”
I’d never said a word to Allie about Riley, and it had eaten at me. Coming clean about this was the right thing to do, one lonely right thing in the sea of wrong things I’d done. And that small right thing was our undoing.
That spring, the people I loved the most in the world had my dream come true for them without me: the band Allison played in with my best friend James—my ex-band!—signed to a major label. They were at practice; they were in the studio; they were on tour. Allison had little time for our music and less time for me.
The Knitting Factory hadn’t totally fired me, but I had been demoted from night manager to security, then found myself having to beg just to get on the schedule. My record—mostly love songs I had written to Allison while on the road—had stalled.
I felt like I had fallen down a well, a well so deep it led to hell. What was worse, I could see a tiny circle of sky and hear the sounds of the living world. I saw Allison for a couple of hours each week—I could smell her delicate blond hair; I was even infrequently allowed to touch her translucent skin—but she wasn’t there. We had sworn we were going to live together, die together, forever and ever! And now Allison had disappeared, like Speck had disappeared, like Riley had disappeared.
No, that’s not right. Allison was playing shows, going on tour, doing photo shoots with my best friend James, who I never heard from anymore. Allison was right there in front of me, bolder and brighter than she’d ever been. It was me who was disappearing. I could see it in her face: each day I was a little meeker, a little smaller, a little feebler, until one day I would disappear altogether, and she would finally be free to go on with the rest of
her life. Chilling as it must be to watch someone die, it must be more chilling to watch yourself die in her eyes.
Allison and I split. And “split” is the right word. I felt like a Siamese twin torn from its other half. In the middle of the night, I packed up my stuff and moved onto a friend’s broken futon in Greenpoint.
I struggled to keep it together. Eben got me another job at a new club on Ludlow Street named Pianos. I started playing bass in a band called Beat the Devil. I went deep into credit card debt to finish my solo record.
I slept with the singer in Beat the Devil, and the band careened out of control. I got into a drunken argument with the label dude from In Music We Trust, and he declined to put out the record. I got fired from Pianos. Again, I bottomed out. Again, I got sober.
I found an apartment with a random gay dude from Craig’s List named Esteban. I got a temp assignment. I felt lost and afraid, so I worked hard, as I had always done. My temp assignment turned into a lucrative but meaningless desk job, cooking the books for a crooked general contracting firm that did renovations in the Bloomingdale’s building. When I had paid off the credit card debt I had accrued, I offered to send some money home to my mother. But while I was frittering away my student loan money and failing as a singer/songwriter, she had been on the upswing. She’d left Paul and moved to California. Selling time-shares there had made her enough money that she even bought a condo.
I should have been happy for her. But by saving herself when I had failed to, my mother had undone my raison d’être. By apologizing, my father had robbed me of the nemesis I had been striving to best. I couldn’t be angry at him now—he called me at least three times a year! Or maybe just twice. Tatyana had made the grand gesture of naming her first child after me, but when I was on my endless tour, she’d kicked me out of her house, and we’d again stopped talking. Every time I thought of Tashina, I reminded myself that I owed her a phone call. But what I needed to say—I know that, though I swore I’d never abandon you, that’s exactly what I’ve done—was too hard, and the phone call stayed unmade. I burrowed back into alcohol.
But in short order, it wasn’t just alcohol. Long hours hunched over a tiny makeshift desk at work aggravated the fickle vertebrae I had injured when I was seventeen. A girl got me started on Vicodin, then Percocet, then Oxycontin. The painkillers did little for the pain, but the high got me through my workdays. My on-off relationship with Shilpa, the singer from Beat the Devil, had turned abusive, so Klonopin and Xanax got me through the nights when she ranted and raged, throwing bottles and mics at my head.
The anniversary of the shooting, then Christmas, then New Year’s, then my birthday came and went with no card or phone call or my email from my father. I sent him a card with $20 in it for Father’s Day, baiting him: #1 DAD! He didn’t respond. Fuck him, anyway. It had been a mistake to try again with him; it was always a mistake. Best to just cut it off clean and walk away. Trying to have a relationship with him, best-case scenario, was a sentence of life in prison without parole. Why fuck around? I’d take a good, honest execution, just get on with it and get it over with, thank you very much.
I managed to patch things up with In Music We Trust, and in the fall of 2007 How to Make a Bad Situation Worse, the record I had nearly killed myself to make, finally came out. Nothing happened. I did a national tour, only able to book shows as “the bass player from Beat the Devil.” Nothing happened. Beat the Devil broke up.
A part-time girlfriend gave me a full scrip’s worth of Opana. Those little pink pills—they looked like cherry-flavored Sweet Tarts—were a dream come true, a vastly superior way to escape myself. Opana cut up beautifully, nothing like that gravelly aspirin-and-Clorox cocaine I strained to get up my nose in bar bathrooms, no coating to scrape off like with Oxycontin. The postnasal drip even tasted good: chemical-like (which I didn’t mind) but also slightly sweet. Like Sweet’N Low.
Alcohol, by that point, only made me feel normal. It slightly lifted my spirits and cleared my mind enough that I could string a sentence together and sometimes even crack a joke. My problem wasn’t that I was drinking too much; it was that I couldn’t drink enough. Alcohol no longer made me feel good; it just made me feel not bad. But snorting Opana made me feel like those old, corny oil paintings of Jesus where he is not just bathed in light but illuminated from within. A couple of lines of that shit, and my body was bursting with love. I could perform miracles, heal with the touch of a hand.
Opana wasn’t cheap, but who cared? I was paid well, in cash, off the books. And these bills, they weren’t wages. You earned wages at a job. At a job, you learned skills, you made something, you exerted yourself, and you moved forward. I falsified documents with Wite-Out and pencils and a scanner, expended the least amount of energy possible in order to rip off our contractors—men with jobs, men who performed work, men who actually built things. My weekly payout was just a kill fee for my wasted life. When my boss put the thick envelope in my hand each Friday, I felt a base thrill mottled with shame, as if it weren’t money at all but some particularly carnal pornography, fascinating as it was repellent.
Money could never buy what I wanted: revenge, the hatred and fear of the public, Allison. So I bought what it could buy: drugs. How much do I want? Well, how much have you got?
I cut up line after line of pink powder with my work ID for the Bloomingdales building, hoovered them with rolled-up yellow Post-its I’d stolen, pointlessly, from the office, and nodded off in incredibly strange positions. Taking off my clothes and getting into bed became mutually exclusive: I either slept in my bed with my coat and shoes on or naked in the hallway.
I woke up for work in the mornings with bemused surprise: Wow. Made it through another night. More than once, I found myself shuffling to work on Monday morning wearing the same clothes I’d left in on Friday. I was on time, and my work got done, so my boss rolled with it.
I quit Opana and then published a cavalier, remorseless account of my romance with it in the New York Press. Friends I hadn’t heard from in years wrote to me, wondering if I was okay; total strangers created blank online profiles just so they could write to me to give me the number for Narcotics Anonymous. I wrote back to everyone, assuring them all that I was okay: it wasn’t something I did; it was something I had done and was now finished with.
I was invited to meet Dave Blum, the editor in chief at the New York Press. I was a good writer with interesting subject matter, he told me over dinner, and he would use me as much as he could. He had an agent he wanted me to meet, as it sounded like I had a book in me. Finally, I was a writer. I might yet do some good thing with my life. I celebrated my progress by filling another Opana scrip at the Union Square Kmart.
My aggressive apathy at work finally paid off. On the first day of spring, a Thursday, my boss let me know that Friday would be my last day. I felt anger and terror. Was I supposed to beg, to wheedle, to plead for an explanation? I laughed and said, “Okay.”
I burst through the door to my apartment that night, furiously crushed up a couple of pills of Opana, stuck my rolled-up bill in the chunky pink powder, and snorted as hard as I could. As the drug came on, I sank to the floor, overflowing with righteous fury and chemical bliss.
When I awoke from my nod, I dragged myself to a bar and went home with a girl I’d met at a show. Alone in her bathroom, I got colossally high. The next day, Friday, I showed up to work on the nod. They gave me my last envelope after lunch and sent me home early—“home” in this case being the Midtown apartment of my drug supplier. We did lines off her parents’ antique furniture, fucked on their white leather sofa. We ground up Oxy and Opana and Adderall and coke, mixed it into a huge multicolored line, then did “Lady and the Tramp,” with her starting at one end and me at the other. When we met in the middle, we collapsed laughing, naked, then high-fived. Junkies rock!
I awoke that night on the street in Brooklyn, bleeding from my forehead. When I made it to my feet, I saw a yellow cab. I raised my hand to flag it down. T
he taxi slowly became a police car, and as I slowly lowered my arm, it slowly drove past.
CHAPTER 7
The End of the End
When the housing bubble burst in early 2008, my mother’s good fortune burst with it. Her sales slowed, then died, then was let go. A year after her peak prosperity, she was on the verge of losing the home she’d only been able to buy by grinding for fifteen years after losing our family home in New Hampshire. I was still so enraged by that public degradation that I was determined to do anything in my power to prevent it happening again. I flew out to California and brought every penny I had—$10,000—to my mother so she wouldn’t lose her home. She declined the money. My life’s savings, the sum of all the wealth I had accrued in my time on the planet, wasn’t enough to save her house. God, I had failed and failed and failed.
Instead, she recruited me to sell her belongings on Craig’s List before she got kicked out, a humiliation with which I was by now intimately familiar. The last day of my visit, I was to help my mother move into a room she had rented in her friend’s house, like some delinquent teenager.
I sullenly posted ads on Craig’s List for the furniture she had bought while she was flush: a set of overstuffed arm chairs for a loving couple to read in; a red velvet love seat for the lovebirds to cuddle on while watching a movie; a bed large as an island, enveloping like a cloud, where the lovers would begin and end each day together. It had never happened for her; it would never happen. My mother and her friends, the first wives, had been conned. Each had borne and raised her man’s children on the promise of “till death do us part,” then been cast off, discarded like an old stroller, useless now that the last brat could walk and feed himself. My mother, the woman I loved more than any other, more than every other, more than any other being on the planet . . . no good man would ever love her. The good men had kept their promises and stayed married. The successful men had bought new women, women half their age. If my mother’s loneliness became too much, Mom would take a man like me: A failure. A loser. A critically flawed man-child.
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