The only title I recognized was his most famous book, On the Road. I almost didn’t buy it because of the cover illustration: a pouty watercolor sketch of an Ann-Margret look-alike with a bare midriff and a bubble hairdo posing, all sultry, in front of a series of smaller pencil drawings of guys with slicked-back hair in short-sleeved shirts playing trumpets. Jazz trumpets sounded like mosquito music to me. Those cover graphics looked wrong, like illustrations from a spread in TV Guide. And the people in them didn’t resemble anyone I would want to know, let alone be.
But for some reason, I took a chance and bought that book and Dharma Bums anyway. And once I got into them, I found a window into a way of being that had never occurred to me before: madness.
“The only people for me are the mad ones,” Kerouac wrote, doing for the word “mad” what Holden Caulfield had done for “goddam.” “The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars!”
There it was. The missing integer: a wired, crazy energy that would cause me to live every moment at a higher frequency. I had been sleepwalking through life, a follower, a sheep. But now I could see that it was madness that would set me apart. It was madness that would wake up Bob and make him take notice.
“Here’s to the crazy ones,” Kerouac wrote. “The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers … The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo … Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Perfect. This was so exactly a description of the new me: one of those people who never said a commonplace thing and was crazy enough to change the world. There was no way Bob would be able to resist an amazing maniac like me whose melodic laugh was “a triumphant call to the demon god.” In fact, Bob might have to get in line. Plenty of artsy souls who were younger, hipper, and a lot cuter than Jack Kerouac’s old-guy author’s photo would probably want to be with me, too. I would be their inspiration, their muse. Though, of course, I would be an artist, too. I would put on my leather jewelry and my thrift store wide-brimmed hat and go burn burn burning like Roman spiders across the stars.
Having arrived at a plan, I felt I needed to get it all done instantly.
“ ‘Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there,’ ” I underlined in my copy of On the Road. “ ‘Where we going, man?’ ‘I don’t know but we gotta go.’ ”
I was ready. Well, almost ready, since I couldn’t apply for my driver’s license for another year. It was not going to be as easy to go screaming into the night without access to a car. It was also not going to be as easy to do something else that was clearly essential for my new identity: hit the bars. But dammit, that wouldn’t hold back a mad genius like me! Especially now that I knew that what I had to do to join my artistic destiny was get roaring drunk. And not half-assed, like the time I siphoned off some of my father’s Cutty Sark. No, I was planning on full-out “barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, and running—that’s the way to live” drunk. I would reach “the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows … where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiances shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven.”
Okay, maybe I had no idea what any of that actually meant. But as long as I didn’t have to take a test on it or listen to any jazz trumpeters in short-sleeved shirts play mosquito music during it, I could see no reason why it wouldn’t all work out perfectly.
Getting mad roaring drunk was my main priority that night when Debby and I took off on our crazy mad bikes to attend an amazing maniac genius party at the empty house of someone whose parents were said to be out of town. Since I was already Sal Paradise, Debby had to be Dean Moriarty, but without the penchant for stealing cars or making love to two different real gone women in hotel rooms on different sides of town at the same time. (At least we definitely knew how to sit on the bed cross-legged facing each other, to “communicate with absolute honesty and absolute completeness everything on our minds” like Sal did with someone or other.)
Most important of all: Bob was supposed to be at this party. Beautiful mad genius holy man Bob with his Brian Jones haircut and his inconceivable radiances. Would he actually talk to me like he remembered that we had made out? Would he be awake enough to join me in some spitting, jumping, and running?
This time I wouldn’t allow him to lie on the floor facedown and fall asleep. I would demand to know what he wanted out of life, the way Sal Paradise used to ask his gonest girls, while also refusing, for their own good, to let them yawn.
The party seemed to be hosted by a boy named Melvin, who didn’t actually live in the house in which it was being held. He was rumored to be half Native American, sending his holy madman ratings into the stratosphere. How he came to have access to this house that belonged to someone else’s parents, I didn’t know and didn’t care.
Not much was going on when I arrived. It didn’t even look like anyone knew there was going to be a party in this standard-issue lower-middle-class living room full of unexceptional furniture. The kids I knew were all standing around in the kitchen, but there was nothing to eat or drink until everyone chipped in whatever money they had to give to Melvin to give to a guy he knew who hung out in front of a liquor store. That guy would definitely buy us whatever kind of alcohol we wanted. How gone amazing maniac madman was that?
I wasn’t present at the sacred moment of the beverage purchase, but I was definitely there when the many tall cans of Schlitz malt liquor and the largest bottle of Gordon’s vodka in North America arrived.
Schlitz was what everyone else was drinking, straight from the can. But Jack Kerouac had whispered in my ear that vodka was the best way to step across chronological time into the inconceivable radiances shining in bright Mind Essence. I wasn’t sure how much I needed to get to the magic mothswarm, so I poured myself a full sixteen-ounce glass.
I drank half of it in one swallow, then shuddered as I waited for the moment when I would join the spirit of the angels diving. Damn, I remember thinking as I open-throated the rest of the glass in order to minimize the agony of the horrible flavor, I’m still not drunk. I wonder what I’m doing wrong. I better drink another glass.
That was also when I realized that I did kind of feel a bit more relaxed than I had at the start of the evening. Definitely giddier, and more ready to throw back my head and unleash my mad demon laugh. Now I knew what I had to do. I made a beeline for Bob, who was standing with a group of guys in the kitchen, sipping his can of Schlitz as he leaned against the refrigerator.
“I need to talk to you,” I said, thrilled when he seemed amenable. He was definitely easier to talk to when he was vertical and experiencing consciousness.
I can’t remember what slick set of moves I used next to encourage Bob to make out with me again. I suspect that the sixteen ounces of vodka I chugged had loosened me up just a little. I briefly felt as though I’d been given a head-to-toe shot of novocaine.
Sadly, I got to live only a very few seconds of my newfound ecstasy, because no sooner did I lie down on the floor on top of my beloved than the vodka hit me like a poorly built ship crashing into a rock.
The next thing I knew someone was helping me out of the backseat of an unfamiliar car at the edge of my parents’ driveway. Whoever was behind the wheel was giving me instructions. “Just say hi to your parents, go into your room, and go to sleep,” a guy, perhaps Melvin, was saying over and over and over.
“Okay,” I said, realizing for th
e first time that I was unsteady on my feet as I attempted to walk away from the car and head toward either the holy void of uncreated emptiness or the most supremely mundane and mediocre of all possible horrible suburban ranch-style houses.
When I arrived at the front door, I hesitated. I had a better idea. I could go into the garage and sleep in my mother’s car until I got my bearings. That way, when I woke up, I would be refreshed and better equipped to deal with both the stability of the intrinsic Mind and the unpredictable moods of my parents.
It all seemed to be working so well, until the frantic piercing voices of my mother and father interrupted my reverie.
“What are you doing out here?” they both shouted as they got into my mother’s car in the middle of the night to drive to the police department. Apparently shocked to find me asleep in the backseat, they were far too hysterical to appreciate the subtle but effective way that I was moving the human race forward.
During the death march from the car back into the house, I remembered the original orders from the mad holy man who had driven me home.
“Okay,” I said to my father, who just stood there, staring and shaking his head. “Well, I’m going to my room now to go to sleep.”
“Whose clothes are you wearing?” my mother asked, her voice drained of everything but her barely contained rage. And when I looked down, I saw not innumerable lotus-lands falling open but an unfamiliar pair of button-fly blue Levi’s with a tear in one knee and a man’s white T-shirt.
“Um, I don’t know,” I said, trying to appear blasé, as though it was a commonplace thing for me to not recognize the clothes I was wearing. “Well! Okay!” I said. “Good night!”
“Are you drunk?” my mother asked me.
“No, not at all,” I said. “Tired. Gotta get some sleep!”
My parents stood there, glaring at me. But instead of taking me into the kitchen to interrogate me under a bare light-bulb, as I feared, they watched, unamused, as I rushed into my bedroom and closed the door.
Lying in my bed, I reminded myself that parental alienation was a desirable new part of my mad-to-live troublemaker persona. Maybe if they stopped speaking to me for a long enough time, I would have a shot at being an artist after all.
Right about then was when I discovered that apparently the earth had slipped off its axis and begun spinning at a right angle.
My parents refused to talk to me for the next four days. Luckily, during that time I was allowed to make a very confusing set of phone calls to my equally hungover friends so I could piece together what had happened after I started making out with Bob that magical night. During the holy void of uncreated emptiness, they told me, I had begun puking all over myself.
Could that be true? I had? Had I buried my one true love in a geyser of puke?
Maybe there was some way he had scooted out before the dam burst? I was too afraid to find out. Oh please, God, let that be what had happened. Let him have been lying on top of me at that point. Let him have sensed the danger and rolled to safety before I erupted.
Meanwhile, I tried to comfort myself with the knowledge that Sal and Dean would have found poetry in an evening of necking and puking. Talk about total madness. Maybe in my drunkenness I’d done the “monkey dance in the streets of life.”
And then, as luck would have it, the school week began with an omen: the principal announced that there was a special mandatory assembly for the whole student body featuring a speaker from Alcoholics Anonymous. After some generic opening remarks, the AA representative gave each of us a checklist to fill out that would help us gauge how far down the road to alcoholism we had traveled thus far.
“Have you ever been drunk to the point of blacking out?” was one of the first questions he asked. “If you answered yes, than you are an alcoholic.”
I felt a chill run through my body. Really? I was? Had I somehow gone from a friendless teetotaling transfer student, suffocating in a stifling airless suburbia, to a certified alcoholic in one day without even getting to make a barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark pit stop at the burning stars? From a dullard with no love life and no creative credentials to a messed-up tragic drunken wastrel whose diseased biology would spiral her into the gutter? Just like that? They weren’t kidding when they said it caught you fast.
Even worse, I had managed to screw up my second and probably last chance to make out with Bob. He had done his part this time. He’d shown up awake. He had offered me an opportunity to prove to him that I was such an inspirational life force that he could not live without me. He had come to the party ready to make out. And I had ruined everything.
No love affair, no matter how majestic or perfect, could go from a kiss to a fountain of vomit and survive. That was the awful truth. I had torn down, annihilated, crushed all that we had worked so hard to build by being a sad shipwreck … an alcoholic. Fifteen and my life was ruined. On and on and into the endless forever of night.
Bobby
LET’S TALK ABOUT YOU FOR A MINUTE.
Let’s say you had a rather long romantic liaison a few decades ago, one that started back when you were in your twenties. For the sake of argument, let’s call the guy you dated Bobby.
The relationship with Bobby didn’t work out too well because most people in their twenties are not that smart about love. It’s hard to combine clearheaded thinking and good common sense with postcollegiate identity crises and binge drinking. How were you to know then that the behaviors you regarded as “living life to the fullest” would one day appear, almost to the letter, in a list of the symptoms of mental illness?
In your case, you thought your big mistake was mixing work and love. Sure, you’d heard people say, “Don’t shit where you eat,” but that never made sense because the way you saw it, every good restaurant has an excellent restroom. And besides, wasn’t combining two things you like to make a third thing you love the kind of good idea that brought us chocolate milk?
So let’s say that when you met Bobby, he was just turning thirty-one. Bobby! Smart, funny, cute, talented, and right in the middle of a divorce from the nice girl he married when he was a hard-drinking, hard-partying frat boy. What if you laughed when you realized he was exactly the type you never would have dated in college because even back then you weren’t amused by watching guys crush beer cans against their foreheads? But now, in your late twenties, you and Bobby seemed to have as many similarities as differences. What if you had so much chemistry with Bobby that the very idea that you would have shunned him when you were in college now sounded comical and small-minded?
Okay, maybe friends who’d known Bobby longer than you had warned you from the beginning that he was a risky choice because, since his marriage had ended, he had scored an impressive number of notches on the bedpost he would have had if he wasn’t living in a one-room apartment and sleeping on a broken box spring. But for argument’s sake, let’s say you got through this unnervingly juvenile period by believing these were only the early days of a brand-new relationship. How could there not be greater stability ahead? Doesn’t everything in life have to muddle through a shaky beginning? Besides, you were so excited by the way you and Bobby had begun to deepen your bond by collaborating. Obviously, Bobby could find tons of girls to date, but how many of them could help redefine and expand his business? And what if this was something you did eagerly because combining work and love seemed like a very good example of the old milk-and-chocolate-combining model to you back then? After all, sharing a studio and having art shows with your art school boyfriend had been one of the best things about your last relationship.
So then what if, over time, this collaboration got more intense as Bobby’s business continued to get larger? And what if this collaboration went on to bring Bobby a lot of success? What if it was the kind of success that put Bobby at the very top of his field of endeavor, whatever that was: manufacturing frozen pizzas, selling foreign imports, managing a hedge fund, running a TV show, whatever. And what if it was not just the
“pay your bills and start a savings account” type of success but more the “purchase multiple dwellings and many sports cars” variety? You’d think that this would have been a triumphant moment for you and Bobby, where you sat giddily on the top of a mountain and toasted your fabulous good fortune.
But what if Bobby had never been the type of person to celebrate good fortune, not even when he was a freewheeling fraternity boy? And therefore, what if success didn’t change his relentless negativity? What if Bobby was the kind of guy who was able to somehow view your mutual achievements as failures? What if all the success only made him depressed and agitated?
Ha! But you know you! You always think you can come up with the solution to everything! So then what if, in your search for a remedy for Bobby’s unhappiness, it occurred to you that maybe your idea of combining work and love was the core of the problem? Of course you would think this. You were trained by your culture and by your gender to value love over work. After all, isn’t love what makes the world go round? So then what if that led you to conclude that the best thing you could do would be to step away from this business you and Bobby had built … selling discount cleaning supplies or running a French restaurant or dropping watermelons off of buildings … whatever it was you guys did together. It made sense to think that if you avoided the line of fire at work, the time you spent together at home would become a safe haven. Obviously, it wouldn’t occur to you that there was one big glaring incorrect integer in this equation, kind of like the inherent flaw in the chocolate-plus-milk formula. What if you had failed to notice that time at work was the only time that mattered to Bobby?
Then what if, even after signs that this wasn’t working too well, you stayed the course, trying to prove that your theory was correct and something good would eventually come of it all? What if you hung around the house, cooking exotic Craig Claiborne recipes from The New York Times Cookbook, until one day when you intercepted some suspicious letters written in a big, loopy, young girl’s handwriting that Bobby claimed had been sent to him by “a crazy person”? Maybe you tried to believe him, even though the letters sounded more feebleminded and adolescent than they did psychotic. After all, “letters from a crazy person” wasn’t an unreasonable explanation in those days, because part of the success you and Bobby had wrought in your business involved the unwanted intrusion of unstable customers whose clinically diagnosed psychiatric disorders occasionally inspired them to break into your house.
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