If they ever find me with a crawl space full of dead hookers, I’ll be sure to point the finger at Dad—and Stanley Kubrick.
But if we’re playing the blame game? Top of the list for “it’s all your fault—you made me this way!” goes to two children’s classic films: The Red Balloon and Old Yeller.
What exactly was the message of The Red Balloon anyway? Every time our teachers didn’t show up, they’d haul out the projector and show us this supposedly heartwarming and inspiring story of a little French boy and his enchanted balloon friend.
But wait a minute. The poor kid is impoverished and clearly unloved. He wears the same clothes every day. Immediately on finding his balloon, he’s ostracized by society, banned from public transportation, chastised at school, even ejected from church. His parents are either dead or have abandoned him—as the hideous crone who cruelly throws his balloon out the window at first encounter is clearly too old to be his mom. The boy’s schoolmates are a feral, opportunistic bunch who instinctively seek to destroy what they don’t understand and can’t possess. In fact, nearly every other child in the film is depicted as part of an unthinking mob, fighting viciously among themselves even as they pursue the boy and his balloon through the streets, like a pack of wolves. The boy runs away, is assaulted, separated from his only friend—then reunites with it only to watch it die slowly before his eyes.
The happy ending? Balloons from all over Paris converge. The boy gathers them together and is lifted aloft. He drifts away, dangerously suspended over the city. The end.
Where’s the kid going? To an unspecified “better” place—for sure. Or to a fatal drop when the balloons empty of their helium (as we’ve seen them do just previously).
The message?
Life is cruel, lonely, and filled with pain and random acts of violence. Everybody hates you and seeks to destroy you. Better to opt out altogether, to leap—literally—into the void, escape by any means necessary. However uncertain or suicidal the way out.
Nice, huh? May as well have put a crack pipe in my hand right then. Why wait? Maybe this was why I never worked at the French Laundry.
Then there’s Old Yeller. Even worse. A more cynical and unconscionably bleak message one could hardly imagine.
The story of a boy and his dog. A Disney story of a boy and his dog—which, as all children’s accumulated experience teaches them, means that no matter what kind of peril the heroes go through, things will always turn out okay in the end. This, by the time we sat down in that darkened theater, excited, sticky with Twizzlers, we had come to accept as an article of faith. A contract between kids everywhere, our parents, and the fine people at Walt Disney Studios. This was as powerful a bond as we knew, an assurance that held an otherwise uncertain universe together. Sure, Khrushchev was maybe going to drop the Big One on us, but goddammit, that dog was gonna make it out okay!
So, when Old Yeller gets sick with this rabies thing, little Tony is, naturally, not concerned. Pinocchio, after all, got out of that whale situation no problem. Sure, things looked bad for him, too, for a while, but he figured it out in the end. Bumpy ride with Bambi, what with Mom dying, but that ended okay. Like Mom and Dad never forgetting to pick you up at school, the Happy Ending was a dead cert.
It will be okay. It will turn out fine.
No one will hurt a fucking dog.
That’s what I’m saying to myself, sitting there between Mom and Dad, staring up at that screen, breath held, waiting for the miracle.
Then they go and blow Old Yeller’s fucking brains out.
I sit there stunned. “What do you mean there’s no cure for rabies? I don’t give a fuck they hadda put Yeller ‘out of his misery’! What about my misery, cocksucker! They were supposed to fix things! He was supposed to get better!! Don’t talk to me about reality! I don’t care if it’s a magical fucking rainbow shining out of a fairy princess’s ass makes him better. He’s supposed to get better!!!”
From that moment on, I looked at my parents and the whole world with suspicion. What else were they lying about?
Life was clearly a cruel joke. A place with no guarantees, built on a foundation of false assumptions if not outright untruths. You think everything’s going okay…
Then they shoot your fucking dog.
So, maybe that’s why until I got my first dishwashing job, I had no respect for myself and no respect for anybody else.
I should probably sue.
3
The Rich Eat Differently Than You and Me
I was holed up in the Caribbean about midway through a really bad time. My first marriage had just ended and I was, to say the least, at loose ends.
By “loose ends” I mean aimless and regularly suicidal. I mean that my daily routine began with me waking up around ten, smoking a joint, and going to the beach—where I’d drink myself stupid on beer, smoke a few more joints, and pass out until mid-afternoon. This to be followed by an early-evening rise, another joint, and then off to the bars, followed by the brothels. By then, usually very late at night, I’d invariably find myself staggeringly drunk—the kind of drunk where you’ve got to put a hand over one eye to see straight. On the way back from one whorehouse or another, I’d stop at the shawarma truck on the Dutch side of the island, and, as best I could, shove a meat-filled pita into my face, sauce squirting onto my shirtfront. Then, standing there in the dark parking lot, surrounded by a corona of spilled sauce, shredded lettuce, and lamb fragments, I’d fire up another joint before sliding behind the wheel of my rented 4×4, yank the top down, then peel out onto the road with a squeal of tires.
To put it plainly, I was driving drunk. Every night. There is no need to lecture me. To tell me what might have happened. That wasting my own stupid life is one thing—but that I could easily have crushed how many innocents under my wheels during that time? I know. Looking back, I break into an immediate cold sweat just thinking about it. Like a lot of things in my life, there’s no making it prettier just ’cause time’s passed. It happened. It was bad. There it is.
There was a crazy-ass little independent radio station on this particular island—or maybe they broadcasted from another nearby island. I never figured it out. But it was one of those weird, inexplicable little anomalies of expat behavior that you find from time to time if you travel enough: a tiny, one-lung radio station in the middle of nowhere. A DJ whose playlist made no damn sense at all, completely unpredictable selections ranging from the wonderfully obscure to the painfully familiar. From lost classics of garage rock, ancient cult psychobilly hits, and pre-disco funk masterpieces to the most ubiquitously mundane medley of MOR mainstays or parrothead anthems—in a flash. No warning. One second, it’s Jimmy Buffet or Loggins and Messina—the next? The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” or Question Mark and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears.”
You never knew what was coming up. In the rare moments of lucidity, when I tried to imagine who the DJ might be and what his story was, I’d always picture the kid from Almost Famous, holed up, like me, in the Caribbean for reasons he’d probably rather not discuss; only in his case, he’d brought his older sister’s record collection circa 1972. I liked to imagine him out there in a dark studio, smoking weed and spinning records, seemingly at random—or, like me, according to his own, seemingly aimless, barely under control, and very dark agenda.
That’s where I was in my life: driving drunk and way too fast, across a not very well lit Caribbean island. Every night. The roads were notoriously badly maintained, twisting and poorly graded. Other drivers, particularly at that hour, were, to put it charitably, as likely to be just as drunk as I was. And yet, every night, I pushed myself to go faster and faster. Life was reduced to a barely heard joke—a video game I’d played many times before. I’d light up the joint, crank up the volume, peel out of the parking lot, and it was game on.
Here was the fun part: after making it past the more heavily trafficked roads of the Dutch side, after successfully managing to cross the unlit golf course
(often over the green) and the ruins of the old resort (flying heedlessly over the speed bumps), I would follow the road until it began to twist alongside the cliffs’ edges approaching the French side. Here, I’d really step on the gas, and it was at precisely this point that I’d hand over control to my unknown DJ. For a second or two each night, for a distance of a few feet, I’d let my life hang in the balance, because, depending entirely on what song came on the radio next, I’d decide to either jerk the wheel at the appropriate moment, continuing, however recklessly, to careen homeward—or simply straighten the fucker out and shoot over the edge and into the sea.
In this way, my life could easily have ended with a badly timed playing of Loggins and Messina. On one memorable occasion, as I waited in the brief millisecond of silence between songs, foot on the gas, the cliff edge coming up at me fast, I was saved by the Chambers Brothers. I recognized the “tic-toc” metronome of “Time Has Come Today” and, at the last second, turned away from empty air, laughing and crying at the wonderfulness and absurdity of it all, diverted from what I very much felt to be my just desserts, making (momentarily) some strange and profound sense. Saving my life.
So. That’s how I was feeling that year. And that’s the kind of smart, savvy, well-considered decision-making process that was the norm for me.
Back in New York, I was living in a small, fairly grim Hell’s Kitchen walk-up apartment that smelled of garlic and red sauce from the Italian hero joint downstairs. As I’d pretty much burned down my previous life, I didn’t own much. Some clothes. A few books. A lot of Southeast Asian bric-a-brac. I was seldom there, so it didn’t seem to matter. My favorite dive bar, where I was on permanent “scholarship,” was right down the street.
I was not seeing anybody regular. I wasn’t looking for love. I wasn’t even looking for sex. I wasn’t in a frame of mind to take the initiative with anybody. Yet, if you brushed up against me in those days, I’d probably go home with you if you asked.
Business took me to England now and again, and one night, surely drunk again, sitting at the bar of a particularly disreputable “club,” waiting to meet someone from my publishers, I noticed a very beautiful woman staring at me in the mirror over my shoulder. While this was of moderate interest, it did not cause me to get off my bar stool, wink, nod, wave, or stare back. I had a pretty good sense by now of my unsuitability when it came to normal human interactions. I felt as if I’d had my thermostat removed—was without a regulator. I couldn’t be trusted to behave correctly, to react appropriately, or to even discern what normal was. Sitting there, hunched over my drink, I knew this—or sensed it—and was trying to avoid any contact with the world not based on business. But an intermediary—the woman’s friend—took matters into her own hands, suddenly at my shoulder insistent on making introductions.
The woman and I got to know each other a little—and from time to time, over the next few months, we’d see each other in England and in New York. After a while, I came to understand that she was from a very wealthy family—that she kept an apartment in New York. That she spent her days mostly traveling to runway shows and buying things with her mother. That she was of British, French, and Eastern European background, spoke four languages beautifully, was smart, viciously funny, and (at least) a little crazy—a quality I usually liked in women.
Okay. She had a problem with cocaine—something I’d moved past. And her T-shirts cost more than the monthly salaries of everybody I ever knew. But I flattered myself that I was the one guy she’d ever met who really and truly didn’t give a shit about her money or her bloodline or what kind of muddleheaded upper-class twits she moved with. With the righteousness of the clueless, I saw all that as a liability and behaved accordingly—making the comfortable assumption that when you’re that kind of wealthy and privileged, the kind her friends seemed to be, you are necessarily simple-minded, ineffectual, and generally useless.
Suffering from the delusion that I was somehow “saving” this poor little rich girl, that surely she would benefit from a week on the beach, enjoying the simple pleasures of cold beer, a hammock, and local BBQ joints, I invited her to join me in the Caribbean over the Christmas holidays.
For the last few weeks, I’d lived friendless and alone down there. In a small but very nice rented villa. The island was largely funky and downscale and charmingly dysfunctional. It was half French, half Dutch—with plenty of social problems, working poor, and a large population of locals going back many generations, meaning there was life and business outside of the tourism industry, an alternate version of the island, where one could—if one so desired—get lost, away from one’s own kind. I’d been weeks without shoes, eating every meal with my hands. Who wouldn’t love that? I thought.
She came. And for just short of a week, we had a pretty good time. We were both hitting the Havana Club a little hard, for sure, but her presence certainly improved my behavior—my nightly attempts at suicide ended—and I believed that I was good for her as well. She seemed, for a while, genuinely happy and relaxed on the island’s out-of-the-way beaches, perfectly satisfied, it appeared to me, with a routine of inexpensive johnnycake sandwiches and roadside pork ribs grilled in sawed-off fifty-five-gallon drums. She took long swims by herself, emerging from the water looking beautiful and refreshed. I thought, surely this is a good thing. Maybe we are good for each other.
We drank at sailor bars, took mid-afternoon naps, mixed rum punches with a frequency that, over time, became a little worrisome. She was damaged, I knew. Like me, I thought—flattering myself.
I identified with her distrust of the world. But as I would come to learn, hers was a kind of damage I hadn’t seen before.
“Let’s go to St. Barths,” she said, one afternoon.
This was an idea that held little attraction for me. Even then, in my state of relatively blissful ignorance, I knew that St. Barths, which lay about ten miles offshore from my comfortably dowdy island, was not somewhere I could ever be happy. I knew from previous day trips that a hamburger and a beer cost fifty bucks—that there was no indigenous culture to speak of, that it was the very height of the holiday season and the island, not my scene in the best of circumstances, would be choked with every high-profile douche, Euro-douche, wannabe, and oligarch with a mega-yacht. I knew enough of the place to know that St. Barths was not for me.
I made obliging, generically willing-sounding noises, fairly secure in the assumption that every rental car and hotel room on the island had been booked solid. A few calls confirmed this to be the case, and I felt that surely she’d drop the idea.
She would in no way, she insisted, be deterred by insignificant details like no place to stay and no way to get there. There was a house. Russian friends. Everything would work out.
It certainly wasn’t love that compelled me to abandon all good sense and go somewhere I already hated with somebody I barely knew into circumstances of great uncertainty. It was not a period of my life marked by good decisions, but in agreeing to “pop over” to St. Barths, I’d made a particular whopper of a wrong turn—a plunge into the true heart of darkness. Maybe I saw it at the time as the path of least resistance, maybe I even thought there was indeed some small possibility of a “good time”—but I surely had reason to know better. I did know better. But I walked straight into the grinder anyway.
We took a small propeller plane the ten minutes or so across the water, landing at the airport with no ride, no plans, no friends I was aware of, and no place to stay. A famous guy said hello to my friend by the luggage carousel. They exchanged witty banter. He did not, however, offer to let us crash at his place. There were no taxis in sight.
From a comfortable rented villa on a nice island, where—despite my nightly flirtations with vehicular homicide and suicide—I was at least able to swim, eat and drink fairly cheaply, and eventually sleep securely in my own bed, I now found myself suddenly homeless. Worse, my partner, as I quickly discovered, was a spoiled, drunk, and frequently raving paranoid-schizophren
ic.
And cokehead. Did I mention that?
Any pretense that mysterious Russian friends with a villa would be there for us had somehow dematerialized somewhere on the flight over. Similar departures from reality would become a regular feature of the next few days. After a long time, we found a taxi to a hotel—where, once the staff laid eyes on my mysterious but increasingly mad companion, a room was hastily made available for a night. A very expensive room.
One of the things I’d forgotten about seriously wealthy people, something I’d noticed during a brief previous exposure in college, was that the old-school, old-money kind of rich people? Those motherfuckers don’t pay for shit. They don’t carry cash—and even credit cards seem always to be…somewhere else, as if whatever small sums as might be needed are beneath notice or discussion. Better you pay. And pay I did. Days and nights bingeing on overpriced drinks, bribing bartenders to scoop us up in their private vehicles at end of shift and drive us off into the dark to wherever she thought we might stay that night. One crappy motel-style room after another that cost what a suite at the St. Regis would. More drinks.
By now, I was a prisoner of her escalating and downright scary mood swings and generally bad craziness. She’d turn on a dime from witty and affectionate to hissing, spitting psychotic. One minute we’d be having overpriced mojitos on a lovely beach, the next, she’d be raging at the manager, accusing the busboy—or whoever was at hand—of stealing her cell phone. Fact was, she constantly misplaced her cell phone, her purse, anything of value she had. She’d get sloshed, forgetful, impulsively run off to dance, to search for coke, to say hello to an old friend—and she’d lose track of shit. She’d forget where she’d put things—if she’d ever had them in the first place.
I am not a fan of people who abuse service staff. In fact, I find it intolerable. It’s an unpardonable sin as far as I’m concerned, taking out personal business or some other kind of dissatisfaction on a waiter or busboy. From the first time I saw that, our relationship was essentially over. She accused me of “caring about waiters more than I cared about her,” and she was right. From that point on, I was babysitting a madwoman—feeling obliged only to get her crazy ass on a plane and back to England as quickly as possible and with as little damage done as could be managed. I’d gotten her here, allowed this to happen, it was impingent on me, I felt, to at least get her back in one piece. This was easier said than done.
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