by Nick Tosches
This last entry, this reflection and resolution of long ago, had been written, I could tell from its date, in my old poky flat in the Village, not long before I moved to my present place. But I had moved so little, inwardly, since that reflection and resolution of long ago.
I discontinued my search. I was unsettled to see my inner life so unchanged through all these years, from what was written in the oldest, leather-bound sketchbook, from the early 1970s, to the smaller notebook of the 1990s, to this very day, many years after abandoning the recording of such things. I had traveled the world, experienced much, learned much, done much, escaped death and the death-in-life of the workaday world. But I had not changed through all these years. These volumes of words to and of and by myself, from the earliest to the last of them, no matter how impressionistically, attested to this undeniably. They revealed my insides when they were written, and they revealed my insides today.
From the first diary entry to the last—I had stopped some years before the end of the century—the sporadic accounts of the days of my life reeked of booze and sex and desolation and little else. There were names of people that I no longer even faintly recognized. Many dated entries bore only the word DRUNK, noted after the end of this bender or that in a devastating succession of them. The sex grew more sparse as the entries neared their end, but not the drunkenness and not the desolation.
What I read obliterated the search for my lost eloquence on the nuanced elusive magic of the fall. It all but obliterated that sense of magic itself.
All that blood. All that loneliness, no matter the laughter and companionship of the barroom scrouge, no matter the rare, loving women or all the others who held me close night after night, swooning in or accommodating me as I discharged my desperation into them. The leopards. All that death and all that dark. And, like a haunted rustling through it all, the fear.
I must change. Once and for all. For real. I must. But this realization, this resolution, seemed heartbreakingly futile in light, or in the darkness, of all that lay before me, the testament of my years, the seeming proof, in these pages and in me now, that I was ever thus, and thus I would ever be.
Could what I had written have been less of errant memoir, notation, and contemplation, but rather a foresight into what was to follow? Not a capturing of this moment or that, but more the annals of a foredooming, a capturing of the inevitable moments of here and now?
I saw the blood on the razor-like Japanese killing blade. I saw the leopard awaiting glance. I saw myself laying the whip hard to Lorna on her makeshift cross. I saw myself as I had been the other night, making love to the hosiery and high heels that Melissa had left behind, fucking them and with a wicked sigh telling myself afterward that it was better that way, for there was no one there, no one near, when the lovemaking was done. My preferred company—what had I called it?—“the company of ghosts.” Happily ever after, with a bunch of pantyhose and a few high heels, watching the shadows fall, seeing them grow darker every time they fell.
Where were they now: Lorna, Melissa, the others? They were here, with me. Ghosts.
His words whispered again through the air. Loath as I was to return to that night, I heard them. They were without voice.
“And why is it that you can only reach out for another person when you can barely reach out for another drink? What do you fear?”
I said aloud, with a bit of false roguish sarcasm, as if to banish the questions without voice:
“Ah, yes: To be, or not to be.”
But the questions, which I had unintentionally but very justly equated with Hamlet’s question, still whispered soundlessly in the air. For me—maybe for everyone—the questions came down to the same fear. There could be no life where fear lurked.
Enough of this. It occurred to me that I wanted to smoke a bit of pot. This was something I only very rarely did; but I recently had been given a small amount of good Hawaiian buds by a dealer—he was the only dealer I knew who could get real Hawaiian marijuana, as well as Nepalese hashish, these days—in the hope that I would lay out a few grand for more when the soon-coming harvest season arrived. I hated to roll joints. I used a little corncob pipe, which I stuffed and puffed away at. Fuck those journals. Fuck fear. Fuck everything. I felt like watching an old movie. But a good one or a bad one? As I coughed and tapped the pipe empty into the kitchen sink, I deliberated as to which would be more entertaining.
I washed down a Valium with water and took to the couch with a glass of cold goat milk.
It was then that it hit me, in a most undramatic manner. I was roaming back in time, back to a time in my life before there was a word that I could read or write, before even the alphabet was known to me. My mother and father had gone to a picture show or a nightclub or something, and they had left me in the good care of my grandmother, whom I loved dearly, from earliest and all but unremembered childhood until now, almost forty years after her death. She could not read or write either, not even in her native Italian; so we made a good pair. As that night progressed, I became aware that it was getting quite late. This led to the unshakeable conviction that my mother and father were not coming back. They had run off, fled from me, left me with my father’s mother, and would never return and were gone from me forever. They had abandoned me. My grandmother assured me in her best broken English that this was absolutely not true. I cried and yowled so wildly and ceaselessly in my imagined abandonment that my grandmother’s daughter, my aunt Dora, who knew how to use a telephone, was pressed upon by her mother to call the theater or nightclub or wherever it was that my mother and father were, and get my mother to the phone to reassure me that she loved me and was coming back in a little while. Words, lies, not to be believed or trusted. In the end, they left wherever they were and returned to me. As well as I could remember, it was the first night out they had taken for themselves; and I ruined it for them. I don’t know where this overwhelming, all-consuming fear of being abandoned came from. Could one be born with the sprouting seed of such a fear? All I know is that, from that night on, though there was no more crying, no more yowling, the fear of abandonment was in me like a growing, stifling vine.
I did not recognize it as such. I did not recognize it as I drove away every woman who loved me, before she had a chance to abandon me. I did not recognize it as I went about allowing no one to get close to me, not really close, lest she betray and abandon me. All my life, I did not recognize or sense this great fear of abandonment at work. I was not aware of its dominion over me.
I saw myself rising in blind, senseless wrath, rapping Melissa on the ass with that length of pipe, telling her to get out. She could never abandon me, then. It was my way.
Where was she now? And Lorna, who might have enjoyed the smack of the pipe on her ass, whom I simply cast aside, not remembering when or how; but now knowing why.
In driving away love and intimacy—drunkenness and sex took their place—I had inflicted on myself and perpetuated and nourished my own fear. I lived in self-imposed abandonment. I had chosen to live, or exist, in fear. I had not only surrendered to it; I had enslaved myself to it. And I never suspected it, choosing instead to be a noble creature, a lone leopard who needed nothing or no one, except as prey. No, I really never knew it.
Until this moment, on this holy autumn night.
LIKE ALMOST ALL REVELATIONS, THIS PARTING OF THE clouds of unknowing, this brilliant forthshining fear-of-abandonment illumination, was little more than pure bullshit.
Better it would have been to watch that old movie, good or bad. That was all reefer was really good for: making you stupid enough to enjoy that which was stupid.
I had recalled a meaningless childhood incident, nothing more than that, and invested it with meaning. It was not the luminous insight into the origin of what imbued my life. It was not the sagacious guide to understanding my past, my ways, my nature, and my life that I had taken it to be. I had in my head composed my own personal Book of Revelation; and like that Revelation of Saint John the Di
vine, it made not one fucking bit of sense. The book of the Seven Seals held not wisdom but folly. Rimbaud did not go nearly far enough when he said that everything we are taught is a lie, a farce. “Tout ce que nous croyons que nous savons est farce,” not “Tout ce qu’on nous enseigne est farce,” would have been more like it: Everything we think we know is a lie.
This statement has nothing to do with Epimenides, nothing to do with Eubulides, nothing to do with paradox. It is the simple truth. It was true when the first thought entered and skewed the brain of Homo habilis, and it has been true ever since. Look at what we call ourselves, in the idiotic arrogance of what we think we know! Homo sapiens—wise, or knowing, man! The self-anointed crown of evolution, and, no less, self-proclaimed to have been created in the very image of the God of his own idiotic imagination. Yes, everything we think we know is a lie. Ipso facto. Everything.
I did not drive people from me to preclude or prevent them from abandoning me. I simply didn’t want them around me for long. If you take a good look at yourself, you’ll understand why.
It was never I who in my years cried out in any tongue: lama sabachthani? It was never I who in my years crooned the theme song from High Noon. No, anybody who needs another person in a lasting way is just lacking.
I recall a night in a bar on the Lower East Side. Me, my friend Frankie, and the woman whom at the time I was living with. It was the dead of winter, snowing hard. I don’t remember what it was that I said to her—the woman with whom I was living—but it must have been so grossly insulting that she stood, announced that she was through with me, and that was that. She was not at all drunk, and I had never known her to react so resolutely to my verbal abuse. She buttoned her coat, drew her scarf close, put on her woolen hat, and strode out through the door.
“You might want to go out there, catch up with her and apologize,” Frankie said.
“Ah,” I said, “she’ll be back in five minutes. And if not, fuck her.”
Frankie looked at me, shook his head, laughed low, and said:
“You’re probably the most self-sufficient son-of-a-bitch I ever knew.”
He was right. Where was my fear of abandonment then? There was none. Not then, not on any of the occasions when those I loved walked out on me, with or without being confronted by what some might call my “bad side.” I had never really been shaken up by abandonment. It had only brought me closer to myself, and to a feeling of gratitude that there was a me to be close to. Why had I so foolishly, in my Revelation of Saint Nick the Divine, dwelt only on those I had cast away, and not those who had cast me away? It was as I jokingly told people when they brought up the subject of cohabitation:
“I can’t even live with myself, but I do retain visitation rights.”
I wanted to be alone, except for when I didn’t want to be alone. And I wanted it my way on both counts. I wanted it as I wanted it whenever I wanted it. Of course, this was something far easier said than done. Hence the pangs of loneliness, hence the desire to be rid of, or to be got rid of by, whoever breathed on me when I wanted to breathe alone.
But I could handle it. One day I might wake in the middle of the night and wring my hands in loss and in longing for Melissa. At the moment, however, I was happier to have her silent nylons and shoes than to have her.
At the computer, I went to the Internet and searched under the words “pantyhose encasement.” Ninety-nine bucks and eighty cents later, I had ordered three DVDs. Their titles were straightforward: Sexy Seamless Hardcore Pantyhose Action, Pantyhose Multilayer Fetish Sex, and Sexy Lesbian Pantyhose Fetish Sex.
I was set. While at the computer, I went to my iTunes thing and put on Tony Bennett’s recording of “This Is All I Ask,” a song that my buddy Pete Wolf had turned me on to one day when we were talking about getting old. I turned up the volume and went to take some baclofen and pour a glass of cold goat milk.
Beautiful girls, walk a little slower
When you walk by me…
It was superbly autumnal: the music, the milk, the relishing of having escaped false revelation; all of it.
More music, less sublimely melancholic, far less; but no less superbly autumnal.
Ain’t gonna be no wedding, baby,
No vows beneath no trees.
Truth be told, little girl,
I’m in love just with your knees.
Gimme your knees,
Your knees is all I need.
Gimme your knees;
On thy patella shall I feed.
I was dancing slowly round the room, alone and smiling, with no feeling or pity for those who were not. My own Parousia was here!
May every altar boy kneel with open mouth before every priest!
May Satan take every soul and fetch me pastrami from the Second Avenue Deli!
Fuck the second fucking coming of the king of the kikes! Multilayer pantyhose sex was coming!
All that was holy, let it be holy still. Holy, holy, holy!
Well, God gave you them knees
To give ’em unto me;
I’ll grease them up good and set you free.
Might work my way
Up or down a foot or so;
There just ain’t no tellin’
Which way Old Nick will go.
So take off them britches,
And set right in this chair;
I’m gonna finish this cigarette,
Then, baby, I’ll be right there…
And, yes, I was right here. And, yes, damn it all and fuck it all, I was set.
THE HUNTER’S MOON, THE BLOOD MOON AS SOME CALL IT, the full moon of the month of my birth, passed.
It was the most distant, the farthest full moon of the year, and therefore seemed to shun the lower heavens and the eyes of those who gazed.
I spent my birthday alone, as I wanted to spend it, in the quiet heart of autumn. I had not had a drink in quite awhile, and I did not want to drink on this day. But I was looking forward to a glass or two of good—I mean really good—single-vineyard champagne to go with the Muscovy drake I was going to roast, pancetta-larded, garlic-larded, with quartered spuds, which never tasted better than when set to cook in duck fat. So I had blown about a grand on a bottle of Krug Clos du Mesnil 1995. It would be something of a waste, as I would not drink the whole bottle, and the rest could not be kept in the refrigerator, no matter how well-stoppered, for any length of time. But it was what I wanted to taste with my fine, greasy duck.
This was not a surreptitious alcoholic craving. Alcoholics who like the taste of the booze and beer they drink are rare. Almost all of them hate it, no matter what they say to the contrary. They endure the taste for the sake of the effect. They will endure anything, down to the ruination and forsaking of their very lives, out of their enslavement to that effect. I wanted nothing to do with the once dear oblivion that drink had brought me. The idea of the taste of it repulsed me. I wanted only the taste of a bit of fine champagne.
I felt the same about blood. The very idea of the taste of it repulsed me.
Could the effect of the baclofen be psychosomatic? I did not know. In the past, I had been administered all sorts of drugs that I was told would work on my brain chemistry and banish darkness and depression. Never had I felt any effect whatsoever. So I figured I was not much susceptible to the so-called power of suggestion. I had not been in touch with Olivier in a long time, so had not discussed any of this with him.
Maybe the change I seemed to be undergoing had nothing to do with pills. Maybe the baclofen had simply become a part of my routine, like the Valium I took with the milk, the Valium that made me feel nothing but which I continued to take, always with cold milk, more as a ritual than anything else. There were those who told me that a mere five milligrams of Valium all but knocked them out. The ten milligrams I took at least three times a day did nothing but subtly enhance the milk breaks I took. Milk and cookies. Milk and Valium. But I continued to take the baclofen. If it was not really helping, it surely was not hurting.
Ponce de León was about sixty when he kicked. Alexander was thirty-two. At least I had beaten those fools out.
I still have six of the volumes of the American Artists edition of The Complete Works of Mark Twain. They must be all but a hundred years old by now. They were, as inscribed in one of them, the “Property of Ernest Tosches,” a great-uncle of mine who did not read. These were the books with which my mother introduced me to the idea of literature, reading to me from them before I myself could read. All I remember is asking her to begin over and over again with the sixth chapter of Huckleberry Finn, “Pap Struggles with the Death Angel,” because it had the word “damn” in it and I liked to hear this curse word, and there was something even better about hearing her read it to me. I’ve kept these books out of the childhood associations they hold for me: my great-uncle (the oldest member of my family to have been born here rather than in Italy), the vaguely remembered voice of my mother, and the books themselves, and her reading them to me, having been my introduction to what I later learned was called literature.