Idiot Wind
Page 32
She wasn’t easily convinced. Why would she be? I’d already dragged her away from a job that she loved in Yellowstone, and now I was asking her to quit a good job at the Luxor and pull up stakes all over again to move back to a low-wage state like Montana, where, unlike me, she had no new position awaiting her. But in the end, loyal to a fault, Kathy agreed to give it a try for my sake. I was pushing fifty at that point, and she knew that the retirement benefits that came with the MSU job were something I desperately needed, so she let me accept Paul’s offer. (Now, every pension cheque I cash reminds me to be grateful for her sacrifice.)
Back in Bozeman, we bought ourselves a single-wide mobile home in a trailer park on the Gallatin River, just two lots downstream from the trailer where Richard Brautigan had lived two decades earlier, back when he was fighting – and tragically, losing – his own long struggle with the idiot wind. Luckily, my sojourn on the Gallatin was more therapeutic, and I never again engaged in any self-destructive behaviour – even when, four years later, Kathy announced that she was leaving me to resume her life in Yellowstone Park as a single woman.
Naturally, after fourteen years together, I was sorry to see her go, but I could understand her urge to explore a new life without me. She was thirty-eight at the time, the same age I’d been when I hit the road to find a fresh future elsewhere, and I knew what it was like to feel the need to move on. So I helped her U-Haul her things down to Gardiner and wished her a tearful farewell, but I never felt betrayed by her decision, and to this day we remain good friends.
One of the perks of working at MSU was access to the university’s email system, and after I was on my own again I began a regular correspondence with an old Bay Ridge buddy of mine who I’d worked with at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich during my early years in the publishing business. Gerry was my oldest friend, and over the years he’d built up a solid reputation as a book editor, earning the respect of an illustrious list of writers, including Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. Gerry and I had been out of touch since I’d left New York, but after some internet sleuthing he’d managed to track me down in Las Vegas shortly before I moved back to Montana. I was delighted when I received his unexpected letter asking me for news of what I’d been up to, and I spent the next week writing a twenty-page reply that sketched out the highlights of my four-month journey to Yellowstone.
After reading my reply, Gerry began a years-long campaign to convince me that I should expand that letter into a book-length memoir. I resisted taking his advice for a long time. I still wanted to believe that I had a novel in me, and it seemed to me I’d be abandoning my youthful dreams by writing a memoir before I’d published any fiction (although I suspect that the main reason I kept dragging my feet was because of my reluctance to re-engage with the man I was when the idiot wind chased me out of New York). However, after Kathy moved back to Yellowstone, I began to spend the quiet nights in my trailer working on the memoir Gerry had been urging me to write, and over the next few years I kept sporadically emailing chapters to New York for Gerry to review.
Though Gerry’s enthusiasm for the project was unflagging, halfway through that early incarnation of this memoir I became disheartened by my seeming inability to find a suitable voice for the story I was trying to tell, and my dissatisfaction eventually led me to the conclusion that Gerry’s faith in me had been misplaced. So I shelved the hundred pages of that draft memoir with all the other half-finished manuscripts I’d given up on over the years and there it would languish for the better part of a decade.
After my divorce from Kathy, I had begun to visit my two younger brothers on Long Island every summer, and each visit had left me feeling more and more troubled by their steadily declining health. My youngest brother, Kevin, who’d inherited my parents’ house, had been confined to a wheelchair ever since the early seventies, a result of spinal damage he’d suffered in a car wreck when he was still in his teens. My brother Steve, the second-born son in our family, had taken over as Kevin’s sole caregiver after my parents died. He had his own ailments to deal with, and the stress of caring for Kevin all by himself was getting to be more than he could handle. So, as soon as I was eligible to collect my pension and Social Security benefits, I took early retirement, sold my trailer and moved back to my parents’ old home in Lindenhurst to give my brothers the help they needed.
My assistance came in handy almost right away. Only two weeks after I arrived from Montana, Hurricane Sandy struck Long Island and turned my brothers’ front yard into a jumbled maze of wind-toppled maple trees – which kept Steve and me busy with chainsaws for the rest of that autumn. ‘Jesus, Steve,’ I remember joking, ‘if I’d wanted to be a lumberjack, I could have stayed in Montana!’
The three of us shared many laughs and good times during the next three years after my return to the family homestead, all of them blessings I would have missed out on had I stayed in Montana, but my reunion with my brothers was far too brief. By the summer of 2015, they had both been diagnosed with terminal cancers – Steve in his lungs, and Kevin in his liver – and I spent most of June and July keeping vigil at their bedsides in Good Samaritan Hospital, until the heartbreaking week when they both passed away, only four days apart. In a way, I suppose that was a blessing too. After all the years they’d spent living together, it seemed only right that their brotherly bond should remain unbroken – even by death.
In the first few months after I lost my brothers, I consoled myself with the thought that I’d done everything for them that I could do. And I took comfort, too, from the thought that Kevin and Steve would let my parents know that I’d stepped up when it counted and had shown my family loyalty in the end. Still, I missed my brothers terribly. Awakened by noises in the night, I’d momentarily mistake the old house’s creaking for the sound of them going about their business – and then I’d break out crying when I remembered that was something I would never hear again.
The next few months were a dark time for me, as I struggled to come to terms with being a sole survivor. Thankfully, Gerry and his wife Susanne were able to lift my spirits when I paid them a visit in mid-September and unburdened my sorrows during a long afternoon on their patio. They were the only people I had left in the world to tell my story to, and after they’d heard me out I felt more relieved and hopeful than I’d have thought possible. So hopeful, in fact, that I didn’t even cringe when Gerry later popped the inevitable question: ‘So, Peter, what’s happening with your memoir?’
‘You know what, Gerry?’ I smiled. ‘I think maybe now I’m ready to make it happen.’
That very evening when I got home I dug out my old road journals and began to reimagine the shape the memoir should take. I decided not to try to salvage any of my earlier drafts but to start over from scratch so I could find a style that rang truer in my inner ear. By Thanksgiving, I was ready to sit down at the keyboard to give the project one last-ditch try and, to my continuing amazement, the chapters began to flow at an encouraging pace. Idiot Wind was growing longer by the day.
Before I knew it, ten months had passed, and I was whooping for joy as I typed out the book’s final page. On that happy afternoon – which came almost exactly one year to the day after Gerry’s ‘patio pep talk’ – the story I’d been carrying around in my head for twenty-nine years was finally out in the world, and as I sat giving thanks in my parents’ old house, the Prodigal Son come home at last, I found myself recalling my favourite lines from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time.
Or, as Neal Cassady would say, ‘Keep rollin’ and you’ll always eventually cross your line again.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Without the encouragement and unflagging support I received from Gerry Howard and Susanne Williams, this book would never have been written, and for that reason (and many others) I dedicate Idiot Wind to them.
Thanks also
to my literary agent, David McCormick, who wasn’t afraid to put his faith in a late-blooming first-time author. David’s editorial input was invaluable right from the start and I have no doubt that the revisions he suggested played a key role in the book’s eventual acceptance for publication.
Many people gave generously of their time to read early drafts of Idiot Wind, and I owe a debt of gratitude to all of them. I’d especially like to thank Don DeLillo, Walter Kirn, Donald Ray Pollock, Jay McInerney, Joel Rose, Paul Slovak, Emmanuelle Heurtebize and Sander VanVlerk for their feedback.
Thanks also to Kathy Maravetz, John and Kathy Nappi, Jakob and Maria Hoyland, Andreas Nowara, Susan Dumois, Rebecca Cole, Greg and Mary Hahn, Paul Mineau, Brenda Biddy-Hoffman, Sandi Tansey, Richard Young, Greg Daskalogrigorakis, Patricia Davis, Kenneth Brown, Geoffrey Gerow, William Sharkey, Jeff Dahlman, Edward Kozelka, John Clemente, Bill Procaccini and, last but not least, my ‘fishing family’ in Montauk, NY, the Quaresimos: Capt. Jamie, Capt. Anthony, Capt. Tyler and ‘Admiral’ Sharon.
Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the outstanding work done by the amazing Jamie Byng and his colleagues at Canongate Books: my editor, Hannah Knowles; Jon Gray, who designed the cover; Leila Cruickshank, Vicki Rutherford and Debs Warner, who handled copy-editing and permissions; and Andrea Joyce and Jessica Neale, my angels in the foreign rights department. Thanks to one and all!
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