[sic]: A Memoir (3 page)

The United Nations Secretariat Building Façade, New York.

And then I was in the east twenties and I went into a bar and downed a martini. That’s what we do, I remember thinking: we break things up and shatter them so we can put them back together, otherwise what would we do? Because we need something to do. And the pieces don’t quite fit back together, forming something new and that’s called growth, like the same furniture in a new apartment. The glass of the fourth martini was a glinting lens, through which I could see for the first time what I had in fact been feeling, which might be described as terror. But terror now was the image of a frozen explosion that could no longer cause harm and was therefore safe to view, to touch even, like a child’s finger against the surprisingly velvety skin of an Egyptian cobra, safely held by its trainer; the child had been squealing in fear, partly real and partly feigned: a benefit performance for her young parents, and now the child is silent, utterly absorbed, tracing patterns on the snakescales, gauging the differences in skin.

Children have these famously brief attention spans. I left the bar. It was chilly now. I walked through Union Square, empty, through ghosts. I was walking down the same street a relative of mine, Will Cody, had rode down on a white horse on September 4, 1884. It was a lavish parade welcoming his circus, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, to New York. Triumphant arches spanned the street, strewn with ribbons. Marksmen on horses; wagon trains; white scouts; Pawnee actors. The whole city watched, wearing top hats and mustaches. A five-year-old building—Madison Square Garden—housed the circus. Will would make a thrilling entrance onstage, on horseback. The spectacle ended with the destruction of an entire mining colony by a cyclone, like the one in
The
Wizard of Oz
. Incredible special effects for the time: a tunnel was drilled under the Garden, through city blocks, to a state-of-the-art mechanical ventilator. When the tornado hit, the ventilator was switched on, spewing specially assembled dry leaves and newspapers into the Garden, spilling into the first few front rows of thrilled spectators. The only member of my family I knew who remembered Will was my Aunt Edna: she had sat on his lap when she was six or seven. We all know ghosts, it’s the sensation when one revisits a place one hasn’t visited in a long time: my grandparents’ home, a playground, a movie theater that’s been converted into a restaurant. I walked past the apartment of a woman I had slept with, once, shortly after I’d moved to New York. That hadn’t been that long ago. But it seemed closer to the time of Will’s triumphant night. Again, the diseased are highly suspicious animals. Why was the recent past so telescoped? Because, perhaps, I was ready to die? Fight the telescoping, I told myself. Bring that night with the girl back, close. Put it closer, make it yesterday. Connect it to this moment with a hydraulic wind tunnel: let it be a bridge, not an exit: let the dry leaves and newspapers simulate the destruction of a model mining colony.

I entered my neighborhood bar. It was hot inside, moist from the kitchen and from the proximity of so many people, most of whom I know. I had been a frequent habitué; I would stop by almost every evening for a beer or two, as would many in the neighborhood. A cross section of my neighborhood, TriBeCa: older artists who’d never really made it as big as their old friends who now lived in Rome or South Africa or who had died, and had paintings at the Whitney or the Met. But these guys were doing fine, they’d bought lofts for no money at all in the early 1970s and were millionaires, at least on paper. I sat down next to a friend of mine, an employee of Con Edison, a big man, tattooed, military haircut, whose machismo was tempered by his choice of drink, a tiny glass of Dewer’s and soda with a cherry. He was a devoted father of two daughters, unhappily married, who was having an affair with a bright young waitress from somewhere in Ontario, who herself was living with a high-level cocaine dealer in a luxury three-bedroom apartment on Greenwich Avenue. He dealt to the movie stars and famous musicians and sons of presidents who lived in the area, and whom we rarely saw. I was in his apartment once, when I was sleeping with the waitress’s best friend. The place was spotless, and, yes, there were sugar bowls with the finest stuff I’d ever had; a luxury condo with luxury cocaine.

Our local homeless schizophrenic sat down at the bar next to me; he’s a jazz aficionado who had tried, one night, to convince me that Thelonious Monk was still alive, that he’d just seen him play the night before, uptown: or rather, he didn’t play. The trio—bass, drums, guitar—played a piece as a warmup and then, to applause, Monk made his thrilling entrance, as if on horseback. He sat down in front of the piano and raised his hands straight up into the air. “Like yoga!” my friend said. “Fucking nigger’s doing yoga!” Monk lowered his hands toward the keyboard, a descent stretched over fifteen silent minutes, the audience rapt. His fingers, those incredible hands from which had emanated a chapter of music history, a millimeter above the keys. Then in an instant they rose slightly, slammed the lid over the keyboard with a brittle clash, and he ran offstage. The trio paused, then started another number. Monk never returned.

And here comes into the bar the restaurant crowd from the swanky establishments in the neighborhood, among the finest in the city, in their black suits, Americans, Italians, Frenchmen
. Sous-chefs, managers, sommeliers, maitre d’s, line cooks. All were surprised to see me. They were delighted. All of these restaurant guys were late-nighters, inveterate cokeheads. The familiar signal, no words. Not even a gesture. A look. Because the instant they discover you’re an aficionado, you’ve gained membership in a private club, a secret society, and at the beginning the initiation fees are waived, such is the delight the senior members share at recruiting a young pledge. The meetings are held in bathrooms of bars and clubs throughout the city, and usually one must wait and listen to an entirely uninteresting monologue by the friend while he goes through the ritual of carefully (or not so carefully, depending on the level of intoxication) dumping the white powder on the shelf in front of the bathroom mirror, crushing the clumps with the pressure of a MetroCard, the old ridged wood serving as the mortar, the flimsy yellow plastic the pestle. We grind away, in titillating anticipation. Oddly, and disappointingly, these monologues often focus on politics: another tirade against the Bush doctrine, a new senator’s tribulations in Albany, the pros and cons of a female in the White House, the virtues of a presidential candidate and whether he’s black or white. Depending on time—there’s always the added excitement of paranoia, waiting for a knock at the door—the instrument of inhalation might be the classic, tightly rolled twenty-dollar bill. Senior members of the club might carry a short, thick plastic straw with a diagonally shorn end like the forty-five-degree angle at the top of Citicorp Center on Fifty-Third and Lexington. If time is pressing, the end of a house key transports the clump of powder to the nostril. The bathroom setting adds a nice tawdriness to the atmosphere of self-congratulation, and if it’s a coed meeting, a celebratory erotic interlude is usually a foregone conclusion. The slight surge of adrenaline hits in about twenty seconds and if the powder has any degree of purity at all—which is not always the case—the clean, white thrust of pleasure is comparable to mountain air, the Rockies or even the Italian Alps. (I’ve never been to Nepal. Had plans to go, once.)

I felt the drug relax into the bloodstream and that little tightening up and opening at the same time, and life’s pressures at last presented themselves individually, conscripted, with perfect upbringing before retiring with a bow. I thought of an old movie where the passage of time was conveyed by the pages of a daily calendar being manually pulled away. After the amount of poison I’d dumped into my body for the last few weeks, what on earth could be harmed by a half a gram of cocaine? And now it was the blissful refuge of a sudden rainstorm in the city, wherein everyone pretends to be inconvenienced, but they’re secretly relieved: they’re all on the phone, they look out through the office window, at the clouds, probably at about the same moment, probably looking at the same building with the diagonally shorn top. Beautiful dark blue, dark grey. Cocaine’s quiet, smug euphoria. The light that brings out the truly urban hues. For the moment—demand nothing.

•

BECAUSE YOU HATE
the disease, you hate yourself for having the disease. You don’t want to die: it’s the opposite of suicidal; the source of the rage and shame is in the will to live itself. You want to annihilate your diseased self in some kind of life-affirming self-immolation. You don’t want to be the sick one. The diseased are repulsive; you sequester yourself as the sick were sequestered in a medieval city. But it’s not suicidal. My college roommate was suicidal. He was profoundly sad; he had lost his mother at seven and never fully recovered from this. He was one of the most intelligent people I’d ever known but more than this he was curious. He was conservative, a fan of William F. Buckley and a Reaganite, but was never judgmental. When I say “sad,” such a banal word, I think it really is perhaps the best one, better than despairing or melancholic; he was always in good humor, always wry. I had just flown back from Paris—I’d been listening to Debussy on the plane, had a layover in New York, the plane tipped, and we descended, and the sun was going down, and the Empire State Building looked orange and it cast a little shadow as we came down, then we went up again and I landed in Chicago—and the front door to the tiny old farmhouse we rented in Evanston was open in spite of the cold. The television in the living room was on, and there were two empty bottles of scotch on the floor, one standing, the other on its side. I remember wondering when it had stopped rolling. My landlord was standing there, with a bunch of policemen. “So you’ve heard?” he said. “I can see, the way your face looks.” He’d figured I’d heard, I realized later, not because of my face, but because it was all over local TV. My roommate had finished up the two bottles of scotch sometime the previous night, left the house, and ran down Sheridan Road to the cemetery. He found a gravestone large enough to serve as a bed—a sarcophagus, really—and he took off his clothes and lay on it. His family was still trying to fly out of Denver so I had to identify the body at the morgue. It was the first time I’d seen a corpse. My roommate was somewhat disfigured by the frozen tissue but perfectly recognizable, and what was strange was not so much the traces of life in the corpse, but, retrospectively, how the traces of death, so definitive now, had been latent in the living self.

•

I SAID GOOD-BYE
to everyone and left the bar and the street was cold now. Her first words—which I heard before I saw her—were (and I’m not making this up), “Hey, handsome—which way is Canal Street?”

Really? Was I still handsome? I mean if I ever was? I had just heard myself say, “Hey, beautiful. Right over there.” Was she beautiful? Too dark to tell. Plus she was bundled up, a hat, a short black winter coat, a scarf around her head like a keffiyeh. She was Asian, she had a light accent: Japanese, maybe. She was small, smiling, her eyes were direct enough that her glancing around at things didn’t spell nervousness, just curiosity. (As you might tell, this is perhaps the trait I value most in people.) She was looking for a bar on Canal Street, she said, to meet a friend; she wanted a drink: she hadn’t had a drink all night. She’d been dancing with some other friends and had lost track of time. I’ve never known the thrill of closing a deal for a lot of money like my friends in finance, and I’ve never had the institutionally certified thrill of, say, getting into a really good law school or getting that government appointment, but this is a thrill that I know. I doubted, I told her, that her bar would still be open, since it was a few minutes after four. “You’re probably right,” she said. For a moment, we stood there like two schoolchildren on an empty playground. “I could use one drink, just a beer, maybe,” she mused. “Is there a deli around here?”

There was, and I offered to walk her there and we smoked a cigarette together. On the way, we talked a little. I told her I was a composer and I was in the process of finishing graduate school. She was originally from Seoul and had gone to culinary school in the States and was working as a sous-chef at a restaurant in midtown. We stopped at the deli and she laughed. “I don’t really want a drink anymore. But you were nice to walk me here. Let’s have another cigarette and I’ll walk you home.” I had told her at some point that I lived in the neighborhood. We crossed lower Broadway, narrow and empty, and stood under the awning of my apartment building, a recently built, cheaply built high-rise. “It was nice to meet you,” she said and smiled, and in mock courtesy I shook the slender, cool hand she had so generously ungloved, and I said I agreed it had been nice to meet. I asked her if she needed a cab.