Read The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld Online
Authors: Justin Hocking
The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (25 page)
Though the house looks massive to me, White considered it a “fishing cottage”; it was modest in size compared to those he designed on the wealthier north side of Long Island. It was part of a colony of cottages, all designed by White and his firm. Andy Warhol was the first artist to buy one back in the 1970s, when he paid something in the ballpark of $500,000. Just adjacent to Schnabel’s, Warhol’s place is now worth $50 million—making it one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the country. I wonder how much of that price is just for the history: it was a famous hangout for the whole Factory crew; the Stones recorded
Black and Blue
down in the basement. Legend has it you could hear them rocking all the way down to the trailer park at Ditch Plains—our go-to surf spot when the North End isn’t breaking.
Something about this visit seems auspicious for me and my imminent life choice. On one hand, I feel assaulted by the level of Schnabel’s success. In a scene from the film, the fictional Basquiat pisses in the fictional Schnabel’s stairwell, maybe as a result of feeling similarly assaulted, as a minor insurrection against Schnabel’s magisterial presence. Or then again, maybe Basquiat was just an asshole; maybe the drugs made him that way.
And on the other hand, I want a little piece of what Schnabel has. I don’t need a giant beach house or a swimming pool with an island or my own four-thousand-square-foot man cave, but I do need some creative autonomy. To surf when I want, write when I want, answering to no one but myself—this is the wealth I’m after. Something needs to change in my life, and visiting Schnabel’s place crystallizes the feeling.
Forecast for the Manhattan Skyline: Small craft advisory. North swell 13 feet at 9 seconds. Winds from the south at 30 mph. Water temp 60, air temp 55. Surf: fair to poor conditions, with strong winds, dangerous rips, and sneaker waves
.
Back in the city, I’m paralyzed with indecision. My hope is to hear back from Karissa, that her romantic status will help me decide one way or another, but Sunday and Monday come and go with no word back from her. Finally, on Wednesday, I get an email from the Portland people saying they need to know right away, that if I don’t want the job they’ll have to go with their second choice.
I have a long phone call with my best friend, Gabriel, who lives in Portland and originally sent me the job listing.
“Just call them and tell them you want it,” he says.
“I’m in a bad way after the whole robbery thing,” I say. “I’m worried I might get out there and completely lose it.”
“I’m more worried about what might happen if you stay in New York,” he says.
“Karissa’s another issue.”
“Portland’s not that small. You’ll probably never even see her.”
“But we run in a lot of the same circles. I’m sure I’ll bump into her.”
“Then you’ll bump into her. Worse things have happened. Now call them up and accept the job.”
“But what if—”
“
Call them up and take the goddamned job
.”
I haven’t heard Gabriel raise his voice with anyone for years. He’s possibly the least authoritarian person I know, but since I can’t supply one myself, he gives me this final voice of authority. So I call. And accept. And try to do so with the most enthusiasm I can muster. And then fall asleep feeling relieved that I’ve made a choice; that is, until I wake up in the middle of the night, in the throes of an even deeper, more dislocating anxiety attack than the one I’d experienced out at Grodin’s.
A few days later, after a series of sleepless nights, I stumble into work and open my email, and there it is, finally, a note from Karissa. She apologizes for taking so long to get back to me, and explains that she’d been on vacation up in Massachusetts with her
boyfriend
, and that during the trip her
boyfriend
asked her to be
his wife
.
Forecast for the Manhattan Skyline: New LARGE groundswell that should show strongest over the afternoon/evening. Look for 15–20 feet+ faces at many spots. Select outer reefs hold occasional bigger sets 25 feet+ late in the day. These are conditions for expert and very experienced surfers only. Anyone else should NOT paddle out as conditions are life-threatening
.
Near the end of the film
Basquiat
, the eponymous artist has lunch with his estranged girlfriend, played by Claire Forlani. It’s an awkward, tragic scene; Basquiat is strung out on drugs, drowning in his own fame, and this is all exacerbated by seeing how well his ex-girlfriend is doing for herself and learning that she’s romantically involved with a mutual friend. He excuses himself to go to the washroom, where he scrutinizes and picks at his blemished face in the mirror, while the lugubrious Tom Waits song “Who Are You” plays in the background. At this very moment, the film cuts to the skyline surfer, who takes an epic, potentially fatal bail and then gets hammered by the falls, a not-so-subtle metaphor for Basquiat’s own fall from grace and his impending heroin overdose.
As I’m sitting at my desk, staring at Karissa’s email, something like a wave crashes over my own head, a neurochemical storm surge that holds me down for a long, long time. When I finally surface, I call Gabriel.
“The fact that you loved her so much shows that she’s a really good catch,” he says. “So it’s not all that surprising that someone else asked her to marry him.”
For the first time in my life, I hang up on my best friend.
My therapist agrees that I should go to Portland, but he strongly suggests that, after everything I’ve been through, I need to start taking some medication first.
When I object, he recaps my past two years: How he’s watched me grow increasingly despondent at my job. How exhausted I am by the city, by my long daily commute from Brooklyn to Midtown. And how having a gun pointed at my face has brought me right to the breaking point.
“Why should you suffer any longer?” he asks.
It seems risky to me, beginning a heavy psychotropic and then moving across the country a couple weeks later, but if it means relief from the kind of pain and anxiety I’ve been feeling, then I’m all for it. And doubly so if it can help me deal with this new blast of depression over Karissa’s engagement.
I book an appointment with a psychiatrist up near the Columbia University campus. He’s a youngish doctor, personable, and in a few minutes I feel more comfortable talking to him than I ever have with my therapist. After listening to my story, he agrees that I need some meds. He prescribes a low dose of something called Celexa, an older version of Lexapro that apparently has fewer side effects.
“I think this will definitely help you with your transition to Portland,” he says. “But more than that, it might change your life.”
Nothing much changes at first, but after a few days I feel a new kind of edginess, like the way I imagine an alcoholic or a chronic smoker must feel after going cold turkey. The shrink warned me that the transition onto an antidepressant is often accompanied by some anxiety, so he’d also prescribed a tranquilizer called Ativan that I was to take “as needed.” I’m in some serious need, so I start taking an Ativan every night to help me sleep. I’m amazed at how a tiny white pill can make me feel so much better, a wave of automatic serenity that puts me fast asleep, until I wake up at three or four craving another.
The first weekend in October breaks sunny and crisp and warm; under any other circumstances I would’ve gone surfing, but now all I want to do is sit at home, watch TV, and take Ativan. Things progress like this for a few more days, until I start to worry I might end up like a pill-junkie version of Basquiat.
I visit the psychiatrist and tell him what’s been happening. He looks concerned when I explain I’ve been taking the Ativan in the afternoons and every night to help me sleep. He suggests that if I’m having trouble sleeping, then what I really need is a sleeping pill.
He writes a prescription.
On the way home, I pick up the grenade-sized bottle of Ambien.
I’ve never done hallucinogens, but what happens to me that night is comparable to a really bad trip. I have a terrible reaction to the Ambien, and combined with slight withdrawal from the Ativan and my difficult adjustment to Celexa, I nearly lose my mind. I can’t sleep; all I can do is lie in a fetal position, my whole body trembling, held under by a heavy pharmacological crush, probably looking and feeling a lot like Martin Sheen having a nervous breakdown in a Saigon hotel room at the beginning of
Apocalypse Now
.
10
When I close my eyes, I see dark, endlessly transmogrifying shapes behind my eyelids, like an evil game of Tetris that you can never slow down or shut off, a kind of hideous phantasm that no amount of conscious will can terminate. The Ambien also causes an awful chemical taste in my mouth, as if I’d polished the Pfizer laboratory floor with my tongue.
I feel like the human version of Newtown Creek, flooded with bad chemicals.
On top of the shadow shapes and tastes, I have severe anxiety and self-destructive urges—
three years in New York and only one
accomplishment
. At the very height of it, the dark, shifting shapes morph into obsessive visual hallucinations.
Vision: the Manhattan skyline surfer.
Vision: an epic bail, washed over the falls.
Vision: a plunge off the Williamsburg Bridge.
And Melville’s in the room with me now; I can hear his ragged breathing, can sense his bitterness and gloom emanating up from under my bed, his body directly beneath mine, like a shadow print burned into the floorboards. This time he’s accompanied by his son Malcolm, who, at the age of eighteen, climbed the stairs of the Melville family home, locked his bedroom door, and shot himself with a pistol, perhaps the result of growing up in the thick fog of such failure.
I somehow endure until dawn and call in sick for the third time this month. After my roommates leave for work, it’s all I can do to get myself from my bed to the couch. I flip through the channels until I find
The Gods Must Be Crazy
playing on AMC. I’m still shaking, feeling sicker than I’ve ever felt, but somehow I’m able to laugh at the movie—the less-than-PC story of a misguided little Kalahari tribesman who ventures from his homeland to the big city just to return an empty Coke bottle. In one scene, he gets locked in prison for poaching a goat; he finds himself trapped in a tiny, dark cell, having no idea how or why he ended up there.
“Poor little bugger,” one of the main characters says, “if we don’t get him out of there, he’s gonna die for sure.”
1
This friend eventually dismantled the signature Basquiat cabinets and sold them for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He made a lucrative, set-for-life, never-work-again career out of them—his
kitchen cabinets
.
2
In his memoir Schnabel writes, “Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.”
3
For instance, casting his actual parents to play the part of his character’s parents in the film. Schnabel also put heavy emphasis on his own obscenely successful career and his cozy family life—one scene depicts him waltzing around his Versailles-sized studio with his lovely young daughter—which, contrasted with Basquiat’s downward spiral and lack of real human connectedness, seems sort of, well,
cruel
.
4
Schnabel is famous for wearing silk pajamas pretty much everywhere, from his outdoor painting studio to televised interviews with Charlie Rose, and word on the street is that Oldman’s wardrobe consisted of pajamas straight from Schnabel’s armoire.
5
Schnabel apparently pulled his weight at the Warhol museum and scored the deceased painter’s wig and glasses for use during filming. It’s hard to imagine a more hip and/or creepy tableau anywhere in cinematic history: David
fucking
Bowie wearing Andy Warhol’s wig.
6
Coincidentally, when del Toro originally moved to California, he was much more interested in becoming a surfer than an actor.
7
The filmwork is vintage footage by Herbie Fletcher, at what looks like Sunset Beach on Oahu.
8
The story of a Connecticut suburbanite who tries to swim his way home from a cocktail party by linking up a series of his neighbors’ backyard pools. In the beginning he seems good-natured, robust, adventurous, but slowly the reader begins to understand that he’s despised or pitied by most of his neighbors, that he’s embroiled in at least one extra marital dalliance, and that he’s actually been kicked out of the home he’s swimming toward, so that in the end he finds himself naked and lost and cast out of his suburban Eden.
9
After I watch it a year and half later,
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
becomes one of my all-time favorite films, further warming me toward Schnabel as a director.
10
The scene was apparently culled from footage of Martin Sheen having an actual nervous breakdown.
I
n the wake of the commercial failure of
Moby-Dick
, Melville wrote the novel
Pierre
, the story of a young writer whose creative ambitions are crushed by New York City. While railing against Christian taboos and toying with bisexuality and an incestuous relationship with his sister, he becomes increasingly unhinged. According to Melville biographer Laurie Roberston-Lorant, the book reads “like a narrative nervous breakdown.”
The bizarre story concludes with the main character’s Hamlet-style suicide, followed by this nihilistic passage:
Deep, deep, and still deep and deeper must we go, if we would find out the heart of a man; descending into which is as descending a spiral stair in a shaft, without any end, and where that endlessness is only concealed by the spiralness of the stair, and the blackness of the shaft.