ALO: May 95, I’m in the James Dean suite, better known as two shoe boxes at the back of the Hotel Iroquois on West 44th Street in Manhattan, and life has definitely lost its colour. You try a few things to forget that he who is not busy being born is busy dying, to block out the thought of yourself as a wingless, hurt, spineless bird of the 60s. Another grey line – they’re not even white any more – another grappa or Southern-anything-without-Comfort can bring you back to life for a few minutes, but it’s not a given. Occasionally you get up from the couch and have to check yourself out in the mirror above the fireplace to make sure you are still there, and that’s an effort. One could say that when life becomes too painful, the body sickens and withers and the soul departs.
Your circulation is so shot, you have a permanent drip; you can’t risk beige trousers ’cause you leave sir john and ten minutes later dicky boy still isn’t finished. At five in the morning there are definitely animals in the soup, the hall and your mind, and the thought of them provides the only colour in this bioflick. There’s an inflamed eyesore-orange cutting through the grey death-white pallor of the door and it’s as bright as the people and/or animals are real and active in the corridor. You eventually open the door, the hall is empty, and as silent and as lifeless, grey and oh-so-off-white as the lifelessness inside.
My blood feels like liquid cocaine mixed with grappa, fire without the flame; problem is it feels there is less and less of it flowing through me. My heart has to beat faster to give me oxygen and to find some remaining grimy pocket of nutrition. I’ve hit that point when more than half of any given day I can’t answer the phone or make a call; anybody could hear the pain. I don’t feel like a long-distance man any more.
I keep getting glimpses of the other side: looks okay, but I don’t want to be there just yet. The seductive calm of the other side is replaced by my wife Esther’s and my boys’ faces and they are not calm, they just don’t get it. I pull back and the other side goes away for a time. I think often of the dark Christine, who right-handed Olympic Studios through the 60s and 70s. When she decided to move on to less painful pastures, she settled all the local accounts, left not a tradesman unattended, paid her milk bill up to date and left a tidy desk, with a neat left-and-right balance sheet for one last well-planned session at Olympic. And so went off to her well-planned death.
She got in her garaged car, plugged up the exhaust pipe, and pulled from her bag a bottle of vodka and a hundred or so sleepers she’d hoarded. She sacrificed her sleep to a dream of relief, planning and styling this final roar of her broken engine. Just in case the vod and hundred nods were not enough, as the exhaust did its work, Christine smashed the empty bottle on the mahogany dash and slashed her wrists to final pieces.
I get some rest and that’s exhausting in and of itself; I get up by noon and head down the block to Un, Deux, Trois for my staple grappa and espresso, followed by a good sweat and a line in the loo, after which I can hold down the soup of the day. The Un, Deux, Trois folk are kind, I’m never rude and they never embarrass me, but it’s apparent I’m embarrassing myself.
It was time to get my affairs in order, so this is how I didn’t do it. My James Dean suite in the Iroquois was such a mess I couldn’t get it together to pack and leave; I just rented a fresh abode and moved on up to Columbus Circle’s Mayflower Hotel, the move giving me the zap to put on a fresh and happy face, allowing my movie to return to widescreen Technicolor for a few moments more. I called room service, ordered a well-done steak, and limited my booze intake to a beer set-up chased by a line to aid my digestive tract.
I hadn’t seen Thomas ‘Doc’ Cavalier for quite a while, and I recalled a long-outstanding debt of quite a few grand left over from our various recording activities in the 70s. Doc still lodged in Wallingford, Connecticut, and in a nearby town lived one Al Goodin, a champion gent I’d met some eight years ago on a jet bound for Vegas who told me a few truths about life. The magazine of the same name had done a piece on the vast number of great white unemployed in all the armpits of North America, and I had asked the obviously worldly and patriotic Al whether this was to be The Grapes of Wrath revisited, the beginning of an end for America. ‘No,’ said Al, his ‘N-o-o-o-o’ so long and a-e-i-o-u-ed that it had to be followed by a prophecy of doom. ‘Andy,’ he said, ‘the end will be when folks our age start asking for our social security and there’s nothing left, and what is left over younger blood will keep for itself.’
I checked out of the Mayflower, kept the Iroquois on tap, hopped in a limo and stopped on Amsterdam Avenue to buy two-fifths for the road. Soon enough we were on the Merrit Parkway heading for Connecticut and in my memories time stood still, my heart throbbing with pain and shame at travelling the same freeway twenty-five years later – when all seemed to be moving forward save I, who had been drunk and stoned then, and still was. Though now I couldn’t let myself drive.
Once I arrived in Weathersfield, I sat down to catch up with Al Goodin and thought I was putting on a good front, when he cut me down with, ‘You know, Andy, you’re a drunk.’ I was in shock. Get the picture: I’d burnt my bridges in show-biz, and now in the real world I was just a plain old drunk. I agreed with Al’s call, which felt both cruel and kind, as it came from a true American soul. I knew that if I was ever to see this man on another occasion, out of respect for his opinion I had better be sober. I’d met my worldly match ’n’ catch-me-out Barnum, and Al was raking my life over his warm coals.
He was a more northern Panama-hatted Ed Begley Sr from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, my mother’s boyfriend Alec revisited in logic. That first conversation with Al left me in a panic and reaching for another line and a grappa. I was such a hypocrite; I frowned at him and pretended I ‘used’ to take coke. I was in a real spin. He had me explain what I did for a living, what I’d done, how I’d got there, where I’d been; this same story used to come out produced with the right amount of colour and echo, but now it sounded scratched, hollow and worn.
‘I don’t know why you bother, Andy,’ said Al.
I interrupted with a panicked ‘What Do You Mean?’
‘I mean,’ he went on, his smile carried on wings of mercy, ‘that life as you know it is over, you are spinning your wheels, you’re redundant. It’s time to get on with change and find your new life. Your old life pays the rent, but your body and soul are spent, go to bed. I’ll drive what’s left of you to Wallingford in the morning . . .’
Three days later Al poured me into Wallingford: not even the coke could stop me blacking out, so I slept it off and waited for another loop of slight life to lock in. Then I called Doc and met him for my brandy-and-beer breakfast; he smiled at a man dying, trying to tie up some loose ends in his life.
‘How’s the family?’ Doc asked.
He can see clearly now, so there’s no words I can muster, just a pained effort of a ‘hmm-guess-howz-my-family’ grimace on my tired barbed-’n’-wired face. I libatiously limoed what was left of me back to New York and sat in a coma; my elevator had shut down, I was cringing in the basement, looking in the Yellow Pages for help. The Jimmy Dean rooms breathed a little, life wasn’t bright but there was a ray of hope; the animals and voices in the hall had done their work and moved on to other folk. To paraphrase Jimmy Webb, the loon’s a harsh mistress. I knew the ride was over, but I wasn’t ready for the other side.
I finally got the message when at five in the morning on 44th Street, returning to my hotel, I saw this horse. Problem was the horse was fifteen storeys high, exiting the Royalton and entering the Algonquin. The horse had opaque white flanks through which I could see all the way to Times Square. I blinked a couple of times to try and get rid of this momentary hallucination, as I’d been up for days already, but every time I opened my eyes, in this endless moment that I can’t put time on, the horse was still there, slowly crossing 44th Street.
And then I decided to get well, to survive, and I called Doc . . .