seven

THE FUTURE

I DROVE INTO TOWN from Malibu and parked Suzanne’s classic red Mercedes coupe—I’d had the engine completely rebuilt—in front of Tremaine. The pizza-oven, midsummer LA heat gave me weird shivers as I stepped out of the car. It was July 1988.

Leonard greeted me at the door. “Come on in, bro. Good to see you upright.”

He hadn’t installed air conditioning in the apartment yet. The place seemed even more unlived in since my family had moved out. It was twilight-dark inside, the shades drawn to block out the blinding light. He was in his underwear, not the wizened elf yet, a guy still in his prime but exhausted. I’d roused him from his favorite landing pad, the couch in the living room where he seized any opportunity to collapse.

“I’ve been shopping for a new car,” I announced. The week before, summoned by the local police, I’d walked up the hill from our house to find Susan holding infant Sara in her arms with five-year-old Sam quietly beside her, standing next to the wreck of our Oldsmobile Cutlass she’d somehow driven off the empty country road, totaling it. “On the advice of an old friend who is an expert in these matters, I visited three dealerships to get the best deal.”

Leonard shuddered, eyes raised to the heavens. He quickly ushered me to my corner chair in the kitchen as if I’d shown up at a hospital ER hemorrhaging. “I’m amazed you were able to leave your house,” he muttered.

“Quite amazing,” I muttered back.

“Did you get the new car?”

I shook my head.

“Of course not.”

Susan and I weren’t picture-takers. Most of our family photos were taken by others who gave us prints. I have one from early 1988, a few months before that hot afternoon. We’re outside on the patio in the backyard in Malibu. Sara is less than six months old. She looks really small on Susan’s lap. I’m sitting in a chair opposite them. Leonard and my dad are behind us. My mother isn’t in the picture. She must be the one who took it.

Leonard was quite fond of my dad, recognizing him as a sympathizer to our cause, a fellow reluctant recruit in the army of the conventional, half in, half out, but not terribly motivated to act out his fantasy of running away to the New Hebrides where, he claimed, he owned property on the island of Espiritu Santo. He told this to everyone he met, embellishing the story with convincing details, including a newspaper clipping he carried in his wallet reporting on the construction of a new power plant on my island. A surprising number of people believed him. Leonard didn’t, but perfectly understood my father’s impulse to fabricate.

Leonard, who never took a bad photo, muscled up for the occasion and poses manfully in his black T-shirt and silver-buckled belt, but you can see—at least I can—what an effort it’s taking for him to smile for the camera.

I rarely take a good picture, but I look great in this one, all smiles. I honestly have no idea where my mind was, because only a few weeks, if not days, later, I would stumble—I thought at first it was the flu—then go down completely.

“I can’t write,” I confided to him hoarsely.

“That’s the worst.” He was definitive. “At least no one else can write either, y’know?” It was a halfhearted attempt at humor. The ongoing strike of the Writers Guild of America against the studios was in its fourth month. The strike committee called me with my picketing assignments, but I was able to beg off, not because of the state of my mind, but my body. I was in as much pain as before the surgery. Despite the surgeon’s cheerful prediction that I’d be fine, the two nerves that go all the way down my left leg were permanently damaged. My hip, knee, and ankle didn’t work very well, painful even to the touch. My calf was partially numb, and one of my quads lay uselessly on my thigh. As my body struggled to compensate, the spinal pain in my chest and neck became as bad as my leg. Anyway, that’s my tale of woe.

Not long after my surgery, Leonard had finally played his new album, I’m Your Man, for the Sony execs. This time there was no drama or cryptic pronouncement about the great and the good. The album was handed directly to Sony International without any promotion or tour in America, where it would barely be noticed for many years.

Nice seeing you again, Leonard. Always a pleasure doing business with you.

Despite his best efforts, Leonard had allowed his suckered hopes to lift his toes off the ground, and he came crashing back to earth in a crumpled heap.

“Are you writing?” I asked, as if a distant miracle might cheer me up.

“Maybe I get a line down in the morning. A full day’s work.”

We thoughtfully munched on some pickles he found in the fridge.

“I’m not sure what’s going on,” I finally ventured.

“You’re wrecked, man,” Dr. Cohen pronounced without hesitation, specialist of specialists, the only one who could diagnosis my ailment without even a stethoscope. You’re wrecked, man became a technical term in our permanent vocabulary.

I detected as well a slight note of celebration in his diagnosis: Welcome to the club. It’s not as if Leonard wished me ill, but even though we’d been friends for a decade by then, compadres in matters of Roshi and show biz and fatherhood, I’d been oblivious to his fundamental condition as he soldiered on, barely managing a wan smile. How could I have known? He never tried to explain it to me. He’d tried unsuccessfully with other, well-meaning friends, who proved smug in the way well-meaning friends can be.

Oh come on, Leonard, it’s not that bad. Cheer up. All you need is a good woman.

“All I need is a good woman,” he’d sometimes mutter, barking a laugh as if something was caught in his throat.

He didn’t try to explain it to me lest I also recommend a good woman. Instead, he waited patiently for me to join him in his scavenged cardboard box in the homeless part of time.

“I’m surprised you lasted this long.” His back was to me as he checked whether there was anything else to eat hiding in the near-empty refrigerator.

“You know how it is,” I replied breezily, not at all sure how it is.

“Ohhhh, I surely do know how it is,” he stated with conviction. “Like the back of my hand.” He put some cheese and crackers on the table like paperweights. He sat down in his chair but turned sideways so we were parallel and could stare together over the counter at the glass-fronted kitchen cabinets reflecting our contemplative faces.

We spent so much time in our formal conversations, but found the greatest comfort in wordless occupation of a shared, enveloping state of mind, even in the darkest dark. We took great care of each other, like simians picking and discarding each other’s nits. We weren’t always wrecked, although Leonard was of the opinion, which I later came to share, that once you’ve been truly and thoroughly wrecked—shattered was his word—you never fully recover, no matter how much glue and Scotch tape and chewing gum you apply to hold the pieces in place.

This is what it feels like.

This is IT.

Not everything. Not the whole cosmos Roshi encourages us to experience.

Not even the truth.

Mood.

The only reality.

We examined magisterial poetic depictions of depression, from the nineteenth-century The Anatomy of Melancholy to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up and William Styron’s seductive memoir, Darkness Visible. We had no interest in joining that club.

Leonard tried meds off and on. I tried meds. I lucked upon one of the most wonderful, compassionate, funny men of medicine I’ve ever known, a highly respected UCLA psychopharmacologist in the early days of the specialty. On my recommendation Leonard checked him out and became quite fond of him. None of his meds ever worked for me, though, and only variations of prescription amphetamine ever made Leonard feel any better. Then again modest doses of speed always made him feel better.

He may have tried some talk therapy in the past. I’m not sure. For a time I engaged in a comforting dialogue with a brilliant woman, a psychotherapist whose tragic view of life seemed to align with my own.

“It’s called cognitive therapy,” I informed Leonard.

“I think I’ve heard of that somewhere.”

“The idea seems to be that in this condition you want to avoid undertaking tasks beyond your diminished capacities, since you’re bound to fail, which only amplifies your misery.”

“Like driving up the dreaded San Vicente.”

“Precisely.”

The dreaded San Vicente was our shorthand for impossible undertakings of any kind. San Vicente Boulevard contradicted the grid of parallel and perpendicular north/south and east/west thoroughfares of the city, running instead at a forty-five-degree angle, producing a series of challenging intersections that created in certain conditions, such as Leonard’s for about twenty-five years, the sensation of driving blindfolded, hair-raising as well for me in the passenger seat beside him.

“At any rate,” I went on. “She prescribed a writing regime for me. Every morning I set a timer for five minutes. That’s my workday. I stop before my mind overheats dangerously from the internal friction of the enterprise.”

“Five minutes? That’s terrific!”

I hesitantly agreed.

“But you don’t stop?”

“Of course not,” I confessed.

“Who could? Do you tell her you can’t stop?”

“She’s very understanding.”

As we pondered this unexpected kindness, an explosion of revving engines shattered the silence. Jack the old Japanese gardener was attacking the lawn with heavy machinery.

“At least she doesn’t insist you try to improve yourself!” Leonard shouted.

“I couldn’t bear it if she did!” I shouted back.

Despite the enormous popularity of the endeavor, we were too fond of ourselves to believe, much less engage, in self-improvement. Besides, Roshi never suggested that any such improvement was part of the program. For better or worse, we possessed a deep affection—I think it’s called amour propre—for our peculiar, particular selves. It was a veritable concrete barrier to personal growth.

Even though we entered the world wrecked, in dire need of a second birth to correct the first one that made us ripe candidates for an extreme spiritual solution, we simply could not embrace the notion that there was anything wrong with us. I can’t recall either one of us ever uttering those pathetic words: I’m so fucked up!

If we entertained any hopes at all, which we did from time to time, we pinned them on certain circumstances falling in our favor.

A hit changes everything.

It’s July 16, 1993. Leonard gave a concert that night at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston, part of “The Future Tour” to promote his new album of the same name. The tour had more style and energy and commercial intent than anything he’d done before. He had a snazzy logo for the enterprise—hummingbirds and handcuffs designed by a dear friend of his, Dianne Lawrence. The logo was embroidered on the back of soft, black leather jackets worn by the band and crew. He sent four of them in appropriate sizes to the Lerner family, including a tiny one for five-year-old Sara.

Leonard had pulled himself up off the mat after the knockdown by Sony in the I’m Your Man bout, taken a standing eight-count until his head cleared, and come out swinging with another brilliant, even more commercially compelling album.

“Oh man, there’s no way Sony can ignore this one!” I fearlessly predicted.

Leonard moistened his lips thoughtfully at my bullish assessment.

While he was squeezing out the lyrics, tunes, and production of his new album in tiny drops of sweat and blood, I had decided—a decision Susan applauded—to quit Hollywood, sell the house in Malibu, and move back to Western Massachusetts. I even found an industrial film company in Boston willing to pay me modest sums to eschew tall tales and write scripts about heavy machinery.

Then unexpectedly the stars realigned. Mel Gibson, at the top of his career, the Sexiest Man Alive, signed on to star in Bird on a Wire. I got paid a lot of money. Even better, studio doors opened wide for me to enter and pitch ideas to smiling senior vice presidents who weren’t even listening, except to the punch line: It’s like Bird on a Wire, y’know?

We left LA anyway. Susan’s Malibu house had zoomed in value in the run-up to the Savings and Loan Scandal, as it was called at the time, which we beat by a month in June 1989. We bought a lovely Victorian house on a tree-lined street near Smith College in Northampton. The kids could walk to school, and I could work on the two script deals I already had in my pocket with the expectation of more to come. A year later Bird on a Wire opened and became one of the top ten grossing movies of 1990.

On its way to the screen, though, the studio hired a hack to rewrite the indie, noirish original script into something appropriate for Goldie Hawn, cast opposite Mel Gibson to give the movie four stunning blue eyes. The finished product was marketed as a “romantic-action-comedy,” if I’ve got my genres right. While most of the scenes were inspired by the originals, they appeared on the screen like distortions in the fun-house mirrors of an amusement park, though not amusing to me, even less so because many other people were amused, but in the wrong way. I tried way too many times to explain what I’d actually written:See, in that first scene where they meet after twenty years…

Oh please. No one was interested.

I lived in Cambridge in the late sixties and early seventies, but I’d never even heard of the Berklee Performance Center in Boston until Leonard’s show. I arrived two hours before the concert. Susan would join me later, along with my sisters and their husbands and some friends of mine. I was eager for them to see for themselves that Leonard Cohen was still alive.

He couldn’t help it. Once again his hopes were running high at the beginning of the tour in Europe. Reviews of the album pulsed with excitement. Sony even booked dates in North America. Most of them were in Canada, though, and the venues in the US were “showcases” like the Berklee Performance Center, small theaters with cachet if you were an aspiring art act.

I walked into the lobby and my heart sank. The theater has since been renovated, but at the time it was a dump. Worse was its modest size, only a thousand seats in a narrow hall. I practically counted them as I walked down the center aisle toward the stage where the crew was making last-minute equipment tweaks. Backstage, Bill Ginn, Leonard’s sweet, slightly mad keyboard player who’d sometimes stayed upstairs at Tremaine in the early years, grabbed my hand and whispered, “Really good you showed up early, Eric. We need a night off.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant until he ushered me over to where Leonard was sitting at a little table in a far corner off the stage, looking as if he was guarding the stack of wooden wine cases beside him. Château Latour.

“Glad you could make it, bro,” he greeted me. We rarely shook hands, much less hugged. Old Leonard was not a hugger. He pointed to the chair opposite him as if we were going to play a serious card game like Go Fish. A full bottle was open on the table. I sat down and he filled our glasses.

“I don’t drink alone,” he reminded me. I understood Bill Ginn’s reference to a night off.

“Neither do I,” I concurred.

We drank with purpose. As we finished the second bottle he confided, “I’m making a heroic attempt to drink all the profits. At a hundred bucks a bottle, I think I have a shot.” He glanced around at his surroundings, raising his chin and eyebrows. The dismal situation required no further commentary.

Sony had shafted him again.

“For some curious reason,” he began, pulling the cork from a third bottle, “my bass player is intent on sabotaging my efforts.”

Only months before Leonard had been so enthused about his new bass player, a widely respected, very hip musician, but months before there had been a surfeit of enthusiasm to go around. I forget whether the problem was that the bass player played too fast or too slow, but Leonard believed, or purported to, that “he’s involved in some conspiracy with my drummer.”

From then on Leonard and I referred to various acts of knife-in-the-back treachery as: He did a [name of the bass player] on me.

“Good wine, eh?”

“Excellent.”

It was tasty stuff, from Pauillac, a bit prim for my taste that had been recently upgraded by all those studio checks, but I understood how its somber style suited the mood. He deftly reached into the wooden Bordeaux coffin that cradled the bottles’ body and neck and pulled out another.

“They served Château Latour exclusively on the Titanic, you know.” He delivered the mordant line in the manner of English nobility, nostrils flared, eyes gazing over the horizon, the Lord of All Manners.

Striking poses was extremely important to us, if only to reassure others that we could still stand upright and make funny faces no matter the circumstances. This, though, was a total disaster. Leonard wouldn’t go on tour again for fifteen years, and then only because he was so broke he forced himself to overcome the dismal memory of this tour.

“We need a few drops more.” Leonard motioned with his empty glass to the wooden case. He handed me the corkscrew. “Could you do the honors? You’ve got more leverage than me.”

Mood is everything.

It may have been Leonard’s only certainty, a reminder he often repeated lest we forget and go aimlessly astray. It was his greatest contribution to our puzzling endeavor, if not to mankind’s perennial quest for spiritual understanding. Mood is everything and everything else is just speculation. Mood is the actuality of existence. What it feels like in the bone.

Whether or not the sages, mystics, masters, or even Roshi believed that, we didn’t care. We wanted better moods, and the older he got, the less constrained he felt about pursuing a better mood.

I’m just trying to feel two cents better.

Backstage at the Berklee theater that night Leonard wasn’t having any luck with it. Curiously, I was actually in a pretty good mood.

In 1993, while most novelists in America secretly (or not) dreamed of their work becoming a hit movie, I was writing a dark, quirky literary novel intended never to appear on any screen. I hoped for a relatively tiny audience of discriminating readers who’d purposely skipped the network television debut of the studio’s mashed-up version of Bird on a Wire that drew forty million viewers on a single Saturday night.

I took the phone off the hook in my top-floor office in an old brick Victorian building in downtown Northampton even though it was still ringing with offers from Hollywood. With the practiced, dedicated speed of a screenwriter, it took me only four months to turn out the first half of my novel. I express-mailed it to Leonard back in LA. It was called Sweet Jane.

He read it in two days.

“It’s got no voice,” he pronounced matter-of-factly on the phone, without the customary editorial preface of mealymouthed praise prior to the negative judgment.

I waited for some elaboration. I could almost see him frowning because I hadn’t immediately grasped his point.

“It’s a screenplay. A pretty good one. But it has no voice.”

Oh. Shit.

Leonard read everything I wrote. His critiques were invariably compressed, not unlike Roshi’s unerring grunts of approval or disapproval.

It has no voice.

There was no mistaking the unspoken corollary: It’s not a novel.

I tossed the entire manuscript in the trash.

Then something happened, the way something sometimes happens in sanzen. Only it was Leonard’s presence in my mind not Roshi’s, resonating like a tuning fork as I relentlessly took dictation from a voice I’d never heard before. Six months later I sent him the finished novel.

“It’s good, man. You found the voice.” He kind of chuckled. “It’s a pretty good one, too. Congratulations. You’re off the hook.”

That’s why I was in a good mood backstage that night at the Berklee theater.

“This bottle is much nobler than the others, don’t you think?” He thoughtfully contemplated his glass as I refilled it.

“It keeps improving with age.”

“Like us.”

Reports on exactly how many bottles we consumed before the show that night in Boston would vary, but most of the band agreed we set a new record. Over my shoulder Bill Ginn tried to catch Leonard’s attention, pointing to his watch.

Leonard slowly got to his feet. “Wish we had more time, but they tell me I have a show to do.”

“Are you good to go?”

“Couldn’t be better! Is Little Susan coming?”

“Of course.”

“Give her my best. I’d love to see her after, but I’ve got a bus to catch unless my bass player pushes me off the stage. Can’t turn my back for a minute.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him.”

“I’m counting on you. I’m passing through New York after this is finally over.”

“I’ll come down.”

“That would be nice.”

“The Mayflower?”

“Where else?” He gave me a salute, buttoned his jacket, and headed for the stage without a hint of a wobble in his stride.