Fall 1988
THE FACTS
Someone is watching me. Someone has been watching me off and on now for sixteen hours. But every time I look out the window he slips behind the refrigerator in the yard of the abandoned house down the street. All I see is his pants leg. All I see is one foot, a tennis shoe, before he ducks out of view. This is happening to me at the E-Z Eight Motel on Macarthur Boulevard in Oakland. I haven’t slept or eaten in three days. I check the locks on the door again. I check the window and turn away. On the TV a young woman is fucking two men and I watch them for a while. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and in a few hours I have to lecture on Huckleberry Finn to a class of undergraduates.
In the bathroom mirror I look at myself. My eyes are bloodshot. My face is drawn and pasty and there’s a distinct chemical odor emanating from the pores of my skin. Over the last few weeks my weight has dropped from a hundred and seventy pounds to a hundred and forty, and I’ve lost the feeling in two fingers on my left hand. Nerve damage. A short circuit in the brain. I look closer. There are delicate, threadlike patterns of broken blood vessels along the bridge of my nose. The condition is called spider angioma, and it comes from drinking heavily over a long period of time, when the liver can no longer freely cleanse the blood and it begins to clot. The tiny vessels burst. I know this because my brother had it. I know this because I’ve read dozens of books on alcoholism and drug addiction, though none of them, no amount of knowledge, has helped me to stop.
I undress. I turn on the hot water, only the hot water, and step into the shower and bear it for as long as I can. The pain distracts. The pain is good, and when I step out I am pink all over, the flesh tender and inflamed. Naked, I return to the bed and lie down, my arms to my sides, like a corpse. The movie is still playing, a continuous loop, but now the scene offers two women. They’re stretched out on a bed in what looks like a motel room, a motel room like this, with a loud bedspread and cheap vinyl furniture. One is only wearing a garter belt and stockings. The other is dressed in tight jeans and a halter top. I want to keep watching them but instead I shut my eyes. Sleep is what I need, even if it’s only for a few minutes, but my body is a live wire. I get up and go to the window again and peer through a break in the drapes. The streets are empty and quiet and most of the apartments and houses that line the block have bars on their windows and doors. The sun is just rising and so far as I can tell I’m no longer being watched. That or he’s hiding somewhere else. At best this is only a temporary reprieve and yet I’m thankful for it. I am relieved.
At the corner an older Buick pulls to the curb and a woman steps out. She crosses the street, a little unsteadily in her heels, and when she disappears I turn away from the window and start to dress. I put on a pair of wrinkled Levi’s and the oxford shirt that I wore to class last Friday. I comb my hair. I use my finger to brush my teeth. Then I put Visine in my eyes and stand before the mirror and try to convince myself that I look like something other than a drug addict. By the time I leave the motel the morning traffic has begun and soon I’m surrounded by other cars and trucks on Interstate 580, all of us moving at a steady seventy miles an hour, all of us trailing closely together.
If the car ahead suddenly threw on its brakes, I wouldn’t be able to stop in time. Neither would the car tailgating me. In an instant the freeway would be littered with bodies, steel and glass. I hold the wheel tightly and concentrate on the road. Ahead my exit is approaching, and I need to change lanes. There’s an opening but I don’t trust myself, whether I looked carefully enough, so I check again. I check three, four times. A mistake at this speed in rush-hour traffic is deadly, and I know I shouldn’t be here, that I have no right to be behind the wheel of a car. But I make it, as I have so many times before, in even worse condition, and once I’m safely parked in the school lot I take a deep breath, thankful to have again reached my destination alive. I light a cigarette and just sit there for a while, smoking, listening to the engine tick itself cool. On the radio the weatherman predicts another bright sunny day.
The month is October but for the last several weeks temperatures have been in the eighties. Students are dressed as if it were still summer, the young women in shorts and skirts, the young men in T-shirts and rubber sandals, and as I start across campus I wish for dark skies. I wish for black clouds and strong winds and rain, hard rain, the kind that washes out roads. The kind that knocks down power lines. But the sky is perfectly clear. Already I’ve begun to sweat.
My briefcase is heavy with papers and books—The Norton Anthology of Literature, The Story and Its Writer, the Bantam edition of Huckleberry Finn—and two classes’ worth of undergraduate essays, about sixty in all, that I can’t bring myself to read. The students will be disappointed. I said I would have them back today. I said I would have them back the week before and now I have to offer up another excuse, another promise I may fully intend to keep but which I will most likely break. My office is on the third floor of the humanities building, and though I’m short of breath I take the stairs. I take them because I don’t want to risk being trapped in the elevator with someone who knows me and having to carry on the pretense of a polite conversation. I’m not ready for that yet, or the crowds, all the people. All the noise and commotion. I need to ease into this slowly, retreat to my office, lock the door and do another line.
The hallway is long and narrow and the walls on both sides seem to merge at the end, into a point, like a diagram in perspective. The fluorescent lights overhead seem extraordinarily bright. Some of the professors are in their offices, and to get to mine I have to pass by their open doors.
The trick, I tell myself, is to stare at the floor. To walk quickly.
I almost make it.
The professor in the office directly across from mine is at her desk having a conference with a young Japanese student. She speaks slowly and loudly as if she’s instructing the deaf. Teaching English as a second language is her specialty and she addresses all of her foreign students in this manner. While I’m fumbling with my keys, trying to get the right one into the lock, she glances over at me.
“You look like hell,” she says.
“What?”
“I said you look like hell.”
“I’ve been up all weekend,” I say. “Working on my book.”
“Yeah,” she says, “right.”
I resent her snide remarks, I resent her as a person for talking down to her students, but I’m in no condition to react. All I want is to escape into my office. She says something else—something rude, I imagine—which I don’t catch because I’ve finally gotten the door open, stepped inside and shut it behind me. I lock it. I check it just to be sure and then I take the small plastic bag from my pocket and empty it onto my desk. I have a razor in my wallet and I use it to cut the crystals into a fine white powder and draw them into two long lines. The rest I return to the bag. For a straw, I roll up a dollar bill. The tissues inside my nose are swollen and raw, I’ve been bleeding, and it’s several tries before I can do the first line. It makes my eyes water, it burns, and I like it. In a matter of seconds all the fear and paranoia, all the things I don’t want to think about or feel, slip away. I take a deep breath again. I let it out slowly and wish that I were someplace, anywhere but here. The next line is easier.
My wife hasn’t heard from me since I left Friday night. What we fought about, I don’t remember, but I imagine that it had to do with money. It always seems to be about money at first and then turns into something else. I pick up the phone. I make the call. It rings and rings, and as it continues to ring it crosses my mind that this could be the last time, this could be the end. I picture an empty house. I picture empty closets and unmade beds. But then she answers, slightly out of breath.
In the background I can hear our second child, Logan, crying loud and sharply. He is three years old and so far he has not been as easy to raise as his brother. His eyes are highly sensitive to light, his ears to noise, and he cries often, constantly testing his mother’s patience. Usually I’m the one to calm him, to hold and walk the boy until his chest stops heaving. He is more used to my arms than hers.
“Honey,” I say, “it’s me.”
“What do you want?”
“We need to talk.”
“I hate you,” she says, and hangs up.
I call back. She answers on the first ring this time but doesn’t say anything. I tell her I’m sorry. That I want to come home. I go on like this for a couple of minutes before she cuts me off.
“Just do what the fuck you want,” she says. “You always do anyway.”
Then she hangs up.
From my office window I can see San Francisco Bay, the waters a greenish-blue. Beyond it is the coastline, and if I left now I could be there in an hour, cruising along Highway I. I want to get in the car and drive and drive but I know I won’t. I know I can’t. Classes have begun, and already I’m a few minutes late. I grab my briefcase and hurry out of the office.
I dim the lights when I come into the room. I draw the blinds and try to keep my hands from shaking. The students are quiet. At the podium I fumble for my notes. I almost drop the book. Someone laughs, and I look up. It’s a kid in the back, a freshman with purple hair and a spiked dog collar around his neck. “Another rough weekend, Professor Brown?” he says. The girl sitting next to him laughs. The rest don’t see the humor in it, and I appreciate them for it. They’re a range of ages and colors but mostly they’re older. Housewives returning to school after raising their families. Middle-aged men frustrated with their careers and trying to start a new one. I have a guy in his seventies who comes to class with an oxygen tank. I am in my early thirties. The course is a standard comp and lit, required of all English and liberal arts majors.
On the board I write the words guilt, compassion, humility. Beneath that I write Jim as moral instructor and then I begin to read aloud from chapter 22. It’s about a lynch mob who set out after a man named Sherburn because he killed the town drunk for disgracing him in public. And considering my condition I think I’m doing an excellent job of it. My mouth is dry but I read clearly. I go at just the right pace. I pause in all the right places. When I first walked into class and looked out over all those faces I wasn’t sure if I’d make it, if I ought to just dismiss them and save myself the embarrassment. But my confidence grows as I continue to read. I’m on the scene now where Sherburn confronts the mob for the cowards they are; it’s one of my favorite parts, and as I pace in front of the class reading with more passion, it suddenly occurs to me that my notes on the board have absolutely nothing to do with the material at hand. The scene I intended to talk about isn’t even in this chapter. That’s when I lose my rhythm and begin to stutter.
An older student raises her hand.
“Excuse me,” she says. “But I think you went over this last week.”
No one laughs this time, though I wish they had. The silence has less to do with respect than compassion for something pathetic. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be such a big deal—professors get mixed up all the time—but because I’m hungover and strung out and have no business being here, I feel I have to justify myself. I try to look surprised at my mistake. I make an act of checking our syllabus, and finally I smile, admit the error and shake my head.
A young woman in the front row catches my eye. Her name is Sylvia Garcia. She’s a shy, unassuming student who sometimes brings her little boy to class with her, and when I’m conscious of being a good teacher I make a point of calling on the quieter ones. I want to involve everyone. In Sylvia’s case, however, that proves a mistake. The word nigger appears three times in the passage I ask her to read, and though I encourage my students to refer to Jim as Jim, as I do, even when the text uses nigger, I don’t require it. The only rule is to remain true to the spirit of the story. That’s why I don’t initially interrupt her. The first time could be a mistake, the stress she puts on it. The second time is clearly not. There’s a slight but certain venom in her voice. It’s as if she enjoys saying nigger, as if she’s been given a license to offend because it’s there in print.
“Sylvia,” I say, “there’s no reason for that.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
She gives me a wide-eyed, innocent look.
“No,” she says, “I don’t. Tell me.”
Now I wonder if maybe I’m wrong, if maybe I’m imagining things, or being overly sensitive. I don’t think so. Another student, a black woman, gets up and leaves the room.
For a while the class is dead quiet. Everyone is staring at me, and I don’t know what to do, whether to turn today’s lesson into a discussion on race or pretend that nothing has happened and continue where we left off. Either way I’m bound to fail. I take the path of least resistance and dismiss them early. No one protests. No one even seems to care.
The rest of the day is uneventful, and I’m grateful for it, though I regret having wasted the class and the students’ time. They deserve much better. I return to my office, lock the door and spend the next few hours trying to get through a stack of short stories from my next class, Creative Writing 101. The first is set on a spaceship that’s under attack by alien creatures. Another all takes place in the mind of a teenage girl but we don’t know where she’s at until the last line when it’s revealed that she’s about to have an abortion. I’ve read them before, if not these particular stories then something very much like them. I’ve read them so often that I don’t know what to say about them anymore that doesn’t sound cynical or meanspirited. Sometimes I think about turning them back with a match taped to the last page. Instead I write things in the margins like great image or well done or good job or Yes, with an exclamation point, and at the end of the story I comment briefly in still more general terms. I’ve only been at this university for a year, as a writer-in-residence, my first real job out of graduate school, and because of the alcohol and drugs I already feel burned-out.
It rarely happens but the student whose work is due for review today turns up absent. I keep the class waiting for twenty minutes and then, like the first, I let them leave early. Normally I teach three courses each term but the dean of the School of Humanities and the chair of the English department have rewarded me with one less class for recently winning a literary award and publishing a novel called Final Performance. So I’m through for the day except for keeping my office hours, which I have no intention of doing. By now it’s maybe two, three in the afternoon and I need a drink to steady my nerves. I need a drink before I can face my wife and kids.
On the drive home I stop at a liquor store and buy a half pint of Smirnoff. That’s all I want. I’ve resolved, on a whim, that I should at least try to limit myself today. But of course it doesn’t work that way. I live in the town of Santa Clara, about forty miles from the university, and by the time I pull off the freeway the bottle is empty and I need another. Trouble is, I made a resolution to limit myself and I’m determined to stick to it. It’s supposed to be about choice, about willpower, but once the craving kicks in I don’t seem to have much of either. So instead of buying another bottle I make a pact with myself, and as a compromise, because there’s always room for compromise, I agree to one last drink. That’s all. No more. And as further proof of my commitment that last drink has to be beer. There are three dingy little bars on the way to my house, when I pull off the freeway, and I choose the closest one. Before I go in I check my watch. It’s just after four. A couple of old Harleys are parked out front, the chrome shining in the sun.
The jukebox only plays old rock and roll but no one is putting in any quarters. Except for a listless barmaid staring at a silent TV, and a couple of gray-haired bikers drinking in the corner, the place is dead. It’s dark and quiet and I like it this way. There are no potted ferns hanging from the ceiling. There are no bright, airy windows and they don’t make strawberry daiquiris or fluorescent-green margaritas. You come here to drink and the drinks are cheap. I get my beer and then go to the pay phone outside the bathrooms and call my wife to let her know I’m on my way.
We have two children at this point in time, our third and last son has yet to be born, and the older one answers. He’s only seven but he’s smart and grown-up for his years, maybe too smart and grown-up. Over and over he’s seen his father loaded and strung out and I know it scares him. I know it hurts him as it hurts his mother, and time and again he has had to come to her aid. To comfort her. No child should have to live under these circumstances, and I worry that one day he will grow up to be just like his old man. For all this I feel deep shame, and yet, without explanation, it isn’t enough to keep me from drinking and drugging.
“Hey, Andy,” I say.
“Dad?”
He says it like he’s surprised to hear from me. That I’m alive.
“Where’ve you been?” he asks. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Put your mom on.”
He calls out to her from across the living room. A few seconds pass. I take a drink from my beer. Then he gets back on the line and says, “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Tell her it’s important.”
“Mom,” he calls out, “he says it’s important.”
I can’t quite make out what she says but her tone is clear enough.
“Did you hear that?” Andy says.
“No,” I say.
“Good,” he says.
“Just tell her I’ll be home for dinner.”
I say good-bye and hang up and return to my bar stool. My beer is almost gone, and because I still have a couple of hours to kill before dinner, and because beer is so low in alcohol you can’t honestly count having just one as a bona fide drink, I order another. In the back of my mind I know that I’m rationalizing but at this particular moment, sitting in a dark and quiet bar, it all makes perfect sense. The next time I look at my watch it’s after midnight.
The house we rent is on a tree-lined street in a middle-class neighborhood in Santa Clara. It’s pitch-black out and so quiet that I can hear my ears ringing. I know my wife hears me pull into the driveway. I know my car wakes her. But I also know that she won’t be out of bed to confront me tonight. That will come later, tomorrow morning, after she returns from dropping our older son off at school. Quietly I let myself into the house and fumble through the dark, down the staircase leading to the basement that I’ve made into an office. I turn on the desk lamp. I take a sleeping bag from the storage closet and spread it open on the floor.
As a nightcap I do another line. It’s the last of my dope and the thought of running out panics me but there’s nothing I can do about it, at least not now. I undress and turn out the light and get into the sleeping bag. My heart is pumping hard. I imagine it bursting, the fluids draining, seeping out, filling me up. I close my eyes and clips from the movie at the motel flash through my mind. A woman and two men. Two women together. Then suddenly I hear a rustling noise outside, the snapping of twigs. At first I think it might be the raccoons that live in the sewer and come out at night to hunt for food. I listen more intently, and when I hear it again I climb slowly to my feet and peer through the basement window that looks out over the driveway. A tall maple grows at the curb, and I see something duck behind it. The outline of a shoulder. The shape of a head.
He’s there and then he’s not.
I don’t know if I’m hallucinating. Or just paranoid. But I continue to stare. Paranoia, I tell myself, is a man with the facts.
And the facts, for this man, are these: I am no kind of father. I am no kind of husband. No kind of teacher. I am instead that man I see and don’t see and he is watching me, as I am watching him, both of us afraid to step out from the darkness.