WHEN WE GOT TO THE AMENDS, I asked my sponsor what to do with my parents. We hadn’t spoken in over a year, maybe two. He told me about “living amends.” How some things would take longer than others, much longer. How they couldn’t be fixed with an envelope of money or a frank discussion of my wrongdoings. How these things were necessary, too, but it would take years of simply being there to repair some damage.
At first, my mom wouldn’t let me in the house. She had been going to meetings, too, ones for parents of addicts, for her own sanity. She agreed to see me at a diner and, over time, even as a relationship built, we still met there a couple times a month. The first few times, it was awkward. She eyed me with reticence; if I went to the bathroom, she looked at me skeptically when I came out. But over time, to my surprise, she loosened up. And I wouldn’t say things went back to the way they were, because they were never quite like this, but the dynamic switched somewhere along the way. Sitting at the table, I could see in her eyes that her dependence, the thing she was powerless over, the love for her son, it had no highs, no euphoria like mine. Her albatross of love for me was only a series of bottoms.
It was a loud, small diner, and we would talk over the banging of dishes and the other conversations. It was the kind of place where the plates were made for pictures. Everything on the menu had five ingredients and each ingredient had multiple adjectives. There was no bacon, it was applewood smoked bacon. Whole wheat pancakes with caramelized bananas and topped with Such and Such Farm blueberries and homemade whipped cream served with a side of rosemary potato hash. I felt uncomfortable in places like this, the workout moms with their yoga mats rolled up under the table, the hungover college kids in sunglasses and bright shirts, the business casual guys with Bluetooths and loafers. The loudness of it made me sweat, made me feel like someone was standing behind me, like things were bearing down on me. The diner I liked was greasier. The food looked like shit and tasted like shit, too. The pancakes and the hash browns were the same bland color, the same mushy consistency. The waitresses were old and overweight and nice, and the coffee was anonymous, weak, and watery. It was open 24/7, and it was quiet all the time, unless an NA meeting just got out or someone was in there begging for change. But I knew my mom liked this place. It occurred to me that day that she was always, in a funny way, current with the trends. She read new books and ate the right foods. She watched the right reality TV shows and called them trashy in the right way. I wondered how she kept up with all of this while she was working sixty hours a week, while she was tucked away in our little corner in Tampa. It felt like an oddity in our house, especially after my brother left, and she was stuck with me and my dad, cavemen who grunted at each other at the dinner table and spoke with hand signs; we would sit outside in the dark and smoke in silence. For the first time, I wondered what she might have been like before. Before me and before my dad. I felt like I understood something about her, something independent from me. I wished, for a second, that I could go back in time and notice this.
One day, as we sat and ate and talked for a while, it dawned on me that we didn’t say anything about probation, or relapse, or my medication. We just had a normal conversation like the rest of the people in the restaurant. I told her about my classes, and she listened while I talked about all of it.
She told me, “You know, when you were a kid, I always wanted you to take more art classes.”
I winced.
“No, really. You were so good.”
I said, “Everyone’s mom thinks that.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “Mothers can be honest, too. We aren’t oblivious all the time.”
I had forgotten about the noise of the restaurant. It was where it was for everyone else, in the background.
“Your brother’s drawings were not good,” she said, “just scribbles everywhere. How’s that for honest? You understood space. You get that from your dad.”
That was the first time in a long time I had heard her say anything positive about him, but then she broke the spell and said, “He is trying to stop drinking, you know.”
“How’s that going?”
“Y’know, I don’t know, we’ll see,” she said, and she looked down at her phone. “Anyways, you had such good detail, and you knew exactly where everything needed to be. But every time I encouraged you to draw or paint more, you just said it was ‘gay.’”
“I don’t remember that,” I said.
“It’s true, you said it with such hate. You never wanted to do art because you thought it was gay.”
She was laughing, a little, and she shook her head and said, “You can be so stupid.”
I nodded, and we continued eating. She looked up at me and she had the beginnings of tears building at the corners of her eyes, which are, like mine, brown and green, the color and density of trees growing over one another.
“You were so peaceful,” she said, “when you were a little boy. Whenever I was with you, I could feel it. Your peaceful heart.”
And for my whole life, I had attributed my unbending nature to my father, and my tumultuous sensitivity to my mother — he was stone and she was water, but looking at her, I could see that I might have had it backwards. She was the Stoic who gave me the power to understand the turning of the world, to contextualize it, and, from him, I got my sentimentality, my untamable feelings, and what were his push-ups if not hysterical cries for love, and what were the tears in her eyes if not evidence of the stable, infinite ground that my entire life was built upon?
In my Faulkner seminar, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3–4:30 p.m., the classroom was cramped; it was loud with the background noise of zippers and canvas and typing. They kept those rooms at school so cold, like jail, freezing, I guess, to kill the germs of the thousands of people who walk around touching things, breathing and sneezing. A girl in the corner typed in bursts, a frenetic five-second spree then a break, she put her hand to her mouth and studied what she wrote. A guy in the front row squirmed in his seat, clearly wanting to interject on the lecture, to bring up something he just googled. The guy next to me bounced his leg; the girl on my other side wiggled her pen up and down with her thumb and her forefinger. In the hallways, people rush, people loiter, talk, and laugh. Outside, ducks waddle across the grass, squirrels and crows dig through the garbage cans, and Evangelicals stand with signs, or yell and argue with passersby, couples hold hands, cars knock into each other in the parking lot. There is a bake sale, brownies for a dollar, there is a band practicing on a field, there are smokers and people who hold their noses when they pass them. Past campus, there is traffic and more noise, more people in more rooms; I can’t see them, but I believe they are there. Down the road is county jail, Bruce’s house, my parents’ house, the Salvation Army, the bay, the river, my halfway house. North is subdivisions and suburbs and, past that, quiet trees.
The professor was a middle-aged woman who wore loose, patterned clothes. Every day she had a different configuration of long earrings and necklaces and layers of bracelets up and down her arm; she jangled like a skeleton while she taught, moving her arms around, pacing. She seemed to know everything about Faulkner and his words; she loved this class, and she didn’t try to hide it. Unlike a lot of professors, she didn’t try to analyze or teach or extract sociohistorical lessons from the books. She just seemed to bask in the problems of the story, the ugliness and the beauty, the humor and the tragedy. It really just seemed like we were in a mutual appreciation club. Sometimes, she would, in the middle of a lecture, ask someone to read a passage aloud from the night’s reading and when they were done, she would just sit there, flabbergasted, and say, “Wow. Can you imagine?”
We were reading The Sound and the Fury, which I had read once in the library, which I had cut through on a breeze of cocaine. The rhythm of the words solved something in my brain, as if they were a sort of combination on a padlock, an incantation, a spell, that changed me for a moment, for an afternoon, and then wore off. When I stepped out of the library that day and waited for the bus, the sun was pleasant, the street noise nothing but a fact of the world, and I thought about Quentin, whom I felt a sort of kinship with. A boy swallowed by his own head, like me, lost in the forest of timeless self, solipsistic and obsessive, drawn to the past and sleepwalking into the future. He was, as I was, self-pitying and confused. And on the bus, I was struck with a consuming thought, that I wanted to talk to someone about all of this, about what I had read, about Quentin, about broken watches and water flowing under bridges like hours under years. About the way he did it, Faulkner, how he could accomplish that chain of linguistic beauty, the extended release of information and images unfolding over each other and leading to somewhere. I wanted to talk about fate and curses, and I wanted to just say, “Wow, what a strange book,” to someone, and have them say something back, anything. But there was no one. There was no one in the world for me to say that to. There was no one for me to say anything to. I hadn’t talked to anyone in days, I hadn’t heard any voice but the distorted version of my own that lives in the folds of my brain. In this realization, there was deep sadness and a realization of how pitiful my life actually was, and out of that came terror, because I felt like if I just read it alone and never talked about it again, then it would be like I just thought it. Like the words of the book occupied the spot in my mind where thoughts usually are, and my thoughts pop and disappear like firecrackers, and I never understand them in any real way. They are just little things that come and go. And I knew that this book would disappear, too. That I would lose it forever.
The teacher called on me, she asked me to read, and she said, “David, you have such a nice reading voice.”
“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire . . .”
My voice sounded clear and calm, grave and forceful. On the journey from my brain to my mouth, the words took a new shape, the shape of reality, of objective fact. As the air hit them, they became beautiful, the way that blood turns red the moment it touches the oxygenated air, but before, before it is blue and nebulous and creeping.
My teacher smiled at me; the rest of the class, they felt something, too. It was like a color in the air, like for a moment the lights in the room showed green, a permeating fact in time and space. This triple life of the words — the words Faulkner gave, the words I spoke, and the words they heard. The life I was given, the life I thought, and the life I lived, three dimensions — height, length, and width. All tangled up with the tripled facts of the other people in the room, tripled lives penetrating deep into nowhere and extending out into the world, bumping into one another and embracing. I rarely participated in the class discussions, but I had a part to play, I could bring the material out into the air, where we could share it together.
It was September and the afternoon storms had been coming in like clockwork for months — you could set your life to them. Clouds growing at three, that thick smell of precipitation intensifying in the air. By the time I would leave class, it was always just about to rain. It was more than the way the clouds looked — it was a feeling. And I could usually make it to my truck without getting rained on if I hurried, but I took my time leaving class that day. I packed my bag slow, and I kinda half talked to some of the other students; I was starting to feel like maybe I was a part of the group, and by the time we got to the door of the building, it was pouring outside, and I could smell the dirt, the fresh clean dirt getting churned up by the rain, and all the people from my class were milling around under the awning, waiting for the rain to let up, and we were all together in the humid air.
Someone, a guy I didn’t particularly like, who was a little too excited about the whole class and the sound of his own voice, a little too excited about his leather satchel with band buttons on it, his glasses, his rarer editions of the books we were assigned, asked me if I would mind reading some stuff from the novel he was working on. He said he appreciates my comments in class; we had talked a few times on our way out of the building, and, I guess, we had developed a sort of relationship.
He said, “It’s hard to explain. But if I send you the first chapter, you will get it — would you mind?”
I wanted, for a second, to look him in the eyes and say, Fuck no. I thought of excuses, about how busy I am with work, or how I don’t have a computer, but I remembered the bus. I remembered myself and the world, and I saw in his eyes that pale blue excitement he brought into class every day, that little tic of his brain that caused him to take up half the class talking to himself, putting on a show, and where it usually annoyed me, I saw something endearing in it, something just careless and human, just, perhaps, like me.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. I told him to send it over to me, and I noticed that he was actually kind of nervous before that, that his whole demeanor changed when I said okay. He seemed to relax, and I wondered, maybe he had wanted to do this earlier, had envisioned asking me for this small favor before but lost his nerve. And I was touched by the courage that took. That never, in a million years, could I summon the courage to do what he did. And I thought of what a small thing it is to ask, how ridiculous it was for me to make him feel nervous about something so small. I saw myself from the outside. Jaw clenched, eyebrows narrowed, sitting in the back of the classroom, giving him short, gruff answers every time he talked to me. For what? I didn’t know. But I was happy to have this realization, and I was happy to give him the answer he wanted. And I wouldn’t say that I liked him all of a sudden or looked forward to him taking up half of next class, but I wasn’t bothered. In fact, my thoughts and preferences seemed to take a back seat for a second, and what was important to me was that he feel relieved in whatever way I could help him with.
“I look forward to it,” I said.
He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder, and I smiled back. He walked out into the rain toward the parking lot, and I waited a few minutes for it to lighten up, and then I followed. I felt good, not in a self-satisfied way, but more like everything was just fine. That, maybe, in some small way, I was beginning to line up what I wanted to do and what I was supposed to do.
My mom saying that thing about space gave me the courage to call my old man. When I finally got through to him, I got him to meet me at an old theater downtown. It had balconies and an organ and little fake gold statues by the stone pillars. It had old-school water fountains, basins with spouts, and the seats were small and steep. The place had died and been reborn a hundred times with the temperamental fluctuations of the little city’s anxious economy. It would close down and get boarded up when the houses in town would get foreclosed on, and when they’d get renovated and sold, when they started to become valuable in the eyes of the banks and the families moving in from up north, someone would come in and scrub the stone, dust off the vinyl seats, and retune the organ. The screen stayed small, and the speakers were never crisp, but it would open its doors and play old movies and sell tickets for half the price of the other theaters.
The ceiling of the place had been painted navy blue and purple like a cloudy night sky, and they had inserted tiny little lights somehow to make it look starry, and if you didn’t think about it, it really did feel like you were watching a movie outside. We met out front of the theater in our customary silence, delivered nods to one another. He looked the same, but smaller, older, same eagle’s nose and gray hair. We were there on a weekend afternoon to see some old movie that time forgot. I didn’t know whether it was gonna try to make me cry or laugh. We sat there in the theater, and I stank like tobacco and grass clippings and exhaust, my fingers stained yellow and my shoes stained green. It wanted us to laugh, and we did. We laughed at the goofy actors, the movie a distorted fun-house version of real life, small and defiant in the corner of the screen of reality; we laughed for two hours in the dark under the artificial night sky in between the pillars and the organ, until our faces and our ribs ached — under the laughter, the gentle sentimentality that undergirds the world and keeps everything intact.
I could tell he didn’t believe that I was sober, that I didn’t drink at all, that he just thought I put the drugs behind me and was starting to grow up, and even though I sensed this, I didn’t correct him. I thought there was something true about it, growing at least, something outside of my control. And even though I felt like I was working hard to stay sober, that I was choosing to struggle against instinct, perhaps something had just worn out inside of me, the little glance of friction finally eroding and stopping the perpetual motion machine, that my instinct was evolving or reverting to something baser or finer, that there was no actual fight, just the light contradictions of a heart fluctuating over time.
On the way out, my dad said that he used to go to this theater with his mother, that he remembers seeing Gone with the Wind there with her, that she loved American movies, and she used to say they were more real than real life. As we walked to our cars, he looked out across the street at the building there and said, “That used to be a department store.”
He pointed over to what was now a restaurant, bar, condo complex. “Above it was a doctor’s office where they used to take me when I was a kid.”
I saw him gone in his memories.
“I didn’t talk until I was five,” he said. “They thought I was slow. That was the speech doctor.”
I scraped my cigarette against my shoe and looked for a trash can; he was staring at the building, and I said, “You still don’t talk.”
“Anything you can say, you can say without words,” he said.
When I tossed my cigarette into the street, he was still looking at the building, and he said, “The sign is still there.” He was right; there was faded lettering running along the corner of the building that said MAAS BROS.
We pressed our cheeks together and he said, “Te quiero mucho,” and he got in the car.
My mom opened a drawer by the TV one day and pulled out some notebooks. They were full of detailed, anatomical pencil drawings of animals, plants, and sunsets like those of a naturalist from the nineteenth century. Multiple notebooks, each page with sketches. There would be five pages in a row of the same animal, getting better each time, the lines getting more realistic, swifter, and I recognized the marks immediately as my dad’s.
“He’s been doing this for as long as I’ve known him,” she said.
I saw him for the first time, like I saw myself, as someone stunted by circumstance, as someone who worked until his body hurt, for decades, but really just wanted to draw little animals as accurately as he could, as someone, just like anyone else, stuck in a world where no one could see the animals of his brain. I tried to look at them the way my therapist from years before had looked at my finger paintings, to deduce some hidden meanings and insights into the psyche of the man who stalked the back of my brain like a silent panther, who was never at the front of my mind, but always approaching me obliquely, surprisingly, conjured up by déjà vus and chance emotions. But the drawings were so accurate, so one to one, that they spoke no secret language, they relied on no lurking ineffable motives. They were drawn in the direct, unmediated language of things, labels in the museum of meaning; when I looked at them, I divined only singular words: ibis, tarpon, raccoon.