That spring I go down to Bedford, New York, a few times to visit Ian. His mother moved there from New Orleans when she divorced Ian’s father. I’m landscaping with a friend at home, and he’s working in a sporting goods store in White Plains. His mother is often away and his brother Sam is in the eighth grade and generally around. Usually Ian scores coke from a friend in Rye and we smoke pot and throw a Frisbee in the afternoon, and at night do lines, drink good beer, and play caps — a game where two people sit on either side of a room and throw beer caps at empty cups placed between their legs until their thumbs bleed from pressing too hard against the serrated metal edges.
One weekend in Bedford we drink so much Guinness and smoke so much weed that by the time the lines come out I’ve already vomited. We stay up all of Saturday and most of Sunday night and on Monday I am supposed to meet Miho, my family’s former Japanese exchange student, in Manhattan. She’s in town for the day, and my mother has asked and I’ve agreed to take her around.
Monday at noon seems a lifetime away as we blare Dylan and do line after line on the breakfast table in Ian’s kitchen. We run out around five o’clock Monday morning, take sleeping pills with a few more beers, and head to bed. I’m in a guest room, and at eight o’clock I wake up and suddenly feel wrong. It takes a minute or two to realize that not only have I peed and shit the bed but vomited all over myself. Ian’s mother is coming home that day. My head is stinging, and I panic that Ian will find out. I creep from the bed, take off my soiled underwear and T-shirt, and go to the bathroom to rinse the more substantial mess off. I take a shower and then, sheet by sheet, pillow case by pillow case, dismantle the bed and put my clothes on from the night before, which reek of pot and are covered in beer stains. I flip the now-stained mattress, gather up the soiled underwear, T-shirt, and linens, and tiptoe as gently as possible out into the hall, down the stairs, and into the basement, where for some reason I know there is a washer and dryer. I empty the load that’s in the washing machine, put it in a basket, and replace it with the horrible load.
Every button I push, cleaning product I open, and door I shut sounds like a rifle shot, and I’m convinced Ian will rumble down the stairs and bellow his trademark What are you doooing? Ian could load that phrase with an empire of disgust and contempt. This is a guy who loved Bob Dylan, thought every other musician was a fraud, couldn’t stand the state of Maryland, any fat girl or woman, and most everything else that wasn’t from Louisiana. I am his friend, but it generally feels like that fragile status is only one wrong band or shitted bed away from being revoked.
I don’t want to make any more noise on the stairs, so I sit down there while the clothes wash and dry. Eventually they dry, and by this time it’s nearly eleven. I make the bed, gather my things, and call a taxi. I wake Ian up to say good-bye and he scrunches his face and says, Jeeeesus, Billy, you look like shit.
This is the last time I see Ian. He won’t get into Boulder. I will, but my father will insist that I go back to Maryland and face the wreckage there, which I do. Brooks and I will be roommates until I graduate, and Jake will go back to Baltimore, where he will — and I suspect still does — bartend and play guitar.
I arrive at Rockefeller Center over an hour late for Miho. My clothes reek and the black Aspen cap on my head — one of Ian’s, one I wore nearly every day then — is covered with lint and detritus of all kinds from the night before. There is bile rising up at the back of my throat, and I have already thrown up twice on the train.
Miho looks annoyed and impeccable. She has on a yellow Chanel-like suit, red pumps, and a blouse that is so white I can’t face it without squinting. She is nineteen but looks like a seasoned executive or a newscaster well into her thirties. She eyes me warily and asks if I am okay. I tell her, Sort of, and ask where she wants to go. I should have known: Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany, Cartier, Bergdorf, Bonwit Teller, Gucci. We spend the day in places where the security guards keep a close eye on me. It is one of the longest days of my life, and I pop into several delis along the way for aspirin and water.
The city seems like an animated cartoon that I have entered through some great cosmic accident. The security guards are the only ones who notice me: to all others I’m invisible. The ragged shorts, the Aztec cloth belt, the Snowbird T-shirt, and the Aspen cap (neither are places I’d been) are a uniform for another world altogether and not one I’m even comfortable in. People seem so sure of themselves, so securely in their lives as they march up and down Fifth and Madison avenues. Some don’t look that much older than me, but they seem carved from matter and shaped by forces I can’t even imagine. I will remember them later, often, and they will seem as the city does: golden, magical, daunting.
I don’t return to New York for another three years. This is after college, and I’m with my girlfriend Marie, who is nine years older than I am. She sets up an informational meeting with a friend of hers, a book editor at a publishing company — one of the few I’m aware of because it is the house named on the title pages of the Salinger and Dickinson books I’ve read and reread. I resist and she insists that I at least explore book publishing, which she seems to think is where I belong. I play along a little with her fantasy, but it’s as if I were five or six, talking to the big kids at the town beach about diving off the high dive: fun to pretend, impossible to do.
The meeting is one block from Rockefeller Center. The book editor looks at my résumé—the one Marie helped me put together — and frowns. He points to the assistants on the floor outside his office and lets me know that most of them went to Ivy League schools, some of them for both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and that my academic career and job experience are a far cry from anything that would get me in the door at a publishing house like this one. It is exactly as I feared and I am nauseous with shame. Marie is waiting for me by the ice-skating rink, where they light the big Christmas tree each year, I think. I lie and tell her the editor was encouraging, that he thinks there may be something there down the line, just not now. She says, See, I told you so, and I agree.
As we have coffee later that day and run an errand for her mother at Brooks Brothers, I am again aware of the security guards, as I was years before with Miho, and believe they can see what I know and Marie seems blind to: that I don’t belong here. That this is a place for a sleeker, smarter, better-educated, and altogether finer grade of person. I get on the train that afternoon in Grand Central, thinking the same thing I thought that hungover day three years ago: This is the last time. And: What if it’s not?
Beginnings of the End
His first drink is his father’s — Scotch — from the bottle, in the woods, with Kenny. They are twelve. It’s fall and the leaves are bright around them and everywhere there is the sweet smell of mulchy decay, of rot. They swipe a bottle from the liquor cabinet and scamper down the logging trail with a pack of his mother’s cigarettes and a Playboy calendar Kenny has gotten from the pharmacy in the next town over.
It tastes bad but he loves it, loves the strange warmth in his chest and the sting in his throat. He has only three or four swigs but it’s enough to make him woozy. Enough to give him a toehold in a blurry, blissful place. A place where he doesn’t have to bring himself along. What he also loves is the dark project of it. The sneaking into the woods. The stealthy plans, the covert moves. The intimacy of an illicit collaboration. They giggle, the way they always do. Kenny stops at one swig, wincing at the taste. They barely smoke a cigarette and they howl at more than ogle the naked calendar girls. They will do this together only a few more times. It is, however, just the beginning of his stealing from his father’s liquor cabinet. Instead of the woods, he’ll bring it to his room, sip it in his window seat from a red-and-orange-striped thermos, and listen to the crickets outside, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Neil Young. He’ll barely hear the racket of the house below. This will go on until he leaves for college.