WRITTEN WORD 12 - Insomnia

I toss around. I get up, have a fake cheese snack, fake cheese so I will not die with clogged arteries, and then I try again. Back in bed I look at the old clock radio whose tape player has not worked for years. When I went to bed it was midnight, and I have to be up at eight so there had been time for a full nights sleep. But now it is 3, and then 4, and I see daylight creeping in from behind the shades. Almost no time left, and I have a lot to do in this day ahead. Better take a pill – though it might be even better to have a cigarette.

I toss and I turn, kind of drugged up now, and it would really be much better if I can smoke. I haven’t had a cigarette in over 20 years. But when I had my last one it was at the end of that day’s regular three packs. So who knows when the lung cancer will strike.

That past comes in. A cigarette on the edge of the desk. All desk edges had cigarette burns. A cigarette right after making love. “Fucking” was the word even way back when it first became relevant to me, a word back then, and sometimes now, more thought and acted upon than spoken. Leaning over to some night table somewhere and finding the cigarettes. Probably putting two in my mouth at the same time so that there will be one to pass on to the girl, in the style of Humphrey Bogart, who must have had an incredibly long list of women fucked. I am not getting any closer to sleep. Maybe I can try what I used to do for sleep when I was in an upper bunk at Ft. Benning in the silly peacetime army. I would think in chronological order of every girl I had ever fucked – which had been a very short list until the months just passed in Indianapolis at the time the Indiana Legislature was meeting. A sweet red-headed whore named Cindy in a flea bag hotel. And then the list got longer just before I was drafted, for I spent those last weeks in Batista’s Cuba. But the list is still short enough so that it needs women almost fucked, and then women I was determined to fuck one day, especially women whom I had not met yet, women in my imagination. But this is not helping at all. Could it really have put me to sleep at Ft. Benning fifty years ago? Of course I am now beside my beautiful wife whom and love and is sleeping peacefully – not in a bunk in the barracks.

I toss and I turn. There are still so many loose ends in my life, going back into the deep past. Was I or was I not molested as a child? Does Aunt Betsy count? Three months behind on the mortgage. Isn’t it time I made money from writing again? Writing is probably all over for me. And the old Volkswagen Golf, its left front tire has a not so slow leak, and there is a strange screeching sound that starts when I pull out of the driveway and does not stop for five minutes, and the whole car shakes and rattles when the speedometer passes 50. And my twin brother, with whom I have been through so much since childhood, my brother the good twin, not so much fun as me the bad twin, and really quite dangerous – the CIA and an even worse Defense Department agency – in Southeast Asia in two periods when I was there on the other side. And up well into middle age, well after I became published, he was still sending me ads from a Washington paper for door-to-door salesman jobs or entry level jobs in grim business writing. He has been sending me classified ads like this for thirty years. And what if it should turn out he was right about me all along. And an ear-nose-throat doctor has just told me that the ringing in my ears is there because something is “asymmetrical,” which calls for an MRI, and I know what that means.

I used to be able to lie in bed and my memory was so good I could put together whatever it was I was doing on any day in the year if I could figure out where the week started.

I groan at the thought of every book or magazine article or pamphlet or web article about how to overcome insomnia. Very light exercise before sleep. Use the bed only for sleeping! Tighten your head muscles, then neck, then shoulders, down to the tips of your toes. Take a hot bath. Have a snack, but not too much. Rid your life of caffeine. Go to bed at exactly the same time every night. Keep the window open. Always keep it shut. Use something from nature – valerian or melatonin or L-tryptophan or a homeopathic concoction. And nothing works. Nothing.

Everything in life open ended. Cathy, whom I loved, then Vannie, whom I loved, then Judy, whom I loved, then Bonnie, whom I loved, and my first wives, Anne and Brenda, loved them too, and then more of the might-have beens – Tina, the girl with net stockings, the pretty freedom fighter in Nicaragua, and on and on and then all the way back to earliest times, to Sandie, and most of all to Kitty. I could stay up all night dreaming of Kitty in that time when I was 15 and it looked for the first time that life would work out.

I wonder now if anyone but me has noticed that those giveaway pamphlets about how to sleep that you sometimes see in doctors officers are produced by drug companies that sell sleeping pills. Certainly everyone has noticed that a good percentage of the anti-smoking TV ads are produced by Phillip Morris, a company whose life depends upon people being addicted young to nicotine, and that the most visible ads for moderate drinking come from Budweiser.

I am feeling coldly logical now. Something is falling into place that should go into the book on writing I am writing. It goes like this: If the pill companies have an interest in promoting insomnia, and the cigarette companies in seeing that nicotine addiction flourishes, and Budweiser needs binge drinking for its bottom line, what about the hidden motives of the owners of writer’s magazines and publishers of how-to-write books who say all writers should sit for three hours a day in front of computer screens even when the screens are blank? Or that everything will be fine once you learn to use hooks and epiphanies and closures in all your stories.

I toss and I turn, trying one side and then the other. In my mind I see steel shelves at Barnes & Noble holding books with advice on how to write and how to overcome writer’s block. They must weigh a ton. You could get killed if they fell on you.

WRITTEN WORD 11 - Without a Family

For a time I had gotten away with writing without context. I of course ignored advise that I use my experiences from my childhood. When I wrote a novel that got published – that event that nearly all who write think will change their lives forever – I let my characters spring into life as if born as adults.

The novel had three main characters – the hero, his friend, and his girlfriend, and many side characters, many of them beautiful women since the novel was set in late sixties Bangkok, in a time of wild erotic happenings and cloak and dagger things, and constant assassinations - so much going on that neither my new agent nor the editor who accepted the book for publication seemed to notice that no one in it had had a childhood. The main character was me, living by my wits. The girlfriend was Marcy, an American who had dropped out of an Antioch Colete work-study program in Tokyo to work in a night club and had come to Bangkok with a CIA man who wanted me dead. Actually my twin brother was in Bangkok then too, working for a Defense Department agency geared to helping Southeast Asian armies work over their countries’ peasants. I was clearly on the other side, which made me and my brother to a considerable extent enemies – not unlike how it had been when we were children He didn’t appear in the novel, neither as child nor man, though so many of the people I knew in Bangkok had cameos. And I kept things moving so fast that neither the agent the nor the editor noticed that no one in the book could have had a childhood since no one in the book had a family.


I got away with this once, but soon afterwards – while living in a claustrophobic Middle Eastern place – I could not do it again. I had signed a contract, and took more advance money, to do another novel, using the same agent and with the same editor. It seemed to me a fitting sequel to the last book, but the opening chapters were sent back by the agent with angry letter. He did not question that the writing was mine, but he just could not believe the life I was portraying. It was as if I had made a clumsy attempt to make up an implausible story. Although this was a novel, although this was fiction, it still had to be more believable than what he had seen. The background of my main character – who happened to be in his mid thirties like me then, and who had done the same things I had done – was so unconvincing, he said, that the story was clearly based on nothing real.

And then the agent said he wondered why in the narration there was nothing at all about where the character had come from, nothing about his childhood, family or background. I did not think then that this was a significant question, though I did remember what Berta had said in Manila about my Florida childhood stories. Now, it seemed, the agent and editor were as off-base as Berta.

Actually this lack of a family of origin was the only part of that novel-in-progress not based on fact. It was only later I realized that the manuscript could not possibly have rung true to the agent, for in life there can no such gap. And maybe that was why the rest of the story seemed artificial to him too.

But where was the public, I asked myself, for anything so uninteresting as my family?

It was much later that it became clear to me that at that time I had not been writing so much because of what I needed to say as because I wanted to keep on having work published. I needed to be A Writer. Strange, I had thought, that this agent, who enjoyed a great deal of success with works that were commercial, should think I was getting it wrong.



The character in my book whom the agent said was not believable, the one who seemingly had sprung to life fully grown, had traveled to the heart of Borneo on the Kapuas River in a time of ritual cannibalism. He had been in insurrections in Angola, Haiti, Cuba, Greece and Malaysia, even though he was not a soldier and not really a war correspondent and did not work for any intelligence service. He had somehow crossed Africa alone from Khartoum to Fort Lamy, traversing a thousand-mile stretch for which maps showed small villages but no roads. Most recently, although he had a poor sense of direction, he had flown small planes for recreation in areas – Lebanon, Cyprus – where you might encounter anti-aircraft artillery if you went a few moments off course. At various times he had already, before coming to the Middle East phase, lived in Slovenia, Greece, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines – as well as the, to him, equally foreign Indiana and Georgia. And, after leaving a boozy, gray, socially correct college, he had gone through a rapid career in wire service journalism, then put in nominal Army time as a draftee while continuing as a newsman, and then gone on to independent adventure. And this was only the start of what had happened – jail in Mississippi in the Civil Rights time, for example, and an unexplained, even to himself, period moving between the Canary Islands and Malta

These were matters already dealt with in the opening chapters of that autobiographical novel I was writing. But there were so many other matters that were not in it.

Without a family, the character in the book again could not have a twin brother, like the author’s twin brother, who was in the C.I.A. and worse. He could not have a first cousin, maybe it was two or even three first cousins, who, like the author’s cousins, had killed themselves. Nor did he, like the author, have a cousin who had been an armed kidnapper, nor a cousin who was in and out of battered women's shelters and had been fucked and beaten by her brother from the age of 7 until she was 16. He did not have a father who as a child had been left with governesses at Christmas while his parents toured Europe. And he did not have a mother who had spent a crucial part of childhood in courtrooms where her father was on trial for political shenanigans. And he had not been raised being told he was slow and stupid. And, moreover, without a family there were no family drug and alcohol problems.

And my character had not spent the summers of his formative years in grandiose, quite beautiful and intensely formal mountain houses where most in these houses, isolated from other human contact, spoke with fake British accents. And he did not have a father who published light personal experience books about big happy families of regular people, nor a grandfather who wrote well-received sexless novels – writing that was so important that no others in the family, it was understood, need ever write anything themselves.

THE WORST THING

The one consolation when I did that final travel writing project more than 20 years ago was that there are even worse things that people do and call themselves writers. Most business “writing” falls in this category, for reimbursement goes well beyond the free accommodations given to travel writers in exchange for lying. In most, if not all, business writing you are being paid directly or indirectly to lie to promote clients who do harm.

The next step down is ghost-writing – which is a way out for people scared to death of their own stories.

And one step below reducing yourself to another person’s ghost is the pretentious falsification of what is real in the name of fiction.

At the bottom is falsification of your own story.

I speak not just as an observer. I speak with the authority only a once active alcoholic has when speaking of alcoholism.

WRITTEN WORD 10 - Stories Told Once

If in my father’s side of the family there could be no stories beyond the stories long ago set in place and constantly repeated, in my mother’s side it often seemed to me there were hardly any stories at all that were repeated. Her great grandmother, she said once, had hidden in a barrel feathers in southern George when the Yankees came through. After the Civil War they had all moved to Galveston, but then the tidal wave came, and they wound up in Dallas, and then her parents had appeared in Long Island. That was about it.


My father walked in on my mother and me. He was red faced in a tuxedo, and it was like we had been caught out in something disgraceful. He was returning from a class dinner to this Perry Street apartment he had rented so they would have a city presence. He had rented it on his own and so never heard the end of what was wrong with it. I assumed the red in his face came from drinking with his old classmates, but I also suspected anger. And anyway there had been plenty to drink here on Perry Street too. For no clear reason my mother had been telling me, with hardly any specifics, about the kind of thing I had never heard anyone mention in connection with this fragile family – an affair she was saying she had had after she was married. And she was saying how it still hung over her life.

The story of the affair was something that – like all stories from her life – was told once and never again.

Like her abortion. My first wife was suddenly pregnant at what did not seem such a bad time to me, though things concerning career seemed up in the air and we were not established in the sense of being owners of property. I wanted the child and she didn’t, and at some point she phoned my mother, with whom she did not get on, and, she said, my mother told her that she, my mother, had once had an abortion. Something I never heard of before or later, and maybe no one else had either.

My mother passed through Greece when I was living a bohemian life there. She was on the way back from Cambodia where she and my father’s mother had been visiting my twin brother Peter who was doing the family proud, she said, in his very correct job as a Foreign Service Officer with the American embassy in Pnom Penh, where as part of the deal he had a big house and servants all to himself. She did not come my house – one room without plumbing on the side of the Acropolis. Instead, we met at a seafood restaurant for a long lunch with plenty to drink outdoors in Piraeus. A bedraggled young gypsy girl came to our table and held her hand out and stared at us. “No one,” my mother said firmly,” should look so hopeless.”

Later in the meal my mother told me how when she was a girl in Long Beach, Long Island, and her Texas father was working for the Republican machine in Garden City, she had spent many days in court seeing, she said, “Daddy on trial.” Like the affair and the abortion, I had no indication she had ever told any of this to anyone else who was still around. It never came up again. Years later she told me she could remember nothing of her childhood before she was in boarding school.

Once and once only she said it really had been hard on Dad to have her mother living with us – her mother from Dallas who sat in her room surrounded by antiques, and a decanter and a small portable radio that looked like a small suitcase, which she played all day and then at dinner relayed what she had heard, as if the commercials were objective news casts.

Mother almost always spoke highly of my father’s family, but once she said they had given him a horrible childhood. She said it once, and never again and no one else said it either. His parents would travel all over the world and leave him at home with a governess, she said – even at Christmas, she implied. This sad little boy, whom she had first spotted in the White Mountains from the small golf course at the Sunset Hill House, where she went every day in summer and could see him coming up the hill from his family’s place in his pony cart.

When she and Dad got married, she said, her father, who was always writing and wanted badly to be a published writer, came up to stay at the Sunset for the wedding. He was divorced from Grandmother Clark, who had been a Texas debutante when he was a Texas ranch hand back in open range days. He was excited just before the wedding, she said, because, he had already arranged to go on a long walk with the man who was about to be her father-in-law, who we called Gaga but was known to others as Ernest Poole as, you know, they always said, the famous novelist.

Before the walk, Mother said, Gaga and her father, Grandfather Clark, had a drink together. Gaga pointed out it was the Depression, and asked him how he would help the new married couple. He said he was broke. Gaga said well in that case I don’t want to talk to you, and he canceled their walk.

When I brought this up another time she kept to the pattern and did not repeat the story. Instead, she said, You should remember, Frederick, that Gaga was a wonderful man.

WRITTEN WORD 9 - Penthouse

There had been a message from someone named Sly from Penthouse on my answering machine. Sky’s words were slurred on the tape. But I caught “Marcos” and I caught “payment.”

I called him back and he said to come right over. The office was near Lincoln Center. I’d been there once before because another editor at Penthouse had bought rights to the Imelda Marcos chapter of the book I did with Max Vanzi on the horrors of the Philippines in Marcos’s last years when his and Imelda’s old friends Nancy and Ronnie Reagan had become the Marcos’s counterparts and sponsors. The Marcoses had gone wild sending out death squads through the archipelago, convincing tens of millions of Filipinos that with Reagan in power the Americans would, if needed, come out of their big Philippine bases to kill Marcos enemies.

Sly – dark, long black hair, black suit, black shirt – was sniffling as only someone who has just had a line or two can sniff – and was so edgy I thought Dexedrine as well as cocaine.

We had just about sealed a deal whereby I would spread Penthouse money around to secure a tape mentioned in our book when it occurred to him to ask if it was video – without video the conversation took another direction. The tape was of Marcos in the presidential bed talking and talking in a voice that reminded you of W.C. Fields, talking love and sex words to a Hollywood girl he had put on the government payroll – then singing love songs in his Illocano dialect – a great scandal in the Philippines. Someone had bugged the bed and I’d heard the tape and knew where to get a copy.

Sly went off to the men’s room, came back sniffling – said let’s go downstairs, meaning a plush bar in the building. Since there was no video tape he said he’d give me $5000 – at that time a rare sum for a magazine to spend – if I would give them an update of the Philippines story complete with all recent developments, such as the money pouring into the regime from sex tours and child prostitution. And I was saved for a time from hunting up further hack work.

I did write a piece. I flew out to San Francisco to get filled in by the New People's Army exiles in Berkley – bringing the Philippine horrors up to date. And I was paid. And, as I expected, they decided not to run it, not even in their foreign editions – for Penthouse was very right wing and I had noticed that, just as Sly almost forgot to ask if the tape were video or audio,he entirely forgot to ask if the piece he was buying would be pro or anti Reagan.

I used the money to spend the summer on the hunt not for what went wrong and led to cruel death in Southeast Asia that year but rather what had happened many years back that accounted for the darkness and violence in the present in the seemingly proper Wasp family from which I came.

WRITTEN WORD 8 - Clothed and Naked

The phone rang again and again in this new happy, busy, non-writing time, and though I screened I almost always picked up. But I never answered when I heard it was Myra Mindell, former school teacher and not so confident editor at this young adult oriented publishing house for which I’d been doing small hack-tinted bread-and-butter books for nearly 20 years. Books with low but steady royalties that sold mainly to school libraries and were easy to do and took up very little of my time. These were sometimes books on countries I’d known well – Indonesia, Jordan – but they were in the catalog side by side with other books on countries written by members of American government or corporate world families that are housed in gated compounds and so know almost nothing of the foreign places they are in. And my next to last little book for this publisher had been one in a bigger format with photographs which was about modern China.

And, to my horror, not long before I’d begun screening out the school library publisher, that China book had sat for several weeks in an outdoor display window of the Donnell Library – you could not miss it when you crossed 53rd Street from the Museum of Modern Art – and to my shame my name was on it in big letters, the pretentious three-name author name I had used a decade back on the published novel that was supposed to change my life forever – and I had not confessed to the low-advance-paying bread-and-butter publisher that in my last go-round in Asia I still had not gotten into China – and still worse, I wasn’t sure it would matter to them that a book on modern China was by someone who had never seen it – who wrote it because he had the contract from before he went abroad this last time and because he was in financial trouble and needed the second half of the small advance money.

The phone was still ringing and I was still ignoring Myra Mindell. It was as if those calls were meant in some petty way to pull me back from all the richness of the life I was in. So I had not answered any questions that appeared on my machine about my recent manuscript for that publisher, which was a little historical book about John Cabot and the northern route to the New World, which made me yawn. And I had not answered any of her written questions either, and then I had not responded to Myra Mindell's silly little editorial changes, and after that I had not responded when they had sent me the manuscript after it had gone through a copy editor and was ready for production.

And my sorry, faking-it China book had been in the Donnell Library window when I crossed from the Modern Art Museum.

Though now – months that felt like decades later – there was something parallel going on up on 57th Street.

As I crossed 57th Street from near Carnegie Hall I saw in a display case on the façade of the Art Students League’s wonderful old French Renaissance building two pastel paintings of mine – two portraits, faces of alive women, actual women I had just drawn and painted from life. Women I had actually seen.

And I had found while drawing and painting them that, as opposed to China, the fact that they had been there right in front of me posing without clothes on was my only hope of getting their faces right.

WRITTEN WORD 7 - Writer at Play

I had listened carefully to that young man who was serious about his music, had been commissioned with an advance to write a book about disco music (which he detested) and was seeking help because mysteriously he was not able to write a word. I knew then what the trouble was. It was simply that there was nothing connected to who he was in what he was attempting to write.

I knew that because I realized that all too often what I had been writing and getting published had little meaning for me. And now it was a time when many things in my life were changing and I was finding writing of little help. And then, not quite getting the message, I was thrown into despair because I just could not finish the writing that I was so certain I wanted to accomplish.

It had seemed like particularly good time in my long career as a professional writer. A journalist friend, Max Vanzi, and I had this new book in the stores about the Philippines and its rapacious martial law leaders and its underground revolutionary opposition – the book a first-hand exposé which, now that it was published, was getting attention. Some people liked it. Foreign policy establishment people hated it. When a new book is getting attention from those who hate it as much as from those who like, it is an ideal time to get new book contracts.

I had not focused yet on how long it had been since I had written anything without a contract. But I had these plans, and it seemed like really a perfect time. I had a new apartment, small but light, looking down on a garden and out over miles of rooftops from West 25th Street. And I was just free of a slow-dying marriage. And I had ideas – a proposal for a book exposing with great irony bizarre but entertaining sex and personal development things in California, things that in life but not writing I might actually like. Or a book about the five greatest rivers of the world. Or a travel series based on the lie that all through the Bahamas and the West Indies there are magnificent vestiges of spectacular old mansions and forts and monuments from some grand colonial era, rather than sorry vestiges of a depressing and brutal and greed-filled slave labor time. Not an unusual lie in the world of travel writing, but a lie nonetheless.

The first of my plans to find a home was this one based on the outright lie. Some months later I returned form the Bahamas, and from a very blonde photographer who had gone there with me, in a depression so deep that at first I did not think of it as depression, but rather as a an objective and mysterious set-back. I continued to send out my proposals.

The one that now seemed on the way to a publishing deal was for a book that had been an editor’s idea about what he considered my amusing family. It would be about my late and distinguished Victorian-style grandfather who had been an internationalist early in the century and had won a Pulitzer prize for fiction. It would be about my years of travel and adventure and involvement in left-wing revolution. And also about my twin brother, the proper twin, who roamed the world almost as much as I did but not for the same reasons, since he was on the other side – doing his traveling for usually secret government agencies, most recently the CIA.

A light family experience book, much like the books that my father once published with considerable success. The editor said it should probably be titled Twins in the American Century. (This seemed plausible, in the mid-‘eighties, which no one except Gore Vidal seemed to know was the last point at which there would be non-ironic talk of “the American century.” The contract would be drawn up as soon as I could produce a sample chapter.

I couldn’t write a word. Writers block had never been this bad.

In desperation I looked in the library on 23rd Street for help, and found a book published by Writers’ Digest Press (which I had always considered a con operation) called something like The Natural Way to Overcoming Writers Block. It was by a woman who put forth the thesis that each writer has deep inside him or her a little boy or a little girl who wants to come out and play. Giving your little boy or girl permission to play was what would end writers block.

I had not thought till I read this book that my depression could get even worse.

And then there came from somewhere inside me an embarrassing uproar. Here I was well along in what I looked upon as a serious if checkered career of writing and adventure, and here I was, just turned 50, having never written a word about the first 15 years of my life. And now sadness was chasing out anger was chasing out sadness was chasing out anger was chasing out crying was chasing out fury and sadness and anger – with this surprising lost child coming from some lost place just as if he were and always had been real – and the last thing he wanted to do now that he was back was come out and play. He wanted to rage. He wanted revenge, and he did not care just now how many dead and injured would be left in his wake.