The Aqua Mustang 9 - CHURCHES?

For a decade up here Alice has been a close friend of my Vermont-transplant friend Peter Cooper, who I went to see as the darkness was closing in September of 1985. Now it is July of 1986, which seems like about three decades later. Now I am here for the summer, and I have just brought this aqua Mustang we are riding in.

Alice is the first woman I have ever met who is studying to be a minister. Actually the first person of any sex to make such a move. She is quite pretty, and full bodied and tan and well read and funny. She is about to head down to New York and Union Theological Seminary, but in the meanwhile she has a weekly gig at a tiny church way, way off in obscure dirt-road countryside where there is no regular minister. I go to see her there. One morning she livens up the service with a bag pipe player she brings in to do Amazing Grace. Another time she shows a very rough drawing she has made of a lighthouse and does a sermon about what everything in the rough drawing means. It seems silly, but now that things are changing I will try not reject anything out of hand – not even what this voluptuous woman tells me about how Jesus came to her in a dream. Around the tiny church are gravestones, including many that have the year of birth but not the year of death yet.

One day I take up Alice’s invitation to drive with her through the countryside to a town called Rochester where many ministers are meeting. As we roll through I am marveling at the soft mountains, so different from what I grew up with. And I am marveling at fast shallow rivers where clear water runs and ripples over smooth stones, just like in tender aspects of New Hampshire. We talk and talk about things that are most on my mind these days – getting at the true stories, the family stories, finding out who did what to who, getting at what really happened, getting at what is real, saving ourselves, no matter who gets hurt. She talks of how in happy days her older brother discovered Vermont when he would come up here to load his truck with milk which he sold back in Massachusetts, and she tells about an uncle who molested her and I can see she has hardly every brought this subject up before. She says this explains her sexuality, and I know that the word here is a code word and so the woman she rooms with is more than a close friend, and this is news I do not want to hear, for despite everything I am lonely.

When we arrive at the Rochester church where the ministers are gathering it turns out to be a prayer meeting. This is 1986 and I had lost my faith in 1951, at 16, in what seemed like a moment of revelation – and I had never thought to look for it again. Since boarding school days I have been in churches only a handful of times, and always as a tourist in places like Greece and Haiti and Manila.

In the prayer circle each minister has a few words to say about where they are in their lives.I just say “I am here,” hoping it will sound like something profound. For I am in a familiar old situation now, pretending one thing on the surface that has no connection with what is underneath.

On the next few Sundays I visit a number of different churches, all except Catholic. It is partly Alice and partly because my old friend Peter up here is involved with subversive social action through a Congregational church and his wife plays the piano at a church for Christian Scientists. But I am still one thing on the surface, another in my worlds inside and down below.

I even put the Episcopalians on my list with the Presbyterians and Congregationalists and Methodists. I dread the Episcopalians, for their denomination was so wrapped up with the Anglo upper class pretensions of my nearest and dearest. Here at the Rutland church, on a fragrant summer day in thin mountain air, they hold a coffee gathering outdoors after their service, which is so much how I remembered it was done long ago. There is no way I can get to the aqua mustang without going through them.

Everyone I meet bids me, this stranger, welcome, this stranger they do not know is faking it. Several of them want me to tell them the location of my home church.

The Aqua Mustang 8 - RUTLAND

I couldn’t write what I thought I wanted to write, this light book about my family that Macmillan wanted and so it must be what I wanted – though I could not do a word on the subject – or on these commercial plans for which I did write brilliantly skillful proposals – rivers of the world, or the remnants, sorry as they are, of colonial days in the West Indies, or everything that I knew I would find wrong with California if I went there again. Life had seemed to blossom, this new bright apartment, and these new projects that kept me at my typewriter night and day – such a joy to be caught up this way – and Cousin Margaret dying horribly after saying she wanted to die, and my wondering about what they had done to her, and then off to the islands with blonde Sally, and that worked out as badly as the brief affair that was ending at the start of the year – a connection with this French-Algerian-Jewish woman Jocelyn (which was pronounced “joss-leen”) – also looking so right she might be who I would want if I could create a woman – Jocelyn, a pied noir from Algeria now ruining an agency for famous photographers in the same big room in which we slept almost next door to the Carlyle, and now Sally, flying in from Rome for our trip to the West Indies, where she insisted we spend every morning hunting up places where she could drink at lunch – a decade now since I had had a drink but I was trying to fit in. So no working love affairs in my life , and people dying, other cousins were in line, and then I had gone up to New Hampshire for a sort of family reunion (though no one in our tight ass family would call it by such a name) – fake British accents and worse. Hard to remember how good life had seemed so recently, how it had seemed that with startling new insight everything had already changed. So puzzling that I wanted to see old friend no more than I wanted to see relatives. I had been delving in the past but on a lighter level than I realized. One recent dark episode was getting Eileen from 30 years back to fly in from California – and both of us unrecognizable to each other and to ourselves. Sex with hardly noticeable orgasm. This time that was becoming dark again. Darker and darker.

Unworkable connections. Shows of activity but desperately alone. I decided on another trip to the past. My brilliant and funny old drinking friend Peter Cooper was up in Vermont, reportedly a new man . The last time I had seen Peter, who had closed so many bars with me in the old New York days, he was already in Vermont, this 16 years ago, living in a musty old hotel that had become a hippy haven in the then nearly dying mill city of Rutland, which was not one of the Christmas card Vermont places, and working at a ski lodge called the Wobbly Barn that was mainly a drug place, located halfway up Killington, a mountain made incredibly ugly with ski trails that put me in mind of strip mining. But now Peter was married again and very sober, directing a state alcoholism clinic, and back to his first love writing, and he had just been published. A small but respected press located also in Vermont, run by Keith Jennison’s almost famous brother, and when I got to Rutland the bound books had just arrived – young adult novel category but much better than it sounded, and it turned out his big contact in Vermont was a this near legendary now retired publishing guy Keith Jennison whom I had worked with on some minor but enjoyable projects in the city (one of them my first published book). And people in Peter’s new crowd, including a lovely woman named Martha, were all in a production of Our Town. And I told Peter about my dead end depression which came, to my surprise, just as I thought everything had changed, and he suggested I go to something called Adult Children of Alcoholics. And this seemed so outrageous and irrelevant and life-giving that I had to do it, like taking up a dare to go upriver in Kalimantan headhunter territory.

MY BOOK

AUTHENTIC WRITING, a memoir on creating memoir, is in production.

The Aqua Mustang 7 - COMMUNITY?

I knew this period on West 25th, in the time before the subway vision and the aqua Mustang journeys, to be an in-between time. But between what and what I was not clear – past and future both now entering realms of mystery.

An unshaven tiny old Hispanic man started a bicycle repair business in front of my building. He squatted on the sidewalk, bits and pieces and parts of bicycles and screws and nuts and wrenches spread out in front of him, frames and wheels chained to the sturdy post of a sign that tried to explain New York’s alternate side of the street parking rules. The tiny old man always had open bottles in paper bags, but was seen as so reliable that some women on the block trusted him to watch their children.

Across the way, on the corner of 8th & 25th, a new Korean run grocery opened, and people in the neighborhood who had not met before bought flowers and fruit there and talked to each other around the salad bar/ hot dish section. I began to know my neighbors, which seemed hopeful if strange. In the time I was seeing none of the hundreds of people I knew in Manhattan from my times living there, which by now spanned nearly 30 years.

A confident woman in the apartment next to me worked an airlines counter out at the airport. Her husband, a dark, jolly Venezuelan, was studying for an accounting degree, for which I helped him with his papers. Sometimes he came over in the uniform of a Central Park soccer team. Sometimes he was in ski gear, ready, with the paper done, to head to Cortina Valley in the Catskills. A couple on the 4th floor, small, round regurlar people I might not have noticed in another time talked in the elevator of how they too go upstate. They had just collided with and killed a deer, totaling their car. It sounded like something happening a thousand miles away.

When the Korean grocery man waved as I went by and said “Have a nice day,” I felt my eyes water, as if this were something meaningful, some actual new life, or model of a life, in which I might be surrounded by people I loved and trusted. Feeling the possibility of it, for I also knew that I might be one of many customers who looked alike to him. Sometimes his pretty young daughter was there between her art classes around the corner at F.I.T. Seeing her took me deep into my past.

For a year I had been a cliché figure, a divorced man living nowhere – borrowed places – friends couches, a maid’s room on 87th St., a stifling condo off season in Florida on the edge of the Everglades, a fancy renovated coop loft in the popular new Flat Iron district with fancy people from my not always fancy international past, a dirt encrusted illegal loft on Canal Street, where I rendezvoused with a woman from 30 years back who flew in from California, and neither of us could accept who and what we had become. She noticed, as she had 30 years ago, that I had no permanent abode.

I had arrived on this block as a boarder – another cliché figure – via an old friend who knew someone who knew a warm hearted Puerto Rican woman who rented rooms illegally in a sprawling rent control apartment in a long low-rise Bronx-style building. She knew everyone on the block, and was kind to everyone, though she was also, like the ladies she sat with in folding chairs on the sidewalk, a great fan of a drug-crazed young man named Bernie Goetz who had just made headlines for shooting young black men in the subway. She was also a great fan of Ronald Reagan though she was the very sort of person this genial old molester was attempting to do in. She had mastered many government aid programs, and distributed food from them – mostly gigantic blocks of cheese, to whoever wanted it, needy or not, on the block. She alerted me to the rent stabilized apartment across the street that just became free, so I had a place of my own again.

One night a naked woman, haggard face and young bouncing body, ran into the street. Rather than gawk or hoot the neighbors wrapped her in a blanket, stayed with her till hospital help arrived.

Chelsea was getting the reputation now, 1986, of being a chi-chi new neighborhood with an appeal to fashionable people, especially gays – yet the second most successful new business near me after the Korean store was a dingy Greek coffee shop. Across Eighth there were still stores that seemed out of my distant childhood – ice cream that was decades away from Hagan Daaz, a shoe store selling Thom McCann shoes, facing a very old store for non-designer fabric by the yard. And there was a faded, linoleum-lined place run by very old people who overcooked flat hamburgers separately.

Behind the stores across 8th were the massive, identical buildings of the International Ladies Garment Workers union, greenery and benches and big spacious apartments inhabited by a mixture of very old union members or their surviving spouses, and younger people who years ago had gotten on waiting lists as the old ILGWU people began dying off.

One intriguing aspect of my building was its facade, decorative concrete that made it look like a replica of something you would see in Venice.
Rita was always on our block as was Freddy the super, a huge round man who, like so many here, had lived on the block since birth. He was usually seen in silhouette walking down the center of 25th Street, tilting from side to side, one thick arm stretched out daintily to hold a leash attached the world’s smallest dog. It was all so different from the more obviously colorful but unanchored places of my past. And so clearly this was the place where, in ways I could not delineate, I knew my life would change like night turning to day or vice versa.

The Aqua Musang 6 - RELIEF

As I drove towards the night, Vermont’s welcoming woods seemed a world I knew, thought I did not know how I knew it, must have forgotten it. These woods that seemed to engulf me now but where I had barely ever been. And above the woods the Green Mountains seemed to turn greener in twilight, which was just the opposite of how it went in New Hampshire, where the taller White Mountains might sometimes be blue or blue-green but could turn black, even when the sky was still gray-blue or sunset purple.

I was in my car but I was in these Vermont woods. I would stop to stand by trees or rolling fields and just stand there breathing deeply. I would stop to look at ponds and streams and breathe some more And all this time, in the aqua Mustang and out of it, I was thinking of a night in the city that could not have been more than nine months earlier but felt like it was from some far distant time that came right after a time I had thought I could never leave.

It was New Year’s Day night in the city, after another gathering of the new people with whom I was associating in this time that suddenly was seeming to me so much younger than anything that could be called midlife. On New Year’s Day night in a car on the East Side IRT I saw myself not in the city but in a clearing, a wooded place, a nighttime scene lit by candlelight – a semicircle of small boys and girls, and forest animals who were as friendly as the girls and boys. And there in the subway car I heard, above the roar and rattling of the old train in its old city tunnel, from somewhere an angry but warm and affirming voice was saying, “Who wants to stop these children?”

And then the rest of the night – in the subway, in the shuttle and on the West Side IRT, and on the winter streets, and then back in my apartment – all night I went back and forth from tears to rage back to sadness that could knock me over and to rage again and again sadness and then more rage and sadness and rage and sadness – emotions hitherto reserved for fiction or drunk scenes.

It was in this night that the sort of depression that had hounded me for 50 years, came to an end. And so too did the fear, always with me in previous light moments, that it would return. The sort of depression that is physically debilitating and threatens to last forever, which is not the same as down times or angry times or sad times.

From the subway I went to my bright apartment in Chelsea, and spent the night moving between deadly rage and sobbing sadness. And time was timeless. And when I came out of it I found myself drinking milk and eating Famous Amos cookies, neither of which were part of my regular diet and neither of which I could remember purchasing on my way home. I came out of it and stepped into something fresh.

For I knew nothing would ever be the same, which was something I thought about this next summer, nine months later, as I moved around Vermont in my new/old aqua Mustang in what I knew was a break from the hunt I was on – a break before taking the car across the border to the granite mountains and rocky fields, and big ultra-formal summer houses and co-existing towns full of local people who had always lived there. New Hampshire where lay the secrets of the demons that I was going steal, and carry back across the frontier, and hand to the demons’ enemies. I knew I would do it even as I delayed my border crossing.

The Aqua Mustang 5 – MIDLIFE CRISIS?

Books were being written about something called a midlife crisis and by some reckonings I was in midlife if 50 is old enough to count. I was surely going through a crisis in the sense that everything in the landscape of my life, past, and clearly present, and even more clearly future, was suddenly other than I had always seen it to be. The old reference points had become as flimsy as those antique chairs you fear will crumble if you sit in one of them.

But I was not so concerned yet about any mysteries I might be entering, for my interpretation of midlife crisis was just the way it was presented by the popular writers – something that was far more literal than spiritual – a hot subject that had to do not with entering areas of mystery but with straight-line solutions to problems.

The crisis part rang true. Maybe I wasn’t suicidal but it felt like the end of the word to me. A new affair with a glamorous French woman did not feel like the romance she assured me it was. This book on the Philippines I wrote with Max was in the stores still and getting a little attention, but it had not changed my life the way I had expected. All my books, I now knew for sure, had been the wrong books, just as my marriage had been he wrong marriage.

Change, in the midlife crisis theories as I read them, meant working hard to get to wherever I was supposed to be – which I thought was roughly where I had been in the first place. Maybe for some it would mean changing how you brought in money, but that didn’t seem to apply either. I was no corporate drone. I was a writer, as friends reassured me every time I thought to do something else. Writers are meant to write, they said. Getting past this dark midlife time would partly be a matter of doing more writing, like a writer should.

Getting back did mean change in the sense that I would look for new places that were the places I ought to explore, and I would look for a woman that I ought to have had in the first place. This was so clear I could see the places and the woman with no evidence that they existed. But my ideas about books became a little more concrete. My agent sent out in all directions new book proposals that I labored on. One was for that light book about my family that an editor had suggested and a publisher seemed about ready to sign. Another was for a piece of travel writing that mean I would close my eyes and breath deep and do what most travel writers do, which is to take air tickets and hotel rooms and food and drink as bribes to say nice things that might not be of any interest at all to the writer. And there was an idea for a book about great rivers of the world, most of which I had already seen and some of which I had explored. And then one that would make fun of things in California – from New Age to free-flowing sex to new politics – including things I actually found appealing but would treat with irony verging on contempt.

So I did try to bring the midlife crisis to an end. I did try to write a happy, funny book about family that seemed neither happy nor funny to me. And I tried to find women when I could find the energy.

And the depression got worse. There was this dread writers block which I did not know yet almost never occurs unless the writer is trying to write something false.

I started with a young therapist who wore a yarmulke whom I had encountered by mistake thinking it was a way to placate my ex-wife, who was no more Jewish then me but had a line into the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, where the sliding scale fees were reasonable. Long ago I had pushed for couples counseling – not that I knew much about counseling – and I had been rebuffed. But now that our marriage no longer existed, she called to hold me to the promise.

So there I was, doing the charade of seeing the therapist separately, after a joint session that proved too volatile . And I soon found the young therapist was brilliant and empathetic. The young guy asked about my family and I said my father had recently died. I also found myself telling him about something I had not spoken about before to anyone in the busy near year since I saw my father’s body – about the details of the death, about how my father had died in great pain in a fifth rate Gulf Coast Florida hospital deserted by his wife, my mother, and by my brother the good twin, who came down but then fled the scene, and by his Anglo daughter-in-law and also his only remaining sibling and by anyone who might have still after these last years been considered an old friend – deserted by everyone except my about to be ex-wife and me, who saw him through to death, his entire chest an oozing red and yellow open cancer wound. His reaction to the pain was interpreted as a final coma by the people who would not come to see him – though probably not by the doctor, who refused enough morphine for apparent fear of a malpractice suit. The young therapist asked me how I felt about my father’s death , which was the kind of question I had never been asked before. I was certain I felt nothing beyond a little safe sympathy, and yet I was sobbing now, me a man who had not sobbed in the many years since he had stopped drinking, sobbing now as if it would never stop.

So I junked the midlife crisis books, sure now that I was no more a candidate for a correct midlife crisis than in school days I had been a candidate for organizations that did trivial things with various sizes of balls. And I started making some wild new moves, entering visual rather than verbal worlds, even joining groups of people on the same sort of hunt I was thrilled to be on, all of them angry and at the same time most of them exhilarated as we made our way out and into our lives. The crisis was not over yet. There were still more attempts to get back to where I had been. But by the following summer everything was so different that I was in the aqua Mustang, moving through nature without a map, and hardly a care in the moment though I knew that at some not too distant moment I would be crossing a frontier into the landscape where it had all begun.

The Aqua Mustang 4 - LIFE FLASHES BEFORE ME

A naked, sweet-voiced girl telling of a lighthearted trip to the beach while lying upstairs at three in the morning over a steamy waterfront bar in Batista’s Havana, and the blacked out windows in Kuala Lumpur when there were snipers, and the black and white smoke from old steam engines in the White Mountains and in Jordan and the western Sudan and Slovenia. And my places with views – over Athens to the monastery mountain Lykvatos, or up through a maze of tenements and office buildings to the Empire State Building, or over the mother of rivers to Bangkok palaces, or past a minaret to the eastern Mediterranean. All those views returning and all those girls still young. Susan cooking me an obscure fish as I looked south over Manhattan almost to the Battery. Sandie kissing me deeply in the shadows when we escaped the segregation of our New Hampshire boarding schools. Startling surprises of light and life in the Jeu de Paume off the Place de la Concorde. These and an infinite number of other places over the years with loves and would-be loves – and Kitty, who embodied the dreamt-of culmination, and then the dangerous time with Cathy, and then talented Vannie, whose sweet face was in my mind and heart as I wandered alone, even when passing graveyards, and the dangerous and obsessive time with Judy, and the lovely and furious days with gorgeous, syrupy Bonnie, and later another sweet Bonnie, and all those times in all those bars, and also times far from bars. And Anne Marie, whom I met at the old Corso, and Mary Anne, whom I met at a Manila restaurant where the waiters were dwarfs – Mary Anne my now ex-wife – these and so many girls and women I knew or tried to know – and all the food and drink consumed – the life-giving warm bile from a just killed snake in a Hong Kong alley, or rosé in Macao, or awful Turkish vodka, or Pernot if not absinthe in Paris – and Musaka in Delphi, or raw liver from a throat-slit goat in a sweltering grass hut village, or cevapcisi outdoors in Llubliana, or raw herring in Amsterdam, or the perfect crepe in Paris, or anything offered in Tuscany and Umbria, or succotash in Indianapolis – and so much else in so many other places, and then all the ships – the Cunard and Italian and Holland-American line liners in the deep past, the old Messageries Maritime in the Far East, a Portuguese liner in West Africa, a Thai liner on the equator, a Turkish liner where everyone was expected to throw up, the Norwegian ship I worked on to get out of Portuguese Angola – ships and more ships back into my very young days – and those treks through Borneo and West Africa and other unlikely places including the White Mountains of New Hamsphire which were always threading their way through memory, and jails for unruly behavior and also one for doing good in Mississippi in civil rights days. And all that writing, good and bad and real and fake and rarely as close as I wished it to be. And that staunch but dangerous if often interesting family I came from that set up a life-long rivalry between me and my twin that could have finished us off when the battle moved from childhood to separate warring sides in Southeast Asia. My recurring attempts to send up fireworks in even the most peaceful places, which was what I was accused of by safer people – this life into which I had wanted to put the excitement that it seemed I needed if I were to be what I thought I should be – maybe modeled on the fiction that I still read.

Though now I was free of fiction, I believed and prayed. The excitement and the affairs and the houses and marriage and girlfriends even in times I had neither wife nor live-in girl, but the almost forgotten long times, interminable times alone in strange landscapes, too often a blur, sometimes so wonderfully sharp and clear, or too sharp and too clear. Drinking or sober alone in damp rooms as well as airy places with views – alone on the streets of places like Sarajevo and Grand Canaria where I spoke none of the languages, times alone that did not seem like mere interludes though on the surface it might appear there was always excitement and constant movement over and between continents.

All this and so much more flashed before me as I drove up and down and back and forth all over Vermont that summer of 1986, listening to music from the lighthearted aqua Mustang’s tape deck. Morning has broken like the first morning, Blackbird has spoken like the first bird… She is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters… Dear Lord above, don’t you know I’m crying? … Each step wakes a memory as freely I roam. On paths and beside lakes with a regular-people’s Walkman – but mostly inside the aqua Mustang this summer in Vermont, an interlude in the car with a heart-breaking girl who had a story and nearly loved me, but most of the time in the car happy enough alone.

This the new time, 1986. This the time I am finally finding ways to live that had not been in my outlines for constructed excitement. Everything now coming to the fore. My life flashing before me as I glide though the soft hills of Vermont with no clear destination.

My entire life flashing before me not as the old saw would have it because I am about to die but rather because I am feeling so alive now that I have recently said several times to people I know from this new present that I, never consciously suicidal in spite of near ultimate depressions, said now that I would not mind dying now because at last now I have tasted how much more the world could have for me.

As my entire life flashed before me in this time I was not dying.