WRITTEN WORD 48 - Indianapolis

When I was growing up the family stories were set piece stories that never changed, even though the family got its identity from a writer.

And maybe they never changed because he was a writer and the stories were written just once and forever – so enshrined that they were meant to always stay in place – unlike stories so alive they grow and change each time an artist steps into them.

Some of my grandfather’s stories were in place before he was born – the woman who would be his mother a heroine in the great Chicago fire, his father a self-made rich man on the Wheat Exchange who read the classics and got his strength from heroic happenings in the Civil War. And some of the stories came straight from my grandfather’s his own life. What he wrote of as a glorious time of leisure and privilege in huge houses on Lake Michigan before everything was thrown into doubt and chaos by the First World War – and also the stories about the settlement house movement and his Socialist politics and the Russian Revolution. All such stories apparently stayed in place in the years when he was politically radical, and were still in place in his final years when his base was a very formal “restricted” summer community in the White Mountains of New Hampshire – one of the last places you would expect to find a serious artist.

As a child I looked forward to having set piece stories of my own that would be as unchangeable as my grandfather’s, and like my grandfather’s would stay in place for me and those who followed me, solid things to keep in mind wherever we might be.

One of them had to do with when at 21 – after years of East Coast life and short happy spells in Europe – I became a wire service newsman and saw for myself that there could be nothing so silly and rear-guard as the flat city of Indianapolis, where I had a room in a brick building next to a Toddle House diner and where I covered mostly McCarthyite right-wing politics, this place where so recently you could not start a political career unless you with the Ku Klux Klan.

And so it was a surprise that I should wind up in Indianapolis when I started writing of places I had loved – places I later lived while young where I would leave my house or apartment in the morning saying to myself I am happy now, here now, in the sort of place I know I should inhabit. Something inside me soared as I walked out from these places.

Walking out of the airy teak house where I lived with Sunisar and then Barbara in Thonburi to step into a small ferry at my river landing across from the palaces and temples of Bangkok. Walking out of my our one-room white-washed house, where I lived with Vannie, my girlfriend from New York, high on the side of the Acropolis. Coming out of a sea-view place to walk along a blue bay in the devious Levantine city of Beirut in a time otherwise of frenetic desperation and deep depression. At these moments – when my spirit soared and I felt I was stepping into a kind of happiness – I would always on some be level be thinking with pleasure and excitement of coming out of the brick rooming house in that most mundane of all cities – Indianapolis – where for the first time in my life I felt free.

But this was something I did not know until I typed it while sitting at an unfamiliar new desktop computer in my mountain view house in Woodstock. Indianapolis, where I was first on my own, covering crazed right-wing politics, making weekend forays into Beat-era bohemia in Chicago, going into a trance in a tiny museum while standing in front of its main attraction, a Cezanne painting, full of mystery, exploring red tile roofs going up a European hillside – in Indianapolis making my own living, dealing with journalists and politicians and labor organizers and girls of the day and of the night, free from family, it seemed, and free from enforced schooling – strangely angry about that family – writing a novel at night when not exploring gloriously seedy night places, and all the while sending off letters to the East making fun of the Midwest. And then years later it all came back while I was writing – how my heart was leaping each time I stepped out of my brick rooming house into places that had no precedent in family lore.

WRITTEN WORD 47 - The Betrothal

That was in 1951, that summer with the Impressionists in Paris. And when everything started to change again three and a half decades later I found myself once more in museum rooms. And again while lying in bed at night I could walk through such rooms and see everything that was on every wall – mostly in bigger museums this time, but much the same thing as in 1951.

It started one morning when I woke up in my small but light-filled one-bedroom Chelsea apartment with a tall, sweet-faced woman younger than me named Bonnie whom I had met recently in an Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting – which was something I was doing that until now would have seemed hopelessly out of character. I had turned my answering machine off before she arrived. When in the night I heard the mechanical, though not the audio, part of it moving I was convinced it was my brother calling to say my mother was dying and I would have to go to Florida to take charge. Me, who was not ruled by family. There was no such call from my brother, though I knew there might have been. The actual call on the machine was from a guy who, like me not long before, had split with his wife. He was wondering if he could sleep for a time in my living room.

Bonnie and I went up to the Met that morning. She had a Walkman, something new to me, but not to many by the mid-80s. We passed it back and forth in the E and number 6 trains. I knew I would remember her if not the Mozart. From 86th and Lex we walked over to the Metropolitan. “Let’s go up to the Met,” I had said, it seeming a properly romantic move since I would be showing her a crucial part of what I thought of, with at this point perhaps insubstantial evidence, as myself.

I felt better than I had felt for years. I was silently thanking someone or something for the fact that I could have yet another adventure like this in this new time when everything was changing . We walked with arms around each other’s waists, something I knew a lot about from thirty years back but not so much as it got closer to the present. In the museum I was going to show her my favorite paintings. But what I found instead was how very narrow my scope was.

I had always, ever since Paris, gone to museums, though I realized on this morning that it had been five years or more since I had been in a museum or a gallery. And I realized that I had not really been a constant museum goer since my first time in New York when my first New York girlfriend, who wore black tights, had been an action painter. That was at the end of the fifties and the start of the sixties, a few crucial years after my time in the Jeu de Paum, years that had spanned college, the army, and a rapid career in wire service journalism.

I led Bonnie to the Impressionists. I don’t know if she saw I was intensely embarrassed. I was embarrassed because I did not know where the 19th century paintings were hung even though I had told her how important 19th century paintings were to me. I asked a guard, just like an out-of-touch tourist would, and we found the Impressionists. And then we went to see the Rembrandts, since I knew Rembrandt from another teenage summer, one that I had spent in Holland. Then I tried to find the Hoppers. I knew Hopper from when I was 21 and a journalist in Indianapolis and roaming Chicago on weekends. I would look in on the Art Institute – where I became fixated upon “The Night Hawks,” that intense and lonely diner scene in late night light that seemed to say everything I had wanted to say about about loneliness and fragile hope in seedy but alluring towns.

There were no Hoppers on display at the Met in 1986. And I had nothing else to show Bonnie. It did not occur to me to ask what she wanted to see. I was hit hard by the admission to myself that I knew so little, did not know what was meant by the High Middle Ages or the High Renaissance, had no idea of what a Rafael or Fra Angelico or a Donatello would look like, and I did not know their places in time. I loved art, but I did not know what I loved.

A few days later I was walking uptown from a dentist’s office on 57th Street. On the radio while he was filling a cavity there had been bulletins about the space shuttle explosion that had just taken place – the space shuttle that carried an appealing woman who was really a New Hampshire schoolteacher. When I was on Madison nearing 75th street I saw I was passing the Whitney. Rather I saw the Whitney had its own building, and had probably had it since some point in the early sixties when I had last seen it in its old small home, which you entered from the Museum of Modern Art. Now it had this big but gentle reddish modern building that for some reason was new to me. And inside I was suddenly listening to a happy old man who said he was a retired banker and was here as a volunteer docent. I followed him, though I had spent most of my life traveling and had always managed to avoid tour guides. He said he had loved art since he was a young man in the city and had gotten to know an artist named Sheeler, who was apparently famous but new to me. I now saw Sheeler’s surprisingly deep and romantic treatments of industrial scenes. And then I came upon Hoppers like those I had sought in vain at the Met. And after that I was standing in front of Arshile Gorky’s portrait of himself as a small child with his mother in Armenia shortly before the mother starved to death in the Turkish genocide. And then I was looking at an abstract Gorky called “The Betrothal," which seemed to be about danger and betrayal, and was more literal than abstract to me, and I knew I was getting connected visually again, to the bad and to the good, in ways I had always wanted. Getting information by induction not deduction. And I did not stop looking in museums and galleries for many, many months, and I only paused in the times, starting a year later, that I was myself drawing and painting.

WRITTEN WORD 46 - Literary Magnolias

I read Keats as if these poems were my Bible. And I thought I could follow the old romantic poets at the same time I tried for the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I thought I could bring literature and life together in this mixed literary way.

When I first began winning debate tournaments I began to think that I would one day be President. But now in this last year of boarding school I was dreaming that one day I would live in one of those garrets of lore in Paris and become a great poet with all that that implied for love and sex and beauty.

I had actually said this to parents while in Paris that I wanted to stay in Paris, and that had set off more ridicule , so I pulled myself inside myself to wait for my time.

These dreams in the midst of this period when so much was falling apart – my young love affair as well as my pride in how I could use logic for noble ends, which had become part of my identity, even though I had not hesitated to override what I believed when I was in a debate tournament.

I would step out of this world, I decided. I was already seeing other girls in vacation times. And also during the vacations I haunted the 4th Avenue used book stores in the city, and found all the books that F. Scott Fitzgerald had published, including the out-of-print short story collections, which to a large extent were about romantic encounters in a romantic version of the South. I was there with Zelda and the magnolia.

At school I became friends with a new boy who joined our class in the last year. I had only contempt for most of his ideas, but who fascinated me, Hans Larson. He was from what he described as a place for the socially prominent, Tuxedo Park. He had gotten his parents to send him to him to prep school because he was making himself into the a facsimile of the sort of people he admired in that rich town. He related without irony, in fact with pride, how they had held celebratory cocktal parties the day Roosevelt died – while he was stuck in an immigrant Norwegian family that ran a plebeian car dealership. He looked just like the rich kids and not at all like the kids in the public schools. A real Jay Gatsby. Hans. I would edit out his politics and his prejudice, things I hated more than ever. Working through the kitchen help, we got our hands on bourbon and drank it in our dormitory late at night.

I decided I would go to Princeton, like Fitzgerald and like others in my very non-Fitzgeraldian family – though I was still a socialist and pacifist. I did not admire anything much that Hans admired except pretty girls. But I would not let anything limit me, I told myself. On some level, I was sure, Princeton would be under the Fitzgerald influence, more Old South than Tuxedo Park. I forgot to check if Negroes would be in my class – segregation in boarding schools being something I had railed against in our school paper. Princeton, in my fantasy would be a dreamy romantic place as far removed as you could be – as far as Tahiti maybe – from the wind-swept Hampshire lake country. Not the gray conservative place I suspected it might be. Hans himself was rejected by Princeton and was headed to what he considered the next best ting, the University of Virginia.

I was in Europe again the summer before college – going on a Holland-American line student dormitory ship to spend the summer in an exchange program in Holland (a venture that took me back to Paris for one last look in the Jeu de Paum). In the ship back I met two welcoming and amusing guys who had just ended their first year at Harvard. They really liked one of the two Holderness boys I knew who were in their class —Dmitri Nabokov , my debate colleague, the wild and brilliant son of a famous father. They couldn’t stand the other, Al Dawson, who was one of the dumb, sadistic, delusional school athletes. I knew for sure that at Princeton it would have been the other way around. I had made a horrible mistake. This would be no place for someone who liked Keats.

But the night before going to Princeton I read my grandfather’s admiring account of the place – admiring even though he was out of step with the would-be aristocratic Southerners who dominated. He seemed to think that on some level they were right and he was wrong. And then I read Fitzgerald’s romantic version of Princeton in This Side of Paradise – and I tensed up, clenched my teeth and all sphincters and concentrated hard to make myself believe that I and the world were not what I really did know us to be.

WRITTEN WORD 45 - Debating & Writing IV

I go into these stories again and again, which is necessary if you are suspicious of pat endings. I have written about that summer in Paris with my parents, my mother’s mother and their favorite, my twin brother Peter, just before our last year at a boarding school in New Hampshire where it had seemed so certain to me that I had come into my own. I go back into old places and write about growing up as the bad twin – unable to read until near the end of second grade whereas the good twin was reading when he was four, and when we started at that boarding school, Georgian buildings in the lake country of New Hampshire, it was just like those English novels I had started to read about the horror of boarding schools, the sadistic athletes, the conspiring masters. I have written about how my life at Holderness had for the first year and a half been like in one of those novels. They ridiculed me and the boys beat me. I knew those English school novels because I had time on my hands in compulsory evening study hall, which was only for the dullest boys. There I was reading – pretending to study but going in secret into Browning and Keats and Shakespeare. I was reading but I was failing all my courses, except English, and they seemed to hate me - not just the boys but also the Latin master who was as sadistic as the boys, the algebra teacher who was really the football coach, the basketball coach who taught history and had us read a text book I could already see was too simple and wrong in its patriotism. And then suddenly my world changed.

This was when I was taken under the wing of the English teacher who was also the debating coach.This was when I began winning all my debates, and simultaneously I started to do well in all my subjects – except Latin which I refused to tolerate. I did so well that I soon had the highest grades in the school, higher than my brother’s. And before the 4th form was over – 4th form being the equivalent in Anglophile boarding school language to the American sophomore year, before that year was out I was on the varsity debate team and I stayed there for three years and led it into bigger places than the little school has every known as I won and won again in each of three years the New England debating championship, and practically no one dared make fun of me anymore.

As I keep writing about it now I tell of how I also found a girlfriend who made me the envy of even the dull athletes. And I write of how in that summer abroad, back with the family again,it seemed I had gone nowhere, my good-boy twin was at the center still and again. My grandmother said my debate triumphs were all very well but maybe it would have been different if Peter had put the same effort into it and then he, not Fred, would be the best debater in New England. And how strange, they said, that Fred has the pretty girlfriend.

I keep going back in my writing into that time in Paris. My world did get bigger then, but being with the family so much closed down. I would wander on my own. It was a stimulating walk through the Place de la Concorde from our hotel on Rue St. Honoré to the Jeu de Pam, which was where the Impressionists were. The Impressionists, whom I had never heard of before that summer abroad. I had never thought much about art beyond Saturday Evening Post covers and the Varga girls in Esquire. It was my mother who first took me to see the Impressionists – which she knew from long ago when she spent her junior year from Smith abroad. But otherwise these painters were outside any context I knew. There was nothing like this on the walls at school or at home. Neither my mother nor any of my elders had before this ever even talked about art.

Sometimes I would go off to a theater I discovered on the Rue de Capuchins where, though only 16 and looking younger, I could see actual naked girls proudly dancing. My main destination, however, did not change. I would go again and again to the Jeu de Paum.

Writing about it years later I am right there looking at Renoir’s girl on a swing who seems to be a girl for me whom I have encountered on a path. I am right there again, and I still see every wall of the museum and still have in my head the precise location of each painting – the exact location still the same for me, though they moved them all to the Gar St. Lazare in the eighties. I am still standing before Monet’s rows of hay stacks and rows of poplars in shifting light and his various aspects of Chartres and the Houses of Parliament – and I am in the South Seas with Gaugin as far from New Hampshire as you can get, but no farther than where van Gogh takes me to places right herein France. And then Manet, that wonderful girl on on her back on the bed, I still know just where she is. And I know that in the far end of the next room, if I look up and to the left, there will be those picnicking artists again with their stately nude model. My eyes are open.

Writing about that summer, I then come to my last year, 6th form yeard, at school when I again won the big debating championships, and had the top grades, but did it by bluff now, my reputation such that if the judges saw I has unprepared they would not trust what they saw and would vote for my side anyway. And the masters who graded my slick papers for classes, other than English, could not get the conception I had stopped doing the reading .

I write about this time in Paris and my last year in school to understand what had happened because of that summer when it was as if I was back trapped in the place where I had begun. In that last year I even walked way from my girlfriend, it was that bleak and confusing

But as I keep going into the story the emphasis shifts, for I keep bringing the paintings back. As I write, it is not just being thrown into a suffocating place with the parents and grandmother and the good boy brother, thrown back into my old sad place in the world. As I write I spend more time each time with the paintings. As I write, it is as if what really happened had to do with the limits of debating – the ability to look at everything only from the standpoint of logic, to only honor the purely linear, being willing and able to argue with equal cogency and vigor any side of any subject with almost no reference to anything I hold dear. As I write, going back into the story for the hundredth time, it is the taste of art – more than the limits of family – that in Paris brings this phase of my life to an end.

WRITTEN WORD 44 - Debating & Writing III

I and Mr. Abbey, our coach, and Dmitri, my debate partner, left the self-contained boarding school campus long before sunrise and headed off on salted New Hampshire state highways and snow-covered mountain roads in Mr. Abbey's new Ford – the new 1951 model! – so up to date it had a middle headlight that turned when you turned the steering wheel.

We stopped for breakfast at a diner. We took a booth. The snow outside had drifted up to the frosted-covered, chrome-edged windows. I ordered a hot dog – this was freedom!

Waiting for our order, Dmitri and Mr. Abbey were talking and I was looking towards the counter, admiring a soft, sweet-faced, tousle-haired local girl who was sipping something through a straw. Over a fluffy sweater she was wearing a silk jacket with a dragon on the back – clearly from a local boyfriend drafted into the war in Korea.

I am feeling free and I am admiring this sweet local girl in the diner. This is the year I have been bringing back to the school all those plastic and wood and brass trophies, each topped by brass woman, naked though without nipples, who holds a laurel wreath high above her head – these trophies towering over the minor second and third place trophies for ball games that were – before I came along – all that could be found in the school trophy case.

Eating my hotdog, drinking coffee, thinking of the debate tournament ahead, feeling I had climbed high. And over at the pinball machine there is a big local guy my age in a red-checkered ear-flap hat and army surplus field coat. He is looking toward our booth – as if he knows us.

He does. It is Harold. He's coming over. Harold, last seen wearing a necktie and school blazer when he'd been in our 4th form class. Harold.

I'd known he was from a New Hampshire town. Most boys in the school were from more advanced states. And he had disappeared, not come back for 5th form – had been sucked back into this wind-swept landscape.

Harold had been my assigned roommate in Niles House in the worst time. This had been before I learned I could be seen as smart. We had started to become friends, but when the popular boys on the floor poured into our room to beat me, he'd stepped aside and watched, then egged them on. And then – worse than the beatings – he'd moved out on me because I was so unpopular. Leaving me the only boy in the school without a roommate.


In the diner I see Harold walking over from the pinball machine. He has his hand out tentatively, shyly, smiling at us – friendly. Supplication.

In 4th form he'd never been a shy outsider like me. But this time Harold is so clearly not from our prep school, but rather from the landscape outside it.

Harold – so easy to dismiss now in the diner, as easy as it had been to dismiss me before I was smart,

Before girls liked me,

Before I was a reader and a writer and a champion debater who traveled.

Harold hardly suitable material for the life I would lead and the books I would write about it.

WRITTEN WORD 43 - Debating & Writing II

I looked around the big meeting room in Livermore Hall - folding chairs lined up with leather sofas - and realized more than half of this small boarding school’s students, maybe 50 boys and also eight faculty members, were here. Such a crowd, it seemed, that I might have been speaking in a coliseum. And for all I knew they were as bloodthirsty as crowds at the ancient world's deadly Roman games.

I knew this room well for this was where we assembled to hear outside speakers – some of them silly, like a burly man who was to give an anti-Communism talk but wound up doing card tricks – and some were deadly serious, like the a tall, thin Quaker who knew what was what in China, including that Mao was popular and would win and Chiang Kai-shek was a discredited warlord that Harry Truman should not be supporting. But now I myself was about to speak here, leading off for the affirmative side on whether our government should provide free health care and higher education. I was 15. My voice had not finished changing. A year earlier I had been considered the dumbest kid in the school and was treated that way by everyone except a key teacher – we called them masters – and two guys who had become my friends in spite of how I had been so slow and unpopular. “Speedy.”

But by the time I was poised to speak in Livermore I had,suddenly, and mysteriously, risen right to the top of my class. I had just made the varsity debate team though I was two years younger than even the brightest varsity debaters in other years.

The room was so familiar. Not just for speakers but also as the place the whole school gathered after dinner every night to sing a hymn and hear a prayer. On the walls were murals showing this rolling-hill part of New Hampshire in autumn colors with figures of the future thrown in – a streamlined train and an airplane with four propellers and nautical-style portholes.

Often that year and the next two years I would be standing in this room surrounded by these gentle murals, building up my case, demolishing my opponents, all the while practicing careful eye contact, my oratory soaring to the point where at moments it was as if I could own the room. That’s how it felt. My words covering over the hymns and prayers that had been here – this meeting room across a hall from a smaller meeting room where mail was handed out in the morning – where now I would almost always find a scented letter in a pastel envelope from Sandie, who like me was 15, an hour away in our sister school, St. Mary’s-in-the-Mountains – the envelope’s stamp, as on my letters to her, upside down to show the writer was so distracted by love it was not possible to get things right side up – and on the back of the envelope in capital letters, S.W.A.K., which according to custom stood for “Sealed With A Kiss” – something far beyond anything I had thought could happen to me - for less than a year ago I had been the slowest, most unpopular boy in this school, ridiculed with that nickname “Speedy” – me the slow and bad twin, in the same class here with Peter, the smart, good twin – and by some miracle I had drawn even, and in some but not all crucial ways I had passed him. At one moment I’d been flunking my courses, the next I’d shot to the top of the class just as I became a member of this varsity debate team.

And a girlfriend! And I was finally seen as bright. Not popular yet, still often ostracized,but not totally despised – and now here I was, on the spot in this familiar room filled with boys and masters lined up on folding chairs – standing before them – and I had to make the opening speech. Could I carry it off with a voice that was still changing, a voice that had recently gone from alto to baritone and might still crack as it headed down to base? And would I be ridiculed and ostracized even further for presuming that I could get away with it?

Right in front of me were the judges. Mrs. Homer, a woman with a pretty monkey face who was the mother of my confident-seeming classmate Bob Homer and also president of the League of Women Voters in the nearby town of Plymouth – she and two other Plymouth League of Women Voters women, these two very gray, were to judge this debate that would begin the moment I opened my mouth – if I could open my mouth.

Behind me at our table was my debate colleague and friend Ken Kaplan, who was a sixth former, the equivalent of senior, while I was just a fourth former. And at the other table behind me was the Portland, Maine team – Lois and Michael – who last year had carried back to Portland some major debating trophies. These two - the legendary Lois, a beautiful, stately colored girl, though you forgot that fast, and sturdy Michael - the New England debating champions, coached by a craggy man named Mr. Walsh who produced a handbook on each year’s national subject that went out to debaters all over America. The strongest team in New England, and their famous coach too, right here in this room where I was in front of this crowd at this school of mine where I still might be an outcast.

Me – a fourth former – Speedy – lucky to be where I was, lucky to have a girlfriend who necked on those rare occasions we got up to her school or they got down to ours – it all being almost as if I were one of the popular guys. And now my life hinged on this moment in this familiar room with the fall foliage murals where, my mouth dry, I did begin to speak even while remembering that I was the slow, dumb, shy guy who would not know what to say.



Very early on the morning after my victory – we’d won and the League of Women Voters women had named me Best Speaker – I and all the school debaters on all levels were off in a school van with our coach to a practice tournament at a southern New Hampshire high school. No one was calling me Speedy today. They seemed to have dropped the word. Finally!

Peter, who was always prompt, was already in the van when I climbed in. He gave me a long look and said something about a swelled head. He shook his own head, and through a sour smile he said, “Hi Speedy.”

WRITTEN WORD 42 - Chapter One

I am in the open ward at St. Mary’s hospital on the island side of the old colony of Hong Kong. I am in this tattered, sprawling open ward for people brought in suddenly – and also, it seems, for charity cases, but non-charity cases too – a place in this overcrowded enclave where you can get a bed quickly and where a doctor, the latest in a series of doctors, allopathic and otherwise, thought I should be.

My new wife was in this same place recently. The rows of beds here must hold 60 or 70 people. For her it was an overdose of hashish, for which I was blamed because the marriage is so flimsy. My bed is almost exactly where hers had been. Across from me there are very old, shrinking people peeking out from their sheets. Chinese people. I am the only foreign devil here – a term not used much in other Chinese cities but still in use here because of the way the colonial British, even at this late date, presume to carry themselves.

When my wife was here it was more interesting across the way. In a bed there, then, was a pale, delicate starlet who, like my wife, had overdosed. The starlet was looking at the ceiling, ignoring the visit of a suave boyfriend, who like the leading men in so many Hong Kong and Taiwan movies, except those that entailed magic, knew how to show his appeal and authority by the way he could half stand and half lean as he watched the irony of life unfold around him. The Hong Kong equivalent of men in French movies who wear their sports jackets draped over their shoulders like shawls. It radiates sophistication and cool, to wear a jacket that way with a half smile on your face, as it does in Hong Kong to lean with confidence and detachment, whether against a table or the back of chair or the head of a hospital bed – with some sad, lovely girl in your view.

But I have no one to look at but the shriveled men and women peeking out of their sheets. And no one seems to know exactly why I am here. I have a low grade fever, have had it for weeks, which my last doctor – a former combat surgeon in a Seventh Day Adventist hospital – said was such a dire sign that, without tests, he put me on an arduous treatment for typhoid. But the nurses here at old St. Mary’s say low grade does not count, so it looks like I am not sick, though the doctor making rounds, a modest grandfatherly Chinese man, wants to look for cancer. I am in a dark haze, unable to collect my thoughts. The one thing no one has said is that all these are physical signs of my deep depression. I do not even know the word. Looking back later it seemed I had all the symptoms, except serious plotting for suicide, and maybe that was because it was so hard for me to pull together coherent thoughts, much less act on them.

I do not know the word “depression.” But I know these mysterious dark times, which can come just as everything is working out, and just as everything is falling apart. These book contracts I carry that define me give me no safety – have nothing anymore to do with me. No more than does my history.

I live nowhere permanently. A few exciting years in Bangkok, a few cloudy years in Beirut, a few in the Balkans, a few in Singapore and now Hong Kong, where I have been before, which I already knew was a two-week city, like Beirut – an artistically barren place where everyone is after money and there are no green parks. In between these times – times of fireworks, times I remember now as being so mysterious as to let in joy – between these foreign times always a few years in New York City, which I think of as my home – sometimes the East Village, sometimes the West Village, sometimes the Upper West Side, anywhere in Manhattan except my forebears’ East Side places. And I am puzzled each time in New York when I head off to adventure in all these thrilling foreign zones (not counting Beirut and Hong Kong), puzzled that I have to push myself through heavy darkness that pours down, each time with no warning that I can catch, and nearly paralyzes me.


And it got worse, for it was never so dark and hopeless as in the time just before I began to look not at these foreign places but at the places of my origin that I had edited out and replaced with foreign places, often war zone places, that I thought could bring definition and safety.