The first job I tried to get in Durham was at the greenhouses in Sarah Duke Gardens on the Duke campus. I had developed an enduring love for cacti and succulents that was in its 7th year already, and the conservatory at Duke included a large collection. I recall walking in for my interview with the greenhouse manager and being intoxicated by the oxygen rich loamy smell and the close humidity- it was January, very cold out. I instantly, desperately wanted the job. So much so that I lied on my application and indicated that I had worked at a garden center in Bethlehem- but was so unskilled at this that I put down the name of an actual business. The greenhouse manager checked, discovered I had lied, and told me he was sorry- that I would have gotten the job if I hadn't lied. That was a real blow to my ego and a bitter lesson. I felt humiliated for sure. I never lied on a resume after that.
A picture of a couple getting engaged in the greenhouse at Duke. Happiness.
The nuke plant got built anyway, in spite of my best fundraising efforts
On the way to our assignments for the day, we would practice our raps- we had a few set openers and scripts, tailored for various socioeconomic neighborhoods. The canvassing manager wisely chose all suburban locales, from lower middle class to high upper middle. Every shift, we were challenged to "make quota," a fixed amount of donations. We got a percent commission of donations over quota.
Picture this long-haired, bespectacled, 18 year old Yankee going door to door in the suburbs of the South, tasked with eliciting cold call donations door to door, selling nothing but shinola. I was, as you may have guessed, very good at it, only falling short of quota a couple times. Tellingly, I had my best days in the wealthiest neighborhoods- and my moments of greatest triumph were when someone who was a shareholder in Duke Power would donate money to help us in our effort to lobby against their rate increase.
The job was emotionally exhausting and lonely, and I began to sink into a severe depression, probably the second or third major depressive episode of my life to that date. The apartment where Lovejoy and I lived was small, shabby, cold. We had no money. She was deeply involved in her studies. I had insinuated myself into her circle of friends, and had gotten to know some jazz musicians. I was playing drums a little bit, playing piano in the Duke practice rooms. But all of my outer life was vicarious, contingent on Lovejoy's existing life. I had been a social butterfly in my senior year, after I had emerged out of the isolation post rupture, with tons of friends, parties, etc. I was the director of the school musical production of Godspell, and played drums in the band. We had also gone on a mini tour and performed in a few theaters on the East Coast after graduation. But as always, post high school, it was the great diaspora, and even if I had stayed in Bethlehem, no one else did.
Compounding these factors, I was struggling with personality disturbances around being a writer. In response to the rupture, I had developed compensatory, grandiose ideas of being a "great artist." I felt myself to be the reincarnation of Joyce. I self consciously imagined I had the fate of being in an imaginary pantheon of Great Writers. I had bought the whole mythology hook line and sinker and it was a serious disruption in my life. I continued to write but it was a terrible struggle, in the face of feeling like I just might be "a genius." I became sullen and withdrawn- it was a couple years before Nicholson's Jack Torrance but I was prophetically going in that direction, in a somewhat more small scale, ordinary way.
Lovejoy had no idea what she was dealing with. She also was prone to depression, and the two of us sank together. It was especially disheartening for us both because it seemed that everyone had been right. Our idea was not workable, we didn't know what we were doing, we would not find happiness simply because we loved each other. The days and nights were pretty heavy. We grew apart. I deeply resented her having betrayed me, still, and had done no work on getting through that and finding forgiveness. She resented my inability to just not get the fuck over it.
She developed a serious case of pneumonia and went into the Duke infirmary on campus. During the time she was in there, I fucked a friend of hers twice, and my disordered and distorted thinking was that it set to rights her having slept with so many other men the prior year. The woman I had the fling with was nonchalant about the entire thing and had no emotional attachment to me whatsoever. It's weird still feeling ashamed of this failed attempt to establish "revenge equilibrium" between Lovejoy and me. It's especially astonishing that my betrayal was when Lovejoy was at her most vulnerable, sick and alone in the hospital.
In my twisted mind at the time, the equilibrium could only be reached if I told her what I had done, which also, conveniently, would relieve my terrible guilt and shame. I don't recall much of the conversation, but I know it was the virtual end of things between Lovejoy and me, although we suddenly became much more cordial, stopped fighting, and some kind of desperate and weird cloud that had been over us cleared completely. I think this was because we both knew that we were bound to split in a final way, when her semester was over. We talked about not living together anymore, and we didn't fight about it, and all of the drama was gone.
I think I was in shock. So this is how living together goes, I thought. So this is what working, paying bills and failing at a relationship goes. So this is how True Love unfolds in the world- killed by reality, gutted by infidelity, burned to the ground by resentment and fear. It felt like such a deep reversal over so short a time that it was simply not able to be integrated into any framework. From January to May. This pattern of experiences that can't be integrated, and in which I myself felt no integrity, where the narrative was so chaotic, characterizes much of my life since.
A weird memory from the spring involves Allen Ginsberg visiting Duke to give a workshop and do a reading, and inviting me to play drums behind him as he "sang" his poem Die When You Die, which he had conceived as a kind of country and western song. He played accordion in 3/4 time and bleated out the words and I thought it was a parody, so I started mixing up the beat and going into free jazz mode. He turned around and said in rhythm, incorporated into the stanzas, "Stay on the beat there!" and I felt humiliated. I left the stage, in response to which he incorporated yet another line in his poem: "Get back on the drums there!" Afterward he confronted me and said I had been very rude and I (drunk) straight up told him his poetry was garbage and I was disappointed in him. He laughed at that and thought it was hilarious. He invited me to accompany him and a group of others to a bar. I went along part of the way. Someone asked him what he thought of acid. He said, "Oh it's very charming." I got distracted somehow and ended up not going with him and his entourage.
One of the vivid memories toward the end of our living together involved a mattress that Lovejoy had bought used at the Salvation Army thrift store. While it was still cold, through winter into early spring, it was an ordinary mattress. But as soon as the warm weather hit, in our sweltering apartment, hundreds of fleas blossomed out of it, and were everywhere, tiny living poppy seeds hopping and springing out of the carpet, covering both of us with raised itchy welts. We bought a flea bomb canister, prepped the apartment, and launched the fumigation. We left, and had four hours we had to spend away from the apartment.
We walked to Sarah Duke Gardens, sat on a grassy hill, and talked. I felt a deep sense of re-connection and so did she, as if it might be possible to forget the nightmare we had just been through. But it was only about three weeks from our planned departure, the arrangements had been made, the end was all set. I had already been hired by my uncle to work at the state park in upstate New York that he was superintendent of. Lovejoy had some kind of plan too. But we said, well, maybe we can try again after a while. The sun set over the gardens. I knew I was still in love with her, and I felt confused to the core by why we just hadn't been able to make it work. Both of us seemed in that moment, in the still evening air, surrounded by magnolias and the smell of cut grass, to know something on the deepest inner level- we had ruined it for good. If anything was going to be possible between us, it would have to be from square one, and we would have to be older, and there was probably a long, long individual road ahead. "Let's at least try to be friends," she said- I recall it clear as a bell ringing right now- and I said, "yeah." I knew I wasn't going to be very good at that. I said something like, "I'll always love you, somehow- I know that." There was a long, aching pause. "Yeah, I'll always love you too," she said.
It was dark. We walked back to the apartment, vacuumed up an astonishing number of dead fleas, and went to bed, not touching.
***
Returning to my childhood home with everyone having been "right" about what a bad idea it all had been, was a moment of terrible shame. Up to New York State went I, for a summer of heavy drinking, playing my tenor saxophone in the foxfire scintillating deep woods at 3 a.m., weeping, lost and feeling fucked to the core. I took a girl on a date to see The Shining, and laughed at all the wrong parts, and once again, terrified her. My cousin said, "yeah, cuz, you gave her the creeps." My cousin and drinking partner loved the Sex Pistols. He looked through a few of the records I had brought up there and declared "this is all n***** music!" I had never heard anyone in real life actually use the word. We drank heavily all summer, Beast of Burden or Jocko Homo on the juke box in the bar we went to.
I started writing to The Painter. I started fantasizing about her. She was at art school in Philadelphia, embroiled in an intense, obsessive love for a gay man who wanted to love her back but could only be friends. I hatched the plan of convincing The Painter to get back together with me. When I returned to Bethlehem in the fall of 1980, I set about wooing her. She wasn't interested.
I went to live with my sister in Manhattan for a while. I was also obsessed with Lovejoy, still. She had embarked on a semester at a research station on the Outer Banks. Eventually, she told me she had fallen in love with another scientist there. I was crushed. I worked at the Barnes and Noble Sales Annex at 18th st. and 5th Avenue, and took the Lexington Ave line downtown from the upper east side every day. I was starving, I had no money. When I did have a little money, I spent it on rare free jazz recordings of Peter Brötzmann, from Germany, or bootleg re-released of Art Ensemble of Chicago records from their Paris years, 1969-1970.
I wandered 5th Avenue and all of Manhattan a lot, and went to the Met on free days whenever I could. I was once famished, depressed and walking up 5th Avenue when I saw a limo pull up and Woody Allen and Mia Farrow got out and went into Elaine's. My sister set me up with a theater project at NYU through a friend of hers- the classics department was putting on a production of Aristophanes' The Clouds. I composed the music for the chorus and was Wrong Speech. Two of the women in the production wanted to date. I was a zombie. I couldn't do anything at all, really.
In the midst of this, I had a powerful spiritual awakening. I was in a sudden bliss state of universal love. I saw everyone and everything as suffused with the light of the divine. I became convinced that Manhattan was hell but that even inside hell itself, the divine pulsed. I was in Manhattan when John Lennon was killed. I recall a drunk guy on the subway, clinging to the center pole, sobbing and singing parts of Imagine in between gales of tears.
This too was a failed plan, I realized. I had imagined that I would pay my dues, find my way into the music scene, make a career for myself in music. None of that materialized. I knew the only place I could go was back home, having failed again. Another layer of ineffective attempts to extricate from my childhood home. I was home by New Year's, 1981. Nineteen years old, going on 20, lost and feeling like there was no way out. I painted, played music, wept, isolated. I was a heavy, heavy presence in my parents' house. I began to pursue The Painter again.
This time, it worked, and we got back together. I had done nothing to heal from anything, except just let time pass and make abstract paintings. One of those paintings, I sent to U this last January as a birthday present.
Falling back into a relationship with The Painter felt like a solution.
This will fix me, finally.
I think I'll leave the narrative thread here for a while. Except to say, plotwise, I drove a school bus for the spring semester, went out to visit my oldest brother in California, where he had taken his first job as an engineer, and had my first experience of the desert, camping at Joshua Tree. My father was convinced by now that, as lost as I was, the solution really was to send me to college. After two years of me not gaining any traction, and in fact becoming less and less functional in his eyes, he was ready to have me out of the house. I applied to NYU, UMass Amherst and St. John's College, and was accepted at all three. My father was relieved when I decided to go to St. John's, since he judged the school to be "serious about the liberal arts, not just a bunch of basket weaving classes." Also, it gave my parents a renewed reason to visit Annapolis, since my older brother had taken away their excuse when he left the Naval Academy.
It was decided. Off to St. John's with me, a few weeks before my 20th birthday. The Painter and I worked out a long distance, Annapolis to Philadelphia and vice versa relationship. Although I was embarking on a kind of solo flight, I went into my first year in a "committed relationship."
Soon after I arrived there, I met B, the man who was my first semester college roommate, and who is now romantically involved with my ex, A. I remain amazed by that. But the earliest memory I have from St. John's is a warm autumn day, sunny, the sycamores and tulip trees with leaves just barely beginning to turn, and I am on the lawn that stretched from the front of historic McDowell Hall all the way to the street. I'm reading The Iliad, in preparation for the first seminar. I looked up from Homer, took in the whole scene, and felt, for the first time in at least two years, that I had been granted a reprieve. I couldn't believe that I had the chance to spend four years in this incredible setting, simply reading and talking about "Great Books." It didn't seem real. I felt like I had finally found a way to transition out of my former life- but by the skin of my teeth, and in a precarious way, entirely dependent on my father, caught in a long distance romance. Nothing really hung together. It was a while before I realized I felt like an impostor.
Almost exactly the view I had, in the above moment. More leaves.
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