My Dark Places

11

I spent a month hooked up to a needle. A respiration therapist beat on my back every day. It loosened big globs of sputum. I spat them in the jar by my bed.

The abscess went. My fear stayed.

My mind was functioning normally. I played memory games to test-fire it. I memorized magazine ads and slogans on milk cartons. I was building mind muscle to fight potential insanity.

I went insane once. It could happen again.

I couldn’t let the fear go. I fed on it all day every day. I didn’t analyze why I drove myself to the point of brain malfunction. I addressed the problem as a physical phenomenon.

My brain felt like an external appendage. My lifelong plaything was in no way indigenous to me. It was a specimen in a bottle. I was a doctor poking it with a stick.

I knew that booze, drugs and my tenuous abstention from them caused my brain burnout. My rational side told me that. My secondary response derived straight from guilt. God punished me for mentally fucking my mother.

I believed it. My fantasy was just that transgressive and worthy of divine intervention. I tortured myself with the concept. I exhumed the midwestern Protestant ethic my mother tried to outrun—and used it for self-flagellation.

My new mental kick was mental self-preservation. I did mental tricks to keep my mind limber. It fed my fear more than it buttressed my confidence.

My lung abscess healed completely. I checked out of the hospital and cut a deal with God.

I told him I wouldn’t drink or pop inhalers. I told him I wouldn’t steal. All I wanted was my mind back for keeps.

The deal jelled.

I went back to Lloyd’s roof. I didn’t drink or pop inhalers or steal. God kept my mind in sound working order.

The fear stayed.

I knew it could happen again. I understood the preposterous aspect of all divine contracts. Booze and inhaler residue could lurk in my cells. My brain wires could sputter and disconnect without warning. My brain could blow tomorrow or in the year 2000.

Fear kept me sober. Fear taught me no moral lessons. My days ran long and sweaty and anxious. I sold my plasma at a skid-row blood bank and lived off ten dollars a week. I haunted libraries and read crime novels. I memorized whole passages to keep my mind running strong.

A guy in Lloyd’s building worked as a golf caddy. He told me it was good tax-free money. You could work or not work as you pleased. Hillcrest Country Club was high-class. The members tossed you some good coin.

The gay brought me to Hillcrest. I knew I just got lucky.

It was a prestigious Jewish club south of Century City. The golf course was hilly and deep green. The caddies congregated in a “caddy shack.” They drank, played cards and told obscene stories. Drunks, dopers and compulsive gamblers ruled the shack. I knew I’d fit in.

Caddy jobs were called “loops.” Caddies were also called “loopers.” I knew jackshit about golf. The caddy master told me I’d learn.

I started out packing one bag only. I stumbled through my first dozen loops and moved to two-bag duty. The bags weren’t that heavy. Eighteen holes of golf ran four hours. The standard two-bag fee was 20 dollars. It was good 1975 money.

I worked Hillcrest six days a week. I made good daily pay and got myself a room at the Westwood Hotel. The place was equidistant to Hillcrest and the Bel-Air, Brentwood and Los Angeles country clubs. Loopers rented most of the rooms. The place was a caddy shack adjunct.

Looping took over my life. The rituals deflected my fear and eased it into a fadeout.

I loved the golf course. It was a perfectly self-contained green world. Caddy work was mentally undemanding. I let my mind wander and earned a living simultaneously.

The milieu stimulated me. I invented back stories for Hillcrest members while I walked beside them, and ran gag riffs on lowlife loopers. The culture clash of wealthy Jews and caddies with one foot in the gutter was a constant laugh riot. I made friends with a smart young caddy going to college part-time. We discussed the Hillcrest membership and the caddy experience endlessly.

I spent time with a diverse bunch of people. I listened to them and learned how to talk to them. Hillcrest felt like some kind of way station en route to the real world.

People told me stories. I took a master class in country-club lore. I heard tales of self-made men who clawed their way out of the shtetl and tales of rich drunks who succumbed to caddy life. The golf course was a picaresque education.

Most of the loopers smoked weed. Weed didn’t scare me like booze and inhalers did. I kissed off four sober months with some Thai Stick.

It was goooood. It was the best shit I’d ever smoked. I started buying it and smoking it all day every day.

I figured it wouldn’t fuck up my lungs or shut down my brain. It wouldn’t spark incestuous fantasies and piss God off. It was the manageable and controllable drug of the 1970s.

So I rationalized.

I smoked weed for a year and a half. It was goooood—but not great. It was like trying to reach the moon in a Volkswagen.

I didn’t drink or take inhalers. I sucked down marijuana and lived as a more subtle full-time fantasist.

I took my fantasies outdoors. I took them to Hillcrest and other golf courses at night. I hopped the fence at L.A. Country Club and fantasy-walked the north course for hours.

I played with my Hillcrest cast of characters and worked them into a crime story. I worked in an alcoholic hero. He hailed from the sad edge of Hancock Park. He nursed a lifelong obsession with the Black Dahlia case.

I worked in the Club Mecca torch and classical music. I worked in the DTs. My hero wanted to find a woman and love her to death.

My 18-year fantasy backlog telescoped into this one story. I began to see that it was a novel.

I got fired from Hillcrest. A member’s son mouthed off to me in front of a good-looking woman. I decked him in full view of the putting green. A security guard escorted me off the premises.

I was bombed on weed. Weed hit me unpredictably.

I got a caddy gig at Bel-Air Country Club. The members and loopers there were just as seductive as the Hillcrest crew. The golf course was even more beautiful.

I stayed bombed at Bel-Air. I bought a tape player for my room and spent hours jacked up on weed and the German Romantic composers. I roamed golf courses at night and wrestled with that one emerging story.

Lloyd moved into the Westwood Hotel. He was off of booze and hard dope and on marijuana maintenance himself. He was flirting with the notion of real sobriety. I told him I wasn’t interested.

I lied.

I was almost 30. I wanted to do things. I wasn’t stealing. I wasn’t lusting for my mother. I had my brain back on permanent loan from God or other cosmic sources. I did not hear voices. I was not as fucked-up as I used to be.

And I was not a civilized human being.

Marijuana maintenance filled me out physically. I ate a lot, lugged golf bags and cranked hundreds of daily push-ups. I was big, strong and hulking. I had beady brown eyes and wore bead-enhancing wire-rimmed glasses. I was stoned all the time. I looked like a crazy man consumed by interior monologue. Strangers found me disturbing.

Women found me scary. I tried to pick a few women up in bookstores and frightened the shit out of them. I knew I came off desperate and socially unkempt. My hygiene was markedly substandard.

I was hungry. I wanted love and sex. I wanted to give my mental stories to the world.

I knew I couldn’t have those things in my current condition. I had to renounce all forms of dope. I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t steal. I couldn’t lie. I had to be a locked-down, uptight, pucker-assed motherfucker. I had to repudiate my old life. I had to build a new life from the sheer desiccated force of my old one.

I liked the concept. It appealed to my extremist nature. I liked the self-immolation aspect. I liked the air of total apostasy.

I danced with the concept for weeks. It blitzed my storytelling drive and soured my taste for dope. I wanted to change my whole life.

Lloyd cleaned up in AA. He told me total abstinence was better than booze and dope at its best. I believed him. He was always smarter and stronger and more resourceful than me.

I followed his lead. I said “Fuck it” and shrugged off my old life.

AA was wild. The late-’70s scene was craaaaaazy. It was redemption and sex and God and big stupid pratfalls. It was my sentimental education and road back to the world.

I met a lot of people who’d lived my life with their own variations. I heard stories that topped mine for sheer horror. I made friends. I learned moral precepts and developed a plainly expressed faith in God that was no more complex and just as heartfelt as a kid in Sunday school’s.

My initial entry hurt. AA meetings taxed me. The people talked ambiguous juju. I only stuck around to hold hands with women during the Lord’s Prayer.

The women magnetized me and kept me coming back. I returned “one day at a time” for some hand holding. Lust and my apostolic will kept me sober.

AA did a subtle job on me. The literature critiqued alcoholism and drug addiction brilliantly. I saw that I carried one strain of a common plague. My story was banal in that context. Only a few incidental details made me unique. The critique gave AA principles a strong moral kick. I found them wholly credible and trusted in their efficacy.

The principles won me over. The people made me capitulate.

I got tight with some guys. I unclenched around women and cut my ego loose at AA lecterns. I became an accomplished public speaker fast. My self-destructive exhibitionism turned around full-circle.

Westside AA swung hard. The demographic makeup was young, white and horny. Booze and dope were out. Sex was in. The Westside mandate was Stay sober, trust God and fuck.

People went to “Hot Tub Fever” after meetings. A guy threw sober wife-swapping parties. Men and women met at meetings and got married in Vegas two hours later. Nude pool parties reigned. Women hit on men blatantly. Annie “Wild Thing” B. flashed her breasts at Kenny’s Deli after every Thursday-night Ohio Street meeting.

I got laid. I went through one-, two- and three-night stands and wrenching stabs at hard-line monogamy. I let detoxing smack addicts crash on my floor while I boogied to late dates at Hot Tub Fever. I made 300 a week at the golf course and spent most of it on women. I picked up junkie prostitutes, took them to AA meetings and fed them the Black Dahlia story to scare them out of hooking. It was a frenetic, often joyous profligacy.

I lived out most of my dope-fueled sex dreams sober.

The real world eclipsed my fantasy world. My one persistent fantasy was that story I knew was a novel.

It haunted me. It invaded my thoughts at strange times. I didn’t know if I had the stones to write it. I was enjoying a season of comfort. I didn’t know that I was running from old things.

My mother was 20 years dead. My father was dead 13. I dreamed about him. I never dreamed about her.

My new life was long on fervor and short on retrospection. I knew I abandoned my father and hastened his death and paid the debt off in increments. My mother was something else.

I knew her only in shame and loathing. I plundered her in a fever dream and denied my own message of yearning. I was afraid to resurrect her and love her body-and-soul.

I wrote my novel and sold it. It was all about LA. crime and me. I was afraid to stalk the redhead and give her secrets up. I hadn’t met the man who’d bring her home to me.