Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

Idiot Wind

It’s a small college on the eastern shore of Maryland, and four of us are renting a house twenty minutes away from campus, on the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a blue raised ranch with aluminum siding and a deck in back, and to us it’s paradise. Ian is a dark-haired, wild-eyed boarding school hellion from New Orleans; Brooks, my roommate from the dorms, is a Cary Grant type from Maryland — Waspy, strangely old-fashioned, friend to all and enemy to none; and there’s Jake, a blue-eyed, curly-haired blond peace monkey who bartends in the summer and plays harmonica and sings in a Baltimore band called The Moonshiners.

There is always a keg on the back porch, and in the fridge piles of lamb chops and choice cuts of beef that we steal from the grocery store in the next town. The stealing begins one afternoon when Ian and I are walking through the meat section. He stops and points to an assortment of wrapped packets of lamb chops and whispers, Billy, c’mon, unzip the pocket on the back of my coat and drop a couple of those beauties in there. Ian scrunches his face with urgency, his eyes bulge, he pleads in his particular way, Jesus, Billy, c’mon, what are you doooin’? and though I’m sure I am going to get caught, I unzip the coat, grab the meat, and slip it in. The coat is an expensive ski jacket with a wide zippered pocket on the back. It holds the meat vertically, and as Ian walks through the store and we check out, there is no sign that he’s carrying our dinner on his back. From that day on we never pay for meat. When we go shopping we take Ian’s coat.

I read during the day, when I’m skipping class — Hardy and Fitzgerald mostly that year, Jude the Obscure a few times. On the weekends I read in my room, the one at the end of the hall, tucked away from the ruckus of the house. There is no one at school or in the house whom I talk to about what I read. I reread Salinger and Knowles and the books of my adolescence. Some of these copies still have Katherine’s scribbles in the margins, and I treat them like museum pieces.

Every once in a while someone has coke or acid but for the most part it’s pot-around-the-clock. Ian has a red Graphics bong he cleans and recleans and strokes like a pet. I keep a constant stash in my room and smoke off a short plastic bong and listen to Rickie Lee Jones and Bob Dylan and when I’m not reading just stare at the maroon-and-brown tapestry tacked to the ceiling. We road-trip up and down the eastern seaboard — Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Roanoke, Boston, New York — to see The Dead, Dylan, Neil Young. Mostly it’s me and Ian, and mostly it’s Dylan.

Brooks is the only one with a steady girlfriend, Shirley, who goes to school in Virginia. I hook up with two or three different girls on a regular basis — all of whom make Ian’s face wrinkle with disgust. Jesus, Billy, what are you dooooin’? he’ll say at the end of the night when it’s clear whom I’ll be taking back to my room. Jake has girls in Baltimore or in town who don’t go to college. We’ll never meet them. Ian will hook up with only one girl that I know of — a girl I have made out with a few times and whom I’ve told Ian I’ve fallen for — and it will be in the backseat of a car on a trip back from Boston while Brooks and I are in the front. We’ll see the whole thing. I’ll be mad and he’ll say he was asleep and didn’t know she was making the moves on him.

One night Jake withdraws money from an ATM and notices a lucky bank error for a sum that makes it seem like a good idea to buy a fresh keg and have some people over. We do and we drink and it gets late and someone notices that Brooks is not with us. Someone else says he’s on campus and we decide to go find him. Ian drives, I ride shotgun, and Jake takes the back. We stop at Newt’s, a grim honky-tonk bar that has all sorts of specials to lure college kids. Fifty-cent beers to get them in the door and tipsy so that they’ll start buying shots. Which is what we do. Tequila. Ian is always several shots ahead of us, but Jake and I are eager to keep up. After last call, we put up stools and chairs and get more free shots. We are all lit in the same way, have the same streaking comet inside us, and agree that heading over to one of the girls’ dormitories is the thing to do. Find Brooks. Drag him home. And so we go. Ian blares “Idiot Wind” in the car and shouts the lyrics, You’re an eeeediot, Babe, It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe. He rocks back and forth against the steering wheel as he wails, and his black hair and red eyes gleam demonlike in the green glow of the Volkswagen dashboard.

It’s at least two by the time we get out of the car. We are roaring drunk from the tequila and there is an unstable voltage humming in each of us. Our breath clouds and shimmers in the freezing cold March air, and we move from the car to the dorm like a three-headed monster hell bent on mischief. We tiptoe through the halls and Ian finds a fire extinguisher to bring along for the journey. He pretends to squirt us and at some point it goes off. Glorious plumes of white cloud billow out of the red canister, which is, in that instant, the most extraordinary thing we’ve ever seen. Ian points his new weapon in the opposite direction, squeezes the handle, and again, a majestic slow-motion miracle blooms out into the hall. Jake and I need to have one, too, so we race upstairs to find two more. Jake finds one and I somehow don’t. They go on to spray each other, the halls, the doors, the floor, a girl who is sleeping. We get split up, but there is a sense that we’re still connected by some invisible electric tether and only a shout away.

I enter a common area where someone has left a nearly finished quilt. Blue and red squares of fabric sewn together in a groovy mosaic. It reminds me of my mother, and the quilt she made me out of scraps of fabric in high school. Without thinking I gather it in my arms and book into the hall. It’s about now that I hear Ian yelling my name. Billeeeeee, c’mon, Billeeeee. Occasionally I hear him bark Jake’s name. Jake. We gotta split. Jake, c’mon. I head back to the hall. Suddenly we all run into one another, and as we do, I see girls coming out of their rooms, shouting. We race for the exit. Someone — one of us? one of the girls? — pulls the fire alarm and almost immediately we hear a siren. The car is parked up behind the bank, and we run through the side parking lot of the dorms and up through the backyard of someone’s house. Ian is in full combat mode and pushes us down behind a hedge and barks in a whisper for us to Stay the fuck quiet.

And so we do. Police sirens, fire engines, and the fire alarm sound through the town while blue and red lights streak around us. It’s now between three and four in the morning and the campus and the surrounding neighborhood are awake. Lights flicker on in the nearby dorms and houses, people pull curtains aside and lean their heads out to see what is going on. We stay there for at least an hour and finally, when things seem to quiet down, we sneak over to Ian’s car and drive back to the house. Brooks is there and has already been called by everyone we know who heard Ian screaming our names.

As we walk up to the front door, Brooks looks at me in horror and says, What the fuck is that? I look down and am embarrassed to realize that I have been clutching the nearly finished quilt the whole time. I’m so nervous the cops are going to show up any minute that I stuff it into a black garbage bag and shove it under the empty house next door.

We stay up that night, get high, worry, and wait for the phone call from school, which comes, and a day later we are thrown out. Jake never comes back. Ian and I plan to go to UC Boulder together the following fall. Brooks moves into a house with friends in town and finishes the semester.

That spring I go down to Bedford, New York, a few times to visit Ian. His mother moved there from New Orleans when she divorced Ian’s father. I’m landscaping with a friend at home, and he’s working in a sporting goods store in White Plains. His mother is often away and his brother Sam is in the eighth grade and generally around. Usually Ian scores coke from a friend in Rye and we smoke pot and throw a Frisbee in the afternoon, and at night do lines, drink good beer, and play caps — a game where two people sit on either side of a room and throw beer caps at empty cups placed between their legs until their thumbs bleed from pressing too hard against the serrated metal edges.

One weekend in Bedford we drink so much Guinness and smoke so much weed that by the time the lines come out I’ve already vomited. We stay up all of Saturday and most of Sunday night and on Monday I am supposed to meet Miho, my family’s former Japanese exchange student, in Manhattan. She’s in town for the day, and my mother has asked and I’ve agreed to take her around.

Monday at noon seems a lifetime away as we blare Dylan and do line after line on the breakfast table in Ian’s kitchen. We run out around five o’clock Monday morning, take sleeping pills with a few more beers, and head to bed. I’m in a guest room, and at eight o’clock I wake up and suddenly feel wrong. It takes a minute or two to realize that not only have I peed and shit the bed but vomited all over myself. Ian’s mother is coming home that day. My head is stinging, and I panic that Ian will find out. I creep from the bed, take off my soiled underwear and T-shirt, and go to the bathroom to rinse the more substantial mess off. I take a shower and then, sheet by sheet, pillow case by pillow case, dismantle the bed and put my clothes on from the night before, which reek of pot and are covered in beer stains. I flip the now-stained mattress, gather up the soiled underwear, T-shirt, and linens, and tiptoe as gently as possible out into the hall, down the stairs, and into the basement, where for some reason I know there is a washer and dryer. I empty the load that’s in the washing machine, put it in a basket, and replace it with the horrible load.

Every button I push, cleaning product I open, and door I shut sounds like a rifle shot, and I’m convinced Ian will rumble down the stairs and bellow his trademark What are you doooing? Ian could load that phrase with an empire of disgust and contempt. This is a guy who loved Bob Dylan, thought every other musician was a fraud, couldn’t stand the state of Maryland, any fat girl or woman, and most everything else that wasn’t from Louisiana. I am his friend, but it generally feels like that fragile status is only one wrong band or shitted bed away from being revoked.

I don’t want to make any more noise on the stairs, so I sit down there while the clothes wash and dry. Eventually they dry, and by this time it’s nearly eleven. I make the bed, gather my things, and call a taxi. I wake Ian up to say good-bye and he scrunches his face and says, Jeeeesus, Billy, you look like shit.

This is the last time I see Ian. He won’t get into Boulder. I will, but my father will insist that I go back to Maryland and face the wreckage there, which I do. Brooks and I will be roommates until I graduate, and Jake will go back to Baltimore, where he will — and I suspect still does — bartend and play guitar.

I arrive at Rockefeller Center over an hour late for Miho. My clothes reek and the black Aspen cap on my head — one of Ian’s, one I wore nearly every day then — is covered with lint and detritus of all kinds from the night before. There is bile rising up at the back of my throat, and I have already thrown up twice on the train.

Miho looks annoyed and impeccable. She has on a yellow Chanel-like suit, red pumps, and a blouse that is so white I can’t face it without squinting. She is nineteen but looks like a seasoned executive or a newscaster well into her thirties. She eyes me warily and asks if I am okay. I tell her, Sort of, and ask where she wants to go. I should have known: Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany, Cartier, Bergdorf, Bonwit Teller, Gucci. We spend the day in places where the security guards keep a close eye on me. It is one of the longest days of my life, and I pop into several delis along the way for aspirin and water.

The city seems like an animated cartoon that I have entered through some great cosmic accident. The security guards are the only ones who notice me: to all others I’m invisible. The ragged shorts, the Aztec cloth belt, the Snowbird T-shirt, and the Aspen cap (neither are places I’d been) are a uniform for another world altogether and not one I’m even comfortable in. People seem so sure of themselves, so securely in their lives as they march up and down Fifth and Madison avenues. Some don’t look that much older than me, but they seem carved from matter and shaped by forces I can’t even imagine. I will remember them later, often, and they will seem as the city does: golden, magical, daunting.

I don’t return to New York for another three years. This is after college, and I’m with my girlfriend Marie, who is nine years older than I am. She sets up an informational meeting with a friend of hers, a book editor at a publishing company — one of the few I’m aware of because it is the house named on the title pages of the Salinger and Dickinson books I’ve read and reread. I resist and she insists that I at least explore book publishing, which she seems to think is where I belong. I play along a little with her fantasy, but it’s as if I were five or six, talking to the big kids at the town beach about diving off the high dive: fun to pretend, impossible to do.

The meeting is one block from Rockefeller Center. The book editor looks at my résumé—the one Marie helped me put together — and frowns. He points to the assistants on the floor outside his office and lets me know that most of them went to Ivy League schools, some of them for both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and that my academic career and job experience are a far cry from anything that would get me in the door at a publishing house like this one. It is exactly as I feared and I am nauseous with shame. Marie is waiting for me by the ice-skating rink, where they light the big Christmas tree each year, I think. I lie and tell her the editor was encouraging, that he thinks there may be something there down the line, just not now. She says, See, I told you so, and I agree.

As we have coffee later that day and run an errand for her mother at Brooks Brothers, I am again aware of the security guards, as I was years before with Miho, and believe they can see what I know and Marie seems blind to: that I don’t belong here. That this is a place for a sleeker, smarter, better-educated, and altogether finer grade of person. I get on the train that afternoon in Grand Central, thinking the same thing I thought that hungover day three years ago: This is the last time. And: What if it’s not?