The Same River Twice: A Memoir

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Shadrack was the first friend I’d had in years, and I decided to join him in Boston. He refused to take me in, saying I required too much psychic space. In Cambridge I interviewed with several “group houses” but my character betrayed me: I smoked, ate red meat, and was a Virgo — poor company to the enlightened. I dialed a number in a roommate tabloid and was interviewed at midnight by five insomniacs in Jamiaca Plain, known as J.P. They accepted me by unanimous decision, a fact that should have made me wary.

J.P. was considered one of Boston’s bad neighborhoods, wedged into a slight gap between two worse neighborhoods. Renovated condos chipped the perimeter, the children of the white flight returning for revenge. The elevated orange line connected everyone by air. I lived near the Green Street station, an area I was often warned against. To protect myself, I wore a scarred leather jacket and a permanent scowl. While walking home one night, I watched a couple cross the street to avoid me, and half a block later cross back. It was one of the better moments of my urban life. I felt vindicated for the general apprehension I carried in the street.

The rooming house was a prewar blight waiting to be renovated and peddled floor by floor. A pair of nitwits who called themselves “urban pioneers” owned the building but lived in fancy Back Bay. A Puerto Rican family lived on the ground floor. The father, Romero, raised chickens in the backyard, and was the manager of the building. He could kick us out at whim, a terrible prospect because when a man finds himself living in a rooming house, there is no place left to go.

Six of us shared a moldy bathroom and a rat-infested kitchen. One guy ran a bankrupt construction business out of the hallway. All day and night his employees drifted around, young Israelis and Irish with no papers. They waited for work in the living room, comparing wars and scars, unified by hunger, cold, and exile. I’ve never seen Jews and Christians get along better.

I hooked a job at the Lune Café as the only waiter for lunch. The small room contained nine tables, revolutionary posters, and an organic menu. The cook was an antique hippie who held himself off the floor by one arm pretzeled through elastic legs. He grunted his name, Orion, while attaining nirvana beside the stove. A scrawny woman of forty emerged from the basement. She told me she was in therapy and believed that all psychologists should wash dishes. It was better than tofu or primal screaming.

“I’ve washed plenty,” I said.

Dazzled by a sympathetic audience, she ranted for twenty minutes about the collective healing power of woman. She told me that the earliest Chinese ideograph for “male” also meant “selfish.” Orion unfolded and shape-shifted to a full headstand. His shirt fell open to reveal a belly tattoo of the Aztec Sunstone radiating from his navel. He remained inverted until J.P.’s lunch rush. White boys with dreadlocks sprawled across two tables. Men wore earrings; the women shaved their heads. Conversation was tense and urgent, A guy with no hands ordered a salad and ate it like an animal while reading the Daily Worker.

Orion folded each order into soggy sheafs of papyrus that passed for bread in honor of repressed peoples. A customer demanded to know the contents of each item, including the precise amount of spice. His voice was nasal.

“One pinch or two of thyme?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you allergic?”

“No,” came the smug reply, “I am macro.”

Later Orion drew intricate charts to explain a macrobiotic diet. Hitler ate no meat, but vegetarians are reluctant to accept him as their own. West Point won’t claim Benedict Arnold, and Kentuckians hate to admit that Charlie Manson was a native. No matter where you go, everyone says he’s from the next county over.

For the next several weeks I lived on raisins, hummus, tempeh, and rice. I lost weight. My nose ran like a sieve. I fell victim to hamburger cravings that Orion deemed a stopover along the path to enlightenment. The dishwasher quit to join a commune of women attempting isolation from men. She suggested I interview as a possible sperm donor because my kundalini was halfway along my chakras.

One morning I woke with an absolute revulsion for work. Determined to get fired, I skipped a shower and wore a plastic nose-and-glasses the entire shift. During the rush, I removed my shirt and pants, wearing only undershorts, a white apron, and the giant nose. People left enormous tips. Someone asked what band I played with. Enraged by my unprecedented failure to get fired, I ripped a sacred Che Guevara poster from the wall and folded it into a hat.

At three o’clock I quit, leaving a squad of neo-anarchists arguing the Spanish civil war over cinnamon espresso. Safely outside, I felt relief tingle my skin. Quitting a job was the last way I had to prove the existence of my own free will. I began planning my return to New York City. Manhattan and Eastern Kentucky both operated from a social anarchy that I could negotiate with ease and comfort. When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied that it would be a good idea.

I headed into the Combat Zone, where mobilization had replaced the shooting galleries and brothels. Junkies poked their arms inside a car window for a quick injection. Pimps drove vans with a mattress in the back and a whore up front. She opened the passenger door to display her wares, and if a guy liked the sight, he entered the van for a quick transaction while the pimp casually circled the block.

For economy’s sake I chose the bar with the most broken bulbs on its neon sign. The Minotaur’s door opened to the damp smell of musk and beer. A rotating mirror ball flicked bright specks onto a stage that held a jukebox smeared with greasy fingerprints. I chugged a beer as a woman plodded the stage, watching herself in the mirrored walls. A bruise marred her inner thigh. She seemed bored. The bartender argued with an old man holding a raincoat over his spindly lap. Finally he pulled the coat away, exposing not his genitals but a colostomy bag.

A woman squeezed beside me, rubbing warm breasts against my arm. A python twined her shoulder and arm, its tiny tongue licking the air. She was a human caduceus in charge of ailing men.

“What’s your snake’s name?” I yelled above the raucous music.

“Boots.”

“Good name.”

“He’s only the size of a belt, but he’ll grow.”

“That was Caligula’s childhood nickname.”

“Who?”

“Caligula.”

“Does he come in here?”

I shook my head.

“If anyone tries to make boots from Boots,” she said, “I’ll fucking kill them.”

Back room action cost fifty bucks, plus a twenty-five-dollar bottle of champagne to assure the club its cut. She said I could use a credit card. I had a two-dollar lingam and had no choice but to leave, feeling guilty, as if I’d rejected her good intentions. I told her, I’d be back later, not wanting her to know I was broke.

Outside, the air was different from a change in weather, one of the coast’s wily tricks. The sky was a gray flannel blanket like a water-color background with too much paint. Wind blew trash along the gutter. Dusk raised a full moon that looked as if it could be peeled away to leave a knothole in the sky. The moon was full as a tick, the mark of lunacy.

I recalled a man I’d known in New York who’d been lobotomized during the 1950s. He’d gone to Islip, Long Island, where the procedure was so popular that the town was nicknamed “Icepick.” Fifteen years later he was released from an institution and placed in my neighborhood. I once watched him trying to cross a busy intersection. He took two steps forward and one back, his movements never varying. He swung his arms and” tilted his head, and on each forward step, he’d say, “Green light. The light’s green.”

There was a mechanized element to his movements, as with a movie actor playing an android. I realized that the front of his head was short-circuiting and he was caught in a synaptic repetition, like faulty wiring that blows the same fuse each time you flick the light switch. I took his arm and said, “Come on, let’s go.”

Immediately the circuitry righted itself.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m going for coffee, for coffee.”

Dusting Jamaica Plain were various artists living illegally in warehouses without plumbing. Shadrack had a studio a few blocks from the rooming house, and used my shower on Tuesday or Thursday. He had a few stops around town, all charted on a pocket calendar from last year. The true dates didn’t matter since the days of the week never changed. On a particularly lonesome day I called him at noon, rousting him from sleep. He grunted twice and whined a litany of woe. One of his girlfriends might be pregnant, his paintings were terrible, and his bowels had failed him three days running. Believing his troubles more genuine than mine, I was momentarily cheered.

An hour later Shadrack arrived for a shower. He griped about the dullness of my razor, and demanded a pair of socks. He was angry that I had not washed the only towel that I owned.

“It’s been three months,” he said.

“Bring your own, Shad.”

“How can you live like that?”

“I don’t get as dirty as you.”

“Good point,” he said. “But I have to stay clean for the women.”

“The young one, the rich one, or the one who might be pregnant?”

He stared at me, insulted. His correction came low and firm, “They are all rich.”

He dressed and left. Shadrack’s dates were invariably white and blond, the angular descendants of northern Europe. He didn’t mind their eating disorders, their stabbing hipbones, their preoccupation with the clothes of other women. When I suggested variety, he refused on the grounds that his mother had dark hair and eyes. As soon as the right trust fund appeared, he would catapult from a heatless warehouse to a skylit studio in SoHo. Until then, he’d make do with my shower.

Under Shadrack’s influence, I hit upon my most ingenious artistic thought — to write a poem about a specific object, then transcribe it onto the object itself. The first priority was to find suitable junk. I spent hours wandering in alleys, seeking industrial trash. My journal filled with entries about a planned gallery show of “found-object-poetry.” I jammed my room with detritus, but never quite got around to writing any poems.

One of the boarders left the rooming house, and Shadrack recommended a woman who worked at a bakery. She’d bring home free food, which I was to share with him as a finder’s fee. Diana was a three-hundred-pound, toothless native of Maine, my age and height, built like a sumo wrestler with silo thighs. She always wore a battered bicycle helmet with rearview mirrors like insect feelers. The day we met, she lacked front teeth. A bicycle hung carelessly over one immense shoulder.

“Hi, Chrith. My upper plate ith at the dentitht. Where can I keep my bike?”

“Anywhere’s fine. Nothing really matters here.”

“I know. That’th why I’m here. Thadrack thaid you’re a poet.”

“How’d you lose your teeth?”

“Knocked out in a poolroom.”

“Uh, yeah. Make yourself at home, Diana. I’ve got to do some serious writing.”

Safe in my room, I lay in bed and drank a finger’s width of bourbon, pleased that Shadrack considered me a poet. It was a sign that our friendship was solid, since I’d still written nothing. Wittgenstein suggested that the truly sacred was ineffable, that the unsaid was more important than the said. As proof, he renounced all of his teachings. I was trying to go him one step further, increase the purity of my eloquence by refusing to write at all, rather than merely abandoning the practice. Anyone could quit. It required real courage never to begin.

Every morning, Diana trudged from her room wearing a tattered red robe ripped at the seams to reveal acres of flesh. She bummed cigarette after cigarette. During childhood, she confided, the other kids slipped razor blades in apples and threw them at her.

“Diana,” I finally said. “Go put your plate in your mouth.”

She returned to fix a cup of Maine coffee. After filling a sock with beans, she smashed them with a pan and dropped the sock in boiling water. The resulting muck could float a bullet. The recipe was from her father, an alcoholic who beat his wife, children, and livestock when drunk. He died of multiple snakebite wounds after passing out in a nest. Diana was fourteen years old and weighed two-twenty. She told me she’d gained weight deliberately, hoping to make herself ugly enough to halt her father’s visits to her bedroom.

“I never told a man that before, Chris.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I’m glad you trust me.”

She grabbed my shoulders and clubbed me in a hug that ripped her red robe further. One sleeve dangled like a hammock from shoulder to wrist. This rite of camaraderie cemented us enough for her lover to move in.

Young and attractive, Sophia endeared herself to me with her habitual breakfast of diced garlic mixed in plain yogurt. She explained that any foulness in her body fled the garlic. Sophia was always chipper, never sick, and to my knowledge, was unbothered by vampires. Her passage through the hall left a vapor. One evening I came home to find Diana pacing a ragged circle in the kitchen, a fierce expression on her face. Sophia slumped in a chair.

“She got fired,” Sophia said.

“So what,” I said.

“She knocked her boss out first.”

“He made fun of my weight,” Diana said. “So I cold-cocked him.”

I rummaged my room, for a pint of Kentucky’s finest and passed it around. Diana knocked back a two-bubble drink.

“Thanks, Chris. I stayed until he came to. That’s when he fired me. I said I was sorry. He was too embarrassed to press charges.”

I invited Diana to battle an old boss from Salem, a beefy Frenchman who might last a couple of rounds. She refused because her invariable triumph won no friends.

“Men can fight and be buddies afterwards,” she explained, “But a woman who whips a man is always a bull dyke.”

“You’re no dyke,” Sophia slurred. “You’re a sweetie pie.”

Diana slapped me on the back.

“I’m a lucky buckaroo. This one thinks I’m special.”

“She’s just drunk.”

Diana laughed and laughed. I handed her the bottle. She finished it and dropped her fists to splayed knees.

“For a man,” she said, “you’re a good hombre.”

They staggered into their room. That night and thereafter, Sophia and Diana left their bedroom door open while making love, a gleeful concert that encased the house in guttural sound. One stuttered a banshee keen while the other snorted and moaned. The jamboree mounted to a dual crescendo of high screams before fading to a gurgle. Encores followed for hours. Night after night I felt a certain reverence for their endurance. They seemed completely uninhibited and free from the recuperative needs of a man. Though neither attracted me, I was jealous of their mutual delight.

Sophia refused to seek employment, claiming that she wouldn’t succumb to the patriarchal system. Diana took a job at a car wash. One afternoon Sophia asked if I’d ever had a homosexual experience. I shook my head, remembering men in New York who’d cruised me with such diligence that I’d begun to wonder if they recognized some latent quality that I didn’t know about. A kindly old man finally explained that men were simply more aggressive than women, that I should view male attention as nothing more than a compliment. “Do you look at women on the street?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Well,” he said, “fags look at men the same way. If you’re gay, you know it. But don’t wait until you’re fifty to come out of the closet. There’s nothing worse than an old queen. I couldn’t get laid in prison.”

Two of my past girlfriends had been involved with women. Another had hoped to sleep with a woman as an “empowering experience.” I told Sophia about them and she explained that our society was a dinosaur shuffling toward calamity. We’d betrayed Mother Earth, a bitter old woman who’d married out of faith. I told her that Appalachians didn’t fit that category.

“We did a unit on you,” she said.

“What?”

“In school. Advanced Sociology. You’re oppressed, you know.”

“No I’m not. I left.”

“Good for you. That’s like coming out of the closet.”

“Not exactly.”

“I think you’ve got some lesbian in you, Chris. You’re like a sister to Diana and me.”

“What time is it? I have to go find a job.”

“You just think you have to. It’s conditioning. No woman should wash dishes for a living.”

“I’m a man.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

I left, considering her idea. Perhaps she was right, and the miasmic flow of my life was merely stress from being a lesbian trapped inside a man’s body. I could save money and have a sex change. Then I could surrender to the narcissism of loving that which I was — a woman.

When spring arrived we opened the windows, a mistake that cost our idyllic life. The sound of Sophia and Diana’s amorous uproar carried into the neighborhood. Just after the peak of their joy one night, a banging began at the front door. I crossed the kitchen and greeted Romero fidgeting in his long johns.

“You have trouble here,” he said, glancing past me to scan the kitchen.

“No trouble. Everything’s fine.”

“I hear all week a woman being beat. That is not fine. Not every night.”

“Really, Romero. It’s okay.”

“Where is the big one?”

“Do you think I could beat her?”

“And the other? She lives here now?”

“No. She’s a friend.”

“Of who?”

“She’s my girlfriend.”

Romero closed his eyes, aware of my lie, face pained with disappointment.

“She must go. Both of them. One month.”

He shook his head and descended the narrow stairs, a successful immigrant bamboozled by America.

I informed Diana over morning coffee. Her entire head became red. She walked to her room and calmly tore the door from its hinges. Ten minutes later she left, abandoning everything she owned, a decision I respected.

Snugly unemployed, I developed an eating system at the faithful Lune Café. I sauntered in every day for organic gruel and gave Orion a five-dollar bill. Pretending to make change, he handed me the five, plus four ones. I left the singles for a tip and kept the five. He called it exploiting the oppressor. All spring the same five bucks bought lunch, often my only meal.

I came home to learn that Shadrack had showered while I was gone. My towel was missing. I called to ask him about it.

“Get a new one,” he said.

“I only need one.”

“It’s more sanitary to have a couple.”

“For who, you or me?”

“The world, Chris. You have to think in terms of global health.”

“Well, I’ve got one more towel than you do.”

“Not anymore.”

He agreed to return the towel if I bought him a beer. We met at a bar and conversation steered unerringly to suicide. Shadrack believed that talking about it prevented the occurrence, by “keeping it in the world, not in my head.”

“Why keep the idea alive at all?” I said.

“You’re missing the point. Suicide is for people who care about life. Mine doesn’t matter. First I’ll get a hot-air balloon and set it up with one rope tying it to the ground. The balloon is a circle seen from any direction. The perfect mandala. I’ll hang a noose from the bottom and put my head in. Then I’ll cut the anchor line. The flight strangles me in the air.”

“What about a note?”

“That’s pinned to my chest. It says, ‘Bury me where I land.’ ”

“Like Robin Hood’s arrow.”

“Not bad, huh? I need two video cameras, one on the ground and one in the balloon. My final work of art. It’ll start a movement. I’ll be famous.”

“Is this a threat because I want my towel back?”

“Relax. Planning all the details keeps it at bay, like a jar of pennies when you’re broke. You know what I worry about? That suicide just puts things off. You don’t die, you just wander after the living like a deaf Pied Piper.”

“Your superstition is showing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Purgatory.”

“Did you know that comes from the word ‘purge’?”

Half listening to his lecture on the etymology of death, I looked around the murky bar lined by sad faces atop sagging bodies. Perched on the last stool beside the door was a patient hooker sipping sweet drinks. She didn’t look bad.

“Painting is a waste,” Shadrack said. “I think I’ll quit and join a Trappist monastery. It’s the same as suicide except you have to live. Know what I mean, Chris?”

“Nope.”

“The vow of silence.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you took that.”

“I’m serious. I should go to India and steal a cart so they’ll cut my hands off. That way I can’t make things, the vow of visual silence.”

“Why don’t you start with a finger,” I said.

“Why don’t you write a poem!”

“Maybe I took a vow.”

“I think you’re scared.”

“The only thing I’m scared of is snakes.”

“Look, Chris. You better start writing or you’ll wind up like me.”

The words had flowed without prior thought and I watched their meaning seep into him. Shadrack seemed to shrivel. Very slowly he pushed his beer glass off the table. It shattered against the floor. There was deliberation in the act, rather than violence; the careful work of controlled passion. He leaned across the table, his voice a hard whisper.

“That’s poetry, my friend. That’s how you write it.”

He handed me the towel as if he were a master of tae kwon do granting a star pupil the highest belt.

“Now leave me alone,” he said. “Go write.”

The bartender walked over and I apologized, offered to pay for the glass. Shadrack was gone and I hadn’t seen him leave. We’d argued before, often mightily, but this time there was a finality to his calm. I thought about our past conversations, his view of the artist as shaman. He considered the process of making art to be holy. Shadrack had given me permission and now he was gone.

During the next nine weeks, I faced my typewriter and never wrote a word. I rolled a fresh page into the machine and stared like a statue for fifteen hours. At the day’s end I placed the blank page to the right of my typewriter. My mind was a tornado. I ceased to bathe, eat, or shave. I simply continued to write without writing.

My brain began to operate in a lucid fashion, seeing details of memory melting into dialogue. I was invigorated by the electrical crossfire in my head. On particularly luminous days, my brain pulsed in a state of ecstasy. The moment I awoke, I rushed to use it, sliding into the marvelous oblivion of self-content, flowing with the same aimless delight of hitchhiking. My mind entered the blank white page to observe myself: a thin skin bag over a fragile gantry of bone. Cartilage hinged the moving parts.

Mail ruined my discipline, bringing a birthday card from my mother. Without quite noticing, I had become thirty years old. I went out for a pint of bourbon, drank it too fast, and got sick. I was in that panting, sweaty state when men swore off alcohol, bargained with God, and resolved to hold a job. I had done it many times. Though I refused to admit failure, I was certainly engaged in failing. The time had come to squirrel a grubstake and leave Boston.

I called the personnel office at the Grand Canyon and was told that the hiring was over, but that I should try the Everglades. It had a late season. I called Flamingo, Florida, and reached a man named Bucky. He said there was an opening for a Naturalist.

“What are your qualifications?” he asked.

“I grew up in the woods.”

“Well, we need a tour guide, Ours had an accident. Have you been down here before?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“I’ll pick you up in Florida City. Call me when you get there. I need a break from this swamp.”

I bought a book about South Florida and spent the evening looking at photographs of paradise. Every animal native to North America lived there. The Everglades seemed like Kentucky with alligators and a beach.

The night before leaving, I nailed my towel to the door of Shadrack’s studio, with a note telling him my plans. I decided to celebrate with a drink at one of Boston’s slickest bars. The acrylic stools were shaped like swans. On one wall hung a liquor poster urging “the art of lingering.” Cooking, war, and flower arrangement had all been elevated to the status of art, and it occurred to me that the high arts had responded by demoting themselves to craft. I decided this was why I wasn’t writing.

I went home and filled a glass with bourbon and frothing tap water. The alcohol killed the chlorine that killed the germs. This was a good old day. In New England I had no more found America than Columbus had. He died obscure, humiliated, and a trifle cracked. His bones were dug up three times, finally ensconced in a lighthouse in the Dominican Republic. At the tip of Florida, I’d be fairly close.

I rode the commuter train to 1-95, a straight shot to Florida. Boston faded into morning smog — Bunker Hill’s phallic monument that commemorated the wrong neighborhood, the icy sliver of the Hancock building, a harbor full of poison. My backpack contained spare clothes and a blank notebook with the word “Poetry” scrawled on the cover. Ponce de León had grown old traipsing Florida for the Fountain of Youth; perhaps I could find the Well of Age.