tonight, but at some point soon, I will pick up. I don’t know what I’ll do with my life, if I’ll ever have a full-time job again, another love, where I’ll live or even if I will, but I will use again, this much I know.
The Mother Lode
My parents divorce the year I move to New York. I am twenty-one and they sell the deep-in-the-woods Connecticut house I grew up in and move to New Hampshire. They go there to save their marriage, but soon after they get settled, everything falls apart. It is my mother who leaves, finally, after years of threatening to, and in her flight back to Connecticut, as my father cancels credit cards and makes bank accounts inaccessible to her, she somehow lays her hands on a little pile of silver—ingots and coins they’d purchased as investments decades before.
A few years after their divorce is finalized, my mother gives me the silver to sell for her in the city. At the time, the market for precious metals is low and we decide to wait and sell later. The silver sits in the back of my closet for years in an old red and blue nylon knapsack I picked up in Scotland on my study-abroad semester in college. She asks about it occasionally but either I am too busy or it’s not quite the right moment to sell. Eventually, she stops asking. The market crests and crashes dozens of times while the silver sits, unsold and unseen, in closets of apartments I move to in Midtown, the Upper East Side, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village. As I move, the silver moves. I forget it exists until I am packing up my things to leave One Fifth and see the familiar old knapsack. I don’t remember, at first, what it holds but notice how unbelievably heavy it is when I pull it down from the shelf in the hall closet. It goes with the rest of my things to the studio on 15th Street, gets shoved to the back of another closet, and there it sits.
Meanwhile, my eight days become eleven and Polly’s four become seven and then—after she joins Heather on a long, coke-crazed night—one. We raise our hands at The Library, count our days; people clap, encourage, and pass us their phone numbers. My routine calcifies: wake up, feed Benny, long workout at the gym, Library meetings at 12:30 and two o’clock, dog run with Polly, Oprah, Meeting House at six, diner dinner with Asa or others from the meeting, and phone calls to Jack, Kim, Asa, Jean, and Polly in between, before, and after. Once or twice a week I’ll see Dave or Jean or Cy for dinner or a movie, but Jack has warned against straying too far outside the fold of recovery until I have ninety days. Bags of food arrive at least once a week from Jean, and when we see each other she’ll ask if I enjoyed this or that and if there’s anything special I’d like. I will never have much to say in response other than Thank you.
On Saturdays there is a 10:30 a.m. meeting that many people from The Library go to, and on Saturday evenings a big gay group that, God help me, because Asa goes, I go to. The skinny boys with white belts are crawling all over the Saturday night meeting. Rafe is usually there, too, always says Bill in his particular tone and clocks me in his laser-like way, making it clear he sees me far more clearly than I see myself. Most of these guys talk about dance clubs and Fire Island, and they’re all young and cute and skinny, and I don’t belong. I feel uncouth and lumpy and unkempt and listen only for the differences in their stories, not the similarities. I’m gay but in this place I feel as if there’s a manual for gays that covers everything from clothes, hairstyle, and slang to eating, drinking, and using habits, and everyone in the room owns it but me. I tell Jack this one night on the phone and he asks me if there have been other experiences, other times, when I felt as if I never got the manual. When I think back to high school, college, book publishing, crack dens even—every world I entered—I felt exactly the same way: that there was a set of rules,
The Mother Lode
My parents divorce the year I move to New York. I am twenty-one and they sell the deep-in-the-woods Connecticut house I grew up in and move to New Hampshire. They go there to save their marriage, but soon after they get settled, everything falls apart. It is my mother who leaves, finally, after years of threatening to, and in her flight back to Connecticut, as my father cancels credit cards and makes bank accounts inaccessible to her, she somehow lays her hands on a little pile of silver—ingots and coins they’d purchased as investments decades before.
A few years after their divorce is finalized, my mother gives me the silver to sell for her in the city. At the time, the market for precious metals is low and we decide to wait and sell later. The silver sits in the back of my closet for years in an old red and blue nylon knapsack I picked up in Scotland on my study-abroad semester in college. She asks about it occasionally but either I am too busy or it’s not quite the right moment to sell. Eventually, she stops asking. The market crests and crashes dozens of times while the silver sits, unsold and unseen, in closets of apartments I move to in Midtown, the Upper East Side, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village. As I move, the silver moves. I forget it exists until I am packing up my things to leave One Fifth and see the familiar old knapsack. I don’t remember, at first, what it holds but notice how unbelievably heavy it is when I pull it down from the shelf in the hall closet. It goes with the rest of my things to the studio on 15th Street, gets shoved to the back of another closet, and there it sits.
Meanwhile, my eight days become eleven and Polly’s four become seven and then—after she joins Heather on a long, coke-crazed night—one. We raise our hands at The Library, count our days; people clap, encourage, and pass us their phone numbers. My routine calcifies: wake up, feed Benny, long workout at the gym, Library meetings at 12:30 and two o’clock, dog run with Polly, Oprah, Meeting House at six, diner dinner with Asa or others from the meeting, and phone calls to Jack, Kim, Asa, Jean, and Polly in between, before, and after. Once or twice a week I’ll see Dave or Jean or Cy for dinner or a movie, but Jack has warned against straying too far outside the fold of recovery until I have ninety days. Bags of food arrive at least once a week from Jean, and when we see each other she’ll ask if I enjoyed this or that and if there’s anything special I’d like. I will never have much to say in response other than Thank you.
On Saturdays there is a 10:30 a.m. meeting that many people from The Library go to, and on Saturday evenings a big gay group that, God help me, because Asa goes, I go to. The skinny boys with white belts are crawling all over the Saturday night meeting. Rafe is usually there, too, always says Bill in his particular tone and clocks me in his laser-like way, making it clear he sees me far more clearly than I see myself. Most of these guys talk about dance clubs and Fire Island, and they’re all young and cute and skinny, and I don’t belong. I feel uncouth and lumpy and unkempt and listen only for the differences in their stories, not the similarities. I’m gay but in this place I feel as if there’s a manual for gays that covers everything from clothes, hairstyle, and slang to eating, drinking, and using habits, and everyone in the room owns it but me. I tell Jack this one night on the phone and he asks me if there have been other experiences, other times, when I felt as if I never got the manual. When I think back to high school, college, book publishing, crack dens even—every world I entered—I felt exactly the same way: that there was a set of rules,
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