You Get To It

The summer I was 25 I spent many of my days writing advice columns for teenage boys and a very few of my evenings trying to determine whether or not I was a stoner. I smoked pot by myself in my San Francisco kitchen, using a sad sort of pipe fashioned from a toilet roll tube and a bit of aluminum foil. Even though I was alone, I felt terrifically self-conscious — not because of the smoking accoutrements, although they were embarrassing — but because I felt like someone pretending to be a person I most definitely was not, and likely would never be.

After dispensing with any notion that I might have the skills to handle the cardboard tube with grace, I would lie on the floor between the two big speakers I had inherited from my parents who no longer wanted the outdated stereo system and listen to guitars and singers better suited to screaming stacks of amps. My mortification aside, I thought about how nice it was there on the rug, floating in a whole new loneliness, one of my own creation.

It is untrue to say I became untethered that year, but I floated away much farther into loneliness than I could possibly understand.

More of my evenings that summer were spent at a local bar, one that had been a favorite of mine for some time, or at shows watching friends’ bands play. It was an appropriate summer for a 25-year-old. Then September came and my father nearly died.

He had been ill for a number of years, although in a quiet way my parents hid from me and my brother. Without warning, he was in the hospital. A tall, broad-shouldered man with a monolithic presence, I arrived to find him in a cell-like emergency room, lying beneath a sheet like a wraith. The next day the doctors wanted to send him home, but my mother insisted they not discharge him. Later that night in an emergency bleed he lost nearly 40% of his blood.

When he went home after the surgery that saved his life, we sat on the sofa together eating pizza and watching the Subway Series. I learned about baseball, about the heartbreak of being a born-and-raised Brooklyn Dodgers fan, about how little I’d known about what I had nearly lost, and about how much I wanted to run away from it all.

In the winter I met a young man and we began to date. He was a singer in a band, a thing I wanted to be but didn’t believe I could, despite two years of lessons from a vocal coach and time spent in a famous gospel choir. We spent our nights drinking with friends. Just before Christmas, when we had been dating for about a month and a half, he disappeared.

I received a call from him after a four or five day absence and went to meet him at one of our favorite bars.

“I’m so glad you showed up when you did,” he said when I arrived. “My ex-girlfriend just left.”

“Does she not know you have a new girlfriend?” I asked.

“God no,” he responded, and turned back to his drink.

A few hours and more than a few drinks later, we went outside for air.

“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “Did you sleep with your ex over Christmas?”

“Oh yeah,” he responded without hesitation.

“How could you do that?”

“Well, I couldn’t ruin her Christmas.”

“What about my Christmas?”

He looked at me quizzically. “But you don’t celebrate Christmas,” he said without even a hint of sarcasm.

I left him standing on the sidewalk but when I woke up in the morning he was in my bed, and I let him stay.

By the time spring rolled around I was living in New York, tending bar and still dispensing advice to teenagers. I knew only one person when I moved, and she disappeared from our apartment in the East Village to spend most of her time with her boyfriend in Spanish Harlem. I had run away to find myself, and all I found was that I wanted to keep running.

I ran for a very long time, until one day I wore myself out.

Year after year of trying to escape, only to find I couldn’t get out of my own way until I started standing still.