“Symptoms of the Underlying Ailment” originally appeared in volume 32 of Chicago Quarterly Review.
This will serve as a partial and ongoing catalogue of incidents in my life that I feel have been, in whatever way, developmentally formative, incidents that I feel have contributed, for better or worse, to the person I am today. I’m sure there are dozens if not hundreds of other events that could be put into this category, but Dr. Isaac, my therapist, has recommended I stick to the ones I’m able to recall most clearly. Of course there are also incidents I can’t remember at all, due to having been a small child or even a baby at the time, but even though I’m unable to remember these times, I’m sure they exist because we are all creatures borne of trauma.
My third-grade teacher once made me stand in front of the entire class to explain why I’d stolen a pencil sharpener. She knew why I’d stolen it. Why do kids steal anything? I wanted it. There was no secret motive. Then she made me turn my Coors Light T-shirt inside out because she didn’t think it was appropriate for an eight-year-old to be wearing. When I took it off there was some indiscreet chuckling around the classroom at the sight of my chubby stomach, which my teacher did nothing to stop.
When I was eleven years old, I spent almost $20 trying to beat Super Punch-Out!! at a decrepit beachside arcade managed by an Irish dwarf with long, greasy sideburns. I never got past Vodka Drunkenski but the dwarf ’s teenaged apprentice took pity on me and showed me how to cheat at Skee-Ball. He walked back to the counter, the glowing eyes of the owl on the Rush 2112 patch on the back of his denim vest staring at me the whole time. I put a quarter in the slot, took an armful of balls, walked up the Skee-Ball ramp, dropped them into the hundred-point hole one by one, and watched as the machine vomited out prize tickets in a long unbroken chain. I did this until I was out of quarters and then took the tickets to the counter, feeling like a champion, and exchanged them for a pair of huge sunglasses and a switchblade comb. The dwarf ’s apprentice called me an idiot for not getting the Iron Maiden mirror prominently displayed on the wall behind him.
I walked home wearing the sunglasses, making a big hilarious show of combing my hair. My dad was in the backyard sorting through the withered tangle of tomato plants he’d forced into a small patch of dirt.
“Cat shit!” he yelled as I came up the driveway, holding a chalky turd up to his face. He threw it down and took a long consoling pull from the wineskin he wore slung over his shoulder every day during the summer.
“Where’d you get that crap from?” he asked. “The arcade.”
“With whose money?”
“Mine.”
“That money is for college, not crap,” he said. “Go bring it back.”
I went back but the apprentice was gone and the dwarf told me no refunds. I didn’t want to go home just to have my dad yell at me some more, so I hung out underneath the boardwalk in the cool sand spelling out curse words with cigarette butts until dinnertime, when my dad was sure to be too drunk to recall what he’d said.
A year later I bought a crummy BMX bike from a PennySaver classified with $40 of hoarded Christmas and birthday money. It was covered in a heavy coat of urine-yellow house paint, and I rode it halfway home before discovering the wasps living inside the handlebars. I tried to return it, but the guy who’d sold it to me threatened to take his rottweiler off its chain. At home I put on long sleeves, tied a dishrag over my face, and sprayed the hose into one end of the handlebars. The wasps flew out like buckshot. Within seconds I’d been stung on my face and exposed neck flesh. I ran inside. The wasps waited for me on the other side of the screen door, flying in beautiful, complex patterns. Later, too ashamed to tell my parents what had happened, I spent the last of my Christmas/birthday money on a bottle of calamine lotion and wore turtlenecks for a week despite the heat.
Days before my sixteenth birthday I lost my virginity to a shy, beautiful girl whose large, wonderful breasts filled her with the purest shame I’ve ever seen. I had no idea if you were meant to buy a gift for the girl you lost your virginity to, so I just took her out for ice cream. At the Carvel she gave me a book of etchings with a thoughtful inscription. Seeing that aside from the ice cream I hadn’t gotten her anything, she told me I was a jerk who was bad at sex. She quickly apologized for this second part and told me she was sure I could do better, but that she wasn’t sure she wanted to give me the chance. She said not to call her until I was ready to be more mature.
The next week I got a job on a beach maintenance crew for $5.75 an hour. Each day of summer vacation I went to the beach at 6:00 a.m. with a basket and a stick with a nail at the end of it and spent three and a half hours stabbing empty beer cans and tampon applicators. When summer was over I took $80, guessed the girl’s size and bought her a dress. Newly mature, I went to her house, where her father told me she’d left the day before to become a Hare Krishna. “This is the truth,” he said, “we are all very upset and think that you’ve had something to do with her decision. We will never forgive you.”
After graduating high school, I sold my decrepit 1968 Volkswagen and most of my clothes for a total of $830 and took a three-day bus ride to San Francisco, where I slept under a friend’s dining room table for $50 a month. Each day I’d spend $4 on a burrito the size of my forearm, cutting it in half so I’d get two meals, and an additional $2.50 on a forty of malt liquor. Even so, two months later, I was down to $175. Seeing that I might not be able to cover my share of the rent much longer, my friend took me to the Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant where he worked as a busboy. His boss, a bone-thin and aggressively bald Italian, agreed to give me two dishwashing shifts a week for $60 a day. He told me I’d only gotten the job because I spoke English and that he was sure I’d find a way to fuck up even something as simple as dishwashing before long.
Nine months later, after moving from dishwasher to busboy and from dining room floor to hallway futon, and after contracting gonorrhea from a high school senior who lived in Russian Hill with her wealthy parents, who were forever out of town, I took another three-day bus ride home.
I spent that winter living with my mother in Far Rockaway. She’d turned my bedroom into a sewing room and charged me $30 a week to sleep on an air mattress in the basement where a dehumidifier chugged along lamely twenty-four hours a day. Soon after, I began selling ecstasy to high school students after an old classmate, who was now calling him- self Mr. Ice, told me he had more pills in the glove box of his ’79 Monte Carlo than he could easily sell himself.
“Besides,” he said, “splitting up the supply knocks the charge down from a class one.” In three months I sold over $13,000 worth of pills, which, after paying Mr. Ice, left me about $6,500 mostly in wrinkled five- and ten-dollar bills.
I ran into another former classmate who was in his first year working as a stockbroker. He was living in a shithole two-bedroom in Chinatown and offered me the smaller room for $600 a month, which I paid in cash, upfront, for six months. My former classmate was paid by direct deposit every two weeks, and on the first and fifteenth of each month he was beset by a moral quandary: rent and bills versus cocaine and hookers from the back page of the Village Voice. Three months after I moved in, we were evicted for unpaid rent, and while packing I discovered a box of neatly labeled mini-VHS tapes in a kitchen cabinet that all showed my roommate sitting on the couch I’d paid for being lazily fellated by a procession of prostitutes, occasionally snorting lines of coke off them.
The night before we moved out, I’d planned to confront him about the money he owed me as well as the cleaning charges for my couch. But before I could do this, he suggested we buy methadone from the junkie couple next door. I agreed. Drinking those little cups of sweet, orangey water made me feel like an adult for the first time in my life. Why this was the case I have no idea, but as we lay on the living room floor on our last night in the apartment, high out of our minds, I remember thinking that everything would be all right, that everything would always be all right. Even as I vomited into the kitchen sink hours later, this feeling stayed with me.
The next day my former classmate moved back in with his parents and I put my stuff into a self-storage unit for $40 a month and stumbled to the apartment of a girl I’d been halfheartedly dating for three weeks. She said I could spend the night, but after that it would be over between us.
Soon after, I was living in another shithole, this time in Bushwick, deep in debt and barely attending classes at NYU. I spent the last $150 of my student loan check on a Ziploc full of mushrooms. My three room- mates and I ate them on a Wednesday afternoon while watching Mr. Show DVDs, and I realized, not without regret, that I would never be happier than at that exact moment. Sometime during the night I pissed my pants.
I dropped out of school and found work in a warehouse unpacking boxes of coat hangers and repacking them in different boxes for $7.50 an hour off the books. I will always remember this time as the second worst of my life. I worked there for just under four weeks and on the last day, while eating an egg-salad sandwich in the parking lot on my half-hour lunch break, I had my first panic attack. I wasn’t choking but suddenly I couldn’t breathe or speak. I threw the sandwich on the ground and spit out what I was chewing. My face was on fire, my eyes bulged. When I finally managed to gulp down a few breaths, I took off my shirt and walked to the subway station without bothering to quit, sweating in the autumn sun. Later I ran into a friend who lived in a squat and he agreed to let me move into a vacant room. It was farther out in Brooklyn, almost so far out I should have just moved back into my mother’s house by the beach. Late that night I moved out of my apartment and never apologized to my former roommates for the rent I owed. I’d see them sometimes, at a party or on the street, and would turn and slink away. I still tell myself I’ll send them a check one day.
The next July, a month of sweltering heat broken only twice by beautiful purple thunderstorms, I received a letter from the IRS informing me that I owed almost $3,000 in back taxes, which was accruing interest daily. I was repaying my student loans at the rate of $200 a month and was hopelessly broke. I didn’t have a bank account, only about $500 in cash stashed in a shoebox under my bed. I was working for $11 an hour at an upholstery place in Red Hook sorting through crates of polyurethane padding and Naugahyde in a poorly ventilated warehouse. I wrote the IRS an angry letter and soon after, my paycheck was garnished $2 an hour.
After work I’d stop in a Polish dive bar where I drank a $3.25 thirty-ounce Budweiser served in a giant Styrofoam cup by an old lady with a face the color and texture of a strawberry. I’d sit there drinking and disinterestedly watching Yankees games while surreptitiously pulling the seat padding out of the barstools. When I’d torn all of them up, I told the old lady I could get her a good deal on reupholstering the stools. When my girlfriend finished her shift as a waitress at an unremarkable Thai restaurant in the West Village, I’d go meet her at the subway station and we’d walk to her apartment, where her roommate and his boyfriend scowled at me and her cat kept trying to kill me in my sleep. My girlfriend told me that her roommate thought she could do a lot better than me. The worst part was I agreed with him.
Eventually my girlfriend told me she was sure I’d never make any- thing of myself, that I’d remain poor and aimless forever. She took up with a philosophy grad student at Columbia and moved quietly uptown. I tried to feel bad about things for a few days, but I never got the hang of it. Luckily, I had six roommates in the squat and was never short on company. The drunk girls they brought home always had friends.
I got a job at a coffee shop in Greenpoint called, believe it or not, the Daily Grind. I worked six days a week and managed somehow to not get drunk every night. After ten months, between my paycheck and the tip jar, I’d saved $6,000 and bought a ticket to Barcelona, where I told myself I was sure to find true happiness. Minus the ticket and some secondhand luggage off Craigslist, I had about $5,200 remaining. I’d paid a chunk of my tax bill and was on ten-year repayment terms for my student loans. My credit was even borderline acceptable for the first time in my life, and I felt that I deserved a vacation. The owner of the coffee shop let me get my shifts covered for three weeks and assured me I’d have a job when I got back.
Two days later I was sitting in a Gothic plaza drinking a €1 carton of sangria. I’d moved into a furnished flat with four Swedes and my share of the rent was €275 a month. I’d been held up for my passport my first night in town so I forgot about my return ticket and grew a heavy beard. I spent my money on sangria and tourist girls and walked the city’s narrow alleys imagining that there were fancy people waiting for me somewhere so we could discuss important things, the truly meaningful elements of life. After five months my savings ran out but my Spanish got very good.
I got a job at a dingy heavy metal bar, Club Playboy, gathering up empty bottles and mopping the floors. The owner, a tall, ugly Basque with pockmarked cheeks, paid me €20 a night plus three large glasses of beer. Three months later, desperate and homesick, I went to the American embassy and applied for a replacement passport. I called my brother and asked him to lend me airfare to get home. He agreed, at 10 percent interest.
I find myself living in Los Angeles for some reason. The woman I call my girlfriend lives outside Winnemucca, Nevada, in a trailer she shares with her clinically depressed alcoholic father. They’re both medicated. We see each other every few weeks, meeting in Reno. During these long weekends she calls me darling and we get very drunk and have more or less decent sex and eat a few meals more or less in silence and hope for something to happen to distract us. We stay in a hotel/casino with Greek-style rooms and generous whirlpool tubs big enough for us both. She lies on top of me and turns the faucet with her toes to add hot water when the tub gets cold. I want her to move to Los Angeles so I’ll be less lonely. I think I want to have a child with her so I’ll be even less lonely, but I’m afraid she’ll never leave the desert. I feel that we are nearing an impasse but I’m afraid to ask for more, afraid I’ll lose her entirely.
One morning, several days after being hit by a car on my motorcycle, being thrown awkwardly but uninjured away from the bent metal and still-spinning wheels, I’m in a small bookstore/café within walking distance of my apartment. I generally avoid the bookstore/café because of the people who hang out there and the fact that they charge $5 for a cup of coffee, but there’s no food in the house and so I go because it’s one of the few places in Los Angeles that serves something approximating a New York bagel. Although “serves” is an overstatement since the employees only toast the bagel and hand it to you along with a plastic knife and a 1.5-ounce individually packaged serving of Philadelphia-brand cream cheese.
I sit eating and sort of reading a novel but mostly overhearing bits of conversation and watching the people come and go. The employees are more adept at socializing than shelving books or making breakfast. Food and coffee appear at their whim, and when their friends walk in, all business is suspended until pleasantries have been satisfactorily exchanged. A man dressed in a freshly ironed cowboy outfit and ten-gallon hat comes in with his silent Japanese wife and their tiny daughter. The woman and man behind the counter rush over to them, leaving their tasks incomplete: the espresso maker whines, a kitchen knife thuds onto the rubber-matted floor. The man in the cowboy outfit and the bookstore/café employees discuss which bands they plan on seeing at an upcoming music festival. The line for coffee grows but no one seems to care.
A chubby man with eczema wearing a leather jacket approaches me and informs me that he is an artist. I congratulate him on this. He says he can tell that I am highly attuned to the creative impulse, that I have the soul of an artist. I want to stop him, tell him he’s wrong, but he’s already explaining his personal creative process. He goes on at length about the need to stay true to one’s ideals. I begin looking around the room for a way out. He seems desperate in that way lonely people in unfamiliar surroundings will seem desperate. After concluding his monologue, he walks away, no goodbye or anything, and a minute later he’s over in the local authors section. “You’ve got to stay true to your ideals,” he says to a bewildered teenager.
Something in the novel comes to mind, but when I go back I can’t find it and I can’t be 100 percent sure I didn’t invent it myself. What comes to mind is a woman, forty-fiveish or so, who lives in a modest apartment with her mother. The woman spent her youth drifting from city to city, working a series of odd jobs, living in a series of spartan apartments with a series of anonymous roommates or lovers, and once, briefly, a husband. She sees herself as an unmitigated failure in terms of career and relationships. She’s trying her best to kick a decade-long drug habit and has already been to rehab twice. She shares the apartment with her mother out of financial necessity but also so that her mother will help her stay clean. Living together like this, the two of them fall into a routine. Each day when the woman comes home from her job at a shoe store, her mother helps her study for her online college courses. In eighteen months she hopes to find work as a dental hygienist. After they finish studying, they eat dinner together in front of the TV. They talk throughout the meal, over whatever is on the TV. The mother reassures her daughter that it is not too late, that she hasn’t messed up her life, that she will still find a way to be happy.
When I’m unable to locate this passage, I wonder about my sanity and my ability to recall things I’ve only just read. Then I notice the sensation of an impending panic attack. I haven’t had one in years, so I try to talk myself down. When this doesn’t work, I get up with some difficulty and make my way outside and try to walk home, but I’m con- fused by the streets, the stores, the billboards, the many cars that seem to be stampeding around. I tell myself to just breathe but I’m unsure if I’m doing it correctly, like, what is the correct amount to breathe? I don’t know whether I dislike Los Angeles, but in this moment I miss New York badly, although I can’t be sure if it’s New York I miss or only my younger self, the asshole.
I think about the worst time of my life: It’s ten years earlier and my girlfriend has just moved out of our wood-paneled apartment. The night she leaves for good, carrying the last of her stuff, a nice blender and an afghan, I get wildly drunk and fall down the stairs, snapping my wrist in half, smashing the tiny bones to bits. I eat Vicodin in a steady stream for two weeks before I’m able to have surgery, setting hourly reminders to chase another pill with another shot of bourbon. I wake up in the recovery room in a dizzy haze and vomit up my breathing tube. A friend meets me when I’m discharged and walks me to the subway and back to my empty apartment, where I resume my regimen of Vicodin and bourbon. I’m so constipated from the pills that four days later, when I’m finally able to shit, I drop a solid brick into the toilet that resembles a mummified kielbasa. As I sit there, my ass burning, I think about all the days on which you wake up healthy, loved, and content, and how on every one of those days there’s some poor dickhead waking up in a hospital with part of himself in revolt—a wrist, a spleen, a tumor that won’t stop growing; some small percentage of the whole—making this the worst day of his life, and he’s praying, not for love or money, but only for the pain to stop, only for a return to normalcy. And then I think of the stupidest and truest thing people will say to you when your life is falling apart: At least you have your health!
My empathy level spikes on those days I catch myself looking at a clock and calculating if I have enough time to get drunk before work. The person I empathize most with is my father. Having had the benefit of growing up around him until I was nearly fifteen, I believed that the natural state of adulthood was undiluted anger. When that anger never arrived, I wondered if I’d done something wrong, if maybe I wasn’t really an adult. Instead of anger, I only discovered a dull ache through which I’ve been occasionally able to approach something resembling happiness, if only by recognizing my distance from it. But I’ll take it. It’ll do.