Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (17 page)

 

Some days later, a letter arrived informing me that I had been accepted to the prestigious Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia University—an improbability to equal the discovery of a second sun in our galaxy.

Just before coming to Toronto, I had read a cover essay by John Barth in the
New York Times Book Review
in which he identified the nation's four top programs, including Columbia. On sheer arrogant whim, as one who never purchases a lottery ticket decides to try once and wins the jackpot, I photocopied some of my published stories—violent and immature efforts all—and, dressed in a long blue thrift-shop overcoat with a torn pocket, trudged from East 5th Street to 116th and Broadway: Columbia University. Slogged up the
steps of 404 Dodge Hall, the School of the Arts, to the second floor, the Writing Division, and found the department empty except for a single secretary: Lini Lehman, a pretty, pleasant woman who smiled and asked how she could help.

“I've come to apply,” I said.

“Wonderful!” she said.

She gave me an application, which I filled out with a pencil stub and to which I appended the stories and twenty-five bucks in crumpled bills that stank of beer. Gave my forwarding address c/o Anna's parents in Toronto.

Looking over the application, Lini grinned and said: “I think it must be a first.”

“What's that?”

“You have no idea to what lengths people go to get into this place. They send press kits, professionally produced videos that are like political campaign ads, letters from famous personages, the works. But you—a pencil, some stories, cash. I love it!”

“I walked here to save on carfare. That should give you some idea of where I'm at.”

“Perfectly. Well, I wish you luck, Alan! We'll let you know.”

I shrugged. “I know I ain't getting in.”

That the letter came just then, at the bottom of my Toronto night, was an extraordinary stroke of fate. In one fell swoop I'd gone from mentally disintegrating drunken caddie/worm digger to Ivy League grad school writer.

Anna inspected the letter with a look of doom. “What are you going to do?”

I shrugged.

But she already knew.

THE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENTAL STATIONERY FELT more real to me than the touch of Anna's flesh. Even as she spoke, her face, its expression, her voice, were receding into memory.

I did not understand what we had been through or to what I was now going. Once, she had been for me the lover and wife that God made from my own rib. I knew that anyone else was not creation's choice for my heart but only someone to mark time with until death brought life without Anna to a close.

“You know,” I said, touching a cheek that at my very touch was disappearing, “I have never loved anyone but you. I will never love anyone but you.”

“I'm your wife,” she said.

My cheek cocked in an ironic half smile. “You are, aren't you? Sometimes I forget.”

She laughed sadly. “Should we go on?”

“Why don't we let time decide. I'll go to school in New York. You stay up here. Let's get better, see how we feel. Anna—we've
loved each other over three countries. Israel, the States, Canada. I want to say how sorry I am that I couldn't live up to partnership as beautiful as yours. I want you to know that I love you, though my love is sick and broken.”

She didn't reply. What was there to say? We had dared the impossible, failed. We were an anomaly. Love like ours was not meant to survive, a kind of transgression, unreal, a dark beauty dreamed by night and slain by daylight. We had opposed too many forces beyond the power of so fragile a love, so tender a union—war, Jerusalem, adultery, angered friends, embittered colleagues, poverty, maybe even God. But deep down, I knew that the only real culprit was me: a truth so painful that I had to pretend not only to others but to myself that I didn't care, or see the wrong in it. Booze helped a great deal with that.

When the train arrived to bear me to New York, Anna slipped an envelope into my pocket. “To read later,” she said.

“I can't say goodbye because it doesn't mean anything that I can understand right now,” I said.

She stroked my cheek. “Precious one.” She turned and walked off. I stood watching for as long as I could before boarding. In my seat, I opened the envelope. There was a note that read only “I love you” and $1,500 in cash, American.

 

I returned to 5th Street. Natan, amazingly, had kept it up. He turned the key back over but with the understanding that I would soon find other lodgings. He and Smardar had never really been my friends—had helped out only for Anna's sake.

I couldn't bear it there anyway, ghost-filled rooms, things of hers left behind all around, a comb, paper lantern, appointment calendar. Spent the first few nights on the floor, curled around bottle after bottle. Knew that if I were somehow going to pull off the Ivy
League, I would need to take myself in hand, and for a while at least, get health, cut back on booze, exercise, eat right. This would depend on whether or not new conspiracies appeared.

For the moment, though, something had shifted. Hope seeped into my soul. Perhaps all the horror and failure would vanish, disappear, just like that! And the nightmares, the operatives, the unfolding skein of sinister designs erupting from the skin of the world like my father's violent psoriasis would just dry up and blow away.

 

A shyster lawyer got me a divorce for a hundred and sixty-five dollars. I found a room in the Upper West Side apartment of a ninety-five-year-old former manufacturer of coat linings named Boris Gimpleman. For two hundred dollars a month and an agreement to keep an eye on him now and then, I could quarter in the study of his dead wife, Bella. The ad had been posted on the bulletin board of the Jewish Theological Seminary on a yellowing 3 x 5 index card that read, in shaky handwriting:

Gintelman to liv mit gintelman. Call Trafalgar 7-4011

It was a place of neglected elegance on West 79th Street. Boris and Bella had lived there for decades and raised a son, Kenneth, who died of cancer. Boris was now tragically alone. A Polish housekeeper came weekly to clean house and resupply the old man with meat cutlets, sliced tomatoes, Special K cereal, and orange juice. Now and then, he sent me down to D'Agostino's, a chichi local market, to purchase Stella D'oro Breakfast Treats, cookies that he liked to dip in his tea.

Each morning he dressed himself in handsome suits with tie and pocket square and spit-polished shoes. Then wandered from room to room, inconsolable, weeping, announcing to the walls and furniture and the heavy draperies: “I miss my vife! Oy, mein Gott! I miss my vife! Ver is my Bella?”

I avoided contact with him. His loss too closely echoed mine. His Bella was my Anna. Waited in the morning as his shambling figure trudged past my closed door before popping out my head, and if the coast was clear then hurried softly down the hall, ignoring the voice at my back calling: “Al! Al! Is that you, Al?” And slipped from the apartment with a soft closing click of the door.

His memory was so poor, minutes later he would forget that he'd seen me. Sometimes he failed to remember that I lived there at all and stood in his pajamas, alarmed, demanding: “Vot you vont? Vye you come to my house?” Other times he sat on the sofa watching
The Eight O'clock Movie,
and at the commercial break, when the program's logo appeared, he would grunt to himself: “Huh! Is eight o'clock?”

Other times, though it was a weekday evening, he thought it was eight o'clock on a Saturday morning, and, struggling to his feet, would announce to the television: “Is time to go to
shul!
”

At the Columbia departmental incoming student orientation a number of former alumni spoke about the importance of the program to their careers. These included Tom Jenks of Scribner's, who'd edited Hemingway's last posthumous novel; Tama Janowitz, the wunderkind author of
Slaves of New York,
who'd recently published an unprecedented four short stories in a single year in the
New Yorker;
and Mona Simpson, author of
Anywhere But Here,
a best-selling first novel.

Among my fellow students were some who would someday gain prominence, including novelist Rick Moody, then a scrawny kid in tees, jeans, and sneakers; the poet Campbell McGrath, who would win a MacArthur genius award; Jeff Goodell, author of a number of celebrated nonfiction works and feature writer for
Rolling Stone
and the
New York Times
; and Musa Meyer, already at work on her well-received memoir about her father, the painter Philip Guston. Two
other fellow students who impressed me were Kim Wozencraft, future author of the best-selling novel
Rush
, and Joseph Ferrandino, who produced a novel,
Firefight,
based on his experiences in the Vietnam War. Kim and Ferrandino had met in the Federal Pen, where she served a term as a former rogue undercover narcotics agent who had played two ends against the middle and ripped off the drug dealers she was sent to infiltrate. The upshot was: the dealers sent a hit man to kill Kim and her husband, who was also a crooked narc. The shotgun-bearing hit man shot her husband and then turned the weapon on Kim, who wrestled the barrel away and just narrowly missed having her head blown off. In the ensuing investigation, she was arrested and imprisoned. About his own reasons for incarceration, Ferrandino never spoke. What little about him I knew is that after Vietnam he had served as a paratrooper against Central American drug cartels. He was a real Brooklyn Italian guy and I liked him right off.

But the fellow student I liked best was an affable poet named John Lane, a relation of Lincoln's vice president, who, despite an enormous gift for writing and ambition to succeed, would enter, following graduation, into a kind of self-imposed exile from all career moves. After a brief stint as a lecturer at UCLA, which he hated, he became a massage therapist and later a custodian at UC Berkeley to subsidize a life of writing, reading, and contemplation pursued at his own pace, in anonymity and exile, free from the compromise and pressures of professionalism.

He was, at the time, married to Kevi, a pretty pug-nosed warmhearted woman with a first-rate mind and a touching determination to see John succeed in his dreams—little realizing, then, that one day he'd walk away from them to save his soul as a writer.

The last presentation of orientation day was made by Robert Towers, the head of the department, a tweedy portly Southern man
of letters, ruddy-faced, clearly a heavy drinker, with graying hair, an amused smile, and glasses perched on the tip of his veiny bulbous nose. After surveying us with a degree of skepticism, he mumbled a few trifles of no import, but then closed with a remark—the real point of his brief talk—that cut right through us, for it best summed up the prevailing outlook of the program at that time.

“Here at Columbia,” he drawled, “the world is divided into two kinds of folk.” He scanned our faces with a sardonic twinkle in his bloodshot eyes. “Those who have published a book…and those who have not.” That said, he turned and shuffled back to his office.

The message could not be clearer: bookless, you were dirt.

AT COLUMBIA, DISTINGUISHED AUTHORS WANDERED the halls like Madame Tussauds wax figures of the famous come tragically back to life. You might find yourself in the men's room assuming the urinary stance next to a legend with hungover eyes. Among the notables who most impressed me were Joseph Brodsky, Daniel Halpern, Richard Howard, William Mathews, and Stephen Koch.

I enrolled in a class with Ted Solotaroff, an editor at Harper & Row, who had produced the famed
New American Review
, a mass trade highbrow paperback of fine lit that brought to the public such notables as Gabriel García Márquez and Harold Brodkey. In one of the first classes, he had us form our chairs in a circle, create a kind of arena in which he prowled like a bull, snorting, murdering us with his eyes, daring us to push past our comfort zones, tap unsuspected inner resources, exceed our own infuriatingly dull limitations.

“Which of you dares to imagine attaining the stature of a Melville? The innovative daring of a Joyce? Can any of you see
your name listed in the roll call of greatness? Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald…” and looking directly at me, he appended “Kaufman.” Everyone glared jealously at me, as cold fear and wild hope shot through my chest. I chuckled nervously. He had set the bar, in no uncertain terms. Of course I must fail. Flattery and dread were a powerful concoction the only antidote for which was a West End Bar boilermaker: whiskey, with beer chaser.

He seemed to take a particular liking to me; invited me frequently to parties in his home where I met famous authors whose names I can't recall because I drank myself senseless, as did everyone else in attendance. It's safe to think that no one else attending those parties will ever recall anyone who also happened to be there.

My favorite teacher was the biographer, translator, and essayist Frank MacShane, a big Scots-looking gent with a rugged, ruddy face, skeptical blue eyes, and gray-brown Rudy Vallee hair. He wore heavy tweed suits, scotch plaid ties, and brogans. There was about him a quality of absolute integrity that I often imagined must have been like Orwell's. Whatever MacShane told you was forthrightly stated, honestly meant, and deeply felt.

He had produced several crisp biographies, including one about Raymond Chandler and another of Frank O'Hara, that were standards of their kind. He was also the head of
Translation
, a well-regarded campus-based magazine of international letters. There wasn't a trace of pretense in the man. He had no patience for cant. His one drawback as a teacher was the fury that he brought to his critiques of shoddy work. The culprit was torn to pieces with such mounting outrage that I cringed in the back of the room, struggling not to laugh. These gorings were so amusing that I invited friends from other departments to see. Once brought in John Lane to watch MacShane excoriate a bright young upper-class thing who had submitted to class an essayistic account of remodeling her kitchen.
It was a plodding sort of piece, fashioned after Tracy Kidder's best seller
House
, richly layered with pedantic details, and she was deep in a description of the struggles she had faced in choosing appropriate contact paper when MacShane exploded: “Who gives a bloody good god damn about which contact paper you chose for your bleeding kitchen!”