Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (20 page)

“That's exactly right!”

The way he said this made me feel like I'd scored an A-plus.

“I'm very glad,” he said. “And relieved too! Hearing you put it that way, I believe we may still have a ball game. Here's our idea. The dean and me. You're to attend therapy with an alcohol treatment specialist at Columbia Presbyterian at our expense. We know you're broke. He's one of the best. If, at the end of treatment—ten weeks, say, the summer—he gives you a clean bill of health, well, then, far as we're concerned, it's all water under the bridge. On condition that you will have no further contact with Carolyn, not even so much as enrollment in the same classes, not even look her way when you pass in the halls. If you agree, we'll take you back.”

“Agreed.”

 

For ten weeks I visited the good doc, nice chap, who drew diagrams, gave articles to read, took an interest in my literary projects. When
he spoke candidly to my drinking problem, I listened respectfully, nodding that I understood. Liked the man enormously, and after each session crossed Broadway to a nearby bar, ordered a double, and hoisted my glass in the good doc's honor.

Still, the Carolyn incident had shaken me somewhat. Resolved to grab hold of life's reins, take charge, straighten out. Joined a gym and got back in shape, purchased a new wardrobe, and sought a position befitting my background and firsthand knowledge of American Jewish and Israeli culture. I obtained high-paid employment as a fund-raiser with the New York office of an Israeli botanical garden.

Lastly, I moved out of the old man's flat and into a large room, with nonworking fireplace, on the top floor of a squalid but colorful hotel by the week—The Hotel California—just blocks from Columbia and, with my new regular salary, easily affordable.

Nattily attired, financially empowered, and muscle-bound, I appeared to my therapist to be in complete remission from drinking. Of course, he didn't know that I got regularly blasted five out of seven nights of the week, either in the West End, where I consorted, drunk, with fellow students who felt we were reincarnations of Kerouac and Ginsberg, or in Augie's, a jazz bar that stayed open after hours and where, to the tune of debilitated and washed-out former jazz greats, you could sit and get blotto with that big granddaddy sax scat-tatting in your ears.

 

Come fall, declared fit, I was readmitted to Columbia.

Far from alienating me from the other students, my little escapade, and the fact of imminent book publication, appeared to lend me an air of legend and tragic grandeur. People who normally never gave me the time of day now invited themselves to sit and talk, or approached with an increasingly familiar kind of hyena smile,
hand extended, firing broadsides of trivial rubbish at my unreceptive face until I simply walked off, left them standing there—which, of course, only amplified the hype.

On the day of my book's appearance, I showered, shaved, splashed on cologne, dressed in my finest clothes, threw on a neck scarf and my London Fog, and grandly strolled twenty blocks down Broadway to Shakespeare & Co., one of the finest bookstores in New York, and stood, thrilling, on the pavement.

The front window displayed a tall pyramid of
The New Generation: Fiction for Our Time from America's Writing Programs,
edited by Alan Kaufman. It was, to then, hands down, the greatest moment of my life.

SOME MONTHS LATER I AWOKE CRUELLY HUNGOVER in my bed beside an attractive young woman with big crazy eyes and an animated British-inflected voice, who advised me as I listened, amazed, that she was my wife.

Her name, she said, was Esther, and she recounted with peals of laughter how we had tied the knot yesterday at city hall. When the justice of the peace had requested a ring put on her finger, I, having none, pulled a pack of Marlboro's from my coat pocket, removed the foil, fashioned a ring from it, and slipped it on her. She was still wearing it.

“Of course, I expect the real thing someday, but for now, this will do,” she said.

I didn't dare tell her not only that I failed to recall any of this but had no idea who she was, period. A gentleman, I invited her out for honeymoon brunch at Tom's, a local luncheonette, where, in bits and pieces, I learned that she was an aspiring actress who worked as a waitress at Phoebe's, an East Village bistro, where I had met her.
Then, apparently, during the next four days I went out on a run with Esther and married her in a blackout.

Gradually, in the preceding months of continuous celebration and then mourning for the feeble rise and ignominious fall of my book's fortunes, my life had blurred into a resigned hallucination, a freak show of inevitable disappointments followed by incomprehensibly destructive drunken escapades. But this, waking up married to a total stranger, was beyond even my imagining.

The New Generation
got poor reviews and was quickly remaindered. The reviews, which had appeared in such places as the
Atlanta Constitution
and the
Los Angeles Times
, had damned the book, railed against the soullessness and vapidity of the Brat Pack writers represented in its pages. Then Nelson Doubleday sold the venerable house to Bertelsmann, the West German company, and publicity for the book fizzled as staffers bailed “like rats off a sinking ship,” as Robin Strauss sadly put it to me. With no one to promote it, my book sank from sight. In time, I would see piles of copies in the discount bins at Barnes and Noble, and I finally acquired the last few copies I could find, at a buck apiece, from the Strand Bookstore. It was heartbreak and my first hard lesson in the literary life. I just couldn't figure out what that lesson was.

As my lit star waned, my schmooze skills shined brighter every day. The world knows how to ruin you, and it will ruin you if you let it. I threw my arms around its neck and thrust my tongue into its ear.

One day, at work, I learned from the home office that the botanical garden didn't have outdoor toilet facilities and that consequently some 40,000 Israeli schoolkids annually had no place to crap while out there frolicking among the citrons and sabras. The home office had but one fund-raising lead to offer: Abe “Ace” Greenberg, CEO of Bear Stearns Associates, one of the most powerful men
in the world of finance, an Oklahoma Jewish cowboy who had been knighted by Denmark for his service as head of the International Raoul Wallenberg Committee. Greenberg had once donated some quarter of a million dollars to have new restrooms built at the Israel Museum. “An unusual man,” read the fax. “Has some sort of ‘thing' for toilets.” The garden's staff regretted that unfortunately they hadn't a clue about how one could get to speak to an individual so high up.

I did. Called Bear Stearns and asked the switchboard for Ace's secretary—and what, by the way, is her name? They told me and put me through. When she came on, I said: “Hey, _______! This is Alan. Let me speak to Abe.”

“Hi, Alan!” she chirped uncertainly. “Just a sec. I'll put you right through.”

A moment later a Minotaur-like voice came on. “This is Ace. Which Alan are you? I know about fifty.

“Alan Kaufman. And you don't know me. But I know that you understand what's important about forty thousand Israeli schoolkids with nowhere to take a crap. Each time they go to visit Neot Kedumin—Israel's famous botanical garden—they gotta hold it in.”

“Never heard of it.”

“That don't make it unimportant.”

“Point for you. Go on.”

“It's plain torture, Abe. There they are in the middle of the date palms and whatnot, jumping from leg to leg. No place to shit. Nowhere to piss. Imagine what that's like.”

After a silence, he said: “That speaks more to me than you may know.”

“I had a feeling it would. Tell me about it.”

“You heard about the money I gave to the Israel Museum.”

“I know they got a plaque up there on those toilets, engraved with your name.”

“Know why I gave that money?”

“Tell me.”

“Because when I was a kid, they took me on a school trip to this place that had no toilet. I told the teacher I must go. I begged: please, I gotta make! But there was nowhere to do it. I crapped myself. This was some embarrassment. I never forgot. So, how much do you need?”

“Seventy-five grand will cover it. We're talking outdoor facilities.”

“You got blueprints, something for me to look at?”

“In your hands first thing tomorrow morning.”

“All right. Send it.”

He hung up.

I sat there in the office, trembling. The boss, a mother with kids, was out kissing ass, trying to raise a grand from some chintzy cheapskate philanthropist who made her sit through fifty hours of tea and chitchat, getting her money's worth in talk therapy, at a rate of about ten bucks per hour, before she'd hand over a check for $500 with regrets that her resources were overtaxed this year, sorry.

The boss wouldn't return to the office until Friday afternoon. I was holding down the fort.

It was perfect. I went out to a local bar, sat calmly sipping a whiskey neat, reflecting on the Greenberg blueprints. Of course, there were none. I'd have to make the whole thing up off the top of my head. Knew nothing whatever about architectural designs, construction budgets, etc. The figure I had thrown out was made up. For some reason fifty G's had seemed too little and 100 G's too much. Seventy-five had a nice doable ring. Anyone with millions can drop seventy-five grand on something they believe in.

I worked all night and through the morning. Kept myself up with coffee and No-Doze. By morning, had a six-page proposal with drawings, budget, history of the garden, nice things that famous people had said about the place (most of it I made up), and a cover letter requesting seventy-five grand. Short, sweet, to the point. I messengered it over, and that afternoon at about 4:30 p.m. another messenger came bearing a large envelope from Bear Stearns Associates. Mouth dry, heart pounding, I tore it open and removed a check for seventy-five grand from Abe Greenberg.

I lost no time. Called the president of the board and announced the gift, the largest ever received in the brief history of their US fund-raising efforts. I requested that I hand the check over personally to him and that I be appointed, effective immediately, as the new executive director, replacing my boss. He'd get back to me, he said. Then I called Israel, announced the gift. They were ecstatic. Explained my terms for continued employment. That they should consider that my boss had succeeded in raising less than four grand to date but I had just opened the door to a whole new world of donors. “I know Abe,” I said. “I've got influence with him. He trusts me. There's endless water in that well. Plus, he'll lead me to his friends. But you've got to appoint me exec. In fact, to get the check I lied in my letter, said that I was the executive director. What if he finds out it's a lie? Goodbye, money.”

When my boss returned to work on Friday, she was fired. I had taken her desk. Outraged, she sat in a chair in the corridor, making calls to the board, the garden. Everyone sympathized. But hard facts must be faced. The money Alan raised will keep the office open for another year, plus build the toilets (turns out they only needed about $20,000, but who's counting?) and pay for his salary. You, on the other hand, have brought less than nothing and are costing us. So, he stays and you must go.

And that was that.

In tears, she picked up her things, which I'd thoughtfully packed into two Zabar's shopping bags, and left, cursing my name.

To celebrate, I went out on a bender that lasted through Tuesday and from which I awoke in a doorway on Ninth Street, in the East Village—my Wuthering Heights place, where lately I always seemed to gravitate whenever blind drunk, perhaps to find Anna, vestiges of her, ghosts, an East Village Heathcliff roaming a pigeon-dotted moor strewn with shattered glass, kicking at rats, shrugging off addicts, bumping muggers, drunks, freaks with my powerful shoulders, howling for my Anna/Catherine, who was in Toronto, nursing her own shattered heart.

I didn't know what to do about Esther, felt so alone in that hotel room with her, had no connection to anyone I could ask for advice. What would I say? “Hey, guess what I did. Married a complete stranger in a blackout and now I can't stand to be with her! What do you think I should do?” I didn't know the woman even well enough to feel contrite for this awful thing I'd done, felt only fear and a kind of disgusted amazement and couldn't quite connect the misdeed to myself, as if someone else had done it and I had been falsely implicated, an unwitting accomplice informed of the crime only after the fact. I couldn't recall a single detail of the city hall ceremony or the days preceding it. It never even occurred to me to have the marriage annulled. Instead, I pretended to be aloof, tolerant, smiled when she spoke, thinking only of my next drink. I tried to put a brave face on the fact that I was now legally bound to one I'd injured and about whom I knew less than I might know about a random person standing next to me on a subway platform. I avoided home and my blackout bride as much as possible. But sometimes we had sex and were nice to each other for a little while, as if to prove that at least basic civility was possible. This would last only
until I rose to dress and go to the bar, whereupon, outraged, she would shriek that I was an abandoning monster and a sadist. The fact that I readily agreed with her only seemed to make it worse.

 

Now and then, to impress my employers, I pulled off some utterly pointless stunt. Once, I arranged to have the West Point Military Academy mascot mule brought under police motorcade escort all the way across the George Washington Bridge and led out into the rotunda of the Abraham Joshua Heshel School, where my office was located. Requested the city to close off the street while the kids in yarmulkes took rides on the mule's back. Nonetheless, the board president, a vain oil tycoon who was on hand to shake hands before cameras with the Parks Commissioner, was pleased by my flimflamming puffery and praised me warmly. Mission accomplished. I could go back to drinking myself out of my mind.