I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (27 page)

5/28/09

Last night I had a dream about Jim Morrison. He was swimming in the Mino and began to drown and I saved him. When I pulled him ashore he shook his head of long hair like a shaggy dog and the water from the Mino covered my own face. I turned to look at him and he had turned to stone—a kind of statue. I started to touch him. He shattered into many stones. I went to retrieve a few to rebuild him but woke up.

The dream had been so vivid that I stopped at the hotel’s computer before having breakfast and looked up Jim Morrison and the Doors on Wikipedia to read about them. This is what I copied down, never having known it before: “The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965.… The band took its name from the title of Aldous Huxley’s book
The Doors of Perception,
which itself was a reference to a William Blake quotation…: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.’”

5/29/09

A bird shit on my head today.

After walking along a very rugged bit of the path, I decided to rest under a tree. Eat a pear. Read some Keats. I knew there was a reference to a “rugged path” in his poem “On Death”:

Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,

And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?

The transient pleasures as a vision seem,

And yet we think the greatest pain’s to die.

How strange it is that man on earth should roam,

And lead a life of woe, but not forsake

His rugged path; nor dare he view alone

His future doom which is but to awake.

Then:

Plop.

*   *   *

I had an e-mail from my brother yesterday. In it he quoted the lyrics of a contemporary Christian song he likes by someone named Chris Rice. It’s called “Prone to Wander.” I searched for it on the Internet after I read the e-mail and listened to the music video of it.

My brother also wrote this: “Sounds like from your correspondence that this journey (if it doesn’t actually kill you) has been full of mercy and might be bringing you back to life. I know it is one of those ‘you’d have to be here to really understand what I’m talking about’ things. But if anyone can communicate the experience in a palpable meaningful way after the fact and do so in the written word, it is probably you. You might be a sissy but you’re a damn tough determined one. I’ll give you that, brother. Come home in one piece. Love you.”

5/30/09

I am now in the small village of Lavacolla, only nine kilometers from Santiago. When I set out in that tiny French village a month ago and crossed the Pyrenees I had planned to make it into Santiago on the thirty-first day. I think I will have accomplished it. But we shall see what tomorrow brings. Today was very, very taxing. I suddenly developed several painful blisters on my feet. It was as if God were telling me not to be so arrogant and reminding me who exactly the Boss is. It was as if I had to be taught one more painful lesson. I could barely walk by the time I made my way into Lavacolla a few hours ago. I am sitting in my room now in the Pazo Xan Xordo, a lovely stone guesthouse built in the seventeenth century. I just burned a needle with a match and pierced my blisters to drain them. If they don’t heal and the bandages don’t give me some comfort tomorrow then these very last few kilometers may just be the most trying of my whole pilgrimage, since I am so close to making it into Santiago.

*   *   *

When I got to the restaurant for dinner tonight there was a line of pilgrims waiting to be seated. I was asked if I would mind sitting with another single party and was escorted to a table with a handsome Australian woman who graciously allowed me to sit with her. We began to tell each other our Camino experiences and the conversation drifted to each of our lives back at our homes. She teaches nineteenth-century literature at a college and I told her of my much less scholastic endeavors as a writer who interviews celebrities but that I had written a memoir about my Mississippi childhood and was now working on its sequel. “This walk on the Camino is a way to break my writer’s block about it,” I told her. Though the nineteenth century was her literary interest—her field of study—she did know enough about the twentieth century and America to engage me in a discussion about Mississippi’s Eudora Welty and William Faulkner.

I then told her that I had been reading lots of John Keats along the path. “I start my students out with Keats since his short life corresponded with the beginning of the nineteenth century,” she said. “What was it that was inscribed on his tombstone in Rome in—dare we say it here on such a severely Catholic path?—the city’s Protestant cemetery?” she whispered, leaning over her picked-at paprika-seasoned octopus. “‘Here lies One whose name was writ in Water.’” She sipped at her Albariño wine. Her face was free of makeup though naturally rouged and dusted with freckles by her days in the sun along the Camino. I thought of Ethne’s vastly more freckled face and how much I miss her sister Mary and her. (I sang “Danny Boy” this morning for them as I set off and serenaded the Big Dipper, since no bird was ready to do it.) The creases about the literary professor’s eyes were whiter than her cheeks. They didn’t look like wrinkles exactly but more like crushed crinoline from her favorite century. They were eyes that had seemed to have read, squintingly, reams of nineteenth-century writers but had seldom cried. They were stern. Steady. I felt like one of her students as she stared at me over the restaurant’s table. “I’ve learned to like octopus these last few days in Galicia,” she said, as if the bits of the region’s culinary delicacy she carefully placed into her mouth were the words of a postmodern poet surprisingly finding themselves in there. “Keats, huh? Hmmm,” she said, swallowing the octopus. She rubbed her throat gently beneath the ribbon she wore as a kind of necklace. I noticed she bit her nails. She did not pluck her gray-tinged eyebrows and one touched her bangs as she arched it a bit and said again: “Keats.” She ordered us a bottle of wine, requesting it be from the Rías Baixas region. “I’ve been reading Emily Dickinson myself the last few weeks on the Camino. Do you like her work? I love teaching her. Especially to my male students from, say, Coober Pedy or other far-flung towns in the bush. The lucky ones are civilized by her—or pretend to be to garner my good graces.”

She buttered a piece of bread, its crust slightly crumbling on the tablecloth as if a few of her freckles had fallen from her face and landed there between us. “What’s your favorite Emily Dickinson poem?” I asked her.

“This week?” she said with a mouthful of bread. She waited to swallow it. I watched the ribbon ripple atop her throat as she swallowed. She then recited this whole poem, her throat continuing to ripple as she intoned it:

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—

That perches in the soul—

And sings the tune without the words—

And never stops—at all—

“And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—

And sore must be the storm—

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm.

“I’ve heard it in the chillest land—

And on the strangest Sea—

Yet—never—in Extremity,

It asked a crumb—of Me.”

she said, brushing her own few crumbs now from the table. She arched her brow again. This time, it disappeared beneath her bangs. “That’s why I’ve been walking the Camino, I think. To find some hope again in my life. And you? It can’t be just to break your writer’s block. That sounds like an evasion to me. My guess is you’ve come to right yourself, not just write. Oh my. I do hate puns. Never more so than when I commit one. Am I being too pedagogic?”

“Not at all. Too charming perhaps,” I told her.

She smiled. Her eyes crushed the crinoline-like lines that creased them.

“I’m trying to find some hope again in my life too,” I admitted to her. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to find: hope.”

“Then I’d suggest more Dickinson and less Keats,” she said. We sat in silence and sipped our wine. “So, lad, you interview movie stars for a living?” she finally asked. “How fascinating. Have you ever met Hugh Jackman?”

5/31/09

I just got up. It’s 5:00 a.m. In a few hours I will finally be walking into Santiago. I can’t believe I am actually going to do it. I have walked every centimeter of these eight hundred kilometers since setting out that morning from St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port. I knelt last night and said a prayer of thanks when I got back to my room here and asked for my painful blisters on the bottoms of my heels to be healed so the walk today will be a joyous one instead of one … well … lacking in joy. I think it worked. I put new bandages on my heels and I just walked around the room and I seem to be okay. I’ll see in a few hours how I’m holding up.

More later.

*   *   *

The sunrise was glorious this morning. I put the Mississippi Mass Choir on my iPod and listened to them as I walked up the path into the mountainside.

I decided not to listen to any more music the rest of the way into Santiago, however, after the choir sang their rousing gospel number about not having any doubt when they also awoke this morning. I have instead let my thoughts wander back over the last month and all that I have experienced on this pilgrimage and all those I have met, including now myself.

A few miles back—I am just outside of Santiago; it’s just over the hill there; I can almost touch it now; I can certainly feel it—I began to hum “Amazing Grace” over and over. I then heard myself softly begin to sing the words of the beloved old hymn. When I sang “that saved a wretch like me,” sobs began to roll to the surface from somewhere deep inside me and I had to walk off the path and hide behind the tree where I am now sitting and bow my head in prayer. I certainly wasn’t expecting such an eruption of emotion and tears. I got out this journal to try to calm myself. There are several birds above me singing and chirping and I am cherishing this moment—attempting to sit very still in it. I am no longer thinking back about the pilgrimage or what awaits me over that hill. I do think, however, of the woman from last night who dared me with her love of Dickinson and digested a delicacy, her throat in both instances rippling beneath that necklace-like ribbon bound about her neck. I am looking up at the birds. Will one shit on my head? Will I care? Had Dickinson looked up at such birds when composing her poem about hope? I feel something bird-like fluttering like a flattened
M
and perching in my soul. It is my father’s feathered hand upon it. It is my Father’s. The sensation is transcendently physical. True. Full of sin. Yet heaven-sent.

It is carnal.

It is spiritual.

Time to rise.

“Keep walking,” said Brigid. “Walking for the sake of walking,” said Jessica. “Tat Tvam Asi,” Jackman said.

I look at the sky.

It gestures:

Onward.

NINE

The Addict

“You have to believe your first job is to be a powerful witness,” Diane Sawyer was telling me as I sat across from her in her office at ABC in New York. It was January 2010 and she was just starting her new role as the anchor of
ABC World News
and had agreed that her first cover story for a magazine would be with me at
Parade
because we were friends. “Well, we’re more like heightened acquaintances,” I had told her. “But that’s sweet of you to say.”

Six months had passed since I had returned from the Camino and, still high from the experience itself, I had stayed mostly drug-free as I kept moving onward in my life past Santiago and through the summer of 2009 in Provincetown, where I’d lived for four months in a converted marine-gear storage house from the 1800s, and then, when autumn arrived, back at my apartment on West 21st Street in Manhattan. I had began to smoke pot again and had done a bit of meth from time to time when it was offered—but nothing major. There had been no binges since my return. For that I was grateful. But the previous night—feeling as lonely and bored as I had often felt before I ever set foot on that path in Spain—I had received a phone call from the boy with whom I had shared meth-infused sex the night before my lunch with Daniel Radcliffe, which, I came to realize, had been exactly one year ago that month. At first I hadn’t known who the caller could be, so I engaged him in conversation, trying to find a hint buried in it until it dawned on me who he was. I had been binge-free for so long that I decided in that moment that I deserved to be bad. I deserved a binge. It seemed as if it and the boy were being delivered to me. I looked on it as fate, almost God’s will, which meant, as it was almost God’s, there was room in there for it to be the Devil’s.

I put the interview with Diane Sawyer out of my mind—I had been doing hours of research already for it—and told the kid to come over. He brought his pipe. I found the meth from an old drug dealer of mine who was glad to hear from me. The kid’s bag of toys was again on my floor next to my bed. This time Archie had Teddy to keep him company as they both watched the sad antic display before them from their staked-out patch on my steer skin rug. Again the clock on the wall had finally informed me that it was 4:00
A.M.
That morning, however, I only had six hours to get ready to be there at ABC and begin the interview. I was thinking of all of that—the binge, the boy, the bag of toys, both dogs—while Sawyer continued to tell me about being a witness.

“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?” I heard her now asking me, having noticed, no doubt, not only how peaked I looked but also the odd reverie in my bloodshot eyes. I had—as I had done when I arrived at the Algonquin to have lunch with Radcliffe—lied to her about having been up all night with a stomach bug in case my appearance was puzzling. And yet I had still been able to find the nest in the conversation with her for the last hour or so—as I had with Radcliffe the year before—and I had gotten her to open up about the challenges of her new role at ABC, her marriage to Mike Nichols, and even her closeness to Richard Nixon when she worked for him at the White House and then returned to San Clemente with him after his resignation. I had gotten so much material from her that
Parade
would later run an extra Q and A from the interview on its Web site as an adjunct to the cover story. But being able to do my job while still under the influence—even if slightly—was not a blessing. It had become a curse.