Impossible Vacation (24 page)

I said again, “Yes, please, please, get my bags off. Get my bags off the plane!” And then as quickly as I said that, I changed my mind. “No, no, I’m on, leave them on—I mean yes—I mean no—yes—no—I mean no.” And then I just fell into a short circuit, “Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no,” and I groaned, almost barking like a dog, between nos and yeses and nos, and Meg, who was in front of me, slowly turned and looked at me as though I were going completely mad. Then she began to move forward toward the plane without me, and when I saw that, I just said to the flight attendant, “No, leave the bags on the plane. Let my bags go back to New York. I’m staying here. For better or for worse, I’m staying here.”

And she said, still very politely, as though she were dealing with a completely sane and responsible adult male, “But, Mr. North, I’m afraid that you can’t do that. You must accompany your bags to New York. That’s policy.” By this time Meg had already boarded without me, and I stood there sweating and shaking in my self-created hell of confusion, then took one giant step and I was on. I got on the plane to accompany my bags to New York.

I took an empty seat by a window in the rear, in what I felt was the safest part of the plane. I didn’t even try to find my proper seat next to Meg. And then, for the second time in my life, I took off in a plane without holding Meg’s hand and this time Meg was on the same plane. I was surprised to find that I was not afraid. I was without fear. In fact I was without almost any feeling at all.

Not only was there no emotion, there was no sense of time passing. That seven-hour flight could have been seven minutes. I remember only seeing what I took to be the tip of Greenland and then descending toward New York. I also remember watching Meg from
what felt like a great distance. I wondered if she was reading or sewing or crying or doing a crossword puzzle or crying on her crossword puzzle. At some point in what seemed like a seven-minute flight, I walked up and said hello to her, like a stranger. She seemed surprised to see me, and at first I thought she was acting, because I thought she knew me well enough to know that I couldn’t stay in Amsterdam without her. I sat beside her and told her that I was scared because I’d never been on a plane before without being worried the whole time, and now I didn’t care one way or the other about the plane crashing. And that made me think I didn’t care if I lived or died. Meg just listened. She didn’t try to make sense of it or throw any interpretation on it. She just listened as we came down into crazy, hot New York in that completely mad bicentennial summer of 1976, the year of the tall ships, the strangest year of my life.

G
OD, MEG WAS
organized. If I was chaos, she was all order and meaning. She got me through customs and had even made plans ahead of time for our friend Barney to pick us up at the airport.

A blast of hot, humid air slammed us as we walked out of the airport and onto the sidewalk. I don’t know why I call it air. It was more like the fumes of summer. It was as though we were back in India, but without the exotic, pastoral vistas. There were no cows in the streets for taxis to weave around, no barefoot men running rickshaws. Only cars and more cars, buildings roaring with air conditioners and countless machines. There was nothing feminine or soft or inviting about New York City. My whole body and mind felt as if they had been thrown into the hellish jaws of a giant robot and were being chewed up by metal teeth. I felt like a robot being chewed by a robot. I wanted to go right back to India. If I could have just jumped on the back of a giant bird … and flown there it would have been fine, but I couldn’t face another plane trip, another giant mechanical coffin with wings.

Barney rushed over to greet us. I tried in vain to hug him and get close, as though I were there, but my body had not caught up with me yet, and it all felt like the ridiculous abstract motions of a robot. Parts of me were scattered in the long wake of our travels. Pieces were still in India, The Tubs, and in that attic room in Amsterdam. New York City was too real.

Meg was so happy to see Barney. I watched it all like a crazy play going on at a great distance. It was as though I had died and was watching life go on without me. There was no homecoming feeling, no feeling of home, only absence. I listened to Barney’s enthusiastic babble about the tall ships that had sailed into the New York harbor and about how someone was filming a remake of
King Kong
at the World Trade Center, and wouldn’t we just love to drive by and see that giant ape wedged in between those twin towers? “No, please,” I said. “I need a drink. We need to get home.” Then, even worse, I realized we had no home.

Not thinking we would return this early, we had sublet our apartment until September, and we were going to have to stay at Barney’s loft. I shuddered, beginning now to realize I had touched paradise and I had not taken it. It had slipped through my fingers. I couldn’t be there or here or anywhere. I couldn’t relax. That would be to let in more pain than I could bear. There was no way out, I thought, as I downed my beers in Barney’s kitchen and tried to drown myself.

After five beers and the insertion of my earplugs, with Meg’s arm across my chest, I at last eased into a welcome unconscious sleep, which was interrupted throughout the night by fire trucks and raving bums in the street below. I woke well before dawn and just lay there soaked in sweat, trying to get a grasp on where I was, what room I was in, who I was lying next to. I woke with all the dreadful feelings of a condemned man who was about to be executed at dawn.

I tried to count my blessings. I tried to tell myself that everything was all right. After all, I had Meg; I could see; I could walk; I could still enjoy beer. But was it enough? It was nowhere near enough. I didn’t want merely to be a survivor. Merely to survive was a disgrace in America. We were doomed the day our forefathers had written “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yes, “pursuit of happiness,”
I thought. Exactly. I saw Americans as a pack of mad greyhounds, all with their tongues hanging out, speeding after some stuffed rabbit.

Meg tried to get me to gear down and focus. “First things first,” she told me. “We must slowly and carefully rebuild our lives here and not overly complicate them with frantic fantasy.”

I was afraid now to make any action out of fear of the multiplicity of crazy reactions it might cause, so I tried to follow Meg’s plan. First we would take a bus out to her parents’ house in New Jersey, where our van had been parked. Then we’d get the van back on the road and go to Rhode Island to visit my father and stepmother for the Fourth of July. That way we’d escape the madness. I didn’t want to see any celebration. I didn’t want to see fireworks or tall ships.

Everything was too overwhelming. The world was too filled with objects and people, and some of the people had to go, had to be condemned to death so that the productive ones could go on living and make the earth into the good and wonderful paradise it was meant to be in the first place, and should certainly have been by this bicentennial summer. And worst of all, I knew that I was one of those who should go. I should step aside for people like Meg, the protective rug merchants of the world, the blessed people with a plan and a will.

Meg’s mother could see that I was very upset and overly thin. At the same time she was not given to indulgence. She came from one of those places where a nervous breakdown was viewed as weak and self-indulgent behavior. So on the whole she left me alone, and I spent my visit there draining endless cans of Budweiser, watching our great nation on TV prepare for its bicentennial summer: smiling faces eating pies and cakes all across America.

Meg cheered when the van started right up, and we were off for yet another joyless visit to another version of home in Rhode Island. Meg drove, and I sat there like the zombie I’d become, wondering how we would ever get through this season in hell together. By the time we got on the Connecticut Thruway, I was reading to Meg out loud from my well-underlined copy of Norman O. Brown’s
Life Against Death
—perhaps the wrong book, but I kept feeling there was comfort in it somewhere, although I couldn’t grasp it. I think I was trying to identify, embrace, at least understand what this dark force was in me,
this huge drive to return to nothing. I’d read a passage to myself and have the fantasy that I understood it, and then I’d get all excited and read it out loud to Meg. But I could see Meg didn’t understand it, and when she didn’t understand it, it fell apart in my mind like gobbledygook, and nothing held together. I wanted that damn book to save me by helping me forgive myself for being so neurotic. I was hoping it would allow me to see myself as a fatality of civilization.

I thought that being with my father and my stepmother, Babs, would be a good way to escape the bicentennial madness. It would definitely be fuzzy and subdued, and I thought, Well, we’ll just take it easy and get drunk by the swimming pool, treat it like a vacation. And maybe if they’re interested, we’ll show them a few of our slides of India Meg had just gotten developed.

I had lingering fantasies of Mom being alive, standing at the gate of the driveway, weeping with joy as her prodigal son came down the road, home from the sea at last, with his round-the-world stories and his duffel bag of dirty laundry thrown over his back. I was able, with Meg’s help, to realize that was a far-gone fantasy, but I still expected Babs and Dad to be just a
little
bit excited about our trip to India.

We drove to Rhode Island on July third. The road up, at least as far as New Haven, was like some insane, end-of-the-world
National Lampoon
takeoff on the Fourth of July, only I wasn’t laughing. I was looking for, if not the answer, at least for some way to forgive it all. I thought if I could figure out what Norman O. Brown was talking about before we got to Rhode Island, I’d be saved. I wanted him to tell me it was not my fault, and not Mom’s fault, and if I had to find fault to save myself, it was in the capitalistic culture I’d been born into. I wanted him to tell me that my pain was real, that I was one of civilization’s discontents, and now I had to learn to be courageous and live with it, and not leak out so much on everyone. I couldn’t help noticing how I had marked up all the pages of the book just like Mom used to do while reading her weekly Christian Science lesson from
Science and Health
.

I felt so alone and out of it, so unpatriotic, as giant breadbox-shaped station wagons filled with large American families passed and wove in front of us, cutting us off as they dragged hideous speedboats and trailers behind them. There’d be a flash of three or four children
smiling idiotic sugar smiles out the back window of a station wagon as a giant semi truck moved up behind them, like a great mechanized whale about to devour them whole. After New Haven, the traffic thinned out some, but it still seemed like one big race to pleasure, everyone heading up the coast to get to the sea before that great bicentennial Fourth of July popped in their faces. And as we rode I had a dreadful sense of how that giant megalopolis was spreading like a great colorless cancer up the East Coast, and every time I heard that phrase “Northeast Corridor,” I thought of cancer: Washington spreading into Baltimore, Baltimore bleeding into Wilmington, which crept into Philly, which overflowed into Trenton, then Newark, and New York, then on to Bridgeport and New Haven. It was one long, endless sprawl of tacky houses, factories, shopping malls, and multiplex cinemas. The desperate thought of it grinding in my mind made me search all the harder for the answer, the explanation, as I paged through that damned
Life Against Death
with shaking hands. Then, just before Connecticut turned into Rhode Island, there was a brief, beautiful stretch of highway where we could see some rolling hills and one or two working farms in the distance, and this, at last, led into the less populated region of Rhode Island where Dad and Babs lived, our weird sanctuary from that 1976 Fourth of July.

Dad and Babs had chosen that ranch house as a kind of pleasure dome where they could start a new life just down the road from their painful origins. They had bonded out of mutual pain and disaster. Shortly after Mom killed herself, Babs’s husband drank himself to death. He’d started drinking in a big way the day the youngest of their three sons was killed in a marine training accident at Camp Pendleton, and he didn’t: stop until it killed him. Dad also started drinking in a big way after Mom died and Topher, Cole, and I fled what was left of the nest, and one night he woke up in a puddle of blood. He had made it as far as the telephone and was able to call the emergency unit, the same one that came so fast for Mom just a few months before, but he passed out before they arrived. Something inside Dad gave way, and there was blood everywhere, but they got him to the hospital before his entire life leaked out. I didn’t go home to visit that time. I only called in each day to see how he was doing. Coleman didn’t go home,
either. Topher had moved to Providence and I’m not sure how often he checked in on Dad, if at all. But when Babs, who lived down the road, found out about Dad’s condition, she began to visit him every day and some new bond was made.