The End of the World as We Know It (12 page)

He had been a bartender when he was young, and he once said to me that the only real money was cash money.

Earlier in the summer, he had tried to kill himself, but that wasn't the reason. That wasn't at all why I did what I did. His story was altogether different. There is no suicide except your own. The rest is just sad and terrible stuff that happens to somebody else.

He was a bookie, a bookie who could quote the sonnets of Shakespeare, who loved the theater but would only go alone and sit on the aisle because he hated crowds, a bookie who drank
more than a case of Heineken a day, so many that his wife kept the empties in the downstairs bathtub until the boy could come take them back to the store. He was a bookie who had a secret life, led late at night. Drug dealers and bars and after-hours clubs where gay boys danced with their shirts off. His wife didn't know where he was half the time.

He was a bookie who was generous beyond belief with the amazing amounts of cash he carried with him at all times. His wife was beautiful, a model, and he had a one-year-old baby.

He didn't find killing himself an easy thing to do. He had a generous and forgiving nature. He tried once and couldn't go through with it. His kindness and intelligence argued against it, but when he did it two days later, he did it with a precision and a viciousness that was astonishing.

I talked to him on the phone the night before he did it. He sounded fine.

He got into his green Mercedes on a warm summer afternoon and drove from his apartment on Beekman Place to Connecticut, where he checked into a cheap motel. He went out that night, to a restaurant that happened, he noticed when he looked at the menu, to have the same name as his baby daughter. He couldn't eat. Then he went back to the motel.

He was a big man, and like a lot of big men in the summer, he was always hot. Before he went to bed, he turned the air conditioner to its highest setting, so the room would be cold enough.

When he woke up, he got dressed in a pair of khaki pants, a clean white shirt, and a Bill Blass blazer with gold buttons. Then he took out a razor blade and cut his wrist so deeply he severed
the nerves. Then he took the razor and slit his other arm from the elbow to the wrist. He had left no note. Not a word.

He hit an artery. He bled profusely. He bled on the bed and the cheap thin rug and the bathroom tile; he bled until he fainted. Ah, this is it, he thought. This is the end.

Then he woke up. He was dizzy, and he was still bleeding, but he was alive. He took the razor and cut his wrists again, and he bled and passed out again, thinking, Ah, this is it, and then he woke up again. So he took the razor and he slit his throat. There was blood everywhere. He was bathed in his own blood.

He lost consciousness one more time and one more time he thought, Ah, this is it. But he came to, and he went to the phone, and he called the front desk.

“There's something wrong with the air-conditioning,” he said to the desk clerk. “I'm freezing to death.” He didn't know what he was saying anymore. He had lost focus.

The maid who found him threw up and fainted. He was still alive. He was conscious. He could talk. The air-conditioning had saved him. The room had been cold enough to slow his circulation, so that, as massive as his injuries were, they had not been enough to kill him. The cold had congealed his blood.

He was stitched together. He was brought back to the city. He was hospitalized. He was near death. Only three people besides his wife knew he had done this. I was one of them. This was in June, right after the Belmont Stakes. It was three days after his daughter's birthday.

The official story was that he had gone to visit his sick father in Georgia. He owed half a million dollars to some really bad people.

The reality was that he was heavily sedated in a locked room in a locked ward at Payne Whitney, under twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance by burly thugs. I went to see him.

The hospital was like a Victorian nightmare, full of drooling lunatics, slobbering and muttering and screaming. It was dark. It was dirty. It was loud.

His condition was a shock. He had cut himself so deeply that one arm was in a cast. His face was as pale as his hospital pajamas.

His other arm was bandaged to the elbow, his neck was bandaged, and he barely knew where he was. When he spoke, he didn't make sense. It was only later he told me the whole story.

What do you say? What would you say? I was terrified of him. There was no way to make conversation of any kind. I told him I was glad he was alive. I told him he was my best friend, that if I had lost him I would feel bereft for a very long time. You say anything in a situation like that. Anything to pretend it isn't happening. You want to believe it isn't real.

He told me he just couldn't stand the mediocrity of his life anymore. He talked like a man underwater.

“It's not anything else,” he said. “It's the mediocrity.” He moved in slow motion. He was glazed with sweat and drugs.

The ward was filled with crazy people, schizophrenics, people who had just lost their minds for no reason, men and women whose hearts and spirits were china plates, broken irrevocably, people for whom there was no world outside the doors of the ward, would never be, no sustenance more vital or soothing than the medications they were being given. They went to a special window to get them. The pills were in little paper cups, like lemon ices.

It was a freak show, people in bathrobes shuffling blankly from window to window, a collection of tics. The bookie belonged in the green glow of the warm bar we always went to, telling stories, paying for everybody's drinks with cash, doing cocaine in the bathroom. Giving drugs to whoever wanted them out of the goodness of his heart, and because he always had more of them than anybody.

A few years before, we had sat up all night, running from bar to bar, then to after-hours clubs, ending up in his study, doing drugs until his sleepy wife came and told him to go to bed and told me to leave. It was five o'clock in the morning. Her patience was exhausted.

I was supposed to fly to Virginia early the next morning for Christmas. He said the only way to make an early flight was to stay up all night. We believed that kind of thing back then. It was almost light when I got back to my apartment.

My father met me at the airport. I looked terrible, clean-shaven, perfectly pressed and expensive, loaded with bag after bag of presents from Bergdorf's and Three Lives and Saks, but terrible. I looked like death on a cracker. I told him a friend of mine had tried to kill himself the night before, and I had sat up all night with his wife at the hospital. I was so hungover I would have said anything.

He'd be OK, I said. But it was close. I said he was just sad, and that I couldn't go to a cocktail party I'd been to every year since I was twelve.

Once, at that party, a professor at the college sent a note over to me, written on a cocktail napkin. It said, “I had such hopes for you. When did you get to be so dull? Why are you so ordinary?”

I had sent a note back. On a cocktail napkin. I quoted Eliot. “I am not Prince Hamlet,” it said. “Nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord, one that will do / to swell a progress, start a scene or two.” I was nineteen.

I looked at my wounded, almost-dead friend and felt guilt. As though I had told a lie and caused it.

At first, I thought that he, in his terror and his failure, had saved me from my own suicide, with my birthday less than two months away. I had thought of it for a year. Now I wouldn't have to think of it anymore. That's what I thought.

I went to see him every single day, seven days a week, more than I could stand, and I saw him turn into one of the shuffling zombies. Tranquilizers. Antipsychotics. Anything given to the violent and self-destructive. He couldn't bend the fingers of his left hand where the nerve was severed. The bandage on his neck made him look like he was about to get a haircut. The heat was excruciating.

It was a terrible thing to do, a terrible moment to have endured. To do that to his wife, in whom he delighted, whose charm and humor and jet black hair he took for granted, and to his baby daughter, whom he adored, the sheer desperation of it and the cuts and the endless sad and cruel details of the blue blazer and the khaki pants and the air-conditioning and the bandages and the drugs—these were all strong reasons to avoid the same fate.

But that feeling only lasted for a few weeks. I began to see what he had done as a necessary action that opened the door for me, a vision of my own way out, a harbinger, even if he had failed.

Even if he had failed, he had made his point. He had written
his point in blood on his clothes and his body and the walls and floors and bed linens of a motel room in Connecticut. And I had no wife. I had no lovely daughter. It seemed, at the time, that I had no one in all the world.

He started shock therapy. In his six months in the hospital, he had something like thirty-seven treatments. He began to look forward to them, because they rendered him speechless and thoughtless for two days, and the blank hours were the hours he found the most bearable. He became addicted to the electricity shooting through his brain.

Nowadays, you can have it done in an office visit. They don't call it shock therapy anymore. They call it electroconvulsive therapy. ECT. Much more modern. Stigma-free.

Psychiatrists tell you how easy it is. It's a walk in the park. People, even famous people, talk about it on television talk shows. They say how much better they feel, how much more cheerful, how it's changed their lives. Anything's possible now, they say.

It wasn't that way then. After a month in the hospital, he was not merely depressed; he was crazy. Every day, I could watch him slip farther into a madness that wrapped him like a wet sheet.

He began to carry a small ball of Silly Putty. He was never without it, and he would form it into endless shapes. He called it his worry fairy, and when he slept, he stuck it on the wall by his bed. When he had his electroshock treatments, he clutched it in his hand.

I began to carry a razor blade. I got a dozen single-edged blades from the art studio of the advertising agency where I
worked, the kind used for cutting mat board. I was embarrassed and scared even to ask for them. In the art studio, I thought they would know what I was going to do with them.

I carried one with me all the time. The same one. If I didn't have it, I panicked. I carried it in my pants pocket, and I was always glad to be wearing a pair of pants that had one of those little watch pockets at the waist, or a coin pocket in the larger right-hand pocket. I called these razor pants. I slept with a razor in my hand.

I would find it in the bed next to me when I woke up. One night, I lost the blade while I slept. I looked everywhere. I never found it. I had to choose another one.

I carried it when I went to see the bookie in the hospital. I never told anybody. I tried to make conversation with him. I tried to get close to the terror and the madness and the mystery of the act itself, but it was beyond comprehension. I turned the blade in my hand as I talked to him, as I tried to nurse him back to sanity with compassion and kindness.

The razor blade I carried had a protective cardboard wrapping around it, so the sharp edge of the blade was covered. It was held shut by glue. I decided, as the cardboard got dirtier, stained by sweat and ink from my fingers, that when the cardboard came off the blade on its own, I would cut my wrists open.

Things began to take on a magical quality. Everything was a sign. I saw the world and my friends with a tenderness I had never imagined. Their lives were so beautiful and filled with work and love and ideas and longing, and I loved them in their flesh, in their reality in a world that was becoming more dreamlike by the minute. The closer I got to my own death, the more
I loved the world I would no longer be a part of, its startling moments of quietude and beauty, moments that seemed to belong only to other people.

I had never been a part of it, really. The rewards of everyday life, the job well done, the loves explored and lost with bitterness or regret, the loves that expanded into an eternity, the waking up next to the skin of somebody you desired with all your heart, the simple brushing of your hair or the taste of beer, had all seemed to me like things that were happening to other people. I wasn't real in the way they were. I envied them their acceptance, and their assurance.

I had wanted to die since I was twelve.

I wasn't safe. I wasn't permanent. My life was a fiction I had created, like an alien who comes to earth and tries to pass as human. The affections of my friends meant nothing to me, directed, as they were, toward a person who wasn't there. There was nobody home.

I lived alone. I had always felt alone, isolated from real people, even when I was involved in one of my failed love affairs, affairs that failed through my own lassitude, through the desultory small cruelties of the people, men and women, I had chosen to love. My love for them was real. Their love for me was both a myth and a torture and so I wrecked everything. I hurt them, and I left them hurting.

I had started to drink heavily when I was thirty-one. Liquor gave me the ability to endure the company of others, to endure the burden of my own self. I was going through the end of two affairs I had carried on simultaneously, one with a woman with the most beautiful hands, the other with a man who was married.

The first time I saw the woman, at a dinner party in Philadelphia where she lived, a party given by my lover and his wife, she made a particular gesture with her beautiful hands, holding up her left hand as though she were holding an egg to the light, and I was thunderstruck. She had a small tattoo at the soft part of her hand between the thumb and her first finger, and as she held up the egg, a small bird rose in the air.

On our first date, she came up on the train and we went to the ballet, the first time I had ever been, and we saw
Serenade
, the Balanchine masterpiece. The curtain rose, and there stood two dozen women in long tulle skirts, their arms raised, their hands making the same gesture. The gesture she had made at the dinner party. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I knew I loved her.