The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (18 page)

But when I go to bed at 9:45, they’re still playing. I lie there with my earplugs in and a pillow over my head, praying they’ll stop.

I drift into sleep, until a cymbal crash kicks me awake. I look at the clock: 10:45.

The last thing I want is to get dressed, go downstairs, and confront them, because I know then I’ll never get back to sleep. But when they’re still playing at 11:00, I don’t really have a choice.

It takes a solid few minutes of pounding on the metal roll-down door before they hear me, put down their instruments.

The Quaker tattoo kid opens the door.

“What the fuck?” he says. “You just ruined our track.”

“I asked you guys nicely,” I say. “It’s now 11:00 p.m. I have the most important job interview of my life in the morning. I’m sorry I ruined your track, but unless you want to ruin my
entire life
, please quit playing,
right fucking now
.”

They all glance at each other, smirking, still wondering who this square is that crashed their session.

I go back upstairs, get into bed.

The music begins again.

In my head: I put on a pair of jeans but no shirt, storm downstairs, bash down the door, sock the Quaker kid square in the face, kick a hole in the bass drum, crash the cymbals over, swinging and thrashing, taking on all three little fucks at the same time, a feral display of my not-dead-yet punk-rock roots.

I imagine myself at the interview the next morning, trying to explain a black eye and bloody knuckles to a bunch of Quakers.

The other option is to call the police, but I know this will involve several hours of conversations, reports. And my guess is they’ll finish playing once they lay down the track I’ve just interrupted.

The studio finally goes quiet at 12:15. By this point, though, I’m so full of rage I can’t sleep.

Around 1:30 a.m., rage morphs into anxiety.

I try breathing exercises, seated meditation, counting backward from five hundred, but nothing works. By 3:30, I feel panicked, drifting around in this hazy sea of non sleep, wondering how I’ll get through a daylong interview without any rest.

At 5:00, garbage trucks circle the neighborhood.

I finally fall asleep at 6:05 a.m.

Ten minutes before my alarm goes off.

An hour later, in the subway, I recall the way so many commuters had ashen crosses smeared on their foreheads two days earlier, on Ash Wednesday. This seems appropriate now—after a sleepless night, I feel like walking death, hot ash blowing through my veins.

I sleepwalk through the Quaker school, which itself is a kind of fantastic maze—all these hidden passageways and stairwells leading to computer labs filled with sparkling white Macs, a huge art room with a skylight, rooftop basketball courts, a private yoga studio, and a library filled with reading nooks, all of it like something from
The Royal Tenenbaums
. Semi-invisible workers in school uniforms cater our interviews with fresh fruit, water crackers and Brie, bottled mineral water.

When Maria and I meet for lunch in the cafeteria, I ask her about this.

“It’s not really catering,” she tells me. “It’s just cafeteria workers bringing food up for meetings.”

“That’s pretty much the definition of catering,” I say, taking a bite of a freshly tossed garden salad. “The cafeteria at my high school served mainly microwave burritos. And the lunch ladies sure as hell didn’t
deliver
.”

Maria laughs. “Considering Susan Sarandon’s kids go here, I guess it’s not such a surprise.”

It’s good to see her, to have a break in the never-ending onslaught of interview questions. Despite how tired I feel, she tells me I look great.

But things decline steadily from this point. In a fourth-period history class, I feel shredded with exhaustion, as if my bloodstream is coursing with sewing needles and heavy sedatives.

Just before the final interview with the headmaster, I find myself starting to tremble again, like I did the first time I tried to leave my job, so I step out into the park and make an emergency call to my therapist.

“I think I might reschedule,” I say. “I’m sure I can come back and meet the headmaster next week.”

The phone goes silent while he considers this idea.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he says. “You’ve made it this far. You just need to marshal all your resources,” he says, this being advice he gives me often, the
marshaling of all my resources
, “and go back in there. I really think you’ll do just fine. In fact, I know it.”

Taking his advice, I go back in and meet with the headmaster—a smartly dressed, balding man with a patrician southern accent. But despite my most intense efforts, I can’t do it, can’t
marshal my resources
. Instead, my resources, still enraged about getting no sleep at all, organize a mutiny against me. They hold me captive, lash my powers of locution to the mainmast, so that I can’t seem to answer even the most basic questions.

I devolve into a blubbering, stuttering mess.

Hearing that I can hardly form a sentence, the headmaster lobs me a softball inquiry, asks how I found out about the position.

I tell him I know Maria.

“We’re surfin’ buddies,” I say, my old California accent slipping out here, lazily dropping the
g
off
surfing
—a word that should never, ever be mentioned during a job interview anywhere in the borough of Manhattan.

The headmaster looks entirely perplexed. He remains cordial and tries to help me limp through his final questions. But judging by his expression, he’s wondering how I made it this far in the interview process, or what the hell I’m even doing in his office. Or maybe this is a practical joke, and I’m just some wily tenth-grader posing as the interviewee.

I drag myself home, collapse into coma-sleep. The next day, thankfully, is a Saturday, so I drive out to Long Island to visit Kyle Grodin.

By myself on the Long Island Expressway, I fly into a rage, slam my fist into the steering wheel, over and over, inadvertently blasting the horn.

The other motorists give me a wide berth.

It feels good to get it all out. To get myself out of the city.

I’m in pretty bad shape by the time I arrive, but Kyle seems to be doing great. He’s in unusually good spirits, and when I offer him a sugar-free, natural fruit juice–sweetened cookie that I’ve brought him from the city, he turns it over and reads the ingredients, something I’ve never seen him do.

“There’s no refined sugar,” I tell him. “But they taste great.”

“It’s not the sugar I’m worried about,” he says. “This thing has like three hundred calories.”

It takes me a minute to register: I’ve just witnessed Kyle
fucking
Grodin not only hesitate before eating a baked good, but actually engage in
calorie counting
.

He explains that he and Anka went to the doctor, where they found his blood pressure and cholesterol astronomically high for someone in his midthirties.

“Dude, I could’ve told you that,” I say.

“Yeah, well, they said I need to change my eating habits or I’m headed straight for heart attack city.”

He leads me to the refrigerator, shows me the spoils of a recent shopping spree at the health food store—drawers of fresh produce, low-fat milk, tofu, and tempeh. He opens the cupboards, where all the boxes of sugared cereal and cookies have been replaced with granola and rice patties.

I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

Kyle stands there grinning.

“Holy shit, Grodin,” I say. “This is maybe the most dramatic reversal of character I’ve ever witnessed.”

The next morning, Easter Sunday, Kyle wakes me up early. Another reversal: usually I’m the one to wake him up, sometimes well past noon, after I’ve already gone jogging or surfing or both. But Kyle’s feeling great—a result of his new diet—plus he checked the surf report and the waves look good.

Down at Ditch Plains, mist shrouds the ocean’s surface, obscuring the horizon and the surrounding sea cliffs. A handful of locals in the water, their figures veiled in fog. The night before, Kyle donated his old four-millimeter wetsuit to my surfing cause. Standing now on cold sand, I slip into the oversized suit, then follow him down to the break. Clean, mid size waves, a mild offshore breeze scooping them out, holding up their spoon-shaped faces. I’ve never surfed this early in the spring, and without booties my feet go numb. Ignoring the pain, I stay out for a solid hour, catching wave after wave as the sun evaporates the fog, impressing myself, even impressing Kyle—just
slightly
.

The interview was one of the most demoralizing experiences of my life. I’d lost an entire night’s sleep and the opportunity for a better job, and for a few minutes there in the headmaster’s office I’d lost my dignity, my whole sense of self. But out here in the cold water, after a good night’s rest, I’ve rolled away the heavy rock of no-sleep and rematerialized back into my body, and I’m grateful to the ocean for carrying me back into this bright brisk region of my chiaroscuro emotions.

O
ne early summer weekend, Asa and I take another trip out to Montauk, where we pitch tents in Grodin’s backyard. Andy Kessler invites us over to his current summer rental for a barbecue, along with a couple of his NA sponsees who are out for the weekend. Andy’s place is in a quaint old motor motel, built in the fifties, abandoned in the eighties, and boarded up for twenty years. Everything’s perfectly preserved—all the Formica countertops, the linoleum floors, the mid century furniture, even the linens. Andy found a little stack of fifties-era postcards with a photo of his room, containing all the exact same furniture. He gives them out as souvenirs to everyone who visits.

We eat out on the lawn, on a rickety picnic table, where Andy tells us how he came to rent the place. He was out at Montauk during the spring and happened to see workers prying boards off the windows.

“They give me the number for the owner, who I call three or four times before he finally gets back to me. We go back and forth on price, the length of the lease, all that bullshit. I think it was obvious how much I really wanted the place. But right before we’re about to seal the deal, he says to me, ‘You’re not a surfer, are you?’ Swear to God, those were his exact words. I’m not going to lie to the guy, so I say
Yes, in fact I am a surfer
. He basically hung up on me.”

“You must have been livid,” Asa says.

One of Andy’s sponsees—this haggard-looking guy with a crew cut—pipes up. “Fucker did that to me, I would’ve taken a shit in his mailbox.”

Andy laughs, puts his hand to his forehead. “You know, there was a point in my life when I would’ve done just that. But I realized he was basically just this sad old man, you know? I was out here in Montauk when we had that last phone conversation; the whole ride home I felt at peace with it. I figured it just wasn’t meant to be. But then two weeks later he calls me back, says he had a change of heart. So here I am, by the grace of God.”

Fridays: 3–11 p.m.

Saturdays: 3–11 p.m.

Sundays: 3–11 p.m.

Mondays: 11 p.m.–11 a.m.

This was my weekly schedule for my first full-time job out of college back in Colorado, where I worked as a counselor in a residential treatment center for adjudicated boys, a place called New Horizons.
Adjudicated
is the technical term for kids who’ve been through the court system and done jail time; our clients were mostly young gang bangers from Denver, wannabes from the suburbs, criminally minded hicks, and assorted fuckups. It was the most demanding job I ever had and it paid nine dollars an hour.

I was a New Staff and the New Staff always gets the worst shift—in this case the weekend shift—working Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights plus the Monday overnight. Monday overnights were borderline psychological torture. I had to do administrative work and bed checks all night, and then take part in the Tuesday-morning staff meeting from nine to eleven. What it amounted to was a grueling, twelve-hour graveyard shift that left me pretty well shredded on my two weekdays off. My boss was a conservative hardass named Tammy who eventually joined the military, and who once reprimanded me for not participating during staff meetings, despite my having been awake for thirty straight hours.

Tammy also thought I was too buddy-buddy with the clients. I’d been working with kids my entire life—mostly at summer camps or skateparks, so using a point system and confronting negative behavior was a hard transition. Sunday-night free time was the only part of the job that came naturally. After everyone finished their chores, we pushed the mess hall tables to one side and rocked breakdancing moves on glossy linoleum. A strange reversal: all these black and Latino kids from inner-city Denver, and me, a white guy from a small mountain town, teaching them how to lie back on their elbows, scissor kick their legs wide, then snap into a tight spinning ball—that quintessential old-school move known as the backspin. They picked it up quickly, but no one beat my record of twelve rotations.

After lights out, staff members wrote “DAP” reports on each client. DAP stands for
Data, Assessment, Plan
. First the straight facts about the client’s behavior during the shift (Data), then an analysis of these facts for underlying causes (Assessment), followed by proactive plans for dealing with the client in subsequent shifts (Plan). It’s a way of communicating with the other staff members and therapists, but also a legal record required by the state.

Despite my ambitions as a writer, I dreaded writing DAPs. I struggled with the act of reducing these kids and their complicated lives to a set of clipped sentences. Tammy pointed out the lack of objectivity in my reports, the overuse of creative language and metaphors.

“DAPs are for therapeutic purposes,” she said, “not for poetry readings.”

Though Tammy and I rarely saw eye to eye, she was good at her job, especially when it came to making sure the clients were
staying in structure and watching their boundaries
. And she had some astute observations about the kids and their personalities.