We Learn Nothing Read online

  But sometimes this life starts to feel grudging and dutiful. I’m clear-eyed again, but the world looks lusterless and dull. I can understand why schizophrenics stop taking their meds. I’m functioning and accomplishing things; everyone approves of my behavior and agrees that I seem happier; I’m not embarrassing my friends with any histrionic displays. But I also know that all around me the air is full of songs too beautiful for me to hear. Sometimes I’ll see a pair of electric-blue damselflies coupled in flight, and I remember how it felt to be weightless.

  You Can’t Stay Here

  My years of heavy drinking were roughly coterminous with my youth, and it’s difficult, in retrospect, to tell which of them I really miss. The association between the two is not just a Pavlovian one. Drunkenness and youth share in a certain reckless irresponsibility, and the illusion of timelessness. The young and the drunk are both temporarily exempt from that oppressive sense of obligation that ruins so much of our lives, the nagging worry that we really ought to be doing something productive instead. It’s the illicit savor of time stolen, time knowingly and joyfully squandered. There’s more than one reason we call it being “wasted.”

  Of course time doesn’t stop for anyone; alcohol just keeps you from feeling it, the way it’ll keep a man cozy while he freezes to death. It elides the years as painlessly as it does hours; your twenties turn into your thirties the same way you’ll look at your watch one minute and it’s only 8:30—the night is young, all the time in the world—and then suddenly and without warning it’s last call. I found myself unexpectedly in my forties in much the same way I used to wake up disoriented on friends’ couches. I’m a little appalled by all the time I’ve lost. I don’t feel middle-aged—I just feel like I’ve been young a lot longer than most people. This lifestyle also leaves you with some conspicuous gaps on your résumé that can be hard to explain in job interviews. I now regret never having played hooky from school, not least because if I had I might not have felt compelled to play hooky from life for the next twenty years. Because it turns out that you can blow life off for as long as you want, but you still have to take the finals.

  But then, wasting time wasn’t exactly an unforeseen side effect of drinking; it was part of the fun. Of course it was fun; if drinking weren’t so much fun it wouldn’t be such a widespread and terrible problem. While responsible people were working their way up their respective professional ladders, my friends and I were spending whole days drinking bottomless pitchers of mimosas or Bloody Marys and laughing till we wept on decks overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. There used to be a bar located in one of New York City’s subway stations, where you could sit on a ratty old sofa drinking cans of Pabst watching the rush hour commuters stream past the doorway. Once in a while one of them would notice you there out of the corner of his eye, and for an instant you’d see him register the improbable vision you presented, like a glimpse of himself in a parallel universe. There is no drinking as enjoyable as daytime drinking, when the sun is out, the bars are empty of dilettantes, and the afternoon stretches ahead of you like summer vacation. The gleeful complicity you and your friends share in the excellent decision to have one more round, knowing full well you’re forfeiting the rest of the day (You know what? I can catch a later train)—you can almost physically feel something lifted from you at this moment, even if you know, on some level, that it will fall back more heavily later on. My friend Nick used to raise the toast: “Gentlemen—our lives are unbelievably great.”

  This bargain was not without typical satanic subclauses: you get to have far more fun than most sober people ever do, but you don’t get to remember it. I could tell you a few hundred hilarious anecdotes about those days, but the exact chronology of events gets a little hazy for a couple of decades. Nick and I once wrecked our friend Gabe’s entire dining room laughing at something one of us had said, whirling around and toppling over and clutching desperately at tablecloths and knickknack shelves, like a couple of robots gone berserk, but the next morning neither of us could remember what had been so funny. It’s gone, irretrievable, and, like lost masterpieces, it’s become enshrined in our imaginations as an unsurpassable ideal, the most hilarious joke of all time. But I still wish we could remember it. Maybe we’ll hear it again in the drinking halls of Valhalla.

  Memory is also how we learn anything. Even flatworms figure out, after a few bad experiences, to avoid the pathway with the electric shock. By contrast, it took me about four thousand trials to realize that drinking ultimately makes you feel worse. I was scandalized to learn that alcohol is technically a depressant. And once you’ve quit wiping your memory every night and having to reboot your whole personality every morning, your experience becomes cumulative instead of simply repetitive; you can start to see your life as something resembling a linear narrative, with an intelligible shape and possibly some meaning, instead of just a bunch of funny stories.

  We couldn’t go on living like that forever; as the traditional last call has it: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” One by one my old drinking buddies succumbed to the usual tragedies: careers, marriages, mortgages, children. And as my own metabolism started to slow, the fun:hangover ratio became increasingly unacceptable. Eventually a day comes when the lined, puffy, sagging face you see the mirror when you’re hung over does not go away, and you realize that it is now your actual face. The hangovers also acquired a dreadful new symptom of existential anxiety in addition to their more traditional attributes. Self-inflicted brain damage no longer seems so cool and defiant, nor wasting time so liberating. Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you’re running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells.

  I don’t miss passing out sitting up with a drink in my hand, or having to be told how much fun I had, or feeling enervated and depressed for days. Being clearheaded is such a peculiar novelty it feels like some subtle, intriguing new designer drug. I don’t know if it’s one I’d want to get addicted to, though. After a week or so of feeling optimistic and silly, my energy level back up near 100 percent, I start getting antsy and bored. Apparently I’m not content to be happy. Sooner or later you want to celebrate your improved disposition with a cocktail.

  I’m more productive now, and more successful; for the first time in my life I’m supporting myself by doing what I’ve always wanted to do. But I laugh less than I used to. Drinking was, among other things, an excellent excuse to devote eight or ten consecutive hours to sitting idly around having hilarious conversations with friends, than which I’m still not convinced there is any better possible use of our time on earth. Lately, in these more temperate years, I’m reminded of Shakespeare’s Henry plays after Falstaff has died: Prince Hal, having spent his twenties as a drunken fuckup, puts riotous youth and disreputable friends behind and finds a place in life for dignity, honor, and achievement—but it also feels as if everything best and happiest and most human has gone out of the world. As if great things may lie ahead, but the good times are over.

  Not long ago I celebrated my forty-second birthday. The evening started out grown-up and civilized, with Belgian ales and Chinese takeout at a quiet bar with friends, but the night took a turn for the puerile when one of my friends, whose age is the reverse of my own, insisted on taking me to another bar he knew nearby where patrons drink for free on their birthdays. This is the kind of bar I no longer spend any time in, having already logged eight hundred thousand hours in its like: a dark, raucous dive with cheap drafts and shots, loud rock and roll, and dank, graffitied bathrooms. He ordered me a concoction called a “car bomb,” which, through some ingenious evil alchemy, is composed of three potent neurotoxins but tastes like a chocolate milk shake. We punched Van Halen and Meat Loaf and the Charlie Daniels Band into the jukebox. We played fierce games of air hockey under a black light. We arm-wrestled with girls. Life
was unbelievably great. It felt just like turning twenty-four. The next morning I was hung over, and forty-two.

  The Czar’s Daughter

  The night we learned that our friend Skelly had unexpectedly died of a heart attack, his friends all got drunk in our respective cities and called one another back and forth throughout the rest of the night. A few hours after I’d phoned her with the news, Renée called me back from New Haven. “Tim,” she said, in what sounded like all seriousness, “has anyone notified Skelly’s daughter in France?” I could hear her husband, Kevin, laughing in the background.

  There was no daughter in France, you see. A lot of the things our friend Skelly had told us about himself were not, in the strictest, most literal-minded sense of the word, true. Once, when our friend Lara was complaining that her older daughter had been telling lies, Skelly broke in to defend her. “She makes up stories,” he protested. “She lies,” Lara said flatly. Skelly, who knew better than to contradict Lara when she was in one of these moods, let it go with an eloquently equivocal expression, as if to say, Well, that seems unduly harsh. It was as though he could see no point in arguing with the kind of person who would denounce Santa Claus as a hoax. Obviously this is how he thought of what he did himself—telling stories, making a dull and mundane life a little more interesting for us all.

  It would never have occurred to any of Skelly’s friends to call him a liar. Despite his incidental falsehoods, he was a fundamentally genuine person. As his fellow fabulist Blanche DuBois once protested, “I never lied in my heart.” He was authentic, decent, and kindhearted. Even though he was a very funny guy—ironic and self-deprecating, first to defuse an awkward moment with a dry aside—I can’t remember hearing him ever once say anything funny at anyone else’s expense, a statement I’m not sure is true of anyone else I’ve ever known. He’d had a younger sister with Down syndrome, and he told me he used to get in fights over her when he was a kid. He reproached anyone he heard using the middle school pejorative retarded. It was the only time I remember seeing him get angry, and we took it seriously, because it wasn’t the anger of a chronically angry man, but of someone who was essentially gentle. All our friends’ dogs recognized him as the nice one who always fed them and took them for walks. Rick and Lara’s daughters inexplicably called him “Wally,” a name that stuck. He told me that even as an adult he’d gotten into a few confrontations with people he saw mistreating animals or children. Whether this was literally true is irrelevant; the fact that he told such stories was a measure of his hatred of cruelty. Skelly’s stories were expressions of his innermost self as pure and unconscious as dreams.

  We met him while we were all working for one of those environmental groups that dispatch canvassers door-to-door to ask for contributions. The job was a refuge for people who were in what we’ll call times of transition. If you were lucky, your transitional phase was just the normal postcollegiate drift, a breather in which to work a low-demand job and drink nightly while you tried to figure out What Next. If you were less lucky, it came after Life #1 had failed to work out. So there were, in addition to the hard-partying young people on staff, an older contingent of former salesmen, lapsed clergymen, aging hippies, empty-nest housewives, and recovering addicts. It was not initially clear to which of these groups Skelly belonged. His drinking and drug habits seemed to place him in the former group; he closed down the bars and smoked pot and crashed on couches and floors with the rest of us kids in our twenties. But it was hard to gauge how old he might be; he was evasive on that question, as on a number of others, and he had the preternaturally youthful look of a science fiction or fantasy writer, someone who’d never quite grown up. Our vague sense was that he was about ten years older than we were—that is, in his early thirties when we first met. But we were never sure of his real age until we saw the birthdate on his gravestone.

  Gradually, in conversations in the van while we were waiting to be dropped off in suburban developments, or while having a smoke in neighborhood parks or playgrounds, putting off the dreaded moment of knocking on the first door of the evening, but mostly while sitting in the Rendezvous Lounge over cans of National Bohemian, an outline of Skelly’s personal history emerged, almost all of it false. He had grown up in Baltimore, gone to a local college and law school, and practiced law for several years (verifiably true). He’d closed his practice a few years ago because he just hadn’t enjoyed the work (qualifiedly true—it was a little more complicated than that). “When you’re a lawyer, people call you up and tell you about their problems all day,” he explained. “It’s frankly not pleasant.” He had lived in France for several years, and had a daughter there with a woman who’d died in a car accident; his daughter, Marie-Claire, was now in the care of her French grandparents, and he visited her once a year or so (totally untrue). He had just sold his first novel, titled The Czar’s Daughter, to a New York publisher (I wouldn’t bother looking for it on Amazon).

  As we later explained it to ourselves, Skelly had told us his most blatant fabrications at the beginning of our acquaintance, in a job with a very high turnover rate, and he clearly hadn’t expected to have to maintain these elaborate fictions for the next twenty years. Eventually, depending on our individual levels of guilelessness, we realized that not everything he’d told us was factually accurate. I’m pretty guileless, as it turns out. I remember asking him once or twice when his novel was going to be published, which, thinking back on it, makes me cringe on behalf of us both. Our boss, Bianca, once saw him walking on Charles Street in Baltimore when he was supposedly visiting his daughter in France. After a while we stopped hearing anything about the novel, or the daughter, and we certainly didn’t bring them up again. This is how it was with Skelly’s stories: at first we actually believed them, then we pretended to believe them, and then we pretended we’d never heard them.

  I was a cartoonist back then, and I used to incorporate caricatures of my friends into my drawings. I did this to Skelly only once—he was easy and fun to draw, with a mop of curly hair, a broad, froggy mouth, square glasses, and a mournful slope to his eyes that seemed to appeal to the viewer as if to say, You see what I have to contend with? In my cartoons, as in real life, he maintained an improbable dignity in the most demeaning of circumstances. But after his first appearance, Skelly forbade me ever to draw him again. At the time I thought he must just be sensitive about his appearance—and, admittedly, my caricatures didn’t flatter anyone—but now I think there was more to it. I think it made him uncomfortable to know that he’d been observed. He once told me sagely, as though it were a personal motto: “The less people know about you, the better off you are.”

  We could dismiss Skelly’s “stories,” as we called them, easily enough by making affectionate fun of them behind his back. More persistent and worrisome were the things we didn’t know about him, or weren’t supposed to know. Like that he lived with his mother. If an older lady’s voice ever happened to answer the phone when you called him, he explained, this was because if his phone rang a certain number of times the call was automatically forwarded to his mother’s house. This was a feature I had never heard of the phone company offering. Rick started referring to the elderly woman who sometimes answered Skelly’s phone as “the cleaning lady.” It was years before any of us saw the inside of his house; Kevin, who was dropping him off one night, finally begged to use his bathroom. He later reported that the décor looked suspiciously unlike Skelly’s taste: “I wouldn’t’ve pegged Skel as a doily man.” Eventually we all just discreetly dropped the pretense that he did not live with his mother without acknowledging that it had ever existed. By the time she died and we went to his house for the wake, where we met his mother’s sisters and friends, it went without saying that she and Skelly had lived there together.

  Another thing we weren’t supposed to wonder about was why he was always broke. Kevin once said that Skelly was always twenty dollars short of having exactly the right amount of money. But none of us ever begrudged him a twenty or
thought of him as a mooch. He’d make excuses about having already eaten when we’d go out to Sabatino’s, the sprawling Italian eatery that was open till three, insisting he just wanted bread, but we’d always tell him to stop being silly and help himself to his share of the bookmaker’s salad and order the tortellini. We were happy to pay for his company. We just liked it better when he was around. Now that he’s gone, we occasionally burn a few hundred thousand bucks in Chinese Hell Money for him, figuring wherever he is he’s probably already deeply in debt.

  His destitution was understandable after he “cycled out” of (got fired from) the environmental canvass, during an interval of un- or underemployment. One night during this period I drove an hour and a half down Maryland’s Eastern Shore to rescue him from a job working as a mate on an old sailing ship he’d nicknamed the Nightmare, which had broken down on its shakedown cruise and was in dry dock, where I found him hungry, freezing, and covered with epoxy. But it started making noticeably less sense after he started working at the Baltimore Opera’s fund-raising office. You always had to triangulate the truth of Skelly’s claims from the few available empirical clues, but we knew that he really did work at the opera (we’d seen his office and met his colleagues) and actually seemed to have risen to a position of some responsibility there. He was once sent to New York City for a training seminar for office managers, where he showed up with fifteen dollars in his wallet and no credit card, so that Rick had to put his hotel room on his own Visa, and also somehow lost his return train ticket, which I had to cover, and which he repaid with money he wired to me, necessitating a trip to one of those seedy check-cashing places down on Houston Street, where I had to stand in a long line of petulant, desolate people in a bare cinder-block room, plunging me briefly into the grim fiscal twilight world Skelly inhabited 24/7. “I have to work” became his standard excuse for not meeting you for a beer or showing up at a party. He seemed to do nothing but work, and yet somehow he was still always broke. It was something we talked and joked and wondered about, one of the Mysteries of Skelly, but somehow we never got any further than idle speculation over drinks. It turns out that when there is some conspicuous gap or contradiction at the center of someone’s existence, there is probably a very specific, obvious reason for it, and the reason you’re avoiding confronting it directly is that it’s something you don’t want to know.