This letter, written to a good friend with whom I went to college and who at the time was working as an English teacher in Madrid, captures the spirit of the last few months I spent as a married man. My wife had already given up on the sacred bonds of matrimony and was planning a new, swinging lifestyle around Morningside Heights. I was working as many hours as I could get as a proofreader in the reports department of Deloitte Touche located near the top of the north tower of the World Trade Center. I worked evenings. Every night the company provided a livery cab home. I didn't drink during the week, probably for the first time in five years, and then would binge on the weekends (an example of which you'll find below). I saved a good deal of money in a short amount of time, around four months. This provided me the nest egg I needed to escape from New York and relocate for half a year in the Emerald City before returning in the fall to try to salvage a marriage that had foundered.
Reading the letter just now I get some satisfaction in realizing that I hit all the points in the timeline laid out in the second-to-last paragraph. Also, I wish I could say after almost 25 years that I had it wrong, that I was just suffering from a depression brought about by an impending separation from my wife. But when I read the last line I think my assessment of adult life, as bleak as it is, is right on the money.
Spring 1990
Mark,
Got your letter Saturday night, the 24th, as I was on my way out and downtown for what would turn out to be an evening of too much drink -- bourbon, malt liquor, cognac -- and smoke that left me stumbling€ around between Broadway and Amsterdam in the vicinity of 110th Street unable to find the subway, unable to see the concrete mole's burrow that signals the presence of the subway in the inebriate's brain. Finally, after seriously considering grabbing a few winks in an abandoned doorway, I realized that I wasn't that far away from Gary and Eleni's apartment. After another 20 minutes of woeful stumbling, I located their place and amazingly remembered the apartment number, 1W. I rang the buzzer a few times and no one answered. So I turned back down the street, forlorn and truly tired, hoping that I'd find the mole's hole this time around; but half way down 109th towards Broadway I realized that there was no way I was going to make it. I went back and rang the buzzer one or two more times; Eleni pulled back the drapes -- they have an apartment on the ground level that faces the street -- saw that it was me and let me in. I apologized, said that I was too drunk to find my way home; explained that I was so drunk because I didn't really drink anymore but that when I did drink I drank quantity-wise as much as I used to when I drank 5 nights out of 7 days; all of this was muttered slurred crazy and earnest through a heavy jaw and rubbery lips. Eleni was slightly frightened because she'd been jolted out of bed at 3 in the morning and Gary wasn't home. He was down in Washington D.C. on his spring break visiting an old college buddy and attending some kind of physician's conference. (Ashley was in Guatemala with an old high school girlfriend staying with Colum and Terri.) The street that Gary and Eleni live on in is an honest to goodness drug dealing death zone.Gary called last night, Sunday night, the night after the Saturday evening I'm describing, and told me -- he's fresh back from Penn Station and Washington -- that two guys had just been shot outside his front door. Anyway, I apologized to Eleni and told her I could leave if she didn't feel comfortable with me being there. She said no, of course not, and unfurled a blanket on the couch. I climbed in; -- that was it, snores and lights out. In the morning Eleni got up at 8 o'clock because she had to go to work. She's working part-time at Macy's now and taking training courses to teach Berlitz, or something like that. I felt like death, breathing that heavy mournful sigh that drives all the way up from the center of the earth and shoots into your body through the soles of your feet, nestling in the belly, clawing into the lungs, and from there passing through the voice box and out of your mouth into the morning light of Sunday -- a new work week begins, ugh.
Anyway, first things first. The reason why I've been such a mute so & so is that I've been working like a dog since the first week of February. I'm doing 40-plus-hour weeks every week working as a proofreader for a huge accounting firm conglomerate in the World Trade Center. And while working long hours hasn't stopped me from writing before, what fucks me up in this case is the shift -- a 2nd shift, from 5 PM to 1 AM, which is usually more like 2 AM. When I get home its 2:30ish and Ashley is asleep and I can't make noise; either that or Ashley is waiting up for me with a nice little meal prepared and expects me to go to bed with her as soon as I've finished eating. Although I realize now since Ashley's been in Guatemala this last week that I'm too hungry and burned out when I get home to do anything more than rustle up some grub and switch on the TV for a few looks. This means that all my letter writing has to be done in the bright light of high noon and, more important than that, fully sober, something I haven't had a lot of practice at. Which brings up another substantial shift this job has created in my personal existential diddledeedoo -- I hardly drink anymore, at the most, twice a week on the weekends. When you're working nights, you just don't have the opportunities to get fucked up. And anyway, like I said, they've got me working like a dog at this place. It's crunch time, tax season, and they've got to get their annual reports off to their multi-million dollar clients. I decided not to be wasting what little energy I do have pissing in the toilet.
The reason why I'm working this job (after having vowed. never to return to office work) is so that I can save money for the big Seattle plan. The plan is that I'll be out in California by May, moving my way up I-5 to Oregon by middle to late May, and settling in Seattle by June. We're going to sublet the place here and Ashley is going to move down to the Morningside Heights-Columbia campus area. This is all being done with a strict sense of gloom and skepticism: more gloom -- but an optimistic gloom, a hopeful sorrow -- on my part, and more skepticism -- a joyful skepticism, a gleeful denigration -- on Ashley's part. Ashley's ready to throw in the towel on the relationship while I'm forever an adherent to the philosophy that everything'll get worked out in time. Oh, well. We'll see how it fares. I sure love her though, and always will.
Well, enough of that. New Orleans, huh? When would you do that? When the fuck are you coming home? Write and tell me precisely what your time frame is. I'm sorry I haven't been writing, and I'm sorry this letter is so harried and lifeless. I'm rushing it before going down to midtown to expedite errands prior to work. It's all so lonely and sad -- the horror of adult life; the ubiquity of the grave; and on top of it all, stronger than anything, bigger and more present than anything else, is the aloneness, the blankness and loneliness that is everything, everybody. Ouch.
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