Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise. I know about ending a dependency. Drink was destroying my life. Tobacco only shortens it, with the best parts over anyway. I got the preliminary word from my doctor by phone while driving alone upstate from the city to join my wife, Brooke, at our country place. After the call, I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of the passing late-August land. At mile eighty-one of the New York State Thruway, the gray silhouettes of the Catskills come into view, perfectly framed and proportioned.
How many times had I seen and loved the sight? How many more times would I? Showing how art should be done. She was thirty when she died in a plane crash, consummate. I was at the wheel of my first brand-new car since , a blue Subaru Forester that I dote on. I wanted for nothing. I want for nothing. The other night, I dreamed that I fetched the car from a parking lot only to find that it was another Subaru Forester, with two hundred thousand miles on it, dirty and falling apart.
But the real one sits gleaming on East Seventh Street today. Twenty-some years ago, I got a Guggenheim grant to write a memoir. I ended up using most of the money to buy a garden tractor. I failed for a number of reasons. Nor do I have much documentary material.
I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them. Susan Sontag observed that when you have a disease people identify you with it. Fine by me! No such selves exist. Playing the Dying Man Enter left. Exit trapdoor gives me a persona. Elvis Presley came on. Autumn leaves covered the sidewalks and ground. I met Richie coming the other way. What do you think?
Something had happened. Monochromeβlike the mausoleum-gray former Berlin Wall, which kids in West Berlin glamorized with graffiti. I had no sense of this, thinking that the kids who sucked up to me and the others who bullied me were reacting to my true self. This left me deeply confused. Years later, I asked my mother if she had been aware of the pattern. She said yes. My mother was a prairie princess, the only child of a school superintendent who doubled as a postmaster, from a tiny town in North Dakota.
