#50 - MY BIKE

This new bicycle was a Raleigh, a dark shiny blue-green English racing bike. Before I rode it away from the store on 14th Street I had them change the handle bars from the bent-in attack-style racing kind, where you are so hunched over you see nothing but the road in front of you, to something like the Schwinn with wide handle bars that I rode in Connecticut before I was old enough to drive. With the wide handle bars I can lean back and take in what is around me – the trees, the water. Sometimes when I am on the runners/cyclers path along the East River downward looking joggers pass me.

Sometimes I rise at dawn and circle Manhattan, up along the Hudson, then down along the East River. One day there is a limousine waiting by the helipad on the Hudson for what is surely some mobster coming in from Atlantic City, a uniformed driver and a burly cat-eyed bodyguard standing by the limousine scanning the sky. There are some warm days now and sometimes there are nearly naked girls, some of them surprisingly pretty, on the lookout for Jersyites with cash who drive through the tunnel.

#49 – EVERYTHING NEW

The thing was everything in these new meetings, like everything in these new-old places outside them, was new to me – like the paintings in the museums and the trees in the parks through which I was seeing my life in new ways, and the many people that had suddenly come into this life, all of this so surprising. All new, and not out of calculated adventure. For nothing in my life now in 1986 had a simple self-explaining context as in encountering headhunters or police thugs in places headhunters or police thugs were expected to be.

And this sort of newness was something I was aware I had not experienced in years. I flashed on when I was 24 and came not to visit but to live in New York – after school and a foray into wire service journalism and my Cuba adventure and the irrelevant peacetime draftee army. Everything back then was brand new to me. When I wandered into this area below 14th Street in the spring of 1959 looking for an apartment, I saw all these young boys with wide-brim grown-up hats and curled locks of hair – some entirely new ethnic group it seemed, for I had never heard of Hasidic Jews. And there were these corner candy stores with their square counters, where you could get drinks like egg cream and also sandwiches and all the older people were white and had accents. I am having a Coke in one of them and a burley young man with no jacket, which seems a the sure sign he is a guy from such a neighborhood, comes in swearing about prices. He has just been up to Times Square to see a new John Wayne movie, but when he found the price there was $1.98 he came straight back and he is saying he will never go up there again.

I had never heard of Ukrainians, and now there were these old women out on the sidewalk on Second Avenue taking the sun on steamer chairs in front of the old Ukrainian National Home. Much like old Polish people by the old Polish National Home on St. Mark’s Place, in a block that also had a couple of new art galleries. Second Avenue had new off-Broadway theaters and also something I had never been aware of – the Yiddish theater and a star named Molly Picon. I did not know about Ratner’s and Rappaport’s and blintzes. I had never been in an apartment like the ones I was looking at in the tenement buildings. One room opened onto another, not to a hallway but to the next room, starting with the kitchen in which there was a bathtub that had a top used for dishes and pots when the tub was not in use for bathing.

Side streets tended to be Puerto Rican, something I knew of but had not lived with. There was a Puerto Rican store across from my first place, which was this ground floor apartment that I shared with Jason Bacon, whom I had known since third grade in Connecticut. We had a cardboard sign in the window with the name of the magazine, Session, we were trying to start. I would often walk over to the West Village, by way of Washington Square which was filled with folk singers. I had liked folk music since I first listened to it as a child with the radio hidden under the covers in a house where no one else knew such music. Some of what I heard now was sublime, some ridiculous, like a young schoolgirl who was clearly a city girl singing about having no beans for her babies on her farm. One of the folks singers who sometimes played in the Park, and also at an up and coming Village place called Gerde's Folk City, was a Wall Street trainee, Frank, whom Jason knew from Yale. One night Frank was playing and singing his original songs for a group of us – anti-Eisenhower songs that went after each member of the gray and cruel Eisenhower businessman cabinet. Like the Interior Secretary, Douglas MacKay, whose name rhymed with “giving the land away.” It was a warm night and from our open window we heard people speaking Spanish in the street. And we suddenly heard a long anguished shout.

We watched as a man ran down the middle of the street waving a knife, which he plunged into another man, whose heart spouted blood like a fountain, and yet another man came speeding in with a noisy beat-up old car, picked up the killer, and sped away just before the cops arrived.

The people, all Puerto Ricans, who had been outside when the killing occurred stayed outside and gathered beneath our window to hear Frank sing. The cops came but could not find any witnesses on the street. Then they tried us, but we hadn’t seen anything either.

#48 – BOTTOMLESS PIT

Abigail had heard me talk about the parks, and knew that nearly every Saturday morning, before the early afternoon meeting I would be in the park. She said she wanted to meet me there.

I told her that at about noon I would be by the pond where they sailed the model boats. I thought that if I were waiting for someone else this could be a setting for a love story, a place to start a fine future. Though certainly not with such as Abigail. I congratulated myself on being big spirited enough to see someone who repelled me.

She spotted me standing by the pond on this very clear late winter Saturday. She marched over, grey and stone faced, in badly fitting trousers and dirty running shoes. I waited for what she had to say, but she just stood there looking at me. I thought she might be silently screaming that I had what she needed and was withholding it from her. But I told myself this was silly projection.

On Sunday evening I went a little early to the Corlears meeting. Janet was there already waiting on a folding chair. I sat beside her and we chatted. As usual, she had a book for me, and I had one for her.

The following morning there was an angry letter from Abigail stuck to my mailbox in Chelsea. She had actually come to where I lived. The letter began, “Far be it from me to tell you who to sit beside….”

It was as if I were being stalked.

47 – 90 DAYS

I was dating now, but not for long with Jenny. She had been telling me how frightened she was, including being frightened by an overbearing young man from ACOA who worked with her as a volunteer at Covenant House – this not long before it was discovered the priest who founded Covenant House was having sex with some of the street children his organization was meant to protect. Bonnie’s fear was not new. It had been clear just before the evening I went to her place with flowers. She had left a breathless message on my machine saying “Have you got it too? The obsession?” And when I got to her place, it turned out she had not gone to bed at all the night before since she was so excited about our date.

Now, she said, we’d better slow down. Too much in the air right now, she said. Things had gone so far so quickly that we should pull back and take 90 days off from sex.

Ninety days was a magical 12-step number, like the Bible’s 40 and 7. It came up in all the programs Jenny attended – 12 step programs that went beyond those for the obvious addictions of alcohol, food, gambling and drugs and took in such matters as procrastination, messy apartments, and love and sex. In these programs you were expected to start with 90 meetings in 90 days, and announce each day how many days you had into recovery from what you were trying to change. And later a 90-day time out was also standard practice when a relationship got so confused that your recovery from whatever you were recovering from was threatened.

It seemed silly to me. I had looked into AA the last time 11 years back when I had just stopped drinking. I did not attend now and I had attended only one meeting back when I came off 23 years of heavy drinking. So I had never gone through an official 90 days at the start. I had not announced my latest number of drink-free days in rooms full of supportive people. After that one meeting 11 years ago I had gone for coffee with a fat man from Alabama who had just canceled a trip home for the holidays for fear he would drink on the bus. I told him I was at the start of my non-drinking. He said I should make no sudden moves. Program people followed certain guidelines, he said. No travel. No new relationships. Not till you’ve had your first 90 days and then your first full year. Despite my belief in tolerance, I felt contempt for him.

Two weeks later I was on my way once again to the Far East, this time with a free ticket to Bangkok my book editor had arranged. Not long after I got there I met a girl in Manila and I was thinking that I was falling in love, and thinking, practically before we talked, that I wanted to marry her.

In the Far East that time I had passed the age of forty and had not had a single marriage yet. I had lived with Vannie and Bonnie and sort of lived with a few others, but I had never been married. And when I got to Asia sober I felt a nostalgia for so much that had never been. Western men I had known in the past were still there and all of them now had appealing Asian wives. Everyone was moving along except maybe me, even though, just off the booze, I had all this sudden energy. In quite quick succession now that I was back in Asia I went to Bangkok, Singapore, Djakarta, Bali, Taipei, Hong Kong. After a party in Singapore I went out to the old bars I had frequented. Not drinking now

I was an alien in this world, which reinforced the feeling that I was drifting away.

I went with a journalist friend and a guy with whom I had taken flying lessons in the deep past out to a rambling place called the Tiger Club, which had been a British forces club and was now open to just about anyone who wanted to join. Someone I met said he had to make a phone call. When he came back his said someone was driving right over who had to see me.

It was the school psychologist from the American school. He had been told on the phone that Fred Poole who was the one who wrote under the name Andrew Harris was in town. The school psychologist, Ed, a big, pleasant seeming man slightly gone to seed, had been telling people for years about his experience with Andrew Harris’s Bangkok After Dark, a soft core porn book I had written in the sixties. Ed had heard about an opening for a school psychologist at a private school in Bangkok. He had gone to a bookstore in Seattle, where he was practicing his school p trade, and the only book they had on hand about Thailand was the Harris book. Ed shook my hand now and said how much he had been wanting to thank me. The book was enough to him to divorce his wife before flying to Thailand, and the sex was everything Andrew Harris claimed, and then he taken this job in Singapore, and the sex was really great here too. It was not long after this that I got married in Manila.


It had been fun and sad that anyone would take that hack book so seriously, though it was mostly based on truth. Andrew Harris and Bankok After Dark, Taipei After Dark, Manila After Dark. And now some years later Andrew Harris was being asked to refrain from sex for 90 days.



Until now with Bonnie I had never honored the magic number 90, but I was relieved to have a break from her. In memories that were coming now there had been relief anytime anything, good or bad, came to an end. My marriage, so full of hope at the start, to that girl in Manila whom I had thought would be my life. My past times with Vannie, and also with Bonnie and Judy and with Rae and Irma and Anne Marie and Cathy, all the way back to Kitty. There had been all these hopeful beginnings, and projections about future possibilities for what might follow. But there were the endings.

#46 – THE PARK

On the main floor in the Met, on the way to the circular restaurant and the 20th century wing, I would visit a larger than life-size late classical Greek high-relief of a clearly nurturing woman on what remained of a funeral stele, a standing slab of white marble. It was said by whoever wrote the identification card that this was a farewell scene, and this big warm woman did seem to be saying a calm sad farewell, her beauty still there on what was left of a standing slap of marble, still there despite broken parts of the stone, including some of the part that was her nose. I saw her with her nose intact. This woman who brought comfort that I felt I needed now – just as I got comfort from the lively combinations of shapes and colors in a Deibenkorn, or the green banks in a Daubigny, or the mood of a Monet garden, or from lively exuberance in a Joan Mitchell abstract, or Hopper’s sunlight on his nude wife as well as on buildings. I would look at these works again and again to conjure up this needed comfort and counteract the equally true versions of the opposite, which I also needed – as in the edge of horror of Gorky’s diagrams into the end of life, or Matisse’s trapped boy at a piano lesson with a harsh gray woman just above him.

And there were these places in the parks that I was constantly revisiting. There was the stately grand passage between evenly spaced old trees through the Mall in Central Park, about which I made, to myself, a bon mot – “A place for important duels” – then realized I was constricting myself, categorizing much the way, it seemed to me, my brother would – categorizing and diminishing it and making it if not safe at least something very small. It did not seem small. I could not recall ever seeing the Mall before this new time.

From the Mall I went past the band shell and along to the heavy stone railings from which you looked down to the ornate Bethesda Fountain, which I had missed in its 60s heyday when it was a rallying point for the young. It was still there, and like so much else in life this year it seemed to me that, fears to the contrary, I was not too late. The people sill looked like sixties and seventies people, and walking through them on stilts were representatives form Vermont’s pure sixties Bread and Puppet Theater. I descended the wide steps leading down to the fountain. And from there I walked along a pathway following the fenced in side of the lake to an old boathouse restaurant and my memories of girls I used to take there. Amazed with each step how much more I could see now.

And then over to the Dairy, a rococo stage-set version of a building connected to a dairy, and on the way an octangular house on a hill with outdoor tables where old men played chess. I did remember this chess place. I remembered the spring afternoon that I had discovered the old chess players and the Dairy. I was 17 then and ready to leave childish nightmares, feeling strong and happy despite my throbbing head, that day being the day of my first hangover. In the night I had been with a group of boys from boarding school. They had accepted me at last as for some reason we were continually ordering rounds of a sickly sweet gin concoction called a pink lady. We had been in the many places where kids underage but in tweed jacket could get served – the men’s bar of the Biltmore, One Fifth Avenue, Eddie Condon’s, Julius’s. We had spent the night, five of us on a damp, smelly carpet in a room at the seedy Carter Hotel on seedy 42nd Street just in from Times Square. I went to sleep, or passed out, while singing something on the floor after announcing that I was suddenly able to sing. We had thought this was the hotel Holden Caulfield went to in The Catcher in the Rye, though unlike Holden we could not get anyone to send up a prostitute.

And then the next afternoon I had been in sunlight in the park looking at the octangular building and the Dairy. I had moved from the Carter Hotel to my grandmother’s. From the park, I stopped at a bakery on Third to pick up a cake she had ordered. I was served by a young and happy seeming, heavily accented Polish girl who seemed as excited as I was. I did not try to linger. The next day I would go to Elysa in Greenwich.

#45 – FOREWARNING

Another woman, who said she was a therapist, looked as disheveled as a bag lady despite expensive clothes. Someone I would cross the street to avoid, even when I might have shown sympathy after she said she had early Alzheimer’s. She lectured us about how we should get to know each other on the telephone, which she said was an “intimate device.” And there was Doris who kept twisting her face into a scary mask and talked crazy, saying things like “Let’s all limo uptown.” Henry, whom I had told about my getting off sleeping pills, had told Doris, and now she kept wanting little private talks with me about this problem.

There was an almost pretty girl named Roberta who leapt from subject to subject incoherently, except when she was describing how she spurned the advances of a rich ad man. I ran into her at the Modern one say and she said "We have to talk," so we went to the café for coffee and she told me she really did not want to get to know me.

A woman with wild red hair who looked like someone who could be both nice and nasty in an office talked of how she was not only a therapist, she too, but a very good one. Because of coming from an awful family where she had had to please everyone, she understood everyone. She described meeting a man at a hotel swimming pool and going straight upstairs to fuck. “And of course,” she said, “the fact that I had to please both my mother and my father is the reason I am bisexual.” She was not nearly so nice seeming as the one who told the group about how she had connected with a toll taker at the Lincoln tunnel, and crossed to Manhattan and then driven straight back through the tunnel to meet the toll collector at a Day’s Inn near the tunnel entrance. And a woman with a deeply lined face – “Premature because I ski,” she said – said of everyone present, “Pets and children stay away from us.”

And then there was a very gray, fiercely mousey woman named Abigail, whom I thought at first must be a telephone operator, because she looked like a former telephone operator I knew in Nicaragua, though the one I knew there was the opposite of what I had thought when I first saw her, for that one was a brave Maryknoll nun and the leader in a house with younger out-of-uniform liberation theology nuns who helped me gather material on the awful ruling Somozas. There was no indication Abigail had such an interesting life. She talked of being an unrecognized, unemployed academic. She talked of how until recently she had worked in theater in wardrobe, but she hated that, and now she was a temporary office worker, which she hated too but not so much. Nothing at all like the nun in Nicaragua, who had turned out to be warm and amusing as well as smart and courageous.

Abigail did turn out to be extremely sharp intellectually, which somehow made it worse, rather than cause me to revise my first impression. Peter Cooper, who came down to visit from Vermont, went to some meetings with me, and hit it off with Abigail. Before he went back to Vermont he asked me if I would get Abigail’s address for him. So I passed this along to her, and the next time I saw her she had two carefully lettered white cards with all her contact points on them. And I think she winked when she said “This is for your friend. And you.”

It wasn’t much to go on but I knew I was being stalked.

#44 – DESIRE

It was hard to realize it had been so recent that my Philippines book appeared and gave me no satisfaction, that I had been to the Bahamas with the sleek blond photographer lady from Rome, and that that was no better, and then to New Hampshire where I saw my nearest and dearest as they really were, and then the blackest of black depressions, not quite cured by a trip to Vermont, but then this program where people of all ages, and with no preconditions moved deep into the sort of past that I had thought could cut off life. And now, just a few months later, I knew more people than I had known in places where I was connected, even here in New York. Also, I was aware of how, despite people I had known for years, I had spent so much of my time alone. And, mysteriously or not, I had in these months gone longer without depression than I could ever remember anywhere on any of the continents I had lived on, or seas I had sailed on, or places to which I had traveled in my head.

One thing about these meetings, everyone seemed interesting, which was not the way I had thought of people in groups. And moreover, there was no lack of appealing women. It was not just Annie and Janet and Tina and Susannah and Bonnie and Bonnie’s soap opera friend. There was Mary, who looked a little like a Scandinavian doll, and in a meeting talked about a waking dream in which she was in fact a doll and lashed to the front of a tractor-trailer truck that kept crashing into all vehicles in its way. I saw her one day standing, looking pert and ready as if headed out on a date, at the open door of a #6 subway car that I had just left by another door at the 51st Street stop. As we were connecting, her door slid shut and she was smiling a “What can I do?” smile as the train pulled away.

A touching woman in her late thirties who had moved out of New York and away from the Manhattan ACOA meetings, appeared at Smithers, and announced she was back and had just signed a contract to do a children’s book. “And that’s pretty neat,” she said, with a smile that seemed a smile though tears.

A big bouncy girl had all male, and quite a few female, eyes locked on her as she described her difficulty with relationships, but this within the framework of describing how at first she and her current boyfriend had rolled around like puppies. And a very young, tightly wound, girl at the Thursday Corlears meeting sat there looking calm and very pretty, even when a new guy who said he was a “recovering sex addict” moved his chair close to hers and stared at her chest.

And then on a Sunday evening I saw someone new in the circle at the Sunday Corlears meeting. A blonde woman. A blonde girl. Wearing what looked like thrift store clothes. She did not seem beaten down. The clothes seemed to drape, rather than hide, what was underneath. An expression of interest and amusement and curiosity on her young seeming face. Not saying much – just her name, Gillian, when people gave their names at the start of a meeting – but letting it be known she had recently been living in India. A girl/woman with a body that, though covered, seemed to flow as she sat there playing with the tresses of her hair, twisting a lock between thumb and forefinger, pulling the hair up, then letting it fall down, rippling over her shoulders and, like her clothing, around her breasts. I hoped no one noticed that I was not paying attention to anything else going on in the room.

#43 – TRACKING BLACK

I bought books about art. This was out of my old book reading habits. The books were mostly worthless. It was like the way I took notebooks with me to those meetings. I did make some notes in them, but the notes were as useless as the linear art histories, for what I was hearing in meetings, and seeing in paintings, was not some linear thing to figure out and categorize with simple insights. These meetings, these paintings, were always about a life, with all the mystery found inside a life.

Art was for me so clearly about this mystery of life. If I read the gray critics and art historians it was from force of habit in the same way I might scan reviews of books by literary critics trapped in theory.

I did sometimes look up the artists I was following. And I even read some silly reviews of some of the art I was experiencing. A man named Russell in the Times had just done what he apparently considered a major piece in which he told New Yorkers that they should forget the Impressionists, who were good for nothing except maudlin middle class sentimentality, and instead they should focus now on things like a large, gruesome, realistic Titian that showed a man being flayed alive. For their own good.

My education in visual art in this time I took the plunge was entirely visual. I had no words for the way Andrea del Sarto used black in his depiction at the Met of the Holy Family, but black took me into Murillo, the only classical Spanish painter with whom I connected then, though the academics insisted I should love Velázquez. And Murillo’s black took me to Goya, and black also took me into Manet, which in the Met also led me into those wonderful women of flesh in Courbet, who understood black too.

Andréa del Sarto’s young women, sometimes Madonnas, based on his girl/woman wife, could move a viewer to tears without the viewer having to know as I knew (well I did find it in books) that he loved her passionately and that when he fell ill with plague she deserted him. I did not know who the Venetian woman was who appeared over and over in the form of Bellini Madonas, but there was a heightened reality for me here. There was something here I knew and often sensed in nudes. And I found myself returning to a woman who appeared in Madonna paintings by Francia. She had a face like I had only seen in life once before, the face of my friend, nearly girlfriend, Linda (pronounced Leenda), whom I had meet in a strange back street office in Amman, Jordan.

Linda had just come up for a few says from Washington, where she had gone while married and where she now worked for a Palestinian organization. I had first known her in Amman and Lebanon, where her curiosity had led to fascination. This time when we met we went to the museums together. One look at a Hobbema and she knew what it was all about. And this had made me wonder if there were not more than the Hobbema summer day I had to give up.

A day later, alone, I looked at the Constable White Horse that hung near a Hobbema in the Frick, Constable’s scene by a mill where you smell the hay and muddy water and the horse. It was one of the paintings in my now regular rounds of New York museums that had given me great hope – like the late midieval nudes of Cravath, anatomically incorrect but so loving as to be real, or like Matisse’s small bronze nudes, or Alfred Lord Stevens’ evocations of his love for everything he painted.

Standing face to face with the Constable I made a sad farewell, thinking for a time that if I could not have the summer day in Hobbema I could not have it anywhere. Hobbema whose dark Dutch woods, had led me in memory into the darkness of the White Mountains. And now the darkness of the White Mountains seemed so complete that it left no room for anything anywhere that said otherwise.

It seemed to me for a time that, although Constable had made a try at covering up horror that lay underneath, his attempts were not good enough. And for a time now I could not look at Monet, my favorite since I was 16, without seeing what he did with pure color as deceptive, even when he took you into darkness in his big water lily panorama at the Modern. A nice try, and I wished I could stay with it. Wished I did not have to trash Monet in the manner almost of a dead critic, and leave Monet in the same place as the sentimental art used by bullies, whether in Nazi Germany or in Life Magazine, to cover up their grim deeds.

I thought for a time that I had fewer choices now that I saw Hobbema's summer day in terms of darkness and betrayal. And it was as if all the best landscape painters were now leading me to the darkness of old New Hampshire as surely as black led to Manet.

So it seemed I had to say farewell to Constable. So much had changed in the landscape of my own past. If the apparent warm beauty of the White Mountains had never been what it seemed, and could not be trusted, neither could Constable’s version of natural beauty.

And I kept thinking of how Linda on another trip two years back had introduced me to Alice Miller. Also to Freud’s Melancholia and Mourning, but especially to Alice Miller. And then I was thinking of a time in 1973 after I left Amman, and Linda was caught there in the Yom Kippur War, and afterwards had come to Beirut and stayed with me and we had almost been a couple, and again once when she stayed with me in New York and very briefly we acted like lovers but did not become a couple there either.

And now the lack of connection in my past life seemed to have something to do with the earth shaking connection I was experiencing between aqua and blood red – the aqua skies in early Flemish paintings that were on my now regular route though the Met’s European painting section and the blood red with which the skiles were streaked. Aqua and blood red leading me, as black did too, not just from one artist to another but from one part of life to another, from one present time into past times. In the East Village I saw aqua and blood red again in a harsh and biting feminist artist’s depiction of a woman crucified. Such razor-edge sexually that it could have been Gorky that got her, or me, there.

And then in the East Village I came upon not Hans Hoffman but someone who had studied with Hans Hoffman and I knew these colors, that seemed to change positions and relationships as I looked, were important to me even if I could not quite catch them now. And maybe I had tried too hard intellectually to catch the abstract paintings Vannie had done that I liked so much so very long ago when I was first living in New York.

In another East Village gallery I saw paintings by a man who did not start painting until he was 80, and could bring life even to a depiction of a tile-covered building in ways that could escape a more carefully trained artist. And I was thinking that I am a mere kid compared to this guy.

And also in the East Village all these story paintings that I had not known anyone was doing. A series done by a couple – actually two people co-existing, to my amazement, on the same canvas – that had K-Marts and Indian canoes mixed up with each other in no longer innocent landscapes. And there were several series of paintings that had to do with what was most on my mind – the mystery and entrapment and torture of childhood.

I came back to these amazing East Village galleries many times without Suzanna. And more than once a gallery owner said she or he assumed that I was an artist.

#42 – INVITATION

#42 – INVITATION

Suzanna the actress was the one who said how good I looked in the white jacket. In the meeting just ended she had given a vivid and sexually loaded picture of hunting up her younger boyfriend at a café in Park Slope where she knew he would be eating breakfast. Suzanna was glamour.

She wore her black hair sometimes partly down and sometimes partly up with what looked to me like incense sticks in it, which felt to me either black or white magic. A week before this I had gone to see her current production, a one-woman off-Broadway show way over on West 43rd Street. She played a series of famous woman athletes, yet stayed totally feminine, and more appealing than ever as she moved about the stage like a trained dancer, raising her arms above her head to show a victory but seeming to me, who had so little use for athletes, more like an unusually graceful woman taking joy in her triumphs.

In this meeting just over I had been talking about my adventures with paintings and the memories they aroused. I spoke of how I was getting my information visually now, and hardly ever through words on paper though my identity had been so tied to my being a writer. I said I was wondering how much the writer idea had had to do with showing the family I was not the small figure they took me to be, showing them by going for success in a field that, for the family, was still dominated by my late grandfather. Also, how much it had had to do with competition with my brother, whom I had been sure the family thought would be the successor to the grandfather.

Susan asked now if I had been in the galleries in the East Village. There had not been much of a gallery scene when I had last lived there 24 years back, which was before the name East Village had been created. If there had been galleries Vannie and I would have been in them fast. I was only vaguely aware that there were galleries now. My wife had known someone doing something with beads down there but it did not seem serious. And I had not been to the small theaters for years. I had known that some exile Filipinos who came into my last book were involved with the theater called La Mama, which was on the block of 4th Street where I had seen so many plays so many years ago. But I had thought,without checking, that La Mama now would be both shriveled and pretentious. I had stayed away from the East Village until this new time when I was revisiting the area because of weekly ACOA meetings – after that very crucial New Year’s Eve meeting on St. Mark’s Place. Which was why I did not know all these galleries had sprung up. I had been focusing on church basements, and a small a Polish restaurant where we went afterwards to talk and eat Kielbasa.

On my way to and from meetings I tended to be more in the past than in the present when I was in this part of town, imagining the Phoenix Theater still alive in the years before it became the Fillmore East, and imaging that the old Yiddish Theater and Molly Pican were still in operation on Second Avenue, and it was almost as if I could still see the big old dairy restaurants Ratners and Rappaport’s. And I thought of the young Vannie down on 4th Street, and the other girls I knew back then, including Alma whom I had first known in college when she was a hustling, delicate girl who looked powdered and pampered and fresh amongst more worn-out dance hall women at the Tango Palace on the north end of Times Square.

For a brief time while I was in college my parents had a small basement studio apartment on 10th Street in case they wanted to spend a night in the city, and since they rarely did I could use it sometimes. It was across from an Episcopal church that, the neighborhood notwithstanding, was so classy it called itself St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie – Bouwerie not Bowery. That one-room place was not exactly where I lost my virginity, but close enough. I had paid Alma by endorsing over the modest check that had been my Christmas gift from my parents. And seven years later she spent a night in my tenement building, which fronted on the 11th Street side of the church.


When I was in White Pines in New Hampshire I had always been aware that I was moving in the present in a place set in the past. But in my place on East 11th it never seemed to me that this was in territory that had been parents’. Any more than it occurred to me now with Suzanna, though I would hear my brother somewhere saying we should pull ourselves together and stop complaining.


But it was so clear that this past that was on my mind now was my past, not theirs.
And now Suzanna was saying I really did have to see these galleries in the East village. And if I’d like, she’d meet me there and show me around.

So on a crisp, bright day we met at a new espresso/vegetarian place down on Tompkins Square, and as we roamed she told me some of her story – a rich and harsh doctor father who loved sailing and took his boat to Bahamaian island called Green Turtle Quay, one of the little known small islands populated by very pale descendants of Scotsmen who had been shipwrecked in the previous century. This all-white place being one of the places I had been to so recently, yet so far in the past it already seemed, with the stylish blonde photographer.

In bright daylight everything about the East Village was new to me. Vast stretches of condemned buildings, some of them “liberated,” by squatters who proudly announced what they were doing on big signs. And in several places between buildings vacant lots had been turned into people's parks complete with heavy vegetation and graffiti slogans and mural paintings of Ché Guevara. And young people everywhere.

A present I could not smother or confuse with any past. And oh my God, the new galleries were a feast!

#41 – STILL UNSPOKEN

At the head of the long table in that darkened hospital conference room what I was doing was presenting my first qualification in ACOA before a group of actual adult children of alcoholics or worse.

They called it “qualifying,” I was not sure why. It was a term carried over from AA, where the language in the literature seemed to be the irony-free language of Midwestern Rotarians. When you led a meeting you were to start by giving a talk about your own experience – like what I was doing for the first time this Sunday afternoon.

You might be behind a podium, or on a chair in a circle, or, like I was now, at a long table filled with adult children, with many more on folding chars in rows down from the end of the table. To one side of me was a scroll that listed the 12 steps to recovery – this AA thing that many of us in ACOA ignored. Another scroll containing numbered items was headed “The 12 Traditions,” and seemed to consist of rules for good behavior in AA and other programs. This was not relevant either, since Manhattan ACOA people took pride in circumventing rules.

After you spoke, a meeting would turn into a sort of forum that you led, calling on people with raised hands who wanted to share matters from their own experience. What hit me hardest was that so many people’s stories appeared when they heard my stories.

My problems with my twin brother – who, I repeated, was in the CIA – might lead to a tearful Germanic lady’s problems with her lesbian lover. The snobbery in my family’s old summer domain might lead to a Vietnam veteran’s chilling tale of being odd man out, apparently dispensable, in a combat brigade. It was as if there were more truth to my own stories than I had believed could ever be made evident.

And it seemed I could say anything here and these people would receive it without criticism. This even though I had never seen most of them before, and with none of them did I have even as deep a connection as my brief connection with Bonnie. I could say anything, and it was seeming that I could count on support here in this darkened room that I would never have expected outside it. And yet there was a big area that I did not touch, either in my background, or foreground. This area that contained my experience in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

My not talking about NH was not because I did not think what had gone on there was relevant to me. But I was not sure why it was so relevant. And it did not seem possible to make anyone, even these kind and empathetic people, much less myself, understand.

I was still very new to this time in which it was possible to question anything without building up defense for an inevitable backlash. When I qualified I was just days away from my experience with the Hobbema painting that in my mind was meant to be a happy summer day painting but became a painting of a terrifying place, with his dark woods becoming mixed in my dreams with the dark woods of New Hampshire, my life’s central supposed happy summer day place.

One thing I did say in that meeting was that now I was off on the biggest journey of my life. It gave me a chance to throw in matters that I thought would make me seem interesting, my adventures in far off and dangerous and in some cases barely explored places. But this journey underway now, this traveling that was time travel….

I began to tear up as I told these people that it was by far the highest stakes journey in all my travels in years of constantly traveling. And this was hardly something made up to make myself seem interesting, for I had all these premonitions about that place, the White Mountains, and I had only recently begun this time travel trip, to get to what I knew without knowing yet why I knew what I knew, to access why on some nearly hidden level I knew so much about the darkness, the precariousness, the suppressed horror, of that beautiful place.

And it was certainly not because I felt I needed to protect those very correct people in those summer towns, those white glove Episcopalian, like my grandparents. These Republicans,except for my grandparents. But it was just that no one would understand.

My not talking about New Hampshire was because I did not yet think any one could understand such a place. Not because part of it was a rich place, though that was an element even though so many in the family had seemed to think of themselves as verging on poverty. And it was certainly not because I felt I needed to protect these very correct people in those summer owns, those white glove Episcopalian Republicans (except for my grandparents). But just that no one would understand.

My not talking about NH was not because I thought the place was so strange but more that I did not think it possible to get across to any strangers what the place was and meant.

#40 - COMPLICATION

Debbie, Danny'’s early forties ex-girlfriend, had fine legs she showed off with fishnet stockings. Tina, early thirties, had red hair and a butterfly shoulder tattoo on her dark Mediterranean skin. Both had had recent affairs with a predator in his 60s who seemed to get around everywhere in the 12-step world, even here in ACOA, which was barely a 12-step program. Both felt the need afterward for AIDs tests, which was still something quite new.

The beaten down man with the tangled gray beard, who I had found so annoying with his spouting of comfortable clichés, kept turning up at meetings. He was said to be a popular figure in Alanon. He confessed in ACOA now that he really wanted to meet girls younger than himself, for he actually had not had a girlfriend in years – if ever, I thought – but now, he told a meeting, he would have to hold back again, because what was coming to the fore in these meetings was incest.

Anyone who went to these meeting knew it was turning up over and over – these meetings where nothing short of racial bigotry or necrophilia was ever suppressed.



Danny told me about a meeting I had missed where a girl related in a high, careful voice how when she was still at home her father would come back from work and take her straight upstairs for fucking, and after awhile when dinner was nearly ready her timid mother would call up to the father, “Are you finished yet?”

“I have to admit it was stimulating,” said Danny, who so clearly had enjoyed it. He had once been married to a very Wasp woman with whom he had two children who were now adults. He lived on unseasoned macrobiotic rice dishes, and practiced Buddhist meditation. But he was brilliant and witty. He talked of how he came from a family of uneducated Slovaks, Slovaks being, he said, the only ethnic group in Europe that by late in the 19th century still did not have a written language. And moreover, he said, “In my family the men when they come and go kiss each other on the lips.”

Danny talked a lot about time he had spent in Buffalo on business. He said people were different there. He said that if he got married again he would marry a simple girl from Buffalo.

AS PARIS LOOMS

I all too frequently hear some wimpy novelist, whether of the thriller or nice-nice variety, talking on public about how he or she lets the characters take over, and it is just so surprising, these fools say, what they see these mostly made-up characters do in their mostly made-up situations.

And the fawning interviewer often says that this nonsense proves the conventional novelist is brave. The novelist who plays it safe by running fast from anything real.

Recently, as our Paris trip comes closer, we have been moving back to Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Sometimes they get into literary fantasy too, but this is rare, for it is so clear that they – in the manner not so much of novelists as of the best of today’s memoir writers – work hard to find out what is in the concrete reality of their own lives – not some fantasy thing that disturbs no one and makes professors of literature and conventional writing teachers feel safe.

#39 – CLOTHING

I was sitting at two tables put together in a raised corner section at the back of a big coffee shop on 7th Avenue near 15th that I must have passed often though I had not noticed till very recently when it became one of our after-meeting hangouts. I was with Lena, whose sister had an art gallery for dealers, Annie who was breaking out of too many years being only a nurse, and Lewis Greenberg who had retired from teaching, and Arthur the art photographer, who said he was glad I had joined ACOA because "we need successful people too," and a pretty dark haired girl, so young she seemed to have baby fat, who was in the city as a nanny, and Sally the therapist who was looking less hang dog each day, and Paul, who looked pure preppy though his particularly vicious father lived and did bad things in Spain, and an enclosed, tense man named Jimmie who just seemed lost, but came anyway. The were all congratulating me on a white windbreaker jacket I had picked up that day at the army-navy store down Eighth near 13th. And I was also wearing an expensive, for me, green checked flannel shirt I had picked up at Saks, and also a thick blue checked wool scarf I got from Lord & Taylor, and in addition, from a store on 8th Street, a new Woolrich denim shirt and new Docker’s made of blue denim giving the allusion of Levi’s. The latter I liked best but I had credit cards left over from the marriage for Saks and Lord & Taylor, and what they had was anyway far better than what I was as used to.

For one day recently as I woke up I had realized that I hated the way I dressed. Prissy Wasp clothing that I had always detested but wore anyway. Like those clothes I had wound up wearing at Princeton.

At first in college I kept my hair a little long and slicked back, and I had worn ordinary shoes like my father’s military surplus shoes that you could buy cheap at Modell’s in Grand Central, and I avoided the thin, humble neckties that were in fashion then. This was was my style still one night on Christmas vacation in my first year when I had a movie date with a girl named Trish in Stamford who was a distanct cousin of Elysa’s and like Elysa went to Miss Hall’s up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

We came in late at Trish’s house, where the lights were on but very dim. Her father, who looked like an off-duty CEO, was sitting in the living room in pajamas chain smoking and taking little white pills. Trish and I went down to a warm, plush basement room, which we kept very dark, and it was my first time really getting under a girl’s bra, and Trish was what I had hoped for. The feel of skin. The girl scent. We rolled around on cushions on the thickly carpeted floor accompanied by Frank Sinatra on the console.

When we went upstairs at around 3 a.m. we were waylaid by the pajama-clad, pill-popping father who said he had something important, to tell me.

You don’t have that short hair yet, and you’re not wearing white bucks or cardigans, and you don’t have a charcoal gray suit jacket and khakis. And your shirt is not a button down and it does not look like Oxford cloth. You aren’t in uniform yet. He paused for another pill. But you will be soon, he said. Everyone at Princeton gives in. His eyes gleamed in what might have been triumph or might have been the pills.

Up till this time in early 1986 I had had prissy wasp clothing. I wore humble shirts (athough no longer Oxford cloth) that mixed fake fibers with cotton, cut-rate office clothing (though I had no office) from a chain of small stores named Bancroft that were spread around the Rockefeller Center area. When I started going to meetings it was before Saks and Lord & Taylor, much less that army-navy store down near 13th Street and a store on 8th Street that carried Woolrich. I was not wearing neckties, but I wore a sport Jacket with my old anonymous khakis of the sort for which I had no affection but which I had been wearing for 35 years. I owned very little. The two jackets I had, one a brown near Harris Tweed, the other an actual Navy blue blazer that had brass buttons with embossed nautical anchors, came from a thrift store near the 50th Street 8th Avenue subway stop. The sort of thing people wore way back in the flat Eisenhower era, but not so much now all these years later.

Why hadn’t I owned a decent scarf? The one I had before the blue Lord & Taylor one was dirty brown, so worn and thin a wind would go right through it. And caked with something that could be gum or coagulated gravy. It had probably belonged to my father 40 years back. These were death clothes, it now seemed.

I felt light the moment I started throwing my regular clothes out. Why in the world did I wear these jackets and shirts if I had not been in a real office since the last time I was a job holder, which was briefly at Time-Life in the 1965 just before I flew off to Bangkok. Just before I began my life on the road.

My ex-wife had sent down a box filled with things I had left in our apartment when I departed. They had arrived in a box which had contained a color TV set, which told me that now she was able to have the kind of television she wanted. In the box I found a wool sweater. It must have been an old Christmas present. It was a sort of muted dark turquoise. Which was as stylish as L.L. Bean ever got. I went to a meeting on the West Side wearing no jacket, just the sweater, and felt I had taken 20 years of my age.

At coffee afterwards at a place on Broadway this very lively long-haired ACOA young lady at my table said how great it was that the sweater matched the color of my eyes.

#38 – PUBLIC SPEAKING

At first it has been impossible to talk at the meetings. Then a couple of weeks before Christmas an advertising guy had come up to me after the Saturday meeting at the Quaker place and asked if I would like to join a weekly men’s meeting that, unlike all the other ACOA meetings, was by invitation. I did not like the idea of segregating the sexes – the way it has been long ago at boarding school and college and the draftee army – and yet I found it easy to start talking here. I thought this was more because I has been invited than that it was a men’s group. I spoke now of my misadventures with the blonde photographer in the Bahamas – part confession and part subtle boasting that I had such a life. She had just called me from Puerto Rico complaining that I had not called her.

I also spoke of my years of roaming the world, and this was when it became clearer to me how I had been drawn to extremely dangerous places. Boasting again, yet something else happening when I brought what I was boasting about to light.

One of the members of this group was a disturbing gay guy who in meetings screamed “get out of my bed” as he described his mother getting into his bed. The advertising guy spoke of wrestling with relationships with women. There was an actor who spoke of depression. It seemed that everyone here had suffered from horrible depression.

The actor spoke at length one day saying we were not really going deep enough. It made me angry, using a session of this group, it seemed to me, the way he would use some confrontational actors' group exercise. Worse, he singled me out for the way I just sat there taking notes and talking very little. The next week he apologized to me and the whole men’s group. At the last meeting before Christmas he suggested we all stand and sing Joy to the World, which, to my surprise, felt pretty good.

So I was talking a little and getting some laughs. But now I was scheduled for what felt like a full performance.

This public debut was at St. Vincent’s. It was not the writing meeting but rather a much bigger meeting, currently chaired by Jenny who scheduled me to speak. The venue was a large conference room across Seventh Avenue in a building that before St. Vincent’s took it over as an annex had been the headquarters of the old seamen’s’ union. It was very close to where I had lived between Greece and Asia.

In this darkened conference room Jenny, seeming soft and happy, introduced me. I spoke from the head of a long table at which ACOA people were seated. And there were many more ACOA people further out in the near dark on folding chairs. Beforehand I was as nervous as I had been at 15 at Boston University before the finals of the New England championship tourney for high school and prep school debaters.

But this was no mere competitive debate. And, unlike a debater, I was not prepared to argue either side of anything. This was life and death, and here in this darkened room I spoke of how after my brother and I left home my parents got two kittens, named one good cat and the other bad cat. I talked about family pretensions, like the fake British accents. I went heavy on my brother, the good twin, and his colonial English wife and how they called the part of Virginia they lived in “fox country.”

With what I thought was quite good timing, worthy of one who had been a champion debater, I let it be known that my brother lived where he lived in Virginia because it was an easy commute to his job at the CIA – mention of which brought gasps in the audience. I talked about how when I was a child they had gotten angry at me when I was mourning the slow death of my floppy, silky brown dog named Brownie. And just as important, how they put me down for giving him such a regular person’s name. Brownie was hit by a car, came home to lie in our yard, had more and more trouble breathing, then after several days, died. I somehow related this to the motorcycle death long ago of Cousin Paul, and the cancer death in the past summer of Cousin Margaret, who said she wanted to die because of what they had done to her. And to the precarious state of all the other cousins.

And I felt I was getting closer and close to darker things than these deaths.

Jenny said afterwards it was one of the best meetings ever.

#37 – KILLING WITH THEORY

There was a sense that what was going on in Manhattan ACOA could not last. The program was always in danger of being taken over by orthodox 12-step people or by orthodox advocates of therapies that stopped short of meaningful results. They were already laying siege, much like literary critics and academy-approved novelists and small town failures who find to their horror that there are writers loose who are saying things no one should be allowed to say.

Scared representatives of convention were coming in from all directions attempting to bury with constructed generalizations what was real in the stories of my new ACOA friends. Sometimes these attacks came from AA people who said things like, “I used to blame my family but now I appreciate them. They had nothing to do with my drinking. I drank because I am an alcoholic. End of story.” Some AA people could get really angry about our probing the past and our showing anger about what we found.

More than once an Alanon person came to an ACOA meeting wearing a frozen smile, and said how much she admired the bravery of those who spoke, and then was never seen at a meeting again. And sometimes these anti-ACOA people got support from the very people they thought they had to subvert. One quite young woman who was overweight, a little pimply and clearly in pain talked in the meetings of the problems of being so pretty, then vanished from the meetings. I saw her on the street shortly afterwards looking anguished and no prettier than I remembered. “I’m fine now that I’ve stopped going to meetings,” she said. “I’ve stopped whining. I got rid of all that negativity.”

The policing and the self policing reminded me of what went on in other spheres. Again those literary and art critics who are so scared of anything new and strong.

I thought of my brother’s reaction at the start of the seventies when he heard Harper’s Magazine Press gave me a $5000 advance for a novel based on my wild time in Bangkok. My brother’s next door summer neighbor, my old friend Mickie, told me what he had said to her: “It should not have happened. Fred did everything wrong. He didn’t even go to graduate school!”

How similar, it seemed now, to what was happening with Manhattan ACOA, where people who had been nearly silenced were letting themselves be heard. Refusing blind obedience to past strictures, so much like the very best modern artists and writers who always defy the academy and the critical establishment and the publishers and dealers.


On sale with other literature at most ACOA meetings, however, was Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child – a take no prisoner’s approach which sided with the abused and not the abuser. She was uncompromising in going after real stories. And I had started reading her just as my life had seemed at a dead end.

At first other books on sale at the meetings seemed to back up Miller, but not for long. For these other books could have the effect of making real stories small by forcing them into very precise categories of stories, to bury your own story beneath some catch-all universal story.

This felt a little like what Plato did two and a half millennia back by forcing things that were real into idealized forms of things. No wonder that Plato felt the only art that should count was art that helped make people docile supporters of the state.

The other books on sale at the meetings were by therapist-writers who specialized in ACOA subjects – Janet Woititz, Claudia Black, Sharon Wegsheider-Cruise. They were proponents of the idea that families could and should be looked at from the standpoint of children falling into basic family roles – most often presented as the hero, the scapegoat, the mascot, the lost child. It was as if we were being told by these therapist-writers that if you dealt with something in its generalized form you would be safe.

I was immediately intrigued with this new, to me, idea. But I was not so interested in it as was Jenny, whom I found touching when she described the comfort she took from these delineations of family roles. She said one of the great things that happened when she entered ACOA was her discovery that there were these books in which "I could find myself." She said she was pretty sure she was the “mascot,” for although there was much violation of her spirit and apparently physical violation too, she had always been the one who distracted the family from its problems by being entertaining.

At one big meeting she got applause when she described how she had just gotten out of jury duty. She had told the judge there was something in her life that made it impossible for her to judge whether or not someone was a criminal. The judge asked what it was, and she said she did not want to say it aloud. The judge asked her to come up to the bench to tell him quietly. She went up and spoke one word and he said “Excused.” The one word was “incest.”

At another meeting one participant reported that over in New Jersey Janet Woitiz had just announced that incest was not an issue for either alcoholics or children of alcoholics.

Someone else reported that at a weekend retreat led by Sharon Wegsheider Cruise no one was allowed to leave the grounds of the retreat house because no one could be trusted to follow her absolute ban on sugar and so might try to smuggle that dangerous substance in.

I went down to Princeton to see one of Rob’s plays. I said I was looking into our family’s past. Rob said that if I found out anything disparaging he did not want to hear it.

He said he and his wife has been to Littleton for a visit with their mother and with his sister Deirdre. He said Deirdre, always a problem to them, had “suddenly gone nuts” while they were watching television. It was a TV movie with a theme of family sexual abuse.

Apparently her often violent brother Paul, long dead now, had molested her once and no one in the family knew about it. Rob did not seem to think this amounted to much.

#36 – JANET IN THE PARK

One day Janet from ACOA stops by my place for coffee. A sweet lanky girl from Alaska who uses no makeup. Her violent father is a failed Republican politician up in that godforsaken place. She is much younger than me though as well read and eager for beauty and experience, and it makes me feel not old but rather that we are coming into life together.

At this time we were each reading the Robertson Davies novels, and sometimes one of us would have a book to give the other before a meeting began. Lovely, and open, and I note the slight soft hairs above her upper lip, which has led me to flash on feeling uncomfortable with other imperfections intruding on scenes meant to be perfect in the past.

I talk about my new time in the parks. We decide to take the C train up to Columbus Circle. From there we walk all the way up to the park’s northeast corner, which is in Spanish Harlem, and where I have recently discovered an untamed body of water called the Meer, which is going to seed in this time when money is being g spent on parts of the park that border on where the rich people live. Like something in the deep South, on the Meer’s east bank grown men and women fish with worms, and on the north bank there is a ramshackle Greek temple structure scared from the elements and with graffiti.

Janet had a live-in boyfriend who worked, because he needed the money, in corrections, meaning prison guard, on Riker’s Island. It seemed to me that now I could be tolerant of anything. She said she loved to sing, and that she and her boyfriend were always singing, but they sang only out of season Christmas carols for these were the only songs they had in common. His work hours left her on her own much of the tine. We had met outside meetings once before when we went to eat in the West Village in a vegetarian restaurant – a place that related less to my New York past than did the Meer .

We found that as children we had both ridden horses – me one summer in Arizona and than taking lessons English style under the supervision of a leathery woman who had horses near the Sunset Hill House and a practice ring right down in front of the Sunset where the road falls off at a point just below a small viewing platform that had a copper chart with a movable pointer to show the names of the mountains. The Franconia Range that you see in front of you and the Presidential Range in the far distance.

The subject of riding comes up as we are passing the Central Park stables and making fun of the nervous faux Anglo young men and women coming and going decked out from head to toe in English riding gear starting with those derby-like hats. English envy gone wild. Janet tells me it is very different at the stables out in Brooklyn in Prospect Park.

So the next weekend we met out in Prospect Park, which seemed as carefully put together as Central Park but, unlike most of Central Park, looked like it had mostly been allowed to go to seed, like the Meer and like the small abandoned garden behind my small apartment building.

We used Western saddles on the two fat, elderly horses we rode that day. We sat on those horses taking in the warmth of winter sun as they strolled along an overgrown bridle path.

#35 – ANNIE IN THE PARK

Back in the present in this ACOA time I keep going to the museums and galleries. And without planning it out, I am also going nearly every day to the parks. Sometimes I combine the two. Paintings in the Met, from Medieval times on. Behind the Met, trees and vast lawns in Central Park. On a rise the hieroglyph-covered obelisk that I had been told when was a child is called Cleopatra’s Needle.

And a 20-minute subway ride away, paintings in the Brooklyn Museum by people I had recently discovered, from Daubigny to Deibenkorn to Prendergast, and just outside the museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, new to me in this time. Orchards and stand-alone trees and bushes from around the world, and a Japanese garden so accurate that Japanese tour groups come to it. And plaques near the Japanese Garden for the “Brooklyn Walk of Fame” with such names as Barbra Streisand and Danny Kaye. And some Greek columns too, not far from a careful patch of woodland featuring local flora, such as I knew well in childhood roamings in Connecticut. These plotted out bits of the natural world fenced off from the possible chaos of Prospect Park.

On a path near Columbus Circle at the southern end of Central Park I meet a red-headed nurse, Annie, to discuss travel plans. I need to go to California for an article I am to write for Penthouse about the Philippines’ near civil war, and Annie is trying to break out of her nurse’s world by getting into the travel business. We sit on a park bench and chat not so much about plane tickets as about ourselves and people we know from these meetings. Close up, she seems to look out on life with a certain confidence, kind but knowing that much of what she sees is the raw material for jokes. A comfortable body, not exactly young but with youth still in her. I like her.

There is scattered snow but the uncovered grass I can see is still very green. She talks about Astoria, where she lives – her amazing view from across the East River of the Manhattan skyline. She says she is sure she will be in relationships again, but now she is concentrating – like me – on overcoming the past – which for her started in a big boozy Irish urban family in some outer borough that sounds to me now remarkably like my past in a controlled size Anglophile family in the summer version of the White Mountains. Though these two places barely share the same planet. I echo her words when she speaks about not being interested in new relationships right now, citing my very recently and bitterly ended marriage and not mentioning the time afterwards with Jacqueline and then Susan. When I say I am not interested, I do not believe what I am saying.

But that is not the only thing on my mind. Annie was one of the first people I heard talk in ACOA, which was barely three months ago but seems like years. I had not even considered liking her then. It was as if I heard my relatives, being nasty about the mundane place and people she came from. It was as if the only way I might be able to talk with her would be to adopt my brother’s or mother’s or Cousin Rob’s special tone for outsiders who do not seem quite real, much less up to certain standards.

And then in that the first time listening to her I saw her a wave of liberation swept through me. Maybe I would never again have to think this way I had been thinking. And this possible liberation raised questions about what aliens were resident inside me – questions I had not asked in all the years since I had at some point in early childhood decided to be the bad twin, eventually going way beyond the family, even at the expense of being seen by them as coarse if not dumb.

#34 – BACK TO THE MOUNTAINS

We got back that summer in time to go to the White Mountains in August. Nana was still abroad and White Pines was shut down but we had an invitation from Old Mrs. Gibbs, who had a big, raised summer house that had steps leading up to its porch, with lattice work covering the empty area from beneath the main floor down to the ground. Her property adjoined that of the Sunset Hill House and had the same view of the Franconia Range, which was also the view from all our family houses.

Mrs. Gibbs came each summer, bringing children, grandchildren and loyal old Irish servants with her. One of the servants slept in a small separate house for the children, used now by her four grandchildren who were in my age group. From Baltimore, the Bowdoins: cheerful Harry and sweet faced Alice, on whom I had had a crush when I was 11 that I never quite shook off, though by now she was an out of reach good girl. From Boston, the Perkins: dapper Jimmy and his tanned patrician sister Louisa, with whom I had had a correspondence, her boarding school and mine, when I was 15 and had not met Kitty yet – nor for that matter girls in the winter from our north country sister school.

Gibbs and Pooles had know each other forever. I was amused that on the back door of the telephone room in White Pines a genealogy chart showed that Peter and I were some sort of cousins with these kids who had been our friends since we were very small. I had wondered fleeting if maybe cousins should not date. And I had flashed on the seemingly inbred farm kids in the isolated township of Landaff, where everyone looked hangdog and alike, these poor kids who came, open mouthed, to stare at us when we summer kids arrived at their tumble-down house-barn complex for our annual hayride.

I was less than a week away from Paris and here I was back beneath these mountains. It was not as if Europe had never happened, but more that it did not relate to anything else. And here I was, looking out on the same unchanging view of the Franconia range – this the reality I could cling to. For now without Mother and Dad and Grandmother Clark to back up Peter, I was popular again, though this time it did not seem so secure.

We opened the Playhouse again, our summer gang. And soon Kitty was in Sugar Hill with her parents and brother, and it was almost what it had been the previous summer. Not quite so safe as before, and also not quite so uncritically appealing, for sometimes now I had to strain to make myself feel it was the best place in the world. Still, we were using the Playhouse. And we and the whole gang hiked up to the Gibbs cabin to cook over a campfire and play capture the flag, which had been one of our childhood games up there.

The same but not the same, for now teasing was something sexual as we boys chased and were chased by these girls on a summer night on a sloping field in mountain woods. It felt fine that I was back in my element, though not so fine that I was so impossibly far away in time and space and maturity from the Rue de Capuchins.

One night at the Playhouse, a couple of days after Kitty had been taken to Canada by her parents, I met a tall, dark visiting girl with sweet lips and I necked with her out the Playhouse porch. Little Peter Mallory, Grandson of Gaga’s old college roommate, followed me about afterward, his eyes and voice full of admiration, asking an irrelevant question for which I had not answer: “When did you know you were in love with that girl?”

We all went to the regular Saturday night dance at the Sunset Hill House, where Grandmother Clark was installed for the end of the summer. The old people sat on chairs in a circle around the brightly lit dance floor in the summer white room they called the ballroom. That night, as often in the past, there was also entertainment. This time a hard looking, slick looking, aging pair of professional dancers who worked the summer hotel circuit put on a demonstration of the rumba and the samba, none of which seemed to have anything to do with us. The woman wore a backless dress and she had plenty of fine skin even though she was not young. The skin was tight and as smooth as I it were a wax version of a girl’s body. Paris seemed so out of reach.

On the big circular terrace outside the Sunset’s ballroom college boys who worked as summer bellboys and college girls who were summer waitresses necked greedily with experience that we were just building up to when we maneuvered in the dark on the Playhouse dance floor. And after the Sunset dance, which never went later than 11, Kitty and I and two other younger couples made our way down across the street and down a dirt drive to a low lying shingled building called The Pioneer. It had a juke box for dancing, and served soft drinks, mainly as setups for the slightly older kids who brought liquor. The neckers from the Sunset passed a bottle to us so we could turn our ginger ale into real drinks, just like real adults, though adulthood seemed was almost as out of reach as Paris.

On another evening we went with our host friends over to the movies in Lisbon, a town with a formal bridge over the stream that ran through it. We were driven by Connie, Alice’s sister who was old enough to have a room now in the main house. We saw 12 Angry Men with Henry Fonda.

One day we hiked to a big pond halfway up Cannon Mountain. One night we went swimming in Echo Lake down below Cannon. Our meals were carried over to the children’s house, where we had a tabletop hockey game with figures you could maneuver with handles on the side batting a ball down towards the enemy’s goal or protecting your own goal. Peter got a lot of laughs whether he was behind or winning by saying, in a Negro accent, “Bring up de colored troops!” I hated such prejudice, “nigger eyes” and all the rest, as much as I hated the never ending anti-Jewish jokes and slurs. But I was not sure what the real world was.

So I thought a lot about Paris. It was as if I had to compartmentalize my thoughts. There was Manet and Monet and Renoir in the Jeu de Paum, and the sweep of grandiose marble on the Place de la Concorde outside of the Jeu de Paum. There was the walk up the Rue de Capuchins to the Casino de Paris and those girls who had not clothes on, especially the happy looking girl who danced over to touch a boyfriend waiting in the wings.

Family would appear in my thoughts of Paris. Mother and Dad and Grandmother Clark and Peter. Dad had been in London most of the time on publishing business. I peeked at a letter Mother was writing talking of Paris as a city of love, so out of context, it seemed, this unlikely flirtation between my parents. Mother spoke French. She had spent her junior year from Smith at the Sorbonne (before something happened – running out of money?) – and she had had to become a day student at Barnard in the city.

One day in Paris she had her old landlady around for drinks. A fat women dressed in black who spoke mainly of the war, and said if the Germans came again she would kill herself.

It was mother who has taken us the first time to the Jeu de Paum. She knew the impressionists from her junior year. Strange that I had never heard of them. She also led us to an exhibition of people called Fauves who came a little later and painted in unrealistic bright colors, great slashes of paint, maybe more real than if they had been realistic. But mother had no history with the Fauves.

There was an American man with a big mustache who was full of energy escorting a group of American women through the exhibit speaking enthusiastically about how the Fauves gave up all “the past crap” and were something new and exciting. He was worked up. He seemed like one of those bohemians I had read about and wanted to be. Even so, it was as if I were being pulled to the side I wanted to reject, for I heard in my head family voices saying this exuberant man was just too, too pleased with himself.

#33 – VISION

I knew certain visuals.

It was my best summer ever – up in the mountains with this gang of girls and boys who let me be in the center. At the center with Kitty, who taught me the 20s revival Charleston when she was 13 and I was 15 – the only time in my life when I could join a casual baseball game, step to the plate, and sometimes actually hit the ball and run bases. The summer after that one they took my brother and me off to Europe, thousands of miles away from the White Mountains and the summer gang.

And suddenly it was as if nothing had ever changed, for I was back in our Connecticut family unit – back with Mother, Dad and Grandmother Clark, and my good boy twin Peter. I was getting letters almost every day that Kitty had sent to American Express in Paris and Venice and Paris again, and the family thought that was the silliest thing they had ever encountered. They laughed.

One evening at dinner at the hotel on the Rue Saint Honoré there was a big vase of black-eyed Susan’s on our table and Grandmother Clark said, Look, Nigger Eyes. And Dad saw my face and berated me for having the potential to cause trouble, and they went along, keeping the awkward peace, with Grandmother Clark when she said, in a very loud voice, right here in Paris, "I have called them Nigger Eyes all my life and I won’t stop calling them Nigger Eyes now."

And I was back in the place I thought I had escaped, despite all the trophies I had been winning, despite having a girl so kind and desirable she was outside their own experience – despite my surprising popularity, despite my leaving the world of the outcasts, despite all this, everything was still the same, as if nothing had happened, as if nothing could ever change. I knew I never should have trusted anything.

Though my life was not so empty now as they may have thought. I did find a few things to trust that summer. I trusted what I felt when looking at Monet and Manet and van Gogh, all new to me, in the Jeu de Paum. The intensity of it was my secret almost, for in this family visual art was something I could have for myself if Peter was not in the way.

I started to hang out at the Jeu de Paum, which was an exciting walk from the hotel through all the marble in the beautifully proportioned and grandiose Place de la Concorde. I would remember for the rest of my life the exact placement of the paintings there – up and to the left in one room Manet’s artists have a picnic complete with nude model, directly in front of me as I entered another room Renoir’s girl on swing, who seemed to me not on a swing but on a path where she had stopped to cock her pretty head and connect with me. The Jeu de Paum, and also the Casino de Paris, which was a little farther away but within walking distance or a quick Metro ride.

There was something to trust here in this old theater too – the waves of desire that passed through me as I watched these happy seeming naked girls – plenty of coyness though no coy striptease, for they were naked before the dancing began – and one of them has a boy friend in the wings – I can see it all from my seat high up and to the side. I see her dance over to a place where the sky blue stage set ends, her arms high, and she has a girl’s cutely cropped brown hair, and rounded arms and legs, and she has these breasts, not too big and not too small, and with assertive nipples and she has a pubic hair triangle, and no tan line. And she reaches out to her right while turning her eyes in that direction and smiling, she reaches to her right again and she and the guy touch hands, this girl and her boyfriend, their touching out of sight except from my privileged spot in the cheap seats. This sweet naked girl and her not-so-secret private life. And I had this fantasy version of my own life. I would not go to college next year, I would return to Paris and become the poet I had started out to be in boarding school, and I would have a girl like the naked dancing girl, and I would live in a garret like artists in the movies, and have intense relationships with people I would meet in tiny bistros with checked table clothes, each table with a candle dripping wax that built upon the side of the wine bottle in which it was stuck – and I would be myself always.

They warned that I should pull myself together.

#32 – AUTHORITY

Not that I was getting religion. Not that I rose to otherworldly explanations. At the start I gravitated to people in ACOA who opposed the religiosity they saw in more orthodox 12-step programs.

There was Veronica, a clinical psychologist divorced from an abusive fat man,who for the first time in her life was closing in on deep past family matters that had haunted her all her years. She seemed to look out at the world from behind a pane of grey-tinted glass, but from meeting to meeting the glass became clearer and more color came into her face. In her work, she had used the past as a starting point, but before ACOA she had never really stepped into the past, she said, either in the therapy she gave others or the therapy she received.


Avoidance by therapists of anything truly risky, not getting at what was at the center of a person’s history, came up over and over in the stories I was hearing. Not that some had not benefited from therapy, but far more often their therapists had run from the harder parts of what they remembered.

It felt much like what I had seen all my life of conventional literary worlds, from members of a puffed up English department in college to the smug Times reviewers to editors I pretended to respect to literary people out in the world as well as back in time in my family. James T. Farrell should never have said what went on with his sister. Hemingway told about people in his life the way no gentleman ever should. We don’t object to sex, they said, but Henry Miller needed boundaries and so did D.H. Lawrence, and also James Joyce when read without the decoding of critics. And the Russians were really quite silly in their intensity. And as for Thomas Wolfe….

Teachers and critics who had their own unresolved issues and usually fled from anyone dealing with true stories that reached into points of danger that might remind the critics and teachers of what they were suppressing in themselves. These careful literary people and careful therapists. These kibitzer critics and sham healers.

Although ACOA was nominally a 12-step program, like AA and its many offshoots, almost no one in it showed respect for the steps. My ACOA cohorts were not following the system, which directed you, step by step, to admit powerlessness over an addiction, decide to call upon a “higher power,” take an inventory of your life with an idea of changing and making amends to all you had harmed. In the untamed Manhattan version of ACOA the only amends that interested us were those that were owed to ourselves. A member of ACOA would admit only to being an adult child of one alcoholic, rather than something shameful the member had gone through. We were out to find the villains in the stories we were bringing to light. We wanted justice. We did not want to bow to anyone. New authorities in 12-step programs did not tempt us.

Most in Manhattan ACOA, as opposed to the far milder versions of ACOA we heard existed elsewhere, ignored the AA, and also Alanon, system whereby you were supposed to get someone to act as your “sponsor” to help you discern right from wrong and keep you on a better path. This was okay for the kind of ACOA that paralleled Alanon, but most of us had contempt for Alanon, which had apparently been started as a sort of ladies’ auxiliary of AA in the early days when AA was mainly male. Something to keep the wives busy. Orthodox 12-step ways could seem to us like enforced religion. We sometimes protested when someone wanted to close a meeting with the Lord’s Prayer, which some called the Our Father, as was always done in AA and Alanon. One night a rigid AA person, a tightly wound old-seeming young man, came to an ACOA meeting at the Corlears School and acted like a right-wing political protester crashing an opposition rally. He lectured on the subject of how we were getting it all wrong. How there was no excuse for the anger he saw in ACOA – people so self centered they did not try to see the other fellow’s side. actually used the words "other fellows side," th of 1930s colleoquial language of classic AA literature. He sounded much like Bill Cosby, the comedian turned moral scold and advocate of family discipline, who was talking these days about how he was sick and tired of hearing people put down their families. Like Cosby on the air, this AA guy in our ACOA meeting seemed to be issuing unspoken threats.

I did, however, feel there was nothing set in stone in our version. Although not many in ACOA had any more use for organized religion than for organized families, there were exceptions. There was a girl far older than her years named Michelle who was living for the time being with a group of actual nuns while she journeyed inside herself and through time. I was her admirer, despite the connection to nuns. She was one of the ones about whom I wanted to cheer when she entered a room, her anger so white hot and clear, her eyes wide open as she tried to pull the past into the present. Her father was a therapist who had become a cult leader. And she was sure he had violated her physically as well as mentally. She was looking for evidence, and she hoped to find it in memory. “I want the visuals,” she said.

The visuals!