Me and the Devil: A Novel (42 page)

He fell backwards, hit his head on the pavement. His pint lay broken in a small pool of whiskey. There was blood running from his nose. He raised his head slightly, laid a dirty hand to the back of it, then stared at the blood that covered his hand.

“Why’d you do that?” he asked, looking up, not at me but toward me.

“Because I felt like it,” I said.

I stood for a moment in the early quiet, looking down at that pain-in-the-ass fucking bum lying there with his shattered bottle and his silenced bullshit. He seemed unable to get up. I enjoyed watching him try. My hand ached as I retrieved my coffee from the bench. I took the coffee back into the bar.

“That was a good one,” grinned the bartender, who had as yet only one customer, some guy down the far end, lost in his beer.

“Fuckin’ pain in the ass,” I said.

“Ought to roll him out of the way from out front of the place.”

“Ah, he’ll manage to get rid of himself. Look at him. He’s already up on his fuckin’ knees.”

Then, sure enough, with the help of the bench, he was on his feet and somewhat upright again. He rubbed the back of his head, at the hair that was matted with blood, gazed at the broken pint bottle, and staggered off.

The bartender called out for the little Hispanic lackey, had him sweep up the broken glass and throw a bucket of hot water on the spilt whiskey and blood.

Yeah, he was gone, all right. And so were those fucking dead monkeys.

“Goddamn dead fuckin’ monkeys!” I heard myself yell out. The lone drunk at the far end of the bar stirred, nodded besottedly as if in sullen agreement. The bartender laughed. This whole fucking world was nuts.

My breath eased as I finished my coffee and wondered whether that was the last punch I would ever throw.

I decided to get another coffee from the corner store across the street. I asked the bartender if he wanted a cup of tea, and this idea brightened his morning all the more.

I
T OCCURRED TO ME THAT
I
COULD GO TO A MEETING, THAT
maybe I should go to a meeting. It was well over ninety days since I had last been drunk, and, in A.A., ninety days of sobriety is, for reasons unknown, considered a milestone, a big deal. When the chairperson asked at the beginning of the meeting if there was anyone present today who was celebrating ninety days, I could raise my hand and everyone would applaud. The thought made me cringe. Then I told myself I didn’t have to raise my hand. For one thing, I had more than ninety days, so I wasn’t actually celebrating ninety days today. For another, and more important, there wasn’t a single fucking thing I had to do if I didn’t want to. Drunk or sober, I had never gone in for that A.A. prima donna shit. I didn’t need any drama queen applause. I didn’t want any. Not for being drunk, not for being sober. If it helped some people get sober and stay sober, fine. But it was the sort of shit that drove me to drink.

There was a lot to be said for the inspiring strength that could be felt in a roomful of people at a good meeting. And there was a lot to be said for the unbearable bullshit in a roomful of people at a bad meeting. It was said that it took only two people to constitute a meeting. I had found some of the most honest and fortifying of meetings to be of this kind.

So, hell, why not a meeting of one? I was not opposed to applauding myself in unostentatious privacy.

It was true. I was not a good A.A. member. I was not a good member of anything, really, not even of the human race—and I say this with a sense of pride. I saw the twelve steps not as a sacred path to enlightenment but, all in all, as a load of churchy bullshit concocted by a few characters who were as wrong as they were right. I saw the twelve steps as leading nowhere and to nothing. It was change that I wanted, for myself and for anyone I might help along the way. I wanted life. I wanted freedom, not congregationalism.

I would rather lie far from the church, not sit in it. Lie far from it on the sweet-smelling grass, communing with that higher power that was within me and the sky above.

Hear ye, hear ye! This meeting is hereby called to order!

Hi, my name’s Nick and I’m an alcoholic.

We will now pass the basket.

This meeting is hereby adjourned.

T
HEY SAY THAT NEAR THE END, NOT LONG BEFORE HIS
death at the age of forty-three, Guy de Maupassant felt and saw his melting, dissolving brain flowing from his nostrils. He hallucinated, saw ghosts. Before he was put in a straitjacket, he declared himself to be suffering from “sheer madness.”

So much for the popular saying that tells us that if we think we’re crazy, we’re not. Then again, maybe Maupassant’s brains really were running out of his nose.

Maupassant’s story “The Diary of a Madman,” as it is called in English, is no longer available these days except as a Kindle e-book, an MP3 download, or an iPad app. To use the title of one of his final tales:
“Qui Sait?”
—“Who Knows?”

I had never felt that my brains were oozing out of my nose. I had never been put into a straitjacket. I had never purchased an e-book or an app.

Was I sane? Why did I so often suspect myself of being insane? Was it actually my brains that I had been blowing into my snot rag? Had anything I had written been turned into an iPad app behind my back? Who knows? More to the point:
qui se soucie?
—who cares?

It was true that I did not like the way I was thinking lately. But it was also true that I did not like a lot of the ragged, old, awkward winter clothes I was wearing lately. I would go to Modell’s, buy some new winter things to wear. I would go uptown to Orvis, get
one of those shearling-lined ox hide leather coats, a nice warm cashmere turtleneck sweater and nice warm cashmere watch cap to match. And I would get some new thoughts, some new ways of thinking. Easy to find, in me, in the sky. And a lot cheaper than shearling, ox hide, and cashmere. Free, in fact. Yeah. That was all there was to it. All new shit. From brain to britches, britches to brains: all new shit. Hell, it was all the same. What shall it profit a man if he shall gain his own soul and lose out on a new set of Duofold thermal underwear and Wigwam socks?

The wisdom to know the difference? Fuck it. There was none. No wisdom. No difference. No acceptance. Let others weigh what could not be weighed in scales that did not exist. Let others compromise and fiddle-faddle with the fate they toyed with like a trifle in their idle hands. There was only change.

The festerings of the brain that we call thoughts could be cast away and forgotten as easily as old clothes.

Swift and resolute action leads to success; self-doubt is a prelude to disaster. He who hesitates is lost.

C
HANGE.
H
OW WAS
I
GOING TO CHANGE?
H
OW, AT MY
age, after all these years, was I going to change? Heraclitus said that it is through change that things find repose. It was best perhaps to just let it happen. There had been no struggle as far as turning away from booze was concerned. It had happened, and that was all there was to it. All I had done was to not question it, to just let it happen. And that was change of the highest order. A change that, try and struggle as I might, I had not been able to achieve in the almost fifty years of my drinking life. Change. Repose.

I moved aside on my bedside table the book I was then rereading—Henry Miller’s
A Devil in Paradise,
a wonderful book if ever there was one—and placed nearer to the bed, beneath the lamp, Philip Wheelwright’s
Heraclitus.
Though more than half a century old, it was the most perceptive, erudite, and valuable presentation of the fragments of the philosopher, and probably always would be.

Heraclitus speaks to us from more than two thousand five hundred years ago. This is just a breath away really when you consider that almost two million years lay between the first hammer stone that man fashioned and the first bronze spike to be driven in by a hammer. And the hammer and nails of the philosopher’s words remain today as uniquely indestructible as when he spoke them, in the fifth century
B.C.
All was change. You could stand in
the same spot by a river and stick your foot repeatedly into the water. Yet, as he said, you could not step into the same river twice, for as the river flowed, its water was thus in its flux never the same.

“Nature loves to hide,” says another of his fragments. In this fragment, Wheelwright finds much about nature concealing herself “beneath vague indications and dark hints.” There is, he says in his reading of this fragment, “a hidden attunement in nature, the discovery of which is far more deeply rewarding than the mere observation of surface patterns.” For me, this was as true of our own natures as of the vaster nature of which we are a part.

Change. The hidden and its vague dark hints. Discovery. Repose. Reward.

One fragment states simply: “I have searched myself.”

The like of this has been uttered so many countless times, dragged through the dirt and dust of lies by so many countless voices. But he is the only one who I feel is to be believed, who I feel to be wholly honest, wholly truthful in saying this.

Yes, just a breath away. I used to dream of sitting with him and speaking with him. Now I did sit with him and speak with him. On a bench, beneath the sky.

I wanted so much to give him the Wheelwright book, that he might tell me what he himself thought of it. But, of course, I could not. He could read only Greek, and while there were words and phrases of Greek to be found in it, the book was written in English, a far cry from the Ionian dialect in which he had written the great lost work from which most of the surviving fragments derived. And, of course, there was no physical hand into which to place the book, or any book, or any thing. Nor were there eyes to read it.

The other morning, on that bench, I saw a large gaping of raw wood on the trunk of the great old pear tree across the street. The
big long bough that had arched almost all the way across the street had been torn from it and lay in the gutter. It had to be twenty feet long. A fucking truck, a big ugly reckless fucking van, must have crashed into that bough. I cursed the unknown truck. I wished upon the unknown driver a violent, painful, and very imminent death. He had destroyed beauty, of which there was so little left to destroy. And for nothing. The bough of the tree, the bough of beauty, lay ravaged and dead. It should instead be the ravager who lay dead and mutilated in the gutter. Or crucified on the desecrated trunk of that tree.

Staring at the open wound of that dismembered tree, I asked Heraclitus: “Where is the repose in this change?”

“Change comes by chance, not the will of gods or men. Change can never be brought about or averted. Chance is the master of all. Yes, change brings repose. It also brings strife, which is the essence of nature. Repose is strife slowed, or, at best, a respite from strife; but never a lasting escape from it. What has befallen this tree, and your love for it, is but one infinitesimal particle of water in the immeasurable sea of flux. And from that immeasurable sea of flux, the constant strife of nature, between the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist, the constant frothy waves of chance bring constant change, and in that change there is repose.”

He seemed to sense that I did not quite follow him, and he resumed:

“For is there not repose in knowing that without constant flux, the endless strife of nature, sometimes witnessed by us but for the most part hidden from us, the vast universe, the world in which we live, would cease to exist?”

There followed one of those lingering moments, like a long breath, when he seemed to leave me but did not.

“Homer was wrong in saying, ‘Would that strife might perish
from amongst gods and men.’ If that were ever to be, all things would come to an end.”

Then, as if in the afterthought of inner searching, he softly said, “No, change does not always bring repose to each and all. My own death brought none to me, even as I knew it to be but one infinitesimal particle of water in the immeasurable sea of flux. No. Death brings no repose. Knowing that might bring some repose as you look upon that tree, which, though smitten by strife, still lives. As do you still live.”

When we spoke, he answered silently. But what he said was always clear in its wordless eloquence.

I never contradicted him or argued with him. Even when he silently whispered to me that I should take a drink, or do worse; even then I just sat and let his silent suggestions pass without question.

There were times when I found myself speaking aloud to him, casually gesticulating as I did so. I always caught myself when this happened. But sometimes it took me longer than other times to realize what I was doing.

One morning, something very strange happened. I was sitting with him when I heard one of two passers-by say something about “her clitoris.” It seemed such an odd phrase to overhear, yet I was certain that I had heard it.

Then, almost instantly, it hit me that she had not said “her clitoris,” but instead was mispronouncing the name of Heraclitus. She knew, I told myself. She did not know the proper pronunciation of his name—or maybe she did, and I had simply misheard her—but, in any case, she knew. She knew who was there, unseen, beside me.