The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (17 page)

But a key would be long in coming, and soon I grew bitter. In college I’d been promising: I belonged to a good fraternity; I had a fetching, whimsical girlfriend; and finally I’d transcended my lifelong inertia and written an honors thesis that was deemed “a model of the form.” And now? I was a bookish sluggard working for peanuts and learning the hard way that a decent undergraduate thesis was hardly a sound predictor of literary success. All the while I sensed that some terrible fall was imminent, and what sanctuary would I seek when it came? I was welcome at home (that is, barely tolerated) only for brief visits during the winter holidays; summer visits were arranged, tensely, on an ad-hoc basis. All this was tacitly understood.

I decided to spend the summer of 1987 with friends in Hermosa Beach, California. I’d just been accepted into the NYU graduate film school for the fall and was giddy with relief that my life was about to have some forward motion again; also I wouldn’t have to write any more apprentice fiction, thank
God
. In the meantime I’d moved from the George Washington Hotel to a nice apartment near the UN with my best friend, Mike (my best friend
to this day
, I hasten to add, with pride and amazement). Mike was dating a dancer/actress who’d done rather well on Broadway and knew a lot of other show-business people. It was a Saturday in late May, and I was in my cubicle at Cambridge University Press for the last time, tying up loose ends for Susan, my boss, who’d been so kind to me. Mike phoned me at work: his dancer girlfriend was having a big party at her raffish penthouse in Spanish Harlem, and so-and-so (a famous actor who went on to become more famous still) was expected to put in an appearance; what say I tip the remaining contents of my in-box into the trash and join them? This I did, more or less, and proceeded to get massively hammered. There was a lot to celebrate, after all, not least my relief at being able to say—to actors, no less—“I’m going to NYU Film School” instead of “I’m in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences division at Cambridge University Press.” The famous guy never showed up, but I did get into a lively chat with an older soap-opera actor (bald, handlebar mustache) who claimed to be a mentor to this celebrity, who was an ingrate, he said, and a bitch.

Next thing I knew I was sharing a cab with this fellow, since we were both heading downtown, and he asked whether I wanted to grab a quick drink in the Village. It was maybe six in the evening; I said sure. Then I was in a leather bar on Christopher Street near the Hudson River, chatting with an enormous fellow in a motorcycle cap who stared impassively at the back of the bar while I wondered aloud whether it was wise for him and gay men generally to cultivate such a lifestyle in this day and age. I might even have mentioned my mother’s old friends—my darling uncles, so many departed, etc. Probably I wept a little. The sun was a faint disappearing orange over the river.

Then it was dark and eight hours later, and I was riding in a cab with a pregnant prostitute. I have never recovered those eight hours in any form; the soap-opera actor, later canvassed by Mike, said he’d left after a single drink, while I’d insisted on staying and maybe talking sense into that guy with the motorcycle cap. If the latter got revenge for my egregious little homily by fixing me up with a pregnant, malodorous (some kind of hair stuff and a hard night’s sweat), and quite pimply prostitute, well then I gratefully salute him across the years: it might have been
so
much worse, and God knows some kind of reprisal was in order. Or maybe I slept at the leather bar for six or seven hours and then endeavored to pick up this person under my own steam; friends tell me I can be eerily articulate in the midst of my blackouts. But I’ll never know. Simply I came to in a cab and there she was. Then we were back at my apartment and she was naked, and very pregnant, and I gave her some money and begged off, whereupon she slept in my bed. I slept in the other room. Mike, thank God, had spent the night at his dancer’s apartment.

Picture our little tableau in the morning. The prostitute made herself at home, taking a long shower and teasing her ’fro as best she could with Mike’s brush. I sat reading the
Times
at a little table next to the partial wall between kitchen and living room, while she came and went—naked, flat-footed, dripping—helping herself to the contents of our fridge. I was loath to get on her bad side. She knew where I lived; doubtless she had a pimp. I read and wished her gone. Then I heard a key in the lock. “
Get back to the room!
” I hissed. “
Go! Now!
” My urgency must have alarmed her—maybe she thought a wife or a cop was at the door—and she trotted
flap flap flap
back to my bedroom, her jouncing naked body observed en passant by Mike from our partly opened, chain-locked door. I let him in. I whispered “Sorry about this,” while he stood there with his mouth open, hands on either side of his head à la Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
. Presently the young woman emerged in her finery and quietly departed, belly first. The next day I left New York for the summer.

I SAW MY
brother again a year later—when all was changed, changed utterly. In the preceding months Marlies had mentioned that Scott was now in California—Mississippi—Hawaii (!)—because he’d joined the Marine Corps and seemed to be doing fine; this, I figured, was some bullshit story he’d fed the poor, gullible woman while leading a hobo life. Even if he’d managed to enlist, I gave him a couple of weeks, tops, before he was returned to the civilian world in a sprawling heap. Meanwhile I’d finished my one and only year at the NYU graduate film school; it cost me roughly $30,000 (I paid off the last of my loans in 2001) to learn I had little talent or interest in that direction and was, let’s face it, lost. So that was that. For the time being, then, I was an incompetent, soon-to-be-fired bartender at an Italian restaurant in Norman, Oklahoma, seeing a lot more of my mother than either of us would have liked. As for Scott, well, picture my pop-eyed astonishment: for he was now, indeed, an ultracompetent aviation supply clerk on leave from his Marine Corps base in Kaneohe, Hawaii. He looked good, too: his face had a glow, and most of his pimples were gone, with little apparent scarring unless you saw him under a certain light. Looking good, in fact, was the one thing we had in common—I was getting a lot of sun—and my favorite photo of us, sitting side by side on my mother’s couch, was taken around that time: Scott seems tickled but magnanimous too, clasping my knee in a consoling sort of way; I don’t seem particularly depressed, perhaps because of my tan.

Ten or so months before, Scott’s pariahdom was complete: all but my mother had disowned him, he couldn’t find a job, and even his more sordid friends kept away. When the last decent bar in town had eighty-sixed him for good, it was time to make a drastic change or give up entirely: the marines. Such was Scott’s notoriety, though, that he thought better of attempting to enlist anywhere in his home state. Rather he drove (in
what
I have no idea) all the way to San Diego, drinking Jim Beam the while, or so he later told it.

I can only imagine what basic training must have entailed; I suppose he persevered out of sheer desperation, a total lack of options, to say nothing of the antic delight he must have afforded some drill sergeant. Anyway, he persevered. My mother went alone to his graduation, and such was my brother’s lockstep conformity on the parade ground, his look of absolute belonging from behatted head to shining foot, that my mother spent the entire ceremony taking zoom photos of someone other than Scott, who finally tapped her on the shoulder as she made to embrace his doppelgänger. Afterward they took a trip to a friend’s place near Joshua Tree in the desert, where my brother reverted to his old ways somewhat: for a solid week he did nothing but lie by the pool and drink, morosely, his Walkman buzzing loud enough to scare birds away—or so my mother said at the time.

After that, he went from strength to strength. In Meridian, Mississippi, he took a course in aviation supply and finished first in his class. He also proved a superior marksman: for months he competed all over the country with the marine pistol team, racking up medals, and soon became an instructor. Finally he got a plum assignment in Kaneohe, where he was dubbed the Sultan of Supply. It was simply miraculous—though like most miracles one could divine certain scientific explanations amid the mystery. Scott, after all, was hardly the first misfit who’d found a degree of success in the military: as a supply clerk he was expected to sit in his cage and push paper, though he also seemed to possess a talent for doing efficient little favors at the right time, for the right person, regardless of protocol. In short he was popular and rather powerful after a fashion, and with his ego burnished for the first time in years, he didn’t need to drink and drug so much. Nor did he have the time or energy. I imagine he spent the odd spot of leisure in his old manner, as in Joshua Tree with my mother—listening to music, skimming magazines or the Bible, tippling the while—but when he got back to work he behaved himself more or less. He had no choice.

YET AGAIN SCOTT
was welcomed back into the bosom of the family. My father told me about their first meeting in over a year. Scott was so rattled he could scarcely finish a sentence; he coughed and made cryptic jokes, compulsively gulping his beer. Finally my father put a hand on his shoulder.

“What’s wrong, son?”

“I guess I’m kinda
nervous
, Papa. I don’t . . .”

Burck waited for him to finish, but Scott just shook his head and stared at his glass.

“You don’t have to be nervous,” my father said. “There’s nothing to be nervous about. Everybody’s happy to see you. We’re proud of you.”

My brother’s eyes began to leak a little, but he was a marine now and kept his composure.

Another emotional moment was when I told him about enlarging that favorite photo of us (sitting, tanned, on Mom’s couch) and pinning it over my bed. I’d mentioned it only in passing, in the course of a rare long-distance chat, after he’d asked me to describe my new digs in West Palm Beach—where I’d moved in the hope of starting over, or at least failing in relative obscurity (I was trying, again, to write). My apartment, the bottom floor of a carriage house, was furnished in a quirkily hideous way, and after I’d mentioned the lampstand shaped like a pile of limes, the cubist painting that my landlord had confessed to be his own work, the yellow sofa with its solemn brown stain, I added, “Oh! And there’s a photo of us over the bed.”

Pause. “What photo?”

“You know, the one Mom took last summer. The one of us on the couch. I made it into a poster and tacked it up. You’re the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning, for better or worse.”

Naturally I wanted my brother to be pleased that I’d put a photo of us (poster-sized, no less) over my bed, but also I expected him to see the humor of that feature in the midst of such a piquant, overall tackiness. And really the dismal fact of the matter was simply this: I’d hung that photo because I thought it flattered
me
, because I was badly in need of flattery at the time.

After a silence, my brother said “Wow” and let his breath out in a long hiss. “I really don’t know what to say, Zwieb.”

He was on the verge of tears over something that meant almost nothing to me. I did my best to change the subject.

I BEGAN TO
fancy myself a kind of knockabout intellectual à la Frank Wheeler in
Revolutionary Road,
and thus I contrived to feel superior to certain old friends who’d surrendered themselves to the rat race. At bottom I was a failure and knew it better than anybody. When my worried father would call and ask how I was doing, I’d tell funny stories at my own expense to show him that my sense of humor, at least, was intact. Meanwhile he helped in whatever way he could—there was usually a check or a fifty-dollar bill enclosed with his letters—though it hurt and probably embarrassed him that his second-born son, something of a white hope up to then, was also having a bad time adjusting to the real world.

Things began to look up a little in West Palm Beach. Good old Mike was there, for one thing—my roommate and best friend in New York, that candidate for sainthood. He too was trying to write, and when I’d first mentioned the possibility of rejoining him in Florida, he replied with a nervous letter, the gist of which was: by all means come ahead; I’ll even find you an apartment in advance (as he did); but I have a good life here, Blake, and I won’t stand for your fucking it up. Fair enough! Probably it was best I hadn’t told him too much about my last days in Norman. In a nutshell: having been fired at the Italian place and being left, once again, with way too much time on my hands, I’d begun making the long drive to Oklahoma City more and more often, the better to hang out with old high school friends—the unsuccessful ones, the ones who hadn’t escaped—and naturally we drank quite a lot, whereupon I’d endeavor to drive all the way back to Norman in the wee, wee hours. This, of course, was downright suicidal, and bore the expected fruit. One night I slammed over a curb on the entrance ramp to I-35 and had to wait until sunrise near the Fifty-first Street exit with a mangled tire, woken every now and then by the shuddering blast of a passing eighteen-wheeler; I was too drunk to work the jack (tricky little gadgets in those old VWs), and finally was rescued by my mother’s boyfriend, Dave, who stopped on his way to work the next morning. Then one night—maybe a week later?—I came back to my blah apartment with the dirty carpet and cinder-block bookshelves and decided I was hungry, so I put a pot of water on the stove to boil spaghetti and passed out. I woke up, hours later, to a mortal stench: the bottom of the pot had melted on the burner, and little metallic embers were flying all over the place; the smoldering carpet was ruined, and surely would have burst into flames if I’d slept a bit longer. I had a slight cough for weeks after. Finally, a few days before my departure for Florida, I fell asleep at the wheel of my Jetta and plowed into the back of another, bigger car. This on I-35 again, late at night. The collision woke me, and sobered me, and when the police arrived I was quite alertly contrite and they let me off with a ticket.