Share Michael Mohr's Sincere American Writing

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There were two girls I recall, mainly, from life before high school. More than two, actually, but only two which made a difference in my young life. Let me tell you about the pivotal moment with the first.

She went to St. Paul’s, the Episcopalian K-8 private school I attended in Ventura, California, a 100,000-population coastal town bisected by Highway 101 and about 90 miles north of LA.

Though I attended school in Ventura and I’d been born in that town, in 1991, when I was eight, we moved 12 miles inland of Ventura to the small white wealthy enclave of Ojai, once home of Krishnamurti and still home of expensive private schools like Thatcher and Villanova, the latter of which I’d later attend for high school between 1999-2002.

Five days a week my father would drive me the 20 minutes from Ojai to Ventura along Highways 33 and then 101, dropping me off at school. He’d then head towards Port Hueneme Navy Base where he worked as an independent contractor as a computer engineer focusing on ballistic missile systems. Around 3pm each day my mom would pick me up and we’d head back to Ojai.

The first girl was named Anne Griffin.

She was a fellow student in Kindergarten. It was a small, expensive parochial school so it’s not totally shocking that I still recall her full name and exactly how she looked…but it’s still a little surprising. She was redheaded, with thick curly auburn hair, pale-skinned and had many freckles on her face, as if Jackson Pollack had flecked freckles all over her skin with a chaotic brush.

I remember the cold in winter, and the largeness of the school campus, and the whole school (only about 200 kids) standing shivering around the flagpole on winter mornings, the sun beaming just barely above the local mountains, we all cultlike chanting in unison the Pledge of Allegiance, sun glinting in our eyes, hands against our shoulders, like Orwell’s little children.

Anne Griffin had this habit of chasing the boys around. The idea was: She chased; we ran. You never wanted to be caught, god forbid, for obvious reasons: Girls had cooties. Remember: This was Kindergarten. She often chased but never seem to actually catch. Looking back now I wonder if this was more of a nonverbal understanding, agreement, symbolic contract, even, wherein she agreed to chase but not actually catch, and the boys agreed to run and always remain elusive.

When the boys discussed Anne it was in grotesque terms: Not about her body or anything like that—we were little children, remember—but in terms of cooties and a sort of inherently grasped notion of “coolness” even if we didn’t then have the language; to be caught was to be “uncool.”

The problem was: I wanted, secretly, to be caught. I couldn’t explain why, even to myself. (I certainly never expressed this externally.) From my vantage point now I know that I was, for whatever reason, highly sexualized from a very young age. I remember thinking about “sex” (or what I vaguely understood to be “sex”) as young as perhaps four or five. There’d always been a Freudian kind of semi-conscious push/pull between me and my mother. She spoiled me badly and yet I also felt emotionally neglected by her for complex reasons I won’t go into here. But there was something about my mom, ergo something about girls, females, women, that drew me, attracted me, pulled me in like a laser beam. Not overtly sexually, not at that point…but something perhaps a layer or two prior to overt sexuality. A deep core desire.

Anne had chased me a few times before in the recent past and I’d done my duty of running away unscathed. Legend—myth—was that if Anne actually did catch you she’d kiss you on the lips. Again, the boys all dialogued about this as being a disgusting, even reprehensible act, something they desperately needed to reject, revolt against, run away from. I acted the part to belong…but secretly I wanted to be kissed by Anne Griffin.

One day Anne was chasing boys around. It was a late winter morning, just after The Pledge of Allegiance. We had a brief recess just before we had to gather in the classroom. We played in an area which was in a long, wide gray asphalt oval which you could run around; between the oval was a jungle gym, monkey bars, sand, slides, etc.

I was walking around the oval this particular morning, minding my own business, when suddenly I heard the other boys yelling something at me. I looked behind me over my shoulder and sure enough: There was Anne, running towards me with a harsh gleam burning in her soft blue eyes. She smiled malevolently. Her dress was typical: Black with red roses stitched on it and little white frills at the collar. She looked like the quintessential American school kid of the late 1980s.

There was only one choice, of course: I ran. She gave chase.

Round and round we flew, me being chased, hunted down like a lion pursuing a gazelle (or something like that). Sometimes she switched tactics and went the opposite way, or she’d suddenly leap onto the middle section and run across the sandy belly of the jungle gym trying to cut me off at the other side.

I always elided her grasp.

By now the whole class was watching. Something new and different had occurred. Usually Anne sort of frolicked around, picking boys at random to chase, and she’d move from one boy to the next. But this time she was spending all her time and energy solely on me. I remember feeling both excited, honored, terrified and worried. How would this make me look to others? Was this good or bad? What would I do if she actually caught up to me? What was fair to do to girls physically, as a boy?

These questions collided into my mind along with my fast-beating heart, my racing adrenaline, the flush of blood to my cheeks, my breath coming out quick, making me pant.

Round and round we went, the noise of the class shouting for me to run, some of the girls shouting for her to cut me off here, chase me there, turn around, retreat, etc. I didn’t know what Chess was back then but now, thinking of the experience, I realize we were playing some kind of physical, nonverbal Chess game. All of my being was electrified and alive in that moment. The cold winter morning now felt good as I expended so much energy; the low sun warmed my goose-bumped skin. It was a game, and I wanted to win, even though I didn’t know what “winning” even meant.

Then, through the shouting and the chaos and the running and the sweat and the cold air now refreshing and the physical movement and now building exhaustion, I heard the bell ring indicating that recess was over and it was time to finally gather in the classroom. But I was in another realm. It felt like I’d walked through a new door, a portal, a fifth dimension, into some original, totally unknown land. Recess faded into the background; it didn’t matter. The shouting student didn’t matter. Even the teachers seemed unimportant to me now.

As the shouting continued, I spied some students turning their backs and heading towards the classroom. Slowly, kids were filing out, going away. Panting, my cheeks wildly flushed, when I looked behind me I saw Anne still giving chase, her blue eyes more determined than ever. I knew then that she was in the same psychological state as me: Gone to the “real world” and existing in some other form. We’d somehow broken from space and time and were in a different universe.

Instinctively, I slowed down a little. There were still perhaps ten boys and a couple girls shouting loudly at us. It was all a delirious sonic background. When I leapt off the asphalt jumping for the central sand of the jungle gym yet again, this time I knew what to do. It had to be done. It was the instinctive, inevitable final maneuver.

I pretended to trip, falling hard onto the sand. I remember the cool feeling of the soft sand against my arms and legs and cheek and I remember the slight taste of sand on my tongue and against my lips and I remember feeling everyone’s eyes on me and I remember feeling an intense joy about the attention, the drama. Being already even then a dramatic, sensitive, deep boy, I relished in the dramatic, climactic, intense experience of “falling hard” in front of the others.

As I started (intentionally slowly) to stand up (which probably looked inauthentic and dramatic as well; I could have been an actor instead of a writer), Anne plowed into me, gloriously, insanely, her warm flushed freckled face blurring into mine, our shadows mixing, our bodies dangerously tangling, and I went down again. She landed on top of me, facing me, me on my back on the sand. She pinned my wrists down and I pretended to not be strong enough to break free. She smiled, intended it to be a sort of “evil” smile, and leaning down, her butt wriggling on top of my hips, she quickly planted a kiss right on my lips. Very fast, very quick and very easy.

When our lips touched I felt a kind of inner ecstasy; not sexual, mind you, but spiritual, almost religious. It changed something fundamental within me and I somehow intrinsically knew that nothing would ever be the same again. It was as if the great Heavens above parted and, just for one singular moment, God showed his face. I had seen The Light. I had witnessed God’s love.

Giggling, Anne quickly jumped off me. I laid there on the sand for a minute. Everyone, I suddenly realized, was gone. I was alone in the totalizing silence: It was only me out there, on my back on the cool sand still, just gazing at the blue sky and the rising sun. A smile formed on my face. I felt saved.

Then our teacher appeared, Mrs. Gold, with her long blue dress and her thin silver necklace swinging around her neck, the pendent making a slight thumbing sound against her collarbone as she walked.

“Michael?” she half-shouted. “Are you ok?”

I did not answer. I slowly got up, brushed the sand off my clothes, and moved towards the class.

The book is free here up to chapter 5, then is paywalled after that. Consider going paid. It’s cheap.

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Refer a friend

TWO YEARS IN NEW YORK

Before, During and After Covid

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This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to people and events are purely coincidental. Copyright 2024.

Dedicated to New York City, the city that changed my life, before, during and after living there. Also to Rick and C.B. (You know who you are.) And to my father, who was the reason I left. RIP. Finally, to my beautiful, amazing wife who keeps me on my toes. I’m glad I had to leave New York, because it meant I got to fall in love with you.

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Prologue

Early May, 2020

Hospitals were overflowing all over the five boroughs. Queens got it the worst, then the Bronx, then Brooklyn. Manhattan not as bad but still terrible, of course. Ventilators were yanked off intubated Baby Boomers in hospitals and handed over to younger Covid patients who needed to breathe to survive. We read the stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker; we heard the tales online and from DeBlasio’s and Cuomo’s mouths. Fear whirled in the air in Harlem like helicopter blades at riots in the 1960s. There was an anxiety which glowed around the neighborhood.

I was, it was obvious, seriously depressed. I barely talked to anyone. Days went by without my even texting a single friend. I started eating and drinking horribly—tons of soda day and night leading to a bad sleep/caffeine cycle; pizza and gigantic pasta plates to suck the carbs from them like manna from heaven in a desperate attempt to feel “better.”

Most white residents seemed to have left. I wanted out of Harlem so bad but my will to take action was very low. Plus I had another three months left on my lease.

I hadn’t told my parents about the two times being chased, or about the gun holdup in the building. They’d just worry. And there was nothing they could do anyway. I felt so alone, so isolated, 3,000 miles away from everyone and everything I truly knew. It was as if I were actually in outer space, floating by myself in the vast dark emptiness, inside of this small, cramped two-bedroom apartment in East Harlem. No one knew where I was. No one would help me. The energy from young men outside had become hostile. I stared at the middle-distance when I passed them; I averted my eyes, looked away, looked down.

Every day was a struggle.

It happened one night when I least expected it. The night before I’d read an article in the Washington Post about how NYC hospitals were seeing a small but growing number of patients in their twenties and thirties who’d come in for asymptomatic Covid-related stroke. Some small percentage of them were dying. Turned out most of them had had Covid without knowing it. That was the thing about Covid—it was often, especially in younger, healthier people, asymptomatic.

This particular day was a bad one. My usual routine now was this: Get up around seven, eight AM, read, drink caffeine, try to hit at least part of an AA meeting on zoom, eat something, feel the strong urge to write but skip it out of emotional Covid fatigue and depression, and then, around eleven or noon, take a “nap.” I was 37 years old and I’d never in my life needed to take naps during the middle of a Wednesday, say. But now I napped every day.

I passed out that day around 2pm. It was sunny and blue outside, but with a crispness which tickled me through my open dirt-stained window overlooking 5^th Avenue. Everything was silent now except for sirens and police and paramedics; even the basketball courts across 130^th were silent; the city had finally removed the nets and locked up the courts.

I woke up later that day confused, groggy, out of it, as if from a profoundly deep REM sleep. My phone, which I reached for on my bedside desk, proclaimed it was 5:30pm. Glancing outside I saw it was bending slowly towards dusk. Covid days were like Before Times weeks. They passed sluggishly and slowly like honey globulating down a tree. Like dripping molasses.

I decided I’d take a shower.

After ten minutes of scalding water I turned it off, got out, stood there a minute, steam rising off my naked body. I closed my eyes. I breathed deep and slow again. My heart, probably because of the heat, I thought, seemed to be beating rather fast. I toweled off.

I walked back into the kitchen. My hot heel and toes cooled against the cold black kitchen tile. I poured another glass of water and drank half of it. I walked into the second room—my writing office—and looked out the window onto 130^th, north, and at the empty, desolate basketball court. A black SUV drove by pumping gangster rap.

Back in the kitchen—thinking I’d put fresh pants on—standing right in the center of the space, I suddenly stopped. My heart out of the blue started pounding. I mean really pounding, as if an angry child were inside my body and was punching as hard as he could. I’d never experienced anything like it, not even when I hopped freight trains, got in scary fist-fights, or hitchhiked across America in my twenties. This was something new and foreign to me.

Next, before I had even processed the pounding heart, a wave of frenetic heat washed through my entire body from my head down to my toes. I imagined being electrified might be like this. After that, my left arm started going numb. I mean completely numb, as in useless limb. Then the rest of the left side of my body started numbing. By now I was absolutely terrified. I remember thinking, I’m having a Covid-related stroke.

Still naked, frantic, the left side of my body mostly useless now, my whole body vibrating with heat and a pumping heart like a fist, the final blow was the worst: I started, for the first time in my life, truly struggling to breathe.

I couldn’t get enough air, no matter how much I tried. The oxygen to my brain dropped. A vast, hyper-intense headache was descending. I panicked. I started trying to gather my clothes so I could…do what? My impulse was to run. But where? Why? Then I thought: Hospital. I need a hospital. But the next thought was: Hospitals are dangerous right now. What if you get put on a ventilator? What about Covid? But isn’t THIS Covid? I didn’t know. I was lost. Scared. Alone. I ran to the window again in the office, looking outside. Empty streets, shiny from a light spring drizzle. Street lamps. Desolation. Nothing.

Police, I thought. Call 911. Or my downstairs Texan neighbor, Latisha. Someone! I sensed in that moment that I was going to die. It was inevitable. I was going to die at 37, 3,000 miles away from friends and family, totally isolated and alone, scared and depressed, in East Harlem of all places. I felt my eyes widen in fear. I was too young to die. Too young to leave this planet, this life. Help!

At last I looked for my cellphone; it took me ten seconds to realize it was already in my right hand. I’d been going on autopilot. Had I been talking out loud? Had I already called anyone? The breathing got much harder again. I struggled. I needed air.

I dialed my mother. She picked up. She knew something was wrong. I never called randomly, unplanned. I said, my breath locked and rugged, “Mom. I need help. Struggling to breathe. Beating heart. Left side of body is numb.”

“Jesus Michael,” she said, the fear hot in her voice. “Ok. Ok. Look. Honey. What happened. Nevermind. Can you sit down?”

“I need a hospital mom,” I said. I realized then there was a hospital up on Lenox and 137^th. Eight blocks away. I could throw clothes on and sprint up there. But with my struggle to breathe?

“No!” My mom yelled into the receiver. “Hospitals are dangerous right now! Let’s see…let’s see…shit…honey, can you call your neighbor? Can you sit down?”

I heard the panic in her voice. I heard my father asking her what was going on. She briefly answered him. I heard my dad say “shit” in the background. I had my mom on speaker phone. I was still in the office. I’d managed to get an old raggedy pair of shorts on. I sat down on the little thrift-store gray couch in the corner. My heart was still beating hard; the left side of my body was still numb; my breathing was shallow and weak.

“Ok, I’m sitting,” I said.

“Good. Good. Ok. Honey. Can you just take real slow, deep breaths for me?”

I wanted to weep. “I don’t want to die mom.” Fear was paralyzing me. My brain seemed half frozen. I was groggy and confused. Time seemed to move in LSD-like waves almost. It was like crawling through psychic mud.

“You’re not going to die, Michael. Keep breathing. Slow. Deep. In…out. In…out. In…out. Okay??”

“Ok,” I said, and it sounded slow and syrupy…

Chapter 1

New York City lived in my body. It’s a place I felt more than anything else. Especially as an outsider, and especially especially as a native Californian. I only lived in Manhattan for a little over two years, and yet it happened to be a moment which had never been seen before and may never be seen again—namely, the global pandemic known as Covid-19. Add on to this the murder of George Floyd and the mass protests which ensued, and the invidious political resentment roiling the nation on both sides of the spectrum—not to mention the chaotic turbulence of the Trump era—and you have one bumpy ride.

I was born and raised in Southern California—Ventura and Ojai, north of Los Angeles. I bounced around for many years and ended up living in the San Francisco Bay Area for a decade, from 2008 to 2019. As a semi-wannbe-semi-legitimate-very-angry rich-kid punker growing up in the late nineties and early two-thousands, I fastidiously read all the books I could find about the first-wave of punk which started in the 1970s. And this, of course, led me to Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, which led me to The Ramones, who grew up in Queens and played at CBGBs. Later, when I had transcended—if that’s the appropriate word—punk rock and discovered writing, I read Jack Kerouac’s roman-a-clef On the Road, the 1957 classic which nailed a generation and changed young men in search of spiritual ecstasy ever since. On the Road, again, led me to New York.

So in 2006—when I was twenty-three—I sold my few possessions, ended my one-year lease at a small one-bedroom apartment in Pacific Beach in San Diego, and, following Kerouac’s lead, took an Amtrak train 3,000 miles east across America to the emerald jewel that was Manhattan.

Back then I was almost halfway through my “drinking career,” and needless to say it was a wild two weeks, complete with drunken tomfoolery; blackouts; never-ending explorations by subway and foot; crazed, frantic sex with strange women I barely recall anymore; and continually craning my neck upwards gazing at those impossibly high, shiny, metallic buildings, like steel dinosaurs which still ruled the land.

That trip set off a pattern: Once every year, I’d go to the city for two weeks. I’d have my inane, insipid run of debauchery, and then come back to the warm, soft, kind arms of California, hungover, hungry, and hopelessly in love. New York, to me then—as now—was a very romantic idea. Not so much a concrete city, per se, but an idea; a mental rabbit-hole which, if I took the ride, pulled me into all the literature I’d ever read, or nearly. The more books I read over the years, the more I started to realize that New York was The Place for writers. So many famous writers lived there. It wasn’t just that the core of Big Publishing was located in The Big Apple. It wasn’t even just that you could potentially make gargantuan literary connections if you were lucky. Or even that intellectuals and writers had flocked and still did flock to Manhattan to get energized off its electric buzzing heart (which never stopped).

It was, really, the simple fact that it was tough to live there. It gave the term “starving artist” more depth, shape, dimension and meaning. Everyone lived on top of each other; everyone was in everyone else’s way all the time. People had harsh, myopic tunnel-vision; it was A City of Solipsism. You thought that rancid smell coming from the culture was narcissism but really it was the intense fury of ambition, burning like a flaming river of bubbling lava. Everything that lava touched got consumed. You even consumed yourself. You forgot who you were. What you were. None of that mattered in New York City. What mattered was making it; success.

In September of 2010 I hit an emotional rock-bottom from alcoholism and got sober. It changed my life overnight. Immediately, all my drinking energy transmogrified into literary urgency. I had the need to finish the autobiographical novel I’d started in 2008 and had chipped away at for over two years. In a fever of hallucinatory vigor, I finished the draft in a matter of months, completing it in early 2011.

From that point on I called myself a writer. My mom was an author. My uncle was a writer. It was familial. As young as eight I’d written poetry. As a child Mom read the classics out loud to me. I scanned my mother’s prestigious library when I was little, picking up classics like The Last Tycoon, Sophie’s Choice, and Doctor Zhivago. I read the sentences with glee, pretending I knew what they meant. It didn’t matter. It was the words, the language that I craved. And the style, personal to each different author. Even then I knew I was destined to put words on the page.

Alcohol stopped me dead in my tracks. But then I stopped. And everything changed.

I continued my routine, after I “put the plug in the jug,” as they say in AA jargon, to visit New York yearly. Now when I went I’d explore in a more pedestrian, mature, rational way. I’d go to literary readings at places like McNally-Jackson Books in SoHo, or The Strand on East 12^th Street. Over time, I grew more and more covetous of New York City, more and more desirous, more and more convinced that, at some point, I’d simply have to live there. The seed had started out small but it continued to grow and spread, metastasizing like some lurid cancer which could not be stopped.

Many things got in the way, as they tend to do in contemporary American life. I was living in North Oakland. I went back to college to finally land by bachelor’s degree in creative writing. I was interning for a literary agent and slowly building my book editing business. At last, just before I turned thirty, I had my first short story published in a literary magazine. I was beyond thrilled. In 2013, I got into a relationship. After two years we left our respective apartments and, with my parents’ help, we bought a small house in El Cerrito, just north of Berkeley. We were in our early thirties, in love, and I was under the naïve delusion that I was, for the most part, ready to “settle down.” We’d both had that decadent decade of our twenties, wherein we’d tirelessly traveled; ran away from adulthood and responsibility; threw sand in our parents’ faces, and chased our fractious dreams.

We lasted for four-and-a-half years. Not bad, considering. But I discovered, in the end, that I was not, in fact, done with the adventurous life. Nor was I finished chasing my dream of becoming a successful writer. In fact, given the ten years of active alcoholism, it was more like I was just getting started. I tried to convince my girlfriend to rent the house out for a year, for us to move to New York together. But she wasn’t interested in that. She legitimately wanted to settle down. Get married at some point. Likely have kids.

It was then that I realized the axiom I’d grasped all my life intuitively: I was a harsh triangle living in the ridiculous square that was American society. I didn’t fit in. I was uniquely, hopelessly who I was. Michael Mohr. Unknown, driven California writer.

We broke up on the first day of 2018. January 1^st. The day after my 35^th birthday. We’d just returned from a Christmas/birthday week in snowy Chicago with friends. It would be our final trip together. We both knew we were traveling down different paths. We’d moved apart at the fork in the road a year before. We knew it, but knowing and acting are two very different things, especially when it comes to romantic relationships.

Over the next year I lived half like a zombie, working extra hard on editing to make money so I could do something riveting, and so I wouldn’t have to feel the profoundly painful reality I was enduring. And yet I did feel it: I wept every day; I talked to close friends for hours and hours on the phone; I went to AA meetings religiously; I wrote; I edited; I survived. The house had been in my name, and had been bought with my parents’ money. My ex had merely helped pick the place out. We’d lived there together for two-and-a-half years. So there I was, thirty-five, living alone in a quiet, safe suburban town where my neighbors were older than me by decades.

That’s when I understood. I had to go. New York. It beckoned to me, calling across the continent like some long lost lusty lover. It wasn’t just about fun or chaos or the question-mark of what might happen; it was the ambitious drive deep inside of me. To do it; to make it as a serious writer. To be encapsulated by all that buzzing, frenetic energy. To stroll around Greenwich Village and Chelsea. To take the subways everywhere. To smell that trash-on-the-sidewalk, feel the warm-rush-of-subway-air-through-the-grate on 42^nd; to hear the constant bleating taxis and unruly pedestrians flipping off undiligent drivers; to hear the unceasing sirens and paramedics and NYFD trucks at all hours of the day and night; to be where Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo, James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion and Kerouac and everyone else I’d read had done it.

Now it was my time to do it. After working my ass off for a year—and recovering, glacially, from the breakup—I finally felt ready for the move. I didn’t have much of a plan. I didn’t know how long I’d go for, or even if I’d stay long-term. Like almost all of my romantic geographic trysts in my life, I leapt off the cliff without a parachute. I’ll figure it out, was one of my common neologisms. (Still is.) So I didn’t rent the house out. Not at first. I didn’t get an apartment in New York. I didn’t know what I was doing, and that excited me.

This was the beginning of my New York City journey. My Manhattan adventure. My romantic dream come to real-life fruition. I was scared and thrilled and ecstatic, full of pumping adrenaline. The future was wide, wide open. I loved that feeling. Anything could happen.

Little did I know that in one short year—twelve incendiary months—the whole city would shut down as a result of a global health crisis. No one could have seen that coming.

My time in New York—and particularly my time there during the pandemic—changed my life irrevocably. It changed all our lives, of course. I am but one man with one story. A speck of sand on the beach that is humanity. But this seems to be the story, somehow, that I have meant to tell my whole life.

But before the pandemic, before we even knew the words “shelter in place,” I had 2019. It was in this year that I became—in my mind—a “New Yorker.”

Chapter 2

March, 2019

Lucius—my 3-year-old Tuxedo cat—and I sat in the back of an Uber heading west over the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, crossing the Harlem River (north of the East River) aiming ourselves at 125^th Street, in Harlem. The vaguely Iranian-looking driver stayed focused on the road, ignoring me, which was great. He spoke softly to his iPhone clipped to the dashboard, speaking in a Middle Eastern tongue I could not decipher. We’d been driving for 45 minutes since JFK. I was exhausted from lack of REM sleep. It was March 26, 2019. I saw the faintest vestiges of snow from a recent storm along the road. The radio was playing lightly, some local news channel, a man talking about how the winter just simply wasn’t ending, and how temperatures were still down in the forties. When, the man wanted to know, would it start to feel like spring. The first rays of light were just beginning to puncture the hibernating bears’ lair.

We got off the bridge and spiraled around in a circle along with other cars; then we headed south onto Harlem River Drive (north of FDR). It was good to be on the freeway again. I saw the river to my left (east), cold-seeming and deep blue, glinting sunlight pecking the water. I glanced at Lucius in his small flexible green crate. I’d been worried about him flying. It was his first time. We’d flown out of SFO.

My ex, Adinah, and I had gotten him when he was just four months old, from Berkeley Humane, in October, 2016. It’d been Adinah who’d wanted a cat to begin with. We had the house. Now we needed a pet. All my life I’d been around animals: My parents always had dogs. Usually chocolate or black labs. And pugs. Currently a 90-pound yellow lab and a Husky/German Shepard mix. At first I’d resisted getting a cat. I’d had a cat we found when I was a kid growing up in Ojai. But I hadn’t had to take care of it myself. Adinah worked a traditional 9-5 in Fairfield as a graphic designer. I worked from home, writing and book editing. Which meant that I’d be the one stuck with the aforementioned four-legged creature. I’d always been mostly neutral, slightly impatient around animals. They were too needy. I myself was needy enough.

But, in the end, we finally visited Berkeley Humane. We looked for two days. When I saw the black and white furry little guy in his cage, and he licked my hand—and, ironically, scratched Adinah—I knew he was the one. We got him, purchased some supplies, bought the little green crate, and took him home. Adinah gone during the days, I fell in love. We named him Lucius after the child in the movie Gladiator, starring Russel Crow. He had an ancient, tough wisdom about him. His whiskers were so long we almost named him Bernie, after Bernie Sanders (because the whiskers reminded us of the former candidate’s wild white hair) who’d just relinquished the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton. Adinah and Lucius were very close. Closer than he and I were in a certain way. She could get him to play in a way that confounded and eluded me. I started to feel edged out, even. But, after we broke up, in January, 2018, and she left the house, we decided it made the most sense for me to keep him. That was when our real bond began.

The Uber slowed down and stopped in front of 2^nd Avenue and 105^th. There was a five-story gray building, drab-looking. For a moment I just stared at the building. How strange it was. I was here, in Manhattan. At 36. After all those years of debauchery in this city throughout my twenties. Bright lights, big city, like Jay McInerny wrote. A shock erupted inside of me: The El Cerrito house was empty. No one was there. I was in New York City. Adinah was gone. We were finished together. A whistling wind blew through my memories of our four and a half years. The bike rides; the backpacking trips; buying the house; home repairs; road adventures; reading one of my unpublished novels in its entirety out loud to her; getting Lucius; getting to know each other’s families; her father’s rejection of me out of hand. It all sat there inside of me like a handful of jagged rocks, cutting my insides. Life was suffering. Life was pain. Life was constant change. Change was scary but good. Necessary. Human.

I got out of the car. The man jumped out and opened the trunk and helped me grab my stuff. I had my blue and gray messenger bag, a cloth bag with extra clothes, Lucius in his little green crate, and my gigantic black wheeled suitcase. Cold wind cut against my exposed skin, rushing north along 2^nd Ave. It was freezing out. I shivered. Even in my thick red REI ski jacket it was cold. I was used to the Bay Area. California. This was very, very different.

I thanked the driver and he nodded and took off, speeding away. I stood on the shoulder of 2^nd. People walked by. No one noticed me. I was just another little specimen in this town. Another young seeker. Another writer hoping to “make it,” just like actors trying to succeed in Los Angeles. They say if you can make it in New York City you can make it anywhere.

Following the Airbnb instructions, I walked into the next door Thai food/hipster coffee restaurant and told the cook behind the counter I was there to pick up the keys to the building next door.

“Which apartment?” he asked, testing me.

I had to think a moment. “4C.”

He grimaced and handed me the keys. The place smelled like rice noodles dipped in sesame sauce and curry.

Escaping the brutal chill, I got into the drab gray building. It was a fourth-floor walkup which meant no elevator. I had to get my suitcase up four flights of stairs. I started the ascent, feeling both resentful and grateful at the same time. As I climbed I heard Spanish being spoken softly behind cracked-open doors, news playing on a TV. I smelled Mexican cooking, sauteed peppers and pan-fried tortillas. I heard the echoes of shoes screeching down the stairs coming my way. At an open space I paused before the next set of stairs. I breathed heavily. Lucius was still frozen with morbid fear. New sights, sounds, smells. Fresh environment. Loud noises he’d never heard. He didn’t even meow. He had to be fairly comfortable to meow.

A young black man raced down the stairs, saw me, pretended I did not exist (New York tradition) and passed me. I resumed my climb.

At last I reached the fourth floor. I slid the keys into the slot at 4C. I opened the door. Inside, it was basically what I expected. My first sensory awareness was the ripe stink of old coffee grounds. There was a little bathroom to the right of the door. A medium-sized open kitchen. A desk. A living room with ratty beige carpet and a ratty, torn orange couch. And a fairly large bedroom with a king-sized bed. Windows overlooked 2^nd Ave in the bedroom. Across 2^nd there was a large building called East Harlem Scholars Academy. I set all my stuff down. I placed Lucius in his crate on the bed. Looking down four floors I saw cars rushing both ways on 2^nd. Well. Here I was. Now what?

I walked slowly around the apartment. The Airbnb guy was a Brazilian artist, it’d said in his profile. Big portraits of his surrealist art hung on the walls in the living room. It was the kind of art which can only be understood, perhaps, while on acid. Bending, dripping hands; four-dimensional clocks; rabid, explosive colors everywhere. The apartment reeked of old laundry. Male sweat. Cigarettes. Bacardi-151. It was perfect. It was like sliding my foot into an old shoe I’d never worn before which somehow fit precisely, as if it had been waiting for me all this time.

I opened Lucius’ crate, on the bed, and he didn’t budge. After five minutes he very slowly, extremely tentatively, started to explore, leaving his tiny cage. He used his nose to smell everything in sight. In less than three minutes he had disappeared under the ratty orange couch. I shook my head, thinking, What a little silly-ass. But I understood. He was freaked out. It was all completely new. For both of us.

For a half an hour I unpacked my suitcase. Then I sat on the couch, in awe that I was, at last, here. All those conversations I’d had with Adinah about moving here. (Even the idea of me going solo and her staying and renting the second bedroom for six months.) All the talks with my mom about the need to go to The Big Apple (she encouraged me to go). All the friends—especially writer friends—I’d told I was “going to move across the country,” before I even believed it myself. Maybe I told them so I’d feel the pressure to actually do it; feel accountable.

How had it come to this again? Being single. Alone. In a sense I’d been alone all my life. Even the four and a half years with Adinah I’d often felt alone. Utterly alone, in fact, as if existing at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, completely separated from all other human beings. I’d always been a fairly attractive guy—short, balding, but handsome. Women hadn’t been a problem from 30,000 feet.

But, besides Adinah, the relationships had often been a mix of chaotic, fleeting, sex-based, and one-sided. I tended to move towards control and criticism, and I tended to end up with codependent, kind, needy women. It was a classic alcoholic cycle. (Even when sober.) A semi-loving, semi-toxic tango which required domination and submission. And yet I had loved Adinah. And she’d loved me. In many ways we’d brought out the best and worst in each other but either way the thumping heart between us was shared. Still, even from the start there’d been that feeling I always had of stark loneliness, of being alone in a narrow cave so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face, no flashlight. Despite all this, she’d added warmth to my trembling aloneness.

I woke up with a start what seemed like hours and hours later. Sweat beaded my forehead. I’d slid sideways down the couch. My throat was dry. I looked around. It took me a moment. Strange paintings on the walls. Ratty rug. Thrift-store couch. Oh. Right. Manhattan. Airbnb. I jumped in the shower and woke up. It was only 9:15am. I’d slept about an hour and a half. It didn’t matter: The adrenaline, the exuberance rushed through me like a shot of cocaine.

Wrapped up in four layers, with my red lightweight REI jacket topping it all off, I jogged down the stairs and out the door, this time without all my stuff. It was colder than Antarctica. That wind rushed at me again. I pulled my hoodie over my beanie-clad head. Brrrrr. I didn’t know what to do, where to go. I had the urge to walk. Move. My whole adult life I’d cherished walking. No matter what city I’d lived in—Ojai; Ventura; Santa Cruz; San Diego; Portland; Philly; San Francisco; Oakland; El Cerrito; etc—I’d loved to walk around the neighborhoods. Morning, daytime, night: It didn’t matter. I craved movement. I liked scoping out the locals. I liked seeing the apartment buildings and homes. I enjoyed the vicarious experience of imagining myself in one of those warm, safe refuges.

I chose to walk west along 104^th Street. I jammed my hands deep into my pockets to keep them warm. Black and Hispanic men passed me and I quickly learned—intuitively—to avoid eye contact and not nod or smile. In Ojai, yes. Bay Area, fine. East Harlem? No. Especially as a white-boy. My first nod had received harsh, cold eyes and tight lips which seemed to drip with this disclaimer: You’re in the wrong hood, brotha.

My walk took me past 3^rd Ave, Park, Madison, and finally I saw Central Park, along 5^th. I remembered walks in Central Park during visits to Manhattan in my drunken, lurid twenties. I realized I was starving. I hadn’t eaten on the plane, minus a small orange juice and some crackers. The last meal I’d consumed had been the night before in El Cerrito before a restless, nightmare-spiced sleep. I stopped at a hotdog stand. Classic New York City. I paid too much for two long, skinny dogs with just the buns and a spray of ketchup. I got an orange Snapple.

I crossed Madison to 5^th. Cars rushed down 5^th at breakneck speed. I found some boulders nearby, along a path. People were meandering around the park, gesturing with their hands to each other, talking about who knew what, distracted, oblivious to my pitiful existence. Who was I? A no-name unpublished writer with no agent and no stature. I had come here to potentially change that. Would I? A voice in my mind said, Goddamn right you will. Another voice said, Be realistic, kid. The ambitious, driven writer and the critical, sarcastic editor. I had both. Always. Thank God, I thought: I’m here sober. In my thirties.

I found a spot to sit on one of the boulders. It was jagged and rough but it worked. I devoured the hotdogs. Drank the Snapple. Wiped my chin and lips with the back of my hand. I watched the cars racing south one-way along 5^th Avenue. I saw in my mind the sunlight glinting off the East River as the Uber drove me towards the Airbnb. It reminded me now of the last time I’d seen Adinah in person. It’d been at the Berkeley Marina, eight long months after she’d broke up with me, severing that special bond we’d developed. The night she told me she couldn’t do it anymore—what pain; what sadness; what relief!—had been our last night together. We cried. We hugged. We shook our heads. The primeval urge to change her mind was present. But then I had what can only be described as a moment of grace. I grasped deep inside that the relationship needed to end. It was for the best. I let it go. I simply ungripped my metaphorical hands and let it go. The next morning I woke up to her crying again. Then she got dressed for work. She didn’t even say goodbye. She just left. She never came back.

When we met at the Berkeley Marina it was September, 2018. We’d emailed since the breakup about money I owed her; minor updates; things she’d left and needed to come pick up when I was gone. But this was our first—and as it turned out, last—time meeting in person. I remember seeing her when I parked in front of the craggy boulders by the shimmering calm blue sea. She stood by the entrance to the pier. She looked the same as always: Short; dark-haired; thick-thighed. An intelligent, creative Jewish girl born and raised in San Francisco on 12^th Avenue. I didn’t feel much. Not then.

I got out of the car and approached her. I tried a sloppy smile. She tried one back. I sensed her nervousness, a tension between us.

“Hey,” I said, swallowing a knot down my throat.

“Hi,” she said, her anxious hands moving all over her body. She kept looking away and then flicking her brown eyes at me. Back and forth.

I breathed deep and slow, and then said, “Shall we walk?”

She nodded and we started walking side-by-side. We began to tell each other our stories—how life had been since we’d split up. We found a green bench and sat. It was warm out still, mid September, an Indian summer. She’d couch-surfed with several friends and even for a while a co-worker near Fairfield. It hadn’t been pleasant. She’d been saving up money and would soon be looking for a room in an apartment in Oakland. For a moment we didn’t speak, eyes straight ahead at the bay. Then Adinah said, “How’s Lucius?”

I looked at her and my heart broke. Lucius. Our precious baby. She was his mother. I had lost Adinah. Adinah had lost me, the house, and Lucius.

“Want to see some photos?” I asked, half-hoping she’d say no.

“Yeah,” she said.

I scrolled my phone and showed her some shots of him being cute. “I let him go outside with supervision,” I said. This must have shocked Adinah. We’d never let him out before. The two and a half years together in the house we’d always made sure the front screen door was closed. It made me think of my mother when I was growing up in the house on La Luna Avenue in Ojai, always yelling at me to keep the black iron gate protecting the driveway and house locked so the dogs wouldn’t get out onto the busy street.

She gulped and looked away from me. “Are you okay?” I asked.

For a moment she didn’t face me. When she did tears were arcing down her cheeks. This prompted my throat to close up in a tight knot and I started crying, too. She held my hand—which was unexpected—and we both wept.

We spent all told three hours wandering around the marina, along the parks and by the water, past the slotted yachts, telling each other about our lives the past eight months, both commenting on how shockingly bizarre it was that we really weren’t together anymore. Memories of the early days of our relationship in 2013 flooded my mind. The good, easy times. The new, fresh, blooming love. The connection. The mutual understanding. The joy of finding, if even for a brief moment, a fellow traveler in life. Though even then there’d been micro-cracks in the dam.

I hugged her tight in front of her little white Toyota Corolla. I stared deeply into her eyes for a moment. I shrugged. She slipped my grasp and said goodbye. In that moment none of the hard past between us seemed to matter—her father’s loathing of me, for instance. It was a pure feeling. Love and letting go. Forgiveness. Grace.

She got into her car and backed out. Then, just like that, she was gone.

I stood there a minute after she left. Then I walked along the craggy boulders by the water. I sat on one. It was bright and hot and sunny now. I saw the Bay Bridge, and the buildings of San Francisco, and the red Golden Gate Bridge, and the Marin Headlands way out there, across the bay. The water was so calm and flat, still. I saw the end of the marina, as if dangling there, heading into nothingness. It seemed incomplete, like a massive finger which hadn’t quite been fully extended. I took a long, slow, deep breath. I held it, closed my eyes, released. When I opened my eyes a rush sensation ran through my whole body, tingling my spine. I understood it. It was over. Really, actually over. Our lives had been cleaved apart. The rush feeling morphed into a profound feeling of loss. I swallowed, took another breath, eyeing the calm sea, and I said, whispering to myself, Goodbye, Adinah.

I walked back to my apartment on 2^nd. It was not yet 11am. I was alone again. Truly alone. And here, in New York City.

I was ready.

Chapter 3

Three weeks later—mid April—the weather warmed. The wind calmed. It was sunny and bright most days (with some minor fog) and not yet humid. In the past I’d always visited the city in summer. I liked this time of year much better: Fewer tourists; less humidity. I started to get the lay of the land. I’d walk west down 103^rd Street to Lexington and catch the local 6 train (it took me a while to figure out the difference between the “local” train and the “express” which skipped stops and aimed right at the goal). The subway experience was still a bit like being on a Disneyland ride to me, that warm rush of air from the tracks; the harsh twisting and curving around turns; screeching of metal wheels on rails; the darkness underground. It had a mystique to it. It reminded me of The Matterhorn ride. For locals I knew it was just another day, another grind, another bumpy ride to work.

It was strange to me how everyone had that glazed, myopic, zombie look on their faces; people always looked down or at an iPhone or at a book or at the floor or the middle-distance. Anything but at other humans. We all pretended we were essentially alone. This truth made me feel irritated and simultaneously glad: For once, I could safely hide. Homeless men entered the train at 86^th Street or 72^nd reeking of trash and body odor, their hands open for change, begging. There was a homeless man with no legs who literally shuffled on his ass using his arms down the aisle bumping into riders’ legs, saying, “Excuse me, ma’am,” and shaking an old paper McDonald’s cup with coins rattling inside. I’d seen this type of thing in the Bay Area, but much less intense and in your face.

I’d discovered that my apartment was the loudest place I’d ever lived in, and that was saying a lot. It started around ten, eleven at night, when the drunks and drug addicts were out. Cursing; fighting; the noise of bottles clinking or crashing onto the sidewalk or street. Then it morphed around midnight, one am, into seemingly endless lines of gigantic, rumbling eighteen-wheeler trucks which drove north along 2^nd. Each time a truck passed, it literally shook the entire building; it was like a miniature earthquake. Lucius, after two weeks, had at last come out from hiding and was now cautiously entering the bedroom. He did not like nor trust the profoundly loud noise of the trucks. I didn’t like it either. It’s just an Airbnb, I told myself; it’ll just be for a while, until you decide what to do.

And I still wasn’t sure what to do. Whether to stay in New York City long-term or not. I’d been here three weeks and I still very much felt alive in the city. Yet I also isolated, disconnected. I didn’t know anyone. East Harlem was “uptown,” and in many ways I longed to be downtown, where the action was. Often I’d take the 6 train and get off at 72^nd and walk around the Upper East Side. Or I’d get off and trudge across Central Park to the Westside, enjoying the grass and the trees, checking out The Dakota building on 72^nd and Central Park West, the famous apartment building where John Lennon was shot and killed in 1980.

There was something so obviously alive and intense, even dangerous about Manhattan, and this energy pushed me up against a wall in a good way. It was as if the city itself held a knife against my jugular. I became an observer. I watched people on the trains, in the park, at restaurants. I sat on benches on Central Park West and eavesdropped on conversations. I closed my eyes and listened to the frantic traffic, the constant honking, watched the yellow taxis and Ubers racing around like cocaine in the bloodstream. Translucent, bubbling smoke chuffed from sewer tops. I still craned my neck, shielding my eyes with my hand, glancing up at those spectacularly, absurdly tall steel buildings around 42^nd Street in Times Square. The more time I spent in Manhattan, the more clearly I grasped that I was both not a New Yorker, and was very much a sensitive, too-kind, almost- hippie Californian.

I discovered AA meetings around the city. My favorite was called Sober Authors—a 12-step meeting specifically for (though not solely limited to) sober writers. It was (as is typical) in the basement of a Catholic church on the Upper West Side at 96^th and Broadway, in a space AAs called The Little Room. Here I found comfort, and, slowly, began to get to know other serious writers. I met two men named Matthew, one in his sixties with a head of curly white hair who had been playing solo banjo to huge crowds in Central Park since the eighties, known around town as The Banjo Man, and a much younger Matthew my age who’d moved to the city a mere three months before I had, from Los Angeles.

The younger Matthew was a screenwriter. He’d lived in LA for thirteen years. Originally from Washington, D.C., he’d gone to LA to “make it” in the film industry. For a while he worked editing and developing scripts for director Michael Mann. He’d been connected; had known stars. But, he said, his drinking and pot-smoking had gotten so bad that he’d considered suicide a reasonable option at one point. He’d been working fourteen to sixteen-hour days editing scripts and novels, and then went home and drank. He needed a change. In December, 2018, he’d gotten on a plane to New York. He’d been here four months, which was how much time he now had clean and sober. He lived up near Columbia University, around 114^th. Matthew had kind, thoughtful blue eyes, wavy brunet hair, wore sharp button-up collared shirts with the top two buttons undone, and always gestured exclusively with his right hand when he spoke, as if it were out of his control. We hit it off immediately.

And I was writing; that was the best thing. I’d sit at that desk by the kitchen and open my laptop and just journal about my days here. I knew eventually I’d start writing fiction again but, for the moment, I was content to just feel my fingers tapping the black faded keys on the large black keyboard I’d brought with me. I wrote about the subway trains. Central Park. The Empire State Building. Walks around 72^nd and 42^nd and the Bowery and Avenue A and Tompkins Square Park and Greenwich Village. I’d always been romantically attracted to the village for obvious literary reasons, namely the Beat writers, who’d written there, lived there, gotten rich, juicy writing material there, and had gotten drunk there, back in the 1940s and 50s. The Village had historically always been a magnet for weirdos, freaks, hippies, artists, writers, the avant-garde. I was at home there and yet, as always with my contrarian nature, also alone.

No matter where I was or who I was with: I felt different. I’d rebelled against my conventional parents in my teens by leaping into punk rock, which had led me to drinking, drugs, girls, anarchy and pain. But even when I was swirling in the core of that anarchic nexus, even at seventeen, I realized we all looked the same; we were all wearing costumes, trying to “look different.” We were all terribly afraid of being perceived as “ordinary.” In my early twenties I metamorphosed from punker to aspiring writer, going out there and mimicking Kerouac’s protagonist, Sal Paradise, hitchhiking across and all over the United States, getting into trouble, meeting women, drinking, exploring America, winding through state after state and through redwoods and along oceans, trying, in theory, to “find myself.”

At the tail end of twenty-seven, I hit an emotional and spiritual bottom and got sober. That shook my foundation; it changed everything. I’ll never forget that last night of drinking. It was the evening of September 23, 2010. In three months I’d be twenty-eight which, at the time, I thought was old. I’d always been a very young kid at heart, with a superbly old soul. Immaturity had sat like silt inside of the sack that was my life experience and wisdom from life as a punk and on the road. That night I met a friend at a bar in North Beach, in San Francisco—the Italian neighborhood way up a hill—called The Saloon. It was the kind of old-school, been-there-forever bar which toothless old men drank at during the day. You’d walk in at noon. It’d be dark, a few narrow shafts of sunlight peeking through an ancient, dusty window. The place reeked of piss and stale cigars and old vomit. Pen-graffiti was written all over the bathroom walls. There was a little wooden stage in the back and one night a week a blues band would play and everybody would dance their asses off. Once, my folks had come to visit and my friend Amy and I had taken my parents there. We’d all gotten drunk and danced.

That evening was the tail-end of a decade of hard drinking. Ever since that first sip of Peppermint Schnapps sophomore year at St. Andrew’s Prep, the private, fancy college-prep high school in Ojai I’d attended for four years, I’d been hooked. Old for my grade I’d been seventeen. From seventeen to twenty-seven: The anger; the women; the drunk-driving; the blackouts; the hitchhiking; the freight train hopping; the hangovers; the lies; the secrecy; the exhaustion.

Now, in 2010, I was living with another drunk in a rough part of North Oakland. I worked a shitty retail job in Hayes Valley, San Francisco, which I loathed. I slept with anything that had a pulse. I’d made so many bad decisions in my life that making a good choice seemed erratic and wrong. I was driving my life into the ground, trying to burn it all down. I didn’t want to die, exactly, but I didn’t really want to live, either. I was at a “jumping off place” as they say in the AA big book.

Around five pm I walked through the double-doors into The Saloon. The bar was off a little side street just off Columbus in San Francisco’s famous North Beach. (Another neighborhood the Beats had lived in and cherished.) I’d gotten drunk here hundreds of times. My friend—a girl from Ventura, where I’d grown up, named Arlene, in town with her grandma—sat there eyeing me across the bar as I held the doors open momentarily, letting disgusting sunlight seep in. Several old men sitting on stools at the bar shielded their eyes; one mumbled, Close that fuckin door, man. The bartender was a cross-dresser, a huge man with a beard and a short dress.

“Hey,” I said, approaching Arlene. We hadn’t seen each other in a year or so. We’d met in a Political Science class at Ventura College after I’d barely graduated high school, around 2003. We hugged; her breasts squished against my chest. She smelled of musky perfume. I sat next to her on a stool—we were up at the bar, down ten feet from the old toothless men—and I ordered a pint of PBR. She already had a drink. We clinked our glasses, toasting to youth and life. She had a cleft chin and almond eyes. She wore tight jeans and black boots. I wondered if she could sense my deadness inside, the self-loathing, the desperate desire for love and affection. All I wanted, really, though, was sex. Hard, fast, rough. I approached sex then like performing chores: The goal is just to get them done.

I’d told myself for the weeks leading up to our meeting here that I could “just have a few drinks,” even though, in my ten years of drinking, I’d never once accomplished this goal. I “knew,” with 110% certainty that I could do it. I could have one drink. Maybe two. I was smart, from a good, educated family (Mom had a master’s degree in nursing; Dad a master’s in chemistry and another master’s in computer science), and I had willpower; agency. No drink was going to tell me what to do. No drink could dictate how I behaved.

But, as the minutes wore on, I knew I’d get drunk. I ordered another pint. Then another. And another. Arlene reminded me that she had to get back to the hotel to go to dinner with her grandma at 7:30. My hand somehow ended up on her thigh. I found myself smiling absurdly at nothing. I ordered another. And another. And another.

That’s when it happened. I had my first and only out-of-body experience. I became aware of two Michaels. One was talking to Arlene, drinking, lying to himself, and the other sat silently on the empty barstool next to him, observing, judging, watching. From that other “me” I watched “myself” take drink after drink after drink, even though I knew I couldn’t stop; even though I wanted to. It hit me then like lightening to the forehead. I was an alcoholic. There was no dramatic flash of my drinking past. No pause in the conversation. No behavior change. I just simply became aware of it. Right then. At 6:35pm on a Tuesday at The Saloon in North Beach in San Francisco, California, on September 23, 2010.

I ended up convincing Arlene to ditch her grandmother. I called a buddy of mine who lived in Cole Valley. We kept drinking. I morphed into a “gray-out” drunk. We jumped into a yellow cab. I found my buddy’s spare key in the hidden spot. We went into his apartment. He was asleep. It was past one am. She helped me pull out the couch foldout bed. I shoved her onto the thin mattress. We got naked. We had rough, raucous sex, and the last thing I remembered was kissing her neck, mumbling something drunkenly about love.

When I woke the next day—at ten-fifteen, very late for work—the apartment was empty. My buddy was gone. So was Arlene. No note. Nothing. I sat up immediately; the vomit thundered nastily. I ran to the bathroom, knelt down, and out it came in a morbid, vacuous rush. How many times had I repeated this experience? My life had become an alcoholic Groundhog Day. When I was done throwing up, I stood and washed my face with cold water from the faucet. I drank from it greedily, too. After drying my hands, I caught my jagged green eyes in the mirror. I looked whipped. I looked broken. I looked done. Like a howling coyote with no howl left. Like Jesus post-crucifixion. I fell to my knees, on the bathroom floor, sobbing uncontrollably.

I knew right then and there. My relationship with alcohol—my first true love, my best friend, my family—was finished.

My drinking life was over.

Chapter 4

Life was a crisscross between violence and solitude in Manhattan. At least I was used to my apartment now. It was early May. It had been warming up considerably, and now it nearly seemed like early summer. (Again, minus the staggering heat and humidity. But it was sunny and nice out.) I developed a routine. I’d sleep in until about eight, then get up and drink multiple cups of black Irish Breakfast tea with half and half. (I’d quit drinking coffee nearly a decade ago, after I quit alcohol. Ditto cigarettes.) I’d spend a solid hour reading whatever book I was devouring at that moment. (Anything from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Colson Whitehead to Kafka to Kierkegaard.) Reading had always been my Achilles Heel, my Other Addiction besides alcohol, drugs, sugar and sex. (And writing, of course.) Walking by a bookstore—especially a small hipster local one—was akin to me pre-sober walking by a bar. You knew I was going in.

After tea and reading it was time for a fast, efficient shower. Then I’d dry and get dressed and sit down at that big wide wooden desk near the kitchen and, after feeding Lucius (he’d bite and scratch first thing in the morning, letting me know who was boss), I’d write a couple thousand words. For now it was just journaling, long autobiographical sketches about my days in New York City. Five weeks into my stay, I still carried that trembling lust for the city. That draining, enraptured excitement, a burning flame which still hadn’t died down completely. (The same burning passion I had for writing.) After writing: That’s when I would finally explore each day.

Sometimes, I’d jog down the four flights of stairs, sleep-deprived, exhausted but smiling, head out onto 2^nd, and trudge south for nine blocks to 96^th Street. It was interesting living in Harlem, seeing the difference between “my” hood and the transformation which occurred south of 96^th. I’d heard supercilious New Yorkers downtown saying things like, Oh, I never go north of 96^th Street. This could have been a sneering, backwards veil for racism, but I figured it was also simply a plea for safety. The reality was that once you morphed into Harlem, the culture and vibe became very different. There did seem to be a stark dividing line which was 96^th: Rich white people in the Upper East Side to the south, working-class and poor blacks to the north. Of course it wasn’t this simple or cookie-cutter exact. There were some middleclass and upperclass black locals in Harlem, and there were condos and apartments there which sold for over a million dollars. And there were complex historical reasons for why this was the case. So what was I doing here?

I’d lived in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods ever since I left home at nineteen. Starting with The Avenue in Ventura, a Latino-gangbanger area, moving through Kay Street in the Beach Flats in Santa Cruz, then multiple neighborhoods in Oakland, and finally, after I got sober and briefly moved to Portland, Oregon (spurned on by my one sober friend from high school, Maggie), an area in North Portland by the railroad tracks. Each of these places highlighted my whiteness, my wealth and privilege. I think subconsciously I partly chose these locations as part of my rejection of my parents’ wealth and what I perceived to be their “money-obsession.” Growing up rich and white in Ojai, with two overprotective, coddling parents who’d both come from money themselves, I’d yearned, from a very young age, to break through the delusions which surrounded me. I didn’t buy the small, safe, white bubble of Ojai. It felt superficial. It reminded me, later, of that film The Truman Show, with Jim Carrie, where his whole existence is a farce, recorded and acted upon.

Sometimes I’d jump on the Q train at 96^th and ride to wherever. It didn’t matter. I loved riding the 2-3 train to Christopher/West Fourth Street in Greenwhich Village and exploring Washington Square Park and looking at all the fancy NYC buildings, walking around the Paris-like cobblestone streets of the Village. I’d often end up at Café Reggio, on 119 MacDougal, the famous writers’ café near 4^th. There were always characters there, Bohemian-types. The café had been there since the twenties. Surely the Beats must have written there, gotten drunk there. Dozens of little crammed round tables and rickety chairs with skinny wooden legs sat all around. Massive prints of Caravaggio paintings hung on the walls. The supposedly first ever American espresso machine was bolted to the wall in a corner. They had Italian food, shakes, coffee, tea, dessert. I’d slam mugs of hot English Breakfast tea and sit with my black-and-white composition notebook and write write write.

Other times I’d get off at West 4^th and watch the basketball players behind the tall fencing right by the subway stop. It was fun to watch them run and sweat and curse, flailing their muscle-bristling arms, stern expressions on their faces, mad with raging youth and energy. It made me think of the first time I ever came to New York City, in 2006, when I was twenty-three. I’d taken the 5 train and gotten off on Lexington—I can’t remember exactly where anymore—and had seen the same urban battle occurring behind the same type of tall black diamond fencing. The men looked huge and tough and hard. Their pectorals gleamed with sweat. It made me, again, feel so white and small-town and parasitical.

Why, I asked even then, was I staying in low-income black neighborhoods? To some degree I definitely was part of the post-90s, 2000s white-hipster-upper-middleclass gentrification phenomenon. Good white kids from good wealthy families moving to the inner city. We claimed it was for the cheap rent. But it was more than that. It was a rejection of our parents’ wealth and success. It was the Original Millennials’ generation who’d been born in the early-mid eighties and had grown up on MTV and pop rock, who’d been saved by time from high school Face Book and Tinder and iPhones, but who’d easily adapted to them when they shook the very foundations of western culture. I had been part of that “movement,” yes. Thinking myself so powerfully unique, so different from “them,” getting sketchy, badly-thought-out tattoos of rock stars I knew deep down I wouldn’t care about a year later. (Jim Morrison was tattooed on my right forearm, Iggy Pop on my left.) I was shedding my snake skin, trying to find myself by pushing as hard as I could against my parents’ desires for me.

Other times I’d wander around 42^nd Street, looking at the architecture and artistic genius of Grand Central Terminal, or walking around 7^th Avenue into the chaos of Times Square, those mega buildings stretching to the sky (hence “skyscrapers”) and the never-ending looping gargantuan flat TV screens ceaselessly showing ads and weather and the latest news minute-by-minute. I’d tromp by places like Bubba Gump on 44^th and 7^th, or the Hard Rock Café or the NYPD Times Square precinct. People were everywhere; omnipresent. You had to constantly watch yourself, stepping around ogling tourists or tall, thousand-dollar-suit-wearing executives, or else tough urban hoods.

The people became one gelatinous, porous, liquid blob. Homeless begged for change. People wore Marvel costumes gesturing madly at you. Toughs drank from bottles on corners. Everywhere you looked: People. And the constant, heraldic noise. Tires clinking over manhole covers. Honking to a staggering degree. The reek of trash along the sidewalks. I’d head back north up Broadway or 8^th Avenue, making my way north to Central Park South, the very bottom of the park, 59^th Street, and head west often to Columbus Circle, seeing that tall, grand statue of the man who had supposedly “discovered” America. On occasions I’d walk all the way back home, taking Broadway and then crossing at the very top of the park, Cathedral Parkway, aka 110^th Street, and then dipping once I arrived at 2^nd to 105^th. Home-sweet-home, my loud, tired, artist’s retreat.

But usually I’d jump back on the Q train or the 4/5/6 and head back uptown. I liked living uptown. I’d always done that. I’d never really wanted to be completely “downtown.” Explore there, yes; live, no. In San Francisco I’d lived in the Outer Sunset, where the Asian neighborhoods were smothered in fog, far away from Market Street and downtown. In San Diego I’d lived in Pacific Heights thirty blocks from the ocean. In Portland I’d lived in the suburban north part of the city. I liked being there but not totally there. I wanted to be close but not inside. In many ways that captured my inherent nature, too. I wanted to be close to people, but not that close. I wanted to be included, but not too much. I wanted to be relied upon, but not often. It was a classic push-pull: Come close, go away; prove you love me, leave me alone.

I saw this trait in my mother. My father, too, in a different way. Given what my mom went through growing up, is it any wonder she had serious trust issues? She once said to me, The world would be a lot better off without people. At the time I’d been a teenager, just loosening my parental leash, drinking, meeting girls for the first time, going to rabid punk shows every night in Ventura and LA, practicing the art of being both cool and a rebel and a reject and a tough-guy.

I didn’t understand what she meant back then, about people. That revelation would come later. People, I would come to grasp, were unsteady. They could rarely be relied upon. You could mostly not trust them. If they had a chance to screw you, they certainly would. It was social Darwinism out there, survival of the fittest. When I realized that I had many of these same traits—both as my mom and as people in general—for a long time I tried desperately to convince myself that I was somehow better, different, not like “them.” But I wasn’t better. I wasn’t different. I was just like them. Just like my mother. This was both a good and a hard thing to understand. My mom had many positive qualities. But she struggled as a human in the world, in the same way I did. She had, after all “installed” the genetic features to begin with. She’d carried me in her body for nine months. She’d birthed me on New Year’s Eve, 1982. I was a hair under ten pounds and broke my mother’s tailbone. It was as if I were born flipping off society.

I discovered a writing group through the Meet Up App: Shut Up and Write. We literally would do as the title suggests: Meet up—usually at a coffee shop near Columbus Circle on West 58^th—say very little (talking seemed to be discouraged, hence the name of the group) and then we’d all silently write for an hour. Doing this I met a few other writers. We exchanged numbers and emails.

Around my immediate neighborhood I found it cold and hostile. The young men in this area seemed to somehow avoid looking directly at me while with their energy reminding me in a swaggering, cocksure way that I was a foreigner, both in terms of race and in terms of non-New York-ness. I think my California-ness practically wafted off me like bad body odor. Pussy, their eyes constantly seemed to be saying. Or, This ain’t your hood, White Boy. And I agreed. It wasn’t. Again I asked myself: What am I doing here?

Since childhood I’d tapped into reincarnated, ancient anger. And now, at thirty-six, eight-and-a-half years off the bottle, the same kind of anger welled up in New York City. Cars nearly hit you as you crossed quickly on a crosswalk when it was your turn. People yelled things out the window at you. The stupid electric scooters almost crashed into you all the time, even on the sidewalks. People had no sense of personal space: The city was so jam-packed with residents that everyone “lived” on top of each other, both in apartment complexes and on the streets. The frenetic, coiled energy like a rattlesnake about to pounce and bite. You had to be ready for anything; tense.

In Harlem there was a new urban tension I’d never experienced before. I intuited the need to keep my head on a bobble; I looked behind me and around and ahead all the time. People shot up dope right on the street. Music blared from passing cars and buildings. Neck-tattooed, huge men walked around with their battering-ram arms hanging dramatically at their sides like wolves looking for prey. I understood that Harlem was a dangerous place. Everyone talked about how “safe” Harlem was now, how “gentrified.” I figured they were either lying to not sound racist, or hadn’t ever lived there. This made Oakland seem tame. It wasn’t California ease; it was Manhattan machismo.

There were women, too. Always women. Women, another addiction. I hadn’t had sex until I was eighteen. A girl at St. Andrew’s Prep. She was in the cool popular crowd, I was one of the weirdo punk rebels. But I wasn’t a nerd. And I wasn’t a total loser. Most seemed to consider me a sidebar. Freshman year I’d been alone. Sophomore year I met two kids—one in my grade, one a grade above—who were bright and from the working-class. They’d gotten in on scholarships. They were punkers and they lived in Oxnard, south of Ventura where you smelled the pungent fertilizer in the strawberry fields mixed in with the scent of the Pacific Ocean. They were the portal; the entry; the door. They were how I transmogrified from lonely weirdo nothing to hardcore alcoholic punk in a mere matter of months. They provided me with shields and swords with which to battle my parents (the Enemy), books to read (1984; A Brave New World), and shows to attend and “dance” in the mosh-pit to. And yet somehow Amelia and I started dating. Went to junior year prom. Fell in “love.” Lost our virginity to one another. Got to know each other’s families. After a year, when we were seniors, I broke up with her. It was a bad breakup.

And since then, post-St. Andrew’s Prep, it’d been girl after girl after girl. Most of them were broken and alcoholic, like me. Some were thoughtful, kind hippies. Still others were attracted to my rage and my intensity and my intelligence and creativity, my hard gleaming green eyes a reflection of my torn, tattered soul. Relationships fell into a pattern: Sex-based; alcohol-based; deep in a superficial way. I had a habit of immediately oversharing with girls, going “deep”—trying desperately to impress them—which strangely always ended up making our dialogue skip along the surface somehow, our intimacy not truly intimate in any spiritual, moving way. It took me a long time to grasp this revelation. Intimacy—true closeness—scared the shit out of me.

I wanted to have a girlfriend, to really be with someone, but deep down I wasn’t sure if I could be. There’d always been that solitary aloneness. Even when I was inside of a woman. Or telling her my deepest fears. Or bragging—ironically and bizarrely—about my fucked-up past. (“Did I ever tell you about the time I shot up Heroin in Santa Cruz when I was 22?”) I couldn’t fully give myself because I didn’t have a full “self” to give. I didn’t know myself. I didn’t like myself. I certainly didn’t love myself. I drank to escape all that, but I added a false veneer of “depth” to the surface, spreading it around to hide all the cracks. I didn’t want any light to get in.

Adinah had exposed some of those cracks to the light. That had been my one sober, “mature” relationship. I’d never forget meeting her at Saul’s Jewish Deli in the Gourmet Ghetto in North Berkeley. She was my server. She’d had short dark brown hair, brown eyes, and a pinched, slightly irritated expression on her face. I remember remarking to my table of sober friends (we’d gathered to eat after a meeting) how cute she was. One friend jabbed my arm, nodding back at her. She and I had exchanged a few passing glances; she always looked away quickly, her pale cheeks burning crimson. When we finished our meal and paid the bill, we all got up and started slowly walking south along the empty, desolate Shattuck Ave. It was warm and dark out, an early June evening. I walked in back with the others. I decided I had to be courageous. What was the worst thing that could happen? She rejected me? I pulled one of my writing/editing cards out of my leather wallet, and walked back into Saul’s. She was punching buttons on the cash register. I steeled myself, swallowed, and approached.

“Hi,” I said.

She looked annoyed and distracted, that wrinkle between her eyes from stress. Her eyes grew large when she saw me.

“Yes?” she said.

I swallowed the lump down my tight throat, and said—thank God no one else was around—“I just wanted to say, I think you’re very beautiful. If you ever wanted to get coffee sometime…that’d be great.”

I handed her the card. She took it, still eyeing me, and then looked at it. “You’re a writer?”

I shrugged. “And book editor, yeah.”

She smiled then. Her eyes had this amazing sparkle in them. She reminded me of a little kid, excited at a new gift she’d hoped for but assumed would not get. She put the card in her jeans pocket.

“I have a friend doing her writing MFA at California College of the Arts.”

“Oh, cool,” I said. My cheeks flushed.

“What kind of material do you write?” she asked.

The door to Saul’s blasted open in that moment and my friend Paul said, “Michael, are you coming?” I wanted to murder him.

“Yeah,” I said, not facing him.

“Well, looks like you better go,” she said.

I laughed anxiously. She shrugged.

“Email me,” I said.

“I will.”

The first woman I got involved with in New York was Jenny at Sober Authors. She was refined; sophisticated; sexy; bohemian; artistic. But it was another woman—another serious artist—who changed me. Sophia Motte.

Chapter 5

Two major developments occurred in mid-June: I moved to a second Air BnB, in Hamilton Heights, on the west side; and I met Sophia Motte.

Sophia was an artist who hailed from Pittsburgh, PA (quite common in NYC I discovered) and had lived in Manhattan for about twenty years. She’d had an eccentric, theatre-actor mother (who Sophia, as a child, once walked in on after a suicide attempt with pills), and an angry, alcoholic father who’d died long ago, when she was in her lurid, alcoholic twenties. She’d initially been a corporate architect (she’d gone to architecture school at Pratt) but had always had a passion for painting. Over the years she began dipping her toe into the artists’ world in New York, working at and attending art galleries; painting on her free time; and eventually getting her MFA in painting from the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, on 8^th Street in Greenwich Village.

She painted feverishly, constantly inspired. She submitted work. At last, after her MFA, in 2018, she began painting fulltime and surviving more or less on her art. (She did have some part-time side gigs, such as waitressing at a restaurant sometimes.) She struck me—California Boy—as the quintessential, cliché NYC artist I’d observed in old films taking place in Manhattan. (Think old black-n-white Woody Allen movies.) She was passionate, driven, kind but ambitious, soft yet determined, and absolutely certain she’d one day become a famous painter. Her work was in the general vein of contemporary impressionism; some compared her work to Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn. Portraits; landscapes; realistic depictions of nature and people with slight blurred alterations making the figures and environment seem not quite totally anchored to the world we know.

Yet her work seemed to show us something deep and penetrating about ourselves.

I met Sophia at an AA meeting. Unsurprisingly—as so many other driven artists are in the world—she was, like me, an alcoholic. She had four years sober when we met in June, 2019. The meeting was in a church basement in the East Village, Stuyvesant Town, right in front of Stuyvesant Park, on East 15^th. Another sober friend—Aldous—who was incidentally also from Pittsburgh had invited me to the meeting.

Aldous and I had met randomly at Think Coffee in Union Square a month before. He was two inches taller than me, square-headed and square-jawed, with buzzed hair, a freckled face, a mellow demeanor, and a fierce, if sometimes misdirected intelligence. He and I could talk for hours and hours. We’d go to meetings and then hit a 24-hour diner and debate politics. Aldous was a rabid Trump supporter. (The first I’d ever connected with.) I didn’t understand his point of view at first. He spoke of Trump as “the greatest orator and political strategist of our time.”

I shook my head and laughed when he said this. But he was always kind. He never disrespected me. He never made it personal. We were able to talk and debate and clash in our opinions yet still see each other’s humanity. This was more than I could say for some of the young, white, usually female radical left Woke people I’d interacted with, who often came off as haughty, hyper-judgmental, critical, and mean-spirited, deciding you were a “racist” or “sexist” if you used one “wrong” word. I’d always seen politics as I’d seen everything else in society: As layered, nuanced, complex. We were living in a completely black-and-white-thinking moment. Everyone reverted into their respective tribes. Critical thinking was at an all-time low. Thinking in general was having a rough go of it, it seemed. Political division was stark. The casual racism and sexism and villainous absurdity of Trump didn’t help, of course, and the far left was only a sensical, if not absurd, overreaction to his administration.

When I walked into that basement, slick from a warm June rain—the humidity had finally arrived—she was the first person I saw. I mean really saw. Aldous was there, across the large room, pouring himself a Styrofoam cup of black steaming coffee. There were dozens of massive classroom desks, four blue plastic chairs behind each one, people sitting in most of them. It was a funny, ironic image: Adult alcoholics in “class” again. Everyone was chattering at once, smiling, laughing, gesticulating, eyes wide, teeth gleaming. It smelled like coffee grounds and doughnuts. Two white scrolls hung from the blackboard: One, “12 Steps,” and the other, “12 Traditions,” the writing in red against the white scrolls.

The first thing I noticed—about Sophia—was her blond hair. Hyper blond. Down way past her shoulders, to the middle of her back. Her hair was slightly wet, too, from the rain. There happened to be a seat at the desk right behind hers. The meeting would start in three minutes.

I walked over and pulled the blue plastic chair out, the thin metal legs screeching along the shiny linoleum floor. I sat and sighed so loudly that the blond woman turned in her seat, looked back at me, smiled, and said, “Long day?”

She had a sparkle in the eyes. Warm, gleaming brown eyes. Her face was slightly round, her skin pale. She had a non-threatening, and very open, expansive, energy. There was something very California about her. I smiled back—sometimes a chore for me; I tended, in my syrupy constant low-level melancholy/depression to maintain a frown—and said, “Yeah. Just tired.”

She laughed, flipping a chunk of her blond hair over her shoulder. She wore red lipstick which accentuated the lines around her mouth. She wore a long-sleeved black blouse. I couldn’t for the life of me gauge her age. “I see you got wet like me.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling embarrassed and not exactly knowing why. I felt my cheeks flush annoyingly, embarrassed, like some kid in seventh grade who’s finally being noticed by the hot popular girl.

“Well,” she said. “I was carrying a gigantic painting all over East 13^th which I had to deliver to this woman who wanted to buy it, and I just got soaked.” She laughed raucously. The laugh made me feel instantly included in her life somehow, as if the very sound of it harkened to family. As if I had just become bonded to her in that instant. Possibly this moment represented the first time in my months in Manhattan that I felt truly connected to another human being. It was like crawling suddenly out of a pit I hadn’t even been aware I was in. It made my soul soar.

“You’re an artist?” I asked.

“Painter, yeah.”

“That’s amazing. And you do it fulltime?” I immediately felt foolish for asking that. Fulltime, parttime, who cared: The point was she did it. She was an artist!

“More or less, yeah. It’s not the easiest life, but it’s what I love.”

“I totally respect that. Hey—doing what you love is crucial.”

“What about you?” she asked.

Me? I froze for a moment. How did you respond to a beautiful woman, especially in such an unexpected moment, and at such an unexpected location? Where was Aldous? I prayed he wouldn’t interrupt mid-conversation. Also, the meeting was about to begin. Now I wished I were alone with this woman. We could discuss Art and serious literature. What type of painting did she paint? What artistic school did she originate from? My mother being a museum docent for a decade, I’d always been intrigued, confused and fascinated by visual art, painting in particular. Did she read literature, this Grand Artiste? I had so many questions. Certainly there was a Manhattan-California, Beach Boys meets Van Gogh-type intelligence which wafted from her like a signal.

“I’m a writer. Just moved here from California a few months ago.”

“Oh, that’s awesome! Welcome to Hell.” Here she giggled fiercely, and then threw her head back dramatically and howled with laughter. I couldn’t help it and I laughed with her.

“That bad, huh?”

She shrugged. “Nooooo….welllll…yesss….nooooo…..kinda…?” she said, suddenly (and comically) tight-lipped and serious. “I love New York. But it’s an insane place. It’s definitely not for everyone.”

“I get you there. I can already see that.”

“What do you write?”

The dreaded What Do You Write question, the one I’d answered hundreds of times over the years, at writing conferences around the nation, at literary readings, in writing groups, at random house parties. I hated but understood the necessity of the question. Surely she related: She must have loathed answering basic obvious questions about her art—and probably Art in general from well-intentioned neophytes.

“Fiction, mostly. Heavily autobiographical, gritty literary fiction. Short stories. Novels. Some essays. Some writing How-to stuff. Etc.”

“Cool! I admit,” she said, “I pretty much never read, especially not fiction. Not anymore. But in college—undergrad—I read constantly. The 19^th century Russians, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy. The 19^th century French authors, Balzac, Flaubert. The 20^th century French existentialists, Camus, Sartre, etc etc.”

I was in love. Love. A gorgeous, well-read, sophisticated New York artist. Yes. Yes!

Right as I was about to respond to this revelation, Aldous approached. Looking down at me, a dopey grin plastered on his face, his blue eyes seeming to grasp what was happening, his right hand cupping the Styrofoam cup of coffee—it smelled like Colombian brew, steam curling up—he said, “There you are, man!”

“Hey Aldous,” I said.

“Looks like you met Sophia,” he said, casually, as if she were not some stunning wunderkind.

“You guys know each other?” I said.

They both laughed. It didn’t sound malevolent.

“Sophia and I are both from Pittsburgh. And we’ve both been coming to this meeting for years.”

“Interesting,” I said.

Just then the bell dinged and the secretary sitting behind the front teacher’s desk announced that the meeting was starting. The sound of chair legs squeaking on the polished white linoleum; shoes shuffling around; desks being moved an inch or two; coughing; throat-clearing; and a member reading “How it Works” ensued. Aldous planted his palm on my shoulder and said, “See you after the meeting, bro.”

Sophia had turned around, facing away from me. I leaned forward and tapped her shoulder. She flipped around. Cupping my mouth I whispered, “I’m Michael.”

“Sophia,” she whispered back, smiling. We held each other’s gaze for a significant moment which seemed to last a long, long time. I didn’t want it to end. I felt very present. Everything else, for a moment, just sort of faded away. Tunnel vision.

We shook quick, fast hands. Her hand was small and pale and soft, delicate in mine.

About halfway through the meeting, after the main speaker had told his epic, devastating, inspiring story of his alcoholism (“what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now”) Sophia raised her hand to share. An electric thrill raced through my whole body. I was cosmically connected to her already, somehow, as if we’d met before in a previous life. It was as if I knew her. Maybe we’d known each other in another realm.

The main speaker called on her. She started sharing. Her share was a little disjointed. I was sort of half listening, engrossed in my fantasy of talking to her after the meeting, perhaps, if I had the guts, asking her out. Generally speaking, this is more or less frowned upon in AA—people came here for their alcoholism, not for dating—but, as with just about everything else in my life, I did what I wanted. Like most men I was driven largely by biology. And curiosity.

Over my nine years of sobriety at that point, I’d gone through various stages of recovery: Rejector of AA; militant AA-member who wants to “convert” everyone; Semi-involved but not completely; detached totally from The Program; and, ever since Adinah and I’d broken up in 2018, my sweet spot: Involved but with some distance, doing AA the way it worked for me. I “took what worked and left the rest.” There were of course the old-time hardline AA “crocodiles,” as David Foster Wallace calls them in his magnum opus from 1996, Infinite Jest. I had always been my own man, blazing my own unique path, living my life the way that made the most sense to me. I was a free-thinker, an independent individual.

My attention cleaved apart and focused entirely on Sophia’s share when out of her mouth the word “boyfriend” emerged. I listened:

“…yeah…I dunno…my boyfriend just isn’t doing what I want him to do, ya know? We’ve been together for a year now and I just feel like he’s not interested in me in the ways I wish he was. I know I’m powerless over him and his actions. I guess I’m sort of co-dependent, too. I mean sometimes he just seems really distant…or like he doesn’t even like me. He treats me like crap sometimes, honestly. We don’t even have sex anymore. I guess I’m resentful. I mean duh, right?” There was a spattering of laughter around the room. “I know I have to dial back my expectations, look at my side of the street here. I should probably do a fourth step inventory around this. Look at my part…”

This hit me like a brick to the eyeball. Boyfriend? But…we’d just been blatantly flirting! Then my deep usual insecurities crawled up from the depths of my solar plexus, where they hid until it was time to strike: C’mon, Michael, do you REALLY think this beautiful woman, this New York artist, was actually interested in YOU? You’re dreaming, buddy! She was just being friendly. Kind. Nice. You’re short; you’re bald; you don’t make enough money; you don’t even have a literary agent! You are a total loser. A waste of space; a waste of time. Who wants you? Nobody. Your mother, maybe. The truth is: You’ll never get The Girl. Not the one you want. You’ll be alone for the rest of your life. You are worthless. You are an unstable piece of shit. A drunk.

I hated this self-loathing internal voice. But it had been there forever, since I was a child. Once, I’d blamed my mother, and certainly there was that angle. But, given who my parents were and who their parents were, I suspected it was also genetic. And my own unique nature to some degree. Plus, I was an alcoholic. That was part of the package of alcoholism: Sensitive; intelligent; angry; narcissistic; low self-esteem.

I managed, at last, to move beyond it. I focused on the rest of the shares. I did not raise my own hand. Generally, I shared maybe 25% of the time. I was insecure about sharing in front of a roomful of strangers; I always worried they’d judge me or reject me or “kick me out of AA,” which of course would never happen.

After the meeting ended the room exploded with sound: Chair legs screeching along the floor; desks moving; everyone talking loudly and raucously at once. It always seemed like people had little cliques they belonged to; people walked to their special little units and talked easily. I stood there, alone, feeling self-conscious. (Another part of the deal of being both an alcoholic and a writer.) Aldous finally came over and we chatted for a bit. Another guy drifted and joined in our conversation. Slowly, people started filing out of the basement, heading up the twisting stairs and through the church to outside. I hoped the rain was over. I’d watched for Sophia but she’d been talking with a cluster of concerned, warm women. Emotions were so much easier for women. They could handle them; express them to each other. For men it was different. We were taught to suppress our feelings, be “tough,” shove emotions down into the depths. It never served us. And it always came out sideways.

All my life I’d been confused—in some ways attracted to men and yet fatally pulled in by women. I’d experimented sexually in my early twenties, solidly confirming my heterosexuality. I was an unusual mix of sensitive and emotional; tough and soft. I liked pillow-talk. I liked talking in general, if I liked someone. Sex, yes. But the talk after sex was in some ways even better. I wanted to express myself, to communicate. I wanted to understand you and I wanted you to understand me. In my teens and twenties I’d worn a punk rock/writer/Jack-Kerouac-traveler mask, acting ten times harder than I was. But the truth was that I was mixed-up inside, a tangle of concrete and soft clay, mostly just a weird combination of female and male and just Michael.

Aldous and I walked up the stairs, through the church and outside. It was a little before dusk. I gazed at Stuyvesant Park across East 15^th. No one was in the park. It was a rare moment of calm, and then multiple cars honked loudly on a nearby street, and it settled again.

I stood there on the little patio where people walked out the door onto the street. Aldous was talking to me but all I heard was wah wah wah wah. I was zoned out. My heart thumped like some tiny child was inside of my gut, punching out, trying to break free: Ba-boom; ba-boom; ba-boom. Where was she? I started to realize she might have already left. This hit like a hard punch to my solar plexus; disappointment surged through my stomach.

A gaggle of people came out through the white door, laughing, a girl saying something like, That’s ridiculous, Alex, I’d have drunk those kids under the table if I still drank now…

And then, at last—thank God!—the white door opened and there she was.

Sophia.

My first thoughts were recursive and painful: She’ll reject you; she’ll reject you; she’ll reject you; she’ll reject you. It was my Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Self-diagnosed. It seemed like the real thing. It’d started when Adinah and I first began looking for a house to buy. It was spring, 2015. I was temporarily living in a second-floor studio on Rand Street in Lake Merritt, Oakland. Later, one of my Jungian therapists would point out that it might not be coincidence that the OCD started then, when Adinah and I were looking for a home. My childhood had at times been unstable and unsafe, emotionally as well as physically, and the anxiety of returning to the symbol of “home” could have been what was driving the OCD. It was a strong argument. I still wasn’t sure if it bought or not. But I took her point.

She saw me. We stood facing each other on the patio. I breathed slowly. Aldous, I thought, please do not interrupt this; please do not fuck this up. I almost turned around to glance at him, talking to some members down on the sidewalk, but I resisted.

“Hey,” she said, joyfully, “I was looking for you.”

“You were? I was looking for you.”

Standing, I could tell she was about 5’3. Perfect height for me. Five inches shorter. Her hair was bright and straight. She had sharp bangs cut an inch above her hazel eyes. Her arms were thin and attractive. She wore a yellow skirt; how had I not noticed that before? We’d both been sitting down. The skirt was somewhat short. Her legs were smooth and perfect.

“Well. I guess we found each other.”

I swallowed. Damn it: Say something! I scolded myself. There was no way I was letting her go without trying. I had to try. But what about the boyfriend? Wasn’t that bad? Wasn’t that sort of unethical? Creepy? Aggressive? Predatory? What about the principles of AA? We were at a meeting, after all.

But then my biology, my instinct kicked in. “Hey. I wanted to tell you. Your share. Your relationship. I mean. I totally relate. My ex and I were together for four-and-a-half years. We bought a house together. Had a cat. She left me in 2018. But we had all the issues you mentioned: No sex; couldn’t communicate or connect; weren’t getting our needs met.” Now I was using an AA member’s anonymous private share as ammo to seduce her??? What was wrong with me? Don’t answer that, a voice in my mind said.

“Yeah,” she said, flicking her bangs gently with a finger. “It’s tough, huh?” She sighed. “I dunno. Chad’s a good guy. He’s fourteen years older than me. A semi-famous sculptor. He lives in Brooklyn. I love him. He loves me. I mean. I think he does.” She bit her lip, averting her eyes from me for a moment. I heard a car rush down East 15^th, along the bumpy cobblestone. The sun was down now; early night surrounded us. “Sometimes I just don’t know anymore. I’ve had so many boyfriends.” She paused. “Sorry—that sounded vain.”

“No, just the truth, I’m sure. You’re very attractive.”

Her cheeks bloomed to a crimson color. “Oh my god I think I’m totally blushing.”

“You are, it’s really cute.”

Nervousness jacked up again like vomit.

“Well, look. I know I’m not supposed to do this—because it’s the program and you have a boyfriend—but I can’t resist. I would love to take you out for coffee or dinner sometime.”

A rush of terror and simultaneous relief flooded my vascular system. Now I partially wanted to run away and never return. I was embarrassed. And yet I desperately wanted her to say yes. There was even something alarmingly, red-flaggingly engrossing about the idea of a “secret relationship,” behind her boyfriend’s back. Bad. Bad!!!

She cleared her throat, playing absent-mindedly with her hair. “Yeah, I mean. You’re handsome. And I feel like we connect and we’re both artists.” Here she paused, looking away again. “But. You know. I do have a boyfriend. He trusts me. I love him. I don’t think it’d be right to, you know, get coffee with a guy.”

I was disappointed. A little ashamed. I sighed, trying to conceal it under my breath.

“Sorry,” she said. She squinted at me, crunching her thin lips together.

“It’s ok,” I said. “I had to try. I hope you don’t think I’m aggressive or anything.”

She placed her hand on my bicep, and slightly squeezed. Her eyes with that sparkle, she said, “Don’t worry about it, Michael.”

This reinvigorated my courage. I pulled my wallet out. Snagged one of my writing/editing cards. It was Adinah, at Saul’s, in 2013, all over again.

“Look. Um. I know you’re taken. But can I give you my work card? It only has my email on it.”

She laughed, throwing her head back briefly like before. I loved this trait, this movement of hers. “You certainly are persistent, aren’t you?”

I grinned dumbly. “Here.” I extended the card. She took it, glancing at it for a second.

“I love the black and white photo of you on here. Really professional.”

“Thanks.”

We looked at each other for a good ten seconds, without talking.

“Alright,” I said. “Aldous is waiting. We’re going to argue politics for two hours at the diner a few blocks away, up on East 25^th.”

“Have fun with that,” she said, smiling.

I stepped forward. She stepped forward, too. We hugged. We held it for a moment. Her arms around my back, I smelled her vanilla perfume. She smelled so good. When we detached I stood close, looking down at her. The chemistry was obvious. I wanted desperately to kiss her. To hold her hand. It was that chemistry which is so rare it always feels highlighted in your brain when it happens. That feeling of home in some spiritual sense. Like a brand-new glove that magically fits like an old one you’ve had your whole life.

“Goodnight, Sophia. Email me if you want.”

“Goodnight.”

I turned, walked down the stairs, grabbed Aldous, and we walked off to argue about Trump at the late-night diner.

Read more

###

Mexico Story

The story I’m about to tell happened when I was 22 years old—17 years ago now—when a buddy and I lived in San Diego. We shared a cramped one-bedroom apartment in a little complex on Thomas Avenue, between Jewell and Kendall Street, two short blocks south of Grand, and about 10 blocks east of the ocean, in Pacific Beach.

            The buddy and I couldn’t have been more different, let me say that from the start. He was 19, born and raised in Summerland, had come from the working-class, was 6’0, half white, half Mexican, with dark hair, dark eyes and thick sideburns which made him appear sinister in some terrifying, yet juicy way. His name was Pablo. He wore a beat-up, perennially unzipped leather motorcycle jacket, smoked Lucky Strike 100s constantly, and, comically, drank Scotch on the rocks.

            I, on the other hand, was three years Pablo’s senior, but was much more naïve. I came from a family with money, born in Ventura, raised in wealthy, protected Ojai. I’d gone to private parochial school all my life. I was short (5’8), sensitive, angry, and had way too much to prove.

            We were both pissed-off punk rockers who’d met at a show in Ventura a few years prior. We’d known some of the same people. We drank hard, we chased women, we got into trouble, we went to punk shows, we brawled.

The idea had been very simple: We both wanted out of our respective towns. We had little money; we worked menial, dead-end jobs. Pablo had never expected to go to college, and I had thrown my private school education (very expensive) at my parents’ face by not even taking the SATs. In the end I barely even made it out of high school. Pablo and I knew nothing about San Diego but we figured Why Not; it was a few hours away from what we knew too intimately and wanted to flee from, and it was a reasonably large city. So we started looking for a place—remember this was the fall of 2005, so a one-bedroom was not insanely expensive, at least as compared to current times—and within a few weeks we scored the place on Thomas Avenue.

We didn’t know a thing about Pacific Beach. Within a few days we grasped that we stuck out like sore thumbs. We wore all black; we dressed punk; we looked haggard and mean. Surrounding us were shirtless dudes with beards and flipflops, saying things like, Bro, you fer SURE gotta hit those lefts out there today. Sexy beach-bunnies were omnipresent: They were great to look at, but there was just no way. They didn’t even see us. It was a different culture, a sense of having suddenly landed on the moon. Not that Ventura, Summerland or Ojai didn’t have some aspects of this culture…but still, this was new to us.

The months passed and we both found jobs. I worked behind the register of a tourist clothing store in La Jolla and in the Gaslamp Quarter. Pablo worked at a costume store. We drank nightly, went to some punk shows at The Zombie Lounge and Scolari’s Office in North Park, got laid a couple times, wandered aimlessly at night around Pacific Beach, mocking locals, cursing ourselves for signing a one-year lease. Sometimes we ended up with Old English forties down by Crystal Pier, at the beach, our bare feet padding the cool soft sand, the small waves crashing in the distance. I can still smell the salt and the seaweed from those nights.

I think it was sometime in early March when we decided to go to Baja. We’d both been before, but it’d been years ago, and with our respective families. We figured, What the hell; we’re in San Diego, might as well taste the treasure of Mexico.

The plan was simple; and if only things had worked out the way we planned. (Then again, if they had, I wouldn’t have this tale to tell.) We were going to take the trolley to Tijuana and then snag a taxi to Rosarito. We decided to just go for one amazing, drunken, Dionysian night. We didn’t even get a motel—the plan was to head over there, get wasted, and then take the trolley back in the wee hours of the morning. Who needed sleep? We were young, damnit!

Everything started out fine. (As it so often does in life when you’re young, dumb and clueless.) We caught a ride to the trolley. We got on. We arrived in Tijuana. It was sometime after dark when we got dropped off by taxi in downtown Rosarito.

We picked a bar, I can’t remember any names now. Pablo and I must have looked like aliens, just as we did in P.B. I remember the dust everywhere. I remember the banner above the street that said, ZONA ROSA RITO. I remember seeing the tourist hotels all over the place. Seeing the Rosarito Beach Motel spelled-out in curling, arcing blood-red letters. I remember the smell of the ocean, to the west, and the tourists and local Mexicans intermingling everywhere. All the little cafes and restaurants and markets. The smell of crab and lobster and fish for sale as we walked.

At that first bar we drank tequila. Shots. Then beers—Tecates and Pacificas. We started to feel good. Standing outside the bar, buzzed already, I stared at the people as Pablo smiled and lit a Lucky Strike 100; I heard the sizzle as he lit up with his silver Zippo, clanking the lid back hard, and smelled the rich scent of the tobacco.

Then we were in another bar. And another. Finally we ended up dancing in some nightclub. This is when the evening begins to be a bit fuzzy to my recollection. We were drunk, clearly. We danced with a couple girls. We each got into a dancing cage, making the girls flee, and danced wildly—stupidly—at each other, our expressions dire and sincere, from across the nightclub.

Next thing I recall is being at a strip-club somehow. Low, red pulsing light. Loud Mariachi music. The stink of male sweat, body odor, beer, and a faint whiff of urine. We sat right up there at the stage, looking up at an attractive Mexican girl who couldn’t have been more than 16. I remember vaguely feeling ashamed, and then thrilled, and then annoyed at myself for feeling thrilled, and then ashamed again, and finally just confused. I watched her liquid body move like a naked shadow back and forth across the stage. Somehow in that moment I recall feeling suddenly completely alone, isolated, as if I were alienated from everything and everyone in the world. That made me feel sad. What, I asked myself, was I doing here, in Mexico, with Pablo? Why did we live in a town we did not like? Was punk rock my true identity? Did it have to be? Why was I so angry, at my parents, at “society,” at myself? Who was I?

Pablo stood up, the metal legs of his chair screeching against the concrete floor, and said he was going to the bathroom. He walked off.

Immediately—and to this day I still don’t know why—after Pablo disappeared, I jumped up and left the strip-club.

Ostensibly, when I think back, I know I had it in my head—Lord knows why—to make my way west to the beach. Something about the beach had always comforted me. I lived my first eight years of life in Ventura, near the ocean. When we moved to Ojai in the early 90s, I still attended Episcopalian school in Ventura, and, around age 12, I became, for a while, an avid surfer. The ocean seemed an obvious symbol: It’s where life had first originated. It seemed to represent perfectly the ups and downs, the storms and joys of being alive. Some days the waves were small and boring; other days bigger and fun; still others the waves were gnarly and massive and brutal and they could hurt, even kill you. You learned how to paddle around the channel and avoid being roiled around by the sets. You learned how to measure the waves coming in carefully. You learned not to fight the current by paddling against it. You learned when to battle and when to let go.

But, unsurprisingly, drunk as I was, I quickly got lost. I was turning around in a spastic 360, attempting to gain some perspective, when I heard the tires of a car rush towards me and then stop abruptly, sliding in the loose dirt. A bright white light surged in my eyes. My heart thudded against my chest. I smelled burning rubber. Both the front car doors burst open and I realized it was a squad car; they were police.

The next 15 minutes is a blur. What I recall is them half talking, half yelling at me in Spanish. Me, trying drunkenly to conjure up some version of High School Spanish. More yelling. One of the cops spread my legs and arms out wide and frisked me. They looked at my passport and wallet; they checked for cash (there was none); they opened and glanced at my flip cell-phone. One cop pulled out a pair of shiny silver handcuffs; I remember vividly the bright headlight beams ricocheting off the silver into my right eye, nearly blinding me. Then the two of them argued with each other. One of them raised his voice to a terrifying degree. And, finally, they suddenly turned around, got back into their car, shut their doors, and burned out in the dust again, taking off, the smell of burning rubber and dust again, leaving me grateful, scared and confused.

*

Ten minutes later—I had carried on in my quest for the beach as if nothing had happened—I was lost again. And exhausted. Very drunk. Not quite blacked-out but close. I found an alleyway and decided to sit down, sliding my back against the wall. No one was around. I patted my pockets in a quick panic, realizing the cops had hurled my passport, wallet and phone onto the dusty ground. But it was too late. I passed out.

*

When I came to it was still dark. I knew even before I opened my eyes that I was not alone, and that I was moving. Or something was moving with me in it, rather. As I became more aware and awake, I grasped that I was in a moving vehicle. Had the cops come back for me? Had Pablo found a taxi and located me? Were we heading back to P.B., or perhaps to a motel in Rosarito?

Then I opened my eyes. I was lying in a backseat, curled up. It was warm. It was a big boat of a car, like a Lincoln Continental. A man sat to my right, wearing a T-shirt, covered in tattoos. He did not notice me. Gulping, I glanced up at the front of the car without moving too much: Green digital numbers told me it was 3:17am. A man drove, eyes on the road. A woman sat in the passenger seat. Everything was silent, just the sound of rubber rolling on rugged road.

At last I decided to move. I sat up, groaning. The man next to me didn’t look nor flinch. But the woman gazed at me, half smiling, with pity it seemed, and the driver caught my eyes in the rearview mirror, saying, “Sleeping Beauty wakes, eh?” He cackled. He had a thick Mexican accent. Looking out the window I saw only scrub brush and desert. A memory of driving through the Mojave from years ago rushed through my mind.

I cleared my throat. “Where are we?” I wasn’t sure why my first question hadn’t been, Who the hell are you and why am I in your car?

The driver gazed at me again, our eyes catching in the rearview mirror. I noticed a gold crucifix swung gently from the mirror. The whole car, I then realized, reeked of pot.

“We’re on our way to El Coyote, mi amigo. About 170 miles southeast of Rosarito. Eh, ese, we found you passed out in an alleyway downtown. We rescued you.”

The woman piped in then, throwing her head back, laughing, saying something very fast—it seemed to me—in Spanish. The driver and the passenger next to me laughed, too.

“Mi novia says you lucky, White Boy. You could have been murdered.”

I took a long, slow breath. I thought for a moment. I suddenly remembered Pablo, the strip-club, the police, my passport, wallet and phone, getting lost. Instinctively I patted my pockets: Empty.

I felt the anxiety, the panic beginning to build inside.

“Can you turn around?” I said, sounding to myself far too worried.

“No, amigo,” the driver said. “Lo siento. We’re heading to El Coyote to buy some guns. We’re staying the night there. We can take you back to Rosarito in the morning.”

Illegal guns? Stay the night in El Coyote? No cell phone, wallet, passport.

Where was Pablo? Was he worried? Had he made it back to Pacific Beach? P.B. felt thousands of miles away, like Odysseus trying to return to Ithaca.

On the rest of the drive I learned a little more about the driver and his girlfriend and buddy. The driver—Juan—was from Sonora, Mexico originally but had moved to Los Angeles five years before. (East L.A.) There he met Marta, his novia. The buddy was from Durango, Mexico and was just helping out. They’d been dealing drugs for years, Juan said, and had recently added guns. They were all in their twenties. They were kind to me. They said they’d seen me passed out, the gringo, and had instantly agreed to save me. They assured me, again, I would have been murdered. Or would have ended up in jail, which, Juan assured me, I didn’t want to do in Mexico.

Around 4:45am we reached the town of El Coyote. I was still drunk but had much more clarity. I’d slept, and my adrenaline was running on high. We were parked in a small back lot behind a crumbling housing complex. I stayed in the car with Marta while the boys worked. I watched them twist up some bedraggled stairs to a pink-doored room, knock, and then be let in. I imagined what was happening inside. My life felt like a movie.

About 5:15am they were back at the car. They both carried several large brown bags and Juan carried a black suitcase. They popped the trunk, set the stuff down gently—making the whole car briefly shudder—closed the trunk with a loud metallic thud, and shook hands with each other. When they opened their doors a gust of cold desert wind brushed in. I shivered. I had only my black Amoeba Records hoodie on, and torn tight jeans, with black high-top Chuck Taylors.

The driver shut his door with a fierce crack, adjusted the rearview mirror, and said, grinning at me, “Well, Gringo, you are lucky today, ese. They don’t need us to stay. They had everything we need. We can go back to Rosarito now.”

My body flooded with relief. I had no plan. But getting back to Rosarito was crucial.

*

At almost 10am—close to five hours later—we pulled up slowly along the curb right near The Rosarito Beach Motel, those familiar blood-red letters. I got out, thanked them all, shook Juan’s hand, and watched them burned rubber as they took off. The dust rose yet again as they sped away.

There I was, alone. In Rosarito. Starving. Thirsty. Hungover. An ache in my body. No wallet. No passport. No phone. No clue where Pablo was.

I wandered around for a while, warming up in the morning sun. I considered either begging for change or stealing some food from a market across the street but in the end the idea of jail, as Juan had reminded me, was too terrifying.

I walked and thought, walked and thought. I could go to the American consulate, I realized. No—they’d have too many questions. I reeked of booze. I had no identification. I didn’t know Pablo’s phone number by heart. Finally I bumped into an area with dozens of yellow taxis and taxi drivers. A few were bickering in Spanish, others smiled and smoked cigarettes, gesturing dramatically with their arms. I approached a gaggle of them; I smelled the oil and gas of their cars, the dirt on their shoes, sweat and body odor. They suddenly grew quiet as I got close. Gringo. I asked, in broken Spanish, if any of them spoke English. They shook their heads, but one pointed to a short, pot-bellied man 30 yards off and said, “Francisco.”

I approached the man tentatively. It felt like myriad eyes were on me now, but maybe I was just paranoid. I felt self-conscious, nervous. What would I say?

            The man had a thick short beard, was about my height, and had a bulging belly, as if he were several months pregnant. He smoked a Pall Mall cigarette and had yellow, zigzagging teeth.

            “Francisco?” I said.

            He looked at me. He was leaning against his haggard yellow taxi. The sun blared against the windshield, like some refracting diamond. He stared at me a long moment and then blew smoke in my direction.

            “Si. Soy Francisco.”

            “Habla Ingles?”

            He smiled. “Yes.”

            I swallowed a lump down my throat.

            I jerked my thumb behind me. “They told me you speak English.”

            Briefly, he glanced back, where I’d pointed.

            “Yes. I see.” He ashed his cigarette onto the muddy ground. “And? Where do you want to go, kid?”

            I shifted my stance. I was so tired, so honestly, unbelievably tired. My stomach rumbled from hunger. I imagined a steaming-hot shower, hot greasy, sugary, fatty food, reams of water, a couple cold beers. That, my friend, would be Heaven.

            “Well. I’m in a situation,” I started. I tried to smile but it came out sideways. He sucked his cigarette again, his cheeks imploding. He grinned and said, “What kind of situation, gringo?”

            I told him the whole story, starting with the strip-club and ending with being dropped off an hour before.

            He chuckled, shaking his head. “You are one dumb gringo.”

            I couldn’t help laughing along with him. He offered me a Pall Mall. I smoked it greedily. He had some day-old tacos in his car and he offered me a few—al pastor—and I thanked him profusely and destroyed them. He even had water. I glugged until I was sated. He did not, however, have beer.

            “So,” Francisco said, gazing out beyond me, towards the ocean. “You have no wallet, no passport, no phone, right?”

            “Yep.”

            “Right,” he said. “And you live in San Diego?”

            “Pacific Beach.”

            He meditated for a moment, closing his eyes, the sunlight beaming against his face, making him almost look holy.

            Then he opened his eyes and said, “I had a son. Like you. Good kid. Drank too much. Got into trouble. He died, six years ago, spring of 1999, in a car crash on Route 16 up near Chihuahua.” His eyes seemed to momentarily glass over. “He was seventeen.”

            “I’m sorry, man,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. What could you say?

            There was a sustained silence for a minute, just the sounds of tourists and people in the background, the reek of gas, oil and car exhaust. Then he said, “Alright.” He suddenly flicked his Pall Mall onto the mud. He sniffled, as if coming into true wakefulness. “I’ll take you.”

            “You’ll take me? Back to San Diego?”

            “That’s right,” Francisco said.

            “I don’t have any money or ID.”

            “I know, amigo. Call it a cosmic favor.”

            We took Highway 1 north and then headed east to connect with Highway 2, which would become Highway 5 in the States, just across the border. I sat in the passenger seat. Our windows were down almost the whole way. Fresh sea air had assaulted us beautifully along Highway 1. It felt good—a more or less full belly; water-saturated; wind zipping my aching, hungover head. I jutted my arm out the window and felt it.

            About two miles before the border Francisco turned the Spanish radio station down, and then off. He said, “Ok. It’s time. Jump into the backseat. There’s a big wool blanket back there. Grab it, get down where the bottoms of the seats are, and hide under that blanket.”

            I smiled for a second before realizing that he was serious. It hit me again: I had no ID. No way to prove I was a U.S. citizen. This was, obviously, highly illegal. But what other choice, I felt, did I have?

            Nervous all over again, blood pumping throughout my body, seeing flashing images in my mind of drug-sniffing dogs, mean border patrol, getting pulled out and arrested, Mexican jail, I leaped to the back seat. I found the wool blanket—it was fat and thick and big. I smelled it, pressing my nose deep. It reeked of horse shit and rotten meat or something similar.

            I got down low, by the bottoms of the seats, and pulled the blanket over me. It was dark and stifling down under that thing, musky and warm.

            The car kept moving at a brisk pace and then started to slow. Francisco said, “Silence. Absolute silence.” I nodded but did not respond. I was too scared. Francisco turned on the radio again, Mexican Mariachi music playing at low volume.

            The car slowed even more, and then stopped. I heard cars ahead of us. Border patrol asking questions in English and Spanish. Then we slowly inched forward again, the line sluggishly moving.

            At last we arrived at the little patrol kiosk. Francisco stopped the car. He rolled his window down. A man said—deep, serious, authoritative voice—“What brings you into the U.S. today?”

            Polite, Francisco said, “Just seeing my sister.”

            “And where does your sister live?”

            “San Diego,” Francisco answered. “Chula Vista.”

            “Passport and ID, please,” the man said.

            There was an exchange. A minute later the man returned. “How long are you planning to be in San Diego for?”

            “Just a few hours, maybe until this evening.”

            “Short trip huh?”

            Francisco chuckled. “Yeah.”

            A beat of silence and then the border patrolman said, “Got anything illegal with you? Drugs, firearms, ammo, fireworks, anything flammable?”

            “No, sir.”

            “What’s in the backseat there, under the blanket?”

            I froze. My heart pounded so loud against my chest it felt like a fist trying desperately to escape my body. My gut tightened.

            “Oh,” Francisco said, trying to sound calm but with an edgy tone in his voice. “Just some clay pots I bought at the market. My sister likes them.”

            “Uh huh,” the man said. I pictured the likely machine-gun carrying border patrol guards. “Anything else you need to claim, or tell me about?”

            “No sir,” Francisco said.

            Silence. It felt like the man might be eyeing the car, the backseat, the wool blanket. Any moment I expected to hear the back door ripped open and the blanket torn off.

            “Alright then,” the man said. “Enjoy the United States. Drive carefully.”

            Francisco thanked the man. He rolled the window back up. Turned the music off. The car jerked forward. We moved along Highway 5 in complete silence for a minute or two.

            Then he said, “Ok. It’s safe now, amigo.”

            I shoved the blanket off. I could breathe free again! I climbed up to the front seat. He grinned. I laughed. We rolled our windows down.

            Traffic was light. The sun was warm and heavenly. We didn’t talk. He was paying it forward for his son. The border was long gone.

            An hour and a half later I was home.