Two Years in New York (Michael Mohr's "fictional memoir" chapter 3)

*Please consider a paid subscription :)

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 103rd 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 86th Street or 72nd 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 along 2nd. 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 72nd 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 72nd 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 42nd 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 96th and Broadway. 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 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 New Hampshire, he’d gone to LA to “make it” in the film industry. For a while he worked editing and developing scripts for a famous director. 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 114th. 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, is 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 72nd and 42nd 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 dimple 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.