What Zack didn’t Show Me
I asked Tine, “What does it mean to be a woman?” while we ate tomatoes like they were apples and smeared sun-softened Camembert onto hand-torn pieces of baguette.
I first saw Tine five days back, some 10-15 kilometers shy of the Spanish/French boarder, near Arneguy. I didn’t know anything about her then, except that she was beautiful. She sat flanking the gravel trail that I and hundreds of other pilgrims were trudging. She was tucked into a ball trying to stay warm on the sunny hillside eating almonds and talking with some older women. Her blonde hair stuck out in cherub wisps from the hood of her cotton poncho and blew across her face in the high wind. I didn’t know she was speaking Danish at the time, but it didn’t really matter. Her voice, mixed with the Basque mountain breeze, was round and warm and filled my head like cherry wood smoke. I looked at her and she waved instinctively, holding an almond between her thumb and index finger.
There are times I get premonitions which I largely ignore, like when I burn the toast in my broiler and think, “Today I’m going to die,” or when I miss the bus in the morning and think, “No, today, really, I’m going to die.” Some great unacknowledged force saves me from burning the toast and missing the bus in the same morning. But after first seeing Tine I had a more hopeful thought, “I will see her again,” and for some odd reason, I believed it.
Four days later I entered Pamplona in the early morning. My pilgrimage was over, or at least I thought. It had been a 500 plus mile trek exactly, which started in south central France—Le Puy in the massif central region—over the Pyrenees mountains and into the ancient Basque city of Pamplona. Peter—an English guy I met in Auvillar and had been walking with for the last three weeks—and I had a late breakfast on the Plaza del Cordilla and smoked several cigarettes after we finished eating. He was carrying on, all the way to Santiago, another 700km at least, and possibly beyond he hinted. We ordered more coffee and smoked another round of cigarettes, just to prolong the departing. After weeks of walking, sleeping, eating, showering and most importantly, pilgriming next to the same man, we had grow quite close; he was someone I can say with a degree of confidence that I love. We still email each other to this day. He harnessed his pack and crossed the square at the center of the city and disappeared down a narrow street. I swilled the dregs of my second espresso, which was cold and bitter.
After breakfast I sat on the step of the Refugio[1] and waited for the maid to open the doors so we could shower and drop our packs. That’s when she appeared to me again. Tine turned the corner and started walking up the narrow cobbled street toward the Refugio where I waited.
“You staying here?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m going to spend a few days here before catching a train back home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Copenhagen.” She paused to catch her breath. “What are you doing?”
“Was planning on spending a few days in Pamplona also.”
She sat down on the steps next to me, smiling and laughing to herself. We agreed to discover the city together over the next few days before she left.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tine tore apart my question with he same delicacy which we disseminated the loaf of bread, that is, with a gentleness that boardered uncomfortably on violence. “What does it mean to be a man?” she asked. I gave her some dumb answer about shopping for clothes in the men’s department and which bathroom I choose when in public. I didn’t talk about the things I never think about. It was a question I didn’t have a good answer for. I couldn’t then, and I can’t now tell if the emphasis is on mean or man. Maybe they’re inextricable? For anything to mean something it has to first pass through and into my gendered identity, which has shaped not only my interiority, but also to a large degree the world and its reactions to me. She mused with a mouthful of tomato and laughed. A small trickle of seedy red water eked out and ran underneath her chin. At this point Tine introduced the term, “Boomblin,” a Danish appropriation, she explained, of, “to walk around aimlessly at talk some more.”
We coursed through the Plaza del Cordilla again, full in that bloated way which comes from eating too much starch and fat and since some of our conversation circled around our favorite authors, I, a huge fan of Hemingway, ducked into a book store to see if they had an English version of The Sun Also Rises; they did. I signed it quickly, “To Tine, A book about some places one man loved. From, a man who also loves those places, Ryan” and planned to give it to her just before she left for Denmark; but later that afternoon, as we sat on the walls of the citadel ruins, watching deer and peacocks mingle with maintenance crews in the grass, I couldn’t wait and sheepishly produced the book from my bag. When we hugged I realized it was the first time her arms touched my neck.
On our last night before going out to eat tapas we went down to the river outside the fortifications of the city. There’s a drawbridge to enter the old part of Pamplona and Tine and I both posed for pictures of each other next to the huge blocks of stone used for the revetment wall. I figured the river we were heading down to at one point had been diverted to encircle the city, but the mote channel was filled with shag grass and wild flowers.
We laid next to the river. The current was swift in front of us and in some places tarried in the leaves of a tree that hung down into the water. Schools of bugs floated and dallied in the sunlight glancing off the dark water. Tine asked me what was next, what was I going to do with my life now. After a 500-mile trek, I wasn’t thinking about a future. The past still meant too much to think about what lay ahead. Tine sat up and brushed some dry grass that had enameled itself to her sweaty arm, the indentions of which folded her skin into topography of red and pale flesh. I sat up then, too, and thought about finally kissing her. I felt the mutual attraction had hung over us for the last two days like a bad storm that threatened to pour, clouds all massy and black and making rain on some distant land, but refused to drop on us. We held our knees and looked into the river. Finally we looked at each other and if two people can touch through their eyes then we were all over each other. I was looking for some symbol, some sign to let me know it was okay to make a move, even just to stroke the side of her face would have been enough in that moment to set the world on fire, but I spoke instead, “So what’s next for you?”
That’s when Tine told me about her boyfriend in Copenhagen; how it was complicated and that she wasn’t sure exactly what she was returning to; how love is like sitting on a train with your eyes closed; you know you’re going somewhere, but not exactly sure where and when you finally do open your eyes you have no idea where you are or how to get back home, so you shut your eyes again, and that this particular relationship had gone through many cycles of opening and closing her eyes, and it had become the only home she knew and getting off a moving train is never easy.
That night we climbed into our separate beds and I sat awake listening to a group of men sing from the street. The lamp outside caught along Tine’s back. Her skin looked silver and vanilla. She signed and rolled over to her side. When her breathing steadied I knew she was asleep, probably half way back to Copenhagen in her mind and I listened intently again to the doleful singing men. The morning rose dim and cold and Tine had already packed her bags and when I peeked up from the bed she simply waved goodbye and closed the door to our room. I had another premonition, “I will never see her again.” On the nightstand was a note:
Hey Ryan,
I’m very happy that I met you
--Thank you for sharing time, space and experience!
I’ve been enjoying it.
Actually I dreamt last night that I was holding your hand
I enjoyed that too—don’t know if it really counts, though J
The very best wishes for the rest of your adventure!
Tine
P.S I’m very excited that I’ll be reading Hemingway in the train on my way back home!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the tenth grade my friend Zack promised to pilfer a playboy magazine from his older brother and bring it to a sleep over party at my parents house. He assured me it showed everything, which meant upstairs and, even better, downstairs. The excitement of Zack’s promise leading up to the party was enough to strangle me. I was a novice, but one look at Playboy, likewise, promised to change all that. I had been stealing my mom’s Montgomery Ward catalogues and hiding them under my bed. I would lock my door and flip through hundreds of pages before finding the goods. Eventually I learned that the women’s lingerie section was always three fourths of the way through, just after the bathrobes and pajama wear. But my studies in female geography were incomplete. Granted, I mapped the curves of the female hip, the crevice between their breasts and the way their ropy hair fell over their shoulder as they looked coyly away from the camera, but so much was hidden away, a mystery that beckoned unfolding.
Zack finally showed up, but without the magazine. Supposedly his brother re-hid his stash and we were shit out of luck. Zack did say he could draw it though. Deftly I procured a yellow legal pad and pencil and Zack commenced his recapitulation of Playboy. He drew two s-shape lines, one next to the other, which looked like a slender vase without a top or a bottom. This was the torso, I knew. Then he went to the head and face and hair, sizing up perspective for what came next. He carefully drew one circle just under the shoulder and paused, turned the legal pad to the side and then drew another smaller circle inside of that. I held my breath. He moved his shaking hand over and started to draw another large circle, just like the one next to it, but stopped halfway and began to laugh. “I can’t do it,” he stuttered out between chuckled breaths. “This isn’t what it looks like.” He scratched out what he had drawn and asked for the Sega Genesis remote.
I’ve never been comfortable being a man. Like Zack’s picture, there are some parts that just don’t add up for me. Not that I want to mutilate myself or get a sex change. No, the body itself is not what makes me uncomfortable, it’s what that body—that physical package I’ve been born with, without choice—communicates, most times unbeknownst to me. Like because I have a penis and pectoral muscles and can grow a half way decent beard, I’m supposed to act a certain way with women. For instance, my girl friends—which I mean friends that are girls—chide me after introducing their single friends to me. “Show some confidence. Go for her. It will turn her on!” I know my girlfriends don’t mean to, but they heap an incredible amount of pressure on me, like the whole endeavor rests on how heroic or valiant I am. I tell them to read the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and think about what advice they’d give to him.
In middle school we played spin the bottle, and once the parties were selected they would retire like two self-flagellating monks behind some tool shed or garage to make out. We didn’t always kiss; sometimes we would just hang back there and talk. But If I liked the girl then I made a move. If things went well, then I found myself with a new girl friend. It was brilliant. No awkward mind guessing, just pure chemistry. I mean the whole point of the game was to find a mate by kissing first then deciding. There were no great stakes in it. You like my mouth, I like yours, so lets get ice cream together some time and maybe you’ll let me feel you up. I don’t know if that’s how the girls felt about it, but none of them protested.
Gone are the days of the bottle. Now I participate in this horrible ritual called dating, which is code for, “I think your cute, you think I’m handsome, so lets beat around the bush until I make a move and remove all doubt from the equation.” I’ve internet dated, I friend dated, hell, I even considered speed dating. But the result is always the same: no matter how much we get along, how many great dates we go on, things will not move forward until I make the move. This is what I hate about being a man. Admittedly, I’ve been with forward women before and it’s equally uncomfortable. I’m not so shallow or crass to think they’re sluts or easy because they rightfully seize something they want, that something being me. Rather, I think, “Oh no, wait, I’m the man, I should be making the move on you, but I’m too emasculated to do so.” And they’re probably thinking a different version of the same thing, because like math, biology is a universal language.
Tine never said, “Hey Ryan, grow some balls and kiss me already, I’m waiting.” But her note did. She wanted an embrace just as bad as me, but was unwilling to make a move for it. We both submitted to cultural biology; how we are expected to behave because of our sex. For three days I let my body speak, my gender communicate untenably. It was doing the most beautifully ambiguous conscripted pirouettes. It held the promise to make a move if I wanted to because that’s what men are trained to do. The script of masculinity demands this assimilation. I like to think of my body as something I own, something which I can perform anyway I like, that I have some agency over the expression of my sex. But I don’t. Culture owns every piece of me. Judith Butler[2] compares this quandary to being born on stage to a script that has already been written and demanded to play a role one doesn’t know they are playing. The rules are never known, but nonetheless, inherited. That I am male is a fact I accept, but how to act manhood out in a social context I feel wholly inadequate to do, like at birth a rule book is handed out and the day I was born the hospital ran out of copies, so I’ve been left to make it up as I go along.
Other women have also slipped through the fissures of my gendered identity. Many of my closet female friends have admitted, “Yeah I did have a crush on you, but now were too close of friends to go there.” Other’s thought I was gay. Some of my more virile male friends negotiate this role more easily. I hear stories about great first dates and then at the end of the evening, a parting, innocent kiss. Two weeks later, well, you get the picture. I imagine these guys in the tenth grade at a sleep over party and their friend bringing over a Playboy. They spread the magazine out on the floor and look at it in prayerful silence. They map the upstairs and downstairs of the female body and stow this possessed information away in a safe place to be used at a later date. When they are finished, they fold the magazine up and hide it in newspaper behind all the other books on their shelves I haven’t read yet, and probably never will.
[1] A special hostel for pilgrims only on the Camino de Santiago—a way marked trail system that extends far into western and Eastern Europe that leads to the ancient holy city of Santiago, Spain. The pilgrimage route/s grew in notoriety during the eighth century when Catholic monks kept pilgraming through the then Muslim ruled Iberian Peninsula. Though a religious overtone still colors the experience, it has been drawing secular attention as well. In France the hostels are called Gites d’etape.
[2] Famous Feminist scholar/philosopher whose seminal essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory launched many ideas about gender identity and the performance of “self” in a social space.
Dissent in the Cathedral
Alcohol for the alcoholic is a story of travel, of encounter, and recovery, even more so. Dr. Bob—cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A)—had his last bender on a train car outside Atlantic City in 1935. It was another case where the business side of a trip was consumed by the personal. Bill Wilson—the other co-founder of A.A—bounced several times over the Canadian boarder during prohibition to secure his “hooch.” But the travel every alcoholic knows is the demon spirit of consumption released with the first drink. Manifestations of the other self, the deranged one, the doppelganger of Dionysus—one is to many, a thousand not enough. There is no greater understanding for the alcoholic: drinking means abnegation of normalcy, abstinence the only defense against one’s own otherness.
I’m a recovering alcoholic, been sober four years. In outing myself, I violate A.A’s Eleventh Tradition: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.” The literature further states: “Personal ambition has no place in A.A.” Like most A.A principals, this seems foggy to me. I understand “personal anonymity”—which I gather means, “don’t promote yourself as a member of A.A at a public level in hopes of recruiting new members.” But when it comes to “personal ambition” I am lost. Isn’t recovery itself ambitious? And personal? No one goes to A.A to make life worse. By default, writing is a public endeavor. Language is public domain. I surely don’t intend to promote A.A, or position myself as a spokesperson for the organization. I simply go to meetings, abstain from alcohol and do other things as well. My recovery is part of me. So what the tradition really says: “Don’t be too much of a recovering alcoholic. Don’t let people know unless they need to.” It is this very principal that makes me uncomfortable even now while writing, and the discomfort still comes as a shock. Is A.A really asking me to “cover?”
The first time I took a drink it was with my father’s permission. It was a hot, humid day in the suburbs of Chicago, the kind of day you wait until dusk to leave the cool confines of an air-conditioned house, if you can. And so it was dusk, my dad sat in a vinyl-folding chair; some form of meat spit and smoked on the grill and my brother played H.O.R.S.E in the driveway with a neighbor. I don’t remember why, but I asked my dad for a sip of beer. To my surprise, he agreed. He passed a wet can of Coors—a time when the label was still gold and navy royal blue, a sign of position—and I tilted it back ever so slightly, filling my ten-year old mouth, which had recently learned to curse. It was bitter. It tasted of the earth, like stored wheat. I didn’t spit it out. I held it down all the way through my throat and into my stomach. It was something to retain, a possession prior to completion. I felt arrived at, not euphoric. It was an incremental amount of alcohol, too little to produce any chemical affect. It was something else. I didn’t know what, but it had happened, like the first time I masturbated, and came; I was moving forward, toward a multitude of possibilities, towards the irrecoverable world of identity. I couldn’t have gone back, even if I wanted to. This is what I gather the Bible means by a fallen world. A place identified, known, naked.
Booze travels well. For this reason, one of my favorite books The Sun Also Rises—an early 20th century travel novel—centers around alcohol, among other things. In each new place, there’s a new drink and a different mood of revelry. I have found this to be true also. Traveling is contextual; it opens space.
My first multistate road trip in high school was replete with a cooler of micro brews, jugs of Carlos Rossi and a battery of other substances. My older brother, his girl friend Ashley and myself piled into my mom’s station wagon and headed for Limestone Maine, home of Loring Air Force Base, on the boarder of the U.S and Canada. The closest major city to Limestone is Quebec, although I had to look at a map to figure that out. For three days tens of thousands of concertgoers filled the runways of the Loring Air Force Base, making our camping tent and car city the most populous town in Maine. Several times a day my brother would slap some cash on me. My job: to find the guy selling New Castle tall boys, 2 for 10$, who burned incense and had a hemp leash for his dog. All weekend the guy never ran out. And all weekend, I never got tired of the errand.
But alcohol itself is a good traveler. It courses quickly through the blood and infiltrates the brain, producing in alcoholics the sensation of abandonment from the stranger, everyday person who ordered the drink. For alcoholics, it’s a departure, a false rescue. Today, neurophysiologic studies show the brain of the alcoholic is a damaged decision making machine. The problem resides in the frontal lobe cortex, the region of the brain responsible for creative thinking, planning of future events, decision-making, artistic expression, aspects of emotional behavior, as well as spatial working memory, language and motor control, and sustaining attention over time. Chronic intake of alcohol restricts blood flow to this area of the brain, and over long periods of time, alcoholics experience “shrinkage” in capacity and matter of the frontal lobes. It’s a negative feed back loop. The more we drink, the less capable are brains are of controlling our decision to drink more or not. Our errors are relearned and forgot. Alcohol, the spirit, is the perfect foe. It sells itself on love, the romance of the drink, and parasitically carves out our body’s main defense, the thought life.
Here’s a paradox, I’ve never been good at selling alcohol to other people. You’d think someone with such an accredited past of selling booze to themselves would be a natural. This is not the case. As a waiter, I tremble when customers order a bottle of wine. This stands in the way of making a lot of money, because, as all waiters know, the higher the tab, the greater the tip, and nothing boosts bottom line numbers like selling alcohol. If fact, at high-end restaurants, selling wine is the paragon of success. The whole ritual of de-corking, pouring a taste for the patron who ordered it, then, starting from the left, filling each glass equally, even though I’ve done it plenty, never feels right. And customers always want to know what I think of the wine. Now that I abstain, I lie, come up with some speech I over heard. “It’s dry. Hints of cherry and oak bark. Goes down like Christ’s tears.”
When I was in the south of France, people persisted I try the wine. I would ask if it was French, which of course it was, then reply earnestly: “I’m from California. I don’t drink French wine.” They stopped offering after that. One man chastised me for drinking a Coke with dinner. He said that’s something his fourteen year old would do. But the French have a way of being so shrewd and serious one moment, and gregarious in the next, as if the past isn’t really that interesting to begin with. That’s what rubs me about A.A, we’re so concerned with and pay the utmost deference to the past, like around every corner, under every bed sheet the train wreck of our former self lies waiting. Bill Wilson said alcoholics suffer from a spiritual malady, and the only way to reconcile this schism is through belief in a “Higher Power,” a spiritual force of restoration. But I wonder, what exactly am I being restored to?
My trip to France was a leap of faith. I took out a 10,000 dollar student loan and did some preliminary research on a pilgrimage through the south and on into Spain that some friends had mentioned in passing. I had never been to Europe. I had never left the North American continent. Therefore, I didn’t know what to expect and as a consequence, had no expectations. There was one thing, though, that I did anticipate: Paris would have A.A meetings. That’s the amazing thing about A.A; it’s just about everywhere. I attended the world convention this past summer (2010) in San Antonio where delegates from almost 130 countries, places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, where drinking alcohol is strictly forbidden, were represented. As of 2009 the “Big Book”[1] was available in 58 languages, and by 2000 worldwide membership was estimated at 2,160,013. The only kind of transcontinental proliferation that trumps A.A is religion.
I got to Paris after 20 hours of travel and crossing the date line for the first time. In the air, on such long flights, time suspends itself. So when I finally emerged on the streets in that nebulous part of Paris somewhere south of Montmartre and east of Pigalle, the afternoon light was crystalline and pure, like honey in a champagne flute. I could taste it. It was metropole. The cafes looked wild, untamed with their sprawling tables suffocating sidewalks, to which none of the passerby’s seemed to mind. I wanted immediately to spread myself over every inch of the city. What I loved at first was that everywhere I looked, Paris met me there. It was a dazzling gem held before my inquisitive eye. That’s the joy of travel, the place itself starts to guide, opens before you.
I secured my room at the hostel and jumped on the metro. It didn’t take long for Ezra Pound’s “A Station at the Metro” to play on a continuous loop in my head. “The apparition of these faces in the crowd…” A moment invaded and enhanced by language, a thing of exquisite beauty. Words, the world they brush against, the threshold of art and life briefly erased and to be there, to feel your feet walking the lines of a poem, a form of transcendence, both hyperbolic and real.
At the corner of Quai de Conti and Point Neuf there is an oxidized bronze statue of a man on horse back with a cape. The horse is frozen in a perfect canter. The plaque below is in French and I can’t understand what it says. The shadow of the statue is aslant and partial on the sidewalk above the Seine. There are some men fishing from the cobbled bank with what looks like fly rods though they leave their lines still in the current. They don’t catch anything while I watch. It seems to me, same as in the states, fishing is actually secondary to something else. An activity of organization for the hours to slip through, maybe?
I go to my first A.A meeting in Paris at the American Cathedral located at 65 Quai de Orsay. The floors are wood and sound old as I walk. We sit in cotton-cushioned chairs arranged in a horseshoe. The room smells like at some point people used to smoke in it. The smell of cigarettes has changed over time. It has a forbiddenness to it, even in Paris. Of course cigarettes are a good way to find A.A meetings. Just look for a motley group smoking outside of a church, and discussions of recovery, what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now are soon to follow. And for the most part these discussions don’t change, for we alcoholics replicate ourselves. Severities may alter from story to story, but the basic principal is the same: we drink to self-ruin.
Almost as soon as the meeting is started, someone is talking about their hesitancy to believe in a “Higher Power.” Now he isn’t French, in fact hardly anybody at this meeting is. The group is mostly English transplants, and at least 20 years my senior. I’m used to the age disparity. If there is one group of people that refute a preponderance of evidence, it is alcoholics. Just try to tell an alcoholic still in his or her cups that drinking is the root of their problems. What surprises me is that once sober, the relative ease we tend to accept the teachings of Bill Wilson, a wall street trader who asks us to believe in a inexplicable, yet life changing spiritual force as the key to permanent freedom from alcohol. But in Paris I hear a proliferation of skepticism. It’s not that these people want to drink, far from it, but they’re not buying the “Higher Power,” at least not the way Bill Wilson writes about it. See, Bill interchanges God and “Higher Power” at will in the literature. At times he even says “Our Creator,” which smells of Christianity. Honestly, this has always bothered me, too. At first, escaping the throes of alcoholism, the debauchery, I was willing to believe just about anything, as long as it meant I wouldn’t make an ass of myself ever again. Initially, sobriety was self-preservation; least my life and brain wilt to mere raisins.
The Paris group asks me to share because I’m visiting from the States and look to me like I’m some torchbearer, for youth—locution. I don’t remember what I said besides, “My name is Ryan and I am an alcoholic.” I’m sure I mentioned the trip I was on, the hope and faith I feigned, which my emotions betrayed daily. In retrospect my faith has always been broken. Faith makes doing easier; it’s a human value, at times a purpose. I convinced myself the 500 mile pilgrimage I was about to embark on was an act of faith—not a Christian faith, something greater—a belief in the order of the multitude that surrounds every act, every word; that something meets us at the threshold of knowing, and guides.
By meetings end, I have a notion A.A as I’ve known theretofore is a particular brand. I get a sense of my Americaness, and the Paris group’s otherness, relatedness like water, an instance of different phase states. Afterwards we sit on the steps of the Cathedral. Some people smoke. There’s a sweaty, bulbous English guy with third degree burns all over his legs. He’s drunk, ashamed. I learn he meant to come to the meeting, but stopped short outside. Earlier that day, he fell asleep in the park where the sun worked something devilish on his skin. I’m shocked the sun can do something like this to us. He’s something of a leper. People from the group know him. Someone runs off to buy food and water, while I say the only thing that comes to mind: “You don’t have to live like this any more,” and hand him my annotated “Big Book.” This is learned behavior, learned speech, the replication of instruction. For the first time in my sobriety, on the other side of knowing is everything, equal and salient.
So I walk. Each day on the pilgrimage is more or less a series of kilometers covered, elevation climbed and descended, cathedrals contemplated in and about. It is a trip of prepositions, of position and relation, of movement, space and re-contextualization, every moment altering. The 500 mile journey is too various, too terrific and beautiful to describe here; it’s, how we say, another story.
After nearly two months of no A.A meetings, I get back to Paris and am eager to go. I find a meditation meeting[2] near the Seine. In a narrow alley I find a door next to which a laminated sign bearing the triangle and circle lets me know I’m in the right place. The door opens to a stairwell leading down into a basement. Everything is concrete. I smell incense and burnt matches and the musky scent all old basements have, a mysterious combination of water, dirt and time. A couple of men are there early like me, setting up the room, making tea and brewing coffee, putting a tray of store bought cookies out on the table. Both men are English. My understanding of the English in France has changed. After hearing countless French Hostel owners in the south lament about the English, how they infiltrate, make no attempt to integrate, learn the language etc, and yet small town economies are dependent on their business in summer, have led to the forced acceptance of a nuisance. Without knowing these men, resentment brews. More people show up, mostly men, mostly English. Our special purpose trumps though. We’re here, together, because we don’t want to drink alcohol. Some of us have been able to do this more successfully than others. The meeting begins when the group leader rings a small bell, reads the preamble, and the meditation commences. I study the candlelight playing on the faces of those with their eyes closed. I imagine not being me. I imagine the supreme fiction rewriting itself. The encounter is one of self-encounter. I would be remiss to say this is comfortable. Finally, I close my eyes and see oak trees from the Midwestern plains. In the negative space between leaves, dark, wet branches, possibilities. “…Petals on a wet, black bough.” I am suddenly exponential.
This is incomplete, I know, a tale of non-closure. With every departure there is the promise of return. Leaving off my alcoholic-self I am weary of where to return. I don’t want to drink, but I also don’t want cocksure answers. A.A promises completion, a sense of unity with the past and the future, of paying things forward. I’m happy to help people who don’t want to drink, suggesting they go to A.A. I’m happy with my sobriety. But alcohol and alcoholism, like most stories, is travel, open-endedness, otherness, and I am in no position to cover, at least not anymore.
[1] A.A’s basic text written by Bill Wilson and published first in 1939, and which is still used today as the program of recovery.
[2] In A.A every meeting has a theme or guiding purpose. Some focus on particular steps, literature, or general principals of A.A. There are also meetings for men (Stage meetings) and women (Women’s meeting) only, and an increasing number of groups are starting gay and lesbian groups, which do not restrict attendance to anyone. A meditation meeting usually consists of ten to fifteen minutes of silence at the beginning, and then an open discussion about the practice of meditation in our daily lives.
Silences and Contracts: The Business of being White
Last winter in some small house in South East Portland the white contract whispers its second clause, “If you void me, you’re all by yourself,” and thus, I acquiesce again to a silent permission among whites to be as racist as we want, albeit, harbored exclusively, safely, within the confines of our own tribe. The agreement is never spoken, but takes shape in the darting eyes of my fellow whites, looking nervously at each other in the presence of a racist joke or comment to reassure the group what is required, silent acceptance. The contract allows for blatant racism, but disallows a protestation to it. No one, not even I, wants to be the prodigal son, to venture into the fray of selfdom, to redefine the contract, to redefine whiteness, so we stay safely at home. In my short lifetime I’ve perfected the sharp art of silence when it comes to race, not to say I haven’t been the provider of many racist jokes and comments. As of late though, my participation has been a mute gesture toward the pervasiveness of this agreement. I accept it. But why in an era of outward racial equality, a rubbing out of institutional discrimination, is this the private agreement?—And why do I participate in it, still?
The most colorful character in my immediate family circle is uncle Leo, a one time major bookie among the west suburbs of Chicago and all around “wise guy” despite his Irish blood. He was a good earner for Frank, Leo’s connection to the Italian mafia in Chicago, my home town; but when Frank fell out of favor with the mob, so, too, did my uncle. After two Melrose Park detectives tore through his apartment, looking for his “sheet,” they warned Leo, “Next time it won’t be us that comes to visit.” My uncle knew the deal, look for another line of work, or get whacked: he courier’s medical supplies today.
The high time for Leo coincided with a golden age for the Schaefer family as well. We had moved from Westchester—a middle class bungalow style suburb— to Hinsdale—an upper scale, mostly, if not exclusively, white suburb, decked out with million dollar plus mansions cut out from Home and Garden magazine and pasted onto a parcel of land barely big enough to hold them. The sheer proximity of homes in Hinsdale afforded neighbors a clear view into each other’s kitchens and living rooms, for the daring, even the bathrooms! There was a conscious trade off: move to Hinsdale, school district 181, black and Latino population 0, crime rate nonexistent and ensure safety of home and person, but sacrifice familial autonomy within the neighborhood, because everyone knew everything about each other. Each family’s jubilations and tragedies sent waves down street. My block was one acephalic white family.
Our living room in Hinsdale was venue to a Christmas party each year and the best part of these gatherings, besides the uncharacteristic bubblyness of dad, were visits from uncle Leo. He gave me my first hundred dollar bill one year, no wrapping paper, no card, just cold hard cash peeled off his big roll held excruciatingly by a single blue rubber band. Leo also introduced me to racial demonstratives like, “Nigger, Gook, and Spick or Beaner,” which hung in my mind with a tantalizing forbidden-ness. As a youngster Leo was my tree of knowledge and he was also the first person to introduce me to the white contract.
Growing up in Hinsdale, conversations about whiteness, what it meant to be white, were as rare as a black or Latino person, but jokes and racial slurs flung about like the integuments of fall. It was with Leo during Christmas parties that I got my first taste of a permission that would later extend itself far into my adult life. Watching football became a racial gridiron. The black players were, “dumb niggers,” while the white quarterbacks and announcers were, “dumb asses,” conveniently un-racialized. Now, uncle Leo’s comments probably wouldn’t have changed one iota in the presence of a colored person, but I knew, even as a juvenile, mine would. It was the same with my all white friends. In their company, I would drop words like nigger and spick with impunity, but introduce a person of color into the circle, and I would sure up my tongue. To use racial jokes or comments in a mixed crowd suddenly publicizes these views, makes the space, the company, public, where this contract simply does not exist.
When old enough, I, along with my father and brother, would meet Leo at the horseracing track for drinks and legal, un-mafia related betting. The track was in Maywood, a town that’s demographic, to be politically correct, had changed. My dad grew up in Maywood, speaking German with his two immigrant parents, went to high school, and worked as a clerk at a grocery store a few years after college. Like so many other neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities—I think of the Mission district in San Francisco—Maywood, a suburb once inhabited by European transplants like the Irish and Germans, turned into a black and brown town. Hardware stores ran short of customers and turned into liquor stores with metal bars locking patrons in and thieves out. Apartment building facades crumbled and dirtied from years of disrepair. Proviso East, the high school my father attended, started producing NBA stars like Michael Finely and Michelle Ford instead of potential college graduates. Gang violence became so rabid that it never aired on local news channels. Maywood became a town whites visited for three things, horse betting, drugs and prostitutes.
The track itself was at the corner of La Grange and First Avenue, across a wide fluorescent intersection from Kiddy Land. Kiddy Land was a theme park I remember vaguely from childhood, eating cotton candy till my gums hurt and my mouth turned Pepto-Bismol pink and riding a small electric train that circumnavigated the entire plot. Through the fence I would glean perceptions into a world foreign, a jungle of littered streets, jangly cars blaring loud music I’d never heard before and shabby men drinking out of paper bags. At these times it was nice to know that I could retreat to Hinsdale, a universe that made Maywood a gleaming catastrophe orbiting at the fringe of my consciousness. Many years after these memories, in the parking lot of Kiddy Land two of my friends got “jacked” trying to buy an eight-ball of cocaine. “They had shaved heads, those fucking spicks,” John (my friend at the time) said throwing a baggy of crushed Tylenol tablets onto my lap.
Leo always sat in the bar/lounge area, near the TVs. His perch at one of the pub-style tables, smoking Marlboro Lights, drinking a flute of cheap champagne and flipping through the program of races to come, gave Leo a flightiness, like his anxieties were a sign that he might leave at the drop of a dime. He had circled all the horses he liked in pencil, and from time to time, would erase his annotations and re-circle some other horse based on new odds that constantly streamed across one of the many televisions. Conviviality with others, except us, was not in his program. At the time I couldn’t blame him. The lounge area was a sarcophagus of broken promise. Bits of paper, the discards of lost bets, covered the floor like failed origami shapes or broken dove wings, dirtied by the bottoms of everyone’s feet shuffling to and fro. The green leather armchairs at the other end of the long hall were cracked and burnished with over use. The dirt track itself glowed under garish stadium lights, which made deep shadows out of hoof prints and the infield was a pitch of crab grass and sedge brush that loosely resembled the shape it had been cut to in some distant, unremembered past.
Our cocktail waitress floated listlessly in all black, an unwashed apron around her waist with week old bloody marry stains still visible on it. She was fortified against all jokes and courtesies, like she had heard every one liner before, and even the first time didn’t find them funny or charming. She took our drink order with as much passion as a sleeping cat, but as she walked back to the bar my eyes fell onto the other patrons. It was a mostly black and Latino canvass salted with a few whites. Hard looking white men with gray hair and rheumatic skin gauntly shaking the paper program at the finishing horses had a verisimilitude with the place, a reciprocity I didn’t. They had given something up to belong at the track. Their skin was light; their hair was straight, but something about them betrayed the same physical package I was given at birth; they were poor, and in my mind, just like the “others.”
The black condition, the Mexican condition, even the women’s condition, was something written in a textbook, something I read about, a tragedy, but not my tragedy. Race was simply the “others” problem and I was comfortable with it that way. Going into job interviews, applying for school or unemployment, getting stopped by the police was a whole lot easier when I didn’t have to consider what social implications my skin color was bringing to the table, so for many years I protected myself from being racialized, from staring my race in the teeth. I equated white with wealth, and wealth with normalcy. To protect this normalcy, and my place in it, I continually reaffirmed the otherness of blacks and Latinos and Asians through jokes, while treating whiteness with the kit gloves of silence. One way to keep the focus off my race and myself was to continually point at others and their race, to make it abnormal. The white contract not only allows for these maneuverings, but also encourages this pedagogy. I’ve heard my own credulity when I muttered nigger to my uncle and friends, my alacrity in discovering a new racist joke and the impatience to share it with my tribe. In each case the result is the same, I fortify my own white center, while pushing the racial ones further and further out.
It’s Christmas last year and I visit my brother who lives in Portland Oregon. We go to a party at his friend Tommy’s house and after the insincerities of small talk had outlived their usefulness, we collected in a guest bedroom and started telling jokes. There was a bottle of Jack Daniels being passed around. Finally, after the quips about men’s sexual competency had run dry the racial bomb was dropped: Question, “How many Jews can you fit into a VW?” Answer: “One in each seat and about five million in the ash tray.” No one made an honest laugh at the joke, but no one protested its presence in our company. Why would they? This was a private space, one where we can commoditize race and displace it upon those of our choosing. By default, we are white and normal; encapsulated, as we were, our consciousness of identity is too wide, too ubiquitous to fathom seriously. Whiteness is commerce. Whiteness is success. Whiteness is safety. Whiteness is the unrelenting silence, the unwillingness to see our race as a set of societal privileges, and not an ethnicity, and it is precisely these societal privileges that keep my duplicity alive. By being white I have an inborn code in my skin. One that tells employers I’m trustworthy, police I’ll cooperate, and the admissions office at colleges that I come from an educated family, which, no surprise, I do. The foundations of these perceptions were laid down far before I was born, but that doesn’t stop me or other whites from inheriting them.
To stand up in this inner circle and announce the presence of the contract—its implications and the cause for its inaction— and my dissention from it would alienate me. To void the contract would force me out of the privatized world of whites and into a scary public world full of racial implication. Without the comforts of being “white”, the way I’ve know it thus far in my life, what would separate me from those poor chaps at the track? The consciousness of my racial identity would be mine alone. Some others maybe there waiting for me, but they haven’t revealed themselves. Why pull on the lose tether holding my nicely stitched tapestry together? Plus, my brother’s friends, or uncle Leo would probably call me hypocritical, for championing those who’s shoulders my race stands on, and being a hypocrite is worse than being a racist; it taints character within the tribe. In being white, I’ve found purity is a premium, and what could be more pure than unstained, unadulterated silence?
Back at the racetrack I lay a bet on a horse that is running 64:1 odds. An overweight Mexican man sheaves out my betting ticket. His swollen wrists try to swallow a digital watch whole. He smiles at me and his pencil thin mustache curves up like the profile of a boat. At the table my dad is deciphering the odds, and figures out a way to bet, with various amounts of money on different horses, that he can’t lose. The race starts and my horse stumbles out of the gate, and doesn’t even finish in the middle of the pack, not by a long shot; he comes in last. I crumble my ticket and add it to the building loam. A bet is like a contract, if you win, the track promises to pay you your earnings, and as I throw the ticket to the ground, I realize how easy it is to get rid of a losing contract, right?
I asked Tine, “What does it mean to be a woman?” while we ate tomatoes like they were apples and smeared sun-softened Camembert onto hand-torn pieces of baguette.
I first saw Tine five days back, some 10-15 kilometers shy of the Spanish/French boarder, near Arneguy. I didn’t know anything about her then, except that she was beautiful. She sat flanking the gravel trail that I and hundreds of other pilgrims were trudging. She was tucked into a ball trying to stay warm on the sunny hillside eating almonds and talking with some older women. Her blonde hair stuck out in cherub wisps from the hood of her cotton poncho and blew across her face in the high wind. I didn’t know she was speaking Danish at the time, but it didn’t really matter. Her voice, mixed with the Basque mountain breeze, was round and warm and filled my head like cherry wood smoke. I looked at her and she waved instinctively, holding an almond between her thumb and index finger.
There are times I get premonitions which I largely ignore, like when I burn the toast in my broiler and think, “Today I’m going to die,” or when I miss the bus in the morning and think, “No, today, really, I’m going to die.” Some great unacknowledged force saves me from burning the toast and missing the bus in the same morning. But after first seeing Tine I had a more hopeful thought, “I will see her again,” and for some odd reason, I believed it.
Four days later I entered Pamplona in the early morning. My pilgrimage was over, or at least I thought. It had been a 500 plus mile trek exactly, which started in south central France—Le Puy in the massif central region—over the Pyrenees mountains and into the ancient Basque city of Pamplona. Peter—an English guy I met in Auvillar and had been walking with for the last three weeks—and I had a late breakfast on the Plaza del Cordilla and smoked several cigarettes after we finished eating. He was carrying on, all the way to Santiago, another 700km at least, and possibly beyond he hinted. We ordered more coffee and smoked another round of cigarettes, just to prolong the departing. After weeks of walking, sleeping, eating, showering and most importantly, pilgriming next to the same man, we had grow quite close; he was someone I can say with a degree of confidence that I love. We still email each other to this day. He harnessed his pack and crossed the square at the center of the city and disappeared down a narrow street. I swilled the dregs of my second espresso, which was cold and bitter.
After breakfast I sat on the step of the Refugio[1] and waited for the maid to open the doors so we could shower and drop our packs. That’s when she appeared to me again. Tine turned the corner and started walking up the narrow cobbled street toward the Refugio where I waited.
“You staying here?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m going to spend a few days here before catching a train back home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Copenhagen.” She paused to catch her breath. “What are you doing?”
“Was planning on spending a few days in Pamplona also.”
She sat down on the steps next to me, smiling and laughing to herself. We agreed to discover the city together over the next few days before she left.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tine tore apart my question with he same delicacy which we disseminated the loaf of bread, that is, with a gentleness that boardered uncomfortably on violence. “What does it mean to be a man?” she asked. I gave her some dumb answer about shopping for clothes in the men’s department and which bathroom I choose when in public. I didn’t talk about the things I never think about. It was a question I didn’t have a good answer for. I couldn’t then, and I can’t now tell if the emphasis is on mean or man. Maybe they’re inextricable? For anything to mean something it has to first pass through and into my gendered identity, which has shaped not only my interiority, but also to a large degree the world and its reactions to me. She mused with a mouthful of tomato and laughed. A small trickle of seedy red water eked out and ran underneath her chin. At this point Tine introduced the term, “Boomblin,” a Danish appropriation, she explained, of, “to walk around aimlessly at talk some more.”
We coursed through the Plaza del Cordilla again, full in that bloated way which comes from eating too much starch and fat and since some of our conversation circled around our favorite authors, I, a huge fan of Hemingway, ducked into a book store to see if they had an English version of The Sun Also Rises; they did. I signed it quickly, “To Tine, A book about some places one man loved. From, a man who also loves those places, Ryan” and planned to give it to her just before she left for Denmark; but later that afternoon, as we sat on the walls of the citadel ruins, watching deer and peacocks mingle with maintenance crews in the grass, I couldn’t wait and sheepishly produced the book from my bag. When we hugged I realized it was the first time her arms touched my neck.
On our last night before going out to eat tapas we went down to the river outside the fortifications of the city. There’s a drawbridge to enter the old part of Pamplona and Tine and I both posed for pictures of each other next to the huge blocks of stone used for the revetment wall. I figured the river we were heading down to at one point had been diverted to encircle the city, but the mote channel was filled with shag grass and wild flowers.
We laid next to the river. The current was swift in front of us and in some places tarried in the leaves of a tree that hung down into the water. Schools of bugs floated and dallied in the sunlight glancing off the dark water. Tine asked me what was next, what was I going to do with my life now. After a 500-mile trek, I wasn’t thinking about a future. The past still meant too much to think about what lay ahead. Tine sat up and brushed some dry grass that had enameled itself to her sweaty arm, the indentions of which folded her skin into topography of red and pale flesh. I sat up then, too, and thought about finally kissing her. I felt the mutual attraction had hung over us for the last two days like a bad storm that threatened to pour, clouds all massy and black and making rain on some distant land, but refused to drop on us. We held our knees and looked into the river. Finally we looked at each other and if two people can touch through their eyes then we were all over each other. I was looking for some symbol, some sign to let me know it was okay to make a move, even just to stroke the side of her face would have been enough in that moment to set the world on fire, but I spoke instead, “So what’s next for you?”
That’s when Tine told me about her boyfriend in Copenhagen; how it was complicated and that she wasn’t sure exactly what she was returning to; how love is like sitting on a train with your eyes closed; you know you’re going somewhere, but not exactly sure where and when you finally do open your eyes you have no idea where you are or how to get back home, so you shut your eyes again, and that this particular relationship had gone through many cycles of opening and closing her eyes, and it had become the only home she knew and getting off a moving train is never easy.
That night we climbed into our separate beds and I sat awake listening to a group of men sing from the street. The lamp outside caught along Tine’s back. Her skin looked silver and vanilla. She signed and rolled over to her side. When her breathing steadied I knew she was asleep, probably half way back to Copenhagen in her mind and I listened intently again to the doleful singing men. The morning rose dim and cold and Tine had already packed her bags and when I peeked up from the bed she simply waved goodbye and closed the door to our room. I had another premonition, “I will never see her again.” On the nightstand was a note:
Hey Ryan,
I’m very happy that I met you
--Thank you for sharing time, space and experience!
I’ve been enjoying it.
Actually I dreamt last night that I was holding your hand
I enjoyed that too—don’t know if it really counts, though J
The very best wishes for the rest of your adventure!
Tine
P.S I’m very excited that I’ll be reading Hemingway in the train on my way back home!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the tenth grade my friend Zack promised to pilfer a playboy magazine from his older brother and bring it to a sleep over party at my parents house. He assured me it showed everything, which meant upstairs and, even better, downstairs. The excitement of Zack’s promise leading up to the party was enough to strangle me. I was a novice, but one look at Playboy, likewise, promised to change all that. I had been stealing my mom’s Montgomery Ward catalogues and hiding them under my bed. I would lock my door and flip through hundreds of pages before finding the goods. Eventually I learned that the women’s lingerie section was always three fourths of the way through, just after the bathrobes and pajama wear. But my studies in female geography were incomplete. Granted, I mapped the curves of the female hip, the crevice between their breasts and the way their ropy hair fell over their shoulder as they looked coyly away from the camera, but so much was hidden away, a mystery that beckoned unfolding.
Zack finally showed up, but without the magazine. Supposedly his brother re-hid his stash and we were shit out of luck. Zack did say he could draw it though. Deftly I procured a yellow legal pad and pencil and Zack commenced his recapitulation of Playboy. He drew two s-shape lines, one next to the other, which looked like a slender vase without a top or a bottom. This was the torso, I knew. Then he went to the head and face and hair, sizing up perspective for what came next. He carefully drew one circle just under the shoulder and paused, turned the legal pad to the side and then drew another smaller circle inside of that. I held my breath. He moved his shaking hand over and started to draw another large circle, just like the one next to it, but stopped halfway and began to laugh. “I can’t do it,” he stuttered out between chuckled breaths. “This isn’t what it looks like.” He scratched out what he had drawn and asked for the Sega Genesis remote.
I’ve never been comfortable being a man. Like Zack’s picture, there are some parts that just don’t add up for me. Not that I want to mutilate myself or get a sex change. No, the body itself is not what makes me uncomfortable, it’s what that body—that physical package I’ve been born with, without choice—communicates, most times unbeknownst to me. Like because I have a penis and pectoral muscles and can grow a half way decent beard, I’m supposed to act a certain way with women. For instance, my girl friends—which I mean friends that are girls—chide me after introducing their single friends to me. “Show some confidence. Go for her. It will turn her on!” I know my girlfriends don’t mean to, but they heap an incredible amount of pressure on me, like the whole endeavor rests on how heroic or valiant I am. I tell them to read the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and think about what advice they’d give to him.
In middle school we played spin the bottle, and once the parties were selected they would retire like two self-flagellating monks behind some tool shed or garage to make out. We didn’t always kiss; sometimes we would just hang back there and talk. But If I liked the girl then I made a move. If things went well, then I found myself with a new girl friend. It was brilliant. No awkward mind guessing, just pure chemistry. I mean the whole point of the game was to find a mate by kissing first then deciding. There were no great stakes in it. You like my mouth, I like yours, so lets get ice cream together some time and maybe you’ll let me feel you up. I don’t know if that’s how the girls felt about it, but none of them protested.
Gone are the days of the bottle. Now I participate in this horrible ritual called dating, which is code for, “I think your cute, you think I’m handsome, so lets beat around the bush until I make a move and remove all doubt from the equation.” I’ve internet dated, I friend dated, hell, I even considered speed dating. But the result is always the same: no matter how much we get along, how many great dates we go on, things will not move forward until I make the move. This is what I hate about being a man. Admittedly, I’ve been with forward women before and it’s equally uncomfortable. I’m not so shallow or crass to think they’re sluts or easy because they rightfully seize something they want, that something being me. Rather, I think, “Oh no, wait, I’m the man, I should be making the move on you, but I’m too emasculated to do so.” And they’re probably thinking a different version of the same thing, because like math, biology is a universal language.
Tine never said, “Hey Ryan, grow some balls and kiss me already, I’m waiting.” But her note did. She wanted an embrace just as bad as me, but was unwilling to make a move for it. We both submitted to cultural biology; how we are expected to behave because of our sex. For three days I let my body speak, my gender communicate untenably. It was doing the most beautifully ambiguous conscripted pirouettes. It held the promise to make a move if I wanted to because that’s what men are trained to do. The script of masculinity demands this assimilation. I like to think of my body as something I own, something which I can perform anyway I like, that I have some agency over the expression of my sex. But I don’t. Culture owns every piece of me. Judith Butler[2] compares this quandary to being born on stage to a script that has already been written and demanded to play a role one doesn’t know they are playing. The rules are never known, but nonetheless, inherited. That I am male is a fact I accept, but how to act manhood out in a social context I feel wholly inadequate to do, like at birth a rule book is handed out and the day I was born the hospital ran out of copies, so I’ve been left to make it up as I go along.
Other women have also slipped through the fissures of my gendered identity. Many of my closet female friends have admitted, “Yeah I did have a crush on you, but now were too close of friends to go there.” Other’s thought I was gay. Some of my more virile male friends negotiate this role more easily. I hear stories about great first dates and then at the end of the evening, a parting, innocent kiss. Two weeks later, well, you get the picture. I imagine these guys in the tenth grade at a sleep over party and their friend bringing over a Playboy. They spread the magazine out on the floor and look at it in prayerful silence. They map the upstairs and downstairs of the female body and stow this possessed information away in a safe place to be used at a later date. When they are finished, they fold the magazine up and hide it in newspaper behind all the other books on their shelves I haven’t read yet, and probably never will.
[1] A special hostel for pilgrims only on the Camino de Santiago—a way marked trail system that extends far into western and Eastern Europe that leads to the ancient holy city of Santiago, Spain. The pilgrimage route/s grew in notoriety during the eighth century when Catholic monks kept pilgraming through the then Muslim ruled Iberian Peninsula. Though a religious overtone still colors the experience, it has been drawing secular attention as well. In France the hostels are called Gites d’etape.
[2] Famous Feminist scholar/philosopher whose seminal essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory launched many ideas about gender identity and the performance of “self” in a social space.
Dissent in the Cathedral
Alcohol for the alcoholic is a story of travel, of encounter, and recovery, even more so. Dr. Bob—cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A)—had his last bender on a train car outside Atlantic City in 1935. It was another case where the business side of a trip was consumed by the personal. Bill Wilson—the other co-founder of A.A—bounced several times over the Canadian boarder during prohibition to secure his “hooch.” But the travel every alcoholic knows is the demon spirit of consumption released with the first drink. Manifestations of the other self, the deranged one, the doppelganger of Dionysus—one is to many, a thousand not enough. There is no greater understanding for the alcoholic: drinking means abnegation of normalcy, abstinence the only defense against one’s own otherness.
I’m a recovering alcoholic, been sober four years. In outing myself, I violate A.A’s Eleventh Tradition: “Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.” The literature further states: “Personal ambition has no place in A.A.” Like most A.A principals, this seems foggy to me. I understand “personal anonymity”—which I gather means, “don’t promote yourself as a member of A.A at a public level in hopes of recruiting new members.” But when it comes to “personal ambition” I am lost. Isn’t recovery itself ambitious? And personal? No one goes to A.A to make life worse. By default, writing is a public endeavor. Language is public domain. I surely don’t intend to promote A.A, or position myself as a spokesperson for the organization. I simply go to meetings, abstain from alcohol and do other things as well. My recovery is part of me. So what the tradition really says: “Don’t be too much of a recovering alcoholic. Don’t let people know unless they need to.” It is this very principal that makes me uncomfortable even now while writing, and the discomfort still comes as a shock. Is A.A really asking me to “cover?”
The first time I took a drink it was with my father’s permission. It was a hot, humid day in the suburbs of Chicago, the kind of day you wait until dusk to leave the cool confines of an air-conditioned house, if you can. And so it was dusk, my dad sat in a vinyl-folding chair; some form of meat spit and smoked on the grill and my brother played H.O.R.S.E in the driveway with a neighbor. I don’t remember why, but I asked my dad for a sip of beer. To my surprise, he agreed. He passed a wet can of Coors—a time when the label was still gold and navy royal blue, a sign of position—and I tilted it back ever so slightly, filling my ten-year old mouth, which had recently learned to curse. It was bitter. It tasted of the earth, like stored wheat. I didn’t spit it out. I held it down all the way through my throat and into my stomach. It was something to retain, a possession prior to completion. I felt arrived at, not euphoric. It was an incremental amount of alcohol, too little to produce any chemical affect. It was something else. I didn’t know what, but it had happened, like the first time I masturbated, and came; I was moving forward, toward a multitude of possibilities, towards the irrecoverable world of identity. I couldn’t have gone back, even if I wanted to. This is what I gather the Bible means by a fallen world. A place identified, known, naked.
Booze travels well. For this reason, one of my favorite books The Sun Also Rises—an early 20th century travel novel—centers around alcohol, among other things. In each new place, there’s a new drink and a different mood of revelry. I have found this to be true also. Traveling is contextual; it opens space.
My first multistate road trip in high school was replete with a cooler of micro brews, jugs of Carlos Rossi and a battery of other substances. My older brother, his girl friend Ashley and myself piled into my mom’s station wagon and headed for Limestone Maine, home of Loring Air Force Base, on the boarder of the U.S and Canada. The closest major city to Limestone is Quebec, although I had to look at a map to figure that out. For three days tens of thousands of concertgoers filled the runways of the Loring Air Force Base, making our camping tent and car city the most populous town in Maine. Several times a day my brother would slap some cash on me. My job: to find the guy selling New Castle tall boys, 2 for 10$, who burned incense and had a hemp leash for his dog. All weekend the guy never ran out. And all weekend, I never got tired of the errand.
But alcohol itself is a good traveler. It courses quickly through the blood and infiltrates the brain, producing in alcoholics the sensation of abandonment from the stranger, everyday person who ordered the drink. For alcoholics, it’s a departure, a false rescue. Today, neurophysiologic studies show the brain of the alcoholic is a damaged decision making machine. The problem resides in the frontal lobe cortex, the region of the brain responsible for creative thinking, planning of future events, decision-making, artistic expression, aspects of emotional behavior, as well as spatial working memory, language and motor control, and sustaining attention over time. Chronic intake of alcohol restricts blood flow to this area of the brain, and over long periods of time, alcoholics experience “shrinkage” in capacity and matter of the frontal lobes. It’s a negative feed back loop. The more we drink, the less capable are brains are of controlling our decision to drink more or not. Our errors are relearned and forgot. Alcohol, the spirit, is the perfect foe. It sells itself on love, the romance of the drink, and parasitically carves out our body’s main defense, the thought life.
Here’s a paradox, I’ve never been good at selling alcohol to other people. You’d think someone with such an accredited past of selling booze to themselves would be a natural. This is not the case. As a waiter, I tremble when customers order a bottle of wine. This stands in the way of making a lot of money, because, as all waiters know, the higher the tab, the greater the tip, and nothing boosts bottom line numbers like selling alcohol. If fact, at high-end restaurants, selling wine is the paragon of success. The whole ritual of de-corking, pouring a taste for the patron who ordered it, then, starting from the left, filling each glass equally, even though I’ve done it plenty, never feels right. And customers always want to know what I think of the wine. Now that I abstain, I lie, come up with some speech I over heard. “It’s dry. Hints of cherry and oak bark. Goes down like Christ’s tears.”
When I was in the south of France, people persisted I try the wine. I would ask if it was French, which of course it was, then reply earnestly: “I’m from California. I don’t drink French wine.” They stopped offering after that. One man chastised me for drinking a Coke with dinner. He said that’s something his fourteen year old would do. But the French have a way of being so shrewd and serious one moment, and gregarious in the next, as if the past isn’t really that interesting to begin with. That’s what rubs me about A.A, we’re so concerned with and pay the utmost deference to the past, like around every corner, under every bed sheet the train wreck of our former self lies waiting. Bill Wilson said alcoholics suffer from a spiritual malady, and the only way to reconcile this schism is through belief in a “Higher Power,” a spiritual force of restoration. But I wonder, what exactly am I being restored to?
My trip to France was a leap of faith. I took out a 10,000 dollar student loan and did some preliminary research on a pilgrimage through the south and on into Spain that some friends had mentioned in passing. I had never been to Europe. I had never left the North American continent. Therefore, I didn’t know what to expect and as a consequence, had no expectations. There was one thing, though, that I did anticipate: Paris would have A.A meetings. That’s the amazing thing about A.A; it’s just about everywhere. I attended the world convention this past summer (2010) in San Antonio where delegates from almost 130 countries, places like Saudi Arabia and Iran, where drinking alcohol is strictly forbidden, were represented. As of 2009 the “Big Book”[1] was available in 58 languages, and by 2000 worldwide membership was estimated at 2,160,013. The only kind of transcontinental proliferation that trumps A.A is religion.
I got to Paris after 20 hours of travel and crossing the date line for the first time. In the air, on such long flights, time suspends itself. So when I finally emerged on the streets in that nebulous part of Paris somewhere south of Montmartre and east of Pigalle, the afternoon light was crystalline and pure, like honey in a champagne flute. I could taste it. It was metropole. The cafes looked wild, untamed with their sprawling tables suffocating sidewalks, to which none of the passerby’s seemed to mind. I wanted immediately to spread myself over every inch of the city. What I loved at first was that everywhere I looked, Paris met me there. It was a dazzling gem held before my inquisitive eye. That’s the joy of travel, the place itself starts to guide, opens before you.
I secured my room at the hostel and jumped on the metro. It didn’t take long for Ezra Pound’s “A Station at the Metro” to play on a continuous loop in my head. “The apparition of these faces in the crowd…” A moment invaded and enhanced by language, a thing of exquisite beauty. Words, the world they brush against, the threshold of art and life briefly erased and to be there, to feel your feet walking the lines of a poem, a form of transcendence, both hyperbolic and real.
At the corner of Quai de Conti and Point Neuf there is an oxidized bronze statue of a man on horse back with a cape. The horse is frozen in a perfect canter. The plaque below is in French and I can’t understand what it says. The shadow of the statue is aslant and partial on the sidewalk above the Seine. There are some men fishing from the cobbled bank with what looks like fly rods though they leave their lines still in the current. They don’t catch anything while I watch. It seems to me, same as in the states, fishing is actually secondary to something else. An activity of organization for the hours to slip through, maybe?
I go to my first A.A meeting in Paris at the American Cathedral located at 65 Quai de Orsay. The floors are wood and sound old as I walk. We sit in cotton-cushioned chairs arranged in a horseshoe. The room smells like at some point people used to smoke in it. The smell of cigarettes has changed over time. It has a forbiddenness to it, even in Paris. Of course cigarettes are a good way to find A.A meetings. Just look for a motley group smoking outside of a church, and discussions of recovery, what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now are soon to follow. And for the most part these discussions don’t change, for we alcoholics replicate ourselves. Severities may alter from story to story, but the basic principal is the same: we drink to self-ruin.
Almost as soon as the meeting is started, someone is talking about their hesitancy to believe in a “Higher Power.” Now he isn’t French, in fact hardly anybody at this meeting is. The group is mostly English transplants, and at least 20 years my senior. I’m used to the age disparity. If there is one group of people that refute a preponderance of evidence, it is alcoholics. Just try to tell an alcoholic still in his or her cups that drinking is the root of their problems. What surprises me is that once sober, the relative ease we tend to accept the teachings of Bill Wilson, a wall street trader who asks us to believe in a inexplicable, yet life changing spiritual force as the key to permanent freedom from alcohol. But in Paris I hear a proliferation of skepticism. It’s not that these people want to drink, far from it, but they’re not buying the “Higher Power,” at least not the way Bill Wilson writes about it. See, Bill interchanges God and “Higher Power” at will in the literature. At times he even says “Our Creator,” which smells of Christianity. Honestly, this has always bothered me, too. At first, escaping the throes of alcoholism, the debauchery, I was willing to believe just about anything, as long as it meant I wouldn’t make an ass of myself ever again. Initially, sobriety was self-preservation; least my life and brain wilt to mere raisins.
The Paris group asks me to share because I’m visiting from the States and look to me like I’m some torchbearer, for youth—locution. I don’t remember what I said besides, “My name is Ryan and I am an alcoholic.” I’m sure I mentioned the trip I was on, the hope and faith I feigned, which my emotions betrayed daily. In retrospect my faith has always been broken. Faith makes doing easier; it’s a human value, at times a purpose. I convinced myself the 500 mile pilgrimage I was about to embark on was an act of faith—not a Christian faith, something greater—a belief in the order of the multitude that surrounds every act, every word; that something meets us at the threshold of knowing, and guides.
By meetings end, I have a notion A.A as I’ve known theretofore is a particular brand. I get a sense of my Americaness, and the Paris group’s otherness, relatedness like water, an instance of different phase states. Afterwards we sit on the steps of the Cathedral. Some people smoke. There’s a sweaty, bulbous English guy with third degree burns all over his legs. He’s drunk, ashamed. I learn he meant to come to the meeting, but stopped short outside. Earlier that day, he fell asleep in the park where the sun worked something devilish on his skin. I’m shocked the sun can do something like this to us. He’s something of a leper. People from the group know him. Someone runs off to buy food and water, while I say the only thing that comes to mind: “You don’t have to live like this any more,” and hand him my annotated “Big Book.” This is learned behavior, learned speech, the replication of instruction. For the first time in my sobriety, on the other side of knowing is everything, equal and salient.
So I walk. Each day on the pilgrimage is more or less a series of kilometers covered, elevation climbed and descended, cathedrals contemplated in and about. It is a trip of prepositions, of position and relation, of movement, space and re-contextualization, every moment altering. The 500 mile journey is too various, too terrific and beautiful to describe here; it’s, how we say, another story.
After nearly two months of no A.A meetings, I get back to Paris and am eager to go. I find a meditation meeting[2] near the Seine. In a narrow alley I find a door next to which a laminated sign bearing the triangle and circle lets me know I’m in the right place. The door opens to a stairwell leading down into a basement. Everything is concrete. I smell incense and burnt matches and the musky scent all old basements have, a mysterious combination of water, dirt and time. A couple of men are there early like me, setting up the room, making tea and brewing coffee, putting a tray of store bought cookies out on the table. Both men are English. My understanding of the English in France has changed. After hearing countless French Hostel owners in the south lament about the English, how they infiltrate, make no attempt to integrate, learn the language etc, and yet small town economies are dependent on their business in summer, have led to the forced acceptance of a nuisance. Without knowing these men, resentment brews. More people show up, mostly men, mostly English. Our special purpose trumps though. We’re here, together, because we don’t want to drink alcohol. Some of us have been able to do this more successfully than others. The meeting begins when the group leader rings a small bell, reads the preamble, and the meditation commences. I study the candlelight playing on the faces of those with their eyes closed. I imagine not being me. I imagine the supreme fiction rewriting itself. The encounter is one of self-encounter. I would be remiss to say this is comfortable. Finally, I close my eyes and see oak trees from the Midwestern plains. In the negative space between leaves, dark, wet branches, possibilities. “…Petals on a wet, black bough.” I am suddenly exponential.
This is incomplete, I know, a tale of non-closure. With every departure there is the promise of return. Leaving off my alcoholic-self I am weary of where to return. I don’t want to drink, but I also don’t want cocksure answers. A.A promises completion, a sense of unity with the past and the future, of paying things forward. I’m happy to help people who don’t want to drink, suggesting they go to A.A. I’m happy with my sobriety. But alcohol and alcoholism, like most stories, is travel, open-endedness, otherness, and I am in no position to cover, at least not anymore.
[1] A.A’s basic text written by Bill Wilson and published first in 1939, and which is still used today as the program of recovery.
[2] In A.A every meeting has a theme or guiding purpose. Some focus on particular steps, literature, or general principals of A.A. There are also meetings for men (Stage meetings) and women (Women’s meeting) only, and an increasing number of groups are starting gay and lesbian groups, which do not restrict attendance to anyone. A meditation meeting usually consists of ten to fifteen minutes of silence at the beginning, and then an open discussion about the practice of meditation in our daily lives.
Silences and Contracts: The Business of being White
Last winter in some small house in South East Portland the white contract whispers its second clause, “If you void me, you’re all by yourself,” and thus, I acquiesce again to a silent permission among whites to be as racist as we want, albeit, harbored exclusively, safely, within the confines of our own tribe. The agreement is never spoken, but takes shape in the darting eyes of my fellow whites, looking nervously at each other in the presence of a racist joke or comment to reassure the group what is required, silent acceptance. The contract allows for blatant racism, but disallows a protestation to it. No one, not even I, wants to be the prodigal son, to venture into the fray of selfdom, to redefine the contract, to redefine whiteness, so we stay safely at home. In my short lifetime I’ve perfected the sharp art of silence when it comes to race, not to say I haven’t been the provider of many racist jokes and comments. As of late though, my participation has been a mute gesture toward the pervasiveness of this agreement. I accept it. But why in an era of outward racial equality, a rubbing out of institutional discrimination, is this the private agreement?—And why do I participate in it, still?
The most colorful character in my immediate family circle is uncle Leo, a one time major bookie among the west suburbs of Chicago and all around “wise guy” despite his Irish blood. He was a good earner for Frank, Leo’s connection to the Italian mafia in Chicago, my home town; but when Frank fell out of favor with the mob, so, too, did my uncle. After two Melrose Park detectives tore through his apartment, looking for his “sheet,” they warned Leo, “Next time it won’t be us that comes to visit.” My uncle knew the deal, look for another line of work, or get whacked: he courier’s medical supplies today.
The high time for Leo coincided with a golden age for the Schaefer family as well. We had moved from Westchester—a middle class bungalow style suburb— to Hinsdale—an upper scale, mostly, if not exclusively, white suburb, decked out with million dollar plus mansions cut out from Home and Garden magazine and pasted onto a parcel of land barely big enough to hold them. The sheer proximity of homes in Hinsdale afforded neighbors a clear view into each other’s kitchens and living rooms, for the daring, even the bathrooms! There was a conscious trade off: move to Hinsdale, school district 181, black and Latino population 0, crime rate nonexistent and ensure safety of home and person, but sacrifice familial autonomy within the neighborhood, because everyone knew everything about each other. Each family’s jubilations and tragedies sent waves down street. My block was one acephalic white family.
Our living room in Hinsdale was venue to a Christmas party each year and the best part of these gatherings, besides the uncharacteristic bubblyness of dad, were visits from uncle Leo. He gave me my first hundred dollar bill one year, no wrapping paper, no card, just cold hard cash peeled off his big roll held excruciatingly by a single blue rubber band. Leo also introduced me to racial demonstratives like, “Nigger, Gook, and Spick or Beaner,” which hung in my mind with a tantalizing forbidden-ness. As a youngster Leo was my tree of knowledge and he was also the first person to introduce me to the white contract.
Growing up in Hinsdale, conversations about whiteness, what it meant to be white, were as rare as a black or Latino person, but jokes and racial slurs flung about like the integuments of fall. It was with Leo during Christmas parties that I got my first taste of a permission that would later extend itself far into my adult life. Watching football became a racial gridiron. The black players were, “dumb niggers,” while the white quarterbacks and announcers were, “dumb asses,” conveniently un-racialized. Now, uncle Leo’s comments probably wouldn’t have changed one iota in the presence of a colored person, but I knew, even as a juvenile, mine would. It was the same with my all white friends. In their company, I would drop words like nigger and spick with impunity, but introduce a person of color into the circle, and I would sure up my tongue. To use racial jokes or comments in a mixed crowd suddenly publicizes these views, makes the space, the company, public, where this contract simply does not exist.
When old enough, I, along with my father and brother, would meet Leo at the horseracing track for drinks and legal, un-mafia related betting. The track was in Maywood, a town that’s demographic, to be politically correct, had changed. My dad grew up in Maywood, speaking German with his two immigrant parents, went to high school, and worked as a clerk at a grocery store a few years after college. Like so many other neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities—I think of the Mission district in San Francisco—Maywood, a suburb once inhabited by European transplants like the Irish and Germans, turned into a black and brown town. Hardware stores ran short of customers and turned into liquor stores with metal bars locking patrons in and thieves out. Apartment building facades crumbled and dirtied from years of disrepair. Proviso East, the high school my father attended, started producing NBA stars like Michael Finely and Michelle Ford instead of potential college graduates. Gang violence became so rabid that it never aired on local news channels. Maywood became a town whites visited for three things, horse betting, drugs and prostitutes.
The track itself was at the corner of La Grange and First Avenue, across a wide fluorescent intersection from Kiddy Land. Kiddy Land was a theme park I remember vaguely from childhood, eating cotton candy till my gums hurt and my mouth turned Pepto-Bismol pink and riding a small electric train that circumnavigated the entire plot. Through the fence I would glean perceptions into a world foreign, a jungle of littered streets, jangly cars blaring loud music I’d never heard before and shabby men drinking out of paper bags. At these times it was nice to know that I could retreat to Hinsdale, a universe that made Maywood a gleaming catastrophe orbiting at the fringe of my consciousness. Many years after these memories, in the parking lot of Kiddy Land two of my friends got “jacked” trying to buy an eight-ball of cocaine. “They had shaved heads, those fucking spicks,” John (my friend at the time) said throwing a baggy of crushed Tylenol tablets onto my lap.
Leo always sat in the bar/lounge area, near the TVs. His perch at one of the pub-style tables, smoking Marlboro Lights, drinking a flute of cheap champagne and flipping through the program of races to come, gave Leo a flightiness, like his anxieties were a sign that he might leave at the drop of a dime. He had circled all the horses he liked in pencil, and from time to time, would erase his annotations and re-circle some other horse based on new odds that constantly streamed across one of the many televisions. Conviviality with others, except us, was not in his program. At the time I couldn’t blame him. The lounge area was a sarcophagus of broken promise. Bits of paper, the discards of lost bets, covered the floor like failed origami shapes or broken dove wings, dirtied by the bottoms of everyone’s feet shuffling to and fro. The green leather armchairs at the other end of the long hall were cracked and burnished with over use. The dirt track itself glowed under garish stadium lights, which made deep shadows out of hoof prints and the infield was a pitch of crab grass and sedge brush that loosely resembled the shape it had been cut to in some distant, unremembered past.
Our cocktail waitress floated listlessly in all black, an unwashed apron around her waist with week old bloody marry stains still visible on it. She was fortified against all jokes and courtesies, like she had heard every one liner before, and even the first time didn’t find them funny or charming. She took our drink order with as much passion as a sleeping cat, but as she walked back to the bar my eyes fell onto the other patrons. It was a mostly black and Latino canvass salted with a few whites. Hard looking white men with gray hair and rheumatic skin gauntly shaking the paper program at the finishing horses had a verisimilitude with the place, a reciprocity I didn’t. They had given something up to belong at the track. Their skin was light; their hair was straight, but something about them betrayed the same physical package I was given at birth; they were poor, and in my mind, just like the “others.”
The black condition, the Mexican condition, even the women’s condition, was something written in a textbook, something I read about, a tragedy, but not my tragedy. Race was simply the “others” problem and I was comfortable with it that way. Going into job interviews, applying for school or unemployment, getting stopped by the police was a whole lot easier when I didn’t have to consider what social implications my skin color was bringing to the table, so for many years I protected myself from being racialized, from staring my race in the teeth. I equated white with wealth, and wealth with normalcy. To protect this normalcy, and my place in it, I continually reaffirmed the otherness of blacks and Latinos and Asians through jokes, while treating whiteness with the kit gloves of silence. One way to keep the focus off my race and myself was to continually point at others and their race, to make it abnormal. The white contract not only allows for these maneuverings, but also encourages this pedagogy. I’ve heard my own credulity when I muttered nigger to my uncle and friends, my alacrity in discovering a new racist joke and the impatience to share it with my tribe. In each case the result is the same, I fortify my own white center, while pushing the racial ones further and further out.
It’s Christmas last year and I visit my brother who lives in Portland Oregon. We go to a party at his friend Tommy’s house and after the insincerities of small talk had outlived their usefulness, we collected in a guest bedroom and started telling jokes. There was a bottle of Jack Daniels being passed around. Finally, after the quips about men’s sexual competency had run dry the racial bomb was dropped: Question, “How many Jews can you fit into a VW?” Answer: “One in each seat and about five million in the ash tray.” No one made an honest laugh at the joke, but no one protested its presence in our company. Why would they? This was a private space, one where we can commoditize race and displace it upon those of our choosing. By default, we are white and normal; encapsulated, as we were, our consciousness of identity is too wide, too ubiquitous to fathom seriously. Whiteness is commerce. Whiteness is success. Whiteness is safety. Whiteness is the unrelenting silence, the unwillingness to see our race as a set of societal privileges, and not an ethnicity, and it is precisely these societal privileges that keep my duplicity alive. By being white I have an inborn code in my skin. One that tells employers I’m trustworthy, police I’ll cooperate, and the admissions office at colleges that I come from an educated family, which, no surprise, I do. The foundations of these perceptions were laid down far before I was born, but that doesn’t stop me or other whites from inheriting them.
To stand up in this inner circle and announce the presence of the contract—its implications and the cause for its inaction— and my dissention from it would alienate me. To void the contract would force me out of the privatized world of whites and into a scary public world full of racial implication. Without the comforts of being “white”, the way I’ve know it thus far in my life, what would separate me from those poor chaps at the track? The consciousness of my racial identity would be mine alone. Some others maybe there waiting for me, but they haven’t revealed themselves. Why pull on the lose tether holding my nicely stitched tapestry together? Plus, my brother’s friends, or uncle Leo would probably call me hypocritical, for championing those who’s shoulders my race stands on, and being a hypocrite is worse than being a racist; it taints character within the tribe. In being white, I’ve found purity is a premium, and what could be more pure than unstained, unadulterated silence?
Back at the racetrack I lay a bet on a horse that is running 64:1 odds. An overweight Mexican man sheaves out my betting ticket. His swollen wrists try to swallow a digital watch whole. He smiles at me and his pencil thin mustache curves up like the profile of a boat. At the table my dad is deciphering the odds, and figures out a way to bet, with various amounts of money on different horses, that he can’t lose. The race starts and my horse stumbles out of the gate, and doesn’t even finish in the middle of the pack, not by a long shot; he comes in last. I crumble my ticket and add it to the building loam. A bet is like a contract, if you win, the track promises to pay you your earnings, and as I throw the ticket to the ground, I realize how easy it is to get rid of a losing contract, right?