I knew it was what Anne, my Stanford TA, called an attachment disorder, that my early experience as a kind of orphan kept me in a perpetual state of unease about becoming close to someone. I knew I seemed crazy to them at times. Flighty. Confusing. Dramatic. I seemed that way to myself. It was more like a reflex than a decision, a strange one for someone so constantly accused of being a “serial monogamist.”
The fear filled my senses, replaced my entire emotional world with a new one in which all I could feel was a suffocation, a feeling like being trapped under glass. The minute I was free, a new kind of panic would set in, the age-old fear of abandonment. Except it wasn’t the fear of being a single adult man in a dating world. It was the fear of a child left alone. Even then I knew it was out of place, inappropriate, amplified to an extreme that didn’t match the ending of an adult relationship.
So it was confusing to live between these two extremes: fearing closeness, then obsessively needing the comfort it provided, to be forever like a Ping-Pong ball going back and forth between the two.
It’s an odd feeling to be so bewildered by one’s own actions, to look in the mirror and see the face of a stranger.
I watched with increasing alarm as friends got engaged, some married, others comfortably coupled off without going through the wild histrionics I put my relationships through. I didn’t know exactly what was happening. Only that I was different, that I couldn’t do something others could. Something vital.
It was an unsettling thought, that sense that here was something else wrong with me. And so it became important to hide it, which I was used to doing anyway. To wave a white flag and retreat. To come to a place where less was expected of me. To come here to this trailer at the edge of civilization. To simply give up on the whole thing.
There will be no white wedding. There will be no “nice girl but we’re taking it slow, you’ll like her when you meet her.” No picket fence and kids and shared jokes under covers on quiet Sunday mornings. It’s just not for me. I’ll become something else instead. Something daring and romantic. Someone who takes all this pain and anguish and tries to create something useful with it, something beautiful if I can. An artist.
I had some short stories I’d started that were more like a series of halfhearted gestures, sketches of scenes or characters that began and went nowhere. I had hundreds of songs no one had ever heard and a lump in my throat when I thought about how badly I wanted to sing them for someone, to just be out at night with a microphone and an audience. If only I had a voice. If only I knew how. How does one even begin to imagine such a thing? Do these people even exist in the real world? It’s like deciding to become a mermaid.
Chuck Dederich, the Old Man, the founder of Synanon, once famously said, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” That might have been the one thing he got right. The future is a blank canvas if you just decide to let it be one.
Dad was more blunt about it when I told him about my decision. “Makes sense to me,” he said. “Situations get too difficult sometimes and so it’s better to just move on down the road. See what’s down there, because whatever it is, it’s got to be better than what you’re living with.”
That was my reasoning. Life isn’t working out? Okay. Pack the car with as many books as you can carry, bring a guitar and an old keyboard, fill your empty pages with lyrics and stories. Read the books, the ones you always wondered about. Swallow your pride and because you can’t do anything else, hold a job or maintain a relationship with another human being, move to a tiny trailer at the edge of the world and just get on with it. Write.
* * *
IT’S LONELY AT night in a trailer on the edge of a canyon listening to a pack of coyotes howl and yip at the moon. I have no cell reception, no phone, no television, nothing but the books and my empty screen, the cursor blinking at me like some kind of challenge. There’s nothing to do but read and smoke, anxiously pluck out some writing five hours a day, then sing songs to the nervous horses in the pasture next to the trailer. To shovel horse shit twice a day, five hours a day, four hours a night.
In between writing binges and songwriting sessions, when I’m driven mad by the loneliness and isolation, when I need to hear a voice or do something besides stare at a computer screen or scribble lyrics in some dog-eared notebook, I go down to the city to visit my brother. He lives alone now in a small apartment near the beach in Playa del Rey. After Tiffany left, he and his son moved from Salem back to Los Angeles to be closer to Dad and Bonnie. Fatherhood turned out to be too much for him to take: he was just too young, too wild, too much the Dope Fiend he was born to be. Mom offered to take his son for a few months, just to let Tony “catch his breath.” It was supposed to be a short visit. But a few months became a year, a year became a few years, and eventually it became a permanent living arrangement.
Mom has a new husband now; though they aren’t married yet, that’s how I always think of him. He’s a tall, bald, goofy black man named Darwin whom she met through her new church in Tucson. He has deep-set eyes and a slight slouch to his walk. I like him. It’s hard not to like him when I go to visit them so I can take Tony’s son camping. Darwin is odd but kind, singing to himself as he slowly cooks dinner, tending to various home-improvement tasks around the house in the warm, slow, steady way of his. He tells old stories about his time as a civil rights activist and he seems like a gentle soul. He makes corny dad jokes with his son, who also lives with them, a sweet kid in rainbow Converse who likes Weird Al and taking apart old radios. He’s the same age as Tony’s son, which makes them something like brothers. They don’t get along, except when they do, also like brothers.
It’s easy to be an uncle, to show up with a baseball glove or a mix CD, to unpack it and ask Tony’s son about fourth grade. I visit three or four times a year and we hike the local trails or sit and plan for a camping trip, going over lists of gear and cold-weather clothing, keeping things simple, instructional, tactile. He needs so many things I have, has so many questions I can answer. I don’t try to be his dad. I can’t be his dad. I know that. I just want to take him fishing or hiking, to ride roller coasters with him, to let him know I love him but also that I like him. I don’t know why that seems so important.
He reminds me so much of Tony, the same guarded blue eyes, the same blond hair, the same attachment to his possessions, his pocketknife and compass, his markers and paper, as if they are guardians or friends, companions in a life spent in between so many different worlds.
He asks me about his dad sometimes, on long car trips to the Grand Canyon or Yosemite. He never speaks to him anymore, so I can feel him searching my face for answers I don’t have as I try to concentrate on the highway. He wants to know little things, like did he play baseball or does he like the same music as me? Does he have big feet? Is he left-handed? What is his favorite food? He doesn’t know his mother, who disappeared years ago, and I know the questions are all really one question: Why? Why did they let me go? Why am I alone here? Did I do something wrong?
I know this question well.
I don’t know how to answer him. I feel protective of Tony and protective of his son. How do I tell him that his father is a good person but he’s sick? It’s a family disease, after all.