I asked him if he wanted me to open the door to let in some air.
“Eh,” David said. “I’d be too self-conscious to talk to you if the door were open.”
He discreetly expectorated into my TRUMP TAJ MAHAL cup and went into a quick story about a photo shoot for Us magazine (seriously, Us magazine?) he’d agreed to do with several other young writers in the eighties. By his account, the shoot had not gone well. Indeed, it had gone the opposite of “well.”
“And do you want to know what good old Dave did before they even took the picture?” he asked. “I ran away. I just ran down the street, crying like an infant.”
“Were you wasted?” I asked.
“I wish I had been.”
Already, nothing David told me about himself came as a surprise—as Quentin Crisp said about why he gave up cleaning his apartment: after a certain point, the dirt can’t get any worse. Have I ever known anyone who’s talked about his past as much as David talked about his?
“Interesting,” I said.
David stayed in my office for the rest of the afternoon, describing more about the excesses of his past. (That was David for you—always wading, no, cliff diving, into the blackest edges of himself, and us.) One of the conclusions I had reached about him, and perhaps the only one about which I would remain consistent, despite everything: his artistic triumph in the face of such tremendous psychological and emotional odds was a miracle for which we all must be forever grateful.
David said, “I hope no one ever writes about any of it.”
But he knew perfectly well what was coming, and so did I. The bill would come due. The bill always comes due. We are always held accountable in the end.
“Oh, they will,” I said.
A heavy pause.
“Ew,” he said. “I am completely fucked.”
He knew where our world was headed: Soon there would be no distinction left between the public and the private. Soon it would all be the same thing.
What is someone “like”? Is he “good”? Is he “bad”? Is she this way, or is she that? What is wrong with him? Who does that? All this thinking we do about other people—all of our talking and complaining, all of our fretting—is an attempt to understand the unexplained inconsistencies and paradoxes in their characters. How do you even begin to negotiate the disjunctions we all have? Almost no one makes any kind of logical, unified sense, and very few people fit together into an integrated whole. All we really have are projections of other people: impressions of character, phantasms of character—vague ideas that may or may not be connected to reality.
2
When I was young, I was always watching, always trying to piece together a version of the world from whatever smoke signals arrived to me. I didn’t need people too much. It was, in my first memories, the bicentennial. The national gestalt was sort of a hokey, good-natured patriotism, and any child of four would certainly have been fascinated by the fire hydrants painted to resemble Revolutionary War–era VIPs such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Ben Franklin. Patchwork Holly Hobbie purses—empty, always and forever, for what was there to keep inside, other than perhaps a dandelion?—were all the rage, and let’s not forget unisex plaid shirts with mother-of-pearl-esque snaps and jeans with embroidered back pockets. A child’s hair, whether upon a male or female head, was to be styled in the gender-neutral no-muss-no-fuss bowl-cut manner.
Marysville, Ohio, is now pretty much a commuter suburb of Columbus, but when I was growing up there, it may as well have been rural Kansas in the thirties. It was a self-contained small town with a main street of Victorian-era buildings, and there was a department store, Weiss Brothers, which, enthrallingly, had a dumbwaiter that carried your money and goods from one floor to another. There were soybean farms and cornfields. There was a Goodyear plant that made conveyor belts and a then new Honda motorcycle plant. It was a town built on lawn pride—the Scotts Miracle-Gro corporate headquarters was also there—and in the summer the yards of our town’s nicer homes, the ones with garden globe ornaments set upon grasses of supersaturated green, were redolent of lawn chemicals.
Our house was a tidy Cape Cod. A morning glory plant grew along a fence in the backyard, and for family photographs I’d pull a purple flower from the vine, posing with it behind an ear. I made humble bouquets of Queen Anne’s lace, dandelions, and clover. I liked drawing flowers, small fragile ones. The wallpaper in my bedroom had bright blue blossoms on it, but I was already developing a sensibility and knew that I might have preferred something more delicate, something in wistful Frenchified pastels perhaps (not that I had any concept of Frenchified, much less France). But you don’t have much of a determinative role as a child. No one asks your opinion about much, not even parents like mine.
When I could read, I was enthralled by a collection called A Child’s Book of Poems, rapturously illustrated by Gyo Fujikawa, which introduced me to the wonders of Christina Rossetti, Eugene Field, and Edward Lear and the following unattributed limerick that fried my brain and kept it fried:
There was a young lady named Bright,
Who traveled much faster than light.
She started one day
In the relative way,
And returned on the previous night.
Other favorites: T.A. [Transactional Analysis] for Tots (and Other Prinzes), the book that gave us, for better or worse, the terms “warm fuzzies” and “cold pricklies”; and, of course, the big daddy of the day, Shel Silverstein. I had a lot more books than my parents did, come to think of it, and my mom’s titles—My Mother/My Self, Sybil, Zelda, and Personhood—tended, like T.A. for Tots, to be exemplars of the seventies personality movement, the movement, sad to say, that paved the way for the noxious individualism of the current era. My father subscribed to Foreign Affairs—the battleship-gray type-only cover guaranteeing the solemnity of the enterprise—semiread back issues of which accumulated like so many silvery mushrooms on the bookshelves he, a high-level handyman, had built in our family room.
I suppose it’s fair to say that my parents could be characterized, at least then, more accurately as doers rather than as readers. It is true that if I spent too much time lollygagging vacantly on the sofa, say, perhaps with a book, although probably not, my mother would suggest, “Why don’t you get up and do something? Move.” In my family, when you said that you hadn’t sat down all day, you said it with pride.
My parents were in their midtwenties when I was born. This was in no way notable, because the parents of everyone else I knew were the same age as mine, yet my mother and father just always felt younger than everyone else’s, as if they were my peers almost. They drove his and hers Volkswagen bugs (his: green; hers: tan); they owned multiple tanning lamps; they drank gin martinis before and during dinner. They were of a permissive seventies mind-set, and it’s certainly possible that we had too few hang-ups—social ones, I mean (we’re actually very emotionally repressed). When I was five, my father told me that if I had been a boy, my name would have been Matthew. Matthew Miller. Sure. I mean, why not? Sounded good enough. Dependable old Matt Miller.
But what did that even mean, if I had been a boy? I would stand in front of a buckling full-length mirror in the small room downstairs where my mother stored Christmas ornaments and sewing supplies, looking at my reflection, trying to work out how I felt about this information. Sometimes, when studying my image in the mirror, I would feel a little pang of mourning for the other version of myself I had somehow . . . what? Killed? Because if I hadn’t been me, would “Matt” be alive? Or was “Matt” my brother? My almost brother, I mean.