Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Jan 20, 1997 | i have just returned from Houston, and I'm afraid I bring you some bad news. It is broken. It does not seem to be working at all. Perhaps it will some day; perhaps it is going to be a hell of a city when they get it finished. But ironically, in the middle of all that brokenness, something old inside of me got fixed; and I am not the person I was the last time I wrote.
I was there last week with the man I love, and at first it was fun and definitely very distracting to find that the entire city was on the fritz. It was like being inside a Bunuel movie. Everywhere we went, everything went wrong. It may have been First Day on the Job Day in Houston. The city was staffed by stunningly incompetent people by a cheerful young cabbie with no front teeth, no sense of direction, no map and a broken radio; by hot dog vendors so unhappy in their work that in previous lives, they must have been vegetarians, or calves, or kings. We needed to call a cab at one point from a cafeteria where as it turned out, none of the employees knew the address; we tried to buy some CDs at a record store where the clerk would not concede that she did not know how to work the cash register.
It was cold and rainy and I began to feel very strange. The small disasters provided lots of entertainment value, but did not cast much light or warmth. I began to feel both very subdued and very skittish, which is a terrible combination. I can do one or the other with a certain aplomb, but the mixed grill effect is a little disconcerting a little more like John DuPont than I care to feel. I felt like I was dodging something, and it was gaining.
My usual reaction to this kind of confusion is to pump myself out of it. Pick up the pace a little; go to a violent movie, have another espresso, maybe pick a small fight just to get the adrenaline flowing again. Sometimes it's good to set a small fire; to tell your partner something especially heinous about your sexual past; or to suddenly get really honest about the way they kiss, or their one verbal tic that affects you like tinfoil on a filling. It's all a way of furnishing the abyss, of dragging in everything you can think of to stay distracted.
But right at the point when I was feeling my most wild and mentally ill, we ended up at Houston's Mark Rothko Chapel. It is a small, ecumenical sanctuary designed by the great abstract expressionist, and it is a deeply sacred place; and it is very, very quiet. The man I love said it was like being inside the mind of someone whose eyes are closed while they're praying. There are giant Rothko canvasses on the walls, purple so dark that they almost seem black, and what at first seems flat, if intense, color soon appears to have images Jesus, cave paintings pushing through. It is one of the most exquisitely peaceful places I have ever been in my life. The silence was pristine, primordial.
Maybe silence springs from the same place in the universe where they God? The Keebler elves? make space and breath and appreciation. I felt in the chapel that I was resting in those places, resting in a kind of hammock; and that turned out to be my mistake. Because it turned out something was gaining on me, and it caught me there in all that stillness.
The man I love got up to go look at the art in the nearby museum, and I sat there for a few minutes trying to self-will him into coming back and keeping me company. "Come back!" I wanted to cry. "Don't go!" as if he were leaving on a freighter for Greenland, or crossing over from coma to death. I felt a terrible anxiety, a desire to sew myself to his pant leg so he would never leave, but I watched him walk away.
It was as quiet as a tomb in there, as quiet as outer space. I felt very agitated, like you would if someone put you in a sensory deprivation chamber after you'd had way too much caffeine. And then this thing started pushing out through me, from the same place where the Jesus thing and the cave painting thing were pushing out from. And I suddenly understood that the man I love WAS going to come back, but that he was never going to be able to come back enough because I finally got I can hardly say it out loud that my dad was dead.
I understood this in that moment, as if for the first time.
I understood it as if the woman at the front desk had handed me a phone, with someone on the other end notifying me out of the blue that my father had just died. It was so terrible, so stark and obviously true, that I felt like I might start keening. But I was suddenly no longer alone a younger man came into the chapel just then, and sat down on the pillows provided for meditation. He closed his eyes, and crossed his long long legs in a sort of reform lotus position. I wanted to shake him roughly on the shoulder and tell him my father had just died. But I sat there breathing, totally stunned.
Now, some of you who have read my books know that my father actually died in l979, when I was 25, in our little family cabin on the Pacific coast, of brain cancer. He had brain cancer, and over a two-year period, he was transformed from a tall handsome brilliant writer funny, political, musically devout if not gifted to a husk to the sickest a person can be and still be alive. It was the end of the world; Nagasaki meets Old Yeller. My brothers and I and our friends took care of him. Luckily we were all still drinking at the time. We stuck together, and that was pretty great, to be together with my brothers in something so huge and devastating and beautiful. It was at once the worst possible death, for someone so young and cerebral as he; but also maybe the best possible death, to have lived with such love and commitment for your kids, then when you became sick, your kids want to do for you what you'd done for them so many years before.
I wrote a book about it, about my father's illness, where everything turned out a lot better than it did in real life, and it looks at the end of the book like he is going to live forever. I believed that he was immortalized in this book, by my having written it, and sold a draft while my father was still well enough to understand this news. It brought him great joy and pride as his life wound down to know I had found a niche in the publishing world.
He stopped breathing one night at our cabin after a couple of months in a coma. It was just about the most amazing thing I've ever seen, second only to the first glimpse of my newborn son. My father, my handsome father! I don't think I would have been more surprised if he'd suddenly changed races before my very eyes.
I cried a lot over the years, but I was always drunk or hungover, always on the way to one of those two states. Then I got all these books published, including the one where it looks like my dad is going to live forever, and along the way I had millions of social drinks, lots of drugs and men, a little fame, endless distractions and a lot of anesthesia. I'd cry in bars about losing my dad, but I'd also cry about having had to have our dog Lllewelyn put to sleep when I was l2. I walked into saloons in North Beach, feeling dewy with emotion, and people would say to each other, "Don't get her started on her father, or the dog."
Then I got sober and I started coming back to life, but early sobriety was like being someone with frostbitten limbs, who begins to feel real tingling in the fingers and toes, the kind of tingling where you wouldn't think, "Oh, wow, this is GREAT" Where instead, you'd look around very quietly, and think, "Uhhhh-oh." Then three years into sobriety, right when some serious thawing was underway, I got pregnant. My dad had been dead ten years when my son was born. And right around the time when I first started to feel pierced by the desire for my father and son to know each other, my best friend got sick. Two years later she died; and by then my dad had been dead for l3 years and my son was three and I was old and tired and had bigger fish to fry.
It was pretty confusing. The men with whom I was involved, whom I collectively always referred to as the police line-up of boyfriends, occasionally wondered out loud if some of my ferocious disappointment in them might really be old, unresolved dad stuff, and I would explain very nicely that, NO, I didn't have them mixed up with my father, because he was tall and handsome and kind, while they in fact were repellent, perhaps even vaguely Satanic.
And I always sort of assumed that one day I would really GET that my dad had died, but I assumed this with the same lack of urgency with which I believed that one day I would take up a musical instrument. I was not ready for it to happen, alone with a strange man meditating on the floor 20 feet away from me; was not ready to release my father's body bag to the proper authorities. But this is in fact what happened.
I kept looking around the chapel, at the sense of Jesus pushing through the purple-black canvas, the feel of cave paintings pushing through all that flat color, the sense of rhythmic labor. I felt like I was going to be crying for awhile, which proved to be true, and I felt like something inside me was becoming more permeable. The light in the Rothko Chapel was very beautiful, and the face of the man who was meditating was soft and rosy, like he was giving off the chapel's light. The thing about light is that it really isn't yours; it's what you gather and shine back. And it gets more power from reflectiveness if you sit still and take it in, it fills your cup, and then you can give it off yourself. The young man's legs were impossibly long and yet he continued to sit crosslegged, silent. I thought about my father's legs. My father had very long legs, too, and he loved to hike. I tried very hard to keep up with him when I was a child. That's how come I naturally walk so fast, and why I can walk forever.
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