Category: your author

Speaking into the Dark

Speaking Into the Dark

A Thank You

Susan Sontag by Annie Leibovitz

I want to thank those who’ve consistently supported and encouraged me over the years. I’m not going to put up a list of names—because I know you probably don’t need or want me to do that—but I’m very aware and you have my gratitude.

Nobody can write consistently (and, by that, I mean decade after decade) without some form of support. If you doubt this, try an experiment: every night for a week, sit in a dark closet and speak for 90 minutes, imagining there is someone listening on the other side of the door.

I only ask that you try this for a week because I doubt most people could get to the third session without going a little crazy. Now imagine trying to do this every night (and feeling like a total imposter and failure anytime you miss) for 20 years. That’s what it’s like to be a writer.

The illustrious Chuck Wendig puts it like this:

And the writing life? The publishing world? Definitely not a realm of pure kindness. The writing life isn’t cruel to be cruel, but there exists a lot of ambient cruelty built into any system based on envisioning art, producing it, and trying to earn an audience for it. Further, writing is an often isolated and isolating act—you’re planting yourself in front of a notebook or computer and writing one sentence after the next for weeks, months, maybe even years. And then once you’ve finished that part, you’re holding it out, asking the universe to love it. No one part of this is actively or personally cruel, but it can sure feel lonely. It can feel desperate, too. It’s easy to lose focus and lose hope—and it only gets worse when someone (agent, editor, audience) takes that story you’ve worked on forever and tells you, “Meh. Nah.”

This is the truth. But Chuck isn’t complaining and neither am I. I think we’re trying to get at the same thing: speaking into the dark is hard. And it’s always dark. It gets significantly darker when you “make it,” when you become a marketable brand and you’re surrounded by businesspeople who want to see you excrete more salable units, forever.

There’s a lot of irony embedded in writerly success, but I haven’t experienced that sort of thing—what passes for fame and status in the highly self-conscious and pathological publishing industry. But I’ve been close to a few writers who have and I’ve seen how brutal “success” can be.

If you want to publish me, grand! I’ll take it. Send me a check and put my face on a website. Still, I’m not so naïve that I believe there’s an end to this or that someday there’s going to be a parade in my honor where everyone will love me. I’m not in this for love or money. I’m in it because I’m addicted to it.

So the best thing for me is just to be able to continue. And expressions of support along the way, the sense that sometimes, perhaps unexpectedly, there actually is someone listening out there, are important.

Now I will stop writing before this seems even more like a metaphor for sitting in the confession box. Bless me, father, for I have sinned. It has been 35 years since my last confession . . . or about 10 hours, depending on how I want to think about my writing habit . . .

 

Vexation of Spirit

Spring semester, 2024, begins tomorrow and I will be teaching another section of “Mindfulness and Skillful Living,” a hybrid class that combines a fairly demanding research and writing component with daily mindfulness meditation and journaling. On paper, it looks like a fluff class and, not surprisingly, the course is always full with a ten-student waitlist. In practice, it’s kind of ferocious. And students can often feel overwhelmed by its level of seriousness.

This time, I’ll be co-teaching it with the chair of the department, who originally created the class. We’ve made guest appearances in each other’s sections and we work closely together on a regular basis. So I mostly know what to expect. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the first day of instruction always gives me pause.

Despite all efforts to the contrary by university bureaucrats and dodgy malingerers coasting through tenure, nothing in academia ever stands still. If you want to be an effective teacher, you have to accept this and learn to move with the interpersonal, departmental, intellectual, and even biorhythmic currents of the semester. At the same time, you have to profess something, which does not mean you have to be agreeable or popular.

It makes me think of spinning plates. Let them start wobbling and you might as well prepare for death. As Martin Amis puts it in Money, “If you so much as loosen your seat belt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it’s an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there’s a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug. So what can a poor boy do?” Well, you can shut your mouth and get to work, for one. Keep your head down. Keep them plates in motion. Indiscipline was severely chastised in the university’s ancient monastic predecessor institutions. And so it is now. Brother Severus, do hand me the scourge.

Co-teaching is much harder than going it alone. It adds yet another spinning plate, the need to keep an open, deferential space for your colleague, who may (in fact, who should) have different ideas, reactions, and assumptions. As a co-teacher, you’re less like the captain of a ship and more like a highly engaged, small-time politician somewhere in rural Wyoming.

Sometimes, the course will seem like a town council meeting. Other times, like a church bake sale. Yes, we can do it like that, but have you considered this other alternative? Yes, certainly, I understand your concerns and I think we should definitely address that in week three. We’ve accounted for the issue in the workshop component at the end of the semester, but let’s bring it up at the meeting. No, that was not my intention, but I hear you and I like your idea. . . . Everything will be fine.

In my other job, the admin one, I spend a lot of time looking at CVs, syllabuses (let’s avoid the faux-Latin ending just once in our short lives, shall we), and schedules. It gives me double vision. I see what I’m doing as a lecturer and what other faculty are doing, have done, will be attempting in their courses. Often, I am dismayed, mostly at myself and my lack of pedagogical precision. Some professors have pristine, metallically sterile assignment sequences that run identically every semester like some kind of cyborg utopia, while mine are more like serendipitous Rube Goldberg machines that induce a strong belief in miracles.

Meanwhile, I’m a short-story writer, writing another novel, which often (maybe usually) feels like clawing my way up a rock face centimeter by centimeter. It’s the first plate to start wobbling when my multiple jobs, masks, roles, institutional Kabuki performances claw into my creative energy. It’s the central fear I carry every semester—that I won’t be able to keep everything spinning through the air or that the quality of my work will decline in spite of my efforts or that my comforting façades won’t be believable (I masquerade as a human, painfully aware that I’m actually a hideous alien space ghost).

Anyone who has tried to write a novel knows it’s a tremendous gamble. All those small hours need to add up to something more than just lost sleep, frustration, and bad nerves. All the things you’ve sacrificed or left undone to take those hours will eventually need attention. All the relatives and old high school pals on the internet, who resent your attempts, will still need to be kept on mute. The rent will need to be paid again. The neighbor dog will need pets. And you will admit you have human needs and are not actually a hideous space ghost, even if you regularly feel otherwise. But go on.

So it begins. And there is nothing I can do to call a false start or a raincheck or a postponement for bad weather. Spring 2024 will commence, all cyborg systems go, mayoral press conference down at the Bob Smith Agricultural Community Center to begin right on time, Alcatraz autopsy dungeon ready.

Nevertheless, I can’t help think of the ultimate lines from Ecclesiastes, “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

Consider the Kitten

When I see something ignorant, robotic, and false being held up as brilliant, innovative, and true, I think of how good my life must be.  I tell myself there will always be stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, especially in writing and publishing.  I remind myself that it’s better to feel compassion for people caught up in mistakes than criticize their blindness.  And I admit that I’m fallible.

Yet there are moments when human nature undercuts my better judgment and I feel willing to kick the kitten that just vomited something on my doorstep.  I’m not proud of such feelings.  But no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much Thich Nhat Hanh I read, there’s a cruel, stony part of me that just doesn’t care.  It’s a hard world, Fluffy.  Get off my porch.

I quit smoking 20 years ago.  Everyday some part of me still wants a cigarette, which is probably why the characters in my short stories smoke.  At least someone still gets to enjoy it.  But I’ve had some great writing insights over cigarettes and coffee—more, I’m inclined to think, than I do now, even if my caffeine consumption has grown to replace the nicotine.  I have clean lungs and a rapid heartbeat.  I’m wired but not as wise.

This might be the root of my intolerance.  Some writers really need to start drinking again.  They’re not able to produce unless they do.  Maybe if I went out and bought a carton of Camel Lights, I’d look at many of the insipid things currently promoted as quality writing and smile along with the alcoholic cigarette ghost fume of Jack Kerouac, who once declared in a letter: “I don’t know; I don’t care; and it doesn’t make any difference.”  That’s it.  Light up.  Nothing matters.

Long ago, at the University of Montana, I found myself on a smoke break during a one-day-a-week, four-hour creative nonfiction workshop that nobody wanted to take.  There were five or six other MFA-program degenerates in the class.  We couldn’t get the workshops and literature sections we needed due to a writing professor having a midlife meltdown the previous spring (which included loudly and publicly criticizing his terminally ill wife, sleeping with his students, physically threatening other faculty in the hall, and declaring that he thought we were all imbeciles).  Of course, he had tenure.  So he went on leave.  Now it was almost Christmas.  And we’d signed up for electives to kill time and keep our tuition waivers flowing until the search committee hired a temporary replacement.  Morale was low.

When English studies people fall, they fall hard.  This is known.  We were all trying to keep it together.  Hence multiple smoke breaks behind the five-story, brutalist classroom building in the dark, snow up to our knees.  There was, I should admit, a deluge of alcohol being consumed that semester.  Cocaine was too ambitious and, honestly, too expensive.  But whiskey in Montana?  Shit, it came out of the water fountains.

Andrea was my smoke-break buddy.  She’d go out the back of the building and lean against the parking lot hydrant.  I always ran into it because it was covered in snow.  Paying attention to things like hidden fire hydrants seemed to require a volume of positive life-affirming energy I just didn’t have.  So I barked my shins on it regularly.  But that was Andrea’s bitter smoking spot.  Out in the desolate lot in her enormous down jacket, she was a shadow and a tiny ember.  I’d walk over and stand next to her.  We wouldn’t talk much.  The protagonist in every one of Andrea’s stories was Taylor Swift.  Once you know that, there isn’t much left to say.

She spent a lot of time obsessing over Lauren, a fellow student and the darling of the department, whose dad was a media executive and had paved his daughter’s way to a book deal and literary fame well before she came to grad school.  This was the ostensible origin of Andrea’s bitterness.  No one suggested that, apart from having family in publishing, success might have been more forthcoming if Andrea hadn’t made every story about Taylor Swift.  But nobody knew anything.  If her collection of stories had gotten published alongside Lauren’s novel and Andrea had gone on a big book tour, everyone, especially the faculty, would have seen it as a sign of the new literary age, the new 20 under 30.  But as it was, Lauren remained the “it girl.”

Sometimes we talked about Lauren, who no one ever saw in class because she was skiing in Vail or visiting friends in Spain or doing a book tour or attending a gallery opening.  We had to sit in a bright classroom that smelled like hospital disinfectant.  We had to read each other’s boring attempts at fiction-adjacent prose and make helpful comments.  And when we weren’t doing that, we had to talk about things like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the rhetoric of Vietnam war propaganda.  Meanwhile, Lauren was living the life.

Maybe Andrea forgot what I remembered: I was here to talk about those things, not to lead the life.  This was not real life.  This was a sub-dimension, a demimonde, an absurd mirror world where we could obsess about each other, be jealous and competitive over silly things, and wind up reading texts we never wanted to read in classes we never wanted to take.  A small part of me knew it was glorious and someday I’d look back at it like a weird fairyland where I had seemingly unlimited hours to write and think and talk about art.  And maybe that radiated outward because I always seemed to cheer Andrea up on our smoke breaks, even if we didn’t talk all that much.

But the smoke break I remember so vividly was the one where Andrea pulled out a hardcover of Lauren’s recently published novel and handed it to me without comment.  I’m not going to name it because Lauren and her novel are real and the book is still in print.  I’d read parts of it in previous workshops and I knew, just as Andrea knew, that it was garbage.

Lauren had everything necessary for meteoric success and it didn’t hurt that she was charming, smart, cultured, and gorgeous.  But she couldn’t write.  Years later, I’d hear that her prestigious publishing house performed a very invasive round of edits to the point where subsequent drafts were almost ghostwritten (maybe ghost rewritten).  But I chalked that up to jealous post-program rumors.  Now, I’m not so sure.

I remember angling the book so I could see it in the light from classrooms, snowflakes landing on the pages.  I remember Andrea blowing a funnel of smoke at my face, as if to say, “See?” or maybe “Take that, you cheerful moron.”  Take that.  Take it and like it.

I handed the book back, and said, “Good for Lauren.”

And I remember Andrea shaking her head, smiling at the corners of her mouth, taking long drags, saying, “Yeah.  Good for Lauren.”

I don’t know what became of Andrea.  After the program, we lost touch.  I know Lauren didn’t publish another book.  She got her degree and disappeared into the soft world prepared for her since birth, a world in which Andrea and I would never set foot.  And to be honest, I don’t blame Lauren for anything.  In the arts, you have to use everything at your disposal, every advantage you can, to do what you’re called to do.  If I’d had fancy connections and book deals, I’d have been leveraging those things.  Andrea would, too. Without a doubt, there’d be a book of short stories with Taylor Swift’s face on the front and Andrea’s on the back.

But sometimes, when I see the same things over and over, when I see the vampires and shills of the publishing world salivating over the shitty writing of a young, attractive first-book all-star, who—let’s be honest—can’t help that she’s young and attractive or that her writing is shit, I don’t feel all that compassionate.  I don’t blame her.  I feel angry at the cynicism in the marketing.  I know she’s a lost kitten who only wants to be loved.  But when I read something like this about to come out with a Big Six publishing house, I might feel inclined to kick her off my front step:

In the little courtyard off Piazza di Santa Maria, the robins are flitting like a crimson rain around the fountain and the statues of great writers no one remembers.  The sky is sad, overcast, and the wind from the café carries the scent of patriarchy and the tears of the forgotten whose poems will never be spoken.  You sit across from me in the melancholy breeze, sipping your Cinzano, your long lashes seductive and unaware of the robin at your elbow, and I am brought back to the fields of San Salvador.  The robins are joyful, but soon they will cry.

I wonder if this person’s parents are famous designers or wealthy investors or successful movie producers.  I hope so.  Otherwise, the sky will truly be sad after this book gets pushed out to pay some business debt that has nothing to do with its author or its contents.

My smoke breaks with Andrea may have taught me more than the classes we were in.  At least I’m still working.  I hope Andrea is, too.  Now I can look back at our writing program with a certain amusement, maybe amazement. I am not a monster, most days.  And I wouldn’t say no to anyone who wants to write a book and happens to have the juice to put that book in front of a large audience.  Better this author than an AI; though, an AI might write it better.

In my more generous moods, I want to bless anyone who cares about literary fiction enough to get involved and try to make some.  But the Andrea part of me, the skeptical, hard-hearted part, is still standing in the snow, thinking, “What the fuck?”

I’ve been absent of late . . .

I think Warren Ellis puts it well in “How to Build a Blog Without Social Media“: “[My website] has always been subject to pauses and hiatuses, chiefly because my job is writing and in busy periods there hasn’t always been enough writing left in me on a given day to sustain this site.”  This is what I’ve been meaning to post here for some time but, precisely for the above reason, haven’t had the mind or occasion to do so.

Lately, I’ve been working on long fiction projects, writing steadily but not visibly or publicly.  I know a growing number of people read my blog and newsletter; though, I don’t often pay attention to the site statistics.  And I’m grateful for any interest and attention paid to my writing—grateful enough, in fact, that I want to thank you for sticking with me during my less visible periods when I have to do the stereotypical fiction writer thing and disappear into the back room for some months.

I am still here, wherever “here” is in a non-local, asynchronous digital medium.  And I’ve been thinking about what’s next.  Here’s an overview of what’s going on and coming up:

  • The Covid lockdown novel had to change as my perception of that time changed.  I’m rewriting the first 190 pages (which is to say, most of it so far).  I thought it was a dead project.  But I couldn’t get it out of my head—more the characters than the setting, but I don’t think it’s possible to separate the two. Hence, the rewrite.  It’s unpleasant and fascinating in equal proportion, not unlike digging myself out of the basement after the house collapsed.
  • The short science-fiction novel about a night-blooming flower (no, the flower is not overtly a character) is going pretty well right now.  It’s about halfway written.  If I can keep writing the way I have been, I don’t think I’ll need too many subsequent drafts.  We shall see.
  • My third book of literary stories, Living the Dream, (delayed two years by the pandemic and the publisher changing countries) is finally coming out.  They tell me it should be available in late April.  This is a good thing, since I already have most of a fourth story collection manuscript put together.
  • I intend to return to my tried and true magazine submission praxis very soon.  So there should be articles and columns appearing here once again.  I can’t predict exactly when or where my work will be appearing, but I guess that’s part of the fun.
  • I’m also still interested in doing an audio-only podcast via my newsletter, where I read poems and passages from books and talk about writers I like.
  • And, of course, there’s the magazine that my friend Kurt and I have been talking about for two decades.  We finally have a talented, serious group, the possibility of legitimate funding, and the will to make it happen.  It’s a big undertaking, but it’s picking up speed and we’re all experienced enough with magazine and small press publishing to know what we love and want to avoid.

So that’s the state of things at the moment.  Watch this space and thanks for sticking with me.  We’ll see where these pathways lead . . .

Michael

The Way of All Things

Wherein I give myself a stern talking to . . . 

“I’m lost. Life makes no sense. It’s unfair.”

Because, deep down, you have beliefs.  You believe it should be different. The problem is not the world or your life. Those things are nature—formless, amoral, apolitical, adogmatic, unorthodox, unpredictable, beyond systems and formulas, always changing.  The problem is you.

Confront life as it is, not as you wish or assume it to be. Nature can seem like anything.  It wears billions of masks, but it has no root form, no core shape. This is hard to accept because it means you have to let go of yourself, the person you think you are, your hopes and dreams, your loves and hates, your stupid temporary identity (which will only last for around 80 years if you’re lucky and eat your spinach).  Otherwise, cling to “only if” and “should” and “must” and suffer accordingly.

People will enjoy making you feel worse: “Stop complaining. The world doesn’t owe you anything” (which is hypocritical because saying that is, in itself, a complaint). But they’re right. The world can’t owe you anything because it doesn’t run on debits and credits. Only human simulations of the world (economics, education, law, marriage, honor, revenge, career, politics, Christianity) work like that.  Only humans feel entitled, chosen, predestined, owed, special, singled out. It’s easy to believe that life is like a bank account, when it’s more like senior prom: frustration, tacky formalwear, mean girls, heartbreak, and cheap booze in the parking lot.

Remember, the world is formless. It’s obvious in weather or animal life. Fly a kite today and sing in the wind.  Tomorrow, run for the basement when the tornado comes to tear off your roof.  Make friends with a tiger today, but know that he might eat you tomorrow. It’s not personal; Simba was just hungry. It can’t be personal. The tornado doesn’t hate you.  It’s not about what you want or don’t want or what you’ve done or what you deserve.

You are not powerless. You can change some things—for a time. Sometimes, the house you build withstands the storm. Sometimes, your hopes are confirmed. Sometimes, your hard training pays off. But your accomplishments are still subject to change. The house will eventually crumble. Fate will eventually favor someone else. No matter how hard you practice, a contender will eventually become the champion you once were. 

It’s inevitable. Axiomatic. It’s the way things are. And one may cry, “Haven’t I sacrificed enough—everything—for this?”  But the world just shrugs: “And didn’t you build a really nice house? Didn’t you get all the books you asked for? Weren’t you eventually able to run that marathon?”  Maybe you’re clever.  Maybe you’re a gifted athlete or an inspired artist.  But you are still mortal, still finite, still as subject to change as the house itself. You, too, will collapse into different forms.

If you don’t like this, who’d blame you?  You’d prefer to be changeless and perfect, to have perfect justice, to be satisfied one-hundred percent of the time.  But the only way forward is to accept the chaos (which is to say, the formless changeability) of life. Let go of quantification, of definitive conclusions and metrics, of belief and “should,” and see the world qualitatively, like a child.  Then the paths of life will open effortlessly for you and the gods will call you wise.

Black Ribbon

Then my uncle bought the costume shop.  And, for a while, things got interesting again.  New Years Eve, 1991, he let me borrow a classic notch-lapel tuxedo and some patent leather shoes.  The whole package.  Socks.  A cotton laydown collar shirt.  Onyx links.  And a midnight solid bow tie.

“You look like James Bond,” he said.  Then he turned to my friend, Evert, and said, “You look like James Bond’s hairdresser.”

“Thanks, Uncle Tim,” Evert said.

“Why do you hang out with this guy?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “But, yeah, thanks.”

Evert was wearing the same thing I was.  But Uncle Tim never felt right unless he was giving somebody a hard time.  He was basically a good guy, funny too.  I was sad when they found him three years later.

This was supposed to be a fun night.  The Hotel Escondido threw a big party every year.  You needed formalwear to get in.  And an invitation.  So Evert and I already had the problem half solved thanks to my uncle, who now sold costumes but also wedding gowns, tuxedos, and second hand suits.

He put three folded hundreds in my pocket and gave me a hug.  “Don’t give any to goofball over there.”

Evert was waiting by the door.  “I can hear you,” he said.

“Be careful,” Uncle Tim said and chucked me on the shoulder.

I was 18.  The year before, Evert and I snuck into the Hotel Escondido in the best clothes we could find.  I was in my old pinstripe Confirmation suit that I had to keep unbuttoned because it had started to tear inside.  Evert wore a sweater and khakis.  We ate canapés, got drunk on fancy champagne, watched the fireworks from a stone balcony, and made out with girls two years older than us, who said they were getting paid to be there.  After midnight, Evert and I escaped through the side entrance one step ahead of security.  It was great.

This year, we were going to do it right.  We’d studied the floorplan.  We knew the exits.  We knew what to say to security.  And with Uncle Tim’s assistance, I felt we were bound to meet some nice girls this time who weren’t being paid.

When we got in my ancient Rambler, Evert said, “Why is your uncle such a dick?”

“He gave us these suits, didn’t he?”

“He’s a dick.”

“He’s old school.  He went to jail a couple years ago.  He had a messed-up childhood.”

“Dick.”

It was somewhat true.  Uncle Tim could act obnoxious, always seemed a little angry, dressed in all polyester, and smoked too much.  But he could pick you up with one hand.  He loved dogs.  And his laughter could almost knock you over.  Nobody talked about why he went to jail.

I parked in the dark corner of a dirt lot seven blocks away from the hotel and set my two steering wheel locks.  Then I pulled the old Alpine out of the dash and put it in the trunk under a piece of cardboard and some crumpled newspapers. Downtown San Diego in the late 1990s wasn’t bad.  And the Rambler wasn’t good. But such were the cars that usually got jacked—the buckets.  And anything Honda.  Evert never stopped making fun of me for using two steering wheel locks on a car like mine, to which I always responded, “Get your own fucking car, then,” and to which he never had a comeback.

The street was ghost empty.  And we could see the Hotel Escondido’s lights turning the everything yellow down at the end.  It had originally been a 15-story office building, built on a hill in 1949 in a time before mirror-glass and rooftop helipads.  It had gargoyles.  The elevators were marble and brass and smelled like old metal.  And there were butt urns set every few feet down the halls.  If you were going to crash a big holiday party, that was the place.

The festivities would be in the ballroom on the ground floor, an enormous space with parallel staircases on either side sweeping up to a vast mezzanine and a stone veranda that overlooked the lights of India Street and the bay.  What most didn’t know was that there was a dirt trail up the side of the hill to a small, unlockable wrought-iron gate.  The gate opened onto a narrow service staircase that led up the side of the building to the veranda.

When I’ve told others about that night, they’ve asked me, “Did you get thrown out?” as if that were the punchline, the most important detail, some kind of moral at the end.  I never know what to say.  Of course we got thrown out.  Was it a stupid plan?  Of course it was.  Were we stupid kids?  My answer to that is all kids are stupid at 18.  The trick to having more good memories than bad is to be the right kind of stupid at the right time.

Later, I waited in the Rambler in front of Evert’s house while he changed into some sweats.  He brought his tux out in a large paper grocery bag, shoes on top.

“Tell your uncle thanks.  But I don’t think I’ll be doing this again.”

I nodded, waved, and pulled into the street.  In the rear-view, I saw Evert standing in the drive next to his mother’s gray Pinto, watching me go.  We wouldn’t be doing this again because Evert was headed to college in a few months.  And I was headed nowhere.  Uncle Tim already said I could work for him at the shop.  I was considering it.  But it wasn’t something I felt like talking about.

When we snuck down from the veranda, we expected a grand ballroom full of people.  But it was half-empty and it didn’t look like the management had paid any models to stand around and look glamorous.  The DJ was spinning solid ’70s disco and nobody there looked under 40.  A few drunk soccer moms were doing something that vaguely resembled the Twist in the middle of the floor, acting more self-conscious than the kids at my high school dances.  No waiters with canapés.  Only a long buffet table with a cashier at the end.

It took about an hour for security to notice us and show us to the door.  We didn’t run.  It was too depressing and low energy for that.  Last year, they’d worn tuxedos, too, and had little earpieces like in a spy flick.  This year it was black windbreakers with SECURITY in yellow block letters across the back.

“Let’s go.”  A windbreakered guard with curly blond hair beneath a black and yellow ball cap that read “A-1” put his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the lobby.  Evert trailed, looking down, hands in his pockets.

“I’ve got an invitation,” I said.

“Sure.” The guard opened one of the front double doors for me.  “Have a happy new year.”

“You, too,” Evert said, “You have a hell of a year,” as the guard shut the door softly behind us.

Evert lived with his mom and sister about five minutes from Pacific Beach.  After I dropped him off, I parked in an alley near Crystal Pier and walked down to the end.  The beach bars were full.  You could hear the distant shouting and music like little pockets of chaos, little hell caverns, each competing for some sort of reward to see who could be the most crazy and perverse.  The Garden of Earthly Delights.  Every New Year’s Eve, the whole world became that painting.

The pier smelled like creosote and rotten wood.  It went far and high enough over the water that you could dive off the end and swim back.  At least, that’s what everybody said.  Or you could die.  It was a big dare, one of the many opportunities for making a bad decision you encountered as a teen in San Diego.  The bad kind of stupid.  I thought about jumping.  I could give the ruined tuxedo back to Uncle Tim with the $300 and make up some wild story.  He’d love it.  Instead, I leaned against the railing and looked back at the city glittering electric in every color of the rainbow.

To my left, one of the fishermen you saw on the beach all hours of the day and night took a swig of something in a paper bag and said, “Prom?”

“New Year’s.”

“Wow.”  He smiled, adjusting his fishing pole against the rail.  “Fuck that.”

The sky was clear.  There was a full moon.  And you can’t stay at the end of a pier forever, even though there were some nights I’d spend hours there, leaning against the rough wooden railing.  If the beach bars sounded like an infernal Hieronymus Bosch pep rally, the ocean at night was a different sort of hell: black ribbon over glittery onyx, the sound of the surf letting you know there’s a lot going on out in that faceless, trackless dark and you’re right on the edge.  One step off the pier was all it took to be part of it forever.

Time of night changes the darkness on a street, even if it’s beachfront and lit up like New Year’s Eve.  I walked down Ocean Front, avoiding the crowds in front of the bars, made a left on Hornblend, and crossed Mission.  Tourists from New Jersey, Connecticut, Vancouver, New Mexico, all drunk, packed ten to a truck, no shirts, speeding pale through the streetlights, hollering, tossing crumpled beer cans at the dark storefronts.

Growing up in San Diego, I saw them every year, every holiday, every summer night I spent at the beach.  No big thing.  Half of them would be arrested by dawn.  A fourth would go home and make up tales of the vacation they’d had.  Maybe a sixth would believe their own lies and want to move to California someday.  But they’d never be able to afford it.  Or they’d get as far as Bakersfield and learn the true meaning of heartache.

I told myself if the party at the hotel had only been better, I’d feel differently about everything.  I told myself then I wouldn’t feel so depressed.  But none of that was real enough to be true.  It was just a story I was telling.  Truth was, I didn’t feel much of anything.  No anger.  No pain.  No regret.  No sense of missing out or that I had to search for something better.  Nothing but a faint melancholy, a vague tiredness.  High school, my life, was about waiting, everything calculated in terms of how long things were going to take, when I could expect them to end, what I’d have to put up with until they did.

And I told myself Evert had it better.  But what did I know?  “I don’t think I’ll be doing this again,” he’d said.  “Why is your uncle such a dick?” he’d said.  I could have told him some obscure Tibetan Buddhism fact from world history, “Yes, the answer is to just apply yak oil to the icon of Yidam Kurukulla and do the great dance of the Knowledge-Causing Mother-Buddha,” and Evert would have given me the exact same look.  The I’m leaving for college look.  The too bad you aren’t but that’s how it goes look.

Right on Bayard and down past Grand.  Left on Thomas where the old cinderblock apartment complexes rust and crumble to eternity.  At night, they look like industrial back lots for meat packing plants or ball joint factories.  Weird and empty.  Nothing you’d want to spend time in.  Orange-white safety lights always buzzing.  Concrete stairwells that smell like piss.  Some tatted-up, naked guy in a window, holding a bottle of wine.

Where was I walking at the end of 1991 in Uncle Tim’s notch-lapel tuxedo?  I thought the Rambler might have already been towed, which made everything feel even more tiring, more futile.  Home was in North Park, 20 minutes east on the 805, with a mother and father whose idea of a good New Year’s Eve was not having to suffer fools all night and start the new year with a headache.  They were smarter than me.  I told myself next year I’d go to bed early.

One of the apartments, three flights up, was open, light streaming down into an empty courtyard parking lot, stereo thumping.  A woman with long wavy green hair leaned over the metal railing and waved at me like otherwise I wouldn’t notice.

“Come up here,” she said.  Flannel shirt and jeans.  Very drunk.

I looked at her.

“Steve.  Come up and dance.”

The stereo inside was loud.  I had to shout.  “I think you got the wrong guy!”

“Steve!  Get up here!”

“I’m not Steve!”

“Don’t worry about it!”  She waved me up in wide, exaggerated arcs.  I thought she might lose her balance and go headfirst over the railing.

Inside, ten extremely drunk people were trying to dance in the small shag-carpeted living room.  A few cardboard boxes of Bud Light had been savagely torn open and unopened cans had rolled under the plastic coffee table.  On the couch, a very large man snored with his shirt unbuttoned, wet spot on his crotch, unlit cigarette between his fingers.  I looked at his hairy belly, at the green-haired woman who said her name was Ada.

“I’m Steve,” I said.  A joke.  But she was busy telling me how the man on the couch had stolen the beer out the back of a liquor store.

“He’s a genius,” she said.  “He’s Polfrey.”

“That’s his last name?”

She frowned up at me.  “What?”

I smiled and shrugged.

Ada stepped back and took me in.  “What’re you doing in that mod getup?”

“Not a lot,” I said.  And that she understood.

We danced.  We danced slow when everyone else was dancing fast and falling into each other.  Some bleached surfer went face-down into the plastic coffee table, rolled on his back, and laughed.  A girl in a burgundy pencil skirt and cream blouse, looking like she’d just got off work at an insurance office and didn’t approve of any of this, sat on Polfrey’s legs, took the cigarette from between his fingers, and lit it.  Someone sprayed beer on the stereo, on the window, on the splotchy ceiling light.  Someone said happy fucking New Year.

I thought Ada might be in her 30s, but at that time I wasn’t good at judging anyone’s age beyond my own.  She laid her head on my chest.  “You sure are dreamy, Steve.  I could take you home to mama.”

We went out in front of the apartment, kissed for a while, and leaned against the railing.  “But I don’t live with my mama.  You want me to take you home?  My girlfriend wouldn’t like that one bit.  You get high?  Do drugs?”

I said I didn’t and Ada patted me on the shoulder.  “That’s good, sweetie.  You keep that dreamy smile.”

“I should go,” I said.  “They might tow my car.”

She gave me a fierce hug and kissed me on the cheek.  “I’m gonna get high.”

At the edge of the parking lot, I looked back.  Ada was still standing at the railing, silhouetted in the doorway light, waving in slow motion, like when you watch someone’s ship pull away from the pier, not really expecting to see them but hoping you might catch one last glimpse.

Walking back to the Rambler, I decided that when I returned the tuxedo, I’d tell Uncle Tim I met a nice girl and we danced all night.  He’d say something like, after you ditched that moron friend of yours, right?  And I’d say yeah, that’s right.  Exactly.