In a fit of optimism, Sabine and I got memberships to MoMA last December. I had visited the museum a couple of times to see Abstract Expressionist New York, and knowing that they were planning a De Kooning retrospective, I figured the repeated visits would pay for themselves. But just like other people with their gym memberships, we ended up only going once this year. I’ve been reading about modern art recently, so when work let out early yesterday, I decided to visit the permanent collection and try to get some of my money’s worth.
I always get cranky after fighting my way through the crowds on Fifth Avenue, and my heart sank when I arrived to the museum and saw the mob waiting to get in. It was gratifying to pass them thanks to my membership card, but not so great once I was in. Why doesn’t it occur to anyone in New York to actually walk up the escalators? Invariably, people freeze as soon as they step on, taking on languid poses to block anyone wanting to pass them. No wonder the inventor killed himself.
When I finally made my way into the permanent collection – in reverse chronological order, it turns out – I was faced with another horror: the iPhone catalogers. These are the people who flit from masterpiece to masterpiece taking photos, only looking at the works through their viewfinders. Why bother going to the museum if you’re only interested in photographs of the art? Here’s a tip: Just visit the website and save yourself $25! Trust me, it’s not that hard to find a good jpeg of Warhol‘s work.
Slightly less annoying were the many people getting their photos taken next to art (though I can’t blame the teens who discovered that Daniel Buren’s stripes make good backdrops – I suspect it was part of the artist’s point). I hurried through the increasingly conceptual sections and went up to the fifth floor, which was of course even more crowded. Old ladies do love their fucking Kandinsky! Thankfully I don’t, so I was able to spend a fair amount of time looking at works by lesser-known artists relatively undisturbed. I did have to put on my headphones, though, because stationed at every wall there is a visitor reliving his Art History 101 course by repeating everything he can remember to his companion. Loudly. I wish I had prepared accordingly, because the Cole Porter songbook was not the ideal soundtrack for looking at early modernism.
My way out was even more frustrating than my way in. You can’t even walk down the escalator? Really? It takes no effort! Gravity is on your side, people! I took a deep breath and faced Fifth Avenue again. I was feeling pretty unhappy by this point. Sure, it’s great to live in a city where if the mood strikes, you can simply walk a few blocks to see some of the world’s best modern art in person, but does it have to be so damn crowded? I’ve lived here for 18 years and I still find the amount of people on the streets overwhelming.
Then I saw what looked like two families of tourists headed my way. How did I know they were tourists? All eight or nine of them were wearing matching knit hats with Elmo’s face on it. One of the moms dropped her bag of popcorn, and the rest of the group jeered at her. “How embarrassing!” She yelped. Lady, dropping the popcorn is the least of it, I thought. And that’s when it hit me: Whatever might be wrong with New York, I can’t live anywhere else. While the tourists might get on my nerves, they’re just visiting. If I left New York, I’d actually be living with them.
Courtesy of Biblio.com
After leaving an excellent exhibition at the Folk Art Museum (Eugene Von Bruenchenhein‘s sexy pics of his wife, if you must know), Sabine and I stopped to look at the African art for sale on the street. I never know what to make of that stuff – is it genuine? Surely not, but it definitely looks real to my untrained eyes. And if it is real, how does it end up for sale on the street? Then again, how does it end up at galleries?
As I was musing these admittedly less-than-fascinating questions, someone passed by me and muttered under their breath, “fucking homo!” While it’s been several years since I’ve been called that (the last time was by a very angry, and relatively tiny, old Puerto Rican in the N Train in Astoria, maybe 10 years ago), it was clearly directed at me.
I looked around in surprise and saw a middle-aged, ham-faced cretin turning to glare at me as he walked away. I then caught my reflection on a window, and I thought “Why, that hydrocephalic oaf has a point - I do look unusually good today!” I was wearing a very nice Marc Jacobs coat (a hand-me-down from a, yes, gay friend), a lovely Ralph Lauren sweater (a gift from a bi friend), and a fetching man-bag (a Christmas gift from my wife, whose sexual history I won’t discuss in public). He also might have picked up on the fact that I’ve been exercising for the last six months, and while my physique is far from Chelsea standards, it doesn’t look much like the result of his nightly diet of Coors Lite, Hot Pockets and Glenn Beck, either. Besides, I figured, this mouth-breather is probably frustrated that he is not adequately represented by his state government.
But here is the surprising part – the knuckle-dragger then walked into the MoMA store! What could someone born with an extra-chromosome be looking for there? Might he also be looking for a flower vase, like Sabine and I were? Sabine was concerned about following him into the store, but we needed something to put flowers in, and I was counting on the safety of being surrounded by so many other similarly-dressed men that the effect on the troglodyte would be like being surrounded by a herd of zebras, making it difficult for him to pounce on one victim.
I didn’t get to see the clod anywhere, but since I’ve recently bought a membership to the museum, it’s highly likely I’ll run into him again at the Andy Warhol movie retrospective.
I always told the women I dated that I was one of those men who would get better looking with age. I don’t know where I got that idea, considering that it was demonstrably untrue for the males on either side of my family, and the evidence was strong in my own looks that the trajectory was not going upwards. Age finally came, and my optimism was proven wrong. Feeling a sense of obligation towards my wife Sabine, who married me in good will, I decided the least I could do was try to get in shape.
I’ve never been one for sports – in fact, most group activities have always seemed to me like potential lynchings – and gyms remind me too much of the humiliations of high school, so my options for exercise are pretty limited. I decided to try jogging, and to my surprise, I liked it. Sure, there were a number of things that bothered me, namely the people who blocked my way: parents with children (in strollers or otherwise), owners walking their dogs, and old people who were invariably startled when I passed them, despite the fact that I was running at only 5 miles an hour. But for the most part I enjoyed running through pretty Sunnyside Gardens in the early morning.
Despite looking ridiculous, I even started wearing ankle weights on my wrists to add a little more punch to my workout. I downloaded iTreadmill, a pedometer for my iPod, to keep track of how far I was running and how fast. Unfortunately, the app can’t run in the background, so I had to keep my iPod in my hand while I jogged, otherwise it would fall asleep and the pedometer would stop working. I found that electronic music from the 90s made the most effective soundtracks, particularly Trance and Drum n’ Bass. Very uncool, I know, but with those ridiculous-looking ankle weights the music was the least of my problems.
After a couple of months I noticed that though I wasn’t losing weight, my clothes started fitting better, which provided the incentive to keep going. Then one day after I came home from work, I noted that my knee hurt as I walked up the stairs. I didn’t think much of it until the next morning. As I started running, the pain in my knee got progressively worse. But since I had already gone to all the trouble of getting ready for jogging, I decided to forge on. By the time I got home from work that night, I was limping like a veteran Civil War reenactor.
I asked my dentist what to do*, and he recommended I stop jogging for a couple of weeks. The two weeks seemed interminable – I was convinced that by the end of my hiatus I would be lucky if I could get around without the help of a Rascal. When I started again, I was relieved that aside from a feeling of tightness on my knee, I was back to startling old people like a champ.
The next few months went along well, though the tightness on my knee never fully went away. I worried that it would worsen, I would have to stop my morning runs, Kevin Smith-like humiliations would follow, and I would find myself looking forward to reruns of The King of Queens and According to Jim. My friend Stephanie suggested I consider joining a gym to use the elliptical. I had to Google elliptical because I was too embarrassed to ask her what that was, and that’s when I found out that it was the high-tech grandson of the NordicTrack. I had briefly used the NordicTrack when I was younger, until I decided it was getting in the way of my pack-a-day smoking habit. Now that I don’t smoke, I felt it could be worth a second try, and I found a reasonably-priced “refurbished” one on Amazon. Until then, I would continue jogging.
And then I fell.
I was putting along one Saturday morning listening to the Sex Pistols. I hadn’t listened to that album in many years, and I was surprised at how terrible Steve Jones’ guitar sounded. Somewhere in the middle of “Problems” (“I’m using my feet for my human machine”) I found myself flat on the ground. It took me a second to realize that I had tripped, and that I had made a weird sound I’m pretty sure I had never made before. I got up, looked around furtively to see if anybody had witnessed my accident, and started running again. I was pleased to see that I hadn’t broken my iPod, but then realized the hand I was holding it with was bleeding. I considered walking home, but not having learned my lesson from the incident with the knee, I kept going. Then I noticed that in addition to the open flap on my thumb, I had torn a substantial chunk of skin off the knuckle on my little finger. I got a little worried because now my knee was really aching, but mostly I hoped no one could see the blood; I felt I was in the most pathetic Nike commercial ever. It was when the blood started to stream over my iPod that I gave up and headed home.
Our friend John was visiting from San Francisco, and he had seemed a little surprised that morning to find out I was now a jogger, so I was mortified having him see me return damaged. I tried to poo-poo my wounds when I came in, but the pain just got worse. Sabine immediately cleaned and dressed the cuts on my hand, but it wasn’t until she asked whether I had hurt myself anywhere else that I pulled up my jogging pants and saw that I’d scraped my knee badly and that it was swollen and hot.
The NordicTrack arrived three days later, and I’ve been using it since. It feels like a good workout, and I’m proud that I don’t end my sessions coughing like I did in my 20s. But as I sweat away in the basement in the early mornings with a little finger that looks like it was chewed by a pit bull I wonder whether there are more graceful ways of growing old, like bleaching my teeth.
[* Shut up, my dentist is a marathon runner.]
(Click for larger image)
This whole alcoholic theme is getting pretty tiresome, so I’m going to cut it short. Here are a few books that I read about alcoholics that I didn’t think merited their own posts or didn’t fit into my parameters of novelistic memoirs:
How Late It Was, How Late (1994) by James Kelman. This is an excellent novel (don’t take it from me – it won the Booker Prize) about a low-life drunk and the indignities he suffers trying to get welfare. That it’s written in an accent would usually get on my nerves fast, but Kelman is simply too good. Here’s how it starts: “Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there’s something wrong; there’s something far far wrong; ye’re no a good man, ye’re just no a good man.” But this isn’t a book about alcoholism, it’s about being poor in Scotland, so that’s that. Try not to hear Groundskeeper Willie when you read it.
Ablutions (2009) by Patrick deWitt. This is a pretty good first novel about a bartender with serious substance abuse problems written by an author who says he has worked as a bartender. It’s well written, very witty and often darkly funny, but it’s not very realistic – which I know is not deWitt’s point, but it doesn’t fit into what I was looking for. Still, I would recommend you check it out. The New York Times website has the first chapter.
Recovery (1973) by John Berryman. Those of you who know about poetry will know Berryman was a highly esteemed poet; since I don’t know anything about poetry I barely recognized his name. This unfinished “novel” was published a year after the author committed suicide. I use quotation marks because the book is really a thinly-disguised diary from Berryman’s (last?) stay at a clinic; there’s little in terms of structure or development to really mark it as a novel. It does have this funny joke: “Do you know about the two drunks who went to the film of The Lost Weekend. Came staggering out. ‘My God I’ll never take another drink,’ said the first. ‘My God I’ll never go to another movie’ [said the other].”
John Barleycorn (1913) by Jack London. This is a pathetic memoir in which London writes about his alarming drinking problem (stemming back to his childhood) all the while denying that he’s an alcoholic. The edition I have has a nice introduction by Pete Hamill (author of his own alcoholic memoir, A Drinking Life) in which he plainly states that London was a hack who wasted what talent he had by churning out inadequate work and, of course, drinking himself to death. I might have liked the book better if London had called it Denial.
The Cup of Fury (1956) by Upton Sinclair. Sinclair was a friend of London’s, and like London he churned out work written in a style that manages to be cloyingly folksy and pretentious at the same time. This book is a long harangue about how many people Sinclair has known who died due to alcoholism (including London). Unfortunately it fails to convince anyone because Sinclair is so self-righteous and so boring that he makes cirrhosis of the liver sound preferable to following his advice.
The Invisible Enemy: Alcoholism & the Modern Short Story (1989) by Miriam Dow and Jennifer Regan. This is a great collection of 15 short stories that deal with alcoholism. The list of authors is impressive (John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, Langston Hughes, Raymond Carver, etc.) and all the stories are quite good, but Susan Minot’s “The Navigator” manages to stand out – it’s really heartbreaking without being sentimental.
After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1931) and Good Morning, Midnight (1938) by Jean Rhys. These two novels are amazing. Someone wrote a terrific essay about them and Quartet (1928) and Voyage in the Dark (1934) that covers the topic better than I ever could: ”As Soon As I Sober Up I Start Again”: Alcohol and the Will in Jean Rhys’s Pre-War Novels. The only reason I didn’t write about these books was that in them, Rhys’s alcoholism seems incidental – the real theme is her existential anxiety and her desperate strategies for staving it off. Blah blah blah – just read the damn things already, they’re very, very good (although extremely similar). Rhys herself was a piece of work, as you can see in this review of her biography in the Los Angeles Times.
I think that’s it for my forays into alcoholic literature, though I’m open to suggestions. I’ve recently been reading some memoirs and accounts of New York in the 1950s, particularly surrounding the Abstract Expressionist scene (which is not exactly a big leap, as so many of them were drunks), so any tips to that end are appreciated.
Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes (1968) is probably the most unusual of the semi-autobiographical alcoholic memoirs I’ve read, though it wouldn’t seem so at first glance. Exley’s writing style is conversational and the stories he tells are for the most part plausible and humorous. And yet…
With surprising aplomb, Exley begins the book with an account of his habit of getting totally drunk and making an ass of himself at a sports bar during New York Giants games. He tells of being laughed at by the bartender and fellow patrons with full self-awareness and no embarrassment. Pretty soon he reveals his repeated stints at mental hospitals, also without a hint of shame, resentment or regret. Exley doesn’t seem to be in denial of his alcoholism – and very likely clinical depression – but neither does he seem proud of it. He doesn’t wallow like, say, Charles Bukowski. I want to say he sounds distant, but that’s not quite right. He’s mostly unconcerned and a little amused. It’s the same with his drinking: he never seems to worry about it, though it’s clear that he knows he has a problem (he attends AA meetings while in the hospital, but he spends his time there sneering at the participants with two other patients).
Exley’s character comes across as a drunk Ignatius J. Reilly, a self-proclaimed genius living off his mother’s generosity while holding her in contempt. Unlike Reilly, Exley is often aware what an absurd figure he is. A couple of times he claims that he’s turned his back on mainstream life in protest of the emptiness of the American Dream, but his hunger for fame belies his stance.
Then there’s the structure of the novel – or rather, its lack of one. Exley’s tales jump forward onto the future and fall back into the past without much justification. One minute we’re hearing about his obsession with New York Giants halfback* Frank Gifford, the next Exley’s back in the mental hospital (for the second time? third?), or back in college at USC with Gifford. Exley’s fixation with the football player is supposed to be the theme that binds the whole book together, but it only appears sporadically, though there is a moving realization of Gifford’s meaning to the author towards the end of the book. This revelation – which there’s no point in discussing, since it won’t make sense out of context – seems to be the climax, but then the book once again goes off into another tangent, diffusing its impact. It doesn’t matter, though, because Exley is so entertaining.
Like all the other alcoholic writers I’ve mentioned, Exley’s life was a horrible mess. The formidable critic James Woods starts a review of Richard Yates’s biography with this anecdote: “[Exley] stumbled an hour late into the grim vinyl restaurant where we were to meet, and called me David. He had ‘been on a bender, David’, he explained, and wasn’t good for much, least of all being interviewed. His skin was florid, his nose pitted like an old orange skin, and he had the withered but pot-bellied shape – a gourd on a stick – of the heavy drinker who has lost interest in food. After 15 minutes I turned my tape recorder off: Exley was incoherent, surely the greatest insult a writer could do to himself.” He would go on to write two other autobiographical novels in the same vein, but they’ve largely been forgotten.
*Whatever that means, I don’t know a thing about football.
Insight into alcoholism: B- There’s not much insight, though there’s plenty of observation.
Overall quality: A The novel is funny and very engaging, if a little flip.
Next: The last of this series, I’m boring myself. I’ll be discussing several other books I read that don’t quite merit their own posts.
