As promised, with this post I begin the serialization of my memoir The Places I Lost It. Since each newsletter will be a whole chapter, they’ll be a bit longer than my typical posts. But stick with it if you will, I think it’s my best work. I’d like to dedicate the book to my wife, Niki. I wrote this a few years ago and she supported me as I took over a year to write it. And to my newsletter readers, especially those of you who have been in touch as we face the journey through mental illness together. So here we go: Chapter One of The Places I Lost It - South Street.
Reflected in the rearview mirror, glistening in the darkness, was a crystalline twinkling of shattered light on the roof of the car behind us. The traffic light, the headlights of the cars crossing the intersection, all broke and sparkled in the clear plastic cover of the lights on top of the police cruiser. I knew we were going to be pulled over. I told Debra, the woman sitting next to me who spoke with the pitch and inflection of a five-year-old when she was wasted, to just be cool and not say anything. The traffic light turned green, and the blinding, bending lights on the cruiser came full on as soon as I inched the car forward. I slowly, gently, probably too slowly, crept across the intersection and pulled over by an open strip of shoulder and grass, next to a fire hydrant.
We’d been out all night at a beach party at a club in Minneapolis. When the bar closed we sat in the biting January cold, still in our bathing suits, outside of a McDonald’s feeding french fries to a homeless guy named Frank. Debra and I met that day at a Marriott in a business park at a sales meeting for the car rental company we both worked for. She was from Miami and had the tan and sun-lightened blonde hair not seen this time of year at my home in Philadelphia. We hit it off and left our co-workers at the hotel bar and went out, looking for a better time.
I lowered the window and felt the cold air slap my face as the officer approached. Once again I told Debra not to say a word. I took the rental agreement from the glove box and my license from my wallet as the officer leaned into the car to ask us where we were going. Right away, Debra squeaked in her childish, whining, drunken voice, “Are you pulling us over because we’re parked in front of a fire hydrant?” I thought I heard the officer chuckle, and he asked us again where we were headed. “The Marriott,” I nearly whispered, and he returned to his car to check out my credentials.
I had no idea where the Marriott was. I thought it was a good idea to just get in the car and drive around. I mean, how big could Minneapolis be? Eventually we’d run into it. On my side was that it was 1985 and drunk driving wasn’t as big a deal as it is today. The officer walked back to the car and handed me back my paperwork. He told us to go right to the hotel and be careful. Emboldened, I leaned out the window as he walked back to the cruiser and asked him, shouting, if he could tell me how to get to the hotel. A fine public servant, he did.
Back at the hotel we managed to lock Debra’s roommate out of the room and spent the last hours of darkness in a frenzy of crank and sex. We missed breakfast and slipped into the meeting room just as the lights went out and the overhead projector came on. Our boss tapped us each on the shoulder and motioned to the hall. He gave Debra a plane ticket and told her to go back to her room, grab her bag, and leave immediately for the airport. He told me to cut it out, get serious, and get back inside and take notes. I thought briefly of my wife, Sharon, and sighed in relief that I wouldn’t have to explain why I came home early, or why I ended up in jail. As I settled back into my chair, for a moment, I felt invincible.
Everything changed when I returned home. I just stayed out at night, stumbling into a bar on South Street called Bacchanal and dancing to a band called Five Story Fall. The street was sour smelling and stretched filthy in the dawn light from the skulls and potions of Harry’s Occult Shop at one end to a highway overpass that completely cut the city off from the waterfront of Penn’s Landing at the other; a couple of shredded pages of The Inquirer tumbling down the sidewalk to be caught on the legs of a sleeping homeless man sticking out from his cardboard shelter in the foyer of Krass Brothers, the store for suits for boys and men. At dawn my wife would come and find me, passed out on the hood of a car with crank burning in my nostrils, a burn only cooled by a snorted mist of water as the thick taste of speed dripped down the back of my throat. Sharon would coax me home and pack me off to work. I never missed a day.
Sharon was short and had thick, feathered brown hair, and a round face that made her look a bit like Debra Winger. When I met her she lived at home with her mom and sisters, all of them damaged by the fact that no father was present, nor had been for a very long time. She was very smart, but luck didn’t deal her the means to pursue much education or career. It always seemed like everything was just OK with her. She was nice, and pretty, and I felt very much at home when we were together, after she came and collected me off a side street. I was glad to go home. I honestly loved her, as I slowly destroyed the smile that drew me in when I first met her and I was innocent. We married in the Church, pre-cana and everything, so I knew I was guilty as we hastily made breakfast and shuffled out the door.
All my life things had always come easy to me. Often, just showing up was enough to put me ahead as I coasted on confidence and innate ability. Things in this marriage were going to take some work, and I’d developed no sort of work ethic. I always got by on charm, humor, and devilish hazel eyes. I always took the easy way out. I got exactly what I deserved. I wanted to go back to the little apartment we shared near the speed line station in Lindenwold, I wanted to laugh with Sharon again. But I wanted the tingling on my skin and a life lived quickly even more. I was immature enough to believe that if I kept moving forward I might someday get somewhere. I was immature enough to never look back, or even around, on my way there. But I hadn’t set a goal, and I didn’t know where I was going. I fell into things and, dusted, brushed myself off and continued on without regard for what I left behind. Impulse yields little that will last, but oh, impulse is fun, even as it risks everything worth keeping.
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As a kid I was curious, some thought too curious, and I spent my days scouring the four sets of encyclopedias my family owned. I wanted to know everything about everything, and thought it possible. I had Jacques Cousteau at sea, Firing Line on television, and above me, the space program. One day in the summer of 1969 my grandmother took me out to the back yard and motioned toward the sky. She said, “They have even taken the mystery out of the moon.” I wrote a play in elementary school about Pilgrims, and starred as Marc Antony in a sixth-grade production of Julius Caesar. For the bicentennial I boarded a school bus and traveled from our home in South Jersey into Philadelphia for souvenirs of the Liberty Bell. Named mayor of the town during youth week, my interests moved from the science of the weather station I built with my father on the pool deck to the Watergate hearings.
There were paperboys then. We carriers would sit at the drop-off spot, our bikes strewn about the yard, and fold and band the local news before stuffing our baskets and riding off to target porches and storm doors, hoping to increase our tips. Boys talk, but we spoke more of music than sports or girls, debating Genesis before and after Peter Gabriel, and trumping all comparisons of lyrics by bringing up the Kinks. My Dad drove us to concerts by ELP and Eric Clapton at the Spectrum, and waited outside while we sat in awe of the volume and spectacle. In middle school the weekly dance began with boys on the chairs along the wall and girls dancing to The Hustle, and I suffered through KC and the Sunshine Band and Chuck Mangione before venturing out onto the floor to begin a life of incautious passion set to the tune of Morris Albert’s Feelings.
Coming of age became more complex when the cable box came into the house. Imagination drivers like the cover of Whipped Cream and Other Delights and a trash picked copy of Playboy stuffed between the mattress and the box spring were replaced by the searing sex of late night movies. When the family slept I’d creep into the living room to fantasize fully into Jacqueline Bissett, moaning as she was drilled off the bed and into the floor while cheating on her husband in Secrets, and Susan George, possibly enjoying being raped in Straw Dogs. My concepts of character, sex, and women in relationships were not fully formed, and I was forever influenced by the directors’ entertaining misogyny. It was all too much for a middle-schooler, and it remained too unsettlingly influential as I grew through adolescence. To the undeveloped, boyish mind, women enjoyed being hurt.
High School began with the frenzy of activity and accomplishment that my earlier years promised, and a successful run as a company president in Junior Achievement stoked in me a passion for business. I played bass in a band that played songs that I wrote, and competed with four other students for the top academic spot in the class. The summer after my sophomore year I tore up my knee playing baseball and sat in a full length cast for weeks with little to do but read and play guitar. Malaise and inactivity began to feel comfortable, and when school began again and the cast came off the extracurriculars fell away, as if my interests were broken still and propped up by the crutches I walked with, and I found little to engage with or even dabble in. Something big changed, and I stopped thinking about the future and instead went looking for ways to kill time, and found none.
My swerve from being so active to being so passive must have signaled some problem, but no one in Catholic, Democratic, working class New Jersey in the late 70s, not even the guidance counselor, let alone my parents, would have considered a psychiatrist to comment on my change in behavior and performance. Occasionally, with friends, I’d hang out around the corner from the liquor store until a beat up Camaro with a gray primer fender pulled, up and we’d press $3.00 on the driver for a six pack, and once or twice I tried pot, but I did not like it at all, so substances were not responsible for my loss of interest in everything. I didn’t think at all about the future as I stood on Station Avenue in front of Kupper’s Market, my collar raised against the cold, and spent another night hanging out on the street doing nothing. My parents should have kicked my ass and put me back on track, but they were simple and confused and didn’t notice that I was wasting my potential. Years earlier I went so far with no need of discipline from them, so self-motivated and self-corrective was my nature, that no foundation existed for them to force me back to work, off the corner, and into something more wholesome and edifying. I got a girlfriend and a job driving a forklift and making deliveries for a paint warehouse, and while I put no effort into studies, I still managed to graduate National Honor Society. I still had my infectious sense of humor and charismatic personality, so it wasn’t all bad. In fact, Catholic, Democratic, working class New Jersey in 1981 was a world of just good enough. And that’s how I graduated High School: Just good enough.
During the summer between High School and College I started working as a tour escort for the travel agency where my mother worked, and I was soon selling tours as well, putting into play an ease with people and salesmanship that profited all. I entered Glassboro State College in the fall and majored in Public Relations, imagining myself a writer of great ideas, still for sale, changing outcomes and changing minds, manipulating facts to meet the points I drove. Sales, fun, and information took my attention and, as in years before the malaise struck, I threw myself into things. The lethargy lifted.
What I found at school I thought better able to teach myself - soul crushing lectures by professors rambling about history and books I already knew from all the reading I did as a kid. There was a class in semantics I found fascinating, but I flunked most everything else, including volleyball, and ended the semester, and my time at college, with a 1.8 GPA. I found business, the idea of buying and selling things, fascinating. The idea that I could apply all of my intelligence and charisma to an outcome that benefitted buyer and seller was a revelation. Soon I was a sales rep for an airline and called on travel agencies in South Jersey, and jetted off to weekends in Brussels and Puerto Rico.
I one day received a letter from a travel agent named Sharon from a travel agency in Cherry Hill. She asked me to dinner. I remembered three travel agents at the office, but not their names, but they were all good looking so I accepted. When I walked through the door I just waited for one to react and knew it was she. We dated for a few months and soon I proposed. After we married, I was 22 and she was 28, we moved into an apartment. I played guitar in a wedding band to bring in a little extra money. We got by. Then I received a small inheritance from my great grandfather that we used as a down payment on a house in Philadelphia. The city presented vast distractions and life began to speed up. I took a job with National Car Rental, another sales job, that enabled me to be home more and to settle into plans Sharon and I shared as I began to think bigger and bigger thoughts and dream really big dreams. Life sped up faster still. A friend offered me a line of crank, and it was a feeling like none I’d had before. Life raced by, and I left for the sales conference in Minnesota.
A few months after I returned, Sharon had to go away for a few days, and Debra flew to Philadelphia to see me. We had flirted constantly on the phone and by mail since we met, and it was inevitable we’d get together again. It was early summer and hot, and we sat outside at Copabanana at 4th and South drinking margaritas, then dashed back to my house to get time alone. Debra was eight years older than me, an inch taller, blonde and long and funny, and fun. Of Pennsylvania Dutch stock, her father, now retired in Florida, owned a gas station, and her mother dressed in white from head to toe. Debra managed to secure Rotary scholarships to attend private schools and study abroad, and at college she studied romance languages and the hockey team. She was married once and worked in Monaco, but then she lived in Florida and did the same job there that I did in Philadelphia. In the mid-80s you heard about truly liberated women, but rarely met one. Debra was one, and I wanted to be with her.
She spoke French and enjoyed a prank, so I called Alan, a drummer in another band I played with, a ska band that never got out of the rehearsal studio, and told him to rush over. I’d met a wild French woman who spoke no English, and she only wanted more. He broke in panting and drank tequila from her arms. Completely apoplectic, he ran down the street to a bookstore to buy a French/English dictionary just to communicate with her. We held up the ruse until he left, drunk and spellbound by the mystery and mayhem. A knock on the door signaled Sharon’s grandparents peering through the window. I straightened up and ran Debra upstairs and into the tub to hide. My grandparents-in-law came in, settled down for a visit, and asked to use the bathroom. I told them they couldn’t. It was broken and I was working on the plumbing. I said no, I wouldn’t need any help from my very handy grandfather-in-law. They knew. I continued the party for another day or two, then crashed from the binge that went on too long, and waited for Sharon to return. She did, and we both knew it was over. She was exhausted by my inconsistency, and I was leaving to move to Florida to be with someone else.
But she had news, too. She was pregnant. Having grown up without a father, she would not bring a child into this world without a husband present, but I had moved on and I would not stay. I knew I should have. I should have ended the affair and stayed in Philadelphia with Sharon, but I didn’t.
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Events of significance often pass unnoticed, only revealing themselves later, after consequence has occurred and the mind has placed cause and effect in context. I needed reference points along the road I’ve traveled. I needed to feel I had some say in the matter, some control. I needed to have life to date make sense. When it didn’t, I needed an event to point to as my derailment. Then I could correct and continue.
The recovery room was dark. Sharon lie on the bed just breathing. The anesthesia still held her and, for a moment, I wished it would never wear off. Her hair, usually so full, fell in greasy strands across her face. I couldn’t bring myself to brush the strands from her eyes, or to hold her hand as she woke. I couldn’t bring myself to touch her. Touching her had brought us to this. After waking, her smile, once so contagious, so bright, was never the same again. Her shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. She turned just slightly inward. Slightly away. The moment the child was pulled from her womb became the one before which we were searching for what we could become, and after which we were hiding what we had become. “What if?” became the stone thrown into all of my reflections.
We’d made our choice, but in making our choice I’m sure we killed something. The killing was somewhere between stepping on a bug and shooting an infant in the head. Somewhere life was possible between us and we turned it away. Life wasn’t possible between us anymore, and soon we parted. The house was no longer anyone’s home, the thick air inside as hardened as my heart against any positive hope or faithful promise or vow made in front of God. We listed it for sale.
Sharon was very close to my family, so I asked them to take care of her. She vacationed with them at my parents’ Pocono house while I cleared out the house in Philadelphia. My sister Stacey told me Sharon broke down in tears at the supermarket. In some sense, even though I left Sharon with them as I moved on, I was embittered when my family took her in and waved me away. But I had stamped out what would have been my parent’s first grandchild, and I broke Sharon’s Pollyannaish heart, a heart that everyone found stainless. Guilt drove me deep inside myself, for I had abandoned any external route to forgiveness. Instead of being merely self-absorbed, I became completely, charity negating, help denying, selfish, happy to start a new life, rotting from the inside out. I talked my wife into an abortion - then I left her for another woman. Sharon would remarry a few years later and have kids, and I would feel the guilt lift as she got what she wanted, what I had denied her. But for now, I was quick to outrun the questions that chased me. I sold the house in Philadelphia at a loss and took what little I didn’t sell or give away with me in my car as I drove down 95 South, past the billboards of Pedro huckstering all to South of the Border. I had good friends in Philadelphia and South Jersey, guys who were in my wedding. But I didn’t look back, didn’t want to. Impulse was guiding me without ties or restrictions. I never spoke with Sharon, or any of the guys, again.
The days in the car driving to Florida gave me time to reflect on how I was once a caring, sensitive child, and how this experience robbed me of any sense of compassion and community. I was an adult focused on little but myself, and I drove on to strike out into a fierce individualism. By the time I reached Broward County I had rationalized every action taken, and built a positive self-image based on the fantasy that I carefully chose my fate, instead of reacting impulsively and making big decisions with little information or discourse. My fantasy placed me at the center, directing life as it moved around me. My fantasy made sense of what I did, and there was no place to better indulge in selfish fantasies than South Florida in the 1980s.