THE ETERNAL RETURN

Before any of the following happened I strongly believed that autobiographies were for the most part worthless unless one had lived through exceptional times or was oneself an exceptional individual. I can’t claim either. That percentage among us is infinitesimal. Most of our lives, I had come to feel, are utterly pedestrian no matter how alternately “touching” or “tragic” or “funny” they may seem to us, no matter how unique we think we are or were. 

For each individual who has survived war, famine, the Holocaust, gulags, or grotesque personal misfortune, there are millions who experienced the same fate but lacked the skill, the ambition and, most importantly, the vanity to actually put pen to paper. And so vanity and a little bit of skill combined to show us the experiences of only a few. Mankind, I firmly believed, was not even the proverbial anthill, but something more akin to a parasitic, self-reproducing fungus, spewing out replacements for ridiculously short lives in an almost paraphilic manner; one would need to set the bar rather high to warrant writing about oneself. 

After the following happened, I changed my mind and decided that whatever I wrote would be worthwhile after all; for posterity perhaps, or at the very least as a case study for clinicians. Although the rationale for existence continued to pose a logical problem, I eventually got my mental illness under relative control, and so I broke the promise I made to myself to never compose an autobiography.  

So call this what you will: autobiography, confession, case study.

I won’t tell you my real name for obvious reasons. Everything has been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.  Call me Lucky. I started using that as a nickname in college as a fatalistic joke based on the quirky “funny” posters one would sometimes see in crappy bars: “Lost Dog: Three legs, blind in left eye, missing right ear, broken tail, recently castrated, answers to the name “Lucky.” And the joke stuck until I started using it as a sarcastic badge of pride. But let’s start. Names are names or misnomers. And one should never trust a writer anyway, whatever his nickname may be.

We create life knowing that it will grow old, wither, and die. But when we choose to create art, we gamble on whether it will be utterly forgotten or last for years, perhaps hundreds of years. Inside every womb is a casket. I will die soon—or maybe not terribly soon; no one knows when one will die—but by writing down what transpired that summer, that season in hell and bliss, as recommended to me as a form of therapy by my doctors, I have finally found a modicum of bittersweet peace. I am now back in California, my adopted land on the edge of the earth where I have come back to the safety of warm weather and, more importantly, the safety of sitting, which is precisely where and how this story began, when I was The Sitter, several years ago. 

Back then, having lived in California for over a decade, I had come to the conclusion that my lot in life was mostly to sit. It is, after all, something I am quite good at, and in this late stage of life it is way too difficult to move my ass towards bigger and better things. This understanding was not provoked by a failed visit to a prostitute, an unsuccessful attempt at assassinating a politician, or humiliation by colleagues or former classmates; it was a gradual process of giving up. 

Sitting has many noble qualities. For one, it does no harm— except, perhaps, in extreme cases of prolonged sitting, to yourself vis-à-vis hemorrhoids. Secondly, it puts one in the perfect position to reflect. Reflection is beyond you when you’re running. I don’t mean physically running, I mean trying to outrun the pack. Consider the Buddha, or Saint Simeon the Stylite who sat on a Greek column in the desert eating leaves from an adjacent tree, shitting green off the side of his Corinthian tower. Did they not both manage not only to achieve enlightenment but also to fight off demons? And all this simply through the process of sitting.

So there, I’ll say it once more: inactivity, be it by fate, circumstance, or volition, is itself noble. Or so it seemed to me before I started on this journey. 

Certainly the world has its pecking order, but the Hindu castes were not created for putting people down. Rather, they are an extension of the natural order of things. They helped create a Dewey System of cataloguing each according to their particular skill—or vice. Each has its place within the mill, within the anthill, including us sitters, of course. It would be foolish to compare a panther to a snail to see who is more noble, and even more foolish to compare a carrot to a panther, or a turnip to a hippogriff. And thus I, in my personal carotene splendor, also feel that I have at times reached enlightenment, or at least have come close. There is still much more sitting to be done, though sometimes even the vegetables scream when they see how pointless it all is. The words of Maxim Gorky: “Man is destined for happiness the way birds are destined for flight” I paraphrased this according to my own means and experiences as “Man is destined for happiness the way a hippopotamus is destined for flight.” And that is why I sometimes dream that I have indeed become a panther, only to wake up in my garden variety garden yet again. After some feeling around in the dirt to make sure I’m here among the worms and the moles I know, I reach for my bottle of liquid pesticide—it helps keep both intruding bugs and unpleasant thoughts away—and begin to contemplate further.  

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Back in my salad days—oh, pardon the puns, there will be more—as a seedling, I knew nothing, but as I took shape, I’d watch the springs and summers with delight and wish I could grow higher, bud into a sunflower, look straight at the sky or maybe sprout legs and pull myself out into the world. Alas, the limbs I grew were as useless as those of a mandrake and like the mandrake I would scream when fate tripped me up, or pulled me around by the hair. When did I become stone ass? There was a time when I had ambition—misguided, naturally, but looking towards the stars, dammit, not into the dirt in the navel. Let me try to retrace my steps.

The catalyst behind it all was Betty. Poor Betty with an ass made of even heavier stone than mine, for she was immobile. But let me start a bit earlier, back in the smoggy, beer colored glow of Los Angeles, before I embarked on my “sentimental journey” only to return and return and return.

I had thought about calling this book The Book of Regret, but that would not have been accurate. For did Geppetto regret carving his Burattino when all he wanted was a piece of crusty bread and a glass of rotgut, with the unfortunate doll just a by-product of his sodden mind? And did his Pinocchio not get flayed, tortured and hanged by the blind cat and the lame fox only to be reborn again and reunited with his maker? I digress. Let’s start from the beginning, or at least somewhere farther back—somewhere we can lay a footprint in the quicksand and try move forward, or backwards, or somewhere, as long as there is movement. Even the sitter— perhaps I should say only the sitter—knows about movement. But again I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with Los Angeles…

It is difficult to recall when exactly I resigned myself to my throne, though even after the melding was nearly complete I would occasionally entertain dreams of escape, most of which were absurd in light of my age and poor health. I sometimes dreamt of working on an oil rig, or better yet, joining the merchant fleet, watching the endless expanse of oceans in between stops in moist, dark places like Lagos, Lourenço Marques, Nagasaki… Their names were fine fodder for fantasy. And my dreams were always incredibly vivid, both at night and during the day. It was easy for me to slip into a semi-hallucinatory, hypnagogic state. Not to escape reality the way an abused child dreams up living fairy tales in which he slays the evil dragon who represents the abuser, but in a fashion somewhat related. I was able then, and still am, to enter a liminal world at the necessary moment. As much as I still wished to see the baobabs of Morondava and the rooftops of Antananarivo, or even more accessible places like Greece or Japan, I knew that time was running out, and so I became an armchair traveler. I complained too much, it’s true. I could have been living in Alaska or Siberia or Tierra del Fuego or any number of horrible places that stain the map. But eventually the oranges of Hieronymus Bosch and the tennis balls that washed up on the sandy beaches of Southern California, or bobbed around in the blue surf, began to bore me to tears and I lost my appreciation for those places to which I had longed to move for so many miserable East Coast winters. Some dark, moist places were undoubtedly staid but many others smelled of the lost idea of possibility, the way clean, bright cities when seen from the ocean gleam with promise, yet almost always turn out to be disappointments.

In my early teens I spent a period of around two weeks in a twilit existence. I was sick with a fever and my mother, who distrusted, feared and hated doctors, naturally did not take me to a physician. I don’t think I saw a single doctor in America until I was eighteen or so, and that was a compulsory physical examination prior to my admission to college. Those two weeks were the earliest I remember of living in a pure dream world. It was winter, or perhaps an especially cold and dark early spring, and for a week or two I awoke when the sun had already set. I remember those nights well, the pure bliss of delirium, two weeks of living in darkness. I remember that when I was slightly better we took a taxi to Queens to visit some people, an elderly couple, some kind of artists or literati. From the car window I saw the street lamps and traffic lights streaking by as if in a hallucination, forming horizontal lines as the car drove wildly over the Triborough Bridge. It was around that time, during one of those long hallucinatory, liminal phases, that I composed my first book—something about cosmology; perambulations on the nature of the universe and the idea of infinity. Utter nonsense, but the subject gripped my adolescent mind.

Infinity. I had no idea what I was talking about or what I meant, and I still don’t. But there was a certain feeling, or a certain sensation, that would come over me—much stronger back then, of course, than today, when the skies seemed open and life was full of promise—and a wave of exhilaration would pass through me, and like Jansen’s tenet that grace can be found anywhere, even in the most depraved of circumstances, so I found infinity in even the smallest scraps of tragedy and the slightest of loves, in sordid stories that nonetheless possessed that indescribable spark somewhere within them that lit the paper lantern. Some of that feeling has survived, though I still have no idea what I was trying then to express.

The inertia, the entropy, that took hold in the years that followed first appeared shortly after we moved—my wife and daughter and I—from Hollywood to Pasadena, a place they call “Connecticut with palm trees.” What few friends I had soon stopped visiting. The sitting, which had started in Hollywood, coincided with my decline into alcoholism. The move to a more self-contained city, even though it was only fifteen minutes from my old neighborhood, encouraged more isolation, the isolation encouraged more drinking, and the drinking encouraged more sitting. 

My old building was a collection of curiosities, a panopticon, a Kunstkamera that in more talented hands would have made a decent comedic novel, but my misanthropy pulled me away from even attempting to “immortalize” these rather pathetic specimens in any body of work. You can see, I trust, or hope to believe, why I didn’t venture far from my throne, and why I stayed the same after our move. I much preferred to sit, and to sit alone.

There are some expressions about certain characters, real or fictional, or even semi-fictional. “He came to such and such a place solely to die” is a popular refrain. I came here to live but chose to sit. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t live in a jar outside a restaurant, nor do I lack limbs, nor am I paralyzed. The paralysis is neither physical nor mental. On the contrary, it’s willed. The mystery is how it all came to be. Despite being glued to the spot, I still yearned to escape, either permanently or perhaps just “to write,” or even to finish my life somewhere new, in isolation. Argentina always interested me, partly due to its relative isolation and partly because the plane fares to Buenos Aires are sometimes cheaper than they are even to Europe. I researched these things rather heavily. Flights to Montevideo, Uruguay were even cheaper. I never fancied the old blind librarian Borges. I despise blind people. They remind me of moles. I also hate them because blindness is my biggest fear. Tango and steak. And nice Beaux-arts architecture. Pedestrian dreams, I suppose. Perhaps something else, I don’t know what—cheap health care? That would be impetus enough, maybe… The Polish guy who got stranded in Argentina, worked as a bank teller, wrote books, where was the brilliant literati society then when he would literally almost starve and finally in desperation had to knock on a neighbor’s door and they gave the poor sod a plate of chicken and rice… This, in the richest country in the world at the time. I hate blind people everywhere. No matter if they live in Buenos Aires or Saskatchewan. “Geographical cure” is a phrase I rather like, but rooted as I am, I do most of my traveling through books and television, and I am aware. I have read that most of the island paradises of the South Pacific are actually hellholes of garbage and prostitution, sex slavery and forced abortions just to name a few. There are other authors to talk about these things, but the point is, I was glued to the throne because I am a sitter. Strangely, just as things turned progressively, almost geometrically stagnant, my perception of time went into warp speed, as if hurtling down a black hole, accelerating with each moment, not just each day. Becoming a new dad in middle-age was supposed to have marked a “personal and spiritual renaissance”—I recall the phrase from some book or other, implying that you will live again, be young through your children—but instead my stagnation and my sitting continued. The West simply became a detour on the way to the cemetery, and that is what happened to Stacy when she moved to California. But more about Stacy later. I am getting ahead of myself once more.

I should say something about myself before we press on. Just a few words—for color. I would say that I am neither utterly pedestrian (owing to my insanity) nor quite unique (owing likewise). The problem with uniqueness is that it was ingrained in my mind by my parents. All my life, until my parents’ death, I swallowed a myth that I was more than unique, more than talented (they were obsessed with vacuous superlatives), that I was destined for greatness and a spectacular life—none of which was true and none of which came to pass. This reinforcement contributed much to my present condition (more on that later too), and bred within me the most profound laziness. Instead of soberly addressing what I should be doing with my life in a practical way, I was constantly told that something great was going to happen to me, that it was right around the corner. And so l walked around like a rock star without a band, while the beast in the jungle waited. 

Physically, I am not entirely unattractive—or so I eventually decided. Though I have always struggled with relationships, I have never been rejected by women due to my physical appearance. It has, I suspect, been various aspects of my personality that many of my love interests have found difficult. But I have always been able to put on charms, put on airs, often aided by Dutch courage; and the fact that most, if not all, of my inamorata were attractive, confirmed that there wasn’t anything terribly wrong with me as a man and a lover, with the possible exception of my predilection for booze, though that was often exaggerated in the mind of my lovers and formed the basis of an excuse for the inevitable separation.  

Allow me to jot down some brief biographical notes. I have been living in Los Angeles for twelve years, but I spent most of my life in New York City. I was a real New Yorker, fully acclimated to a frightful and maddening city that is a world in its own. Over the years I rented apartments in every borough except Staten Island. Apart from an ill-fated summer in San Francisco and four years attending college in upstate New York, I hadn’t lived anywhere else. But after some time New York became unbearable. I convinced my partner—now my wife—to move with me, and so we sought out smoggier and greener pastures in Los Angeles.

 I was born and raised in Europe. “Occupied Europe,” shall we say. In its epicenter, no less; the command room of the Evil Empire, Moscow. Not just geographers but most educated folks will agree that Russia, while a transcontinental country, occupies one third of the European continent and culturally falls squarely within the framework of “European civilization.” Here in the US, I found and still find to this day Americans who believe that the Eastern Slavs came from a different planet, that we walk around in bearskin coats and the ground is permafrost. The last part is true in the far north, of course… but I digress. 

My Russian roots made my assimilation difficult for a long time, and though I loved Russia’s culture and its writers and its songs, with no hope of ever returning I tried to embrace not only New York but all of America. But that only deepened my feeling of homelessness, made an absence where a sense of belonging ought to have been. Everywhere I looked I could not find myself, until eventually America—the idea of America, I should say—died for me. Much of Russia is cold, this is true. But if one looks at Russian paintings (the same goes for Scandinavian works, by the way), one sees that the vast majority of them are set in summer. The short, warm season is what gives inspiration to northern Europe. We may be Scythians, but we are not Eskimos. In America my imagination ran wild, searching for something which I could never find, neither on my day trips nor my interstate adventures. America was tinged with sadness from the start, and eventually it drowned me. I sought something in this country—not Karl May westerns but something that I always felt was just below the surface of that long, endless street of grey that stretches from ocean to ocean. I had sought something but I found nothing but a carcass. Over time, as a way to survive, I cultivated a perverse affection for that carcass—but it never lasted, and it was not enough. Even the sordid became tiresome. Even after we quit our jobs, packed our car with essential belongings, and headed for the sham utopia of sunny southern California. 

A few years later some friends came to visit us in LA and we drove with them to the Grand Canyon. I had already seen that beast, twice. I could well understand why those first Spanish explorers, dumbstruck on discovering this unreal place, lost their minds. At first I could only look at it for a few minutes and I was done. This time, with our friends, we camped the night next to a man and his son. To me the child seemed kind of slow, but it’s possible he was just shy. I don’t remember how old he was, perhaps ten or twelve. His dad struck up a conversation with us. He asked about our trip and whether we’d been here before, and I described our cross-country route. “Yeah, we did that trip—me and him and his mom—we camped out around here…” He paused then and looked up at the stars. I wondered if she was dead, or just divorced. This man too sought possibility at one point. And then his cards were taken from him. He must have been only a few years older than me, no more than a decade, and now I’m more than a decade older than he was and I can still see the look of regret on his face as he turned his head away from me, then to his kid, then back to the campfire. Wherever his mother was it didn’t matter. Something in this boy’s father was dead. Partir, c’est mourir un peu, mais mourir, c’est partir beaucoup. 

That lonely man with his boy at the campfire has never left me. The way he talked, the way he said so simply, “His mother and I…” I knew and saw regret, defeat. People latch on to certain phrases, episodes. Those philologically inclined perhaps more so. Classical scenes of farewell, or better yet—scenes of regret. There are too many to count and I have ratcheted my own points and continue to do so. My mother was the queen of regrets and farewells, and I will tell you about her later.

Another experience of regret, from when I too was around twelve years of age, has also stayed in my mind. A very banal regret. I was somewhere on the Jersey Shore with my dad, buying fruit at a farmer’s market. My favorite band at that age was New York Dolls and I was wearing a t-shirt with their name on it, which the fruit seller commented on. “New York Dolls, I remember them… I partied with them a few times…” She smiled, but bitterly. The smile of regret. Perhaps the smile of a washed-up groupie. It is related to the smile of sorrow that says “I fucked up” but it is a unique smile in its own right. I had no idea how old she was—at that age it is impossible to tell. For me, at least, it still is. Even if she had been twenty-something, as I speculated, she seemed already infinitely older and wiser than me—and more damned. Though I had no idea about groupiedom and was not even moderately knowledgeable about sex, I sensed something about her: the sense of regret, the sense of defeat, the sense of the end of youth. That girl at the fruit and vegetable market with her bleached hair, holding on to memories of “partying” with the band stayed with me. It is remarkable that I remember it to this day, thirty five years later.
But off track. Regret will come back in spades in this narrative, and the full nature of regret only came to me much later when I decided to squash it, strangle it. I began to understand certain things about what happened to me that year in New York by putting pen to paper, by understanding that the process of giving up can be interrupted by one last burst of madness and freedom. 

It’s actually very easy to recognize when someone fucked up. You see it in their eyes, in their manner of talking, the voice of regret, that obscure feeling that life is elsewhere and has shot passed them. The unassuageable look of loneliness. One would have been tempted to put Betty in that category of unfortunates simply because she was confined to a wheelchair—but that would have been a mistake. Her wheels served her well, she was, to use the cliché  “fiercely independent” and had a tremendous amount of interest in things—mostly me and my family for some reason, or so I thought. But she had that constant look that read “I blew it” written all over her face. In short, Betty had a secret. Or secrets. Just how horrible or mild those secrets were was impossible to say. As for her supposed interest in me, perhaps she saw my own regret, a reflection that I too fucked up somewhere along the way. 

“How time passes, faster than in the blink of an eye”—that was a recurring line in the one book I managed to finish while living in LA, a story about Christ called “Next Year in Jerusalem,”  a reworking of the Gospel story in which Christ struggles to define what it is he is preaching. My version eliminated the fantasy and fireworks of the New Testament, and Christ comes to a miserable end one sunny and absurd day. But instead of providing momentum for the next book, finishing that story left me feeling empty, stagnant. As much as I looked forward to fishing tennis balls out of the surf instead of using an ice scraper on my windshield while standing in feet of yellow snow, I had reached a state of permanent torpor. Blue Pacific blues. Blue was supposed to be the color of possibility… When the mail would come and there was nothing there but junk, or if the mail came early, I would feel like the day was now over and there was nothing left to look forward to. Yes, my wife was supporting me, and despite the logistics—that with my being out of work for so long I would have been reduced to working as a Walmart greeter and whatever pittance I made would offset the cost of daycare and babysitting—I still yearned for something from life other than a piece of bread and butter. My wife Charlotte, my dark eyed Sephardic princess, had become so subsumed by her job at a certain fashion magazine that our sex life progressively withered unto atrophy, and at that point in time I write of, we were in a roommate situation—where the roommates despise one other. And that led me to live in a world of imagination. I will not say much about Charlotte in this book. I do not wish to give her more pain than I already did by being a bum. I will leave out our troubles in case she ever reads this book. Let’s just say we met in New York, fell in love, and upon my suggestion agreed to move to LA with me. And it turned out somewhat like that son and father in the campground by the Grand Canyon, one of us blew it and that one was me. Whilst Charlotte quickly adjusted to not just the city but found social circles and a profitable job, I continued to dwell in fantasies of “making it” in the film industry without any connections, but mostly without even any plans. It was a recipe for failure straight out of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive but I couldn’t see the palm trees for the rats. 

It was after the birth of our first and only child that I gradually ceased to exist in Charlotte’s mind. So when life gives you lemons, you make vodka and sodas with lemon. When reality is unsatisfying, you can hedge pleasant dreams against nightmares.

After over a decade in LA I started to have the most incredibly vivid dreams of New York, as vivid as dreaming can be, as vivid as the dreams I would have about having a conversation with either of my dead parents. As is often the way in dreams, my physical perception would be different and the geography of New York would change. The skyscrapers lost their height somewhat, and there were fewer people. The sheer height of Manhattan and the density of the crowds interferes with seeing that you are actually there when you are, and so these days it is only in dreams, when New York is bathed in a benign light, that I would actually visit. I tend to believe that was less true in the 1970s when I arrived. Even then it might have been claustrophobic, but it was nothing like it is today.

On waking from these gold and yellow dreams I would keep my eyes closed and remain in bed. I would lay there motionless like some Proustian brat as I fell, up or down (who could say?), from the heaven of my dreams. And yet even as I fell, lost as if I were an invalid confusing twilight and dawn, my eyelids would peel open and the yellow—yes, yellow—light, would peek in through the blinds. I would stay in bed as long as I could stand it, half-believing that I was in that fictitious and at times benign New York that doesn’t exist and that most likely never truly did.

How the world spins; how tightly we are all are tied together, especially now.

I could hardly bear to look at photos of New York anymore. New York was my life, my lover, my enemy. I miss it now more than ever, but what I miss is something that is either gone or may not have ever existed. I am putting all of this in the book that I am currently writing. This morning I wrote (from personal feeling) something about how so many people born or raised in New York wish to escape. And New Yorkers who move to California wish nothing more than to “return” but they are not sure where they really yearn to return to.

The yellow evening sun beating against the glass and burglar gates, protecting my childhood safety and my mind, while garbage-strewn alleys were outside instead of guardian angels crashing into airplane pilots, yet my young imagination ran wild; decades before I heard of that Franco-Brazilian aviator, I was my own Alberto Santos-Dumont in my own airship circling around some type of imaginary Eiffel Tower. The airship had now sunk. It had deflated years before.

My life revolved so much around my parents that when it came to forging my own identity my development was rather stunted. I was coddled by my parents; they presented me to others as the perfect child, but I was very far from perfect. 

It took me five or six years to start going through my mom’s boxes. Among carbon copies of letters sent to relatives abroad and endless Xeroxes of the articles she wrote for the émigré newspapers, there were hidden clues. I realized that I was not the only one who felt like their life was made up of missing pieces. 

Of course everyone has secrets. Some of these are utterly naïve and benign, some are a bit murky but ultimately harmless, and some others are pitch black, bitter to the core. The latter ones are rarely, if ever, revealed. 

It was not a major revelation to me, as I dug through my mother’s papers, that she had kept a “motherload” of letters between me and my old lovers. What freaked me out was that she somehow found and saved the correspondences. It felt like a betrayal of trust. My mother had always been a snoop and an egregious one at that, constantly prying for juicy bits, often brazenly. Going through her boxes—her smell still there; her name, Julia, handwritten
on the lid—I wondered at the olfactory reminder: does this mean that matter can neither be created nor destroyed?

That was what came as a stark contrast to her own history. I remember only very few things from her early life, I do not know quite how she and my father met nor even why they decided to get married. Memory is selective and so are histories, which is why everything needs to be written down, so that they will not be forgotten and in some sense, or in some way, our lives will go on forever. I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, here present my research so that human events do not fade with time.

Going through the suitcases and crates of my mom’s life I found an interesting note from her own mother. It described how my mother was born. I found it enthralling. My mother did not know anything about how she was born and why. This is probably more common nowadays but under the hammer and sickle it was not only taboo but a Hester Prynne letter scenario which perhaps never left either the mother or the daughter.

I threw out a great many of the horoscopes she wrote for extra cash, and in which she also believed. She decried religion, and in the depths of her delirium would yell, “I am going to hell and I can’t wait!” And yet like all of us she needed to believe, to believe in something. Looking through them I found a note scrawled in a hand I recognized as my grandmother’s. It started, “You were born…” but I immediately put it away. I knew my mom was resentful of her mother but here I had found one of many skeleton keys, one that might open a locked door. Even though my mother spent most of her life—no, all of it—with my grandmother, she did not know her own history. And just as her mother would "abandon" her,—so she abandoned me in the same fashion at times. Julia wanted to live unencumbered and I was too young to know how to live, and I still don’t. Julia wanted to be unfettered and I unfettered myself from New York only to find a different type of entrapment in LA: in perpetual unemployment, in marriage, in fatherhood, in age. Each move of us insects is not enough to escape the web of God the Spider.

I had a Day of the Locust one time.