Idiot Wind Read online

  Fifteen years earlier, fresh out of Dartmouth with an honours degree in English, I had moved back to New York from New Hampshire and landed my first job in the publishing business: a copy editor’s position in the college textbook division at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This is it! I thought. My childhood dreams of a literary career in the Big City were becoming a reality. I was twenty-two at the time, and everything seemed to be going to plan. Two months after hiring on at HBJ, I capped a five-year courtship by marrying my high-school sweetheart, Marie – despite my father’s repeated attempts to talk me out of it. He said I’d be foolish to rush into marriage with the first (and only) girl I’d ever dated. I ignored his warnings. I was young and in love and sure I would prove him wrong.

  Marie and I moved into a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge. Our budget was too tight for anything grander. But we didn’t mind. We were two kids from blue-collar families and no strangers to stretching a dollar. Besides, like all newlyweds, we had faith that love would conquer all – and that better days were coming. And for a few charmed years our optimism seemed justified. Marie was promoted to head buyer for women’s sportswear at Gimbel’s department store in Manhattan, and shortly thereafter I was promoted to chief copy editor at HBJ. When our raises came through, we moved to a bigger apartment in neighbouring Dyker Heights, where I converted the spare bedroom into a writer’s den. It was a welcome change; in our old apartment the only place I could set up my typewriter was on the Formica dinette table in the roach-infested kitchen. And while at first that had seemed a suitably bohemian setting for writing a debut novel, it had quickly lost its romantic appeal. Now I had a proper desk in a roach-free space, and I vowed to start putting in more time at the typewriter.

  Unfortunately, that vow was easier to make than to keep, as Marie and I began spending more and more of our evenings caught up in the whirl of Manhattan’s nightlife. Between Marie’s connections in the fashion business and mine in the publishing world, we were constantly being invited to parties that kept us in the city late, and by the time we’d wobbled off the RR train in Bay Ridge and grabbed a cab home I was rarely in any shape to hit the typewriter. In my sober hours I’d look through the paltry pile of manuscript pages I’d produced since I’d left college, and my heart would sink. I had set myself a goal after graduation, to publish my first novel by my twenty-fifth birthday. That deadline was already in the rear-view mirror. I began to doubt I’d ever reach my goal. However, instead of redoubling my efforts, I started feeling sorry for myself. And that’s when my troubles began to multiply.

  Before then, I’d never had to wrestle with self-doubt. I’d sailed through school with honours at every level, accomplishing everything I’d put my mind to. So when I set my sights on a writing career after college I naively assumed I’d succeed, as I always had. Now, the limits of my abilities were becoming painfully apparent. And since my early success had left me woefully unprepared to deal with disappointment, my first reaction was to sulk and play the ‘if only’ game. If only I didn’t have to slave at HBJ for rent money, I’d have finished the book by now. If only I hadn’t married Marie so soon, I’d have had more solitude for writing. Which only made things worse because I knew I was making excuses, not progress. Before long, Happy Hour at the Lion’s Head was the only time of day I felt good about myself, and as the months dragged on I began drinking more heavily than I had in my fraternity days at college.

  As my Irish nana used to say, ‘a burden shared is a burden halved’. In hindsight, I have no doubt I should have confided in Marie. After all, how many thousands of hours had we spent sharing everything on our minds since the night we’d first met at a Sadie Hawkins dance in the Sachem High School gym? But instead of opening up to the one person who could best have understood what I was going through, I kept my troubles to myself. I had too much stubborn pride, I guess; I could never bring myself to confess to Marie that her Ivy League wonder boy now felt like a loser.

  Marie could hardly ignore the changes in my behaviour, however, and began to complain about all the ‘overtime’ I claimed to be working at the office – my fallback excuse for the hours I spent drinking every evening in the West Village, fooling myself that hanging out with real writers was the next best thing to being one myself. A pathetic delusion only alcohol could sustain. By the time I showed my guilty face at home, it would be after nine o’clock and Marie would already have eaten dinner and retired to bed without me. But her patience was wearing thin. One grim night I arrived home to find all the house lights blazing – and Marie crying hysterically on the living-room couch. She had reached her limit.

  ‘My God, Marie, what’s the matter?’ I asked, as if I didn’t already know.

  ‘I can’t take this any more, Pete,’ she sobbed. ‘If you can’t make time for me, what’s the point of staying together?’

  It was wrenching to look at her weeping face and see not the polished sophisticate she’d grown into during her years in the rag trade but the vulnerable teenager she’d been when we first started dating. I’d made her miserable, and misery had stripped her bare. I felt so ashamed it was hard to meet her eyes as I stammered my apologies and swore that I still loved her. To my relief, Marie followed her heart and believed me. I even believed it myself. Yet, for all my good intentions, it wasn’t long before I betrayed her trust again, even more egregiously, by climbing into bed with another woman while Marie was overseas scouting the latest French fashions at the Paris Prêt-à-Porter show.

  Drunks save their lamest alibis for themselves, and though I knew this latest betrayal was only another selfish attempt to distract myself from what ailed me I told myself it was just a one-night stand – my shot at a taste of the free love I’d steadfastly refrained from during my hippie days in college, out of loyalty to Marie. But my infatuation with Bobbi B – a husky-voiced siren ten years my senior – was stronger than I’d expected. Our first hook-up soon led to another, and eventually blossomed into a year-long affair that only ended when Bobbi – like Marie – discovered how hollow my promises could be.

  Bobbi was an ad exec who occasionally had to fly out to LA to oversee production of TV commercials and sometimes she’d give me the key to her apartment on Barrow Street and ask me to collect her mail while she was away. On her final trip before our break-up she asked an additional favour. ‘I left some cash on the kitchen table. Will you go down to the Con Ed office and pay my electric bill when it shows up in the mail?’

  ‘Sure,’ I promised, and then forgot all about it – until Bobbi returned two weeks later to find her power shut off and her refrigerator full of rotting food. After that, she washed her hands of me. ‘You’re a great fuck, Pete, but a lousy friend,’ were her parting words. Which stung, because I couldn’t deny it – any more than I could deny I was a drunk or a lousy husband.

  Soon afterward, Marie reached the same conclusion and informed me she was filing for an annulment. It crushed me to hear her say it at last. But I knew it was the ending I’d seen coming for a long time. There was no point pretending I could fix what I’d broken.

  My father was right, after all. I wasn’t the exception that proved the rule. I was just another naive fool who’d rushed into marriage prematurely – and hurt a good woman who deserved better. There was nothing to do now but bow out gracefully, and with tears streaming down my face I picked up the phone and called one of my HBJ co-workers to ask if I could rent the spare bedroom in his apartment on the Upper West Side. The following morning – a cold, grey Saturday at the start of America’s Bicentennial year – Marie helped me stow my belongings in a rental van. We hugged goodbye in tearful silence. There were no words that could have made our parting any easier. And so, with a feeble toot of the horn and a farewell wave, I set off for Manhattan to see what I could salvage from the wreckage.

  Remarkably, the problems that plagued my personal life hadn’t yet affected my performance at work. Hungover or not, I showed up at my desk every morning and gave HBJ my best effort. But shortly af
ter my split with Marie I left HBJ to take a job as acquisitions editor for the textbook division of D. Van Nostrand Company in their offices near Madison Square Garden. The new position was a rung higher on the corporate ladder and the bump in salary it brought me would pay a lot of bar tabs, so I thought it was a change for the better. Instead, it proved to be my undoing.

  Acquisitions editors spend a lot of their time meeting with professors who claim to have the next big idea for a bestselling textbook. In that regard, the job comes with built-in excuses for absenting yourself from the office. If I said I was going to spend the afternoon on the Columbia University campus, or pop over to Brooklyn to interview someone at Pratt Institute, my superiors had no objection. In fact, they took it as a sign of diligence. They had no clue that most of my so-called scouting trips were just a convenient cover for my increasingly frequent bouts of midday drinking – at least not at first. But six months into my tenure, as it became obvious that my time away from the office wasn’t producing any signed contracts, I could sense my bosses growing skeptical about my ability to get the job done.

  I knew I was headed for a reckoning. I had stepped up my drinking to reckless levels after Marie sent me packing. But in the end it wasn’t my failure to sign new authors that sealed my fate. Instead, it was my failure to meet a pressing editorial deadline for one of the textbook projects I’d inherited from my predecessor – a freshman-level primer on textile design. For months, I’d been bluffing about my progress editing the manuscript, when in fact I’d hardly made a dent in the first chapter. The deadline for transmitting the text to the printer for galley production was rapidly approaching, and the textbook’s author was calling me nearly every day from her office at Ithaca College to ask why I hadn’t sent her an edited manuscript. When she finally threatened to take the matter up with the managing editor, the only way I could stall her was by promising to fly up to Ithaca that weekend with the edited manuscript so we could work through all the changes together.

  There was little chance I could edit the entire four-hundred-page manuscript in the two days I had left before our meeting, but I was desperate enough to try. That evening I went down to the Village to connect with the dealer Bobbi B had always bought her speed from, hoping a supply of bootleg Black Beauties would boost my productivity. However, even wired on amphetamines I couldn’t outrun the ticking clock, and when I flew upstate on Saturday morning I had less than a quarter of the manuscript ready for inspection. I arrived in Ithaca strung out from a two-day speed jag and half-drunk from the three Bloody Marys I’d downed on the plane – in no shape to make a good first impression, even after I’d popped a few breath mints and ducked into the restroom to splash my face with water. Still, there was no turning back now, so I hailed a cab and grimly set off for the professor’s apartment.

  Despite her hectoring tone in our recent phone conversations, the professor greeted me warmly when I turned up at her door. She was a big-boned blonde in her late thirties, with a pageboy haircut and the open, guileless smile of a Midwestern farm girl.

  ‘Nice to finally meet you, Peter. Come on in,’ she said, and ushered me to the dining-room table, which she’d cleared off to use as our workspace.

  While I dug the manuscript out of my briefcase, she poured coffee, then we settled down to go through my suggested changes. By the time we took a break for lunch, we had nearly run through all the pages I’d had a chance to edit and my stomach was so tied up in knots I could barely choke down the ham and cheese sandwich she fixed me.

  The moment I’d been dreading was upon me at last, and with no hope of avoiding it any longer I pushed my plate aside, cleared my throat and confessed the true state of affairs. The poor woman was stunned.

  ‘You haven’t even touched the last three hundred pages?’ she gasped. ‘We’ll never make the printer’s deadline now! How could you let this happen?’

  I owed her the truth, and she got it. The whole sorry tale of my break-up with Marie and ensuing slide into alcoholic irresponsibility. I had tears in my eyes by the time I finished, and her eyes were brimming too, but her sympathy for my personal problems didn’t deter her from telling me she’d be calling my boss on Monday to insist that he reassign her book to an editor she could trust. It was the only sensible thing to do, and I didn’t try to dissuade her. But I begged her not to act until I’d had a chance to break the news to my boss first. I was grateful when she grudgingly agreed to delay her call until ten o’clock on Monday morning.

  Back in Manhattan, I typed my letter of resignation as soon as I’d unpacked, then spent the remainder of the weekend at the White Horse Tavern, getting falling-down drunk like Dylan Thomas. Fuck it! I told myself. Why go gently? If you drink hard enough, you reach a point where you quit worrying about your screw-ups and just accept the fact that whatever happens next will be something you richly deserve. ‘Martyred to drink’, as the Irish would have it. I’d jumped on that cross like I was born to it. And perhaps I was. Shake my family tree and you’d have Irish martyrs dropping all around you – as I often reminded myself whenever I was tired of shouldering all the blame. At heart, I always knew that was a cop-out. But when you’re stumbling off a barstool, you’ll grab any crutch that’s handy – shillelaghs not excluded.

  First thing Monday morning, looking every bit as miserable as I felt, I walked into the managing editor’s office, repeated my tale of woe and tendered my immediate resignation. Mr Pak’s reaction to the news wasn’t the angry dressing-down I’d been expecting. Instead, with enviable equanimity, he nodded his head in regret and said sadly, ‘You should have come to me sooner.’ Mr Pak seemed even sorrier for my loss of face than I was. Which shamed me worse than any tirade could have – as if my self-esteem weren’t dragging in the dirt already. Mr Pak hadn’t cursed me out, but I cursed myself plenty back out in the street, and that morning I swore I was going to make some changes. Then I popped into the first Blarney Stone I passed and raised a glass to the future.

  To make ends meet after the debacle at Van Nostrand, I began soliciting freelance copy-editing and proofreading jobs from my contacts in the business, and for a while it looked like I might have a third act. I should have known better. If I’d had the self-discipline you need to be a successful freelancer, I wouldn’t have been freelancing in the first place. Inevitably I began missing deadlines and getting blackballed from future assignments, and within eighteen months the ruin of my publishing career was complete. Not surprisingly, those same months marked the steady growth of my newly acquired taste for cocaine. From then on, I had the idiot wind at my back, sweeping me toward a future that would bring no end of fresh regrets.

  Enough! I vowed, as the bus emerged from the tunnel and fought for traction on the Weehawken hill. The damage was done. Brooding over it was pointless. It was time to start looking ahead. Fortunately, my harried existence as a coke addict hadn’t completely sapped my capacity for optimism, and as the bus pushed south through New Jersey I soothed my mind with the consoling fiction that the uncertain road ahead would provide me with the Kerouacian adventures I’d been longing to experience ever since I first read On the Road as a high-school sophomore. Who knows? I thought. There might even be a book in it.

  In my daydreams of hitting the road like Jack Kerouac, I’d always pictured myself as the Sal Paradise character, Kerouac’s fictional stand-in. Now here I was, hitting the road in the guise of Sal’s drug-addled sidekick, Dean Moriarty. This was a worrying role-reversal. One I’d have to overcome – and soon – to avoid the fate of Dean’s real-life model, Neal Cassady, who died aged forty-one with a bellyful of booze and pills, the hapless victim of his own excesses. I didn’t want an end like that. I doubt poor Neal wanted it either. But we’ll never know. He died alone by the side of a railroad track on a freezing night in Mexico, a holy fool who kept his own counsel to the end.

  Of course, in the back of my mind I realised that my pretensions of following in Kerouac’s footsteps were a self-aggrandising fantasy that allowed me to
distance myself emotionally from the dismal situation in which I now found myself, but when you’re down and out you’ll clutch at the flimsiest of straws to convince yourself you’re not totally worthless. If clinging to my Kerouac fantasies was the only way to keep my spirits up out on the road, so be it. At least I’d be in good company.

  My hands and face were a sticky mess by the time I finished the jelly sandwiches, so I grabbed my pack and squeezed into the toilet cubicle to wash up and shave. When my blurry image in the sheet metal mirror looked marginally less disreputable, I finished cleaning up my act by removing all the drug paraphernalia from my pack and burying it deep beneath a pile of wadded paper towels at the bottom of the waste bin. Now, if a highway cop nabbed me for hitchhiking and started nosing around in my pack, the worst I’d be facing were vagrancy charges. Foresight, I grinned. When was the last time I’d exercised any of that?

  The bus was barely doing thirty on the snow-clogged New Jersey Turnpike. Which was fine with me. The longer it took to reach Richmond, the longer I’d have to sleep. We were just passing Rahway when I bundled my coat for a pillow and turned in for the night. The next time I open my eyes, I told myself, all the snow will be behind me.

  The trip through the Garden State must have triggered it – Kate, bless her soul, was a Jersey girl from Bergen. A chestnut-haired, Scots-Irish beauty with a hint of Cherokee in her cheekbones and a smile that could gladden my heart from a block away. I met her one night in the Lion’s Head, about a year after my break-up with Marie. By then, I was back to dating and in no hurry to abandon the life of a bed-hopping bachelor in post-pill Manhattan – but from the moment Kate and her raucous girlfriend Flossie came laughing into the bar that night, tipsy and on the prowl, my bachelor days were numbered.