No Fare No Well

vrepentaimmpmbate, 'gtharder-

USCALOOSA, 1974-197

t is not by desire, but 1 am now of the age of the Ancient Mari-kfil ner, grabbing at your arm at the mouth of a dark alley, speaking of my own dead sea, my own phan­tasms, once people but now figments warped in a ball of dark molten glass. Among them are a few treasonous aca­demic wretches, but mainly they are pre­cious loved ones—my children, my lost wife, my hearty supporters, my fellow addicts now gone old, nuts or dead. A few warning voices cried out, but I could not listen. By age 33 I was gone into perfect alcoholism. This is a common tale to the world but uncommon to this cookie who thought he was tough and had a glib, nihilistic answer for those lesser ones, you know, ignorant of my mission. You will not have to say, "Unhand me, graybeard loon," because my grip on you is kindly and loose. Either my story stands or you walk.

Only now can I put into words my mis­sion and my own unflinching arrogance.

Now that I'm the age of old hero Bob Dylan, who, last I looked, passes as a slimy midget at a square dance, with that pencil-thin mustache and Hank Williams death coat. The age of other hero Keith Richards, seen lately wearing bass lures in his haii, a pal of mine pointed out. These durable roadmen have earned their couture by work in song and dance, of course, while mere screeders like me get the hand-me-downs from Picasso. I had no plans for living past 40, still don't, and it seems a good time to just jump in and be

a goddamned fool. But older dudes with gray ponytails or pearl studs in their ears embarrass me. I do recall dressing for my mission in Tuscaloosa, sometimes in coat and tie as 1 stumbled, but smartly, you understand, to the saloon or liquor store that opened the earliest. What mission?

I attached a nobility to my hard drink­ing. It brought more fools into focus and illuminated my friends into angels. I believed my courage, vision and art were tied to the countless bottles and glasses I upended. Much fortitude was required from me, lonesome on God's mission, although, God knows, who was he? More likely a drunk himself whose vocation was hiding from us, thereby assuring his myth. A few soldiers of art were given birth to light up, even bum our given portions of this earth and make it happy or at least wiser. Rough, even unto lunacy and break­down, was the way. Because God was tired, his mistakes had brought terror in their wake, and he needed an eon on the

lam. His son had proved this earth would break him, heart and body. This Christ himself retired mysteriously to the desert for meditation and recovery from ignorant and cruel men. Back in the world, betrayed by a close friend, he made it only to age 33 before the hatreds of church govern­ment and the Romans brought on his tor­ture and nailing to the rugged old cross. He died more quickly than those around him, calling out that his father had for­saken him. His brief life and then death by what some might construe as suicide pointed to holy fatigue over this scream­ing, violent, stupid world. I counted myself as no Christian then, but is it any mystery why I played Dylan's Slow Train Coming endlessly through four worn-out vinyls?

At my own 33, I was given the rest of my life to amaze and discomfit the unchanged fools evermore, and I was a snob, although I'd have fought with any­body who called me one. None could avail against me or weigh on my ears. I had ready answers. I was a made writer.

Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, Donald Barthelme, Philip Roth and John Cheever had declared this truth in print, on book jackets. I loved this big town and believed I was bringing students close to their own sacred instincts. I spat on techniques and devices. Still do. My colleagues had voted almost unanimously for my tenure and promotion to professor. I was a friend to man. But this was a small matter. I kissed no ass. I can hear my tinny roars from here, an awful prelude to DUIs, jail, hospi­tals and the state's own nuthouse, which, I sense, sat on the edge of the campus itself. A wonderful irony until I was hauled there by gentle policemen to whom I pro­tested I was a war hero and kind. But I had shown an empty revolver in some berserk lecture about the six movements of a story. With that .22 magnum I blew in the floor of my MG convertible to let out the rain­water. But worse, I'd shot a hunting arrow into the front door of my estranged wiie's house to protest my love. My children

were rightly kept from me where I lived in the green shack almost on the railroad tracks. Such was the din inside myself, I don't recall any noise.

Fired by the university, I wore this dis­missal by idiots as a badge of pride. With student thieves, check bouncers and the raving castaways of the drug stream, I was attempting a comeback as a punk rocker at 37. I must assure you, as my bandsmen and girlfriends in love with ruin did me, I remained rock-righteous, stoned by mediocrats. Noth­ing much registered. I waited sincerely for the check for a million from the Pub­lishers Clearing House sweepstakes. I opened no other correspondence.

It was a long four-year good-bye to Tuscaloosa I lived. I waited two years for my literary talent to return, the talent that had won me an intense cult (and cult only) around the country.

Totally without talent, but in physical necessity, I wrote a small book called Ray in asthmatic, expressionistic vignettes

combed into handsome form by my brilliant friend and editor Gordon Lish, to whom I owe lifelong thanks. Gordon was a hard drinker him­self in those days. He knew the love, loss, impotence and raving, and he was, sui generis, the mas­ter of the echo. Too much said is too much dead. Negative space is your friend. I never reread my books, in fear akin to panic that I could never return to such grace as I had early on. It was only years later that I could thank Gordon fully for what a masterpiece of

editing he'd done on the bleating scat­tershot of this book.

I'd lost everything, but I had Gordon. Pride and snobbery kept me drinking, but they also kept me upright, convinced I was even better now torn to pieces. And only a monster, in my case, could not give thanks on his knees to his blood kin—brothers, sister, bewildered and crushed parents, nephews—who traveled hundreds of miles again and again to assure me I was still their good tiger, worth saving, even though they had to be horriiied by my insane self-appointed bungalow at the tracks, instru­ments lying all around, sheets nailed to the floor, women much too young for me loung­ing in or fleeing the precincts, my ragged bandsmen sworn to sing my novel in punk rock, some of them trash so long now you could not imagine their having essences from which to decline.

It is a good thing I did not know I'd hit bot­tom, but I can now recall with clarity when it was. I was in the Bryce asylum drying out

yet again when my father came to the ward door and they let me out to the foyer to talk with him. He was white-haired, handsome, fedora in hand but stooped in grief.

"Son, I'm just an old man. I can't make these trips anymore. Where did we fail you?" With his hand on my shoulder, he broke into tears, a rare act for the tough guys of the Depression and World War II.

"It's not your fault, Daddy," I said.

His sorrow should have floored me, but once out of the bin (they couldn't hold you ii you scored sane on a truly dumb psycholog­ical test), I got drunk instantly and returned to the door of the ward with a huge box of cigarettes for the poor fellows still locked up. Oh, my children, what a grand specimen I was. I recall a big wad of arms of the insane reaching for me, mouths screaming thanks. These poor souls, and me free out on the roads like a Lincoln burning premium. "Hannah's out! The Captain is out!" yelled

my acolytes in the shack when I returned. Some had stolen, some had given. The place had been cleaned up by one of those sweet girls who slept with me out of pity, I think. Back, feisty, arisen!

My dad wanted me out of this town bad, and I did leave for Hollywood work, got a nice option sale on Ray that saved me from pennilessness, and I became healthy near the beautiful green Pacific. I was a bum screenwriter, however. Rob­ert Altman gave me a slight piece of work but can never know how much he restored my pride, even as I failed and came to know I was cut out only for fic­tion. He didn't care. I did. I was next to genius, and this man invited me into his wooden Malibu mansion, where, in a Plexiglas tower, seagulls all around me, I failed and was brought coffee by a Spanish maid. Then the benevolent John Leggett of the Iowa Fiction Workshop found me and brought me out there. He must have learned I was straight and knew I needed another chance.

But let me explain why leaving Tusca-loosa was hard. It is the physicality of the place, mansions and shacks, both of which I knew well. Foremost I would be absent from my children altogether in California,

but next was the curious magnetism of the little city where junk housing will run right smack up to beauty in the form of Greek Revival eruptions or the magnificent front quad of the university campus. It is a city that has been, and is trying to go, every­where. It was once the state capital (much Queen This and Queen That) but appears to have been abruptly halted by overhead bombers, wave after wave, saying, "Just forget it." Out of those bomb bays fell cells and clots of student housing, hives of premade crack dens and rotting WWII box homes rammed window to window, with multiple suburbs of "country club" estates (laundromat, pool, tennis-court bacheloramas) and an outright nasty uni­versity "strip" without even a fair bookstore. The nasty and the sublime are in a quar­rel. The thing is, I'm a small-town creature, and this was my first adult city. I inhaled it, knew it by dark crooked alley, by wide

genteel street. The people in the university are not just "cosmopolitan" (so what?); they are smart. Gay Talese went to school here. On the south side of town, on Jerusa­lem Heights, sits world-famous Archibald's barbecue, where you get your order with only white loaf bread on the side, served by women whose behinds are so vast there's not even a memory of a butt. Didn't I say nasty and sublime, one never far from the other? I loved the choices; I romped in the mess. Here I once had an English Tudor mansion and a new blonde wife with eyes blue like spring sky in Nebraska, where she grew up. She had a girlish laugh that just hollowed you out with gratitude. I had a gorgeous and nasty city to love. I sat a princedom of literary fame. Then turned beast and threw it all away.

I was by no means too good for this place. I was this place, I dressed for this place, colleagues and students loved me, and I loved them back. I lost so much here that, still, I'm already saying good­bye when I drive into its city limits to visit my daughter and her husband, always a sweet time. But the pain is too much. You turn beast by causing confusion and pain to others, then drinking yourself into righteousness. You repeat this so much it

is impossible to ask forgiveness again. In those close to you, love turns to concern, to pity, to dry understanding (the coup de grace), then to nothing. You are a bray­ing doorstop. I remember being ushered politely out of one fancy bar by the owner, who thought I was not, well, ready for the establishment. He would bring me drinks outdoors. How special, I thought. I was wearing nothing but a long leather over­coat spattered white by paint from fresh­ening my slum. Yet I had my own servant. I carried a torch for my wife long after divorce, in fact long after her evapora­tion. She ceased caring whether I would be a monk or an astronaut. Curing cancer would not bring her back. Worst of all, she was forever beyond apology or amends. My children gathered back to me once I was clean, but 30-year-old phantoms are all over me on reentry to a big town that wanted to be gracious to me, to laugh

with me, to share its best with me. I get the shivers, the dread.

It is a heavily trafficked city of almost 90,000, blue collar in the main, but home to 16,000 university students, and in 1974 to Paul "Bear" Bryant, whose foot­ball team is number one in the nation. He is a myth who smokes Chesterfields and drinks bourbon, sometimes heavily. His myth permeates the town so deeply that even my gay barber, with a butterfly tattoo on his throat, alerts me in a whis­per to an update on the Bear, a man I love too: Bear has told his team he will avoid drink in honor of their efforts to lilt themselves to a higher spiritual plane of blocking, tackling, passing and running through the line of the powerful teams of the Southeastern Conference, toughest in America. Bama just lost a rare game and its violently loyal alumni throughout the nation are baffled and angry, blam­ing the players for not heeding the guid­ance of Saint Bear, who always takes the blame for a loss. Please stop this frame, right here in the barber's chair on the uni­versity strip. The physicality of the town drew me in, I have said. I mean precisely its physical, balls-out athletic force, my friends, and (concluded on page 134)

NO FARE, NO WELL

(continued from page 66) most definitely its football. 1 felt one with the team, felt like busting some­body up, felt like streaking into the end zone after hauling in a bullet pass midstride on a post pattern. I was still in decent physical shape and won at tennis against stiff and much younger competition. I surrendered bodily to the Crimson Tide, loved its out-of-control fans, hoarse and limp after a bashing-good win in Birming­ham. Loved the Jack Daniels on ice, maybe a little Coke thinning it, in the paper cup. You're sunburnt even in sweet October. Please could I begin again when I left that barber's chair,

all freshened up for any party, ready for love and too much sunshine?

This town had me in one beautiful hug.

1 remember now commiserating with the barber over the Bear's drinking problem, but we knew he'd lick it. This was nothing to a myth.

Christ, even us little people could lick a little habit like that.

Good-bye, good barber. I'm bigger than I let on. I love even queers, for instance. I'm on a mission.

And in fact I knew heaven 10 years later when I saw my father and I was sober. My dad wore the checkered fedora the fans of Bear Bryant wore all over the USA.

You turn beast by causing confusion and pain to

others, then drinking yourself into righteousness.

In those close to you, lovjJurns to concern, to pity,

to dry understantfftn, then to nothing.