I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (29 page)

The Michael J. Fox issue I was holding was dated January 1988. I did the math—had it really been twenty-two years ago?—as I sat there in that latest January in my life. Fox was on the cover because he was about to open in the film version of Jay McInerney’s 1984 novel,
Bright Lights, Big City.
A story fueled by Bolivian marching powder, not pipes packed with meth, it was about a young straight guy’s anti-quest for love in downtown clubs instead of this old gay one’s on Internet sites.

I sat staring at Fox’s painted portrait on the cover. This was one of the issues of
Interview
I had been in charge of before Shelley Wanger took over as editor in chief. Inside of it was a short story by Charles Bukowski I had commissioned titled “Hollywood.” I thought of that small town in Ireland where Mary and Ethne were from, the name that they swore to me meant “little cell of Kevin.” There was a feature about David Hockney and his stage sets for a production at the Los Angeles Music Center of
Tristan und Isolde
and I thought of our crying together at Henry Geldzahler’s memorial service at the Met when we told each other how he’d cut us out of the herd and how, when I left, I had found my way back into the midst of it, where I still, lost, remained. I flipped to the Fox story and skimmed the introduction before getting to my first sentence spoken to him in the Q and A. “I met Jay McInerney at a party at Norman Mailer’s the other night…,” I began. I smiled at how easily even back then I could name-drop. “Jesus. What a New York sentence,” Michael countered. I smiled too at his rejoinder but read it a bit differently that morning. Staring now at the burnt spot from a meth pipe left atop my desk, marveling at how less than an hour ago I had gotten through my latest interview those twenty-two years later, I felt as if I now were serving out the final days of my New York sentence.

I threw the Michael J. Fox issue back atop the pile and crawled atop my filthy sheet—turning over on my side in the fetal position. I shut my eyes. Archie and Teddy jumped up next to me and curled up against my chest. The musk of their fur filled my nostrils as I gently enclosed their tiny paws inside my palm. I moaned at my exhaustion and blotted out the memory of the last twenty-four hours by recalling how that Michael J. Fox issue had gotten me out to Hollywood long before I knew it too could be considered my cell.

Dawn Steel, then the president of Columbia Pictures, had known me during my highfalutin flunky years at Paramount before I got my job at
Interview
. She was then the president of production at Paramount and oversaw such hits as
Flashdance
and
Top Gun
and
Fatal Attraction
. She had read the Michael J. Fox
Interview
issue when it first came out and given me a call at my office. Dawn, who cut a fabulous corporate figure in her Giorgio Armani pantsuits, had once asked me why I was wasting my time at Paramount if I didn’t want a career in the movie business. She had been dallying at my desk waiting for my boss, Buffy, to get off the phone and noticed that instead of doing the filing required of me in my job I was working on a series of short stories. “If you want to be a writer, write,” Dawn told me. “But if you’re a secretary you can’t say, ‘Fuck the filing.’ Well, you can say it,” she said, smoothing the lapels on her Armani. “But you’ve still got to do it.”

There was a vulgar side to Dawn no Armani could disguise. She didn’t deny it either but wove it into her public persona. What some found overly brusque I found rather bracing, even refreshing: her female ballsiness. I think she thought she needed such a demeanor in her office arsenal along with her tailored Armani suits in order to deflect the machismo of the male executives over whom she had risen and who resented her for it.

Maybe Dawn sensed I was the one male on the executive floor who was no threat to her, since I was sitting at a secretary’s desk. Whatever the reason, she was always kind to me and, when she got me one-on-one, took me quite seriously in a way those same men never did since they could not fathom why a male would be sitting at such a desk.

Dawn had moved on to head up Columbia Pictures when she was hired to replace former independent producer David Putnam, who wielded his British outsiderness in a punitive fashion in his disastrous foray into American corporate movie culture. After arriving at Columbia, she had quickly put down a macho chit, hiring Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn to star in an upcoming Brian De Palma movie,
Casualties of War
.

Dawn called me up to compliment me on my Fox story and, more important, for having followed her advice to pursue a writing career. “Fuck the filing now!” she exclaimed, laughing. She asked if
Interview
and I might be interested in cohosting a party for Fox and De Palma at her home in Los Angeles as an intimate little send-off for them as they left to make that film for her in the jungles of Thailand. I, of course, jumped at the chance—with Fred Hughes’s approval once he made sure he would also be invited.

The party turned out to be my first real experience seeing Hollywood in its own close-up, which made it clear to me that glamour is but the bit in the bridle that buckles business to every social function there. That might sound cynical, but as I lay in bed curled up with Archie and Teddy that January morning in 2010 and recalled that party that Dawn and I threw back in 1988 I also realized how innocent we all really were—Dawn and Michael and Fred and I—as an unscripted De Palma digressed yet again when telling me the story of his upcoming film and Dawn rolled her eyes at me behind his back.

I introduced Dawn to Fred that night and the three of us, standing in the corner, later marveled at Michael J. Fox’s grace as he moved about the party leaving behind him, in an echo of light, a bit of his stardom’s glow to hover around those he had just talked to, displaying—no need for me to take that planned side trip to Griffith Park the next day—the real astronomy of Hollywood.

“He’s so jaunty,” Fred said admiringly. “And yet so cagey too—like Cagney playing George M. Cohan. You should do a remake, Dawn, and put that boy in it. Just look at the way he moves.… yes … jaunty,” Fred said again, the word conjuring for but a moment—I couldn’t help but notice it—an imponderable sadness in him even as he willed himself not to ponder it and just as quickly revived. “This is a jolly party, Dawn. Not exactly Hollywood in its heyday. But jolly, just jolly,” he said. Dawn and I laughed at Fred’s forced bonhomie, his backhanded compliment, and then both said at the same time as we all clinked our glasses, “Jolly, just jolly!’ the three of us falling silent and watching Michael move so gracefully about, all of us, I assumed, dwelling on a future that would from that moment on be nothing but brilliant.

But it was not to be.

We were wrong.

All of us.

Dawn died, in 1997, from a brain tumor.

Fred died too, in 2001, after a long secret bout with multiple sclerosis that could no longer be kept secret, the last seven years of his life spent wordlessly in bed.

Michael was to discover his Parkinson’s disease.

“And I’m a drug addict,” I said aloud for the first time that morning as I lay, no longer wordlessly, in bed. I opened my eyes. “I’m a drug addict,” I said again. I looked at Archie and Teddy still curled up beside me. They were the first ones to hear me say it. I cradled their paws more tenderly in my palm for telling them such a thing. And then I cried.

*   *   *

I wish I could say that the next day I went into rehab or found some other structural group equivalent. I didn’t. Instead, though admitting I was an addict, I convinced myself that my addiction wasn’t that bad. I only used meth for sex binges once a month—twice sometimes—and as long as I was only using it two or three days out of thirty I felt I was safe. The addiction was controllable. And as long as I only smoked it or snorted it and never administered it intravenously then I wasn’t a serious addict. I had even thrown guys out of my apartment who arrived with a needle ready to administer it to themselves. I had been with people who were really bad and messy drug addicts. I knew what that looked like and I was not a bad and messy drug addict. I was still keeping my life together.

That all changed on July 4, 2010.

*   *   *

I was back in Provincetown that summer and had begun to get more heavily into using. The first of that July I had been awake already for a day or two smoking meth and fucking around with a few of my new drug buddies, so I was in no shape to go hang out at a Fourth of July party at the home of one of my oldest and closest friends. He had also had a son by a surrogate a couple of years before, and the thought of being around the innocence of his beautiful child in the condition I was in was too much for me to bear. Instead of trying to sober up, I decided to just keep bingeing and found a sex partner online who said he had plenty of meth. He invited me over. I put on my sunglasses and took an alternate route on my bike to his place so I wouldn’t have to ride down the main street in town and chance running into people I knew. But as I approached the guy’s address I realized he lived one street over from my friend’s house where the party had begun. The back of the guy’s apartment abutted the back of my friend’s place. Should I chance being seen? Yes, I’d chance it, since I wanted more drugs. I wanted more sex. I parked my bike and quickly made my way into the guy’s basement apartment without being found out—there was, luckily, an old wooden fence between the properties—but his place was so close to my friend’s that I could hear the familiar voices of other friends at the party and my friend’s son, laughing and playing, running around outside.

No turning back now, though. I was in the stranger’s dingy, dark apartment. He quickly locked the door behind me. His curtains were already drawn. There were leather S and M accoutrements strewn about. We exchanged small talk as he saw me eyeing the bag of meth next to his computer on his desk. “Have you ever slammed?” he asked, using the blunt terminology that meth addicts employ for shooting up with a needle.

“No,” I said.

“Want to try it?” he asked. “I can administer it. I’m good at it.”

I shrugged. I don’t know why I shrugged. I don’t know why I was ready to acquiesce to a needle being put into my vein. I guess it was the natural unnatural progression of addiction, the chasing of a bigger, more intense and instant high. Maybe it was because I was already strung out from being up for two or three days. I am making no excuses for my decision. It didn’t even feel like a decision. It felt instead like I was simply yielding to what I had become. It felt as if the fight were over. I was literally laying down my arms as I lay on the bed. I was ready. That was all. I was ready.

The stranger diluted the meth in the needle, carefully measuring it out.

He tied a strap around my biceps.

He touched my arm.

And when he touched it I felt everyone who had ever touched my arm touch it with him.

He touched my arm.

Again, he touched it.

“I’m trying to find the right vein,” he explained. “There … here … this is a good one.” His finger lingered atop me as if a blind man were reading braille and had found the word he’d been searching for in the coded raised script he’d read many times before. I was now no longer writing the text. I had instead become it, a text that I could not even comprehend. My heart raced. I didn’t want to watch the injection, so I closed my eyes. I saw the two nurses standing over my mother so long ago and inserting that morphine drip into her arm. I finally felt the cold, sharp prick of the needle in my vein that I had wanted to feel that day I watched my mother drift away. I felt the push of it inside me. The stranger gently talked me through it. “I’m going to pull some of your blood back up into the needle,” he whispered close to my ear where he bent over me. “There. Good. I got it. Now—breathe; that’s it, breathe. I’m going to push it gently back in.” I felt the warm rush of my own blood—mixed together with the meth—as it went back down into my body. He untied my biceps. He pressed a cotton ball with alcohol against me. “Hold this there,” he told me. “And lift your arm above your head.” I did as I was told as the world sprouted wings and flew away at warp speed. I held on. I felt its wings flapping against my face. This was as close to flight as I had ever come. “I’ll be right back,” the stranger said. “I’m going to go do mine in the bathroom. Are you okay?”

I moaned, a combination of exhilaration and fear. The sense of flight rose higher within me. I opened my eyes. I spotted a blindfold on the floor. I put it on. I lifted my hand in the darkness in front of my face and for the first time since I was a child—for the first time since I saw my mother do it—I traced the
Ben Casey
symbols in the air. “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity,” I intoned in a tired whisper. I touched my nipples. I fingered myself. “Hurry,” I heard myself begging. “Hurry. Please.” I squirmed. The rush grew stronger and stronger. I struggled to stay atop the wings enveloping my body. The room spun. I splayed myself atop the bed. The bliss that settled over me was finally decipherable.

“Daddy!” I heard the innocent voice call next door. It brought me back to what I was doing for but an instant and I hated myself, but even self-hatred felt new in that moment.

“Daddy,” I heard myself say when I was running around a yard in Mississippi.

Ready or not, here I come, I heard. This is what a valley is, I heard. Everywhere there was an exquisite incongruity. “My memories of her drift in and out.” I had the sensation of leaving my own body by burrowing down to its deepest desire. “We shall not cease from exploration.” Sometimes we get to cross the street. A lone labellum clinging to its own life. A bevy of bejeweled Arab women arguing about something. “What they call in Sanskrit my ‘
bhavana.
’” Words were useless against it. Death, not a symbol, has many guises. A soprano. An alto. A hog caller. A stronger castle in the air. White-necked ravens. The scree through which one had to maneuver. “Kevin, honey, what are you doing?” She no longer walked her pet ocelot. I thought of the Vicious Circle. Radcliffe giggled. David Copperfield. “I know—right?” That freshly fallen pine straw carpeting our country yard. My arms—Twombly—became more frantic. My wrists were wrong. De Kooning. I caught a glimpse of her glistening body. There was a flash of nipple. “Do you know what a landscape is?” The bartender leaned in closer. “Lips?” “You’re wounds of a feather.” I wave back. I am waving still. A second shadow. To those who woo her with too-slavish knees. Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet. The tacky reflections of themselves. Ledger’s face circled in marijuana smoke. The whore choked me now. “Figgit,” he no longer whispered. His little face a fist of tears. “I will never abandon you.” A de Menil daughter. Come on, there’s another reel. Just go to the end of the reel. I was flying. My lavalavas. Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time.” The smell of his cordovan brogues. “Being alone,” I said, telling him the truth. A night that was no longer silent. Close your eyes. Clear your heart. Cut the cord. Things real. Things semi-real. No things. A wild horse grazing in the mist before me. “He opens the Doors.” Chico’s paw. Coco’s.
“Fantasma inquietante.”
A “waking dream.” Japa mala. Father Raphael. “The almond man is nuts.” He must have conducted a bit of Schumann at some point in his life. Some deeper stream I can’t quite name. “… the one with the most pain we have met…” The girl lifts her hand, covered in what she had coaxed from him. “Piteog.
Piteog
, Sister.” Piteog. The past is what passes through us all.