I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (33 page)

But in my search for it all, I did find a syringe still in its package. I have no idea how it got there or who left it. I stood holding the syringe in my hand. I felt the rush in my gut I would always get as I contemplated shooting up meth. I did not put the syringe with the paraphernalia next door. I stuck it back in the corner of the drawer and stuck the knowledge of it being hidden there in the back corner of my brain. It was the dumbest thing I’d done in six months.

*   *   *

And then I did something dumber.

I smoked meth with someone I met online.

I could say I did it out of loneliness. I could say I did it because I was tired of being a burden to my friends and family. I could say I did it because I was exhausted from being poverty stricken and being embarrassed to pay for my groceries with food stamps and, even though I had begun to volunteer at the soup kitchen in Provincetown, to be eating many of my lunches there myself. I could say I just wanted to escape what my life had become because of smoking meth in the first place. But all of those things are excuses.

I smoked meth when I had close to six months of sobriety because I am an addict.

I only smoked it for one night. It was not a binge. For those things I was grateful. And I knew that I would walk back into the fellowship I had joined within twenty-four hours of doing it. But I had to start counting my days of sobriety all over again. And I still had a speech to write for my trip to Albania for the State Department. The vast divide between the person with a meth pipe in his mouth and the man who was scheduled to have an inspiring speech in a little over two weeks bewildered me. Were the gods bemused by my bewilderment? I certainly was not. Yet I was not depressed by it either. I knew I was still on the path toward recovery. I had taken a slight detour. I had slipped a bit in its own scree. Like that night on Mount Kilimanjaro as I trudged toward another kind of summit: three steps forward, one step back.

I buckled down to write my keynote address.

Soon my sister arrived in Provincetown to take care of Archie and Teddy for ten days upon my departure for Albania and my pilgrimage to Rome.

*   *   *

I sat on the Spanish Steps rolling up my sleeves in the Roman heat. The speech in Albania had gone well and now I was on another kind of mission. I rubbed the tattoo on my right forearm and read the word “Hope” over and over as I listened to Haydn’s last six sonatas being played by Glenn Gould on my iPod. I looked up at the window right above me at 26 Piazza di Spagna, John Keats’s final address. Had he listened to some of these same sonatas by Haydn, his favorite composer, being played for him by his friend artist Joseph Severn on the pianoforte Severn had rented for them and put in their second-floor sitting room? Had listening to Haydn put some hope into Keats’s own life or was he by then, suffering so from consumption, beyond hope? He had, after all, referred to his time there in the apartment above me as his “posthumous existence,” a kind of existence I too had seemed to be experiencing for the last six months.

“Not only was Keats fond of music,” Severn wrote after moving with him from England to Italy in November of 1820, “but he found that his pain and o’erfretted nerves were much soothed by it.” It was blisteringly hot when I arrived in Italy in June of 2012 from Albania, but, as I sat on the Spanish Steps in the beating sun, the Haydn was soothing my own o’erfretted nerves, so excited was I to have finally made it there, a pilgrimage I had dreamed of making to this very spot ever since I first discovered John Keats and his work when I was in college back in Mississippi. Severn wrote that Keats had told him he loved Haydn “for there is no knowing what he will do next.” That is also the reason I love Keats. When I first read his poems and letters during my college days I was never sure what line was coming next, where his thoughts were taking him and, thus, me along with him. I longed to have such a friend as Severn read me Keats’s poems lovingly aloud as he had played Haydn so lovingly for Keats, so alone finally in his illness as I was feeling that day there in Rome in my addiction, having only eighteen consecutive days of sobriety once again since I had last used.

Above my sunburnt head, on the side of the building where the apartment was located, there was carved into the ochre walls a replica of the lute that Severn designed to be carved into his friend’s gravestone where he was “buried in the non-Catholic cemetery,” as Andy Warhol had told me that day he’d quoted Keats back to me. The lute was missing four of its eight strings to signify Keats’s life cut short at the age of twenty-five on February 23, 1821. Severn lived on for another fifty-eight years after his friend’s death but was buried next to him.

As I looked up at that carving I thought of Keats’s quoting Milton in his letter on “The Vale of Soul-Making”:

How charming is divine Philosophy

Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose

But musical as is Apollo’s lute

Then, as Gould lutelessly leaned into Haydn’s Sonata in E-Flat Major, I stood ready to enter the room where Keats had lived and died. I had always wondered when this day finally would occur and if, as usual, I would be alone when I experienced it. I had come to the conclusion sitting there on the Spanish Steps contemplating the life that had brought me to that place—more important to me than any cathedral or church along the Camino—that after a life of so much solitude it was only fitting that I would experience this place all by myself. “Though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk,” Keats’s words, written in a letter to his brother George, circled in my head as I climbed the narrow stairwell of the house at Number 26. “Though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet’s down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winander Mere, I should not feel—or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime.”

I bought a ticket—the place is now known as the Keats Shelley House, with more than eight thousand books devoted to the Romantic literary period—and, walking through the library, entered his bedroom. After Keats’s death from consumption all the contents of the room, as decreed by the Vatican, were burned. But the fireplace where Severn had cooked Keats’s meals was still the same. The stone floor was the original. There was no one else there, so I lay on it. Its coolness reminded me of that stone floor back in the mountain village on the Camino that day I had been so angry at the Catholic Church and that Catholic path and needed such coolness at the end of such a challenging day. That day I had ended up with my face on the floor, prostrate in a Catholic church. But on this stone floor I lay looking upward. Prostration was not called for. I was not here seeking forgiveness. Neither was I here to fix blame. I was simply feeling blessed. Present. I felt more alive than I had felt in months. I looked up at the ceiling that was still the same one that had been there when Keats had lain in that same room feeling less alive by the day and pondered it through his own kind of pain. I said a prayer to the gods of poetry and to the poet himself who had lain there pondering.

I stood.

I walked over by the bed to look down into the hollow eyes of a replica of Keats’s death mask encased on a table there. Upon his death there were casts made of his face, a foot, and a hand by Gheradi, who was Casanova’s mask maker in Rome. Severn, grieving, used the mask to paint his famous portrait of his friend reading at Wentworth Place. This was exactly what Keats had looked like, and I smiled knowing finally, yes, he really was my type. I stared down into the mask’s vacant eyes. Why couldn’t these be the eyes that came devilishly alive as I continued to stare longingly down into them and not those of that Spanish Christ on the cross back on the Camino that I had stared up into? Why couldn’t light begin to shine on me from these? But standing there staring down into his face, I realized Keats had not been my spiritual guide all these years. There was no transmogrification needed to confirm his deity to me, for that was not what his role in my life had been. Keats’s humanity had always been my beacon, not his soul. It was how he made the world a place where flesh rightly belonged. No wings were needed for flight when I read him. No feathery feelings filled my chest. He anchored me to this world where I so often felt but a visitor. That was the vision he offered me: to see the world more clearly unclouded by talk of heaven or the hovering before me of hallucinations.

I turned from Keats’s face—freed anew by his long-ago presence in this world—and read Severn’s letter describing his death. I then sat in a chair by the window overlooking the Spanish Steps and contemplated that view that Keats himself had sat staring at for those last two months he was confined to this very room. His eyes filled my head. His soul remained his own. Now, having made this pilgrimage so unlike the one that had spanned a month in Spain, mine could be.

*   *   *

Or could it?

There would be one more test.

One more battle.

The Sunday after I returned from Tirana and Rome I was sitting in the back pew of the Saint Mary of the Harbor Episcopal church in Provincetown. I often went there for Sunday services because the rector was, like me, from Mississippi and his soft Southern accent as he preached his heartfelt sermons comforted the lost little Southern sissy somewhere still inside me. I sat there that day right before the Eucharist was to take place remembering all that had transpired only days before in Albania and Italy. Someone tapped me on my shoulder, interrupting my reverie. It was one of the ushers who asked in a whisper if I would be a Bearer of Gifts up to the altar. I had never done it before. Was I worthy of such a task? I had not even been baptized in the Episcopal Church. I was still officially a Methodist. But I reasoned—if reason is needed in such a place where faith is the abiding principle—that if I was being asked then it was God’s will that I do it whether I were a worthy Episcopalian or not.

I stared down at the altar but sank quickly back into my reverie, thinking of that day when I visited Keats’s bedroom on that hot Roman afternoon and knelt at an altar of my own making. After a couple of hours I left the Keats Shelley House and started to walk over to the Trevi Fountain. But I turned back. I walked again up the narrow stairwell and told the young man who was selling the tickets that I had forgotten something and asked if it would be okay if I went back inside for a moment. He was nice enough to allow me. I let him assume I had left a book behind or my keys or some other item. When I walked back into Keats’s small bedroom there was an old white-haired man sitting in the chair at the window where I had earlier sat gazing out at the view. We each waited the other out. He eyed me suspiciously as he sighed and got up from the chair to leave. I peeked through the door to make sure he was exiting the place, then turned and knelt in front of the marble fireplace. I said a prayer of thanks to whomever deemed to hear me in that moment for bringing me finally to that very spot and allowing me to be in the same room where Keats had lived his “posthumous existence” that continued each time I plucked a sentence or two from one of his letters or read a poem of his with just a bit more understanding. It was an existence that continued that morning at Saint Mary of the Harbor back in Provincetown even as I was given a silver box filled with the Communion wafers and walked down the aisle toward that more traditional altar to hand the box of wafers to the Episcopal priest. I looked out the church window at the sunshine on the bay—a deeper natural sacredness that Keats often credited more than Christ’s.

*   *   *

When I got home from church that day where I was staying in my friend’s place on the wharf I signed on to Facebook and had a message from a drug dealer I had not heard from in two summers, wondering how I had been and if I needed anything. Had my being made the whispered offer to be the Bearer of Gifts only half an hour earlier been a gauntlet thrown down? Was Lucifer rearing his head at such a gesture? My addiction was certainly whispering to me as I read the unexpected message.

I reasoned—as I had reasoned back at Saint Mary of the Harbor—that this too was somehow the will of the universe. I went into a trance. I sent a message back to the drug dealer and we made a plan to rendezvous in a parking lot beneath a hotel for me to buy the bag of meth. I thought of that needle still hidden back in the corner of a drawer.

When I returned with the meth I diluted it in the syringe, which was much larger than the syringes I was accustomed to. But I still measured the amount of meth to match the line where the “3” was labeled on it.

Archie began to race about the apartment. That cry he had not made in six months came howling from his little throat.

I ignored him.

I tied a belt around my biceps.

Archie cried some more.

I touched my arm.

“Archie! Hush!”

I touched my arm.

“Archie!”

I tried to find just the spot to stick the needle in one of my veins. I found it—there, right there—on the first prick. I pushed it in deeper. The blood rushed up into the giant syringe, turning the meth-infused water a scarlet as dark as the bloody bludgeoned eyes of that Spanish crucified Christ before they opened and bathed me in light. I was scared for but a second. Was I about to shoot too much meth into my body? I went ahead—all thinking stopped—and did it. The rush was instant. Staggeringly so. Phenomenal. Fierce. The flight was just as immediate. A thousand feathers flapped inside me. All those flattened
M
s from one word only: “meth” “meth” “meth” “meth” “meth” “meth,” turning into “me” “me” “me” “me” “me,” until only
M
s, the racing hum of millions of them, not thousands, filled my ears, my head, my body. I was bathed once more in light.

A few minutes later—fifteen, twenty?—the husband of my friend who was allowing me to stay in his apartment was knocking on the door. He held Archie in his arms. I hadn’t realized I had left the door cracked open and Archie had run over to their cottage next door. He’d never done that before. Was he trying to save my life? Was he herding me back to it?