I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (36 page)

The question embarrassed me, but I, indeed, did and admitted it to him. That morning after breakfast he stopped by and gave me a check for one thousand dollars as a loan to tide me over during the summer, since I had confessed I was down to my last two hundred dollars after buying my ferry and train tickets. We hugged and he wished me luck and told me to call him any time I needed to talk. In that moment I felt the instant love I felt for him the first time I ever saw him and his pierced ears parading around the East Village when I thought he was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. As he walked away from me down the wharf I had the same feeling. Yet how far we both had come. Now I was the one battling needles and neediness.

I went inside to check that the apartment was clean enough and put my bags out on the wharf to take the walk down to the dock to catch the ferry. I already missed Archie and Teddy terribly. I restacked some books on the floor and stopped when I saw my late friend Perry Moore’s novel
Hero
there on top. I knelt and placed my hand atop it as if it were a Bible on which I was taking an oath. “If you can hear me, Perry, I need you, buddy,” I said aloud. “I need your help in this. Please. Help me. If you are there somewhere in some parallel universe, if your spirit is here this morning, I swear to you I will stay sober this time. I swear I will to honor your memory. To honor our friendship. Can your hear me, Huck? I swear. I swear. But help me, man. Help me.”

I made it to the ferry just in time. I found a seat and concentrated on the horizon as that old boyfriend of mine who had just lent me the money had taught me to do to ward off seasickness when I accompanied him to the Caribbean a couple of times to visit his mother and father, old hippies who lived on a gaff-rigged schooner down there. To calm myself I thought of other trips I’d made in my life as I was embarking now on this one. I’d remembered to pack my journal from the Camino in my backpack so I could work on this book while I was in New York and I took it out to read that last page I’d written in it.

5/31/09

… I am writing this sitting in the square outside the cathedral here in Santiago. I sat at this very spot earlier today when I walked into it. I was having a hard time believing that I had made it all the way across Spain and had walked over seven hundred kilometers to get here. I sat as far away from the cathedral as possible with my back to the wall of this building all the way across the square where I’m sitting now and stared up at the cathedral’s spiraling magnificence and said a prayer of thanks before walking over to go inside for the pilgrims’ mass.

As I was sitting on a pew earlier Toby and Aurelia and Teresa grabbed me from behind to give me a hug. They had arrived the day before and had been coming in for every mass ever since, they said, to see if they could find me.

“There’s someone outside looking for you,” Toby whispered. “Did Lucas e-mail you about a man who he told to be greeting you when you arrived? That man is out there now. Lucas wanted for him to be the surprise for you when you walked up the stairs to the cathedral. You should go thank him. He has a note for you.”

Yes, Lucas had e-mailed me about some man, but I had decided I wasn’t going to spend my time looking for him after thirty-one days walking on the path. I needed this pew. I’d earned it. “Toby,” I said. “I’m tired. Could you tell the man to come see me sitting here instead? I don’t want to lose my spot on this pew. I’ll save you a place here with Aurelia and Teresa and me.”

Toby laughed and shook his head at me. Aurelia and Teresa knowingly smiled at me as they sat down. “Still so … mmm …
hartnäckig
?” Toby said, turning to Aurelia.

Aurelia: “Stubborn.”

Toby: “Yes, still so stubborn, Kevin, even after your many days on the Camino. Have you not learned a new patience?” He patted me on my shoulder. “I will go get this man who Lucas said would be there for you.”

I thanked Toby and turned to watch the preparation for the Botafumeiro to be swept from side to side in one of the most renowned rituals of the mass that is held here for the pilgrims. The thing was as big as a Buick. They have been doing this for centuries, because in ancient times, I was told one day on the Camino, the pilgrims arrived having not bathed or showered and the smell of them was overpowering. Several young priests were preparing the elaborate pulley system that was rigged up at the front of the cathedral that took even more of them to pull in unison to get it to swing back and forth. The ornate thing looked like it weighed close to a ton.

Suddenly I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders. I turned around and the man whom Lucas had told me would be meeting me was Lucas himself. So that was the surprise he and Toby had been planning for stubborn me. I jumped up to give Lucas a hug and now felt guilty I had not gone out there myself, but if one had to feel guilty what better place than a Catholic cathedral? I couldn’t believe I had begun my Camino lying in a bunk next to this boy—now a young man after his own month on the path—and was about to end it with his sitting next to me at this mass. Toby and Lucas and Aurelia and Teresa and I all lined up sitting in a row down the pew. Lucas reached for my hand and slipped the note in it that he had written for me upon my arrival. It read:

Lass Los

Der Eine kommt, der Andere geht

Schau nicht zurück, geh dein’ Weg!

This means:

One comes, another goes

Don’t look back, go your way!

I turned to him. I folded the note gently in my palm. “Thank you, sweet Lucas,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

The mass was beginning. The young priests were taking their places at the pulley. The pipe organ moaned into being from somewhere in the cathedral. “Those are lines from a song by a singer named Dennis Lisk,” Lucas whispered to me as I marveled at the beauty of the cathedral all around us, at all the grimy pilgrims crowding the pews, at my friends seated down the pew from me. The moaning of the organ grew louder, as it became its truer self and filled the place with the amazing music it was created to make. Lucas leaned closer to me. His whisper competed with the music. “Do you know what
lass los
means?” he asked. I shook my head no. The music now thundered. The incense was being hoisted. It hung above our heads and, burning, swung in its vast encasement to and fro, its perfumed pungency released in puffs and adding even more clouds to the celestial scenes painted on the ceiling. “It means ‘let go,’” said Lucas. “‘Let go.’”

I closed the journal.

“Let go,” I now whispered to myself.

I looked again toward the horizon, the low gathering clouds seeming to rise from it like puffs of perfumed incense in a Galician cathedral.

I peered past them up at the sky.

It gestured:

Onward.

*   *   *

I checked into a cheap hotel on 23rd Street when I got to New York and went to a meeting of my fellowship. I went to bed that first night back in the city still not knowing where I was going to live. I had enough money in my shrinking budget for one more night in a hotel and then I’d have to find a bed in a men’s shelter, which I had resolved I would do if all else failed.

Luckily, the next day my friend Michael called to tell me it would be okay to stay in his extra bedroom as long as I needed. He was my last option, but sometimes it only takes the outstretched hand of one person, one friend, to save a life. With that one gesture, Michael saved mine. I will be forever in his debt. His kindness might have kept me from killing myself that final night in that hotel room. I wasn’t even that sad or upset. As I’ve said, it just seemed like a rational decision. It was the solution to a problem. I’d had a nice life. A long run. A semblance of a career in the magazine world. My first book had been a
New York Times
bestseller. I’d even had one or two boyfriends I could say I truly loved and still do and will for as long as I do live. But maybe it was time, I reasoned, to call it quits for good. And then again I once more thought of that Angel of Light who gave me his reprieve and allowed me to live. There had to be a reason for that. Maybe it was even to give me time to finish this book. I know some readers, if you’ve made it past those passages, are rolling your eyes at my bringing him up yet again. I don’t care if you believe any of that or not. But believe this: My belief in him and his benevolence toward me and his giving me a second chance at life kept me alive long enough that day in that cheap hotel room to get that phone call from Michael.

I was asked by Michael if I could spend one more night at the hotel on 23rd Street, because he was away at an antique show in Massachusetts. I could swing that if my credit card wasn’t rejected, since I had had to stop paying all my bills in order to eat during the last month. That’s how broke I now was. I had bought a sandwich at the barbecue place next door to the hotel and saved half of it to eat that night for supper. I wolfed it down, then went online to find another meeting that night of the fellowship I had joined to get sober.

Once I moved into Michael’s I went to up to three meetings a day of the fellowship—that is, when I wasn’t working in Michael’s store. Not only was he allowing me to stay with him rent-free, but he had also given me a job one day a week as a “shopgirl” so I could make a hundred bucks to live off during the week. By the end of three months of sobriety I had gone to close to 270 meetings. If I couldn’t find a way to afford rehab or an outpatient program, I would just triple up on the fellowships I’d found. I was more serious about my recovery than ever.

I even called up Brandon, the kid I had mentored for years, and asked him to see me one morning. I had disappeared from his life in the last year and I wanted to explain to him why. I felt guilty that after telling him when he was a child that I would never abandon him I had done just that in many ways. It was another promise broken because of my addiction. I met him at the Starbucks where I had first seen the “angel” while I was reading Shirley MacLaine’s book about the Camino. I told Brandon about my meth addiction that day. He sat and listened as I talked for thirty or forty minutes and told him the whole saga, all the ups and downs, as many of my secrets as I thought he could take. I owed him that. We’d been through so much together over the last dozen years. In many ways he knew me better than anybody.

Brandon was now eighteen and attending Borough of Manhattan Community College. In fact, we were meeting before he had to head downtown to his statistics class. I was so proud of him. He was the first male in his family to have ever graduated from high school, much less attended college. I had watched him grow up from a six-year-old and I now sat watching the young man he’d become absorbing all I had told him. I saw in his eyes a glimpse of the fright I’d first seen in them when I met him when he was still such a child. “I would never have known it, Kev. That you were in that kind of trouble,” he finally said. His voice was very quiet. There was none of the thuggish bluster that he could summon now that he was an urban teenager. “I did once see some pot in one of your drawers in Provincetown when I was visiting, so I knew you smoked that, but I never knew you were doing the hard drugs. You were still always there for me.” He paused. He gently touched my arm, not knowing that underneath my sleeve was the place, still red and scarred, where I’d last shot up. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah, Brandon. I think I am going to be,” I told him. “I wasn’t sure there for a while. But I really do think I am going to be,” I told him.

We sat in silence for a long time. Neither of us really knew what to say after I’d made such a confession. “Oh. I almost forgot,” I told him, and reached into my pocket. “I bought you this graduation present.” I gave him the small box that contained a cross on a necklace with a graduate’s mortarboard as part of its design.

“Cool,” Brandon said.

He unclasped the necklace and handed it to me to put around his neck.

He held the cross in his hand and looked down at it. “I like this graduation hat on it,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Brandon, for disappearing. Do you forgive me?” I asked him.

He looked shocked by the question. “Come on, man. There’s nothing to forgive,” he said, the echo of all the love I’d ever felt in my life there in those words he hadn’t even realized had been spoken to me before and he was now repeating with so much grown-up grace.

*   *   *

After saying good-bye to Brandon that morning I still had some time to kill before the fellowship meeting I always attended at 12:30. So I stopped off at the Strand Book Store on Broadway to browse its stacks and kill some time. I had wished Weiser Antiquarian Books was still open, since I had been thinking of all the hallucinations lost to me in my sobriety. Weiser’s specialized in mysticism and the occult and especially works by Aleister Crowley, which I discovered when I looked up the company on my computer to see if it still had an online version. So many of my drug visions had involved astral projections and someone had told me that Crowley had created much of his following by promoting such visions himself. I’ll go ahead and say it: I missed my visits from the Angel of Light and thought if I read about such visions by others then my loneliness for him could be sated.

At the Strand I found references in the books I was browsing through to many of the things I have written about in this one. Others had seemed to have had the same visions I had had. That was comforting in its way even as it made me feel less special. Then I found a poem by Crowley that shocked and comforted me all at the same time. It was called “Hymn to Lucifer.” That was one hymn that Diane Sawyer and I had never sung from the Cokesbury. I cocked an eyebrow like that Australian professor had cocked hers at me when discussing Emily Dickinson, a much better poet than Crowley from what I could tell from reading those first few lines—and an even much more spiritual and visionary one in her way. I certainly didn’t have any Crowley lines crawling across my flesh as I had hers. But I read on. When I got to the last sentence contained in the poem’s last five lines—“The Key of Joy is disobedience”—I slammed the book shut and shoved it back onto the shelf at the Strand as a cold chill ran down my spine and then just as quickly raced back up it in a rush of warmth that I could only equate with a momentary slam of meth in my veins.