 loved or kissed. We kissed more and I held her wet, red shoes in my hand.
We returned to the car and continued to kiss.
And then the Malibu cops rolled up and asked us both to get out of the car. The cop who interrogated me was Japanese American, about my age, compact and ripped, and fast-talking. I’d grown up with kids like him. My best friend from childhood was a cop in Sacramento. This guy in front of me, I knew exactly where he was coming from: he wanted to bust bad guys but didn’t care too much what you did if you weren’t an absolute menace.
He asked me for my license and I told him I didn’t have one, that me and my girl were just sitting in the car, and that we were about to switch places so she could drive back to the hotel because I would never break the law and drive without a license.
He stared at me, as if to say Are you kidding me, you expect me to believe that? But he broke a half smile and said, “Quick thinking, smart-ass. Are you drunk or on drugs?”
And I said, “No.” False.
He said, “If you don’t have a license, who drove here?”
I said, “Her.” False.
He said, “Why were you in the driver’s seat?”
I said, “I wanted her to have more legroom.” False.
He looked at me, either disgusted or impressed with my commitment to the lie. He walked over to her and asked, “Is your boyfriend on cocaine?”
She said, “No.” True.
He asked, “Are you on cocaine?”
She said, “No.” True.
He said, “There’s a ten o’clock beach curfew in Malibu. If you move your car about twenty-five feet south, you can hang out on that beach or in your car and do whatever it is you need to do. I don’t care. But get out of Malibu.”
I don’t know why the cop didn’t press the issue. Maybe his shift was ending or maybe he didn’t care what we were on as long as it wasn’t cocaine.
Years later I would wish the cop had pushed the issue—after all, I had been sitting in the driver’s seat, and any fool would have known that I’d intended to drive without a license. So what if the cop had pressed things, what if he’d checked my sobriety, what if he’d pulled me in for the night?
Ava and I wouldn’t have gone back to my hotel room and been unfaithful to our partners. And I wouldn’t have changed the course of my life for the next many years.
Ava studied for her PhD in psychology during our three years together. I paid for everything except her rent. I overheard her tell a friend that she was on the Swofford Stipend. Once I caught her stealing fifties from my wallet but I didn’t confront her: if I had she might have left me. She introduced me to the regular recreational use of cocaine. I cheated and lied; she cheated and lied. We turned each other into animals.
I TOLD MYSELF that the side of the mountain would save me. Down the block from my cabin sat a Buddhist monastery, and while I didn’t plan on attending meditation, I read my Shunryu Suzuki and felt that if I was close enough, it just might count as meditation. The mountains, they say, have magnetic forces, and the mountain magnetism would pull some of the good forces across the side of the mountain from those bald monks and into my cabin oasis. When it comes to spiritual health, propinquity is everything, right?
But the two six-by-sixteen-inch beams in my cabin were close, too, as well as that multitude of old-growth trees and a fittingly thick length of rope I’d been carrying around for a few years. I once wrote that the suicide is brave, which would make the rest of us cowards. I felt a coward. It would have been easy enough for me to drive down to Kingston and buy a shotgun and a single shell at Wal-Mart. I made the excuse that I didn’t want to make a mess for my new landlords, a kindly hippie-ish string-instrument-playing couple in their mid-fifties with two liberally educated daughters and a happy plot of land with a very fine old mountain dog, and what a complete dick I’d be to blow my brains out all over their carefully constructed and manicured and maintained mountain ideal. Also, what would happen to all my stuff? My life was currently in storage on five pallets in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. All my papers, and most of my books, and a few pieces of furniture, the few I hadn’t given away while I prepared to leave Manhattan.
During the day I stayed on the mountain and I wrote. At nights I might drive to Phoenicia and drink beer and watch sports with construction workers. I walked to the top of Mount Tremper, three miles up and back, once a week.
On weekends a twenty-five-year-old hedge-funder from Manhattan would take the bus up after she got off work on Friday afternoons. We would drink and have sex, and sometimes do drugs, and watch sports until Monday morning, when she took the bus back to Manhattan. We did stupid things like buy scratcher lottery tickets, and drive forty-five miles for bad Mexican food and to get drunk with the locals. We’d flip a coin to see who got to drive home at two or three a.m.
But one weekend I’d had enough and I told her not to come up because I had a lot of work to do, and I never saw her again. She was a very pleasant girl and I am sorry that things ended abruptly. She sent me a few text messages accusing me of ruining her life, but I told her this was impossible, and that she was young and smart and pretty and by most measurements had a full and good life waiting in front of her.
I THOUGHT ABOUT suicide. I read Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind again and again.
I rewrote, thousands of times, this quote:
A good father is not a good father.
My father sat in a chair in the corner of his hospital room, upper body hunched over a brand-new government-issued aluminum walker. This was December 1999. The last time I’d seen him, in August, he’d helped load my U-Haul for my move from Sacramento to Iowa City. He’d lifted boxes and furniture, and he’d bought the beers and pizza, and later he’d treated my friends to a strip club, lap dances for everyone. Now he could barely lift his head to greet me.
“Hey, Bubba,” he said, deploying my least favorite of the multitude of nicknames he had for me: Tone. Old Tone. T-Bone. Pussy Hunter. Jarhead.
“Hey, Dad,” I said. “What’s the word? When can we wheel you out of this fleabag joint?”
“You ain’t wheeling me nowheres. The doc says walk. I’m gonna walk.”
“So let’s hit it.” I clapped my hands twice. I had a date that evening in San Francisco with my old college girlfriend.
A few days earlier I’d received a phone call from my sister Kim telling me that the Old Man had bit it hard in his living room—he’d collapsed, grasping for life, gasping for air. And whom did he call? Nine-one-one? No, he called a guy who performed menial labor for him. And the guy drove over in his pickup truck and heaped my father into the front seat, and here at the hospital his doctor told him to stop smoking or he would die soon.
When? he asked.
Now.
He’d smoked for forty-five years. He’d also spent twenty-two years in the Air Force, thirteen months in Vietnam, many of those months within the Agent Orange–tainted jungles and many other years breathing the fumes from the narcotics of war that drive the workings and skeletons of every military base.
Here we were on a military base, the same place I’d been born, Travis Air Force Base. In the late 1960s, while her husband fought in Vietnam, hippies spit at my mother’s car as she entered the base to take her children to the hospital or to buy groceries.
My father pointed out the window. “You see that building, that short building over there? That’s where you were born.”
“You tell me that every time we’re on base.”
“Well, Bubba, maybe it’s important to me.”
It would be many years before I could understand the importance of such a building to a man.
Right now all I wanted was to wheel the Old Man out of here. Hell, I’d fireman’s-carry him, if need be. I had a seven p.m. drinks date in San Francisco, forty-five miles away, and nothing would stop me from making it. I hadn’t been laid since moving to Iowa City. My father was alive and breathing. I needed to get him home and I needed to hit the road.
“Have some patience with me,