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Failure of a Man Named Love

IT WAS FRIDAY NIGHT, CLOSING TIME AT THE SHIMMY JOY, the downtown Third Street, Niagara Falls, New York, singles nightclub where I worked as a bartender four nights a week. I was drunk as usual, telling myself one of these days pretty soon (before it was too late) it would be time to quit. The bouncers waded through the mob, bellowing threats, throwing stools up on tabletops. A few customers clung to the counter, pleading for one last drink. I glanced at the door, hoping Charlene would show.

It was the dead, deep winter of 1983. Niagara Falls was in bad shape, its people moving out, its lakes and river poisoned by manufacturing, unemployment around twenty-five percent. Much of the automobile industry, the lifeblood of Western New York, was crippled or shut down. Niagara Falls was the home of Love Canal, the environmental disaster of the decade, a housing development built on top of a chemical dump site, now fenced off and posted, the windows boarded up, a ghost town sinking amid dead trees in a quagmire of toxic waste.

With unemployment, the number of bars in Niagara Falls had doubled in the last two years. Many people had also turned to selling drugs to make a living. Cocaine was the drug of choice. Third Street even had its own pusher, a likeable mush-mouthed loser named Weasel, who made his nightly bar-to-bar rounds in a trench coat lined with glittering packets of “product.” Weasel liked to wrap up his evenings at the Shimmy Joy, where the late crowds were best. Unless he had sold out, he usually enjoyed an entourage of devoted tail-wiggling shiny-lipped females. Tonight he arrived with three. In 1983 there was no need to waste your time reading How to Pick Up Attractive Women; all you needed for shallow virile success was gold neck jewelry and one or two packets of Weasel’s Witless Whoopee Powder (guaranteed to cure shyness, rancor, and unpopularity for as long as twenty minutes). I glanced at the door, hoping Charlene would show. Weasel waved at me, mush-mouthed a greeting (“Yo, bro... [unintelligible]”) and, though the bar was closed, I poured him a drink, Amaretto on the rocks.

I had come to Niagara Falls the year before to cook in the restaurant of a friend, who moved to Washington D.C. three weeks after his restaurant failed. I had just turned twenty-eight. Charlene, an engineer at Harrison Radiator in Buffalo, who’d been laid off and was now waiting tables, was twenty-four. She was not a very nice girl. I was no Mahatma Gandhi myself. When I first began to date Charlene, the people who knew her warned me. “Won’t work.” “Wrong girl.” “You’ll be sorry.” But there were many things to like about her: her unpretentiousness, her aloofness, a certain reckless sang-froid. With diamond black eyes and long dark hair, she was lithe and brainy, small breasted and tall. She had read and admired Jude the Obscure. She had an engineering degree from SUNY Buffalo. A hearty Czechoslovakian girl, she could drink all night and was great in bed. Unfortunately she slept around. And to teach her a lesson, so did I. Though I was on the verge of straightening out my life, etc., Charlene seemed unaffected by her barren and dissolute existence. Each time she found out I had been with another woman, all she wanted to know was, “Is she prettier than me?”

I counted my tips: fifty, a good night. Charlene didn’t show. To hell with her, I thought. I convinced myself I would get rid of her soon, straighten out my life, etc., and drove to an after-hours place. I must’ve known two thousand people in NFNY. If I didn’t know their names, I knew what they drank. Being a bartender at a popular nightclub is like being captain of the high school football team. Everyone knows your name. They wave and smile and want to be seen with you, want to buy you a drink. I hit three after-hours places (hoping, despite myself, to find Charlene) before I finally ran into Oz, who invited me over to his house on Grand Island.

Oz was a third-owner of the Shimmy Joy. Once he’d had a good-paying job with GM, now he had a better-paying position with the Colombian Drug Cartel. He wore a purple kimono and glided along like a phantom on wheels. He was a big-time coke dealer, but he’d broken the cardinal rule and gotten himself hooked on the product. He smoked cocaine. We called it freebasing. There was no word yet for crack. Oz cooked it up in the kitchen and brought it into the living room on an engraved stainless steel platter: big, amorphous, soapy yellow chunks. It was a secret art. He was the only one who knew how to do it—except I’d watched him from around the corner, and I knew how to do it too.

We gathered around the wet bar in the corner of the living room in the dark leather-furnished, wood-smelling home with the television always on. Oz inspected his equipment: a large glass pipe with a globe-shaped chamber, a dozen dime-sized brass screens, a box of Q-tips, and a bottle of Bacardi 151. There were five of us, the so-called elect, including Kirsten, a comely college student, and Wondra, a sexy cocktail waitress, both regulars along the strip of bars on Third Street. Oz called the women who were attracted to his drugs “cocaine harlots.” They didn’t seem to mind. He was always good for a couple of grand. He lit a candle. His rings glittered. The sleeves of his kimono rustled like a surplice as he dipped a Q-tip into the rum.

The first inhaled hit of volatilized cocaine is the best: it launches you through the roof of the sky. There is no greater high. It makes an orgasm seem like a stubbed toe. You love, with the power of God, all things: house plants, bumblebees, lint balls, even the cat shit in the sandbox beneath the sink. I thought of Charlene and loved her for once purely, without resentment or remorse, without a trace of indignation for having neglected me. I longed to share this feeling with her, this unfathomable, infallible, and virtuous love. So I called her apartment but she wasn’t home.

At 5 a.m. the other two owners of the Shimmy Joy arrived. The glass pipe, its walls caked with alkaloid snowflakes, its smoldering brass screens dripping with Babylonian dreams, floated from hand to hand, jolting and frying medulla oblongatas and greedily scorching one pair of already scorched and scarlet lungs after the next. We babbled in exhaustive refrains like overcaffeinated housewives at a high school reunion: “...you know, I’ve always wanted to tell you what a great person I think you are ...” As the sun blossomed in the curtains the sense of fellowship began to drain. The conversation waned. I caught my waxy, inebriated image in the mirror. Oz yanked down the shades and glided into the kitchen to cook up some more.

I stumbled back to work at 5 p.m. like something dragged up from a lake: no sleep, not even time for a shower. I felt as if I’d traveled around the sun, like a bag of charcoal with legs. I had to get drunk to make it through. The customers broke in waves against the bar. I spilled drinks, dropped glasses, gave the wrong change. The owners didn’t care. They were freebasing over at Oz’s. About eleven o’clock, Charlene coasted imperially through the door and down through the crowd, nudging into the only open space at the end of the bar, the plastic buttons of the cigarette machine glowing red and green behind her. I was too wrecked to go down and say hello. I didn’t feel like listening to her anyway. She flared her nostrils at me.

Eventually she made her way down to my end and leaned into me for a kiss. I took in her scent, peanuts and ashes and Cherry Sucrets. As long as I was incapacitated and uninterested in being with her, as long as I could put into doubt her ability to attract, she would remain at the bar.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

I fixed her a drink, vodka and iced tea, with lemon. “Where were you last night?” I said.

“Oh,” she answered aloofly. “I went swimming.”

“Where?”

“At Gene’s,” she said. Gene was a bartender, who lived in a complex with an indoor pool. “There was a party there,” she said. “What about you?”

“I went to Oz’s.”

She set her hand on her hip. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“I did. Four thirty in the morning. You were probably in the pool, drunk in your bikini.”

She wrinkled her face as if she’d just swallowed the lemon wedge in her drink. “Who all was there?”

“I have to get back to work,” I said, shoving away. “I’ll talk to you later.”

When the Shimmy Joy closed at two, I was embalmed, a flat EEG, not enough energy to pull on the cigarette dangling from my lips. Charlene lingered, closely monitoring all the women who smiled at or talked to me. I told her as she left that I would see her tomorrow, which meant that she would disappear for a week. If I really wanted to see her tomorrow I would’ve said, “It’s over between us, Charlene. I’ve started seeing someone else.”

I didn’t see Charlene for nine days. But I called her up twice and listened to the telephone ring. I imagined her apartment, crossword puzzle books on the couch, doilies draped over the television, empty Diet Coke cans, the portrait of Mother Cabrini on the wall above the dining room table. Two friends told me they had seen her several nights “swimming” at Gene’s. On Friday, after work, the one night I could usually count on her to show (at least for a few minutes to make sure I was still miserable), she was nowhere to be found. I found revenge in the form of a meaningless liaison named Gina Bonaventure, a Niagara University psychology major with a weakness for bartenders and whoopee powder.

The next night Charlene strolled into the Shimmy Joy late, drunk with her girlfriend, Pamela, who worked in a pharmacy. Pamela was broad shouldered with short bangs and big gums, and she dressed for her nights out barhopping as if she were stepping up to the podium to accept her Oscar for Best Actress. Charlene sidled up to the end of the bar. We kissed. I smelled Scotch in her hair.

“I’m toasted,” she said.

“Congratulations.”

“Don’t be snotty.”

“Been so long since I’ve seen you I almost forgot what you looked like. What are you having?”

“Two vodka and teas.”

“I’ll have a greyhound,” sniffed Pamela, regally raising her chin.

Charlene rummaged through her purse for a cigarette. “I heard you went out with Gina.”

I filled glasses with ice. “I heard you went swimming.”

She tossed her head. “Once.”

Pamela scowled at me. Like many of Charlene’s close drinking companions, Pamela disliked me.

Eager customers were beginning to lean over the bar through the gaps, holding up their empty glasses.

“I gotta go,” I said. “You be home later?”

She lit a cigarette and snapped out the flame. “I’ll be home.”

Pamela slashed my image to pieces with her eyelashes. Charlene looked off into an imaginary distance. The two women left before they’d finished their drinks.

Later that night Charlene was not home. I waited in front of her house in my car for an hour, looking up at the dark icy brown windows. Finally I left. I saw her car approaching from the other direction, but I didn’t bother to slow down or wave. I didn’t want to admit that it was over between us, that I had failed (again), that all the people who warned me were right, that my ability to make judgments was unchanged, that I had started over only to repeat every mistake I had ever made, that my life was not a long unlucky streak but a carefully and even beautifully tragic self-made design, that I was like Wayne Newton—maybe a different hotel, but the same show night after night.

Charlene lived in the LaSalle District, only two miles from Love Canal. In 1892 an entrepreneur named William T. Love had tried to construct a canal between the Niagara River and Lake Ontario, but abandoned the project with the arrival of the economic depression of 1893. Eventually the land was sold to a chemical firm named Hooker, who filled the chasm with an estimated 21,000 tons of chemical waste. In 1953, with the old canal packed to the brim, Hooker covered it with dirt and sold it off to the local Board of Education for a buck, not neglecting to include a clause that relieved them from any future liability incurred by the waste. An elementary school was erected on the site and the remaining land was sold to developers. Houses went up and hundreds of families moved in. It wasn’t long before 21,000 tons of noxious chemicals began bubbling up through the ground. Children burned their feet on the lawns, basements filled with strange gases. Miscarriage, birth defect, and cancer rates soared. The 60 Minutes crew raced to the scene and tumbled salivating out of their vans. In August of 1978, the state of New York declared a medical State of Emergency. Five days later, Jimmy Carter declared the Love Canal area a federal emergency. Two hundred thirty-nine families were evacuated; the neighborhood was closed down and sealed off.

I drove down to Love Canal that night. I often strolled these abandoned grounds to think. I felt at home here. No one bothered me. The old toxic ghost town was more silent and peaceful than any graveyard. There wasn’t the faintest sign of life, not a bug or a flower or a bird. My tracks through the virgin green moonlit snow marked the only traces of a living human soul. The mists crept low around the corners of the houses and the cold air reeked faintly of sauerkraut and chloroform. Before the poisons were discovered and the people moved out, this was a neighborhood much like the one I’d grown up in, with its trim little houses, square little lawns. Swing sets. Clotheslines. I passed a sign that said DEAF CHILD AREA. I saw a tricycle covered with snow in a driveway. The wind moaned and the cloudveiled moon shone down through the dead, ice-crusted trees. I listened —children screaming, barbecues blazing, dogs barking, the squeak of swings, laundry rumpling in the breeze. Ghost sounds.

On the way back to the car I decided to leave, to really leave, not only my hopelessly abysmal and dissolving horror-house sweetheart and my poisoned Honeymoon City, but my own stagnant drunken empty life. I wondered what Charlene would do when I told her I was leaving. I pictured her dabbing her eyes in mock sorrow, then yawning. I didn’t think it was possible that she would understand I really meant it this time.

Four days, two motels, and sixteen cups of coffee later, I was sitting in a Tarzana Denny’s with my mom and dad at a little table in the center of the room, eggs down below me, the plump yolks shimmering in a pool of grease, and my mother saying: “We’re glad to have you back.”

My father, his face a jug of red wine, his dark coiled Greek black hair invaded with gray, beamed at me. He had just come up from San Diego. My mother had recently left him. My father was Wreck Number One, drunk every night, though he had quit drinking for weeks now to try and win her back.

“Do you have any plans?” my mother said.

The sun poured down through the windows. I took a drink of my orange juice. “I don’t have any plans.”

“Are you going to stay around for a while?”

I picked up my fork and pierced one of the yolks. Two waitresses in tight brown polyester with full trays almost collided. A whole crowd of what looked like church people filed in through the door, and there was nowhere for them to sit. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Why don’t you eat?”

“He’s had a long trip,” said my father, taking a sip from his coffee. He watched the sun in the windows, the waitresses, the people standing in line to eat.

My mother studied me. “You’ll find someone else,” she said. My father rattled the cup in his saucer. My mother changed the subject. “You’d probably like to get some rest,” she said.

I nodded.

“If you want to stay for a while, I can get you a job,” she said. My mother was high up in the ranks of a computer company.

“Maybe I’ll stay for a while,” I said.

“Good,” she said, leaning back in her chair. She glanced at my father, who beamed.

I moved into my mother’s guest room in her condo in Tarzana. The next day I started work building dictionary databases for court reporters. It was glorified word processing. I made eighteen thousand dollars that year, exceptionally good money for me.

I was sober now, my first concentrated campaign against chemical sloth and permanent childhood. Because I was the kind of person who drank to be someone else, I was not eager to form new friendships. As long as I stayed alone I felt I could stay sober. At night, like my mother, I brought work home with me. Anything to keep from falling back into the old hole. My mother stayed late every night at the office. When she finally came home, she liked to go out to dinner. We sat in a restaurant together and had trouble conversing. This was unusual for us; I believe it came from her guilt over leaving my father and my realization that I was exactly like him.

As a child growing up in San Diego, I had always despised the pervading smog and voracious anonymity of L.A. But living in L.A. wasn’t so bad. It was a great place to be alone. On the weekends I drove to Santa Anita Racetrack, which lies like a polished English cobblestone village under the cool, dry blue shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains. Watching the horses fly around a track with money on them was the next best thing to getting high. There was nothing like those chilly winter L.A. mornings, and the crisp sound of your money flushing down the toilet. Occasionally my sister came with me. We were close growing up, good friends. To her misfortune, she respected and imitated me, and by nineteen she had already attended her first A.A. meeting. She was still a heavy drinker and occasional drug user. We were Wreck Numbers Two and Three. My mother had gotten her a job at the computer firm three months before I’d limped in from Niagara Falls. She came with me six or seven times to the track—Hollywood Park when Santa Anita closed—and she never won a race in all the days we went. It takes a special talent to lose beyond any realm of probability, and it became a joke with us.