THREE: YOU MUST GO HOME AGAIN

I limped painfully past the boarded-up houses and luxury tenements of Stephen Street, cursing my literary pretensions. “Think, damn you, before you buy any more ‘footwear inspired by the works of Flannery O’Connor’,” I mumbled. The sun laid a harsh cast over everything, not that anything needed it – this was, after all, the town that Diane Arbus fled in tears, claiming it was “too depressing.” I could scarcely believe my lack of luck – this sick, venal municipality dangling precariously over the Pacific, not even my damned hometown, marked me from the day I arrived here as a youngster. A combination of parbroiling hormones and a miserable climate led to the first of five suicide attempts (off-brand vodka, a jumbo bottle of analgesics, and the pills that came in it), after which my guardians spirited me away to happier climes just a little ways down the road. I enjoyed a blissful semester in the comfort and security of Fort Clanieachicook, but a misunderstanding between myself, a gape-jawed sophomore, and a bandsaw sent me right back to Port Winestain, where I managed to graduate third in my class of seven at PWHS before the second of my five suicide attempts (head in toaster oven) granted me a blessed reprieve and a happy soujourn at the State Hospital for Depressives with Singed Hair and/or Grill Marks on Their Cheeks in North Eastham (since shuttered, sadly – the town, I mean; the hospital’s still there). Upon my return, I resolved to make the best of a bad situation, which meant the third of my five suicide attempts (Pop Rocks, Pepsi, a centrifuge). After I recovered and stopped oscillating, I made one of the biggest decisions of my life. Inspired by my favorite book at the time, Zen and the Art of Stowing Away in the Baggage Compartment of a Greyhound Bus, I set out to traverse the highways and byways of this land in search of America. I was thwarted when a guy in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho informed me that they had broken up almost twenty years before and then pummeled me mercilessly and stole my shoes for comparing the words of “Ventura Highway” to Leaves of Grass. With the passage of time and the wisdom of hindsight, I daresay Reverend Jefferies had a point. Licking my wounds (and nearly dislocating my spine in the process), I returned to Port Winestain and attempted to settle for and into the simple life such a locale provided. I found a job cataloguing the high school’s collection of stage play manuscripts and at night busied myself working at my uncle’s still, brewing up some of the finest bootleg liquor in all of Jayne County. But the constant overcast weather and the futility of my surroundings led to a worse depression than before and in short order to the fourth of my five suicide attempts (Picnic, lightning). Clearly, I was never going to make anything of myself in this miserable burg. A clean break was clearly in order, so I sold all my possessions, committed a few minor felonies which would ensure my quick imprisonment should I set foot there again, and said goodbye to Port Winestain for what I was sure, what had to be, the final time, and departed. Destination: Unknown.

Unknown, New Hampshire, was a place I had read and heard a great deal about – some of the underground publications whose monthly appearance in my mailbox had been one of my few sources of solace in this coastal blight of a town, like The Bi-Fortnightly and The New Archaic, published frequent squibs on the goings-on there, most regularly on the Scribe and Scrivener’s Retreat held there every July at Brobdignag Gardens, overseen by one of the finest writers of our age, Burnham Woodruff. What burnished, glowing daydreams I had, my mind’s eye dancing with visions of some of the greatest freethinkers and creative artists in the world, wandering through the verdant fields without aim but with an occult sense of purpose, composing sestinas, epic tales, lyrical contraindications, beholden to no one but themselves and the ministrations of their muses. And I heard there were chicks there. This, I was sure, would be the place where my life’s artistic destiny would be forged, the venue for my metamorphosis from sickly, maladjusted small-town freak to robust, confident big-city freak. So, armed only with a dream and a sidearm just in case I ran afoul of that jerk in the baggage compartment again, I headed east.

To say it didn’t go quite as expected would be an understatement. So instead I’ll say it fucking sucked. I took up temporary residence in a small sub-basement apartment in the Derry ghetto, acquired and filled out all the necessary paperwork, provided a sample of my writing and a hunk of scalp, and waited. Three weeks passed. Finally, the word: I was to report to Brobdignag Gardens the following morning with only a change of clothes, a notebook, and an overall weakness of will. There were seven other novitiates waiting to enter the Gardens that morning besides me, all of whom seemed to be cut from similar, threadbare cloth – every one of us had the desperate, haunted gaze of the sub-suburban oddball, and all the hopes, dreams, dandruff, adenoids and halitosis that went with it. By the end of the first day only five remained. By the end of the second only three. By the end of the third there were four (one of them left the day before to attend BanacekFest 2003 at the Nashua Civic Center and came back a day early when his George Peppard costume was rejected by the event’s organizers). But our numbers kept dwindling after that. For, as it turns out, the Scribe and Scrivener’s Retreat should have had the words “From Reality” appended to its name (though, to be fair, there wouldn’t have been enough room on the sign). Upon entering, we were roughly manhandled and thrown into makeshift bungalows, denied protein and sleep, and forced under the watchful eye of armed guards to write almost a thousand words a day, every day. Those who did not were hauled away in the night and never seen again. During the day, we were obliged to perform acts of endurance – our arms pulled behind our backs until our shoulders separated and then made to copy-edit for hours (“AP Style, not Chicago Manual, maggot!”), twenty-mile runs at the crack of dawn while listening to lectures on Ayn Rand, long days under the punishingly hot sun alphabetizing Woodruff’s library. As for the Great Man himself, he spent most days pacing menacingly above us, shouting excerpts from his manifesto, Das Kapitalized, in between making threats like “you split that infinitive, I split your skull!” The worst moments came when he would stop in front of a hapless novitiate, like the one we called “Corpulent Guy” who had collapsed on a particularly hot afternoon while attempting a particularly grueling allegory. Woodruff loomed over the poor guy, a menacing smile cracking his features, and said, “What we have here is a failure to elucidate.” I never saw Corpulent Guy again.

It soon came clear that leaving was the only way out. I knew my page number was up – that wacky post-Restoration comedy of manners I was constructing was lacking in character development, and they all knew it. So I fashioned a clever camouflage consisting mostly of camouflage clothing, distracted the guards with a first-edition autographed copy of Naked Lunch I dangled from the tree outside my bungalow, and escaped under dust-jacket of darkness. I quickly found I had no place to go – the eviction notice on my sub-basement apartment was written on dactylic pentameter, so I knew Woodward had friends on the outside – so, without other recourse, I skulked back to Port Winestain where, as expected, I was thrown into the local jail on a charge of grand theft go-cart. Those six months and fourteen days in stir were perhaps the happiest I ever spent in this town. It wasn’t until much later that I made the fifth of my five suicide attempts, which I’ll tell you about another time.

And here I was now, again, drawn like a magnetic moth to the flame-shaped refrigerator door of this most despairing of locations. Stones in my shoes. Walking the two and a half miles to my place of employment because I forgot how to drive a car. It also seems so inevitable, so pre-ordained. Several more attempts at escape, at finding more salutary climes for a man of my reduced means, and they had invariably failed – I would still wake up in the same squalid room, looking out the same window and seeing the same civic equivalent of terminal depression in front of me. Trudging forward but never gaining ground, a treadmill that wouldn’t even tone up my thighs properly. A failure even in self-destruction. Was there something, someone even, to pull me out of this long, slow circumnavigation of the area surrounding the drain? Had I reached 5000 words yet?

Just outside of the Gorge ‘n’ Loiter on 23rd Street NE, mere blocks from my place of semi-gainful pseudo-employment, a hand clamped down on my shoulder. And a booming, familiar voice direct out of the deus ex machineshop bellowed a greeting. “Well, well, well, well, well. Look who’s back. I think we need to have a few words, comparatively-young man.”

My inner voice was locked somewhere between “oh God” and “oh, good.” This could be the turning point – to what side I would end up pivoting, I did not know. But one thing seemed certain – this was a great goddamned place to end the chapter. And these last ten words would net me my quota.

(10/4/09 – 9:08 AM)