Pocket Kings (47 page)

It was about three o'clock when I got home from decking Clint Reno.

I knew I had to be out of the house by the time Wifey returned. If she saw me—she had already imparted this to me a few times—she might get a restraining order, and a restraining order, I knew, would be a serious hindrance to us ever getting back together.

I gathered clothing into a suitcase for a possible long haul. In the living room I started hurling books onto the floor.
Ulysses
was the first to go, and with sadistic relish, I tore
Th
e Waste Land and Other Poems
to shreds. Next was
Anna Karenina,
which I'd never even finished, and
Gravity's Rainbow,
which I knew I was supposed to think was a masterpiece but had never liked. I tossed out Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid and chucked Chuck Palahniuk and Chuck Klosterman and dispatched
Dispatches
and sent
Lolita, Augie March,
and both
Lord
and
Lucky Jims
to their Maker. I showed no mercy.
Th
e last book I threw out was Dr. James's Olde Insomnia Elixir:
Th
e Golden Bowl.
It was like
Fahrenheit 451
—which I also tossed out—when all the books go up in flames, except that's supposed to be sad and this wasn't. I was glad to be rid of them. I dragged four large Hefty bags filled with books down into the building's basement.
Th
ey'd never be read, skimmed, or seen again.
Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Farewell, My Lovely, Goodbye, Columbus, Bonjour Tristesse
and
Fuck You, Charlie.

Back upstairs packing my laptop, I espied the dog-eared copy of
DOA
that Cynthia had never finished. I tore it up, ten pages at a time.
Th
en I went onto my desktop computer and found
DOA,
trashed it and emptied the trash. As of that second, it no longer existed anywhere in the known world (Clint had probably purged his copy a long time ago; Deke Rivers was massacring his). I went into a file cabinet and found a few short stories and outlines and first chapters of books I'd started. I destroyed them. EVERYTHING MUST GO. I went back to the desktop computer and dragged more of my writing into the trash. I ripped
Still-Life With Pear
off the wall and broke it in two across my leg, then cut it to pieces. I ripped
Self-Portrait With Headache
off the wall and broke it over my leg, but as I did so something behind the painting fell to the ground with a clank.

It was a key.

I left a note telling Cynthia I'd dropped by to pick up a few things, that I was going to seek professional help and make her proud of me. I took a taxi over to the storage facility in the twenties; the facility is one square block of twelve stories of wall-to-wall dust overlooking the Hudson. I showed my key and ID and a few minutes later I stood in an eight-by-twelve unit, where a low dangling lightbulb barely lit up my dozen or so cartons.
Th
e boxes on the bottom were starting to give way. Poems, short stories, watercolors, gouaches, oil paintings, plays, screenplays, everything. My entire creative output, my oeuvre, the issue of my spirit. Tens of thousands of pages. How many weeks, months, and years of my life had I wasted trying to make something out of myself? If someone were to tell me the exact number in hours and minutes it would stop my heart for good. I dragged a box out into the corridor, then another. Wheezing from the effort and the dust, I created three stacks of cartons in the narrow gray hallway. I grabbed a fistful of paper from a carton on top. It was a play I had written or co­written long ago.
Th
is box was filled with plays I once thought would make me rich, famous, and honored.
Th
ey hadn't. I reached into the next box down and pulled a page out and saw it was a lousy love poem (John Donne meets William Carlos Williams) I'd written for Cynthia when she and I had just started dating . . . when I saw that I toppled over the whole stack with a kick. I reached into the top carton of another stack and pulled out a thick manila envelope. I tore it open and pulled out the yellow clutter of paper within and looked at the front page and read it.

“
Th
ings were very bad then but still we carried on.”

I left it all in the hallway and when I went back downstairs I told the two men working behind the desk to throw it all out.

Th
is is exactly where a flashier, more competent writer would have begun this story. At the end.

I spent another week at the Tunnel Motel in New Jersey, trying to track down Second Gunman and my money. I had once worked my original thousand-buck stake up to 550 times that . . . and I knew I could do it again. But I couldn't. Hanging out at the Low tables I got my remaining $1,000 up to $1,400 and moved up to Medium, but before I knew it I was down to $250. With her stack up over $140,000 Wolverine Mommy visited me at a table in Low—it was humiliating for me to be seen there—and asked me, “What are
you
doing down here?!” I dropped fifteen bucks to her two 9s and left without answering.

Never telling Cynthia about what Gerald/Johnny/Second/Bjorn had done to me—or what I'd allowed to be done to myself— I left her an urgent-sounding message saying she had to call me, that my life was at stake. She called me back and I told her I was checking into the Shining Path Clinic. Even though she made no promise to take me back, she told me she was rooting for me and instantly I knew I'd made a smart move not telling her about dumping all of my dough.

Finally I was doing the right thing.

I flew here to the Southwest—I charged the flight—and checked myself in. Shining Path, one of the best treatment centers of its kind, stands on fifty acres (five of which are parking lots) and abuts a magnificent golf course; looming over an Olympic-sized pool is the center itself, a prismatic glass and steel building that looks like a swiftly rejected design for a World Trade Center replacement, only set on its side.
Th
e grounds are completely flat, not even a pimple, and the lawns are perfectly kept; the white gravel roads cross each other neatly and there are trees here and there, all exactly the same height.
Th
e whole place resembles a small architectural model of itself and when you stand or sit on the grounds you feel like a tiny plastic figure frozen in your tracks.

Th
e ten-page form I signed upon checking in asked me what I did for a living. Having not been published for years, I wrote: “Unemployed writer.”
Th
e center's Assistant Director admitted me; he was friendly at first but flatly refused to call me Chip.

It is a twenty-eight-day program. Individual therapy, group therapy, making your own bed (and lying in it—how fitting), cleaning your room, group and individual prayer.
Th
ey put me in the Non-Substance Wing, which makes it sound as if it either is going to melt under the sun or float off with the first breeze.
Th
e patients in there are kept away from the junkies and alcoholics in the other wing, for the same good reason that in prison shoplifters should be kept away from murderers. In my section were sex addicts, hard-core masochists (there was a guy who loved to have cigars put out on his arms and legs), shopaholics, gamblers, video-game fiends. If there was a thing in the world that you could get hooked on, this is where you went to get unhooked on it.

All the rooms are small and identical and supposedly there are no special privileges: even if you were Prince Charles or Bill Gates, they'd stick you in a room with a plumber or truck driver. Or with someone like me. My roommate was Jared; he was from Tyler, Texas, and was only seventeen years old. Jared had what I thought at first was a savage purple rash around his neck. But, he told me, he was a “space cowboy”: he was addicted to “the Choking Game,” aka Space Monkey, American Dream, Knock Out, Hawaiian High, and about thirty other wonderful monikers. He and his buddies choked themselves until they almost passed out or did pass out.
Th
e rush as you lapsed into unconsciousness, Jared told me, was super awesome.
Whatever,
I wondered,
happened to good ol' circle jerks and the Soggy Biscuit Pro-Am?!

Shining Path doesn't allow card playing. Computers and laptops are
verboten
. (Too many gambling, video-game, porn, Zappos, and eBay addicts trying to get cured.)
Th
e good part for me was this meant no playing; the bad part was it meant no writing.

Every day it was sunny, warm, zero humidity, no wind.
Th
e sprinklers always came on at the same time, to the second, and did the exact same water dance for the same amount of time. Even the grass takes part in the clockwork.

I attended two lectures—or confessionals—on my first full day. (Attendance is mandatory.)
Th
e first speaker was a sex addict named Tom. He really should have chosen a different poison for himself: Tom wasn't attractive or rich and was lumpy around the middle . . . it could not have been too easy for him being a sex addict. “I tried to kill myself five times,” he told us as he nervously jingled the change in his pockets.
Th
e second lecturer was addicted to betting on the horses. “I tried to kill myself seven times,” he said. At the next confessional the following morning, a woman told us about her addiction to self-mutilation, but there was a slight downtick: she had only four suicide attempts under her belt.
Th
eir stories moved many in the audience, myself included, to tears, but I also wondered how a person can possibly fail to commit suicide, given all those whacks at it.

I mentioned that to my counselor, a lanky social worker with the lamentable name (considering she was treating a card player) of Jackie King, and she threw me out of her office and told me to see her the same time tomorrow.
Th
e next day she told me that despite what I may have read about how winning releases certain pleasure-inducing chemicals in the brain, gamblers gamble not to win but to lose. When I told her that I didn't lose, she didn't believe me. You've hit rock bottom, she said, that's why you're here. With what Second/Johnny/Gerald had done to me in mind, I corrected her: “No. Rock bottom hit
me.
” When I told her how wonderfully refreshing an ice cold beer tastes in August and opined that the single worst part of being an alcoholic is that, after you've kicked the habit, you're not allowed to ever have another drink, she threw me out again.

Th
ere were a few hot female patients there and there were rumors among the men that one or two of them were nymphomaniacs, but I missed Cynthia and wanted her back. I wanted to move back into my apartment, forget about cards and the $550K I'd been robbed of, and write an unlikely happy ending to this story.

I hadn't noticed it the first two days—everything was so new— but there were copies of
A Million Little Pieces
everywhere.
Th
ere were plenty of Bibles, too, but Frey's mendacious masterwork was definitely Good Book No. 1. People not only believed the book, they believed
in
it.
Th
ey were like pilgrims flocking from thousands of miles away to gaze at the Virgin Mary's tear-streaked face in an Egg McMuffin.

Th
e library was filled with other substance-abuse and addiction and self-help memoirs, books with such lurid titles as
Hammered
and
Wasted
and
Cracked and
Hammered
and
Wasted and Cracked
and
Drunk and Disorderly
and
Rich Coke Slut
and
Smacked-Out and Dead
and
Madison Avenue Meth Mama.
Th
ey made me cringe. Someone should just cut them up, throw two-thirds of them out, and randomly paste what's left into one book and call it
How I Grew Up in a Fucked-Up Family and Endured a Screwed-Up Childhood and Started Getting Stoned as a Kid and
Th
en Totally Got Wasted with Booze and/or Drugs For Years and Lost Everything I Had but Somehow Lived to Whine About It to You for Profit, Catharsis and Fame.

(Sometimes I think a National Book Award should be awarded to every brutalized person who ever suffered at the unloving hands of their own family, and to all the destitute people who got addicted to drugs, booze, or gambling and forfeited the treasure of their souls, and to all the trampled, powerless victims of poverty, disease, violence, war, and mass murder . . . who never wrote one single word about it.)

Th
ere is no coffee or tea at Shining Path because there are caffeine junkies; the gym only allows you in for a half-hour at a time because there are exercise junkies and the Runner's High isn't permitted; no iPods or other personal stereos are allowed on the premises lest anyone get addicted to love, hooked on a feeling, or develop a hard habit to break. Watching soap operas and game shows is banned, too.