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06-05-2011
An excerpt from Mike DeCapite’s RUINED FOR LIFE! along with the Ted Barron photograph that inspired it appear in Sensitive Skin #6.
04-30-2011
Doc’s Clock was a good place to get out of afternoon’s flare-up, when the sun over Mission Street was blazing toward some painful equipoise between day and night, and hung in a shaft through the transom and the open doors, and lit the linoleum floor tiles there, and lived, for an hour, in the varnish of the near end of the bar, and in a glass of beer halfway down, and in an ashtray in the dark, suggesting by inference the farther reaches of the room.
Down back, someone left the men’s room and came knocking through the tables, past the shuffleboard machine, a guy in a white cowboy hat, along the bar, beat-up drunk. He veered into a barstool and spun off toward the street, and stood there in his plaid Western shirt, getting his bearings in the light before choosing a direction and moving on. The bartender, a woman I didn’t know, came out of the dark, took his glass and empty and wiped the bar. She dropped the bottle in the recycling and asked what she could get me. I was killing an hour after work while my wife packed some things at home. She was moving to her sister’s place while I figured out what I was doing with a woman in Los Angeles.
I reached for a napkin. I could never just sit. I started writing a few things down, just to be doing something. Even apart from my circumstances the drink made me nervous, as a first drink always did at that hour, as though something were about to happen, as though I were engaging some impossibly greater force, fate for instance, or maybe it was the hour, happy hour, the witching hour, or maybe it was my situation after all. I sipped my drink, a whiskey on the rocks, and described my surroundings, the sunlight that, now, dazzled the backbar and frescoed a patch of the wall, and pretty soon it turned into a letter to the woman in LA. A couple of bearded kids came in and I put them in the letter. One of them called the bartender Amanda.
I’d flipped the napkin over and covered half the other side with writing when a woman in office clothes blew in and took a stool across the curve of the bar from me. I put her in. She asked Amanda if there was a payphone she could use to page someone. Amanda said the bar’s phone was a rotary phone but she could use a payphone across the street and page someone to the bar. The woman went through her bag. She was in a flurry. One of the bearded guys offered her his cell, and she paged someone to the number at Doc’s. Then she thanked the guy and ordered a vodka with a twist. He put his phone away and resumed his conversation. They were talking about movies. I wrote, “Wherever you go, the only thing people are talking about is movies.”
When the woman got her drink she pulled a big red hardcover book from her bag and started reading it. She flipped pages forward and back. She had her book and the guys had their movies and I had my letter, and we all had our drinks, and we were balanced there, floating on the moments in a nice equilibrium.
Then the phone rang and she was off her seat. She left us wobbling there and ran down to take it. Amanda was talking into the phone.
Amanda asked if there was a Mike.
I slipped off my stool and walked down. The woman was coming back. I told her I wouldn’t be long.
I took the phone. My wife was calling to say she was leaving now. I talked with her for a minute and walked back to my seat.
I summed all this up in my letter to the woman in LA. She was married too. The night before, her husband had announced he was moving out and wanted a divorce.
The woman across from me said, “That fucking piece of shit.”
I looked up. It had just escaped her. I wrote it down.
She drained her vodka and kept pretending to read her book, or genuinely trying to read it to distract herself. She was visibly upset now, squirming around on her stool, pushing a hand through her hair. I got another napkin, and from then on it was all happening as I wrote, as though I were creating it.
She was off her stool by the time I heard the phone ring. Amanda said “Mike?” and held the receiver in the air. I avoided the woman’s eyes as I walked on down.
It was the woman in LA. I told her I was leaving soon and I’d call her from home. Back on my perch, I picked up the cigarette I’d left smoking on the bar. The woman across from me was barely keeping it together. Her face would collapse toward tears, and then she’d take a breath. She rubbed her right leg, forcing her concentration on the page.
She let out a ragged sigh. She drained the icewater dregs of her drink. Then she clapped her book shut, stuffed it in her bag, and walked out.
We watched her go.
The phone rang. I sat up. Of course it would ring the moment she left. I saw the whole tableau unfolding from a bird’s-eye view of the tricks and slights of fate. Amanda gestured with the receiver toward the end of the bar. I ran outside into the sun. The woman was in a crowd at the corner, waiting to cross. I ran up the block, dodging people, fixed on her there with her headphones as she gathered herself forward into the empty evening. She stepped off the curb and I touched her elbow and said, “The phone! The phone’s for you!”
She stalked past me toward the bar. She was free now to get it off her chest, and she marched along, relieved and cursing.
I trotted behind her saying “Aah, he probably tried to call while I was on the phone.”
She said, “I’m sorry. It’s been going on a long time, y’know?”
I followed her in. It was okay now, for someone, for tonight anyway. Amanda and the two guys were standing at attention. They’d been watching the doorway.
One of the guys said, “It’s for you, guy. I think it’s for you.”
I turned as she whirled out, and I followed, making silly helpless apologies as she looked to the left, to the right, and moved off.
I watched her go for a minute. Then I walked back through the bar and picked up the phone. It was my wife again, calling to tell me one last thing.
04-19-2011
photo by June Hony
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When it was over I hid out in the Catskills. When it was really finished between us, and had been for some time. One afternoon I stood up and the chair went over. I heard it as it might have sounded to my neighbor downstairs, hitting the floor. I laughed and thought Okay, this is idiotic.
I packed a bag and drove north. I wanted to put myself out of reach. She hadn’t called me for weeks, so I was doing my part to deepen the silence. As I drove I was thinking about her, quarreling with myself, replaying the scenes, staging new ones. There was no real hiding. But I could put new sights in front of me, which would force their way between my thoughts of her. I could put myself in the hands of time, or try.
It took forever to get there, longer than I expected. Spring was only just arriving to the mountains. Everywhere was the sound of water making its way down. In a week, the grey mountainsides were touched here and there with green, or a color more temporary than green. A hawk would circle. The landscape seemed to hang in the balance of the year. It could go either way, forward or back. The stars I saw on my first night reminded me about stars, as though from a former life. Cooper, who lived up there and was used to them, talked about the stars he’d seen from the Sinai Peninsula. He’d felt he was seeing them through thousand-year-old eyes.
I was helping him to paint a church. It was a white wooden structure, unadorned, with a little stream running behind it, surrounded by mountains. There were only about forty pews. It was a First Old School Baptist church, whatever that meant. It had been there a hundred and fifty years. The last member of the congregation had died ten years before. She was 98 years old. Maybe the denomination had died with her. The place was less a church than a tomb. It felt like a tomb, even after we took down the old wooden shutters and let some light in. It was colder in there than outside. In the mornings I could see my breath.
There was a lot of prep work to do, cleaning and spackling and sanding. It took a few days just to paper the floor and tape it off. While I worked I thought of my ex, and then the one before her, and the one before her. I dipped a bucket in the stream and felt her eyes on me, or the one before her, or the one before. Now and then I swept up a loose, old-fashioned nail like a nail from the cross.
I was disoriented by the daily lightness of it all. I had the feeling I was forgetting something, like my wallet or keys. One morning I woke up looking at a mirror, thinking Where am I that there’s a cello in the room, and all these toys? I drove to the church on a winding county two-lane. Two geese were looking at me, stepping toward the road. They were a beautiful grey, with black heads and necks. They were working the grass, but stopped and stood at alert. Then one of them lowered its head to continue what it was doing, and the other followed.
At the church, my folded sandpaper was on a bench, beside a pail of cold water with a sponge floating in it. I propped open one of the heavy leaded windows, turned on the radio, and resumed sanding the pews and thinking about her. Cooper was at another job, so I could devote myself to her without distraction, cycling through my thoughts while the radio cycled through its tired playlist. When I went outside I couldn’t hear the radio, only the wind in the grass and in my ears.
We were sitting in the yard after work. Cooper was drinking a beer. He put down the newspaper and said “Quit acting so heartbroken.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“I know, but I can hear you. Knock it off.”
“I’m suffering, here!”
“Yeah. It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? Now that you say it out loud? It sounds a little unreal.”
“That much I’ll admit.”
“So knock it off.”
He lifted the paper and folded it over. Mosquito torches were flaming, smoking. I moved along the perimeter of the yard. I knew what he was talking about. Just because you’re suffering doesn’t mean it’s not an act. We’re all acting, all the time. Men, anyway. Even when we’re alone. She’d never believed I was in love with her. She kept me at arm’s length while she figured it out. She was always halfway out the door. Maybe she knew something I didn’t know. But we don’t like to give anything up. So I was always trying to convince us both. The momentum of it carried over after she was gone. It was dangerous because it was open-ended. Now that I had no one to convince but myself, it could go on forever.
The weeks went by. I was walking out of a hardware store when it hit me that I hadn’t thought about her in half an hour. High spring seemed to be reflecting a shine from beyond the world, a place where nothing moved. Every morning I saw the geese in the grass, and they watched me go by.
As I felt more independent, the pain eased off. I suspected it might slip away altogether, and with it my last connection to her. One night I almost called. I told myself I’d sleep on it and decide in the morning. But the decision had been made with the decision to decide. In the morning I went straight to the phone. Cooper was crouched by the fireplace with a coffee and the Times, letting his cigarette smoke go up the chimney. He said nothing as I took the phone outside. She didn’t answer, so I left her a message and the number where I was. In doing so I gave away the game.
Hour by hour at work, crawling around and painting the old pews, I thought of her. She’d see it was a shame to let it all go, let it die of neglect. One fantasy came smoking out of another. She was coming to me in a white eyelet sundress I’d given her. I was marrying her in this very church. After work, I went straight to the answering machine. She’d left a message saying “I’m not coming back.” I went to bed early.
I got up in the morning to clean up the mess. I expected a litter of ashtrays and bottles, but the party which got out of hand was all in my head. Cooper was over by the fireplace with the Times and a coffee. I had a clear sense that my mind was a universe, too big for me to handle or contain. I could find any truth I wanted to find there, but it wouldn’t really be the truth. There is no really. A universe was just the raw material for any illusion I chose. And if nothing is true, you have to choose. You have no choice.
I drove to the church. The geese were in the grass near a guardrail. Farther on, a grouping of deer was paused near the edge of the woods. They happened to be deer. They watched me and I watched them as they went by, as though we recognized each other there. Meanwhile, my head was trapped inside my past. Encased in it, as though my past were a helmet that provided me with oxygen and protected me from the void. I wanted to drop my past and take my chances in the void. In a field, a red fox was stalking a crow. The fox turned its head, tracking the movement of the car. I could feel the whole sick, repetitiously failing cycle of love twisting back through the years. There was a parasite inside me, a worm which wanted something I didn’t want. I couldn’t sell out to some idea of love or God, or my need for either. What I wanted was to renounce my identity. See through it to the entity underneath which was free of definition, free of history, free of expectation, and was just an opportunity for life.
In front of the church was a stone platform which had been built as a place for people to step down from their carriages. I used to go out and sit on it in the sun and smoke a cigarette and watch the grass stirring in the breeze. The platform was a stairway of five stone slabs. Cooper had told me that the stone was bluestone cut from a local quarry. But there was no quarry in sight. I could hardly believe that people using 19th-century tools had cut those slabs from the rock and carried them out of a quarry and loaded them onto a horse-drawn cart and transported them there, for that purpose. The labor, the danger—even the conception were beyond my grasp. Let alone, say, the Great Pyramid, or the cod industry, or the Roman walls running all through Europe to England. Like most human endeavor, the thought of it left me exhausted rather than inspired. The exhaustion started with myself. The only thing I could feel good about was that I hadn’t had a drink in three years. That was all I had to go on. What was I doing here? It was a matter of yes and no to life. It was the little matter of God. In the grass, impossibly, the sun was shining on each and every blade.
03-05-2011
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I was driving a delivery van for a painting contractor. We had a job on East 79th, and I pulled up there on a blinding, fractured, disgusted summer morning – a hundred degrees already – with one of those terrific, all-encompassing hangovers: the kind of hangover where you can’t tell the difference between the inside of your head and the outside. You know there’s a difference, and you try to respect it according to custom, but the distinction is tiring to maintain. I opened the back of the van and rummaged around and hauled out a ladder and a dolly. The doorman was watching me from under his awning. I stacked the dolly with cases of paint and thinner and a box of assorted supplies and then rolled it, with the ladder under one arm, past the awning, to the side entrance, through the black iron gate topped with razor wire, and down the ramp to the basement. I liked it better down there because it was dark and cool and clean. Everything was painted industrial grey. With the hangover I was basically one with my surroundings, so I felt safe there.
I rang for the service elevator and waited for it like a toad: pulsing, existing, breathing the cool darkness through my skin. The elevator came down and the guy slid the gate aside. I stood the ladder against the back of the car and rolled the dolly in and told the guy “Seven.” I think I said it. I must’ve said it, because he closed the gate and we were riding up. I hadn’t said anything but the floor number and thanks to him in many weeks because he was a silent, furious guy who canceled smalltalk. The man was tense. No good-morning, no sports, weather, nada. He seemed like he could snap at any minute. Word was that he was an ex-con. So I just stood there behind him, absently touching the right side of my face, where my wife had raked me last night. We fought constantly, like trapped, provoked animals. The guy opened the gate and I got the dolly and ladder out.
I made my delivery and had a coffee with the crew and took a lot of ragging about my face, the gist of which was that I’d probably deserved it, and then I went out to the stairwell and rang for the elevator again. I was glad to get out of there because the job site was filled with sunlight and disordered and noisy. The coffee hadn’t done anything for my hangover but speed it up. As a distinct entity, I was still porous. I remembered I was supposed to call my wife, and started a conversation with her in my head. I’ll pick you up after work at six – did you bring your stuff? – maybe we’ll go to the gym, and then we have to take that movie back. The guy slid the gate open, I rolled the dolly in, and now we’re riding down. It hits me that he’s decorated the elevator like a cell. It’s like a cell anyway because of its size and the metal bars, but he’s got pictures from magazines of cars and women, and a calendar with the days crossed out. Meanwhile I’m still talking to my wife: We’ll get some things for dinner at the place on Bedford . . . what are you going to want? . . . maybe I’ll make broccoli and pasta. We get to the bottom, I’m telling her Alright, I gotta go, I’ll see you later, bye, and the guy opens the cage and I say, out loud, “I love you,” and roll the dolly out of the elevator.
I took three steps and my hands went cold. Did I just say that? Six weeks I don’t say a word to the man and now “I love you”? I was a psychopath. And I couldn’t take it back – what could I say? “I’m sorry, I don’t love you after all?” “I’m sorry, I had you confused with my wife”? “I’m sorry, I had you confused with the basement”? Given the hangover, it could even have been true! Maybe for a moment I did love the elevator operator. I didn’t look back.
01-28-2011
Read an outtake from Mike DeCapite’s unpublished novel RUINED FOR LIFE! at Sensitive Skin.
01-05-2011
Today at its website, Atticus Books has published a Radiant Fog piece called “Happy” that Mike DeCapite wrote in 2004. You can read it here.