Katerina Read online

  Kevin nudges me I turn toward him he motions toward some American girls a few tables over, speaks.

  Cute.

  Yeah.

  Go over?

  I look at Greg, speak.

  What do you think?

  Better than sitting here by ourselves.

  I motion toward the couples.

  We got them.

  Kevin and Greg both laugh, I speak.

  They’re cool, man. Way cooler than us. We could probably learn something from them.

  Kevin laughs again.

  I’m not here to learn.

  I laugh.

  Fair enough.

  Greg stands, with his full stein of foamy lager.

  It’s our last night, let’s go.

  We walk over. Spend the night drinking and laughing and drinking with the four American girls, who are studying in London and came to Munich for the same reason we did. We move from tent to tent at a certain point we start drinking Jägermeister with our beer, blackness and oblivion soon follow, blackness and oblivion. My next memory is waking up on the train as it pulls into Paris Gare de l’Est. I smell awful, my lederhosen smell like beer and vomit, my head is pounding, I’m sick and shaking. Greg and Kevin aren’t much better. Three dumb crazy drunks. Though for them it is only an occasional gig, and for me it is my only gig. We make it back to my apartment Louis isn’t home. I get into bed drink half a bottle of wine so I can sleep, I close my eyes, I wake up twenty-four hours later shaking I run to the bathroom and vomit. Bile and blood. Over and over and over. My kidneys hurt, they literally hurt, my head hurts, my mouth is dry, my vision is blurred, my thoughts spin spun spinning spunt. I drink some water as much as I can straight from the bathroom faucet, I splash it on my face, I rub cold water on my arms let it drip off the tips of my fingers. I drink some more. I walk back to my room Kevin and Greg are gone. There is a note on the floor next to my bed. It says

  Epic Visit. Sleep it off and get back at it. And call if and when you come back to America. Later. Kevin and Greg.

  I get back into bed and though I don’t want to do it, and doing it will make me fucking hate myself and want to die, I know the only way to go back to sleep is to drink. I take the remaining half bottle of wine in a couple long draws. A chill runs down my spine, my stomach is immediately on fire. But the rest of me calms and says thank you, thank you, thank you, for giving us what we need, thank you.

  I close my eyes.

  Pull the covers over my head.

  Curl up into fetal position.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  Breathe.

  I wait for my heart to slow down my hands to stop shaking thoughts to slow.

  Eyes closed covers over fetal calm.

  I hate myself.

  I’m sick.

  I hate myself.

  Los Angeles, 2017

  * * *

  I started going to Church in Paris.

  Whenever I felt lost or depressed or like I wanted to die, I went to Church.

  I’d sit alone.

  Read the Bible.

  Look through the Book of Common Prayer.

  Watch light move through stained-glass windows.

  Imagine all the weddings at the altar, all the baptisms, all of the funerals.

  Imagine how many services had taken place.

  How many people had worshipped.

  What they thought.

  What they felt.

  What they believed.

  How they prayed.

  What they prayed for.

  If their prayers were answered.

  Sometimes I’d kneel.

  Sometimes I’d stand.

  Sometimes in the front of the Church, sometimes in the back.

  I’d stare at the floor.

  Stare at the Cross.

  Wait.

  And stare.

  Wait.

  And stare.

  Wait.

  I always wanted to believe. To find comfort or relief. To discover some connection between me and God, or me and Christ, or me and the Holy Spirit.

  Or me and all of Them.

  I wanted a sign.

  Something.

  Anything.

  A sign.

  That they knew I was there.

  Sometimes I read prayers from the Book. I’d read them quietly but with my voice at a level so that if someone was listening they would hear me.

  Sometimes I read verses from the Bible.

  Sometimes I looked at the Cross and spoke.

  Asked for help.

  Or shared my thoughts.

  Sought advice and counsel.

  Vented.

  Cried.

  Begged.

  Begged.

  Begged.

  Paris, London, back in America before I went away.

  While I was away, not locked up, but sick, sick as fuck near death with others who were the same.

  I didn’t want to die.

  I was scared.

  So scared.

  So fucking scared I wet my bed every night for the first week.

  They had a Chapel so I went.

  Read the Bible.

  Got on my knees.

  Prayed.

  Begged.

  Cried.

  I wanted a sign.

  Something.

  Anything.

  Please.

  A sign.

  I got over my sickness.

  I’m supposed to say I recovered.

  But I didn’t.

  I defied it.

  Mocked it.

  Taunted it.

  Fought it.

  I beat it.

  And if there was a sign, I missed it.

  Or I wasn’t aware enough to see it.

  I kept going to Church.

  Sometimes for the silence.

  The deep heavy cavernous silence.

  Sometimes for the peace.

  Sometimes to read books, not the Books of God, but just books, novels, the Tao Te Ching, Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and for some reason when you read in a Church, everything you read is heavier, more insightful, more impactful, more powerful.

  I’d talk to God.

  Say

  What’s up, Dude? How are things in Heaven?

  Ask God for advice.

  I really dig this girl but she doesn’t dig me, thoughts?

  Curse Him.

  I’m in fucking pain and I’m asking for your fucking help.

  Good times.

  Bad times.

  Once a month, or once every couple months.

  Church.

  When I could write well enough to write books, I wrote books about God.

  People thought they were about other things, about drugs or sex or a city or a friend, but they weren’t.

  They were about God.

  My struggle with, my lack of, my yearning for, my faith and my doubt, my rage directed toward.

  Cover of my first book had the hand of Adam reaching to touch God the hand was covered with little sprinkles alluring and devastating a hand reaching for God covered with temptation.

  Another was my own Bible, a Bible about a God I could believe in.

  Every day.

  I thought about God.

  Now and then, sometimes for no reason but often because

  I went to Church.

  Sat stood kneeled talked laughed prayed complained cursed sang read looked every time I went I looked.

  For a sign.

  I wanted to believe.

  I wanted.

  Wanted.

  Life moved, good times bad times, triumph and disaster, joy and devastation, life moved.

  One day.

  One day.

  One random day.

  I got a note.

  It was sent to my publisher.

  Who sent it to my office.

  Which is what they do when people send me notes.

  The note was in a nice envelope on nice paper.

  And it said
br />   I read all of your books. And an interview where you said you wished you believed in God, but that you didn’t. You’re wrong, absolutely wrong. You do believe in God, you just don’t understand your belief, and you don’t understand how to believe. Someday you will, someday God will touch you. Until then, hold on.…

  I thought about the note long after I read it.

  Usually I put such things in a box, under my desk, and when the box is full, it goes into storage, with a couple hundred other boxes, filled with similar things.

  But I kept this one.

  And still it sits, three years after it arrived.

  On my desk.

  In the corner.

  It sits.

  My black desk.

  Plywood painted black sitting on two black file cabinets.

  And I see it.

  I think about it.

  And I know the person who wrote it

  Is right.

  I’m old now.

  Not in years yet, but in experience and pain, sorrow and regret, in good intentions gone horribly wrong and bad intentions yoked with guilt, I’m ancient now.

  And I hope.

  I learn.

  Or see.

  Or know at some point know.

  How to believe.

  How to look at myself in the mirror.

  How to fix what I have broken.

  How to smile and feel it.

  How to love without pain.

  How to settle the accounts I’ve defaulted on so many, so many.

  How to wake up and pray.

  How to look up and believe.

  I wonder if I deserve it, any of it, am I worthy or am I worthless.

  Do I get another chance or have I used them up.

  I still go to Church.

  Show me a sign.

  A sign.

  A sign.

  Show me.

  Paris, 1992

  * * *

  Though it takes a week to recover, I never stop drinking. I vomit two or three times a day, but I’d rather be sick than deal with delirium, and I’d rather be sick than deal with trying not to be sick. I wake up drink. Work until I start shaking drink until I stop shaking. Work until I start shaking again drink until I sleep. Do it again. Day after day and October passes. Louis tells me I need to get out that I’m killing myself I tell him if I die I will be dying for my art and there is no more noble way to die. He tells me I’m an idiot and he’s right. I’m a fucking idiot. But I don’t know anything else except being an idiot, and I don’t want to do anything else, so I keep on with it. Drink and work and sleep. Drink work sleep.

  *

  I finish two hundred pages of my book I am convinced it is a masterpiece. I read it and I realize it’s garbage and I should never show it to anyone. I get a box out of the Baker’s garbage bin put the two hundred pages of the book in the box. I walk to square Boucicaut and find some rocks and I put the rocks in the box with the pages. I walk to Pont Royal and throw the box, and the rocks and pages in the box, into the Seine. As I watch the box and the rocks and the pages sink below the surface of the water I decide to spit on them. I lean over the rail and hawk the biggest, greeniest, nastiest, most disgusting loogie I can and I spit down into the water where all my bullshit nonsense writing just sank. And for whatever reason it makes me smile. Months of work. Gone. With a box and some rocks and some spit. Good fucking riddance.

  *

  November it gets cold rains every day. People love Paris in the summer but I love it now. Fuck the sun. The gray looming and drifting and enveloping. Over Paris. In Paris. On every street, around every building, in every alley. Paris with sun is like a beautiful woman in a designer dress easy to fall in love with and easy to walk away from because you know she’s too beautiful to be yours. Paris in the gray is a femme fatale who draws you in and makes you fall in love and makes you believe she loves you and once you’re all the way in, she knifes you. I keep writing every day but I go out more, I choose life more, back to wandering and watching and getting lost, back to hours standing in front of paintings, back to nights at Stolly’s and Sacré-Cœur and Bar Dix and Polly Maggoo. It is said that a happy and stable life is about balance I can’t ever find it. Whatever I see I want to see more, whatever I taste I want to taste more, however long I walk I wish I could keep going, whatever I take or drink or touch more more more. And the gray and the beauty below it and within it, the beauty consumed and enhanced by it invites you toward more, it sings to you and it caresses you more more more the true Paris, the Paris of drifting, enveloping Gray wants to give more. And so I go out and in and around and I dance to the song and I shudder at the touch and I marvel at the beauty and I follow the direction more more more, and I wait for the knife in my back, I wait and I look forward to that fucking knife, more.

  *

  A relatively sober afternoon cleaning the apartment. I find the number Kevin gave me, the number in San Francisco. I walk over to the phone it’s nine hours behind Paris but I know she wakes up early. I dial a few times and hang up before it rings. Part of me wants to talk to her to hear her voice to smile at the words she chooses to know how she is and what she’s doing to smile and feel my heart beating faster, to allow a flood of love and joy and memory to come into me even if I just heard her say one word hello it would all come back, all of the hope and the need and the inspiration, everything that made me okay when I was with her. If I heard one word hello. And part of me knows better. Knows that if I start down that road there is no good place for it to end. That I couldn’t do it before and even if I wanted to do it now, if every cell in my body in my heart mind soul and spirit wanted to be with her and follow that path, I couldn’t do it. I wish I could but I couldn’t. And that part of me that knows better is countered by part of me that doesn’t care, that wants the pain from the sound of her voice, wants the heartbreak it will cause, wants the chaos and self-destruction that will follow it, I want it that pain more more more I want it. The two sides. Love and pain. I dial half the number hang up. Dial most of the number hang up. Pick up the phone, stare at it, don’t dial at all hang up. I dial the number it starts to ring I hang up. I take a drink, a long drink from a bottle of cheap red wine it burns I dial and let it ring. One ring two and three she answers.

  Hello?

  Hi.

  A pause, a moment. Heart pounding I heard the only thing I needed to hear my heart is pounding I could hang up now.

  A pause.

  A moment.

  How’s Paris?

  It’s good.

  Everything you dreamed?

  Don’t know yet.

  Behaving?

  No.

  I think about you there, worry about you.

  I’m okay.

  I miss you.

  Same, though I try not to.

  Why?

  Because it hurts.

  Yeah, me too.

  How’s San Francisco?

  It’s great.

  Everything you dreamed?

  Yes.

  What are you doing?

  Working at an investment bank, got a nice apartment in the Marina, go out once or twice a week, hang out with friends on the weekends.

  Sounds nice, mellow.

  It is.

  We talk for an hour, I know the call will cost a fortune but I don’t care. Every second of the call is wonderful, every second of the call hurts, hurts my heart and mind and soul and spirit, I can feel the pain seeping into my body, my bones, moving into every part of me, deep and heavy and real pain. We talk about books politics she gives me updates on friends from school tries to explain to me what she does at her job, I tell her about Shakespeare and Company and Maison de Gyros, sitting in cafés watching the world go by. We stick to happy cheery subjects avoid going into whether either of us is seeing anyone I certainly don’t want to fucking know. She asks when I’m coming home I tell her I don’t know she asks if I’m ever coming home I tell her I don’t know. She tells me she’s glad I called, and I tell
her so am I, she says don’t lose her number I tell her I won’t. We avoid saying the words I know I still feel, when we say good-bye I hang up the phone and stare at it and bite my lower lip and let the tears run down my face I am not going to sob or wail or let the pain out I want it.

  I want the pain.

  I want the fucking pain.

  It makes me feel alive.

  Makes me feel something other than hate, other than hate for myself.

  Love and loss and regret and sorrow mixed and swirling into pain.

  I want it.

  So I bite my lip and stare at the phone clench my fists and let the tears run down my face.

  For an hour.

  Two.

  I don’t know.

  But at a certain point the tears stop.

  The pain doesn’t.

  I miss you.

  The pain doesn’t.

  *

  The Alcoholic’s Dilemma. We drink because we feel pain. The drinking kills the pain. When the drink wears off we feel more pain, so we drink more to kill it, which makes us feel more, so we drink more. And thus it goes until you either stop or die. But stopping hurts too much.

  And so.

  And so.

  I go.

  *

  Polly for two straight days when it closes I sleep in a park around the corner I don’t remember much though I do know when I walked in for day three Omer refused to serve me.

  *

  Bar to café to bar to café on rue Saint-Denis and du Faubourg-Saint-Denis I wake up in a doorway. I’m wearing pants but I can tell I’m not wearing underwear. I’m wearing socks but my combat boots are gone. My wallet is in my front pocket I take it out there is still money in it. The doorway is in the section of Saint-Denis where ladies of the night like to stroll I imagine I spent a minute or two with one of them last night before passing out. I don’t give a fuck about losing my underwear, but I am bummed about my boots. I have had them for years they were beat-up and beautiful. I get up and walk to Les Halles I find a shop selling the same style same brand I buy a new pair. They’ll need to be broken in, but so be it. I find a bar to get a drink raise a toast to my missing boots, and to a long friendship with my new ones.

  *

  Philippe wants to try a Long Island Iced Tea. He read about them in a magazine he pulled out of the garbage and figures I’ll know where to get them. I don’t generally drink Long Island Iced Teas, but I know a place near the Champs-Élysées where American businessmen go to drink fancy cocktails. Philippe and I go to the bar and I drink Long Island Iced Teas until I can’t walk. Philippe carries me to a cab gets me into bed I wake up twenty-four hours later.