Hotels Hospitals and Jails: A Memoir

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  This book is for my father,

  John Howard Swofford

  &

  my love is for

  Christa

  WAR IS THE POETRY OF MEN, BY WHICH THEY SEEK TO GAIN ATTENTION AND RELIEF THROUGHOUT THEIR LIVES.

  —THOMAS BERNHARD GATHERING EVIDENCE

  Prologue

  There are days I still fantasize about combat, long nights when I wish I had rejoined the Marines as an infantry officer after September 11 and gone back over and got some war to score that kill I’d missed the first time. Most people don’t understand that desire, but I was born a war baby: my father impregnated my mother while in Honolulu on R & R from Vietnam. And I believed that there existed no grander test for a man than combat. Every other pursuit was pure, unimportant leisure when compared to a firefight. I didn’t know if another war would make me a better man, but it might. It certainly would have changed me. Or it might have killed me.

  What did I do instead of heading back to war? My first book, Jarhead, was turned into a movie, and I wrote and published a novel. I divorced one woman, and I spent many years falling in love with various versions of the wrong woman and walking away from the right woman once. I bought two engagement rings. I bought a beautiful apartment on West Nineteenth Street in Manhattan. I taught at a few different colleges. I ate at some of the best restaurants in the world (in Paris, Madrid, Tokyo, Istanbul) and at some of the worst (in Ho Chi Minh City and Australia’s Pilbara region). I spent an unconscionable amount of money on Burgundy wine and I drank most of it. I bought and used the occasional batch of recreational drugs. I nearly killed myself in a sixty-thousand-dollar sports car. I watched my father get sicker and sicker from a heinous disease that was possibly partially the result of his twenty-three years in the military and his exposure to Agent Orange. I thought about killing myself for months on end. A few times I fantasized about killing my father.

  I flew women to London and Tokyo and Oakland and Seattle and other cities I’ve forgotten.

  Once I slept in a hotel room in Shinjuku, Tokyo, with my girlfriend Ava. Staying in a room ten floors below us was a woman named Anya whom I had flown to Tokyo from Munich. A few Metro stops away in Roppongi was a Japanese girl I’d just spent a week with before my girlfriend Ava and my ex-girlfriend Anya arrived, a few hours apart. Somehow, I had sex with all of these women throughout the week and I did not get caught. This is to say, I took risks. And the meaning of the word girlfriend had a lot of elasticity. I thought I’d created a new language of lust, but really I spoke artifice and despair.

  I told so many lies about my whereabouts late at night or early in the morning I’m certain I set a record for the audacity of my libido.

  I believe that having been a marine and having gone to war helped me become a great liar. Growing up with a Vietnam War veteran for a father helped me become a liar, too. I learned this from my father: If the lie will not get you blown up, the lie is worth whatever the cost. My father excelled at deceit. He deceived his wife and children about what kind of husband and father he was, but mostly he deceived himself about how that little war in Southeast Asia had changed him.

  Like many combat veterans I know, my father and I lived with the wickedly exciting and doggedly exhausting knowledge that we had once, for a short period of time, flirted with death, and won. This knowledge is like a drug, the purest cocaine or eighty-year-old Highland single malt scotch: once you have had some it alters your understanding of the world and of other people and of consequences.

  If I lied to a lover about what neighborhood or city or country I’d slept in the night before, it didn’t really matter: the relationship might sour but she would never kill me. Lying about sex became fun. It became a hobby. Manhattan bored me, drinking bored me, drugs bored me, but lying about sex never bored me.

  Eventually I had wasted such a massive amount of money on women, wine, drugs, cars, and booze that my dissipation and deceit blew up in my face. I looked up one day and could no longer afford the mortgage on my apartment. I had to sell and became, in a way, homeless.

  I would have liked to ask my father for advice but at the time our relationship was in complete disrepair.

  But for some time my father had owned a Winnebago and a dream: that we two traverse the country and come to an understanding and discover a friendship. One trip wasn’t enough. Neither was two. It took three.

  1

  Goodbye to All That

  In February 2004, on the first night in the apartment I had bought on West Nineteenth Street in Manhattan, Ava and I slept downstairs. The mattress had been delivered that afternoon and I told the delivery guys to leave it in the living room. I liked the idea of the bare apartment, the walls freshly painted gallery white, nothing in the apartment but a new mattress, a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. We brought in food from the Indian deli on Ninth Avenue. We drank the champagne and we made love.

  My last night in the apartment, in May 2010, I dragged the mattress downstairs and splayed it on the bare living room floor. It was the last piece of furniture I needed to rid myself of.

  Ava and I had been broken up for nearly three years but we habitually slept together every few months, whether or not one or both of us had a partner. Sometimes these evenings went well. Sometimes they did not.

  I’d called her earlier in the week and asked if she wanted to say goodbye to the Mountain Lodge. The apartment invoked a Tahoe ski condo, with a two-story brick fireplace and a brick sitting window and dark wood spiral staircase.

  Ava had been with me when I first saw the apartment and had somehow convinced me that I should make an offer on the most expensive property I’d looked at during my two-month, seventy-three-apartment search. That was the morning after the first night I had done cocaine with her, and only the second or third time in my life I had taken the drug.

  (Note to reader: when purchasing an apartment, do not do so after a night of cocaine.)

  Now we sat on the terrace and looked at the Empire State Building. We champagne-toasted the apartment. Six years earlier, at the age of twenty-eight, she had been beautiful. Now she was just pretty. I was six years older than she but her face held numerous and deeper lines. She’d spent her college years and her early thirties running around Manhattan doing cocaine and sleeping with many men, and smoking packs of cigarettes, and those men and that cocaine and those cigarettes had begun to take a toll.

  She asked, “How many times do you think we had sex here?”

  “Thousands.”

  We went inside. I had thrown a plain white sheet over the mattress.

  Knowingly, playfully, she asked, “And why is this still here?”

  “I thought you might want to say goodbye to the mattress.”

  “I thought that for once you might want to do this the right way,” she said.

  “What is the right way?”

  “Marriage. Babies.”

  “We have never known the right way,” I said.

  We undressed ourselves and made love slowly and deliberately, as though defusing a bomb.

  Afterward we walked around the corner to a new hip restaurant. We sat at the bar and drank gin
martinis, hers dirty, mine with a twist.

  After I paid the bill she said, “Once more.”

  We returned to the apartment. I felt as though we were entering a crime scene and the crime had been my life in New York City. We went straight to the mattress.

  An hour later she dressed and we kissed at the door. She said, “Goodbye, Mountain Lodge. I’ll miss you.”

  She did not say that she would miss me nor did I say I would miss her. I never saw her again.

  I sat down on the mattress. I looked around the apartment. It had been the center of my life for many years: work, lovers, cooking. Writing. Sex. Eating.

  I dragged the mattress three stories down and out of the building and threw it on the sidewalk. An old man I knew from the neighborhood passed by. He stopped and stared at the mattress, stared at me, pointed at the mattress with his cane.

  He said, “You gettin’ rid of that? It’s a perfectly good mattress!”

  I said, “That mattress should burn.”

  I hailed a cab to my girlfriend’s house.

  The next morning I moved alone to a cabin in Mount Tremper, in the Catskills.

  MY NEW HOME sat on ten acres on the side of the mountain. From my former life in Manhattan I had brought with me two pieces of art, an abstract figurative painting and a drawing. The caption beneath the drawing—a dehumanized fool’s version of tic-tac-toe—read: WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY TO ME? I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

  I’d bought the drawing five or six years earlier but the relevance of the artist’s quotation to my life had in the prior six months reached its zenith. I understood no one. Others had difficulty understanding me.

  I needed the solace of a cabin on the side of a mountain in order to redirect my life. But the cabin I found had thick beams and the forest around me was comprised of very tall old-growth pine trees, and thick beams and tall trees were an invitation to a self-hanging.

  In addition to the artwork, I dragged to the mountain a few suitcases of clothes; a desk I’d had custom-made in Manhattan by a Japanese woodworker whose family had been creating beam-and-trestle furniture for five hundred years; a pair of handmade cowboy boots I’d had fashioned in Austin; ten cases of Burgundy, whites and reds; one hundred books from my library; two Turkish rugs I’d bought in Istanbul; a collection of family photographs; a wooden airplane that my paternal grandfather had constructed as a boy during the Depression; my maternal grandfather’s baseball glove from the same poor period in American life; two jump ropes, one leather and one plastic; one Le Creuset Dutch oven, yellow; a large and perfectly seasoned cast-iron skillet; a memory foam pillow.

  I decided that over this summer I would rid myself of the waste from a number of troubled romantic relationships. Recently there was the Bad Writer; the charming but sexually incapacitated ER Physician; the beautiful, dynamic, and sweet but troubled Dancer I almost married; the Rich Girl/Boho Artist I almost married; the Canadian Writer I should have married; another Canadian Writer I might have married.

  But the grand master of my romantic ruin was Ava, the woman I’d moved to New York for in 2004.

  I remember the temptation, the first kiss, and the moment when passion overrode and crushed common sense.

  We met at a party in Topanga Canyon on the deck of a house with a Pacific Ocean view. We were both in town for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. She was twenty-eight and Cuban American. Her hair was black and long and straight. She had a wide girlish smile and a deep throaty laugh. She sold advertising for a New York art magazine and wanted to be a psychologist.

  She said, “I have a live-in boyfriend in Brooklyn. He’s lousy in bed and has a crap job in television. And he won’t marry me. My father says ‘Why buy the cow when the milk is free?’ ”

  I knew that when preparing to cheat certain women malign the husband or boyfriend and invoke the folksy wisdom of the father.

  I said, “I have a girlfriend who lives in SoHo and Victoria, BC. She’s a wonder in bed and a great writer.”

  She stroked my beard and said, “I like your beard. My father has a beard.”

  She read aloud the time from my Rolex dive watch and said her father also wore one and that like all the old Cuban guys in Miami her father pretended to run a scuba diving company but was really still trying to assassinate Castro. She said her father was a friend of Luis Posada and had been in Caracas in September 1976 and after reading his journals she thought he might have been involved in the downing of Cuban Airlines Flight 455. I assumed that all the Cuban American girls from Miami made this boast. All of this is to say she was beautiful, dark-skinned, and possibly dangerous.

  She looked at my watch again and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  I had no license but I drove her rental car down from Topanga to the beach at Malibu because we determined that I was less drunk. We walked toward the water and kicked our shoes off.

  She said, “I want you to kiss me.”

  And I did.

  Her shoes, stylish red Italian flats, were sucked out to sea in the wash and I broke the kiss and waded into the water to retrieve them. They were her favorite shoes and I had saved them and we returned to kissing. I don’t know how long the kiss lasted, a few minutes, twenty, an hour, a month. I forgot about my girlfriend who was meeting me in Seattle the next day, I forgot about any woman I’d ever loved or kissed. We kissed more and I held her wet, red shoes in my hand.

  We returned to the car and continued to kiss.

  And then the Malibu cops rolled up and asked us both to get out of the car. The cop who interrogated me was Japanese American, about my age, compact and ripped, and fast-talking. I’d grown up with kids like him. My best friend from childhood was a cop in Sacramento. This guy in front of me, I knew exactly where he was coming from: he wanted to bust bad guys but didn’t care too much what you did if you weren’t an absolute menace.

  He asked me for my license and I told him I didn’t have one, that me and my girl were just sitting in the car, and that we were about to switch places so she could drive back to the hotel because I would never break the law and drive without a license.

  He stared at me, as if to say Are you kidding me, you expect me to believe that? But he broke a half smile and said, “Quick thinking, smart-ass. Are you drunk or on drugs?”

  And I said, “No.” False.

  He said, “If you don’t have a license, who drove here?”

  I said, “Her.” False.

  He said, “Why were you in the driver’s seat?”

  I said, “I wanted her to have more legroom.” False.

  He looked at me, either disgusted or impressed with my commitment to the lie. He walked over to her and asked, “Is your boyfriend on cocaine?”

  She said, “No.” True.

  He asked, “Are you on cocaine?”

  She said, “No.” True.

  He said, “There’s a ten o’clock beach curfew in Malibu. If you move your car about twenty-five feet south, you can hang out on that beach or in your car and do whatever it is you need to do. I don’t care. But get out of Malibu.”

  I don’t know why the cop didn’t press the issue. Maybe his shift was ending or maybe he didn’t care what we were on as long as it wasn’t cocaine.

  Years later I would wish the cop had pushed the issue—after all, I had been sitting in the driver’s seat, and any fool would have known that I’d intended to drive without a license. So what if the cop had pressed things, what if he’d checked my sobriety, what if he’d pulled me in for the night?

  Ava and I wouldn’t have gone back to my hotel room and been unfaithful to our partners. And I wouldn’t have changed the course of my life for the next many years.

  Ava studied for her PhD in psychology during our three years together. I paid for everything except her rent. I overheard her tell a friend that she was on the Swofford Stipend. Once I caught her stealing fifties from my wallet but I didn’t confront her: if I had she might have left me. She introduced me to the regular recreational
use of cocaine. I cheated and lied; she cheated and lied. We turned each other into animals.

  I TOLD MYSELF that the side of the mountain would save me. Down the block from my cabin sat a Buddhist monastery, and while I didn’t plan on attending meditation, I read my Shunryu Suzuki and felt that if I was close enough, it just might count as meditation. The mountains, they say, have magnetic forces, and the mountain magnetism would pull some of the good forces across the side of the mountain from those bald monks and into my cabin oasis. When it comes to spiritual health, propinquity is everything, right?

  But the two six-by-sixteen-inch beams in my cabin were close, too, as well as that multitude of old-growth trees and a fittingly thick length of rope I’d been carrying around for a few years. I once wrote that the suicide is brave, which would make the rest of us cowards. I felt a coward. It would have been easy enough for me to drive down to Kingston and buy a shotgun and a single shell at Wal-Mart. I made the excuse that I didn’t want to make a mess for my new landlords, a kindly hippie-ish string-instrument-playing couple in their mid-fifties with two liberally educated daughters and a happy plot of land with a very fine old mountain dog, and what a complete dick I’d be to blow my brains out all over their carefully constructed and manicured and maintained mountain ideal. Also, what would happen to all my stuff? My life was currently in storage on five pallets in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. All my papers, and most of my books, and a few pieces of furniture, the few I hadn’t given away while I prepared to leave Manhattan.

  During the day I stayed on the mountain and I wrote. At nights I might drive to Phoenicia and drink beer and watch sports with construction workers. I walked to the top of Mount Tremper, three miles up and back, once a week.

  On weekends a twenty-five-year-old hedge-funder from Manhattan would take the bus up after she got off work on Friday afternoons. We would drink and have sex, and sometimes do drugs, and watch sports until Monday morning, when she took the bus back to Manhattan. We did stupid things like buy scratcher lottery tickets, and drive forty-five miles for bad Mexican food and to get drunk with the locals. We’d flip a coin to see who got to drive home at two or three a.m.