One of my favorite books of the year is Rob Roberge's The Cost of Living. Gritty, wild, searing, it it's about love, loss, and addiction, all told in a voice so razor sharp, you better keep the bandages handy. Don't take my word for it, Cheryl Strayed calls The Cost of Living "mind-bendingly smart." Janet Fitch calls the novel, "lyrical and ferociously realistic." And I call it genius. Rob is also the author of Working Backwards from the Worst Moments of My Life, Drive, and More Than They Could Chew. Extra bonus: Rob is one of the funniest, smartest people on the planet. I'm so honored to have this excerpt here. Thank you, thank you, Rob.
You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a
Memory
(June, 2011)
DECEMBER 30, 1983
Police search waters for missing
woman. Middletown - Police and firefighters in several towns are looking for a
missing Middletown resident whose car was found running on Route 3 by the
Putnam Bridge early Tuesday morning. Sarah Barrett, 42, of Middletown, was last
seen by a friend around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. A state police trooper found her car
in the northbound lane of Route 3 just north of the bridge around 8:20 a.m.,
state police said.
MAY 12, 1984
The body of Sarah
Barrett, 42, of Middletown, was found in the Connecticut River Saturday morning
in the waters off the Deep River landing area. Deep River and Middletown Fire
Departments responded to recover the body around 10:30 a.m., after receiving a
9-1-1 call from a fisherman alerting them to the discovery. Barrett had been
missing since December after her car was found running near the Putnam Bridge
in Glastonbury.
The
night before my father would beg me to kill him, I sat alone in a hotel room
across the street from his hospital, re-reading old newspaper articles about my
mother’s suicide. I had six months clean for the second time in my life. The
first time stuck for six years. But that seemed impossible to do again. My skin
itched and my body crackled and I had no idea how I’d get through the next five
minutes, let alone the night, or the rest of my fucking life without being
loaded. I was freezing and the room wasn’t cold. I went into the bathroom and
turned on the heat lamp, which came on along with a fan, and I paced for a
minute. I sat on the toilet, fully clothed with the seat down and counted the
square inch white tiles on the floor three times while breathing deeply. I
listened closely to the fan’s small jet-like idle to block any thoughts that
might come. I tried counting the subway tiles on the walls but couldn’t
concentrate. I looked back down at the floor. I let my sight blur and the moldy
grout started to form a pattern that looked like floating chicken wire.
I needed
sleep. Without it, I was apt to fly into a manic episode my brain stabilizers
and anti-depressants and sleeping pills could never reach. I was allowed to
travel with a few benzos, which frightened me, but I needed them for anxiety
attacks. They couldn’t really tame a manic swing, anyway. If I was lucky enough
to skip a psychotic episode, there would still be the inevitable depressive
suicidal down and I’d fought through enough of those over the years to be
exhausted at the thought.
The meds
had been more or less working. For the first time in my life they’d found a
combination that seemed to keep me steady and fucked less with my weight or sex
drive than the other pills. Though I didn’t really have much use for a sex
drive unless Olivia took me back. She’d never divorced me, but she probably
would have if I’d had my own insurance for rehab and the meds. But still, I
told myself far too often for it to be healthy, if she hadn’t divorced me maybe
that was a sign there was still a chance we could be together again.
I closed
my eyes and tried to breathe with my head between my legs and I felt the heat
lamp on the back of my neck.
Ten
minutes later I was dripping sweat. The floor tiles came up a different number
every time. I’d counted two hundred forty two, two hundred thirty eight and two
hundred and forty four tiles as my sweat dripped and pooled on the ones closest
to the toilet. I had to stay in there and count until I had hit the same number
twice. Two counts later, I came up with two thirty eight and I could leave the
bathroom and try to find a temperature that worked.
I wanted
to call Olivia but was worried she wouldn’t want to talk to me in this state.
There was no way I could tell her I wanted to get high. She made it clear she’d
seen and heard enough about that in her life. I scrolled through my contacts
and looked at Ray’s number. Ray was the guy the label sent out on tour with me
to make sure I stayed clean. Part of the contract. It was embarrassing, but,
with a track record like mine, I couldn’t blame them for a minute. My
ex-sponsor—when he was still my sponsor—told me I shouldn’t have been planning
a tour, but I said I had to make a living. He told me I had to stay clean and
that was my full-time job until I heard differently. I wouldn’t budge and he recommended
Ray, who’d been, as my ex-sponsor dismissively called it, an “addict’s
babysitter” for a bunch of actors and musicians. Ray had turned out to be more
help than the sponsor, though. He knew what touring was like. He knew what
playing bars every night meant. I was surprised that I ended up liking a guy
who was supposed to tell me what to do and to keep me in line.
I turned
out the light and focused on my breathing.
My right
hand ached. It was tight and premature arthritis swelled the joins and the
repaired tendons. I’d flown out of LAX early that morning and the humidity of
Connecticut made it feel like I had cut glass in every knuckle.
A car’s
headlights cut through the drapes and made the room bright for a while and then
the light went out and I heard the car door open and close. There was the click
of a woman’s shoes on the asphalt.
My room
faced the parking lot. They’d asked me which side I wanted. Like the hospital
was ocean view or something.
The
surgery scar on the back of my hand ran a deeper red color in the humid air.
Looking at it, I thought about Olivia and thought about my relapse and quickly
tried to stop thinking about either of them.
I’d left
the heat lamp and fan on. The fan whirled and heat coil light bled into the
room through the open bathroom door. I closed my eyes and saw the ghosts of
orange light for a while before it faded.
My
mother left twice. First, when I was thirteen, after my father killed that man
and again when she jumped off the bridge. If she ever explained her reasons for
leaving me with him, he never told me, or showed me any letters. For years, I
was convinced she was sending me letters and that my father kept them away from
me or burned them. I had no idea at the time if she ever really tried to get
word to me, but I’d created a world in my mind where she overflowed with regret
for leaving me and kept trying to get me back.
By the
time I was staying at the hotel across from his hospital, I’d only talked to my
father twice in twenty years and he hadn’t said much more than that my mother
had gone crazy and that was that. That I’d started to believe his version near
the end didn’t matter for the first forty-five years of my life—when I believed
what I wanted to believe. That she was the saint and he was the monster. That
simple belief shaped so many years.
Things I
remembered:
I
remembered her working the night shift at the Emergency Room at St. Jude’s
hospital, where I’d been born. We didn’t have money for a sitter, she told me,
explaining why she brought me to work. I’ve always been dug in and too stubborn
to forgive my father for much of anything, but I’ve never blamed my mother for
having me sit, night after night, in a room where people were wheeled in with
gunshots, knife wounds, and people beaten so badly their families couldn’t have
recognized their faces. Where I saw a construction worker with two feet of
rebar that went in his mouth and came out the back of his neck and he was awake
and conscious and when he tried to speak, I saw shattered teeth and blood
filled his mouth the way water does when you dig a hole at the shore. When he
tried to speak, he gurgled and I heard what teeth he had clatter against the
rebar. At one point, his head sagged toward his chest and blood poured all over
his orange reflector vest.
I
remembered the woman who held a dead child she wouldn’t let go of even after
the police were called and stood over her dumbly for hours.
But back
then, and in my memories, it became time with her and time away from him, which
made it, no matter what surrounded the situation, part of the good times of my
childhood. Or at least what seemed like, if not good times, safer times.
I
remembered the man who’d been torn nearly in half in a car accident, his guts
open, his intestines out of his body and snaking over his chest. Later that
night, word came back to my mother at the desk, that the man from the car
accident was brain dead. They were waiting for his family while my mother
explained to me there were machines that could keep a person alive.
I asked,
“Is he dead?”
“He’s
brain dead, honey.”
“What’s
brain dead?”
“He’s
alive, but his brain doesn’t think anymore.”
What
could a brain do if it didn’t think anymore? I thought about Mike the Headless
Chicken. In the late 1940’s, some farm family was cutting a chicken’s head off
for dinner, but the chicken lived. It lived for seven years and got named Mike
the Headless Chicken and the family made a small fortune, charging people a
nickel at county fairs and travelling side-shows to see Mike run around without
his head. They fed it with an eye-dropper. He died eventually when food got
stuck in his feeding hole. I’d read about it in an encyclopedia.
I said,
“Will he join the circus?”
“Who?’
my mother said.
“The
brain dead man. Will he go to the state fair?”
She smiled
sadly. “Sweetie, where do you get your ideas?” She hugged me tightly and I
hugged her and felt the stiff and mildly abrasive fabric of her uniform that
smelled like soap when I huddled my face against her. “He’ll live at the
hospital.” She released me. “For a while.”
“What
then?”
She
didn’t answer. One of the few sharp images I’ve been able to keep of her while
she was alive is a snapshot of that moment. She hugged me again, her uniform so
stiff and rough it felt like construction paper, and didn’t let go for a long
time.
I
wondered what she thought, unable to tell me about death. What do you tell a
five-year-old kid? She held me close and tight enough that the world felt safe,
even with all the blood and the brain dead man and everything else in that
emergency room. I couldn’t let go of those moments of her protecting me.
A woman
protecting me, always, I’ve taken to mean love.
I’d
forgiven her the fact that I should never have been in that hospital at that
age. That she never should have allowed that. That I shouldn’t have seen what I
saw, and that it was her fault that I did. Instead, I cherished that moment of
her holding me forever. And I tried to find that moment, again and again and
again in so many women’s arms over the years.
I called
Ray and told him I wanted to get high. That I was thinking of killing myself,
which—without warning—I was. That I was scared.
“All
you’re allowed to be is scared,” he said.
I heard
the whirl of his big aquarium and I figured he was standing close to it.
“Feeding the fish?”
“You
call to talk about my fish? Talk about something that fucking matters.”
I looked
around the room. “How many hotel rooms you think you’ve been in, Ray?”
“What?”
“In your
life,” I said. I listened to the fan and went to the window and pulled the
heavier curtains over the light gauzy ones that let in light from the parking
lot. The room got darker. Large moths careened into the light outside my door.
I was amazed they could live through even one blow that hard, let alone
repeated ones until they finally destroyed themselves, smashing madly against
the light and glass.
Ray
said, “Who cares?”
“I’ve
been in maybe a thousand.” I thought about the years with the band where we
played nearly three hundred dates a year. We had three years with over two
hundred and seventy days on the road. Around two hundred and fifty shows.
Before that, there were the years where we stayed on strangers’ floors. “Maybe
more.”
“You
want a fucking medal?”
I said,
very calmly like I was ordering a coffee, “I’m really thinking of killing
myself, Ray.” I was actually thinking of doing it once my father died of his
cancer. Whether he died a day or the week or two the doctors gave him at the
outside. Once they were both gone, it seemed like I could just close the door
on this whole fucked up family if I still felt like this. But if I told Ray I
was waiting to do it, he might have grabbed the next flight, so I made it seem
like I was thinking of it right away. I needed to talk it out, whether I was
going to wait a week or not. Or, I had to admit the possibility, I might not be
able to go through with it.
He
didn’t say anything for a long time. Maybe forty five seconds—an uncomfortably
long pause on the phone. I listened to the fan in my background and the trickle
of the aquariums in his.
He said,
“You’re in a bad place, Bud.”
I
laughed. “Isn’t that kind of the definition of suicidal?”
“I’m
talking a literal bad place,” he said. “You’re back home. Your father’s dying.”
“I’m
reading old newspapers about my mother’s suicide,” I told him.
“Jesus,”
he said. “Triggerville.”
“I know
Triggerville pretty well,” I said. “I grew up here. It’s home.” I paused.
“Maybe I’m more comfortable here.”
“Listen
to you.”
“What?”
“Feeling
sorry for yourself. Asking for me to confirm your childish feelings and I won’t
do that. I’m here for a lot of things, but that’s not one of them.” Ray could
say words and make it sound like he’d spat them at your feet. He had killed his
wife in a car accident eleven years before when he was driving drunk. He had to
give the go-ahead to take her off the machines from his own hospital bed, where
he stayed until he was well enough to go to prison for manslaughter. If he’d
left her live on life-support, his lawyer said the charges would have been
reduced to very little time away—maybe none with a deal. He knew about feeling
sorry for himself, about what it was like to punish yourself for years.
He said,
“You know what? You are more comfortable there.”
I needed
a cigarette and walked out of my room. The air was so thick and muggy it felt
like I was breathing though a warm towel. “Thanks for all the help, Ray.”
“You
want to kill yourself, call some fucking fan that’ll bring you dope just to say
they got high with you. Don’t call me.”
I didn’t
say anything.
Ray
said, “You still have a few fans. Go find one that wants to say he got you
high.”
I felt
numb. Like my insides were a block of ice. More bugs thunked against the light.
I lit a cigarette. I didn’t have my key card with me and I left the door open a
crack and several huge moths got into the room. Their shadows swirled around on the ceiling and I
heard them banging into the walls in my room.
I
thought about hanging up. “Look, I don’t want to get angry.”
Ray
sounded kind for the first time. “Killing yourself, whether you’re getting
loaded or fucking hanging yourself in your thousandth hotel room
closet—destroying yourself in front of people who love you is an act of anger.
And cowardice. You’ve got a wife. You’ve got real friends. And you know what it
does to people. If you’re not guilty of that, make your case.”
“I’m not
in front of anybody I love.”
“You
always are.”
I watched
the smoke drift as I blew it out—gray in the dark and then slightly blue when
it past the light. “Maybe it’s just in my fucking genes.” A lot of stats backed
me up.
“Your
mother was crazy,” he said. “You’re not.”
I felt
the way you feel when you’re a kid and the world gets to be too much—too
swollen with emotion to keep it inside. I tried not to sound like I was close
to crying, which was stupid, because Ray was one of the few people who wouldn’t
have cared. Who would have cared enough not to care. “I’m not trying to be…I
don’t know if I can live clean,” I said. “I’ve tried. Really tried. It hasn’t
worked.”
“Look, I
love you. But you wouldn’t be the first junky or drunk I loved who went out and
died. I had to make peace years ago that my life was going to be littered with
people who couldn’t stay clean and who didn’t make it. What do you want me to
say?” His voice sounded like a resigned shrug would look. “I’d miss you. I’ll
say nice things about you along with how pissed I am at you at your funeral. I
can’t make up your mind for you. You’re afraid to change. You’d rather live
your self-fulfilling prophecy of being a loser.”
I leaned
on the wall and smoked. My left arm grew stiff from holding the phone and my
right hand didn’t work well enough to hold the cigarette between my index and
middle fingers. I could just barely hold a guitar pick with that hand. I had to
jab the cigarette between the middle and ring fingers junky-style, the way I
had for years because you couldn’t drop it while you nodded out and burn
whatever place you were in down to the ground. My hands were mangled. Every
fingernail bitten bloody and malformed. My mother told me I started biting my
nails when I got teeth. I was worried before I knew there was a word for it. “I
am a loser—don’t you get it?”
“I get
plenty.”
Whenever
I was pissed at Ray, I forced myself to think again about him waking up in the
hospital and hearing about his wife, dead but not dead yet because of him—with
her somewhere in the same building but gone already. People had died around me
most of my life. I’d hurt other people. But I hadn’t killed anyone. Ray had
been worse places than me. I stopped myself before I said anything stupid or
hurtful. I watched my cigarette and thought another thing I do that destroys
me. Inch by inch instead of mile by mile, but intentionally fucking myself just
the same.
It felt
like some storm inside seemed to have passed, at least for that moment. A fist
had let loose a grip and opened up—gone from clenched around my heart and lungs
to relaxed.
Ray
seemed to sense it. “How’s your father?”
“He’s
dying. All I know is what I told you this morning.”
“But
nothing went wrong when you talked to him?”
“I got
here after visiting hours,” I said. “There hasn’t been a chance for something
to go wrong yet.”
There
was a pause. Muffled noise came from a TV close to my room. Like most things I
could barely hear, things at a distance hurt my ears and gave me blinding
headaches.
Ray
said, “You going to kill yourself tonight?”
I
thought about it. “No.”
“You going
to get loaded?”
“I want
to.”
“That’s
not what I asked.”
I tossed
my cigarette into the parking lot and lit another. When I closed it, my zippo
clicked with its cold metal authority. An ambulance siren swelled closer and
closer until it turned across the street, into the emergency room.
“No,” I
said. “Not tonight.”
“Good.
Call me tomorrow,” Ray said and hung up.
After
St. Jude’s and the emergency room, she worked at Fairfield Hills Mental
Hospital—where I later learned she became a patient when she went crazy. I was
six and with her at work after school and I took a pill off the floor of the
pharmacy and OD’d for the first time. I’d crawled around on the cool tiles and
the pill looked like a piece of candy. I felt that dreamy
floating-out-of-my-body-feeling for the first time and felt my brain lift like
a state fair balloon and wondered why life couldn’t always be like that and
thought that maybe this was what it would be like to be kept alive by machines
and brain dead and maybe it was much easier than people thought and the next
thing I knew I was in the hospital and they were flushing me with charcoal and
my mother you cried and my father stood there, and I couldn’t understand why
everyone was so upset. That first overdose was the first time in my life I felt
true peace.
And then
there was the man my father killed. And then she was gone.
In my
forties—when I was still clean—I allowed myself to see that she was crazy and
nothing could have been done. But I found that out too late and by then I’d
learned there are few things worse in this world than learning something
crucial about someone you loved too late for it to matter. Too late for you to
do anything about it.
I found
my key card so I could lock my guitar in the room. I smoked and walked around the
building and saw across the city street the hospital where my father was dying.
Some of the rooms flicked with blue TV light. Some still had their cold
fluorescents on. I wondered which was his room. I wondered if he could sleep. I
wondered what kind of person I was that part of me wanted him to be asleep and
part of me wanted him to be awake and in pain for however many hours he had
left.
The
traffic changed from green to red. The little white pedestrian lit up and told
people when they could walk. Then the countdown numbers came—along with the
beeps for the blind—one every second. Every beep a reminder of the treacherous
sweep of the secondhand. Of the seconds of pain I had just wished on my father.
The lights changed again. I stood there for ten more cycles of Red, Yellow,
Green. No one was out at this time of night and the lights just did what they
did whether anyone needed them or not.
It
struck me that if my father lived as long as the doctors said he might, I could
be here on my birthday—just two weeks away. I stood and smoked a cigarette and
looked at the hospital where I’d been born, just shy of forty-five years
earlier.
One
night, alone in our house with my mother, I’d seen a spider with a body as big
and dark as a black olive and I ran to see her.
“Are you
scared?” she said.
I
nodded.
“Most
spiders aren’t even deadly,” she told me. “Things that scare us aren’t that
bad, most of the time.” She licked her thumb and wiped something off my cheek.
“What you’re afraid of almost never happens.” She held me with both of her
straight arms on my shoulders and looked intensely into my eyes. “Ok?”
I nodded
again.
“You
know what the most deadly insect on earth is?” she said.
“No.”
“The
mosquito,” she said. “It’s killed more people than any other bug. And people
think they’re harmless.”
She
pulled me closer.
“The
smallest things, the ones nobody else notices, baby. That’s what you need to be
afraid of.”
Before
the suicide I expected her to come back and rescue me. When I asked my father
about her, all he’d say was “your mother’s gone” in a tone that made it clear
that his answer was the end of the conversation.
I
thought I must have done something that drove her away. Even years later,
guessing and hoping it had to be because of my father, because of something I
didn’t know, I wondered why she left. How she could leave a kid. Before her
suicide, I always thought someday I’d get the chance to ask her why.
The
police, then the papers, said there was no note. Only her car, still running,
on the side of the bridge. For too many years, I lived in her past and not my
present. I woke up, sweating and hearing that car idling, smelling its exhaust
in the cold morning air, even though I wasn’t there. She’d crossed the road and
jumped on the opposite side of where she’d parked. The driver’s side door was
open and her purse and wallet sat on the passenger seat.
I
learned quickly not to romanticize her death. I did at first. I imagined her
free, weightless, flying and empty of sorrow for a moment—and maybe empty of it
forever after that. Like the overdose, but lasting until time would stop.
Afterwards, I read and read and read about bridge suicides. The impact was like
being hit by a car. The water might as well be cement—the body hits the water
and stops and the organ tree keeps going and rips itself away from all the
connective tissue that keeps us together.
The
children of suicides were five times more likely to kill themselves than the
rest of the world. Later, in one of the rehabs that didn’t take—while they
tried to find some combination of meds that would keep me from psychotic
episodes—there was some doctor telling me that junkies were fourteen times more
likely to kill themselves than their peers.
At four
in the morning, I left the hotel. There was no way I could sleep. I walked ten
city blocks to a Dunkin Donuts and bought a coffee that spilled so hot it
seemed like melting plastic on my fingers. I poured a third of it out and
walked back to the hotel, smoking.
The sun
wasn’t up yet, but I smelled the salt in the air from Long Island Sound. At
6:30, I heard the Amtrak to New York City and I remembered getting drunk under
the railroad bridge with Tony when we were in our first band in high school.
They had a maintenance level ten feet beneath the train level and you could
drink wine and, as long as they weren’t up on their ladders doing repairs, lay
on the old wood supports and smell the tar in the railroad ties , mixed with
cooler salty air from the water and listen to the sea gulls and be wasted and
feel the train coming from ten or fifteen miles away. First, a small vibration,
maybe when it pulled out of Stanford. And then it would grow and I would close
my eyes and feel the heat and light of the summer sun and the train would get
closer and louder and closer and louder until the noise swept everything else
away and you prayed that it was a New York Express so the noise would stay that
loud for five full minutes because the train wouldn’t stop like it would if it
was a Local.
I
finished my coffee and lit a cigarette and went back to the hotel and waited
for the sun to come up.
A life
of questions. What brought her there to that place that she was so out of
options and without hope that any day would ever be different again? Always
wondering how she felt. How different was her moment from my crossing of that
line over the years? A loneliness that swelled so hard that it must have pushed
against her skin from the inside, that she must have had a pain no words would
ever reach. And could I have done something, anything, before she left? Could I
have changed the course of events that brought her to that moment, that
collection of seconds, where she stood and decided, finally, to fall toward the
river, cold air in her hair and face, the wind pining back and fluttering her
dress in that moment before impact?
And, later,
when I did attempt suicide and even later, after what I hoped was the last
relapse, where I’d get close again to ending it all, when that same loneliness
swallowed the world, I wondered: Was I trying, in some sort of desperation, to
get close to her, or trying, just as desperately, to get away?
