Now Hiring Friendly People
To those who don’t travel very often, the Courtyard Marriott might seem like a decent enough hotel. It’s clean, sure, and the staff is polite. I wouldn’t give you two cents for its pillows, though, and the tubs are far too shallow for my taste. In the deserted lobby of one I stayed at in New Hampshire, there was a coffee bar—not a Starbucks but a place that “proudly served” Starbucks, and sold it alongside breakfast cereals and prepackaged sandwiches. I noticed it on my way back from lunch, and just as I decided to get a cup of coffee, someone came from around the corner and moved in ahead of me.
I’d later learn that her name was Mrs. Dunston, a towering, dough-colored pyramid of a woman wearing oversize glasses and a short-sleeved linen blazer. Behind her came a man I guessed to be her husband, and after looking up at the menu board, she turned to him. “A latte,” she said. “Now is that the thing that Barbara likes to get, the one with whipped cream, or is that called something else?”
Oh f*ck, I thought.
“I can do a latte with whipped cream on top,” the young woman behind the counter said. She was fair and wore her shoulder-length hair pushed behind her ears. Tiny moles were scattered like buckshot across her face, which was bare but for a bit of eyeliner. “I can do one with flavors too.”
“Really?” Mrs. Dunston said. “What sorts of flavors?”
In the end she settled on caramel. Then her husband squinted up at the board, deciding after a good long while that he’d try one of those mocha something or others. And could he get that iced?
As I groaned into my palm, he wandered off. His wife, meanwhile, leaned her bulk against the counter and began her genial interrogation. “Are you from this area?” she asked. “No? From Vermont? Well, that’s interesting. What brought you here?”
I learned that the coffee person used to work at the town’s other hotel, which had recently closed for remodeling. “So after it’s done, will you stay put or go back over there?” Mrs. Dunston asked. “Me, I have a son at the college, so that’s what I’m doing, just checking in. He’s my second boy, actually. The first one went here too. He’s not working in his field yet, but with unemployment as high as it is, he’s lucky to have anything at all. If I’ve told him that once, I’ve told him a hundred times, but, of course, being young, he’s impatient, which is natural. Wants to set the world on fire, and if it can’t happen by tomorrow morning at nine a.m., then life’s just unfair and hardly worth living. What about you? Did you go to college?”
It’s one thing to be jolly and talkative—my mother was that way. A dry cleaner, a gas-station attendant: no one behind a counter or cash register was spared the full force of her personality. The difference between her and Mrs. Dunston is that my mother had a sense of her audience—not just the person she was talking to but others around her who were listening in. “I can see you’ve got a line,” she’d have said at some point, or, “Look at me, monopolizing all your time.”
She’d also have made her chatter more compelling. In my mother’s version, the underemployed son would sleep each day until dusk, possibly in a dank basement, with the leg of a dismembered child in his mouth. She spoke in a voice that addressed everyone and invited them to join in. Mrs. Dunston, on the other hand, was simply loud. Loud and just as dull as she could be.
After what felt like weeks, the young woman finished with the orders. Two cups the size of wastepaper baskets were placed upon the counter, and then Mr. Dunston reappeared and pointed out the plate-glass window toward a cluster of grim buildings on the other side of the parking lot. “What are those?” he asked.
The young woman said that they used to belong to the college. “Of course, that was before they expanded the west side of the campus.”
“And when was that?” Mr. Dunston asked. He was a good ten years older than his wife, midsixties, maybe, and he wore a baseball cap with a tattered brim.
“I beg your pardon?” the young woman said.
“I said, when did they expand the west side of the campus? Was it recently or did they do it a long time ago?”
WHO THE HELL CARES? I wanted to shout. WHAT ARE YOU, THE OFFICIAL HISTORIAN OF WHO-GIVES-A-F*ck COLLEGE? DO YOU NOT NOTICE THAT THERE’S SOMEONE IN LINE BEHIND YOU? SOMEONE WHO’S BEEN STANDING HERE ROCKING BACK AND FORTH ON HIS GODDAMNED HEELS FOR THE LAST TEN MINUTES WHILE YOU AND THAT BRONTOSAURUS RUN YOUR STUPID MOUTHS ABOUT NOTHING?
I was this close to walking away, to marching off in a huff, but then Mrs. Dunston would have turned to her husband and the girl behind the counter, saying, “Some people!” I’d gotten a similar reaction the previous morning, when I’d squeezed past a couple standing side by side on the moving walkway connecting concourses A and B. “In a great big hurry to meet that heart attack!” the man had called after me.
I wanted to remind him that this was an airport and that some of us had a tight connection, if that was okay. But, of course, I had no connection, tight or otherwise. I just couldn’t bear to see him and his wife standing side by side, blocking the way of someone who might have a tight connection.
The Dunstons’ bill came to eight dollars, which, everyone agreed, was a lot to pay for two cups of coffee. But they were large ones, and this was a vacation, sort of. Not like a trip to Florida, but you certainly couldn’t do that at the drop of a hat, especially with gas prices the way they are and looking to go even higher.
While talking, Mrs. Dunston rummaged through her tremendous purse. Her wallet was eventually located, but then it seemed that the register was locked, so the best solution was to put the coffees on her bill. That’s how I discovered her name and her room number: 302.
My only question then was what time I should arrange her wake-up call for. Let’s see how chatty you feel at four a.m., I thought.
Then it was all about returning the wallet to the purse and getting that safely zipped up before taking her drink off the counter and starting in on her long good-bye.
When the two of them finally lumbered off toward the elevator, I approached the counter, hoping the woman behind it would roll her eyes, acknowledging that something really needed to be done about people like the Dunstons. She didn’t, though, so I decided I would hate her as much as I’d hated them. When she told me that her little stand didn’t serve regular brewed coffee, I hated her even more.
“I can do you a nice cappuccino,” she said. “Or an iced latte, maybe?” This last word was delivered to my back as I stormed out the door. Then it was up the street and around the corner to a real coffee place. The pierced and tattooed staff members scowled at my approach, and I placed my order, confident that they would hate the Dunstons as much as, or possibly even more than, they already hated me.
Rubbish
I don’t know why it is, exactly, but once Hugh and I settle in somewhere, we tend to stay put. All those years in France, and except for a single weekend in Arles, I never visited the lower half of the country. It was the same after our move to England. London, we knew, but everything outside it was a mystery to us, a sort of “out there” we planned to get to “one day.” That day arrived in the summer of 2010, when we visited some friends in West Sussex. They’d told us the South Downs were beautiful, but we weren’t prepared for just how beautiful; these massive, chalk-speckled hills so green they made our eyes cramp. The roads were narrow and bordered by trees that formed canopies overhead. All the houses had names, and that too seemed enchanting. Our friends live in what’s called the Old Manor, which is near a place called the Granary. Hugh and I stayed with them for only one night, but it was enough to convince us, in the way that horrible, childless couples can be convinced of such things, that we needed to sell our vacation house in Normandy and resettle in West Sussex as soon as possible.
After returning to London we got on the Internet and found two properties that were within our price range. The first was called Faggotts Stack and was located between the hamlets of Balls Cross and Titty Hill. Sight unseen it had everything going for it. I’d have bought it just as a mailing address, but Hugh wanted something more beat-up, so we eventually went with choice number two, a cottage. Built, they reckoned, some four hundred years ago, it had no heat except for fireplaces and portable electric radiators. Half the windows wouldn’t open, and the half that wouldn’t close let in rain that rotted the floorboards and promoted great patches of mildew that clung like frost to the crumbling walls. There’d been a pig in the backyard but it had passed away—“Died of shame,” Hugh guessed—that’s how trashed the two-acre property was, a minefield of broken crockery, spent shotgun shells, and beer-bottle caps.
Slumped on the edge of it was the two-story cottage. Originally made of stone, it had been patched with brick and then patched again with what looked like dirty snowballs. The ground-floor windows had panes the size of tarot cards, and those were nice, as were the interior walls, which were crisscrossed with beams. The ceilings had them too, all corroded by worms and beetles.
“We’ll take it,” Hugh told me, this while standing in the living room, before we’d even seen the second floor. What with such a bucolic view—sheep grazing in the shadow of these great, verdant hills—the work seemed inconsequential. “Give these people what they’re asking, and do it today so we can get started.”
If I had hesitated he would have left me. Because that’s how Hugh is. You do not stand in his way; this I learned a long time ago. I also learned to trust him, especially in regard to property. Aside from the view, he liked that the place had not been modernized: none of the Sheetrocked closets or prefabricated shower stalls you’d just have to rip out and redo. Because the house was Grade II listed, broken windows could be replaced but not double-paned, as that would keep out the historic cold. Gutters and chimneys could be repaired, but you couldn’t put skylights in the attic or even insulate the walls, as that would amount to smothering the original beams. Hugh asked if an interior kitchen door could be moved two feet to the left, and when the answer came it was not just “no” but something closer to “hell no.” It’s as though we had asked to have ice cubes in our wine, like, “Ick, who are you?”
We bought the house in late July and gave the previous owners three months to pack. I was out of the country when Hugh got the keys and the builders began what turned out to be a yearlong occupation. A lot of what they did was invisible. By this I mean drainage ditches and septic tanks. The ancient roof was taken off, and when it was put back on using the exact same lichen-covered tiles, it didn’t look any different. Rotten floorboards were pried up, the mildew problem was seen to, and then the plumber and electrician arrived.
While the builders worked on the cottage, Hugh lived in what used to be the stable but was later converted into a guesthouse, the kind you’d have if you wanted to either discourage guests or contain them in one spot while slowly depressing them to death. It was especially grim in the winter, when in order to get warm you had to stand directly before the fireplace. There you’d rotate like a stump of gyro meat and wonder when the next train could carry you back to London.
By the time I finally joined Hugh in the stable, it was December, and I began to notice the many things that had escaped my attention on my previous visit. For instance, there’s a gliding club a mile and a half away. On a website, its members rhapsodize about how peaceful it is. And they’re right, gliders are quiet. The propeller planes that tow them into the sky, on the other hand, are like flying chain saws, and on a clear day their presence could be almost constant.
What really got to me, though, was all the rubbish on the sides of the road. In London the idea is that if you put something on a wall or stuff it between the slats of a fence, it doesn’t count. Like it’s only really litter if it touches the ground, at which point it’s the wind that did it, not you. It’s frustrating, but I’d grown to expect trash in a city. In the countryside, though, and in such beautiful countryside, it’s heartbreaking, one of those things that, once you notice it, you can’t stop noticing.
Our property faces a winding, tree-lined lane that leads to Amberley, a village so picturesque and meticulously cared for that it seems almost false, like a movie set. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said the first time I saw it. Because it’s almost too much: the cozy pub, the twelfth-century church, and the two dozen or so perfect cottages, many with sloping thatched roofs. The center of life is a little food shop, and walking to it on that first December afternoon, I saw more litter than I had the entire fifteen years I spent in Normandy. I said to a woman I passed along the way, “Did a parade just come through?”
When I mentioned the trash to the neighbors, they agreed that it was a disgrace. “It wasn’t like this thirty years ago,” said the woman in the house to the right of ours. She couldn’t tell me why things had changed. It was just part of a general decline. In that regard it was like graffiti, something that had inexorably spread until people lost the will to fight against it. Then, to make themselves feel less powerless, they decided it was art. I tried looking at the trash that way: Oh, how the light plays off that vodka bottle! Look at the bright blue candy wrapper, so vivid against the fallen brown leaves. It didn’t work, though.
On my second day at the house I got on my bike and rode to the town of Pulborough. The first few miles are on narrow roads cut through a magnificent forest, the floor of which is relatively free of underbrush. This makes it easier for the deer to run, and affords a clearer view of the trash, entire bags of it sometimes. These are sacks of household garbage that people feel inclined to abandon for one reason or another. They’ll dump appliances too: microwaves, television sets, outdated sound systems released into the woods like they’d be happier there. There’s a landfill these things could be taken to, but it costs money and you’d have to go out of your way, so why not feed it all to the foxes? They like stereos, don’t they? And panini makers with frayed cords? Building supplies are another big item—cans of polyurethane, broken cinder blocks. Joint compound. Hot water heaters.
On the other side of the forest there’s a busy two-lane road. I’d been riding on it for a quarter of a mile when I came upon a man collecting garbage into a plastic bag. He looked to be in his late forties and wore a stocking cap pulled low over his forehead. “Excuse me,” I said, “but is someone paying you to do this?”
It was a wet day, and as a car barreled past, spraying me with mud, the man told me that he was acting on his own. “I live along here, and when the rubbish gets to be too much, when I just can’t stand it anymore, I come out and collect it.”
Another car sped by, and I said the queerest thing. “Well, you…,” I told him, “you are just a…really good…citizen.”
My face burned as I rode away, but later I’d reflect upon my goofy compliment and I would be glad that I’d stopped to offer it. It’s not that I changed a life or anything, but as the weeks passed and I eventually became that man by the side of the road, I’d grow to understand the value of a little encouragement.
Pick up litter, and people assume that it’s your punishment, part of your court-mandated community service. Is it him who’s been breaking into toolsheds? they wonder. Him who’s been stealing batteries from parked cars? At first I worried what passersby might think, but then my truer nature kicked in, and I became obsessed. When that happened there was no room for anyone else, except, occasionally, for Hugh, who does his part but won’t pull the car over to collect every plastic bag he comes across. He can talk about litter, but when the topic shifts to the price of heating oil or the correct way to lay a paving stone, he can shift with it. For me, though, there is no other topic.
Here’s who I’ve turned into since we moved to West Sussex: On a good day—a dry one—I don’t have any mud on my clothes, just the usual dirt from crawling under fences, this to chase down empty bottles of Lucozade, an energy drink that gives its consumers the power to throw more bottles farther. My arms are scratched from reaching into blackberry bushes for empty potato chip bags, of which there are a never-ending supply, potato chips in the U.K. being like meals in space. “Argentinean Flame Grilled Steak” a bag will read, or the new “Cajun Squirrel.”
Since cleaning roadsides has become my life, my fingertips have turned black, like spent matches, this the result of prying up bottle caps. There are almost always leaves and twigs in my hair, and because I know I’m going to get filthy, I dress for the occasion: in rags, like a hobo.
“You need to get yourself a good stick,” one of my neighbors said. “The kind with a nail on the end. That’ll save you from having to bend over.”
It’s a nice thought, but adding a harpoon to the mix would only make me more of an outcast. Then too, it might prove hard to carry. When I first started trash collecting, I did it on foot. Moving farther afield, I took to riding my bicycle, tying a bag of garbage to my rear fender and balancing a second, much larger one on my basket. On my back there’s a knapsack with moist towelettes in it. These I need after picking up dirty diapers or packs of spoiled meat that maggots are living in. I say to myself, Just leave it, but if I did, the road wouldn’t be clean, just almost clean, which is the same as fairly dirty.
Pedaling home through the forest, I’ll peer over my full, teetering trash bag and review my efforts: not so much as a cigarette butt to spoil the view. Enjoy it while you can, I think, for by the next morning it will be defiled. Once, I found a stroller with the seat burned out, this as if the child had spontaneously combusted. Weeks later I came upon a sex magazine, but for the most part it’s the same crap over and over, the crisp bags, the empty cans of beer and Red Bull, the endless Cadbury and Twix and Mars bars wrappers. The soda and candy point a finger toward kids, but according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England, one-quarter of the population readily admits to throwing trash out the window. That’s thirteen million people I’m picking up after, and not one of them seems to appreciate it.
One afternoon while driving back from the beach, Hugh pointed out a McDonald’s bag vomiting its contents onto the pavement. “I say that any company whose products are found on the ground automatically has to go out of business,” he said. This is how we talk nowadays, as if our pronouncements hold actual weight and can be implemented at our discretion, like we’re kings or warlocks. “That means no more McDonald’s, no more Coke—none of it.”
“That wouldn’t affect you any,” I told him. Hugh doesn’t drink soda or eat Big Macs. “But what if it was something you needed, like paint? I find buckets of it in the woods all the time.”
“Fine,” he said. “Get rid of it. I’ll make my own.”
If anyone could make his own paint, it would be Hugh.
“What about brushes?”
“Please,” he said, and he shifted into a higher gear. “I could make those in my sleep.”
A few days later, returning from the butcher in Pulborough, he presented me with his goatskin-sack idea. “Everyone gets one, see. Then, if you want a soft drink or a takeaway coffee or whatever, that would be your mandatory container.” He seemed so pleased with himself. “It could even have a strap on it,” he said. “Like a canteen but soft.”
“Well, wouldn’t people just throw those out the window?”
“Too bad if they do, because they’re only allowed one of them,” he said.
“And how would you clean it?” I asked. “What if you wanted milk in the morning and wine at lunch? Wouldn’t the flavors run into each other?”
“Just…shut up,” he told me.
At night I lie in bed and map out the territory I’ll cover the following day. The thing that holds me back is maintenance, retracing my steps and spot-cleaning the stretches of road I’d covered the previous afternoon and the afternoon before that. What did my life consist of before this? I wonder. Surely there was something I was devoted to?
With the arrival of warm weather, it became a bit easier to live in the stable. Three old friends visited from the United States, one in July and two more in August. “Want to pick up rubbish on the sides of the road?” I asked.
And all of them answered, “Sure. That sounds fun!”
I felt like the Horsham District Council should have given them something, a free tour of the Arundel Castle, maybe. It’s the local government’s responsibility to clear away the trash, but in order to maintain all the roads, they’d need a crew of hundreds. And until people change their behavior, how much can they actually accomplish?
“I’m not judging, but do you ever throw litter from your cars?” I asked the men working on our house. They all told me no, and I said, “Really, you can be honest with me.”
I asked the cashier at the local shop, the owner of the tearoom, the butcher. “No,” they all told me. “Never.”
I find a half-empty box of doughnuts and imagine it flung from the dimpled hand of a dieter, wailing, “Get this away from me.” Perhaps the jumbo beer cans and empty bottles of booze are tossed for a similar reason. It’s about denial, I tell myself, or, no, it’s about anger, for isn’t every piece of litter a way of saying “f*ck you”?
In trying to make sense of it all, I create a weak-willed weight watcher, an alcoholic, an antisocial teenager, but the biggest litterer I ever knew was my Greek grandmother, who died in 1976. That woman would throw anything out a car window. Her only criteria was that it fit.
“What the hell are you doing?” my father used to shout, and it would take her a moment to figure out what he was referring to. Farting? No. Throwing a paper grocery bag out onto the highway? What was wrong with that? The important thing to Yiayiá wasn’t a clean outside but a clean inside. A tidy station wagon reflected upon you personally, while a tidy landscape, what was that? Look at the sky, littered with clouds, or the beach trashed with shells. How was that mess any different from a hundred cans in a ditch?
My grandmother didn’t drive, but if she had, there’d be no end to the garbage trail she might have left. It doesn’t take many people to muck up a roadside. A devoted handful can do the trick. One of the things I find repeatedly is a plastic Diet Coke bottle containing a meticulously folded Mars bar wrapper. I imagine this is someone’s after-work snack and that by putting the wrapper inside the empty bottle, the person feels he’s done his bit. And though he has turned two pieces of trash into one, until he learns to keep it in his car, I don’t think he’s entitled to pat himself on the back. Who are you? I wondered the first and third and fifth time I came across one of these stuffed bottles. Do you think about the four hundred years it will take for this to decompose, or is this as inconsequential to you as flushing a toilet?
“What the government needs to do is take a sample of everyone’s DNA,” I said. “Then, when a bottle or can is discovered on the ground, we just run a test on the spout and throw the person in jail.”
“What if they’ve poured it into a glass?” Hugh asked.
And I said, “Why do you have to make this so difficult?”
It’s pathetic, really. Here we are, recent immigrants thinking that everything will be perfect once we fundamentally change the people who were actually born and raised here. I tell myself that it’s possible sometimes, though deep down I suspect it’s just rubbish.
Day In, Day Out
Seven is truly a wonderful age. For two days. That’s the length of time my friend Pam and her son, Tyler, who is in the second grade, normally visit. He’s at the stage where whatever I do, he wants to do. This includes wearing button-down shirts; singing “Galveston”—a song made popular by Glen Campbell—until everyone begs you to please, for the love of God, stop; and carrying a small Europa-brand reporter’s notebook. I gave him one the last time he came to the house in West Sussex, and, aping me, he stuck it in his pocket alongside a pen. That afternoon Hugh drove us to the nearby town of Arundel to tour its castle. There was an issue of the local paper in the backseat of the car, and leafing through it on our way there, I came upon a headline that read, “Dangerous Olives Could Be on Sale.”
“Hmm,” I said, and I copied it into my little notebook.
Tyler did the same but with less conviction. “Why are we doing this again?”
“It’s for your diary,” I explained. “You jot things down during the day, then tomorrow morning you flesh them out.”
“But why?” he asked. “What’s the point?”
That’s a question I’ve asked myself every day since September 5, 1977. I hadn’t known on September 4 that the following afternoon I would start keeping a diary, or that it would consume me for the next thirty-five years and counting. It wasn’t something I’d been putting off, but once I began, I knew that I had to keep doing it. I knew as well that what I was writing was not a journal but an old-fashioned, girlish, Keep-Out-This-Means-You diary. Often the terms are used interchangeably, though I’ve never understood why. Both have the word “day” at their root, but a journal, in my opinion, is a repository of ideas—your brain on the page. A diary, by contrast, is your heart. As for “journaling,” a verb that cropped up at around the same time as “scrapbooking,” that just means you’re spooky and have way too much time on your hands.
A few things have changed since that first entry in 1977, but I’ve never wavered in my devotion, skipping, on average, maybe one or two days a year. It’s not that I think my life is important or that future generations might care to know that on June 6, 2009, a woman with a deaf, drug-addicted mother-in-law taught me to say “I need you to stop being an a*shole” in sign language. Perhaps it just feeds into my compulsive nature, the need to do the exact same thing at the exact same time every morning. Some diary sessions are longer than others, but the length has more to do with my mood than with what’s been going on. I met Gene Hackman once and wrote three hundred words about it. Six weeks later I watched a centipede attack and kill a worm and filled two pages. And I really like Gene Hackman.
In the beginning I wrote my diary on the backs of paper place mats. My friend Ronnie and I were hitchhiking up the West Coast at the time. I was mailing regular letters and postcards to my friends back home, but because I had no fixed address, no one could answer them. And so I began writing to myself. Those first several years are hard to reread, not because they’re boring—a diary is fully licensed to be boring—but because the writing is so horribly affected. It’s poetry written by someone who’s never read any poetry but seems to think its key is
lowercase letters
and lots of
empty
spaces.
I’d love to know how much it cost me to do a load of laundry—something, anything practical—but instead it’s all gibberish. I was living in places without locks on the doors, and perhaps I worried that if someone found my diary and discovered what I was actually like, they’d dismiss me as dull and middle-class, far from the artist I was making myself out to be. So instead of recounting my first day of work at the Carolina Coffee Shop, I wrote, “I did not see Star Wars,” one hundred times in red pen.
After a few months of place mats, I switched to hardcover sketchbooks and began gluing things around my entries: rent receipts, ticket stubs—ephemera that ultimately tell me much more than the writing does. Then came an embarrassing drawing phase, which was followed by a slightly less embarrassing collage jag. In 1979, I began typing my diaries, jerkily, with one finger, and having the pages bound between hand-painted cardboard covers. This meant that rather than writing publicly, most often in pancake houses, sometimes with a beret atop my head, I did it at home, in a real apartment now, with a lock on the door.
Perhaps it was this—the privacy—that allowed me to relax and settle into myself. In June of that year, I wrote that gas in four states had reached a dollar a gallon—“A dollar!” I wrote that after our German shepherd, Mädchen II, peed on my parents’ bed, my mother entered a new dimension of cursing by calling the dog, who was female, a “shitty motherf*cker.” Finally I was recording my world and writing down things that seemed worth remembering. Then I discovered crystal meth and took two giant steps backward. The following six diaries amount to one jittery run-on sentence, a fever dream as humorless as it is self-important. I tried rereading it recently and came away wondering, Who is this exhausting drug addict?
I wanted to deny him, but that’s the terrible power of a diary: it not only calls forth the person you used to be but rubs your nose in him, reminding you that not all change is evolutionary. More often than not, you didn’t learn from your mistakes. You didn’t get wiser but simply older, growing from the twenty-five-year-old who got stoned and accidentally peed on his friend Katherine’s kitten to the thirty-five-year-old who got drunk and peed in the sandbox at his old elementary school. “The sandbox!” my sister Amy said at the time. “Don’t you realize that children have to pee in there?”
My diary regained its footing after I gave up speed. Writing-wise it was still clumsy, but at least the focus widened. I didn’t own a TV at the time but wrote a lot about the radio I was listening to. Occasionally I’d tune in to a music station, but I always preferred the sound of people talking, even if the subject was something I didn’t care about—sports, for instance, or the likelihood of Jesus returning within the next few hours.
Radio played a bigger role in my diary when I moved to Chicago in 1984 and started listening to a weekly Sunday-night program called Getting Personal, hosted by a woman named Phyllis Levy. It’s easy to hear a sex therapist today, but this was not a podcast or a satellite program where you could use whatever language you wanted to. Phyllis Levy was on a commercial station. Both she and her callers had to watch their mouths, thus using words like “pleasuring” and “cavity,” which somehow sound much dirtier than their more common alternatives.
I often wrote about how understanding this woman was, how accepting. The only time I recall her drawing the line was when a man wanted to have sex in his half-blind wife’s empty eye socket. Looking back, I think it must have been a joke. I mean, really, who does things like that? Phyllis, to her credit, took the call seriously, gently suggesting that with the wealth of other holes nature has provided us, perhaps this particular one was best left unexplored. Coming from North Carolina, I couldn’t believe that this was on the radio. And on a Sunday! I used to listen at the typewriter and copy down the questions and answers I found most compelling. Other people’s sex lives were great fun to write about. When it came to my own, however, I couldn’t have been more discreet. Early diaries mention that “B. came over and spent the night” or that “After dinner M. and I were romantic twice.” There are no details, much less full names. I think I worried that if someone ever read what I had written, the sex would be more embarrassing than, what, exactly? The whining about not having sex?
While a student in Chicago, my worst fear was realized when someone I’d been seriously dating got his hands on my diary. I was out of town at the time, and later learned that he was hurt, not by what I’d written about him but by his almost complete absence. I’d actually devoted more space to my barber than I had to him, and of course to the goings-on at school. At the start of my second year, I signed up for a creative-writing class. The instructor, a woman named Lynn, demanded that we each keep a journal and that we surrender it twice during the course of the semester. This meant that I’d be writing two diaries, one for myself and a second, heavily edited one, for her.
The entries I ultimately handed in are the sorts I read onstage sometimes, the .01 percent that might possibly qualify as entertaining: a joke I heard, a T-shirt slogan, a bit of inside information passed on by a waitress or cabdriver. To find these things, I turn to my diary index, which leaves out all the mumbly stuff and lists only items that might come in handy someday.
Volume 87, 5/15: Lisa puts a used Kotex through the wash, and her husband mistakes it for a shoulder pad.
Volume 128, 1/23: Told by saleswoman that the coat I’m trying on is waterproof “if it only rains a little.”
Volume 129, 4/6: I write down my e-mail address for Ian, and after looking at it he says, “Oh my God. You have handwriting just like Hitler’s.” Note: what kind of person knows what Hitler’s handwriting looks like?
Volume 132, 12/5: Sister Gretchen has her furnace serviced by a man named Mike Hunt.
Over a given three-month period, there may be fifty bits worth noting, and six that, with a little work, I might consider reading out loud. Leafing through the index, which now numbers 280 pages, I note how my entries have changed over the years, becoming less reflective and more sketchlike. It’s five a.m. in the lobby of the La Valencia Hotel, and two employees are discussing parental advice. “I tell my sons they should always hold the door open for a woman,” says the desk clerk. He is a Hispanic man, portly, with a lot of silver in his mouth. A second man stands not far away, putting newspapers into bags, and he nods in agreement. “I tell them it doesn’t matter who the lady is. It could be a fat chick, but on the other side of the room, a pretty one might look over and notice, so even then it’s not wasted.”
Here is a passenger on the Eurostar from Paris to London, an American woman in a sand-colored vest hitting her teenage granddaughter with a guidebook until the girl cries. “You are a very lazy, very selfish person,” she scolds. “Nothing like your sister.”
If I sit down six months or a year or five years from now and decide to put this into an essay, I’ll no doubt berate myself for not adding more details. What sort of shoes was the granddaughter wearing? What was the name of the book the old woman was hitting her with? But if you added every detail of everything that struck you as curious or spectacular, you’d have no time for anything else. As it is, I seem to be pushing it. Hugh and I will go on a trip, and while he’s out, walking the streets of Manila or Reykjavík or wherever we happen to be, I’m back at the hotel, writing about an argument we’d overheard in the breakfast room. It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it. I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but “Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!”
Were I to leave the hotel without writing in my diary, though, I’d feel too antsy and incomplete to enjoy myself. Even if what I’m recording is of no consequence, I’ve got to put it down on paper.
“I think that what you have is a disorder,” Hugh likes to say. But who proves invaluable when he wants the name of that restaurant in Barcelona that served the Camembert ice cream? The brand of soap his mother likes? The punch line of that joke he never thought was funny? “Oh, you remember. Something about a woman donating plasma,” he says.
Of course, the diary helps me as well. “That certainly wasn’t your position on July 7, 1991,” I’ll remind Hugh an hour after we’ve had a fight. I’d have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes a while to look these things up.
The diary also comes in handy with my family, though there it plays the same role as a long-lost photograph. “Remember that time in Greece when I fell asleep on the bus and you coated my eyelids with toothpaste?” I’ll say to my brother, Paul.
To heavy pot smokers, reminders like these are a revelation. “Wait a minute, we went to Greece?”
As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts. By this I meant that I would stop living in a fantasy world; that, while standing in line for a hamburger or my shot at the ATM, I would not daydream about befriending a gorilla or inventing a pill that would make hair waterproof. In this regard too, my diaries have proven me wrong. All I do is think up impossible situations: here I am milking a panda, then performing surgery, then clearing the state of Arizona with a tidal wave. In late November 2011, my most lurid fantasies involved catching the person who’d stolen my computer, the one I hadn’t backed up in almost a year. I’d printed out my diary through September 21, but the eight weeks that followed were gone forever. “Two months of my life, erased!” I said to Hugh.
He reminded me that I had actually lived those two months. “The time wasn’t stolen,” he said, “just your record of it.” This was a distinction that, after thirty-four years of diary keeping, I was no longer able to recognize. Fortunately I still had my notebooks, and as soon as the police left, I bought a new laptop and sat down to recover my missing eight weeks.
The first challenge was reading my handwriting, and the second was determining what the notes referred to. After making out “shaved stranger,” I thought for a while and recalled a woman in the Dallas airport. We were waiting to board a flight to San Antonio, and I overheard her talking about her cat. It was long-haired, a male, I think, and she had returned home one day the previous summer to find that he had been shaved.
“Well, in that heat it was probably for the best,” the man she was talking to said.
“But it wasn’t me who shaved it,” the woman said. “It was somebody else!”
“A stranger shaved your cat?”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” the woman said.
I eventually re-created the missing two months, printed them out, and placed the finished diary in my locked cabinet beside the 136 others that are shelved there.
“What should I do with these things when you die?” Hugh asks.
The way I see it, my options are burial or cremation. “But save the covers,” I tell him. “The covers are nice.”
As for seven-year-old Tyler, who knows if he’ll stick with it? A child’s diary, like a child’s drawing of a house, is a fairly simple affair. “We went to a castle. It was fun. Then we went to a little zoo. That was fun too.”
I thought my account of August 11 would begin with an accident I’d had at the castle. We were in the formal gardens when I took a wrong step and fell down before a great number of people, one of whom shouted—making me feel not just stupid but stupid and old—“Don’t move him!”
My face burned as I picked myself up off the ground.
“That happened to me not long ago,” Pam said, trying to make me feel better.
“It’s what you get for horsing around,” Hugh scolded.
Tyler said simply and honestly, “That was really funny.”
I pulled out my notebook and wrote—as if I would possibly forget about it by the following morning when I’d limp to my desk—“Fell down in garden.” I was mentally writing the diary entry, the embarrassment I felt, the stabbing pain in my knee, the sound of my body skidding on the gravel path, when we entered the castle’s petting zoo and I saw something that moved my fall from the front page to the category of “other news.” The place wasn’t much: some chickens, a family of meerkats, a pony or two. In one large cage lived a pair of ferrets and, next door, some long-haired guinea pigs. A woman and her two sons, aged maybe five and seven, spotted them at the same time I did and raced over to get a better look. The younger boy seemed pleased enough, but his brother went bananas. “Jesus!” he said, turning to look at his mother. “Jesus, will you look at those?”
I pulled out my notebook.
“What are you writing down?” Tyler asked.
“Have you ever seen guinea pigs so big?” the boy asked. “I mean, Jesus!”
The woman offered Tyler and me an embarrassed look. “You shouldn’t use the Lord’s name like that, Jerry. Some people might find it offensive.”
“Christ Almighty,” the kid continued. “Someone should take a picture.”
Writing about it the following morning, I’d recall how incredulous the boy had sounded. Yes, the guinea pigs were big—like furry slippers, sizes nine and ten and a half. They were hardly gargantuan, though. Had he possibly confused them with hamsters? The look on his face and his unexpected reaction—evoking Jesus as a weather-beaten adult would—were remarkable to me, and standing there in that dinky zoo, my knee throbbing, my little notebook firmly in hand, I knew I needed to keep the moment forever.