The Trick is to Drink it Quickly
Part 1 memoir
“Love, that soppy plotline that gets in the way of a good story”
—Stephen Fry
I moved from New York City with my dog, Wogart, to the small mountain town of Nevada City, California when I was twenty-four. I lived there for a few years and they were fun, at least until the meth heads showed up and my murderer neighbor got out of prison and moved back into his house across the street. But before that it was good. I fell in love with a skater and we started a band. We made money busking and spent it on records and beer. Summers were spent floating in the river, winters making soup on a wood stove. We had lots of friends and free time. We had jobs—shit jobs, mostly—but other than that we kept a flexible schedule and were closer to childhood than adulthood in that we didn’t worry about what time it was or what needed to be done. We didn’t worry about the future.
Victim Shouting
I was riding on the back of my friend Jamey’s motorcycle when we got hit. A drunk driver in the middle of the night—blew a stop sign and drove straight at us. My friend swerved out of the way just in time, but not before I flew over the car and bounced off the windshield. I was pretty banged up and hit my head and couldn’t remember much of anything for a few months.
I was shocked and impressed when I read the police report. It was interesting to see what a normally shy and awkward kind of person like myself had up her (tightly buttoned) sleeve, when it came down to it. A cop who rode in the ambulance with me wrote down everything I said while I was in and out of consciousness:
3:31 A.M. Victim shouting: “FUCKING GODDAMN SON OF A BITCH!”
3:35 A.M. Victim shouting: “FUCK IT ALL TO HELL, SHIT SHIT SHIT!”
3:40 A.M. Victim shouting: “CUNTS! ASSHOLES! CUNTS AND ASSHOLES!”
It went on for a couple of pages.
A few days before the accident, I had broken up with a guy who I’d been seeing for about six months. But after the accident I couldn’t remember anything about it. Which, I like to think, is why I ended up back with him. By the time my memory started to kick back in, we had moved in together, and after a while it became clear why I’d left in the first place.
I was cooking dinner one night, Spaghetti, when Jake got home from work.
“Hi there, Beautiful,” he said. I looked up. He was basketball-player tall, with messed up teeth and warm brown eyes. Before I met him I’d heard him described as a giant teddy bear, and he really was: easygoing, friendly with everyone, attentive and affectionate.
“Howdy,” I said.
“Man, that smells good. Can I help you do anything?”
“Sure. Could you chop up this garlic?”
“I can do that.”
He chopped the garlic, then began to roll a joint.
“Would you like a hit?”
“Nah. I’m good.”
He lit the joint.
“What did you do today?” he asked, smiling. His whole face crinkled up when he smiled.
“I hung out with Casey.”
“Oh yeah? What did you guys do?”
I hesitated.
“We met up with some friends of hers and got high,” I said, after a moment.
My dog Wogart was hanging around at my feet. I reached down to pet him. Jake took a long drag, then exhaled.
“Some friends?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
I looked at him. He was still smiling, but I already knew.
“Who were these friends that got you high?”
“Um, Xavier. And José.”
“Huh. So you’re telling me that a couple of dudes smoked you out?”
“I guess, yeah …they were nice.”
“They were nice”?
“Yeah, I mean, they were generous.”
Jake nodded his head, slowly, then took another puff.
I waited.
“Where did this take place?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything. Jake put the joint down, then leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms. He began to shake his head, slowly, from side to side.
“I should have known. You brought them over here, didn’t you.”
“Yeah.” I looked at the ground. “But Casey and I were coming over here anyway. She wanted to borrow a dress. We just met up with them while we were walking.”
Jake picked up the joint and took another drag. I looked at the spaghetti, bubbling in the pot. I didn’t feel hungry.
“Okay,” he said, “let me see if I understand. While I’m at work, you’re hanging out in my house letting ‘Xavier and José’ get you high.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Oh, I think I know what it was like. My weed isn't good enough for you anymore, huh? You have to let a couple Mexicans smoke you out?”
Before I could stop myself, I smirked. Jake was half Mexican himself.
“You think it’s funny?”
“No, just—”
“Just what? Just bringing guys over here while I’m at work and getting high? Where did you sit, on the bed?”
I looked at him.
“So you were all sitting on the bed?”
“You know we don’t have enough chairs yet!’
“I know you’re an ugly little bitch.”
“Please don’t.”
“Please don’t. God, listen to you! You’re pathetic.”
“Please stop. I didn’t do anything.”
“They probably weren’t all that interested anyway, you know?”
“I don’t know.”
The spoon was lying on the counter. I picked it up and stirred the spaghetti.
Jake put the joint down.
“Turn around.”
I kept stirring.
“Look at me.”
I turned the gas off under the pot and looked at the floor. He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed. I stumbled. Wogart backed away, growling.
“Don’t,” I said. He pushed harder. This time I lost my balance and fell. He knelt down on the floor beside me. For a second I thought he was going to apologize. Then I felt his hands wrap around my throat. His fingers smelled like garlic. He crouched over me, squeezing softly as he spoke.
“Jesus. You're such a little crybaby! Why don't you just run home to mommy?”
He squeezed harder. I looked up at him. He was still smiling, but his face looked ugly now. I stayed still. Wogart circled around us, barking. I closed my eyes.
After a minute, he let go.
Something Good
I took Wogart and went home to my parent’s house and bought an extra large dog crate and a ticket to New York City. I was twenty-two and unemployed with no savings but I had insurance money coming in from the motorcycle accident. I wanted to get as far away from Jake as I could without leaving the country, and the money made it easy. Although he crept around outside my bedroom window for a few days before I left, alternately pleading and threatening, I didn’t see him again.
Jake hadn’t liked it when I played my violin, probably because when I was playing it I had a feeling of autonomy that he couldn’t touch, so I had stopped, but I was good at it; I’d studied with great teachers who were famous for their pedagogy as well as their own playing, and although I was deficient in confidence and ambition I had won praise and scholarships and could have made a career of it and maybe there was still time so when I got to New York I started up again. I took lessons uptown with a great teacher and practiced for hours in the evenings and on weekends. I lived in the East Village in a tiny studio full of cockroaches and as I played I would watch them crawl out of the woodwork and onto the walls and sometimes it seemed like they were marching along in time to the music. I tried to romanticize the experience and think of it as “quintessential.” This worked pretty well which was good because I couldn’t afford another apartment.
I answered a newspaper ad and was hired, somehow, to take care of two siblings: a three-year old and an eight-year old, the children of a successful couple—a cartoonist and an editor. It was the kids who helped me figure out the city. Even the three-year old understood the subway system better than I did. I was a little baffled by the parents; their pace of life. They were incredibly busy and seemed important in the way that well-regarded people can seem even if they don’t want or mean to, but the children lived unperturbed in the way that only a young child can be by the comparative fame of their parents. I tried not to let it perturb me, either.
The three-year-old was bright and charming like most three year olds, except more so. He had a mop of glossy brown hair, and a way, when he was going to sleep, of just talking, just speaking into the dark, to me, to everyone, to no one, completely pure and unselfconscious. He would lie there and babble a sort of stream of consciousness babble, and the images he described and connections he made were fluid and clear and it was wonderful to listen to.
I remember taking the eight-year old to soccer practice, which she hated. She had all the beauty of her brother but none of his self-assurance. She just wanted to read. Her mother had made it clear to me that she wanted her daughter to be more confident, to mix more, be active, have fun, and all of the other healthy things that playing sports can foster. So I tried, dutifully, to encourage her—but inwardly sympathized, more than she knew. I watched as she sat, miserable, in the grass on the sidelines until she was called to play; once on the field she just stood there, doing as little as possible—technically part of the game but absent in spirit. She seemed resolved to distance herself from the whole thing. I admired her for it.
At home, she would shut herself up for hours in her room reading, which is what I had done as a kid. Her parents were arty, literary people, same as mine, our fathers both writers, atheists, non-practicing Jews. It was like I was on the outside, or on the other side—of childhood, looking in, at a family that resembled my own but that I wasn’t a part of. Was this adulthood? To keep your head down, useful but invisible? I wasn’t sure. It felt safe enough at least so I lowered any expectations I might have had—of making meaningful connections, of achieving success, or getting attention—in the big city, and took care of the kids and read books and played my violin and wished my own parents weren’t so far away. I found that a busy city was a rotten place to be lonely.
Jake called and said please come back, give me another chance, and I said I don’t know but then he said he’d started going to counseling and was so sorry about everything and I didn’t really buy it but then, after a few more months, after he’d called again and again and said how the counseling was going really well, and things would be different, and he was different–– figured, in the way that you do when you’re demoralized and not thinking clearly––that anything would be better than being lonely so I said okay, I’d come back and see how it was.
When I told the family I was leaving the girl shut herself in her room with her comic books for a few days, not speaking to me. Finally she opened the door, but didn’t come out.
“You’re leaving,” she said from the doorway. “Every single babysitter leaves us. I thought you were different, but you’re not. You’re just like all the rest of them!”
There was such a look on her face—fierce and betrayed.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. It struck me, very clearly, just for a moment, that I was leaving something good—someone who was growing attached to me. I’d been so caught up in my own loneliness that I hadn’t noticed.
I pushed away the thought and left anyway. I flew back to California and to Jake and it was good for a few days or had the look of it but after about a week he started in again.
“I can’t understand why you would go back to that asshole,” said Casey, shaking her head in disbelief. I couldn’t understand, either.
Easy
In the spring, not long after my twenty-fourth birthday, I finally pulled my head out of my ass and left for good. I was getting knocked around, which was bad enough, but the worst thing was that I stuck around, that I played the part of a person who believed him when he swore he'd change. That thing to me, afterwards, was the more humiliating of the two. Finally I gave up hoping—that if I behaved better (or he loved me more) he would change—and started hating. After that, leaving was easy.
This time he didn’t come after me. Maybe because he could tell that I was no longer available to be fucked with. Maybe living far away in New York had given me autonomy. Or maybe I had regained whatever sense I’d had before the motorcycle crash—when I’d left him the first time.
The days were just starting to get warm again when I moved to Nevada City, a small gold-mining town in the foothills of the western side of the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern California. The town was laid out on a hill overlooking further off hills covered in pine and manzanita. A rocky, winding river with clear water and deep swimming holes was a little further north, and a roaring creek bisected the town itself. The buildings and houses were Victorian, the saloons still had false fronts. It was pretty, I had family there …it seemed like as good a place as any other to start over. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, it gets awfully cold up there in the winter,” said my Dad—and the matter was settled.
I still had some money from the accident and wanted to buy a house of my own, an idea that, at twenty-four and barely able to look anyone in the eye, seemed, at least to me, audacious almost beyond belief. But money, I learned, could lend you a kind of confidence that would have been impossible to get otherwise.
I got lucky and was able to buy a cheap house on the edge of town, a couple of miles down a badly-paved road. The house sat at the top of a cleared acre surrounded by forest. A narrow path, not much more than a deer trail, led through the meadow down to a creek. The creek was deep and rocky. You couldn't see it from the house but you could hear it; it roared.
I liked living there. It was beautiful and the air felt fresh and smelled good. The house was big and had renters in it when I bought it and they stayed after I moved in but at first I kept pretty much to myself—for a while at least my own thoughts and Wogart were company enough. He loved to splash around in the creek, and we took long walks together through the woods. I had started playing my violin again a little too, which, as it had always done, made me feel like my life was worth something, even to me. But the rest of the time I was kind of at a loss. Life with Jake had been miserable, but even being miserable takes up time, and after the first few weeks spent setting up my new home I found myself with nothing to do.
I called Casey. “You have to get out and meet people,” she said. “I mean, I know you’ll hate doing it, but I don’t think you have a choice, unless you want to wither away and die alone.”
“What’s wrong with dying alone?”
“Nothing. But I know you can do this. Just put on some fucking lipstick and go somewhere and talk to someone. You’ll be fine.”
“You’re lying.”
“Of course I’m lying. But you have to do it anyway.”
Casey was right. I had to get out and meet people, somehow. Maybe I could even fool some of them into liking me.
On Saturday I walked into town. There were plenty of people out. I made an effort to stand up straight as I walked, and to look at the faces around me. I wanted to be liked but wasn’t sure if I could be. I felt doomed. The world, if it bothered to look, would see it, my shame and weakness, in my expression, my body, the way I walked.
I paused for a moment and looked around. There were a couple of guys standing on a corner nearby. Skaters, around my age. A tall, well-built Black guy, and a skinnier white one. They stood with the tails of their skateboards balanced against the pavement, watching people go by. I walked over and stopped just behind them.
“Hey,” I said. The white one turned around. He was good-looking, or more than good-looking; tan with green eyes and curly brown hair. I tried not to stare.
“What’s up?” he said, smiling. The other guy turned and looked at me, then turned back to the street. I stood, lamely, behind them.
“What are you guys doing?” I said.
The first guy looked at me.
“Watching the pretty girls go by.”
“Oh. I can see that.”
I waited. He smiled, but didn't say anything.
“What are you doing after?” I said finally. I felt far away, like I was watching somebody else try to pick up these guys.
“We're going to the river.”
“Cool. Can I come?” I heard myself say.
“Sure,” he said. “Let's go.”
I followed them across the street to their car, doubting, half–hating them. The white guy got out his keys. “I’m Jesse, by the way. This is Greg,” he said. Greg looked at me briefly and nodded. Jesse opened the back door and began to clear a space for me on the seat. What the fuck am I doing, I thought. But I got in the car.
We drove through town, then turned out onto the old highway. The road began to climb up toward the mountains, twisting and narrow. The two guys sat in front, talking to each other about their band, an upcoming show. I sat in the back and listened. I wasn't having a very good time.
“Dude, that new song fucking ruled,” said Greg.
“You think so?” said Jesse.
“Fuck yeah.”
“Cool. I liked it when I was writing it but I wasn't sure.”
“We just gotta get that shit tight before Saturday.”
“Oh we will, we will.”
I realized that they were showing off, bragging to impress me. I felt a little better then.
Jesse turned on the radio. “Stairway to Heaven” was playing. I’d been into Led Zeppelin when I was a kid and knew every guitar solo by heart, but I couldn't stand that cheesy song.
“This is the best worst song ever,” Jesse said. He laughed and turned it up.
“Dude, I know,” said Greg. He started doing an air guitar solo along with the music, contorting his face in pseudo-ecstasy.
“This is the extended version,” I said, “a fifteen minute circle jerk.”
Jesse laughed.
“Fuck yeah,” he said. He smiled at me in the rearview mirror. “That's all they needed to do—take a horrible thing and make it worse.”
We listened to the shitty song all the way to the river.
Half–Drunk
It was hot. The windows were open. I stuck out my arm. I could feel the breeze pushing through my fingers. The road wound up through the canyon, shady in the hollows. There was the scent of dry sugar pines in the warm air. I looked out the window at the manzanitas, smooth and red-limbed in the afternoon sun.
We stopped at a bridge and got out. I could see the river below us. There was a deep swimming hole. Sunburnt women lay flat on wide rocks. There were plastic pool toys floating everywhere, purple and pink. Kids screamed in play. There was a smell of cigarette smoke drifting up.
“You couldn’t pay me to go down there,” said Jesse.
“I know,” said Greg, “it’s a fuckin’ cesspool.”
“We should go higher up,” said Jesse. “To the north fork. Way less crowded. Is that cool with you guys?”
We got back in the car. Jesse drove slowly. We were pretty high up now, the river just a thin silver line. After a while the road ended. We got out and began to walk down a dusty trail. I looked at my ankles, brown with dirt. The two guys were in front of me, talking about people I didn’t know. Jesse looked back at me for a moment.
“You haven’t been up here yet?” he said.
“Nope.”
“You’re gonna love it. It’s such a rad spot. Nice shorts, by the way.”
I looked at him. We were wearing the same kind of shorts: brown work pants cut off at the knee. He turned back around. I looked at his T-shirt, worn out and full of holes. I could see his back, the bone and muscle of it, underneath. I looked at his legs. He was wearing skate shoes, no socks. I skated a little myself. I thought about that, looking at him, then looked away.
We walked for a while. Jesse slowed down and turned to face me.
“We’re almost there. It’s just around the bend.”
The trail veered sharply down toward the river. “It’s a little gnarly right here,” he said. I nodded.
The hill was steep. We scrambled, half-sliding, to the bottom. The air was cooler down there. There were huge granite boulders, worn smooth over time. The river flowed between them, cool and bright. You could hear the water splashing. It sparkled in the sun.
The two guys stripped down to their underwear. I took off my shorts, but kept my shirt on. I sat on a rock and looked down at the water. Jesse climbed onto a big boulder in front of me. His boxer shorts were blue and threadbare. He passed so close that I could have touched him. I wanted to touch him. The feeling was overwhelming, a blow to my new-found independence.
He jumped. I watched his body arc through the air, a long line. He landed, hard, and surfaced nearby. I looked away.
The water was cool. I floated on my back. Pine trees grew out of the canyon wall above me, long shadows across the rocks. Jesse opened a six pack. “Catch!” he said, and tossed me a beer. The trick, he explained, is to drink it quickly, while it’s still cold.
We lay on the sand. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds drifting in and out. There were half–drunk cans of warm beer all around. The bees buzzed, drowsily, above them.
North Fork of the Yuba River
Jesse dropped Greg off first, then drove me home. I got out of the car. I could see Wogart, paws on the windowsill, watching from inside the house.
“I’ll be rolling back up to the river again tomorrow,” said Jesse. I turned around.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I could come pick you up, if you want. Your dog could come too.”
We went back to the river the next day and the day after that. Jesse told me all about his ex-girlfriend. He seemed pretty cut up about her. He told me how they’d met when he lived in the city, but after a while she had changed. I didn’t really want to know. She started hanging out with some guy, a dealer—and before long she had cut off her hair and dyed it black and started using. When Jesse objected she broke up with him. Before that, he said, she’d had long golden hair and played the harp—“like an angel.” He looked sad when he said it so I kept a straight face.
When he finally kissed me I was a little let down. He kept doing something weird with his eyes—he’d make one look in front of him and the other off to the side, trying to make me laugh. I laughed, dutifully, but it detracted from the moment or from what I wanted the moment to feel like.
“Cut it out,” I said. I just wanted to look into his eyes, but didn’t know how to say so. “You’re ruining this for me.”
“Sorry. I’ll focus. Okay …what were we doing?”
I laughed.
We spent the summer in the river, sunburned and drunk. We floated in the water and drank cheap beer that had sat in the sun for too long; sour and warm. The days that we didn’t go felt flat by comparison, like how a sailor might feel a little constrained by the immobility of solid ground after a time at sea. “To float is to live!” I said, or something cheesy like that. But Jesse knew what I meant. It turned out he was a really nice guy. Too nice, maybe, too eager to please, couldn’t let anybody down, even if it meant lying. But I didn’t know about that yet, and my adoration was uncompromised by anything like worry.
Oh yeah, this is great! You have a huge gift!
Yo tambien