“He says that we should take him to dog school,” I said. “He says we need to show him who’s in charge.”
Matt threw back his head and howled. Ze game of love, he noted, is never called on account of darkness.
It was pretty clear who was in charge. It was not me.
IV
Brown, 1985
On the contrary. I didn’t think I looked this good.
The Pacific Ocean crashed on the rocks before me. I raised my hands to the ocean, like the victim of a stickup. Then I took off all my clothes, stepped into the sea, and dove beneath the waves. It was cold. Everything below the surface was dark.
I’d come to the seashore in Olympic National Park at the tail end of a cross-country road trip I’d taken with my friend Peter Frumkin. He’d welcomed me to New York City on Veterans Day two years earlier, the autumn after I graduated from Wesleyan. I got off the train at Penn Station and we headed to a bar in the East Village, the Grassroots Tavern. There, over a couple of pints, Peter unfolded a giant map of Manhattan and, with a Sharpie, outlined exactly where it’d be safe to walk and where it would not. Then he gave me a subway token. “Good luck,” he said. “You’re going to need it!”
A couple of weeks later, he got mugged in one of the places he’d said was safe.
The next day, I got breakfast at the Waverly Coffee Shop in the Village. I gave the waitress my order, and then she gave me a look. It was Shannon.
She invited me to join her after she got off from work that night. Which I did. We walked around the piers on the Hudson and looked at the distant Statue of Liberty, which was green.
Later, I spent the night at her apartment way uptown.
In the morning, I found the super in the apartment next door to hers. It was for rent. Shannon paid for the deposit and also helped me find a roommate, a friend of hers named Charlie Kaufman, a young filmmaker.
Years later, of course, he’d make Being John Malkovich, and Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. These, of course, would be works of genius. But back then, like me, he was just one more doofus.
I settled into our new apartment and got a job cleaning toilets in a bookstore. In my spare moments I worked on a novel, about a wizard who owns an enchanted waffle iron.
I tried freelancing, traveled around the city researching stories of the obscure and opaque. On one occasion, I spent an afternoon with the members of a Titanic disaster fan group in a bar. After a few rounds, they started to sing: “It was sad when that great ship went down.”
I interviewed officials at Amtrak, trying to figure out why train whistles sound like train whistles. Why do they use a G-major sixth chord (GBDEG) on all the engines? Why, oh why?
No one would tell me.
A year or two went by. Charlie moved uptown with his girlfriend. Shannon—whom for the second time in my life I somehow failed to befriend—headed off to Paris. I hated that I could not reach her, after she’d so generously helped me find my very first harbor when, filled with terror, I had arrived in New York City to make my fortune. But whatever it was Shannon was looking for, it did not appear to be me.
I got an editor to read my novel about the enchanted waffle iron. “Somehow,” she said, “it lacks an emotional center.”
After two years, I’d had enough. That was when I headed west with Peter. On the way we stopped at places such as Vent Haven, the museum of retired ventriloquists’ dummies in Kentucky, or the Corn Palace in South Dakota. It was fun, the big road trip. But it was also kind of like rowing a lifeboat away from the Titanic. I wondered what all those people in the disaster fan club were celebrating. Was it simply that they were not the ones who were dead?
We camped on the beach on the Olympic Peninsula for a few days, Peter and I. That was when I woke at dawn and walked naked into the sea. I dove beneath those dark waves, then staggered back out.
I sat down on the beach and stared at the ground, like a blob of malformed pink flotsam washed up by a storm. I put my