494-5316.
Sunday 20 March 2005 | I like a cookie
Today I had lunch with the Edimatrix and for long moments we just looked at each other with dismay. She is exactly my age and her divorce went through on New Year’s Eve. “I know the judge,” she shrugged; “I just didn’t want it hanging over me another year.” She ran into the courthouse with her filled-out forms and stood outside the courtroom while the clerk went in and the judge signed off on her divorce from the bench, without more than a cursory glance at the paperwork. Et voilà, single once more.
We look at each other some more, over grilled salmon salads at Counter Culture. I note that Hunter S. Thompson shot himself—successfully, I should add, God rest not his vicious, demented soul—the same night I made my abortive attempt. I tell her about 2004: the looming undone divorce papers and taxes and financial impossibilities, the vomiting godmother, the probable folly of adding a young Buddhist monk to the mix and I also mention the Librarians—how they’ve ditched me, and rightly so, in a laudable attempt to save their marriage, because I am without question an evil vixeny literary seductress. “And not only am I still broke but now I’m going to have a huge hospital bill,” I blurt out. “You didn’t have health insurance?!” I shake my head and we’re silent again. She cradles her head in her hands, looks at me with that disarming journalistic blue gaze which has unseated state senators and wheedled the likes of Bill Richardson and Ralph Nader into admitting more than they know is prudent. “I would be just heartbroken if anything had happened to you.” She offers to buy me a cookie (”Jesus, I’m turning into my grandmother. I try to solve life problems with cookies”); I decline and go to my film screening, for which I am late.
Whereupon I snuffle through Born into Brothels and conclude that probably more of my problems than not can be solved with cookies. Accordingly come back home and have many of them, Trader Joe’s hideously addictive Crisp White Chip Cookies, which are the size of a quarter and contain nothing natural or in the least bit nutritiously improving. Eloise flounces down on the duvet, looks at me in feline disgust, and licks her armpit vigorously. As Annie Dillard once said, if animals are so moral, where are their books? I can’t help my carb cravings—one of the three antidepressants I take is notorious for making you want to “eat sugar straight out of the bag,” as the poor bugger who writes crazymeds.org warns. I am, I once wrote in the throes of undergraduate hyperbole, slain by my own hand in the third act of the play.
So I try not to look toward Atalaya when I’m driving around in my rusted-out Honda, whose head gasket threatens to catch fire at every stoplight. [And it did, eventually, by the way; on my birthday, on Cerrillos Road, with Mandarin saying uneasily I think there’s something wrong and me ignoring the billowing smoke coming from underneath the hood and saying stubbornly, No no it’s fine.] I try not to look up, especially at night when the moon is shining and I’m damned if I can’t hear an almost audible voice, a siren, a call.
That’s just silly. But there I was trudging breathlessly and almost merrily uphill, stopping at every switchback to take another swig and another turquoise pill and look down at the multiplying orange-and-violet lights of the City Different, and utter colorful curses upon it. Since 1988, I told it authoritatively, my head swimming, you’ve ruined me. As I neared the top I began raving exclusively in awful French (moi, j’ai fait du suicide! mais ce n’est pas ma faute), for no clear reason I can now remember, and singing the Civil War songs my mother and grandmother sang to me as a girl, were taught by their mother and grandmother: Just break the news to mother / she knows how much I love her / and kiss her dear sweet lips for me / for I’m not coming home—conscious only of a relieved effervescence, like Jim Dixon with the bottle cork making a festive pop and the port coursing down his chin, toodling merrily on but going more and more slowly until suddenly I was abruptly facing the wrong way on the trail and had slid uneasily down several rocky bits and lots of ice and yards and yards of snow and come to rest hanging around a tree trunk, where there’s no snow—its metabolic process generates enough calories to melt the snow in a radius around its base. And curled there and looked at the moon—at the several moons, to be exact. Somehow my face dripping with tears and now not waving but drowning, looking up at Her face and wailing, raging, begging, completely drunk and fucked-up and done.
I tried so hard! I heard myself screaming from a great distance. You can’t say I didn’t try. I tried to be a writer. I tried to do it for you. I tried as hard as I could. You could have helped me a little bit, just a little bit. I tried so hard! It turned mourning, elegiac, and I felt full of dramatic grief for my life. “Parasuidical gesture” is what this is called. They can call it what they want to, but in that moment: just so fucking done. I tried so hard. I tried so hard. Maybe next time I can do it. Maybe next time you’ll help me. I wasn’t strong enough. I couldn’t say no to people, I didn’t have enough strength, enough talent. But I tried for you. I tried so hard.
And passed out cold.
—Coming to, sharply, much later, I don’t know how much later, when my clog fell off my right foot into the brilliant frozen moonlit river. “Snow!” I said, laughing stupidly, because I thought at first that was what I’d stepped into; I felt for my shoe briefly with my hand but gave up almost immediately, dimly aware I’d never find it in the black ice-chunked water, thinking idiotically that I didn’t want to get frostbitten. Somehow I was doubled over, half-crawling along the river bottom, with no memory of getting there, other than sliding and falling. I started saying plaintively over and over, “Where’s N.?”—then, more and more defiantly, “I can go home if I want to. I can change my mind.” And finally, over and over again, hypnotically, feeling with my hands down the frozen gorge, limping in socks, unable to feel my feet but knowing they were bruising and being stabbed with sticks and stobs and sharp rocks—
Four nine four, five three one six. 1537 Dent Street. 494-5316. Four nine four, five three one six. These were my phone number and address when I was six years old. I didn’t know I still knew them. I suppose my parents made me say the numbers over and over until I memorized them in case I got lost. I’m sure they never thought in their worst nightmares I would be 35 years old, picking my way barefoot across the SF National Forest at three in the morning, following breadcrumbs or brilliant turquoise sedatives to some species of home: 494-5316. 494-5316.
[Too fucked-up to feel ashamed, though that would come. There followed being pounced on by a punchy group of SAR guys, a 3 a.m. ambulance ride to the ER, a three-day stay in the psych unit and at this point about six months of three antidepressants, two antianxiety meds and twice-a-week DBT.]
If I’m honest, which at this point may be about all I’ve got going for me here in the prose department, I will admit there’s no small piece of me which sorrows it didn’t sleep, didn’t still, didn’t come to rest in the snowless circle under a Ponderosa sapling. That believes it belonged more there than here. I’d left a suicide note, an adolescent list of memorial service songs (Ani’s “Joyful Girl,” Tori’s “Pandora’s Aquarium” or maybe “Icicle,” Kurt’s acoustic “All Apologies,” and “The Wonder of Birds” and “Medjugorje” by the Innocence Mission); and an request for an inscription to be cut on a square plain block of granite, to go somewhere in Santa Fe under just such a tree, along with any ashes there might be remaining of what’s left:
SO THIS IS THE WORLD.
I’M NOT IN IT.
IT’S BEAUTIFUL.
—Mary Oliver
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