A Delicious Madhouse

RECOVERY JOURNAL

April 9, 1019

The wind blows me here. The wind blows me there. No, it’s nothing so haphazard as that. Good and bad decisions blow me and I giddyup. 

A room of one’s own (along with money) is what a woman requires in order to write fiction in a man’s world. This is what Virginia Woolf wrote and then lectured  in 1929. Who’s afraid of her? Not I. It makes sense. What must a woman (or man, thank you) have in order to write nonfiction in a man’s world or anyone’s world? I’d say a clear hour each day and nobody yelling in your ear, no president braying, soap opera portraying, TV shrink allaying. Who’s afraid of that? I am. 

So, I’ve got this:

A room temporarily mine (and not ten bucks, I tell you) in the West Hollywood Craftsman bungalow of Irving Boomer, who has the best name I’ve ever read or heard spoken. Irv is smart as a slap across the face. He’s a bipolar former modern dancer who studied under Martha Graham and he will tell you about it all day every day if you let him and suffers from the same sort of addiction to crystal methamphetamine as I do, though he refers to meth as “mama’s magic medicine” and not “the devil” as I prefer. He views the crud as a viable treatment for his bipolar-2, both the gut churning depressive episodes and the wild manic turns during which he dons costumes and jetties around the house in peans to Graham and other choreographers whose names are stage-whispered in reverence, though I haven’t heard of a single one of them. All day every day.

The house is astonishing, given to him long about his fortieth birthday by his family as an apology for treating him for decades like a magical wind-up toy. The place is also an asylum to house his nuttiness. Get him a crazy-pad, they reckoned, stock it with furniture and art and booze, extend him a spending account, and he won’t come over any more and embarrass us with our historical negligence or his blossomy excess. They were right. It works like a charm. A decade hence, the house is crumbling and wonderful, every corner of every room stacked with piles of mismatched decadence—laundry from who knows how long, dessert plates enameled with remnants of ancient apple pie, years of the New Yorker, USB jacks and plugs, cleaning products, gardening supplies, sex toys, silverware, doilies and dance shoes. Containers of personal lubricant, automotive lubricant, and dozens of dust-caked bottles of facial and body emollient. Cologne dispensers. Television remote controls. Trivets. Art supplies and bicycle parts, especially pedals and horns. 

You get the idea.

More than anything, there are tools that deal with starting fire and putting it out—lighters, torches, candle snuffers beside smoke detectors that are open-gutted and free of batteries. 

The light-on-fire stuff makes sense. 

This is a house of methamphetamine or was and isn’t currently, don’t be alarmed, dear reader. One generally smokes meth. This is also a house of cigarettes, many many many. This is a house of votives, displayed around the joint on tables and mantles and settees in threes and fours, enough candles to satisfy a decent sized cathedral. This is a house of tea lights to light tea time (which exists here), middle of the night seances, and moments of intimacy. There are torches for creme brulee, plumbing repair, and lighting the living room fireplace. Boxes of matches lie around the kitchen to give the oven and range a kick start. 

Really, it’s a wonder the house hasn’t burned to a cinder. 

There have been many parties in this house, fueled by methamphetamine and wine and rich food, served on platters and platitudes and beatitudes and bad attitudes. Pa rum pa pum pum. 

Let that settle a moment.

At present, the curtains are drawn. There are no parties. There’s just Irv and me. The apple pies are one-offs wrapped in waxed paper that are delivered every day or two from the local deli along with penne pesto or pastor al mole, peanut butter and jelly, soda and seltzer and wine. Irving pays for all of this from the family dole. I, as mentioned, haven’t get ten bucks at present. We’re both sober, me a little longer than Irv, but it’s one day at a time for any alcoholic or addict and all we have is today. Today, and yesterday, and tomorrow, you are likely to find Irving and me asleep, me in the bed and him on the sofa. Or vice versa. We are comatose in shifts. Or at the same time. There’s no rhyme or reason. Just young sobriety in all its inglorious splendor.

The difference, I suppose, between us is that for me, longterm sobriety is the goal and endgame of all of this. Whereas for Irv, sobriety is a lark, a temporary thing to try out, discuss with his friends on the telephone, and later journal about in curlicue script. (Oh—we both write.) 

In the hours that I’m awake, rumbling and fumbling around the house (or The House, as it really does deserve to be called) I’m doing what any dutiful son of parents who loathed packrat tendencies would do. I’m cleaning and going at the piles of excess, sometimes in plain view, sometimes secretly during his long naps in order not to raise his ire. 

To be fair, I shouldn’t throw away anything that isn’t mine, including things from the fridge. Irving, lips trembling with emotion, has forbidden me from discarding anything from the refrigerator including mushy spoiled tomatoes. (It was my preparing to throw away a rotten tomato that earned the warning.) Today, I pushed my luck and tossed a jar of amber colored mayo whose expiration date is a year passed. I know I had better hustle it out to the trash barrels in the back yard before I catch hell.

As I write now, I wait for the dryer to finish another load of his towels and tablecloths and jockstraps. There is a closet in the second bedroom mounded so high with clean and soiled laundry that its window is blocked and the doorways still-life vomits tee shirts and haberdashery onto the room’s floor. 

I can only guess how many dozen loads of laundry this translates into, or how many years its been since the closet floor was visible. I’ll be gone from this remarkable house before all the laundry is done. I’ll have the proverbial ten bucks and a room of my (one’s) own, thanks to a series of voice-overs I’ve been recording during this time of transition. 

But the memory of this delicious madhouse, and my time here, will stay with me for keeps.