David Foster Wallace's Creative Nonfiction Syllabus

README.md

Salon Magazine has David Foster Wallace's creative nonfiction curriculum here.

• Learning to Surf by David Gessner
• Sleeping with Alcohol by Donna Steiner.
• Where I Slept by Stephen Elliott

David_Gessner-Learning_to_Surf.md

Learning to Surf

by David Gessner

Out just beyond the breaking waves they sit there bobbing, two groups of animals, avian and human, pelicans and surfers. As they rise and fall on humps of water, the pelicans look entirely unperturbed, their foot-long bills pulled like blades into scabbards, fitting like puzzle pieces into the curves of their throats. The surfers, mostly kids, look equally casual. A girl lies supine on her board, looking up at the sky, one leg crossed over the other in an almost exaggerated posture of relaxation. For the most part the birds and surfers ignore each other, rising up and dropping down together as the whole ocean heaves and then sighs.

Pelicans are particularly buoyant birds and they bob high on the water as the surfers paddle and shift in anticipation. There is no mistaking that this is the relatively tense calm of before, rest before exertion. Soon the waves pick up and the kids paddle furiously, gaining enough speed to pop up and ride the crests of breaking surf. They glide in toward the beach where I stand, the better ones carving the water and ducking under and cutting back up through the waves.

I just recently moved to this southern island town, but I have been here long enough to know that those who pursue this sport are guided by a kind of laid-back monomania. Each morning I bring my four-month-old daughter down to the local coffee shop, and each morning the talk is of one thing. The ocean, I’ve learned, is always referred to as it.

“What did it look like this morning?” one surfer asked another a few mornings back.

“Sloppy.”

Remembering my own early-morning glance at the water I could understand what he meant, the way a series of waves came from the northwest, while another group muscled up from the south, and how the two collided and kicked up. Aesthetically it was beautiful, but practically, at least from a surfer’s point of view, it made for a landscape of chop — not much to get excited about.

Another morning I heard this:

“How does it look today, dude?”

“Small.”

“Nothing?”

“You can go out there if you want to build your morale.”

It’s easy enough to laugh at these kids, but I like the physical nature of their obsession, the way their lives center on being strong animals. In When Elephants Weep, Jeffrey Masson speculates that animals feel funktionslust, a German word meaning “pleasure taken in what one can do best.” The strongest of the surfers, the ones who have grown up on the waves, must certainly feel this animal pleasure as they glide over and weave through the water.

I watch the surfers for a while longer, but when the pelicans lift off, I turn my focus toward their even more impressive athletic feats. Pelicans are huge and heavy birds, and the initial liftoff, as they turn into the wind and flap hard, is awkward. But once in the air they are all grace. They pull in their feet like landing gear and glide low between the troughs of the waves, then lift up to look for fish, flapping several times before coasting. If you watch them enough, a rhythm reveals itself: effort, glide, effort, glide. They are looking for small fish — menhaden or mullet most likely — and when they find what they are searching for they gauge the depth of the fish, and therefore the necessary height of the dive, a gauging guided by both instinct and experience. Then they pause, lift, measure again, and finally, plunge. The birds bank and twist and plummet, following their divining-rod bills toward the water. A few of them even turn in the air in a way that gives the impression they are showing off. If they were awkward in takeoff, now they are glorious.

There is something symphonic about the way the group hits the water, one bird after another: thwuck, thwuck, thwuck. At the last second before contact they become feathery arrows, thrusting their legs and wings backward and flattening their gular pouches. They are not tidy like terns and show no concern for the Olympian aesthetics of a small splash, hitting the surface with what looks like something close to recklessness. As soon as they strike the water, instinct triggers the opening of the huge pouch, and it umbrellas out, usually capturing fish, plural. While still underwater they turn again, often 180 degrees, so that when they emerge they’ll be facing into the wind for takeoff. And when they pop back up barely a second later, they almost instantly assume a sitting posture on the water, once again bobbing peacefully. It’s a little like watching a man serve a tennis ball who then, after the follow-through, hops immediately into a La-Z-Boy.

THE PELICANS CALM ME, which is good. I have tried to maintain a relaxed attitude since moving to this island, but at times it’s hard. I had vowed that I would stay forever on Cape Cod, my old home, but it was my writing about how much I loved the Cape that led to the offer of a teaching job in this overcrowded North Carolina resort town of outboard motors, condos, and southern accents. My wife, Nina, had just given birth to our daughter, Hadley, and the lure of health insurance and a steady paycheck was irresistible.

The truth is, the move has unsettled me: in coming to this new place I find myself, and my confidence, getting shaky. If I’ve behaved well publicly, in the privacy of our new apartment I’ve at times started to fall apart. As each day unfolds, I grow ever less sure of myself.

One of the things that disorients me is the heat. It’s the kind of heat that makes you want to lie down and give up, to start to cry and throw out your arms in surrender. I’ve known brutal cold in my life, but cold has the advantage of invigoration, at least initially. Now I understand the logic behind siestas; every instinct tells you to crawl to a cool dank place and lie there and be still.

Lifting my daughter into our un-air-conditioned Honda Civic feels like sliding her into a kiln, so we are desperately trying to buy a new car. But today the Toyota guy calls with bad news. Our credit report has come back and our loan has been rejected.

“You have weak stability,” he tells me, reading from the report.

I nod and consider the poetry of his words.

BUT THERE ARE OTHER MOMENTS, moments when I sense that this may not be such a bad place to live. With summer ending, the parking lots have begun to empty. There are fewer beach walkers and more pelicans. Each morning I take long walks with Hadley, and have begun to take field notes on my daughter. I’m struck daily by her creatureliness, and the fact that this squirming little apelike animal, barely two feet high, has somehow been allowed to live in the same house with us. Nothing cuts through my doubts about having moved here quite like this new ritual of walking with my daughter in a papooselike contraption on my chest. On good days we make it all the way to the south end of the island where we stare out at the channel.

Many things have caught me off guard about being a father, but the most startling thing has been the sheer animal pleasure. “Joy is the symptom by which right conduct is measured,” wrote Joseph Wood Krutch of Thoreau. If that’s true then my conduct these days must be excellent.

This morning we watch two immature, first-year pelicans fly right over the waves, belly to belly with their shadows. It’s exhilarating the way they lift up together and sink down again, rollercoastering, their wings nicking the crests of the waves. Eight more adult birds skim right through the valley between the waves, gliding by the surfers, sweeping upward before plopping onto the water.

Feeling that it’s only polite to get to know my new neighbors, I’ve begun to read about the birds. I’ve learned that the reason they fly through the troughs between the waves is to cut down on wind resistance, which means they, like the surfers they fly past, are unintentional physicists. When I first started watching pelicans I kept waiting to hear their calls, expecting a kind of loud quack-quork, like a cross between a raven and a duck. But my books confirm what I have already noticed, that adult pelicans go through their lives as near mutes. Whether perched atop a piling in classic silhouette or crossing bills with a mate or bobbing in the surf, they remain silent.

Another group of adult birds heads out to the west, toward the channel, as Hadley and I turn home. Before moving here I never knew that pelicans flew in formations. They are not quite as orderly as geese — their Vs always slightly out of whack — and the sight of them is strange and startling to someone from the North. Each individual takes a turn at the head of the V, since the lead bird exerts the most effort and energy while the birds that follow draft the leader like bike racers. These platoons fly overhead at all hours of day, appearing so obviously prehistoric that it seems odd to me that people barely glance up, like ignoring a fleet of pterodactyls.

Yesterday I saw a bird point its great bill at the sky and then open its mouth until it seemed to almost invert its pouch. My reading informs me that these exercises are common, a way to stretch out the distensible gular pouch so that it maintains elasticity. Even more impressive, I learn that the pouch, when filled, can hold up to twenty-one pints — seventeen and a half pounds — of water.

“I have had a lifelong love affair with terns,” wrote my friend from Cape Cod, John Hay, a writer whom I have always admired for his sense of rootedness. I’ve come to pelicans late and so can’t have my own lifelong affair. But I am developing something of a crush.

I’M NOT A GOOD WATCHER. Well, that’s not exactly true. I’m a pretty good watcher. It’s just that sooner or later I need to do more than watch. So today I am floating awkwardly on my neighbor Matt’s surfboard, paddling with my legs in a frantic eggbeater motion, attempting this new sport in this new place while keeping one eye on the pelicans. Even though you can’t bring your binoculars, it turns out that this is a great way to birdwatch. The pelicans fly close to my board, and for the first time I understand how enormous they are. I’ve read that they are fifty inches from bill to toe, and have six-and-a-half-foot wingspans, but these numbers don’t convey the heft of their presence. One bird lands next to me and sits on the water, tucking its ancient bill into its throat. Up close its layered feathers look very unfeatherlike, more like strips of petrified wood. I watch it bob effortlessly in the choppy ocean. Most birds with webbed feet have three toes, but brown pelicans have four, and their webbing is especially thick. While this makes for awkward waddling on land, it also accounts for how comfortable the birds look in the water.

I’m not nearly as comfortable. Two days ago I spent an hour out here with Matt, and yesterday we came out again. Despite his patience and coaching, I never stood up on my board, in fact I never made more than the most spastic attempts. Today has been no better. The best things about surfing so far are watching the birds and the way my body feels afterward when I am scalding myself in our outdoor shower. So it is with some surprise that I find myself staring back with anticipation as a series of good waves roll in, and it is with something close to shock that I find myself suddenly, mysteriously, riding on top of that one perfect (in my case, very small) wave. Before I have time to think I realize that I am standing, actually standing up and surfing. The next second I am thrown into the waves and smashed about.

But that is enough to get a taste for it.

I HAVE NOW BEEN PRACTICING my new art for three days. The pelicans have been practicing theirs for thirty million years. It turns out that the reason they look prehistoric is simple: they are. Fossils indicate that something very close to the same bird we see today was among the very first birds to take flight. They were performing their rituals — diving, feeding, courting, mating, nesting — while the world froze and thawed, froze and thawed again, and while man, adaptable and relatively frenetic, came down from the trees and started messing with fire and farming and guns.

What struck me first about these curious-looking birds was the grace of their flight. Not so the early ornithologists. In 1922, Arthur Cleveland Bent wrote of their “grotesque and quiet dignity” and called them “silent, dignified and stupid birds.” A contemporary of Bent’s, Stanley Clisby Arthur, went even further, describing the pelicans’ habits with something close to ridicule. Arthur writes of the pelicans’ “lugubrious expressions” and “ponderous, elephantine tread” and “undemonstrative habits,” and says of their mating rituals that “they are more befitting the solemnity of a funeral than the joyous display attending most nuptials.” His final insult is calling their precious eggs “a lusterless white.”

Even modern writers seem to feel the need to lay it on thick: as I read I make a list of words that includes “gawky,” “awkward,” “comical,” “solemn,” “reserved,” and, simply, “ugly.” It never occurred to me that pelicans were so preposterous, though I’ll admit that recently, as I kayaked by a sandbar full of birds, I laughed while watching a pelican waddle though a crowd of terns, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. But “ugly” seems just mean-spirited.

When not seeing pelicans as comic or grotesque, human beings often describe them as sedate and sagelike. Perhaps this springs from a dormant human need to see in animals the qualities we wish we had. Compared to our own harried, erratic lives, the lives of the pelicans appear consistent, reliable, even ritualistic, as befits a bird that has been doing what it’s been doing for thirty million years. And compared to their deep consistent lives, my own feels constantly reinvented, improvised. But before I get too down on myself, I need to remember that that’s the kind of animal I am, built for change, for adaptation. Long before we became dull practitioners of agriculture, human beings were nomads, wanderers, capable of surviving in dozens of different environments.

Though barely able to hold their heads up at birth and fed regurgitated food by their parents while in the nest, newborn pelicans fledge within three months. The one year olds I watch flying overhead are already almost as capable as their parents, while my daughter will need our help and guidance for many years to come. But this too makes evolutionary sense: one reason for our long infancy and childhood is to give the human mind time to adapt creatively to thousands of different circumstances. Pelicans, on the other hand, are ruled by a few simple laws and behaviors. Still, at the risk of romanticizing, I like the sense of calm the birds exude, the sense of timelessness, of ritual and grace.

We humans face a different set of problems. Our bodies still run on rhythms we only half understand (and often ignore), and we have adapted ourselves beyond ritual. To a certain extent all rules are off. The life of a hunter or farmer, the life that all humans lived until recently, directly connected us to the worlds of animals and plants, and to the cycles of the seasons. Without these primal guidelines, we are left facing a kind of uncertainty that on good days offers a multifarious delight of options, and on bad days offers chaos. Ungrounded in this new place, I am acutely sensitive to both possibilities. And while it isn’t comfortable building a foundation on uncertainty, it has the advantage of being consistent with reality. Maybe in this world the best we can do is to not make false claims for certainty, and try to ride as gracefully as we can on the uncertain.

THE HUMAN BRAIN IS NO MATCH for depression, for the chaos of uprootedness. To try to turn our brains on ourselves, to think we can solve our own problems within ourselves, is to get lost in a hall of mirrors. But there is a world beyond the human world and that is a reason for hope. From a very selfish human perspective, we need more than the human.

Water and birds have always helped me live, have always lifted me beyond myself, and this morning I paddle out beyond the breakers and lie with my back to the surfboard just like the girl I saw in early fall. But while my legs may be crossed casually, I spend most of the time worrying about falling off. Even so, as I bob up and down on the waves, the whole ocean lifting and dropping below me, my niggling mind does quiet for a minute. And then it goes beyond quiet. I’m thinking of Hadley, sitting up now and holding her own bottle, and I feel my chest fill with the joy these small achievements bring. She will be a strong girl I suspect, an athlete. And, no doubt, if we stay here she will become a surfer, delighting in her own funktionslust.

Glancing up at the pelicans flying overhead, I notice that there is something slightly backward-leaning about their posture, particularly when they are searching for fish, as if they were peering over spectacles. From directly below they look like giant kingfishers. But when they pull in their wings they change entirely: a prehistoric Bat Signal shining over Gotham. Then I see one bird with tattered feathers whose feet splay out crazily before he tucks to dive. When he tucks, dignity is regained, and the bird shoots into the water like a spear.

Inspired by that bird, I decide to turn my attention back to surfing. I catch a few waves, but catch them late, and so keep popping wheelies and being thrown off the surfboard. Then, after a while, I remember Matt telling me that I’ve been putting my weight too far back on the board. So on the next wave, almost without thinking, I shift my weight forward and pop right up. What surprises me most is how easy it is. I had allotted months for this advancement, but here I am, flying in toward the beach on top of a wave, its energy surging below. A wild giddiness fills me. It’s cliché to say that I am completely in the present moment as this happens, and it’s also not really true. Halfway to shore I’m already imagining telling Nina about my great success, and near the end of my ride, as the great wave deposits me in knee-deep water, I find myself singing the Hawaii Five-O theme song right out loud.

Though no one is around I let out a little hoot, and by the time I jump off the board I’m laughing out loud. A week ago I watched some kids, who couldn’t have been older than twelve or thirteen, as they ran down the beach on a Friday afternoon. Happy that school was out, they sprinted into the water before diving onto their boards and gliding into the froth of surf. I’m not sprinting, but I do turn around and walk the surfboard back out until I am hip deep, momentarily happy to be the animal I am, my whole self buzzing from a ride that has been more the result of grace than effort. Then, still laughing a little, I climb on top of the board and paddle back into the waves.

I COULD END ON THAT NOTE OF GRACE, but it wouldn’t be entirely accurate. The year doesn’t conclude triumphantly with me astride the board, trumpets blaring, as I ride that great wave to shore. Instead it moves forward in the quotidian way years do, extending deep into winter and then once again opening up into spring. As the days pass, my new place becomes less new, and the sight of the squadrons of pelicans loses some of its thrill. This too is perfectly natural, a process known in biology as habituation. Among both birds and humans, habituation is, according to my books, the “gradual reduction in the strength of a response due to repetitive stimulation.” This is a fancy way of saying we get used to things.

While the pelican brain repeats ancient patterns, the human brain feeds on the new. On a biological level novelty is vital to the human experience: at birth the human brain is wired so that it is attracted to the unfamiliar. I see this in my daughter as she begins to conduct more sophisticated experiments in the physical world. True, all of these experiments end the same way, with her putting the object of experimentation into her mouth, but soon enough she will move on to more sophisticated interactions with her environment. She’s already beginning to attempt language and locomotion. Although pelicans her age are already diving for fish, she, as a Homo sapiens, can afford to spot Pelecanus occidentalis a lead. She will gain ground later. Her long primate infancy will allow her relatively enormous brain to develop in ways that are as foreign to the birds as their simplicity is to us, and will allow that brain to fly to places the birds can never reach.

While I acknowledge these vast differences between bird and human, there is something fundamentally unifying in the two experiences of watching the pelicans and watching my daughter. There is a sense that both experiences help me fulfill Emerson’s still-vital dictum: “First, be a good animal.” For me fatherhood has intensified the possibility of loss, the sense that we live in a world of weak stability. But it has also given me a more direct connection to my animal self, and so, in the face of the world’s chaos, I try to be a good animal. I get out on the water in an attempt to live closer to what the nature writer Henry Beston called “an elemental life.”

I keep surfing into late fall, actually getting up a few times. But then one day I abruptly quit. On that day it is big, much too big for a beginner like me. I should understand this when I have trouble paddling out, the waves looming above me before throwing my board and self backward. And I should understand this as I wait to catch waves, the watery world lifting me higher than ever before. But despite the quiet voice that is telling me to go home I give it a try, and before I know it I am racing forward, triumphant and exhilarated, until the tip of my board dips under and the wave bullies into me from behind and I am thrown, rag-doll style, and held under by the wave. Then I’m tossed forward again and the board, tethered to my foot by a safety strap, recoils and slams into my head. I do not black out; I emerge and stagger to the shore, touching my hand to the blood and sand on my face. The next night I teach my Forms of Creative Nonfiction class with a black eye.

So that is enough, you see. One of the new territories I am entering is that of middle age, and the world doesn’t need too many middle-aged surfers.

I feared fatherhood, but most of the results of procreation have been delightful ones. One exception, however, is the way that disaster seems to loom around every corner — disaster that might befall my daughter, my wife, myself. No sense adding “death by surfing” to the list.

WHILE I HAVE NATURALLY begun to take the pelicans for granted, they still provide daily pleasures throughout the winter. What I lose in novelty, I gain in the early stages of intimacy. I see them everywhere: as I commute to work they fly low in front of my windshield; they placidly perch atop the pilings while I sip my evening beer on the dock near our house; they bank above me as I drive over the drawbridge to town. My research reveals that in March they begin their annual ritual of mating: a male offers the female a twig for nest-building and then, if she accepts, they bow to each other before embarking on the less elegant aspect of the ritual, the actual mating, which lasts no more than twenty seconds. These rituals are taking place, as they should, in privacy, twenty miles south on a tiny island in the mouth of the Cape Fear River. The eggs are laid in late March or early April and a month-long period of incubation begins.

Around the midpoint of incubation, my human family achieves its own milestone. Throughout the spring I have continued to carry my daughter down the beach to watch the pelicans fish, but today is different from the other days. Today Hadley no longer rests in a pouch on my chest but walks beside me hand in hand.

I remind myself that the mushiness I feel at this moment, the sensation that some describe as sentimentality, also serves an evolutionary purpose. With that softening comes a fierceness, a fierce need to protect and aid and sacrifice. This is not a theoretical thing but a biological one. In fact this transformation borders the savage, and here too the pelicans have long served humans as myth and symbol. “I am like a pelican of the wilderness,” reads Psalm 102. At some point early Christians got it into their heads that pelicans fed their young with the blood from their own breasts, a mistake perhaps based on the red at the tip of some pelican bills, or, less plausibly, on their habit of regurgitating their fishy meals for their young. Whatever the roots of this misapprehension, the birds became a symbol of both parental sacrifice and, on a grander scale, of Christ’s own sacrifice. The images of pelicans as self-stabbing birds, turning on their own chests with their bills, were carved in stone and wood and still adorn churches all over Europe. Later, the parental symbol was sometimes reversed, so that Lear, railing against his famous ingrate offspring, calls them “those pelican daughters.”

THE YEAR CULMINATES in a single day, a day full of green, each tree and bird defined sharply as if with silver edges. I kiss Nina and Hadley goodbye while they are still asleep and head out at dawn to the road where Walker will pick me up. Walker Golder is the deputy director of the North Carolina Audubon Society, a friend of a new friend, and today he takes me in a small outboard down to the islands at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. We bomb through a man-made canal called Snow’s Cut and I smile stupidly at the clarity of the colors: the blue water, the brown eroding banks, the green above.

We stop at four islands. The southernmost of these is filled with ibis nests — 11,504 to be exact. Ten percent of North America’s ibises begin their lives here, and at one point we stand amid a snowy blizzard of birds, vivid white plumage and flaming bills swirling around us. Next we visit an island of terns, the whole colony seemingly in an irritable mood. This island, and its nearby twin, were formed when the river was dredged in the ’70s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which used the sand to consciously aid the Audubon Society in an attempt to create nesting grounds. Terns, like ibises and pelicans, require isolated breeding areas, preferably islands, and this human experiment, this marriage of birders and engineers, has worked to perfection. We watch as a pair of royal terns spiral above us in their courtship dance.

The terns are impressive, but the highlight of the day for me is North Pelican Island, the nesting ground of almost all of the pelicans I have watched over the last year. Hundreds of pelicans sit on their ground nests, some of which are as big as beanbag chairs. They watch impassively as we approach. The old naturalists might have called these birds “undemonstrative” and “lugubrious,” but I’ll go with “calm.” In fact, while we’re anthropomorphizing, I might as well put “Buddha-like” in front of calm. It’s hard not to project this on them after experiencing the wild defensiveness of the tern colony. The pelicans barely glance up at us. Theirs is a much different survival strategy, a much quieter one, but natural for such a big bird with no native predators on these islands. I crunch up through the marsh elder and phragmites to a spot where two hundred or so pelicans are packed together, sitting on their nests, incubating. Some still have the rich chestnut patches on the backs of their heads and necks, a delightful chocolate brown: leftover breeding plumage. They sit in what I now recognize as their characteristic manner, swordlike bills tucked into the fronts of their long necks.

While the birds remain quiet and calm, there is a sense of urgency here. This marsh island, like most of the islands that pelicans breed on, is very close to sea level. One moon-tide storm could wash over it and drown the season out. It is a time of year marked by both wild hope and wild precariousness, danger and growth going hand in hand. The birds are never more vulnerable, and as a father, I know the feeling.

I’m not sure exactly what I gain from intertwining my own life with the lives of the animals I live near, but I enjoy it on purely physical level. Maybe I hope that some of this calm, this sense of ritual, will be contagious. If the pelicans look lugubrious to some, their effect on me is anything but. And so I indulge myself for a moment and allow myself to feel unity with the ancient birds. It may sound trite to say that we are all brothers and sisters, all united, but it is also simply and biologically true. DNA undermines the myth of our species’ uniqueness, and you don’t need a science degree to reach this conclusion. We are animals, and when we pretend we are something better, we become something worse.

Having seen these fragile nesting grounds a thousand times before, Walker is to some extent habituated to them. He is also more responsible than any other human being for their protection. “We only visit briefly in the cool of the morning,” he explains, “so not to disturb the birds.” Playing tour guide, he walks in closer to the nests and gestures for me to follow. He points to some eggs that look anything but lusterless, and then to another nest where we see two birds, each just a day old. Though pelicans develop quickly, they are born featherless and blind, completely dependent on their parents, their lives a wild gamble. Heat regulation, Walker explains, is a big factor in nestling survival. Pelican parents must shade their young on hot days, and one dog let loose on this island while the owner gets out of his boat to take a leak could drive the parents from the nest, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of nestlings.

But we are not thinking about death, not right now. We are instead watching these tiny purple dinosaurs that could fit in the palm of your hand, the beginnings of their extravagant bills already in embryonic evidence. And then, in a neighboring nest an egg trembles. There’s a tapping, and a pipping out from within.

A small blind purple head emerges from the shell. “Something only a mother could love,” Walker says, and we laugh. But we are both in awe. It is the beginning of something, any idiot can see that. But what may be harder to see is that it is also a great and epic continuation.

While we watch, the almost-pelican cracks through the eggshell, furious for life. Then it shakes off the bits of shell and steps out into a new and unknown world.

Donna_Steiner-Sleeping_with_Alcohol.md

Sleeping with Alcohol

by Donna Steiner

Start small. The bottle cap. Silver on the underside, green and black on the top. It's fluted around the edge, like a pie crust, and dented in the middle, like a felt hat. The green is the green of grass; beer companies like to associate their products with nature. When I poke the cap with my finger it skitters across the desktop, making a sound that isn't unpleasant. It's a sound I'm accustomed to, for she will often toss the caps onto the kitchen floor—they make great cat toys. We know an artist who creates beautiful, expensive murals using nothing but bottle tops and flip tabs. The murals look like aquariums, all gleam and fluidity, like daydreams of cold liquid.

I study one amber-hued beer bottle. It's slender, nine inches high, and seductive in the way that bottles often are. This one looks to me like a human torso, and my instinct is to hold it, covet it. I don't drink, but I want to experience what the serious drinker experiences. With no one to witness my foolishness, I surrender to the process. Lifting the bottle to my mouth is a small turn-on. The lips fit perfectly around the opening. I feel a charge, a subtle electricity. My throat feels as though it's vibrating: a little air, a little liquid, a little moisture left on the lips. One kisses a bottle mouth—she taught me that.

There's a pretty picture on the label: snow-capped mountains overlooking a green lake. She loves to hike in the woods; I can picture her sitting on a rock overlooking the tranquil lake. There's a list of states in which the bottle can be returned for a five-cent rebate. (Exchange fifty-two bottles and earn enough for a six-pack. Or: nine nights of drinking will earn her one night's free supply.) CONSUMPTION OF ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES IMPAIRS YOUR ABILITY TO DRIVE A CAR OR OPERATE MACHINERY, AND MAY CAUSE HEALTH PROBLEMS. The alcohol content isn't listed, and "may cause health problems" means this stuff can kill you.

There's something contemplative about drinking. One drinks, pauses, places the bottle on the table, pauses again. A drink, like a cigarette, or a pair of eyeglasses, can make you look thoughtful—it can make you feel thoughtful. The bottle, resting in the curve of your palm, becomes the focus of the mind's wandering. The drinker savors the up and down, the choreography of drinking: the bottle comes up, the head tilts back and the eyes briefly close, the liquid goes down, and as the bottle is set down the eyes open. It's a pleasurable rhythm, the arm as a lever, a delicious exercise, a drawn-out, self-imposed tease. The bottle is turned in the hand, admired, held up to the light. Its arc, its smooth lines and sensuous curves, and especially its soon-to-be-delivered promise, all conspire to make the drinker slowly less sober. Thoughts become sinuous, like a river, hazy like morning fog. The tongue turns funny in the mouth, and the first bottle becomes the second, the third. Each stands in for the one before, all identical, making it easy to lose count. Few things make the mouth happier and the soul, ultimately, more lonely.

She refers to herself as a drunk.

When I think about her I don't think: drunk. I think: runner. I think: artist. I see her dancing around our apartment, mouthing the words to Motown songs but miming disco moves. I consider how her voice deepens when she wants to talk about something serious, how she has no tolerance for indirect conversation or ambiguous language. I remember how my hands trembled when I met her. She has the most resilient body—cigarettes, alcohol, it doesn't seem to matter. After not training for a year she can go out and run five miles easily, ten or more with a little effort. She wakes up in the morning in the middle of a conversation, asking "what's the difference between a barnacle and a crustacean?" I've learned to feign grogginess, to mutter "I'm not sure" as I reach for a reference book. She has a long list of wacky endearments for me, including "my fresh coat of paint" and "my little prize-winning chicken." And she's in the very small group of people who think I'm fun—even when she's sober.

Okay. (Say it!) Sometimes I think: drunk.

A typical night. She arrives home from work, carrying a book bag, a lunch bag, and a plastic grocery bag. The last holds her nightly six-pack. She sets the beer in the refrigerator before changing into running clothes. We drive to the track, discussing our respective days. She puts in her miles, covering the distance with a posture I'd recognize anywhere—shoulders slightly tense, eyes focused on something far away, jaw set. As she accumulates laps I walk around the oval and watch the light change the appearance of the mountains, seeming to flatten them. When she's through, we walk a half-mile together, then leave. We stop for fast food, then return home and catch the end of an NBA game, a thriller, with Utah pulling off the win in Chicago. She drinks a beer or two during the game, then retreats to the porch to polish off the other four. During the third or fourth bottle I join her outside. By eleven I'm sleepy, and say good night.

At 2:30, I awaken; the bed beside me is empty. This is not common, but neither is it unexpected. Sometimes she's walking to or just returning from the corner store with a follow-up six-pack. At times like that I don't fall back asleep. (She'd make an easy target . . .) I listen for her, or I go outside, scan the street for her slender, huddled figure. Tonight, I hear the bathroom faucet and know she's home. She makes her way towards our bedroom. Her shoulder hits the door frame, but she finds the bed and is asleep within seconds.

I get up. I check the door, make sure it's locked. There's a receipt on the table, which we'll use for scrap paper. Nine bottles are neatly lined up on the kitchen counter, like bud vases or bowling pins. She drinks in multiples of six, which means the other three are elsewhere. Sometimes the caps are stacked up, collected in a little tower, and when I drop them into the trash they sound like tambourines as they rattle down.

The only unusual part of this night: the fast food. Usually we eat at home. The rest—the track, the lateness of the hour, my casual, late-night surveillance—is routine. This is how we live. She drinks, I observe. You would never suspect that we're into threesomes. But if you could see in the dark you'd see me, my lover, and alcohol. Mostly I think I sleep with her. But sometimes, in moments of exceptional despair, I think I am sleeping with alcohol.

I tell her I'm thinking of writing this essay and ask if she'd be okay about it. She says sure. I'd like to conduct an interview, and one night we sit down for about thirty minutes, side by side. I have a notebook and a pen, she has a bottle. She's drunk from start to finish, drinking as we talk; therefore, more drunk toward the end than the beginning. When we're through she says "let's do it again, same questions, when I'm sober." I agree, but I'm not sure my writing schedule and her drinking schedule will allow for that.

I hadn't planned the questions in advance, so again, I start small.

How much does a six-pack of beer cost?

Cheap beer is $2.49 plus tax, which comes to $2.61. Better beer, on sale, is $4.99 plus tax. Really good beer is around $6.00 but I never buy that. Too expensive.

Do you remember your first drink?

Yes. When we were little my parents would let my brother and me have wine mixed with water on holidays. I was eight or nine.

Did you like it?

I loved it.

I remember my first sip of beer, too. My grandfather lived with us in the summertime and he always had projects. He'd work really hard and at the end of the day he would have one beer and a cigar. That was it—one beer. He'd give me a sip. I must have been around seven.

He'd drink real slow. I remember once a wasp flew into the beer can. When he sipped, it stung him on the mouth.

Why do you drink beer, as opposed to wine or anything else?

Beer tastes the best. (pause) Wine takes too much effort. The whole picking-out-the-wine thing—it's like learning an art. Wine would be like getting into Baroque art. Too much effort.

What's your favorite?

Saranac, or Black Dog. Black Dog is very good, although I like the Saranac, too. I like a small brewery that does a lot of different brews and has specialties.

How many beers does it take to get drunk?

Whoa. Tough question. (pause)

What do you mean, "drunk?" (pause)

It depends on the brew. Microbrews are much stronger than regular brews, and light beers are like drinking soda to a real drinker. They're like drinking nothing.

So, say a six-pack of Black Dog?

That can make you drunk. (pause) It's a pretty darn strong beer. (pause) You know, there's nothing listed on the side of the bottle to tell you what you're drinking. . . . A lot depends on expectation. I read this the other day—if you expect to get really drunk, you will. It's a pretty well-documented study, totally scientific. And I have felt that to be true—if you think you're going to get drunk, you will.

Has anyone ever asked you to quit?

Yeah.

Did you quit?

Not at the time she asked. Probably about two years later.

How long did you quit for?

Seven or eight years.

What's the worse thing that ever happened to you while you were drunk?

(She laughs.) Well, I got raped, I broke my foot . . . (She's counting on her fingers.) I don't know. I got kicked out of college, I had a car accident, I lost my driver's license . . .

(long pause)

That's all.

What do you think of AA?

I think it's a really great thing—camaraderie and all that. I did attempt once to do it, you know, like they ask—to go to ninety meetings in ninety days. I was very diligent, but I just couldn't quite accept the idea that we were gonna be drunks for life. It didn't seem plausible to me.

Why?

It was the same problem I had in rehab, and it just seemed logical that plenty of people quit with no support system and it was over and done with. (pause) The whole notion of AA is so mired in God stuff. You know, I really—for a person not prone to being brainwashed—I actually went to church. I'd sort of bought the God thing. I went to the church and sat there for a while—but it still didn't make any sense to me.

What would be the best incentive for quitting?

Love. (No hesitation. Although I am totally into my role as the detached interviewer, my eyes fill with tears.) (long pause) But that's never enough.

How come?

(long pause) I think because drinking sometimes makes you feel . . . like you're somehow filling your time in a productive way, you know. Without it you feel a little at sea, like you wouldn't know what to do with your time. Of course, you're also thinking "well I'm only sitting here drinking." But when you're not drinking you sit there thinking "I'm not doing anything." Even if you are doing something, it feels like nothing.

I felt like I wasn't doing anything if I wasn't drinking. . . . Time flows when you're drinking.

All this is just during the transition period . . . that I'd feel so lost . . . once you're through it, you're fine. During, it's like . . . god, what am I gonna do next, how am I gonna fill the time?

I read that Marguerite Duras, in the midst of her alcoholism, had thought of killing herself but what stopped her was the thought that "once you're dead you won't be able to drink any more . . ."

(She laughs.)

When I'm not drinking I'm perfectly happy. It's nice to go to work clear-headed and enjoy people. Like last week when I wasn't drinking—I didn't want to drink. But that is the ultimate quandary: why the hell do I do this?

What's the best thing about drinking?

(long pause) I don't know. (sigh) Zoning away from most things. Being able to just . . . sometimes you have time sort of stop. You just kind of sit outside and look at the same star for a long time and think about it. It's different from other drugs in that you're still there, you can control your dosage, you know how drunk you're gonna be. It's a control freak's drug, in a lot of ways.

Do you think you'll ever quit drinking?

No. (silence)

I'm sorry I'm so hard to live with.

You're very easy to live with, for the most part.

Yeah, but for that last part I'm a real pain in the ass.

---

The night before we'd sat on the porch, late, 1 a.m., then 2, close to 3. Early in the evening I'd spotted a falling star. It had blazed, perfectly vertical, with a long, bright tail, then was gone. She saw it, too. As the night wore on I saw several more, until I'd counted four. She was finishing her sixth beer. Strange, complicated math.

Even in the middle of winter, when we lived on the east coast, she'd bundle up and sit outside, snow falling, late into the night as the temperature dropped below zero. I'd fear she'd fall asleep, that I'd find her in the morning, dead of exposure. The partner of the alcoholic fears many things; some fears are realized and some aren't.

A friend's father fell on New Year's eve. At the top of the staircase he was drunk. At the bottom he was dead. Five minutes before midnight, five minutes after. Ten stairs.

We have stairs. Our home has hard edges and sharp corners, surfaces that could break a bone or blind an eye. She stumbled into bed the other night. The lights were on. I watched her try to remove her clothes—once, twice, she lost her balance. A painting she'd completed was propped against the wall. I heard the canvas ping each time her ankle struck it. Finally she sat down, wrestling off her pants. You make a choice to live with the fear, or you leave.

I have no intentions of leaving. I walk around our apartment, continuing my role as reporter, looking for evidence. Not evidence of alcohol—that would be easy. If I moved this chair I'd find seven or eight cat-batted bottle caps. There's probably a stray bottle or two under her drawing table. So what? I want evidence of something else, proof of why I stay. Her jacket's tossed on a chair and one of the cats is curled upon it. I lean in and smell the jacket, and the cat's warm fur. The phone number of our favorite pizza place is stuck on the refrigerator, along with the first card she gave me: a picture of a map. Written inside: Let's go everywhere. Her guitar rests against the wall, and her bike leans against mine. Hers is covered with dried, splattered mud; mine is covered with dust. Piles of books, art supplies, the painting of Kitchen Mesa, New Mexico. She'd wanted to sell the painting when she finished it; I'd begged her to keep it. A few of her books, field guides—North American Wildflowers, Eastern Forests, Western Birds, Eastern Birds. Above the shelf, the first photograph taken of us. I look deliriously happy; she needs a haircut. The other day she said that my scalp smelled great. "What does it smell like?" I asked, and she replied "outdoors and olives, and tiny toasted nuts." When I remind her of this answer it makes her laugh, but she doesn't remember saying it.

She drinks. Meaning life is sometimes difficult in ways that it would not be difficult minus alcohol. A statement of fact, one hundred percent accurate. But there's another fact, the one that says she is incrementally, methodically destroying herself, and destroying us. For every night's consumption of alcohol, something of value is lost, and although each individual loss may appear subtle, they accumulate. Coordination, so important to an athlete, is affected. She cuts her fingertips with carving knives, burns her palms while cooking. Communication is damaged. She can become increasingly remote, or arbitrarily contentious. Drunk enough, she will contradict or repeat herself, habits that would disgust her sober, eloquent self. Other times she is witty, adept at theorizing or storytelling, charming. She can be amorous or silly or suddenly vulnerable, and is often irresistible, even as I smell the alcohol, which seems, at times, to emanate from her pores. Someday I will regret turning quietly away from the brushes with disaster, I'll regret the rationalizations, and I'll regret my gratefulness for now—now she is here, now she is intelligent and beautiful and now there is health—or the illusion of health. The greatest fear: that I'll regret it all.

I'm lying in bed and she is asleep beside me. Her hand rests on my chest, right above my heart, and at first it feels warm and light, precious beyond words. But soon I can think of nothing but its weight, as though my heart is being pressed upon, quietly smothered. It is an image for how alcohol works, one of the ways in which it corrupts good lives. It steadily, insidiously shifts the focus—away from intimacy, towards despair.

I tell her I'm using the interview in the essay. "Do I sound like an idiot?" she asks. I say no. "Oh good. God forbid I should sound like an idiot and a drunk."

It's almost impossible to grow up in the United States without a degree of experimentation with alcohol and, since I wasn't a complete outcast as a kid, I had a few encounters. I think the first was at a friend's house, seventh grade, or sixth. It may have been whiskey, although I still can't tell the difference between one form of hard liquor and the next. Blindfolded, I'd know to say "beer" as opposed to "wine," but that's about as sophisticated as I can be. A bunch of neighborhood kids each took a sip and then we went outside to wait. We thought we'd get drunk, and were a bit disappointed, but mostly relieved, when we didn't.

I drank, just a little, in my twenties. "Just a little" is literal. I've consumed less than thirty bottles of beer in my life, perhaps ten glasses of wine, a few sips of champagne. I may have been slightly intoxicated on one or two occasions, but the taste of alcohol is a deterrent—I hate it. I realized fairly early that I wasn't going to be the hard-drinking, hard-loving writer. I'd have to settle for half. Little did I know that some day the one I waited my whole life to find would turn out to be the other half.

Living with an alcoholic you learn the extreme fragility of good intentions. "I'm going to quit drinking" mutates into "I'd like to" and "I wish I could," then to "Maybe I can cut down," and finally, to "I want to quit, someday, really . . ." You learn the meaning of patience. You learn how tough you can be, and how complicit. You think you learn how to love someone unconditionally. But you wonder, always, if she loves the bottle more than she'll ever love you.

And you learn the code. It took me a while to learn but once I did, it became routine to accept it, to collaborate on and refine the code. The pretense is very simple. If she doesn't bring home beer after work, at some point in the evening she'll say "I'm going out for cigarettes/milk/the newspaper." It doesn't matter what the noun is, because they all translate the same way: beer. When she implements the code, my proper response is "okay." Or I'll say "pick me up some Gatorade." The code is totally unremarkable, and occasionally humorous. I'll ask "are you going out for REAL cigarettes or for EUPHEMISTIC cigarettes?" and we'll laugh. Once in a while I'll prompt a variation of the code. I'll say, innocently, "If you're stopping at the store after work, could you bring home some _______," knowing the "if" is ridiculous. Of course she will stop. I hardly ever need to go to the store.

It's all so predictable and mundane, and it's not a pattern that enhances our lives in any meaningful way. And yet, I wonder why relationships involving alcohol are seen as shabbier, more pathetic than those in which both parties are sober. Most of our friends are coupled; we are no more and no less complicated in our relationship than they are. But I sometimes sense their pity, a degree of non-comprehension: How can you live like that? I wonder what they see, or think they see. Her alcoholism doesn't feel like a choice, but neither, frankly, does it feel like an illness. It feels like some murky combination of the two that we've chosen to call a fact. The most accurate, although exceedingly dull, description would be "problem." We contend with a problem, which happens to be alcohol. We are unexceptional.

But there are markers in the lives of any couple in which alcohol is the third party, events that sober couples don't experience. In the early months of our relationship she rarely appeared intoxicated, and I was slow to learn the signs. Even now, unless I'm counting bottles, I often can't tell if she's drunk. There's some lag time before the full effects of the alcohol register. She doesn't begin to slur, for example, until around the seventh or eighth beer, and may begin to weave or stumble shortly thereafter.

I remember the first time I helped her to bed, the first time I saw her trip over nothing at all. I remember the first time she stumbled and took me down with her, my back and thigh absorbing most of the impact as we fell into a bookcase. I remember the first time we had sex while she was drunk. I don't remember the second time, or third, or fourth. Eventually I stopped counting. And I remember, most sharply, the sadness and shock I felt upon waking one morning, when I realized that my lover had appeared drunk in my dream.

We live, for the most part, as though nothing is wrong, as if nothing is out of the ordinary. We live as though we are brave, persevering, mature. We try to live as though there's no shame, no stigma, no pressure to change. We try, but it's all there, part of the background, like an ugly piece of furniture we throw a sheet over.

We live as though the alcohol is temporary and we are permanent.

"No." That's what she said, remember, in response to my question "Do you think you'll ever quit?" But she was drunk when she said it.

I like broken things, torn things, tired things. I have a small collection of bone and shell pieces, fragments and hinges that are more attractive, to me, than intact ones. I like old sheets and worn towels. A towel is perfect when you can see through the fabric. Sheets seem to smell better as they age; the older they get, the more they smell like fresh air or clean closets. It's related to my affection for the smell of skin, my desire to just move in close to a body and breathe deeply—my idea of intoxication. My favorite sheets aren't yet worn enough to be considered perfect, but I know they will become worn—the anticipation is slightly thrilling in itself. The sheets are blue and gold striped, with black and beige for accents. I loved them so much that I bought two sets. They were too stiff when purchased, rough and scratchy, and it's possible to burn tender body parts on new sheets—especially in the early months of a love affair. But I've washed them so often that now, four years later, they've become less dangerous, more familiar.

The one who sleeps beside me has become less dangerous and more familiar, too. I didn't know, when I met her, that alcohol was an ongoing chapter in her history. If I'd known from the start, I would not have proceeded differently. I approached the problem from a position of naïve compassion, but I've grown self-protective. I'm frequently harsh, as she is, on both of us. At times I see her as self-involved, self-indulgent, and see myself as misguided and desperate. That's what alcohol does. It tempers hope, alters perception. It lets the heart roam a little less widely, as though possibilities have become fewer, the world itself somehow less. It forces you to assess, a day at a time, risks versus benefits. The effort wears you out in ways that cannot be judged attractive.

If I could drink one of her bottles each night, then over the course of a year her alcohol intake would be reduced by . . . Yeah, a strange and complicated math.

What is the cost, the toll alcohol will take? I can feel our couplehood eroding, as though we are standing on a bank that's becoming saturated, our footing steadily becoming less stable. I wonder if we're past the point or not yet at the point when I can look into her eyes and say "Stop; this is killing you." Marguerite Duras: "We live in a world paralyzed with principles. We just let other people die." Regardless of any principle, or plea, or ultimatum—or, regardless of their absence—I believe my lover cannot stop drinking. (. . . letting her die!)

Is the bottle half-empty or half-full? The question is dramatically beside the point. Always, eventually, it ends up empty.

3 a.m. Moonlight seeps in around the window shades. She's just coming to bed, but she overshoots her mark and ends up near the closet, in a corner of the room. She can't see; it's dark and she's already removed her glasses. But, of course, that's only part of the problem. She's unable to crack the maze of the dark room. Her brain can't hear me silently rooting for her, just turn around; a simple ninety-degree turn will do it. It's like watching one of those battery-powered kids' trucks that can't back up so it just spins its wheels. I hear her bumping gently against a wall-mounted mirror. All she has to do is turn, but the smooth glass and her faintly-perceived reflection confound her, like a bird persisting against a window. Her white T-shirt catches the little light of the night. Beautiful.

Beautiful, and drunk. I get out of bed, and I take her hand.

Donna Steiner's writing has been published in literary journals including Fourth Genre, The Sun, and The Los Angeles Review. She's a contributing writer for Hippocampus Magazine, teaches at the State University of New York in Oswego and is a 2011 fellow in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Sleeping with Alcohol was previously published in the Bellingham Review and reprinted in Utne Reader under the title "Love Drunk."

Stephen_Elliott-Where_I_Slept.md

Where I Slept

by Stephen Elliott

My homeless year began early October 1985 and ended in the last day of August 1986. I was thirteen, and then fourteen, and it’s a story I’ve never told in part because I slept so many different places that year. I slept in the broom closet of a friend’s apartment building. The closet was just inside the entryway, past the eight slotted mailboxes. It was the size of a single bed, crowded with mop buckets and cleaning solutions, and I could stretch all the way out and my toes would just touch the door. The building itself was a tan/yellow brick four flat. Kwan lived with his parents and grandmother in a two-bedroom on the second floor, part of a wave of Korean immigrants arriving on the north side of Chicago in the early eighties on their way to the suburbs along with the Kurds and Russian Jews. When I would come over to visit after school his grandmother would clutch my head in her bony hands and pray for me.

“She wants to know if you’re going to church,” Kwan would interpret. When it was time for dinner Kwan would politely ask me to leave.

I had a leather bomber jacket my father had given me in one of our better moments, and some clothes, and I wore all of it when I slept there. It was just as hard and cold in the broom closet as it was outside and it was winter in Chicago and I was thirteen. I could see my breath pooling in the dark and woke shivering in the middle of every night. I had a watch so I knew it was usually three and then I waited until six and I went to the laundromat on California Avenue and sat there trying to get warm. But after a while I couldn’t get warm and even in school I was shivering all the time, vibrating in my big jacket.

But this isn’t about school (I was in eighth grade). And it’s not about my father handcuffing me to a pipe and leaving me there in the basement of his old house. And it’s not about the hotel room I ended up in one homeless evening with a white man in a nurse’s uniform and a wig giving head to three black men, lines of coke spread haphazardly across the table. All of that is true but this is just a list of the different places I slept. It’s the only way I can get any perspective.

I slept at home. I went home several times. I had a large bedroom and the walls were covered in wallpaper that looked like an open sky full of birds and clouds. I had a down comforter and two pillows in Charlie Brown pillowcases. I had a manual typewriter I banged on and I taped bad poetry over my walls and listened to Pink Floyd albums on the cabinet record player. I made dinner from endless cans of Chef Boy ‘R Dee and stacks of frozen steaks. If I was to guess I would say that between rapprochements with my father I slept at home a full month out of the eleven I spent as a homeless child in Chicago. Friends who ran away would climb in through my window and sleep beneath my bed.

I turned fourteen in a basement I had broken into with my friend’s Albert and Justin. Justin was often homeless that year and he slept many different places as well. The floor was blue cement and we sat up most of the night against the wood storage sheds working our way through pints of vodka and confessing to things like masturbation. In the morning the police woke us with flashlights and boots and sent us back to the streets. I slept in the police station, the 24th District, the flat dark building with the giant parking lot on Clark Street. I was arrested for curfew, then drug possession, then breaking into parking meters. I slept on the scratched steel cot inside the cell in the juvenile unit or sitting upright with my wrist next to my ear, handcuffed to a steel loop in the wall.

A Jewish man found me in the broom closet. He seemed confused. He couldn’t understand why a child was sleeping there. He probably owned the building. He was probably just coming to get a mop. “It’s OK,” I told him, gathering my things in my arms, careful not to look in his eyes, and walking away. I was fourteen. I didn’t want to answer the obvious questions. The broom closet was locked after that.

On the coldest nights when my lashes became icicles I snuck into a boiler room and slept next to the warm pipes and left when I heard the banging that meant someone was coming down the stairs. I walked along Devon Avenue when the bank clock read twenty below. I had hypothermia. It was like a circuit at times: roof, roof, boiler room. Other times it was a pattern and I would go to the same place over and over again and go to sleep just like anyone else.

I slept at my father’s girlfriend’s apartment on a couch in her living room and I watched her sleep through the half open door to her bedroom, her blanket riding up her naked thighs. She slept flat on her stomach with her head turned breathing softly into the pillow and her legs slightly spread. I watched the balls of her feet, the curve of her toes and her tan calves. This is not about her struggling to hold on to me arms wrapped around my waist while I lunged for the doorknob, my father on his way, upset over the social workers that had begun to bother him about his homeless child. Or the violence that would occur after he found me walking late that night down Chicago Avenue covered in snow and took me home for a single night smacked me across the face and shaved my head.

I slept in my grandparents small flat outside of Sheffield, England. My grandparents are dead now, both of them. They weren’t expecting me. I drank barley wine at night with them and my grandfather told me stories of the great war and made jokes about his missing thumb. When they went to sleep I journeyed out to the pubs and I drank some more. During the day I hiked the Uden valley, watched the sheep in the long green fields. I found my first strip club in the back of a small pub with a broken window. Several times I hitchhiked into Sheffield to watch punk rock bands and met people who were looking for fights. I wasn’t looking for a fight. After a week my grandparents sent me back to America.

I slept above the Quick Stop on Pratt and California, only a block away from my grammar school. I climbed the gutters to the roof and laid in the corner beneath the lip to block the wind. Sometimes I would poke my head up and see the crossing lights and the black empty streets and I would feel so lucky and free. There were video games in the store but I wasn’t allowed inside. The teachers knew I was homeless and bought me lunch but no one offered to take me home. My friends parents also didn’t offer to take me in. At PTA meetings parents were warned to keep their children away from me. I was a known drug user, an eighth grade drinker when I could get the money together. One time Justin’s father chased me down the sidewalk in his Taxi, trying to run me over. When I jumped the fence to get away he pressed a gun against my friend Roger’s chest and demanded he tell where I was. But Roger didn’t know, and that, like so many other things that happened that year, is not what this is about.

I stole food from the dumpster behind the Dominicks, cold packets of meat just past date. I slept at the canal where we built fires and planned adventures, all the neighborhood’s forgotten children, the ones whose parents didn’t notice them missing or didn’t care, dancing near the flames. Nobody looked for us. We named things. The tree I sat in was called Steve’s office, the fire pit was Pete Brown’s grave. Pat had a throne dug into the dirt below the path and Rob had Rob’s chair, which was just the tip of a boulder protruding horizontally from the slope. We respected each other’s space most of the time. We built a fire every night and we threw rocks at the rats as they scurried in and out of the filthy water. We had wonderful times at the canal playing heavy metal music and popping acid while trying to stay awake for cops and tougher kids that might want to beat us up. One time Fat Mike came running, out of breath. He had seen headlights near the baseball stadium. “Dude,” he said. “Could be a cop car, could be a party car, I don’t know.” We laughed for hours over that. We woke up covered in dirt, reeking of smoke, and went to school.

I slept at home. My mother was dead. My father didn’t always notice me when I came back; other times he woke me with a loud whistle. He never reported me missing when I left again, we didn’t want each other, and eventually he moved himself to the suburbs with his new wife and didn’t bother to get me his forwarding address.

I slept three nights with a Christian man who did painting work for my father. He lived in a small apartment and his wife was dying rapidly, like my mother had. I went with him to church. I ruined his baking pan cooking hamburger on his stovetop. It wasn’t working out, he told me. Years later my father still tries to contact me demanding I write his Christian friend a thank you letter.

There was a man named Ron. He had an apartment beneath Pat’s mother’s apartment. Pat’s mother was a junky and Ron was just a twenty year old slacker who would one day go to community college and get a degree in hospitality that would allow him to work in a hotel. I had stolen some money and bought a quarter pound of marijuana and Ron let me stay with him until the marijuana was gone. Pat’s mother is dead now. Justin’s parents are also dead. Roger’s dad is dead. Dan’s mom is dead. It has nothing to do with the story but my friend’s parents all died young.

I slept beneath Brian’s bed and when Brian’s father caught me he kicked me out then he beat Brian. Brian’s father saw me stumbling down the street drunk with my shirt off in the middle of winter and he said to his daughter, “I ought to put him out of his misery.” He did too much coke and had a bad heart. He died too.

I slept in the closet of an independent living home for wards of the state. The home was on Sacramento. A normal, boxy looking house in the middle of the street with a small basketball court in the backyward. Eight boys lived there, transitioning between group homes and living alone. Some of the boys snuck me inside. The closet was small and I had to sleep with my legs crossed sitting up. I was discovered by the staff and they fed me a bowl of cereal. Someday soon the state would take custody of me and I would also be a ward of the state and I would live in that very home for a time.

More often than anything I slept outside. I slept in parks and in the woods and on the neighborhood rooftops. But when you can fall asleep anywhere you often do. I was always the last to leave the party. I never had to go home. Sometimes Justin would have a girlfriend and I would sleep on the couch and he would sleep in the bedroom. Justin was popular that way. He was beautiful, like a woman, with his long black hair. Sometimes Justin and I slept together on a gravely rooftop and he would wrap his thin legs over my legs and his sinewy arms across my chest and hold me tightly his face buried in my neck and I was never sure if he was doing that because he wanted to or because he thought I expected it from him.

Justin and I slept at the Maxworks, a hippy commune in Jewtown. The neighborhood doesn’t exist anymore. They’ve paved it over to expand the University campus. Maxworks was a three-story abandoned building taken over by radicals many of whom lived there for twenty years. They smoked dandelions and banana skins and made pocket money selling handmade pipes to the junkies sitting around garbage cans outside. Justin and I were too young to recognize what we had stumbled on, the failure of an earlier generation’s promise. They gave us acid, yellow sunshine, and one of the women, in a flowery skirt with unshaven legs and armpits, had sex with Justin. I don’t remember her name but I remember her spinning in circles in a trash heap near a fire. Her arms were outstretched and dress transluscent. I was so jealous but there was nothing I could do about it. I was an ugly child and sometimes my ugliness kept me safe.

From the Maxworks, over the next eight days in the summer of 1986, Justin and I slept our way in cars and trucks across America. The truckstop in East Los Angeles was a sea of flashing lights, the air wavy with gasoline, open trailers filled with rolls of carpet, men standing on dock ladders or leaning back in their rigs chatting lazily on the radio in the deafening hum of the motoring engines. I slept in the cabin of a truck while the driver molested Justin in the front. I slept right through it and in the morning sitting in a donut shop under a blank grey sky surrounded by highways and the roar of traffic Justin told me he wanted to kill that man. He had stolen our only bag and inside was my poetry and our maps. I thought that was what Justin was talking about, the poetry and the maps, but it wasn’t. Years later when I was at a party telling my favorite story, about hitchhiking from Chicago to California with my best friend, he would interrupt me and say, “Steve, I was molested.”

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” I asked, which was a dumb thing to say. I was so angry.

In Las Vegas we slept in the juvenile detention center. We had caught a ride with a German and he took us from Los Angeles to the strip. He wore shorts and drove with a beer between his legs. Good beer, he said, from Germany. He stopped in a convienance store and bought cheap beer so we would have something to drink too. He had a small bong in the glove compartment and a pillbox filled with weed and we smoked that as we drove into the desert and he dropped us off at Ceasar’s Palace where we stocked up on free matchbooks and wondered what to do next.

A state trooper answered that question. We were out on the entry ramp, trying to hitch a ride out of town. Our clothes were muddy and ripped. We were put in jail as runaways. They contacted my father who stopped in the printer and told the woman working there, “They arrested my son in Las Vegas. I’m not going to get him.”

“No offense,” she told me when I met her years later. “But I didn’t give a shit.”

I said goodbye to Justin in his small room with white walls on the ground floor of the institution. It was early in the morning, the desert sun rising above the low buildings, and he wasn’t quite awake. His dark hair covered his eyes. His gym shoes were in the hallway in front of the red walking line and he asked why I was being let out first. I told him I didn’t know. They drove me to the Greyhound station and then they took my handcuffs off. I slept on a bus for three days as it snaked slowly across the country from Las Vegas into Chicago. They gave me four dollars when they let me out and I spent it on cigarettes and candy bars. We stopped at the McDonald’s dotting the highway and a state fair in Carbondale. The man next to me fed me whiskey in a coffee cup and I slept against his shoulder at night. He was fresh out of prison and asked if I would be willing to snatch someone’s purse. I said I didn’t think I would be very good at that. Justin wouldn’t get out for several more weeks and when he did he would be re-arrested on an oustanding warrant and he would go to audi-home and his parents would refuse to pick him up and the state would take custody of him and he would spend the rest of his childhood in a state home in the Chicago suburbs.

When I got back to Chicago I slept on the streets, as I had been doing for so long now. I slept on a friend’s porch until his mother found out. I slept on the same rooftops. I hooked up with a children’s agency and they put me in Central Youth Shelter. It was a gladiator arena filled with children awaiting placement stuffed thirty to a room. We sat around during the day watching television or playing basketball in the fenced in yard. The shelter was understaffed and nobody would tell me where I was going or when I would get out. Then I walked away.

I slept for a while in a house connected to a Catholic church and in private homes of people that had volunteered to take in children while the state waited the requisite 21 days to decide if they were willing to take custody. There was something wrong with the adults that took me in, all men living alone. I think they were pedophiles and I was a disappointment to them. I played pool with other homeless children at the Advocates center beneath the Granville train tracks. There was a girl there, a year older than me, tall and thin and freckled. She always beat me and then did this little victory dance with her hands, fingers stretched like wings. She had the biggest smile.

Then I slept in the house I had grown up in which my father was in the process of selling. It was an obvious mistake.

I woke into his fists and I tried to cover my face. He dragged me into the kitchen where he had clippers, forced me to my knees in front of the cabinet, and he shaved my head. It was the second time he had done that. There were giant bald patches from where his hands slipped and I looked like a mental patient, which was ironic. He must have been waiting for me, or searching the neighborhood. He had planned to do this. Revenge for something. The meanest thing possible, worse even than the beating, worse than handcuffing me to a pipe, to be humiliated in front of everyone. To be a circus freak. It was an act of raw cruelty well within my father’s emotional range. Something he felt was owed him for the negative portrayal of himself as a parent, for the hatred he saw when he looked in my eyes. But that’s not what this is about at all. This isn’t about hate or love or what went wrong between my father and I or the kind of resentments that never go away. This isn’t about splitting the blame between bad parents and bad children. It’s not about culpability. It’s about sleeping and the things that are important to that like shelter and rain.

That night was the last night of my homeless year. It was the end of August and high school would start in a couple of days. I had cut my wrist open and there was a bright red gash that bled through the afternoon. It was hot and a festival was underway in the park. A soft breeze cut around the sleigh hill and a few clouds pocked the long sky. I solicited beer and people bought me beer because they thought maybe I was crazy or maybe they could get me to leave. I asked one man if I could go home with him and he said, “Look, I bought you a beer,” which was true enough. As night fell a band ascended the stage and I danced while they played, slamming in the moshpit at the top of the baseball diamond, my wrist still open splashing traces of blood on people’s clothes. Proof I was there.

I crawled in the entryway of an apartment building across from the park. I didn’t care anymore. I slept in the open and I heard footsteps pass and a door. The floor was small tiles held together with cement and the door was a glass case barreled in dark wood. I rested with my head on my arm and my knees pulled toward my chest. I had a sack of clothes somewhere. A friend’s parent had given it to me, long white shirts and discarded pants, but I couldn’t remember where I’d left them. My jeans were torn and I wore a black rock and roll t-shirt. I knew it was only a matter of time until the door closing became a phone call and the phone call became swirling red and blue lights and the lights became a backseat and a window with bars. The police came and they asked where my parents were. I told them I didn’t know, which was true. The police weren’t mean or angry. They were just doing their job. In the morning I met a different set of officers who didn’t wear uniforms or carry guns. The new officers offered me sandwiches and something to drink. They asked what happened to my wrist and I told them I fell on a tin can but they didn’t believe me. I was taken to a hospital and a kind nurse used surgical tape to close the hole in my wrist.

“Why would you do that?” she asked and I wanted to laugh at her. I wanted to ask if she was offering me a place to stay. But she was just concerned and nice and I would meet a lot more people like her. Things got much better after that though it took me a little while to recognize it. Things were going to work out fine save some scars.