1.

You get used to craziness. You get so used to it that the insane becomes normal, and you just live with it. Out of love. Out of fear of loneliness. The fear that hits you and tells you to bail out is never as strong as the fear of loss and loneliness. Or, you keep thinking you are this powerful person with so much money and control over people that you can make them change. And because you believe in hard work, while the results might not be immediate, you know they will happen. You are invariably an optimist, despite knowing how the flick ends. Well, that’s me. Hard working. Caring. Conventional. Frightened. How did I get to that place?

That night was when I realized really clearly and like a shot through my gut that my wife Tiffany was really ill. You’d think I would be filled with compassion, like some saint. There was some there—mixed with about every other emotion I could manage to identify—and a whole lot more I still have no idea about. I’m not that smart. I’m not going to try to sugar coat who I am. I’m just trying to tell this damn story. I remember the night though; since time is all one now I could say it happened yesterday, or a few yesterdays ago, but, in fact, it plays out all the time. The children were in the other rooms. Henry and Shauna (three-year old twins at the time) were with our nanny Shenny (we were doing okay out here in the big enchilada, even had the Guatemalan nanny). Sean was in his room, and their mom was downstairs. It was about a month after she returned from Dr. Frankenstein’s anti-smoking clinic in Napa. No, actually, it had a real name, and I’ll tell you it down the road. I was in the bedroom, reading, typing, watching Fox News, waiting for a new terrorist attack on America. After all, they were truly attacking us asymmetrically, and we had to be on alert—that’s what Homeland Secretary Tom Ridge had developed the color coded terror threat for. But with the volume down for another Billy Mays infomercial, I could hear her talking a mile a minute, banging, clanging, frantic words that journeyed through the air vent into my oldest child’s room by the wall that separated his room from ours; prattling, hangling disconnected words, like Zyban and Zion, numeral combinations, and other mantras treaming like a radio talk show host you can’t shut out of your mind—it’s Crazy Tiff Time—streamed into my room through the air duct. I just stayed in bed and listened, not understanding a word she was saying. I didn’t try to go downstairs. I didn’t want to. Tiff was so irritable lately, it made me afraid, and she never seemed to make sense to me anymore. I didn’t want to dare risk the wrath of Tiff the Terrible. The door to her office below opened ever so slightly. That was the last sound through the vent. I turned down the news drone from Brit Hume and his gang of pundits. I heard her opening the kitchen drawers. I heard the fridge suction open and smooch shut. I heard ice crackle on the counter. A drawer opened. Rattling of silverware. I am laying in bed, mind you. The kids are in the living room, and Sean is in the kids’ room, or what was supposedly their room. This was our room. I was staying isolated, tired, flat on my back. I was an innocent Yid.

Suddenly she was in our room, moving quietly into the bathroom, brushing her teeth, I supposed. She had a lovely body, five feet eight, dark hair, nice full lips, brown eyes. No that was the old model. I’m sorry. I know. I’m an asshole. I’m sorry. She was not that way anymore. It hurt me too. But I also wanted to get through this. I don’t think she did. 

Not ever quite sure where she was from. Family secrets. Things not told, never learned. Fingers over my hair, fingers on my skin, fingers living with me and within kept coming over me as she lay in bed beside me and put her arms around me and laughed and kissed me. It was over almost before it began, and she was so out of it, it wasn’t much fun. I didn’t feel clean. 

 

The ceiling fan was going around in circles quiet and cooling. I went downstairs to get some ice water. One of those big hack-through-the-back-of-a-calf butcher knives lay on the brown ceramic tile of the cabinet counter. The kind her granddaddy used at the butcher shop, for hacking and slicing. Nice. Now what the hell was she doing that with that? It wasn’t out when I went to bed. I didn’t see any ham or roast beef to slice. 

 

A weird time for people to be talking about the environment, because Dubya was no friend of the environment.

I thought it might be helpful if Tiff and went together to Manhattan to meet John Oakes of Thunder’s Mouth. John is a great publisher who took chances on a lot of writers and produced some really good books with all of his publishing ventures. 

I had to do some research in the Adirondacks and then later in New Jersey, so we decided I’d fly out a few days earlier and we would meet in the city.

I awoke on June 19, Father’s Day, in a hotel room in Albany, New York, alone. And I am thinking how the hell did I leave my kids behind with a woman who was losing her grip? And I did it. I did it, because I had my secret weapon: Shenny—steady and loyal and naturally feeling like mother. They had somebody there caring for them. Jesus, lord. Thank you, Lord.

In my clinging tendril mind I was seeing my littlest boy, pink binky bobbing between suckling lips, his twin sister sucking two fingers that were swollen, water-logged. She was wrapped like a burrito in her blue Care Bear blanky. Our older boy was in bed, sleeping late. He was okay, too. But Tiffany wasn’t, and I didn’t know if she’d even be able to catch the flight in just two days. I had scheduled a town car to take her to the airport. But that was no guarantee, the way things were going. Fact is, when she was coming back from Boston, from her father’s funeral, she kept rescheduling flights. She wouldn’t fly. I don’t know why. So we didn’t know when she coming home that time. The rest of the time the kids would spend with Shenny.

 

 

I lifted the trunk and dropped my suitcase in the rental car. Soon I was on the highway, in Saratoga County, near the Mohawk River. A sign said, “Welcome to Solar Town.” The sky was long, the land flat. I passed by The Ripe Tomato American Grill, open since 1934. You don’t see these kinds of things in LA, and the places you do see along the highways usually end up being roadhouses. I was near the Hudson River and Queensberry. The land was inundated with water.

Before meeting Tiffany, I spent two and a half years representing the public on a committee at the National Academy of Sciences . One of the reports I received from the New York Department of the Environment detailed the extensive contamination of fish from the state’s inland waters with chlordane, an insecticide used to eradicate termites.

I looked at the creek waters meandering under the roads, passing by Fort Ticonderoga. All the water flowed through the upper levels of earth and mingled. The chlordane used the water for transport and was everywhere. A single molecule of poison could flow through the earth or a human body. I loved New York all the more for the wounds it had suffered and grown past.

The land was beautiful. In a past life, I might have reminded everyone that it was contaminated, yet forgotten to mention its beauty.

Moving past the lowlands, I headed up into the highlands and slate-colored Adirondacks. The land was heavily covered with unbroken forest canopy and perfect rock formations that poked up out of the green. The Ausable River ran up against the mountain slope, icy white blue waters melding with the granite. The highway entered the wilderness.

The road went up though the jagged pine trees reaching to the sky. Turning off the 87 onto 9-N and heading west, I drove a narrow highway that wound alongside the river, past the small towns of Clintonville and Jay with cyclists and backpackers at tables, bikes and packs leaning against porches, picket fences, and white walls. Route 9-N turned into Highway 86. I drank in everything, every little corpuscle of earthen granite and rising bushy trees. Had I ever been here before? Just shut up. You’re a fucked-up guy. You messed up your wife. I hated hearing that little accusatory voice—it was the prosecutor and totally against me. It lived inside me, too. I needed an exorcism. I needed something, someone. This was going to be beautiful. But there was a certain terror enveloping me.

I stayed at the Hilton in Lake Placid, which was only a block from the smaller lake in the middle of town. I was uptight, as I recall, over something really silly. I remember walking around looking for a new mouse pad. I just had to have one, because I had lost mine or left it back at the hotel near Albany. In any event, I found one made from petroleum foam with a picture of a man on a dock with a fishing pole and mist rising off the lake. I worked through the night on my book and slept fitfully.

The next day Dirk Bryant of the Nature Conservancy, in Keene, met me at the air field. He was around five nine and had some maps and fishing poles. “Why don’t we do the flight first,” he said, “then, if you want, we can go fishing.” 

Phil Blinn, our pilot, met us in the morning in front of a yellow Cessna 172 N7962G, and we strapped ourselves in. I sat in the co-pilot seat, Dirk aft. It was a perfect day for flying, not much clouds. 

“We’re flying over Whiteface Mountain and Mirror Lake,” Blinn said into the headphone set. I was flying over this amazing 104,000 acres of nearly entirely canopied forest that the state of New York under a Republican governor, Domtar, a private company, and the Nature Conservancy, a non-governmental organization, put together that would ensure the long-term sustainability.. The forest would be managed for sustainability, less boom and bust.

“We started working on the deal three years ago,” Bryant said. “Closed it on the last day of 2004.  See how the canopy extends for miles? That’s unbroken canopy and that’s what endangered species like Bicknell’s thrush and the spruce grouse need in order to survive. Land used to be clear cut, which left huge openings in the canopy.”

I did go fishing. I did write about it. It was beautiful to be on that beaver lake casting my rod and looking at the mama catfish in the pool with her young, protecting them. I heard a loon too. Crazy laughter. I thought about Tiffany.

 

She’d been brief on the phone when I called to tell her I was on my way. I thought maybe I’d get lucky and have the old Tiffany back. She sounded good. That was great. I actually smiled and hurried along my speedy way. I got us booked at the Sheraton on 57^th and Avenue of the Americas because it was the first hotel in the country to derive its power in part from a hydrogen fuel cell, and I wanted to be able to say I stayed there. At that time, in 2005, green wasn’t as embedded into society’s fabric as it would quickly be by 2010. I got lost in the Bronx. I always get lost someplace in New York. It was all good. But not really. I didn’t really like being lost up there. It was creepy. Lots of elevated trains, struts, weird streets. I finally made my way down to the Sheraton, though, and drove through all that maze of one way streets and boulevards and this was New York baby, where my family is from, and I loved it. Loved every moment. But dreaded too what was coming.

I checked into our room but she wasn’t there. I put my luggage in the room and went back to the elevator, took it all the way up to the club level. Yup. Bingo. Bungo.

Before she spotted me I saw her there with a beer, finger tapping the bar, smoking, bending the cute little ear of the pug-faced bartender in a puffy blouse and bowtie. Tiff’s eyes opened wide when she turned.

“What took you so long?”

“I came here as quickly as possible. I’m sorry if you thought I took too long. I really wanted to see you. What do you think of the hotel?”

Her hand was around a glass.

“You bastard, you don’t care about me.”

I pulled in close and whispered down low, my elbow on the bar top. “Now come on. I just got here. Be fair. Of course, I do.”

“If you did, you would have gotten me an early check-in.”

“Oh, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

“You’re cheap. I had to wait two hours to get in this dump. Have you seen our room? You put me in this dump.”

“Come on, now. This is the Sheraton in Midtown. It’s expensive. It’s nice. I’m not a king and you’re not the queen.”

“Oh yes I am.”

“They give you early check in if you ask, queenie.”

Everybody turned and looked at us. I could feel the heat in my face and knew it had turned tomato red. The bartender, a compact blonde with a flattened nose in a white ruffled blouse, came up to us.

“What will you have to drink?”

“Coke.”

Tiffany drank her beer full up.

“Bring me another, please.”

I went and ate some of the bread, celery, carrot sticks, pot stickers, and other goodies at the free bar before grabbing my petro-glass and doing a disappearing act.

I went downstairs and unpacked. I had bought the Bill Clinton autobiography at the Burbank Airport and was reading it—the early years. Since most of his childhood had involved dealing with a drunk stepfather and broken dysfunctional family, I could relate. Big Brother Bill.

The door slammed. I stayed stretched out on the bed, reading.

“You don’t care about me or you would have been here sooner—and this room is miniscule, for God’s sake.”

She traipsed around and knocked her fist on the wall. “I could design this place better. This is a box. And, God, what colors! You tell the people you know here at this hotel to hire me as their designer, you got that?”

“You sure could do a better job.”

“What do you know? I wrote your books for you.”

I kept reading. If I stayed quiet, she might stay relatively calm. I kind of tried to disappear and pretend not to be there.

“Tomorrow, we get to meet John,” I said.

“Are you going to tell him I write all of your books?”

“Come on, please don’t—”

“And that you’re a carrot dick? You dangle little gifts but you never give me anything!”

“I have tickets tomorrow night for Mamma Mia.”

“Who cares?”

“All right, all right, I’m going out.” 

But she did not stop movement, frenetic, and it was a small cramped room. 

“Why the hell did I even take you?” she said. “Get the fuck out.”

“I’m going to get a cup of coffee.”

I was back on the streets of the city I loved like LA. I’d gone to school in Manhattan. I loved New York. I loved everyone there. I always have associated trips to New York with success. It was where my family was from. I was a New Yorker even though I was born in the City of Angels. My favorite team always was the Yankees. It was in my blood. My father was born in the Bronx when there were still dairy farms and the Bambino ruled.

I walked into a Starbucks. A smiling girl with brown eyes and dark hair and smooth brown skin in a brown and green barista outfit came up to the counter.

“Can I get a cup of organic coffee?”

“No,” she said. “You’d have to buy a bag.”

“But what about drip?”

“Honey, it’s not even fair trade.”

God, I did have a great meal with John. She was so crazy, and it was a little weird and strange. I know we came in and said to everyone at the office. I was really happy, folks. I worked so long at being a writer and I am not very good at it. Getting to meet my fellow literary comrades in the offices of Avalon Publishing Group was exciting. I smiled like a big shit eater and walked around and said hi. It was quick, though. 

So okay, so cool, Starbucks. Die. No organic. You must die!!!!

Nah, I just bought a pound, paid up, and had them make me a cup.

I drank it and wrote something for my book.

I was going to get to see John. How very cool to be a writer and have a meeting with your publisher in New York.

I went back to the room feeling great. Tiff loved her Janis Joplin look lately. She had the granny glasses and hippy colorful scarves and flowing skirt in white boots. My beautiful crazy love with her auburn hair and brown eyes wore lots of scarves and a brown felt hat with a full brim half pulled down over her eyes. She walked ahead of me when we got out of our cab, which I wished she wouldn’t, because when she wanted to say anything she shouted to be heard. So she’d be walking forward and shouting backward, “Come here, dickhead.” I would run to catch up with her. “Get me some pizza, cunt.” I was just nothing.

At the club, she was drinking heavily, beer and whisky, talking with some guy at another table and said she wanted to go party with him.

“Honey,” I said. “Come on. Please don’t do this.”

She pushed me hard. “Get your hands off me.”

“I’m going out bar hopping, baby cakes,” she said, pulling her purse over her shoulder and looking back at me, not a pleasant thing at all. “And don’t try to stop me or I’ll have the fuzz on your ass as quickly as I can dial 911.”

She disappeared out the door. I ran out. I got a cab to stop but she wouldn’t get in. I went back alone. I didn’t sleep and she didn’t come back to our hotel room until sometime the next day. She had our credit cards.

We ate at a Cuban fusion restaurant nearby. “New York City is the eating capital of the world,” John said.

“I’m excited to have both your books.”

We sat down and snacked on the bread.

“I want to do a book about ordinary women saying extraordinary things. I want to go all over the world painting women and recording them. Do you think you could fund the book? I’d need about a quarter million. Can you get it for me today?”

“Well, hold on,” John said, “let’s get a proposal together.”

“I write all of his books, you know.”

“I bet,” John said.

“No, seriously, John. He can’t write without me. He would die without me.”