A Double Life or a House of Mirrors?

Carving Narrative Out of Noise: The Mess, the Message, the Methods

I’m struggling.

I’ve written about the lost years, the dark years, the drunk years —which are pretty much the same years—for years and years. I’ve told the war stories in 12-step recovery meetings, but just like in recovery, I’ve lost interest in the titillating nature of my adventure stories. But, all I have are my stories.

When I started DGD-What I Did for Love, I said, and I quote, “I want to tell my story in chronological order. Unfortunately, things didn’t always happen to me in chronological order.” Feel free to fact check that quote, linked there for your convenience. I was being a little facetious, a touch playful, but the truth is my brain has scrambled everything up to a point that parts of my life don’t even make sense to me. I’m fact checking and researching myself.

This week’s post was supposed to be about how life after losing a job and getting an ultimatum from my mother: Get a job, go to college, or find somewhere else to live.

Yes, Virginia, there are spreadsheets.

I’ve gone through all my research with documentation from journals to medical records and newspapers and charted several variations of my life on a Google spreadsheet called TIMELINE. The first tab is an overview of the events in my life from 1960 - 1993. Individual tabs go into greater detail for the years 1969 - 2018, with columns for Month, Age, Where (I was Drinking), Who (I was Having the Sex with), plus a text column for Notes—being any details that might’ve seemed relevant. The cost of a haircut in 1976 ($3), or a gallon of gas in ‘78 (29¢) is given the same weight and relevance as my beliefs in that same year that:

1. the ocean talks to me

2. the sky was trying to tell me something

3. the face I saw in the mirror was the not same one people saw when they look at me.

My concept of relevance might have been a little fluid, but then my diet was also pretty fluid (wink wink). And while that may have been a contributing factor to my memory loss and confusion (alongside traumatic dissociation), the booze certainly kept me from killing myself more than once, so there’s that in the plus column. Just remember kids, not all the alcohol things in an alcoholics life are a negative.

1975, in the notes column: “lots of dental work.” Someone named Jason appears a lot in one month; I’m surprised he doesn’t appear at all on THE LIST, which means I had a chaste relationship for at least a month and that doesn’t sound like me at, not even a little bit. There’s evidence I tried to join the Church of Scientology that same year, but I’d die on the hill that says that didn’t happen until some time after 1981.

Is Scientology the kind of thing I could forget I’d done?
And then go back and try again?

Maybe. There is a fuzzy recollection of coming to in the back of a classroom—and something on the board or on the book covers tells me I was studying to be a realtor. But it’s only that one memory, without any documentation, so I could have just as well imagined it. Or I might have been a realtor.

It appears that 1978 was the year I was introduced to cocaine, even though I’d have to tell you it was 1975. 1978, a yearlong game of “One of These Things is Not Like the Others,” in retrospect, looked like6 it had potential, like I had some potential. I worked for a company that managed regional theater tours—I have a singular photo of a gay man named Mitchell from then. I quit to do lights at CBGBs, which I quit as well. When the Dead Boys performed and Stiv Bators blew his nose in a piece of bologna at ate it, I got on my high horse declaring that “this is not what I was trained for.” There were gigs at Playwrights Horizon and the American Place Theater. 1978 looks like it was a moment of grace, an intersection where I could have gone either way. Where I did go was to Boston with trunkful of peyote to sell, accompanied by two members of the Plastic One band. Boston PD requested that we leave the city. Thanksgiving season, I woke up handcuffed to a bed, a man sitting at the foot of the bed, his back to me, smoking a cigarette. I was twenty-one years old. I have no idea what transpired before or after his cigarette.

There is another spreadsheet that began as a short list in a journal, and grew to the point that a spreadsheet was quite simply the only way to manage it. It’s sortable. It’s color-coded. It’s THE LIST of people I’ve had sex with. I’m a list maker, its the only way I can make a little sense of the world, I keep a list of foods I have in the fridge. If I don’t write it down, it didn’t happen, you didn’t exist. I felt bad for the ones I’d forget, so I wrote them down, kept a running list, a sexual sign-in sheet. Like walking through the subway tunnels and seeing all the graffiti tags screaming I WAS HERE to the world, one after another, except the HERE where they were was my vagina and I was the one throwing the all tags.

The facts of a life.

Sometimes, the only way I can track the facts and truth of a thing is cross-checking the lists, dated photos and vague memories. I have a single memory of walking into the theater at Nassau Community College, holding hands with Bobby M. He appears on THE LIST in 1976.

Let’s assume, then, I started college in 1976.

We worked on a Lee Myles commercial in 1977. How do I know? The photographer’s name is on my list.

I’d started hanging out with the Washington Square pot dealers in 1975 (His name was Papo but everyone called him Shortrun. I just realized that his name probably wasn’t Papo either). So, that’s the year I first tried cocaine, 1975—except it’s not —because the spreadsheet clearly says it was 1978.

Plato’s Retreat shows up with Alan in 1977.

Looks like I worked at a restricted Long Island country club in ‘78. My only recollection is the help weren’t allowed to enter through the front door. I wouldn’t remember working there at all if the cook’s name wasn’t on THE LIST. He took me to a motel, from that I draw the conclusion he was probably married.

While I was in community college, studying theater, movement, lighting, props and (barely) learning to tap dance and walk a tightrope, it seems I was also:

1. Doing the Erhard Seminar Training, aka est

2. Escaping from the club, Bon Soir, the night two people were shot

3. Turning my first trick

4. Backstage at the circus, attaching myself to a lion trainer named Jewell and a troupe of unicycle-riding basketball-playing black men from the Bronx

5. Grieving a friend who’d been killed arguing over who got the payphone next.

6. Auditioning as a topless dancer

7. Being a gorilla in a haunted house

8. In a long-distance relationship with a convict

9. Taking Peyote for the first time

10. Transporting and selling Peyote

11. Possibly being raped

That was 1978.

I look at that list and can’t make sense of those things being true at the same time it was true I was a college student. Correction, community college student. It’s a Venn diagram where the circles should never intersect; I can’t parse those two lives into one person, so how can I tell you who I was, what I felt, what I thought? How do I tell you my story when it not only doesn’t happen in chronological order, the timelines run in separate but parallel universes.

If I can’t get to the how, to the nut of the story, can I find the why? I’m so much more interested in the why of all of it. Why it happened this way. Why my brain won’t integrate the stories into one narrative. Why. I want to tell you the why but I’m barely treading water in the torrential downpour of what.

By 1979, I’d moved on to a four-year school in Manhattan to study film. Did I? An Economics professor, Abe, is on THE LIST, so at the very least, I took an Economics class.

Frenchie, from the NY Dolls and The Three Dollar Clothing Store on St. Marks Place appears in 1979, which is how I know when I moved into my apartment at 41 East 7th Street, nineteen years of leases having disappeared.

The Hell’s Angels appear in 1980.

The Italian restaurant on 52nd Street and 2nd Avenue in 1981. I kept a cup of tea on the bus station in the back of the restaurant, by the espresso machine. A friendly barmaid kept it filled with Harvey’s Bristol Creme Sherry, a used teabag on the saucer completing the image for authenticity. I don’t think I lasted long there because men associated with the topless bars start showing up on THE LIST.

It’s a long list.

1982 had Doyle, who I met working in a NYC afterhours club, Valentinos, so that would also be the year I lost 3 days and 3K miles, waking up in Seattle with no memory of leaving work in NY.

Forensic Research

Assembling a life from clues. Collating evidence. Mismatched puzzle pieces. Letters. Ephemera.

Some years (1982-1986) there were no calendars, date books or address books to reference. I can guess what happened using THE LIST as an anchor or foundation, but that’s all it is, a guess.

When I want to write about the dark years, these are essential parts of my toolkit, a pile of scraps, to make one life story from multiple lives that don’t make sense.

I was shocked to learn I’d only been at Robbie’s Mardi Gras for two weeks.

I’d dreamed of Johnny Carson.

I’d wanted this next essay to be about my half-assed attempt at having a life a mother could be proud of. I’d planned on telling you my dream of being on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. About community college.

I went to my resources to understand who I was, what parts of me had disappeared between 1975 and 1979. I was different people.

The me who lived in the suburbs and went to school.
The me who ran crazy in the streets of New York City.

The me who men hit or hurt.
The me who walked away after I was finished fucking, leaving them to wonder what had happened.

I hadn’t been living a double life. I’d been living lots of lives—simultaneously—overlapping, melting and leaking into each other.

A few years ago at a reunion of our community college theater group, sitting at a round table of men and women I’d spent almost every day with for two years—we’d been that close—a woman I’d been friends with when we’d been girls, leaned in.

“Do you remember taking me to Plato’s Retreat for my 19th birthday?”

I didn’t. But I also didn’t doubt it. Neither did anyone else at that table.