Loitering: New and Collected Essays

by Charles D'Ambrosio

My instinctive and entirely private ambition was to capture the conflicted mind in motion, or, to borrow a phrase from Cioran, to represent failure on the move, so leaving a certain wrongness on the page was OK by me. The inevitable errors and imperfections made the trouble I encountered tactile, bringing the texture of experience into the story in a way that being cautiously right never could. In fact, as much as I wrote and rewrote many of these pieces, often, in a contrary mood, the goal of those revisions was to get the thing to read like a rough draft, cutting sonorities of thought and style that seemed dishonest, fighting against the insane clarity of public discourse or, in the more personal pieces, scraping away until I renewed my sympathies for raw subjects that time and habit had turned sclerotic.

At the risk of sounding parsonic, it seems to me we’ve ceded so much space to the expert and the confident authority that expressions of real doubt or honest ignorance are now regarded, in the demotic mind, as a kind of recreancy, a failure of loyalty, the sign of a faith betrayed.

Seattle in the seventies was the nadir of just everything.

“At that age one may fall irrevocably in love with failure, and success of any kind loses half its savour before it is experienced.”

There are maybe ten or fifteen people on the bus but between them if you counted you’d probably come up with only sixty teeth.

Four in the morning and I crawl out of the tent, thinking, what’s my penis for, anyway, other than pissing?

The canker of self-consciousness has been long in me, so like a lot of writers I not only do a thing, I see myself doing it too—it’s almost like not being alone.

If you can love abstractly, you’re only a bad day away from hating abstractly.

My father’s early education in money must have given him a glimpse of something savage and hollow in the heart of the system. The shock of that insight took the form of shame, as it does for so many of the son’s of immigrants, and so now, as I look back, it makes perfect sense to me that my father’s public self glowed in the company of people who did their business legitimately. His passion for securities—and common stock, particularly—was where he ultimately acquired his citizenship; in the bank, or on the phone with a broker, or in class teaching others about finance, he acted like a man with the rights and privileges of a native, a status his own father had never fully attained.

The streets down there were always drifting with deranged characters but that night even people with nowhere to go had found somewhere to go.

Like a lot of people my father felt a poem was a bunch of words with a tricky meaning deeply buried away, like treasure, below a surface of rhyming sounds.

“After nine years of sixty-hour weeks of intensive research, not reading and study, but research, I know I was a terrific dad and terrific husband.”

“What did I destroy in you that was not already destroyed?”

Above all, the real is arbitrary. For to be a realist (in art or in life) is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are. That there is no design, no intention, no aesthetic or moral or teleological imprimatur but, rather, the equivalent of Darwin’s great vision of a blind, purposeless, ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no “products”—only temporary strategies against extinction.

All these houses are waiting for the future to come and haunt them.

Maybe nostalgia is a species of the ideal, a dream of a last interior, where all the commotion of a life is finally rewarded with rest, drained of history.

He was dwarfish and looked like an abandoned sculpture, a forgotten intention.

George was another fixture in the bar, a salesman working, like me, in the furniture warehouse. He drank beer all day, chased with shots of peppermint schnapps so that his breath would smell fresh, as though he’d just brushed his teeth. Like most drunks he had the baffling notion he was getting away with it, fooling everybody. I felt sorry for George because he wasn’t fooling anybody and couldn’t see the truth, that he was being tolerated and temporarily ignored. With his insulin shots, instant coffee, his shabby dress, his elaborate comb-over, he led an obscure life, irregular and unobserved, except at the bar. There he gambled with a nervousness torqued up tight by a belief in the quick tidy fate of accidents, of moments that decide everything. Sometime in the past, he believed, things had gone wrong, gone fatally so. The present was his evidence. Divorce. Bankruptcy. Alcoholism. He had a gimpy leg, he was diabetic. He gambled the games, the horses, the numbers, the state lottery, everything. Sometime in the future there was a wager that would be won, a score that would redress everything, and perhaps this injection of faith, more than, say, a visit to the doctor, eased the pain for him. “When I have money,” he told me, “I can’t sleep, I can’t hardly eat. I don’t feel good until it’s gone.”

Now when I think of it, I understand it was never so much the potential for gain that animated gamblers like George, these men who had nothing, but being reawakened to a world where loss was once again possible. That’s really what gave them life and drove them again and again to the game. Loss was their métier and to have that taken away, to be, finally, lost, was the worst thing imaginable. As long as you could fall farther you distinguished yourself from the fallen. Loss reinstated possibility, but possibility without hope. And perhaps this explains how all of us blithely imagined that the general wreckage would pass over the bar, that it was somehow exempt. Gambling offered a refuge from the outside world, its advances, its mysterious evolution. No one believed the bar would end, not because we didn’t believe in progress, but instead, more precisely, because our kind of gambling, the wish of it, was an attempt to salvage the past. We weren’t so much hoping to change the future as we were trying to amend history. We wanted the past completely restored and made livable. We believed that was the only kind of winning that counted.

A good haunted house is about the utter collapse of our accidental differences, the uselessness of class, of gender, of education, of personal history, of all the distinctions we cobble together and call the self. Late enough at night none of this stuff protects you, not from the boogeyman. What’s haunted or, more accurately, what’s uncovered by terror, is the poor forked thing, and the agon of a haunted house isn’t between God and Satan, or the righteous and the sinners, but rather between the self and annihilation.

A haunted house poses ontological problems, and thus ought to place courage in jeopardy—it ought to reach down deep into the Platonic dualism between physical and spiritual courage and blast it apart. A good haunting gives us a workable vision of equality, a denominator similar to the danse macabre.

A haunted house makes the experience of horror real, a thing inescapably participated in, with everybody hell-bound.

Throughout Hell House it was mostly (sexual) girls who were in jeopardy, owing in part, I suppose, to the stock conventions of horror flicks; the girls’ bodies acted as territory in a disputed moral landscape.

All of this was meant to be hideous and repellent, yet each room offered such a long, prurient, gazing look into the life of degradation that the scenarios often seemed like a spastic reaction against a real desire, a fascination. I see two ways to take this observation. One is: somewhere along the line somebody had to imagine the act of sex, and that’s one of the reasons, I think, that so many of the stories ended in murder—it was a way of punishing the imagination and paying for the fundamentalist sin of passing sympathy. The economy of it was creepy in its efficiency, with the condemnation and dispatch following so swiftly on the lapse or frailty or doubt, never considering, for instance, that promiscuity might be about an ambivalent need for love, or the desire, the stray hope, for something other than nothing—possibilities that would engage the imagination, tempting it.

Loyalty—in its darkest form, which left so much death as its legacy to the twentieth century—rids the divided self of anxiety and guilt, so that murder smiles.

But Hell House was quite specifically somebody’s vision of others. Whoever created Hell House seemed to despise people, their freedom, the varied possibility of them. Whoever it was could imagine only concluded lives, lives summed up by a single act, in a world where most of us have agreed, not always happily, to live with ambiguity.

Kierkegaard says anxiety “is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite.” He says, “anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” In other words, anxiety has no object; in fact, it tries to become fear because fear has a definite object that can be faced with courage.

I think it’s fair to say horror bridges some kind of gap between fear and anxiety, using objects that are present yet unreal, objects that retain a somewhat objectless character. Horror makes visible the source of our anxiety, typically arriving dressed as death. It’s nothingness in a black cloak, coming for all of us, a bequest of our bodies.

In the distance you could hear the constant hum of cars, and while Biosquat’s ambitions are somewhat Edenic, at present it still retains the mood and look of a vacant lot; it has a spurned and forgotten quality, as if the world had, without warning or explanation, fallen in love with someone else.

Fourier believed the world would eventually contain thirty-seven million poets equal to Homer, thirty-seven million mathematicians equal to Newton, and thirty-seven million dramatists equal to Molière—although, he admitted, these were only “approximate estimates.”

It wasn’t a conversation; he was just beating the air like a rug, hoping to knock all the doubt and ambiguity out of it.

When I asked the kids if they were happy, none of them could really answer; the question, I gathered, was puzzling. “Happiness is a big word,” Tonia told me, after a long, stalled silence.

Most of the boys beyond the age of ten smoke, and cigarettes, for them, act as a kind of coin, a wealth to be acquired and traded and shared. The absence of “real” money, flat money, is essentially the absence of a future.

Hair clips and cigarettes are known as commodity money, money with intrinsic value, which is close kin to barter and, at this point, at least in modern societies, a very distant relation to flat money, which has no intrinsic value.

The one thing you can say about the future, Joseph Brodsky has written, is that it won’t include you. That’s true, and yet the dyad of money and children plots you way out there in that world of tomorrows you don’t get. Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on. You believe in a time that’s not your own.

I’m a little wary of prelapsarian schemes in much the same way I’m leery of conspiracy theories, both of which seem only to describe the limitations, like Hamlet’s nutshell, of the holder’s mind. You don’t really want to crash down the whole universe just to satisfy your situational unease or your incapacity to see the whole picture, do you? You don’t want a life based on your failure to understand life, right?

The ability to detect authenticity is a critical faculty, something all of us develop, more or less. You can fail on either side, you can be gullible, easily duped, or you can be too skeptical, believing nothing.

After my brother’s death I felt I had too much feeling to be myself. I felt attacked by my emotions, under siege, and the sensation, day after day, was like life had stuck to me. Like it was pinned to my back.

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; He doesn’t fill it, but on the contrary, He keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.

“You can never get enough of what you don’t want.”

Every lie breaks the world in two, it divides the narrative, and eventually I fell through a crack into the subplot, becoming a minor character in my own life. The surrendering felt much like the blackening of consciousness just before you faint, the letting go, the acceptance, and whatever was good in me turned passive and strange.

There was a day in Brooklyn Heights, along the promenade, when I watched a baby, crawling in diapers, pick a cigarette butt off the ground and eat it.

The King County Regional Justice Center is a kind of justice multiplex and includes under one roof a jail, courts, probation stuff, covered parking, all the amenities. Outside the parking garage on a patch of sloping lawn there’s a sculpture garden with a Native American motif—big trinkets of rebar bent to look like teepees, arrows, some kind of mandala/dream catcher thing, a piscine shape, etc. Looking at it you feel less in the elevated presence of art than hammered over the head by a governmental or bureaucratic intention, and the effect is of Sovietized realism, of culture that’s policed, official, approved, frozen, clichéd, one-note, panderly, in other words, everything that art is not.

Just about everywhere you turn there’s a placard that tells you what to do or not do. The hallways are full of instruction. Press to Open. No Smoking. No Weapons Allowed. No guns, no knives, no chemical sprays, etc. For Public Safety the use of skateboards roller skates roller blades Strictly Prohibited. Please use revolving doors. Eviction info in rm 1B/1100. Men. Women. (Generic bathroom symbols, with gender distinguished by skirt (girls), pants (boys).) You feel squeezed by subtext, monitored like a child in class, but you also wonder a little what evil alien race of cartoon figures comes here in need of so much explicit guidance.

By the strident and aggressive tenor of the talk you couldn’t tell if this Bonnie Hart entertained any doubt, then or ever, she was so careful not to cross herself, so careful to arrange her moral outrage along the lines of least resistance. In a sense the whole program was about Hart rendering the round world flat and endorsing lopsidedness, halfness. This seemed a crude and retrogressive project, since what really distinguishes us from apes is not the opposable thumb but the ability to hold in mind opposing ideas, a distinction we should probably try to preserve. But these days you get the impression people think it’s kind of recreant to waver, as if by feeling and expressing, or worst of all admitting, doubt and uncertainty, you’re being disloyal to a guiding idea.

I started being unable to understand the words people were using, I couldn’t make sense of trust and manipulation and adultery and power base and exploitation and teacher, and other than seeing this as ample evidence of why I’m not a judge or a lawyer or a doctor or a cop or for that matter anybody with any meaningful responsibility or position in this world, and getting a real sorrowful glimpse of why that’s probably a very good thing, I also began to believe that of course Letourneau had to be sentenced, that sentencing her was a way of stabilizing the language. She upset accepted meaning (and by the way I have no problem with Judge Lau’s decision. That’s not my concern here). What I wonder about is language, about what gets lost when laypeople concede the control of words to clinicians, scientists, lawyers, etc., which is, scilicet, the rich, supple instrumentation of language that makes it an encounter with reality, that lets it reach into everything, into every little part of life, and how in this case a circle had formed and experts with fixed language were returning Letourneau to a fixed state, and doing so by excluding, again and again, notions that were not naturally a part of their descriptive vocabulary, like love.

“We stink in each other’s nostrils.”

At any rate, nearly everything urgent and alive becomes doo-wop down the road, at least in this country’s pop culture, and along the way a somewhat self-hating irony lays waste not only to the work but to the desires it once carried. It’s like we die into adulthood.

“I’m haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary. . . . I’ve been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.”

A lot of readers, however, want to smelt fiction in order to separate the truth from the slag, not the uppercase sort of Truth but the humdrum kind that conforms to facts, to actuality.