2002-06-30 - 9:19 p.m.
“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head…. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already.…“Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren’t. You see yourself as the kind of guy who wakes up early on Sunday morning a steps out to cop the Times and croissants. Who might take a cue from the Arts and Leisure section and decide to check out an exhibition—costumes of the Hapsburg Court at the Met, say, or Japanese acquerware of the Muromachi period at the Asia society. The kind of guy who calls up the woman he met at a publishing party Friday night, the kind he did not get sloppy drunk at. See if she wants to check out the exhibition and maybe do an early dinner. A guy who would wait until eleven A.M. to call her, because she might not be an early riser, like he is. She may have been out late, perhaps at a nightclub….”
—Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984: 1–4)
I can’t remember the last time a book so captivated me that I picked it up at every free moment; Bright Lights, Big City may be the second novel I complete in this year of our Lord 2002. I picked it up in a used bookstore in the area known as Riverdale, which I found one day after field school when I deliberately got lost looking for a CD store. First I looked at their anthropology/archaeology section, which could have been titled the Discredited Anthropology/Archaeology section. Then I saw this book on a fiction shelf I scanned, and picked it up.
I’d been considering reading it for some time now, since Maria gave us an excerpt to read in urban anthropology. She said she used to assign the book, but too many people complained, including Prof. Andrews, who she teaches the class with; they were put off by the second-person narration and that the main character spends alot of time doing cocaine in clubs. Although I have a general idea, I wonder what the specific message of her assigning this book is, and the implications of its resonance with me.
Earlier Friday, I mentioned to the Columbia grad-student Field School Associate Director that I was reading it, to which he had no reply. The next day, he’d overhead that someone had mentioned they are reading Naked Lunch for the first time, and said, “I’m a big Burrughs reader.” This from someone who never utters a politically incorrect statement. In contrast to the TA overseeing our site, who boasted the other day that an ancestor of his girlfriend, who we met in the early 19th century on a Maryland plantation wrote a traditional song for the master; it’s written in her family ledger. A white guy? Someone asks. “Does my girlfriend look black?” he demand, with partially-mock indignation. “Khris’s not-so-subtle racism,” was how another member of the field school described it Saturday night.
Anyway, I was talking to the associate director on Friday because he was in the archaeology lab, where I was, working on my garden-perspective project for Dr. Leone. “If you have car,” he told me, “you should check out Dunbarton Oaks. You might really get alot out of it.” He was the second person to mention it to me. The first was Maria, on the phone just before I left for here and she left for Massachusetts. “They have a collection of Mayan artifacts there,” she said. I’ve never expressed an interest in the Maya; I guess because Tony Andrews is at New College, I’m supposed to be interested in the Maya. I’m more interested in clubs.
“You have always wanted to be a writer.… But between the job and the life there wasn’t much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity. For a few weeks you got up at six to compose short stories at the kitchen table while Amanda slept in the other room. Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and climbing out of bed became harder and harder” (1984: 40).
I didn’t go to any clubs this weekend, and I never called the guy I went out with last weekend. Its just as well, as I would have made plans for Friday, when, like most other people in the field school, I collapsed into a 12-hour-sleep shortly after arriving home, which lasted just long enough for me to drag myself up and drive to Annapolis Saturday morning, for the privilege of leading public site tours. Thankfully, they were so poorly promoted that only a handful of people actually showed up.
Then Saturday night arrived, and I took up the invitation of one of the field school members who was hosting a party at her apartment. We’re among the group that’s become friends. Here I faced a fundamental choice: Do I go to this ordinary party at an ordinary apartment with ordinary people, albeit who I’ve become friends with, or do I take my chances with the big city a subway ride away?
On the way over, I fulfilled my part of the party by picking up the material for smores. She was planning a barbecue. Also on the way, I stopped at C Depot, where I gave in to an impulse and used my mother’s credit card to purchase The Eminem Show. I also brought a pillow and blanket, as suggested, so I could get trashed. Although as I got dressed for it, I picked out my clothes with the thought in the back of my mind that if things got too lame I could depart for the clubs off Dupont—I know how to walk to the metro.
Shortly after I arrived, the girl’s boyfriend, also a member of the field school (they hooked up in then second week) started up the grill and soon the covered patio was clouded with black smoke. The only members of the field school who showed up were those who have become friends. I drank down the beer I’d brought with alarming speed. We put The Eminem Show on the stereo. I am the derringer aimed at little Erica to attack her character. Then the hamburgers were served, with nothing Boca present, and maybe it was the speed I had drank on an empty stomach. Or more probably, the sudden shock of half-cooked ground beef on my stomach for the first time in years. I’ve been playing the vegitarian—cheating—I’m not a vegan but I don’t eat meat—game for too long. I excused myself to the bushes behind the patio, and emptied the contents of my stomach, for the first of two times that night.
The Southern white girls present, Kelly and Krissy, broke it down to Eminem. It’s difficult to describe what this night represents, but it’s something angular and significant, even though nothing happened. I feel obliged to quote again:
When you were growing up you suspected that everyone else had been let in on some fundamental secret which was kept from you. Others seemed to know what they were doing… If you ever go into psychoanalysis, you will insist that the primal scene is not the encounter of parents in coitus: it takes the shape of a ring of schoolchildren, like Indians surrounding a wagon train, laughing with malice, pointing their vicious little fingers to insist upon your otherness. The scene repeats itself across schoolyards across the county. Not until college, when everyone started fresh, did you begin to pick up the tricks of winning friends and influencing people. Although you became adept [note—I didn’t], you also felt that you were exercising an acquired skill, something that came naturally to others. You succeeded in faking everyone out, and never quite lost the fear that you would eventually be discovered a fraud, an impostor in the social circle. Which is just about how you feel now. Even now, as you puff yourself up with tales of high adventure in magazine publishing, you can see Elaine’s [the date’s] eyes wandering out over the room, leaving you behind” (1984: 47).
The rest of the night was a dull blur. All I remember is the green onion dip that Kelly made and watching a rerun of SNL. The night began to get interesting when we started winding it down to go to sleep, still drunk and all prepared to stay the night as per instructions. We lay on the couch, and I draped my comforter tightly over the lower half of my body to shield me from the air conditioning. Krissy and Kelly compared me to a mermaid. A mattress had been laid out in the space in front of us. I envision Kelly and Krissy putting on a lesbian show, and tell them they should. Laughter. “Maybe Mike’s not gay after all.” I’m not! I wanted to shout, but I lack the conviction to shout anything now. Right, I say, I just say that to get chicks. We’d conversed about the career of Rupert Evert earlier in the evening. Two trailer park girls go round the outside, round the outside, round the outside. We’re all exhausted; in keeping with my book, I suggest that a few lines of blow would keep the evening going fantastically They say they’ve never done anything but pot.
I am convinced that if there was more alcohol and drugs involved in that night, an orgy would have happened. I remember a conversation I overheard between the ass. director and the non-Marxist TA: “I remember our field schools were drunken orgies. What became of those days?”
Then I slept on the floor, waking up whenever the bizarre dreams that have haunted me of lately caused me to twist around. I also woke up to peal the cracked and blistered contact lenses out of my eyes since I’d forgotten to bring my case or drops. Then, with little sense of time spent in sleep, it was time to awake. We realized that with our horrendous wake-at-5-a.m. schedule, we’d called it a night just after midnight. It was just after 10 a.m. on Sunday morning. Our first task was to smoke cigarettes and clean up the mess of bottles, cups, and cigarette butts that littered the patio.
Then breakfast, the most bizarre breakfast I’ve ever eaten. Ryan went to the nearby grocery store for staple foods, and then he and Heather (his girlfriend and the resident) prepared it: scrambled eggs, bacon, and bagels. I discreetly passed on the bacon; heather dropped the mixing bowl of eggs on the floor. “Heather you klutz,” he said. “But the bowl was hot, and there was no space on the table!” she protested. I don’t think he’ll marry her, however seriously however quickly their relationship has gotten. Then we sat at Heather’s breakfast nook apartment, where the couple served the food and the visitors joked about the archtypical family that had been re-created. “Breakfast is ready, kids” Ryan and all of us joked. We’d run out of chairs and I’d taken the portable vinyl chair from outside, Ryan’s chair that he had at the site on Wye Island and gave him a slight status advantage through material goods, to complement that he received from experience. At this table, however, it only brought me about a foot above the height of the table. Sitting on the end, they looked at me, “Little Mikey,” they joked with a laugh. I smiled back, disturbed that this mock family put me in the weakest position. It’s the closest thing to an actually family Sunday morning breakfast I’ll ever experience.
Then the group decamps. I’ve looked at my watch, and calculated that there’s no reason not to make the trip to Dunbarton Oaks today. “Make sure it’s open before you go down there,” someone says. I’ve invited everyone, but they’ve demurred. In fact, it is open today.
Also relevant, I haven’t just heard of Dunbarton from Maria and the ass. Director; the first day I pulled into Maryland I picked up the Sunday Washington Post, and the style section had a small article about this charming place called Dunbarton. Take a cue. It doesn’t open until 2 p.m. for some reason.
Dunbarton is in Georgetown; it was originally an estate for some rich people, Mr. and Mrs. Bliss, appropriately enough named. I park on the street in Georgetown and pay my $5 and go inside to a garden to rival any in Europe, so the Post told me.
All I can think the entire time I’m in there is how this would be the most wonderful place in the world to go to if you were on acid. As it happens, I have no LSD, but the sun and the sleep deprivation and nicotine interact to make the flowers move and the stones of the pathways and the walls bend and sway, and for a moment I’m not on earth, but in an alien world constructed by Horkheimer and Adorno. The basic principle of the garden, the brochure tells me, is a progression from formality to informality as you get further from the house; the rigid concrete squares of the uppermost terraces dissolve into more curvature shapes, and then to the wilderness garden. This concept could belong to Dr. Leone.
Actually, the wilderness portion of the garden was too expensive to maintain, and given to the park service, where it is now a part of Rock Creek Park. When it was in its original state, deep in the wilderness garden there was a unicorn state, signifying that you’ve really gotten out there. When the wilderness was broken off, the unicorn statue was moved up next to the house, and now it makes no sense. The Mayan artifacts, also, turned out to be a major bust, with only about eight rooms of interesting but scant pieces.
That concludes my weekend up the point of my return. In the meantime, I’ve finished Bright Lights, Big City and also gotten drunk and disturbed. A passage about passing out after mixing alcohol and Valium has made me drowsy, and the rest of the book sapped my energy before coming to a non-conclusion.
I can’t imagine what would have gone though my head if I’d read this book last semester at the height of dissipation, but as it is, I’m not sure what to do. For a while I held the book in my hand and wandered around the courtyard and parking lot outside my dorm like and idiot. Now it’s dark.
More happened; I’ve given up on recording all the subtleties and details and Grand Themes. There was a point to all of this, but I’m not sure what it is.
