Vacationland Read online

  I was accused of being a “fag” maybe only three times, which, for Massachusetts in the 1980s, was an accomplishment. And one of those times the accusation was actually a kindness. I was having lunch with my close friend Jason, and he asked if I was gay. “Everyone is wondering,” he said. “You don’t seem to have any interest in girls and you dress like Doctor Who.” I had to admit it made sense. But I wasn’t gay, I told him. I felt bad about it. It might have made me more interesting.

  Of course Jason was gay, but I didn’t figure that obvious subtext out until years later, because I was purposefully stupid on such subjects. The truth was that all hugging and kissing matters made me uncomfortable. What I really wanted was to skip adolescence altogether and jump to the life of a sexless middle-aged bachelor that I yearned for. And I succeeded.

  Both of my parents were the first of their families to go to college, Boston College, where they met. My father grew up in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. His father worked in a paper mill until he retired to a life of cribbage and long stretches of silence. My grandfather converted to Catholicism to marry my Italian American grandmother, who made good spaghetti sauce and sang “Tiny Bubbles” frequently. Her sisters, one widowed, the other never married, lived across the street, where they collected cats and suspected that someone was sneaking in and stealing the copper pipes in the basement and replacing them with perfect non-copper replicas. (This was not happening.)

  My mom grew up in Philadelphia. She had one younger brother for a while until her parents felt guilty for using birth control and quickly had five more daughters (Catholics!), all in a three-bedroom row home in northeast Philadelphia. Though she loved her family, she reversed course when she and my father married and settled into their careers: she became an atheist, had only one child, and moved our tiny family into an enormous house, twenty-two beautiful, crumbling rooms that had most recently been a commune. My mom fixed up much of it herself, and to afford it, she rented whole floors and wings out to graduate students and young doctors. Even then we had more house than we could possibly need, and the three of us would wander around it, only occasionally bumping into one another.

  Only children have a special relationship with their parents if they aren’t divorced. You’re alone together in the big house of the world, and you quickly come to rely on each other for company as much as anything else. You spend a lot of time traveling, going to movies, watching Brideshead Revisited with your dinners on your laps. Pretty soon you all feel like boarders: they are not so much your parents as your weird older roommates.

  I was fourteen when a nursing colleague of my mom’s who had been renting some rooms in the house moved out. Her area was sectioned off with its own bathroom, living room, bedroom, even a foyer. It was perfect. I announced my intention to give up my own perfectly spacious bedroom that I had never had to share with anyone, ever, and move into what amounted to a secret apartment within my childhood home. After all, I was in high school now. I deserved it.

  My parents did not object to this land grab. Maybe they didn’t hear me from the other side of the dining room when I proposed it to them. Either way I began setting up my new life. I took apart my old bunk bed (all only children have bunk beds, of course. They sleep on the top bunk to at once embody their surfeit of resources and literalize their loneliness: the empty, siblingless space that follows them, even to bed). I arranged the top and bottom bunks into an L in my new living room, adding some corduroy-upholstered bolster pillows to make a kind of loungy sectional. I scavenged a green shaded library lamp and an old school desk and I put a manual typewriter on top of it so I could type all my thoughts. I had a fern. A fern. I still don’t remember where that came from. They were everywhere in the ’80s, I guess.

  An old steamer trunk from some sub-attic was my coffee table. I put my parents’ old black-and-white television on top of it, and there I would retire of an evening to watch TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes, swirling a snifter glass of whole milk and simply murdering an entire box of Triscuits: a sophisticate.

  And from that home base I would go out and explore the semi-metropolises of Boston and Cambridge and suck the thin marrow from their bones. I would go to cafés and read Julio Cortázar alone. I would peruse the early work of Nik Kershaw at Planet Records in Kenmore Square. I would go to the first Newbury Comics and be scared by photographs of Wendy O. Williams and purchase Art Spiegelman’s Raw. At a midday animation festival at the Off the Wall cinema in Central Square, I saw “Vincent,” the first short by a then-unknown Tim Burton. “That young man is going places,” I said to nobody, because I was alone.

  One time, coming home on the Red Line from Harvard Square, I was unwrapping a new cassette I had picked up at the Harvard Coop, an anthology of jazz violin. A young woman next to me said, “Oh, I have that! It’s great.”

  “Good,” I said, and nothing else. I put on my headphones and stared straight ahead. Because as much as I wanted credit for making myself into such a fascinating fake-adult, on some level even I knew I was a pretentious weirdo and she would be better off not talking to me.

  I had no curfew. My parents both bought my grown-up act and saw through it for its sad yearning. What kind of trouble was I going to get in? Worst-case scenario, I might see some provocative installation art. And so I traveled out and back, day and night, fearlessly. And I would do this all by train and not by bus, because if your train conductor does shrooms in the morning, you will probably die. But you will die on the way, between two well-defined stops. It’s not risk I am afraid of. It is ambiguity. On those trains, I knew where I was going.

  When I became an actual physical adult, it was terrible. After high school I went to Yale. If you are not convinced of what an easy time I’ve had of it, witness this: I took no loans and needed no financial aid. My parents had saved assiduously and I punished their good deed by studying literary theory. Not literature—that would be too practical. I was less interested in books than I was in the concept of books. That is still true.

  I mentioned that my mom was a nurse. That makes sense. But even now I have a hard time explaining what my father did during his long and obviously successful career. I know he was an executive at an early computer company. Later he oversaw a state-backed fund that invested in local emerging tech companies.

  I am just using my brain to force my fingers to type those words. I never really understood what they translated to in how he spent his time, whom he worked with, how he felt about it. “My father is a businessman doing business things for businesses,” was always my best guess, even now that he is retired. When I went to college to spend the money that he and his mystery occupation had raised on my behalf, he asked that I take one course in bookkeeping. It was his only request: that I take a moment to peer into his world. Of course I didn’t do it. I’m sorry, Dad.

  Instead I read historic comic strips as literature and worked at a video store and lived in a basement. I went to London for one semester on a drink-abroad program of my own devising and got a job at a cheesemonger’s. I loved mongering. I would turn the cheeses over once in the morning and once in the afternoon (to keep their moisture evenly distributed) and between those times I would stand outside waiting for midday, when the beautiful French teenagers would descend from the École Français at the top of the street to pillage the neighborhood for warm hunks of bread and massive chocolate bars. Even their acne was beautiful.

  I liked Yale because its architecture was majestic and historic and largely fictional. On the tour for prospective students I was informed that all the Gothic castles and redbrick Georgian piles that made up the campus were designed at the same time, an imitation of the slow architectural accretions of Oxford and Cambridge. The shingles were buried for months, the windows purposefully broken and repaired to seem old. That is when I fell in love. It was a set: the concept of college. Imagine if the phony Hogwarts in the middle of the Universal Studios theme park granted degrees along with alc
ohol. Now you feel it.

  Once I went to a party in a Tomb. Yale was founded before the advent of the fraternity system, so the white men of generations past had to make up their own structures for sub-erotic bonding and pointless tribalism. That is why there are eighteen a cappella singing groups at Yale (more a cappella than a city the size of New Haven could ever require, though no one seems to be doing anything about it) and a half dozen or so senior secret societies, each with its own clubhouse called a Tomb, stately huge buildings that look like beautiful old public libraries with two distinctions: (1) they are completely windowless; (2) they were not built for the betterment of all society, but the secret use of, originally, small groups of wealthy eighteen-year-olds who needed privacy in which to maybe organize the secret world government but probably just drink and masturbate into a coffin.

  Skull and Bones is the most famous of these secret societies, particularly for the illuminati-meets-onanism angle. But I was not invited to that one. I was invited to Book and Snake. But you dance with the secret society that brought you, I always say, and I was excited to see inside this blank, sepulchral temple to historic white privilege and take its secrets into my eye-holes. And I did it, though I don’t remember what I saw. Reports from contemporaries confirm that I did make it inside the building and all the way to the top of the stairs; but the luminous truth that pulsed there (plus a fair amount of grain alcohol I had consumed at a small, pre–secret society tailgate I hosted) overwhelmed me. I fell backward down the stairs, where my head hit a portion of floor that grabbed whatever I saw out of my brain and returned it to the void. I woke up in the hospital with no memory of ever going inside. Secret societies know how to keep their secrets.

  It was the first time my actions had made my parents cry. I listened to them crying on the pay phone of the Cross Campus Library. I knew that they would get the ambulance bill, and I was a good boy, so I called to give them a heads-up. I could have died, they pointed out. But I hadn’t.

  “What did we do wrong?” my father asked, slicing me in half.

  “Nothing,” I said. It was a dumb question. How could they have prevented me from climbing those stairs? If anything it was their support and love that gave me the courage to climb them, to chase weird adventure and come back with stories. “You have never done anything wrong. You have done everything right,” I said. And I was crying too now. Because I knew I had fallen away from them, in some way, forever, but I knew that it was inevitable and also right.

  This changed when I moved to New York. I did not intend to move there after graduation. I personally wanted to stay in New Haven and continue to work in the video store—a career with a future. But I was ordered to by my then-girlfriend, now-wife, who had moved there the year before with a mutual friend, and I complied. My roommate Adam and I chose our apartment based on its proximity to a bar we liked on Third Avenue. The apartment was a duplex: I slept in the living room, Adam slept on a kind of balcony above me that counted as a bedroom. The apartment began below ground. Our one window began at street level and stretched up about six feet, perfect for any stranger to stand, arms akimbo, and watch us sleep or, as would occur, pee on the bedsheet we nailed up as a curtain.

  It turns out that New York had made no arrangements to receive me. No jobs were reserved for recent graduates with a degree in literary theory; no skylit garrets had been set aside in the West Village for me to think thoughts about books in. Even if New York were paying just a dime a dozen for dumb dreamers like me, the city would go bankrupt in twenty-five minutes.

  I got temp work with a book publisher. My job was to tear up copies of David Mamet’s Oleanna (fun!) and then tape down those pages onto blank sheets of printer paper and then number those sheets with a rubber stamp for reasons that are still unknown to me. You would think I would have loved it. Apart from the many, many thousands of dollars I had soaked my parents for indirectly, I had never taken a handout from them, because I loved having jobs. Aside from cheese- and video-mongering I had washed dishes in a small restaurant in Boston’s Combat Zone, unloaded trucks for a furniture stockroom, doled out soup in a pseudo health-food café, and sold tickets and concessions at the Coolidge, the same art-deco movie theater I used to go to as a teenager to see Marx Brothers and samurai movies. Two smells I will never forget are the deep oil-and-aluminum-foil odor that worked into my fingers after a shift at the old ticket machine; and the tang and sizzle of the Windex as it hit the popcorn kettle. That’s how we poisoned people.

  I loved work because it was like travel: a chance to meet different people and inhabit their worlds. So the more tedious and unengaging the work was, the better, because it left more brainspace for observation and inquiry, and also because I’m pretty lazy.

  In college I had taken a job as a traffic counter. I would sit on street corners in New Haven early in the morning with a clipboard. Alongside one edge of the board was a series of numerical counters. I would count the number of cars that went straight, left, and right and write those numbers down on a sheet of paper. I listened to music on the Walkman I borrowed from my roommate without telling him, and when the batteries wore down, I would listen to AM radio. That’s how I first heard Rush Limbaugh and began to understand that not everyone absolutely agreed with me about everything. Pedestrians passed me on their way into work and, because my second shift was at the end of the day, on the way out as well. They thought I had been standing there all day, and I let them think that. Counting traffic was a mystery we could all enjoy.

  Once a week I would go to a different café or restaurant to meet a woman whose name I forget. I would hand off my count sheets to her, and she would tell me the intersections I was to be stationed at the following week. One time I asked her why we were counting the traffic, and she said, “I have no idea.” It was perfect.

  So you would think that tearing out pages and taping them down and numbering them would really be a delight. It was just like counting traffic, except inside, so I didn’t have to wear three pairs of pants to keep from freezing before the sun came up. A real step up. But I couldn’t enjoy it. As I stamped each page away, a growing sense ate at me that I was no longer becoming something—the perpetual state of college—but ending up as something. I didn’t know what that was. I had difficulty tolerating that ambiguity. And so I grew anxious and depressed.

  309.28

  Soon after that I started going to therapy. Someone told me that New York University was offering talk therapy on a pay-what-you-can basis. They charged less because the therapists were all in training. It was like barber school: you show up, they randomly assign a young therapist to you, and he or she starts giving your mental health a crude, halting trim. If this does not sound appealing to you, you are wrong. You should always pay full price for a haircut, but if you have a chance to buy discount therapy you should grab it, because the markup on that shit is insane.

  Just having permission to talk about yourself, to let your dumb thoughts out of your head so you can see them as they hang there in silence, is an illuminating gift. You could probably get the same effect talking to a cardboard standup of Captain Kirk. But in my case I had a real human therapist who was also a beautiful woman, only a few years older than me. You can appreciate what a boon this was to a girl-shy nerd and narcissist. Finally, I could talk about jazz violin all day long and she was professionally obligated to listen thoughtfully and pretend to be interested. If this sounds gross and predatory, that is because it absolutely was. I am sure she sensed it. But the salutary effect was immediate. My anxiety and depression fell away almost instantly. From then on my therapy was just a weekly visit with Dr. Woman, my beautiful forced friend.

  I remember telling her that I was beginning to fall asleep more easily, and the secret was to just fall asleep and not try to control every aspect of my dreams because my whole life feels like it is spinning out of control. Like, if I start dreaming that I am swinging like Batman from a grappling hook, I can just g
o with that rather than self-critiquing my own dream as a nerdy cliché. She nodded and inched her chair backward.

  This went on happily for a couple of months. Then I received a letter. It was a single-page form from Psychotherapy Supercuts, requesting some basic address and personal information. Now, I love filling out forms. I enjoy any opportunity to create order out of disorder while also basking in the impression that someone cares about my address and middle initial (K). But there was something on this form that ruined my enjoyment of spelling my own name, a line item labeled “DIAGNOSIS.” And after it, a number, filled in by hand, perhaps by Dr. Woman herself:

  309.28

  I didn’t understand. Our therapy had barely begun. How could she have figured out me, the most complicated person on Earth, so quickly? And why was she speaking in code?

  I brought the letter with me to our next session, and before we even sat down, I totally brandished it.

  “Before I tell you about all of my fascinating feelings,” I said. “Please explain something to me, if you can. What is 309.28?”

  She blinked. I was crazy. She explained it was nothing, just a diagnostic code they were required to put down to process payment. She explained to me that the code comes from the DSM: The Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This thick book breaks down every possible mental issue and assigns them numbers, presumably so therapists could gossip about you in front of your face. There was even a copy in our therapy room, up on a shelf, thick as a phone book.