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Orangutan
A Memoir
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Few people who have been slave to an addiction as vicious, as destructive, and as unrelenting as Colin Broderick's have lived to tell their tale. Fewer still have emerged from the darkest depths of alcoholism—from the perpetual fistfights and muggings, car crashes and blackouts—to tell the harrowing truth about the modern Irish immigrant experience.Orangutan is the story of a generation of young men and women in search of identity in a foreign land, both in love with and at odds with the country they've made their home. So much more than just another memoir about battling addiction, Orangutan is an odyssey across the unforgiving terrain of 1980s, '90s, and post-9/11 America.
Whether he is languishing in the boozy squalor of the Bronx, coke-fueled and manic in the streets of Manhattan, chasing Hunter S. Thompson's American Dream from San Francisco to the desert, or turning the South into his beer-soaked playground, Broderick plainly and unflinchingly charts what it means to be Irish in America, and how the grips of heritage can destroy a man's soul. But brutal though Orangutan may be, it is ultimately a story of hope and redemption—it is the story of an Irish drunk unlike any you've met before.
From the Trade Paperback edition. less
Crown/Archetype; December 2009
ISBN 9780307453419
Download in secure EPUB
Title: Orangutan
Author: Colin Broderick
ISBN 9780307453419
Download in secure EPUB
Title: Orangutan
Author: Colin Broderick
Buy, download and read Orangutan (eBook) by Colin Broderick today!
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My wife reads my journal and is waiting for me when I come home from work with it opened to the page where I say that I have fallen helplessly in love with a teenager. The same teenager she’s had her suspicions about all along. I try to deny it, but she informs me that it’s too late, my good buddy Bill, my business partner, my AA sponsor, has already confirmed that it’s true. I take a seat and try to comprehend the magnitude of his deceit. I decide to take this opportunity to I tell her how I really feel. I tell her that I’m unhappy in the marriage and that I want a divorce. She hopes I rot in hell. So I move to the couch in the basement.
Within a week Bill and I have parted company. He has apologized for his indiscretion but I can’t look at him anymore without wanting to rip out his throat. He comes by when I’m not there and takes his few personal items, then has me served with papers seeking half the business. I tear up the papers and throw them in the trash can. I have never seen him or spoken to him since.
The adoption agency has called; they have a child for us in South America. She’s almost two years old. We are to fly immediately to meet her and take her back to the States. Brigitte tells me that this is the last thing she wants me to do for her. She cannot do it alone. The agency wouldn’t allow it. She needs a husband. I agree to go along.
We agree that when I come back I will find an apartment somewhere nearby and we will work something out so that we can take care of the child together.
Three days before we fly to Ecuador I find out that Brigitte has emptied my bank accounts, sold the stocks I had purchased, and maxed the credit cards that were in my name. I’m suddenly about forty thousand dollars in the hole. I am completely broke. I have to call Tony to borrow money for gas. She won’t lend me twenty dollars of my own money. My friend who’s a lawyer begs me not to go through with the adoption process. He tells me that I’ll lose everything. I know he’s right, but I feel guilty about falling in love with someone else, so I go along as a form of penance.
My friend steps in and takes care of the business while I’m gone. The poet Rick Pernod and I decide to become business partners and make a fresh go of it at the café. I tell Oksana that I am in love with her, and she tells me she will be waiting for me when I return from Ecuador. Brigitte and I travel to Ecuador. My daughter is a beautiful, healthy two-year-old, and I cry the moment I take her in my arms. I had never expected to fall in love with her instantaneously. She is the most beautiful child I have ever seen in my entire life. I look into her eyes and I know her and she knows me. I return from Ecuador a few days early, as agreed, to set up my own apartment and prepare for my daughter’s return. Oksana and Rick are waiting for me at the airport. I am an emotional basket case.
I borrow money from Tony and rent a one-bedroom apartment in Riverdale, up on the Parkway. I buy a new bed and move a few personal items out of the house. Brigitte returns from Ecuador with our daughter. She refuses to let me see her, just as my lawyer had predicted. She hires an expensive lawyer of her own and announces she wants full custody. After a brief struggle and the advice of two other attorneys, I relent. I give her everything. The house, the money, Molly, and our daughter. She moves away and I have not seen or heard from her since.
I have an apartment in Riverdale that I can’t afford. I have a ten-year-old car in need of repair. I’m completely broke. My credit is destroyed. The coffee shop is barely paying its own bills.
I close the café on a Friday night after I have signed the divorce papers. I lock the doors. Oksana has gone out for the night with some friends of hers. I am alone. I turn down the lights and take out a bottle of absinthe someone sent Rick and me as a gift from Prague. It’s the real deal. The illegal stuff with the wormwood. We were saving it for special customers. I pour a small glass of it. I dip a spoonful of sugar into it, remove it again and then light the absinthe-soaked sugar. It burns with a blue-green flame. I haven’t tasted alcohol in eight years. I will have one drink just to see what it tastes like. I want to drink again. I don’t want to be a drunk. I’ve just decided that I’m going to have a few drinks every once in a while. I deserve it after all I’ve been through. The flame is hypnotic. As it dances I picture van Gogh in Arles, Joyce in Paris, Hemingway in Spain. I was meant to drink. Why should I deny myself this right? I was born to drink. I drop the spoon into the glass and stir. I take it in my fist and smell its sharp menthol fumes. I lift the glass and my arm almost doesn’t want to bend. I force it. It hits my lips and I don’t stop until the glass is empty. My eyes water. I set the glass down and brace myself. My throat burns. A hot flame runs all the way to my gut. I’m still alive. That tasted good. I think I’ll have one more. Just one. After three I decide I’d better just take the bottle home with me. I don’t want to get drunk and then have to drive home. I take the scenic route home through Fieldston. There’s something familiar about myself that I can’t quite put my finger on, but I like it. I go home and finish the entire bottle. I’m thirty-one years old. I’m broke. I’m divorced for the second time. I have a teenage girlfriend. I’m drinking again.
IT’S DRINKING AGAIN
See, I’m not an alcoholic. I just drank a bottle of absinthe and I’m fine. You people are crazy. Alcoholic! Ha. Jesus, it’s nice to be drinking again. I’m Irish; I’m a writer; who the fuck did I think I was kidding? So I was young and a little confused. Quitting drinking at the age of twenty-three! I can’t believe I have denied myself this pleasure for eight whole years. Never again! I will never put myself through the misery of being sober ever again. Sober life sucks ass. It’s no wonder all my cousins stopped inviting me to their little parties. What a bore I was. And those muscle cramps in my gut, gone. Gone. They were stress-related. I was all bunched up. I was a tightwad miserable fuck. All I needed was a good drink to relax. My God, I feel like an idiot. How? How could I have been so stupid? AA! Jesus. What a bunch of dry old farts. What a miserable, despicable collection of rejects. What a sad, pathetic little family of losers. What they need is a good drink. Every last one of them. I cannot believe I associated myself with those people for eight whole years. My family must have thought I’d lost my mind. I can’t wait to have a few drinks with the lads again. Or a nice bottle of beer with the old man next time I’m home. Jesus, I can’t wait. Drink like a grown-up. You know what? I’m glad I went to AA. I’m glad I went through a couple of therapists. It was not a complete waste. At least now I know myself. I will always be able to monitor my own drinking. If my drinking begins to cause problems, I’ll check myself. I just have to keep an eye on it. If it gets out of hand, if I find myself crossing any lines, I’ll just pull it together, knock it on the head for a week or two. God knows that shouldn’t be a problem. I didn’t drink for eight years. A week or two is a joke. If I watch it, if I’m careful, I’ll be able to enjoy this luxury for the rest of my life. I am so damned happy I could cry. Thank you, God, for giving me this beautiful opportunity to drink again. I promise you I will continue to pray. I will keep the twelve steps in mind and continue to live a good, responsible life. All I have to do is keep my drinking under control. It’s that simple.
TWO WEEKS LATER
It was one in the morning on a hot Friday night. I was sitting in the dark by the open window, watching the traffic roll by on the Henry Hudson Parkway. There’s something about the sound of passing traffic that normally soothes me, but it just wasn’t working on this particular night. Nothing was working. I’d finished the two bottles of wine and started in on the vodka. Oksana was gone. We’d had one of those boozed-up fights the previous night that makes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like a children’s fairy tale. She had stormed out, saying she was going back to live at home with her parents. Again. I was glad she was gone. I needed time to think. Everything was happening so fast I could barely keep up with it all. I was just out of a six-year marriage. My café-bookstore was closing. I was broke and back working construction. I needed a smoke. A nice fat joint would sort me right out. That had always worked before. I’d just go get myself a nice little dime bag of weed. Just enough to take the edge off. I’d come home, turn the lights down, listen to some Floyd. Chill the fuck out. Just like the old days. I’d just have another little glass of vodka for the road. God, it was good to be drinking again.
I took a ride in my old Honda Civic to White Plains Road. The same area where I’d been beaten and left for dead ten years before. It was time to give it another shot. Surely it was more civilized now.
I spotted a few guys hanging out near the old street corner. They looked cool. I was good at this. I have a real feel for people. I can sense danger a mile away. One of the guys, a young black kid, gave me the nod. I nodded back. I was in business. He flipped his head left to right a couple of times, checking for cops, and waved me onto the side street. I made the turn and pulled in at a hydrant. I left the car running and stepped out to greet him as he walked toward me.
I leaned against the front fender and folded my arms nonchalantly. I wanted him to know that I was cool, that we were the same, he and I. We were both cut from the same cloth. I’d done a little dealing myself back in the day, in London. I knew the scene: a lot of posturing, head-nodding, grunting, toughguy shit. I could almost taste the weed already. Eight years without a smoke. This was going to be great. The kid was moving toward me, crossing the street at a brisk pace. And now that I could see him up close, he looked a little crazed. Maybe I’d misjudged this motherfucker. I’d had a lot to drink. It was too late anyway. I was just going to have to roll with it and hope for the best. Maybe I shouldn’t have pulled onto this side street. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten out of my car. Maybe I shouldn’t have left my apartment. Maybe . . . He had a knife in his hand. He must have pulled it from his waistband. I definitely didn’t see that coming. Fuck.
“Give me your wallet, muthafucka.” He had stopped about an arm’s length away and he held the knife toward me. It was a big knife. Shiny. “Give me your muthafuckin’ wallet, asshole.”
“Fuck you,” my mouth said.
“What d’you say to me, mutherfucker? You wanna die? Give me the muthafuckin’ wallet.”
“Go fuck yourself.” There it was again. That mouth of mine sure did have a life of its own. He swiped the knife across my middle. I managed to pull back just a fraction without making a big to-do about it. He’d missed. Maybe he meant to miss.
“Give me the wallet, man,” he continued. He looked a little perplexed now, as if this was just way too much work. He was obviously used to a little more cooperation than this. “You want to die?” he said.
“You’re not getting my fucking wallet, asshole,” my mouth said with great confidence. He swiped again. This time he was pissed. He slashed the knife across my throat in a wild swing.
“Give me the wallet!” he shouted. “You want to die here?” I casually reached my left hand to my neck and rubbed my fingers across my throat. I held my hand up to my face and looked at the thin streak of blood across my fingers. He’d cut me alright, but barely. It was only a nick across my Adam’s apple. No big deal. He really was pushing it, this kid.
“OK. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” I said, pausing to collect myself. It was time for some diplomacy here. This was beginning to get serious. I was going to have to calm down and negotiate. Treat him like a businessman. That’s it. Give the guy a little respect. They love a little negotiation, these guys. They want to feel like they’re being heard. That’s cool. I could roll with that. “I’m going to take my wallet out and I’m going to hand you the cash. But I keep the wallet—” Slash. There he was with that knife again. This time he connected. I lifted my right arm and sure enough there was a huge gash running across my arm between my elbow and my hand. It was wide open. I could see a white wall of flesh. It was deep. This kid was a tough negotiator, no doubt about it. I actually laughed a little. He’d really taken me by surprise with that one. It was time to wrap this thing up before things got out of hand.
“OK,” I said, holding my arm up so that he could get a good look at the cut. “If you put that knife near me one more time, I’m going to take it off you and shove it up your fucking ass.”
“Are you fuckin’ crazy, man . . .”
“I’m going to take my wallet out and give you the cash,” I said, reaching for my wallet. “I’m going to give you the cash and I’m going to keep the wallet.” I had the wallet out. I opened it and he waited, shifting nervously from foot to foot while I removed the cash. There was maybe two hundred dollars in there.
I handed it to him. “Now go fuck yourself, asshole.” He grabbed the cash from my hand and ran off up the side street. When he was about twenty feet away he turned and shouted, “You’re fuckin’ crazy, man. You need fuckin’ help.”
“Fuck you, tough guy,” I shouted after him. It was then that I noticed that a few guys had gathered across the street. They made their way toward me. I was in no hurry to go anywhere at this point. I put my wallet back in my pocket as they gathered around. There were maybe four or five of them. Young black kids.
“He cut you, man?” one of them asked.
I held up my arm so that they could see.
“Fuck, man,” he said, taking a good look at it. “He fucked you up pretty good, huh?”
“Yeah, he’s a real tough guy. He a friend of yours?”
“Naw, man,” one of the other kids said. “We don’t know that guy.” They were all huddled around, inspecting my arm. It did look pretty bad. I felt alright about it somehow. It didn’t hurt too badly.
“Any of you guys got a smoke I could bum?” I asked. A couple of them dug into their pockets. One of them handed me a smoke, another held out a light for me. “Well, guys, it’s been real, but I gotta get myself to a hospital.”
I got back in the Honda and searched around until I found a plastic bag on the passenger-side floor and placed it behind the stick shift between the two seats to catch the blood from my arm. The guys gathered around the car and watched me as I placed it just right. “This muthafucka’s crazy,” one of the kids said, laughing.
I was going to have to find a new spot for weed, I decided. White Plains Road was now officially off-limits.
At the hospital I gave them a false name and told the doctor I’d cut myself cooking a chicken. He eyed me with a look of tired skepticism, jotted something on his clipboard, and sauntered off out of the room, scratching his head without another word, leaving the nurse to patch me up. Apparently he’d heard that one before. He didn’t want to hear the truth any more than I wanted to tell it. I’d had enough fun for one night without having to deal with the cops as well.
Two hours and fifteen stitches later I was back home on my couch with a large tumbler of vodka. The sun was coming up as I finally hit bed. I had to drink half the bottle to put me to sleep. The birds were already chirping in the trees outside my window.
“You’re an asshole,” they were singing cheerfully. “You’re a big fat waste of space,” another one squawked. I got up and closed the curtains on them, fuckin’ birds. What the fuck did they know? Goddamned pain-in-the-ass chirping motherfuckers. Go bug somebody else. Tomorrow was going to be a long day.
When I showed Oksana the stitched gash on my arm the next day, she slapped my face and burst into tears. I guess I deserved it. The blood had caked and blackened around the stitches, making it look a lot worse than it was. I told her an edited version of the story, minimizing my role in the whole scenario as much as possible. I told her that the guy had grabbed my arm through the open window and cut me when I tried to hand him my cash. It didn’t help things much.
I poured us a couple of large glasses of red wine and promised her nothing like that would ever happen again. That did the trick. I was just going to have to be more careful from now on.
I was glad that something so violent had happened so soon. It had really opened my eyes to the dangers involved in drinking again. I could now see clearly where I had crossed the line. I should never have gotten into the car in the first place. I should have just gone to bed. It was a stupid mistake, but there was no point in getting my pants in a bunch about it.
It just wouldn’t happen again. I was sure of it. I had to be careful. I had to keep this beautiful gift of drinking in my life. There was no way I was going back to those goddamned church basement meetings. No siree. I was done with that chapter, thank you very much.
Alcoholics Anonymous! Ha. Who could have ever dreamed up such an outfit? An American, of course. Bill W. What a wanker. Typical: an armchair philosopher; a lazy, good-fornothing couch bum who couldn’t do it by himself. He couldn’t just tighten up a wee bit. Pull up his bootstraps and get on with his life like an Irishman. He couldn’t just cut back a bit when things got out of hand with his drinking. No, no, of course not. That would take effort, self-control, discipline. It might mean work. God forbid. Talk about your stereotypical Yank. If the work was in the bed they’d sleep on the floor. Work? Not on your nelly. Not in this country. But if you’d like to sit down and have a chat about it, well, then, that was a different thing entirely. They’d be lined up around the block for that alright, in deck chairs, of course, with the portable TV and a cooler of refreshments, just in case. Oh, no, old Bill couldn’t just stop; instead he had to dream up some little egomaniacal, cockamamie cult to absolve himself of all his drinking sins and spoil it for everybody else. Well, fuck you, Bill W. Why couldn’t you have kept your big yapper shut? I will never, I repeat: never, associate myself with that bunch of brainwashed buffoons ever again. Not so long as there’s a breath in my body. My poor family. I can’t imagine the embarrassment I must have caused them. “Oh, our boy Colin’s had to get help with his drinking. He’s an alcoholic.” The shame. What utter humiliation. My God. Brainwashed. That’s what I was. Brainwashed. There was no other logical explanation. Keep coming back. It works if you work it. Keep it simple, stupid. Oh, yeah, well I’ve got a slogan for you pal. Go fuck yourself. Boy, was it good to be drinking again.
Things were good between Oksana and me again in no time. She liked the idea that I had been stabbed, that I had a scar. It was her scar. She owned it the way she owned everything about me. I was hers and she was mine.
I was working construction again, but it was different from before. I was a finish carpenter now. I was moving up in the work chain. The work was cleaner and the cash was much better. I was working with a crew of guys installing baseboard and door trim on a job up in Westchester. We had about four hundred apartments to do. It was easy work once you got the hang of it. We worked in crews of two. One guy did the measuring and nailing and the other took care of the cuts. We now had laborers to handle all of the rough stuff. My days of lugging sheets of plywood and floor-sanding machines up and down flights of stairs were over. I left work in the evening as clean as the moment I walked through the door that morning. Now, this was the life.
On Friday evenings the tool belts were discarded and the gang box was bolted shut a good half hour early. Once we had those checks in our hands we were history. Irish lads working in every corner of the city were on the move and their destination was Woodlawn. It was a race straight to the Tara Hill Bar on Katonah Avenue to cash those checks. By five o’clock the place would be jumping, AC/DC on the jukebox, a line of quarters backed up on the pool table, a cold beer in every fist, the occasional group of cheeky-faced Irish American girls stopping by to flirt with the boys. The lads still in their work clothes, dusty from the day, some tanned from a day’s sweat in the sun, tying one on before we all went our separate ways for the weekend. I was back. No, I wasn’t back; I had never been here before. It had never been this good. I was no longer a newbie, fresh-faced and green off the boat. I had survived in this town for twelve years now, while others had chickened out, gone home, or gone mad. That was an accomplishment in itself. This was living. Beer had never tasted so good as it did on those evenings. We had earned it. We had suffered through the hangovers early in the week and managed to bash out another five days’ work. We were the men. You couldn’t take it away from us. We deserved this. For a fleeting crystallized moment, as those first few crisp beers rushed to our heads, we were the kings of Katonah Avenue.
I would usually stay for only about five or six bottles before I said my good-byes. I lived in Riverdale, another fifteen-minute drive away. I had to be careful. I couldn’t afford to get caught drunk driving. I needed my transportation for work. I’d heard enough horror stories over the years that I did go to meetings to know that drunk driving was something I would never do.
On my way home I would stop at the liquor store. Oksana was too young to go to a bar, so I would stock up enough booze and movie rentals to keep us going for the weekend and we’d just hole up for two days until it was time for me to go back to work. A half-gallon of good vodka, one decent bottle of red wine, two magnums of cheaper wine, and a twelve-pack of beer for Sunday to taper off. Who had it better than me? Nobody. I got a letter in the mail about that time from a New York journal called Rattapallax. They wanted to publish one of my short stories. I’d written it just after I’d started drinking again, a response to the Omagh bombing. Rick Pernod had edited the story for me and in the process had taught me a few valuable lessons about the importance of clarity in my work. He’d made only a few suggestions, but those small changes had transformed the story into a fairly tight piece. I’d always been careless in this regard. Every time I’d submitted something before, I’d sent off the rough draft, convinced that whoever was lucky enough to receive my masterpiece would be on the phone in a flash with a book offer and a fat check. Strangely, that had never happened.
I called the editor of the journal and he told me in a voice as mean as a rusty bucket of nails that I should stop by to see him. The editor’s name was George Dickerson. Dickerson was not only a poet and editor, but he was also an actor, best known for his role as the detective in the David Lynch movie Blue Velvet. I told him I would be there within the hour. I was more than a little keen to hear what he had to say.
The man who opened the door of his fifth-floor walkup an hour later looked like something that had been peeled off the blacktop in the parking lot of a truck stop outside of Nevada. A mottled strip of parchment, infused with the tire tracks of an unforgiving life, pockmarks and windburn, oil stains and all. I could not have dreamed of a more suitable candidate to publish
my first short story. I wanted to take him in my arms and hug the life out of the old bastard, but under the circumstances I thought it would be best to resist the temptation.
The apartment might best be described as a den, the den of some curious word-foraging animal. It was a chaotic explosion of paper. There were books and stacks of paper covering every square inch of the place. Sheaves of paper and dusty folders spilled out of every crevice. There wasn’t a square inch of the floor still visible. George made no attempt to excuse the carnage or clear a seat for me. He quite simply slumped into it, and with a nod of his head invited me to do the same.
“So you’re the new Irish writer, huh?” he said as he leaned over and miraculously located, among the madness, the very file that contained my story. I was tempted to suggest that he spray paint it bright orange so that it would be next to impossible to lose in here, but it seemed George understood this chaos better than I was giving him credit for.
“Yeah, that would be me.”
“From the North by the sounds of this story,” he said, flipping through the first few pages. The story was called “Bang.” It is set in the area where I grew up in County Tyrone and narrated in the voice of an elderly farmer. It had been the easiest short story I had ever written; I had bashed it out in two sittings. The voice of the farmer spoke to me and I just put his words on the page. It was that simple. It was an experience that taught me to get out of my own way and let the writing happen. All my previous efforts and struggles with my egotistical sense of how things should sound had availed me nothing. I wasn’t that important, it seemed, in the grand scheme of things.
“I’m from a place called Altamuskin,” I told him. “That’s where the story is set. All those events were part of my own experience of growing up there.”
“Some childhood. You ever think of writing a book about it?”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“By the looks of this story there’s probably enough material there for a couple of books.”
“I want to make sure I can really write before I tackle that stuff. Writing about home is tricky business.”
“You’ll get there.”
Then he started in about his own stuff. He was working on a book of poetry. He was reaching for another folder to show me something he was working on. That’s where he lost me. We’re a selfish breed of creature, writers are. I could have yapped away all day when it was my own writing we were talking about, but the minute he mentioned his stuff I was out the door. I thanked him for the honor of being published in his journal and I was gone.
About a month later, I walked into a magazine store between Seventy-first and Seventy-second on Broadway, and there on the shelf next to Poetry and the Paris Review was the third edition of Rattapallax. I was tempted to announce my good fortune to the other folks in the store browsing through the magazines, but I restrained myself. A gentleman in a tweed jacket and the tussled hair of an English professor lifted a copy and thumbed through it right next to me. Then he returned it to the shelf and bought the Antioch Review instead. There were three copies left on the stand. I bought all three. I would send a copy to my parents and give the others to friends. There may be other stories and journals in my future, but none will ever equal the rush of seeing that first one in print, in a store, for sale, in New York City. I felt like my entire existence had been validated in that one simple moment. I was now a published writer.
Inspired by my newfound success, I started on a new novel. It was time to take this thing seriously. Maybe if I put as much effort into my writing as I did into my drinking, I might actually get somewhere. But it was impossible. I was too tired from working during the day to put the required energy into it. Even when I pushed myself to stay with it, there was always the drink to slow me up. Or Oksana. I discovered quickly that dating an eighteen-year-old could be a real drain on the creative process. Teenagers are a particularly selfish breed of creature; they are like writers in that regard. I’d work on the novel religiously for four days in a row, get drunk for three days, die with a hangover for two days, and then by the time I was feeling like writing again I was ready for another drink. After six months I had amassed a sketchy seventy pages. The more I looked at it, the uglier it got. The uglier it got, the more I drank. I needed some fresh experience, some inspiration.
Every summer, Oksana took a trip to Russia to visit her grandparents. This year I was invited to tag along to meet the rest of the family. I leapt at the chance.
Since we had started seeing each other, Oksana had been bringing me all her own favorites to read: Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov. I was drunk with the tragedy of it all: unrequited love, duels to the death—they really knew how to wipe the smile off your face in a hurry, these Ruskies. We spent months reading entire books aloud to one another: Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita; her favorite, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, we read twice.
Oksana went a couple of weeks ahead of me to spend the whole summer in Russia, as she always did. I had time for only three weeks.
I traveled with her mother. We had a pleasant, civilized flight, drinking tea and chatting, reading the New Yorker. The thought crossed my mind more than once that this might have been a more enjoyable trip with someone of my own age, someone with as much class as her mother, like my ex-wife.
Divorce can be beautiful to observe from a distance but painful and bloody to execute, like ripping a rosebush out of a thick hedge with your bare hands. This is the real reason people stay in miserable marriages for the rest of their lives. Better to endure the dull ache for a lifetime than suffer the ferocious evisceration for even a flash.
I was more than a little anxious about meeting Oksana’s childhood friends and spending what was likely to be an entire three weeks drinking vodka with them. I had begun to distrust my drinking self again. I was not wholly predictable once that first mouthful crossed my lips. Bad things had started to happen when I drank—not all the time, mind you, but enough. Oksana and I fought almost constantly now when we were drinking. I would have to be careful in Russia. I’d heard stories. This was not a country to stagger around with your eyes half closed. Not if you valued your life. I would just have to be extra vigilant while I was there, stay away from the vodka, try to stick with beer. That was the answer. The possibility of not drinking at all was out of the question. My fellow countrymen would never forgive me.
Had I been spending the three weeks visiting Russia with her mother, none of these anxieties would have been an issue. Oksana’s parents had always been very civilized with me. I could never quite understand why. I suppose they were just very civilized people. They were much closer in age to me than I was to their daughte
