In The Mind's Eye

"Buddy"

I met him when I began drinking seriously, still grubbing in the debris of my divorce guilt.  He had been drinking seriously for a long time, that is, for a long time even after he had detoxed at the VA hospital, which he said was the best part of the joke.  The worst part of the joke was Vietnam.  But he said that only once, laughed a little weakly and stroked his stained beard.  He wanted to talk to me about books and my writing most of the time, and I wanted to talk to him about the best way to keep the alcohol abuse at a tolerable level, what he called workable abuse.  This way we shared some booze and avoided Nam.

I'm calling him Buddy now, but he had a regular name, something common, for one of the saints.  He had been reared an Irish Catholic, which is why he joined the Marines when he was underage, hated his father and so thought he had less to lose in the Marines.  Vietnam proved him wrong.  He didn't tell me that.  Some of the other Nam vets did.  The sober ones felt it was a sickness, like a virus or shingles that hides in you forever, coming and going to remind you of death and madness.  But Buddy never talked about it as an idea.  For him it was only smells, tastes and touches.  And all of that had to do with food, booze and women. None of it had to do with the field and the fire fights.  He never talked like I had imagined it.  You'd think he spent his hitch in Saigon or some other city.  Anyway, he seemed to be continuing the booze and women part of it when I met him.  You might say that's what kept our mutual interest in tack.

In those days, I thought writing the novel and the plays could be done the way I thought it had been done by Papa and Scot and Bill.  Drink a full pot of coffee while you re-write the previous day's efforts, then go out and get a six pack of cheap beer, start drinking that while you begin the new stuff, so that by some time after one or two in the afternoon you'd be ready for Buddy to show up for some stops around the neighborhood bars.  This way I was able to soften the glare of my guilt by feeling I'd put in a day's effort on the art, and I'd done it safely rutted in the paths of prior genius.  You can begin to see that Buddy and I, besides sharing large quantities of booze, also shared large quantities of self-delusion.

We were also big on divine sorrow; at least that's what I called it.  I think William Blake called it that first.  I've never been exactly sure what Blake meant by it, but Buddy and I were sure we had a pretty good lock on its meaning and inevitability in our lives.  People now might tag it a universal negativity.  Less sympathetic people might call it self-pity and self-absorption in the extreme.  Whatever it was, Buddy and I felt it in our bones.  It was one of the things we didn't even have to talk about that much.  And it seemed the women went for it, at least they went for Buddy's version.  But he didn't seem interested.  Not in the women's efforts to connect emotionally with him.  That and the fact that I was too old for Vietnam were the only two things that Buddy and I differed on, at least while we were both drinking.  Buddy seemed more interested in me than I was in him.

He thought I had something unique, a talent, if not for writing, then for insight, maybe even savoir-faire.  Given the propitious atmosphere and kind and amount of booze, I could turn a particularly apt phrase to capture the spirit of a moment or persona.  At times like those, I wish I'd recorded that aptness.  It might be entertaining to some people.  I had also read books, which separated me from Buddy (for the most part) and from most of our fellow denizens.  Sometimes I felt that Buddy's interest in me went beyond (not in the sense of transcendence) the intellectual or psychological.  I recall clearly the night in the parlor of my third floor flat when he confessed his love ("I don't just mean love, I mean really love you!") for me.  And then he collapsed gently on the floor and remained unconscious for the night.  Someone said that booze neutralizes the frontal lobe inhibitors and that whatever is said in a stupor (contrary to "Oh, he was drunk, he didn't mean that.") is the truth of the speaker's wisdom (so to speak).  So I was on guard from that moment on.  I wasn't going to risk my ambivalent sexuality on Buddy's professed love for me, sober or drunk, no matter which came first.