It's My Birthday!

A story of how I didn't die

Creative commons/Wikimedia

It was like that scene in West Side Story, if Tony were played by a doughy, round-faced Midwestern manboy who drank 40s and recited Larry Levis poems from memory. I saw A. across the room at the first party I went to in graduate school, in a bungalow along the railroad tracks in an Arizonan college town where we were studying—if you could call it that—to be writers.  

Or at least, it was like that for me. He didn’t notice me until I marched up to him and announced that we’d be going home together. He lifted one eyebrow and curled his thin mouth, which sent an electric current through my toes. His eyes were kind and warm inside an otherwise bewildered face. “Okay,” he said. And I said, “Let’s go then.”

I was 29, the oldest person in the MFA program. I had a smart, charming, employed, creative, kind, and much younger boyfriend back home in New York City. When I’d left a week before, we’d come to a vague understanding, billed as “We’ll see what happens.” If one of us met someone else, we’d officially part. But that official parting hadn’t happened yet, so A. and I went to my little guest house in the back of a nondescript ranch house on a wide suburban street, surrounded by fig trees that didn’t belong in that clime, and rolled around until we were afire with unfulfilled desire. “I’ve never wanted to have sex this much in my life,” he told me. Then he left.

His best friend C. and some other poets lived in that bungalow along the railroad tracks. C. was azure-eyed and raven-haired, with crooked teeth and a mischievous smile. Rumor had it he’d grown up on an Indian reservation in South Dakota, though his skin was pale. A. was with him and the other poets almost every night, drinking beside the backyard fire as the freight train winnowed by. They were like poet hobos, luxuriating in the romance of their simulation of poverty.

Soon I was there most nights, too. I played the ukulele and we sang Hank Williams songs and got intoxicated, by drugs and booze and song and the sentences we scribbled in our notebooks, certain they were brilliant. I was there to learn to write a novel, and could hardly understand a word of either of their poems, but somehow, I knew they were good.

C. and A. were always laughing, always reading poems aloud, often drunk. There was a competitiveness between them, some alluring and mysterious sour spark that made them seem a dangerous pair. They often made jokes about their love affair, and I wondered if there was something physical there that they could not name. They loved the same music that I did—Townes Van Zandt, Elvis Costello—and I liked hanging out with them both, the bantering and the learning and the playing with words that I had left my other life — the steady boyfriend and the work in kids’ TV — for. I’d spent most of my teens and twenties battling the demons of depression and suicidal desires, but there in Arizona, with the drunken poets, I felt ecstatic, invincible, full of purpose and possibility.

I almost never saw the other drunken poets without A., and A. and I only saw each other alone late at night, no planning. Never a date. Only a phone call, his gravelly voice asking casually if I wanted to come over, as if we didn’t know what would unfold. It left me in a permanent state of longing, a cat always in heat.

Once we were together, he was deliberately, achingly slow. He removed one garment of mine at a time, drawing out these late-night sessions for hours, his searing eye contact as arousing as everything else. Though I had lived a life of debilitating corporeal shame, I was not embarrassed of my body with him. I was on anti-anxiety medication that gave me a sense of power or pride. The boyfriend back home and I parted even though A. was not my new boyfriend. I wanted him to love me, but he never opened the door further from the crack, ensuring that I’d be permanently peering in, begging to be let inside.

Every once in a while, I hung out with C. alone. Something hung in the air between us, but he seemed both out of my league and less alluring than A. His interesting backstory, talent and searing good looks made him the program’s favorite poet, and he walked the halls of the English building with a hint of swagger, but I preferred A.’s slight hunch, his humility.

One night, C. came to my apartment, one of four tiny places in a low-slung building with a slab of dirt and parched cacti in the yard, a family of gray tabby stray cats prowling the street. We sat outside and talked and laughed, and as he got up to leave, he pressed me against my car and kissed me, hard. I understood that I had no official allegiance to A., but I had done something wrong. Or maybe, I had gotten caught up in their story somehow, the story of their crooked, collaborative friendship. I had no idea what A. did on the nights he wasn’t with me, but I was certain he wasn’t kissing any of my good friends in the program. Maybe it felt a little bit good to do the wrong thing, taking a tiny bit of power back. Or maybe I thought I could leap from A. to C., hoping that finally someone would catch me.

I was about to turn 30. My place was tiny, so I asked if I could throw a party at the drunken poets’ bungalow, and they said yes, just show up the next weekend with the people and the booze. When C. came back a few nights later, I understood he was there to sleep with me. He came inside and we did it, not with joy but resignation. C. may have heard from A. about what it was like between the two of us, but it was not like that with him. I was shy and shamed and it was awkward and awful and at the end of it, I knew everything was ruined. I knew that A. would shut even that tiny crack of door fully shut. One of the lesser drunken poets sent me an email that I had invited too many people to the party, and they canceled it. C. and I never spoke again.

Then I was alone. The medication stopped working, and the ecstatic feelings, that I realized then had become mania, mutated back into suicidal depression. I could not face that I’d turned this corner to see the flat, gray, permanent nothingness of my aloneness in front of me, which I assumed I’d spend the rest of my life traversing. On the precipice of 30 and alone and getting a useless degree at a third (fourth?)-rate university and the source of my inspiration had evaporated and alone and alone and alone and I didn’t want to be alive anymore. To be 30 and alone was to have failed.

My dear friend Trista flew into town from Los Angeles. My ex-boyfriend, who, I realized then, had been the greatest boyfriend in the world, sent me a gift certificate for a massage at a local spa, and on my birthday, Trista came with me. I sobbed on the massage table, rivers of snot and tears pooling at the masseur’s feet. I didn’t want to kill myself. I wanted never to have been born.

I went to a Supercuts in a strip mall in suburban Phoenix to have my head shaved, both for the ritualistic renewal and to see if it would cure my dandruff (it did). It announced to everyone else in the program that I was, in some fundamental way, Not Okay. That night, Trista and I got cheeseburgers at In-N-Out Burger and watched a Julian Fellowes film, because burgers, art movies and friends were worth living for. She kept me alive.

The next semester, A. started arriving at department functions with a fiercely beautiful undergrad who was, I heard from friends, super talented and incredibly cool. She, like C., had azure eyes and jet-black hair; he was dating the female version of his best friend. I saw what it was like when he opened the door all the way, his arm draped around her shoulder, his meaty paw at her waist. She had him all to herself.

I left the program at the end of that semester, a year early. By that time, I was mostly broken with depression. I went home, humiliated and alone, but with a degree and an agent and a publishing contract for my first novel.

After it was published, I read at a reading series on the Lower East Side and ended up becoming friendly with the host, who told me she knew someone I might like. We met, and eventually we married and had a family. My book barely sold a single copy, but if I hadn’t gone out to the desert and ruined my life to write it, I would not have what I do now: a life worth living every single day.

A little while after I met my now-husband, I heard an update about the poets. A.’s girlfriend had announced one day that she was leaving him—for C. He and the woman ran off and got married. I understood then that C. had to take everything A. had. There wasn’t much either of them had wanted from me. C. had only come to my apartment to sleep with me as his source of energy, which came from competing with and defeating his best friend. I wished that I understood it more, that I could make some kind of novelistic art out of that twisted relationship, but I didn’t.

Still, I felt that, on some level, I had come out the unwitting winner in their competition. Ever since that night of my thirtieth birthday, twenty years ago today, I have done the same thing on my birthday: cheeseburgers and an art movie with friends, celebrating not only that I didn’t die, but that I don’t want to.

Today, I think about how little I wanted to live twenty years ago, how scared I was that my aching aloneness would never end, that that Arizonan college town amid the death spiral suburban sprawl was the last stop on the railroad tracks. It has taken me decades to learn that so many annoying clichés are such because they are true—this too shall pass being the most reliable of them.

I am still insecure and immature, but I am hoping to achieve the state that I’ve heard so many women over fifty arrive at, known as “I Don’t Give a Fuck.” Right now, at this moment, my family is in a rare state of okay-ness. Partially covid-positive, sure, and with my victory trip to Arizona to canceled, but okay. Amid the pandemic, the barely-operational public schools, the reduced income, the gender culture wars, the parental pressures, the warming planet—right this moment, we are blessed with the great gift of muddling through, because okay is the new great. And I know that this too, even the good stuff, shall pass. But for now, I’m so glad I made it through that terrible night, on which I had placed far too much import and symbolism, to the great gift of the rest of my life.