This morning I woke up feeling like a passenger on The Ship of Fools. This trip's passenger list is made up of people who have written self-published memoirs. No, no romance novels, no porn, no BDSM, no theories on various conspiracies, just memoirs, and just those that the New York publishing world wouldn't touch.
O.K., up here on deck, what are we supposed to do? I suppose mingle. I suppose be civil. I suppose in some cases we could take ourselves seriously, perhaps engage in seminars, round table discussions, or in my case, hide in a corner and cringe, or engage in compulsive eating.
What brought on this conniption fit is that I started reading on Kindle one of Those memoirs, by a former girlfriend, someone who was reluctant to buy my book, wanting a free copy, and who I just don't feel that close to anymore, that I would want to be that generous, seeing as how my goal with my book has been to pay for it's printing.
Her book is fine. She has had a successful career as
model, actress, photographer, and she had remained beautiful, which puts
her in a special category of its own. I hesitate, well, more than hesitate, to critique her fine book, only because I would feel too deeply my own embarrassment about being self-published, which is of course, my problem.
That's not what this is about. It's about having to actually live in, and with, the feeling of failure. Which is as uncomfortable now as it was getting fired from a job at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, by the head librarian, Bernard Karpel, in 1967, after a year of putting books back on the shelves and inserting Kurt Valentine's paper-work into cellophane binders for his archive. I was fired for being "hung-over and stinking of booze all the time." It was a bad feeling, and one I couldn't digest. I felt it for a day or so, and then drank and rationalized it away with Beatnik attitude. Mr. Karpel had been so kind about it; he reiterated that he'd never had to do anything like it, that it hadn't ever occurred to him that he would be faced with such an agonizing chore, and that I was a nice guy and all that, but that it was not possible for me to continue; the dignity of the institution being at stake.
Some of that hollow, low self-esteem empty feeling lurks in my soul, a soul that is for the most part healed, and happy and grateful for a life that allows me to read, and ride horseback, and stroll the countryside like a Lord of the Manor in my old age. It lurks in my soul in the sense that I'm allowed to feel that old feeling of hollowness, helplessness, for what it was, real.
Because reading, (perusing), her book, I was faced with the character that I was when I was 27 years old, as seen by a healthy, sane young woman, seven years my junior, that I was involved with, in fact lived with on and off for a year or more, while I was a dry drunk, on the wagon and using the Marijuana Maintenance Program.
For those in Rio Linda, the M.M. isn't an actual institution but a common hipster "cure" for alcoholism, which makes an alcoholic less prone to dangerous, noisy, and disagreeable behavior, while at the same time allowing him to avoid real, homeostatic reaction to stimuli.
I don't come off too badly in the book, that is up to as far as I've read, but I'm not the main character, after all; she is. The character I play is close enough to the real me to be
quite recognizable. He has a cover-story. He doesn't wear his feeling
of failure on his sleeve, in fact he has those feelings tucked away
somewhat, but he hasn't much strength of character. He is an artist
manque with all of the sad clown appeal of that term.
And I'm not the love interest; it's understood that the real love of her life is out there, always just out of reach, because he is an International Playboy who doesn't have to worry about reaching some measurable degree of socio-economic equanimity, because he has a trust-fund.
My life hasn't been heroic, and it hasn't been a mystery solved, it's been struggle and small successes. The struggles mostly have had to do with self-acceptance. So in some sense, her story as it relates to me really is the story of my life.
