Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

I enter a common area where someone has left a nearly finished quilt. Blue and red squares of fabric sewn together in a groovy mosaic. It reminds me of my mother, and the quilt she made me out of scraps of fabric in high school. Without thinking I gather it in my arms and book into the hall. It’s about now that I hear Ian yelling my name. Billeeeeee, c’mon, Billeeeee. Occasionally I hear him bark Jake’s name. Jake. We gotta split. Jake, c’mon. I head back to the hall. Suddenly we all run into one another, and as we do, I see girls coming out of their rooms, shouting. We race for the exit. Someone — one of us? one of the girls? — pulls the fire alarm and almost immediately we hear a siren. The car is parked up behind the bank, and we run through the side parking lot of the dorms and up through the backyard of someone’s house. Ian is in full combat mode and pushes us down behind a hedge and barks in a whisper for us to Stay the fuck quiet.

And so we do. Police sirens, fire engines, and the fire alarm sound through the town while blue and red lights streak around us. It’s now between three and four in the morning and the campus and the surrounding neighborhood are awake. Lights flicker on in the nearby dorms and houses, people pull curtains aside and lean their heads out to see what is going on. We stay there for at least an hour and finally, when things seem to quiet down, we sneak over to Ian’s car and drive back to the house. Brooks is there and has already been called by everyone we know who heard Ian screaming our names.

As we walk up to the front door, Brooks looks at me in horror and says, What the fuck is that? I look down and am embarrassed to realize that I have been clutching the nearly finished quilt the whole time. I’m so nervous the cops are going to show up any minute that I stuff it into a black garbage bag and shove it under the empty house next door.

We stay up that night, get high, worry, and wait for the phone call from school, which comes, and a day later we are thrown out. Jake never comes back. Ian and I plan to go to UC Boulder together the following fall. Brooks moves into a house with friends in town and finishes the semester.

That spring I go down to Bedford, New York, a few times to visit Ian. His mother moved there from New Orleans when she divorced Ian’s father. I’m landscaping with a friend at home, and he’s working in a sporting goods store in White Plains. His mother is often away and his brother Sam is in the eighth grade and generally around. Usually Ian scores coke from a friend in Rye and we smoke pot and throw a Frisbee in the afternoon, and at night do lines, drink good beer, and play caps — a game where two people sit on either side of a room and throw beer caps at empty cups placed between their legs until their thumbs bleed from pressing too hard against the serrated metal edges.

One weekend in Bedford we drink so much Guinness and smoke so much weed that by the time the lines come out I’ve already vomited. We stay up all of Saturday and most of Sunday night and on Monday I am supposed to meet Miho, my family’s former Japanese exchange student, in Manhattan. She’s in town for the day, and my mother has asked and I’ve agreed to take her around.

Monday at noon seems a lifetime away as we blare Dylan and do line after line on the breakfast table in Ian’s kitchen. We run out around five o’clock Monday morning, take sleeping pills with a few more beers, and head to bed. I’m in a guest room, and at eight o’clock I wake up and suddenly feel wrong. It takes a minute or two to realize that not only have I peed and shit the bed but vomited all over myself. Ian’s mother is coming home that day. My head is stinging, and I panic that Ian will find out. I creep from the bed, take off my soiled underwear and T-shirt, and go to the bathroom to rinse the more substantial mess off. I take a shower and then, sheet by sheet, pillow case by pillow case, dismantle the bed and put my clothes on from the night before, which reek of pot and are covered in beer stains. I flip the now-stained mattress, gather up the soiled underwear, T-shirt, and linens, and tiptoe as gently as possible out into the hall, down the stairs, and into the basement, where for some reason I know there is a washer and dryer. I empty the load that’s in the washing machine, put it in a basket, and replace it with the horrible load.

Every button I push, cleaning product I open, and door I shut sounds like a rifle shot, and I’m convinced Ian will rumble down the stairs and bellow his trademark What are you doooing? Ian could load that phrase with an empire of disgust and contempt. This is a guy who loved Bob Dylan, thought every other musician was a fraud, couldn’t stand the state of Maryland, any fat girl or woman, and most everything else that wasn’t from Louisiana. I am his friend, but it generally feels like that fragile status is only one wrong band or shitted bed away from being revoked.

I don’t want to make any more noise on the stairs, so I sit down there while the clothes wash and dry. Eventually they dry, and by this time it’s nearly eleven. I make the bed, gather my things, and call a taxi. I wake Ian up to say good-bye and he scrunches his face and says, Jeeeesus, Billy, you look like shit.

This is the last time I see Ian. He won’t get into Boulder. I will, but my father will insist that I go back to Maryland and face the wreckage there, which I do. Brooks and I will be roommates until I graduate, and Jake will go back to Baltimore, where he will — and I suspect still does — bartend and play guitar.

I arrive at Rockefeller Center over an hour late for Miho. My clothes reek and the black Aspen cap on my head — one of Ian’s, one I wore nearly every day then — is covered with lint and detritus of all kinds from the night before. There is bile rising up at the back of my throat, and I have already thrown up twice on the train.

Miho looks annoyed and impeccable. She has on a yellow Chanel-like suit, red pumps, and a blouse that is so white I can’t face it without squinting. She is nineteen but looks like a seasoned executive or a newscaster well into her thirties. She eyes me warily and asks if I am okay. I tell her, Sort of, and ask where she wants to go. I should have known: Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany, Cartier, Bergdorf, Bonwit Teller, Gucci. We spend the day in places where the security guards keep a close eye on me. It is one of the longest days of my life, and I pop into several delis along the way for aspirin and water.

The city seems like an animated cartoon that I have entered through some great cosmic accident. The security guards are the only ones who notice me: to all others I’m invisible. The ragged shorts, the Aztec cloth belt, the Snowbird T-shirt, and the Aspen cap (neither are places I’d been) are a uniform for another world altogether and not one I’m even comfortable in. People seem so sure of themselves, so securely in their lives as they march up and down Fifth and Madison avenues. Some don’t look that much older than me, but they seem carved from matter and shaped by forces I can’t even imagine. I will remember them later, often, and they will seem as the city does: golden, magical, daunting.

I don’t return to New York for another three years. This is after college, and I’m with my girlfriend Marie, who is nine years older than I am. She sets up an informational meeting with a friend of hers, a book editor at a publishing company — one of the few I’m aware of because it is the house named on the title pages of the Salinger and Dickinson books I’ve read and reread. I resist and she insists that I at least explore book publishing, which she seems to think is where I belong. I play along a little with her fantasy, but it’s as if I were five or six, talking to the big kids at the town beach about diving off the high dive: fun to pretend, impossible to do.