About a year ago, my life started to suck. My wife left me. I lost my apartment. I was smoking too much. I was drinking too much. A carbuncle blossomed on my chin. A tooth fell out. Dogs growled at me on the street. Seagulls routinely shat on my head. Homeless people ducked into doorways at the sight of me. Even inanimate objects seemed eager to get in on the act: curbs rose up to trip me as I crossed the road; money leapt from my pockets rather than have me spend it. To "cheer myself up," I went to Atlantic City and drained my bank account. Destitute and degraded, I sat down beside the boardwalk, put my head in my hands, and wept.
It was perfect.
Maybe I should back up a little. A few months before the A.C. debacle, a New York literary agent contacted me. She’d read an article I’d written about being a problem gambler, and she wanted me to turn it into a full-length memoir. Hooray! All I had to do was write the book, collect the royalties, and clear a space on my shelf for the many awards that would come my way. The only thing was, the article I’d written ended with me kicking the gambling habit once and for all. This, I quickly realized, was a disastrous turn.
When it comes to memoirs, people don’t want to read: "I woke up this morning with a new appreciation for life." They want: "This morning I was rushed to Boston City Hospital, my life hanging by a thread." Memoir readers want heartache, tears, and maybe a little vomit and blood thrown in for good measure. But what could I offer in the way of dissolution? I didn’t have a life-threatening illness. I hadn’t been locked up for a crime I didn’t commit. Hell, these days I didn’t even have an addiction to call my own. Just my luck.
And then, with a flash of irresistible logic, the answer came to me: the only way I’d be able to write my memoir, and thus pull myself out of the slump I was in, would be to keep on slumping. In fact, I’d have to slump bigger and better than ever. Misery would be my ally, failure my friend. I developed a little catch phrase: "Bad for the Life, Good for the Book." I’d go out on creepy blind dates and think, "Bad for the Life!" I’d lose my last $20 on the way to the grocery store and think, "Good for the Book!" I learned to slump with panache, even grace. By the time I sat sobbing on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, I knew my life had clear literary potential.
And things only got better — by which, of course, I mean worse.
When September 11 occurred, I was staying in a friend’s unoccupied condo on Beacon Hill. The place was barren except for a tattered couch, a broken futon, a pile of weights, and a large splodge of what appeared to be double-chunk chocolate-fudge ice cream on the countertop. I would come home at night and chisel at the petrified ice cream and thank God that all I had to work by was a naked bulb. Meanwhile, I would formulate grim, eminently publishable passages in my head: "I rasped my fingernails, blotched brown by the aging fudge, along the arc of the mighty carbuncle."
This was good, but I needed more. When the FBI issued a warning about a possible terrorist attack on Boston, I stayed put in the condo, even though it was located a matter of feet from the State House. I took to standing at the window waiting for dirty bombs to go off. At work, I made a point of handling every item of suspicious mail. I wrote articles calling Osama bin Laden a buffoon. Eventually, I had to settle for a major falling-out with my dad. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it was something.
As 2001 wound down, my wife and I attended our divorce hearing. I was bitterly disappointed. There were no tears, no brouhahas. She didn’t leap up in the courtroom to point the finger of blame: "Bastard!" It was all very calm, even tender. Damn her. Otherwise, things were going swimmingly. One night, I got so drunk at my local bar that they shut me off. Yes! The same night, someone vandalized my bike beyond repair. Woo-hoo! Later, I was jumped by a gang of thugs in the South End. Glory be!
Yet I soon began to see that my plan had a flaw. The thing is, while downward spirals may make for great writing, they don’t make it easy to write. I could wind up penniless and filthy, jabbering angry mantras in the middle of Harvard Square, but this sort of thing can be very time-consuming. I could become suicidal, the final pages of my memoir a gripping depiction of the pills, the bottle of cheap voddy, the cruddy motel room and its sickening roaches. But then what? I couldn’t pick up my Pulitzer if I were dead, now, could I?
Yep, there was no question about it: Bad for the Life was becoming Bad for the Book.
In the end, I never did write that memoir. For a while, I found myself in the odd position of not returning the e-mails of that big-shot agent, knowing full well that most writers would claw their way up the side of a skyscraper to see her. Then the agent stopped e-mailing. I’m a bit disappointed about that, I guess, but I’m also happier than I’ve been in ages. I have a lovely girlfriend now. The carbuncle’s gone. I’ve stopped drinking so much. It’s been weeks, if not months, since a seagull shat on my head. Sometimes, I really do wake up with a new appreciation for life. But you don’t want to read about that.
Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com
