Winter Field Period

Mike’s house had a long, narrow hallway. On one end was a small kitchen. I guess you’d call it a galley kitchen. Off to the side was a narrow area with the dining table. You could just squeeze in maybe four people.

This was in Glen Rock, New Jersey, around 1978. That’s where I spent the Winter Field Period, this thing Bard College had. The idea was that we were supposed to be doing something purposeful on our own. So we went there for the holidays and stayed through most of January.

The hallway, narrow like on a ship, had all this nautical stuff on the walls—a sextant, a compass, an antique barometer. Useful things when one has lost sight of land. Off the hallway were the bedrooms: his father’s at the far end, and three more small bedrooms off to the side. Tight quarters for Mike, his younger brother David, and his older brother Patrick. Pat was apparently in New York City studying to be a Jesuit priest.

I don’t remember what we were supposed to achieve during our Winter Field Period. Some of the time we babysat young David. There was a party or two, and one pathetic attempt to play a gig at a local folk venue. But mostly we read our books (Naked Lunch and a lot of Beat poets for him, Journey to the End of the Night and a smattering of Brautigan for me), and we wrote in our journals.

And I did an awful lot of sleeping, falling in and out of dreams.

There was a narrow staircase across from Mike’s room that led down to the basement. It was the largest room in the house, with wood paneling and one small window up near the ceiling. That’s where we smoked a lot of weed, away from the ears and eyes of his father.

Mike’s father was Irish Catholic. An ex–Navy man. He had the look of someone who had once been in charge and had not been relieved of duty. He moved through the house as if it were still his watch. I didn’t see much of him except at the dinner table, where the four of us sat with our knees nearly touching.

Other than that, he was something of a ghostly presence, walking the passageway or sitting with a bottle in the galley. Some nights I could hear him in there on the phone.

“You bastard,” he shouted. “You ugly bastard, mick. You still remember it wrong. Talking through your ass.”

At first I didn’t know what to make of it. Was he angry? Was this an altercation? But this would happen every few nights. He’d be in there with the phone and his whiskey. I could hear the thrum of his voice, though I couldn’t make out the conversation. Then it would come—a staccato burst of insults followed by bellows of laughter.

It took a while, but I figured out this was some sort of carrier frequency. He wasn’t the kind to show his feelings. He never expressed affection for Mike either, but when we went out he would always say, “Love you,” and Mike would return the salute—“Love you”—with the same clipped tone. This was his way. The semaphore of fatherly love.

I heard all this from Pat’s room, where I did a lot of sleeping and dreaming. The room was orange and pink. There was a bed, a chest of drawers, a closet, two windows with white metal blinds, and a small round table beside the bed.

On the wall above the bed—though not over the headboard, more off to the side—was a wooden cross. It was squat and wide, with Jesus in a white robe, arms outstretched, haloed, looking comfortable. There were no nails through the hands or feet. No stigmata. That alone was strange.

Stranger still was the light switch.

It had a full figure of Jesus molded in relief, and right around the waist was the switch itself. The plate was made of translucent yellow plastic with a small light inside it that came on when the switch was off. But here’s the kicker: it had been wired backward, so down was off and up was on. In the dark I could see that little glow inside it.

A small, steady erection glowing in the darkness.

January settled in. The days were short and the house stayed inside itself. Light came through the blinds in thin stripes. We were supposed to be making progress on something, some project with a name and a deadline. I don’t remember it now, and I don’t think I was very aware of it then. You’re standing in your socks in somebody else’s hallway and it’s gone.

Some mornings we babysat David. I can’t remember what he looked like, so in my mind he is a cherub eating cereal, not quite watching the small black-and-white TV we left on for him. I would watch him from the doorway with only a vague sense of the tableau before me.

Once or twice we tried to behave like people on a schedule. We took our instruments out. We talked about a local place where you could play. We went. We played. It was over. The room didn’t change around us. Afterwards we walked back through the cold, hands in our pockets.

Time and again we’d be back in the basement smoking. We took our hits from a small wood pipe and breathed the smoke into a damp, rolled-up hand towel to hide the smell. Sometimes we read to each other from our journals. Mike’s were dense and jagged, full of borrowed voices—men in rooms, deals being made, bodies treated like equipment, drugs with names that sounded invented. I responded with the enthusiasm I knew he craved, and said nothing about how little of it stayed with me.

I read to him some of my dream entries. Like this one:

Wednesday dream: I’m going down the stairs to the basement. I have to brace myself to stay upright, as the stairs seem to move drunkenly beneath my feet. When I arrive at the bottom, it’s not the basement—it’s a beach. I walk along it for a while, passing someone standing off in the dunes with his back to me. He has long blond hair and is wearing a long white robe. I can see that it’s open in front and that he’s urinating in the sand. He looks over his shoulder and winks at me. I hurry along.

I come to a girl sitting in the sand with a green plastic pail between her legs and a blue plastic shovel in her hand. She looks up as I approach and tells me I had better get to work. That’s when I notice a small desk and chair beside her. I sit and see my notebook on the table. I look back at her. She is diligently pouring sand from the blue shovel into the green pail. Blue into green, I think. What could that mean? When it is full she lifts it, but it has no bottom. She pushes the little mound of sand away, puts the bucket back in place, and starts over.

She looks up at me again, squinting. “Is the project finished?” she asks.

I look down at the notebook, which is now open to a page. I look to see what is written there but it’s just streaks of ink bleeding into the damp paper. I’m holding a cheap plastic pen that is leaking ink onto my finger. A wave washes over my feet and I wake up to the sound of it receding over the sand.

I still have the journal from that trip. It doesn’t help much with remembering what happened. It’s mostly dreams, daydreams, and pages where the handwriting loosens and tilts, the result of writing late and drunk. I kept trying to describe things anyway, to catch the shape of the house, the way it held us, how there was a hollow at the center of everything. I kept circling it, letting my words fall over the edge only to disappear soundlessly.

The days passed by this way. Sand poured into a bottomless pail.

I made plans to visit Vicki in Binghamton. She and her roommate Laura picked me up from Mike’s house. Mike and I had been arguing about content and technique. It was a good, hot argument, the kind that feels productive while it’s happening, but it soon became tiresome. I was relieved when there was a knock at the door.

I changed into clean dungarees, threw a few shirts, my tape recorder, and some tapes into my backpack. I forgot my journal and the book I’d been reading. We were on the road almost immediately, out to Route 80 and through the Gap, heading north.

SUNY Binghamton wasn’t sunny at all. Everything seemed gray. My doldrums had followed me there. One night Vicki and I got a bit too stoned. I talked too much, saying things that came out wrong. Not cruel, just off. I wasn’t tired of her, exactly. I wanted to feel more. Something I couldn’t articulate. Instead I was just rude.

In the morning I made some lame excuses about needing my books and my journal and took a bus back to Jersey.

Two buses, actually. I called Mike when I got to Manhattan. No one answered. I called again when I got dropped off in Ridgewood. Still no answer. So I called our friend Dave, who drove me back to Mike’s house.

I went inside to find his father alone in the kitchen, a whiskey glass in his hand, staring out through the blinds. He barely grunted when I said hello and shrugged when I asked if Mike was around. So I retreated back to Pat’s room.

Mike finally showed up well past midnight. His eyes were red and he was a bit drunk. He was furious. “I can’t believe this,” he said. “He read my fucking journal. He went into my room.” Mike and I shared our journals with each other, so I knew he had an entry about sleeping with Allen Ginsberg. Had his father seen that part? Yes indeed. Not that he knew who Allen Ginsberg was, but obviously it all hit like a storm.

The next few days were deafeningly quiet, almost like after a monstrous explosion, when sound hasn’t come back yet.

We only had a few more days to go, but we had to get out of there. Mike was afraid his father would tell Patrick about the journal. We figured he would sooner or later, and decided it would be better if Patrick heard it from Mike first. So we went to Pat’s apartment on the Upper West Side. He was attending Fordham, preparing for the priesthood. This was going to be interesting.

We found the address: a walk-up on West 134th Street. We dragged our bags up three flights of stairs and knocked on the door.

Patrick opened the door with his roommate beside him. They were both neatly dressed, in that careful, put-together way. The apartment itself was neat and clean and well laid out, larger than I expected, especially for the city. I chalked it up to adjacency to godliness.

They showed us around. We walked from room to room as they talked about ordinary things—what food they were preparing, whether we wanted red or white wine with dinner, the provenance of the quilted bedspread. That was when I noticed there was only one bedroom. I registered it the way you register a missing step on a staircase. I sensed it meant something, but the thought evaporated as we continued into the living room.

Mike and I sat on the couch, and Patrick and his roommate took matching chairs facing us. Patrick suggested not waiting until dinner for some wine, and the roommate fetched some glasses and a bottle of red. There was a brief interlude of silence as we started in on the wine. Patrick seemed as jittery as Mike.

There was a small pause after that. Patrick leaned forward slightly. “I should go first,” he said.

At the same time Mike said, “No, I should.”

They both stopped. Patrick laughed, a little too fast. Mike smiled, then didn’t. Patrick lifted his glass, set it down again without drinking. Mike shifted on the couch.

“I really think I should,” Patrick said. “No,” Mike said. “It’s kind of a big thing I need to get off my chest.”

After another awkward moment, Patrick gestured for Mike to go ahead.

Mike took a deep breath, straightened his back, and came right out with it. “Patrick, I’m gay.”

There was another stunned silence. Mike and I held our breath, watching their expressions. But the shock there was short-lived. They turned toward each other and burst out laughing.

We stayed a few days after that, quietly enjoying ourselves. It was clear that Patrick was not going to enter the priesthood. Where he and his partner would end up wasn’t clear yet. Nor was how, or when, they would tell the old man.

Years later, what I remember is how much I saw without knowing what I was seeing. Rooms, objects, gestures—the hallway, the light switch, the single bedroom—waiting patiently for me to catch up.

I still have the journal. The dreams read now like notes left for someone else. Sand pouring, ink running, containers without bottoms. I kept describing the shape of things as they slipped away. Even Mikey is gone now.

Understanding arrived slowly, the way sound returns after a blast—not as an answer, but as a condition. By then the rooms were empty, and whatever had passed through them was already gone.