Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Long Past Stopping: A Memoir
Long Past Stopping: A Memoir
Long Past Stopping: A Memoir
Ebook469 pages8 hours

Long Past Stopping: A Memoir

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

Oran Canfield—son of self-help guru and Chicken Soup for the Soul creator Jack Canfield—tells his surreal story of growing up in Long Past Stopping. In this remarkable memoir, writing with a wry and cutting edge, Canfield relates tales of a childhood in flux—being buffeted about among family friends, relatives, rebels, and born-again circus clowns, in an anarchist private school, communes, and libertarian enclaves—and of a young adulthood spent among the ruins of heroin addiction. Long Past Stopping is Oran Canfield’s often hilariously harrowing tale of surviving life in the strange lane.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateSep 15, 2009
ISBN9780061937217
Long Past Stopping: A Memoir
Author

Oran Canfield

Oran Canfield was raised in Massachusetts, Philadelphia, New Mexico, Arizona, and the San Francisco Bay Area. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works as a musician and freelance art handler.

Related to Long Past Stopping

Related ebooks

Personal Memoirs For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for Long Past Stopping

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

38 ratings10 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Oran Canfield's memoirs of his childhood and drug addiction are difficult to read. His life story is so bizarre and chaotic it makes me realize just how sheltered a life I've led.It begins with his father, Jack Canfield of Chicken Soup for the soul fame, abandoning him and his mother when he was a year old and she was pregnant with his brother Kyle. He was often abandoned in his childhood, as there were plenty of periods his mother couldn't take care of him. He was left with anyone who could take him for a while, and it was mostly a pretty bizarre collection of situations. He and Kyle were left for a while at a school that believed in letting the children decide what to do with no imposed structure. Mostly they seemed to jump on a trampoline.Oran was so shy it was beyond painful and into terrifying. He learned to juggle in large part because it gave him something to focus on so he didn't have to talk to anyone. He was part of a circus for a while, but it was mostly an unpleasant experience of endless physical work and pain.The book alternates chapters between stoires from his childhood and the story of his addiction to heroin and other drugs. Given the life he had led, and his severe levels of anxiety and self-loathing, drug addiction seems an unavoidable part of his life. He went to rahab several times, but it never took. It is not until the very end of the book that he tries an experimental drug that works to end his addiction.Am I glad I read this book? I think so. I have my own addiction issues that his help illustrate. It certainly shows me a life very different from my own in outward from, though. Usually I welcome that, but Oran's life is just so painful it does not make for a pleasant read, at least not until the very end.Disclaimer: I received this book free from Amazon Vine in return for a review.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Although I found Canfield's book amusing and entertaining, I also found it difficult to follow. Several chapters seemed similar to another and made me feel as though he was trying to entertain us rather than inform us. I hope that his intention was to inform people about how much his abandonment issues and chaotic childhood contributed to his addiction, Instead, I felt he was solely trying to write a funny book. So while the combination would have been fine, I felt the effort to be comicalwas a bit misplaced in this clearly sad story. Did he make the best of the life his dysfunctional parents forced on him? Yes. But his behavior also tramautized others in his life who wanted to help him find peace. I found the chapters a bit monotonous though some of them were funny.I would recommend this book to readers that will be entertained by his unconventional life without being overly shocked by his abandonment by his later famous father.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is the memoir of Oran Canfield, who was born in the mid-1970's to two psychologists who ran a holistic health center. His father leaves the family and becomes mainstream Christian motivational speaker Jack Canfield, while his mother tries to find the Oran and his brother Kyle the environment they need to be happy and creative. This includes time training Oran for a juggling career and tenure at an experimental private school. During his 20's, Oran attends art school but then finds that he is happier and more successful as a drummer with local groups in San Francisco. As he gets involved with a heroin addiction, however, his music-scene friends, his family, his estranged father, and his many rehab counselors all try to help him get back to his earlier self.Canfield interleaves chapters from his childhood with those from his 20's, structuring it very tightly so that there are little echoes across adjacent chapters. Although there is a lot that happens, it feels like it moves very quickly because of its tight structure. This is a warm and moving book about the many people who love Oran in their many different ways. It is a sad and frustrating book about the confused thought processes and physical challenges of quitting an addictive drug. It is also an eye-opening book about the 1990's musical counterculture and the ways in which "misfit" people finally find friendship and something satisfying and productive to do by finding each other.//Received May 2010 for Early Reviewers program
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Tried three times to get into it. Just couldn't get past the first two chapters. Had a hard time keeping my attention...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Long Past Stopping is a memoir about Oran Canfield's almost unbelievable life. It often reads like fiction. The chapters alternate between stories of his unconventional and often difficult childhood and his struggles with addiction and rehab in his adult years. Though the topics covered are quite heavy, Canfield's sense of humor keeps things lighter for the reader. This book is definitely a page turner.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I have to admit that I was first attracted to this book because it was written by the son of the Chicken Soup for the Soul guy. A memoir about growing up with chicken-soup dad was bound to be interesting. Upon reading, I found that there's actually very little about being a Canfield kid in here. That's because Jack Canfield, who peddles heartwarming claptrap to millions, abandoned his wife and sons when the children were infants (one was still in utero). Oran Canfield grew up by and large without his father; his childhood was by all accounts unconventional. So, what exactly is this book? It's a mix: half a memoir of addiction, and half a reminiscence of a very unconventional childhood. Told in alternating chapters between childhood and adulthood, we learn of Oran's descent into heroin and cocaine addiction, and how he grew up in the circus, hippie communes, and experimental schools. As a memoir of addiction Canfield does a good job illustrating the hopelessness that surrounds addiction, and the significant difficulties involved in overcoming them. I did find the back and forth of the book quite distracting. Just as I would get engaged in one thread of the narrative it would shift to something completely different. Overall this memoir kept me engaged, and certainly made me feel for both the child and adult Oran.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Oran Canfield was raised by his mother, a therapist with unconventional views on child rearing, nutrition and almost everything else. Oran and his brother Kyle were frequently left by their mother at quirky boarding schools, or with virtual strangers, or with the circus. His father is a self-help guru, the creator of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books, who abandoned Oran when he was a year old (and his mother was pregnant with Kyle). Jack Canfield seemed unable to provide any guidance or support to Oran.It is not surprising that Oran had difficulty relating to people, a lot of creativity, and an addictive personality. This is Oran's story of his childhood and his struggle as a young adult with heroin addiction.Oran Canfield is a good story teller, and has portrayed his struggles with honesty and, at times, with humour.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "Long Past Stopping" finally showed up in my mailbox on Thursday 13 August, the day before i left for vacation. Cool, i thought, something to read on the airplane. I've never read a memoir before, so i can't compare Canfield's structure with others, but i found his book involving and intriguing.No question, Oran Canfield had a very unusual childhood, described as the chapters alternate between those days and his adult life. His unusual experiences as a young boy, coupled with his own personality, clearly shaped his inability to connect with people, an alienation that makes him uncomfortable. He was abandoned at age one by his father, a famous author and psychotherapist, who occasionally gives him money and shallow insincere pep-talks on rare face-to-face meetings, rather than any genuine human connection. As he was raised by his mother, who has very odd ideas about food, clothing, and education, which often included fostering him out, sometimes to complete strangers, Oran frequently finds himself without much structure, guidance, or emotional support.As a young adult, he is a wannabe artist/musician. Eventually he feels his persistent discomfort with others, as well as with his own feelings, is alleviated by heroin. He goes from someone with creative potential to a compulsive junkie who manipulates strangers and steals from his friends. Even when he is very strung-out on heroin, he is unwilling to admit he's an addict, continuing through many unsuccessful attempts to break the habit.Throughout, Canfield is an engaging story teller. I found frequent laughs in his wry story of bizarre youth and addicted adulthood. I sympathized with him as a child but was frustrated by him as a young man who cannot see what he is doing to himself.Eventually he triumphs over his heroin addiction and alcoholism, but the ending of the book simply peters out. I wanted to know a bit more about Oran in recovery and found the weak conclusion unsatisfactory. I hope he has some more books in him, because he certainly has skill as a writer.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book is fast-paced and a quick read, but it is by no means a light and breezy book. The wit used does not disguise its serious subject matter, drug addiction. True to addict behavior, Oran is completely self-centered and self-absorbed. His autobiographical account of life through 26 and sobriety is well-written and thought-provoking. The chapters alternate between his childhood and his early 20s when he bounced in and out of rehab. His childhood had 2 constants: juggling and inconsistency. His parents, both successful therapists, basically abandoned him. While there are humorous parts, the childhood chapters are sad, as Oran is dumped off and discarded from school to school and location to location. The chapters discussing his drug usage and rehabs are compelling and haunting. They do not glorify an addict’s life, as some other books about alcoholism and drug addiction do. Those chapters are raw and real and recount a very few highs and the numerous and overwhelming lows of his experiences. Canfield is not a likable character (for lack of a better description), but I needed to find out what happened and how he survived his struggle.I liked the book, but it is not for everyone. Readers should be ready to settle in for some incredibly heartbreaking moments. It’s definitely a story of survival, but there are times I questioned if and how he would make it and whether or not I thought he should make it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not always pleasant, but I couldn't put it down.Canfield bares all (if there's more I'm not sure I want to know) in this devastating recovery memoir/cautionary tale.I never did trust all those Chicken Soup books and the author's scoop on their creator (the author's father) just reinforces my suspicion....It sounded so interesting, that when I didn't snag an Early Reviewers copy, I put it on my Amazon wish list. And then I happened upon an advance copy at the ALA conference and started reading it while I was on the road home. (no, I wasn't driving) If real life hadn't interfered, I would have finished it in 24 hours. So I guess you could call it riveting.

Book preview

Long Past Stopping - Oran Canfield

prologue

In which our speaker begins to weave his yarn in a cellar full of strangers

UM…MY NAME’S ORAN, and…" I begin to say into a microphone, before cringing at the sound of my own voice and then drawing a complete blank. My whole day has been spent obsessing on what I’m going to say, and even though I’ve done this a few times, I’m still deathly afraid of speaking in front of people. My mind is jumping all over the place from my childhood, to my drug-using period, to the last seven years in which I’ve managed to stay clean, and back again.

It’s a hell of a lot to think about, and I have no idea where to start, until someone in the front jars me out of it by whispering, Start at the beginning.

one

In which our protagonist sets foot in this world, survives a nuclear meltdown, and learns the secrets of juggling from a traveling group of hippies

AS FAR AS I KNEW, life started when I was four. I don’t have any memories from before that. It was as if I had walked into the theater halfway through the movie and had to pay extraspecial attention to figure out was going on.

There were three of us in a big house somewhere near Philadelphia, and there was a pool and a kitchen drawer full of sugar. The woman with the long dark braids wearing Guatemalan clothes was my mom, and the kid crawling around on all fours in a Guatemalan skirt was my brother, Kyle. There was another character who hadn’t yet made an appearance, but his name came up almost daily. His name was Jack, and from everything I’d heard he was the lying, cheating, conniving, manipulative, inhuman son of a bitch who had left my mom when I was one and she was six months pregnant with Kyle. I didn’t know what kind of clothes Jack wore, but in my imagination he had red skin and horns.

I watched and I listened, and Mom filled me in on the parts I had missed.

I WAS BORN AT HOME in a small town in western Massachusetts, where my parents had recently opened up a holistic health center. Present at the birth were my mother, my father, a midwife, and ten Buddhist monks from the monastery up the road. The monks were there to chant throughout my delivery.

Oh, it was so beautiful, Oran. Really just an amazing experience, Mom told me when I was old enough to understand such things. You were big, though. It took you seventy-two hours to come out and I had to go straight to the hospital afterward. When I got back, we ate the placenta.

You what? I asked.

Of course, honey. That’s where all the nutrients are stored for the breast milk. Humans are the only mammals that don’t eat the placenta after they give birth.

I took her word for it.

We’ve become so detached from nature we’re losing our natural instincts. I mean, can you believe that people have their babies in hospitals, under all those fluorescent lights, and the first thing they do is spank you to make you cry? Then they take you away from your mother and they cut off your foreskin? It’s barbaric. No way was I going to put you through that. Seriously, the very first thing they do is hit you and then cut off part of your penis. The way she put it, it did sound like a pretty crappy reception.

Did you cook it? I asked about the placenta.

Oh, yeah. We fried it up with some butter. It’s kind of like steak.

Then what?

Well, you know, we were extremely busy running this business and taking care of a staff of twenty-five people, so all day you were passed around among the fifty or so people at The Center. Everyone loved you.

In between leading primal or scream therapy sessions, Mom would breast-feed me, or Jack would walk around with me strapped to his chest reading poems he had written. But for the most part, a community of weird therapists, early self-help freaks, and drug-experimenting hippies took care of me.

It was really an incredible time, she said with a distant look in her eyes.

A YEAR AFTER I WAS BORN, when Mom was pregnant with Kyle, Jack hooked up with the masseuse employed at The Center. He decided that my mom’s birthday was as good a day as any to tell her he was in love with someone else and she should probably pack up and leave.

I didn’t know what to do, Mom told me. After the divorce, we got in the camper and I just started driving. I didn’t know where to go, so we just drove around the country.

Kyle was born in a hotel in Mexico, delivered by the town doctor. Mom decided that it might be nice to cook up the placenta with some onions and bell peppers this time. She invited Jack to come down and see his son, but she never got a response. She went back to the States just long enough to take care of Kyle’s paperwork and was told by a pediatrician that he was most likely both retarded and a midget, but that it would be a few years before either was noticeable.

Devastated, aimless, and alone with two kids, she decided to continue south to Guatemala, because of a rumor that the Nestlé Corporation was trying to get the Indians to quit breast-feeding and use their scientifically engineered baby formula instead. We moved to an area called Panajachel on a huge lake surrounded by seven villages, each with its own language. With only gutter water to mix with the formula, these Guatemalan babies were dying from all manner of disease. Mom rented a house near a big lake and began her one-woman crusade against Nestlé.

In the beginning, she walked around from village to village wearing a Guatemalan dress and combat boots with Kyle strapped to her chest and me riding on her back. After a catastrophic earthquake that killed twelve thousand people, we were left at home while she went around educating the natives on the benefits of breast-feeding and the evils of American corporations.

The earthquake was unbelievable, she said. You were fine, but Kyle almost died. He was only a few months old and his lungs couldn’t handle all the dust in the air. When we got to the hospital, they tried to turn us away because they were so full, but when they saw Kyle, they agreed to take him in. We slept in the hall for three days. When we got back home, the house had been taken over by a bunch of Indian families who had lost their huts in the earthquake. It worked out, though, because they were more than happy to take care of you guys while I went out to work.

I loved listening to these adventure stories, and I wished I could remember being there because they sounded like fun.

AFTER TWO YEARS of living in Mexico and Central America, Mom was ready to come back to the States and start her own therapy practice in Philadelphia. For the first few months we lived in a house that belonged to some friends of hers while she looked for a place to start her new therapy center. While we were there I managed to eat an entire drawer full of sugar. Mom thought I liked to climb on top of bookshelves and run around in circles because I was a curious and active kid. The truth was that I was high on the refined sugar that I ate by the handful. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. When the high wore off, I’d find a closet or a cupboard to hide in.

We moved from there to an old three-story mansion she bought in the suburbs. In a matter of months her new center was teeming with clients. She liked the house because it was made of stone, and it was a stone house that had saved our lives in Guatemala when the earthquake hit.

The new house had tons of new closets and cupboards to explore. Mom would find me and ask, Ory, what are you doing under the sink? or Hey, Oran, what’s going on down there? I’d poke my head out from under a bed, and she would just kind of laugh at me. If I really didn’t want to be found, I would go into a closet and cover my whole body with a pile of clothes, but this would usually instigate some sort of panic and I would have to get out of the closet without being seen and find another hiding place where Mom could find me so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about where I’d been. She was confused when she found me in a spot she had already checked.

Seriously, Oran. Is there something going on in there I should know about? Mom would ask.

I didn’t have an answer for her.

I LIKED MY SPOT ON THE STAIRS, where I could watch Mom’s clients come and go. It was right between the first floor and the landing. It faced the front door and gave me a view of the dining room on the right and the entrance to the conference room on the left. I found that I could just hide out inside of my head instead of the closet or cupboard. For the most part none of Mom’s clients ever seemed to notice me there; it was almost as good as hiding in a cupboard.

That’s where I was sitting when Jack walked in. When Mom told me he would be coming, I expected to see a monster with fangs and horns, but Jack looked just like everyone else who came to the house: khaki pants, tucked-in blue shirt, short hair.

We weren’t big huggers around that house, but Jack came up with his arms open and, not knowing what to do, I mimicked him and found myself on the receiving end of his uncomfortably long embrace.

Oran? I’m Jack, your father.

Hi was all I could think of to say.

You’re getting so big I hardly recognized you. What are you, five years old now?

Four, I answered.

Where’s Oran?

I’m Oran.

I mean Kyle…your brother.

Outside, I answered.

I was content to stay on the stairs while Jack went out to find Kyle, but Mom’s face made it clear that I was to follow them outside.

Hey, Oran. I hardly recognized you, you’re so big, he said to Kyle. Kyle glanced at him for a second before going back to playing with a pile of pinecones he’d collected.

That’s Kyle, Mom said.

I mean Kyle. Hey, Kyle, how old are you now? he asked, walking over to him. Kyle wasn’t doing too much talking yet and seemed not to hear him.

He’s three, I answered for him.

How can he be three if you’re four? he asked, visibly confused. Truth be told, I was confused about that, too. Some of the time I was two years older.

They’re eighteen months apart. Remember, Jack, how I wanted them to be close in age so they could be friends?

Jack nodded, but it didn’t look as if he remembered much of anything about us. I was surprised that Mom was being so nice to him considering all the time she spent ranting and raving about what an evil monster he was. Can you imagine leaving your wife when she’s six months pregnant and taking care of a one-year-old? she often asked me. I always shook my head. I really thought he was different. What a fool I was. They’re all the same. He used to read me these love poems—he wrote wonderful poems, by the way. Then on my birthday he took me to the lake house, and that’s when he told me he was sleeping with that blond masseuse, and I cried and told him we could work it out, and he said it was over, that he was in love with her. Can you believe it? Again I shook my head.

That’s about all I knew about this guy, and I was relieved when he left and I got to go back to my stairs.

A MONTH LATER THERE was a meltdown at a nuclear power plant a hundred miles away, and, not knowing the extent of the damage, Mom wanted to get Kyle and me out of the area. Mom alternated between screaming and crying on her office phone. These are your sons, Jack! Well, of course the government is going to say that, but no one really knows how bad it is. That’s why you need to come down and get your kids out of here now! She was still sniffling when she came out to help me pack up my stuff. So, Ory, Jack has agreed to take you, and Grandma Ada is coming to get Kyle.

Why can’t I go with Grandma? I asked.

Because you and Kyle need to start having a relationship with your father. I just thought maybe I was wrong about him and he would come get you guys, but he’s too busy to take care of his own kids, she said, choking up. I had to plead with him just to get him to take you! Can you believe it? I shook my head.

ONE OF JACK’S FRIENDS picked me up from the train station, and a few days later Jack came and took me to the therapeutic center in Massachusetts that he and my mom had started. He was the main guy there, but beyond that I didn’t have any idea what exactly he did. A bunch of adults would go into a room with him and emerge a few hours later. That part was no different from what my mom did in Philadelphia, and I felt lucky that, with two parents who fixed other people, I would never have any problems of my own.

I got to see the room I was born in, and the lake house where he told Mom it was over, and just as Mom had described it, Jack was so busy that I was passed around to the staff, who watched me for a few days until the experts declared that it was safe to return to Pennsylvania.

WHEN I GOT BACK, MOM was concerned that sitting on the stairs all day wasn’t good for me, so she hired a piano teacher, sent me to school, and tried to expose me to the arts, science, and nature. I couldn’t understand what the problem was. Everything seemed fine to me, but she thought it was bad that I didn’t talk to anyone and claimed that she had never seen me smile. She was right for the most part, but what was so bad about not smiling? Plus it wasn’t totally true. Mom was a busy woman, running her new center, appearing on television, doing panel discussions, playing music. She was so busy she had to hire someone to take care of us. I smiled when Laurel, our Jamaican housekeeper, would sneak Kyle and me into her room to let us watch TV and give us ice cream. Laurel would have been fired in a second if Mom found out she had given us something containing processed sugar, not to mention let us watch TV, so we kept it a secret.

Laurel worked her ass off for us, but she did get a couple of nights a week to go spend with her family. This was kind of traumatic for Kyle and me, because it meant no TV and ice cream after Mom left for the night to go play piano at one of her jam sessions. Bob, the psychoanalyst who rented a room upstairs, was always around, but we didn’t like him too much. We would make the best of it by going through the stacks of records Mom would bring back from her trips to New York. She called it rap music, and Kyle and I could listen to these records for hours. We would memorize the lyrics and make up dance routines.

Like almost everything else that seemed normal to us, such as carob, tofu, macrobiotics, Rolfing, homeopathy, and Gestalt therapy, I didn’t know anyone who had ever heard of rap music. Laurel hated it, though, and would go into one of her fits if she heard us listening to it. "Lord have mercy on my soul. Turn off dat racket, boys. I don’t know what has become of black folks in dis country. Dey call dat music? And what you white boys listenin’ to dis for? Your mother is a crazy woman, going to New York and carrying on the way she do. Lord have mercy on your souls is more like it. I’m going to pray for you boys. It’s too late for your mother. Prayer won’t help dat woman. I don’t know what will." We listened to Laurel in the same way we listened to our rap albums. It didn’t matter what she was saying, we were mesmerized by the rhythm of her voice, her accent, and her way with words.

Sometimes if we were lucky, Mom would bring us along to her jam sessions in the heart of West Philly. She may not have been able to see me smile from her place behind the piano, but I couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear seeing her on the stage. At the bar, she was no longer Dr. Canfield, the accomplished doctor of psychology who was engaged in a one-woman battle against the Man. At the bar they called her the doctor, and when we walked in everybody knew it. I don’t think any white folks had ever set foot in that place; at least I had never seen one, but you couldn’t imagine a warmer reception. Everyone seemed to know and like Mom. All the other musicians rotated from song to song, but Mom stayed up there for three hours at a time. She always asked someone, usually whoever was closest to the door, to keep an eye on us, but once the novelty of trying to talk to the two socially retarded white kids wore off, we would never see that person again. It didn’t matter much; we just stood on top of the table, watching Mom until we got tired and climbed back down to the booth. At 2:00 a.m. or so she would wake us up and say good-bye to everyone, and we would get in the Peugeot and drive home.

IN AN EFFORT TO EXPOSE Kyle and me to some of the stranger opportunities for American kids, Mom sent us off to a circus-arts camp in New York the summer I turned seven years old. The camp was run by ’60s icon Wavy Gravy and his partner, Surya, a Sufi clown.

The circus camp offered classes in tightrope walking, juggling, acrobatics, and magic. Since Wavy didn’t really have any skills, circus or otherwise, he played a one-stringed instrument he called a unitar and taught a class called Space Eaters, which could be loosely described as an acting class for the other kids like himself who didn’t possess, or have any interest in acquiring, the skills for the more technical circus arts.

I’m not sure what it was that drew me to juggling. I was equally bad at everything I tried to do, but aside from tightrope walking, which was limited in how far you could take it, juggling had less of a performance aspect than most of the other classes. True, you did have to do it front of people, but the clowns had to act goofy, and the magicians had to talk to the audience, and juggling seemed like less work than acrobatics and trapeze. It was kind of like staring into space all day.

Most kids either learned to juggle in a couple of days or just gave up. Three days into it, I could barely throw one ball back and forth, but I had figured out that if I spent the whole day at least trying, no one would talk to me. Occasionally one of the teachers, Lance or Surya, would offer a few words of advice, but for the most part it was the first thing I had found that made not talking to anyone socially acceptable. So I kept at it despite not being very good.

By the time my mom came back for the big performance, I had been at it for a week and could keep three balls in the air for a minute or so. I had never performed in front of an audience before, and just the thought of standing in front of a crowd of people made me want to vomit. How the hell could I focus on keeping those balls in the air, when I couldn’t even keep my knees from shaking? Unable to think of a way out of it, I walked onto the stage, and for almost one minute I forgot about the audience because it was all I could do to focus on the juggling. And despite myself, I actually smiled.

I DIDN’T KNOW AT THE time that a smile could so drastically change the course of my life. If I had known, I wouldn’t have done it, but to judge by my mom’s reaction, it was as if Christ himself had come down from the heavens. Actually, Christ coming down would have just pissed her off. It was as if the whole world had just been enlightened by the smile of her seven-year-old son. As a result of this smile, I rather suddenly found myself with an identity, a social network—if you could call it that—and a reason for my existence.

On our return to Philly, Mom lost no time researching the juggling scene, finding out where they met, and who was the best teacher in the city. At that point, I didn’t need any outside motivation. As soon as I realized that I could isolate myself in the backyard with my juggling balls, and my new unicycle, without anyone bothering me, I was there. And I stayed there for the next year. Nonetheless, Mom found the best juggler in Philadelphia, and I would go over to his place a couple of times a week for lessons. Fu was a very short Vietnamese immigrant, not much taller than myself, who could juggle seven balls. At the time, there were only four or five people in the world who were capable of that, and all of them seemed to be pretty successful, but Fu didn’t use his powers for fame or money. Like me, he just juggled in his backyard. My lessons, however, seemed to have very little to do with juggling. They pretty much consisted of listening to long monologues in his broken English about flow, balance, becoming one with the objects I was juggling, and tuning into the natural order of things. What I actually learned was to tune out and nod my head as if I were listening (which I came to find was also a very useful skill).

Much to my mom’s relief, I began talking to people at the juggling meets in Franklin Square, and even made a friend my own age at school. Life was moving along, and aside from the minor things like not being allowed to watch TV or eat anything with sugar, dairy, wheat, chocolate, or meat in it; or having to wait twenty minutes after we ate to drink a glass of water; or not getting our immunizations; or not seeing any Western doctors (even when a car hit me at fifty miles per hour right across the street from the Children’s Hospital); or not being allowed to play competitive sports; or finally, being the bastard children of the great white devil himself, who was not a red man with horns like I had thought, but actually a white guy somewhere up in Massachusetts who was posing as a motivational speaker—aside from these small things, there was, in retrospect, a sense of normalcy that we would never experience again.

two

In which a young man is introduced to the pleasures of a dark substance, through the benevolence of a learned professor

I WAS A TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD art-school dropout living in a storefront at Sixteenth and Mission streets in San Francisco when I met Lawrence. He came in to my life like Satan in one of those little Christian comic books that the Mexican women would hand out on the street, the ones in which you get in a fight with your parents about not going to church and suddenly Satan, disguised as a rock star, shows up at the door with a crack pipe and says, See, your parents don’t understand you, but I do… Only instead of a crack pipe (that would come later), Lawrence appeared with a piece of tinfoil, a drinking straw, and a dirty brown lump of heroin.

My friend Jake, whom I had gone to school with at the San Francisco Art Institute, had found the storefront about six months earlier, and there were six of us—mostly artists and musicians—living there. Not knowing anything about construction, we were still in the process of building our rooms, learning as we went along. The place was close to six thousand square feet including the basement, which was filled with two feet of water when we moved in. Our goal was to eventually create a multipurpose space, where we could put on art shows and music events and have room to work on our own projects as well.

As time passed, my initial excitement about the storefront was diminishing, and depression, which I had experienced in waves for as long as I could remember, was creeping back.

I tried to fight it off by keeping busy. Aside from continuing to work on the space to make it livable, I had taken on an internship with a piano restorer and was playing in my band, Optimist International, plus every Saturday, Eli (my roommate, high school friend, and bandmate) and I ran a music venue out of the large front part of the commercial space we were calling home, featuring experimental music by people who simply had nowhere else to play. We inherited the night from a restaurant in the neighborhood called Radio Valencia, which could no longer justify having three customers on what should have been their busiest night of the week. The owner didn’t care so much about losing money, but that he was losing his employees. No one wanted to work a Saturday night shift only to make fifteen bucks in tips. So he donated fifty chairs and gave us his mailing list.

Everyone who lived at the space was encouraged to use it for public events. Jake, having gotten to a point where his art work was Pure Concept and could no longer be expressed through the making of objects, started granting one-month residencies to his ten-by-fifteen-foot studio, having no use for it anymore. His idea was to give artists some space to work for a month and afterward host a public showing of whatever it was they had made.

It was a good idea, considering that the studio wasn’t being used. The dot-com boom had driven rents so high that it was getting harder to find both work and exhibition space in the city, but aside from coming in to have a look at the room at the beginning of the month, not one person actually used the space to do any work. Instead, these artists would spend their time talking and thinking about what they were going to do, and then they would talk some more. I couldn’t help overhearing some of these conversations, as we still hadn’t built our bedroom walls up to the ceiling yet. I’m not sure what was worse, listening to my friends talk about art or listening to them have sex.

So Jake, listen to this idea, I heard a voice say one morning while I was still lying in bed. It was Erin, Jake’s best friend and the visiting artist that month. I get a suit, and change into it, and then I cut my hair, but I’m smoking cigarettes the whole time. Ha ha…What do you think? Erin loved laughing at his own jokes, 90 percent of which were completely over my head.

Yeah, that could be good, Jake agreed.

You don’t think it’s too much like that piece what’s his name did in Nayland Blake’s class? Erin asked.

Well…I hadn’t thought about that. I guess it does kind of seem like a similar idea on the surface, but the sweat suit he was wearing has a totally different connotation than the symbolism of a business suit.

I don’t know, heh, heh, it is pretty funny…but I’m wondering if it’s too didactic?

Didactic was a word that pissed me off; it was always being thrown around in art school. In fact, you couldn’t have a real conversation about art without it, but I could never remember what it meant.

I guess it depends on what your point is, Jake said. If what you’re trying to say is that we should all give up on art and get jobs, then yeah, I could see how some people might see it as being didactic, but if the statement is that cutting your hair and wearing a suit can be a form of artistic expression, then it could work.

You don’t think people will think I’m making some kind of a statement about Jeff Koons?

Maybe…but is it for or against?

Then Erin started laughing again. I know. What if I was telling jokes the whole time?

Christ, I thought. If they continue doing shit like this, they’re both going to end up wearing a suit and working nine to five, and it’s not going to be so funny. Unable to listen to them anymore, I finally made a move to get out of bed. Erin must have heard my loft creak.

Oh shit, was Oran asleep? he whispered to Jake.

Yeah, but it’s one thirty. What am I supposed to do? Not talk in my own room? He said it loud enough that it was obviously directed at me.

Hey, go ahead and talk, I yelled back, but I just want to let you guys know, you sound like total assholes! I had always hated conceptual art, but since dropping out of school, I had become much more vocal about it. Jake and Erin had heard this from me so many times that they just ignored it.

A month later Erin showed up, cut his hair, put on a suit, smoked a cigarette, and told some jokes. The highlight was when he threw his still-lit cigarette butt into the surprisingly large crowd and it landed in someone’s hair.

The next month our neighbor Izzy, also known as the Sasquatch, got naked and poured champagne all over herself. The month after that, a girl I had never seen before showed up and banged her head against the wall until her forehead was a bloody mess.

I was always judgmental of these projects, but I tried my best to hold my tongue and be supportive if only to offset the fact that every Saturday night my roommates would go straight to their rooms and put on their headphones to avoid the racket coming from our weekly music event in the living room. They were as offended by my musical taste as I was by their art. The truth was that we were both lucky if we got even ten people to show up to one of our functions.

A SIDE FROM JAKE’S residency program, he was also appealing to other artists in the community to come up with ideas for events. One such idea was from a visiting faculty member at the Art Institute who was also a professor at Stanford University. Lawrence, while not exactly famous, had managed to make a name for himself in the art world back in the 1980s. I knew who he was because a couple of friends of mine, including Eli, had been in his films, and I had gone along to the shoots a few times in the past. I never saw a final version of any of these films, but the shoots always involved wearing weird colorful costumes, drinking lots of alcohol, and smoking brown lumps of heroin off of tinfoil with a straw. Since the heroin was technically a movie prop and I was not in the movies, I never got to try it.

I wasn’t really interested in heroin anyway. I had tried it once when I was eighteen, and again a couple of years later when I was in a very short-lived relationship with a heroin addict. It wasn’t bad; it was just that lying around completely immobilized didn’t appeal to me. Granted, I was an art-school dropout, not a Stanford philosophy professor, but I failed to see the concept or artistic value behind Lawrence’s work. In my mind it was nothing more than an excuse to get together with a bunch of people and get fucked up—a theme party with a video camera. Jake, however, was excited that Lawrence wanted to shoot a film there.

He wanted to use the basement, which was flooded again, and still full of rusted, disintegrating metal shelving and other trash from the previous tenants. Because it was built below the water table of the creek that flows through San Francisco’s Mission District, it was always wet. The water would drip out of the crumbling brick walls and seep up through the disintegrating foundation. The sump pump was always breaking down, causing six to twelve inches of stagnant water to accumulate, depending on how quickly we noticed it. Our basement was half a block long and sloped down toward the back, where most of the water came from. I would often ignore the flooding until it got within ten feet of my rehearsal studio, at which point I would take off my shoes and wade barefoot out into the darkness, trying to avoid sharp objects and grope around for the hole we had made for the pump, reaching down, sometimes almost to my shoulder, to free the switching mechanism from whatever it was caught on. This was always followed by a mad dash to the shower. Who knows what the fuck was in that water, but afterward any part of my body that had made contact with it was always covered in this light brown, translucent, oily substance.

When we had first moved in, there was also this white fluffy mold that covered almost everything in the basement. We made an attempt to brush it all off with a broom, but it was back the next day and we quickly gave up. Same with the various types of unidentifiable mushrooms growing out of the walls and cracks in the floor. The basement had a dark vibe, to say the least. Maybe that’s why Lawrence wanted to use it. So after pumping out the water, consolidating the rusted shelving into a pile, and swapping out the one bare 60-watt lightbulb for a 120-watt one, the place was ready to go.

Lawrence arrived and set up a table underneath the lightbulb. Then he laid out a mirror with a razor blade on it, a piece of tinfoil, some pills that I think might have been Valium, a bottle of tequila, six canisters of nitrous oxide, a bong, a couple tabs of acid, a bottle of aspirin, a conductor’s baton, and a colorful pile of little balloons. He began the task of ripping the balloons open, each of which contained a bag of coke and a bag of heroin. After separating the white bags from the brown ones, he emptied a bag of coke onto the mirror and put a lump of brown heroin on the foil. Then he set up his camcorder and waited for people to arrive.

Eventually, maybe twenty people showed up. It was hard to tell because it was so dark. You couldn’t really see anyone unless they were within a few feet of the light, and it was so creepy that no one was really speaking above a whisper. At some point, Lawrence broke the awkward hush by standing under the light and telling us about the piece.

So, this piece is called ‘Composition for Mood Swings.’ When you feel like it, come up to the table, take the baton, and point to whatever you want.

He then walked over to the camera, turned it on, and walked back to the table. Conductor’s baton in hand, he looked straight at the camera and said, Composition for Mood Swings, waving the baton around as if he were conducting an orchestra. Then he just stood there and waited. The first guy to walk up to the table grabbed the baton and pointed to the bottle of tequila and the aspirin. I’d already decided the piece was total bullshit, but as long as I was there, I was going to try something more interesting than that.

I stood by myself in the back corner, drinking a beer, until almost everyone had gone up and ingested the various drugs. When I finally made my way up there, the cocaine looked yellow and sticky, and the last thing I wanted to do was take acid or smoke pot. The only thing that looked at all intriguing was the heroin. I grabbed the baton and pointed to the tinfoil, but there wasn’t much left. Lawrence handed me a straw, set his lighter under the foil, and I inhaled the last of it. Then I headed back to my dark corner and waited for something to happen, but I didn’t notice anything different. I was as anxious and judgmental as ever.

Some more people pointed to a few more drugs, and when only the bottle of aspirin remained, everyone left.

A FEW NIGHTS LATER, Lawrence showed up at the house, which was a bit of a surprise since I was the only one home.

Hey, Lawrence. Jake’s actually at work right now.

Oh, that’s okay, I was just in the neighborhood and thought I would stop by, he said.

Oh, did you leave something here the other night?

No, I just thought I’d come by and see what was going on. Lawrence made me very uncomfortable.

Not much. I was just heading over to the Casanova, I said looking for an escape. The Casanova Lounge was a bar on Valencia Street where Eli bartended. I don’t know how the place stayed in business. The owner seemed to want to draw a very specific crowd of fucked-up artists and musicians, but none of us ever had any money. So we would drink for free until two in the morning and mope about how shitty everything was.

Hey, do you mind if I come in for a minute, and I’ll head over there with you.

Sure, I said, letting him in. I figured he needed to use the bathroom, but as soon as he got in the door, he pulled out a couple of balloons from his pocket and asked me if I wanted any before heading over to the bar. I figured, why not? I didn’t feel anything the other night, and I was still kind of curious.

Sure, I said. Why don’t we go to my room?

Sitting down at my desk, he opened a balloon, unwrapped the cellophane from around the heroin, and broke off a lump of the brown sticky stuff, which he placed on a little piece of foil that came from his back pocket. He then reached behind his ear, producing a three-inch straw that was kind of melted and brown at one end. Being a gentleman, Lawrence handed me the foil and the straw, which I put in my mouth so I could get my own lighter out of my pocket. I ignited the lighter under the foil, and a big cloud of smoke came up before I could even inhale.

"No,

Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1