All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found Read Online Free PDF Page A

mother’s devastation revealed itself wordlessly, with an expression of almost complete vacancy in her eyes, as if she’d gone somewhere in her mind from which she would never return. Their estrangement from each other’s experience of grief was too painful for me to contemplate it for more than a moment, so I turned away from them, turned inward—a strategy that became a habit, a habit that became a posture, a posture that solidified into an all-encompassing personality, that of a man shrouded in almost total self-regard.
    The ambiguity I preserved in the story of his death was already on its way to becoming the story of my life. He was my silent partner, my all-purpose excuse, my left-hand man, and depending on my whim I was sometimes calculating, sometimes impulsive, one minute attentive and the next minute aloof, one day hungry for intimacy and the next day desperate for freedom. By remaining enigmatic—by refusing to be any one way or any one thing—I honored him. He would remain forever unfinished, and so would I.

PART TWO

Fax Boy
    M y address was the movie house, downtown Missoula, on the banks of the Clark Fork. The yellow marquee glowed outside my bedroom window, and night after night an early and a late show played through the wall of the balcony across the hall. I read novels till dawn, slept till noon, napped around seven each evening with plugs in my ears to keep the movies muted. I walked the river paths after dark. I lurked in AA meetings in order to hear people talk honestly about terrible things. I drank coffee in one of three coffee shops each afternoon, whiskey in one of five bars most nights. I went months without having a conversation lasting more than three minutes. I swam through time like it was motor oil. I made one promise to myself. I would not buy a gun.
    I took a semester off and returned to New York on borrowed money, my first cash advance on my first credit card. I sublet an apartment in Queens whose occupant, an Italian man in his thirties, was laid up in the hospital with two broken legs. I didn’t ask why.
    I completed my aborted internship at the Nation —a year and a half later than originally planned—for the sum of one hundred bucks a week, a willingly indentured servant at a magazine founded by abolitionists. I spent my days fact-checking articles on how to reinvigorate the labor movement, a staple of Nation reportage whose frequency and desperation of tone increased as union membership declined. During lulls between deadlines I gathered specious research for a contrarian columnist on what he called the hoax of global warming.
    Back in Missoula, I worked on my pool game at Flipper’s, my drinking game at Al’s & Vic’s. One day I received a piece of paper in the mail saying that I’d earned a bachelor’s degree. I couldn’t have begun to tell you how.
    Lacking immediate prospects after graduation, I stayed on in Montana. There was no urgency to make anything of my life, and Missoula was as fine a place as any to hide out from postgrad choices. Besides, the place was too beautiful to leave in summertime, and I couldn’t bear to give up an apartment that cost $180 a month and placed me within easy walking distance of so many quality bars. On summer days fishermen cast their flies upstream from the Higgins Avenue Bridge, a hundred yards from my room above the Wilma, while a bagpiper went through his mournful musical paces, using the bridge abutments as acoustic enhancement. I eked out a living baking bread in the early morning hours alongside a failed novelist who’d mastered the texture of the baguette, though not the art of fiction, during two years in Paris in the 1970s. Afternoons in my apartment, with the windows thrown open to the breeze off the black cottonwoods along the river, I worked halfheartedly on what I hoped would become my own first novel, a doomed imitation of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy that stalled forever at page forty with the impossible scenario