The last time I saw him, he was dying, in a room at Christ Hospital in Jersey City…He was lying there, shrunken, wheezing, his eyes wide and bulging with fear and surprise, and I couldn’t help but think of something I’d stumbled upon one night by the lake at a summer camp in the Adirondacks — a frog in the gaping jaws of a snake, its eyes wide and bulging, as it was inexorably drawn into the abyss by the snake’s peristalsis. And my mom said to my grandfather…and I don’t even know why I was privy to this, an interloper to such intimacy…she said to him, “Dad, we’ve had such wonderful times together…You can let go now…You don’t have to fight so hard.” And I thought it was the most magnificent, the bravest thing I’d ever seen her do. And you know what a magnificent, brave person I think she is. But I also thought, why do we have to wait until we’re literally dying, until we’re already in the jaws of the serpent, for some loving, benevolent person to say to us, “You can stop fighting so hard. It’s okay. Let go”? And this “letting go” is one of the things we (the Imaginary Intern and I) mean by Gone with the Mind.
By this time — and it almost seemed as if years had passed since he told me the story about his wife picking out that birthday card for him — the guy at the bar and I had had so much to drink that we were arm in arm, singing…alternating between a child’s piping soprano and a grandfather’s imposing baritone—
Do you want to live off the grid…like a yid, in Madrid?
Let’s not…Let’s not and say we did.
Would you like to eat squid, in a pyramid…with Billy the Kid?
Let’s not…Let’s not and say we did.
When I was a little boy, I was so sensitive that the sound of beautiful music — like “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys or “I’m Telling You Now” by Freddie and the Dreamers or “Game of Love” by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders — would make me physically ill. During one of the summers that I went to that camp up in the Adirondacks — I must have been about ten — we took a little day trip to Lake George. I’ll never forget being in a gift shop up there, one of those touristy places that sells all sorts of goofy trinkets and T-shirts and stuff…and that song “Red Rubber Ball” by the Cyrkle came on the radio…and when it got to that part “The roller-coaster ride we took is nearly at an end / I bought my ticket with my tears, that’s all I’m gonna spend,” I just lost it…I’d been missing my parents terribly, the kids in my bunk had been picking on me quite a bit, and they’d nicknamed me Tweezers which, to this day, I don’t understand…and the “we” in that line about the roller-coaster ride, I, of course, took to mean me and my mom…in other words, that the beautiful, sanctified time with my mom was over, and I also interpreted that to betoken the mortality of my existence as a child, and I just couldn’t bear that thought…I still feel as if almost everything I do is a kind of desperate, irredentist maneuver to recover that lost territory from oblivion, to recuperate that Eden, that once-upon-a-time…and I sort of slumped to the floor of the gift shop in tears, and I remember vividly the cloying, almost suffocating aroma of taffy and candy-coated nuts, and my weird, freckle-faced, perverted counselor from Alabama coming over to console me.
From the very first day of summer camp…from the very minute I stepped off that bus…this guy began trying to cultivate a “special” relationship with me…primarily by constantly taking me aside and, very confidentially, feeding me some piece of racist and prurient misinformation including the assertion that black people had larger sex organs than white people. I wasn’t even entirely sure what a sexual organ actually was at the time. He said he had a photograph which proved it, would I like to see it? And I said, Okay, sure. And this is going to be hard for you to believe, but it’s true, I fucking swear on the life of my mother…He showed me the photograph of the African man with the elephantiasis of the testicles, and he told me all black men had balls this size. And for a number of years after that, I’d look, y’know, I’d try to check, which got me into a lot of trouble…staring at black men’s crotches and wondering how they managed to somehow fit their colossal, wheelbarrow-worthy balls into their pants, thinking perhaps it was somehow akin to the way a Rastafarian might fit his enormous trove of dreadlocks into his crocheted cap…And as soon as I got home from camp that particular summer, I immediately went over to my grandparents’ house at 1904 Hudson Boulevard and immediately rushed over to the set of encyclopedias on the bookshelf, took down the E volume, flipping the pages in an agitated panic to the entry for elephantiasis, because I’d completely convinced myself that this creepy counselor (whose name I’ve repressed) had somehow snuck into my grandparents’ house, clipped out the photo of the guy with his balls in the wheelbarrow, and snuck out again…a real-life version of someone creeping into a crypt, crapping, and creeping out again. But, of course, the photo was still there…the page, at least, unmolested.
When the Imaginary Intern said, “I’m worried about you,” I felt like saying to him, I’m worried about you. There were times, as I said, when he’d mumble ominous things to me and just…just sulk, y’know? He was kind of like a precocious child, but a child nonetheless. Well…let me put it this way: he was like a precocious child who had turned into a morbid adolescent…well, a reclusive adolescent with morbid compulsions (it’s almost impossible obviously to describe the Imaginary Intern without describing myself).
One time he got this eerie look on his face, as if he were holding a flashlight under his chin, and he said in this heavy Japanese accent, “I am the ghost of your dead sister.” And then he switched to this sort of posh Indian accent. “You realize, don’t you, that the only part of your life that the autobiography actually represents is the time that elapsed as you wrote it…the time with me…your autobiography is actually a biography of me.”
“Why do you think I’m obsessed with this idea of giving the world an alphabet-soup enema?” (This was our code language for wanting to be a writer.)
After a very long, Viennese pause, he said, “Why do you think you are?”
And I said, “I don’t know…Prolonged exposure to radiation from violent events in deep space?”
When he’d say things to me like “I’m the ghost of your dead sister,” I didn’t take it all that seriously. I think he was just trying to seem more badass than he really was. I mean, it’s more impressive, more exciting, “cooler” I suppose, to say “I’m the ghost of your dead sister” than “I’m an imaginary entity conjured up from cracks in bathroom tile.” You know what I mean? I get that. It did occur to me sometimes that he was less a coproducer, less a collaborator on the autobiography and more a product or a by-product of the autobiography, almost like (and I’d never say this to him)…almost like some sort of teratoma which flourishes in the favorable nutrient medium of childhood retrospection. Nonetheless, I hated seeing him sulk, hated feeling that he was dissatisfied in any way…
I said to him once, “You’re an Imaginary Intern, you know…you’re not an Imaginary Indentured Slave. You’re free to leave whenever you like. I just want you to be happy.”