At Home With a Ghost - 58

(Those who are coming to this serialized story for the first time, you can read the complete opus to date by clicking here.)


Harry's ghost requested it. I refused. I fought it. In the end I wrote it: the story of two musicians trying to write one song, groping desperately through a fog of drugs and alcohol. By contrast, creating the script about them took no effort, took no time at all, and I had a bewildering amount of fun. This was so unusual, in my long experience as a screenwriter, that I had to wonder, was it really I who had written it?

What does it really mean when we writers say that something "wrote itself"? It has happened to most of us at least once, unpredictably, and it's a wicked ride. All of a sudden the work gushes out; riding the giant surge of inspiration, we're barely able to type fast enough, forgetting to eat, sleep or pee. The exhausted writer will say afterward, in a happy daze, "I don't know where that came from."

Writers crave this mysterious and violent visitation, which feels like being mauled by your muse. But you can't order up a delivery if you don't know where it comes from.

Thus we are drawn to the treacherous lure of ju-ju, the magic substances and talismans that bargain with the brain to synthetically recreate that ride. It's like hiring a hooker or buying an inflatable doll when your true object of desire is out of town. We pretend she's our muse, an artificial version of what we're seeking but that has been known to get the job done. You tell yourself the trick will work - until one day, it doesn't.

The menu of paid companions is long and diverse, because selecting a writer's helper from the catalog is a very personal choice. There are the hallucinogens, the opiates, the stimulants, everything from absinthe to Adderall. Complications may include dizziness, shortness of breath, sudden rage, loss of equilibrium, cardiac arrest, kidney failure, schizophrenia, suicidal thoughts and, in some cases, death - but hey. It's for the work.

In the previous chapter I described Harry Nilsson and John Lennon trawling Palm Springs for mind-altering materials, so that they could get to work on some music. The search absorbed so much time and energy that the writing never even began. I was no different; I too believed that my best work only manifested if I was artificially plugged into an exalted state. Like Harry and John, I needed to override the pain.

I refer to the painful difficulty of writing itself.

Yet when I was a child discovering how much I loved to write, it was easy, all play and no work. After all, why would any kid choose to do something painful? Or ask where the ideas came from? They simply tumbled into your imagination, and the fun began. You felt good about yourself when you made something from nothing; and if you were a child who generally didn’t feel good about herself, you became willingly addicted to the pleasures of creating.

So when did it become painful?

I decided to be a writer when I was 14. My boyfriend, who was five years older, dropped out of Princeton to write a novel. He wrote every day, or tried. It had never occurred to me that I could write as a profession, until I observed the simplicity of his choice: first decide you’ll do it, and then just do it. Even on days you don’t want to. This is your work.

I started practicing right away. That was when anxiety first crept into what was once playtime, now called work. As the professional I imagined myself to be, I was no longer courting only the praise of parents and teachers, whose support I could always count on, but also exposing myself to the judgment of strangers. I felt the pain of expectations – my own, and those of nameless numberless readers to come.

I needed help to quiet the jitters. I noticed my boyfriend drank beer and bourbon, and smoked cigarettes. It lodged in my mind that this, too, was professional. I didn’t much like smoking but I manned up and inhaled. It more often made me want to take a shit than write. Alcohol was better. Although my parents didn’t drink, there were a few liqueurs like Dubonnet in the sideboard for guests. The trouble with alcohol was, after the first giddy page zipped off the typewriter carriage, the mind started to leak fuel. Incoherence was only a half a page away. Still, that first page was a winner, and I could start all over the next day, with Marlboros and some horrible aperitif helping me to nail page two.

Once I’d polished off all the guest liquor, and was busted for it, I turned to caffeine. By this time I was writing my first novelette, and wildly menstruating. Midol became my boughten friend. Since I was pretty sensitive to drugs, a single Midol tablet was the equivalent of a cup of strong coffee. My mother dutifully purchased Midol for me at the pharmacy, while my manuscript pages piled up: sixty pages, and no cramps.

To double my supply, I exaggerated the quantity of my periods. As far as Mom knew, my menses were titanic. In my high school senior year, she took me to a gynecologist, who prescribed Daprisal. Oh, the rapture of Daprisal: dexedrine and aspirin, for gals on the rag, Baby’s first speedball. In college, taking Daprisal and staying up all night to write a paper in a single session was like a sacred ritual. I presented my mind on drugs as a kind of burnt offering to the muse. In return I could reasonably expect to finish the paper by dawn, at twice the page length required and in passionate prose that had deteriorated to blabber by the time I came to write my conclusion.

Halfway through my junior year at Sarah Lawrence, I followed my boyfriend’s example of dropping out of college to write fiction. While holding down a job at the Village Voice, I wrote in my spare time. By then, pot, mescaline and acid were also available for muse-chasing, but proved too unpredictable. I might just as easily wind up on the roof, cackling at the stars, as hunched over the typewriter. Marijuana tore me from my desk and sent me out for ice cream. Daprisal, alas, was discontinued (as was my boyfriend).

As I became a true professional hired to write screenplays, I sought anything with an upward tilt. Uppers brought not only energy but grandeur: words came intercut with imagined applause, awards accepted, revenges accomplished, certain select people eating crow, and approval from both parents plus God. When I took uppers, I didn’t merely feel good about myself; I thought I was a flaming genius. Still, I was too tense with ambition to tolerate straight amphetamines; they made me hypomanic. I needed that yin/yang upper/downer speedball combination, like cocaine with wine, a treasured formula when I could afford it. This mixture saw me through a novel and its script adaptation. Whenever inspiration flagged, I’d stumble up the Pacific Coast Highway to the bar at Moonshadows, still dressed in my nightgown, which I wore with boots, hoping people would think it was a granny dress but really not caring if they didn’t. There I would chug a legal speedball: Irish coffee, the Tao of caffeine and bad whiskey with Reddi-Wip and a cherry.

I always wrote at night, but had to change my habits when I got married and had a baby. Then my work window shrank to four hours in the daytime. Drugs and wine were inappropriate for breakfast, especially while I was breastfeeding, since I’d be transferring my jones to my daughter via the nipple. I settled for a weak juju of Darjeeling with milk, and redoubled my entreaties to whatever was passing by – deity, angel, ghost, muse – to help me meet studio deadlines. I asked for easy inspiration to do work in which I took small pleasure, except when I got the checks.

By the time Harry Nilsson’s ghost appeared in 1994 I was down to green tea, Chupa Chup lollipops, and anti-depressants: not much in the way of mind-altering drugs, but I still believed you had to pay some kind of fee, anything, to receive brilliant ideas from wherever they came from. Hell, once I’d even slaughtered a sheep to that end (see Chapter 26 and 27) Writing is hard, I would tell anyone aspiring to push words. And, I should have added, expensive. Because ever since adolescence I’d been treating my muse as coin-operated.

That changed on the day I sat down at my desk, early one morning before I’d even made tea or unwrapped a lollipop, and began writing a script I had no intention of writing. I was idly noodling around, dreading another day of unemployment. It was so baffling not to have a job, when for years I’d had my pick of offers. Why now, at my peak? Just write anything, I told myself. See what happens. I opened a blank script document and typed “EXT. – DESERT – DAY”. And so began the saga of Harry and John Lennon and May Pang and me on our lost weekend in Palm Springs.

Five hours later found me still writing. I could have gone on, except it was time to make dinner for my family. As I fried fish, I pondered what had just happened. The tidal swell of inspiration, the hot rush and rapids of ideas, the obsessive focus to the exclusion of all else, the feeling of being wrung dry afterwards – in short, the headlong ride that writers crave – none of that had occurred.

I had been calm, patient, entirely free of anxiety. The flow of words, scenes, imagery was gentle and constant. The characters had been simply there. It was as natural as stepping into a shower already running.

And every day afterward was the same: the water waiting for me, generous, regenerating, until the script was done.

I thought back to the vision I’d been shown in my meditation trance a few months before: an image of creation as a ladle pouring forth sheer radiance, a shower I had merely to step into whenever I felt ready to join the flux. It had no location. It was just there.

Muses and ghosts, grandfathers and jinns might act as sherpas to the source, but I was astonished to realize I didn’t need them anymore to find the shimmering falls. I had only to drop my towel and get naked before wading in, and that small action was called…trust.

Trust was the one and true juju, my offering to that effulgence of spirit: if I trusted that inspiration was eternally there, a gracious unending flow, then creation would grant me my portion.

It didn’t matter that the script, called Karma Kamikazes, was never produced (although it remains one of my favorites). It appeared heaven intended that no paid employment would come my way until I completed this one project, a divinely scheduled lesson wherein I would learn, finally, how to write.

From that time on, I have written in this way. I know where the words come from, and I trust that the water is always on. I’m back in playtime, in the fun.

Further, it was a kind of goodbye to all the spooky that had gone before. At long last, I had outgrown my need for the dead and disembodied, a need that had occupied my life since my first contact with my deceased grandfather.

The day after the script was finished, I got a call offering a job. The producer claimed to have been unable to reach me for weeks, unaware she was using a wrong number. Never mind, I said. Even if you’d had the right one, I was unreachable.

The universe had hardly ceased doling out lessons, though. The hardest one seized me high in the Andes, on the second day of a 2005 hike up the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. What lay before me was Dead Woman’s Pass, and another goodbye.

(To be continued.)