Sewerside

      When I was young, I heard that my cousin Ronnie was committed to the sewerside. 

      Loved working there maybe or was forced to, I figured.  Like Ed Norton on the Honeymooners.  That is really all I ever knew about him.  Much later I found out that I had misunderstood and that what he had done was take his own life.

     In most religions, killing yourself breaks a whole bunch of rules; I wouldn't know about all that.  But I do know that no one in the family seemed to understand it.  A great mystery, no one could get the how and why someone would do such a thing.

      But I did, even then.

      At that age I had not read Dylan Thomas but I agreed with him anyway: that it might be nice to be dead for a change.

      I have lived with murmurs of sewerside for a long time, have often thought of it; even found myself trapped in that familiar corner, staring at that window in my bedroom like an escape hatch or the front of that screaming subway train as a ride out of the unworkable here and now.

      I would love to say that I never did it due to a profound reverence for life deeper than my deepest despair but that would be a lie.  More likely I never did it thanks to the same thing that had me staring down the building or the train in the first place...a paralyzing fear of the future.

      You could call this depression I suppose, but in a Jewish family this is like saying you have a liver.  In fact, for me, it was more melodramatic than that.  Any little thing could trigger it.  Like backing up into that stupid car and thinking that my drive was gone forever.  Or reading those vile, horrible things J said about me and wondering if she knew me better than I did.  A stormy glance, a stinging jab, a rotten letter, anything and sometimes nothing much at all.

      I presume it has something to do with an innate talent for misery; the sense that good things are fragile but bad ones everlasting...and that anything you have is one more thing that can be taken away from you.  An insufferable sense, to be precise, of suffering as some kind of flair.  It is crazy to think so but then it seems that anyone who thinks about suicide enough comes to the conclusion that it is worth thinking about.  Sophocles thought it balanced sin; Aeschulus said that it led to wisdom.  For Camus it clarified our choices.  And then there was Siddharta for whom it was the nub of life itself.

Nub.  That’s a good word. 

      Yet in all this time, I have never quite been sure if this was desperation or just poetic overindulgence on my part.  Like a dream of tuberculosis those artists must have had back then.  In a way, I began to think that this was all some kind of literary hoax I was pulling on myself, this swooning after nothing as a kind of mad madness madly maddened.  You see what I mean?  An excuse to use words as flails. 

      To wit: one time after backing away from the window, I wrote down that professors have studies; artists have studios; businessmen have offices.  Thieves have cells and judges have chambers.  But suicides have the sky.  What kind of desperato writes all that down?  And in any case, rewriting it now, I do not even know what it means.  Sometimes I could feel myself trying to be nutsy enough to take the next step, but always pulling back as a kind of retreat from hyperbole.

      That same night – according to my notes – I made a list of things to eat: crow, my hat, shit, my words.  But I went to bed hungry anyway.

Hah.

      I read somewhere that there were four main types of suicide: Escapist, to avoid grief; Aggressive, to make others guilty; Oblative, to go beyond dumb life; and Lucid, to solve a problem.  To which list I might add Comical – as a punch line to a too long joke – but this may only be funny to me and perhaps not even to me either.

      I do not know what Cousin Ronnie was going through just before he took the plunge.  Maybe nothing like any of this.  Maybe he was jilted or juiced or just a schmuck who bungled a fake attempt.  I have no idea.

      Not anything like me, of course, who has taken the time to really think the whole thing through.