Miss Endorphin Euphoria Talking to the Sun on Fire Island (Part 1)

I’m no Don Juan. I’ve not even loved each of them equally as a Don Juan might. Two have mattered more to me than any: one a shot of dopamine, the other endorphins. One made me feel alive while the other would jolt me into euphoria. I got a tattoo of one and used a second to entice the other. Both were their own reissue of Holly Golightly, intelligent and pretty and so fiercely independent that no doubt neither thinks of me anymore. Miss Dopamine Vitality had crushed a schoolboy me; but Miss Endorphin Euphoria brought me to the brink of something and then threw me over into it. Weaving effortlessly through my mind, I felt her venture across the junctions of my blood-brain barrier more than once.

I was troubled and hassled by her troubles and hassles, more so than she ever was by her own or mine own. I would have handcuffed myself to a tree and thrown the key out of reach had she requested it. Perhaps my willingness to do anything she might want of me planted seeds of uncertainty and spurred on her departure.

I don’t wish I’d had more sex with more women. I’d never wanted to be a Don Juan. Undoubtedly, I’d always choose being fucked over being sad, and I did at times feel as though I were taking short, accelerated steps on the tips of my toes, with knees and hips stiff and trunk angled forward. I felt like the greats must have , like Muhammad Ali or Robin Williams. Though this never lasted, and I would move from festinating back to reading before anything too serious took hold. Modern classics they’re called. Although there’s no point reading Camus, Hemingway, and Capote if no one knows you’re reading Camus, Hemingway, and Capote.

I wanted people to know because a young man in a cafe reading is idyllic, yet if people knew I wanted them to know they would have seen what I was so concerned to hide. With all the sickness, death, turmoil, strife, hatred, jealousy, famine and passion that exists, a personalised experience of depression was, I felt, burdensome and boring for anyone else. This was, then, a hedonic incongruity. I knew not how to prevent others from discovering and revealing my method of coping while satisfying an entirely human desire to have others see me at my most intelligent and brilliant best. Loneliness was the problem and the answer. The problem-answer. My favourite person in the world left, immersion in classics stifled this loss, avoiding meaningful relationships with anyone who remained kept me as I wished to be.

By the time I was twenty-one these thoughts had encompassed all that was me for ten months. My shot of endorphins was gone and with her all that enriched me. Despite the beliefs of Percy Bridgman’s critics, that which encompasses an individual can indeed be brought under a single concept, even another person – someone who had once left a name and number on a desk as an introduction. A soul can be comprised of passion and with thoughts of the actions of another. Their behaviours, whether moral or immoral, infect our soul. Acute withdrawal symptoms yo-yoed between throwing furniture around a bedroom and screaming into a pillow. When my hands hurt I screamed and when my throat hurt I threw. For those ten months, I focused on problem, immersion, and answer.

At a cancer screening lecture, I thought of how much more effective a treatment her voice might be for any clinical population compared to citalopram or clozapine or galantamine. At a funeral, advising mourners that a life can continue to unfold itself after death through sharing and story-telling, I thought of how she might have made each of their faces a strange violet-green colour with pride and envy. Walking across a stage, shaking a hand and catching both feet in a gown, its hood trimmed with mid-grey, red and gold, I thought of how I might have tripped over in Rome and looked up to see her smiling rather than an audience laughing. Loneliness and disgust are surprisingly easy to live with. Both are entirely concerned with you, the individual, the ‘clever-clogs’ whose luck has run out. Both indulge our positive self-image just so risks of clinical diagnoses are held at arm’s length.

Her arms. How have I lived without her arms?

*

I did, during the earliest stages of her absence, consider drastic, physical means of endorphin replenishment. Between drink and drugs and some surf-and-turf rock-and-roll, drugs won out. Endorphins are the endogenous human equivalent of heroin, you know, so heroin it was . Rapid effect onset and a euphoria that could last for hours at a time, all the while relieving physical pain, which, it turns out, can manifest following even mild psychological trauma. I was desperate and unconcerned with how I might acquire something the stuff. Though I was concerned with whether or not a drug of this nature would suit me, I reasoned that if heroin use were to do anything to my image, it’d buff it up bright with a sheen of ruggedness and brutality. My term-time address was part of a council estate which was almost always perfumed with weed, and where there was weed I reasoned there would be people willing to find the substances that lay beyond. In my hometown, certain members of one side of my family had, in a previous life, entered into relationships with people who by this time were imprisoned for attempting to distribute millions of pounds worth of amphetamines and opioids. If family connections failed I could, I thought, just as easily get what I had decided I needed in the northern parts of the city.

I remember sitting canal-side with someone who called himself my friend but who was nothing to me, no more than a mule, and watching them move steadily towards my inner arm with a hypodermic needle in what seemed like slow motion. Instinctively, at least now I’m going to attribute my actions to an instinctive fear of something like HIV or deep vein thrombosis, I slapped the needle away to be lost in some grass somewhere. I felt guilty. Later that week I read in the paper how a young boy had stepped on a needle whilst running barefoot through the same green that mine must have landed in, and although there was no worry of the child contracting anything particularly nasty – I hadn’t used it after all – I had probably forced the boy’s foot into a state of relaxation that it had not asked for. Wasting the mule’s time didn’t weigh heavy on my consciences too much, I doubt he was concerned with anything other than how to increase and increase and heighten and increase his ecstasies.

I guess I learned during those first few months that my desperation and desire for a close approximation of what she had given me could not push me beyond the bounds of what I considered stupid and life-threatening. Yet, despite my apparent perseverance to present a demeanour of intelligence and brilliance to the outside world I did engage in serious and deep thought about the possible benefits of religion.

During this embarrassing lapse in what had always been a proud and staunch opposition to organised religion, I recalled the states of rapture that Benny Hinn appeared to induce in those he claimed to heal and a phrase from a sermon of his, “The flesh has limits, the spirit has no limits”, – could this bliss replace the one I had lost? – and I repeated the words of a secondary school classmate, “It helps.” My judgement was, however, quickly restored, with regard to religion at least, when I considered how meaningless such a statement really was. It helps what? It helps how? I remember a definite refusal to allow something else to take credit for my hard work should I survive, and I remembered the words of Leviticus 20:13 and the instances of child rape and my long-held contention that religion is immoral since religious extremism breeds violence rather than an extreme commitment to peace.

Only after I had tried these popular methods of dealing with loss and desperation did I resign myself to problem-answer. A self-prescribed medication that brought on a persistent numbness that was entirely necessary but could be interrupted in the most beautiful way for a few minutes each day.

Waking tended to break the persistence, but only shortly. I would forget all that seemed to matter and my mind would be blank and ready to take in the bright and good reality all around me. Perhaps it was the monotony that restored my numbness. Habitual showering and dressing and eating can have that effect. Every day for thousands of consecutive days I would wake minutes before an 0600 alarm. Facing the bedroom wall on one side of a king-sized bed, the yomp across a terrain of duvet and paper towards the room itself would often be cut short. A look at the clock confirmed again and again that I had fallen asleep for a while, never more than minutes. The dull ache in my neck confirmed again and again that I had inadvertently halted my expedition, finding myself head-down arse-up on my knees, fending off sleep. I’ve no doubt wondered more than the next person whether there is some causality to be identified between tiredness and Western Civilisation, or tiredness and my generation, or tiredness and my bed in particular.

Standing and looking down at the carpet, once Dodge Colt red and then a chestnut rose, each morning I would abandon balanced breathing until my lungs were full of courage enough for me to look in the mirror. My reflection never surprised nor disappointed me. Stark ribs, asymmetric clavicles, and a budding kyphosis were characteristic features that had been thrust upon me and, for all my previous endeavours to shed them, had stuck and had become as much a part of me as the chair-throwing induced calluses.

Mango scented shower gel was no longer mango scented. Water no longer became too hot nor too cold – perhaps because of my tepid outlook – and rough towels were no longer harsh. My skin and hair felt as they might have had I been living in 1908 and washing had once more become rather a trying affair, although I maintained my hygiene out of habit.

I now know how useful habits can be. Mine had been in place for so long by then that they were terribly intricate. Dressing habits kept up an established style of monochromatic loose-fitting silk shirts, tight-fitting patterned trousers, and flashes of ankles that were as skinny as any healthy person’s. Most people of a healthy weight have similarly sized ankles – a handy detail for those seeking more effective ways of defeating their enemies. Eating habits were not normal but were set, though, as I remember it, my capacity for surprise and disappointment were never impaired. Something other than food must have been keeping my figure, beyond consideration of those ribs, collarbones, and vertebrae, and its reflection constant. Walking and working habits were ordinary and non-excessive and therefore not symptomatic of anything. I wasn’t anything, problem-answer saw to that.

I was, through all of this, a passenger living in a haze within a bubble within a dream. Consumed by monotony but doggedly lucid. Everything was clear to me, and yet I could change nothing about my life, could not improve it. Buses to and from the places at which I was expected to appear proved a steadfast anchor. In the months immediately following the great endorphin shortage of my life, I had managed to get a jiffy of honest delight out of whichever author I was taking advantage of. As time went on I found myself more and more on a bus, wearing the big coat with the big pockets that usually had some novel stashed away somewhere in case of emergency, unaware of which story I might discover there or how I felt about it. My immersion had become habit, and because problem-answer, and I along with it, had also become habit, it no longer effectively inoculated me against thoughts of her.

*

I couldn’t see it entirely clearly then because of all the haze but I see now how truly awful those days were. Worse was the apparent unflinching desire of the endorphin-variety Holly Golightly to manifest herself in whomever or whatever I looked at, glanced at, peeked at. Always was she breathtaking. Never was she real.

Strangers to whom she bore even the vaguest resemblance captivated me. Orange-tips, medium-sized and common and widespread in bushes and hedgerows, were as her hair in a breeze. The rustic, mock-Tuscan décor of buildings I would pass as I went about my habits were as her natural beauty. The colours of sunrises and sunsets carried into my eyes as her soul had so often seemed to. I could not habituate to these cues, and they demanded my attention.

The purest exposition of my immersion, a coffee shop and a modern classic, had, as one might have guessed, become habit too. So much so that my eyes would often appear glazed and uninterested in whichever literary masterpiece had fallen into my lap. Snippets of conversation from regulars would slip through the dream-like haze every so often but arrive blunt to the passenger housed within.

“I couldn’t get over the shock of its severity, nor the realisation that I’d been sheltered from it for so much of my life,” I remember one man said to another. He spoke with feeling and conviction that had his companion leaning forward, drawing, however, no warmth from me. “I assumed it’d be no different from here…although I probably should’ve expected harsher attitudes,” he continued, “Neruda christened it the Wild West after all. Maybe it was anti-British sentiment, spilling over from Argentina?”

“How did you overcome it?” his comrade was rather gentler than this in teasing out the details of the man’s experiences, but his exact words are lost to me now.

The man sighed, not out of frustration or sadness but of a strange sort of passionate pride for what he claimed he had been through, “Once the honeymooning and negotiating were out the way, I stuck to the shadows. I avoided the west side, Alemania and San Martín were worst, and kept my head down. I even came to view some of the hostility as a VIP experience. When restaurant owners would have waiters stand as a screen next to me as I was eating so my presence couldn’t drive away potential customers, I thought of this as star treatment offered to the baddest man in town. This way I had control. Reckon that girl I went to find, the one that I thought was nice, is pretty fucking far from nice since I couldn’t find her. Nightlife and happiness, the reasons I visited, were exchanged for segregation and loneliness, but at least it stopped the whispers of ‘negro’, ‘sucio’ and ‘vete a la mierda’.  Just, if you go, stay away from south-central towns.”

I remember this conversation out of the hundreds of others that had failed to carve through my foggy cognition because Miss Endorphin Euphoria would have thrived where that poor fella had suffered. She would have ever so effortlessly overcome the information overload, the gaps between generations and in technology, the skill interdependence, the homesickness and the boredom. She spoke Spanish, you see, and had a way about her and skin pale enough to be accepted almost anywhere she wound up. Of course, she never used these tools to assert any dominance over those without them but, regardless, she would have suited Chile. She would, I think, have come to share my love for Neruda, as I did hers for O’Hara. Even amongst four million annual tourists, she would have stood out as unique, as someone who was there for something deeper than pictures and memories and Valdiviano and Cueca.

These thoughts were never realised then. It is only now that I can recount them tenderly, without bitterness.