Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist's Memoir

Keeping Up with the Days

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . KeepingUpwiththeDays There is no doubt in my mind that a demon has been living in me since birth. —David Berkowitz (“Son of Sam”) in his diary A pparently, I could be quite a show-off. Once, at a college dorm party, I engaged the guests by dangling by one arm from the terrace railing. The dorm was in a high-rise building, the party on the fifteenth floor. Another time, in the parking lot of an abbey in northern Germany, a similar desperate bid for attention had me jumping backward, or trying to, over a two-foot-tall post chain barrier. Apparently I was wearing cowboy boots; apparently the back of a heel caught; apparently I was out cold for two minutes. When I came to, I couldn’t feel or move from the neck down. My first (apparent) words to my traveling companions: “Guys, I think I just ruined our summer vacation.” My nervous system recovered, but my memory didn’t. If I say “apparently ” it’s because I don’t recall either scenario. If not for the testimonies of multiple eyewitnesses, I’d dismiss both stories as apocryphal . I wish, too, that I could blame my memory lapses on alcohol or mind-bending drugs. But I’ve never been much of a drinker, and drugs played no role in my behavior or my memory loss. If I don’t remember either incident, it’s because I didn’t make a record of them on paper. For a period of about ten years, starting when I was a senior in high school, I was a compulsive journal keeper, you might even say addict. Wherever I went, I carried a notebook with me, and filled it with the flotsam and jetsam of my days. In the beginning the journals were oversized (twelve-by-sixteen-inch, some even larger), plain paper notebooks designed more for sketching than 66 Keeping Up with the Days for scribbling, with spiral bindings that came unwound and caught on girls’ sweaters and in their hair. In my journals I recorded observations , experiences, snatches of conversations, lush descriptions of landscapes and rooms, of people I met, places I visited. When at a loss for words I threw in some sketches, too. But mostly I wrote. In fact that’s just about all I did. For ten years I was a machine whose primary purpose was to turn life into words and feed them to my ravenous notebooks, like a mother bird feeding worms to her chicks. To give you an idea of just how bad my habit was, when dining among friends I’d keep my damned notebook open next to my place setting, between salad bowl and bread-and-butter dish, and scribble away between bites of food and sips of coffee or wine. (The few notebooks I’ve kept from those addicted days all bear ketchup, soy sauce, coffee, and wine stains to prove it.) At first even my most indulgent friends balked at being shadowed by this recording angel, this stenographer escaped from the courtroom , this dime-store Frere Goncourt. Those who didn’t like it had a choice: they could grin and bear it, or they could stop being my friends. I lost a lot of friends. The ones I didn’t lose got used to it, or they resigned themselves, I guess. I can’t be sure. Honestly, their feelings weren’t of that much concern to me. When it comes to an addict and his addictions, the feelings of others don’t often count for very much. And like all addicts , I rationalized my behavior and its morality. After all, was not my habit as much a part of me as my arms and legs? Did my true friends—those capable of understanding me at all—not understand that to ask me to put my notebook away would have been like asking me to saw off my nose and slip it into my pocket? We were inseparable , my notebooks and I, like John and Yoko. People think of diary keeping as a positive thing, a source of therapy and enlightenment, not to mention self-amusement. All over the country “journaling” workshops are the rage, with participants encouraged to unleash and unburden themselves daily in writing, to get to know themselves and tend their psychic and spiritual gardens. In the United States alone, five million diaries or so-called “blank books” are sold every year (it wouldn’t surprise me to learn...