Cheever_ A Life - Blake Bailey [273]
Most agree the drugs probably killed Lang. At any rate, he and Cheever gradually fell out of touch: Cheever got sober and began writing again, while Lang returned to the black community he'd gotten used to in prison. “Lang's car has been parked by the bank for a week,” Cheever observed in 1976, a few weeks after finishing Falconer. “He could be sick or dying or gone on drugs and I look for him. I find him getting soup for Peaches in a restaurant. … I seem to love him.” A few months later, Lang wrote a note thanking Cheever for helping him complete his five-year parole (he'd celebrated, said Cheever, “by getting pissed and falling down a flight of stone steps at the Soul #4 Bar and Grill”), and they continued to cross paths until the very end—or rather Cheever's end. Lang's came a few years later: one person said he collapsed while shoveling snow in front of the Star of Bethlehem Baptist Church, but John Dirks thinks he was found dead in his squalid little room on Spring Street. “He just burned himself out,” said Dirks, though he added that Lang had stayed out of prison, as far as anyone knew.
* Susan had begun working as a reporter for the Tarrytown Daily News.
*”Cabots” is the last story in The Stories of John Cheever. Though Cheever published six more stories (not including novel excerpts) in his lifetime, Gottlieb saw fit to exclude three of the four preceding the 1978 Stories, and almost certainly would have excluded the last two—very weak—stories of Cheever's career in the event of a posthumous volume.
* David got out of prison in 1972, resuming his considerable career as a writer and character actor. He wrote a play about prison life that was performed at the Public Theatre in New York, and later became a staff writer for The Cosby Show. More impressive still was his ten-year stint as one of the lovable denizens of Sesame Street.
* The woman's name (given in the journal) is omitted here.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
{1972-1973}
CHEEVER SEEMED PERMANENTLY IMPAIRED by alcohol. His face and extremities were swollen, his speech was slurred, and almost any kind of physical exertion made him dizzy to the point of fainting. Most ominous, perhaps, were the spells of “otherness” he began to experience in the spring of 1972: “With a hangover and a light fever I distinctly get the impression that I am in two places at once,” he wrote. “I am aware of my surroundings here—rain and the beech trees and [also] I smell the coal gas and see the furniture in the old house in Quincy Have I gone mad?” These frightening lapses continued, until Cheever was finally persuaded to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at a local church. He found it “dreary”: “The long speech I have prepared seems out of order and I simply say that I am sometimes presented with situations for which I am so poorly prepared that I have to drink. … I am introduced to the chairman, who responds by saying that we do not use last names.” For the next three years, whenever the subject of AA came up, he'd explain that he'd gone to a meeting where someone had blurted out, “Hey! There's John Cheever!”—though (as we see) he'd found it even more distasteful that he wasn't, in fact, allowed to utter that celebrated name. In any case, he decided AA wasn't for him, and besides: “I think detoxification would kill me dead.”
He persevered with his writing after a fashion, but the best he could do were disparate little vignettes that he sometimes tried stringing together into stories. The first inkling of Falconer (“Sauced, I speculate on a homosexual romance in prison”) appeared in his journal that April, around the time he became troubled with “otherness,” which may explain why he'd failed to write anything