Dropping Out

An excerpt from Sy's first book, Four in the Morning

I saw a movie recently about a young couple who decide to quit their jobs and spend the rest of their lives roaming around the country. They encounter one mishap after another, losing almost all their money as well as their illusions. Their odyssey is short-lived; eventually, they go back to their old jobs. Escape just isn’t possible, the movie is saying. Dropping out is as ludicrous a dream as the lives we want to drop out from.

For Hollywood, such cynicism isn’t surprising; still, the movie troubled me, reminding me of my own life, my longing to be free. Years ago, I decided to escape, too, from a whole way of life, tis worries and its comforts, its cruel mortgaging of the present to the future. I wanted to create something different for myself, paying as I went, writing no checks my heart couldn’t cover, giving up a good living for a good life.

We’d been planning the getaway for more than a year, reading travel books studying maps, going to the bank every Friday with our two paychecks (my wife was a teacher, I was a newspaper reporter) to deposit one in our checking account and the other in our savings. Judy and I knew something was missing from our lives, though we had no idea what it might be. We were both good at what we did; we had master’s degrees from prestigious universities and the kind of savvy that makes getting ahead less a challenge than a social obligation — the shelf of your life cleared for the trophies the future will surely bestow.

I’d already won some awards, and displayed them proudly in the hallway next to my degrees — the same hallway I’d pace at night after getting home from work, not knowing what to do with myself, feeling hemmed in by our small apartment, and hemmed in too by the world’s most exciting city, having had enough remarkable meals in enough intimate restaurants, and hemmed in most of all by my own restlessness, which I couldn’t even name, like some hauntingly familiar melody that had become the soundtrack of my days.

I wanted a change. I wanted to take a giant leap away from everything familiar: my job, the city, the weekly visits to my parents’ house to argue with my father, the friends whose lives were turning into success stories whose endings I could guess. I needed to say goodbye to all that.

In 1969 we sailed for Europe. It took five days, but that was the idea: I wanted the sense of making a great passage, of crossing an ocean, of journeying not just through time but through space. How often we measure distances, even the greatest distances, in hours. Instead, I wanted wave upon endless wave, the luminescent greens and blues, the darkest of darks lapping against the giant hull, as the ship carried us forward into the night and the next day and the next night, making time itself unreal. I wanted a passage through the mind, a beginning, a birth — but of what, I couldn’t say. Standing by the rail, looking across the watery nothingness, I was staring as well into my own life. We had sold the car and the furniture, quit our jobs, put all the money in traveler’s checks. To leave behind nearly everything was exhilarating and terrifying. I wondered how a blind man might feel being helped across the street by a total stranger. What trust I had placed in a part of me I knew nothing about! More than once, I asked myself if it wasn’t too late to turn back.

We docked in Southampton, England, and rented a car for the drive to London. “It keeps stalling,” I told the man at the counter. He walked outside and stood beside the car while I tried again. I turned the key, shifted clumsily, gave it some gas, and again it stalled. “The brake,” he said. I stared at him, confused. “The brake,” he repeated politely. “You need to take off the brake.” Accustomed to cars with automatic transmissions, I hadn’t even looked at the brake. I smiled sheepishly, thanked him, coaxed the gearshift into first, and pulled directly into a lane of oncoming traffic — forgetting, in my embarrassment, to keep to the left. I swerved, eased the car into second, but when I tried to shift to third, the gearshift wouldn’t budge. As we coasted along at twenty-five miles and hour, everyone passed us but no one blew his horn. How extravagantly courteous! How disconcerting! How I yearned for the rudeness of a New York cabbie.

Don’t we often ache for what’s familiar, even when it’s painful? I’ve read that battered children sometimes reach out to their parents as they’re being carried to safety. How I longed for the home I’d been counting the days to leave. I felt uncommonly estranged here, and my mood of displacement only deepened as our travels continued. I realized, after a few months, that it had less to do with the eerie beauty and dinginess of the cities, the nuances of custom, the attitudes that changed like the landscape, or the languages that rose and fell across the centuries of shared history, than with a different migration altogether, the journey I had begun within myself, which was moving beyond my borders.

I was becoming less sure of who I was. How could I convincingly call myself a journalist, since I wasn’t writing, or a New Yorker, since I had no address, or even a resentful son, since I was no longer losing ridiculous arguments? The backstage door was swinging open, and the troupe of selves I called me was breaking up, leaving like actors at the end of the show. The old lines weren’t working anymore.

There were, of course, other, more obvious changes: my hair started curling down past my neck, and soon reached my shoulders; instead of dressing each day in a suit and tie, I wore jeans and a leather vest; I carried a shoulder bag rather than an attache case, and though I kept a pipe inside, just like in the old days, it wasn’t for tobacco. Some of these changes were purely symbolic: I’d never cared for long hair on men, but it wasn’t just hair; it was a flag, a sign of my independence. Some of the changes were for convenience: since we were living in a van and camping out, dressing casually made sense. Yet other changes spoke of deeper stirrings: using drugs helped me clear the rubble around my heart, even if the flowers that grew in the cracks were short-lived.

My besieged ego latched on to these changes. Here, at least, was the outline of an identity. Being a hippie had never been my ambition, but it was better than nothing; to my ego, anything was better than nothing. For without the armor of an identity, I was defenseless against myself — which is to say, my own pain and confusion. Always, I had read the newspapers carefully; could I bear to read between the lines of my own life with such scrutiny? Where inside myself was the peace I wanted to see on earth? Could I forgive my father for bullying me? Could I forgive myself for bullying my wife? Could I even think about these things for more than a few seconds without reaching for the door? When your face in the mirror becomes a headline your heart can’t bear, when you see how much of your life is a monument to fear, and there’s no one left to blame, no parent or teacher or boss, indeed not even yourself, then the desire to escape becomes overwhelming. There are many exits, plainly marked; pretending you know who you are is one of them.

We stayed in Europe for two years, then headed back to America in search of the ideal commune. By this time, we’d become acquainted with Eastern religion, which my ego had turned into another prize. Now, I was someone spiritual. Now, I was on the path. Now that I knew we were all one, I could use that knowledge, too, to set myself apart.

This is a country with a tradition of rebellion; ever since the Boston Tea Party, every generation has staked its claim to something a little nobler or fairer or sweeter than what came before. Had I come of age in the thirties, I probably would have become a Marxist; in the forties, a hipster; in the fifties, a beatnik. No doubt, I would have been tempted to define myself narrowly then, too. What is more seductive, after all, than the mind’s whisper that it’s the form that counts: what you do, where you live, how you look. But there’s no form, in the system or out of it, that guarantees happiness or justice or salvation. Look at organized religion. Look at the rebel leaders after they win power. Look behind the curtains of every life that proclaims an easy path to glory, freedom without a price.

Look at my life now: independent, uncompromised, a living example of the best of the ideals I struggled all those years to attain. But don’t miss the small print, the warning that living all your ideals may be dangerous to your health. My friends joke about how early I get up, how hard I work. I make a joke of it myself, because I’d rather hear their laughter than their admonitions, their reminders of what I know yet every day forget: that if I get too caught up in getting things done, I end up sabotaging what I cherish the most. How easy it is to create suffering while trying to save the world. How tempting to tyrannize myself, to dictate goals, instead of risking real democracy, true self-government. The runner gets out for half an hour a day, but the poet has been under house arrest since last August and the contemplative who originally lobbied for getting up early, so there would be time to meditate before going to work, is hooted down now, denounced as a malingerer. Why sit for twenty minutes doing nothing, the boss wants to know.

If my life looks the same as that of any overwrought executive; if the most serious writing I get to most mornings is my list of things to do; if I swill coffee; if I go away to the beach for the weekend, taking with me two boxes of unread magazines (telling my wife, with a straight face, this would be a good chance for me to catch up); if I continue to pretend I[‘m ever going to catch up by working a little harder; if I think of vacations as needing to be earned; if I again and again confuse fulfillment with the form of things, rather than remembering it’s my own awareness that gives meaning to the form — then what am I to do? Sell the car and the furniture and set off on another journey in search of myself? Drop out again? Can you drop out of dropping out?

When I was in Europe, I heard of an American who would live in a country until he started to understand the language, then move to another country until he learned the language there. Each time he moved, it was said, he realized people were talking the same bullshit as everywhere else.

Where is there to go when you’re always bringing yourself along? What novelty doesn’t wear off? To drop out of society — that’s the easy part, like stepping off a cliff. To land on your feet, to keep the ground of your humanness under you — that’s the work of a lifetime, not a lifestyle, and it’s the work I find hardest of all.

Visit https://www.thesunmagazine.org/