Going Back, Part Eight: Presidential Court

It’s been a while. There’s a reason: I had a really hard time writing about the next place we lived, 17 Presidential Court in downtown Syracuse.

I started a new career there. We started adapting to post-college life (and the struggle to find post-college friends). We were married in that apartment. I got sober in that apartment. I remember things that happened there – but unlike the other places I’ve written about, I don’t remember how I felt. I couldn’t find the emotional connection to that particular little place. The reality is that, especially compared to where we lived before and after, I really barely remember our life in that little apartment.

And, when we went back to Syracuse in May, we didn’t even really visit the location, although we spent some time in the neighborhood. Just a drive-by, a nod of recognition, and that was it.

Moving downtown

When it was time to leave campus (see Part Six here), we knew we didn’t want to stay in the University neighborhood – after five years, it was time for a clean break. Lee was working full-time at a little ad agency in the carriage house of the University Club, while I was working full-time at the printer in Fayetteville. With only one car, living downtown or a short bus ride to it made the most sense. To our surprise, we could actually afford a good apartment in the Presidential Plaza complex, which in those days was considered a very nice address, and learned that we could rent one of the townhomes down along Townsend Street – a comfortable, two-story, bath-and-a-half two-bedroom apartment with an enclosed patio area.

No neighbors above or below, only a shared wall on each side – about as good as it could get in apartment living. Set off a little from the road, it was a bit of a private enclave with off-street parking. Coming from the relative squalor of Marshall Street, living in the bar district and subject to alternate side parking, this couldn’t have been a more shocking change. We left a whole bunch of junk we no longer wanted (but couldn’t get hauled away) behind on M Street (with our security deposit, I’m sure), borrowed a van for the little we were taking with us, and moved downtown late in August 1983.

Leaving old cast-offs behind meant we had almost no furniture. We sat on lawn chairs for a while, ate on a folding table, put our records into some new stacking milk crates, got some cheap shelving and a desk and made do.

I was mostly over the miserable feeling of not having graduated, focused entirely on transitioning to our new life and getting ready to be married. And in order to keep my worst nightmare – being stuck at that print shop – from coming true, I started casting about for a new job. Incredibly, the perfect job opened up at a typesetter I hadn’t even been aware of before, and before September was out, I had started work at a small, high-quality typesetting shop in the Delavan Center on West Fayette. (“Small” means: the owner, plus me, at least at the outset.)

My spirit was instantly transformed – escaping a job I felt trapped in and doing something I loved, learning a whole new system, becoming very dedicated to the craft, and getting paid well all made me feel much better about myself. And now we were working within blocks of our home, and of each other.

Getting married was, of course, emotionally huge. I know from looking back at my diaries from the months leading up to it that I was absolutely filled with self-doubt, with fears over whether I would be good enough, and whether I’d ever get my alcoholism straightened out. It’s right there in my own handwriting – but I couldn’t figure out how to address it. The inertia of addiction is so hard to overcome under any circumstances, and in 1983, the varieties of help were very, very limited. I wanted to get better, and to be better, but didn’t know how to do that.

There was also another situation among my friends, a story that isn’t mine to tell, that weighed extremely heavily on me in those months and for a long time after. In the weeks leading up to the wedding, my head was just swirling.

As simple as we tried to make our wedding – basically an elopement in our apartment with a judge and a handful of guests – there was still activity leading up to it: visits from parents, purchasing of furniture, all that sort of thing. We planned a dinner for afterward, hired a photographer, confirmed and re-confirmed the judge would show up. (Oh yes, somewhere in there, because this was still required for a marriage license in 1983, I had to go to the local free clinic for what was then called venereal disease testing.)

The Wedding Day

I remember a handful of things about our wedding day.

I remember madly vacuuming the apartment with ABC’s “The Look of Love” blaring. I especially remember the song “All of My Heart,” a song I perform nowadays, giving me strong feelings about having fucked up this relationship more than two years before, and now hoping it was safe from my self-destructive capabilities.

I remember Lee and her mother finishing the hem on Lee’s lovely homemade dress, as well as basting a hem on my new suit – a stitch that would stay for a few years until I needed to start wearing a suit more regularly.

I remember my family arriving – without my father. No one had given me any warning that he wouldn’t be able to make the trip, but as happened often, he was too sick to travel. I knew he would have done absolutely nothing to try to be healthy beforehand – he never did a single thing to protect his own health. I was angry about it then, I’m mildly angry about it now, but it’s just one more thing he didn’t show up for so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Even though he wasn’t there, I also remember my father disregarding our wishes. Lee and I had decided we were not exchanging wedding rings, and had told people so. For one thing, it was an expense we could not bear at the time – when you’re sitting on lawn chairs, there are higher priorities in setting up a household – and we were modernists who didn’t believe we needed rings as symbols or external proof of our relationship. But despite not actually coming to the ceremony, he sent a wedding ring for Lee to wear. It was very modest, purchased at a discount chain store jewelry counter. At the time, I said it was up to her and I think she was a little touched to be welcomed into the family so she accepted it. I’ve given it little thought since then (and quite a few years into our marriage, we bought our own matching rings that we both love and wear because they mean something to us, not because society demands it), but sitting here 41 years later, I’m becoming absolutely livid that he decided to override our wishes. I was in such shock at the time that he hadn’t shown up that I couldn’t really process that someone who wasn’t there was – with whatever good intentions there may have been – dictating an element of our wedding.

I remember some other things, too. There was champagne, brought by a self-invited guest if I recall correctly, and the judge got a bit tipsy. Lee and I stayed relatively controlled but we were still giddy. We did the ceremony, said the words (of which I remember nothing), we opened a few gifts, then we went across town to a favorite restaurant, Maggie Jordan’s, where we just had a nice meal with our handful of guests, and then went back home to collapse.

Well, to drink more and then collapse – which meant one of our friends crashed with us overnight as he lived too far to walk and none of us could drive. So we woke up to a houseguest the next morning, but so it goes. The houseguest found his way home, the families did as well, and we were married, and on our own.

Marriage itself

Practically speaking, very little changed from being not married to being married. Yes, there was the intensity of that commitment, and the weirdness of having “a wife,” of being “a husband.” (There was also the weirdness of having separate family “receptions” back home the week after our wedding. We did almost nothing according to tradition.) Otherwise – our apartment was better furnished (gifts from parents), our jobs were the same, our social situation unstable as we tried to figure out how to make friends post-college.

After years and years of being students, we didn’t really have a good template for not being students anymore. So, we did some of the same things, going out to hear bands and go dancing, hoping to find some friends where we could. Having always been opposed to drunk driving, the drinking would actually start when we got home from whatever club we’d been to, staying up until ridiculous hours watching old Bowery Boys movies on our little 12″ black and white TV, basically just staying up so we could get drunk. It was aimless.

There were a couple of trips to New York in the autumn and winter, including one where my drunken behavior at a friend’s party embarrassed me so (and created so little reaction in others, as they were well used to it) that it finally led to my making a plan for sobriety – and I’ve written all about how that went before. Read it here if you like. Short version: it finally took. Here I am.

What I didn’t do was communicate what I was going through, or what my objective was. I just stopped – and didn’t share any of what I was going through with my partner. That had to have been bewildering, and it certainly didn’t help to establish the connections we needed to be building together now that we were responsible adults living in the world.

But in fairness to myself – I wasn’t communicating what I was going through with myself, either. I was just holding on for dear life, getting from one milestone to the next – getting through two weekends without drinking, going to a baseball game without drinking, going bowling without drinking (that one, I must admit, I didn’t see the point of). In fact, it was all about doing everything without drinking. I had no process, I had no reflection, I wasn’t journaling, I wasn’t talking with anyone else about it all. It was not the ideal approach.

So I guess it isn’t any wonder that I don’t feel a connection to that space – I was barely there, barely present.

All that happened while we were living in that sparsely furnished apartment, a handful of new prints on the walls to make it ours. There were adventures with bats in and around the apartment (including one who slept next to our mailbox nearly all the time), there were frozen pipes and frozen beer bottles in the downstairs bathroom, there were endless sirens (we lived across from the police station and very near the hospital), and there was just a lack of any sense of community among our neighbors – nearly everyone there was transient, just coming to Syracuse or just leaving it. It wasn’t a good fit for us, so we started looking around for another place to live when the lease was up.

When we visited in May of this year, we drove by the old place. Its patio enclosure faces a busy street, so we didn’t even bother trying to stop for a photo (StreetView will do just fine), and didn’t want to go into the complex itself as we had no real business there. Despite all that happened there, and maybe a little bit because of it, I feel no particular attachment to the place.