A couple of lifetimes ago—back in the early 1980s, in my early 20s—I collected taxes for the Internal Revenue Service, which you’d think would tell you all you need to know about why I drank so much then. They called me a revenue officer, and I had official credentials with my white face on it that I had to flash to taxpayers whenever I knocked on the doors of their homes or businesses—mostly in South Central LA—to demand full and immediate payment of their delinquent tax bills, even though most of these homes and businesses were so dilapidated and forlorn that I understood full well why their back taxes had piled up in the first place.

It was a terrible, terrible job: everybody I met was either afraid of me or hated me, and they took shit out on me that had nothing to do with me, and I unwound to a horrible day’s work by listening to the Clash’s “Clampdown” and learning the true meaning of irony. My co-workers were whiny and humorless and unmotivated and their faces seemed drained of blood, and the atmosphere in the office was a lot like the film Office Space, with people going mental over copy machine malfunctions and feeling murderous about their bosses and more than a few employees looking like candidates for full-blown psychotic breaks.

While my work life gave me plenty of reasons to head for the bars, I made sure I was good and fucked up personally just in case there was any question as to the legitimacy of my need to drown my sorrows in drink. I was, for one, a failure at love—I’d failed twice, majorly, and what was worse, I was a failure at being alone too. I had a Leo’s sense of silently nurtured and easily wounded pride, a Holden Caulfield-ish (and deeply unhealthy) contempt for fakery and phoniness, and a fear of women’s mystery that had me sometimes walking the same half-deserted streets and muttering retreats as Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock. I was a mess.

What I had going for me, though, was a sort of youthful, innocent faith in connecting with other people. I don’t know where I got it, but from way back I had it in my head that given enough time, given the right circumstances, given the proper environment, the walls of character armor could break down between people, that I could understand and be understood, that I could look straight into someone’s eyes—no matter who it was—and in the moment when that person looked back, we could connect: feel our common humanness, which to me meant agreeing and commiserating at how hard every day was, how strange and lonely life was, how mysterious it was that we all suffered so much without admitting it to each other, and how nice and even beautiful it was to have this meeting of the eyes where we at least acknowledged that this was how it was. I really believed this.

I believed this even more when I was drunk. And I believed it more than ever on one Thursday night when I got together with some IRS co-workers for many pitchers of beer. One of the people who came along was my boss’s boss, my branch chief, a guy I think I chose to test my theory of connecting on precisely because he was so unlike me, an ambitious government climber who lorded it over his workers and whose manner was guarded, phony and permanently sardonic. “Ah, here’s a guy I can break down,” I thought, given enough booze and enough sincere effort.

So I worked on him. We drank for hours, and after all the rest of my co-workers had peeled away, it was just him and me, and I was so drunk that the world narrowed to his face, that red-bearded face that could, I swear, burn down half a cigarette in one single desperate inhalation. And then it narrowed to one of his eyes, pale blue and bloodshot and ever-shifting to avoid mine, and then I told him to look at me, hey, look at me, and when he did, I told him about my faith that we could connect to anyone if we tried hard enough, even he and I, and then I asked him if he felt the connection with me, right here, right now, and he said to me:

“Not in a million years.”

What happened after that, I don’t remember. The next thing I knew I was lying in a bunk in a holding tank at a police station somewhere in Watts, with a bleeding head wound and a cop telling me I was allowed to make two phone calls, and that I needed to tell whoever I called that I’d been arrested for drunk driving and that I’d been in an accident on the 110, and that I was lucky I wasn’t dead.

Which begins another story, but certainly the story of my faith in connection ended there, forever. For better or worse, I’m no longer the kind of person who has the confidence, or desperation, to believe that any of us can connect, that our loneliness can be bridged if we only want it enough. And thanks should go to my innocence, that branch chief whose name I forget but whose pale blue eye I never will, and many pitchers of beer.

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