Jonathan Ames - The Double Life Is Twice as Good: Essays and Fiction

T he trouble happened because I was bored. At the time, I was twenty-eight days sober. I was spending my nights playing Internet backgammon. I should have been going to AA meetings, but I wasnt.

I had been going to AA meetings for twenty years, ever since college. I like AA meetings. My problem is that Im a periodic alcoholic, even with going to AA. Every few years, I try drinking again. Or, rather, drinking tries me. It tries me on for size and finds out I dont fit and throws me to the ground. And so I go crawling back to AA. Or at least I should. This last go-round, I was skipping meetings and just staying home and, like I said, playing Internet backgammon.

I was also reading a lot of crime fiction and private detective fiction, writers like Hammett, Goodis, Chandler, Thompson. The usual suspects, as it were. Since my own life was so dull, I needed the charge that came from their booksthe danger, the violence, the despair.

So thats all I was doingreading and playing backgammon. I can afford such a lifestyle because Im a writer. Im not a hugely successful writer, but Im my own boss. Ive written six booksthree novels and three essay collectionsand at the time of the trouble I had roughly six thousand dollars in the bank, which is a lot for me. I also had a few checks for movie work coming in down the road.

By my economic standards it was a flush time. I had even paid my taxes early, at the end of Marchit was now mid-Apriland I was just trying to stay sober and keep a low profile in my own little life. I wasnt doing any writing, because, well, I didnt have anything to say.

Overall, I was being pretty reclusive. I only talked to a few people, primarily my parents, who are retired and live in Florida and who call me every day. Theyre a bit needy, my senior citizen parents, but I dont mind, life is short, so if I can give them a little solace with a daily call, what the hell. My father is eighty-two and my mother is seventy-five. I have to love them now as best I can. And the only other two people I really spoke to were the two close friends I have, one who lives here in New York and the other whos in Los Angeles. I have a lot of acquaintances, but Ive never had a lot of friends.

One night a week, I did leave the apartment to go see this girl. It was nice. I guess you could say that she was a friend, too, but Ive never really thought of the women in my life as friends, which must be a flaw. Her name was Marie and we would have dinner, maybe go to a movie, and then wed get into bed at her place, never my place, and the sex with her was good. But it wasnt anything serious. She was twenty-six and Im forty-two, and I retired from being serious with women a few years ago. Somebody always got hurt, usually the girl, and I couldnt take it anymore.

Well, Ill shut up now about all this. Its not my drinking problem or my finances or my dead love life that I want to talk about. I only mention all this as some kind of way to explain why I had too much free time on my hands, because whats really on my mind is this trouble I got into because, as I said, I was bored. Bored with backgammon and bored with reading and bored with being sober and bored with myself and bored with being alive.

I should make it clear that I wasnt at all bored by the books I was tearing through and loving, but bored by the fact that I wasnt actually doing anything, just reading, though it was, in fact, Hammett and Goodis and Chandler and Thompson who sort of provoked me to take action, and its when I took action, because of those authors books, that I blew up my life.

It was a fantasy, a crazed notion, but I got it into my head that I wanted to play at being a private detective. I wanted to help somebody. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to have an adventure. And its pathetic, but what did I do? I put an ad on craigslist in the services section under legal. It read as follows:

Private Detective for Hire

Reply to: serv-261446940@craigslist.org

Date: 200704-13, 8:31AM EST

Specializing: Missing Persons, Domestic Issues.

Im not licensed, but maybe Im someone who can help you. My fee is reasonable.

Call 347555-1042

There were two other private-detective ads on craigslist and they offered all sorts of helpsurveillance, undercover work, background checks, video and still photography, business investigations, missing persons, domestic issues, and two things that I didnt quite graspskip tracing and witness locates.

I figured the only thing I could help with was trying to find someone or maybe following someone, which would most likely be a domestic issuean unfaithful spouse or boyfriend or girlfriend. I didnt have any qualms about that, following an unfaithful lover, though in all the private-detective fiction Ive read the heroes never do marriage work, as if its beneath them, but I thought it would be fun to follow somebody and to do so for the purposes of a real mission. Sometimes, probably because I want everything to be like it is in a book or a movie, I have followed people on the streets of New York, pretending I was a detective or a spy.

I did try to cover myself legally by writing in my ad that I wasnt licensed. I dont know who does license private detectives, but I figured it was a difficult process and, anyway, I just wanted to put the ad up, mostly as a lark, a playing-out of a dream, like when I would shadow people on the streets. But I really didnt think anybody would actually call meI was offering far fewer services than the other private detectives and I was acknowledging in the ad that I wasnt exactly a professional.

If somebody did call, then I figured after talking to me they would try somebody more reputable, but whatever came of it, even if nobody called, I thought it might be something I could write about, a comedic essayMy Failed Attempt at Being a Private Detective. Often during my writing career, mostly for my essays, Ive put myself in weird positions and then milked it for humor. This situation would be like the time I tried to go to an orgy but wasnt allowed in. Even when nothing happens, you can sometimes make a good story out of it.