We’ll Never Have paris TEN 2013
X
TEN
Push me, pull me. Cut to the chase.
WNHP10 Š June, 2013. A nonfiction memoir zine. Many of these stories originally appeared in Fewer Mannequins, 2012. Reprinted with permission.
THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES The first article of clothing I ever purchased by myself was a magenta sweater. I also purchased blue dangling earrings from Claire’s and a cream-colored mesh belt that tied around my waist and fell past my knees. For 1985, this outfit put me near affordable suburban mall fashion. I was in 8th grade and had gone to the mall with my best friend. My mother refused to take us shopping and so I purchased my own clothing that day. I don’t know where I ‘d gotten the money from, perhaps Christmas, but I remember her looking guilty and me feeling this was the start of growing up. Looking back I would call it bittersweet. I also went to the mall to shop for back-to-school clothes at the start of 9th grade, which was high school and therefore doubly important. Ann and I bought identical white shirts, tan pants, and grey flats. Our bodies were completely different so we resembled friends displaying their private awkward-
ness together. While she was quite a bit taller we wore the same large shoe size. She never let me live this down. I also had an abnormally large big toe and when I tried out my first pair of open-toed shoes, the laughter was so beyond ribbing as to be true peals of hysterical disbelief that I never have bought open-toed shoes again and slyly judge women who wear them. But on this day I walked home from the mall. There was not much in my hometown except the mall and one’s imagination, and I combined them both by making the 2-mile walk home a magical journey. There was an open field leading to a country club golf course that took up a third of the trip. A lot of figuring out where dramatism separated from actual drama took place on private walks that were sometimes accompanied by Matt the Penguin, called such for his half-blond, half-black Robert Smith hairstyle. I liked our friendship but he freaked me out and scared me a little. We had been to the mall together buying birthday presents for his moth-
er, and when he got home that day he was the one to discover her dead. He was 16. This bonded our friendship for a while. My mother would invite him over whereas previously he had never been to our house. Our friendship didn’t work in my house. A lot of us from school went to the funeral and at that time I was one of his best friends. I was all right until I saw the flower wreaths that said ‘Beloved Daughter’ and ‘Loving Mother’. I was wearing my most favorite shirt that made me feel powerful, still, I sobbed uncontrollably in the bathroom. Yet when my parents divorced, I was the one who had to comfort my friends. Though they practically grew up in my house, they didn’t. They were shocked and each one felt privately the pain of what they feared most for themselves – where their own parents had failed, that they had latched on to a family that fooled them, lured into false hope. Men would always leave. That this was no longer the safe haven. Being one who never cried, my role (as all roles are)
was securely fastened to the other moving parts, supporting roles, set scenes and props. Fixed. Not comforting but copasetic, a shock absorber. This was who I was, sanctified since the time my father realized he could trust me to shift the manual car while he drove home from the diner, nodding off while he did. Our clothes smelled of the fryer. I sat with my hand on the shift, and he would call out “-second”, “-third” to keep himself awake, hitting the clutch while I shifted. He thought we made a great team and eventually I didn’t need to be told what gear to choose. I didn’t need to be told a lot of things but I was. Part of the adult teamwork that started way too young included taking me out for one-onone talks about my mother and their relationship and why she couldn’t see where he was coming from. Like driving, I learned the adult answers because even at twelve it was obvious. I can’t say I didn’t care. I did care because I was too young not to and also too young to know that this was
weird. Not so much mothering as cooling. I felt honored that I was chosen - “your brother doesn’t get this, I could never talk to him like this”. But was it my superb listening skills or just being a woman he could take out for dinner? I prefer not to go there. I remember one evening above all others. My mother was angry with me; hurt and mad and all those emotions only drove me closer to a conscious, deliberate effort to not be like her. My father took me out to dinner, just us, to snub her and assert his fatherly power. I felt guilty but proud in my sophomore year giant orange sweater that was my signature piece all through high school. The 80s theme was ‘down to your knees’ and I’m sure there’s a deeper meaning in there somewhere. That night at dinner at Casa Too Mucha in my orange sweater and Avon lipstick, at fifteen I was my dad’s marriage counselor and friend. Listening and understanding. Agreeing and empathizing. Unemotional. Calmly, fifteen years later, it was I who had the task of taking my mother’s cat to be put down. My
brother didn’t understand the slightest bit about the cats in her life, and yet he made a show of not forcing me to be the one. As if anyone else would ever be the one. “I’ll do it!” I slammed over the phone. “I want to do it.” And I did want to do it. For all the ways I had leaked my disdain of her life, her choices, her illness. Not only for me but for my whole family’s shame of unconcern. My father took us with him like the Pied Piper. It was no wonder, now looking back, that she went with the rats given her choices. Not rats but cats. But now we were sending the healthy ones away and the sick one to be put to sleep. Rather, I was. I saw this chance to do the right thing. The parallels that I didn’t even know were lining up because it was still being played out, not being looked back on five years later. I don’t know what I was wearing the Thursday morning I drove from the hospital back to my house that had been housing only three cats for months while my mother’s fate lay undetermined. When I walked in, the cat sitter had already taken the two cats and put the white one in the carrier, ready to be taken to the
vet. We disliked the cat so much we couldn’t even call her (him?) by name, just by color. The cat sitter had given me the tidy gift of not having to meet her like the slave auctioneer at the block or the reaper at the gate. She’d separated the live from the soon to die and left me to be alone for my final task. She told me the white one just waltzed right into the carrier. Normally cats resist getting in that thing with all their might, sensing they are going to the vet. But this one went right in and waited calmly with blue eyes dead ahead because it had been throwing up for months and none of us noticed that it was just ready to die. That moment I gripped the carrier grimly and fought back tears, biting down hard on logic, holding onto logic to help me through the truth, that this cat had to go. That when my mother, after months of throwing up and being ready to die didn’t die, didn’t stare ahead with dead blue eyes but came back home, wasn’t going to be able to care for these cats. And I was going to take care of them for her benefit.
I drove this dying thing to the vet bawling uncontrollably all the way. I could see the flowery wreaths that said ‘Beloved Daughter’ and ‘Loving Mother’ and don’t know I how stayed on the road to drive there. I picked up the cat, said ‘ok let’s go’ and brought it inside. It was quiet and knowing and as much as I had hated this cat, when the time came to go, I couldn’t leave it. I petted and petted this cat as if I could make up for the years. It wasn’t my fault; it wasn’t my mother’s fault; it wasn’t the cat’s fault, but it was too late. As the vet tech carefully removed the package of life from me (God knows why) I blurted out a line from a Lorrie Moore book: “Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!”
THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD I was having breakfast at my second favorite place in NY today between jobs. I’ve been waiting for a job that brought me to Murray Hill so I could eat breakfast there since they only serve breakfast during the week and not on weekends. I’d gone in with a limited amount of time, factoring in being a little late for the next job (I know her and she won’t care) and with my mind set on pumpkin waffles (but they weren’t on the menu so I ordered French Toast). I took a table instead of the bar and sat down next to a mother and daughter. I noticed the young woman’s hot chocolate and waiting for a chance to interrupt asked if that was hot chocolate with marshmallows. She said yes and I said ‘then that’s what I’m gonna order’. Then she asked me if I lived in the neighborhood and when I said no, if I worked in the neighborhood. They wanted to know what were some good restaurants in the area. I noticed the young woman with the hot chocolate was friendly. Then she asked about good restaurants in the East Village. Now I was kind of center stage. I thought, shit, are they gonna wanna talk all through breakfast? I’d just
ordered so we were looking at least 15 minutes. I hate talking to strangers about ‘the best of ’ anything. I don’t know other people’s preferences. After giving a conversation-ending answer I got up and went to the restroom. When I came back, they were in their own conversation so I figured I was off the hook and it was over. But as I sat there (without my book because I’d forgotten I did have one) I was listening to them. It was impossible not to because our tables were separate by less than a foot, and all they were talking about were restaurants and food! I thought, who are these people with nothing else to talk about? This is sad for a mother and daughter to have nothing else to talk about. They must be tourists and the mom must be high maintenance, needing all her meals planned out and Zagat surveys filled out. Mom observed my French toast and said to the daughter, ‘Oh, that looks good. You could probably eat that, if you can chew it, it looks like the bread is cooked well enough’. I jumped back into the conversation and here is what I learned. No, they were not tourists on a luxury vacation spending all their free time searching for the city’s best eats. As we talked, nothing was further from
the truth. I never did get their names but the young woman was here for medical treatment at the cancer center, indefinitely. Her mom took her to treatments during the week and her husband took care of her on weekends. They were housed at the cancer housing center which was near Penn Station, and there were no grocery stores nearby, and even if they could cook in the dorm, there was one kitchen and stove for so many people and going out to eat was their only opportunity to kind of get out and do something before a long day of chemo. To add to this, the only reason they were talking so much about food was because there was so little she could eat, either by doctor’s orders or her own ability to stomach certain tastes and foods. She was very open about her condition and seemed to want to talk about it, since I certainly didn’t ask. I also quickly did the calculations that her husband probably stayed behind in their home state to work because he had to. Someone has to keep the money coming in to support them, and eating out and blowing all that money everyday was the last thing they wanted to do. But didn’t they need to have a little dignity and enjoy a good meal, keep themselves as healthy as possible, and who knows how many weeks or months this person has left? Now that I
looked at her I guess I could see that it was a wig and that having serious cancer would incline you to having conversations with anyone new who wasn’t gonna talk about cancer. I sure didn’t want to talk about cancer, so suddenly talking about restaurants was the greatest thing on earth, and I knew where to send them. “Near Penn Station, that’s easy! Do you like Asian food?” I asked excitedly. Andria doesn’t like to lie. I like to be real. I could tell them about Korean and Vietnamese food because I really do love it. I could talk to them both with respect and not with fake cancer pity because that’s something natural to me. They were both real talkers. She wanted to know what I did for a living and mom was still talking about food. Then we all had to leave. She told me to get a mammogram early. They don’t pay for women to have them until like age 50. And she was now 35 and already was quite a ways into the struggle for proper treatment. She looked at me like she didn’t just mean women should have one, but like I should have one. I thought about it. Was it fate that I should meet them or just another NY moment? What were the odds? I left one job early to make it to eat here today between 10:20 and 10:50am. I sat next to them
and sat alone, easy to talk to. It reminded me that cancer man, wtf? When they go to Pho 28 on 32nd St tomorrow or Thursday, are they going to strike up a conversation with a Chinese herbalist who specializes in cancer, or is mom going to choke on a chicken bone? Or when I see my doctor this month, should I ask for a mammogram and tell her, just because I have a feeling? God knows I never have been able to give myself a breast exam because it freaks me out just thinking about cancer. While we are on it, you know, I’ve changed over the years to feeling very vulnerable where I’d originally felt invincible. I felt strongly that illness would never fell me and not just because I was young and cocky. I felt it. I knew it. Now I feel differently, like a victim ready to be blindsided and victimized by the uncontrollable unknowns in my body. There but for the grace of God go I.
NEURAL FIRINGS 1 Some people have lemons and make lemonade. Some people just sigh, too tired to make lemonade, and go to Dunkin’ Donuts for an iced coffee. Me, I run to the nearest person, finger already pointed, screaming, “Do you see THIS? What the FUCK am I supposed to do with LEMONS?” I somehow need to prove to anyone within earshot that I saw thru the plot.
…...... SEPT 2, 2009 I am living in the future always. I am one step ahead. I save nothing. I put the memories away. I put myself away. Everything goes away. Everything is painful. Yet the present is a head on a pike that I spear and wave in the face of you like flames, fanning the fire. For what, I don’t know. I’m braced for the disappointment and it is there. It is always there. Maybe this is the stability in my life I lack and the only thing I can count on to find and so I do. So when I find the photo of myself from 2002 and it
is another person, when I unwrap the trinket from a wedding and see that it is Kim’s and not Terri’s, when I un-box the wine glasses from my mother’s home, when I find something I have written, it doesn’t matter the format. Everything is 6 feet under or another galaxy. I’ve made myself autistic to the present and future and once in a while I record this in words. I put that on display and I put it away.
1.
PACKING vs PARENTING
I am unpacking from my trip to Jaime’s for Christmas. Really what I am doing is multi-tasking: putting away things, checking email, putting in new CDs, getting ready for work. I am telling myself that I should slow down and single-task the unpacking. It’s not everyday that I get to put away the shampoo and conditioner back in the bathroom, carefully rotating the bottles to face forward. They have already been removed and I feel inspired from a week away to make small changes, maybe big changes too. I think, maybe I should put the new lotion on the counter so I can see it better. We only get to return from vacation every so often, and how many times do we go to a specific place a
second time? I probably will never go to Jaime’s parents house in Iowa ever again. So it’s like how you feel to set up the baby’s nursery for the first time. Painting the walls pink, blue or yellow with your loving husband helping on the other wall, rollers in synchronized rhythm. Perhaps you will playfully splash a little paint his way, and that will be the signal that it’s time to go make out, because soon the baby will come and there won’t be time for making out. At least this is how I imagine it. I will never have a child, so I won’t be painting the nursery with my loving husband. At this rate, there will be no loving husband with which to paint any wall. Probably will never own a house, which has walls, which would be painted on spring afternoon, when the weather finally warms up, before the in-laws come for Sunday dinner to show pictures of their vacation in Lake Tahoe at their timeshare. I am uploading photos from my camera, and while I wait for them to upload, with that spare minute, I brush and floss. I need to water the plant, but I am also unpacking and separating dirty from clean clothes. When I open the Christmas cards waiting for me, even though most of them are from businesses and have nothing personal to say, not even a hand signature, I should pause, looking it over with a smile and say out loud to no one, ‘That’s nice”. Unpacking means I went somewhere and now I am home, and there is no guarantee that will happen again. I don’t have to get this all done before I leave. Didn’t I tell
myself I would make time to go to the store and buy all natural yogurt with fruit to bring to work? Imagine how it feels when you bring home your child for the first time, and everything you need is ready to be used because you bought it way ahead of time. Well, you bought a few things, but most are gifts from your baby shower that someone threw for you, perhaps a sister. Some are presents from the landlord who knows you by your first name. Others, your mother’s work associates. Your mother doesn’t work a blue-collar job. Instead, I travel from place to place, checking it off of my list of accomplishments. You only need to go once. No one asks you to go again. Once you have already been there it’s the same. You come back and think how nice it was to get away from it all. You think of all the things you are going to change in your personal life. Number one is always making time to read more books. People will ask, “How was the trip?” “It was great. It was so relaxing.” But you don’t say that being out of the country is the only way to stop thinking about how low you feel when you see your brother’s baby smile at you. You know that all you have to do is smile back and make it feel like the star of the world, that it would be so fucking easy, that a baby has enough love for everyone
and all you have to do is talk baby-talk to it and make faces, and you still can’t do it. That you are jealous of all the love the baby gets and you totally know that it is sick, warped, demented. Instead, you hold this baby while the others leave the room, and you whisper to her, “I am trying my best to love you.” All you have to talk about is where you were and where you are going next. All you have is the life you thought you wanted. And as soon as the suitcase goes back into the closet, after I water the plant and feed the fish, and send my photos to Flickr, it will be as though I have never left.
HAIR FOLLIES My hair is naturally curly, not too thick and not too thin. On good days it is curly, on bad days it’s frizzy, but once in a great while, I have perfect spiral curls that hold their shape all day and I look magnificent. I know a lot of women would kill for my curls, while many with curly hair go to great lengths to
straighten their hair spending time with brushes and blow dryers. I let mine air dry. Women have asked me if I ever wanted to straighten it? If you have had long curly hair for as short a time as I have, maybe you too would not want to fuck it up and play God. Yes my hair is naturally curly as I said, but I didn’t grow up like you. I didn’t know I had ‘good hair’ to borrow the term, until high school. For reasons my mother never explained, she didn’t grow my hair. I had a boy’s cut all the way to age 11. My mother had close cut hair; her two sisters had close cut hair. She had another much older sister with a 1950’s bleached platinum beehive so she didn’t weigh in, and yet another sister with curly thick hair that was chin length at best who lived out of state and wasn’t around to be a hair model. My father’s sisters had close cut hair. No one had hair that moved and swayed in the breeze so neither did I. Girls, understand! I never had pigtails. I never had ponytails! I didn’t wear braids tied with ribbons to match my birthday party dress. Nothing for boys to pull, nothing to try and oops! Cut myself. I had nothing to compare it to at the time but looking back it was a kind of torture. It is one thing not to be blond but to deny a little girl pigtails is a piece of childhood gone missing. In fact, I was so ignorant of hair care I clearly remember going to school all the time without
combing my hair or so much as looking in the mirror before I left the house. I found a photo of myself standing in our driveway leaning on my mother’s 1980s Chrysler. The polyester boys’ shirt didn’t help matters any. I wasn’t a tomboy per se either. I would say I was neutral. Again, I feel certain that long hair would have pushed me over the borderline into fullon princess. I wanted a Strawberry Shortcake doll, but I didn’t want a pony. I liked pink but didn’t have much of an opinion on clothes so I wore whatever was around. Somehow in 5th grade, my hair started to grow or my mother let it grow without running me to Mr. Peacoff who cut old ladies’ hair. Then everything is a blur until about 10th grade. My hair was long enough that I could get a perm. But wasn’t my hair naturally curly, you ask? I am from central NY, which is essentially like being from one of the following: a) NJ, b) Long Island, c) parts of Florida. By this I mean, HAIR and NAILS. NAILS AND HAIR. Lots and lots of hair sprayed permed hair. Nails with nails on top of them. So odds are, as I no longer remember, I got a perm on top of hair that had some fullness but no shape whatsoever. What did my hair look like before the perm? I asked my oldest friend to find out. Here is what she said: “Your hair was always so short when you were younger. Once in fifth grade it was a little longer and quite wavy. Yes, I do remember the perm--we both got them at Holland’s department store in the
NH shopping center. I can’t forget that because yours was so tight it looked like little Cheerios all over your head and I couldn’t stop laughing! From then on, beautiful curls---I’ll say you got your moneys worth.” I got a perm...and it lasted a few months, then a year, then two. “Wow”, everyone said, “Your perm has lasted a long time!” I just never needed one again. I discovered in 10th grade that I had really nice hair that had been waiting to come out like a bear in hibernation. Of course, I could have just done the wash and go, like I have done since my freshman year of 1990 but in high school, I would take that thick curly hair, blow dry it upside down for maximum fullness- wait for it, then a curling iron then hairspray it all into a firm mountain of fro. I’ve seen some photos, and if my mother should have been involved in hair decisions, it should have been then. But she was too busy forbidding that I wear hats. And that is another story. My mother hated my thick long hair and she hated that I liked hats. For the next ten years, whenever I would need a haircut I would just ask a friend to do a trim, straight across, curl by curl. From the porch window into the bathroom, my mother would call out in a singsong voice, “If you slip with the scissors, I’ll give you 50 bucks..” This became the running joke as if we were a comedy team like Martin and Lewis, initiated by either my mother or my hair-cutting friend. No trim at my house was
complete without the call and response. From about 2004-2008 I would half-heartedly buy hair products and then use them only occasionally, as if they were long lasting like an oil change on my car. I didn’t discover the joy of reliable and daily use of hair products until 2008. I just discovered how to accurately dry my hair last fall. The critical drying period consists of wrapping it in a cotton pillowcase Carmen Miranda style on top of my head for 10 minutes, then a doggie bath upside down shake followed 10 minutes later with a styling cream. You could say I was developmentally delayed with hair. Like any person with a lifelong delay, I find myself behind once in a while still regarding my coiffure but I have come a long way since the girl in the boys’ shirt leaning on a Chrysler.
MEMOIR, 1996 In July of 1996 I packed some clothes, a 4-track, my flute, sax and tin whistle and went to Ireland on an open-ended ticket. This was a year of firsts. A nose piercing, a new career as a teacher, and newly married. I didn’t quit my job but I had no job to return to. I was hired on an emergency certificate, which didn’t promise me any position in the fall. I also wasn’t quitting my marriage, though it looks like it on paper doesn’t it? I was going on a solo trip just five months into it. This was, however, completely in line with my life at the time. I had a lifeline across the ocean to support me from afar. Maybe less ‘support’ and more ‘don’t stop me’ would be more accurate. We didn’t live together. We married in Las Vegas on his weekend leave. We drove through a snowstorm in his jeep, were married by an Elvis impersonator, and took separate flights home afterward. There was no honeymoon and our only souvenir consisted of three Polaroid photos that cost fifteen dollars. I had more support from friends who were actually
around. These were people that reflected my transforming life, running me into conflict between who I wanted to really be and the person that held down a real 9 to 5 job. I kind of had the best of both worlds. Of the 3 and a half housemates, I was the only one making enough money to sock it away for a lengthy trip. I made 1,050 a month and my rent was 200. I had nearly no expenses. I laugh now but this was my first venture in alternative living. I thought it was great. I couldn’t even breathe in Regular America in 1995 and 1996. Couldn’t bear to go inside a furnished house with magnetic note pads on the refrigerator and suburban wallpaper. Wallpaper? We didn’t have furniture. No curtains, not dresser, no TV, a broken phone that didn’t ring. Not for trying to be cool and chic either. It simply never crossed our minds that we could buy things. To give an example, when my brother came to visit once, he took me to the department store to buy things like a bath mat and an extra towel. Not for my benefit, but for himself for the two nights he and his friend were staying over. We all gathered, impressed, around the bath mat, gaping at the added color and promise of comfort to our bathroom. My
brother and his friend stayed only one night and flew red eye the next night. We still laugh about it. They were totally out of their element. At the time it wasn’t funny to my family, who got the report about my Bohemian house and freaky, unemployed housemates and rotating houseguests without last names. They knew I held a professional job, but didn’t know I had married. Now they were told I was going to Europe, starting with Ireland, for an indefinite amount of time. My mother forbade me, then upon realizing that was impossible, begged me not to go. They couldn’t in their wildest dreams fathom what possessed me. And possessed I was. 1996 was new to other things as well. My friend and I had hopped a freight train without knowing where it would go or how we could get back to Portland. This quietly sparked the longwaiting fuse to get out of here. Everyone I knew was doing nothing but playing music. Traditional Irish music was new to me, too. I was mad for the foot-stomping, circular rhythms of reels, jigs and hornpipes of the East Ave Tavern. Half of the tavern was actually from the country and it seemed like everyone else had been and was going. So I decided why not.
Music infected me. My best friend at the time was a Bob Dylan wannabee. Living the lifestyle, driving herself cross-country and busking for money. Searching for romance through poverty, if you will. I felt conflicted. I liked being near this but didn’t have the balls to unlearn my working for the man. She wanted it badly, to write songs to reflect her newly adopted lifestyle, and I didn’t want it quite as bad. Yet, the songs started to come to me anyway. Once I wrote a whole song in my head while driving home from work. The melody, the lyrics, from my head composed in the air. I pulled up and parked in front of my house and wrote it all down in my notebook lest I forget it by exiting the vehicle, like waking from a dream. I spent six months of this Bohemian year living like a gypsy hitchhiking through Ireland, staying with strangers, following trad sessions as far as France. Men I met and traveled with were confused as fuck that I was not only not ready to roll but was a married woman. I never feared and didn’t care. I thumbed it because I couldn’t stop myself. I would lumber under my giant green backpack towards the bus, and then my thumb would go out and I would be ready to hitchhike again. Standardized
transportation was too much like standardized housing, too much like the kinds of adults I wasn’t ready to become yet. I even tried to spend a night sleeping in a castle ruins under the stars, but chickened out when I saw broken glass and feared I wouldn’t be alone, or, feared that I would be. I went not only to play Irish music but also to play other kinds and work on writing my own. When I started my trip at a friend’s hookup in London, I left the heavy saxophone there until I figured out where I wanted to stay. After I decided on Galway for a few months, I settled in on my own music. With the help of musicians I’d met at the hostel and the cafe I worked at (under the table) I wrote and recorded eight songs on a 4-track recorder. The cassette tape cover art was a black and white Xerox photo of our wedding Polaroid, profile full body shot. There was only one copy and as I write this memoir I hope when I go home I can find it. I don’t play music anymore. I can’t explain it. I haven’t been back to Ireland since but that was the start of the wanderlust behind my travels and moves to different cities. I am in many ways the same risk taker in personality, but less as the years go by. My spirit of adventure remains, but here is how youth differs
from age. My emotional capacity is split between the future and the past, whereas in youth we have only the future to look to. I travel in fact am writing this in flight home to NY from Portland, a city now full of sentiment for the friends and music and times I have just described. And when I return home I want to find that lone remaining souvenir, the culmination and the reward of my Bohemian year. Look at it again and stare, dumbfounded at the woman I was in 1996 recording her first album in Galway City, Ireland with her now ex-husband not present, but at least represented on the cover.
RETAIL VALUE RON
My teenage brother was a miserable fuck. If you Googled the words ‘miserable fuck’ there would be a photo of my brother, stealing toys from homeless children. We had nothing in common and he wasn’t interested in me or my friends. He enjoyed the benefits of being the older brother. And what he got, as the older brother, was the entire basement for his room. It was pretty much his own apartment. Other than going down occasionally to do laundry, no one else went down there. It had a private entrance making it easy for party in or party out, plus a private bathroom for the novice high-school drinker to puke or pass out in. I however had no privacy. My friends were the opposite of Ron – we were goody two-shoes and a Friday night for us was my parents ordering the three of us a pizza and watching a movie. Deep down they were pleased with the parental attention, and I was just as happy to not have to go out for entertainment.
My sophomore year I threw my first party. It was a Christmas party of the only six friends I had. We wore red and green and got small presents for each other. We were loud and nerdy and we threw it in the basement and had a blast! This is before my brother moved in. The following year I wanted to do it again. By then some friends had already formed alliances with others. This left only my closest two friends and we had planned a Beaches kind of Christmas celebration, less fun and more serious. I thought Ron would go away. But he didn’t. Instead, his friends Derrick and Bob Moyer were over. Us girls were trying to out-do each other with sappy, “you are the best friends anyone could have” poems and speeches and personal gifts, and Derrick and Bob were trying to pick up Ann and Dana, hoping to score in the car on a double-date. “Mom, they’re running it! Make them leave!” I cried. Ron sidled over with that untouchable air and said, “Let’s see the gifts”. “No!” I said. I knew he would think they were dumb and cheap and girly and he was ruining the serious Beaches vibe, because we had just seen the movie Beaches and I was concerned that I was in a three-way bestfriendship and not a
two-way and I wanted to cement the deal that we were (despite the threesome element) in fact best friends forever and they could decide between the two of them who would raise my children when I died of cancer. Mom weakly protested my brother when he went ahead and held up my gift. “What the hell is this?” Did you buy this at the dollar store?” Now I knew that Ann and Dana would judge me and leave and go off and be Beaches on their own without me. But instead, they both laughed. Fueled by teenage girl laughter, he said, “Ann and Dana, I think you guys got screwed monetarily here. Your gifts cost way more than Ange’s gifts. I’d say Ange is the big winner here.” Mortified and fuming, I was speechless. Christmas was fucked. Ann and Dana laughed more, and even my mom got a chuckle. It seemed the girls thought my brother was funny. My senior year of high school, when it was time for our tiny annual Christmas party, my mom put out the coffee and cookies and my brother came to judge us again. Not as a quiet bystander, he stole the show. He evaluated each item that was given to me or from me, guessing the cost, making me look cheap and thoughtless, but my friends gracious and thoughtful.
“Look at this. Dana bought your suede gloves. You can wear these! They must have cost fifteen dollars. And Ann got you silver earrings! Now I can tell they are not from Claire’s. Ann has nice taste. But geez, you guys got screwed here! Come on Ange, you gave them some leftover candy you found in the drawer and tried to dress it up by giving it in a coffee mug. Gee, a coffee mug and candy. Wow. What a friend you are.” At this moment, I wanted to kill my brother. I was seeing red. The girls burst out laughing so hard they were falling over. Then they agreed, “Yeah, that sounds like something Ange would do!” They started calling him Retail Value Ron for the way he would cost itemize each gift and decide who had been screwed the most at Christmas. It was so bad it was good. We stopped wanting him to leave. It became an annual tradition that no gift giving would happen without my brother present. More people started coming, and we started to keep track of who won each year. By winning, meaning who gave the best gifts, and then, who gave the worst ones. They even started to bring a gift for Ron, but I argued that was swaying the judge and not allowed. Ron of course disagreed and gladly took the gifts.
Over the years we even had prizes for the winners. My mother got in on the tradition, and wanting me to win, would buy extra presents. Her daughter wasn’t going to lose in her own house. Looking back on it, I realize that the ribbing and judging me was a gesture of love. Of knowing me well enough to call me out on the cheap homemade gifts or chiding that I had been caught re-gifting or recycling. Ron made fun of Ann and Dana’s gifts, too, but he made fun of me much more. I loved that this event belonged to my family, to me, but I also hated being made fun of and laughed at, even at times by my own mother. Ron was callous, like a sports announcer, but in truth, he was often right, and always unstoppably funny. I laughed at myself along with everyone. I did win Retail Value Ron one year. I bought gift cards with a monetary value stamped right on it, and gave them inside a reusable tea tin. No one could deny monetary value. But often, I lost. I always got great gifts, though, and we carried this tradition on for ten years. My brother, by virtue of being a dick, had created a unique holiday tradition that no one else had, and I looked forward to it every year once I had moved on from the movie Beaches. Once
my mother passed away, none of us had the spirit to do Retail Value Ron anymore, and we were getting too old to make time to meet on short Christmas vacations or to be excited about small gifts. Today the holidays are such a drag. A cyclical depression like rings in trees, reminding us we are older and the event still deeply worthless, heavily capitalistic and spiritless. I miss the way Retail Value Ron erased all of these markers at least for a short while.
NEURAL FIRINGS 2 Do you remember having a doll house? Remember the tiny furnitire and the stiff little dolls that only bent at the waist and laid flat in bed? The way it was open sliced down the middle where you could jet pack fly in and out of rooms? This is why I didn’t dig the doll house format, for all of these reasons. Then I made friends with the Jenkins girls who did something original. They made an open doll house environment with whole shoe boxes representing individual rooms. Your doll could walk in and out of rooms that were proportionate with their size and the shoe box sized rooms allowed for walking around your play situation and it felt very real. So NYC in one word: pedestrian. In NY you walk, and everyone walks with you. Public transportation is the great equalizer and the sizr of the city and the walking necessity is the universal life blood. I mean it when I say that more than great food and absurd entertainment of all kinds and all the shit you love to have about NY, it’s running into good friends, co-workers and your waitress crossing the street or on the train. ………..
Mike’s yoga class is the only one I will attend at Body in Motion. Sundays at 6pm, Mondays 615 or 8pm. He’s almost funny to look at - muscular and short like a wrestler with feathered, puffy 80s hair. His is the only pace that I can practice and enjoy. He changes up the routine per class but draws from the same options that cycle around. It’s the flow that keeps me coming back. He knows me by name and often finds time during the ninety minutes to take pity on my weak form and tight back by pulling or pushing me into position. But it’s his booming tenor yogi voice that makes me smile inside. He speaks with stretched, metered words that I have come to memorize. We did this cleansing exercise Monday night where you breathe in deeply and then sharply and repeatedly exhale. Exhale. Exhale. Imagine an entire class going into labor together, men included. That mantra of exhale, exhale! Exhale! It seeped into my head and gives me direction when I least expect it. Still half asleep this morning, rushing to the N/R/W. Which way was I headed? Which set of stairs is it? Downtown! Downtown! Downtown! ………….
If you live in or have visited NYC you are familiar with the triumph and failure of catching trains. You quicken your pace when you see people walking towards you, disembarking from an uptown or downtown train. Is it yours? You break into a sprint down the stairs, cutting through the crowd like salmon swimming upstream, and ideally burst through the closing subway doors, sometimes blocking the closure with your body. Sometimes, you get there just as the doors have closed and the train leaves without you. Sometimes the train doors have closed but it waits idling, taunting you with that “almost made it” feeling which you wouldn’t mind if the train had actually left, yet it is still there. The conductor could open the doors, right now, and let you in. His chosen people. This is like life isn’t it? Here is what I have observed. People wanting to get on that train, knowing the train that should be theirs. I have been on all levels of acceptance myself, and observed the person-to-train interaction from all angles. Being on the train and watching from inside, if I am feeling self-righteous I am privately pleased the train is leaving without wasting another few seconds. If I pass someone racing down while I am prodding up and out, I feel empathetic, like a shared kinship. Here is what I have noted. It doesn’t matter how you
handle the situation once those doors close. There is no secret answered. I used to think pounding the doors with your fist would get you give you a second chance. Maybe standing there patiently, smiling, would call up grace and the doors would open. Today I saw something in between. A patient wait, but with a touching of the door, like one fingering a tombstone, already knowing the chance is gone, yet still waiting, disbelieving as the train after idling, does not provide but leaves. I was exiting but paused to share a moment with this woman. She wasn’t mad, just sorry, and I smiled and shrugged for her as if to say, I have been there. We have all been there. Winners and losers on the subway of life. Entirely random. Out of our control, to some extent.
OWS / WTC I live here in NYC and I hadn’t been to OWS. I first heard about it via the Bluestockings list serve. Bluestockings being a politically active radical punk group of people, hearing about a protest on Wall St. didn’t catch my attention. I also have never been a news watcher, never ever. Also shit happens in NYC everyday. When I heard about Michael Moore coming, Radiohead possibly playing a live show, I started to take notice. The fact that protestors were arrested and framed by the NYPD, even this did not require a response. Going up against the concept of Wall St and big money, corporate greed, whatever, but in this vague ‘you suck’ kind of way just seemed dumb. And complicated. It’s complicated. I have been starting to feel guilty that I hadn’t gone to see it myself. I over think a lot of things in life. It’s who I am. Who cares if I go? Does going equal support? Why wouldn’t I support it? What would support look like? What would commitment look like? I can’t stand to be involved in anything I cannot affect. I can’t bear to be in any kind of group. I am the original punk. I don’t join book clubs, I don’t join
committees, I can’t work in a group. I hate group discussion. I hate voting. I’m for action. I can think of what would make that action happen, but if I can’t force the hand, then I bail. I feel about protests the way I feel about being agnostic. I want to feel it, but I don’t because some kind of reality gets in my way. Christians want to hold hands. It makes me want to retch. Bands want you to clap along. I can’t even stand group claps. I think of every Earth Day celebration. I remember my first protest. The one and only time I held a sign and marched around a block. I felt hideous. I was mortified to be involved in such a weak effort. I remember interpreting a protest against the annual APA Convention with a group of mental health patients, workers and supporters. I tried one last time to believe in a protest cause. It was in 2005 or 2006 with Code Pink. I lived in DC and heard about their plan to stage a hunger strike on the White House grounds. I joined the parade and that ended in a staged ‘last supper’ on a pink table cloth. Speeches were made and people were encouraged to show support by fasting to whatever degree they felt comfortable with or joining full monty in the hunger strike. The cause was ending the war. This really made me think. I thought about
it for a little bit, could a hunger strike bring down the war? Is this something I could do? If I knew for sure it would effect the necessary change, I guess I could go through with it. But, I didn’t. I didn’t do shit. But Cindy Sheehan did. But the war did not end. It seemed to me that if a person could do a hunger strike and with that media attention, could not achieve a result, then everything else was fucked. **** We know 9/11 happened. No one is gonna forget it. I’m not anti-memorial, but I don’t think it is my patriotic duty to touch the ground. I have mixed feelings about the people who need to go and see it. I definitely have strong feelings against taking a photo of yourself and friends in front of it. So when Jon and his friends said they were going to the 9/11 Memorial and did I want to come, I thought about the irony that I would visit a stone cold memorial to history when history was being made with live people in Zucotti Park right fucking now. So I decided to go to both. And you know what, people were taking photos of their friends and families and life goes on whether I act like like the judgement
police or not. And really, the reflecting ponds (I think they are called?) are beautifully done, the winning touch being the black hole square. That hit home and reminded me why I hate memorials. It’s because I hate the absurdity of trying to stop what has happened. Don’t tell me that’s not what is at the core. Compensation. That’s the words that went through my mind when I entered and security asked to see our tickets at seven different checkpoints in the way in. Yes, seven checkpoints. For WHAT? NY trying to make up for the loss. Cops and security and NYPD camera bubbles and reflecting pools and America. Where is the memorial to America? It’s across the street and it’s called Occupy Wall Street. Compensation. There’s a brand new fancy hotel on the corner to the Memorial, the W Hotel. The American mentality is and has always been to get a refund, isn’t it? When I went to the Vietnam Memorial I was 23 years old. I went with the goal of reading every name. I wanted to show respect and not just pass
by quickly. I remember seeing the movie about the making of the memorial, and the tag line, “It’s got to have all the names.” So I took it seriously that the wall was about the names. After reading 2 or 3 walls, I started walking, passing section after section. I cried for my innocence. I realized then that I didn’t know shit about anything, and that it wasn’t about the names. It was about the length of the wall. And not until much later did I realize that it wasn’t even about that. It was about compensation. 9/11: I was living in California. I first heard about the plan attacks in another language. Not hearing it in English, but seeing it in ASL. Ed Copra and another teacher and I had all just gotten out of our cars at about the same time, and Ed signed that a plane had hit the WTC. As I said before, I never listen to the news ever, so I had gotten up and gone all the way to work without knowing this. Since it was west coast time, hours had already gone by. I know a few other people who were living elsewhere when they found out. This is all I have to say on my experience with learning the news. I wonder though, what kind of person I would have been. Would I have helped? Would I have helped survivors in some way? Or
would I have just split? USA: Survivor Guilt. We are all, this is my theory, 99% of us, living with Survivor Guilt. This is how I am going to connect my experience going from the 9/11 WTC Memorial to Occupy Wall St. As I left the info center, the last words I heard going out were from a video saying ‘survivor guilt’. America has it all, comparatively. We know it. So, when we walk down the street, and see a homeless guy asking for change, we look away. Are we all greedy assholes? Are we judgmental? I think we don’t know to do with our discomfort. Maybe I am wrong and it is the complete opposite. If people felt guilty about their status they would be stepping over each other trying to give til it hurts. To individuals and mass charities. What do we do with guilt? We deny it and pass the buck. And that is America, I guess. Then again, Americans like to help each other out. And as a government, we kind of do that, too. But now I am thinking about Occupy Wall Street again and I wonder, fuck, this is surprisingly successful! Over 950 satellite
movements in 26 countries, I think. Then I think about everything I have just written and how it applies to me. Could I have faith? Is there a clear goal? Do I have some kind of guilt preventing me from participating? Is compensation owed to the people? Are the OWS people the kind of people who “haven’t seen the Vietnam Memorial”, so to speak, or are they totally clear in their task? Do I feel activated? Yeah, I guess I do! But there is so much wrong with America. I mean, it’s fascinating that OWS doesn’t appear to have a concrete goal which was part of the reason I blew it off. It makes total sense though now that I think about it because it is too complicated to deal with. I guess a sit in is the only way to issue the ‘fuck you’. I guess I could get behind that. But I am not a joiner, and going there didn’t make me want to join. I do want to take the time though to care about this, which is progress.
EPILOGUE When I die and I am fading from earth, I want my last memory to be of karaoke. One of our karaoke nights in the private Korean room, BYOB. Dancing and screaming my brains out, jumping up and down, doing my favorite thing with my favorite friends. Drinking as much as I can between songs, but I can’t drink because I am busy jumping on the couch, dancing in front of the screen, laughing and laughing. Everyone singing along, everyone shaking to the music, playing a tambourine, whooping it up. I feel young, I feel alive, completely myself and outside of myself. When my star goes out and fades to dust, I want this to be the closing credits. When I die and I am fading from Earth, I want my last memory to be when Jon and I went scuba diving in Barbados in 2005. We had just descended into the bluest water ready to start the tour when I chickened out. We had a full conversation under water in sign. “Come on, it will be OK. I’m with you. We’re going to see beautiful coral. You’ll be fine, come on.” But I chickened out and signed that I was going back up. He went on ahead. I reflect on this moment often. I see Jon, in the bluest water ever, telling me to come. When I die, I want that to be my last memory, when I take his hand underwater and I go on. I want both of them.
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