I love how the radio can immediately transform a quiet, empty room. With the snap of a button, you’re immediately connected to a voice, to something welcoming, to something intimate. To music. I’m not talking about shock jocks and those inane morning dee-jays with their ridiculous banter; I’m talking good radio—found mostly left of the dial, mostly in am frequency. On the loneliest of days, all I need is my radio. Elvis Costello tells us that “radio is the sound salvation,” and so it really is.
I got radio in my blood. My father built his reputation in radio. Years as a dee- jay, and as program director. He was a fucked up guy, skipping out on us when I was 7--which must have been easy because he never looked back. So I didn’t know the man, don’t know what he looks like, have no idea what made him tick. But I know he loved the radio—and he gave me that gift.
My first radio? A black transistor with a sharp metallic smell. It was purchased in the winter of no heat and the government cheese, and so I know my mother went without something crucial in order to buy it. Food in those days was scarce; housing a luxury--so I can't imagine what she gave up. But when I got my radio, and it crackled to life, it made everything okay. And there was a lot that wasn’t okay back then in that isolated, small town--a place where it snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed. Until you’ve lived in a place like that, you don’t understand the deafening silence of snow. Storms that lasted for days; snow that fell with a vengeance, and white-outs so thick you couldn’t see your own boots—assuming, of course, that you had money to buy them. And everything muffled; dead; buried under enormous mountains of snow that drifted up to our second story window. Nothing moved, nothing breathed under the weight of all that snow. At least not until I snapped on my radio.
Even as a little girl, I could hear the sounds of the "city" in the voice of my favorite dee-jay. Could hear in that deep, warm voice the highways and exit ramps and shopping centers that existed around him. I felt connected to him, and I’d press my ear to the speaker to forget about the snow covered, silent streets outside my window.
It was the first thing I packed when I moved to that “city,” an hour's drive south of our town. Not that I had much at 18, all alone. Some clothes, and my radio. I rented a furnished efficiency just off the boulevard at the top of a hill, eating loneliness for breakfast, lunch and for dinner. But there was nothing to return to, and so I stayed put up there on the hill. Beyond my window, down on the boulevard, I could see the yellow neon lights of Arthur Treacher’s; off in the distance, the on-ramp to the highway. When I turned on my radio and looked out that window, it was like a vision to me.
And it was there one night, sitting alone by the window, that I heard my father on the radio. Funny I would recognize his voice--but I did--holding my breath until it was confirmed. And I sat there, still as stone, and listened. Listened to the voice of my lost father--on the radio.
***
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
Monday Morning
So it’s Monday morning, the start of a whole new work week. Nothing new there. Been starting new work weeks, just like this one, forever. Alarm rings; I lay there a moment, thinking; lift my legs to the side of the bed; and the day begins…
I’m one of the lucky ones: I have a job I like. But I’ve done some crazy things in my time, let me tell you. Paid my dues in that department. Started babysitting when I was 12. Fifty cents an hour when I sat for my mother’s friends; $1.00 an hour for everyone else. But that job should come with combat pay—and not just because of all those kids; all those meals & clean-up; the first aid. But for the husbands with their lascivious eyes, and their itchy fingers. The coming home early. The rides home after they’d been drinking, me and my new breasts and hips on the front seat beside them. My parents, like the rest of my girlfriends’ parents, oblivious. Smiling and going back to their yard work when he picked me up on his motorcycle. Stabbing the legs of two pink plastic flamingos into our front yard as a 42-year-old man leaned in to buckle the helmet he had brought for their daughter to wear. My whole body trembling, as I lifted one newly elongated leg to position my body behind his on the seat, wrapping my arms around his slightly doughy waist. I could smell the man-ness on the back of his neck. And of course later his wife would find him bent over the couch, just about to kiss me. Me, too polite to say no. Didn’t know how to say no. Maybe didn’t want to say no. And then Jimmy—the tall, lanky husband of a long-haired baby making machine. Five kids under the age of 5, and him looking to make more. Pinning me one evening to the floor, touching. I could smell the whiskey on his breath, could hear his kids sleeping upstairs while I prayed for his wife to pull up the drive. I knew how to say no by then, but he wouldn’t listen…
Oh, the jobs I’ve had—and the people I’ve met. Some crazy ones, I tell you. Like my 4-day stint for a business publication on Wall Street, with the publisher sitting alone in a conference room, dirty dishes around him, his razor and shaving cream right by the fork. He promoted me three times that week amid whispers of a brain tumor by the long-term employees who had been there slightly more than a week. I’m sorry about his brain tumor, I told his faithful and grossly overweight assistant, as I stood by the elevator, waiting to go down. Please just send me my check.
Then the retirement community developer in Austin. Just the two of us in a 2000 square foot office. Headquarters someplace in Vegas. But he couldn’t close the deal—something about an endangered salamander—and Vegas pulled him back, his shot at the “big time” over. And yet headquarters had requested that I stay on, to keep a presence in the area. Him explaining it to me that day, his face crumpled and tired. Me, sympathetic, but with the dawning realization that I was going to be alone in a palatial office, with my employer a thousand miles away. How hard it was not to smile, not to do a jig right there in front of that defeated, corporate man. I stayed on for seven more months, taking naps in the conference room, on top of his desk. No one called. No one ever came by.
Jobs, jobs, jobs. Such a big part of our lives. I got mine, and you got yours. And the crap we’re often willing to put up with just to keep ‘em… Hiding our real selves behind suits, behind desks, behind the protective wall of email. Unless of course you’ve got one of those jobs that no one else wants--and then you’re too worn out to hide. Woolf once said that life is just a series of illusions. Which of course it is, but I’ll take my illusions, thank you, and please stack them really close together. So I don’t fall off into the abyss as I’m stepping along: to my job every Monday morning, singing along with the radio…
I’m one of the lucky ones: I have a job I like. But I’ve done some crazy things in my time, let me tell you. Paid my dues in that department. Started babysitting when I was 12. Fifty cents an hour when I sat for my mother’s friends; $1.00 an hour for everyone else. But that job should come with combat pay—and not just because of all those kids; all those meals & clean-up; the first aid. But for the husbands with their lascivious eyes, and their itchy fingers. The coming home early. The rides home after they’d been drinking, me and my new breasts and hips on the front seat beside them. My parents, like the rest of my girlfriends’ parents, oblivious. Smiling and going back to their yard work when he picked me up on his motorcycle. Stabbing the legs of two pink plastic flamingos into our front yard as a 42-year-old man leaned in to buckle the helmet he had brought for their daughter to wear. My whole body trembling, as I lifted one newly elongated leg to position my body behind his on the seat, wrapping my arms around his slightly doughy waist. I could smell the man-ness on the back of his neck. And of course later his wife would find him bent over the couch, just about to kiss me. Me, too polite to say no. Didn’t know how to say no. Maybe didn’t want to say no. And then Jimmy—the tall, lanky husband of a long-haired baby making machine. Five kids under the age of 5, and him looking to make more. Pinning me one evening to the floor, touching. I could smell the whiskey on his breath, could hear his kids sleeping upstairs while I prayed for his wife to pull up the drive. I knew how to say no by then, but he wouldn’t listen…
Oh, the jobs I’ve had—and the people I’ve met. Some crazy ones, I tell you. Like my 4-day stint for a business publication on Wall Street, with the publisher sitting alone in a conference room, dirty dishes around him, his razor and shaving cream right by the fork. He promoted me three times that week amid whispers of a brain tumor by the long-term employees who had been there slightly more than a week. I’m sorry about his brain tumor, I told his faithful and grossly overweight assistant, as I stood by the elevator, waiting to go down. Please just send me my check.
Then the retirement community developer in Austin. Just the two of us in a 2000 square foot office. Headquarters someplace in Vegas. But he couldn’t close the deal—something about an endangered salamander—and Vegas pulled him back, his shot at the “big time” over. And yet headquarters had requested that I stay on, to keep a presence in the area. Him explaining it to me that day, his face crumpled and tired. Me, sympathetic, but with the dawning realization that I was going to be alone in a palatial office, with my employer a thousand miles away. How hard it was not to smile, not to do a jig right there in front of that defeated, corporate man. I stayed on for seven more months, taking naps in the conference room, on top of his desk. No one called. No one ever came by.
Jobs, jobs, jobs. Such a big part of our lives. I got mine, and you got yours. And the crap we’re often willing to put up with just to keep ‘em… Hiding our real selves behind suits, behind desks, behind the protective wall of email. Unless of course you’ve got one of those jobs that no one else wants--and then you’re too worn out to hide. Woolf once said that life is just a series of illusions. Which of course it is, but I’ll take my illusions, thank you, and please stack them really close together. So I don’t fall off into the abyss as I’m stepping along: to my job every Monday morning, singing along with the radio…
Sunday, June 28, 2009
6-28-09
The Rachel Stories—A Blog
6-28-09
It’s Sunday, my favorite day of the week. I like the inherent quietness of a Sunday. The Times on the front step, doing the puzzle with Will Shortz on NPR, Weekend Edition with Lee Ann Hanson. How I love the radio. My friend of 40 years, the radio. A voice in the wilderness all those years ago in that isolated, snowy town.
Not everyone likes Sunday the way I do. My brother says Sundays are the most depressing day of the week. That they sadden him as much as a Bob Seger song. Nothing worse, he says, than hearing a Bob Seger song on a Sunday. Makes him want to jump off the Tappan Zee, it depresses him so. And those new green signs they’ve hung along the bridge—that “Life is Worth Living” and the 800 number to call—don’t make an ounce of difference. Wouldn’t stop him from pitching himself into the cement-like Hudson below on a quiet Sunday afternoon with Bob Seger singing on the radio.
Sundays are quiet days, church-going days, I guess. But not for me. I get my spirituality from other places. Like the radio. Like the food pantry where I volunteer. Like the way my 7-year-old laughs sometimes. I’ve seen all the churches I need to at this point in my life. Saw Little Richard testify in a neglected old church in an Upstate town. Witnessed a bunch of believers getting slain in the holy spirit. Watched people speak in tongues at a Holiday Inn gathering that had me bolting for the exit sign. Saw the Mighty Clouds of Joy moving the mostly-black crowd at a long ago NYS Fair, me and my mother among them; and her sprinting down the aisle, eager to answer their call to claim Jesus as her savior, having traded in Engelbert for Jesus a few months before. And after, the bass player hawking a diet pill remedy while the band was on break. Spent more time still mouthing phrases so ingrained in my head that I’d long since lost track of the meaning. Inthenameofthefather, andoftheson, andoftheholyspirit, amen. Even at a young age, I wondered where the women were in all that. And I always thought it was the craziest notion that Mary conceived her baby through immaculate conception. What a field day Cosmo could have with that one, after the list I read yesterday. And don’t get me started on the Orthodox Jewish women I teach—who arrive for class in the back seat of a cab or their husband’s or father’s car; their hair hidden under wigs, their support hose and sensible shoes and long sleeves, even on the hottest of days. We are so afraid of women’s sexuality… So, yes, I reject the shrink-wrapped, white-washed organized religion of Sundays—in favor of my own spiritual journey. Which is limited, I admit.
So I’m always looking for redemption. Not consciously of course. More often it finds me. It’s funny how shit like that happens. We get gifts from the heavens when we need them most. It’s like God (not the white bearded, staff-holding, egomaniac that Religion has packaged, but Something Else) going, Hey, Stupid, I’m right over here. These days I can feel that Hand, saying, here, take this. A gift. It’s what you need right now. And me, not smart enough to recognize what’s being offered. I’ve got my Agenda. Got my Plan. Driving 100 mph in a big fucking circle. That’s how smart I am.
So, it’s Sunday and all that. And thanksbetogod it’s sunny again. And I sleep until almost 9am, which is very late for me. I make breakfast, listening to the radio. Comfort my son over a loose tooth that pains him—and he wants to be a baby again in my lap with his long, peach-fuzzed legs, his 60 lbs, his neck still slightly reminiscent of baby powder and lotion. But we move on: he to his “maff” books and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Me, upstairs to take a bath for the second day in a row because my hair is still rocking. No need to shampoo. Get dressed.
And the day shifts. I head into Manhattan.
As always, I find parking. Lucky like that. It’s hot already, muggy. I wedge my Ipod headphones into my ears. Listen to Them. It’s Sunday after all—and my spirituality also comes from music. From people like Van—who I saw perform in a polyester brown suit outdoors at Tanglewood on a hot August night, that plump Irishman whose spirit sustained us when we got home and found the note that someone close to us had been murdered and someone closer had committed suicide… So I walk cross-town on 53rd, with a young Van in my ear, heading for the Folk Art Museum. And just past 6th Ave., there’s some kind of gay pride parade assembling. Techno thumping from the flatbed trucks lined up to glide down 5th Ave. Beautiful, tanned men in all manner of undress and women’s dress are dancing, laughing. A Caribbean-theme truck with men in enormous feathered headdresses in vibrant shades of blues and pinks. And then I notice the truck celebrating the older men’s leather bar; and these men are not “beautiful,” not tanned, not buff. They are middle aged men in their middle aged bodies. Undressed. Dancing. I watch one overweight man, dressed in nothing but a thong and a hard hat, dancing to the pulsing music. Here I am, world, he seems to be saying, love me for who I am. And beside me, a couple nudges each other and laughs. Tourists with their fanny packs and digital Canons. Wipe that smirk off your face, I want to say, but the music is too loud; and I can see that they are too smug in their convictions for my remark to hit home. Probably went to church this morning, and will go back home with stories and photos of all the faggots on 5th Avenue today.
Inside the Folk Art Museum it’s quiet, except when the door opens and another visitor comes in, bringing the techno with her. But just for a moment, and it’s quiet again. I use my student ID to buy a reduced price ticket from the androgynous person at the front desk. The museum building is 5 floors, but very narrow—dwarfed by MOMA, the Goliath next door. The concrete staircase is magnificent in its apparently unsuspended design. But overall, I’m disappointed. Yes, there are the quilts. The Nadelstern creations that appear as though you’re looking at them through a kaleidoscope—her only “studio,” a kitchen table in a small apartment in the Bronx. And there are the wood carvings by Ulysses Davis, a black southern barber, who created over 320 wood carvings that he kept in his barber shop—carvings mostly of patriotic and religious symbols. Most amazing is his series of carved busts of forty U.S. presidents, from Washington to The Moron’s father, George H.W., all lined up in two neat rows along the length of a wall. But I found a certain melancholy in the number of “artist unidentified” works displayed throughout the museum. These self taught artists, unrecognized, unacknowledged for their contributions. How hard it is to be an artist in this country. To claim yourself Painter. Sculptor. Dancer. Writer. As Mademoiselle Reisz tells Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, an artist must have very strong wings.
Which most of us don’t. And tonight I’m thinking about Helen Marish. Self taught Painter. Artist. Whistling at her easel while listening to the radio or her John-Luc Ponty records. Me writing on the couch beside her. Canvas after canvas after canvas disappointing her. Hundreds of them never shown, never revealed. Her paintings like the 1800 poems discovered after Dickinson’s death. Helen’s McKeesport and Port View—her own Pittsburgh in all those off-kilter, slanted images. And beer drinking Joe, trying to relate to his artist daughter the best way he could that night many years ago, by making her a squeegee so she could finish a silk screen. And Helen, of course, rejecting it. Helen Marish, Painter, Artist, Friend. She has saved every single one of my stories, every single letter and card. Believing—no matter how long I never deliver. I miss you tonight, Helen. My 30-year-long friend out there in Hell A, probably cruising the streets as I write this, tossing an interesting bit of trash into your car, to make into something later. To make into art.
***
6-28-09
It’s Sunday, my favorite day of the week. I like the inherent quietness of a Sunday. The Times on the front step, doing the puzzle with Will Shortz on NPR, Weekend Edition with Lee Ann Hanson. How I love the radio. My friend of 40 years, the radio. A voice in the wilderness all those years ago in that isolated, snowy town.
Not everyone likes Sunday the way I do. My brother says Sundays are the most depressing day of the week. That they sadden him as much as a Bob Seger song. Nothing worse, he says, than hearing a Bob Seger song on a Sunday. Makes him want to jump off the Tappan Zee, it depresses him so. And those new green signs they’ve hung along the bridge—that “Life is Worth Living” and the 800 number to call—don’t make an ounce of difference. Wouldn’t stop him from pitching himself into the cement-like Hudson below on a quiet Sunday afternoon with Bob Seger singing on the radio.
Sundays are quiet days, church-going days, I guess. But not for me. I get my spirituality from other places. Like the radio. Like the food pantry where I volunteer. Like the way my 7-year-old laughs sometimes. I’ve seen all the churches I need to at this point in my life. Saw Little Richard testify in a neglected old church in an Upstate town. Witnessed a bunch of believers getting slain in the holy spirit. Watched people speak in tongues at a Holiday Inn gathering that had me bolting for the exit sign. Saw the Mighty Clouds of Joy moving the mostly-black crowd at a long ago NYS Fair, me and my mother among them; and her sprinting down the aisle, eager to answer their call to claim Jesus as her savior, having traded in Engelbert for Jesus a few months before. And after, the bass player hawking a diet pill remedy while the band was on break. Spent more time still mouthing phrases so ingrained in my head that I’d long since lost track of the meaning. Inthenameofthefather, andoftheson, andoftheholyspirit, amen. Even at a young age, I wondered where the women were in all that. And I always thought it was the craziest notion that Mary conceived her baby through immaculate conception. What a field day Cosmo could have with that one, after the list I read yesterday. And don’t get me started on the Orthodox Jewish women I teach—who arrive for class in the back seat of a cab or their husband’s or father’s car; their hair hidden under wigs, their support hose and sensible shoes and long sleeves, even on the hottest of days. We are so afraid of women’s sexuality… So, yes, I reject the shrink-wrapped, white-washed organized religion of Sundays—in favor of my own spiritual journey. Which is limited, I admit.
So I’m always looking for redemption. Not consciously of course. More often it finds me. It’s funny how shit like that happens. We get gifts from the heavens when we need them most. It’s like God (not the white bearded, staff-holding, egomaniac that Religion has packaged, but Something Else) going, Hey, Stupid, I’m right over here. These days I can feel that Hand, saying, here, take this. A gift. It’s what you need right now. And me, not smart enough to recognize what’s being offered. I’ve got my Agenda. Got my Plan. Driving 100 mph in a big fucking circle. That’s how smart I am.
So, it’s Sunday and all that. And thanksbetogod it’s sunny again. And I sleep until almost 9am, which is very late for me. I make breakfast, listening to the radio. Comfort my son over a loose tooth that pains him—and he wants to be a baby again in my lap with his long, peach-fuzzed legs, his 60 lbs, his neck still slightly reminiscent of baby powder and lotion. But we move on: he to his “maff” books and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Me, upstairs to take a bath for the second day in a row because my hair is still rocking. No need to shampoo. Get dressed.
And the day shifts. I head into Manhattan.
As always, I find parking. Lucky like that. It’s hot already, muggy. I wedge my Ipod headphones into my ears. Listen to Them. It’s Sunday after all—and my spirituality also comes from music. From people like Van—who I saw perform in a polyester brown suit outdoors at Tanglewood on a hot August night, that plump Irishman whose spirit sustained us when we got home and found the note that someone close to us had been murdered and someone closer had committed suicide… So I walk cross-town on 53rd, with a young Van in my ear, heading for the Folk Art Museum. And just past 6th Ave., there’s some kind of gay pride parade assembling. Techno thumping from the flatbed trucks lined up to glide down 5th Ave. Beautiful, tanned men in all manner of undress and women’s dress are dancing, laughing. A Caribbean-theme truck with men in enormous feathered headdresses in vibrant shades of blues and pinks. And then I notice the truck celebrating the older men’s leather bar; and these men are not “beautiful,” not tanned, not buff. They are middle aged men in their middle aged bodies. Undressed. Dancing. I watch one overweight man, dressed in nothing but a thong and a hard hat, dancing to the pulsing music. Here I am, world, he seems to be saying, love me for who I am. And beside me, a couple nudges each other and laughs. Tourists with their fanny packs and digital Canons. Wipe that smirk off your face, I want to say, but the music is too loud; and I can see that they are too smug in their convictions for my remark to hit home. Probably went to church this morning, and will go back home with stories and photos of all the faggots on 5th Avenue today.
Inside the Folk Art Museum it’s quiet, except when the door opens and another visitor comes in, bringing the techno with her. But just for a moment, and it’s quiet again. I use my student ID to buy a reduced price ticket from the androgynous person at the front desk. The museum building is 5 floors, but very narrow—dwarfed by MOMA, the Goliath next door. The concrete staircase is magnificent in its apparently unsuspended design. But overall, I’m disappointed. Yes, there are the quilts. The Nadelstern creations that appear as though you’re looking at them through a kaleidoscope—her only “studio,” a kitchen table in a small apartment in the Bronx. And there are the wood carvings by Ulysses Davis, a black southern barber, who created over 320 wood carvings that he kept in his barber shop—carvings mostly of patriotic and religious symbols. Most amazing is his series of carved busts of forty U.S. presidents, from Washington to The Moron’s father, George H.W., all lined up in two neat rows along the length of a wall. But I found a certain melancholy in the number of “artist unidentified” works displayed throughout the museum. These self taught artists, unrecognized, unacknowledged for their contributions. How hard it is to be an artist in this country. To claim yourself Painter. Sculptor. Dancer. Writer. As Mademoiselle Reisz tells Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, an artist must have very strong wings.
Which most of us don’t. And tonight I’m thinking about Helen Marish. Self taught Painter. Artist. Whistling at her easel while listening to the radio or her John-Luc Ponty records. Me writing on the couch beside her. Canvas after canvas after canvas disappointing her. Hundreds of them never shown, never revealed. Her paintings like the 1800 poems discovered after Dickinson’s death. Helen’s McKeesport and Port View—her own Pittsburgh in all those off-kilter, slanted images. And beer drinking Joe, trying to relate to his artist daughter the best way he could that night many years ago, by making her a squeegee so she could finish a silk screen. And Helen, of course, rejecting it. Helen Marish, Painter, Artist, Friend. She has saved every single one of my stories, every single letter and card. Believing—no matter how long I never deliver. I miss you tonight, Helen. My 30-year-long friend out there in Hell A, probably cruising the streets as I write this, tossing an interesting bit of trash into your car, to make into something later. To make into art.
***
Saturday, June 27, 2009
6-27-09
Today wasn’t all crap. The sun came out. I got my hair done. I ate ice cream. So in that way it was good. But in lots of other ways, it sucked. Like for starters, waking up here in a place that feels alien, temporary, budget. Every morning since I moved in, the very first thing I think about is the fact that I’m here. In this bed, under this window, in this room. I don’t believe in Fate and Luck and stuff like that. Actually it’s not that I don’t believe in them, it’s just that I believe more in the cold hard reality of choice. Fate and Luck are like salt & pepper sprinkled over our choices. So when I’m lying in bed in the morning, thinking about how it is that I’ve awakened in this fatigued-looking room, I find myself reflecting on the choices I’ve made along the way. Some good, some bad. Like everyone else, I suppose. But it’s an easy place to avoid, especially since it’s summer. Although you wouldn’t know it by the weather. Every day it rains. Every damn day the sky is laden with clouds—dark, thick, brooding ones. Every day I think, well, this has got to be the end of the rain. But instead another day dawns and the clouds are there and the rain follows soon after. But today, like I said, was good in that regard. The sun was out all day.
So after I woke up and finished bumming out about being here, I took a bath. I take a shower one day, and a bath the next. I like the variety. And I’m not one to go a day without bathing, although I think plenty of people do. I shave my legs everyday, too—even in winter—which freaked out a friend of mine once when I told her. She lets her legs go in the winter, she said. But the hair on my legs would grow as thick as a pair of long johns, and I’m not into that. In fact, it’s a bit of a job keeping the hair at bay when you’re dark like me. So I stay on top of that kind of thing.
After that, I went and got my hair done. What a mood lifter when you come out 90 minutes later, grays gone, bleached and tired out hair miraculously turned into rich dark silkiness. But while I was sitting in the chair, with those funky smelling chemicals lathered over my head, I read one of those magazines you always find in hair salons. Not the ones with all the celebrities in it (almost none of whom I know anymore), but one of those magazines for younger women that focus on fashion and lots of stuff about men: loving men, having sex with men, understanding men, finding men, etc. For some reason, I thumbed through that magazine today, despite bringing a book with me that I’m really enjoying. God, how depressing it was to read all that, and yet, I couldn’t put it down. That magazine makes us seem so desperate. So uncertain. So in need of instruction. Really, it’s there to make us half nuts with the pressure—disguised, of course, as “help”—of catching and keeping a man so we’ll buy products and services to do that. Even more depressing was that I read the damn thing. Couldn’t put it down. Was sort of disappointed when Lady (yes, that’s her name) called me over to the sink to rinse the color out of my hair. Wait, I wanted to say, I’m not finished reading the 100 tips on how to please your man in bed. There were a few in there, I have to admit, that were a revelation to me. I mean, how do they know these things? Was there a small group of staff assigned to pen this article? Was it written by one person? Did they assemble a focus group of men to be the definitive answer on blow jobs, 69s, and different styles of intercourse? Send out questionnaires? I learned, for example, that men like it when you get on top, but that you should lean back and spread your legs really wide so the guy can see himself pumping in and out of you. Yet about ten tips later, they said that you should lean in close to your lover, when you’re on top, so that you won’t be self conscious about how much your breasts and stomach jiggle when you move. You’ll enjoy it more, and so will he, they said. So which is it? I really wanted to know—which, when you think about it, is rather depressing for a woman my age.
So the sun was out, and after I left the salon, I went to the pool. I didn’t want to fuck up my new hair color, and so I plunked an enormous straw hat on my head—and immediately became, I felt, a cliché. White. Suburban. Female. 40s. Straw hat. If anyone saw me, they’d read me one way, and not the way I am at all. (Which is what way? Half the time these days, I really don’t know. But I know it ain’t that.) I set up my chair, got out my book. I love the water, the ocean especially, but pools are a close second. I love the way the sun glints off the water in a pool, especially in the late afternoon. I like the smell of chlorine, the sound of people diving and splashing. And I like to swim naked in pools, although clearly that wasn’t happening today. If the White Suburban Woman in her 40s took off her bathing suit and jumped naked in the pool, it would be like a scene right out of “Jaws.” People running for cover. Leaping in fear. What is that?? We love our youth—especially when it comes to women. Pure unadulterated youth. Please, woman, put your clothes back on! So of course I sat there, a cliché in her straw hat and one-piece bathing suit. And for a long while I read. But even that was hard because the book I’m reading is magnificent. So good that you have to take breaks to think about everything he packed into that passage. Or how he rendered an image so perfectly, so creatively. Pure genius that the rest of us can never achieve, even with an infinite number of revisions. A voice that comes along only once or twice in a generation. And yet I happen to know, because I’ve gone to see him read, that he struggles as an artist in this fucked up country—this place of the Almighty Celebrity (and their pontifications that I once read you can have text messaged to your cell phone throughout the day for a small subscription fee), and it made me sad to think about all that talent and no one knows who he is. No one cares. Hell, no one reads anymore, so who gives a damn about some writer when there’s so much going on with Tom Cruise and Angelina—or whoever’s in the limelight these days. (Actually Michael Jackson’s in the limelight today, but that’s a whole other thing to write about. Maybe tomorrow.)
So I put the book away after a while, and just watched the people around me. Observations? The human body is interesting in its delivery and evolution. Boys thin as pencils, and their middle aged selves with hair sliding off the top of their heads, landing instead on their backs. Bellies hanging over their trunks. And the nubile girls in bikinis traveling in packs. Arms folded over their new breasts, shoulders slouched—but certain they will never end up like the White Suburban Woman in the Straw Hat in her 40s in the one-piece suit in the chair by the side of the pool. And while I sat there, a massively pregnant woman waddled by—a Vehicle really, her sole purpose these days to use her body to deliver a new person to this crazy, upside down world. And it made me think about the fact that we fall in love with one kind of person, and through circumstance and expectation, that person often quickly becomes someone very different. Like the pregnant woman whose body will take a beating from being that vehicle, and who will pump her breasts, clutter a once easy-going life with plastic toys and lots of gear, who will eventually come to fantasize about a much different life. Or the bald headed man with the hairy back who looks around his daydreaming wife, to the TV screen behind her. So few of us know how to navigate all that change.
But don’t get me started on love tonight because I am not in a good place when it comes to that. In fact I’ve never been in a worse place. Actually that’s not entirely true. Many years ago, in a town many miles from here, I was left by the man I loved to suffer alone the physical and emotional aftermath of an abortion in my 9th week of pregnancy. He was so damned relieved to have that baby out of the picture that he couldn’t bear the sight of my suffering, my desperation. Instead, he went whistling down the front steps (I swear I remember him whistling, although who can really trust memory?), leaving behind an enormous specialty sandwich, wrapped in wax paper, that he bought me on the way home from the abortion clinic. You hungry? he asked, as he drove and I sat staring out the window of the passenger side, hiccupping after sobbing my way through that terrifying experience. I couldn’t speak and so he took that as a “yes.” Was grateful for something to do, and so that’s how that huge sandwich ended up on my coffee table that hot day in June all those years ago. Through my contractions, I watched the wax paper slowly unfold after he deposited me on the couch and the sandwich on the table. So, no, I’m not hurting like that. Nothing can be as bad as that. But I’m hurting tonight, just the same.
***
So after I woke up and finished bumming out about being here, I took a bath. I take a shower one day, and a bath the next. I like the variety. And I’m not one to go a day without bathing, although I think plenty of people do. I shave my legs everyday, too—even in winter—which freaked out a friend of mine once when I told her. She lets her legs go in the winter, she said. But the hair on my legs would grow as thick as a pair of long johns, and I’m not into that. In fact, it’s a bit of a job keeping the hair at bay when you’re dark like me. So I stay on top of that kind of thing.
After that, I went and got my hair done. What a mood lifter when you come out 90 minutes later, grays gone, bleached and tired out hair miraculously turned into rich dark silkiness. But while I was sitting in the chair, with those funky smelling chemicals lathered over my head, I read one of those magazines you always find in hair salons. Not the ones with all the celebrities in it (almost none of whom I know anymore), but one of those magazines for younger women that focus on fashion and lots of stuff about men: loving men, having sex with men, understanding men, finding men, etc. For some reason, I thumbed through that magazine today, despite bringing a book with me that I’m really enjoying. God, how depressing it was to read all that, and yet, I couldn’t put it down. That magazine makes us seem so desperate. So uncertain. So in need of instruction. Really, it’s there to make us half nuts with the pressure—disguised, of course, as “help”—of catching and keeping a man so we’ll buy products and services to do that. Even more depressing was that I read the damn thing. Couldn’t put it down. Was sort of disappointed when Lady (yes, that’s her name) called me over to the sink to rinse the color out of my hair. Wait, I wanted to say, I’m not finished reading the 100 tips on how to please your man in bed. There were a few in there, I have to admit, that were a revelation to me. I mean, how do they know these things? Was there a small group of staff assigned to pen this article? Was it written by one person? Did they assemble a focus group of men to be the definitive answer on blow jobs, 69s, and different styles of intercourse? Send out questionnaires? I learned, for example, that men like it when you get on top, but that you should lean back and spread your legs really wide so the guy can see himself pumping in and out of you. Yet about ten tips later, they said that you should lean in close to your lover, when you’re on top, so that you won’t be self conscious about how much your breasts and stomach jiggle when you move. You’ll enjoy it more, and so will he, they said. So which is it? I really wanted to know—which, when you think about it, is rather depressing for a woman my age.
So the sun was out, and after I left the salon, I went to the pool. I didn’t want to fuck up my new hair color, and so I plunked an enormous straw hat on my head—and immediately became, I felt, a cliché. White. Suburban. Female. 40s. Straw hat. If anyone saw me, they’d read me one way, and not the way I am at all. (Which is what way? Half the time these days, I really don’t know. But I know it ain’t that.) I set up my chair, got out my book. I love the water, the ocean especially, but pools are a close second. I love the way the sun glints off the water in a pool, especially in the late afternoon. I like the smell of chlorine, the sound of people diving and splashing. And I like to swim naked in pools, although clearly that wasn’t happening today. If the White Suburban Woman in her 40s took off her bathing suit and jumped naked in the pool, it would be like a scene right out of “Jaws.” People running for cover. Leaping in fear. What is that?? We love our youth—especially when it comes to women. Pure unadulterated youth. Please, woman, put your clothes back on! So of course I sat there, a cliché in her straw hat and one-piece bathing suit. And for a long while I read. But even that was hard because the book I’m reading is magnificent. So good that you have to take breaks to think about everything he packed into that passage. Or how he rendered an image so perfectly, so creatively. Pure genius that the rest of us can never achieve, even with an infinite number of revisions. A voice that comes along only once or twice in a generation. And yet I happen to know, because I’ve gone to see him read, that he struggles as an artist in this fucked up country—this place of the Almighty Celebrity (and their pontifications that I once read you can have text messaged to your cell phone throughout the day for a small subscription fee), and it made me sad to think about all that talent and no one knows who he is. No one cares. Hell, no one reads anymore, so who gives a damn about some writer when there’s so much going on with Tom Cruise and Angelina—or whoever’s in the limelight these days. (Actually Michael Jackson’s in the limelight today, but that’s a whole other thing to write about. Maybe tomorrow.)
So I put the book away after a while, and just watched the people around me. Observations? The human body is interesting in its delivery and evolution. Boys thin as pencils, and their middle aged selves with hair sliding off the top of their heads, landing instead on their backs. Bellies hanging over their trunks. And the nubile girls in bikinis traveling in packs. Arms folded over their new breasts, shoulders slouched—but certain they will never end up like the White Suburban Woman in the Straw Hat in her 40s in the one-piece suit in the chair by the side of the pool. And while I sat there, a massively pregnant woman waddled by—a Vehicle really, her sole purpose these days to use her body to deliver a new person to this crazy, upside down world. And it made me think about the fact that we fall in love with one kind of person, and through circumstance and expectation, that person often quickly becomes someone very different. Like the pregnant woman whose body will take a beating from being that vehicle, and who will pump her breasts, clutter a once easy-going life with plastic toys and lots of gear, who will eventually come to fantasize about a much different life. Or the bald headed man with the hairy back who looks around his daydreaming wife, to the TV screen behind her. So few of us know how to navigate all that change.
But don’t get me started on love tonight because I am not in a good place when it comes to that. In fact I’ve never been in a worse place. Actually that’s not entirely true. Many years ago, in a town many miles from here, I was left by the man I loved to suffer alone the physical and emotional aftermath of an abortion in my 9th week of pregnancy. He was so damned relieved to have that baby out of the picture that he couldn’t bear the sight of my suffering, my desperation. Instead, he went whistling down the front steps (I swear I remember him whistling, although who can really trust memory?), leaving behind an enormous specialty sandwich, wrapped in wax paper, that he bought me on the way home from the abortion clinic. You hungry? he asked, as he drove and I sat staring out the window of the passenger side, hiccupping after sobbing my way through that terrifying experience. I couldn’t speak and so he took that as a “yes.” Was grateful for something to do, and so that’s how that huge sandwich ended up on my coffee table that hot day in June all those years ago. Through my contractions, I watched the wax paper slowly unfold after he deposited me on the couch and the sandwich on the table. So, no, I’m not hurting like that. Nothing can be as bad as that. But I’m hurting tonight, just the same.
***
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