It was twenty years ago today

10 04 2011

I was standing in the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, chatting with my sister-in-law and nephew, when I was thrown back in time.

There was K.

K. is the sister to B., who led the choir in which my nephew sang, and for which he and twenty or so of his classmates and a few parents flew to New York to sing. I mentioned something to my sister-in-law about B., who I hadn’t seen for over twenty years, when I last saw his sister.

“There she is,” s-i-l, said.

Where?

“There, in the black sweater, standing next to him.”

Holy shit.

It took a moment to recognize her, but, yep, there she be. I walked over to her group and stood there for a moment, waiting for someone to finish talking. K. looked over at me, kinda squinted, then her face and eyes and mouth and arms flew wide open.

Oh my god!

She lives in Jersey, with her wise-ass husband and their three sweet kids and four cats (“never look at kittens when you’re in a bar drinking”), runs a school for the performing arts, and occasionally performs around town.

(I’ve mentioned K. once before: She was Maria in our high school’s production of The Sound of Music, and she’s one of the reasons that I hang on to that memory.)

Oh, and that JG Wentworth opera commercial? She sings all the female parts for that.  I think that’s the right one; maybe it’s all of the commercials—I don’t remember, what with being a wee dazed and all.

I never thought I’d see her again.

I don’t know that I will. I mean, I gave her my number and e-mail and we talked about meeting up in the city and her giving me a tour of her school but, honestly, who knows.

It would be lovely, I think, to see her again.

And if not, it was lovely simply to see her again.


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I’d like to stay and taste my first champagne

30 12 2010

The hills are quiet.

Agathe von Trapp, eldest daughter of George Ritter von Trapp, stepdaughter to Maria Augusta Kutschera, older sister to 9 siblings, companion to  Mary Louise Kane, died Tuesday at the age of 97.

Her alter ego, of course, was Liesl, memorably played by Charmian Carr from the 1965 version of The Sound of Music.

Here’s her signature scene from the movie (skip ahead to the :30 mark)

I never liked Rolf, even before I knew what Nazis were—he was a smug prig. And, of course, a Nazi. (I don’t even much like this scene—those lyrics!—but it would be a cheat not to show this.)

Agathe was not Liesl, and The Sound of Music was not a documentary; it also just possible that life was not as idyllic for the von Trapp children as was suggested by the movie.

I don’t care.

I love The Sound of Music. Love love love.

I saw it for the first time when I was around 6; it was playing at a cinema in Sheboygan, and my mom and grandma took my sister and me to see it. I was opposed going in—a musical? where they’ll be singing the whole time? how awful!—but boy oh boy was I a convert coming out.

Mountains! Singing! Adventure! A lake in the backyard! Julie Andrews! Bad guys! Escape from bad guys! Mountains!

Really, what’s not to love?

What cemented this adoration, however, was my role in my high school’s production of the musical. K. was Maria, M. was the Baroness, and I (eek!), I got my first speaking role as Brigitta, the daughter who makes her entrance reading a book.

(This matters because one night F. (Liesl) and T. (Louisa) and I went out for a little pre-rehearsal nip. By the time we made it to the auditorium, we we all roaring drunk—F., the driver, the drunkest of all. I was lucky in not having to march and march and march and hold the line, but even when I did finally make my entrance and take my place in line, I had difficulty (as did F. and T.) remaining erect. Some time later (and while rehearsing a different scene) F. was ordered off the stage by the D.-the-director, and when she refused to leave—screaming “I”m not drunk!”—D. high-heeled her way up to the stage and threw her off. T. and I thought it best to leave the auditorium at this point.)

I had a ball in this play, and not just because of the drinking. Play rehearsal was 6-10 MTTh, and after school until 6 on Wednesdays; as the opening approached, we had Friday night and Saturday rehearsals as well. All that time together, on stage and down front and in the green room and the wings and hallways and on the catwalk and in the way back of the auditorium, it was cozy and liberating all at the same time. The whole place was ours.

M. and I were already friends, but K. and I became quite close, as I did with F. and T. Since all of them were older than me, we didn’t have much to do with one another during the school-day, but the intimacy of the shared work remained. Almost all of us in the cast were theatre kids, weird, slightly disreputable (well, except for K., who was unimpeachable), and if we didn’t swagger like jocks, we did delight in our performing selves.

It was a wonderful time. Not perfect (see: F. getting tossed from the stage), and not without the drama of both adolescence and the high school theatre scene, but oh, we were all so alive, so willing to give ourselves wholly over to this production, and to one another.

I can’t live like that, not all the time, and maybe, now, not at all. But I’m glad I was there, I’m glad that it’s all still with me.

So Agathe, even though The Sound of Music was only barely your story, still, thank you, and rest in peace.


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Love me, love me, say that you love me

26 09 2010

Love isn’t really my thing.

I don’t have anything against it, and it’s not that I don’t believe that it exists (whatever that means), but love and I don’t have much to do with each other.

I’m thinking about this because I referred to love in the comments to my last post, asking if someone were told that her belief was hated but that she was loved, would she, in fact, feel loved?

It was not so much the definition of love I was after so much as the question of being, but, nonetheless, it felt a bit. . . odd to use the term.

People have told me they loved me. My parents. My friend M. (who knows how it discomfits me). And I would guess that at least some of my friends would say, if not to me then at least about me, that they love me.

I don’t disbelieve them: if they say they love me, then okay. But I don’t feel it.

And I don’t feel badly about it. A little bad, insofar as I don’t say it back—this is one lie I can’t quite manage—but I don’t feel this great gaping and gasping pain of the absence of it in my life. Perhaps I can say that I feel the absence, but it is simply absence, something I register, and nothing more.

Have I ever felt love? I don’t know. I remember as a child telling my parents I loved them, and I think I would have said that I loved people (I certainly loved my pets) and meant it, but I also remember feeling that there was something obligatory in the saying: It was always tied, always. . . crimped or stapled into some line of duty.

I don’t remember it ever having been—although it must have been, once, it must have been—free.

And because it wasn’t free, because there was always that stitch in the side of any profession of love, it felt like a lie, a compulsion in order to reassure those around me that. . . oh, christ, I don’t know what. That I belonged? I can’t remember this, either, can’t remember why I felt guilty for saying it, only that I did, that I questioned whether I meant it.

This isn’t about conditional versus unconditional love: conditional doesn’t equal coerced. But I did feel compelled, for whatever reason, felt that there were certain things I must feel about certain people, and that I had to rank these people in a particular order—family before friends, parents before all others—and that to break ranks was a kind of betrayal.

And I betrayed.

Again, I don’t know where these feelings came from. Parents are the usual suspects, but they did (do) love us, and they did (do) try to be good parents. Perhaps it was a matter of their uncertainties and my sensitivities colliding in a way no one intended, but leaving us all damaged, nonetheless.

Damaged, hm. No, I’m not pained, but I do recognize that this absence is, indeed, an absence. And I wonder what its presence is like, and whether I, so long used to living without it, could even ever know what love is.

I don’t know what I’m missing, which makes me wonder what I’m missing.


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The secret to a long life is knowing when it’s time to go

5 09 2010

A friend is moving away.

Not for awhile—not for a year—but she is leaving.

I’ve got to get out of this city, she says, even as she asks, How can I leave?

Already, she’s missing it.

Already, I’m missing her.

I guess I can hope that she’ll change her mind, but her announcement isn’t a surprise, not really, and because it’s not a surprise—because what’s driving her away from the city have been there for almost as long as I’ve known her—I don’t think she’ll change her mind. It’s not a matter of saying These things you think are bad aren’t really that bad at all, not when these things are bad and not when, in the end, the bad things aren’t  the issue.

No, the city no longer works for her; she can’t live her life here. And so she must go.

I understand the impulse: it’s been pulsing in me since I was a teenager, driving me ever onward. I loved Madison, but never considered staying; it was my college town, and, defined as such, a transitional place. Similarly, Minneapolis and grad school. Albuquerque was a hideaway and I knew even as I didn’t know that the moment I landed I would depart. Montreal—so easy to love, and I did—but my postdoc was for two years, so there was no question that I was just passing through.

Somerville? Oh, no.

And New York? New York was always the holdout city, the one dreamt of as a teenager, the place I could never scrub from my mind even as I avoided moving here. Until I did.

This is the last place; where else could I go?

So I wonder about my friend, and how she can leave. I wonder this even as—still—I wonder where else I could go.

Part of this restlessness is plain unhappiness, dissatisfaction with a life to which I am ill-suited. I don’t think I will ever be rid of this dissatisfaction, that I my life will never suit me. It’s not that I nurture this estrangement, but that I distrust comfort; ergo, satisfaction will always decay into unease.

I have to remember this when I think about leaving. I cannot outrun the thermodynamics of my own existence.

But I also have to remember that even if there are no perfect places, there are better and worse places. For my friend, New York may be better than her (many) previous cities, but that a new city may be better than here. She does not have to be trapped by the grandness of this city.

And I wonder about that. I wonder if I could leave without feeling like a failure.

A year before I left Massachusetts, I visited a friend, in Madison, who grew up in the New York area and lived for many years in the city. She was about to leave for a job in the southwest, and when I told her of my plans to move here, she was wary. New York is a tough town, she said. Unhelpfully, I thought.

I now know what she means (even if it wasn’t what she meant), but at the time I took it as a challenge, as in, You don’t have what it takes to live in New York.

It was humiliating. And devastating, in a small way: How could New York City—my city, my last place—how could it not be for me, or me for it?

So I’ve been here four years, and I can handle it. But just because I’m not handled by it, I wonder, is this my last place? Do I stay to prove a point that does not in any way matter?

Could I do what my friend has done and recognize that this city and her life are not the same, and that the life matters more than the city?

I have to see that, whether I stay or go. I am staying, for now, for however long now lasts, but like my friend, I can’t let this place matter more than my life.


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Friday poem (Sunday): The Nude Swim

14 03 2010

Odd how people become friends.

The first cause is proximity: We’re seated next to each other in a first grade class, have lockers across the hall in high school, settle in the same dorms, go out drinking after the first grad seminar.

And work. We meet at work.

But I didn’t become friends with everyone from school or in college or grad school, didn’t want to hang out with everyone I ever met at the paper or food service or the restaurant or co-op or bookstore. Only some people were interested in me; I was only interested in some of them.

I have good friends in New York, which is one of reasons I like New York.  That I lacked such friends was among the reasons I couldn’t take Boston, that I left good friends was among the reasons I so fiercely miss(ed) Montreal.

And among my friends, here, is Cte. She is a singular personality, who draws clear lines around people: in or out. I’m glad I’m in, because she’s smart and witty and always willing to argue (and as little likely to concede as I am), and who holds on to those inside as strongly as she pushes off those on the outs.

Need I say that she rejects sentimentality and that her heart, while large, does not easily warm? Or that she fends off any kind of direct affection—she will let you buy her a drink—especially the physical kind?

In that, she reminds me of me, or at least, how I used to be. I’m less likely to sprout spikes at the intrusion of a hand on my shoulder, but there was a time when I would literally spin away from any human contact.

No, I was never physically or sexually abused: this was not PTSD. Nope, it was something much simpler, a way to control what I couldn’t understand, and thus couldn’t let any one else access.

I was afraid all the time. Afraid of myself, my volatility, my desire and contempt for comfort, afraid of what others could do to and for me. I was drowning and refusing to be saved, hating myself for wanting to be saved.

I took it out on my body. I didn’t hate my body, but it was just one more thing I didn’t understand. I wanted to live in my head—my mind, I thought, was strong—because everything else about me was beyond me, and because beyond me, weak. I thought if I could just deny enough of myself, I could eventually bring it under control.

The key was control. I couldn’t control my emotions, so I sought to deny them. And because those emotions could be sparked—I still don’t understand why this happens—by the touch of another, I sought to deny myself all touch.

No one who knows me today would call me touchy-feely, but I am much more free with a hug, a kiss, an arm around the shoulder. To be honest, at some point I had to force myself not to flinch, because such obvious unease only drew attention to that unease, and question-mark looks I’d rather not answer; the point, still, was (and occasionally is) to manage myself, to manage how others see me.

Yet I have also become more comfortable with touch. I am conscious of it, always, and far more at ease giving than receiving, but it is a relief, truly, when with people I know and trust, when with my friends, to not have to police every goddamned move.

So I wonder about Cte. I don’t know enough about her—surprise! she’s not one to go on about her life before, well, now—to know why she behaves this way, or that it is in any way a problem for her. She could simply believe that, for her, such physical interactions are unnecessary. She might get enough from the people around her just by having us be around her.

I admire her strength. And I hope that’s what it is.

This is all a very long intro to a not terribly long poem.

Anne Sexton was, famously, the best friend of Maxine Kumin, but it is not for the theme of friendship that I chose her tonight. No, it is for her extravagance, her unwillingness to shut herself off from herself.

(Given her emotional instability and suicide, perhaps it could be argued that a bit more willingness to turn away would have kept her alive. Or perhaps it would have led her to kill herself much sooner than she did. I don’t know, and it doesn’t much matter now anyway.)

Sexton wrote songs to her breasts and her uterus and about masturbation, so if I really wanted to push myself beyond my own boundaries—if I am less stiff than I used to be, I am still easily mortified by myself—I’d print one of those.

But this is the one that moved me, a poem about nakedness and ease, about the unexpected ways others may see us, and about the unexpected ways such sight can still us.

The Nude Swim

On the southwest side of Capri
we found a little unknown grotto
where no people were and we
entered it completely
and let our bodies lose all
their loneliness.

All the fish in us
had escaped for a minute.
The real fish did not mind.
We did not disturb their personal life.
We calmly trailed over them
and under them, shedding
air bubbles, little white
balloons that drifted up
into the sun by the boat
where the Italian boatman slept
with his hat over his face.

Water so clear you could
read a book through it.
Water so buoyant you could
float on your elbow.
I lay on it as on a divan.
I lay on it just like
Matisse’s Red Odalisque.
Water was my strange flower.
One must picture a woman
without a toga or a scarf
on a couch as deep as a tomb.

The walls of that grotto
were everycolor blue and
you said, “Look! Your eyes
are skycolor. Look! Your eyes
are skycolor.” And my eyes
shut down as if they were
suddenly ashamed.


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En garde!

19 01 2010

That old bastard Remy had a good death.

Surrounded by friends, at the lake he loved, nourished by old arguments, a last good-bye, and then a heroin slip into the after.

The Barbarian Invasions lacked the cruelty of The Decline of the American Empire, but given that the end was death, not disclosure, the wistfulness was appropriate.

It’s to be said that Remy truly was a rotter: He slept his way through Montreal, allowing his wife to believe he only indulged when travelling. She was true, believing in the best of him, even as he bedded her confidantes.

That’s pretty much the plot, such as it is, of The Decline: friends eating and drinking and divulging and screening their sexual lives.

And Invasions? Twenty years later, and the reprobate is dying in a seedy Montreal hospital, his hostile son spreading money over the layers of bureaucracy in order to procure his father some peace.

And heroin. I mentioned the heroin, didn’t I? It gave Remy peace in his last days of life, then carried him into death.

Not a bad way to go.

I no longer steady myself in plans of my death, but I do, nonetheless, wonder how it will be. Yes, we all die alone, blah blah, but before that last blip, how will it be?

Will there be friends? Wine? Arguments and laughter? Perhaps I’ll die in my sleep, in an apartment or hospital room or on a beach.

Come the apocalypse, well, I live in New York City: if it’s man-made, I’ll burst in the flash or fall choking from the bad air or waste away, abandoned to a pathogen.

But while I may think about this more often than others—and I don’t know if I do, given that American can-do spirit that says we can live forever, so best not to speak of death—I don’t think very long about it.

Not because it’s morbid or sad, but because it’s, mmm, boring. Death’ll come when it comes, and any control I’ll have over it’s arrival will likely be small.

And as for my worries about living my last days alone, the way to guard against that is not to live the rest of my life alone.

So wine and friends and arguments and laughter, now. If I take care of that, the rest will take care of itself.


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Closing walls and ticking clocks

11 10 2009

It was my twenti-mhtph class reunion last night.

I didn’t go.

But I did get to talk to folks who were at the reunion. T. called me amidst it all, then passed the phone to one person after another.

It was very loud.

I’m not sad I wasn’t there. I managed to miss all previous reunions, and, unlike in previous years, I wouldn’t have minded attending, but a trip back to SmallTown just was not happening.

B. filled me in a bit, today. I try to remember to call all of my friends and family members on or near their birthdays; B.’s day fell on a mad grading day, so it wasn’t until this weekend that we managed to connect. Anyway, she noted that a lot of people looked much the same as they had, some of the guys had gotten fat, one woman looked really, really old, and one of our classmates had gone completely around the bend.

Cameras-in-the-forest, president-not-born-in-US around the bend.

Everyone else seemed to have retained his or her sanity, however, and even Mr. Alternate Reality apparently entertained more than he offended. (It also apparently helped that another classmate basically served as his minder.)

So we’re halfway to the end. Does this make us old, or young? We are, thank the gods, no longer teenagers, but are we old? We ache and dye our hair and talk about our health, but we still have hair to dye and health to discuss, and we’re mobile enough that we can generate aches.

We’re forty-xmpthish: One lifetime down, one to go. Does that seem like so much more or not much more?

Who knows. It’s all we’ve got.

It’ll have to do.


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17 rules for hosting visitors to New York City in August

23 08 2009

When issuing general invitations for visits to New York City, remember:

1. Enforce the no-visiting-in-August rule.

2. If friends nonetheless visit in August, make sure they are of good cheer, and willing to adjust.

3. Apologize to those August-visiting friends for the lack of air conditioning in humidity-infested apartment.

4. Do not freak out when August-visiting friends buy air conditioner for you while you’re flat on your back with a migraine.

5. After freaking out when August-visiting friends buy air conditioner for you while you’re flat on your back with a migraine, thank them. Continue to thank them.

6. Even though apartment is now comfortable, leave apartment to see the rest of the city.

7. Don’t try to see everything there is to see, but do take them to the places they request.

8. When these friends shop, be glad that they are efficient shoppers, i.e., once they find what they like, they buy it, and move on.

9. Take friends to visit one of your favorite places in the city, one you need to visit more often yourself.

10. Be grateful when friends are not simply polite about your favorite place, but genuinely impressed and glad you showed them.

11. Be glad friends are only minor-ly freaked out and/or really good at suppressing freak-out at sight of rats and roaches.

12. Suppress urge to compare one’s own fucked-up life with their utterly-together lives.

13. Introduce visiting friends to NYC friends. Trust they’ll get along.

14. Try new bars.

15. Try new drinks.

16. Drink the whiskey in front of you.

17. Remember the best part about the friends’ visit is the friends’ visit.


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Categories : Stray bits

In my room

1 08 2009

So bad. So, so bad.

The Room.

Have you seen it? Does it not make you want to gouge out your eyes, puncture your eardrums, and spend the rest of your life repenting of whatever sins led you to this movie?

Or, you know, buy a box of spoons and maybe some confetti and gather with friends in the balcony of an old theatre and watch it again? (Only this time, remember to bring beer—the bigger, the cheaper, the better.)

The Wikipedia summation of the film doesn’t really do it justice, insofar as it attempts to make sense of the six-million-dollar travesty. So here’s what you should know (WARNING: I give away the ending!):

Johnny, with his greasy long hair and muscular-yet-horrifying body, lives with Lisa, a nondescript blond who is nonetheless repeatedly referred to as beautiful. Lisa is variously described as a princess, a sociopath, and a tramp, all of which make her sound more interesting than she is. Lisa has boring sex with Johnny, then seduces Johnny’s best friend Mark (again, we know this because apparently Mark can’t say ‘Johnny’ without also saying ‘best friend’) with more boring sex. Lisa’s mom Claudette visits to say things such as ‘talk to me’, ‘I have breast cancer’, and ‘all men are assholes,’ then leave. At one point, Lisa’s friend Michelle and her boyfriend Mike come over to have boring sex with chocolate on the couch. At another point, Johnny invites his psychologist friend Peter over to the house to offer his professional insights, then complains that Peter psychologizes everything. (At one point Peter gets ‘cheeped’ by the boys, as in You Are A Chicken.) Oh, and then there’s Denny, the half-wit half-adopted drug-using neighbor boy-man who ‘likes to watch’ and gets in trouble with a drug dealer. Oh, and don’t forget the football, which is often carried, seldom tossed, but trotted out in alleys, on rooftops, in a park, and on the street. At the end, Lisa throws Johnny a birthday party, gets caught by Peter/Steve (don’t ask) trying to initiate boring sex with Mark, and instead initiates a boring fight between Mark and Johnny in which the phrase ‘motherfucker’ gets tossed about—the highlight of the film. Then Johnny shoots himself. The end.

Note that this makes the movie sound better than it actually is. Tommy Wiseau, the actor/director/producer/demon-from-hell, reportedly spent $6 million on this thing. I shudder to think what would have happened had he had $16 or $60 mil.

So why spend $12.50 on this? Because it’s a thing: one friend mentions to another that the movie runs once a month at midnight at a theater in the East Village, with the audience providing the entertainment the movie itself lacks.

Because I’d been feeling like a bum and a punk (tho’ not an old slut on junk) and in a bit of a funk, and needed a night out.

Because I keep telling myself to push myself more into my life and to take advantage of what New York has to offer (even when what it offers is so, so bad), and here was a chance to do that.

Because I haven’t been saying ‘what the hell’ nearly enough. (Although, after subjecting myself to this flick, I think I have, in fact, discovered something about hell.)

Besides, who wants to be a chicken?

*cheep*  *cheep*


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Talkin’ at the Texaco

8 06 2009

To SmallTown and back in 48 fun-filled hours! Whoo-hoo!

It wasn’t bad, actually, and another 12 or even 24 more hours would not have been the worst thing.

Still, all that quiet was unnerving. Fucking BIRDS woke me in the morning!

That’s not right.

Paying the same amount for a pitcher of beer that I would pay for a pint, well, that IS something New York could learn from SmallTown.

Saw family, saw friends, laughed a lot.

Came out as bi to half my friends. Would have come out to them all, but, mm, timing. Besides, one of the people I told is unlikely to keep the news to herself, even though I asked her to.

Ts. knows everything about everyone, and tells all to all. So be it.

Found out something bad a friend had gone through, long ago. Those who heard this were suprised, but not shocked. Certain things made sense, in retrospect.

What was striking, however, was the guilt carried these decades later by the woman who told us. She was a kid, in no damned position to do anything, and unlikely to have found help from anyone in a position to help, and still, she feels she should have done. . . something.

If nothing else, I hope she got a bit of relief telling us. I fear she has not.

Really not happy smelling like an ashtray after my night out. Yes, in this respect, at least, smelly New York is less smelly than SmallTown.

Found out S. and her husband will be visiting New York at the end of this month. I hope we can at least squeeze in time for a beer. At a smoke-free bar.

T. and I firmed up plans for her visit in August. I know: August in New York sucks (hot, smelly, hot & smelly), but she has time and I have time and what the hell, we’ve been through worse together.

Now I have to decide whether to go back for a class reunion this fall. Shees, and I have issues with Facebook; don’t know that I’d do much better face-to-face. . . .


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