sweetheart redux

welcome

2012-01-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

Still on Hiatus ....

2011-11-02T14:34:00.001-07:00

Planes of Sunday - Chapter 54 (Last Chapter)

2011-08-17T07:36:00.000-07:00

for anyone new to the blog, I have been serializing chapters of a novel I wrote for the past few months, and this is the last chapter. xox robin

54.
“The Sun”

The morning after that long, important night, the heat was oppressive.

Christopher woke up in the small empty lot Christina had dragged him to. Struggling, he rose from his bed of broken Coors bottles and brittle Queen Anne’s Lace. It was the time of Sunday morning when many people are up by now and “Breakfast with the Beatles” has already been on for an hour, sprung jarringly from the single speaker of Shirley’s digital radio alarm clock. Shirley lay sleeping on the brown corduroy couch in the living room, the snug slit of her mouth like a female bird’s vent.

The way anticipated moments have of getting botched up by the complicity of expectation, as though we would rather spoil our surprises and spare our fears the validation of disappointment, Christopher opened the front door that morning not to find a woman who wakes and smiles dreamily and offers to make some unnecessarily large meal, but to find a mother who reacts to fear with irritation, and who screamed when she saw her son so disgustingly beaten up and hung over and dirty, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck did you do last night? Did you get in another fight? Don’t you have any respect for me at all? I’m finally starting to believe what everyone says about you, that you’ve just turned into a monster. An irredeemable fucking nightmare.”

It was in the waiting room of the ER that Shirley finally calmed down, finally squeezed his hand and sighed, “Oh, boy. Must’ve been some night, huh?” They giggled. He thought of cynically uttering some maxim like “Boys will be boys,” the way she always did, but instead he just told her that he missed her last night, and she said she missed him too.

“I should have come straight home to you, mom.”

His nose was so completely broken, she had a hard time imagining that his face would ever heal to become again the face she’d known his whole life, the face she’d made, for herself, she’d thought at the time, when she was so young and just wanted a baby so she would have something of her own, some guaranteed love. But now she saw that she’d made his body for him, as though she knew him before he was born, and wanted to give him this perfect gift of himself, that he could use however he wanted.

But his nose looked bad. One of his eyes was swollen shut. There was a big bump on his head, and large wounds all along his skull, and he was walking stooped over, because when he stood straight, it made the cut or whatever that mess was on his stomach, hurt even worse, bleed even more. Shirley took a devastating inventory of her boy’s injuries.

“Well,” she decided to playfully ask, “Did you at least meet any girls?”

This kind of sympathy borne of love eludes me. And why should I think it could repair all the longing and the failures of words and bodies, the only tools we have? Christopher has AIDS, and so do I.

Planes of Sunday - Chapter 53

2011-08-16T08:20:00.000-07:00

this is the second to last chapter

53.
“I’m Nobody! Who are You?”
–Emily Dickinson

The rest of Mickey’s life, absolutely every aspect of it, without any tiny reprieves of tenderness or excitement, carried on in steady, quiet haplessness. He didn’t believe in the tigers of destiny, the way Shirley had, so his drive back to the West Coast, when he decided to leave Shirley and Christopher in the middle of the night a few weeks after the big car accident, cannot be explained by anything more purposeful than the fact that he’d remembered he’d left his only really nice pair of shoes at the house in Malibu. For a couple years in Santa Cruz he rented a guesthouse behind the home of a minister, his wife and their adult daughter, Anne. He rejected the family’s occasional dinner invitations, but often found himself engaged in conversations with Anne, when she’d appear in the driveway as he left for work. Both because she wanted to prove that she was less conservative than her parents and because she’d been raised in a predominately homosexual neighborhood in San Francisco, she had the habit of bringing up homosexuality frequently in her conversations with people. Mickey became more and more paranoid that the woman spoke that way to him because she thought he was gay.

He moved into a room of the Mark Twain Hotel in Hollywood. The day after Halloween, his first year there, Hollywood Boulevard was littered with the odd debris of a finished celebration: crinkled pink and yellow stripes of streamers, a broken plastic speculum, a gym sock with a face drawn on its toe, beer bottles, a tangle of red yarn with a barrette clipped in among the soiled red plumage, a bed sheet. In the corner of the parking lot across from the hotel he lived in sat the usual six Styrofoam bowls full of dry cat food and the two Styrofoam plates of wet cat food left there daily by a woman who imagined the cats lining up for the food like people in a cafeteria. But today there were little pellets of rat poison mixed in with the food, the handiwork from the night before of a pubescent boy from Glendale. Mickey was a custodian for the city, and this was his first time being assigned his own neighborhood to clean up. It was the first time he felt he had the right to touch the arrangement of cat food; he threw it into a large trash bag tied to one of his belt loops. When he lost sight of his two co-workers, he looked over his shoulder to see if he was being watched, and then he snuck across the street and up the stairs to his own room. He propped the dustbin he was carrying against the hallway wall before unlocking his door.

“Hey! Hey! Nikki, where you at?” someone hollered outside on the street. He lay back on his bare bed, and placed a little bit of pot in the cradle of an old corncob pipe his dad’d bought him one time as a gag gift. He watched as the thick smoke slithered from his mouth, like a long, sexy tendril of blonde hair. He just wanted it quiet.

“Hey! Nikki! Nikki! Niiiiiiki!!! Come downstairs, we gotta go!” Mickey walked over to the window and yelled, “Shut the fuck up.”
“Why don’t you come down here and make me?” replied the young man who’d been yelling for his girlfriend. He was a football star for UCLA, a thoughtful and funny young man whose only real flaw was that he was easily antagonized. Mickey buttoned his pants back up and ran downstairs with an urgency to shut another of the world’s loud people up; the older he’d gotten, the more it had aggravated him and made his stomach hurt to hear obnoxious laughter coming from the next room or to hear mothers yelling at their kids in horrible foreign languages, and teenagers snapping their gum with their mouth open on the public busses. He wished for a physical confrontation with every one of these noisy people.

The fight he got in with the football star gave him a broken wrist and a concussion, and his body ached so bad he had to crawl up the stairs back to his room, passing no neighbors on his way there. It was the middle of the day when Mickey crawled back into his bed, where he slept and slept. He’d had a father who had worn a wristwatch on each wrist, and who must have been long dead by now; Mickey hadn’t kept in touch. He tried to remember if he’d really had a son, or if they’d all been aborted, if he’d really once known so many young girls who had trusted him and then had to drown their kittens because of him. The pain in his head was unbearable now. He knew that babies weren’t kittens, but a kitten was the only image he could firmly hang on to. He napped again, briefly, then awoke to find that his eyes wouldn’t focus. The collar of his shirt was sticky. A kitten was the only object he could clearly conjure. That tiny, warm, furry little thing, you could palpably feel a kitten’s happiness when you pet it. Their paws were so tiny. Mickey moaned. He turned on his side, and fell asleep again. Then he stopped breathing, and was dead.

Planes of Sunday Chapters 51 & 52

2011-08-14T11:01:00.001-07:00

I'm posting 2 chapters today because I accidentally posted a misnumbered Chapter 51 a few days ago, so some of you might have already read it. xoxo robin

51.
“Ain’t it just like the night
to play tricks on you when
you’re trying to be so quiet?”
-Bob Dylan

One night long ago he’d showed up at the house where we first kissed, and I was there. I’d come to think of it as my place and not his – this was when I was popular, and the people who lived there invited my friends and me over all the time. One of my friends dated a boy who lived there, and another friend was dating a boy who lived with his parents about an hour away from the house, but he slept on the living room floor of the house more often than he called his willing, sloppy mom to come pick him up (the car rides home, they would each be stoned or drunk and absorbed in their separate, jumpy thoughts, but then at moments they would both notice the closeness of the other’s quiet body, the amoral therefore thrilling situation of being a mother and son, loaded together in the same cup of a night, the two generations fun-loving and instable in such a similar way. This occasional living-on-the-edge family unit they formed made them each feel like a pioneer on the frontier of kinship. At these moments, their separate thoughts would touch each other.) This boy, David, cared for the house in a way that none of the rest of us did. He brought by banners he stole from a skateboard shop and decorated the walls with them, only the banners with obscure drawings and phrases on them, like “Wild Air.” He called me a cunt one time, under his breath, when I sent a beer flowing onto the threadbare carpet. He’d been friends with the people who rented the house before my acquaintances moved in, and told us stories about the things that had gone on in the house when they lived there. We could sense that when it was no longer our place to sit and drink and kiss in, he would become friends with the new renters, and tell them stories of our nights there. But we, the characters, would be like ants making trails across the sand in these stories, and the house would be an entire beach, the house was and will probably always be the protagonist in David’s stories, and I personally don’t know why he loved the house so. Maybe it’s where he felt he’d earned a personality, or maybe the place made him feel independent. We were the age when we didn’t know what a burden independence is.

David also loved to tell stories about his childhood with Christopher. Christopher and he were from this city, while the rest of us were just passing through, and I can see, in hindsight, how vital that fact is, how much it means. I feel it, when I think of Christopher still back there living with his mom, after all his plans for London, San Francisco or L.A. I can see how the location where one is raised loses its curse of inanimateness and becomes to the people who were raised there and decided to stay there a third parent, a mute mom-dad who can never be abandoned. From the stories David told of growing up with Christopher in that city, I learned of a snowball spiked with glass and thrown at a retarded adult’s face at the bus stop, an action Christopher perversely chose to stand by, instead of showing remorse. I learned more about Christopher’s first girlfriend, a black girl named Pammy who’d broken his heart by embarking on that passé journey away from home, to college. I learned about the junked car David’s dad kept in their driveway, where Christopher and David spent so many of their nights, just talking and thinking. And the weekend they spent in Coney Island on acid and how they felt bad for the cop with the impractically thick accent, who found the boys huddled under the boardwalk and worried because he thought they were psychotic and homeless.

Christopher was never there at this house on the nights I was, but the things he owned and had left at the house were like a bookmark he’d left behind, so he could open the door at any second and read the collective mood we were in and maybe decide to wow us with a story, or he could point at me and ask, “What’s she doing here?’ and I would suddenly have no allies. He could disappoint us by only staying for a little while.

So one night he showed up for his wallet, which he’d left behind, and when he saw me on the couch, he reached for a Pabst Blue Ribbon and sat in a partially gutted easy chair across the room. His presence made me want to be irreverent and sexual and spilling over like the two girls who’d made it possible for me to be in this situation of social contact. One of the girls, Emily, had the idea to give me a tattoo on my shoulder blade with her boyfriend’s tattoo gun. Flattered, I took off the tight, expensive mini-dress I’d worn with the hope of turning someone on. The dress, once on the floor, was transformed from something with shape and worth into a rag. My shoulder bled more than anyone had expected, because of the alcohol I guess, and the girl put a washcloth on it and told me that we’d wait until the bleeding stopped to finish the tattoo. Maybe an hour passed with everyone talking to Christopher and me sitting there in my slip, realizing that the project on my skin had been forgotten, and the half-finished heart on my shoulder would stay half-finished, looking the rest of my life just like a cursive letter C, an ironic and cruel little anecdote about my college years. It was obvious I had no real worth in the game that was being played around me, the romping cruelties that weren’t supposed to matter because youth is supposed to make one resilient, the cutting into of flesh that was all a joke. I stood up to leave, vowing “Tomorrow I’ll start having dignity,” when Christopher held out his pea coat to me, the one that fit him so perfectly, and said, “Poor Caroline. Your dress is trashed.” So he remembered me.

“Where have you been?”

He had broken up with me by disappearing from sight. From his friend who loved the house, I’d gathered that he was still living in the city, and that he’d just moved in with another girl. It’d been a few months that I had not seen or heard from him, and now all my waiting and self-flagellation had paid off; he had come back.

“Let’s go somewhere and talk. Do you like the basement?”
Wildly and generously he gestured with his arms as he paced along the basement floor, paraded around in front of me, describing the depths of the remorse he felt for having left me so suddenly and mysteriously. He grew more animated as the narrative of his past few months grew more intense, and he described the exact pitch of the voice of the girl he was living with, and a conversation he’d had with a drunk Vietnam vet in the park, this guy who had these great tattoos of people getting stabbed to death all over his arms. He was as detail-obsessed as a little boy, and since I did not know he was on drugs, I pondered while I watched him perform whether it was his upbringing or just a self-generating motor that made him such a fascinating talker. I grabbed on to his shirt and harnessed him to the stairs. “So you missed me then?” I asked, and he hesitated, stunned at how vastly I had missed the point of what he was saying, how he was describing his own self confidence and the adventures it had gotten him in to.

“Can we get back together?” I asked.

“Caroline, why would we-? I mean, I guess, if you think so. Yeah, I guess we should get back together,” he said. He looked at me and gave me a pat on the head. Then I was so forceful I have no way of knowing what expression was on his face or if he was hard or if the surface of his skin got bumpy when I took off his shirt and pants and he was exposed so entirely to the cold air of the basement. All I saw were my own hands as they pushed away fabrics and released the tautness of belts and elastics. The moth-eaten collar of a black cotton shirt as I pulled at it and it birthed a perfect head of black hair and an open mouth. A sock full of holes that my hand threw behind me into a tower of collapsed, mildewed boxes. My hands, my own hands, disappearing underneath me, pulling something towards me. Blind, panicky hands fluttering towards heat. Moth hands. Dusty pigeon-wing hands. Alighting hands. Clutching. Pushing.

When I graduated from college, I spent almost two years teaching in Seattle and acting as the Lattimores’ shy, surrogate daughter. Then I had what can be called a nervous breakdown, and all the delicate ties I’d established, the tender, slip-knot lassoes I’d thrown around people and routines, these things had to be instantly abandoned; I was desperate to return home to my family. I donated all of my furniture and clothing to the Goodwill and took a plane home to my mother and father, who I realized for the first time were really all mine. This was more safety than I could’ve imagined in my wildest dreams. I rented an apartment that was within walking distance of them and the house I’d grown up in. There was a law office across the street from the very same grocery store I’d gone to as a child, and I got a job as the receptionist for the law firm. Six times a week sometimes, I worked a ten hour day at that office, delighted to be kept too busy for lunch breaks, and when each hard day’s night approached, I walked to my parents’ house, where they had dinner ready for me. This was my short interval in Paradise. For after some short time of this minute routine, I started to find it a challenge to gather energy to walk over there. I only wanted to watch TV alone and fall asleep when I got home from work. On my rare days off, I wanted to stay in my pajamas all day with the shades drawn over the windows, waiting out the sunlight. Poor bored, housewife mother called me on my days off and left messages on my answering machine, “Call me, dear, just to say hi. I was thinking you might stop by for awhile today, if you get the chance,” and it seemed too hard a task to me to call her back. The only times I ever went to visit her were on the days I’d wake up seized with the desperation to be near her, and would irresponsibly call in sick to work with elaborate excuses, just so I could spend an afternoon with mom at McDonald’s, or at the movies. These outings were my stolen time. It was time stolen from the awesomely unfulfilling office work I performed, and time stolen from the unsettled stomach I got when I ate my T.V. Dinner each night. Time stolen from my heart-breaking remisiscings of the short life I led in New York City, how everything was beginning for me and I was at the zenith of youth, and I had just met Christopher.

52.
“The Nest”

Pammy found herself walking to the subway station with a petite, vicious girl her own age and with two boys she knew she would think about, with an interchangeable hoping, when she eventually returned to her own apartment. She would be alone in the single room with the Halloween decorations on the wall. She would sit down, just to fully absorb the pleasure of having her own place, and then for a moment she would miss living with her dad, and would consider how gentle the big man was, who moved furniture from penthouse to penthouse for a living, cringing with embarrassment when he worked for delicate, pretty white women, who couldn’t help but watch him lift their dressers and desks with awe, like they were watching a bear put his paw in the ocean and withdraw with it a flopping, desperate salmon. Then Pammy would stand, and would shed her white dress like a snake’s old skin, and out of the corner of her eye would glimpse her own spectral reflection on the window’s surface. Then she would wish to be observed at that moment by Jenkins, with his blonde, satisfying approval. Or for Christopher to be sitting on a corner of her bed and for them not to have yet made love on this night of their reunion, so that the span of his attention illuminated by longing was still to come.

And then like a bad surprise she was not satisfied with anything, and wished to start all over.

The underground parking garage of the apartment building she worked in was three story’s deep, and when she walked from her car through the subterranean rows of other people’s cars was when she tried hardest to transform the mundane into something poignant, imagining how distant and novel even the yellow-painted columns of an underground parking garage would seem to her someday when she was more established somewhere else, and maybe how she would even wish to be back there again. She would hint to her dad that she wanted him to tell her she should quit working there, that she was too smart and pretty for such a job. She’d tell him how she was scared of her adult male co-workers, the drug addicts or former drug addicts whose fun lives had turned them into losers and amnesiacs. But she would show up to work stoned herself, and often slink around the parking garage for hours instead of going where she was supposed to, feeling delinquent and inattentive. It was the paradoxical way many young women act, who feel both corrupt and innocent at the same time, cradled.

One night Jenkins was suddenly there, sitting at the security desk where she was supposed to sit. Jenkins smiled at Pammy with one corner of his pink mouth, and Pammy felt that involuntary function of her body that responded to physical interest switch on. It seemed practically impossible to her, standing there, that the coupling vignette was about to begin all over again, but it always did, ever since she’d grown into her looks as a young adult, with her two full breasts like precarious glasses of wine she had to shield from shattering by sometimes pushing ahead of other people in public places, scooting in front of slower walkers through doorways.

As a young adult watching her own beauty develop, she worried that her personality was being corrupted by these new advantages her attractiveness afforded her, and these advantages seemed things bestowed on her due to very temporary luck. She’d had an auburn-haired, well-off, beautiful best friend named Julie in high school, the type of girl who grew into a women the pharmacists fell in love with and wanted to care for when she came into drugstores to get her prescriptions refilled. Julie went home with moody adult men she met at bars who would tell her that she was perfect, Julie’d tell Pammy. These men took Julie to their apartments to have sex with her even when she felt dry inside and her flexed feet got cramps in their arches. For days after these single nights of attention, Julie would sit in the living room, where the phone was, waiting, watching television with her father, too paralyzed with expectations to do her homework. She’d hope for calls from men who hadn’t even asked for her phone number. Maybe, she thought, the men would remember her full name, which she liked to call herself by when she was drunk and flirtatious, and they’d looked her up in the phone book. She’d smoke cigarette after cigarette, sometimes thinking of her mother who lay wilting with emphysema in a hospital. “Hey Pammy, what’s up? I just called to say hi. I’m feeling a little down,” she’d say, and the conversations were always absent-minded, like she was treading air, waiting for Pammy to say something satiating like, “Julie, that guy you like is going to be at a party tonight. Do you want to go with me?” Pammy cringed and observed as the beautiful women and girls like Julie broke the bones in their thin ankles just a little bit more with each high-heeled step they took through hallways littered with unfamiliar belts glowing in the sad morning light of the morning-after. She was afraid that to be beautiful was to be weak.

Eventually, however, Pammy grew comfortable with the advantages of beauty. She began to realize that her beauty was an absolute redemption for everything she said or did, something like an ornate suit of armor, which would last for at least twenty more years. Shielded by beauty in this way, she learned to utilize her heightened position by being thoughtful towards others. She felt that in wearing old-fashioned or home made clothing she was standing for other people and herself as a symbol of that obscure prettiness in the world so hard to remember to appreciate, like two red threads and a blue piece from a plastic bag woven into a bird’s nest. When she went home with boys she wasn’t attracted to, it was often in the service of helping human contact look like a sanctuary, instead of the letdown she privately felt it mostly was. She tried to make sure everything she said was interesting and everything she did was done slowly, with care. She was trying to charm the human race.

But on this night I’m telling you about, it descended on her that this precious, internalized plan would not be sustained. One instance one day of getting too upset with herself for not leaving a big enough tip at a restaurant, or a few more boyfriends who hoarded their thoughts from her like jewels would make her want to surrender to the ordinary. For a second her disappointment lifted when Christopher kissed the light brown dome of her shoulder and whispered, “Hi.” But then Jenkins appeared in front of her and slapped her hard across the face, and she knew she had to run, to the bird’s nest with the two red threads and the bit of plastic bag, if she was going to save it. So she ran down the street, turning her head only once in their direction to scream with a heavy tremor in her voice, “Fuck you. Fuck you. I’m a fucking artist and you never even knew it. No one ever asked me what I liked, because you never even fucking cared about me. Fuck you!”

The two men were already fighting by this time. Christopher only got in one punch to Jenkins’ ear before his arms were pinned down on either side of his immobile ribcage on the cool pavement. Jenkins pounded over and over again at that bloody mass of pale wet flesh with its shadowy divots and peaks, until that electric-feeling cloud over his vision lifted and he could see that the boy’s nose was mashed shapeless and that he had stopped moving. Carefully, ashamed, he rose from his position over the body and looked apologetically at Christina, who was screaming and sobbing. He slowly walked back to the pink wreckage of his home, trying to slowly, coaxingly walk off the nausea and the fear of his home being empty when he finally made it back there from whatever hostile, blurry street he was on right now.

Jenkins never saw his three young friends or his girlfriend again after this night. A couple weeks later, he was bringing home a pretty, quiet girl with a lazy eye, who looked like an album cover from the nineteen sixties and who shot up between her toes, and they were waiting across the street for a jockish couple to walk out of sight, and the girl whispered to Jenkins, “Do you like fucking under the stars?” Jenkins watched as the jockish couple’s pit bull stopped in front of his palace and sniffed out all the drowsy secret habitation of that place.

The dog was an omen. The next day, a construction crew arrived and Jenkins snuck away, bringing with him only his money. The crew built scaffolding along the building’s façade and attached a large blue tarp to part of the scaffolding. One night, an unsure, lonely girl walked past the building and thought to herself, “How beautiful,” as she watched the blue tarp swell in the wind, like an ocean’s wave.

Planes of Sunday - Chapter 50

2011-08-11T15:46:00.000-07:00

50.
“There will be time, there will be time
to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create.”
-T.S. Eliot

“Hey, I need some security over here,” said Jenkins, beckoning her to him with a jerk of his head. “You snuck away,” he said more softly to her as she drew nearer.
Christina ran over to Christopher and pushed him.

“I’ve seen my fucking mom more recently than I’ve seen you, and she lives in Europe. You didn’t write me one single letter. Heather was in rehab the same time as you and she told me you acted like you didn’t know her. It’s like you don’t even care about me.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, Christina, I don’t. Okay? Fuck it, I’m starving. Can we just get some food?”

By the time they left the pizza place, Marcus, Joey and Def had disappeared with a large, loud group of boys and girls their own age, who had been sitting at the next table. They were at a party in some kids’ parents house, and who knows if they extracted glory from the kids there by being escaped sex offenders from juvenile hall, or if they just pretended they went to some high school, and were best friends there, raising benign mischief for some made up geometry teacher. Jenkins and Christina had shot up in the women’s room together. Christopher had gotten Christina to buy him a piece of pizza, but then had clandestinely wrapped it up in napkins and put it in his coat pocket, following the habit he’d had since childhood of saving up a special treat for the perfect solitary moment to savor it, like the caramel apples he saved from Halloween that Shirley finally threw away rotting, and forgotten, every mid-November. He let them walk ahead of him and stepped into an alley to throw the now-cold, smashed piece of food away in a dumpster. Even though they were all walking to the subway station, he knew this night could not end like this. Some excuse would have to materialize in the rose light of dawn to prevent the end of this odyssey through wine-dark seas of affection and disappointment, and the noise of trucks and the sudden threat of relapse and the time-travel scents that clung to his clothing of Pammy, Christina, of me, Terence, of George’s cat and George’s store and George, of the girl with the gray tooth and her suicidal room mate.

“Okay, it’s your turn now.” Oh thank God, there was more to come, after all. Christina stood beside him with the syringe in her hand like a math teacher’s favorite chewed-up pencil.

“Fuck you, Christina. I’m not stupid like you are. I’m clean.” He looked down the street at Pammy, who would be deaf in that far distance to any of the thoughtful, hard things he might say now to deny Christina’s gift to him.

“You’re so stupid, Christopher. You’re so fucking dumb and proud I almost feel sorry for you. I do feel sorry for your mom. She’s probably falling asleep in front of the TV with MASH reruns on, crying herself to sleep because she can’t get a boyfriend and the only man she gets attention from, her son, has stayed out late again, his first night out of rehab. One of many more rehab visits to come, no doubt. She probably has an unopened bottle of Vodka she’s kept on the coffee table in front of her all night, and has spent the whole night telling herself over and over not to drink any of it. You think you can escape turning out lonely like her without doing something to keep yourself from turning out that way? You think that you can just walk around being normal like everyone else and that because you were a good boy and said no to drugs, it will make you special and protect you from boredom? No, you think you don’t need drugs because you’ve got a new girlfriend. And what happens when you get tired of her, Christopher, the way you get tired of everyone and everything? You’ll find something new to get tired of? Maybe next time, someone will get tired of you for a change.

I’m so sick of it, Chris. I’m so sick and tired of doing the same things over and over again and watching you do the same things and having to be conscious through every sad detail of the whole thing. Now give me your arm.”

Christina was a whole different kind of girlfriend. The romantic fantasy she peddled was the promise of an escape from all girlfriends. He gave her his arm.

Planes of Sunday - Chapter 49

2011-08-10T08:18:00.000-07:00

49.
“First Church of Chris”

The upwards lilt of the word “yes” when spoken aloud, like the upwards rise of the dome of cheeks when one’s mouth is smiling, so that if a child says, “Let’s play a game. I’m going to cover my hand with my mouth and you try to guess if I’m frowning or smiling,” the other child can tell by the cheeks. That triumphant upwards lilt when someone he actually wants says yes to sex, and he is guaranteed at least a few minutes to try to discover or recover something vital.

About forty minutes passed with their breathing and each thing they said and their sex so absorbing like it could only be if it was the last or first time.

Christopher mumbled, “I’ve only ever wanted you,” at one point, when she had him in her mouth, but she didn’t hear him, or else pretended not to. Finally, Pammy and then Christopher sat up and brushed the gravel and tiny pieces of trash off their clothing as they heard the teasing voices of teenaged boys in the distance, and one deep, carefully meted out voice and a girl’s voice that nervously rolled from flirtatious to unfriendly in the space of five words.

“Hey, do you have anything else on you?” the deep voice asked.

“No, but I could get you some crystal meth in like an hour. A friend of mine lives right around here.”

“Oh, no, that’s cool. My friend Joe was good friends with Timmy Tank from that band GI Joe and he told me that right before Tim died, he told Joe never to fuck with that stuff.”

“Well maybe that’s why he died,” said the female voice. Pammy could imagine how Jenkins was nodding his head and grinning at this. As the group came into view, she saw him pat the girl on her head.

For a breath-held moment, Christopher felt as though a party were about to start getting good, which was still one of his favorite feelings, even in this half-alive time of his when he had just sworn off the one thing, the drug, that had given him real comfort. He had had to swear off the drug that was what he had always wanted from life since the age of eleven, that aloofness and password into the realm of the subterranean; he had had to swear off that dubious angel, fun, just to convince his mom that he could be a good person. The feeling of anticipation quickly faded and Christopher became protective of the body sitting next to his, like a young boy who wants to be a good man and has learned that men express tenderness through the avenue of discipline. “Straighten yourself out, your dumb boyfriend and his little rats are coming.” She looked at him with injury in her eyes but then, sushing him, pressed her pointer finger vertically across his lips so that it rested in the divot above his top lip, the space on a body named an “angel spot” by Humphrey Bogart when he was making Bacall fall in love with him in the movie Key Largo. She’d watched that movie with him one night on TV, when they were fifteen and tired from staying up the previous night. Shirley watched it too, sitting on the couch with them, a giant metallic bowl of popcorn on her lap. Shirley had fallen asleep before it ended, and Pammy and Christopher went into the bedroom she remembers as dark and familiar. Together, quietly, each had listened as virginity cooed like a huddled pigeon, both of them thinking something like, “This is really it.”

Planes of Sunday - Chapter 48

2011-08-09T08:40:00.000-07:00

48.
“Enveloping People”

“So where did you and Jenkins meet? Why are you even back here? I thought you were still in Philly, learning about Shakespeare and medicine at some Ivy League school.”

“Yeah. I dropped out. On account of it was boring as hell and uninspiring and all. So then I went and got this job as a security guard, and-”

“You got a job as a security guard? But Pammy, you could be a fashion model, or a famous actress.”

“Yes, but this was so much more interesting.” She was relaying this in a sarcastic, self-deprecatory tone, but she also sort of meant what she was saying – dropping out of college and being a security guard was more interesting to her. “You know how I’ve always sort of loved self-defeat. Anyway, so I’d just started as a security guard, and then Jenkins started a week after me, and that’s how we met. Love at first sight, or something.”

“Choo choo choo,” the automatic sprinklers were saying, like trains. Christopher and Pammy were walking in the parking lot of a church across the street from the pink destruction site. Pammy in her white dress was walking a crooked line with her arms stretched out at her sides like she was walking a tight rope, and he almost did it, he almost inched down into that last resort of begging attention by telling someone something honest and pitiful and making them feel sorry for you. He was going to tell her that he lived with his mom, and that, though he loved Shirley so much, he felt powerless right now and like a loser, and that he sometimes thought about killing himself. But then she turned to him of her own accord, and put the full force of her thoughts on considering his body standing there so close to hers.

“Come on, let’s run around or do cartwheels or something noisy, we should be having fun,” she said, “Don’t you think we should appreciate being together, after all this time?” Then how grateful he felt to have a real friend in this world. He put his hand on her hip and drew her closer to him, closer.

Planes of Sunday - Chapter 47

2011-08-05T15:13:00.000-07:00

Hello,
I got confused when I last posted, and I posted a chapter erroneously as Chapter 47 - the real chapter 47 is below. Sorry about that. xox robin

47.
“A Neon Population”

The first thought Christina had that morning was of the party she and her current boyfriend Carl attended the night before, and the plain-looking girl there he’d been so friendly to. Christina spent some time considering what she thought of as Carl’s stupidity, and then she spent a little time feeling drowsy and yielding, and discounting the sentiments of her earlier unkind thoughts. It was the morning of the day when she’d finally hear from Christopher, after what seemed such a long time of nights and days in which the absence of the sexy tension of his presence had been so noticeable. In the living room she could hear the houseguests, some high school acquaintances of Carl’s from back in Michigan. “Wow man,” one of them said to Carl on the first day of their visit, “You guys have marble walls in the bathroom. This place is a palace.” They didn’t know that Christina was a drug dealer, from a rich family; she just reminded them of all the rich girls they’d known at school. The pile of mildewed towels in the corner of the marble bathroom was to them just the twin of the beer cans that floated in the glowing swimming pools at parties rich kids would throw when their parents were away.

Pretty, pale, clear-skinned Christina. Christina with her wavy, shoulder blade length brown hair sometimes dyed a darker brown. She was drawn to unattractive, immature men and panicked in the short spans of time between boyfriends, but there was no one to scrutinize or point out this behavior to her. Though it was not always true, she sensed that these men had endless patience, and were grateful for her need for attention.

The houseguests she favored (she liked to keep her house full of guests) were almost always fifteen or sixteen year old girls who bought drugs off of her and had striking appearances and mean or particularly gentle personalities. Sometimes these girls still felt empathy towards the parents who put up with them, and had to be coaxed by Christina into running away from their homes. “That man’s a monster, you’ve got to get the fuck away from him,” she’d scream of some girl’s stepfather, and the girl would feel embarrassed for Christina, and excited by her, and would dare herself to actually go through with running away this time. Christina spent an afternoon showing one of these girls how to shoot up. The girl threw up and then wanted a cheeseburger, and Christina drove until she found a burger shack she’d never seen before, with outdoor seating in an area under an overhang that smelled of piss and Creamsicles. While Christina sat on one of the red plastic benches, waiting for her friend, she scanned the street and noticed they were the only white people around. It tantalized her. She felt as though she was gazing upon a neon population, and she wanted to do something fun, but there was nothing she could think of that she enjoyed. It had been so long that she had been too tired to have sex at night, and she couldn’t remember any food that tasted good.

This was also the day she met Jenkins, who became an important person to her, because his mom was her cellmate and only ally at the correctional facility she ended up in a few months later. His mom, a petite woman named Maxine, would ask, “What do you think he was doing living in an abandoned building? Did he tell you? Did he tell you anything about himself, or mention me in any way?” She had Midwestern blue eyes that stared at her own hands when she sat silently in the counselor’s office during her weekly sessions, refusing to explain why she’d turned to credit card fraud. Sitting on the top bunk with Christina, though, she looked right into the girl, and said, “They try to convince you that you need to own all these new things to make you happy. And then once you’ve fallen for it, you’re screwed, because how can you afford all that? But you want to buy the new stuff, right? They made you want it. And then they won’t let you have it. It’s right to have wanted nice shoes and belts for Jenkins, don’t you think? How’s he look now? Is he still tall?” Christina listened to Maxine speak of herself with the tone of someone who is in the right, as though she truly believed herself to be the victim in this situation. Christina wished for a feeling of victimhood to come over herself, as well; she was desperate to discover that there’d been some force unfairly causing her to do what she had done; otherwise, how could she go on living?

She’d gotten angry over something one night and had plunged a screwdriver into the neck of one of her boyfriends, the one after Carl.

Planes of Sunday - Chapter 46

2011-08-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

46.
“Your Body has Never Been Good for Much,
But Your Face, That is Another Story.”

Often when he thought about his mother, it was a way to reflect the image of his life back at himself as something archetypal, rather than a life to be lived. In this light, he could tell himself that all his shortcomings were predestined, that because he’d had such a flawed mother, his flaws were irrevocable. But then, the legend of her deficiencies would prove not expansive enough to explain his own failures to himself, and he would dread what the real excuse must be; plain laziness, plain goddamn uselessness.

The young men waited in the wrecked apartment for Christina’s arrival, and Christopher walked around the neighborhood with Pammy, blaming the way she wasn’t paying enough attention to him on some vague curse Shirley must have marked him with at birth.

At the treatment center, they made him feel like he would be supported indefinitely, a coverage almost magical enough to make any rejection of him whatsoever seem impossible. At the treatment center, there had been righteous frustrations and good intentions and unbridled vomit, and the future was a thing to bravely put off and to pretend to want. He’d had a therapist there, a dazzlingly intelligent woman, who genuinely and not just professionally liked him, and the fact of this validated him immensely. Her esteem for him impacted him so much it became a source of frustration, it made him antsy and fragile to be as precious as he felt, and so to remedy this, he vowed to become humble. Humility, hopefully, would silence the conversations with other people he constantly rehearsed in his head, and would instill him with patience in receiving the gradual opportunities he believed he was owed.

At the treatment center, one of his old girlfriends, Catie, wrote him letters from her current boyfriend’s parents’ condo in the hills when she was staying there for Thanksgiving weekend.

“Dear Christopher,” she’d written, “John’s dad is the quintessential yuppie. We went to the car wash with him the other day and he was like, helping the Mexican car washers there buff his BMW. Lame. Way to help the ‘little guy,’ pal. Anyway, I miss you. You sent a letter to your mom to me on accident. It said her name on the envelope but it was addressed to my apartment. I thought it was really sweet that you kept the scrap of paper I wrote my address on -- thank you! Well, if there’s any way I can help you, AT ALL, call me, ANY TIME DAY OR NIGHT.” And then in much smaller handwriting, “I love you very much. Love, Catie.” It was like she was telling him she would wait forever for his use. They were all that way.

He thought of Catie, of August, of me, of Pammy, and even of Bell, and Christina with her obvious ploys to bewitch him, and he was trying to consider them one at a time but when each girl became only a memory of an instance he felt securely cared for, he let these girls melt into the single theme of regret. He could have done something to lend one of these misfitted girls who came to him some real importance in his life, and then their attention would have been able to sustain him, and in that space of their sustenance, he could have lain back on a couch of theirs and made a plan for himself, so that now he wouldn’t just be working in a convenience store, the job a friend had set up for him for when he got back from rehab.

August and her stupid retro record player she took so much pride in as she sat beside it on the floor, her beer boxed in between her Indian-style legs, and put on single after old single, watching him sit on her single chair, eating the food she bought for him. The songs she put on were always things like Aretha Franklin’s “I Ain’t Never Loved a Man the Way that I Love You” and Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving you Too Long.” She would just sit there in an agony of trying to feel desirable, trying to think of charming, off-hand things to tell him or just hoping that the songs would speak for her.

Me and my way I could seem not cloying, by focusing on my books and movies I cared so personally about, and then the way I would decide to let myself falter and tell him I love him and ask if he loved me.

Christina and her breasts pushed against his arm, her way of standing by him when they were doing any chore together, the drug chores that established and sometimes threatened their camaraderie.

That black-haired girlfriend too lethargic to feed herself much of anything or to get up to answer the phone. That quiet, younger girlfriend who always used words like “translucent,” “iridescent” and “transcendent,” the kind of words that girls who wear lots of purple and tell people that they believe in fairies love to use. That loud, tall girlfriend with a disease, who he turned into a monster and who will use all the drugs he introduced her to until she dies from them.
Pammy and that other lover of hers which was independence.

How could he have decided which one would have made him whole? They were all so similar, he found himself saying and doing the same thing so many times, only the little pictures above their beds changing. The way both August and I like to collect old-fashioned objects and how we think that makes us artists. The way both Christina and Catie, and a couple of the other girls he’d known, thought that giving oral sex would infuse them with some sort of power over him. The languages they all made up to use with only him, all the words they used for making love and for their body parts and for his, and for him.

Love had let him down, by being too plentiful. It had cheapened itself with its multiplicity, distracting him with its multiple similar promises.

Planes of Sunday - Chapter 45

2011-07-27T11:49:00.000-07:00

45.
“ ‘I want to be Queen.’ She laughed and trembled.”
-Arthur Rimbaud

Terms of attraction are too common to use in describing my first meeting with Christopher, or how he has changed, marred, really, my life. Attraction is what motivates people to read their horoscopes, scanning newsprint for a signal from the island of desire. Translated like that into words, though, the signal becomes impotent, a currency too insubstantial to compensate us for the burden of our expectations. What I want you to know about my relationship with Christopher is that he cured me of my superstition that God was spying on my thoughts all the time, and sometimes punishing me for moments of being too happy (a bastardization of that saying, “Pride goeth before the fall.”) I’d wanted, for example, to be a smoker, ever since I was a little girl who was given to precocious fits of pensiveness; I’d want to sit on the back porch and watch the sun set, but I would want to do it with a cigarette in one hand, that poignant final touch, that torch of mortality. What prevented me was the fear of reproval. When I became involved with Christopher, though, I saw the careening way Providence gave and withdrew itself, so willy-nilly. I was no longer afraid of God then, but of freedom, that thing that strips morality of its authority to organize outcomes.

I’d gone out wearing my padded bra the night I met him, with the resolve not to speak much, because I didn’t enjoy the other college kids I was stepping out with. They were too aesthetically undefined and gossipy for me, and I was waiting, with a faith like prayer, for a group of artistic people to recognize me as someone with potential, and decide to teach me how to live artfully.

Christopher was standing at the mouth of an alley, smoking the cigarette I’d been craving since I was nine. The people surrounding him were not the impoverished park-dwellers or the plain-looking high school pals he sometimes hung out with; they were the friends he was impressed with, who dyed their hair and dressed up as time travelers from past decades. Christopher took out his Zippo to light the cigarette of a girl in white go-go boots, and then that force that could not have been God (because at that moment I was thinking only, “Me, me. Me.”) urged his face towards my walking body, which can seem attractive because it is thin and long.

I have to get this just right, in case he reads it. The surprisingly demure way he put his hand on top of mine as we sat next to each other on the couch in the living room of his friend’s house, but also the constricted way he asked that friend “Are you going to give me a few dollars for those beers you drank?”
One of the boys put on an album they all liked and Christopher stood up on the couch and screamed along with the lyrics and the other boys in the room responded to him with such enthusiasm. The enthusiasm surprised me, because it seemed self-diminishing, like the other boys were bowing at his feet, and they were all such striking, cocky boys it seemed they should all be standing on pieces of furniture, undulating for adoration. But I was the only girl there and the only one who wasn’t drinking, plus I was a newcomer, so how could I begin to know how much those boys loved each other? The end of the song came and he shouted, “Thank you, New York! Good night!” and swatted at a chandelier which had originally been intended as an imperishable upside-down wedding cake for the imaginary newly-weds houses are built for. A few of the crystals dislodged from the chandelier and fell on or near the boys’ bodies and threw shards of reflected light on their faces and shirts. They looked up to watch Christopher jump in the air and scream, and they watched with equal attention when he sat back down and asked me softly, “Would you like a beer?” This tenderness of his, as an arm reached out to hand me a beer, the boys also noted with interest, as they faded one by one out of the room like the pink indentations from a seat belt slowly disappearing from one’s stomach.

I drank beer. I laughed when he asked me questions about myself because everything that’d taken place before this night seemed inane, all my school pictures in yearbooks just tiles on a bathroom floor, my parents and my home a sitcom that was being transmitted somewhere in space but I would never have to watch it again. His face was right there, on mine. Our mouths symbiotic wounds. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” he said.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” is the refrain I scanned the radio for, from the very beginning of that period of youth when privacy is like a carnival. Before that, it was the sentiment that kept me riveted to my seat in front of the T.V. when the Wizard of Oz made its annual appearance, those four fast friends on the lam together, in a town in the middle of the sky: run away from home, little girl. What I thought Christopher was telling me was that there was something better out there, and beyond that, something even better.

Planes of Sunday - Chapter 44

2011-07-26T07:50:00.000-07:00

44.
“The Backpack”

The place where Jenkins and his friends lived was a partially collapsed apartment building that had been painted two different shades of pink and was surrounded by sagging cyclone fencing. It was nouveau-Greek in structure and looked like the sort of place that, when the fire sparked in it, had been abandoned by Southern California transplants with a collectively naively childish sense of aesthetics. There was a courtyard in the building’s center, watched over by a statue of Adonis, a left-behind pair of boxers bunched up by his right foot. The external staircase and the fiberglass columns that line the staircase were still intact and the majority of the peonies stood fast in the neglected soil, their feathery petals gray with soot, but the roof was entirely eaten away and all the glass in the window frames and in the white-rimmed lanterns that lined the long hallway were shattered with jagged starbursts across their surfaces.

Jenkins and his cohorts, who were just a few kids much younger than him that he’d met at another squat, who’d followed him here when he discovered this place, attempted to utilize all the space they’d taken possession of by spreading out the few small objects they owned. There was a plastic bong in the center of a one-time bathroom in a unit upstairs, a skirt thrown from the second floor onto the courtyard, beer cans and bottles in each room, and on top of a dryer in what was once a laundry room, a backpack full of clean socks and underwear eventually deemed unnecessary and a photo album of a foster family who had proved impatient and bitter. Mostly, though, the boys inhabited an apartment on the first floor, in a corner of the building.

When Pammy and Christopher entered the living room, which was lit by a dozen or so candles nestled in paper bags from liquor stores, a short boy of about fifteen, who was in the middle of telling a story, looked over at them and called “Fire, look out!” The other two boys laughed at the familiar refrain, and Jenkins smirked over at Pammy, who went to sit on his lap. Christopher was left the only one standing, and resolutely took a seat on the floor next to a box of beer he grabbed a can of.

“So you guys escape from boarding school and left your smack in a desk drawer? That’s so sad.”

Jenkins was tall and lean with chin-length blonde hair that was longer in the back and stuck in s-like tendrils along the long surface of his always slightly damp neck. His sideburns were curly and sandy and traced his square jaw line. He was wearing light blue corduroy pants and a tattered black New York Dolls t-shirt, and on his forearm in dark black ink was a tattoo that said “FUCK LOVE.” Certainly, he appreciated the spontaneous festivity of having a guest, and he and Christopher were the kind of naturally festive boys who instantly understood each other, and so Jenkins planned to crack open the tension by using his authoritative, sexy humor. But then he felt a sudden pang of emasculation, as though someday soon he would lose his knack of levity in conversations, and so what he said as he squeezed Pammy’s hip was, “Did you buy this asshole at the Elvis store or what? Where’s the drugs?”

“Oh shit,” remembered Pammy, doing her best to ignore the situation she was in, “I think we might’ve missed the song I requested. Where’s the radio?” The boy who brought the radio to her especially got a kick out of watching her sing along with the dopey classic rock songs she liked so much. He was the kind of boy who no matter what was just not smart, and who didn’t talk much. One time though, when Pammy was over and they were all drinking, the boy thought that nobody else in the room would be able to hear him, so he leaned over and mumbled in Pammy’s ear, “I’m feeling it, man. I feel fucked up. I wish I was dead.” Pammy had heard this identical remark from friends and acquaintances she’d known her whole teenage life, and the unspectacular passion of his sadness had made her feel embarrassed.

Planes of Sunday - Chapters 43

2011-07-19T14:24:00.000-07:00

43.
“The Word Boyfriend”

Pammy didn’t want the heroin for herself, but for her boyfriend, Jenkins.

Christina’s voice came out loud from the little sunburst of holes in the receiver, and when she asked Christopher where she should meet him, Pammy whispered Jenkins’ address in his ear. They were standing in a phone booth in front of a liquor store, two blocks away from the pink, fire-ravaged apartment building where Jenkins and his friends squatted. When he got off the phone, Pammy told Christopher, who was feeling heartbroken and exhausted, to start walking without her, she needed to make a call. Inside the booth by herself now, she watched her reflection in the glass while she listened to the dial tone. Then the voice came through.

“Hello, you having a good time Rock and Roll night?”

“Yes Kevin the Radio Legend, I sure am. How are you?”

“I’m just great, little lady. What can I do for you?”

“Well Kevin, I’d like to request a song if that’s alright.”

“Ooh, it is more than all right! Why don’t you tell all of our listeners your name, Miss.”

“My name is Pamela.”

“And what are you up to tonight, Pamela?”

“Well Kevin, I just got off work and I am ready to party. Woo Hoo!” She laughed, and she was still looking at herself in the glass, and she felt like this night could be memorable and good, somehow. Anyway, she had Christopher back now.

“Alright! We’re going to get that tune on for you in just a moment, Pamela. You have a great night.”

“You too, Kevin. Rock on.” She ran back to the pink building to turn on the radio, which ran on two batteries, two little bullets in their chamber.

Planes of Sunday - Chapters 42

2011-07-18T08:27:00.000-07:00

42.
“We’ll keep on spendin’ sunny days this way
We’re gonna talk and laugh the time away
I feel it comin’ closer day by day
Life would be ecstasy
You and me endlessly.”
-Rascals

One of the bad things he’d done that he’d had no other explanation for besides the shrugged-shoulders explanation of “anything goes,” was he’d come on to Bell, the woman George used to help, when he was leaving George’s apartment once and decided to walk up the stairs to each floor, just to see what the rest of the building looked like. On the fifth floor, she’d been standing in her doorway in an oversized t-shirt, and he’d walked over to her as though magnetized, and talked her into letting him move in; he’d just been kicked out again by Shirley. They hardly talked at all during the couple weeks he stayed with her. He did make her happy once; he went down on her and made her come, and then he’d immediately reached for a joint on the bedside table, put it in her mouth, and gallantly lit it for her, saying, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” She slept peacefully that night; lying next to her, he could feel through her skin that for once she wasn’t holding her muscles tensed. Eventually, he put some of her money in his pocket and snuck out in the middle of the day when she was napping.

Later, he spent about a month living in Bronxville, in a house rented by August, the girlfriend he had after Bell. Overly caring August, and a pretty, sullen vegetarian named Rebecca, and her boyfriend Tim, whose leisurely inquiries about other people’s well-beings and whose amusement with nature Christopher would spy on and grow jealous of. They all lived in this house that they decorated with old-fashioned knick-knacks along the windowsills and in the bathroom. They put seashells in the flowerbeds that lined the front windows, planted yellow Dahlias, and cooked meals for each other. He always thought about how he should be able to make love to her, it would be such an easy thing that would make her so grateful, but even kissing her made him nauseous. She was a good sport, who never pouted over his lack of interest. An avid admirer of Kerouac and Bob Dylan, she didn’t want to impinge on any boy’s freedom or inhibit his creativity by making demands on him. She wore boy’s clothes and was as tall as him, and in bed each night he wore a soft blue pair of her jeans and a man’s pajama top of hers that she called a “blouse” and felt sexy in when she wore it, because its thin cotton revealed the outline of the dark bras she wore.

Usually on Sundays, he slept heavily until noon, while she lay next to him, achingly conscious, trying in slow inches to coax one of his arms around her waist. There was this one Sunday, though, when he woke up early. Birds were chirping wildly and it was spring. All of the pretty, useless things in August’s room shone with reflected sunlight and for a second he felt unwelcome, but then he decided to make a contest out of it; he would trick her and her spoiled housemates by acting at ease in this radiant environment. Then, gradually, this self-consciousness of his melted away and he purely basked in this day that was like a Motown song. The four of them had a breakfast picnic, and then planted some basil in the cool soil of the backyard. They had a long conversation with the next door neighbor, a lesbian Raymond Chandler fan who brought out a cooler full of beer for everyone to share. In the evening, Christopher said to himself, “I’m going to look at the world with new eyes.” He glanced over at August as she crouched to pet a cat near the garage and pretended she was not being observed (“Move slowly, smile beautifully” she was coaching herself). He saw her newly, newborn, a girl in a pink dress with a pink sunburn, curled inside the tender, pink womb of dusk. That night he parted her stubbly legs like one gingerly opening an oriental fan and not understanding its function, only noticing its obsolete, pleated delicateness. “I love you,” she told him, pleased, when she was about to drift into sleep, consumed with the sensory contentment of the warm left-over dampness in her underwear and her own body’s smell on his hands. He was able to tolerate her for two more days before he abruptly moved out when she was at a class one afternoon.

Tim, Rebecca, and August lived in the house for five more months and then their landlord sold it to a realty company who raised the rent by $150, and they moved out. The way people that age do, they left the things behind that they hadn’t gotten attached to, camouflaged amongst the things left behind by other people on the high shelves in the garage and behind the bedsheets that hung over the two crawl spaces in the attic. Christopher had left his guitar and amp there. He’d left a well-fitting pea coat he’d always felt cocky in, and a Who songbook, a suitcase of clothes. At the time, when he left the house for good that day, he had imagined that those things of his were safe there in that place, that they were being kept company by three kind, vigilant people who would live there for a long time and who, in some strong way bordering on the paranormal, cared very, very much about him.

Planes of Sunday - Chapters 41

2011-07-14T09:01:00.000-07:00

41.
“Enter Pammy”

Then entered Pammy. The ironic red white and blue stripes of the sweatband she wore on one wrist highlighted her red lipstick, the shimmering light blue eye shadow spread from the battalion of lashes to the pretty commas of her eyebrows and the white of the dress she wore. “Chris!” she laughed. She had on black ballet slippers. “How are you? God, I haven’t seen you in a million years. You sho’ is a sight for sore eyes, honey chile.” That last bit was a form of political commentary she slipped into conversations when she’d had a few beers to drink. More than half the boys who got crushes on her were white, and they all imagined that she was the only black woman who’d ever heard of punk music or art. She sometimes black-faced around them, coyly, to make her resentment of this fact known, but none of the boys ever picked up on this, and always thought she was just being funny. When they’d been teenagers together and Christopher’d had his mean black pompadour and all his other vintage gangster paraphernalia and told himself that he was living, breathing poetry, they’d be at a party together, him strutting around the room making eye contact with everyone and she sitting in the center of some stranger’s couch, flanked on all sides by boys with stringy, shoulder-length hair. The front of Christopher’s body would suddenly ache to press itself against the back of her body, and he would look around for her. There she would be, on the couch, holding a sweating beer bottle with her knees, making up ridiculous, offensive rap songs for the boys, wanting to make the boys understand how they were objectifying her, but also wanting to make them laugh.

“God it’s been a bad day, Chris. It’s just been one of those days, you know, that last forever and are full of a bunch of weird coincidences and awful shit? But now you’re here, and I don’t have to cry in my beer all alone. God, Chris, it’s been forever. Would you like me to buy you a drink? I found a twenty in a parking lot by a bank today, and I’ll keep feeling guilty about it until I’ve spent it all.”
Not knowing Mickey’s and Shirley’s tendency to order the same kind of beer, in a time in the past when the extras who litter the background with their constant bodies wore a different style of clothing, Christopher ordered himself and Pammy each a Schlitz, his eyes seeking comfort in the kitschy plastic marlin nailed to the wall above the cash register while he waited for the beers. He turned back once to look at her where she sat at the booth, and watched her running her fingers through her hair. Because he’d never noticed the habit women have of combing their hair in that way, he assumed that she was just fixing it; he didn’t intuit that it was just something done for the pure sensory pleasure of it.

“So boy, what have you been up to? You look great. Just as sexy and sly as ever.”

“You didn’t hear the rumors? About the heroin and stuff?” Many people’s conversations in that town contributed to a general information network about Christopher, so that when he ran into old acquaintances, he never had to engage in that impersonal recital of recent events, knowing that they’d already somehow been informed – he could instead spend all his energy just on describing his favorite events, the impractical events that don’t let a person know where you’re living right now or where you’re working these days or if you’re seeing anyone.

“You can get heroin? I really need some.”
“Jesus Christ, Pammy. Not you, too?”

As they sat side by side in the subway car, she told him about how fun her day had been, how many people she’d run into who had been brimming with anecdotes and party invitations (almost mentioning how desirable she felt during these encounters), and the way the weather made her feel. She withheld any narrative about the dark, early hours she’d spent that morning with insomnia and diarrhea, working on a painting that was so obscurely symbolic and beautiful she couldn’t stand it and later threw it in the dumpster behind the apartment building. This part of her day was on the tip of her tongue as well, and speech seemed like a candy store; it was charming and exhilarating to omit all signs of unhappiness from the story she was creating for Christopher, and it was equally exhilarating to think about being honest. She didn’t tell him any of the bad things that she’d alluded to earlier.

A girl who always tried to attract Christopher when she saw him at parties got on the train at one of its stops, and Pammy watched as the girl, a golden heart locket nestled in her warm cleavage, tried ploy after ploy to beckon him to her, from conjuring up taboo images of her sexual experiences with other women to acting preoccupied by something else. When the young woman got off the bus, Pammy turned to Christopher and said, teasingly, “God, you have all these beautiful people making fools of themselves for you, just so you never forget how great you are. It’s like your birthright as a pretty white boy or something. Man, I wish Peter Pan had been a girl.” Christopher remembered a musical production of the children’s story he’d seen on television as a little boy, and the trim woman with a blonde pageboy haircut who played Peter, and he said to Pammy, “He was.”

The only thing that marred their little trip was a piece of food on his front tooth that made her feel embarrassed for him, especially when he smiled.

Planes of Sunday - Chapters 40

2011-07-13T09:06:00.000-07:00

40.
“The Bar”

“I remember you,” the girl he’d gone home with said, as he approached the bar.

“Yeah, me too. Mandy, right?” and then, recalling a habit she’d had the night he slept with her of hinting that she had an eating disorder, “you’re the girl who doesn’t eat or take vitamins or nothing, right?”

Flattered, she replied, “I’m trying to slowly kill myself. Life’s too sad,” and she laughed. The way she said it came off warm and humorous instead of needy, and made her seem for a little while afterwards a remarkable person, both to her room mate and to Christopher, a triumph that meant a great deal to the girl. The room mate, who turned from the middle-aged man she was speaking with, was a short lesbian with olive skin and dark brown eyes and hair. Acting carefree the way she was, instead of serious, she looked attractive to Christopher. Both the girls were thin and tall, with large breasts, and he didn’t mind wasting some time hanging out with them, he decided. “Let me buy us some drinks,” the room mate said.

But after his third Jack and Coke, Christopher felt resentful of the two girls for what he saw as their coercion of him to ruin his tally of sobriety, which rehab had made him so proud of. His sobriety had been like a single, perfectly typed page, that now had a smudge of White-Out right in the center of its text and had to be completely crumpled up and thrown away. Somewhat bitterly, he asked the room mate, “Are you going to get me drunk, or what?” and she answered, “Yes, I am. Order yourself another, it’s on me. I don’t have any money anyway.”

She was a girl with a lot of friends from the Gay and Lesbian club at school, who thought of her seldom when not actually in her company, and as someone reliable. Since she was fifteen she’d been stealing Valium from her mother and carrying the little pills around in a vintage matchbox stuffed with a bit of Kleenex in her pocket, and she took the pills often and for no reason, telling herself it was the dull taste of the pill dissolving in her mouth and not its drowsy power that she craved. But nobody knew this about her, so there was no one to think that she needed help. However, Christopher was meeting her during a period in her life where she was behaving differently from all the other eighteen years that came before. It was the year she had her breakdown. “How can good and evil co-exist?” she’d assert to her philosophy professor, and he would not know how to answer, because he was flunking her out of his class, for truancy. How can good and evil coexist? How could she find a way to go down to the underworld, but be true to her own kind soul while she was down there? Would that cause the world to explode? At night in the mental health facility her mother and stepdad placed her in, later on, she’d dream she was trapped in an orphanage like the one in the musical “Annie,” with singing girls dressed in flower-printed aprons dancing on their beds and singing rhyming songs about the orderlies and psychiatrists. The suicide note she left, a few months after this night I’m telling you about, read, “If I should die, I want you all to know that I love you all very much and never meant to hurt any of you.” Her parents spoke consolingly, repetitively of this note to each other, and never mentioned the poem they found in her journal called “Nobody Liked Me,” a thing written down so angrily hard the words tore the paper in places.

On the night I’m telling you about, though, everyone just thought she was drunk. “God, Christopher, I’m really sorry,” Mandy said, “Laura’s been pulling shit like this all the time lately. The other day she was walking around outside without any socks or shoes on, it was that day it hailed. I’m really sorry she offered to buy us all these drinks without having the money to pay for them. But like, I don’t have any money either, Christopher, do you?”

That was how Christopher spent all the money he had in his wallet on this night. A few times during his stroll through this night, he’d think of Shirley waiting for him at their apartment, and would know that he should call her to tell her he wouldn’t be home until very late. But because he’d spent even his last nickel, he told himself there was no way to get in touch with her. Having these obstacles of economics, time, space between him and her made the idea of her protection so potent that at one point during the night, when Pammy was in the bathroom and he was waiting for her, Christopher heard himself muttering, “Oh God, mom, I’m coming home to you.”

Planes of Sunday - Chapters 39

2011-07-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

39.
“A boy and his skin”

On this night I want to tell you about, once Christopher left George’s store, he walked around the park for awhile, following a path lined by benches. On one bench there was a young couple in black leather jackets huddled together, and on the bench next to them a young woman spilling her heart out to her dad about a fight she had at school with her best friend over a boy they both liked who was “very materialistic, Daddy.” At the row of benches across from them was a young man, smoking a cigarette, sitting by himself with his tape player on the bench next to him and a rap song loudly playing on it, and two benches away from him a hobo in a grimy green cable knit sweater held his sweating head in his hands and mumbled to himself that he was in hell and that hell was earth and the devils are the other people, an urgent paraphrasing of a play most kids have to read in college. Christopher came to the center of the park, and then walked down its other pathway, where at one bench sat a tired looking woman with freckles, eating something with chopsticks out of a white box on her lap. She had an Indian print scarf wrapped around her head like a turban and a purple shawl around her shoulders, and occasionally she put down a chopstick to write something in a leather-bound journal. Across the walkway from her sat a young girl, high school age with messy hair and pretty blue eyes sniffling and reading a novel and a tawny squirrel on the bench next to her, and on the bench next to the squirrel, another girl with messy hair; another upper middle class girl who’d gravitated toward messiness, writing a sex poem in the bare spaces of an illustration in a children’s storybook. And then two men walked in the opposite direction of Christopher and one was tan and drunk and dirty and had wild curly hair and was saying to the other man, a short drunk Asian college student, “The thing about the park is everyone goes here at night and reads and shit because they’re so fucking bored,” and one of the girls looked up at them bemusedly and with a little fear.

Christopher was walking to a bar very similar to the bar his mother had spent her young life dreaming of. Once inside the bar, he noticed, instantly disappointed, that the place had been discovered by a whole pride of people his own age. About to gesture to him was Mandy, this one girl he’d gone home with one night, her room mate sitting in the background somewhere on a bar stool, telling a business man consolingly that she bet his kids thought he was cool, that she would have thought it was cool, growing up, if her parents drank the way he did. Christopher didn’t remember the room mate being this nice. The night he ended up at their apartment, on a block that was so populated with college students that they didn’t fear the derelicts who also resided there because they were so outnumbered, the room mate had sat with her back towards him and the girl, watching a program on public television about the suffragists. When the program was over she had turned off the TV and, retreating to her room, said “Don’t make too much noise. I have to wake up early tomorrow.” The girl Christopher had gone home with had a gray front tooth. She was funny at first, with her stories about the neurotic essays she read out loud in class and the questions the other kids in class asked her afterwards. She also had this funny story about a cousin she had in the Marines who talked to her about Oscar Wilde, but who always yelled out the window at strangers, “Yeah! Nice tits!” when he was with his friends. Her face got pinker the more she drank, though, and she started acting as though it were Christopher who were pursuing her and not the other was around, as though that pink, bloated body of hers were a tool to barter with. She rubbed his crotch and told him, “I’m going to fuck you so good.” He felt embarrassed for her and wondered what she was thinking when she said that, because he wasn’t even hard. A lot of girls seemed to mistake a boy’s body for something else, he’d noticed. They mistake an orgasm as a beginning of something, instead of its end, pushing their own body finally forward once the other body retreated.

Planes of Sunday - Chapters 38

2011-07-11T08:28:00.001-07:00

38.
“Easter”

One Easter, Christopher attempted to wake up his mom by sneaking into her bedroom and jumping up and down on the mattress she was occupying in her long nightgown with the little blue cherries printed on it. Coming in for a landing, he accidentally jumped on her left ankle, and she shot up and yelled, “Knock it off, you little fucker,” and slapped him softly across his face. Of course, when she woke up for good later on that morning, she was able to coax him into forgiveness. By afternoon, he’d reemerged from his feigned anger and was resubmerged in his usual eight year old’s fog of adoration, his usual demanding questions, what was she like when she was eight years old?, did she have any more pictures of herself to show him? Could he sleep on the floor by her bed that night, so it’d be like a slumber party? As usual, Shirley basked in the curiosity of his interview, smiling vaguely and answering in modern-day fables, like a wise, generous movie star. But she remained traumatized by the blow she’d administered to his little face.

It took years for her to receive her punishment for this one moment of maternal impatience. It took until her son was seventeen, and it was another Easter, strangely, and their dinner guests were Shirley’s boyfriend, and Christopher’s first girlfriend, Pamela. “Pammy,” she was called. Pammy was black, which was exhilarating for Shirley, who always felt honored and surprised when a racial minority was nice to her. The young woman’s trademark at the time was a sweatband she wore on one wrist and three silver charm bracelets she wore on the other. After dinner, when the teens offered to clean up the dishes and Shirley wasn’t even out of the kitchen yet, she heard behind her back the excited breathing noises that could only be the two of them kissing. Then, her son must have been groping her too suddenly, or else maybe he accidentally splashed some dishwater on her, because Shirley heard Pammy say, “Knock it off, you little fucker,” and slap him. “Knock it off, you little fucker.” From Shirley’s mouth, it had sounded ridiculous all those years ago. Christopher had obviously told Pammy about the time his mom slapped him, and now it was a private joke of theirs, a way of mocking the things their parents did that were wrong and ineffectual.

From Pammy’s mouth, the command had sounded soft, and her slap had been soft, as well. She’d affectionately slapped him across his face, and then kissed his cheek, watching the happiness blossom across the features of his face like a houseplant cared for by a woman with a perfect green thumb.

Planes of Sunday - Chapters 37

2011-07-08T08:14:00.000-07:00

37.
“I haven’t laughed this hard in
a long time –
I better stop now
Before I start crying.”
-Elliott Smith

There are other times I remember quite distinctly as well, times when it almost seems possible that we could have been married, that he thought of me and needed me and was offering himself back.

“Caroline, is that you?” He had just spotted me and was giggling, like we were children playing Hide and Seek.

“Shhh. Wait! - stand right there for a second. I’m peeing!”
There was a time, during my sophomore year, when I was popular. So here I was on this night, doing something outrageous, a small group of three or four girls around me, giggling like Christopher was, whispering “Come on, Caroline!” and other commands that included my name and some amused urging.

Christopher was still standing there waiting for me to finish.

“I pee on churches now,” I told him, “that’s my new thing.”

“But what are you guys doing at this church, though, at one in the morning? I don’t think they’re having mass tomorrow.’

“This isn’t a catholic church, duh!” I felt confident. “It’s a wedding chapel.”
He pretended then that his heart was being shot with an arrow, an arrow coming from a gloating cupid who was on my side and was mumbling to Christopher, “See, now she’s taken.”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting married here tomorrow? And I was just thinking about you last night.” Everyone started joking about marriages, about how I always have to go to the bathroom, about all of Christopher’s girlfriends. Someone even joked about the hope I held on to of Christopher liking me again, and I didn’t mind. God we all felt good that night, we all felt funny and sexy and glad to be alive, standing there.

“Actually,” one of the girls clarified, “We’re trying to find the party.”

“You guys are so lost! It’s like, a mile away.”

“Then how come you’re here?”

“Because I’m walking to the party, too. But see, I’m not walking around chapels at midnight trying to find it, I know where it is. This is just a leisurely stroll for me.”

”Oh so you’re all smart, now that you’ve dumped me,” I kept giggling, sipping from the flask I used to carry around when I was popular, “after our momentously long relationship.”

I’d pulled my panties up and crawled out of the chapel’s tangle of bushes by then. We’d all started walking in the direction he was steering us towards by now, and as I was making this last chiding remark, walking towards him, he hung back from the others a bit, and with his hands in the pockets of his tight jean jacket, held out the crook of his arm for me to link arms with him. I punched him playfully on his shoulder, whispering with a playfully angry face (squinty eyes, gnashed teeth), “You heartbreaker,” before putting my arm through the crook of his.

Remember, I’d just told him a moment before, “Oh, you think you’re all smart.”
Well now he said, “No, I’m dumb,” he whispered it in my ear. We looked at each other for a second before walking faster to catch up with the others, my friends, my casual, breathing, noise-making friends (what a fucking privilege, really, for people to know you, to say your name out loud).

He was saying that he felt dumb for not being with me, there’s no other possible explanation. But we went to the party, and Christina was there so he unlinked his arm from mine to go over to speak with her, and after that night, I didn’t see him again for at least a month.

Another time, my roommate and I had just gotten home from the Laundromat. I threw my heavy pillowcases, filled with my cleaned clothes, on the ground. Not expecting anything. Our telephone had caller ID and I walked over to it to look at the ID screen, to see if we’d gotten any calls while we’d been out. I pushed the button with the up arrow on it to scroll through the list of callers. There had been 7 calls in a row, at two or three minute intervals, all from the apartment of David, a close friend of Chris’s. I called back and David answered.

“Hey, it’s Caroline. Um, yeah, I was just wondering if Chris was over there.”

“Yeah, he was, but he just left a few minutes ago.”
“Oh. Hmmm. I don’t know, it’s just that he called me, so I was returning his call.”

“He called you from here? Huh. Yeah, sorry, I don’t know where he went.”

”Okay. Um – did he leave by himself?”
On the other end of the line, Dave hesitated. The dead air had a faint hum of guilt or sympathy in it, and I could also hear people in the background, laughing and yelling over the music that was playing.

“The thing is, we’re having this little get-together here, me and Chris and a couple other dudes, and some girls, and like, he and someone else that was hanging out here, they just went on a little walk, like the minute before you called. Sorry, Caroline.”

In fact, he was already kissing the girl he’d left with. He was holding her wrists and kissing her neck, as they stood in line at a hot dog stand on the corner of Dave’s block.

Planes of Sunday - Chapters 35 & 36

2011-07-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

hi, if anyone's out there reading this can you give a holler? it's lonely.

35.
“The Man in the Moon:
A Dream That Felt Real”

The first night he ever saw the basic features of a shadowy human face appear in the center of a full moon, Christopher was four years old. Shirley carried him on her hip as she walked up and down the few short aisles of their corner grocery store. She watched as the cashier suddenly abandoned his post, and then she looked at her watch and said, “Oh Christopher, it’s time. You’re going to love this.” She carried him out front to the parking lot, where several other families from the block were gathered, plus the cashier and a buddy of his, and four or five untended children. “Look in the sky, Christopher,” Shirley said to him with her big smile so near the warm crown of his head. In the night sky, a cloud floated across the face of the moon, and when it passed, each person in the parking lot witnessed the unveiling of something that could only be impossible: their own faces, on a billboard so colossal it had to have been manufactured by God, perhaps as a gesture of comfort, like tomato soup brought to a sick child who, out of insecurity, views the soup as a gift almost unbelievably kind, so kind it is almost torturous.

36.
“When I run dry
I stop awhile and think of you.”
-Simon and Garfunkel

When I had been thoroughly discarded by Christopher, I wound up with a boy who told me he was in love with me on the first night we met, and then we lay nervously back in his bed and made love. He was handsome but clinically depressed, though his worst trait was his stinginess, and I gave him his first kiss immediately after asking, “Exactly what is it that you hate most about the world?”, and received his answer before he put his mouth to mine a second time, “Most people are just such assholes.” I’d been encouraged at first that he said things like that people are assholes, it was the sort of things that one of Chris’s sexy friends might say, or Chris himself, if he was in one of his fighting moods, but when this boy, my boy, Ben, said things like that, he was not surrounded by friends, as Chris and Chris’s friends always were. He was solemn, living in his grandparents’ attic in a small town right across the New Jersey border. One afternoon when we were making love, he put his hand over my mouth to smother my passionate moans, and it was embarrassing for me, because we both knew what new, uninspired lovers we were and that the noises I made were just done out of niceness to him, and were quiet, anyway. The best time he told me he loved me was when we were waiting for a bus one night, and the statement was unexpected and emphatic, seemingly brought on by the sight of my bare arms as I took my sweater off. Still, the whole time we dated, I treated him like he was my prelude to a reunion with a somehow newly ownable Christopher. I used Ben, to keep me company while I mourned the inequities of wildness. We spent much of our time together chit-chatting in the living room where his grandparents sat. I became hyper-aware of the old peoples’ rituals, practically setting the rhythm of my own habits to theirs. They’re making coffee, it must be time to wake up. Oh, Sixty Minutes is on the television. I’ll take off my pretty skirt and put some sweatpants on, settle in for the evening. When they went to bed, so did we.

We used always go to a place called the Candlelight Diner. No matter how inconsequential or awkward I may seem to clerks in grocery stores, or flat-chested to cashiers at Victoria’s Secret, I am secure in the affection those Candlelight Diner waitresses felt for me. Let Ben, who I still think of when there is nothing else to think about, take some new, more well-balanced girlfriend to that place. That is, if he still lives nearby. Let him pay for her meal and then, slipping his wallet into his back pocket, turn his head to watch her briefly comb her long fingers through her own long hair. I was the girl whom these waitresses had thought was married to that young man. I tipped them so much more money than was ever appropriate and made them joke that they were saving the money to use on a baby shower for me. They put the elaborate bottles of syrup in front of us on the table and stood over us while we ordered more coffee, growing protective of what they saw in us as love. I always asked about their children, and the waitresses mistakenly saw me as a woman who would have children of her own someday.

I was thinking about Christopher the whole time. I was remembering the first time he held my hand, even as Ben’s grandmother first held my hand and told me, “You’re a pretty girl.”

Those months with Ben are a time I can remember very distinctly, of thinking about Christopher, the exact thoughts I had. There was also every Christmas, when I would be back home, visiting my mom, dad, and sister, who was a teenager at the time. Every Christmas, since I first met Christopher, there is always something about being in the backseat of my parents car with my sister next to me as we drive through neighborhoods, looking at the decorations on all the houses, that gives me a falsely premonitory vision of Christopher and I someday being married. Someday living in a little house with Christmas lights on it, back in the same city again, in the same vicinity, me no longer wondering where he lives now, what he’s up to. Not just living in the same city again, but in the same house, the same life. Yes, it’s impossible.

But maybe things can somehow change. Time could go backwards, somehow. Can it?

Planes of Sunday - Chapter Thirty Four

2011-07-06T08:46:00.000-07:00

34.
“I took the keys from Maudlin Street
Well, it’s only brick and mortar!
And… truly I do love you
Oh oh
Wherever you are
I hope you’re singing.”
-Morrissey

“God, George, this is blowing my mind right now, to be in the old store. I love this place. I always have all these dreams about it, it’s so weird to actually be here. And it’s weird that it’s been here all this time and that I haven’t even come by to visit you the past couple years. Sorry, man, I feel like a jerk.”

“Oh, not at all. I know, uh, that the last couple years” – he pauses, unsure what to say next – “maybe don’t even feel like real life when you think back on them. I know you’ve been having a problem with drugs.” The unfamiliarity of him speaking seriously to you makes tears come to your eyes. “If you can believe it, my old friend from Penn State, you met him - Michael - he had a big problem with heroin, too. He stole all the money I had in the world one time. We were in our twenties so of course it wasn’t much, but, I saw the drugs really change him.”
You haven’t been listening to his whole story, instead absorbing the fact that he’s been able to keep track of you, while you have completely forgotten about him at times.

“So you and mom are back in touch.”

“Oh yes. Sure. You know your mom, she starts to hate where she works after a few months there, starts to feel lonely when she doesn’t make any friends and gets to where she just wants to cry and talk to someone when she gets home at the end of the day. Especially this newest job, they have her working ten hours straight through sometimes. You know how she is, and she hasn’t met someone she likes in, goodness, it’s been over a year since that fellow who took her to Niagara Falls, and then you moved out and sort of went missing. That was too much for her to handle on her own. We talk all the time. I saw her just yesterday, actually; we met up at that coffee shop you like.”

You change the subject.

“You used to have the coolest records here. I know you weren’t sure what most of it was, but trust me, they were all cool, and some of them were worth a lot of money, too. I remember there was like some original pressing of a New York Dolls single, I think. And all those rubber stamps you have of lungs and hearts and stuff, and all the Bukowski books – man. My friends loved this place, you know?, and I almost felt a little bit like I owned it with you. Mom kind of asked me to visiting you but I know she knew I still stopped by all the time.”

At this point in the night, you are still as talkative and glad of who you are as when we met for coffee a little earlier. You start thinking of the group of friends you had in high school, the ones who loved George’s store. There was a girlfriend named Pammy when you were with this group, she was like the queen of the group. She loved the rubber stamps and little toys and antique religious children’s jewelry George kept in the drawers of an old salvaged card catalogue cabinet. You didn’t get impatient as you stood there watching her find little objects she couldn’t believe actually existed. “Oh my god, look at all this,” she’d say, and the merchandise she was so excited by fit in both palms or her hands that she extended towards you: a sterling silver charm of a little girl’s head in silhouette (50 cents); an old tin pin advertising a circus in Maine in 1953 (one dollar); a rubber stamp with a headshot of the Supremes etched into the rubber pad (asterisk-style stars swimming in the background) and another stamp of a witch in a sexy leotard flying on a broom, with her arms thrown sexily in the air (one dollar per rubber stamp); an old picture booth photo of a stranger (five cents); a pewter charm of an anchor (twenty five cents); and a small plastic bottle of blowing bubbles, shaped like a rabbit. All of which George would have given to her for free, if it had not been evident that buying these mostly miniscule objects was part of the fun for her. Once, she bought an old cotton housedress with a pattern of butterflies printed on the fabric that you knew had belonged to George’s mom. Pammy was excited all day, she was going to go home and make something with her purchases, sew the charm to a big rag doll she was making, get stoned beforehand and blow some of the bubbles from the rabbit bottle and just watch the bubbles float off weightlessly through her open bedroom window. You should have stayed with people like this who had these kinds of ideas based on beauty.

“Why don’t you let me make you some tea, before you have to go back out into the cold. Is Irish Breakfast still your favorite?”

You have no real favorite of the teas he used to serve you, whenever you came to his apartment to be babysat, or whenever you spent an afternoon just sitting around with him in his store, but you liked to say you had a favorite and had decided on Irish Breakfast.

“Yep, still my favorite.”

“Okay. You can follow me back here while I make it, if you’d like. It’ll only take a moment, I just have to microwave us some water.” There’d always been a microwave in the back room, but now, as you follow him through a narrow path between stacks of books and videos to get back there, pushing aside the a heavy velvet curtain (a gift from Shirley) which has long cordoned off the backroom from the rest of the store, you see that he now lives here, that he’s brought a cot in and a hotplate, and his old black and white TV set, the one on which you once watched Wizard of Oz with him, laughing when Dorothy went on about how different Oz was from Kansas, because on George’s old TV set, they looked just about the same. This room stinks. Next to the miniature refrigerator, there’s a trashcan full of mostly empty cans of chili that must have mold or something growing inside of them, the trashcan is swarming with flies. You go to the bathroom to splash some water on your face, almost hoping that this is a dream you will wake from. You find several pairs of woolen navy blue socks soaking in the bathroom sink, and then discover another culprit of the unbearable smell when you look under the sink and find a box of cat litter that seems not to have ever been tended to.

You leave the bathroom, shakily, and see George next to the microwave, stooped over to pet his cat, who has a pink, swollen eye and a line of dried blood along one torn ear. George picks the cat up and holds him. He looks up and sees your horrified face and says, “Well, things just haven’t been going well for me or the cat, by the looks of it. Have they?” He tries to smile, apologetically, but you still feel horrified by this disgusting place, and angry that George has let himself get this way.

“Does mom know what you live like? She should help you. You should live with her, with us.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he replies, almost sounding annoyed. “But to tell you the truth, I’m pretty tired out. Thanks for helping me with my grocery bag. How about a rain check on the tea?”

Pushing your way back through the velvet curtain to the front of the store, you think you might throw up. Back outside again, you begin to cry, feeling almost cheated, now.

You’d wanted the proper opportunity to tell him that in your mind, he will always be your father. You’d wanted to give him all the money in your wallet. You want to, someday, confess that it was you who beat him over the head with a flashlight one night when he was leaving the movie theatre. You took his wallet out of his back pocket and just left him there on the ground.

(But that’s not true, right? You did call 911 and tell them there was some guy passed out in front of a movie theatre).

You wanted to ask what the argument had been about, between him and Shirley. And you wanted to repeat this to him, before you left for the night, in the night you imagined for the two of you when you saw him through the grocery store window:
“I’m so sorry, and would give anything for you to forgive me. I will always think of you as my father. You took care of me.”

Planes of Sunday - Chapter Thirty Three

2011-07-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

33.
“George”

Certain people admire George. They are mostly people in their twenties and are the type of person to which his poor hygiene does not cause a shudder, but instead heightens their tenderness towards him. They admire him for his integrity, gentility, oddness, and what some might call his open-mindedness, which seems unexpected because of how old he is (fifty eight on this night Christopher runs into him, but in appearance, an amorphous old but not ancient age – some people who have known him for many years have guessed him to be in his perpetual mid sixties).

For instance, when his store was still making money, he’d hire other people to watch it for him sometimes, and one of these people was a transvestite who’d named herself Bonnie. This acceptance of Bonnie seemed like a liberal gesture to George’s admirers because they did not intuit that George feels himself an outsider, and feels an affinity with other outsiders. He genuinely enjoyed the company of Bonnie, who he felt protective of, his instinctive impression of her being that she was a woman who bore a stigma. Before Bonnie left the city, Shirley, Bonnie and George occasionally all went out together to Barnaby’s for drinks, and Shirley’s impression of the transvestite was the opposite of George’s; she thought of Bonnie as a subversively costumed gay man, and felt so excited to be acquainted with him, as though she had some stake in the wild New York scenarios Lou Reed sang of.
These disciples of George would never guess at the natural ease of his liberalism, which looks like mere tolerance to them. Similarly, some of them have incorrectly assumed that George’s shop was a charity thrift store like the Goodwill or Salvation Army, because of the sloppy arrangement of merchandise, and the cheap prices, but in fact it is just George’s store, stocked with the things that he likes; art and poetry and fiction books; bric-a-brac kitschy or beautiful; punk records brought in by his disciples in exchange for store credit, and then bought by different disciples of his, usually with store credit; old skeins of beautiful fabric; purses that release a smell of perfumed powder when you open them; costume jewelry and clothing all left behind by his mom when she passed away; postcard reproductions of paintings and old gas station signs; old glossies of movie stars.

They also assume that he is shy, because he has never spoken about personal matters with any of them, answering their questions with answers that contain all fact, with no glimpse of a personal history underneath. But he is just particular about people.

Alcoholics Anonymous made Shirley feel older than she was, and the fact that you are not supposed to undertake new projects or relationships in the early stages of courting your sobriety was disappointing to her. You are not even supposed to be in the mindframe to want a new relationship, she resentfully observed; instead, you are supposed to want only the guilt-free state of sobriety.
Once the threat of having Christopher taken away from her because of the car accident passed, and once she’d gotten over the embarrassment of having loved and then tolerated Mickey (who she looks back on as pathetic), the need to belong to AA, or even to be sober, passed, and the only thing she felt she needed was a boyfriend. This change occurred when Christopher was eight years old and they’d been living for a few years in an apartment that -- playing with destiny, dancing beside it (taunting it?) always --- was in the same building where Shirley’s and Christopher’s first New York apartment had been. She worked half-days in a doctor’s office. As she tidied the apartment or just sat on the couch and read, Chris still in school for three more hours, she was sometimes made nervous by the thought of her inevitable return to Barnaby’s. In her memories, the bar had come to mean so much, as she romanticized the brief time in her life when she’d been a lone girl standing near her own kitchen window, admiring a view that belonged to only her, when her parents didn’t even have her address yet and she was as young as an adult can be.
She made up her mind to actually do it on a Thursday. During this time (this was before Bonnie), George had a man named Charles watching the store for him when he needed to run errands. There’d been a woman before Shirley, Bell, who George had doggedly helped. Bell was younger, prettier and from a richer family than Shirley, making her the more miserable woman of the two. But the reason she’d garnered George's help is because of how incapable of survival she was. She was slumming, living in the same apartment building as he. There existed no person to ask George, “Man, she calls you up and you go out and buy her cigarettes and vodka and leave them on her doorstep for her? That’s crazy. Why do you do it?” She needed these things. She cried in her apartment most days, taking drugs, staring at the ceiling, painting pictures of her own face and desperately begging God for George or the parents whom she hated to call her. On this Thursday, he’d been sitting at his comfortable recliner at his store, preparing to read a John Cheever novel, when the phone rang and it had been Bell, who immediately started to cry, “I’m starving. There’s no food in the apartment. I’m freaking out.”

After dropping off a grocery bag filled with five frozen pizzas (and then leaning against her kitchen wall for awhile, watching her put one of the pizzas in the oven, noticing the resigned expression she wore on her face that day, asking her if she’d taken her medication, leaving a slightly used box of watercolors for her on her couch as he told her “goodbye”), since he still had Charles watching the store for him, George decided to make a stop into Barbnaby’s. This is another thing that George’s young followers would not guess about him, his comfort in bars and the thrill that never wore off for him, until he got too sick for it, of being surrounded by so many excitable people all tending to the flowering buds of their own drunken conversations, some with red faces flushed with drink and smiling only for themselves, some becoming wildly funny, wildly happy, sometimes even newly twenty one year olds, maybe sitting with their parents visiting from out of town, thinking thoughts like “I can’t believe we’re all getting drunk together. I just want to drink too much and laugh about the things they did wrong to me, and forgive them in a single gesture.”

Leaning against the bar, that Thursday, he saw Shirley laughing and talking with Virginia, a bartender who’d been there for ages by now.

And you can call this love at first sight. Love is still love, even when it is a one-sided devotion. He would in no time at all love Christopher, too. He would become what Alcoholics Anonymous terms an enabler, someone who gives an addict what is required to continue with the addiction, an enemy of willpower. But this would be an unfair judgment of him. In a normal situation, with insiders, with people who belong in mainstream society (George imagines), a loving husband does not begrudge his wife her pleasure in accumulating jewelry; he places the tiny box with the beautiful bracelet inside of it on her lap on Christmas morning, and feels so gratified watching her smile when she pulls at the wrapping paper and glimpses her treasure. Likewise, George wanted to make Shirley happy. He listened to her. He knew she felt with certainty that her parents had not loved her, that she feared she was too insecure (too inhuman, really) to have had a child. How could George not always give her whatever gift she wanted? Drinking calmed her. He has always, his whole life since he’s known her, even when the doctors discovered the mass of cancer in his lung, just wanted to somehow prove to her, “See, everything turns out alright in the end.”

After talking and drinking with him and Virginia for a couple of hours at Barnaby’s that day, Shirley walked into George’s store two days later, and invited him out for more drinks, his treat. She was still pretty and complex.

George remained her best friend through all of the new boyfriends she met and then repelled. There was a schizophrenic with a beard, who glued covers of mystery novels to pieces of cardboard and sent them through the mail to her apartment, where she and Christopher dutifully threw them in the trash and wished out loud (in case God was listening) that he would not stalk them. There was an artist with worn-through long-sleeved shirts and silky hair, who jumped up and down on the Murphy bed with Christopher one night when he couldn’t get to sleep, and ruined holidays with his moodiness. There was a Vietnam Vet who was homeless when they first met him. There was a lawyer who used to live in the apartment where Rosemary’s Baby was filmed.

George was the grown up who often met Christopher at the gate when school let out at the end of the day, walking him to whatever short-lived clerical job Shirley had, helping Chris pass the time until mom’s work day was over. Sometimes George walked Christopher to school in the mornings, as well, and they went through different phases of routines. For the majority of Christopher’s fifth grade year at school, they had a routine of stopping before school at a bakery for cheese Danishes. “Does the woman who worked there still remember us?” the part of Christopher who wants to be famous asks himself. They also had a routine of going to a video arcade after school on Fridays, and one of renting movies from the library, and bringing them to Shirley, like an offering.

Their longest-running routine was of waiting for Shirley at the park across the street from her psychiatrist’s office, one Friday a month. The park was in a neighborhood with colorful tigers painted on grocery store signs and baby girls dressed like morning glories being carried in the arms of their mustached dads. Chris and George would just sit and listen to the noises around them, sometimes bringing along books to read, not talking, the actual moments already heavy with the poignancy of memories.

George lived in a studio apartment situated at the top of the stairs that led to the second floor. There was a long horizontal window in his living room wall that for some reason was positioned so that it looked out on the hallway. He had a smaller window that faced out towards the world, too, and like Shirley, he loved to see the clotheslines strung between two buildings or poles on rooftops, burdened with their colorful flags of damp dresses and undershirts. Walking up the stairs to the second floor landing, a person could quite clearly see into George’s apartment, could even see him sleeping in his bed, which stood along the wall opposite the window, when he forgot to draw the curtains closed some nights. Much later in his friendship with George, when he was already a teenager, and George and Shirley were estranged from each other, Christopher came to see him one afternoon. It was a Sunday, and Christopher recalls hearing the drone of a single engine plane in the background; his mother had thoroughly versed both him and George in the story of how that sound has made her feel sad since she was a little girl, and she somewhat managed to convince them of her theory that that sound was only made or heard on Sundays, Sundays with their hollow promise of rest and the Lord’s companionship. In the past, when he still made money and was healthier, George would have been at his store on a Sunday afternoon, unless he was out somewhere with Christopher and Shirley. But he was at home this afternoon, convalescing from a flu that’d lasted too long. Chris was bringing him a Thermos of soup. The curtains in the window facing the walkway were drawn, but they were of a diaphanous mossy green fabric anyway, and he could clearly see George lying on his side in bed, propped up on one elbow, reading a book that lay open before him, occasionally letting go of a page to pet the cat that lay warm and purring next to him, inside the space made between George’s stomach and the bent arm that held the book.

He was smiling.

The sight of his private and complete contentment made Chris feel somehow heartbroken. He almost felt paternal, as though he could enter the dark room, open up the opposite curtain to let some light in on the pages George was reading with squinting eyes, retrieve the filthy afghan from where it was balled up on the floor by the foot of the bed, and lay it over George’s frail legs. He knew George had spent much of his savings on him and Shirley, most recently covering close to a year of his and his mom’s rent when she was unemployed and going through a depression that was like an invisible beast who used his gigantic palms to push her deep into her mattress, only allowing her to get up to use the bathroom or shuffle to the door to let George in, before he got his own key to the apartment. They had cost George so much money, while his store simultaneously began losing money; the most loyal customers had grown out of their interest in precious junk, and were never replaced.
So here was George, in his bed with his cat and a smile and a book, in bad health, poor, sweating in a rust-orange sweater. Christopher wanted to sit in the red wooden chair in the kitchen next to the card table, and keep vigil over his friend. He wanted the chance to tell someone, “I would do anything for George.”

But you decided not to knock on the door. You wouldn’t disturb his peace, Christopher, not on this day.

Planes of Sunday - Chapter Thirty Two

2011-06-30T08:42:00.000-07:00

32.
“The Long Night”

When I started this story, I meant only to tell you about this one night, the first night he was back in the city, after spending three weeks in a rehabilitation clinic upstate in Ithaca. This was a night on which he felt he was a protagonist in a movie. He felt like people were watching him, as he walked around seeing people he’d loved or hurt or grown up with or just kissed, with his new outlook, which was that he had been through something major – he had finally been through a recognizable trial, and it had enriched him. His addiction and rehabilitation were a neon glow from beneath his cheekbones.

When he’d reflect on this night the next morning, it would seem that there’d been quiet and loud and then quiet parts again, like falling in and out of sleep with the TV turned up loud in the background. Happiness, sadness, happiness, safety and then danger, had all washed over him and receded, the safety, the happiness and love of him would arrive with a shhhhhing breath and then fall away, like the ocean’s waves.

It was an in-between time. He could already see, that first night, that he would have to train himself to ignore the people he’d sold drugs to without appearing to be ignoring them. He had to greet his old high school friends and his past girlfriends and his clean NYU buddies with apologetic hellos that he sort of mumbled, so he wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of passing strangers if his acquaintances ignored him. He’d stolen money from a lot of them when he was on drugs, and two of them he’d even beaten up, under circumstances that seemed melodramatic to him now. The thought occurred to him that he could have eventually killed someone. But there was always a part of him that knew that someday he would quit drugs, quit selling and shooting heroin. He had expected to be congratulated by his victims when he reappeared to them all clean and full of charming, fragile egoism again.

On this night, this night important for the sense of a journey it inspired in him, he was walking around deciding where to go, having met me for coffee earlier in the evening. It was on the verge of snowing, and he was wearing only a jean jacket over his t-shirt, and no gloves. When he exhaled cigarette smoke, the swirling clouds were filled out and sustained by the visible crystals of his breath. He was not thinking of me as he walked along, that much I know. I knew that when I met him for coffee that night, but it doesn’t matter. I was thinking of him, and I always will. I sat with him and listened to him in all his overexcitement, as he explained how full of shame he had been this past year, and how ruthless, and how absolutely reborn, invincible he felt now. This was the one opportunity I ever felt I could tease him for his cockiness, since he was practically fishing for insults from the people he’d hurt, so he could agree with them and then make their grudges disappear. “I am cocky!” he burst out, squeezing my wrist affectionately, “and it feels great.”

There was no way to coax him into thinking he needed me, I saw. To have put my hand on his, on the Formica counter, and to have urged his face towards me, that fashionable image of me I’d so painstakingly prepared for that night, to have urged his face towards an expectant, made up face of mine with the palm of my left hand and to have looked at him and asked, “Remember that picture you had of me?” and for him to have looked down at the counter smiling for a pause and then to look back up at me and say, “I walk around with it in my wallet,” -- that was what I had hoped would happen. But Christopher is a legend. People like that can’t help but think only of themselves. People like that walk into your frame of vision when you are not expecting it, and they touch you on the shoulder for a second and excite you with a burst of attention, but if you try to grab their arm after they’ve started to walk away, if you try to weasel out more than your fair share of attention from them, you are left feeling abandoned before you can even begin the telling of an intricate anecdote you had been saving for just this thwarted moment.

Rubbing his hands together briskly as he exited the coffee shop, and then putting them in his pockets, Christopher headed south. He walked past a small grocery store, where he stopped to watch as a man who stood at the counter, wearing an olive green turtle neck sweater and gray pants, pushed his thick eyeglasses up onto his forehead and hunched over his open palm, sorting doubtfully through pennies for a tarnished dime. The forehead his glasses harnessed was a wide, creased expanse, crowned at its very top with wisps of white, shoulder-length hair that partially obscured a long, narrow scar. Christopher waited outside.

“George.”

published online

2011-06-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

Yay, an ezine with an older short story of mine (i'm on year 2 of writer's block) just came out today:

http://thescrambler.com/eng/issues/issue-46-june-2011/robin-crane/

Robin

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Thirty One

2011-06-28T10:09:00.000-07:00

31.
“Sweet Sixteen”

When I was sixteen, I began calling myself a feminist, which, on top of all the other reasons, made me almost giddy with a sense of purpose because of how deeply it upset my conservative, Catholic parents. But another reason I turned to feminism is because even at that young age, or maybe I mean especially at that age, I felt as though some trap had been set for me and a large gang somewhere, a gang of gods, and goddesses sitting supple in beauty chairs on Mount Olympus smoking Virginia Slims, were crossing their fingers and wishing that I would fail in life. That’s just how it felt to me.

And there was another reason I turned to feminism. The reason was, I felt like I was so pretty and smart and giving, I couldn’t understand why I didn’t have a boyfriend. That was all I wanted, so badly, just to have someone who would value me and tell me that I was special. My desperate longing for companionship terrified me. I couldn’t imagine what the next seventy years of life would be like if I already felt this unfulfilled. I wanted to use empowerment and self-awareness as a hammer to smash my longing to pieces.

Before I finally gave in, to whatever this is that I’m in now, I spent almost half my life presenting myself to people as a feminist, based on a fear of desire so strong I had to turn it into something political just to be able to survive. What’s so weird is how Christopher was consumed with the same kind of longing when he was sixteen. If it’s not gender that dooms people to desperation, and if even good looks won’t stave off that monster, desperation, what is it made of and what works to kill it?

2011-06-27T13:19:00.001-07:00

30.
“I was dancing when I was aaah.”- T. Rex

Christopher had a friend named Christina who looked like a child and taught him how to deal. Her own clientele, which she shared with him, included a small variety of types; she never dealt with destitute, truly desperate adults. She, and briefly, Chris, sold to artists and former artists, to minorities with sad jobs at convenience stores but vivid night-lives, and occasionally to college kids, or kids not in college but college-aged, kids in bands with noble ideals and ideas about drugs that they learned from the Beats and hugged like artistic security blankets. Chris and Christina, the breathtaking twins. Often, nobody would see them together for weeks and then they would show up at a party, standing so close, talking with their faces so close together, their intimacy appearing both erotic and familial.
He always had these short-lived relationships with girls who never even guessed that their concern for him, that thing that originally drew him to each of them, was also the quality that would shortly make them seem burdensome and transparent. He couldn’t explain that he didn’t want sex, or even to spend much time with them.
He just wanted to come across the one something that would make him truly special to the world, in his vague version of what the world was, an amorphous infinity with the mother’s pride and forgiving personality of Shirley.

These girls all ate away at him, with their sly demands for attention. They demanded his presence, or else they felt uneasy wondering where he was. It seemed to him that he was the only person in the whole world who inspired this sort of parasitic lust in others, but it was not his ego that made him feel this way. No, I think it was more like a superstition. He felt he’d been jinxed with a charm that made everyone desire something divine from him, so that he was forced over and over to disappoint people, all those pretty girls with their bitten fingernails and their secret frantic prayers and their battles with boredom and insecurity.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Twenty Nine

2011-06-23T13:34:00.001-07:00

29.
“With Love to Christopher”

I used to know Chris. This was back when I was pretty and could seem mysterious; my hair was bleached blonde, tipped black at the ends, like Debbie Harry. I was an upper middle class college girl who used the self-timer function on my camera to take photos of myself in pretty dresses, kneeling to pray; I imagined someone looking through my photo album and seeing these photos and understanding that I wanted help. I always wore used clothes. This is before I got my job in Seattle and underwent the chipper road trip that led me to the Lattimores’ home and my perpetual walk across the lawn to their front door. One time, they invited me to a dinner party at the house of another friend of theirs who is my age, but I declined, because it fills me with anxiety to be around big groups of people my own age, in social situations. They seem so cynical, so sexual and ready to injure.
And I blame my fear of being injured by cynicism and sex on Chris. He was a handsome, heartbreaking teenaged boy. Even the little reddish pink spots on his chin and around his eyebrows, especially those spots, added to his sexiness. The dirty black Jack Daniels t-shirt he wore everyday during what he later told me was the worst time of his life added to his sexiness, because it made a girl wonder what he was thinking of instead of changing his clothes, and also the shirt smelled of his body. It wasn’t only rich new wave college girls like me who yearned for him. I saw young women with their mothers turn to look at him, and the mothers watch him too. I saw little girls turn to look, and little boys, cats, old men. We were walking once, and we saw a married couple with a baby screaming at each other, the husband crying, and Christopher walked up to them and said, “Hey, guys, don’t fight, it’s okay,” and when they turned to look at him, it was like the sky flashed with a lightning bolt that was made of pure admiration for him, it lit up their faces. Each night of the one week we dated, we ate dinner at a greasy spoon called The Blue Lagoon, where I watched the older, blue-collar waitress glance longingly at him as she placed in front of him the food I paid for with the money mom and dad sent me. That week was the best week of my life. He had a picture of me that he said he kept on his pillow, so he could pretend I was there sleeping with him. He was my first boyfriend and I loved him.

During that one romantic week, he was at the beginning of becoming a heroin addict, but I didn’t know it yet. He lived with his mother in an apartment above a barber shop, working nights as a janitor at the college. Before his shift started, at eleven, or once it was over, at six the next morning, he sometimes hung out at Washington Square Park with two or three other handsome boys he’d known since high school, and they’d pick up freshman college girls, “fawns,” as the boys jokingly called them. They’d either date these girls for a long or little while, or else just spend the night with them, either dazzling them with stories about getting in fights at punk clubs and only talking about themselves and their glories, or else by acting inquisitive and awestruck by the girls – or else just by treating the girls poorly, which sometimes works best of all. Even when I was this age, when I was eighteen and nineteen, I knew that this careless sort of courtship was harmless. I mean, it wasn’t really harmless, it hurt girls’ feelings, but it didn’t really matter in the end is what I mean; it was all very temporary. All this youth and lying and flirting and noise and beer was just the activity that precedes real life, real live routine that lasts forever like a career, unless you are brave or unlucky.

Sometimes Chris wouldn’t hang out with these boys, and would instead sit with a group of drug-dealers with dreadlocks and black eyes and menacing, lyrical dialects, and he would observe their camaraderie, and interject his tokens of brotherhood from the periphery of their group. He went through a phase of sitting on a bench and listening, enraptured, for hours, to his bounty-hunter friend, a tanned, wrinkled man with graying brown hair and a moustache who wore a turquoise ring and an elaborate turquoise belt buckle, and who talked of himself and his profession proudly and at length, and who was out to rob something of Chris’s, maybe his youth. The two of them sitting together and talking was an odd sight that made people wonder, “What’s their story?” When I saw them together, I’d tell myself that I would write a short story about the two of them for my fiction class, but for some reason I just fell behind in that class and the professor didn’t seem to trust that I could be insightful, so I got discouraged and always did my assignments on subjects I wasn’t really interested in. In my mind, though, I kept notes on the way Chris ignored his cool, young friends or the college girls he’d known when he was sitting with the bounty-hunter, and how he smiled at this untrustworthy man, who must have been promising Chris the secret to easy money, and bought him cups of coffee. “What does Christopher want out of life?” I’d postulate in that writer’s journal I kept in my head. I think the eighth graders I taught English to in Seattle could tell that I have something like a journal, all for me, in my own head. I think that’s why I was their favorite teacher. See, I try to keep a bit of mystery like a glint in my eyes. I want people to guess that there’s something special about me. I keep an actual journal (on paper), as well. Once, a student glanced at its open pages where it lay unguarded on my desk, and he read the first line on the page, out loud but softly: “She whispered into my ear.”
I’m writing little stories in it about my childhood and the things I saw and did when I lived in New York. I’m working on a story now, as a matter of fact. It’s a wistful narrative, the wispy female narrator overflowing with empathy for the unstable characters she has created, building their personalities like towers of alphabet blocks. When she starts to stack the blocks too high, the characters collapse and their stories turn to nonsense. The narrator embellishes their minor tragedies to satisfy her own lazy sadness.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapters 27 and 28

2011-06-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

I know you are all on the edge of your seats for the next installment of the wildly popular Planes of Sunday, and I just wanted to mention something about this installment, which is 2 chapters -- it's the last chapter of Part One and the first chapter of Part Two, in which the protagonist is no longer Shirley but her son Christopher. Part One has been taking place over several years in the 1970's and Part Two takes place during one night in the 1990's when Christopher is a young man. Without further ado ...

27.
“Divorce”

“Oh, my handsome one. Shit, I even miss your eyelashes. Do I sound like a fag, or what?” Mickey was talking to Felix again, on a telephone Shirley’s dad had set up in the bathroom.

Felix wasn’t responding. He just held the receiver to his face and smiled and felt overwhelmed and happy.

“I can hear your breathing, little Felix. I can hear you,” he laughed, drunk, flirting, “What are you thinking of, I wonder.”

“That I love you.”

“Oh, that’s too nice to hear.”

“Mickey, are you in the bathroom? I told my mother we were about to leave.”

“Okay, okay. Just a minute.”

At the entrance to the white beach house, the old woman only offered Shirley a handshake, and Shirley told herself that she was through with trying to love this woman, and would never come back to this beach house again. Of course, we have spent the longest part of our lives learning the near-impossible lesson that the blame we place on our mothers for ruining our lives will in no way compensate us, ever, for the pain of that weighty self-doubt we lug around inside us like misshapen hearts. They are just women; it only took ourselves to replace confidence with the flotsam of petty needs and weak instincts.

That night, they made it to Tucson before stopping for dinner. Shirley had too much to drink, and when they got out on the road again she quickly crashed the car into a fence. The car broke the fence and careened down a small hill, into a ditch. Christopher was fine, and Mickey’s only injury was whiplash. Shirley broke her nose and a finger. The finger never healed correctly; it remains unbendable and unusable on her right hand. For obvious reasons, her friends in AA referred to this finger, when explaining it to newcomers, as Shirley’s “battle scar.” These friends reacted lovingly to the story of the night of her big car accident, as she told it in one of the first meetings she attended; one or two of them in the audience nodded vigorously, or rocked back and forth in their chairs, as though responding to a sermon.

“We’d stopped for dinner at Denny’s and I drank about eleven of those little bottles of wine they have there.”

(Someone in the audience jokingly mumbled to his neighbor, “They have wine at Denny’s?” Shirley smiled gratefully at that person, continued.)

“The waitress looked like she honestly didn’t know what to do with us. I have a hard time imagining how others perceive things when it comes to alcohol abuse, but I think that if I were that waitress, it would have seemed crazy the way my husband was just sitting there with our kid, not trying to stop me. But yeah, he just sat there and let me do whatever I wanted, and I finally felt like I had control over him, instead of the other way around. Anyway, I was totally belligerent and insisted on driving. And I mean, I was blind-drunk. We must have been going 90 miles per hour. We were on a stretch of highway that paralleled train tracks, and I pretended to be racing this really fast train, for Christopher, who thought it was just the funnest thing in the whole world. I screamed something like, ‘Look at the train, Chrissie!’ and when I let go of the wheel to point, I lost control of the car and drove through the fence. There were all these huge splinters from the fence, like two inches long, all over the windshield.”

Part Two

28.
“Anything Goes”

“Hey, little man, what’s going on?” Terence is sitting on the floor, absentmindedly winding and unwinding a straw wrapper around his finger and watching the people hurrying by. You crouch down next to him.

“Is that you, Christopher? Damn, you look different without that Elvis hair of yours. Did they make you change it at the place?”

“Mmm-mmm, they didn’t make me change it, there’s just no reason to spend time on your hair when you’re out there detoxing in the middle of the woods. I just got back. I just got off the bus right now.”

You just got back to the city, and Terence is the first person you see who knows you. You were about to leave the Port Authority building when you see him sitting there and decide to come over to him. He’s a heavy black kid who told you when you two first met that he was thirteen and lived with his family, but you suspect he is around two years younger than he says, and that he’s homeless.

“Hey, I’m pissed at you, man,” he tells you now.

“You’re pissed at me?” You can’t help but patronize him and smile at his declaration. “What’d I do?”

“’Cause Shannon was up there when you were there too and she told me in her letter that you saw her whenever you guys would be eating lunch, and you never said hi. That you just ignored her every day. What the fuck?”

“Aw, Terence, I don’t know. I mean, you guys are kids, you know? I like you guys, you’re my friends, but you’re kids. I can’t always talk to you. There was this model there from San Francisco who’s going to talk to her agent about me when she gets out, you know? How am I going to interrupt this beautiful girl every time Shannon walks by in the cafeteria, and be like, ‘Hang on a second, I have to say hi to this twelve year old speed freak.’ You know what I mean, Terence. I had to focus all my attention on this model.”

The first time you met Terence, your friend James had been walking through the park, and he’d seen Terence laughing and singing to himself on a bench. James brought him to the party where you were and told everyone there, “Hey you guys, this little kid is frying. I love him. He’s been telling me how his dad plays guitar and teaches him to play, like, Hendrix and Velvet Underground songs.” Everyone assumed the kid was lying, but someone brought Terence a guitar, and he did know how to play. He played a few songs that everyone sang along to, telling each other, “I love this kid,” bringing him beer after beer all the while. You guys probably shouldn’t have been so excitable with him that night; later on it would come to seem that he’d actually believed you all did love him, and when things soured, he seemed to really hate most of you, to resent you guys for having promised a wealth of attention and then having snatched it away so swiftly. After that first night, he was the it-boy among your circle of friends for a while. You guys were always buying him un-asked for six packs and inviting him to parties (Where was he coming from when he arrived? How did he always figure out how to get to the party, even when someone had just yelled the invitation as an afterthought as they were walking away and had forgotten to tell him the apartment number?), and James even had him introduce his band one night when they played at CBGB’s. For a while he was even crashing at James’s apartment, and then one day James’s skateboard went missing, and so did Terence, and that was the end of his short tenure of popularity. But you still saw him walking around sometimes and maintained an acquaintance both with him and some of the other possibly homeless pre-teens he was often with. They had admired you so much.

It was the fact that Terence didn’t go to school and was often out walking around at all hours, but that he also showed signs of actually having a home, showed signs of being cared for by a family, that first gave you the thought that it wasn’t just with you that anything goes, but with a lot of people. Maybe he did have parents who took care of him, and he just didn’t want to be with them sometimes and they were okay with letting their kid be independent, and had some way of explaining away the bad parts of his independence, just shrugged it off somehow and looked at each other and said something like, “Well, I guess anything goes these days.” You’ve done so many violent and unkind things, you believe the world is basically an amoral place, but a part of yourself was detachedly watching the bad things you did, kind of marveling at the fact that you weren’t stopping yourself at any point, marveling at how far you could take things. “Anything goes,” you’d sometimes say to yourself and shrug, selling your actions to yourself as existentialism. Caring about Terence, but showing him how to shoot up once, for instance, and even sharing your needle with him, even though he’s just a kid, is something bad that you did. And his parents, if they’re real, maybe even saw him acting strange that night when he came home from hanging out with you and Christina, and maybe just let it happen. In the muddle of things that happen, you’ve had to assume that right and wrong don’t matter, and that even some parents, like Terence’s if they exist, must possess a moral ambivalence as well. Such possible ambivalence in a family manages to scandalize you. For all the friendly teasing you got in school about your mom being a slut and a heavy drinker, you think of your own childhood as having been safe and fairly loving; it just wasn’t enough for you.

Sometimes Terence suddenly turns nasty, as he does now when he says, “Well, fuck you,” and turns away as if to ignore you. You pick up your duffel bag to walk away, anticipating now your night of walking around and surprising everyone you run into with your presence, and of, eventually, coming back home to your mom, who has told you she doesn’t mind you not coming straight home.

Standing outside, smoking and deciding where to go first, you feel a tap on your arm. You turn around and there is Terence. He tells you he is sorry, and says that he’s glad that you’re back. You two stand around together for a while and smoke. You feel so relieved that he has forgiven you. It is true that you love him, in a way. You would beat someone up for it if you ever found out he’d been hurt. You would take him home to Shirley if you ever saw him walking around at night in the snow and it seemed like he was going to freeze to death otherwise.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Twenty Six

2011-06-21T08:48:00.001-07:00

26.
“The Tiger”

The funeral was executed by suburban, Christian college kids who hated summer vacation because it meant working full-time at the cemetery, a place they always flipped off whenever they drove by it on the freeway, having long forgotten their fear of the dead. Shirley fell asleep in front of the television that night, and Mickey sat up in bed for some time, wondering where she was. He felt the little tigers of destiny, those spidery little animals, crawling up and down his bare legs. In Christopher’s baby-dreams, he was riding the tigers of destiny. Sweet, horrible freedom. One tiger had tried, for years, to steer one woman into the right direction, towards a bar all the way across the country, and it is facts like this that keep me unsure whether God is benevolent or petty. Was Shirley born to lose, is that the point? She thought, often, yes, she was definitely born to lose. For a long time, she felt that her love for her son was her only redemptive quality. Before Mickey interrupted her on the toilet that night in the Italian restaurant, there were nights when she would leave Christopher with the awful landlord and go to the bar, only to find herself suddenly seized with the uncontrollable desire to repent. And so she’d run home as fast as she could run through the muddy snow riddled with melting spots of dog pee, just to snatch her son from the landlord’s brown couch, always with the feeling that she was rescuing him for the final and most important time.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Twenty Five

2011-06-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

25.
“Bringing Down Baby”

Shirley’s mother had a new housekeeper, an animated young woman named Jeanie whose sexiness transcended the borders of sexuality and bled into the realm of saintliness. The day before the funeral service was to be held, at a cemetery that wore its Christianity gaudily like an oversized wedding ring, Shirley spent most of the day drinking alone in the kitchen. Jeanie was giving the house a thorough cleaning for the funeral reception, but she idled in the kitchen, scrubbing the same counter top over and over, singing to herself, “Aim is a tambourine, man,” an overheard bit of self-amusement that led to her telling Shirley how she’d grown up in Mexico City, listening to American and British pop music on the radio without yet comprehending the language. The other funny way she personalized pop culture was a poster for that movie The Elephant Man she kept tacked above her bed, next to a framed photo of her father and herself as a little girl, riding an elephant at a circus they went to when their family visited some town in Texas one summer. She didn’t show Shirley the poster until late that night, when the two women came across each other in the upstairs hallway, and the cumuli of each woman’s alcohol-breath reached the other woman’s nose and the scent was like a wink.

In the bed Shirley was sharing with her son in her childhood bedroom, Christopher was dreaming of the gardenia bushes that grew along the side of their house in Long Island. Shirley’s mom had waited until she could feel the weight of the two Valiums, and then had pulled the comforter off her bed. She fell asleep on the floor, swathed in the comforter’s pearly gray silk, a chic cocoon. Mickey was sitting cross-legged on the guest bed, watching himself in the mirrored closet doors as he held a phone along the side of his face and said, “Felix, say it. Say it, Felix.”

An Elvis Costello song played softly in the maid’s quarters. “Check this shit out, Shirl,” and Jeanie did an imitation of an elephant that turned into an imitation of her father yelling at her to do the laundry. “And now I do laundry for your mom and dad for a living. What a life!” But then instantly she remembered Shirley’s mother coming home from the hospital and walking halfway up the stairs before turning around to tell Jeanie, “He died at nine-fifteen this morning.”
“Shit, Shirley, I’m sorry. I forgot for a second that your dad just died.”

“No, it’s alright,” said Shirley. In the company of a woman used to polishing its surface, she was at last allowed to look into her parents’ mysterious medicine cabinet, had finally rummaged through many of the drawers and cabinets in this eggshell home of her childhood, and now, with her new friend, she felt coursing through her the lightness-inducing influence of an old prescription drug of her dead father’s. The two women sat in Jeanie’s poorly ventilated room, what she called “The Ass-Hole of Malibu,” both of them feeling grateful for the other one’s company, especially in light of the company they were helping each other avoid. Shirley’s mom was cold and silent, and Mickey had been brooding and snapping at everyone since their arrival; it was a relief for both women to not have to steel themselves against these people for the night. But they both agreed it’d be fun to wake Christopher up and play a couple games of Clue or Uno with him, if he wanted to.
“Objectively, I know it’s wrong to wake a sleeping child, but I just miss him,” Shirley was starting to cry a little.

Both women were glad for Christopher’s company, and rewarded him for being excited to stay up late by making him hot chocolate, and letting him win almost all of the hands of Uno they played. Already, Christopher was turning into someone whose conversations made women laugh and exhale appreciative sighs.

“My little man,” Shirley whispered, watching him with pride and resignation.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Twenty Four

2011-06-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

24.
“A hoped for phone call late one night”

“Mickey, it’s so good to hear from you. How are you? Let’s see, you must be in Michigan right now. Am I right? What are the local radio stations like, did you listen to any? I always love to listen to the local radio when I travel, it’s like a sociological insight into that area, don’t you think?”

“God, will you just shut up for a second, Felix? Just shut up. I don’t feel like talking about sociology,” and then instantly, “Sorry I snapped at you.”
He had so much to tell Felix. He began by describing his worries about the possibility that Shirley might be planning to leave him, and the anger it would make him feel for not having ruined her first. And then there were fantasies of salvation, which he might achieve through loving his son or overworking himself or secretly loving another man. There was sex, too, that giddy, brain-warbling power over another being’s body, sex all-consuming as a domestic animal’s adoration of its human owner. He told Felix to take off his pants and stroke himself, and Felix pretended that he was; he lay on his stomach on the trash-strewn carpet, holding the phone to his ear and absentmindedly staring at the bottom of an usurped ashtray. He quietly listened to Mickey’s slightly outlandish fantasies and demands until Mickey interrupted himself by whispering, “Oh shit, I have to go,” at which point Felix placed the phone back on its receiver and got into bed. The night had been an exciting one, and it seemed like a mistake to just go to sleep in bed alone and wake up for work the next day like always. He considered calling up the man he’d met at the bar last week, who’d been so rough on Felix it’d hurt more than it’d felt good, but Felix would fall asleep alone on accident, in the middle of remembering the dirty questions Mickey had just asked him. He had a dream that night that he and Mickey moved into an apartment above the restaurant where they worked, and that Mickey was more tender than in real life, too tender sometimes, but it was a pleasure for the dream-Felix to have to chide him, “Mickey, don’t worry so much,” or “Mickey, quit it,” when Mickey wouldn’t stop hugging him.

Felix was right, Mickey and his family were in Michigan that night. They were sleeping in a Detroit motel situated in the parking lot of a Denny’s where the neighborhood dogs, who’d formed a gang, held their nightly meetings; the biggest dog recited the minutes each night, “Bark! Bark!”

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Twenty Three

2011-06-13T11:44:00.000-07:00

23.
“Travel”

The Buick the Jasinskis bought was a mammoth, burgundy possession that did not resemble the tastes of anyone in this little family. Mickey felt angry with himself as he drove it off the lot, convinced that he’d subconsciously chosen that particular car as a way to fill his farce of a life with further humiliation. Shirley, when she saw him approaching in the gigantic, ungainly vehicle, intuited how much her husband loathed it, and felt that it had been bought, instead of some nondescript used Toyota or Mazda, so that he’d have something further to blame her for; they had decided to buy a car and drive to California for her father’s funeral. “That fucking shit-for-brains,” she actually muttered under her breath, shaking her head and rolling her eyes, for the benefit of an imaginary sympathetic female friend. They’d stopped making love recently, Mickey was always managing to avoid her, and it hurt her feelings so much it turned her into a cruder, brusquer version of herself than she had ever been, even with all the different personalities she was always trying on. When Christopher saw his dad behind the wheel of that car, he thought it must be some grown up joke and began to laugh and clap his hands. The car would end up wrecked and wedged, front-first, in an embankment that ran along some train tracks, somewhere in Arizona.

Travel can be deceptive, a promise that goes unfulfilled and leaves one feeling disappointed in oneself for not being able to extract a poignant revelation from the barren, unfamiliar landscape. If you are about to travel a long distance, maybe you spend the week or so before you are scheduled to leave being particularly lazy. You don’t brush your teeth for a couple of days, maybe, because you don’t want to take your new toothbrush out of its package until your first night in an odd motel room. You let yourself slide, because you think that when you start your journey you are starting an exploration into some frontier of clarification. You think that the experience of traveling will be some sort of net that will gather up your worries and procrastinations like butterflies. You imagine that every small effort you make during your trip is being recorded in a ledger somewhere and magnified, and turned into a legend. But then what will happen when you are actually in the middle of the voyage is that you will get bored and long for the sanctuary of your favorite prime time sitcoms. Your appreciation for the things you saw on your trip will materialize months later, in hindsight, when it is too late.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Twenty Two

2011-06-10T09:56:00.001-07:00

22.
“Oh, but California,
California I’m coming Home.”
-Joni Mitchell

Shirley’s father awoke at around two in the morning, and found no position which would help him get back to sleep. Outside in the front yard, nature looked dosed and synthetic. No bird sang, there were no squirrels in the branches of trees, the roll of the ocean sounded like a shopping cart being pushed around in circles in a grocery store parking lot. The fact of being in danger was annoying to the man, who put on his bathrobe and went downstairs and poured a coffee mug full of Remy Martin, but then put the bottle’s cork in his pajamas pocket and drove himself to the hospital, clutching the left side of his chest with his right hand during stoplights. At one point in the drive there, he saw a white truck pull over to the side of the road. A young man got out on the passenger side and turned his back to the road, to piss into a cluster of Birds of Paradise.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Twenty One

2011-06-08T07:49:00.000-07:00

21.
“Ain’t it just like the night
to play tricks on you when
you’re trying to be so quiet?”
-Bob Dylan

“Felix? Jesus, what are you doing here? What time is it?”

Having nothing else to offer, he offered up a sort of joke at the expense of his own sense of emptiness. “I think I’m pregnant.”

“Shit, you sound like Shirley. You might as well come in, I guess.”

It was one of those nights where the moon starts out low and gigantic, tea-colored. Felix had started walking to Mickey’s house at night to spy on him. Tonight was the third trek he’d made here, and Felix told himself that it was the night to enter, three being a magical number; the number of wishes given, and of examples to present when you are trying to convince someone of something.

“I’ll get us some beers,” Mickey said. It was the first time a man had ever been in love with him. He walked with care, relishing each step, anticipating his beer as though it would be his first one in a long time. It was only when he was sitting on the couch, knees touching the other man’s knees, that he felt repulsed, and, freeing his hands from Felix’s hands, seized the two beers and threw them in the trash can, where one of them erupted, upon landing, with a thick, white lava.
It was a night that lasted so long. Clouds crept across the horizon like teenagers tiptoeing out of their bedrooms. Clouds kept the sky dark into the morning. With the extension of night came the extension of night’s logic, that belief that the portent of night-time activities evaporated like dew in the daylight, expressed so well in the song “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” They took a walk and ended up at Felix’s apartment.

Indeed, when the sun finally did come out, Mickey could tell that he would be able to pretend on that day and on all the days that followed that he had never made love to a man. He could even make love to a man again, as long as he vowed only to do it late at night and in absolute secrecy. The vow satisfied him, but only partially, because it existed simultaneously with self-disgust. All around them, the sun made objects glow. Felix rolled over to face him and said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Twenty

2011-06-07T08:07:00.001-07:00

20.
“Women”

She was eleven or twelve when Shirley began her habit of abruptly deciding to change her identity. Just a little girl, she would start the day in her worst pair of pants and a ratty old teal sweater of dad’s, for instance, clothes she’d rescued from the trashcan and had to be secretive with, because her mother always wanted her to look clean. Little Shirley would be determined that day to begin a happy path as the mysterious nerd, because as that kind of girl, nobody would bother to talk to her, and in not talking with anyone, she would never compromise her secretly kind, wonderful personality with the greedy words that came out of her mouth. This was actually one of her favorite personalities to try to have, the monk’s personality. But in the middle of trying to be a little girl monk one day, the ugly clothes framing her somber beauty (she imagined) and her eyes glowing like two lumps of foxfire, she’d suddenly notice a girl with long, straight hair and thick eyelashes standing next to a water fountain, and a boy bending over the faucet, pretending to try to drink the water the pretty girl was splashing in his face with the flips and flights of her pretty hands. Watching the girl, it would seem to Shirley suddenly that the secret of contentment lay not in the monk’s life but in that girl’s bare legs that promised sex and her scared, proud mouth that took sex away. Then, all over again, Shirley would re-plan the way she wanted to be. She would have to devise which nuances and scents would help her turn into this new kind of person. Which heroine from a pop song would act as her new role model? How could she turn herself into Sloopie, or how could she start being mysterious like Ruby Tuesday?
A married young mother now, Shirley woke up one morning tired of stumbling around odd and delicate, and wanted to be a new kind of woman. She wanted to be someone flippant and practical. Her attempts to act this new way came as an immense relief to Mickey, who began to feel less haunted by his wife. Still, there was something about her and this new tactic that made him feel threatened.

He was justified in his uneasiness, for, without being able to help it, part of Shirley’s motivation in trying to fill herself up with what she called positive energy was a contest she’d imagined between her and Mickey of who could act more normal. The times Shirley felt the lightest and most capable were times when Mickey came home from work particularly quiet and uneasy. Being in charge of cheering him up was like winning the contest, because it was an opportunity to be needed instead of to need. Don’t think of Shirley’s cunning as cruelty; it was not resentment or bitterness that made her antagonize instead of love him. It was not resentment, it was just a fear of abandonment. Or, rather, it was a resentment born of this fear.
She was in the middle of heralding the arrival of her newfound light-heartedness one morning, painting the dusty kitchen a light yellow, when the news came that her old father had died of a heart attack.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Nineteen

2011-06-06T11:43:00.000-07:00

19.
"Hey"

“How come some guys dress like women?”

“I don’t know, Mickey. I’ve only known one tranny, and I forgot she was a biological man whenever we talked – it was just like talking to a woman.” They were passing a joint between each other, sitting on the floor, watching a muted sitcom on the TV in Felix’s apartment.

“I just want to be Bowie,” Felix sighed mock-dramatically.

“I don’t want to be bored ever again,” said Mickey, and Felix agreed. In the background, a Brian Eno album played, and the music made Mickey feel cool, almost perfect: near-angelic.

“You should move back to the city,” Mickey concluded. Then he gathered his shoes and coat and left.

At work, they smiled at each other sometimes, making brief eye contact in passing. Then, once, when Mickey was feeling like the dirty-grinning tomcat he used to feel like, he slipped a little piece of paper in Felix’s hand as Felix walked by, and as soon as he could, Felix went into the bathroom and locked the door, hurriedly unfolding the slip of paper. Written on it was the single word, “hey…?”

Felix kept that first note from Mickey in a cigar box full of seashells from a beach in Florida and pretty pens that’d run out of ink.

Mickey’s apartment was ornamented with antique branding irons hanging from hooks along one wall, and rows of photos with bits of narratives beside them glued to the refrigerator. After awhile it sunk in to Mickey that this man was an artist. Felix detachedly told stories about the pet goat he had as a child, and the red teeth his ridiculous, single mother always had because of the lipstick on her mouth, and how her red teeth looked like blood, like she’d been punched in the mouth. He’d sit with his mom at the kitchen table and carve jack-o-lanterns that looked delicate as Easter eggs, or dye Easter eggs that looked vibrant as a skein of clean, red hair. Sometimes Felix would unwisely switch to a lighter mood and start acting effeminately and teasing about sex or boasting about how ostracized he’d been as a faggy teenager in high school. He’d say these things partially in defiance, daring Mickey to be disgusted with him, because Mickey told him all the time, brusquely, that he couldn’t stand it when Felix acted like a fag. During these particular conversations, Mickey felt like he was watching a blind martial artist administering swift, graceless blows and that all Mickey needed to retaliate with was a derisive snort or an abrupt departure. When Felix dared him to be disgusted, it worked, and Mickey would get up to leave.

On his night off, Mickey brought Shirley and Christopher to the restaurant one time, and Felix instantly loved her, her uncombed hair and musty clothes, the bright pink silk Chinese pajama top with stains under the armpits, and the soft, worn-in blue jeans, the red Mary-Janes. To him, she looked drunk, lonely and smart. And special.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Eighteen

2011-06-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

18.
“For Linda”

He wanted his budding sense of propriety to fill him out, the way scrawny men in cartoons can inflate their muscles like balloons; he wanted the fact that he was the head of a household to show on his face, some signal apparent to strangers. Also, he wanted more attention from Christopher. As insignificant a man as his father was, Mickey had, as a child, been content to taxi his father’s billfold around on the carpet like it was a toy car; when his dad came home from work he would take it out of his pocket and toss it to Mickey on afternoons when the child hadn’t been able to devise any better amusement for himself, and this accessory of his dad’s inspired a bit of pride in Mickey, it was such a concise little object. Christopher followed Shirley loyally around the house, barely recognizing his father. Once, Mickey saw him shake a bottle of Tylenol and a bottle of vitamins like maracas while singing, “Mommy, mommy, mooooommy, I love you! I do!”

But these were just the thoughts Mickey thought with the outermost layer of his being, in the part of his inner life that he felt sure Shirley could psychically invade if she tried. Deeper in himself, his wants were much stronger and much less related to his current life. He’d been so well-known where he grew up, he’d been dangerous and funny and sexy, the heaviest drinker, the smoothest talker; all of the old-fashioned family friends, teachers and neighbors agreed there was something wrong with him, that he belonged in America. He’d been an artist. When he first moved to the city, he’d taken perfect, scandalously erotic photos, mostly black and white photos of high, naked black women he met at discos. He’d gotten sucked off in bathrooms, four, five, might as well have been a hundred times, by men and women (but with the men, he’d felt disgusted afterwards, it made him feel like he’d been involved in something akin to bestiality). He’d had secrets. He was a secret artist, a secret Dionysus. Only a visitor, always. That was his sly, secret policy.
One night after work, he walked into a gay bar. It was not on purpose or on accident that he went there, he wasn’t wanting anything, he would tell himself later. It was just that he wanted to drink and to put off the walk home. Shocked, he saw a man from his work sitting on a barstool; he felt his features grow stern, and he walked over to Felix, his co-worker, like he had no choice but to do so, and once he was standing in front of him he waited for Felix to speak first, and Felix did. He said “Hi, Mickey.” There was weariness in his greeting, like he’d been expecting Mickey to come to him for some time. He also sounded, almost imperceptibly though, disappointed, as though he wished this wasn’t the place he came to every night. And there was tenderness in that greeting too, and a whisper of complicit, cynical curiosity at what would happen now that they’d met here, at what the rest of their conversation could be like.

Later, Mickey would incorrectly imagine Felix sitting mock-demurely at a table at an all-night restaurant somewhere with some of his friends and talking about Mickey. The words “him” and “he” and “his” in this story would all belong to Mickey. The chance to be the main character in someone else’s stories: yes.

In truth, Felix didn’t know many other gay men. He had casual sex sometimes, but it never sunk in to him that the men were gay, or that he was gay, and that they were embodying their labels. He was not in touch with his family anymore, so there was almost no need to identify himself as anything. Besides Mickey, there was only one other person who regularly visited him at his apartment or went out for coffee with him, and she was an older woman he’d met a couple years ago at a McDonald’s he used to go to every day after classes, the year he went to art school. The woman lived on her unemployment checks, and spent most of each day drinking coffee in a few different restaurants and reading poetry books or writing in her journal. One of her legs was extremely shorter than the other, and more than once, her arhythmic walking caused the coffee she held to softly splash around in its cup and spill a little onto the front of one of the house dresses she wore. They began talking on a day when a child’s birthday party was being held at a clump of tables, and Ronald McDonald came out and asked the birthday girl, “Do you know how much your daddy paid to have me here today, little girl? You must be very special.” Felix and the woman were sitting at separate tables, coincidentally both reading Letters to a Young Poet, amongst all the grotesque exchanges of a fast-food restaurant. They were both secretly the kind of people who read poetry books in McDonalds as a way to feel charmingly dualistic and ironic.

One night, apropos of nothing, he confessed to her that he threw up almost every meal he ate. Another time, she came over with her sleeping bag, and a bottle of Margarita Mix and one of Rum were wrapped inside the curl of the sleeping bag. “We’re going to have a slumber party tonight, Felix!” she laughed. Her boldness surprised him, because he made it a rule not to display his fondness for her, while she paraded hers for him around like it was a pony. Even while depending on the time they spent together, he maintained a coldness towards her, partially because of the fact that she was as lonely as him, which lowered her worth as a friend, and partially because the loyalty she presented him with made him wish that he had a man who would show him this much care. So, the night of their slumber party, he watched with cool sobriety as she drank and excitedly made tacos and chatted, and at around one a.m., he told her that he couldn’t sleep with other people in the apartment and that she had to go home. His behavior that night is something he reflects on even now, years after their friendship ended when she buried her idiosyncrasies for a short-tempered man she married and moved to Trenton, New Jersey with. Felix panics over the thought that his treatment of this woman ruined his chance for happiness. If he were writing this story instead of me, he would dedicate it to her, as a penance. For Linda, the kindest, funniest woman I ever knew.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Seventeen

2011-06-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

17.
“God”

He couldn’t help but feel jealous of the books. He even found himself complaining to another waiter at work about how engrossed Shirley was in her reading these days. He told this man anecdotes about the carelessness this constant reading bred in her, almost as though it were an old joke between the two men, and actually this sort of clunky gesture of camaraderie was a symptom of a minor tragedy that befell Mickey during this period in his life of domesticity. The tragedy was that in order to create this new family life, he had trained himself to act friendly, and then forgotten that it was an act. He was still handsome and Shirley still took him seriously, but she noticed fissures in the masculine authority he presented to the world. He was the youngest of a group of breadwinners from the neighborhood who got together to watch ballgames on TV. From her chair at the kitchen table she eavesdropped on little bits of their jocular teasing and their baritone notes of condescension when they said goodbye to him upon leaving his house in the evening. She tried seeing Mickey through the perspective of one of these men, and saw how he didn’t really fit in, how he appeared a bit effeminate and how his stretches of silence were irksome.

The truth was, Mickey had never found God; he had lost Him one day when he was twelve and found himself ordering his younger sister to pull her down her panties so he could spank her, knowing that she would obey. When that day happened, he knew that God could never forgive him. What Mickey’s spiritual revelation had instead consisted of was him looking at his reflection in an Italian restaurant’s window one night, and glimpsing in that window Shirley, sitting across the table from an unfamiliar woman. He had just been wandering around, killing a few hours before he went to a club where almost all the surfaces were mirrors, and the mirrors presented the dancers and talkers and drinkers with reflections of themselves, and they covertly watched their own mouths move as they talked and thought, “Is it really me?” and grew exasperated at the perfection and litheness of their own lips because it seemed unfair that not everyone there was in love with them and that, despite the breathtaking beauty of their own lips, life could finally be so boring. When he walked by the window and saw her, the thought that violently seized him was a memory of how detailed and precious each action had seemed to him on the camping trips he used to take with his family. The image of the little shanty-town of tents he and his family erected in the clearings of cold, dense forests made him think of those miniscule scenes built of hardened sugar inside of sugar Easter eggs. Seeing Shirley, he wished he could go back to being an unsullied person. He would have to go back in a time-machine to his childhood to achieve this, and when he got back into the past, he would know not to take a single thing for granted. As he watched Shirley through the window, he was yearning for those camping trips he had once been able to adore, before he introduced the aspect of sadomasochism into his relationship with his sister, and became obsessed during these family outings with finding places where he could hide from his parents. He wanted a family of his own, in which he could redeem himself for all his bad deeds and thoughts.
Opening the door to the Italian restaurant, his whole arm shook. I didn’t feel like going out and drinking tonight, but I ended up here anyway. “I ended up here anyway, Shirley. Come on, pull your tights up, get off the toilet. Let’s get you back to your apartment. Will you let me see the baby?”
He had ended up here, in this house with her and a baby that was his.

She drank wine as she read, so he felt jealous of the books. Wine was the potion that made her fun to be around, usually, and she was wasting it on those bricks of paper that kept her weighted to her seat. She’d put the book down and start making a casserole for dinner and her hands would tremble with uncontrollable excitement, caused by an encounter a Julia Holly character had just had with a new lover. Mickey wanted at these times of her forgetfulness of her family to snap her out of her miasma of fiction and force her into constant appreciation of their real life, which was something similar to fiction, constructed and careful, as though they were being observed by eyes from above.

But she, of course, felt like it was him who kept them from being close.
“Why don’t you ever talk to me?” she asked him in a fantasy of hers.
In a fantasy of his, she also asked him that question, and in his fantasy, he answered, “Believe me, Shirley, I wish I could.”

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Sixteen

2011-05-31T09:50:00.000-07:00

16.
“Marriage”

“Dear Whoever Finds This,
My name is Shirley Jasinski. I am a young stay-at-home mom. We live in Long Island. My hobbies are reading and shopping at thrift stores and rummage sales. I like toys and jewelry best. My son is two and a half years old. I wrote our address down at the bottom of the page in case you find this message in a bottle and want a new friend. My son is telling me to tell you to make sure to send a picture with your letter. Bye-bye!”

The message traveled around the country and finally reached a middle-aged widower in Newport, Oregon, fourteen years later, and it struck him as a cruel twist of fate then that such an enchanting communication should float in towards him at a time in his life when he only knew what to do with misery. He gave the message and the bottle it arrived in to his oldest niece, who hugged his neck and said, “This is so neat, Uncle John. Thank you.”

Their house on Long Island had two floors and a basement, and was part of a duplex. “Five Seventy-Three ½” it said in steel cursive letters along the top of the front door. Their neighbors had a red-headed teenaged daughter who spent the weekends that summer laying in the sun on a blanket on the front lawn with her boyfriend; Shirley’s legs would get rigid when she’d walk past them up the walkway, holding her groceries against her breast like a shield against the unpredictable attention or rejection of strangers. One night, though, she heard the redhead and a couple other teenage girls sitting on the neighbors’ half of the front porch, telling anecdotes about their friends and mocking their boyfriends. Shirley lay in bed on the second floor above these young women, the blanket tucked under her armpits, listening as their laughter cut through the muggy night and their clear voices reached her. It was like she had a yards-long ear trumpet that only funneled back the kindness to her eardrum, drowning out their superfluous criticisms and observations based on youthful insecurity, so that she only heard the girls’ high regard for each other and their humor. She stayed awake listening to them, and the whole next day, she made an effort to look the people of this neighborhood in the eye when she passed them on the sidewalk. Just that one gesture made her feel as though she were slowly edging into the realm of the-rest-of-the-world.

Christopher developed a rash of red bumps around his mouth that looked like Herpes, and it made her paranoid that even though both she and Mickey had been told by their doctors that they didn’t have Herpes, they did anyhow, and it’d been transferred to Chris. His pediatrician said with certainty that it was an allergic reaction to strawberries, but nonetheless, Shirley felt guilty, and was sometimes struck with waves of panic.
Mickey wore a crisp long-sleeved white shirt to work; he was a waiter at a restaurant close enough to walk to, an Italian restaurant similar in ambiance to the one where he’d seen and reclaimed Shirley.

On the surfaces of the tables and counters in their little home, the appearance of tiny termite wings made known the constant possibility of the home’s destruction. While Shirley sat and read novels in the kitchen, she extinguished her cigarette butts in an empty jar whose label read “Artichoke Hearts,” and she contemplated the irony this ashtray would signify if she someday died of heart failure from smoking.

The newlyweds kept their pantry well stocked with bottles of red wine and Mickey’s cases of Olympia beer, in stubby brown bottles with a horseshoe on the label for good luck. It was funny about the beer’s label being good luck, because Shirley’s favorite wine was called Black Cat.

Mickey was really here, he was really hers now, and all the awkwardness of sharing space with another person attached itself to the movements she made in his presence, like it was her shadow. Gone were her pre-Christopher fantasies of marriage and domesticity as an isolated apple orchard glowing golden at dusk.
But routine is a strong thing. It pierces the skin and releases its ether. Days offer their own consolation; sleep, or the soothing privacy of a bathroom with its door closed. The built-in amusement of drinking. Christopher when he pulled on her hair with a flattering desperation when it was time for his nap or attention from his mom. His little hands touching her face. Routine possesses a symmetrical beauty that is not as cold as it first seems. Routine becomes history, and history feels safe. One of the things she would often think of when she felt sad or aimless was that the night she had first talked to Mickey, she had set out for the bar wishing to meet a guy who would say, “I didn’t feel like going out and drinking tonight, but I ended up here anyway,” and when Mickey finally spoke to her, those were among his first words.

Christopher learned to walk, and there were times when the synchronized steps of their six feet reminded Shirley that she was in an enviable position by being in this exclusive gang of a fledgling family, even if it did feel like her husband didn’t love her. She’d walk through the aisles of the grocery store on one side of Mickey, and there on Mickey’s other side was Christopher, talking precarious little steps: they were like an awkward Christmas tree, or the Supremes.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Fifteen

2011-05-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

15.
“Are you Nobody, Too?”
-Emily Dickinson

In the process of getting ready for her dinner plans with Marina, Shirley sat on the bathroom floor and accidentally drank too much while she was searching through the jewelry boxes she kept under the sink, for the best earrings to wear. Then she dressed Christopher in his matching shirt and pants with the figures of tiny baseball players printed on their fabric. When she was this drunk, minutiae like the handsome faces on the baseball players always overwhelmed her, because it made her think of the amount of detail that goes into so many products, and how these products, all over the world, all inevitably get junked someday, like a million velveteen rabbits shunned by their beloved owners, who will not keep them once they have been ruined by too much love.

She brought him downstairs to the apartment manager’s place to be babysat. There, she had to defend herself from the manager, who always made a show of knowing what Shirley’s problem was, with the way she skeptically replied, “uh huh,” to Shirley’s slurry words of appreciation, and the way she loudly sniffed the alcohol on Shirley’s breath. “Well, here I am, the woman who always pays her rent on time. Ha ha, just kidding.” This was a common trick of hers, this purposely awkward attempt at friendliness. In theory, it forced people who did not like her to help her out, as though she’d just fainted and the people she imagined were her adversaries had to save her, for fear of being observed just leaving the inert body where it was. Often the trick did not work, though, as on this night, when the apartment manager looked at her and said, “Yeah, don’t worry. I’ll take care of little Chrissie for you, you go out and whore around.”

She did look like a whore. Not the kind of whores for rich men, who wear black or white short dresses with red lips and gold jewelry. She looked like the kind of whore who is all mismatched, wearing a secondhand tank top over a flat, goosebump-covered chest, and an expression of bewildered need: a rag doll. She hurried back upstairs to her apartment, to pick out the outfit that would make her look well-balanced on her evening out (so exciting to her, to be taken out for a meal and given the opportunity to talk!) with her new friend, but all the clothes in her closet were old and smelled like cigarettes, so she started to cry. Then there was a knock on the door, and it was Marina.

The two of them went to a dimly lit Italian restaurant that Shirley had walked by before and thought looked clean without being too expensive. The chandeliers had called to her as she walked by the restaurant, “Step into the light.” Her memories of the meal are blurry. Shirley remembers that she kept trying to speak slowly so she would sound reasonable, but then before she knew it, she was accusing Marina of having a superiority complex, when what she’d meant to convey was that she admired Marina’s bravery in facing up to the dull challenges the sober world presents a person with. Then she told Marina, “I know you. Underneath all those nice clothes you’re probably sweating with fear.” It was supposed to be a tiny tribute to the woman’s complexity, like a haiku about the balance between vulnerability and order that Marina seemed to maintain, not a drunk’s slurred indictment. The light from the chandeliers hurt her eyes. She walked up to the bar and sat down sloppily next to another drunk woman who was decked out in tacky golden tones, waiting for her date to return from the bathroom. Shirley stared disdainfully into the stranger’s face, until she could see the pins and needles numbness forming on the woman’s skin. The woman turned out to be an intelligent alcoholic journalist who told Shirley, “My only complaint with this whole feminism thing is that I have to be the pursuer. I mean come on, I’m getting them laid, must I also buy my own drinks?” She laughed and nudged Shirley with an urbane elbow. Shirley sat with the woman as long as she could, until the man who’d come back from the bathroom took the feminist by her other urbane elbow and guided her away. At some point, the bartender called Shirley over to him, and when she put her ear up to his mouth, half-expecting to hear him say “Remember me? Your old pal from Barnaby’s?” he instead whispered a come-on line she repeated over and over to herself, trying desperately to extract its nuances, in case it was really a compliment.

Back at the table, Marina looked away while Shirley apologized for her behavior, which she repeated over and over was “quite uncommon” for her. Marina said, “Please Shirley, please, just drink your coffee, and everything will be alright.”

After the point in the evening when the waiter brought the bill, her memory gets even blurrier. She remembers going to the bathroom and sitting on the toilet with her head resting against her knees, for maybe as long as half an hour. Then there was a knock on the door, and when she opened it, her underwear still bracing her ankles like a pair of cuffs, Mickey was standing there, telling her he had a cab outside for her, waiting.

“Shirley,” he whispered in her ear later that night, when they were spooning in her bed and she imagined Christopher listening in on their conversation from across the room in his crib, though he couldn’t yet comprehend language, “Shirley. I’ve changed. I’ve found God.”

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Fourteen

2011-05-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

14.
“I forgot my love of horses.
I didn’t drink enough at night.
My eyes were plain.
I watched the strangers’ TV’s instead of their
Motions through their living room windows,
Their painstaking silhouettes.”

For two weeks, Shirley had been wearing an old thrift store t-shirt from a summer camp in Rhode Island that dangled long threads from its hem. Its fabric was so thin you could see her nickel-sized nipples through the worn out fabric, so that she often held Christopher against her chest like a bra. Each morning when she woke up in the shirt, she didn’t have the heart to take it off, her body so anticipating the shocking chill of being naked. Then one morning, she woke to find she’d left the window open the night before, and the chill air of the bedroom felt refreshing. It was the first real day of autumn, and she loved it. She was thankful for the prettiness of the dying red leaves that littered the sidewalk in front of her apartment building; the t-shirt was thrown into an overflowing trashcan she kept by her bed.

Often, her cloudy logic leaked into the outside world, infecting the things around her with a hope that didn’t make sense. So she was not surprised, but only wary of the strength of her own telekinesis, when later that same fall day, the woman who’d given her a ride home from a thrift store the other day came back. The woman’s brilliant common sense had made Shirley almost giddy and now that she was standing in front of her again, Shirley knew that this arrival was a reward for her courage in throwing her old shirt away, though as soon as she thought this thought, she remembered how her dad had always said that she suffered from magical thinking, a compliment that had tricked Shirley, because it wasn’t really a compliment at all.

Shirley moved a card table next to the window and set it up for coffee, a tableaux of saucer, sugar bowl and little stirring spoons so satisfying in its daintiness and organization, she almost wished the day would be over once their cups were empty, and that she could go back to bed, to wake up to a fresh day of more coffee with company.

“So Shirley, I remember you telling me yesterday that your family is back in Los Angeles. That must really be rough, raising little Christopher with no help, especially as young as you are. Does the father contribute anything?”

“What? Oh, no, but we’re alright. We have money. We go for walks in the park and free events at the library and stuff; it’s fine.”
When she thinks of this conversation now, Shirley does not remember many specifics, only that it was the second conversation she had with Marina, who was the third woman she’d thought would save her, the first two being her mother and then Virginia. Sometimes having a woman around who even seems the type who might offer to save you is enough, makes an unbearable life feel merely anecdotally awful, a “rough patch,” or a merely “bad day.”

I remember this one girlfriend of Chris’s, named Pammy, who I felt saved me one night. She was his first real girlfriend in the chronology of his girlfriends, and the two of them used to go out as friends after they broke up, before she moved to Philadelphia for college. To Chris, fickle and sexy and airworthy as Peter Pan, I had become his Wendy after she’d been proven too practical and plain to survive in Neverland, and it was always up to him whether we were going to act like still-attracted former lovers when we ran into each other, or best friends, or casual acquaintances, even enemies. He called and asked me one night if I wanted to tag along with him and Pammy to a party, and I literally put down the forkful of spaghetti I’d been about to bring to my mouth, put my wet hair in a ponytail, and ran to the address he’d given me over the phone. But I was too nervous. I sat on the steps of the unpopulated back porch, finishing a bottle of Night Train I’d carried with me in my pocket; I’d imagined I’d be using it mainly as a fashion statement, it’d be my ironic accessory, but instead I drank it all, crawled to the grass, dug a long, shallow foxhole in the lawn with my hands. I threw up in the dirt, and then lay next to it, moaning. I heard the porch door opening and I panicked at being discovered so utterly pathetic and sick, so unattractive. But it was Pammy, who made me feel safe and cool when I was around her. “Girl, you got the right idea.” She sort of shuffled over to where I lay, dug her own shallow hole, threw up in it and threw the dirt back over it, and then --- god, I wish I could go back to being that young. She spooned me. And we fell asleep like that on some acquaintance’s parents’ lawn, feeling blessed and restored when we awoke, striking and lovely as two gazelles.

Nothing this fantastic happened the first (and last) time Marina came to visit. But it was pleasant. They smoked and talked and paid attention to Christopher. The air drifting in through the window stunning Shirley as it had earlier that morning, with how crisp it felt, like it was a hand that could smooth her frizzy hair.
Beneath the talking women, on the street corner, a heavyset Latina sat on a shopping cart her daughter had turned on its side for her as the two waited for their ride home. Down the street, a band practiced playing a punk-rock song in a garage they’d rented next to a storefront, and nobody called the cops on them that day because those who heard the noise admired it like a soundtrack for their city lives. Across town, Marina’s husband sat at his professorial desk, chuckling over a science fiction vignette he’d written about morality. Marina felt immensely comfortable with him, and knew she would always be in love with him, in a quiet, predestined way. When Marina was generous to people other than him and their sons it made her feel guilty, the way as a little girl she’d known she was a traitor to her mother when she’d cut up the art books mom had given her at Christmas to use the pictures for stationery; the stationery was folded into envelopes and sent away from the small domain of her possession. Marina couldn’t have helped it though; the paintings and photographs contained in those books had made her feel that the world was pretty and too fragile, like her self.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Thirteen

2011-05-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

13.
“Horses Forever”

The loneliness was what got to her the worst. Christopher was her only company. At first, she’d been infatuated with him. She didn’t own a camera (she could hardly believe in her own existence, and imagined that film brought by her to the young men behind the photo counter at Woolworth’s to be developed would seem film brought to them mysteriously, by a phantom, and that photos of her and Christopher would be like proof of the afterlife), but she followed him around as though she was carrying an always-ready camera in her hand, watching him sneeze or smile; watching him notice a fly near his highchair and point at it; laughing as he poured cereal down the front of his little overalls. But after awhile, Shirley became fixated on her loneliness, and it made her irritable.

Marina had a thin vein the color of a marina that ran from the delicate dome of her forehead down along the side of her cheek. Almost everybody who ever met her was instantly charmed by her, despite her tendency towards neuroticism and her conservative responses, unnerving in their succinctness. Her primness, though, was just her way of being observant, and as for her being neurotic, the only person it seemed to hurt was her younger son, who unwittingly adopted this trait, and in whose possession it became panic. In all the girls he met at college, he looked for the one who reminded him of Marina and who would also be an antidote to her.

With both her sons away at college, and with her part-time job at the veterinarian’s over by one o’clock, and with her husband teaching existentialism at the college until eight at night, and nine o’clock on Wednesdays, she had most of each day to herself. She was accustomed to spending this leisure time at home, self-consciously occupying herself, relieved only when it was time for the rest of the world to come home from work.

One afternoon she went into a thrift shop and watched as a woman with long, wild hair, carrying a baby in one hand, sifted with the other hand through a row of skirts, drawers full of ladies gloves and jewelry, and bins of toys. If Marina had been a different person in a different life and had wanted to make friends with this woman (but she did, for some reason, want to make friends with the woman), she would’ve smiled and said, “Sometimes I think the toys are for the mother, not the child.” It would be one of those jokes intended not to be funny but instead as a way to help you identify a stranger’s personality.

The woman reminded her of those intense little nature girls her sons were always bringing home when they were little boys; those horse-crazy girls so wishing the wild streamers of a mane were the hair on their own heads, so swiftly ducking beneath the eye contact of human adults and other children. If Marina had one of these horse girls in front of her right now, it would be one of her favorite types of people to be around because she likes weirdoes and people who are shy, so she would make the little girl comfortable by asking about books and by offering food.

assorted

2011-05-13T12:24:00.000-07:00

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Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Twelve

2011-05-12T08:16:00.000-07:00

12.
“Planes of Sunday”

“Oh god. Your mommy’s so sorry about all this.” She leaned over the side of the crib, talking to him incessantly at night. She told him, trying to be nonchalant about the whole thing, “The trouble with me is I want beauty and there is none.” She told him, “I’m jinxed. I always have been. It’s like God’s playing a joke on me, and the worst part of it is that nobody’ll ever believe me about it. I’ve had these coincidences, my whole life, these fucking coincidences that are so weird, they’re like predictions of fucked up stuff to come, and I couldn’t ever possibly categorize them and, like, write them down and show them to anyone, you know?, to prove how, just how doomed my life is, because there have been too many of them. And now it’s going to wear off on you. Now you’ll be unlucky, too.”

The first time she’d ever gotten drunk had been when she was seventeen, on one of those young weekends where revelations about others’ perceptions of oneself and opportunities for popularity or sexual contact are so haphazardly condensed into those two nights, the star of the weekend feels exhausted and pensive come Monday, and disgusted at the whole boring cycle of daytime, the money and waiting of it all. These kind of weekends will make a young woman think that she is like Alice in Wonderland, and she will try to hold on to this feeling of daintiness and adventurousness forever but then she will want to share her excitement with someone else and early in the morning will call up a boy she likes on the telephone, and when the piercing ring wakes him up he will lose all his attraction to her, and she will be able to sense it, and will not feel charmed anymore.

The first night of that weekend was the occasion of her first date, before she met Phillip. She was going out with a breath-taking boy who was always trying to be gracious to make up for the cruelty of his good looks, but who could only disregard her forever when she gave him such clumsy oral sex that night. The next morning found her nauseous with self-hatred. But when she touched the damp cup of her first drink that night at an acquaintance’s house, she had a hope that it would assuage some of her anxiety.

And it did. She was sitting on a hard wood floor in her acquaintance’s parents’ living room, looking at the African masks, which were situated next to a beige-framed photo of the family at Big Bear. She could hardly keep her head up. On the couch she was leaning against, a boy and a girl were mocking the arrogance with which the room was decorated, and the girl who lived there started laughing and handed the boy her joint and then took a beer can from the table and threw it at one of the masks, feeling absurd and carefree, and then beamed with pride and said, “Fuck everything phony. Fuck it, man. I’m sick of all of it.” They were so brave, thought Shirley, and she moved over close to them, so that her shoulder touched the girl’s leg. Sitting there, she knew that night that everything put off or botched up today would be justified and certainly, gracefully reconfigured tomorrow.

Always, in the dusty, early, idle hours of Sunday, it seemed to her that the airplanes took off more frequently than on other days, and their banshee hums sounded like sighs to her, and gave her the impatient longing of a sigh. The Sunday of her first hangover, she woke to the sound of one of these airplanes. She was seized by a sudden fear, which was more like a revelation, that she would never, ever be able to enjoy her own company. Her head was resting on her arms that framed the toilet’s rim, and she just sat there on the floor like that, listening to the planes. Molecules of dust settled on the nauseous figure of this girl, who would exactingly remember this morning as something important.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Eleven

2011-05-11T13:49:00.000-07:00

11.
“Mermaid”

When Shirley passed out on the bedroom floor that day, Christopher, unalarmed, crawled over to her and lay on her hair, which was fanned out sloppily on the floor, like a mermaid’s hair underwater. Her hair was a thin mattress Christopher took a nap on, hugging the back of her unconscious head like a teddy bear. Breathing on her. Waiting for her to wake up. When she did wake up, he’d crawled around to face her by then, and their eyes were level with each other. “Oh, hi sweetie!” she said, cheerfully, as though she’d been closing her eyes to better concentrate on a party she was going to throw for him, “Boy did mommy sleep, didn’t she? Silly mommy was so sleepy, she took a nap right on the floor!” She realized she was going to throw up, and trying not to run to the toilet, she continued, “Oh! I think mommy has a tummy ache.”

Borrowing a Page (sans - $$$) From the PBS playbook

2011-05-10T15:24:00.001-07:00

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Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Ten

2011-05-09T08:03:00.000-07:00

10.
“Inspirational Nights”

She noticed the baby had fallen asleep, so she put him in his crib, and went to sit in the duct-taped beanbag chair by the TV. One of these days she was going to have to get her act together. After all, life is supposed to be precious – right? Decorating their small apartment suddenly seemed like the most significant gesture she could make to prove that she cared about Christopher’s life, about his brain and the types of thoughts he’d someday have; whether they were going to be enchanted or commonplace thoughts, or even evil, seemed to depend on what she would turn their home into, starting tonight. “Wouldn’t it be neat if each room had a theme?” she thought, and wondered if anyone had ever come up with this same idea, or only her. The bathroom could have pictures of birds glued on its walls, or maybe she could first paint the walls blue, and maybe even paint some clouds on top of the blue, and then glue the pictures of birds over the clouds. She could buy a beaded curtain and in hanging it, create a delineation between the kitchenette and the area where the dining table was; she would have a dining room now. She could even buy two beaded curtains if she wanted, because mom and dad sent her money every month, and she used almost none of it to buy food, she was eating so little these days. Anything was seeming possible; the space in her apartment, which was her tomb, like a cave she was both unwilling and hardly able to leave, seemed possible of multiplying, and only because of her efforts, because of her. On her side of the bedroom she’d cover the wall with her old dresses that no longer fit her, and on the baby’s side of the bedroom, she would paint, maybe, stripes of primary colors, and tack up illustrations Xeroxed from Where the Wild Things Are, his favorite book, next to his crib. She still didn’t know where she was going to get the energy to execute all these plans. Frankly, part of her wished she was dead, and therefore, it was hard to get up enough energy to do things that were going to help her. But, with another part of her being, she felt so excited this night, pushing herself deeper into the beanbag chair, thinking of all the possibilities, all the things she could do. All the ideas suddenly coming into her mind, overwhelming her. When this wave of inspiration ebbed, she felt confident that more ideas would come later, that they would trickle into her consciousness like a sedative from an I.V. tube, and these ideas would keep her amused forever.

She went to bed so inspired, at first she didn’t know what to do with herself. But then the inspiration made her drowsy, and she was torn between getting up to do something beautiful or burrowing her face into her quilt and inhaling its dusty perfumes, grinning to herself, falling asleep.

The next morning when Christopher’s crying woke her up, she carried him downstairs to the corner liquor store with her, where she bought her first pack of cigarettes that were only her own, not bummed from Mickey or shared with Mickey or Virginia. When they got back from getting the cigarettes, it was probably only 9 o’clock, but she poured herself her first drink of the day, vodka and soda water. She drank all day, realizing that this was going to be how she’d get through this one day without being bored or lonely or ungainly, unlovable towards her own son. “I’m always going to be drunk.” She made this decision quickly, firmly; nonetheless, it took a long time to fully understand what this decision meant.

One day she would realize what kind of woman she was, and wonder how it had happened. Somehow, there seemed to be a correlation, between that burst of inspiration she’d gotten that night she was making plans for their apartment, and the will to get so drunk she passed out on the bedroom floor the next afternoon. It’s hard to explain. It was like, there were these two polarities equally pulling at her, pretty apartment or dump, nice life or sad life. And, with the perverse logic of a chronic self-defeater, she’d chosen a dump, a sad life, and who knows, but maybe she even wouldn’t have, wouldn’t have consciously chosen anything, if not for those ideas she’d had for the apartment, those ideas that’d made her feel too good.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Nine

2011-05-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

9.
“Dancing in the Living Room”

Any quirky, single man spying her silhouette in the window, as she held her son to her chest and took him for a twirl through the living room and sang along with the rock songs on the radio, and even dipped his little body like he was a diminutive Ginger Rogers, would have certainly fallen in love with Shirley. She called her son “baby,” jokingly, like it was a pick-up line instead of a physical description. “Hey, baby, want a side of strained carrots? Come on up and see me some time.” She started out hopeful, smiling often to ward off self-doubt and bad luck. I was like that, too, when I graduated from college and was setting off on the drive to my teaching position in Seattle. I was starting something new and was convinced that bravery would permanently protect me from disappointment. So I drove along, making sure not to act aggressively towards the other drivers on the road, and laughing at all the deejay banter on the radio and making sure to buy myself full meals along the way. Now I usually eat a carton of yogurt for dinner, or macaroni and cheese; for breakfast I have coffee and then later I take the first of my daily Valiums, and it keeps me too pleasantly dizzy and complacent to become hungry. But on my drive from New York City to Seattle, breakfast was a sit-down meal at some local version of IHOP, eggs, hash browns, bacon and sausage. I was spending my money, on myself, to sustain my life. It was like I was saying, “Look at me, God. Aren’t I funny and responsible? Now give me my reward.”

Then I arrived in Seattle and the first friend I made at the school was a middle-aged science teacher who told me one afternoon that his wife and he would like to have me over for dinner. They lived in a neighborhood called Queen Anne, in a white two story house with a red door. The conversations they beckoned me into, about literary magazines and modern art and appropriate high school curriculums, were orderly siren songs to me; I didn’t even explore the rest of the city because I knew I wanted to be safe there in that house with them. I loved their neighborhood, the fact that it shared a name with the weed I always treated like precious bouquets of flowers when I was a little girl. And I loved the red door; who wouldn’t? And walking up the cobblestone walkway to their home, seeing the house whose two-storied body was like a tiered wedding cake while its lit windows were like jack-o-lantern eyes; I loved that, too. I was coddled there. Now, I can’t even help it, I hear myself talk in this chipper oldmaidish voice, about little things I don’t even care about. What man would want me like this? Not Christopher. Even when I try to be sophisticated, I hear myself babbling “Goo-goo, Ga-ga” at somebody’s toddler, or I say “Oh, isn’t that nice?” when I hear wind chimes: insipid bits of banter. When I was with my two friends, the Lattimores, at their coddling, softly lit home, I always knew what to do with myself, and it would never hurt to do it. I would sit back in the burgundy velveteen chair while the supper dishes were taken away and I would wait for my decaf to arrive in its delicate china cup, dirty rainwater in a cup-shaped flower. Richard Lattimore always sat across from me and asked about my lesson plans for the upcoming week, or described some even-tempered couple he’d met at the Buddhist temple the weekend before. “It’s really wonderful there, Caroline,” Judith Lattimore would chime from the kitchen, “You should come with us some time.”

Then at night when I got into bed I’d suddenly feel trapped in this life, and would have to tell myself that my own contentment, just contentment, not exaltation, is the only thing that should really matter to me. I was content, I was content, if I didn’t compare myself to other women my own age, up at this hour smoking cigarettes and laughing with lipstick all over their mouths, laughing into the night, marching around in their tall shoes on their way to apartments and bars. I was content, but the contentment was like an anticipated act of violence that would fall flat, leaving the near-victim bored and expectant for the rest of life. My contentment was the water I treaded, waiting for something that never happened to happen. Even my nervous breakdown has turned beige, the frantic, hot pink sunset-show of it over so quickly, leaving me to sit here watching commercials.

Similarly, Shirley’s attempt to ease into motherhood with a cheerful spirit was not eternally sustainable. The first problem she ran into was that of constructing a schedule for herself. She knew, for instance, that the healthy thing to do was to make sure to leave the house at least once a day. Everyday she took Christopher for a walk in his navy blue stroller with the white piping. Christopher, too, loved the pigeons. He had soft, shockingly black hair and blue eyes. People told her in her prime seconds of human contact that she had a beautiful baby. Bet it never felt as though the scope of kindness of these strangers extended to include her. She felt there must be something inherent in her, some bad quality that radiated from her hair like pheromones and smelled, only subconsciously detectable, like untrustworthiness.

For months after that one afternoon with Virginia, she only had one other visitor at the apartment, and only once. It was Mike the Vietnam veteran from the bar, who asked her tenderly the next morning, “Where is your old man, anyway?” The sheets on the small bed smelled musty. He rested a sweaty hand on her bare stomach. She wasn’t sure whether he was asking about her father or about Mickey, so she feigned haughtiness and just shrugged.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Eight

2011-05-02T13:32:00.000-07:00

8.
“In Loving Memory of the Pigeon”

“You know what I like most about drinking?” he asked her. They were sitting at one of the small tables along the wall at Barnaby’s. The song about summertime that has the line “All around, people looking half-dead” was on the jukebox.

“I like the way drinking makes a person feel good.” God, he was right, she did feel good. She realized she felt as young as she was, and for all of her precocious worrying fears, she did believe in that purported belief of all teenagers, that she would live forever and no permanent harm could befall her. The facts: she lived in an exciting city, even if a congenital laziness prevented her from exploring much of it. She was pretty. She was nineteen. She had a job and a boyfriend. And she was pregnant. Shirley lined these facts up like ducklings, and looked across the table at Mickey with an authentic smile, rare on her hesitant lips.

Back at his apartment, he was lethargic with beer; his limbs felt heavy, and even the act of thinking felt physically taxing. The news that she was pregnant seemed a physical burden, demanding as it did a conversation. His lips moved sluggishly.

“Well, little girl, you got us into this mess, but I will pay for the abortion, yes?” This scene was one of the scenes that repeated itself in his life, it was by now a familiar motif of mutual resentment and details to be hammered out, not the cause of disbelief and grief that the first abortion had been, when he was fifteen and his girlfriend had believed they were complicit in murder.

“I’m not having an abortion. You can do whatever the fuck you want, and in fact, I’m fucking sick of you.” She was drunk but it had never made her slur or feel this violent anger she felt all of a sudden, reading in the expression on his face all the smug self-satisfaction he felt for having maintained a detachment towards her.

“It’s going to work out great and you can just stay here by yourself, just rot in your apartment. And stop saying ‘yes?’ at the end of your sentences, you sound like a cartoon.”

“Work out great? Jesus, Shirley, what planet are you from, huh?”

California. But if you’ve never visited that state, you can’t comprehend how the Gold Rush has distorted the racial memory of those who were born there. She took a breath, lost her courage. “Look Mickey, I think we’d be great parents. If it’s a girl she’ll probably mostly look to me for answers and stuff anyway, you wouldn’t have to change or anything, you could just enjoy being around us and still do everything you like. You could still go out to clubs. And if it’s a boy, come on, I know you hate that your dad is so spineless, you told me he disgusts you. You could teach our son to have guts. You wouldn’t really even have to do anything. I would do all the housework for you guys and everything and you could let him hang out with you and watch you fix things or whatever. Please.”

“Shirley, have you ever seen me fix a goddamn thing? And no offense, but you keep house like a little boy. I’ve seen you mop your bathroom floor with wet paper towels tied to the end of a broom handle. Get the abortion. I’ll pay for it. If you want to, you can move in here after you get it. But if you don’t get it, goodbye. I’m sorry, but goodbye.”

Shirley had the baby. She named him Christopher.

God, Christopher, where are you, this very second? Are you awake right now or still asleep? How do you look? Is there someone next to you or are you alone? I’m in bed right now, this notebook on my lap, trying to picture you at this very, very moment, right now. I’m writing a story about you.

Virginia picked Shirley up from the hospital, her family of young women trailing behind their matriarch like autograph hounds, all three of them eyeing Shirley suspiciously when the nurse handed Christopher to her and it looked for a second like she was going to sneeze on him. She had a cold that seemed to linger for at least the first two years of Christopher’s life. During that year or so when Christopher was practically the only company she kept, a sort of dopey silliness crept into her personality, and during this time she relished in the symptoms of this cold of hers; her constant sniffle made her feel glamorous, like the wild, unbreakable girls her own age, tacky and strange and beautiful as birds-of-paradise, who went to clubs or parties full of artists with diseases, and who always seemed to be sniffling because of the coke they snorted. And when she coughed, Shirley felt it sounded like the chronic cough these wild girls caught, from smoking cigarette after cigarette as they stood around talking to each other and laughing. Shirley mostly only talked to Christopher.

The day Virginia drove Shirley and the baby to Shirley’s apartment, she had it in the back of her head to suggest that Shirley move in with her, but she was also distracted, thinking about the laundry she had to do before her shift at Barnaby’s that night, and vaguely calculating how much rent she would now pay if she was going to be splitting it with Shirley and wondering if her landlord would raise the rent if he found out Shirley was staying there. These speculations preoccupied her, and her invitation to Shirley never got extended. The invitation would have changed the course of Shirley’s and Christopher’s lives, of course. For one thing, it would’ve changed the role of men in their lives; men would’ve become just people, just visitors to their home, and not the sources 0f income and anxiety that they became, out of necessity, in their two-person household. Shirley would have turned out differently if she’d moved in with Virginia. She would have become more capable. She wouldn’t have gone through the endless minutes of loneliness that sometimes made her feel crazed.

Instead, Virginia stayed for awhile, that first afternoon with the baby, discreetly hunting for dirty dishes on the floor and stacking them in Shirley’s sink for her while keeping up a stream of conversation. Shirley seemed stunned and restless, walking around the apartment vaguely taking inventory: baby’s onesies in the big plastic bag next to the hamper; crib by the window; box of wet-naps under the bathroom sink; four packs of diapers, sent by mom and dad in a big box, no letter or even note included. After awhile she just sat at the table by the kitchenette, baby on her lap, watching Virginia wash the dishes. Finally, Virginia seemed to be done, turned the faucet off, wiped her soapy hands on the fronts of her tight black jeans, and smiling, said “Okay, well I cleaned up a bit here, I think you’re all nice and ready to launch into motherhood. Are you okay? Honey, you look so sad. How about if I take the girls back home, get ready for my shift, then come back over here to get you and we go to the bar and show off little baby boy. They’d love it! Nobody’d smoke around him! We could throw you a little last minute Baby Shower down there tonight. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

Shirley could imagine sitting on a barstool, being adored again the way she’d felt before she’d become Mickey’s, when the men at the bar had still felt free to flirt with and secretly love her. They would pass Christopher around and each feel a little paternal for him. As a middle aged woman in the 1990’s, when Shirley meets people whose lives aren’t average, like her lesbian coworker who bought a house with five other lesbians and uses their basement as a functioning art gallery, or an ex-girlfriend of Chris’s who was an emancipated minor living in an apartment she shared with a homeless old man she saved from getting beaten up one night, she loves these lifestyles, and the fact that they are the sole inventions of the people living them. The happiest thing she could imagine was for Virginia to watch over her and her son, and for her to continue to work at Barnaby’s, maybe while Virginia’s daughter babysat for some extra money each night, and for all of the bars regulars to feel they had a personal stake in the wellbeing of Shirley’s little family. She wanted to flirt forever. She wanted drunk, generous people basing their own happiness on hers. But it seems like a person has to be raised, almost trained, to make the life they want for themselves, and Shirley had not been raised in this way.

“Thank Virginia, but that’s okay. I’ll be fine here. I feel so tired! I’m just looking forward to our first night together, my little Christopher and me. I can’t wait to cuddle up and sleep with him tonight.”

“Um, Shirley? I think I read somewhere that it’s not too safe for newborns in regular beds, you know? That there’s the possibility of them smothering in the pillows or something? I could be wrong though.”

“Oh, yeah, gosh, you’re probably right. Thanks, Virginia.”

She stood at the window and watched Virginia and her family walk across the street. Then she saw something; a dark blue Station Wagon hit a pigeon that’d been about to alight from the gum-spotted pavement. Shirley saw the bird flip itself onto its back, its broken wings splayed like the horizontal beam of a cross, and she yelled out the window, “No!” to the car behind the Station Wagon, as she saw it flatten the bird’s body into something red and terrible. At that moment, she was blind to everything else. She only wanted the pigeon to live again.

Planes of Sunday -- Chapter Seven

2011-04-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

7.
“Cats in Dreams”

In novels, even little things like boiling an egg, or going to the grocery store or Laundromat alone on a Sunday afternoon are documented, as though each action in a life is important enough to be written down. Maybe we will find out that these actions are clues to the mystery. And that’s not all: the thoughts one has while performing these tasks are also recorded, and always these thoughts let you know that each character, however minor, has a personality. All these under-appreciated chores are clues related by an all-knowing watcher, who sees through your thoughts with x-ray vision. In such a world of fiction like this, everything is brought up to the same radiant level, and even ugliness isn’t negative any more. An old woman standing in a stained undershirt in front of a mirror, examining her infinitesimal pores and the white, curly hairs on her chin: radiant.

Also in a novel there is melodrama. One cries oneself to sleep or falls in love at first sight but never attains the one sought after, and these things also are a comfort because they are so sad. Shirley read of rapes and fatal losses of faith, and of families swallowing their own poisonous potions, and it soothed her to have her fearful outlook confirmed by these tragedies, and to have a guideline for the behavior she would recite when these things would all happen to her someday. Her favorite author was a woman named Julia Holly, a writer so notable partially for the contrast between her practical face and the frantic, panting volumes of words her photo appeared on the back of. What Shirley loved about these novels was the emphatically naïve young wife and the emphatically suspicious fat girl. The emphatically suicidal fifteen year old who keeps such a detailed diary. The end of the novel was always a gold cup for these women and girls. Congratulations on reaching the end, ladies, Holly smiled down on her creations, congratulations, you slightly fabricated versions of my mother at various stages in her life. Congratulations on orchestrating each action with such striking poignancy or sloppiness, on coming to some conclusion, even if just a postmodern hyphen.

Shirley imagined some woman like Julia Holly, not nice but not a bad person either, and so interesting it didn’t matter what her flaws were, watching over Shirley like God, as Shirley walked back into the cool, tiny bathroom that afternoon and examined the pregnancy test that sat on the edge of the sink. She was pregnant.

So this is what it is like to feel important. She was imagining the psychic eyes of Julia Holly watching from a corner of the bathroom, recording what she saw for the novel Shirley was imagining herself as the protagonist of: “The young woman looked at herself in the mirror then, touched her pale chin softly with her fingertips, brushed the bangs of her long, brown hair back from her forehead, said out loud to herself, ‘I’m on my way.’”

“Gee, it sounds like your neighbor upstairs is roller-skating in his living room or something. Listen to all that noise!” she remembers having said to Mickey, as she lay in bed next to him, on what must’ve been the night of conception. Their heads had both been propped up on pillows and she was watching him smoke, and when he turned to face her, she knew not to expect any commiseration in response to what she’d just said, because it was just a commonplace, feminine thing to say. She was right, he just looked at her and said “Can you hand me the ashtray?” She could feel his semen inside her, and was sensing the warmth of it as though it were not fluid, but an emotion: comfort. She turned away from him and pulled the corner of his filthy bedspread up against her face, fell asleep still clutching at the blanket’s edge like that, like it was a piece of clothing she was struggling to keep from falling off, or the floppy ear of her favorite stuffed animal as a child, a faded pink bunny with a plastic cord sticking out of its back that made it say “Happy Easter!” when she pulled on it.

Shirley wanted a baby to buy clothes for. She wanted it there in a basinet as an ace up her sleeve; she wanted to nearly forget its existence and then to stand forlornly and uselessly gazing out the kitchen window at the neighboring rooftops, bored, but then to suddenly remember, oh but wait, I have a baby to hold. She even liked the idea of having to overwork herself to keep food on the table, because it would give her something noble to do with the rest of her life. She also liked the idea of marrying Mickey and staying at home and cleaning while he went to work.

“Hey, Virginia? You have kids, right?”

“Well, I have a young daughter who has two little girls and no man in sight. We all crawl into my bed at night and sleep in my one small bed like some poor, starving Appalachian family I saw a story about on the news once, all stuck together in the tiniest little shack you can imagine. That’s my apartment now, just this little hen house, this tiny room where we got to crawl over each other just to get to the bathroom. So yeah, you could say I have kids.” Virginia’s sentences tumbled out of her mouth long and with a wild, languid momentum like William Blake poems when she was this drunk; it was towards the end of their shift at Barnaby’s, so probably at least four whiskeys by then. Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

“No, but I mean when you actually had your daughter, when you were pregnant with her, what was it like?”
She drew close to Shirley and sighed.
“Poor Shirley.”

Shirley wanted a baby who would be uncannily responsive like a cat in a dream. She used to often dream, when she was younger, that she was alone with her cat and that the cat had learned to communicate with her and could vocalize the personality Shirley had invented for it. Something that can be held against one’s chest, and woken up in the night when you are lonely. Something as eye-winkingly poignant as rock n’ roll on the radio when you haven’t been able to sleep and it’s dawn now and you wish that someone was there to watch you endure the rolling over of a new day with that pretty dawn color in your cheeks, Shirley, even though sometimes you are less attractive than others, and even though there is no person in the world capable of that omniscient tenderness you desire. And then you burrow your face into your hair, like your face is an animal.

Planes Of Sunday -- Chapter Six

2011-04-27T14:55:00.000-07:00

6.
“Till Human Voices Wake Us
And we Drown.”
-T.S. Eliot

When he first got to the city, he lived on the money his parents sent him, a situation he laughed bitterly about when he spoke of it to Anna, the family friend he had flown to this new country with.

(On the long flight over, they’d gotten drunk for a few hours, and their mutual sexual attraction made them hyper; they squirmed around in their seats, giggling, him tickling her under her arms and her slapping his hands away coquettishly. At one point he had asked, “Hey, you want to get married when we get over there?” and she had said “yes.”).

Anna was ten years younger than him, someone to have sex with, occasionally even after he was with Shirley. “Can’t you just imagine them over there, working all their little jobs, pulling out the couch to sleep on every night, thinking ‘I hope our son becomes big millionaire, and that Anna meets nice businessman,’ and here we are snorting this coke up our noses? And fucking. Those poor parents.” Anna felt this same contempt for people back home who’d expected anything from her, but she would not join in when he spoke like this, because she had laughed along with him the first time she heard it from him, and he’d suddenly stared at her admonishingly, saying, “Shut up. This is serious.”

The money from his parents let him swim through different lifestyles, the landscapes of which bobbed up and down only slightly in his memory, like a Styrofoam cup on the surface of a river. He slapped Anna very hard on the mouth one night, and after that she never made a show of enjoying his company when they were together; the slap is another memory that doesn’t quite stick in his bank of memories.

To this day, he understands it would be inappropriate to explain it to anyone. To explain his real self. Almost all people, unless they are the offspring of alcoholics and appreciate the chance to be helpful or blamed for something, get angry when a person unburdens himself of a heavy load of fears, so who could he explain it to? That bleeding-heart masochist who will listen to sob stories is a rare breed, especially when you are a man and the confidante you want, that person to ask the questions you fantasize that someone will someday ask you, is another man. He just wanted to tell someone, “I am a good person.”

For several weeks, he lived only on cottage cheese and tap water, leaving his apartment only to buy more cottage cheese. He wanted to waste away. His father had attempted suicide as a young man, leaving deep cuts on his wrists that he kept hidden with thick-banded wristwatches he wore every day, sometimes even to bed – one on each wrist. To Mickey, the suicide attempt was the only compelling event in this man’s unimpressive life. The courage of that attempt, and the paradox of the ridiculous armor of wristwatches, the absurdity of it all, enthralled Mickey to think about, as he lay in bed throughout entire days, delirious with hunger, half attempting to die. The envelopes that arrived from his parents remained unopened, the checks inside the envelopes transformed into extraneous scraps, like birthday cards. Then he started going to a disco club several times a week, where his coke habit developed and quickly escalated, and the checks practically hopped out of their envelopes during this phase, like little butlers who receive gratification solely from being called on to serve.

The night he first noticed Shirley, he was just walking into the bar, and saw her watching Virginia with admiration as Virginia absentmindedly smoked and hummed to herself between bits of conversation. Mickey caught Shirley’s eye and asked,

“Anyone sitting here?”

“Nope, it’s all yours,” she smiled. Her nose made a whistling sound when she inhaled and in that instant she loathed herself.

“It’s allowed for the patron to buy the barmaid a drink?”
Her insecurity, slinking about her skin like a fog, almost a fragrance, made him interested in her. He liked to watch women being shy. Of course, he also liked confidence in women. He had a girlfriend once who felt intimidated in his presence; she was an American girl spending a year in Russia, doing some research on the Neo-nazi movement there -- they’d met at a bus stop. One night, he took her with him to go drinking at the apartment of a female friend of his. The American girl quickly got too drunk and fell asleep on the mattress they’d been sitting on, on the floor, her head resting on his thigh. Mickey watched her chest move as she breathed in and out. Then he looked into the kitchen where his friend was tidying up. She was a stern, overweight, butch lesbian he’d been friends with since high school because of their shared political and social beliefs – anarchy, nihilism, cruelty administered in the name of independence – and there was no detail of her face or body that had ever welcomed or received his sexual appraisal. But watching her so at ease and unselfconscious in her own kitchen, he called in to her, “You’re very fetching.” Shaking the water droplets off a juice glass, she’d replied, “Asshole,” thrilling inside because the charge of absolute excitement he got when pursuing a woman was the same sort of excitement she felt at being utterly unavailable to men, unpersuadable. Still, he’d wanted her, her with her bulk and her ease in her own kitchen, and he’d also wanted the pretty, stilled figure at his side, that agitated and frail girl. He wanted to be overwhelmed by them both, wanted the pressure of each woman’s body and upbringing and country and neuroses pressing down on his chest like hands trying to crush his ribs.

The same few situations occurred in his life over and over, people’s faces changed but the things they represented to him were just themes that repeated themselves.

So here he was, in bed next to this new sleeping American girl, this new anxiety-ridden girl with a pretty face and her sloppy clothes that made her happy. And his thoughts were split between images of the sex they’d just had, and fantasies of what it would have been like to go home with Virginia, instead. Because when he’d walked through the door that night, he had been watching Shirley watching Virginia, and he’d also been watching Virginia watching nothing, just watching herself, her image glimpsed covertly in the mirror behind the bar, her own arms as they reached for empty glasses.

But he did fall in love with Shirley, and stayed in love with her for many weeks. Then after awhile what he felt for her was only the generalized pity he felt for all women, because when we are young, we are always somehow beautiful and we are always somehow losing. And then, when we get old, we shrink, our hands and spines curl in on themselves, and we need help carrying our things up the stairs.
Their first night together, as she stood there at the bar listening to him and answering his questions, she was also listening to the thunderstorm outside. Sometimes a flash of lightning lit everything up for one startling moment. Sometimes a thunderclap was so loud, it shook the rows of glasses on their glass shelves. This weather was dramatic, she found herself relaxing into this first conversation with someone she knew she would be involved with, soon. It felt, with the dramatic lighting of the sudden lightning flashes and the rolling timpani sound of the thunder, and the menacing, seductive wetness of the heavy air around them, that she was just following a script. She was the pretty girl in the movie. She felt she could burrow into this plot, this pre-determined mistake, the way a sick baby animal burrows into a hollow log and just hides. She was curling up inside the hollow log of destiny. She would come back to his apartment with him tonight.
The next morning, she had to arrange the way she was to remember this first night with Mickey from now on. Because something had happened that she knew was not normal. When he’d just pulled out and was lying next to her in bed, after making love, she had said, breathlessly, “Say something to me in Russian,” and he had. The next morning, when she asked him what he had said, he looked at her a little rebelliously and said, “I said I may have Herpes.”

Now she had to teach herself how to react to this man. Because if thought of from a certain angle, it was funny, the way she’d been asking for him to tell her something beautiful in a language she couldn’t understand, and the incongruity of what he’d actually said. She had been a little rich girl living in Malibu, watching TV every night, never experiencing anything dangerous. And she had rejected all that, had moved here to this dirty place, had drank herself to sickness her first night here and had crouched near the gutter to throw up, only to look up and see a police officer standing over her, laughing at her to another policeman and shaking his head. But these moments of poignant harshness were like diamonds, and the new identity she was forging for herself, that of a reckless orphan, was like a ring she was crafting to someday set these diamonds in, someday when she would have survived all the ugliness she was putting herself through now and had become strong and interesting because of it, a woman with stories to tell.

So, viewed in light of this, a romantic glow to every ugly thing done with the desire to wipe out the future, it was funny what he’d said to her.
In stirrups at the Gynecologist’s office two days later, the doctor asked why she thought she might have Herpes.

She was pretending to be someone casual today.

“I don’t know. I met this guy the other night and I ended up going home with him. He didn’t tell me until the next morning that he thinks he has Herpes. So, better safe than sorry, I guess.”

The doctor frowned.

After examining her, he told her to put her clothes back on and come to his office. There, he asked her if she wanted any condoms, asked her a few standard questions about her medical history, and then spoke about himself. He was a sexually frank older man who kidded around with his patients’ husbands about sex when they accompanied their wives and girlfriends to his office. He was proud of the fact that he was both Puerto-Rican and Jewish, and told her some anecdote about this; she tried to listen the way she imagined his other patients would, and tried to reply this way, too:

“Okay, well, thank you for letting me know that I don’t have Herpes. Boy, that’s a relief. I know I should be more careful with who I go home with next time. I know that STD’s and stuff can get passed from a woman to her baby, right?, and I wouldn’t want that to happen with me.”

There were pictures of babies stapled all over the bulletin board on his wall. The babies in these pictures looked proud of themselves. The women in these pictures, holding their babies, knew they had gained this doctor’s approval.
But the second Shirley insinuated that she wanted a child, the doctor replied, “Oh Jesus, please, don’t you go having kids.”

Planes of Sunday -- Chapters Four & Five

2011-04-23T20:49:00.000-07:00

4.
“The Sun”

It drifts across faces and skates the busted pavement, holding in its hand nostalgia. Where is the sun going? It is spreading its arms to the future, and its legs to the past.

5.
“But the night was so cold
and it almost kept me warm,
how come the night is so long?”
-Leonard Cohen

She learned to take Mickey seriously the night she saw him beat up Jack, a popular regular with a white beard and a boyfriend he talked about but never had proof of. Jack, who looked a little bit like Jack Nicholson and dressed like a professor, even though he was a clerk at some drugstore. He was standing close to Mickey at the bar, telling him something, and then all of a sudden Mickey punched him in the face, knocking him to the ground.

Before that punch, since the first night Shirley’d seen Mickey (Michal, actually -- Michal Jasinski) come in for a drink, she was unsure of how to classify him. He had a thick accent that she couldn’t identify, it sounded both Spanish and Russian; she wanted to know if other girls her age would find him exotic and attractive, or if he was someone that people disregarded. He was a short, muscular man in his early thirties, with brownish blondish hair that was slightly receding. He had dark brown eyes and a handsome face marred by imperfections such as a weak jaw-line, caused by having his jaw broken in a fight, and a few eyebrow hairs so long and wily they crossed into his line of vision. He wore a tight, dirty white t-shirt and gray pants everyday, which made him look like the taxi drivers and janitors who were Shirley’s new family, but also like the punks who never talked to or noticed her. He had a tattoo of a naked woman on his bicep, drawn in an Art Nouveau style, making it hard to determine whether this was art or pornography; similarly, the paint smudges on his pants could have been house paint or the excess paint from an artist’s brush.

He became a regular. Shirley, meanwhile, marveling at the lawlessness of this city where a bar owner would hire an eighteen year old, became a bar-back there, Virginia’s helper.

Because the sometimes menacing edge of Mickey’s voice never materialized into violence, and he was mostly childishly content in his drunkenness, she finally cast him in the barroom screenplay of her imagination as the friendly, handsome foreigner, the comic relief for the brief melodramas that occurred; a drunk construction worker crying over memories of an ex-wife, or one of the punks getting too high in the bathroom and leaving in an ambulance. But instead of eventually revealing himself an innocent or a fool, he punched Jack in the face that one night, and when Jack was on the ground, he kicked him in the ribs.

Weeks later, in bed, he asked her, the foreign rises and falls of his speech now familiar to her, “Do you think I hate homosexuals? I don’t, you know. Jack said something very, very nasty to me that night, yes? Very dirty, and that’s why I got mad.” An afterthought, “Actually, he said something nasty about you.” Shirley knew that this was a lie, and it was the first time she’d been lied to like this. The night before, she’d had a nightmare that Mickey had been standing at the entrance of her apartment, rubbing his thumb against a kitchen knife he held casually at his side, and had said, “You know I have to kill you, darling.” But tonight, she felt so assured of his basic goodness by his use of the word “homosexual,” when he could have said something crass instead, and it became a habit of hers to repeat this question of his to herself, often, adding her own nuances to it, until it became like a love letter disguised as a shopping receipt. “Do you think I hate homosexuals?” Do you think I can give you a baby, Shirley, and that you will be good? Do you think we will someday have a really fun life, with no lulls in it, only vacations and friends all around us? She’d wonder what kind of person he really was, in the plush, hidden recliner of his soul.

Planes Of Sunday -- Chapter Three

2011-04-21T09:05:00.000-07:00

3.
“The Tiger”

It starts out with a vision. A vision develops in one’s mind when one is just doing something plain old and dull. It develops into a private script one comes to adopt and cling to as a bona fide prediction. Once something has been established as a prediction, it embeds itself in one’s future and lies in waiting for its chance to spring. Oh destiny, you cruel tiger. You make a messy meal out of humanity.
Shirley’s vision, the one she thought of as a prediction of her future, was a vision of moving to an apartment building in Brooklyn with a crooked staircase, and hanging out in bars in the city with sooty older men. She would become their pal, their drunken slow-dance partner, their wet dream they would fantasize of romancing with sob stories and dignity, or raping. Where did she get these images from, movies? She would be a wealthy missionary, spreading hope and peace to the whiskey world, using her cleanliness like Clorox to bleach out the urine stains of futility. Only at night times maybe but maybe forever, for all of them, until there wasn’t a single guilty feeling left in her whole body.

So, because she had imagined this future so meticulously, and given it credence by being afraid of it and looking forward to it, what she did the summer she graduated high school was load up her car and drive to Brooklyn to start over new. She hurried the long drive there, as though it were only the arrival itself that mattered. But when she finally arrived, of course, she regretted having hurried; she regretted not having trained herself to be a more self-satisfied, lovable girl who mused over her own independence with a sly smile, someone who naturally stopped at all roadside attractions. She should have tasted the cherries sold at the fruit stand just off the highway in Eastern California, should have asked a stranger to take a photo of her in front of the arch in St. Louis, should have bought one of the postcards on the rack near the cash register in the hotel where she slept in Missoula, Montana. The picture on the postcards was of the hotel’s neon sign, a cartoon bear resting its night-capped head on a log, blowing Z’s of sleep from his neon mouth. “I’m on my way!,” she could have written on the back of the postcard, and whomever she decided to send it to would have been momentarily charmed.
Her second night in Brooklyn, the location of destiny, the clotheslines glimpsed through the window of her one-room apartment looked festive, like streamers hung across a doorway for a child’s birthday party; Shirley dressed in an old cotton dress and walked. The humidity made her clothes and skin feel damp like the salty beach air at her parents’ house had. She walked until she found the right bar, Barnaby’s; there was a stool there that had been waiting for her for years, its burgundy vinyl just longing for the pressure of her thighs. Shirley sat down on it and had her first look at Virginia the bartender, who she chose as her real mom, and whose affection, she decided, had already been won simply by Shirley having finally arrived. Her eyes then passed over the rest of the bar; the backless barstools lined up like bony animals at a feeding trough; the worn-in couches at the shadowy rear of the place; and the small, duct-taped tables that lined the wall. She then absorbed the diversity of the men there; the group of old black men; the little clump of predatorily good-looking, sullen punks and rockers just on their way to a show; a few older gay men whose tastes were communicated through subtle signals; a short, slim Puerto Rican man who sat at the bar and kept Virginia company most nights. And then there was the majority of men there, the white men with red, sunburnt faces and white hairs in their beards and moustaches, the ones she’d imagined she would someday know. This was the place.

“I’ll have a Budweiser.”

“That man over there, his name is Mike, he says he wants to buy this one for you. He’s really pretty harmless,” said Virginia.

Mike was a one-eyed Vietnam vet who would in time tell Shirley his life story, over and over, sometimes confessing to an unbearable weariness, as though she had begged to know what got him down. Shirley developed an affectation of closing her eyes and singing along with the juke box when a song she particularly liked came on, creating moments when the tipsy men at her table would realize how pretty she was and try to remember some charming pose of their own to use on her when she opened her eyes again. Sometimes, when one of the men uttered one of their awkward or too-generous or dirty remarks, the polite tolerance with which she responded felt sharper than disgust; it was a reminder to the man of the falseness of his drunken sense of insight and control. But the bar was cool, even during the hottest part of summer, like a cave, and the glasses of beer glowed amber, and it was easiest just to feel grateful to be there, in a city that was famous, in a room where there was always more to drink. This Shirley knew.

Planes Of Sunday -- Chapter Two

2011-04-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

2.
“So, Come on Night.”
-Elliott Smith

Shirley at eighteen, self-consciously beautiful, like a slightly malformed goddess. Capable of surprising a cousin at a picnic on the beach one summer by throwing her arms up over her head and smiling, poised like a gymnast before a cartwheel, when she saw that her aunt was about to take a photo of her (Christopher loves that photo). But incapable of stopping herself from marveling at her own unhappiness, even as the photo was being taken. Cold-seeming, though genuinely awed by nature, smoking pot and sometimes sneaking through the porch door to the beach late at night, just to watch the ocean rolling and curling and falling in on itself: “beautiful,” she’d murmur. So, capable of short intervals of joy. But incapable of ease. Silent and glum during sex with her junior and senior year boyfriend, Phillip, who loved her. Crouched over her body, his long hair fell along the sides of his calm face, like curtains, and brushed against her cheeks. This felt good, but like something that belonged to a different girl’s life, not her own. By the time she makes it to her thirties, she will be an apologetic smiler with wrecked features, but Shirley, at eighteen, is like a whisper-prayer, like a thought that is both sentimental and violent, and makes the thinker feel temporarily out of place.

Planes Of Sunday -- Chapter One

2011-04-19T15:30:00.000-07:00

Here is Chapter One of my first novel Planes of Sunday, which I've been trying to get published since I was a baby.
xox robin

1.
“The Sun”

It was the nineteen seventies. Shirley’s mom was a tan, slender, glistening peroxide woman who walked gracefully like she was on one perpetual Valium, which maybe she was but Shirley could only guess; her mother’s habits were things tucked into opaque fabrics or behind heavy walnut doors ornamented with brass knobs, or lined up in rows in the medicine cabinet in the adult bathroom which Shirley, even as an eighteen year old, was forbidden from entering. Having to wonder at what corrupt threads ran through the foundation of this household which she had been raised in, suspended in the center of like an anchored balloon, made Shirley feel naïve. Did her parents do drugs at their dinner parties? Did they have affairs, and if they didn’t, was it out of laziness, a moral code obscure to her as hieroglyphics, or love? Did her mom douche? When Shirley was fourteen, she read about douching in her health education textbook, and she wondered if her mom did things like this, bathroom dances. Shirley did not want to know about her mom and sex, but clung to the mystery of feminine hygiene, as though it could be a password to get her into the kingdom of affection.

She lived the white life, in a neighborhood full of long, white cars parked in front of cubist white Malibu homes, satisfying boxes stacked on the hills. The sand on the long beach was white. The swirling fringe of the ocean, eating up the beach and then retreating, white. Inside the homes, long white couches stretching across the hardwood floors, promising leisure. The women wore white leather high-heeled sandals and white linen dresses that trailed behind them like ghostly pets. Their teeth were white and so were the tips of their French-manicured fingernails. Their husbands wore white pants.

One autumn morning after a windstorm, she looked out the window while her toast toasted, and was shocked by the sight of a street strewn with stray palm fronds. The sienna, broken-hearted shape of the stalks of those feathery palms glistened like bare pairs of lungs, and the image temporarily endangered her bored sense of security within this mute, bleached beach landscape.

Dad was an old man who mostly kept his eyes closed against the rays of sunlight that shone on the metallic skeleton of the chaise lounge he burrowed into like it was a basinet. He was relaxed; he drifted into and out of warm sleep. He slowly opened his eyes to the vision of his young, strange offspring, poised tensely against the furniture in her own home, and then his gaze would sink to a woman who floated in the center of the pool on her own island, her pouting face so cooled by the slick pages of an open magazine.

Sweetheart #6

2011-03-28T18:05:00.001-07:00

I present you with Sweetheart #6, originally put out in May 1995.

Sleepyhead

2011-03-28T13:30:00.000-07:00

Phew, that is a long blog nap I've been taking since the new year started. While I've been asleep I've turned 32 and gotten a couple new cavities. I'll started blogging again soon. I plan to post good old Sweetheart Issue #6 up here tonight or tomorrow.

Sick of Sitting ‘Round

2011-01-19T11:17:00.001-08:00

“I’m dying for some action/I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book” – the boss

Blaaaaaah. Blah blah blah! Hell damn shit! Fuck! Stupid! Bunny! Puppy! Kitties! Lalalalalala! Okay I got that out of my system.

My grandpa moans in his sleep (well actually it’s up for debate whether he’s actually asleep or just sleepy when he says his trademark lament) “I’m old, I’m fat, I’m tired,” in a huge loud voice, practically every night, and if I were only a tiny bit less considerate, I would be bellowing this at night too these days. I have the post-Holiday doldrums in a big way. What I would like to do as a cure for these bore-blues is to start writing a third novel, a really long one this time, maybe even historical fiction (that’d be so cool! I’d really get to use my intelligence and my interest in history), but I have such writer’s block. It’s moved on to imagination block; I usually fantasize little stories all day long, like little scenarios of me telling someone off or someone interviewing me for a book on riot grrrl or something, silly little things like that, and I’m not even imagining those little things anymore, I’m just re-running and pondering recently watching film plots, etc. And I’m at least trying to read a lot of good writing to get me into a writing mindframe. I just finished reading an AMAZING book called The Colour by a British woman named Rose Tremaine, it’s really a strikingly well written book with a plot that doesn’t resemble anything I’ve ever read before. And now I’m reading Moby Dick and a book of short stories by Raymond Chandler. Still! No!! Inspiration!!! I’d like to go with Geof to Paris and to small towns in Ireland but that’s not really in the cards right now, but something like that would be so exciting. And I’d like a dog and a cat and a rabbit and a vegetable garden and a house and a literary agent and a million dollars and a best friendship with Bill Murray. Oh yeah and I wish Harry Potter and Griffendore were real. What was I saying? Oh right. Hell damn shit. Bunnies….Kitties…bored….don’t deserve a blog…. Xxoox princess robin

Hollywood Weirdness

2010-12-30T11:36:00.001-08:00

Living in Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, gives me a surreal feeling and sometimes an almost disbelief in my actual life versus various fictional lives I come across in movies and novels. I am a native Angeleno and I glamorized Hollywood with a purposeful naivete when I was a teenager – I knew that the corner of Hollywood and Vine was just a street corner with a heavy metal shop (or a liquor store or something – my memory fails me) and some poor people waiting for their bus on it, yet I loved that street corner anyway, and loved books and movies and songs and photos that built on the mythology of Hollywood, and I went there every weekend for awhile, a feeling of excitement on the bus ride there and usually a vague feeling of depression on the bus ride back but always wanting to live there when I grew up. I could go on forever on this part of my teens (Hollywood, Nirvana, Courtney Love, a book called Weetzie Bat, Guns N’ Roses and Riot Grrrl are the main themes that dominate my youth) and a few years ago I tried to write specifically about Hollywood but I find my attention span too short for all the non-fiction projects I start. Let me just sketch out a few more facts and then get to the Hollywood weirdness in particular that was distracting me as I drove to work this morning.
Facts: I loved Hollywood until my first band played its first show at a club in Hollywood and I was beaten up really bad there; then I wouldn’t go to Hollywood anymore, and started having panic attacks, and looked forward to moving out of the state for college. After college I moved back to L.A. and was appreciative of it and had the time of my life (not counting college) living in Hollywood. When me and my husband moved back to CA from Philly we lived in the San Bernardino mountains for awhile but when he started apartment scouting he told me he found the perfect place, and he ended up driving me to the same building I used to live in before, so I live where I used to live but now I’m a weird grown up going through an awkward early onset midlife crisis.
So that brings us up to date: I live in Hollywood and my midlife crisis consists of agoraphobia and a phobia they haven’t named yet, it’s an amorphous thing, it’s devastating but it lasts a whole life time sometimes, only white middle class girls seem to suffer from it and it’s characterized by not being entirely responsible with one’s tranquilizers sometimes and being a pretty flake and a bad housekeeper and an interesting person and an animal lover and a passionate crier and frightened and a wild gesticulator and a voracious reader. So the Hollywood weirdness that’s striking me lately is when I see it portrayed in movies or read about it in books. The examples that come to mind most readily are the movies “Heaven Can Wait”, “Greenburg” and “Funny People”, the A.M. Holmes’ novel This Book Will Save Your Life and the Joan Didion memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. I read or saw all of these works recently and in all of them there were appearances of places really close to where I live. In some cases even my street was named or shown. I don’t know how to end this post because this is just a ramble, not a fully formed thought. It just feels so weird to hardly be going out and to be going through this anxious phase full of fear and doubt and to see a version of my surroundings in works of fiction; when something is fictionalized it is given importance. It’s almost as though I’m watching or reading about my life, but my own life is so ___________ right now. That’s my current Hollywood weirdness.

day late dollar short

2010-12-23T13:32:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite books I've read in the past year is Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, who also wrote the amazing novels Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans.

I became anxious a few months ago when I heard that a film was being made of the novel, but I just learned that the film has already come and gone (in limited release), and while that information released me from the anxiety I feel at having someone ruin something I love for public consumption, I was also disappointed. here are a few pretty film stills.
xoxo robin

Cat Noir

2010-12-15T08:48:00.001-08:00

I wrote a children’s story about a little boy whose cat dies, and for two months it was the best-selling book for children ages 5-7. Almost unanimously, the book critics who wrote about the book focused on the originality and bravery of the scene in which my protagonist, little Christopher, kneels beside his bed to say a prayer the night his cat Velvet has had to be put down, and finds he doesn’t know what to say. “Thank you my God for the day you have given me,” he begins, as his nightly prayers always begin, the way he was taught at Sunday School. But then he doesn’t know how to continue. “I feel very sad,” the prayer concludes. The book itself concludes with an illustration of Christopher smiling, sitting between his parents on an imprecise green watercolor brush-stroke of a couch. His mother and father each have an arm around his shoulder, and with their free hand, each parent holds the hand of Christopher that is closest to them. The words on this last page say: “They explained to him that there would be other sad days in life, but that the sadness would just make the happy days feel better. Christopher understood. ‘Thank you, Velvet,’ Christopher whispers. The End.”

The book made me enough money not to work in an office for awhile, and my husband was able to add me to his health insurance plan, so I took a year off from the life of work I’d been living. I was going to write another novel. None of the other ones ever went anywhere, but my agent assured me that, thanks to the success of “Christopher and Velvet,” I wouldn’t have any more difficulty getting published in the future. But, and this I couldn’t tell anyone, I’d already ruined the fragile balance of my well-being. I’d thought too much about Christopher and Velvet, before, during and since I’d written the book. “I feel very sad,” I often whispered to myself.
Instead of a novel, I started to write a memoir about myself and the cats in my life, a memoir that would prove so disturbing, by the time I finished the last sentence, I would have lost my capability to pretend that everything is all right. I would be a shaky, haunted-looking stray.

TO BE CONTINUED

Curse of the Moody Polar Bears

2010-11-30T13:04:00.000-08:00

Looks like I’m going to have to use this blog as a rant forum again this entry. Here goes: both at the last office I worked in and in my current one, I’ve noticed a trend of people who don’t like someone else assuming that the person they don't like is bipolar. “Bipolar” really seems to have made it into the lexicon of well-known words. A person will say something like, “God she drives me crazy. She’s totally bipolar, I can tell.” At my last office, I wasn’t overly fond of much of the staff, so it was hard for me to not say something like “better bipolar than sub-intelligent.”

But now I like my co-workers, yet I still overhear all these assumptions that their enemies must be bipolar, to describe said enemy’s unfathomable jerkiness. It really makes me feel like shit every single time I hear something like this. Bipolar people are a pain in the ass to deal with, okay, I get it. I believe that, at best, psychiatry is a misogynist pseudoscience fueled by kickbacks from the drug companies to the less ethical of the "doctors", so I’m not here to attack the misuse of a clinical term. I just feel like when people complain about “bipolar” assholes that are hard to deal with, well, it’s just too thoughtless, and also, it’s hard not to take personally. At my old office, when someone would bitch about a bipolar co-worker I’d say “oh really? Hmm. I’m bipolar,” just to keep people on their toes. It is hard not to take the casual use of that word a bit personally.
When I had a nervous breakdown and became an outpatient at a mental health facility, it was a prerequisite that the intake doctor give you a diagnosis, and I was given “Bipolar II” (like the Scarecrow being given his diploma or the Tin Man his heart-shaped watch). It is different from the regular, heartbreaking Bipolar disorder. Bipolar II includes racing thoughts and rapid cycling mood swings. So instead of spending a year trying to start one’s own business and then the next year homeless, the type of extreme action that someone with Bipolar disorder might do – I, who may or may not legitimately be classified Bipolar II (I think the best term for me is probably bummer-magical) have a hard time controlling how fast my thoughts go in the morning, even before coffee. I have short-lived manias, and I don’t really have bad depression crashes because I’m on an anti-depressant. The “rapid cycling” that characterizes bipolar II is a rapid cycling of moods, and yes, I’m very moody, laughing one second and bitching really harshly at someone two minutes later. Anyway, maybe I’m bipolar II, maybe I’m just me. But it really seems such a terse dismissal of people’s problems (people diagnosed as Bipolar usually have a much harder time than what I’ve described as my own rollercoaster) when people use the term Bipolar to complain about someone who is a moody, indecisive asshole. If you are one of those people who has fallen into the habit of using "bipolar" casually, could you try, just for a week, to try replacing the word “bipolar” with “moody” or “indecisive”? Or even a really gnarly swearword nickname. I’m just trying to keep some things, like the suffering of the mental ill, sacred.

short story

2010-11-16T14:02:00.000-08:00

Angel Girls
By Robin Crane

Martin started giving him advice about girls when Tom was in his early teens. The advice focused on the bleak side of love, and all of Martin’s theories were proven true in Tom’s unfolding love life, leading Martin to guiltily wonder (at least he’d had his heart in the right place when he’d warned Tom of the landmines and Chinese Fingertraps hidden in an interesting girls’ psyche) if he’d created a self-fulfilling prophecy for his brother.

Two stoned young adults lying on their respective beds in the bedroom they shared, always lying on their backs and keeping their eyes trained on the ceiling instead of at each other (at night with the lights turned off, the glow-in-the-dark constellation stickers Martin’d long ago stood on a ladder and stuck to the ceiling gave them a landscape they never tired of staring at), they talked late into the night, almost every night.

Martin said once, “You’re going to have the same problem I do. You’re going to fall in love with – well actually, you’re going to fall in love with girls like Tammy (Tammy was Tom’s crush from 2nd through 4th grade). Ha, what do you know?, it’s already happened. Tammy was different than all the other girls at your school, right?”

“Of course. She was amazing, she was so pretty. She was like if someone stuck the soul of Garbo inside the body of Shirley Temple and then turned Shirley Temple into a Marilyn Manson fan.”

“Right. She already had a sense of style, and I remember when she came over to the house after school sometimes, she was nuts. She always said these weird things, or else she’d be uncomfortably quiet and mom’d have to twist her arm to get a complete sentence out of her. And she was kind of funny-looking but she was pretty too. I’m right, right?”

“Spot on,” Tom said, being in the midst of his British slang phrase. “You know, I still think about Tammy sometimes. I tried looking her up on Facebook but I couldn’t find her. I think her family moved to somewhere in Oregon, somewhere near Portland.”

“Well, yeah, of course you miss her sometimes, she was your first love. But she’s probably either a lesbian, a cutter, or, like, an inpatient at a drug treatment center by now. Or so charming she crushes everything in her path. Some of these crazy girls are so charming it’s like torture, because then they turn on a dime. They end up on sex benders too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Girls like the type I like, because they’re special … girls you’ll like … we like them because they’re different, but they’re different, they wear weird clothes and mouth off in class and it seems so wonderful to be the one to take care of them, because they’re damaged. Their stepdads or uncles molested them. It’s always something like that with these girls. They always end up having some weird sex issues. You can never just be, like, their man, their important person. Their brains are always crowded with all this other bad stuff.”

“Not always. That can’t always be true, with every beautiful girl either of us is ever going to like, forever and ever. You’re smart, big brother, but you and over-dramatization are like…” Tom wasn’t expected to finish the thought, because they were stoned. Thoughts were allowed to hang in the air in these circumstances, the unsaid portions being unnecessary to say because they were easy to guess at.

“You just wait and see,” Martin said. He was only half-kidding; he’d just had his heart broken that day. “The best girls are so crazy. Something bad has always happened to them. There’s nothing to do, though, once you’ve met one of these girls. You just have to smile to yourself the first time she kisses you, and feel devastated with pleasure once you guys start doing it, and then she’ll start to get too paranoid and awful to stand or else she’ll just decide she’s done with you and, and that’s what happens.”

“I think I know this already,” Tom giggled.

“Oh yeah? How?”

“Movies and songs. Especially songs.”

“Well anyway, good luck. I just you needed warning. Do what you will with this knowledge, Tonto.” These were the last words he said before turning his back to his brother and falling asleep that night.

This vision of Tom’s romantic future proved, as I said, prophetic. All these girls, these beautiful girls with self-inflicted cigarette burns on their arms like irritated mosquito bites, and the sexual history of having been too promiscuous or of having let nobody touch them. All these beautiful, irreverent artists. They never needed him or else they needed him too much. Instead of self-exploration, the problems of his current girlfriend was what he meditated on in his idle time. But Martin had insinuated that these girls carried on, somehow immortal.
Martin had not warned him that these girls possessed any vulnerabilities they were not able to use to their advantage. Tom had to find this out himself. He was 23. His girlfriend’s name was Marie. She had dark brown hair and a too-generous inclination which led her to allow homeless men to make inappropriate remarks towards her, the type of behavior that she deemed worthy of a slap in the face when it came from a peer or a business man (she was beautiful and appealing to almost all men). Because her parents were well-off, they’d bought her a Lexus SUV. It was much too noticeable an automobile for her but it would have been unkind to refuse the gift.

What happened was that she was driving late at night down a side street, and a car that’d been behind her suddenly sped past, though the street only had one lane for each direction, and blocked her so that she could not drive forward. Marie had pepper spray in her purse but as the man who got out of the car and walked towards her kept his stare meeting hers, and she urinated on herself, she knew that the weapon would be of no use, it would be too hard to move enough to use the pepper spray. Plus, she just couldn’t hurt another person. This is the story as her friend, Pansy, sitting in the passenger seat, told it. “Just keep the windows rolled up and gun it. Just start driving. Run him over if you have to. Marie?” Marie did keep her window rolled up, staring at the tall, heavyset, bald white man who was staring at her and who raised a gun level with her head and shot her in the head through the glass of the window. He tried to open her door to toss the body out and get in behind the wheel, but the door was locked, and the way he got in the car was to let Pansy stumble and run away, and then to get in through the passenger’s side of the SUV. Up ahead, his brother got behind the wheel of their car, and the assailant followed behind in the Lexus to their house three blocks away, where the Lexus would be stashed in the garage for the night.

Pansy moved to Columbus but one night when she was back in L.A. because her parents and her therapist had decided together that celebrating the holidays might be a healthy move for “reintegrating her emotionally into society,” she and Tom ran into each other at the grocery store and she said, “Could we hang out for awhile?”

“I’d like that. We can’t talk about Marie though, I can’t do that.”
In place of verbal agreement, Pansy just blanched.

“So,” Tom was trying to keep things as light as possible, “uh, we’ll just go stand in line and buy our stuff, and…since neither of us have anything that’ll go bad, we can leave it in my trunk and-“

“Oh, my dad was going to pick me up in a half hour, in front of the store.”

“Oh, okay, I’ll just sit with you until he comes if you want.”
He could see that her brain was hurriedly running through scenarios, sentences, outcomes, memories, but he couldn’t even guess at the gist of these thoughts.

“I changed my mind, Tom, I just want to wait for my dad by myself. I’m sorry. Sorry about Marie and sorry I’m about to blow you off. I just have to do what’s best for me.”

That’s true. When a woman is in a threatening situation or feels threatened by the prospect of life itself, she has to do what’s best for her. These special women that Martin and Tom are drawn to resemble feral cats sometimes. These special women can die. Everyone dies someday.

Sweetheart #5

2010-10-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

Here's Sweetheart #5, put out in 1994, sometime in 9th grade. all the rhyming feminist poems are lyrics from what i called my "solo career" ... from before i started being in bands. i particularly like this zine because it predates much of my late-teen bitterness :).

xoxox robin

As always, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

road rage

2010-10-21T15:40:00.001-07:00

When I give in to road rage, I know that I’m being a Los Angeles cliché, but I also feel like a realer version of myself, at the same time. I wish it were illegal to turn right on a red light in CA, or at least in my neighborhood (Hollywood). The fact that people can turn right on red makes it so that when they’re at the corners of intersections, they just stare left, waiting for an ever so slight break in the oncoming traffic so they can make the coveted (why?!) maneuver of turning right on a red (presumably, these assholes don’t want to be late for their botox injections and hand-done carwashes because these people sure don’t look like they have jobs to get to – they look like disgusting soulless dipshits sewn into $1000-but-still-ugly clothes). So they’re not even aware of the fact that the pedestrians have the right of way and are attempting to make eye contact with these drivers so they can safely cross the street. I’ve almost been hit several times as a pedestrian, when I thought I’d made eye contact with one of these jackoffs. I’ve also been the person who was driving straight down the street, minding my own, when one of these drivers made a right turn in front of me that made me have to jam on the breaks.
This morning, I was waiting to turn right on the corner of La Brea and Hollywood, two busy streets. La Brea might look empty for a second but then out of nowhere there’ll be someone turning onto it up at Franklin, speeding like a little demon down the street, and I’ve never been interested in trying to turn right on my red at this corner and hoping not to get hit by one of the La Brea speed demons. This morning though this old woman would honk profusely everytime there was a teeny break in the La Brea traffic because I was supposed to try to speed in front of the oncoming traffic. Maybe if she was driving she could outrace them, she had a BMW, but I have a 2001 Corolla that takes a second to accelerate. But she would not stop honking. I was seriously seeing spots from anger, I thought I was going to have a fucking heart attack. Sometimes I feel like I hate society at large and then I think “nah, life is beautiful,” and then some disgusting bitch like this lady completely shatters my fragile optimism. So to drive her crazy, I rolled down the window and turned up the radio and pretended I was just sitting there enjoying the music while waiting for my light to turn green. She increased her horn honking. Then when the light turned green, I waited for the pedestrians to pass before I made my turn and that about made her break her wrist with how hard she was honking. Finally I turned, she sped in front of me, I flipped her the bird forever and honked and honked at her. This might seem crazy to you but why should people be able to get away with acting like that. Then she got to my right and started mouthing some insult I couldn’t hear because our windows were closed. I reached over to roll down my window (I don’t have automatic windows like her) and screamed “I’m not going to speed to make a red light.” She decided to keep her window rolled up and to all of a sudden switch to “nicely” waving at me, probably thinking it’d drive me crazy to scream without being heard. I switched gears and overly nicely waved back at her when she did this, but then couldn’t help but switch to another “fuck you” and bird flipping before the light changed and we kept our distance from each other on the road.
So, am I myself when I succumb to road rage, or am I giving in to the city’s bad vibes? Really, I think I’m just being myself. I hate injustice, I hate someone owning a car that costs as much as some people’s rent, and I hate anyone who’d be self-centered enough to disregard other people’s safety. Too bad my anger turned into a bad episode of arrhythmia and a flaring up of the frequent pain in my scar tissue, that usually flares up when I get agitated. Who cares. If you're out there, lady, I'm ready for round two.

come to dvd, my pretties!

2010-09-24T12:55:00.001-07:00

two of my favorite movies that I keep hoping will be released on dvd are Housekeeping (1987) and Really Rosie and the Nutshell Kids (made for TV, 1975). These are two movies that, as a quirky, assertive girl, are endlessly enjoyable for me, but they also possess amazing charm, both of these films.
Housekeeping, which I own on VHS at least, is based on a beautiful (though admittedly [and beautifully] slow) novel by Marilynne Robinson. I have heard that this book is a cult classic in colleges, with feminist literature major types. I didn't know that when I first read the novel, and honestly, I like to think that me and my friend Jocelyn are the only 2 people in the world who've read this book -- I think the book inspires that sort of feeling, there's a quietness to it that makes it like reading your own secret. Watching the movie first, letting yourself believe the characters are real, and then reading the novel afterwards is a neat experience, because there are extra adventures in the novel, so it's like you're finding out extra clues about the characters. Sylvie, the aunt in the movie, played by an actress who hasn't gotten as many roles as she should have, is Christine Lahti (admittedly, I extra like her because of her tallness). I think my favorite fictional film character (besides Margot Tenenbaum) is Ruthie -- she's just the best. I try to base my fashion sense on Sylvie and my sense of ethics on Ruthie. Until it eventually comes out on dvd, if it ever does, please try to get your hands on it if you still have a VCR.

Really Rosie is a different kind of amazing. It's based on Maurice Sendak stories and characters, features amazing, simple animation, and Rosie is voiced by Carole King, who sings all the songs. I have an illustrated song book for this movie, and had the VHS years ago, but I don't have it anymore, and I want everyone to see it. The best thing about this movie is its lonely end. Rosie is a bossy little girl who lives on a street somewhere like in brooklyn, and she talks her friends into putting on a big show with her -- this is me all over -- I used to ALWAYS try to talk my friends into putting together sometime of show. there are all these amazing songs, and when she's about to get down to the brass tacks of actually executing the show, her friends either get bored or get called inside to dinner, and she's just like "hey, where's everyone going?" and she's left all alone sitting on a stoop, talking to a cat or something. This scene epitomizes loneliness so amazingly. But the other great thing is that Rosie is full of confidence -- there's a song about it that goes "no star shines as bright as me, I'm rooooooosie," but it's obvious that it's the kind of confidence she has to work hard at to make herself believe in. in other words, she's the perfect blend of vulnerable and amazing. There's a DVD called "Where the Wild Things Are and other Maurice Sendak Stories" (2002) that has some of the songs from Really Rosie in it, but it's not the same as watching Really Rosie, because you don't get to enjoy the whole plot when you're just watching bits and pieces.
I highly recommend trying to get your hands on both of these movies, they're two of the best I've ever seen.

xox robin

xox

2010-09-23T07:17:00.001-07:00

back soon... writer's block. in the meantime, check out my new craft website: wearetheleopards.net

a story i wrote shortly after my heart surgery

2010-09-01T15:51:00.000-07:00

In A Lonely Place
By Robin Crane

When she regained consciousness, Elizabeth’s mind was working, but her body, her mouth, still couldn’t move. She heard her parents, who were standing at the foot of her bed in her room at the ICU, speaking to her. They weren’t speaking of her in the third person, the way two people might be expected to when they think that someone is unconscious, but they also weren’t talking like they thought she could hear them. It was more like they were speaking to her superstitiously, as though this one-sided conversation ensured the definite future of conversations she would soon be able to participate in.

When she finally regained control of her body, the first thing she did was try to speak, even though her parents had left hours ago. It was an effort embarked on solely to hear her own voice, but it wasn’t possible because there was a plastic tube obstructing her throat. Still, she wouldn’t stop trying to say something, and finally the attending nurse snapped at her, “You’re the only patient I’ve had who has been this bad. Stop fidgeting and go to sleep.” So, one of the first thoughts towards another person Elizabeth had after her surgery was “Fuck you. I just got my heart cut open.” This didn’t seem to bode well for life from this point on.

Her parents brought her eyeglasses after day three in the hospital, allowing her to see the images on the TV screen and to henceforth watch TV practically constantly. TV, as always, was like a person who was unconditionally kind to her. The morning she’d gone in for surgery, while in the waiting room, she’d been watching the morning news and had seen a story about a monkey in a zoo that, just out of nowhere, had begun to walk upright. She would remember this serendipitous nudge from me forever.

At night, with only a little bit of the light from the nurse’s station outside her door creeping in, the bluish glow emanating from the screen made her room look like a movie set, and the idea of her being observed by an unseen audience made her feel less catastrophic. There was a Humphrey Bogart movie on one night called “In a Lonely Place,” about a man who is powerless to stop his own violent urges, purposely staying on the fringes of society as a way to protect people from himself, as though he could become possessed by his uglier self at any moment. With an IV full of Valium warming her, the character’s plan of self-exile struck her as the safest, most noble option for survival she’d yet come across in her twenty five years. It suddenly seemed almost worth it having that singular, new scar of hers running down her chest (it would never heal correctly), if it meant she had an excuse to set herself apart from the nice but luckier people who surrounded and loved her.

She left the hospital on a Tuesday afternoon, still wearing the terry cloth hospital slippers and shuffling along the bright, white hallway. The nurse from her first day in the room in the ICU happened to be exiting the elevator as Elizabeth and her father were boarding it, and in passing, Elizabeth looked the woman in the eye, and said, definitely loud enough to be heard, “Bitch.” It was an enormous relief.

I know all this because I am the Goddess and the entity that sees everything all at once and reads your thoughts. I am wonderfully kind and have an empathetic, bottomless sense of humor. I love you all. There is no such thing as hell.

Folk Song

2010-08-12T16:05:00.001-07:00

The doc took one look at me and said
“Tell me about your mother”
I said “No sir, but you can tell me about yours
next week or another.”
The pictures in his office gave one the blues
All the mountains and lily ponds in cheerful hues.
The sickness is an epidemic
Please send relief
FEMA send the antidote
For Bored Beyond Belief.

short story i wrote recently

2010-07-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

My Favorite Siblings

Lorena and Iris were gathered around the computer screen, each vying for sole control of the keyboard while trading their opinions of the photos and short bursts of autobiographical information that appeared on the Myspace pages of girls they knew from school. I was sitting at the sticky dining room table nearby, tutoring their younger sister, Maria, and from time to time I looked up from the book we were reading together and I caught glimpses of the images on the computer screen. To me, the teenagers in the pictures looked near identical to the two teenagers with me in the room, and it made me sort of sad, the strong pull of conformity, as well as the instinct in females for comparison, the way Lorena and Iris were comparing themselves and each other to these other young women. But then I corrected myself. For starters, the middle school they attended required them to wear a uniform; you had to wear either a gray polo shirt or sweatshirt, and navy blue pants or skirt. This explained why they looked so similar, I told myself. Still, the girls all wore their hair the same way. They flat-ironed it straight, and parted it dramatically along one side of their faces, their severely straightened bangs halving their blemished foreheads – why make adolescence any more grotesque and lonely than it has to be already?, I asked myself whenever I was struck by the severity and aggressive declaration of aloofness intended by this popular hairstyle.

I had to remind myself, when the girls’ MySpace session was beginning to irritate me, that Lorena and Iris, and each girl whose image they were scrutinizing, was an individual, with a past and a self-awareness and most likely thirsty, undertended, at the mercy of brash actions they had no time to think out beforehand, just acted on. Self righteously, I’d just forgiven all teenaged girls their self-absorption. But in particular, I could forgive Iris and Lorena anything, because they were clever and compassionate and tough, and they did me the kindness of treating me more like one of their own than like a grown up.

I was a single, 30 year old woman, raised an only child.

I think it’s probably abnormal to be this young and so genuinely uninterested in living.

It was the time of day for the ice cream truck to begin its daily routine, its several circles around the block and then its idling in front of the apartment building for up to an hour sometimes, playing its never ending recording, a music-box tinkle robotically humming the melody of the song “Around the World in Eighty Days.”

“Ooh, Sammie, it’s your ice cream stud”, Lorena teased me, “Go say hi.” This teasing was the result of me having glimpsed the teenaged boy who drove the ice cream truck one day, and telling the girls, mostly just to have something relatable to say to them, that I was surprised at how handsome he was. It’s true. He almost looked like Johnny Depp, except he had the cowboy sideburns of Johnny Knoxville. That’s what I said to the girls, thinking that these celebrities were people they would have heard of, but Iris immediately demanded, “Who are they?”

“Go talk to him,” the girls excitedly encouraged. “Pleeeease. We’ll watch from the window. You have to!!!” I usually smoked a bowl in my car before starting my tutoring sessions, so my inhibitions were low as they made this request. “Maria and I were just in the middle of diagramming the plot of Amelia Bedelia,” I weakly protested, but Maria had already closed the book and was giggling, expectantly, knowing her every request was my pleasure and that I was about to step outside to talk to the young ice cream man.

“Okay, dorks, I’ll go out there, but when I get back inside, you need to turn the TV down, or off; I have a headache,” I said, stalling. Then, I walked to the window of the opened metallic shutters of the ice-cream truck, wheat-pasted with bright cardboard pictures of Good Humor ice cream bars, Eskimo Pies, Astro Pops and Moon Pies. I called in to the boy inside, not sounding like a sexual being or like a customer either.

“Hola,” I said, in my white urban twang.

“Hi,” he replied. “I like your earrings, they match your eyes.” I didn’t expect we would actually flirt; I was planning on just pretending for the sake of my onlookers that I was having a conversation with him while actually just standing there looking at the rows of candy like jewels, squishy tamarind suckers like amber wrapped in cellophane and the little dented freezer inside. He surprised me with his sweetness. So much so that I said, “Thank you,” already forgetting he’d complimented me, just thanking him for the attention.

“Are they a gift from a boyfriend”
“Yes.”
“Aw, that’s too bad. Where is he right now?”
“I don’t know, he gave them to me five years ago, and we broke up later that month,” I smiled. “I tutor the littlest girl who lives in the apartment behind us.”
“Oh yeah? So you’re smart, huh. That’s nice, that’s nice.”
“Mmm hmm,” was all I could think to respond with, but I’ve always enjoyed humming that particular phrase of assent. The noises are soothing. Mmm. Hmmm.

The young man stopped the organizing and counting he’d been at while we’d been speaking, and he said, “You want some meth?”

“What? No!” My feelings were hurt, but I wasn’t shocked. I forced myself to believe in Existentialism when I was in college, and now nothing shocks me.

“No,” I reiterated, “Of course not. You don’t sell drugs to little kids, do you?”
I was asking more out of curiosity than outrage, but his expression changed quickly to one of pure hatred. “Of course not. How old are you, though, in your thirties, right? Why else would you come to this truck? You want an Eskimo Pie?” I was speechless.

“What?” he demanded, and I turned around to walk back to the apartment, pretending for the girls that I’d just had a funny conversation with him. I felt so ugly and old and hopeless, at that moment, but then, I heard him addressing my back and what he said was, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Lo siento. I think you’re pretty,” and my gratefulness at his graceful ending to our horrific exchange registered immediately on my face, and I think the girls, as they watched me, thought he’d just said something exciting, something flattering in a normal way, like, “See you tomorrow?”

This all transpired a couple weeks earlier, and the girls were now teasing me about him, but looking through the apartment window, I could see that he had been replaced by a much older man.

“He’s not in the truck today, girls. Look, it’s an old man. Hey, what time is it, anyway?” I stayed for sessions of 2 hours. An extra half hour had passed. “I don’t know, “Lorena said. At 14 (the oldest of the sisters) she was constantly angry with her parents, and now she complained of them, “God, they’re always late. But you can go home now if you want; you don’t have to wait for them. It’s okay for me to be in charge.” I didn’t want to leave them, though, and it had nothing to do with believing Lorena incapable of holding down the fort. I was concerned that her parents hadn’t warned me that they were going to be late. Despite Lorena’s complaint about them, they seemed to me prompt and responsible, and it was uncharacteristic of them to not be home by now. But I did leave, reassuring myself first by asking Iris, “Your parents let your Lorena babysit you guys, right?” and she said, “Yeah, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Here, you can finish the crackers.” Ever since Maria first asked if I wanted to share her snack with her, Ritz Crackers, I’d been eating them compulsively, trying to sneak them out of their plastic packaging so it wasn’t noticeable how greedy I could be sometimes. “Thanks,” I smiled, only slightly abashed at the immaturity required to eat snacks offered by children. But I loved it, the taste and texture of the buttery crackers dissolving in my mouth.

“Okay, I’m going to leave now, alright? But, like… are you guys scared? I’ll stay until they get home if you’re scared, not that there’s anything to be scared of; I’m sure it’s just traffic” – the husband and wife worked at the same company, an airplane parts manufacturing plant in Westchester, and commuted to work together. I directed this question to Maria, I think because I knew she found my over-solicitousness amusing, but of course it was Lorena, the one in charge, who answered: “Don’t worry, we’re fine.”

By 8:30 that night, I’d already had my third shot of the vodka I kept in the freezer, its bottle frosted like Christmastime windows in old movies. I drank standing at my filthy kitchen counter, in purple underwear and an oversized sweatshirt from my Alma Mater, its cuffs riddled with little holes because I nibble at the fabric of my cuffs during times of nervousness. “Fuck it,” was a phrase I was saying to myself, my toast, before each quick gulp of the cold, bitter syrup.
What was I giving up on, stealing significance from, as I repeated this mantra, “Fuck it”? Fuck what? Well, I meant it as an undercutting of my existence. Because I am an insignificant person, with no proof to the contrary. So, “Fuck it,” and I swallowed a 4th shot.

Who do I consider significant? People who do something passionately enough to make them famous, and mothers, mothers like lionesses, martyrs more real than Christ.

The phone rang, and it was Maria. “Maria? It’s 9:30. Are you allowed to be up this late? I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
She was crying. “My parents didn’t come home yet, Ms. Samantha. What do I do?”

“Shit!” I said, and she giggled at the swearword, against her better judgment in light of the serious situation. “And also, Iris got mad at Lorena for bossing us, so she left. I think she went to her boyfriend’s place but we can’t call her because she left her phone here.” Then Lorena must have taken the phone from her hands, and now I was asking Lorena, “What’s happening there? Where are they? Do you think Iris is going to come back tonight?”

“I don’t know. How’m I supposed to know? Shit!” She yelled it so loudly I imagined passersby outside (one thing I loved so much about their neighborhood was the way people were always walking around, just strolling on the sidewalk or sitting in groups on steps, like I imagine neighborhoods used to be in some other, better decade) hearing her and wondering what was wrong.

Lorena’s sobs were so quiet they just sounded like deep breaths. I heard Maria, who I secretly considered my best friend, cooing, “It’s okay, LoLo, it’s okay, Pretty." Then Maria took the phone back from Lorena. “Hi,” she said. “Hi,” I responded. “Is there anyone you can think of to go over and get help from?” The neighborhood was one in which most people were acquainted with each other; the elementary school was catty-corner to the residential block, and almost every apartment held a child who attended that school. I was just an outsider in that world but I sensed a network of camaraderie between the parents of those children and I imagined there were neighbors who’d be better able to help the girls than I was. The problem was, and I’d observed enough interactions between Maria and other neighborhood kids to know this, she seemed to harbor a vague sense of rivalry towards each household on the block. Once, a girl her age knocked on the front door, and after some deliberation, Maria opened the door a few inches. “What is it?” she demanded of the girl, who was craning her neck to get a look at me. Her face registered a fascination with who I might be, and then she looked around, took in the whole room, the huge framed poster of a jaguar hanging over the comfortable rust-colored couch, the family photos arranged on top of the television, the stack of DVD’s in the corner of the room.

“What do you want?” Maria asked of the girl, almost wearily, as though the girl was out to drain Maria of what little energy she possessed (she was lethargic and mysterious, my little friend).

“Can I borrow your Finding Nemo DVD?”
“No.”
“Come on,” the girl whined, “Why not?”
“Because it’s not mine,” Maria snapped, and then she closed the door in the girl’s face and came back to sit next to me, telepathically asking me to leave the subject be, but I couldn’t help myself, I asked her, “Why were you so mean? She seemed like she really wants to be friends with you.”
Like a spurned lover in a sitcom, Maria answered, “She knows why.”
I persisted, because Maria was so considerate to me and her family, it was hard to adjust to this new harshness in her. “Well Jeez-Louise, you didn’t have to be so mean to her. Was she mean to you once?”
“No, not really.”
“Well then why did you just slam the door in her face?”
“Okay, she’s nice outside of school, but in class, she’s a brat.”

Since then, I’d seen her snub adults and other kids her own age, always in the same precociously guarded way, and so I wasn’t surprised when Maria now told me “Nobody here can help us.”
“Do you want me to come over?”
“Yes!”

I was slightly drunk as I drove there, and I know that is bad, but it is what I did.

When I arrived at their apartment building, my headlights danced across the familiar face of Iris, temporarily stunned by the light and in disbelief that I was there. She was sitting on a stoop the next apartment building over, with a group of teenagers. None of them were speaking, they were just psychically sharing their boredom or maybe their stoned, far-reaching thoughts, and watching the neighborhood dogs and cats scale roofs and fences like nonchalant acrobats.
“Samantha?” Iris ran to me as I got out of the car, and for the regard she held me in at the moment, I wish I could pay her a hundred dollars or make her immortal, I felt just that validated.

We separated from the group and she grabbed my hands. “Lorena’s being such a bitch. She keeps saying mom and dad are dead, like that they got in an accident. Something weird must’ve just happened at the factory, like a bomb scare and they’re still sitting outside, waiting for their bosses to tell them that they can go home. But Lorena’s running around the apartment making Maria cry. And then she called her gay-ass girlfriend over to comfort her, and when I bitched her out to leave, she grabbed my arm with her busted-ass manicure and made my arm bleed.” On a different day I would have appreciated having the mystery of tough, secretive Lorena’s sexual orientation revealed to me, but now it didn’t matter.

“Let me see your arm where she scratched you,” I said, and she held out her arm but it was a plane of completely unharmed skin. We made eye contact and she just shrugged. She started to cry. We entered the apartment. Lorena and Maria were leaning against each other on the couch, watching TV.

Maria was awful at reading comprehension, the subject I was tutoring her in. Whenever I brought a book for us to study, I did an exercise in which, before we actually read the book, we looked at the illustrations on each page, and based on what the picture showed, she predicted how the plot was going to develop, and then we turned the page to see what the next picture showed. Without fail, her guesses at a logical course of events was always incredibly off the mark. We read one book where a postman delivers mail to different fairy tale characters, stopping to chat with each character before moving on to the next. The postman climbed up a beanstalk to bring the giant who lived above the clouds a letter from his tiny antagonist, Jack, and the giant poured the postman a huge mug of tea as a gesture of kindness; the postman then trekked to the house of Cinderella’s bitter stepfamily, delivering a wedding invitation for the wedding of Cinderella to Prince Charming, and the women tried to engage him in a conversation about their resentment regarding Cinderella’s good luck; next, he brought three kind, rural bears a letter of apology from Goldilocks, and the bears invited him to stay for dinner. When he delivered a catalogue for witch supplies to the witch from Hansel and Gretel, I asked Maria, “What do you think is going to happen next?”

“I think the witch is going to get mad at him for bothering her, and as punishment, she’s going to put a curse on him to take his voice away, like the witch does to Ariel in The Little Mermaid.”

I used to let her failure at reading comprehension frustrate me. I use to get irritated that she had such little regard for, or maybe it was an understanding of, plot, of how events are most likely to shake out. Of course the smug, paranoid, house-proud pig who builds his house out of bricks will be prepared when the inevitable predator finally arrives at the door. Of course everything will work out in the end for Snow White, while karma catches up with her stepmother, the wicked woman who suffers from debilitating vanity. Maria had no interest in outcomes. Whenever I asked her to define “reading comprehension” for me, which I did at least once at the beginning and end of each tutoring session, she had a different wrong answer, from “Um…a poem?” to “The pictures in the story.” After four or five sessions of trying hard to teach her, though, I became charmed at the way she always included me, my favorite animal, my favorite color, in the writing exercises I gave her. Once I asked her to write a five sentence story with a cohesive beginning, middle and end, and this is what she wrote: “Once upon a time there was a girl named Ms. Samantha. She visited a girl named Maria twice a week. Maria was ten years old. Ms. Samantha was pretty and funny. Sometimes she got confused, and when she did they both thought it was funny and laughed.” I could have taught her about using pronouns carefully, but I loved the way I couldn’t tell from the story whether she was saying that Ms. Samantha got confused, or whether it was the little girl who had the fits of funny confusion. Gradually, we began speaking to each other as peers, in a pidgin language of simple words and roundabout summaries for serious problems. Once, when Lorena absentmindedly pushed her sleeves up, Maria and I simultaneously noticed a maze of cuts that Lorena kept hidden under the cuff of her long sleeves. “I think my sister’s pretty sad, or mad or something,” Maria whispered once Lorena’d closed her bedroom door behind her.
“I think you’re right,” I said.
“I hope she stops hurting her arm.”
“Me too. If she doesn’t and you feel like talking to me about it, maybe I can help. Maybe I can ask her to stop, or ask her what’s wrong.”

“Thanks,” she said, handing me a Gummi Bear. She wore her hair in a Pageboy cut her mom trimmed every month or so. Sometimes when I was teasing her about something, I tousled her hair, and it was so soft it felt like touching mist. She liked to have the images that decorated her clothing commented on; if she was wearing her t-shirt that advertised a summer camp called Wood Valley (she hadn’t been to the camp, but had chosen the shirt at the Goodwill), for instance, I’d say I liked the eagle that was depicted on the shirt’s design, or the waterfall, and a comment like this would make her smile and talk about how much she liked eagles or waterfalls. Now, as we waited for her parents to come home, she sat next to me on the couch in a matching pajama top and pants with a repeating pattern of ladybugs, and I said, “I love ladybugs,” and she said, “Me too. One time a real ladybug landed on me when I was wearing this shirt.” She was crying though. So were Lorena and Iris. “Who should I call, you guys?” I asked. My chest felt tight with panic, but I was also still drunk, and my thoughts were muddied. I didn’t think about calling the police or any of the girls’ relatives. Lorena said she just wanted to watch TV, so that was what we did.

“Will you stay tonight, until they get home?” Maria asked.

“Of course I’ll stay. I’ll stay as long as you guys want.” I flipped through the channels and settled on Nickelodeon. Something awful was surely going on. I was in the midst of a tragedy, probably. But I couldn’t help it, it felt good, to finally be a significant person.

Horror Movie

2010-07-19T18:17:00.000-07:00

This is a zine I did a few years ago. Click on the image to make it bigger if you're having a hard time reading it. love, princess robin

Los Angeles to Philly, A Whiter Shade of Pale

2010-07-07T17:06:00.000-07:00

I lived in Philadelphia for a couple years recently and I still don’t know what to make of the experience. An important piece of information to back up how “what just happened?” I still am about having lived there is the fact that neither Geof nor myself ever visited Philly before we moved there. I used to take the Greyhound and Amtrak around the country a lot, and on one of those trips, I guess it must have been on the bus, I woke up at sunrise just as we were passing through a rural part of Pennsylvania, and it was breathtakingly beautiful, so for a few years after that I used to often say I was going to move to PA. I don’t think I really meant it, I just like to say things just to say them sometimes, to keep the conversation lively or whatever, but in any event, I think me telling people I was going to live in PA someday was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Anyway, I don’t even know where to start, trying to distill my Philly experience, but I think I’ll just go with the main, possibly bad, habit I picked up from living there, and that is the ability (or in any event, the interest) in distinguishing the cultural roots of white people. As a white person, I’m not sure how important I think my own cultural identity is (I love playing up my Jewish side, but that’s mostly because I love Woody Allen, Sarah Silverman, Yiddish, etc. so much); this is probably a result of my white guilt. Anyway, before I lived in Philly, a white person’s last name was just a proper noun, I’d never sit around and think “Paul Rudd…. Hmmm, Rudd? Rudd? Where’s that from?” and now it’s like a pet interest of mine to know the origin of people’s last names, not to act out on the information or anything (duh), just to know. Last week, I correctly identified an Eastern European Ellis Island bastardization of the last name of a new acquaintance, and on a regular basis, when I meet a new white person, I mentally try to identify whether their last name is German-originated, or Ellis Island Italian, or what. I picked this white cultural roots need-to-know in the east coast and can’t unlearn it. See in the east coast in general I think, and definitely in Philly, the neighborhoods are split: Irish-,Polish-, or Italian-American, primarily (in Philly), and it’s been that way for a long time, so it’s a big part of that city’s history. It’d be ridiculous to write an article about Fishtown (a town next to where I lived) without mentioning its primarily Irish-American population, for example, because that is a huge part of that town’s identity. Yes there’s a primarily Puerto-Rican barber shop there, and an Italian restaurant perhaps, but it’s still the place where Irish immigrants settled when they were moving to the U.S., and that’s that. Meanwhile, in L.A., I think a lot of the residents, or at least the white residents, aren’t Los Angeles natives. My dad said the idea of “splitting for the coast” was always around when he’s a hippie, and it’s still sort of like that, so it’s not like “Oh, how long has your family lived in Azusa (one of many towns w/in L.A. County)?” It’s more like, “Oh, you’re from Indiana.”

My married name is a common Polish one, and hardly anyone in L.A.’s ever heard of it (unless you live in my Eastern-European-heavy neighborhood in Hollywood), but in Philly, my last name immediately identified me as belonging in the Polish category, & often, people either did me immediate favors or rudenesses, depending on their love or hate of the Poles.

One doctor in Philly asked me where my ancestors were from, and I said that I think my paternal grandparents roots’ are both Estonian, or Eastern European in some sense, my mom’s mom English, my mom’s dad Sicilian … and this doctor said “Wow, you’re a mutt!” That blew my mind. I’m used to Los Angeles mixtures --- Pilipino&African-American babies, Hispanic&Jewish couples, etc. White is sort of still just white to me, though after having white backgrounds always brought to attention in Philly, I did notice what are either cultural tendencies or just stereotypes of these various types of white people, and it’s interesting from a sociological standpoint, though it’s likely cluttered my brain with more reasons not to trust humanity in general, as if I needed any more reasons, with this suspicious brain of mine. Ha! Xo princess robin

3 of my favorite videos

2010-07-02T20:59:00.000-07:00

success in a handbasket

2010-06-30T17:39:00.000-07:00

There’s an old adage, probably at least 20 years old, that, roughly quoted (from a song by the Smiths), goes: “I was looking for a job and then I got a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now.” I bring this up because I’m used to complaining about having too much time on my hands, and I just started a perfectly fine (in the future, I foresee thinking it’s even great) job, so if you are unfortunate enough to be in earshot of me this week, you will probably hear me complain about being overwhelmed instead of the recent common complaint of unerwhelment. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, with some people (me!).

Anyway, I was thinking about free time. Do only single people and Buddhists enjoy free time? Single people spend their free time doing all these great activities where they might just run into someone to fall in love with (dj’d pool parties on the roof of The Standard, artwalks in Chinatown, blah blah blah), and Buddhists know how to chill out: with their free time, they draw out all the daily rituals and relish in the simple acts of doing them…. Brushing teeth could become mind blowing and take an hour …. Laundry can be done while simultaneously chanting under one’s breath, etc. I have no Idea what ambitious single people and Buddhists do with their time but this is life as I imagine it for them. Who else might enjoy having lots of free time? Drug addicts? Cats? Loafers? Obsessed athletes? I dunno. I’ve never known what to do with too much free time, myself. Not including living things, writing is what’s most important to me, but I have a strong love/hate relationship with it. I don’t like talking about writing, and often, I don’t like writing – it’s physically painful to me, often. It’s so frustrating to have an idea and to try to translate it effectively into words, it gives me physical pain when I’m in the midst of trying to write a story and failing at it. Also, I almost never write. I write in short, quick bursts, usually, and when I’m done, I usually only edit for grammatical errors, not for content. So, maybe I can’t legitimately call myself a writer, maybe just a fiction-lover. Anyway, whenever I’ve had long stretches of unemployment, like the one I just wrapped up last week, I always kick myself for not taking advantage of the time to write. But I only get inspired when I’m out in the world a lot, and when I have free time without free money to accompany it, I’m not likely to go out in the world more than necessary. I wrote my first novella on scraps of paper I kept in my pocket when I was a janitor, and the novel I just finished writing was written in my car during lunch breaks from a job that made me cry all the time. Sitting in my apartment watching all the Harry Potters in order, in a row, at least once a week, for at least 2 years, didn’t provide much life-based fodder for short stories. I did part time tutoring in English Language Arts with children from underserved communities during the last 6 months of my CA unemployment period (so I guess I wasn’t actually unemployed during that time, but I’m pretty sure I lost money on that ‘job.’ But the time spent with the children I tutored was, while a bit heartbreaking because it was so easy to get emotionally attached to them and I had only a limited amount of hours to spend with each of them, such a relief to me because it was something productive for me to do with my time. I realize that at least the past couple months have been spent watching movies (like I say, many of these movies were Harry Potter) and crocheting, with some IM’ing and the occasional face to face socializing thrown in.

So, am I a workaholic? No. Am I lazy (meaning, could I have spent all my recent months free time training for a marathon or writing more?)? – sort of, yes. I don’t know why free time makes me as anxious as it does. I know I’ve always relished being the passenger in car trips, and I think the two are related – being a passenger and being bad at enjoying spare time. Maybe I just genuinely enjoy watching movies and crocheting and it’s not as dumb a pastime as it sounds to me.

Maybe I just need to have a full-time job like I just got to force me to interact with the world at large. The whole issue of having had too much time on my hands vs. feeling overwhelmed now (but so relieved to be having a regular paycheck soon) makes me consider the meaning of life in the modern world. What is one supposed to do with a life. A person lives their life and has experiences and learns lessons whether they choose to or not, just by dint of being alive. But, you know, there’s the popular bumper sticker that reads “Follow Your Bliss.” What do the people with those bumper stickers on their cars do with their spare time, or for a career? Do they procreate and take bike rides on the weekend and own their own bakeries or what? What is “success”?

Hollywood Forever?

2010-06-23T18:32:00.000-07:00

In case you've never been to the touristy part of Hollywood Blvd., which I live a couple blocks from, there's been a growing phenomenon the past few years: people who I can only assume are incredibly poor & in some cases homeless dress up like characters and stand in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Visiting yokels take pictures posed with these characters and then usually understand that they're expected to pay a little something to the person in the costume (like a dollar). Sometimes these characters are a bit of a nuisance, but I'm sure that dressing up like Elmo for dollars on a 90 degree day, as a creative way of panhandling, is probably sort of a nuisance to the costumed people. anyway, here's what recently happened, in this fair city of HOllywood:

http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-hollywood-characters,0,2280392.story

okay, i always expected there to be a big sweep that'd get rid of the characters in front of the theatre. that in itself wouldn't irk me so much. but here's what local government-sanctioned eyesore takes up the space where they used to panhandle:

oh shit, what happened, is everyone okay?, i thought, the first time i passed by this corporate sculpture, which is in fact some piece of shit corporate stunt to promote King Kong (I guess there's going to be a new one?). And then when i realized that it was just a tourist attraction, i thought wow, how clever. Not really, though. I think it's so fucking crass. Why is a deadly looking fake car crash an okay tourist attraction? and why is it okay to squeeze poor people out of every area they manage to get some small claim on, like the characters who made a few bucks in front of the theater?

it's so, so lame and gross. i hate it.

A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

2010-06-19T22:22:00.000-07:00

Hmmm, so nobody's very interested in reading my novel in serialized form in the blog format, it seems. Duly noted, and that's okay.

What've I been thinking about lately?

The Lakers Riot that we had here in Los Angeles, the celebratory riot in downtown, got me thinking about human nature & class issues. I was unfairly attacked when I was a teenager, by a mob of people, so my gut reaction is to be upset by groups of people giving in to mob mentality. while I've increasingly come to appreciate the spirit of anarchy, I still have mixed feelings about the Rodney King Riots. It was just so unfair that Reginald Denny got beaten up so bad, it seemed like such a misdirection of anger. But then, his beating was no worse than the beating King'd received from cops who were allowed to get away with it. My husband is usually pro-riot, so I've thought about the good sides of that riot of the nineties, and I do think that it was the result of a bunch of disenfranchised people not being able to control their rage, it released some of that rage. Maybe in the long run, that riot was useful? I'm still not sure.

The Lakers celebration riot was not political like the King riots. or was it? I think a lot of people are upset by how shitty their jobs are and healthcare and unemployment, etc., so when my husband said he thought the riots were sort of cool in a way, I thought about it and thought that it was possibly just another necessary release of people's rage. I hope the rioters didn't hurt anyone and that the property they did damage to was to cars too expensive to exist (I CAN'T STAND that some cars cost more than houses), or to Bank of America or one of the fancy new lofts in downtown that's standing where homeless people's homes used to be (where the fuck are homeless people supposed to live, when even Downtown Los Angeles's Skid Row has been gentrified?). At the same time I constantly wonder if violence can ever truly be productive.

The other thing I have been thinking about is self esteem, because when i recently posted on FB about burning my neck with a curling iron because I was feeling down on my frizzy hair and was trying to tame it, I got a lot of sweet and concerned responses, some of them including advice about frizzy hair management. The fact of how quick the responses came and how sweet they were made me think about self esteem, made me wonder how many people my age still have self esteem issues regarding their looks, and also made me wonder if my hair looks worse than i thought it did - HA!
xoxo Robin

Yesteryou, chapter 2

2010-06-15T18:09:00.000-07:00

One of my earliest posts on this blog was chapter 1 of a novel i sort of recently finished writing. i was thinking of serializing it in this blog but i never put the second chapter up. so, below, is chapter 2. The novel is called Yesteryou.
xo robin

2.

"Did you miss me?" Beth asked, sarcastically. But in fact, James had. They had just seen each other two hours earlier, for the smoke break they'd agreed to take together, and now she was back, wearing a sweater unfamiliar to him that looked like a patchwork quilt, and she was asking if he wanted to sit with her on one of the benches outside for lunch. She always drank a fountain soda from the food court and always steadily smoked on her lunch breaks, but she only sometimes ate. Yet she wasn't painfully skinny. She had just the softest suggestion of a double chin. When she looked down at a novel held in her lap, he saw the extra fold of fat reveal itself under her rather pointy chin, and it only made her face more beautiful.
She thought he looked like John Lennon only with dirty blonde hair, and all the little rips and stains and awkwardness that hung about him, signaling a deficiency of self-worth to the straight world, only attracted her more, the way the girl characters in Shangri-Las songs go for the bad boy, only not quite the same, because while there was some of the mythical bad boy to him, he also had a bad back and a tendency to whine sometimes. She really, really loved him. More than that. She was obsessed with him, to the point of being scared for herself. As she stood in front of him this day, he told her he had to work through lunch because of missing his bus that morning, which made him get to work late.

"But you know what we should do sometime?" he asked, having planned to make this suggestion for weeks, "We should grab a drink after work one of these days, maybe at Bluejay's," which was a locally famous bar across the street from the library where they worked, in downtown Los Angeles--the bar was decorated in vividly colored Chinese themes inside with a light that cast pretty shadows across the drinkers' faces, and the owner, who tended bar, was what people call "a character," someone who'd "been around forever."

"Sure," Beth said, inwardly thrilling, "that sounds great."

"Really? Okay, when should we do it?"

"How about today?" She was giving herself a stomach ache from the stress of pushing the invitation like this, and from smoking more that she usually did while they talked, but it seemed like there'd be a time in the future now when she would know that he was hers and there would be no more stomach aches, no more need to solidify plans with him with a desperate worry at the back of her consciousness, dreading the possibility that he would cancel. By the time her work day was finally over and she was taking the elevator to the floor he worked on, she'd thrown up twice, retching quietly in the bathroom stall, waiting for the patrons to leave the bathroom so she could be sick in peace.

Most women Beth's age wore jeans and t-shirts and let their hair grow long and hang loose. But Beth had liked, since she was a teenager, how women look when they've put most of their hair up in a loose bun, so only a few wisps of it curl about their face, and women who adorn themselves with interesting pieces of jewelry, and when she grew up, that was how she made herself look. James thought of her look as sort of bohemian and timelessly feminine.

She was one of those people who believe they are cursed, and there did seem to be some truth to it.

Sometimes, when she got really upset, she hugged herself and rocked back and forth. In late middle age the thought would occur to her that, more than once, she'd observed mentally retarded children soothe themselves in this way as well, and this realization would make her feel hopelessly, almost tenderly but at the last second cruelly, sorry for herself.

In time she would come to hug and rock herself plenty on James's account, and, once or twice, on Richard's account, but less so, though Richard would become her husband and by all rights the man she should love most. The rocking motion approximated the comfort in the "shhh" sound of the ocean or of wind through the leaves of trees. Rocking herself was the comfort of feeling autumn's crispness after a summer so hot it raised little bumps of heat rash on the insides of her soft thighs, from the combination of sweat and friction as they rubbed together under her skirt when she walked.

Try rocking yourself right now, where you sit.

She was only 22 when she started working at the library where she met James, but already at this young age she sometimes got the Yesteryou blues about the inevitability of aging. She could take a drink or a toke to feel light-hearted, or pull some strands loose from her bun so that they fell along the sides of her face, to feel pretty, but there was no trick she knew to perceive the world the way she had perceived it when she was a teenager. Only, this one and only date with James, at the Bluejay Bar, came close to that delicious nervousness of the fun nights of her youth.

He met her on the steps by the tiled fountain in front of the library, and told her, "You look different somehow." And she said, "Thanks."
And when they got to the bar, he said, "Looks like Jay is wearing his Chinese Eagles shirt," familiarly, though he'd never been inside the bar before, only heard about it from their co-workers, who said that Jay loved the rock group The Eagles, and almost always wore a band shirt for the Eagles, the text written in Chinese characters.

And she said, "I don't like The Eagles," smiling as she stared at a space to the left of James's ear, too nervous to meet his eyes. They found a booth at the back of the small bar and they sat there talking and drinking for four hours, with his left leg pressed against her right leg after the first hour. She could feel the beat of her pulse in her throbbing crotch. As they sat there talking, he told her all the things about his life that she'd already learned from talking about him with her good friend Alice, who had a friend that worked in his department. "He's been married before, and my friend saw a picture of his ex-wife. Guess what? She sort of looks like you! You must be his type," Alice told her. Beth loved to spend the night at Alice's apartment in Hollywood on Friday nights, and always had to hide her excitement when accepting Alice's invitations. They both loved to watch the actions of Alice's cats and to order a pizza to be delivered, and then to watch the Late Show with David Letterman. Meanwhile, right outside the building, other women were walking around in their favorite dress-up clothes, trying to have as much fun being out in the night and talking to people as the amount of fun they imagined famous people to have. Alice and Beth both knew it was an odd thing to have these slumber parties, but Beth reasoned that if she had been one of those girls lucky enough to have gone away from home to attend college, she'd probably have been assigned by the college to share a dorm room with another girl who she'd end up eating pizza with and watching TV at night with, anyway. So the deliciously comfortable Friday nights at Alice's were her right as a young woman, and her consolation for not being born into a life where it was possible to go to college. The Friday before this date with James, Alice told her, "I think he really likes you, Beth, I do," and now, yes, there was no doubt, he did.

A group of five of their co-workers came in when Beth and James had been there an hour. One of the men in the group, meaning no harm, but not knowing how Beth, when uncomfortable, was bewildered by jokes, teased her. "Hey, I thought you were a nun," he said, at which she blushed, her mouth poised to say something it would never say, struggling with whether this was a joke about her seriousness (should she say something light in response?), or whether there truly was a rumor that she was a nun.

"God, I hope you're not a nun," James whispered in her ear, and when he brought his face far enough from hers for her to see it, her breath caught in her throat from the shock of how handsome he was, even this close, and how intently he was looking at her.

She would call what she felt for him love, even though they did not become lovers, because what she felt was so strong, it could not be anything else. She loved everything about him. Later, whether it was true or not, she would believe that she remembered many of their early conversations verbatim. And later still, when he was married to a women she'd never met, this caused Beth her first fit of -- what was it, hysteria, some other kind of uncharted constellation of grief? -- she called him several times a week, tormented with lovelorn grief, and thinking to herself, "I should be in a hospital," and "I want to die.” During these conversations, she wrote down much of what was said between them, with the shorthand method she'd learned in high school. In these talks, he said the same things often: "Beth, you have to calm down" and "You have to stop calling me like this."

Why is calmness so important?, she wanted to know.

only child syndrome

2010-06-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

I think I might be a textbook case of an only child born of interesting parents and raised in los angeles: i was lonely, did stuff for attention, and much of the stuff done for attention involved art projects featuring dolls (my best friends!). anyway, this particular photo must've fallen out of one of my oldest photo albums last night, when i was scanning some old photos of friends to put up on Facebook. i just found it on the desk this morning and it seemed a bit like magic. two of these dolls were ken dolls i turned into trannies, & the girl dolls were unique in their own right. i brought them to school often, when i was in 7th grade, & me & my "weird" clique of friends played with them at lunch. definitely a sweet bunch of kids who wanted it known that we weren't just anyone, that we were unique. the two tackle fish that the african-american barbie is holding were named alfred and zappa, as my scrupulous teenage documentation states: these were two tackle fish i tied to the end of a scarf i wore on my head almost every day of 7th grade (the scarf is the blue fabric with the gold stars and moons on it that is the backdrop in this photo). the scarf was kind of gypsy-looking and i also wore a lot of jewelry and heavy metal t-shirts with long skirts, so i called myself a Metal Gypsy. Anyway, this photo is pretty funny, only-child's-tranny-dolls'-family-portrait-wise. i documented so much of my childhood as neatly as this photo shows because i always wanted to be famous, & i think a lot of people with the fame desire document their lives this much, to be able to provide good artifacts for all the documentaries that will be made about us someday or something, i think.

pessimism poem

2010-06-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

The ones who want kids will be sterile
and the ones who don't care will be breedy
and like Michael Moore recently theorized
student loans keep employees acting needy
and cancer's a little more cancerous
at County Hospital than at Cedars Sinai
and sometimes when the cookie jar's empty
all you can do is just sigh.

renting movies from the library

2010-05-28T22:13:00.000-07:00

admittedly, i've been too much of a couch potato this last century as a mostly unemployed young woman. that's a story for another day. but in any event, it's long been my goal to see as many films as possible -- isn't it weird how many movies there are? how many millions of dollars that get spent on straight to video b-movies, even? i'm not being critical here, i really do think the film industry is a marvel.

in any event, i'll tell you right now, in this hardcore film watching year of mine, i've developed a problem: the Harry Potter films. i'm addicted to them. as i write this, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone plays in the background, and it's actually a calculated decision on my part: i keep our less popular dvd's in a drawer, & the more popular ones on shelves, and i'm currently letting myself watch each Harry Potter movie one last time before banishing it to the drawer.

anyway, i just started renting movies from the library down the street. some people's local libraries charge for dvd's but not mine (though if you want to buy drugs or hook up with a male prostitute, which you can also do at this library, at the front entrance before the library opens, it'll cost you plenty). you are aloud to rent 3 movies per genre: for kids movies or grownup fiction movies, you can rent the movie for 2 days. for documentaries, they're presumed boring enough to be in little demand, and you can therefore keep them for 7 days. most of them are russian language though, but i did have some good documentary finds: all the michael moore movies (don't bother arguing with me if you hate him, because i don't want to hear it), and a good one about hunter thompson called "Gonzo."

for the most part, the dvd's offered are slim pickings, because they're donated, i think. This is how and why i recently ended up re-watching the Back to the Future trilogy, or finally giving in to watching Jerry McGuire. i've ended up watching some movies i never would have seen otherwise. recently, i watched the original Towering Inferno (which geof's dad is in, as a stuntman). it was pretty good -- the ruggedly handsome steve mcqueen looks awful in comparison to paul newman ... i think they were both in their fifties in that movie. anyway, the movie Poseidon has the same plot as Towering Inferno except on a yacht, and even though the library carries the original Poseidon, I opted for the early 2000's remake, starring Kurt Russell. What, i watched these movies? yes.

i have always hated Disney movies, even when i was a cute little youngin, but i rented the old animated disney version of Alice in Wonderland, and boy does that movie suck! all this weird shit happens to her, and it's kind of neat and pretty, but then right when things are about to get interesting, she wakes up and her private tutor says something like, 'Oh Alice, what am i going to do with you? you've been napping this whole time!' The end. what the fuck?

geof and i made a deal that i would watch the 3 original Star Wars (i never had) if he'd read Slaughterhouse 5 (my bible), and i was able to rent 2 of the 3 Star Wars from the library, so that was helpful. i had to watch the first one for an undergrad film class and was the only student who hadn't seen it before, and i never saw the other 2 -- I'm glad I finally saw them. I wish I liked them when I was a kid because Princess Leia is a really strong female character: she's smart, compassionate, strong and an anarchist and i would have loved loved loved her when i was a little girl. instead, i only loved that weird Ewok movie/Star Wars spin-off, with those blonde siblings in it that dress the way people dress in Malibu in my imagination, taupe linen shifts and braided headbands, etc.

Today from the library I rented: Mouse Hunt (kids movie with Nathan Lane's voice), The Muppet Movie (which kicks almost as much ass as Follow that Bird), Flyboys (i'm powerless against movies with james franco in them), and Bulworth. I lose my temper on a regular basis with strangers who try to take advantage of me or do a half-assed job on medical procedures, which unfortunately happens often in the hustling bustling city of Los Angeles, but other than that, i try to keep my feelings reigned in, which is hard for a tempestuous, passionate, some may say crazy girl like me. in any event, when something makes me extremely happy or sad in a movie or book, days worth of passionate disappointment or bliss get unleashed and I cry like crazy (my poor dad and stepmom had to stand around the theatre lobby like 'uh, should we go check on her?' recently when we all went to see Slumdog Millionaire and i excused myself to the restroom to cry uncontrollable rapturous tears for a half hour). I saw Bulworth when it came out, and it might not seem like it'd be a good movie, but it's really excellent. but it made me too emotional to want to see it again. Anyway, that's what i just finished watching, and the ending hasn't change since the last time i saw it, so i just finished crying. hmmm, what should i do with myself now?, i thought. while i take care of my Harry Potter-watching project, that is. So here we are. good night. xox princess robin

Musical Therapy Part II

2010-05-24T13:33:00.000-07:00

There've been a couple misunderstanding of lyrics that always seemed poignant to me. The uk surf version of The Pixies "Wave of Mutilation" was one of me and my mom's shared favorite songs when I was a teenager. One lyric goes:

I've kissed mermaids
Rode the El Nino

but my mom always misheard the lyrics as

I've kissed her legs

and once she told me she loved that line because it was so tender.

When I was heartbroken once in college, sad Otis Redding songs were all I wanted to listen to, and similarly, the lines I misheard were also my favorite lines. There's one verse that goes:

Honey, I saw you there last night
With another man's arms holding you tight
Nobody knows what I feel inside
All I know is I walked away and cried

and I always love the last line of that verse, which I thought was All I know is I want the way you cried.

Musical Therapy

2010-05-22T21:01:00.000-07:00

in 2004 i had open heart surgery. in the long run it was a success, but in the immediate post-op aftermath, my cardiologist, Dr. Dumbfuck (which in English translates to Fatally Incompetent), didn't actually look at any of the echocardiograms he had me wait hours to take, 3 days in a row, and so nobody knew my heart sac was filling up with blood, until my heart almost stopped working one day, and this time when i went back into the hospital, i guess the insurance company weighed the risks of making me leave again asap, and this time they took care of me until my heart was healed. i lived.

in 2005 i had a nervous breakdown, but i'm too sarcastic to ever go fully crazy, so while i was a bit incapable of taking care of myself, i wasn't fully incapable, and therefore i was a day-patient (I didn't have to live at the facility, i could go home at night, not that i wanted to) for 3 weeks at a rehab/mental health facility. the famous one wc fields went to.

we had music therapy on fridays. the woman who facilitated the class looked like a ballerina and was nice and calming. she let people play songs that they related to, as a form of therapy. my closest friend at the institution was, unless he was bullshitting, raised by his grandpa in a cult, had been in Desert Storm, and was an ex-cop. he was on twice the normal dosage of whatever it was he was on, and the side effect was that he basically had amnesia. even though he looked like a jock and i always try to look like a sloppy ne'er do well, he seemed to be sweet on me, he'd get me soda refills at lunch and stuff like that. but he forgot me and got reacquainted with me every day, liking me more on some days than others. One Music Therapy class, the facilitator let him put on one of his songs, and it was Marilyn Manson's "The Beautiful People." Here are some of the lyrics:

The beautiful people, the beautiful people
It's all relative to the size of your steeple
You can't see the forest for the trees
You can't smell your own shit on your knees

There's no time to discriminate,
Hate every motherfucker
That's in your way

Oh god, it was so funny to see the pretty ballerina smile and close her eyes and nod her head along with the music. "Okay, that was really interesting, very expressive," she said, when the song was over. A middle aged women who was normally really quiet said "I liked it. It reminded me of the rock music we used to listen to when I was younger."

Every song that played during these sessions yielded such fascinating reactions. The Eagles "Desperado" made a lot of us cry. it's really a beautiful song, tacky as it is. I love these lines:

Now it seems to me, some fine things
Have been laid upon your table.
But you only want the ones
That you can't get.

Desperado,
Ohhhh you aint getting no younger.
Your pain and your hunger,
They're driving you home.

When it was finally my turn to play a song, I chose Elliot Smith's No Name #3. I love the chorus:

a good old fashioned fight
so come on night
everyone is gone
home to oblivion
home to oblivion
home to oblivion

But my friend with the amnesia and the history of falling victim to brutal institutions (a christian cult, the army, the police force), he put on the wrong song. He put on No Name #4, which goes like this:

For a change she got out before he hurt her bad
Took her records and clothes
And pictures of her boy
It really made her sad
Packed it up and didn't look back
I'm okay lets just forget about him
The car was cold and it smelled like old cigarettes and pine
In her bag I saw things she drew when she was mine
Like this one here
Her alone nobody near
What a shame lets just not talk about it
No it doesn't look like you
But you did wear cowboy boots
That's your fame
There's no question about it
Once we got back inside
With one ear to the ground
I was ready to hide
'cos I don't know who's around
and you look scared
it's our secret do not tell okay?
Let's just not talk about it
Don't tell okay?
Let's just forget all about it.

This song sounds to me, obviously, like it's about an abusive relationship. "That was a very pretty song, Robin," the ballerina said, "Are the lyrics significant to you in any way? do they remind you of something that's happened in your own life?" The empathetic therapist thought I'd been in an abusive relationship, and i didn't want to embarrass anyone by admitting that it was the wrong song. I told her, "uh, i've never really listened to the lyrics. i just like how it sounds."

the music therapy class would never hear my own real song choice, the song about going home to oblivion.

it was a strange 3 weeks. most of the people in my group therapy sessions were on the make. we were in a nice, warm waiting room of our real lives, but recovering from psychic incapacitation takes too long and is too sad.