Sleepyhead

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

come to dvd, my pretties!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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