Monoblogue

Traditional Fields Family Easter Protocols (Circa 1985)

2009-04-14T08:39:00.001-07:00

5:30 am: Wake from dream about playing mini-golf with friendly monsters. Tremble at the sound of the “creepy bird,” whose song signals the arrival of the evil zombie Easter Bunny doppelganger who rises from the dead every Easter Sunday to abduct over-eager, non-sleeping children and fly them away to a dusty fairground populated by the dead. Quiver under the covers, as terrified of being discovered by the evil rabbit as you are terrified of being discovered terrified by your still-sleeping mother, whose habit of explaining away childhood fears by brain chemistry and behavioral psychology, is so effective you come out the other side feeling both comforted and completely ashamed of yourself. 5:45 am: Satisfied the demonic rabbit has moved on to the Orr’s house, you crawl out of bed making as much clamor as possible. Stomping across the landing, slamming the double doors, messing with the toilet seat and opening and closing the radiator cover cleverly disguised as a shuttered cabinet. Recoil in horror at the sight of a spider in the window. Contemplate the mermaid shaped bathroom toys. Braid their hair. Investigate the contents of the medicine cabinet. Make flowers out of toilet paper and bobby pins. Wonder what would happen if flushed one of your sister’s My Little Ponies down the toilet. Pretend to be the long-suffering political prisoner of a despotic regime and deliver a rousing, if whispered, l speech to the imaginary hard-hearted queen. Flush toilet. Flip the lightswitch off and on several times.

6:05 am: Upon exiting the bathroom, delight to find that the sun has started to rise, which means you can now go about waking people in earnest. Go first to your parents’ room and say “mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom,” until she rolls over, groans and tells you to go back to sleep. Calmly inform her that this is not possible. Scoff and walk across the hall to wake your three-year-old sister. Tell her if she doesn’t get up the Easter Bunny take back all of her candy.

6:08 am: Return to parent’s bedroom with the enlisted support of your sister, her security blanket and your own stuffed raccoon (named Violet DuBois). Stand perfectly still with stare at your mother with the most puppy dog expression imaginable, trying to create the illusion that you are a sweet, frail child, instead of the Machiavellian tyrant you know yourself to be. Sniffle a bit. Let your sleepy eyed sister say something stupid like “Did the Easter Bunny bring something for Daddy?” that parents just eat up. Listen to mother groan. “All right. All right. Go put on your slippers and give me a few minutes.”

6:10 am: Sit crouched on upstairs with little sister, awaiting the green light to go downstairs, as Mom puts on bathrobe. Wonder at the amount of noise coming from Dad’s study. Secretly hope the Easter Bunny has brought you a Walkman.

6:12 am: Enter den, where two large, beribboned wicker baskets sit atop the gate-leg table in front of the picture window overlooking the lake. The sun has just cleared the tops of the mountains. Dash over the soon-to-be completely refinished floor to gape the mounds of chocolate rabbits, jelly beans, egg shaped petit-fors, sour candies, gummy bears, white chocolate lollipops, tiny pastel stuffed animals and one of those imitation Faberge eggs made of sugar with a tiny confectionary vignette inside. Wonder if it would be satisfying to eat. Trade sister a bag of gummy bears for her petit-fors. Thrill to discover, at the bottom of the basket, a cassette copy of Wham!’s “Make It Big,” but no Walkman. Your cousin once got a Walkman from the Easter Bunny, despite the fact that your cousin is kind of an asshole. You explain this to your mother on the way to the kitchen as you lick marzipan frosting off your fingers.

6:35 am: Coffee is made. You request a cup. It is served “Nana-style” with a lot of milk and at least three heaping teaspoons of sugar. Mom sticks a pan of hot cross buns in the oven and requests that you stop tormenting your sister. Which strikes you as typically harsh and unfair, as your sister has been trying to bite your arm for the last half hour. Your father emerges in a disreputable brown terry cloth robe and discussion begins about when or whether to go to church. This discussion will last for at least three more hours.

7:30 a.m.: You are nominated to call Nana. Nana tells you she loves you and wishes you a Happy Easter as you jerk the cord away from your sisters grasping fingers. Before handing the phone to your mother, you tacitly suggest that Nana is infinitely cooler, more loving and more generous than either one of your parents. Oh, and by the way, Nana would totally make the Easter Bunny bring you a Walkman.

8:00 a.m.: Dressing begins. For you, this involves dress (sometimes with pinafore), white tights, white leather (but never patent leather—white patent leather is tacky) Mary Janes and a large hair ribbon. Your sister’s dress is in a complementary color with a French lace collar and satin sash. Your mother takes you outside to pose you in front of the forsythia and pink dogwood so she can get a few snapshots before you get grass stain on your tights and chocolate all over your dainty white gloves. Your sister gets a speck of pollen on her dress and starts to cry. You take off running for the swingset deaf to your mother’s appeals, promptly fall and get grass stain all over your tights.

9:30 am: Your father has yet to shower, but your mother looks like she’s ready to go to a yacht party in Monte Carlo with Cary Grant. Her high heels precisely match the indigo of her low cut, full skirted linen dress. She wears a shiny gold choker and matching earrings, and you think she looks quite fabulous, despite the fact that you would have gone with something a little more Diana Ross (ruffles, feathers, sequins). She taps her heel against the floor of Dad’s study and suggests that he might hurry up if you’re going to make Sunday School. Dad sits in a leather chair of roughly the same color and condition as his bathrobe. He looks irritated at having been distracted from The New Yorker. You cross your fingers and hope your father ignores this request. “I, for one, don’t need to go to Sunday School,” you say, in your best approximation of a world-weary thirty-six year old. “I mean, don’t we all know the story?” Your mother warns you against blasphemy and shoots your father a look that says this is why we need to take them to Sunday school. Your sister asks for some orange juice. Your mother sighs. Your father tells you they’ve reprinted a story in the New Yorker by James Thurber.

9:55 am: You sit on the sofa in the den with your sister, disappointed that there are no cartoons, only church programming, which is boring and weird, though sometimes they wear interesting costumes. It is clear you will not be attending Sunday School, which is fine with you, because Sunday School is always boring. Last weekend you spent the night at Kristina’s house and went to her Sunday School class at the Lutheran Church where you learned two important things: 1) Martin Luther was not the biological father of Martin Luther King and 2) Palm Sunday did not mark the occasion in which Jesus and his disciples rented a condo at the beach. It’s hard to say which of these realizations was more disappointing to you. A month ago, your mother took you to Sunday School at her church for a few consecutive Sundays and you were instructed to memorize the titles of the books of the Old Testament with the promise of a prize. So you did, thinking that prize might include a Walkman, but actually it was just a coupon for free French Fries at McDonalds, which was kind of a bummer as you’re not a huge fan of either French Fries or McDonalds. You wrangle the remote from you sister and manage to catch the conclusion of “Splash” on HBO before moving on to MTV.

10:10 am: The airing of Madonna’s “Material Girl” video prompts a frantic dance party. Your three-year-old sister knows all the words. You indicate that you have a personal relationship with Madonna. Your sister appears to believe you.

10:35 am: The entire family loads into Dad’s sputtering Saab. Your bangs have already been parted unattractively by cowlick. Your mother tries to correct this as you fiddle with the rapidly expanding hole in your tights. The backseat is cramped, and feels more so because the red felt upholstery covering the ceiling sags like an old lady’s panty hose and threatens to engulf your Easter bonnet. Your mother reminds your father that there will be neither parking nor seating still available at the church. Your sister breathes. It irritates you. You ask her nicely to stop breathing and she takes the opportunity to smack her lips in your ears. By the time you get to the expressway, you’re hitting her and she’s biting you. Both of you insist that the other one started it. Your mother threatens punishment if the violence continues. Your sister keeps slurping. You raise a hand as a warning. Your sister screams that you hit her.

10:52 am: A parking space is discovered in the drive-thru lane of the Biltmore Village branch of Wachovia. You hustle over the green in front of the Church, where two ushers try and direct the bottleneck of tardy, well-heeled parishioners. Inside they’re already vamping on the pipe organ and you hope maybe this year you will get a seat with a decent view of the stage. But of course you don’t. You’re directed to the furthest back corner of the side arm of the cross-shaped sanctuary, which pretty much guarantees you will see nothing but the procession and recession. Once seated you crane your neck, see a few of your friends and try to get up and go see them, but are directed to sit down or else by your mother who looks like she needs a cigarette and a Bloody Mary.

11:00 am-12:00pm: Stand up. Sit down. Kneel. Stand up. Kneel. Sit down. Sit down. Stand Up. And also with you. Scoot the embroidered prayer bench back and forth using the heels of your shoes against the stone floor. Pick up the Book of Common Prayer. Put It Back. Pick It Up. Skim the Text. Add “in the bedroom” to the end of every sentence. Giggle. Ask your mother for a mint. Flip through the hymnal. Add “In the Bedroom” to the end of every title. Tilt your head back to look at the people in the stained glass. Try to figure out which one of them is supposed to be Jesus. Ask Jesus for a Walkman. Ask Jesus for a copy of “Like A Virgin.” Think about being a nun. Wish you were Catholic so you could be a nun. Figure you’d make it in a convent about a week. Hope that the person responsible for your inevitable excommunication would look a little like Andrew McCarthy. Twiddle your thumbs. Mess with the hole in your tights. Wish your guardian angel still brought your presents. Listen to your mother explain, again, that all the flowers in the front of the church came from the Biltmore Estate. Find the choir sort of boring. Sit down. Stand up. Ask if you take communion because you’d like a snack. Get denied. Go with your Dad while he takes communion and kneel beside him on the bench. Get blessed by the rector, whose fingers smell like Vicks. Go back to seat. Be bored. Try to make faces at friends across the church. Stand up. Ask if it’s almost over. Thrill at the recession. Watch an acolyte stumble while carrying a candle. Wonder if you’d survive if they had to evacuate the church in a hurry.

12:05 p.m.: Help yourself to iced butter cookies from central table in fellowship hall. Find friends. Ignore little sister. Tell your friends that the Easter Bunny brought you a Walkman. Pretend not to hear when little sister calls you a liar. Walk outside and try to enter as many closed doors as you can. Get shepherded back inside by your neighbor, who teaches your gifted class at elementary school. Ask her if it’s true that the Episcopal Church only exists because Henry VIII wanted a divorce. Glow with praise that you are precocious. Figure being called precocious at church means that God wants you to have a Walkman.

12:30 p.m.: Drive to Biltmore Estate, using Dad’s pass. Listen to mother ooh and ah over the spring greening of the grass. Wonder why there’s so much bamboo on the estate and no pandas. Ask to go to the house. Get told that you’re just going to the gardens to take pictures. Sulk because the gardens are boring. Walk through greenhouse. Get posed with your little sister. Ham it up for photographs. Try to appear as if you are a glamorous movie star. Get annoyed when your father does not take a picture of every single one of your practiced facial expressions—furious, distraught, sultry, tragic, Wonder Woman. Run out through the tulips, imagining that Heathcliff or Prince Charming or Han Solo or ideally David M. from your gifted class will pop out of the jonquils to receive your theatrical embrace. Imagine that you are a princess. Imagine that you live in the house and all the other people around you are peasants. Call someone a peasant under your breath. Feel bad. Know that as princess you would abdicate to lead the peasant revolt. Ask your dad for fifty cents to buy a Fresca from the vending machines. Wish you were in the throes of an epic romance. Make plans to call David later and ask him if he likes you and then hang up before he responds. Complain that your father is wasting all his film on your sister.

1:45 p.m.: Arrive at Country Club. Immediate take off for Ladies Lounge to lounge on the sofa for a little while, pretending that every woman that comes in is a guest at your Parisian salon. Make rounds through dining room, greeting all your friends. Brag about your haul from the Easter Bunny while finding some way to highlight the tragedy of not receiving a Walkman. I mean, I got a Wham tape, but what does the Easter Bunny expect me to play it on? The Fisher Prince tape player. God, I think not. Get told by at least six people that the Easter Bunny isn’t real. Explain that you know that, but that your three-year-old sister does not and so you have to go on pretending. This is absolutely true. Explain to no one that you are terrified of an evil, Easter Bunny doppelganger that haunts the pre-dawn hours of Easter morning. After all, that one might be real. You don’t really have any hard evidence one way or the other. So better safe than sorry. Incidentally, this more or less encapsulates your religious beliefs in a nutshell.

2:00 p.m.: Order a Shirley Temple and join the Easter buffet line for large helpings of some sort of casserole, chicken salad, overcooked scalloped potatoes and whatever seafood options are available. Avoid the beef for fear that it might be too chewy. Excuse yourself to return to the Ladies’ lounge at least three times during the meal. Practice an English accent. Practice an Irish accent. Practice a Russian accent. Think your French accent is pretty believable. Elect yourself chair of an imaginary committee. Try to replicate the opening dancing sequence from “West Side Story.” Perform a “Camelot” medley. Pretend to be imprisoned. Practice your swoon. Think you have tremendous natural talent as a tap-dancer. Flush a bar of soap down one of the toilets. Try to hide in the lobby. Run into Teresa in the hallway. Encourage her to play Cabaret Singer by Day/ Spy by Night in the bar. Discourage Teresa from inviting Erin, your nominal best friend to play along. Erin will want to add babies into the mix. Everyone knows that a glamorous spy would have nothing to do with a baby. War is hell. Tough women have to make sacrifices. Dodge the Gestapo all the way back to the dining room.

2:30 p.m.: Convene outside the Pro Shop for the Annual Easter Egg Hunt in and around the tennis courts and the eighteenth hole. Listen as some guy in a green golf shirt who looks like he’d rather be getting a root canal explain that there will be prizes for the most eggs collected. And one lucky person stumble upon the Magical Golden Egg that contains a magical prize for one very special little girl or boy. This last bit is delivered in a monotone. Look at Erin and roll your eyes. The countdown begins. Three. Two. Egg Hunt.

2:35 p.m.: You’ve been shoved, elbowed, trampled and roundly inconvenienced. You’ve crawled through pine mulch to retrieve two or three empty plastic eggs under a buggy rhododendron. You’re too short to reach the high places and too tall to crawl around like under the shrubbery. After all, you have some dignity, not to mention three new holes in your tights and a lot of pine needles stuck to your pinafore. Erin has managed all the same things without getting one single thing on her pink smocked dress. Which defies logic. Likewise the fact that what’shisface has found the Magical Golden Egg for the second year running. Amy tells you that what’shisface goes to Asheville Catholic and has a real Pac-Man machine in his house. Also he breakdances. You are so over breakdancers. You tell Amy he’s probably lying about the Pac-Man machine. And you should know. You’ve totally told that lie before.

2:38 p.m.: The magical golden egg is not magical at all. It’s a plastic pantyhose egg spray-painted gold. Contained inside, however, is a ten-dollar bill which pretty much the most magical thing you can take to the mall. What’shisface walks through the crowd cradling his prize with a smug grin and as much swagger as a four-foot tall third grader with a clip-on tie can muster. That guy is a dork, says Amy; because dork is about the worst thing you know to call someone. I don’t like him, you say. One of the boys flips him the bird and gets in trouble. You have no idea what flipping someone the bird means and are embarrassed of asking for fear of being mocked.

2:55 p.m.: Your mother takes a million years to finish talking and leave. You try to get Kristina to invite you back over for a sleepover at her house, despite the fact that you were there the weekend before. Kristina has a laundry chute large enough to crawl through, a Persian cat and a large, round sunken hot tub. Last weekend at Kristina’s you broke one of the jets of the hot tub, got caught going through her mother’s dresser drawer, kept Kristina up all night to her parent’s great consternation and taught Kristina and her seven year old brother the word “motherfucker,” which you’d recently learned from a Goldie Hawn movie. It does not cross your mind that you’ve done anything wrong. Even after you are never invited to Kristina’s house to spend the night ever again.

3:15-9:15p.m: Return home. Eat candy. Sit in the kitchen hallway eavesdropping on your mother’s telephone conversation while your sister falls asleep on the sofa to HBO. Later your dad will play a Miles Davis record and you will eat a grilled cheese. “The Sound of Music” will be broadcast tonight on one of the networks and you just can’t get enough of the nuns. You will be made to go to bed just after the wedding, but before the Von Trapps must run from the Nazis. You will be unable to fall asleep and sit up reading one of the four books you have squirreled away beneath your covers the light of the streetlamp. You will finish a chapter of “Watership Down” and dream about rabbits—good ones and evil ones. And Easter will be over until next year.

Swords Drawn

2007-02-23T16:11:00.001-08:00

In a stack of family papers, liberated from the back of a dusty cabinet at my father’s house, I came across an official certificate dated January 11, 1823, in which some relative of mine named Jacob Slaughter of Sullivan County, was given an official military commission from the state of Tennessee.

As a historical document, it’s not terribly interesting. I don’t know who Jacob Slaughter is, how or even if he is related to me. I’m not sure why he went into the army, or what he did there. The only thing noteworthy at all is a statement printed on the back that reads as follows:

“I, __________, do solemnly swear on Holy Evangelists of Almighty God that I have not given or accepted a challenge either written or verbal to fight a Duel, nor have I fought one since the passage of an act passed in the year eighteen hundred and seventeen entitled, An act more affectually to prohibit Duelling, nor have I been second or bearer of a challenge for such a purpose; and that I will not fight a Duel, or be bearer of a challenge either written or verbal for such a purpose, or act as the second of both or either of the parties concerned in a Duel, during my continuance in office, So help me God.”

A space at the end requires an initial, which Jacob Slaughter did not provide. Perhaps because he refused the commission, or perhaps because the Anti-Duelling clause was, by 1823, a mere formality. Maybe there’s an interesting story tied into all that, maybe not. From my 21^st century vantage, I find the fact that such as proviso was necessary, even as a formality, to be the more salient point.

Italy Complete Record: Day Three

2006-05-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

Venezia
March 29, 2006
Hotel Antico Doge
2:15am

I start out of sleep, flustered, wide awake, and cursing jet lag. I can hear Anna’s even breathing downstairs which confirms that I am alone in this. I go to the bathroom, fetch a bottle of mineral water out of the mini-bar, and finish “The Talented Mr. Ripley,”

before trying (and failing) to fall back to sleep for about three hours. Every time I close my eyes I’m spinning in these swirls of Baroque detail—grand architecture and curlicues and busy trompe de l’oeil paintings. This kind of insomnia is incurable without drugs or alcohol, neither of which I have on hand. Instead, I lie back on the bed and contemplate the crude, white-washed ceiling beams above me, put in place by medieval hands. I stand up in the dark to run my hand along the ledge, half-expecting some haunted transmission, but instead only amusing myself by imagining melodramas taking place in this house three centuries ago. The mayor’s son. The doge’s daughter. A pregnant serving girl. The Spanish Inquisition. The alleyway outside the window stays busy all night, and I hear someone toss a bottle at our wall. The glass cracking and clanking against the cobblestones below.

I try to fall asleep again.

Still doesn’t take.

At four am, I contemplate Christianity, after failing to induce sleep by way meditation (usually works, which is why I’ll never be a mystic). It seems to me that all the great things (art, music, philosophy, architecture) Christianity (and in particular, Roman Catholicism) produced came out of the need to justify how you (and by extension, everyone else) should put aside all skepticism, rationality, and native intelligence in order to put all your faith into a bunch of Middle-Eastern fairy tales about a vicious, unforgiving, and unintentionally hilarious god and his eager, self-effacing hippie son. It’s certainly a challenge. And Italy, the cradle of Catholicism, provides a wonderful example of just how bizarre Christianity actually is. Like, how on earth did the descendents of Caesar, Virgil, and Ovid ever accept this shit? At what point did the general population just decide that Bacchanalia was uncivilized, but that drinking the simulated blood of a Hebrew radical was something to be praised (and in some cases, rigorously enforced)? I think most of the Romans probably agreed t

hat Jupiter probably didn’t have sex with the Lady of Sparta in the form of a swan, and that Castor and Pollux were probably not hatched out of shells. That was just a metaphor. But the Virgin Mary? Hey man, that’s the gospel truth (no pun intended).

But you have to love the holdovers from the ancient world. Italy’s writers for millennia have prided themselves on knowing exactly how to get to the gates of hell, and getting clearance to stop by for a friendly chat with their dead friends (all damned, by the way). They don’t get stuck ther

e—no getting eaten by a three-headed dog, or drowning in the river Styx, or pissing off the demons—but instead go home to report the experience as some kind of rollicking anecdote. It doesn’t matter if you’re a defeated Trojan who can’t keep a girlfriend alive or a malcontented Florentine in love with a dead nine-year-old. Hell is at your command!

*****

Antico Doge

5:20 am

On my fourth trip to the bathroom, Anna stirs and asks if I can sleep.

“I’ve been wide awake for three hours,” I say.

She sighs. “You wanna do something?”

“Like watch the sunrise over the Grand Canal?”

She shrugs.

I get my coat.

*****

5:30

The night desk clerk gives us a puzzled look when we tromp downstairs to hand in our room key well before dawn. We unlatch the great wooden doors and head out into the cool, damp alleyways around the hotel.

The streets are empty but for a small battalion of grumbling men and women in coveralls, armed only with plastic push brooms, against a truly amazing amount of litter. The canals are oily black, and the view down the small bridges is shadowy, but not sinister. It’s too peaceful to be sinister. I climb the steps to the top of Rialto Bridge, careful not to disturb the chorus of sweepers, and let the cold wind off the canal burn my cheeks and dry out my eyes.

A young British couple, very enamored of each other, appears on the bridge, travel-weary and dragging suitcases, and asks us to take their picture against the lightening Eastern sky. I oblige, and watch them walk away, my arms over the edge of the bridge. We take a lot of pictu

res, and I am hyper-conscious, as we walk back at the sound of my boots against the cobblestones and wooden walkways. The way every sound echoes throughout the campo.

Back at Antico Doge, I find our favorite bench is occupied by a sleeping young man, who is either passed out from drinking or the most fashionable homeless genius I’ve ever seen. We stand on the bridge speculating for a while, until he stands suddenly and wanders off in the general direction of the Canal. We claim his bench, still warm from his body and sit there unt

il the sky turns blue and the chimes in the belltower ring for six o’clock.

I leave Anna awake downstairs studying maps and I return to bed finally able to sleep.

9:00am

The included breakfast at Antico Doge is served in what was once, reputedly, a ballroom. I admit to having little experience with ballrooms, but I’m not buying that the small, windowless, gold breakfast nook was ever anyone’s idea of a party room.

Certainly the breakfast crowd is not in the mood to party. It strikes me as we walk into to the virtually (and awkwardly) silent space that we are the youngest people staying in the hotel by at least twenty (if not thirty) years. We take our plates to the bar in a veritable vacuum, passing several couples with facial expressions broadcasting: “Oh Bloody Hell, the barbarians have arrived.” I try to make as little noise as possible, which is challenging, as the more polite we try to behave the more hilarious the conditions seem. By the time we leave, I’ve spilled coffee on my lap and announced, “Fuck, I think I just ate half a ham” (the latter was supposed to be a whisper, but the acoustics in that room were such that I think the other gu

ests could hear my hair growing).

We drop the room key again with the young, American girl at the front desk:

“How in hell did she get that job?” asks Anna.

“Maybe her parents were Italian. There are family loopholes in the whole EU thing.”

“How can I get tha

t job?”

I sigh, and take off on a convoluted narrative in which I remind Anna that our respective familial connections to Europe are distant, to put it mildly, and I’m pretty sure we can’t get working papers because somebody 9 generations ago might have lived in Scotland.

“Did live in Scotland,” says Anna. “My mother’s maiden name is Stewart. My ancestors were related to the royals.”

“How bout that?”

“True story,” says Anna.

“Well in that case, can we start calling Charles the II “Uncle Charlie,” because I really like the way that sounds.”

“And James the First can be Uncle Jaime.”

“The Holy Bible—Uncle Jaime Edition. Sounds good,” I say. “I still don’t think you can use that to get a job in Italy though.”

“Probably not,” says Anna. “Damnit.”

9:30 am

We step onto RialtoBridge, to see the shuttered doors coming off the stalls and stores we’d passed earlier in the day. The sky is cloudless, full blue, and from the top of the bridge we can see the flowers and fruits of the street market on the other side of the river. Most of it is crap—shitty tourist stuff—plastic masks, bad t-shirts, but we walk slowly in case we miss something.

The other side of the Canal is quieter, and once we’re a few blocks out of the market, less clogged with tourists. On otherwise empty alleyways, we pass waiters in white aprons taking cigarette breaks from side work against high terra cotta colored walls. Venice has a lot of the following things:

Mask stores
Lingerie stores
Stationary shops
Restaurants that advertise both Pizza and Gelato. (In fact, one was actually called simply: “Pizza and Ice Cream”)
Hot men.

So many of the last in fact, that it becomes almost impossible to not be distracted by eye-candy at every twist and turn. It’s not just that men in Venice are tall, slender, dark, and handsome. It’s that the tall, slender, dark and handsome men in Venice are extraordinarily well dressed (even if they’re wearing hoodies and jeans—the jeans fit well), congenial, and inclined to smile appreciatively at every passing woman. When they speak, they look you in the eyes. And even hecklers from across the Canal are pretty flattering. (“Bella! Bella!” being infinitely preferable to “Back that Ass up!”) This has the benefit of making you, as observing/ed female, feel infinitely more confident, beautiful, and desirable than you may even be. This is not a talent that most American men have, and romance on this side of the Atlantic suffers for it.

On the way to Frari, we stray too far into the wrong direction and end up by a University where a bunch of students are participating in what looks like a Fraternity initiation, involving stripping, getting doused with all manner of shit, and then awarded a black robe and laurel wreath. There’s quite a crowd gathered, including a perambulatory band with accordion. Anna and I promise ourselves we will figure out what’s going on, and head back in the right direction to Frari.

10:45 am

Though spacious, high, and true to its architectural era, Frari isn’t a grand cathedral, but what it lacks in architectural opulence, it makes up in quality of featured art. Titian’s “Assumption” stands in full, brilliant glory over the altar, and each corner features pieces—both paintings and sculptures—of similar beauty and craftsmanship. Donatello’s John the Baptist—skeletal and decked out in animal skins. The Bellini “Madonna in Child” in the smaller chapel, which is truly magnificent. The Venetian painters, unlike their Florentine peers, had a gift for capturing beautiful women. This seems as if it shouldn’t come as such a surprise, but the fact is: most Renaissance art is all about glorifying the masculine. After days of seeing dulled female heads on lumpen, androgynous bodies, the business of the women in Venetian painting seemed all the more remarkable. Titian’s women are perfectly beautiful and remarkably human for their time, and Bellini, his teacher, painted the most gorgeous Madonna I saw in Italy, whose puzzling facial expression—acceptance mixed with regret mixed with tedium mixed with sadness and exhaustion—is truly remarkable to see. When I stepped in to see her, in that tiny Chapel, in the company of two elderly English tourists, I felt like I’d earned some rare glimpse into the real character of the mythological virgin, and found it rather heartbreaking.

We interrupted a tour group, lead by Enrique Iglesias’s mole, which has since evacuated to the face of a skinny young Italian man, on our way out. I bought lots of post cards, and we agreed to stop for coffee on the way to see the Tintoretto Chapel.

At a small cappuccino stand, run by two friendly women who didn’t speak a word of English, we sat outside to smoke and watched the parade of hot men. Anna determines the predominant fashion trend among young Italian women involves patterned tights and puffy jackets, and starts to revise her opinion on the latter, having previously filed it under the “Way Too Brooklyn Hipster for My Taste” heading. The back of Frari is under construction, so the entire square smells a little like nail polish remover, and every now and then you catch sight of the construction crew, who are all dressed like they came from Disco Night at the Star Trek Convention. Fuschia jumpsuits. Shiny silver stripes. Not kidding.

I drink a coffee and a lemon soda in quick succession and we head back to Scuola di San Rosso—a brilliant white building in a square of brilliant white buildings. Inside it is quite a bit darker. We wander round the first floor, looking up at Tintoretto’s often creepy and certainly elaborate biblical scenes before realizing that the real show is upstairs. This ballroom of a chapel with high gilded frescos on all sides, including ceiling. (They give you mirrors so you can see what’s above you without straining your neck—and this is a great idea, except you end up looking at all the pictures in reverse). I marvel at the opulence of the space and the, to be blunt, bat-shit crazy quality of Tintoretto’s work and subject matter. I get “Let’s Get It On” stuck in my head at the top of the stairs, and probably irritate the other patrons by humming the line “We are all sensitive people, with so much to give . . .” over and over, until Anna and I are distracted by a ceiling panel that appears to be God coming out of Godzilla’s nose in order to give Moses revision notes on the Ten Commandments. (This later proved to be “Jonah and the Whale,” but I had to buy a postcard in order to figure that out. And Tintoretto obviously had no idea what a whale looked like). I don’t know why—when confronted with the sublime—I am apt to devolve into a giggling adolescent. Chalk it up to my philistine tendencies, I guess.

After perusing the gift shop and finding no cheap coffee mug printed with Tintoretto’s likeness we head back out into the streets around the university and find more students engaged in the laurel wreath ritual around low-rent coffee stands and used book stores. We get turned around following two young mothers pushing babies in carriages and come out in Campo Santa Margarita, where Anna explains the history of the Rio Terre Canal (which apparently was once an actual canal, but is now a street. ) We stop in a lovely, quiet, and chilly church, and then head out through the archways to the area around the Accademia.

12:30pm

The Accademia Bridge is one of the grandest wooden bridges I’ve ever seen, rising in a high arch over the Grand Canal. From the top, you can see the view of Venice that’s printed on all the postcards. As such, it is absolutely clogged with tourists and gypsies selling ragdoll animals and praying mantises made out of palm leaves. Because we are tourists, we edge into the crowd to take our own series of predictable snapshots, and I fall into serious consideration of all the flying lions[1] around town. The water beneath us is brilliant blue green, and you could for a moment imagine it as tropical and pristine were it not for the omnipresent scent of old fish and rotten trash. After a while, you stop noticing the way Venice smells.

We go to the Peggy Guggenheim because we fear it will be our only real opportunity to see Modern and Post-Modern Art whilst in the country of ten billion crucifixion scenes. (This was, incidentally, correct). Twisting through the narrow streets back toward Ms. Guggenheim’s villa, we encounter a truly dazzling assortment of international hipsters, all of whom look like they’ve recently stepped out of an LCD Soundsystem show, except for the inevitable clutch of teenaged mohicans, who scowl when they sip their espresso and prove that, even in 2006, there’s really no place free of purple haired fifteen year olds in a safety-pinned Exploited T-shirts.

By the time, we reach the Peggy Guggenheim, there are only hipsters. Legions of them. Working at the ticket desk, lounging in the courtyard, smoking against the walls. I hear at least seven different languages, but everyone looks like they should be sitting on the back patio of OCSC on a weekend night. I do realize that I’m definitely playing the part of the pot to the kettle here, but seriously? It’s a bit unnerving.

I enjoy the art. Especially the Italian Futurist collection. It occurs to me that I’m never going to stand in awe of Jackson Pollack, and that the popularity of Surrealism at Campus Poster Sales has permanently compromised my ability to look at a Salvador Dali painting and not think about nineteen year old stoners. The temporary exhibit of B&W photographs documenting the Venice Biennale from 1948 to present is way more interesting than it probably should be, and, arguably, my most favorite piece is a recent Jenny Holzer bench, which like most of her stuff is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Peggy Guggenheim is buried there, in a grave in the courtyard alongside her fifteen lap dogs. I spend entirely too much money on postcards of the lady herself, in tricked-out sunglasses, partly because they guy working at the gift shop is incredibly charming.

2:30 pm

By this point, we’re exhausted and hungry. We cross the Canal to head back toward Piazza San Marco for lunch, and end up on the street with all the expensive designer stores (which I have no business even looking at). The plan is eat at one of the upscale tourist traps along the outside of the square, but we find, upon arrival, that they are, by and large, closed for the season. Spent, Anna and I collapse against a column in the corner to be observed by a thousand or so morbidly obese pigeons.

“These are the fattest pigeons I have ever seen,” I say.

“They look like turkeys,” says Anna.

“Tiny, fat turkeys.”

“Look, they can hardly fly even,” says Anna. “You figure they’re kickable?”

I sit back to watch a near-Hitchcockian drama play out between a group of high school students and about two hundred pigeons. They’re screaming and holding their heads.

“I don’t think anyone would stop you at this point. Might be kind of a public service. Of course, they might shit on you.”

“I’m just waiting for that to happen,” she says. “I read a whole section in the guidebook last night about how to get pigeon shit off of you. Apparently you let it dry first.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“It’s kind of gross.”

“So is eating the fat pigeons,” I say. “But in a pinch, I’m sure they’d be filling.”

“Hello Bird Flu.”

“This is like Ground Zero for Bird Flu,” I say, and quiet. An outbreak of avian flu in Venice would be like Night of the Living Dead. “Jesus.”

Sitting in Piazza San Marco is sort of like taking a sedative. After a while, you stop noticing how much time has passed or what you have to do. It becomes very hard to pull yourself away and motivate. Eventually, the hunger factor forces us up off our asses, and we wander out toward the canal, intrigued by the notion of excellent Bellinis at Harry’s (where we don’t actually end up eating due to a lack of outdoor seating). Anna balks at paying to use the toilet. I buy glass fish for my mother at the stalls by the Canal, and ultimately we end up at a pizza place about two blocks back from the Piazza, where our waiter initiates what is to become a popular thread on our trip through Italy.

He arches his eyebrows and smiles. “So you’re English, right?”

“No.”

“Scottish?”

“No.”

“Austrailian?”

“Nope.”

He puzzles. “Irish?”

“No.”

Anna rolls her eyes and raises her hand. “American.”

“No,” he says.

We shrug apologetically. “Yeah.”

He shakes his head and takes our wine order, still not convinced.

I had told Anna before leaving the States that I’ve rarely been identified as an American at first blush when traveling in Europe.[2] This is no put-on on my part. I don’t fake accents or adopt new personas. And I don’t know why this is, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take it as a compliment. Anna didn’t believe me when I told her, but when the maitre d walks away, she looks across the table and says:

“Okay, you’re right. That was totally flattering.”

I think for a moment on the semi-tragedy of how embarrassing it’s become to be an American in the Bush-era. And I try to not to wonder if the continual confusion over my nationality derives from the fact that I don’t have perfect teeth.

I eat most of a small pizza and we drink an entire bottle of wine sitting there, getting politely heckled by a table full of Italian boys in track jackets. We take off after lunch, opting out of the lines in front of the Cathedral to pay 7 euro for a cramped elevator ride to the top of the bell tower, where we gawk amid middle-aged tourists, and look out over the red tile roofs to the distant Adriatic. By the time we return to ground level, Anna and I decide to head back toward the hotel on the Vaporetto.

5:00pm

We ride up the Grand Canal watching the passing hilarity of un-self-conscious gondolier passengers. Seated on the front edge, I have a good view of what rush hour traffic looks like in a city of water. Behind me, a young Scottish couple muses about the possibility of Vaporetti-Spotting. We disembark at Ca’ D’Oro, and wander back down the Canareggio Streets to our hotel, and then onto the Rialto, where I spend entirely too much money on a leather journal, bought from a husband and wife team who make sketchbooks in an ancient style. Anna gets run out of a tourist stall by an angry proprietor for trying to take a picture of an incongruous American Civil War chess set displayed among the plastic lions and cheap glass beads.

We finally settle back for another cheap bottle of wine at a Caffe beside the Bridge and irritate an uptight young English couple by smoking. The sun is sinking lower in the western sky, and I take a short detour on the way home at a cheesy chain store to buy a skirt.

By the time we get back to Antico Doge, we’re dog-tired and fall asleep for about an hour and a half, rising late—at almost nine to wander around the corner to a small restaurant called Trattoria di Bepi.

9:00pm

In our (limited) experience, Venice is not much of a late-night town. In fact, by 9:30, Venice is pretty much sleeping save a couple of discos by the train station. This apparently has something to do with a necessary, of fairly Draconian, noise ordinance. Water and narrow alleyways do little to insulate against sound. By the time we arrive at the restaurant, literally one block from our hotel, at a few minutes after nine, the staff is already stacking chairs, anxious to go home. We settle into a communal dining area, and are seated midway down a table next to an older couple. An American woman, Brenda, who is from Atlanta and runs an international glass shop with a showroom at the High Point Furniture Market, and her attractive European significant other (we later speculate that he’s probably Greek). They come to Venice regularly to deal directly with the Murano people, but have spent the better part of the last week in rural Romania dealing with remote artisans in regions without real roads. We hear a collection of colorful anecdotes about fly fishing in the Carpathians before they offer up the location of a bar up the road called Tortuga and promise to meet us later for a drink, should we choose to join them.

Anna and I order an Italian variant of the seafood platter and are served plates brimming with tiny, crispy anchovies and squids. Anna puts her squeamishness aside and does tolerably well with the mystery seafood. I’m not squeamish, but find the meal mediocre at best.

10:30pm

After dinner, we wander the empty streets around the hotel searching for Tortuga. We find a movie theater and a lot of houses with darkened windows but no sign of nightlife. We finally surrender to return to Rialto and Signore Nefarious, who appears just as unhappy to see us as he did the night before. We sit in the far corner table, the Canal lapping mere inches from our outstretched feet.

“At risk of being cheesy, this really is the most beautiful place,” I say.

Anna nods. “Yeah.”

“Shame we have to go tomorrow.”

“True.”

I turn my head to look at the lights on the water and feel the brisk wind against my cheek. I wonder, idly, if I’ll ever come back, while somewhere inside the bar, the wait staff thumps the bar triumphantly at the end of the soccer game playing on the television.

And though we’re not leaving until the next morning, I take a moment to say goodbye to Venice.

[1] Not actually griffins, as I find out later. Flying lions are a symbol of St. Mark and a sign of the Enlightenment. They also, at least in Venice, bear a significant resemblance to the Cowardly Lion with wings. In other words, not terribly intimidating. I plan on dressing my cat, Maud, as a Venetian Flying Lion for Halloween this year. I’ll keep you updated on how this goes.

[2] Even in England my sister and I shared an elevator in a fancy hotel with a couple convinced we were Irish

Italy Complete Record: Day Two

2006-04-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

March 28, 2006

Venezia
10:15am

The Venice airport is charming and small and laid back. Even the Italian military guys in baggage claim, wearing modified fatigues and carrying automatic rifles, mostly just lounge and laugh and try to flirt with female passengers (including Anna). We enter the small, marble and glass lobby to buy Alilaguna water bus tickets from a window beside an espresso stand where two attractive elderly men in designer eyewear bicker lovingly over a couple of cappuccinos.

We pull our suitcases outside to smoke a cigarette beside the taxi lane and watch the all of the following pass, in succession: Two nuns in full habit, four young men in Italia soccer jackets with complicated hair, a glamorous middle aged woman with Cat’s Eye sunglasses, high heels, two dogs, and a fur coat, a Marlon Brando lookalike in a long black dress coat and a black suit, and finally, a tall, black-haired, blue-eyed guy in what looked like surgical scrubs and a track jacket, who approaches with some measure of feline grace and asks for a light. Easily one of the hottest guys I’ve ever seen. After thanking us politely, he darts off into the parking lot, leaving Anna and I to sit stunned into silence on the bench.

“Wow,” I say.

“Wow,” says Anna. “Bad pants, but, Wow.”

“You figure they hire that guy as a greeter? Like, “hey, welcome to Italy where the hot men are.”

“Wow,” says Anna.

“Also the nuns and the fashionistas and the Sofia Loren look alike and the Mafioso looking dudes. Do you think the Italian tourism board pays these people to walk around the airport, play the stereotypes, and amuse the travelers?”

“Wow,” says Anna.

“So this is Italy,” I say. “May be premature, but I’m gonna say that I’m pro-Italy.”

Anna shakes her head. “That guy? So fucking hot.”

*****

11:45 am
It’s drizzly, quite foggy, and a little cold. We’re standing about a half a mile from the terminal on a covered dock, floating on the murky green water of the Lagoon, waiting for the waterbus with an eager English teenager[1] and his white-haired dad. I’m feeling a little high at present (it’s now almost 5 am, my time), a condition not aided by the ceaseless rocking of the dock and the occasional glimmer of blinding white sunlight through the fog. I close my eyes and hallucinate a sea serpent.

When the boat shows up, about fifty people converge out of nowhere to join us on our ride across the Lagoon. The guys on the boat are affable enough, drinking coffee from a novelty mug featuring a pair of breasts and what I imagine must be a cheesy joke in Italian. They steer with no great precision using a polished wooden captain’s wheel which looks like it was stolen of an 18^th century pirate sloop and attached with superglue to the metal dashboard.

I lean my head against the window as we pass through a colonnade of elaborate buoys and rock jetties, each topped with signs that look to have been painted about a century ago (at least). These markers are each topped by a single fat seagull—as if part of the gimmick—as we pass through the brightening mist. I halfway anticipate a pirate attack by the time we round past an island housing a villa and an enormous cemetery. Sunlight starts creeping through as we pass the Lido and through Murano, where we see the glass factory and lots of black fluffy dogs.

Crossing the grandest part of the grand canal in a near golden fog—the outline of the distant domes and towers rising out of the mist—I feel like I’m sailing into a Henry James novel or some strange, Italian Avalon that emerges from the haze sporadically to seduce the stray visitor into some decadent alternate reality. Wouldn’t be so bad, I think, as we round into the Grand Canal and I get my first look at the Byzantine archways of the Doge’s Palace, and beyond to the great, elaborate edifice of St Mark’s. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a little teary at that first sight of Venice through the shimmering, damp mist.

We disembark at the far end of Piazza San Marco, just to the right of Harry’s Bar, and drag our now damp and heavy suitcases over a narrow waterside sidewalk abutted on both sides by market stalls selling Carnevale masks and Italia warm-up jackets. We pass a block of pay-to pee toilets and round the first edge of waterlogged sidewalk cafes to pass beneath the columns at the edge of the square. I give a nod up to Triton, standing on what appears to be a crocodile, and the friendly looking griffin with the fat paws as we merge into the crowd of tourists in front of the Cathedral.

Well past the point of standard exhaustion, wet from the rain, yet uncomfortably warm, Anna and I convene on the overturned pallets the Venetians use for walkways when the square floods at high tide for a cigarette break and a map consult. It starts raining harder even before I manage to light the cigarette with the now damp, globetrotting matches from Orange County Social Club. Hordes of tourists rush in the direction from which we have come to the Vaporetti stop, the rest huddle in awkward clutches under awnings and clear plastic ponchos of the Disneyworld model. I glance up at the aged, green Etruscan horses stampeding high over the Cathedral archways, and can’t summon up any energy to hurry. The pace and grandeur of the place is anathema to efficiency, and I can’t stop wondering at the vastness of the square, the long rows of colonnades, blackened with soot and age, the wide public space (one of the most magnificent in the world—urban planners teach seminars on it). It would be hard to live in Venice at any time in the last millennium or so and not have a deeply felt sense of civic pride based on the remarkable achievements of the planners, architects, and engineers who managed to create a kind of heaven on earth effect out of a swamp. Venice was the least likely to that became the richest city of medieval Europe. As center of trade and commerce, Venice played out of both hands, innovating, stealing, borrowing, or skimming off of the top from and for the East and the West, often at the same time. How else to explain how Europe’s most elaborately Byzantine city provided the financial backing, the transport, and the suggestion to the Crusaders that sacked Constantinople?

(Probably not coincidence . . . just saying)

At the end of the day, though, Venice’s ability to survive the last thousand years or so really boils down to is luck, bolstered by an appealing, if counterintuitive notion, that nature is no match for the wily, baroque sensibilities of the Venetian population.[2] The jewel of the Adriatic with waterways guarded by griffins and pagan gods, with a Carnevale that set the bar for debauchery on at least two other continents, with a list of noteworthy painters and artists (Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, et al) whose unique translation of Renaissance ideals showed less concern for piety and neo-Platonism and more for pleasure, feminine perfection, and other such worldly aims. (Among other things, Venice gave birth to Casanova). And there’s something quite intoxicating about the city’s historic flouting of its own obvious mortality. The gold encrusted facades of palazzos on the grand canal, slowing rotting and sinking into the lagoon. It’s some sort of testament to the ephemeral quality of human endeavor—no matter how grand. And it doesn’t take long to recognize that Venice is extraordinarily beautiful, and it’s beauty is not in spite of the grit and decay, but because of it. [3]

It is my idea to brave the rainy streets with a crude map and find our hotel on foot. It's not the best one. The shower has picked up considerable strength since we landed and we slog through with miniature travel umbrellas past crowds cowering under the awnings of jewelry shops and tourist traps. Schlepping a oversized suitcase through the alleys and over the white marble bridges of Venice is hard enough when it’s not raining. Factor in our condition (hungry, tired, wet), the crowds, and the smirking, dawdling gondoliers who took some pleasure in watching us take a suitcase over the same stairway three times before we finally figured out the right direction, it feels downright purgatorial. Venice is like a maze. There are plenty of dead ends, but you end up walking all the way around a block before you realize the sidewalk stops at the canal and unless you want to swim (not advised), you’re pretty much back at square one. About thirty minutes into the quest for our hotel, Anna and I land in an empty, perfectly charming courtyard just east of the Rialto Bridge, where we consider giving up entirely and surrendering to the fact that we are lost. Finding our hotel is futile. Why even try?

And, as usually happens in these scenarios, about five minutes later we arrive at our hotel.

Antico Doge is the former residence of the mayor of Venice, facing a little campo in Canareggio, fitted with its own small belltower and a great many tobacco stores. (This square is, incidentally, the only place with park benches in the entire city of Venice.) You enter the hotel through heavy wooden doors on the ground floor (which look somewhat less imposing for being wedged between a store selling off-price designer jeans and an extremely loveable video arcade featuring vintage Galaga machines, football betting, and cheap rates for internet browsing) and drag your sopping wet suitcase down their plush pink runner to a tiny check-in area where an attractive woman looks at you with obvious pity and tries to distract you from thinking about how long it’s going to take you to get in your room (top of the stairs) and into bed by offering a complimentary trip to the Murano glass factory in the back of a tiny motorboat owned by the manager of the hotel, which, right now, sounds like the last thing you want to do. And finally, you check in and a 50 year old man who is probably 5’2 and weighs (probably) forty pounds less than you do (at least), but otherwise bears a striking resemblance to David Straithairn starts hauling your luggage upstairs before you can stop him, and by the time you reach the stop of the stairs (narrow, marble, fitted with an itty bitty funicular), he’s purple from the strain and you’re red from embarrassment, and you have no idea what to expect when he uses an enormous brass key with an even larger silk tassel on the end to open your room (called “The Danolo”).

I worry that I accidentally booked the suite.

Anna puts it well.

“Shit, this is nice.”

High polished hardwood floors, gold silk brocade walls, crystal chandeliers.

“Italian MTV,” says Anna.

“Bidet!” I say. “Mini-bar!”

Anna opens the drapes to unlatch the seven foot tall windows. “Interesting alley views!” (Not the suite)

There’s a stairwell leading upstairs to a loft with a queen size bed. Downstairs there’s a twin size bed fitted as a sofa. Both (we will learn) are hard as rocks.

Slightly reenergized by our successful hotel room conquest, we leave the hotel to buy a phone card from the tobacco store across the campo. The guy running the place is chaming, though I findthat all the Italian I’d tried to learn disappears as soon as I tryto speak it. I buy a cigarette lighter and Anna and I walk deeper into Canareggio to sit on the edge of an empty fountain and smoke a cigarette.

On about the third drag, I slide on my sunglasses (the clouds are finally clearing), and woozily turn to Anna: “I think I’m either going to pass out or die.”

Though Anna insists she isn't tired, she agrees to put off further exploration until after a nap. We stroll back to the hotel, I slog up the steps to the loft, and without even bothering to take off my clothes, fall asleep in about five minutes.

*****

The nap you take after crossing the Atlantic is only ever supposed to last for an hour or two. Invariably, though, you lie down at two, fall into a deep sleep, and when you open your eyes again, it’s dark outside.

Such is the case our first afternoon in Venice. I don't roll over until about 7:30 and shuffle down the stairs to see Anna stirring on the bed below.

“We should eat something,” I say, opening my suitcase.

She groans in protest.

“Seriously.” I pull a clean shirt from the pile and a pair of heavy rhinestone earrings to trick me into believing I look clean, attractive, and well-rested. By the time I’m dressed and out of the bathroom, Anna has watched enough of Italian MTV to compare it favorably to American MTV.

“They play way better videos here,” she says.

In other words, they actually play videos here.

I flip through the channels while she dresses. We drop the key with the concierge and take off into the darkened streets.

*****

Our first meal in Italy is profoundly mediocre. We end up at a Trattoria with a nautical theme and lots of wood paneling full of paunchy, elderly Brits and an overfriendly techie with really fucked up teeth from Fayetteville, North Carolina, who insists quizzing us about the status of all of his favorite bars in the greater Triangle area. I guess he’s nice enough, but he looks a little like a hamster and I sort of wish he would leave me to enjoy my mediocre crab pasta and cheap white house wine in peace. We empty the carafe of wine with ease, trying to dull the awkwardness of the restaurant, and leave with a fond farewell from Captain Fayetteville.[4]

Over at the Rialto Bridge, we stumble upon a little bar at the base, with tables all the up to the Canal. It will become our home away from home for the duration of our stay in Venice. We order a couple of cappuccinos from a surly, bald waiter, whom I nicknamed Signore Nefarious, in honor of my favorite surly French waiter, Monsieur Nefarious[5]. Venice is very quiet, even early at night, so much so that you can hear the water lapping against the carved stone banks. We watch gondolas pass under the bridge, the water reflected under the arch like green sequins.

Anna yawns.

We pay the bill, check our email at the arcade beside the hotel, and go to bed.

[1] I hesitate to use the word “dorky,” but that’s probably closer to the truth.

[2] This logic is not as appealing as it once was. By all reports, the permanent population of Venice is shrinking every year, while the tourism trade grows exponentially. The most recent count put Venice’s population at about 65,000, less than half of what it was in the 1960’s.

[3] On a personal note, I found myself thinking about New Orleans pretty much from the moment I step off the boat. This is no passing thought. At some point in the future, as ocean levels rise, Venice will cease to be. If they had hurricanes in the Adriatic, it probably would have happened a long time ago. I doubt Venice would condescend to compare itself with an upstart colonial city at the mouth of the Mississippi, just as I doubt New Orleans could ever aspire to such great heights, especially not now. But I’m haunted by the latter the whole time I’m in the former.

[4] It occurs to me sometime later that he was probably in the military.

[5] He works at Brasserie Lipp on Blvd St. Germain in Paris. Eat there just so he can serve your food, make snide comments about your face or family members, and allude to his plans for world domination. I (and I say this without irony) absolutely adore him.

Italy Complete Record: Prologue/ Day One

2006-04-20T12:52:00.000-07:00

The night before we left for Italy Anna and I inadvertently ended up hosting a celebratory send-off to ourselves in place of the now traditional Sunday night dinners. Wilson and Whitney came by (with additional) friends in tow, to fetch the keys. The Boop arrived to partake of the pizza we ordered from up the street and watch a re-rerun of “Grey’s Anatomy.” I handed out house keys like party favors, while Anna showed off her comprehensive list of instructions to the small army of friends and (in the Boop’s case) relatives we’d retained as housesitters and airport shuttle service. The Boop departed that night with a stern warning that we “better be ready to fucking go” when she came by to take us to the airport the following morning. Lateness would not be tolerated. I laughed at her worry. Barring packing, I was ready to go in January. Barring plane tickets and hotel reservations, I’d been ready to go for years. I just needed a little shot of travel catalyst to jolt me out of the sweet, if shrinking, complacency of everyday life in Carrboro.

By the time everyone left, I was a little intoxicated, a condition I’d hoped for, in order to insure sleep unencumbered by the Christmas-Eve-at-Eight-Years-Old variety of insomnia in which I’d toss and turn on “is it time yet?” until the pre-dawn light brought a bevy of less glamourous travel anxieties. I’d been quizzing myself on rudimentary Italian using homemade flashcards written out during a shift at CD Alley the week before. “Vorrei una bighlietta a Venezia?” “Dove vaporetto?” I was pretty sure I’d end up sounding like babbling idiot (in most cases, I did, but most Italians are reasonably good-humored about correcting pronunciation). I jumped out of bed two or three times in early evening to recheck the location of my passport, convinced that I’d merely hallucinated its presence the last two or three times I’d looked. Finally satisfied that I was reasonably sane, I crawled into bed with the Ripley Omnibus and finally fell off to sleep with visions of rich, young, murderous American expatriates dancing in my head.

That night, I dreamed I fell in love with a soft-spoken Irishmen. He worked at an over priced junk shop that sold banquet tables full of china and crystal swans of all types. The owner was, literally, a witch with white streaked gray hair and a talent for shape-shifting. I was a journalist—a feature writer for a large newspaper-- assigned to interview the sister of a high profile cult leader (who had, depending on who you asked, either been martyred or committed suicide), and at least as unsure of my skill at asking the right questions as I was of my ability to stay objective. The morning before the evening interview, I’d gone junk shopping with my friends to quell my anxieties, and ran into the Irishmen after accidentally breaking a pair of pink crystal swans. When I balked at having to pay the cost of the items, the witch dealer turned into a fireball and threatened to kill me. The Irishmen was able to extinguish the flames, both literal and metaphorical, and asked, in repayment, that I consider going out with him that evening. I laughed, not believing he was serious, not believing he was actually interested in me (he was tall and lithe i, more attractive than I thought myself capable of dreaming up), but he pushed on, and I finally agreed and asked him if he would mind accompanying me to the interview that night.

The cult-leader’s sister lived in a small white farm house with a tin roof on a street very similar to the one where I actually live. Her name was Ginger, and she was about twenty years old. Pretty, with long brown hair and wide set eyes. She welcomed us onto her screened in porch with an offer of green tea, and we sat in the light of pink Japanese lanterns as a summertime thunderstorm rolled in overhead. I stuttered on how to ask this girl, whose plight had been widely discussed in the media, for the story of her life. But the Irishmen, who knew nothing about her, simply took my hand and opened the floor with a simple question about her childhood. It wasn’t the question, but the way he phrased it, and I sat back, awed, as she started talking easily, shedding new light on circumstances I thought I already knew. From then, my job was easy. She answered all of my questions, and I left moved by her story. “You have a real gift for this,” I said to the Irishman, as we departed, hand in hand over the now slick streets. He shrugged modestly and admitted it was his first attempt at interviewing anyone. We went back to his room, an upstairs studio over the junk shop where he explained to me that his business with the witch was something of an informal indenture and he longed to find a way out of his current arrangement. We kissed there, and I think he told me he loved me, and I woke in that sort of glow, and that was pretty much my state of mind as I shoved the remaining toiletries in my bag and rolled my suitcase out to the living room.

Anna and I drank a cup of coffee and double-checked the locks on the windows and went to sit outside in the warm morning sun to wait for the Boop’s shuttle services.

DAY ONE—March 27, 2006

As promised the Boop arrives promptly at ten. I stub out my cigarette and listen to the trademark sound of blaring female melissma from her stereo as she speeds down our narrow, dead-end street. We reach a consensus that the two suitcases Anna and I have packed for the trip will prohibit us from taking the Volkswagen. We load into my car, and the Boop plays a burned copy of Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore” on repeat as we ease down the highway to the airport. She leaves us with a warm bon voyage and a promise to return my car at the earliest convenience.

In American airports since 9/11, the security threat is apparently always yellow and everyone wearing shoes is subject to scrutiny, because, as you well know, terrorists never go barefoot. My passport receives some funny looks from the US Air ticket counter guy with the unfortunate eyebrows, probably because it looks like it was traded for two rolls of toilet paper and a bootleg copy of “Justified” in some third world streetmarket, and the interior picture (circa 2000) makes me look like a thirty-five year old woman with a bad dye job, desperate to sell you a McMansion in the Atlanta suburbs. Additionally, I seem to be one of those people who could set off the metal detector wearing nothing but a loincloth made of Kleenex. I don’t know why this is. My best guess would be that the penny I swallowed at the age of four has never managed to work its way out of my system.[1]

After establishing that I am not a security threat, we are released into the terminal to sit under the anachronistic (and not inoffensive) murals of antebellum South in the C concourse coffeeshop, where Anna grouses about the lack of breakfast food and I, in a fit of pre-flight hypochondria, suck down a handful of zinc lozenges. We go for a last cigarette break in the basketball themed bar beside our gate. The televisions overhead play a loop of highlights from last seasons' NCAA tournament, and I sit back to sip on scorched instant coffee and revel in the notion of putting an ocean between myself and a city full of bitter Carolina fans. A couple of baggage handlers wearing gold chains beneath their orange vests swagger in to sit beside us, and Anna smiles a little. I don’t know if they respond. We feign exuberance for pictures, but it was really too early to feel anything but premature cabin fever. I buy a New York Times from an airport newsstand looking for news from Europe and learn little except that the Paris suburbs are still burning and the British are dissatisfied with Tony Blair, but not enough so to vote Tory.

By the time we board, I’ve finished the paper, including the crossword and the obituaries. It’s a sold out flight to Philidelphia. We are offered incentives of free travel to take a later flight. A mustachioed British man, on the model of Falstaff’s conservative brother, groans audibly, while I eavesdrop on the conversation of an extended Indian family, also traveling on to Frankfurt.

Once seated, I realize I’ve left my journal inside the terminal and run back down to retrieve it. The woman at the gate, who has a face like a buttered pancake and a truly monstrous hairstyle (equal parts mullet, bouffant, and Marie Antoinette) informs me that she has no time for my hijinks and I will miss my flight if I do not board the plane. By some miracle, I notice my reject pile of newspapers to the left of the doorway and pull the book out from beneath. The Bouffant snarls, when I run back to the plane, like she’s disappointed I made it. And I take my seat, breathless, to the applause of the flight attendants.

Losing the book wouldn’t have been such a terrible thing. I had no important documents stuffed in its pages, save a poor quality Xerox of my passport and a collection of Post-It notes covered in chickenscratch directions from the various train stations to our hotels. I cling to the book like a security blanket during take-off.

*****

On a clear day, Virginia and Maryland look like England from 20,000 feet—like a patchwork, a rural checkerboard of well-tended, over-civilized farmland, broken only by water. White people fear the wilderness. Things can grow and flourish, but only after learning not to overstep their boundaries. After four hundred years, the original thirteen colonies look even more domesticated and compartmentalized than their old world counterparts.

*****

USAir

Philidelphia-Frankfurt

About 4pm, EST

So here’s the secret:

I don’t know why I’m going to Italy. Despite the anticipated nice scenery and good food and art, I feel ungraciously ambivalent. The trip derived from an offhand comment from an offhand conversation during which my mother asked me what I wanted for my thirtieth birthday, I responded by saying I’d like to go to Italy, expecting her to respond with something along the lines of: “Good idea. I’ll let you know when I win the lottery.” But instead, she quieted, and responded with a simple, “Then why don’t you go?”

I had the money to pay for it, or rather, I had an inaccessible bank account maintained by my grandmother containing a dwindling amount of funds technically reserved for foreign travel. Or something like that. Over the years I’d ended up dipping into it a half-dozen or so times to put down payments on shitty used cars, or to pay the security deposits on apartments and utilities. The foreign travel thing had never really come to fruition, partly because I had a run of semi-free trips abroad due to family circumstances, and, partly because I couldn’t find a traveling companion willing to actually go and not just talk about it. Most of my friends had already traveled extensively in Europe, having done some version of the Grand Tour post high school, followed by a semester+ of study abroad. And even those that hadn’t dismissed the whole notion of traveling in Western Europe as something so grotesquely unhip they wouldn’t even consider it. [2]

That said, as we walk through the Space Age International Terminal (“This looks like where they make the robots,” I say to Anna), I can’t help thinking that I’ve somehow made the wrong decision, and blown the rest of my travel money for the indefinite future on a place destined to disappoint me. Maybe I’m just a little freaked out by how spontaneous this trip isn’t. Or maybe I’m feeling a twinge of regret at having my wild European adventure when I’m thirty instead of eighteen, and no longer young enough to scrap my plans and take off for the Amalfi Coast on a back of a Vespa with some aspiring photographer of dubious background without anxiety about losing the deposit on hotel reservations.

I try to curb my misgivings by accompanying Anna into the Swatch store, where we’re observed impatiently by a young woman with exotic fingernails, and again at a terminal restaurant where we eat microwaved quiche in a clutch of plastic tables occupied by German families and British businessmen. Out of affected habit, I improve my posture and switch my fork to the left hand.

*****

I don’t fear flying, but I tend to take stock of my accomplishments before take-off just in case. On the plus side: I have finished my book, turned thirty, experienced some modicum of financial security, and am traveling to Italy for eleven vacation days. On the minus, I haven’t had any decent action since before 9/11, I am ludicrously single, the only people who have read the book are my mother, my current roommate, and one ex-roommate, and haven’t actually seen Italy yet, in person.

There’s a bone thin teenager on our plane with tight jeans and leather jacket and long wavy hair, who looks like he should be fronting a glam garage band in 1972.. He’s traveling with his paunchy, middle aged Dad who looks like he probably never listened to rock and roll, even in 1972. Anna and I try to determine his nationality. My money’s on Sweden. Anna insists he’s German. Possible he’s just from New Jersey. Whatever the case, we both find him oddly attractive, and consider asking if he has groupies back home.

The woman at the gate calls our row. I smile at the youngest Indian boy from the flight from Raleigh, who is surreptitiously cleaning the face of his IPod with the embroidered hem of his grandmother’s sari. I reassure Anna that we do in fact have window seats and step onto the plane.

*****

About 7:00pm EST

Seat 22 E

The sun sets over Nova Scotia (overheard chatter: “No, it’s not Nova Scotia” “Yes, it is” ‘No it’s not, just look at it. It’s obviously something else.” “Like what?” “I dunno. Something else.” “Like what, Bob?” “Like whatever is between Greenland and Nova Scotia, you know the other place.” “Jesus, Bob, you sound so ignorant.” “Can I have my magazine back?” “Turbulence makes me constipated.”) and I note the entire visible spectrum including green over the distant clouds.

*****

About 9:30 pm EST

Seat 22 E

I haven’t been on a TransAtlantic flight since they’ve adopted On Demand movie showings. Anna and I watch “A History of Violence” in staggered time, and I marvel at the fact that I’m still oddly attracted to William Hurt (who apparently does not age). I then watch “Walk the Line” and wonder how anyone has ever been attracted to Joachim Phoenix.

*****

About 11:00pm

Seat 22E

Anna leans over to me, after the lights have all been turned out and service suspended to re-tell the tale of the kid she knew from school who killed his mother. I hear the people behind us silencing to hear the story, which ends with: “It’s a shame he had to kill his mom and everything because he was totally cute.”

*****

About Midnight/ 6am

Seat 22E

No one in coach is drinking. Is it that five dollars for a cocktail is that unthinkable for these people? I see clusters of orange light below, and wonder what exactly we’re flying over (Scotland? Scandinavia?) Whatever it is looks like a poor attempt at creating paisley on a Lite Brite.

*****

Frankfurt

8:30 am

Landing in Germany, we take a shuttle bus from the plane to the terminal with the glam rocker, his dad, and a loudmouthed skateboarder in a red track suit, who complains to anyone who will listen about the size of old lady ass he was forced to sit beside over the Atlantic and thunks out a clumsy hip-hop beat against the top of his skateboard. “That guy is draining my will to live,” I say to Anna, feeling already a little loopy and discombobulated. The sensation is heightened because last time I went to Germany they were only six hours ahead of Eastern Time.[3] “I swear to God.” Anna shoots me a look that says, “you obviously have no idea what you’re talking about” and we mosey through Customs. Tragically, the hot German passport boy of yore has been replaced by a balding man with a facial tic and an uncanny vocal similarity to guy featured in all WWII U-Boat
movies, whose job is to glower frequently and yell “Schnell! Schnell!”

We find the first smoking station (what looks like a cross between a bar and a radiator with illuminated Camel ads on top) in the customs baggage claim, which coincidentally is in the same room as the American Military offices[4]

We bum a light from the track-suited asshole. His name is Kevin. He’s American. He offers up that he’s in the military, and with a glance to the uniformed officer across the room, covers his mouth to say: “I hate my life.” As I’m barely able to put two words together, I’m unable to determine whether or not he’s been to Iraq. Mostly he says he misses home (San Diego). Misses skateboarding with his friends, and sitting on the beach, working a crappy job and getting stoned on the weekends. I don’t press for more details. I’m pretty sure I can’t rationally discuss American Foreign Policy at the moment, not when jet-lagged and undercaffeinated, and huddled round a communal smoke-eater with at least one uber-hip German girl who looks like an also-ran in the Roxette lookalike contest. Anna and I turn to leave and I tell Kevin to take care of himself, and resist the urge to say “do whatever you can to get the fuck out.”

As usual, I get frisked at a security checkpoint, this time by a beautiful blonde German girl whose nametag read Astrid. I regretted that my sexual orientation did not allow me to enjoy the experience more than I did. I suspect others would have found it to be a pleasant surprise.

The flight attendants and gate personnel in Frankfurt ride bicycles through the terminals with bells on the handlebars. At least one of them was singing. I hoped they might gather for a choreographed routine about air travel.

Anna “geeked out” when she pulled Euros out of a Deutschbank ATM, and asserted that we were really in Europe, a fact I’d arrived at sometime earlier, when I tried to apologize for stepping on Astrid’s toes in broken German. We bought foamy, instant coffee from a stand called “Time Out” up the hall from our gate, and chainsmoked three cigarettes while checking out a table of exceptionally attractive African men with thumb-nail sized diamonds in their ears. By the time we board, I’ve determined that Lufthansa employees are the happiest people in the world, and I’d willingly take whatever they’re taking to appear that euphoric at 7:45 in the morning.

[1] The apparent consensus of the security personnel is that I must be hiding something in my left breast, by to the amount of time they spend waving the beeping magic wand round my nipple.

[2] There seems to be some consensus among a certain population of young Americans that the only real way to travel involves visiting developing nations with a recent history of extreme political violence, having a spiritual adventure among shamans in mudhuts, and coming back with hand carved pottery, a prolonged intestinal disorder, and stories of exploited children as souvenirs. I’m not begrudging anyone their holiday in Cambodia (I’m also a Dead Kennedys fan), but I got to the point where I found myself bristling whenever someone launched into an angry screed about how my desire to drink a glass of wine beside a Venetian Canal reeked of bourgeoisie small-mindedness and insensitivity. (Note to self: apparently, getting stoned in South America and taking artful pictures of impoverished, indigenous children to display and sell for $250 a pop on the walls of the Fair Trade coffeeshop back home makes one more than just a tourist, but a much more conscientious member of the global community.)

[3] I spend a good portion of the next two hours trying to figure out whether a new time zone was created and the US Government has censored all mention of it as part of some shady Homeland Securty initiative. I manage to get myself reasonably worked up about it before finally learning that Daylight Savings happens in Europe a week earlier than it happens in the US (thank you bewildered concierge in Venice). The only thing worse than thinking you’re crazy is realizing you’re stupid.

[4] Isn’t there a statute of limitations on occupation? Are we waiting until everyone who was alive during WWII to die of natural causes? And what have the Germans done recently to unnerve us other than be more progressive than at least 90% of Americans, and (understandably) less tolerant of our own forays into Imperialism. Maybe it’s just the David Hasselhoff thing that wigs us out.

The Passion

2006-01-27T11:40:00.000-08:00

There are so many things I could say about this, and yet, perhaps it's all best left unsaid.

State of the Union

2006-01-19T09:37:00.000-08:00

It has recently come to my attention that a great number of my peers, during their senior year of high school, composed lengthy letters to their future selves as part of a class assignment. Some of them were to be sent out following their graduation from college. Others were saved for a certain birthday. Twenty-five. Thirty. They were assigned and, theoretically graded, though by what criteria I could not begin to guess. (Word count maybe? Proper use of the semi colon? ) I can identify the particular breed of high school English teacher psychology used to justify such a project—builds motivation and ambition, fosters forethought. But it’s impossible to ignore the implicit cruelty in forcing bitter twenty and thirty somethings to revisit the fatuous claims of their teenage selves and note just how much dignity they’ve willingly compromised in the intervening years. Now imagine the middle-aged, overworked, underpaid faculty member as he gleefully stuffs an envelope addressed to the asshole from seventh period, class of 1994, who earnestly believed he would hit number one on the billboard charts, buy a rocket ship, seduce Uma Thurman, and successfully perform a brain transplant using only a toothbrush and butter knife all by the time he turned thirty years old. (That guy, incidentally, is still slinging lattes and whining every night about his inability to earn the respect of his twenty-two-year-old manager. The teacher, at least, has health insurance. Revenge is sweet.)

Fortunately or unfortunately, I was never given such an opportunity. Prep schools shy away from forcing you to think too hard about your future. It’s generally accepted that you will be successful, if not by your own hard work, then through the generous bequests of your forefathers. At least successful enough to make a sizable contribution to the annual fund every year for the rest of eternity. The teachers don’t really mention that—it would probably be considered bad form—but the mercenary demands of the Alumni Association are as much an inevitability as the 10 million your classmate Prescott Tarkington Tarkington IV [1] will come into the month after graduation. And what’s the point of asking that guy to imagine his life ten years down the road? What would he have to say? “I’ll probably upgrading my jet” or “I hope to be investing in hedge funds” or “I’ll likely be residing at some posh Southern California facility recovering from a truly mind-blowing cocaine addiction” or “I’d like to have made some headway in negotiations to purchase the government of a small oil-rich country in the Middle East.” The only thing the school wants from you is your tacit promise that if you find yourself in possession of an extra 6 or 7 million dollars you might float it toward the construction of a new fitness center or dining hall. You know, for nostalgia's sake.

As for the rest of us, the realization that we lacked the advantagesof Tarkington Tarkington and his cohorts probably kept us from shooting too high. There’s a special kind of knowledge gained from living across the hall from an heiress at age sixteen. You may talk to her every day. You may have the same classes and creatively interpret the same dress code. You may even strike up a fond friendship, built on mutual acceptance and avoidance of the rules stated in the handbook. But once exams are over, all bets are off. She’ll be spending her summer sailing and riding horses while interning, by special arrangement, for the top magazine publisher in the world. You’ll be lucky if you can get a job filling water glasses at the Olive Garden. She’ll spend her nights at lawn parties with Kennedy scions. You’ll spend yours smoking cigarettes in the Waffle House parking lot, bewildered by your family’s insistence that tangible, meaningful success in America has nothing to do with the existence of a trust fund. You wonder if your high school only gave you such a generous financial aid package so you could call bullshit on the Protestant Ethic and go ahead and accept your place. You wonder if you’re better off knowing now, at age seventeen, that you will one day be slaving away in an airless cubicle at some regional branch of the multinational corporation owned by Tarkington Tarkington while he drag races Bentleys with an Arab prince in Dubai. You wonder if your friends from public school who haven’t even had the theoretical advantages you have aren’t luckier for the chance to imagine those extravagant idylls for themselves without having to acknowledge just how high the cards are stacked against them. Ignorance, they say, is bliss.[2]

***

If you had asked me at eighteen years old what I thought I would be doing in ten years, I would have fed you some insincere line about doing something meaningful. I wouldn’t have expanded on what that something meaningful was. If I liked you, I might have mentioned writing. If I really wanted you off my back, I would have said something about acting. But the fact of the matter was, when I was eighteen years old, I believed I was destined for failure. Not just disappointment. Not even Samuel Beckett style “Fail better” failure. I mean, full throttle, up shit’s creek with no paddle, sewer dwelling, Book of Job failure. It wasn’t an idle concern. It was, I believed, my destiny. I wasn’t sure how it would happen, or why. In some versions, I thought I might surrender to a narcotic addiction, or fall into some seedy sexual underworld. Sometimes, I thought my failure would be occasioned by some cataclysmic event—an apocalypse of some kind, or the rise of some fascist government. In my most romantic moments, I thought it might come out of involvement with some revolutionary political movement gone horribly awry. But always I believed it would only really initiate after a realization of my own guilt and weakness and subsequent renunciation of self. I would suffer as a nobody. And I would deserve it.

I spent most of my youth disguising my natural tendency toward underachievement under a thin (and honestly translucent) veneer of anti-authoritarianism. After all, it’s pretty easy, to justify not wanting to work for the Man. It’s a little harder justifying not wanting to work for anyone at all. I had the sort of resume that wouldn’t even make the first cut at Hippie Dan’s Espresso and Frozen Yogurt Kart. By the age of nineteen, I’d already started giving up the ghost of financial solvency. I’d hung out with enough amateur panhandlers to know that almost anyone could justify begging with the right combination of righteous anger and rhetoric. I read zines devoted to squatting and dumpster diving. I learned which cities had the mildest climates and the most tolerant attitudes toward panhandling. I convinced myself that I had all the right attributes—survival instinct, revolutionary spirit, authenticity, fashion sense, (somewhat punk rock and deconstructed by necessity) -- to be a great gutter poet. I could be a voice of the disenfranchised, composing hard, white knuckled prose on the sidewalks of the haunted, unforgiving metropolis[3].

If you were to read my journals from this period[4], you’d find a lot of reference to the need for paring down a life to the barest essentials. Becoming impervious to the harshness of life lived without material comforts. Toughening up. Depending on no one. Being wily and capable. I composed countless manifestos on the topic in the no-frills script style I deliberately cultivated, partially because it stood in stark contrast to the bubble-lettered cursive favored by the Old Alison, and partially because the angular, masculine quality of the block letters looked so much more commanding in the coffee stained pages of 99cent composition books I purchased for the purpose. If it seems petty to spend that much effort on revising your handwriting . . . well, then you pretty much get the point. And the handwriting is the most interesting part. The rest of it is some embarrassing muddle of ideas, derived from a hysterical and inchoate combination of freshman level philosophy, punk rock song lyrics, post-apocalyptic movies, and a used copy of “The Lives of the Saints”[5] I believed it to be deeply profound at the time, as much confirmation of my revolutionary sensibility as necessary tool for understanding my own ignoble, inevitable future. Ironically the very ideas I clung to in my youth as evidence of my own inherent radicalism in fact reveal nothing so much as a disquieting conservative streak. One obvious enough that even my nineteen year old self should have been able to identify it, had I been able to pull my head out of my ass for even a second

But let’s be honest. The implicit political orientation of my journal entries were infinitely less absurd than the context from which they were born. Namely: a reasonably priced, spacious, 1920’s era apartment, outfitted with eccentric cast offs from my grandmother’s antique store, on a polite tree-lined boulevard about two miles from campus. The campus where I was (theoretically) attending classes. On my mother’s nickel. The apartment to which I returned after a long, hard four hour shift cashiering at the independent video store. Or faking a British accent and serving tea in the showroom of a gentlemanly London-born importer at High Point Furniture Market. Or (wait for it) nannying for two precocious blonde pre-adolescents in a tract mansion in the suburbs. Was I really preparing myself for a life of hardship? Did I have the foggiest idea what it was like to ever really want for the basic essentials of life? Of course not. And, as I would have pointed out then, that was beside the point. The journey was about the fall, not what preceded it.

I never really told anyone about my worst-laid plans, which is unfortunate, as I probably deserved to be roundly ridiculed for being such an unforgivable twat. Society, rightly, has little tolerance for bored dilettantes who abdicate opportunity in order to treat abject poverty as a wild, Bohemian adventure. It wasn’t like I was going to do it for the greater good—I wasn’t going to run away from my life to feed the hungry or cure disease. I wasn’t following a vocation—spiritual or otherwise. In fact, about the only thing I can say about my abiding fascination with giving every up was that I never imagined myself becoming a better person, serving myself through the illusion of selflessness. It wasn’t about saving my soul or writing some smug college essay about what I learned about humanity by digging ditches[6]. It was about losing myself entirely. And if, as I was sometimes able to believe, my renunciation would temporarily tip the scales in someone else’s favor, then all the better. But even if it didn’t, so what?

Most self destructive people I know are failure fetishists. We prefer the riches to rags movies over their more optimistic counterparts. We prefer Eve to the Virgin Mary. Oscar Wilde to Charles Dickens. It’s sort of the old American love of the underdog, taken to its illogical extreme. You’d be surprised how easy it is to sympathize with the defeated, no matter how badly they needed to be defeated. (Or maybe you wouldn’t if you have ever spent any time at all in the South) Just as cynics are usually disillusioned idealists, self destructors are frustrated improvers . . . really frustrated. Whatever will we may have once had to positively change things has atrophied and turned against itself. The only thing we’re really good at is needlessly complicating and fucking up our lives

Comparatively speaking, I was sort of a mild example. I wasn’t a nihilist; I just admired them. My parents used to lament my inability to believe in anything. That wasn’t true. Most people who make plans to destroy themselves as conscientiously as I did know exactly what they’re doing, and believe in it wholeheartedly.

It wouldn’t have taken a genius to recognize that my attachment to failure was unhealthy, and, if left unchecked, would probably lead to some (literal or metaphorical) pit of despair at the end of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Boulevard. Fortunately for me I ended up bottoming out early on. Not in some post-modern approximation of a Dickens back alley, but alone in my car on Interstate 64, somewhere between Richmond and Charlottesville, VA. (A whole other story) I was twenty three years old, then. And it still took four more months before anyone realized there was something seriously wrong with me. (Chalk that up to most useful things I ever learned at prep school—evasion and denial) By that time I was a disaster and the glamour of survival against all odds had pretty much worn off entirely. I checked out. Moved home. And spent the next year working for my mother and sitting in psychiatrist’s offices swallowing what little remained of my pride.

***

Suffice it to say, things haven’t turned out exactly the way I expected

A decade and some change have passed since senior year of high school. I’m neither rich nor famous, neither feared nor adored on a massive scale. I haven’t managed to collect some catalog of exotic, preferably foreign lovers, but that’s probably to be expected. I’m not married. I don’t have kids. At eighteen, the idea was borderline repulsive, and even now I can’t quite imagine it. Like, does that sort of arrangement require wholesale sacrifice of all my free time? Would I be expected to domesticate and start doing someone else’s laundry? (Bear in mind, my definition of long-term committed relationship would be fulfilled with little more than regular sex and someone to get a beer with every now and then). I don’t own a house or a luxury car. And I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what to do with a jet.

I arrive at the thirtieth anniversary of my birth in reasonably good health—physically and emotionally—and at a decent comfort level. I have good friends and a better relationship with my family than I ever believed possible. I make my living writing, even if it’s not the kind of writing I thought or even wanted to do and I work for myself. I get to spend a few hours a week behind the counter of a dusty record store talking about music to people who care about music. I live in an aging cottage on a tree-lined street in an improbably liberal small southern town with free public transportation. My twenties will not conclude with some triumph of hard work, perseverance, and pluck[7], but I’ll probably not spend my thirtieth birthday under an overpass with a cold can of beans and a dog named Pork Chop.

It’s not a bad life. I wouldn’t have known enough to want it at eighteen, which is probably a good thing, because I probably would have found some way to fuck it all up.

[1] Names have been changed.

[2] Which I suppose explains the continued, popular appeal of the Republican Party.

[3] A place that looked less like the mean streets of New York and more like the charming, if decayed streets of Richmond, Virginia’s fan district, which was, in the mid 1990s, chock full of art students similarly pretending to be homeless.

[4] Hilarious. Really

[5] A favorite of my teenage years, for reasons I cannot begin to explain

[7] Not surprising as those two qualities have been nearly absent entirely from my young adult life.

2005-08-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

create your own personalized map of the USA

Never knew how severely I'd neglected the Midwest in my travels. But seriously? Nebraska? Why?

Origins of the B.A. Society

2005-03-21T13:30:00.000-08:00

Secret societies at schools in Virginia, even schools like mine, were hardly novel. My father once attempted to form his own as a sophomore at UVA. I’d co-founded a club in high school, under the auspices of introducing thoughtful discourse to the student body, but actually allowing my friends and I to get an administrative green light to convene at odd hours, act like assholes, and get official pictures taken of ourselves.

It was January. I’d come back from Christmas Break to find campus devoid of life. Winter had taken hold. The pristine landscape rendered skeletal by the cold, we shivered in the shadow of the two tits of Tinker Mountain. My first night back I walked across the hall to rouse Courtney from a television stupor.

“I don’t want to go outside,” she said. “It should never be this cold.”

Courtney was from San Antonio and therefore one of the few people in I knew whose tolerance for cold temperatures was even lower than mine.

I sighed, summoning up my best impression of a hardened Arctic explorer. “This isn’t cold. This is just January. Wait til it snows.”

Courtney shivered and swallowed. “I guess we should go out then. While going out is still a possibility.”

Thus attired for a holiday weekend with Admiral Byrd, Courtney joined me to ride downtown under high winter night skies. The local scenesters and skateboarders had dissipated, leaving us alone in the front window of the only coffee shop in Roanoke Virginia in 1995. She prattled on about her dysfunctional long-distance relationship with a twenty-four year old photographer in Rochester, NY; I used the empty campus to illustrate why most colleges had done away with short terms years ago. Hollins’ 4-1-4 system highlighted their perverse attachment to archaic attitudes and practices. “Cotillions, horses, unreported date rapes, short terms . . . It’s a fucking finishing school with accreditation. I have to transfer.”

Courtney stirred half a jar of sugar into her dainty coffee cup. “We should hang out with that chick, Lucia. She seems like she might not totally suck.”

I peered out the window toward the bookstore across the way, hoping to catch sight of some raffish townie with a leather jacket and a dog-eared copy of “Ulysses,” who would (if he existed) make a perfect boyfriend. Dismayed by the absence of activity, I turned my attention back to my coffee and the only memory I had of Lucia.

Courtney and I had gone to a reception following some campus event. One of those faculty cocktails with cheap wine and microwaveable finger foods in the elaborate parlor in the oldest building on campus. Courtney made small talk with her poetry instructor while I was trying to steal bottles of wine[1] Lucia was sitting in the back room with a non-traditional fellow student—a twenty-four year old former bartender and comic book aficionado from Illinois. I could remember a lot of details about that night (including the gummy quality of the mini-quiches and the location of the ficus tree I ducked behind to shove pilfered bottles in my backpack), but outside of the name and a vague recollection of a sharp tongue, I couldn’t remember anything about Lucia.

“The last Hollins person we tried to hang out with attempted suicide before Christmas[2],” I said.

“What’s your point?” asked Courtney.

“I dunno.” I waved to a small group of townie boys walking across the street. Our entire social circle, give or take. “Maybe we shouldn’t try to integrate anymore of our classmates into this, I dunno, is this a clique?”

“I know cliques,” said Courtney. “This is no clique. This is two of us. And a bunch of guys who only ever talk about records. Most of whom aren’t even hot. Calling this a clique is an insult to the idea of cliques. We need more friends at Hollins. Lucia doesn’t suck. We’re inviting her out tomorrow night.”

* * *

I made Courtney call Lucia.

“People don’t like me,” I said. “They have funny ideas about me here.”

Courtney shot me a look suggesting that I was both acutely paranoid and absolutely right, and dialed Lucia’s number.

“I’m not going to be surprised if she doesn’t want to hang out.” I pitched a can toward Courtney’s trash can, and noted she’d removed all of her Pearl Jam posters since before the holidays.

Courtney silenced me, and after a brief conversation, announced:

“She’s coming over.”

“Good,” I said.

***

Lucia was breathless upon arrival. It was cold, and she had apparently run from her room across the quad.

My first impression of Lucia was that she was much more like my friends from high school than anyone else I’d met at Hollins. She was bold, funny, a bit of a hippie, and easily able to recognize my profound lack of badassitude with a single glance. This was both a relief and a disappointment. I thought she was spunky and a little weird and a timely reminder that all girls weren’t vain, estrogen-addled nutcases with no sense of humor. In fact, hanging out with Lucia was so blissfully free of angst and manipulation that I forgot to ask her if she had any suicidal tendencies until well after she introduced the subject: “Before Christmas, a girl on my hall attempted suicide. We cleaned up her room after the ambulance came.”[3]

Her tone suggested pity, a little disgust, and the very blackest of black comedy, employed when things get so disturbing nothing else seems appropriate. It was the way I talked about Hollins in general. I liked her.

“We’re going downtown to hang out with townies, listen to punk rock, and irritate the local police department,” I said. “If you’re into that, I’m driving.”

She shrugged. “What the hell.”

***

With the addition of a third party, I felt even less inclined to attend my farce of a short-term class. It was called something like “Agitators and Extremists.” I’d missed short-term registration, after pressing engagements[4] forced my late return from fall break, and it sounded like the least boring of the available alternatives.

I’d reviewed my revolutionary history over Christmas. At the time I was somewhat enamored with “Lipstick Traces,” and looked forward to making the broad jumps in logic necessary to discuss both Guy Debord and the New Model Army in the same essay question.

On the first day of class, I arrived in fine form, and found a classroom full of docile khaki-clad blondes calmly discussing the radical leftist stance of the Indigo Girls. The professor, a round, middle-aged Gloria Steinem wanna-be, wasn’t much of an improvement. She spent the first two full class periods on Angela Davis’s hair, and the following two class periods on Angela Davis’s bone structure. On the fifth day, during an impassioned paean to Angela Davis’s earrings, I went to the bathroom and didn’t come back except to turn in a paper on the last day.

***

Courtney worked at the circulation desk at the library three days a week. On those nights, left to fend for myself until midnight, I worked on a long fictional project about the Florida suburbs, based, in part, on my experiences at my cousin’s wedding. The dorms were quiet, as many of our classmates (including my roommate) chose to spend short term on internships and foreign travel. Those remaining--too lazy, too poor, too unoriginal to find opportunities elsewhere--took to leaving our doors open to the empty halls. We visited room to room, and ceased even superficial adherence to campus rules regarding intoxicants. It was the only time that I remember liking my hallmates.

One night, I let a girl down the hall dye my hair a brilliant, iridescent red. “I love doing this,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to be a stylist, but my father won’t hear of it.”

Later, as I admired her professional results, I told Courtney about her comments.

“Seems silly,” I said. “If she wants to go to beauty school instead of college, fucking let her go to beauty school. It would save somebody some money, at least.”

Courtney smirked. “Money’s not an issue,” she said. “That girl has plenty of it. She’s a fucking Rockefeller.”

I rolled my eyes. “She can’t be that rich.”

“No seriously. She’s a Rockefeller. As in Center. As in literally.” Courtney bummed a cigarette and looked off down the hall toward the girl’s room. She neglected to take her usual potshot at rich people.

“Maybe we should invite her to come out with us,” I said.

“Are you kidding?” asked Courtney. “If we’re going to do that, we might as well ask Misti.”

***

From the first day of living in the dorms, Misti was preceded by a extraordinary trail of rumor and speculation, it was hard for me to believe she hadn’t made national news. The story cited by most involved an accident, with terrible and mysterious consequences, a historic lawsuit, and a resulting monetary settlement which experienced exponential growth each time the story was told.

The elaborate details added to that narrative varied by the teller, and often involved exotic locales, celebrities, expensive, self-destructive extracurricular activities, glamorous ennui, and, at least once, a dissolute member of a European royal family. By the time I actually met Misti, I’d been treated to at least six unique versions of her biography from at least as many narrators.

As far as first impressions go, she didn’t disappoint. Misti had a casual elegance that seemed to me both old-fashioned and enviable. She was the sort of girl who went to sun on the quad dressed for Monte Carlo, circa 1959. All broad-brimmed black straw hats and Italian sandals and exotic jewelry and copies of French Vogue and Vanity Fair. She was blonde and thin and charming, and apart from her tendency to talk like a Valley Girl when excited, she reminded me of Holly Golightly, had she been played by Grace Kelly. This was, I would learn, no accident.

We became friends during a first semester philosophy class, and fell into a regular pattern of skipping at least once to drive to the handful of stores that carried designer labels in Roanoke. I read magazines while Misti tried on dresses. She told the occasional outrageous anecdote—involving clubs in Miami or European escapades—but tended to withhold information

I thought Misti would be a welcome addition to our nights out. If nothing else, she would add sophistication, however manufactured, to our rumpled triumvirate, and likely usurp me as most over-dressed.

“I think Misti is an excellent idea,” I told Courtney.

“Misti goes to frat parties,” said Courtney.

I shrugged. “You went to frat parties until two months ago. I can’t see how that has any real bearing on anything.”

Courtney pursed her lips. “She’s not exactly punk rock.”

The only thing more ridiculous than Courtney’s statement was its tone of intimacy. As if she was the arbiter of all things punk rock. As if being punk rock was a rare and enviable genetic strain. As if we were dogmatic, street-hardened Mohicans with anarchy tattoos. As if being punk rock could ever be a requirement for anything.

I coughed, and blinked to focus on her facial expression.

Totally sincere.

“Lucia listens to Phish. You wear overalls. I like Joni Mitchell. I don’t think Misti poses any real threat.” I turned on my heel and stalked down the hallway feeling a tinge of guilt. After all, Courtney’s purism and group xenophobia were at least partially my fault. I’d been the one to utter the p-word on the first day of classes.

I knocked on Misti’s door and found reading and listening to Mahler.

“We’re going to see Lucia. She’s sick,” I said. “Then we thought we might go downtown and see a crappy band play. You in?”

Misti turned down her music and ran a hand through her hair. “Could we get an espresso?”

“They have espresso downtown,” I said.

She sighed and turned the corner of a page with a manicured fingernail. “All right. I’m in.”

I closed her door behind me and sashayed down the hall, passing Courtney on my way into my room.

“She’s coming,” I said.

“She won’t enjoy it,” said Courtney.

“That’s her business,” I said. “Let’s go.”

***

It took about three hours for the four of us to acclimate to each other, as a group, in a group. It took about three days for one of us—I don’t remember which one—to propose an ironic title.[5] BA Society. Bad Ass Society. So-called for our utter lack of bad assitude, regardless of what some members might have you believe. Lucia supplied us with a secret handshake, and the rest of us set down rules for membership. The only one I remember had to do with an enthusiasm for smoking cigarettes. The rest merely insured our group could not be breached by any outsiders—save the recipients of a few honorary memberships. Like those of any good secret society, most of our proceedings were silly, self-indulgent and meaningless to outsiders.

But I can’t tell you everything.

That would be breaking the rules.

[1] Tricky, when all you’ve got for camouflage is a backpack and a beaded sweater, but not impossible.

[2] Sadly, true. Fortunately, she was unsuccessful. I don’t remember much about her now either, except her name (which I will not mention here), the electric green crewcut she gave herself prior to chasing a bottle of Xanax with a fifth of Jack Daniels, and her observation that my preference for cars with standard transmission meant that I had penis envy

[3] Total suicide count, my first semester of college: 2 attempts; 1 successful. Out of a college of less than 1000 students.

[4] An extra day spent in Wilmington, NC with my best friend, side trip to Poindexter Records (Durham) for new releases, an hour of loafing at the Duke Coffeehouse, and an attempt to short-cut back to Roanoke on Highway 29 that landed me in another dimension, maybe Danville, VA, very late at night.

[5] Lucia says: “At the risk of sounding pompous, I do believe I came up with the moniker of B.A. Society. I distinctly remember standing outside of Tinker one night, doing a little jig up on a wall of some sort, loudly proclaiming we were Bad Ass, and we should call ourselves the Bad Ass Society. I know you were there, and wholeheartedly agreed.” Thank you for clearing that up, Lucia.

2000

2005-03-19T09:19:00.000-08:00

The Castle. Heidelberg, Germany. Early May

1979

2005-03-19T08:52:00.000-08:00

The kitchen. 109 Westwood Road.

Hands

2005-03-09T12:51:00.000-08:00

I’m a chronic nailbiter.

I don’t know when I started, and imagine the only technique capable of making me stop at this point would be something painful and Pavlovian. And that probably wouldn’t work. I think you have to really want to quit biting your nails, and I don’t really care. I was cursed with ugly hands with stumpy fingers that I have managed to bruise, callous, and scar regularly since childhood[1]. I’ll never be mistaken for a Victorian noblewoman or a professional hand model, but whatever. On my list of physical insecurities, the hands barely make the cut, so I’m not worried.

Having never had fingernails, I don’t know what I’m missing. They appear helpful opening cellophane wrappers, and look like an excellent tool for navel lint removal. I’m aware there are many different kinds of manicures, and that breaking a nail can be both painful and very sad. I’ve often enjoyed the sound of long fingernails clacking against a keyboard at the next desk, and have heard terrifying stories about the damage caused by sparring teenage girls with full-set acrylics. I find myself admiring the 4” spiral talons sported by my favorite check-out girl at the local craft sore. They’re a glossy dark purple with a metallic stripe and always remind me of a royal curly-cue straw.

My mother and grandmother found my gnawed fingernails uncouth. They were cited from time to time as evidence of negligence on my part, an overt sign of weakness that would betray me on dates, in job interviews, in making new friends. To drive the point home, an urban legend would be introduced and I would hear about how just last week “a friend of Mr. Hamilton’s ex-wife’s sister’s husband’s second cousin twice removed was biting her nails and two days later she caught smallpox and suffered, unloved and unwanted, in an alleyway frequented by hookers and drug dealers. All she ever wanted was to find true love and happiness, but all she found was pain and death and her last words, delivered to a rat the size of a Yorkshire Terrier, were ‘If only I’d taken better care of my cuticles, and had a nice manicure every now and then . . .’ And that’s a true story.”

Most of the time I hadn’t the foggiest idea who Mr Hamilton was—whether he was real or imagined—so stories about his extended family rarely hit home. What I did know was that it would be pretty hard to catch smallpox from biting your nails, unless you had really bad hygiene and a dangerously lax supervisor at the CDC.

When I tried to explain this I’d add that I’d noticed no boy, no potential employer, no conversation partner peering down their nose at my fingernails. In fact, the only person who usually paid attention to anyone else’s hands was me. I memorized the shape of the space between fingers, and noted the size of knuckles, the diameter of the palm, the spot on the pinky where the guidance counselor had fucked up her nail polish, the long scratch on the thumb where the boy down the street’s cat registered its complaint.

This hyperawareness of hands played a supporting role in my ability to identify musicians—a convenient party trick when you’re friends with girls who want to date boys in bands. It’s easier than it sounds, mostly because musicians like to show off their hands. They’ll tap tabletops elaborately and clutch their coffee cups with fingertips. The type of instrument played can be determined by the location of calluses, length of nails, or habit of holding almost anything like a drumstick.

Like many piano players, I was a reacher—compulsively fanning out my fingers to their widest span. At my peak, I could cover an octave and a half from pinky to thumb on my left hand. It meant I could play Chopin without cheating. And even if no one else noticed, I liked to simulate on the edge of diner tabletops during high school. To me, it was a physical feat on par with running five miles, or mastering the chin-up[2].

I wasn’t a great musician. I was barely a good one. At the height of my game—about age sixteen for those playing at home—I would attend recitals and auditions and be roundly shamed by some fleet-fingered eight-year-old. In retrospect, my only real skill was a slightly better than average ability to recognize notes and play by ear (a habit my first piano teacher tried, unsuccessfully, to break me of). This served me well once a year when my mother would seduce me to play the piano at her black-tie Christmas functions with promises of open bar and mild praise from a gaggle of local country clubbers. I’d slouch uncomfortably at the keyboard, trying to pretend I didn’t look like a freak in whatever off the rack taffeta monstrosity I was wearing, and entertain myself by inserting a couple bars of The Clash into the lite-jazz rendition of “O Holy Night,” to see if anyone else noticed. [3]

I’d like to tell you the end of my formal musical training coincided with some grand realization of mediocrity, that I stopped playing piano regularly because I recognized my talents lay elsewhere, and chose to spend my time cultivating the skills that really mattered. Of course, this is not true. I quit playing the piano because it seemed less cool than playing the guitar, and I arrived at the conclusion that I would rather be Keith Richards than Billy Joel. And I assumed the transition would be easy. I had a decent handle on 88 piano keys. Six strings seemed less than daunting. After all, most of the guitar players I knew were all but self-taught. I had a decade of formal training to their dog-eared stack of guitar player back issues. I would take the world by storm with my prodigious talents and keen ear for melody. I would be the one girl, in all the world, who could outplay the boys. At night, I would sit home and consider my incipient fame. The spoils of celebrity and genius. Would I be a mega-star selling out stadiums? Or would I be more of a seminal figure, ushering in the next big thing by influencing countless other musicians? Would I be a sexy, slinky, rock and roller? An eccentric genius? An arty impresario? A snarling, political punk rocker? Would I subvert the image cult? Would I become a fashion icon? Would I move to London? Would I develop a drug addiction? Would I be invited for dinner at Kim and Thurston’s house? Would I have groupies?

A decade, some change, three guitars, and at least six semi-imaginary bands later, I’m forced to admit the answer to these questions is a resounding no. My guitar playing skills are roughly equal to my mathematical ability. I still flub the most simplistic formulas, and whatever limited dexterity I may have once shown on a piano is simply a foregone conclusion when transferred to a fretboard. This has been, to put it mildly, something of a bummer.

My mother started playing the guitar when she was about fifteen. Her fater, child of a musical family, bought her a thin-necked, steel-stringed Gibson for her sixteenth birthday. She played regularly and took to spending her nights holding impromptu jam sessions with friends under picnic shelters at various Roanoke, VA city parks.

By the time she got to college, she was good enough to attract the attention of a Richmond DJ who offered to record her demo. He probably thought she was a capable guitarist with a nice, sultry singing voice. She also had long, straight, dark hair, big green eyes, a nice body, and long legs[4]. In a world of plain-faced folk singers with no make-up, my mother had a penchant for mascara, high heels, and day-glo minidresses. Physically it was Joan Baez meets Nancy Sinatra. Vocally she was Judy Collins meets Dusty Springfield. To put it bluntly, she was marketable.

Alas, my god-fearing grandparents prohibited her from cutting a record, worried that a record deal might interfere with her ability to marry well, and left my mother’s possible musical career up for speculation. She didn’t retaliate, but graduated from college, married a man from a wealthy family, and occasionally lugged the guitar out once or twice a year to entertain her children. As time passed, her desire to play the guitar was subsumed by her desire to have nice fingernails, and that was pretty much the end of it. This was unfortunate, because by the time I wanted to learn, she was investing in regular manicures, and already reminding me that employers would notice if I didn’t take better care of my nails.

I can’t say anything. Not when I sit two feet from a guitar that gets played about twice a month, when I’m suffering from insomnia, and sit up at four am playing (but never perfecting) Kinks songs for my cat. Coated in a thin layer of dust, it stands as a kind of monument to all of my aborted ambitions—music, painting, acting, academics, the one completed, and three uncompleted books, stalled in revision on my hard drive.

I used to tell people that I wrote because I was a failed musician. The truth is I write because it’s easier than being a musician, because I lack the drive to practice, because I’d rather tell myself stories about being a musician than actually play an instrument, because I could never endure the sort of criticism I once meted out, because I’m too impatient and too competitive and too easily distracted.

Because, at the end, I just don’t have the right hands.

[1] The most recent of which being a long purple burn scar on my left ring finger, achieved during the Annual Thanksgiving potluck when I fumbled while removing the turkey from the oven

[2] Physical skills I have, of this writing, yet to accomplish.

[3] Kudos to the guy who plays the piano at the Durham Nordstrom for trying this same trick with the White Stripes recently.

[4] My mother is 5’10 barefoot.

Bizarre Love Triangle

2005-02-24T19:40:00.000-08:00

For a few years in the early 90s, everyone was a vegetarian. I don’t know why. It seemed like the right thing to do—not necessarily because we cared about the animals (leather consumption was on the rise), and certainly not because we were concerned with living a healthier lifestyle (everyone also smoked and French fries were considered a perfectly legitimate vegetarian option). We stopped eating meat because everyone else stopped eating meat. Cheeseburgers were unfashionable and pork was downright tacky. I heard a lot of half-assed excuses for why eating meat was bad, but ultimately no one really believed them. In about six months in 1997, 95 percent of all vegetarians I knew fell off the wagon, made a beeline for the local steakhouse, and, coincidentally, became better than average cooks. The remaining five percent became vegans, started referring to their colonic hydro-therapists as “Miracle Workers,” and (for reasons I cannot begin to understand) stopped eating wheat, usually after relocating to the West Coast. We felt sorry for them, but ultimately celebrated their decision to survive on tasteless crap 3000+ miles away, while we were free to prepare crab cakes and lamb tenderloins and oxtail and chicken green devil curry at our dinner parties.

Much like vegetarianism, our collective flirtation with bisexuality arose out of similar circumstances. Less indicative of any real sexual confusion than boredom and curiosity, my friends pranced around for about five years declaring themselves openly bisexual, regardless of whether or not they’d actually hooked up with a member of the same sex.[1] It was a pretty sweet deal, in that it allowed women to shave their heads and stomp around campus handing out riot grrrl pamphlets in combat boots and National Coming Out Day t-shirts during the week, while spending the weekend hooking up with Tim, who took women’s studies classes and claimed to be bisexual because it made chicks think he was more sensitive and artistic. The actual homosexual community was divided on the issue—half choosing to benignly ignore the new army of bisexuals, and possibly get a little sideline action from an otherwise unlikely candidate, and half getting pretty cross at the exploits of the undergraduate interlopers. As openly heterosexual ombudsman for complaints against bisexuality, I heard a lot of kvetching about the political ramifications of the new culture of fence-sitters, which, if extrapolated, was certainly worthy of concern. But from my standpoint, the bigger issue boiled down to semantics— “”bisexual” sounds a lot better than “unable to commit.”

When I met Adrienne, early during my freshman year at Hollins, the bisexuality fad was at full-tilt. So much so that my reluctance to jump on the bandwagon was met with a fair amount of condescension from my friends and classmates: “You’re still heterosexual. Really? How very quaint.” I did a lot of eye-rolling in those days, and chose to ignore the implications of the word “still.”[2]

I’d auditioned for the head of the Theater Department at the beginning of the semester, while still under the misguided impression that I might want to be an actor. I wasn’t cast, and it wasn’t a tragedy as I found myself, among other things, free (of parental, administrative[3], and/or directorial prerogative) to do whatever I wanted to my hair. As a result, my roommate’s suggestion that I audition for a grad student production wasn’t terribly appetizing. The script, an unappetizing slush of feminist theory and performance art entitled “Penthesilea,” wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but I was bored, and by that time, my few friends on campus had tired of my interminable ranting. So I auditioned, got cast as Aristotle, and started attending rehearsals in the basement of the science building three times a week.

The first time I saw Adrienne, I thought she was a boy. A thin, hip, smirking boy, who looked for all the world like a troublemaker at an English boarding school. Adrienne was, in fact, one of the hottest boys I’d seen in a long time, which caused no lack of confusion on my part when I found out she was a girl. She was funny, and smart, and a little bit of an asshole, and tended to squint while inhaling cigarette smoke in the same fashion as the boys I admired.

She’d been cast as Achilles, for the reasons noted above, and, like me, believed the quality of the play straddled the fine line between sham and utter debacle. I think she got into it because her then-girlfriend had been cast as the titular character, and because, well, she had nothing better to do.

Adrienne and I spent a good amount of time outside the stage door smoking cigarettes in the rain. While our cast mates, a fairly dull lot, spent their time between scenes completing math homework, studying Gaelic, and recounting childhood tales of victimization, Adrienne and I discussed whether or not ability to make spit yo-yos at fourteen was enough to convince the eighth grade that you were a card carrying punk rocker. We talked about bad movies and good music in the kind of coded language I’d learned from all the boys I knew.[4] Both of us had been the focus of whimsical delusions on the part of our classmates. They believed me a scary nihilist with serious street cred[5]; they believed she was an androgynous changeling endowed with supernatural shape-shifting abilities. Both of us derived pleasure from their confusion (I had a score of perky blonde would-be antagonists terrified to knock on my door; she had extraordinary skill at scoring pretty, probably heterosexual girlfriends), but at the end of the day, neither one of us was very happy. On campus, we collected curiosity seekers instead of friends. In my case, girls that thought I might have some privileged information about how to be tough, cool, and able to get dates with boys in bands; in her case, girls who just wanted an easy way to experiment. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to uncover the real source of my bad attitude[6], nor would it have taken a genius to figure out that Adrienne wanted more than playing rebound to a fraternity brother. Not that we had those conversations. It would have ruined the dynamic. Fact is, I liked Adrienne because she was funny and didn’t talk to me like I was a stereotype. We were casual friends—the kind that would stop and smoke cigarettes on the dining hall steps, or take occasional late night drives to the diner up the road for a cup of coffee at 1am—not soulmates. Our paths crossed, we made each other laugh, and that was pretty much it.

Seven months later, I would arrive home late, following another Friday night spent with townies, and find my roommate, Mason, sniffling at her desk, and shooting daggers my direction whenever I so much as breathed across the room. She and I hadn’t been on the best of terms since the beginning of spring semester. I assumed her current state had something to do with the fact I drank all of her vodka or interrupted her nap that afternoon with a lively telephone call to my friend at Brown.

I ignored her and set about preparing for bed. She sighed. Three or four times. Cleared her throat. I plumped my pillows and opened a book.

“It’s just not fair,” she said.

I turned a page.

“It’s just not fucking fair.”

I looked up. “What’s not fair?”

“You ruin everything.”

I nodded and tried to remember if I’d spilt wine on her sweater or dropped one of her earrings down the drain. I had deliberately scratched the back of her Hole CD, because another reprise of “Doll Parts,” would have driven me to commit Hari Kari with the samurai sword she had hanging over her bed. But I’d copped to that months ago, fearing retribution at the point of the selfsame samurai sword, and she’d moved on Mazzy Star. Water under the bridge.

“What did I ruin?” I asked.

“Don’t act like you don’t know.” She gazed at her computer screen. “Several months ago, I realized I loved someone. Someone unlike anyone I’ve ever known. Someone who made me realize something very important about myself. Someone who made me realize I was—“

A vegetarian.

“Bisexual. And tonight, at the library, I finally tried to tell her how I felt, and all she could do was talk about you.”

I put my book aside. My stomach growled. The realization of whose name she was about to say came so suddenly that I felt sort of dizzy.

“Adrienne,” she said. “I think I’m in love with Adrienne and you’ve fucked it all up.”

Having missed rationality’s hasty departure (by my watch about an hour before my entrance), I knew better than to try and defend myself by reviewing the catalog of Things I Didn’t Know. That Mason liked Adrienne, for example. Or that Adrienne liked me. Bewildering. I mean, it had honestly never crossed my mind. Not in months of hanging out. Not for a second. And it was flattering to think that Hollins most popular (lesbian? Strikes me now that Adrienne also told me she was a bisexual, although I never saw her date a man) would pine over me. But still, weird.

For a split second, sitting there on the bed, I entertained a fantasy of running over to Adrienne’s room, through the misty spring night, to arrive breathless on her doorstep, to ask her to verify if what I’d heard was true, to embrace bisexuality, to see if the illusion of her boyishness would be enough to make me forget that she wasn’t a boy, but a girl with short hair and small breasts and a bit of a swagger.

It was that last point that stopped me. I was pretty hard up for action, and still open-minded enough to think that okay, yeah, maybe, but if I could only conceive of hooking up with Adrienne because she reminded me of a boy, if I was just doing it to “see what it’s like,” then I would be a fraud, and I would be using her, especially if she really did like me. And maybe she was cool with that. Maybe it suited her fine, but I knew how it felt to be used, to be an experiment of sorts for someone you legitimately care about and have the whole incident chalked up to a learning an experience, or an accident. Some interlude sworn to secrecy, because the other party felt it was just too embarrassing to contemplate by light of day. I knew how it felt to be tossed out. And consequently, I knew, at that moment, that I was unfortunately, definitively heterosexual.

“I’m not interested in Adrienne,” I told Mason. “It’s my tragedy to report that I’m seemingly only interested in those who are not interested in me. I’m surprised and flattered, but I’m no threat to you. She’s a friend of mine. That’s all.”

Mason made some play at sniffling and left the room before I fell asleep, perhaps to report what I said, perhaps to find a dark corner of the common room to write a love letter to Adrienne. I don’t know.

I also don’t know, to this day, whether what she said was true. Adrienne and I would see each other off and on for the next three years. Her circle of friends intersected with my remaining friends at Hollins. She dated a series of girls who would then go on to long-term relationships with men. She introduced me to Modest Mouse, and never failed to keep me entertained. We never talked about what Mason said. I never mentioned it; she never acknowledged it.

Adrienne sort of disappeared off the face of the planet about five years ago. Those who’d kept up with her cited unhappiness, frustration, maybe a touch of something more. I don’t pretend to really know anything about her life. Childhood, psychology, hopes, dreams, aspirations—those weren’t the things we talked about. Last time I saw her, I was in the middle of my own nervous breakdown, but I’d been drinking airport bottles of Scotch all afternoon, and by the time she showed up, my own personal tragedies had been appropriately reduced to dirty jokes about my psychiatrist.

Like vegetarianism, fashionable bisexuality lasted only as long as it was convenient and not boring.[7] Then people moved onto swing dancing and the Dogme manifesto and polyamorous child rearing zines and sooner or later, Radiohead. Such is the way of things. Most of the avowed bisexuals I knew in college have either gotten married (to a heterosexual) or have come out of the closet. I’m “still” heterosexual, still single, and still suffering bad dreams that find me back at Hollins. But that’s a whole other story, and I find myself suddenly craving a cheeseburger.

[1] If they had, it amounted to little more than drunkenly groping their roommate on a dare.

[2] Delivered in much the same manner as, “Oh my god, you still haven’t moved to Williamsburg. You poor thing!”

[3] Quoth the Asheville School Handbook: “Any radical hairstyle is prohibited (e.g. a bald or partially shaven head, punk style, or inappropriately bleached or colored hair). Hair must remain within a slight variation of the person’s natural color.”

[4] Being an outsider at an all-girl’s school can have an oddly masculinizing effect.

[5] Earned on the suburban mean streets of a North Carolina resort town, no less.

[6] I thought I was too smart to be at Hollins.

[7] We were, after all, the slacker generation.

Voice Lessons

2005-02-16T14:27:00.000-08:00

I come from a long line of big talkers. Loudmouthed soapboxers, amateur advice givers, obnoxious critics, part-time preachers, stand-up comedians, and enthusiastic fabulists. My limited understanding of genetics and the limited resources available to me have not, as of yet, been able to account for the exact moment when the clearly dominant bigmouth gene defeated its demure, discretionary recessive sibling, but judging from how much everyone seems to know about my family (on all sides of my family) in spite of lacking physical evidence, I'm inclined to think it predated the wheel.

Whatever the case, I like to imagine some apocryphal incident when some thickly bearded fellow in animal skins, or perhaps his cackling wimpled wench, effectively steamrolled over the tribal chieftain's opening remarks in favor of a hyperbolic, detail-rich anecdote about his father's sordid sexual secrets or the misadventures accompanying the five minute walk from mud hut to village green. For reasons unknown to me said talker was neither offered up as a ritual sacrifice to the God of Polite Conversation nor stoned to death and allowed to advance the logorrhea gene into the next generation.

As such, events in my family tend to feel like the International Competitive Filibuster Tournament, where words flow like Niagara and breathing can be a real disadvantage. There's no way to politely break up a trademark monologue (in fact, raising your hand will merely spurn the talker into either a reflection on his or her education or summon a sharp-edged screed on the merits of not being an asshole). You have to jump in with both feet, speak loudly, and make a compelling narrative. For if you are not able to win the listeners over to your story, youll only be met with shame and ignominy. If you have to ask a question, make sure you have cleared your schedule, relieved your bowels, and have received adequate rest. If you're lucky, the answer will be explained, analyzed, illustrated by personal and or historical example, disseminated, and ultimately deconstructed in the space of about an hour. Sometimes one question can go on for days. Beware the "I was thinking a little more about what you said last night, and I realized I hadn't given you a full enough response." If it comes to that, you are categorically fucked.

The upshot to all this is that lots of talking prohibits any hard filter. Given enough time, you can pretty much find out everything there is to know about my family. Traversing the murky path through poetic license, rumor, self-delusion, and plain old exaggeration can be perilous, but if youre armed with a halfway decent bullshit detector, the road to capital T truth is reachable. I find it helpful to invite as many members of my family as possible to weigh in on an issue before contemplating relative veracity. When that fails, there are always friends, neighbors, co-workers, ex-lovers, sworn enemies, and Google.

Then there are the high risk stories--those introduced with the "Never tell a soul I've said this to you" or "This is truly horrible, shocking, meaty stuff and it would kill your ___________ (father, mother, grandmother, aunt, best friend, dog, mayor, congressman, etc) if s/he ever knew that you knew" These stories will be held over your head like a brass ring. Any tale requiring such a grave disclaimer must truly be something special. The teller knows it, and therefore can string you along for days with a "One day I will tell you this story. It will explain everything, but it will also appall your fragile sensibilities. You cant handle it yet, but maybe one day the flower of your innocence will wither and you'll be armed with the kind of steely constitution necessary to hear what I need to tell you about your__________ (father, mother, grandparent, cousin, goldfish, fifth grade teacher, great uncle)[1] " Usually, said storyteller will hold out on you for about three days, at which point their compulsion to narrate will sate your ravenous curiosity. There have only been a few times in my life when I've been made to wait for the payoff, which usually comes quite out of nowhere and is preceded by "Youre now old enough for me to tell you this. " My heart flutters, the room silences but for my breathless anticipation and the clinking of ice in a tumbler of Scotch.

And the payoff? Not really the promised panacea, but usually a good, solid yarn, full of sex, violence, and occasionally death, populated by a roving cast of grotesques[2] (more Faulknerian than Dickensian, due to my geography), and (nine times out of tine) featuring a strong (if not completely heroic) female protagonist[3] Sometimes I am haunted by what I hear (one story in particular gives me the willies just thinking about it[4]), but I'm not sorry to have heard it.

In my family, there is no such thing as too much information

Of course, the downside to all this is the lack of simple language. Storytelling is fundamentally self-indulgent. Instead of real advice, I get an illustrative anecdote or some psychoanalytic criticism. Oftentimes, the stories don't coalesce. How my mother got dumped by her college boyfriend and unofficial fiancé, though told eloquently, doesn't really relate to me feeling sorry for myself because I couldn't make any friends when I was fifteen. All the extra-linear grappling and philosophical reaching won't allow for a story about my father failing out of college because of his membership in a debauched fraternity to shed any light on why I suffered a bout of depression at age twenty-two. At best, the stories are a distraction; at worst, they're a needling reminder of how much less interesting and, by extension, less important, your reality is by comparison. My tales draw sighs and accusations of spotlight hogging and scenery chewing. My side of a conversation is treated to workshop style critiques and editorial scrutiny. My father accuses me of lacking sensitivity, vulnerability, and emotional candor, while my mother pans my heartfelt confession as the work of a drama queen.

I talk too fast, as a rule, sometimes with a shade of a stutter, trying to cram in all the details necessary before the inevitable sigh and bored stare. The are you still talking face. As a writer, I am a compulsive revisionist. As a talker, I am frantic, illogical first draft. Too loud. Too bold. Too much information. I just want to be heard over the clamor of other voices telling other stories. I want mine to be the one worth hearing.

[1] This is, of course, hyperbole, but it adequately conveys the way I was prepped for tales of familial transgression when I was a child.

[2] Bootleggers, whores, madams, lovers off the carnival circuit, tramps, drunkards, bible beating murderers, slave drivers, cowboys, pirates, adventurers, gamblers, adulterers, traitors, lunatics, thieves, dirty politicians, addicts, witches, bitches, rogues, rakes, coal miners, and decadent aristocrats.

[3] Irregardless of the tellers gender.

[4] You'll pardon my reticence at telling. Its damn good material and it got dropped on my lap like proverbial Manna from heaven when I was about sixteen, and I'm inclined to wait until I can do it justice.

Society Column

2005-02-16T10:16:00.000-08:00

I try to believe that the true blue bitches of seventh grade plateaued somewhere around age fifteen, and are now living colorless lives in some ugly suburban condo with four kids and a cheating, sleazy husband. My friends have stories like this about their seventh grade antagonists, how they went home recently and found Stacy or Michelle missing teeth and working at Wal-Mart, hair crisped by too much dye, morbidly obese, and still bragging about winning the dance contest at someone’s illicitly coed slumber party.

We laugh—“Totally acceptable schaudenfreude. Karmic”—and I skirt around the issue of my seventh grade nemeses, because they’re sure as hell not working at Wal-Mart or morbidly obese. I know this because my mother calls every Sunday to read me their wedding announcements in my hometown paper, and the vast majority of my those girls have write-ups that sound something like this:

“Maggie Fairchild, daughter of Dr and Mrs Henry Marlowe Fairchild of Asheville, married Robert Archer Winthrop IV (of Charleston, SC), this past Saturday at Trinity Episcopal Church.

Ms. Fairchild is a graduate of Brown University where she double majored in Art Semiotics and Political Science. She received a Master’s Degree in Comparative Lit from Stanford University, before attending Harvard Law. An Olympic snowboarder, she currently practices constitutional law at Winthrop, Winthrop, Steinberg, and LaMancha in New York City. Her self-titled debut album, “Maggie,” was released earlier this fall to critical acclaim

Dr Winthrop is a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and works as a Cardiologist at Name Hospital. A noted philanthropist, Dr Winthrop spends two months out of the year using art therapy and experimental procedures to heal impoverished children in leper colonies worldwide. His first novel, “Eat, Eat the Blossom,” published by Simon and Schuster, won the Pen/Faulkner award in 2003.

The bride and groom will honeymoon in Tahiti.”

You get the picture.

I squirm.

My Bio pales in comparison.

Let’s just put it this way: if you believe in karma, then I must have been a bad ass motherfucker in my past life

Roommate Wanted

2005-01-13T22:07:00.000-08:00

To share a charming two bedroom cottage on what (in this writer’s opinion) might be the best street in Carrboro, spitting distance from Weaver Street Market, Orange County Social Club, Cats Cradle, et al. Reasonably well-landscaped yard, large deck, tastefully furnished common areas (with antiques, original art, nice furniture), well-stocked kitchen, cable television, and wireless internet. The house also comes equipped with an extensive library of music (many formats), books, shitty guitars, and a Velvet Elvis. Potential roommates must be able to live with a cat (Maud), a chatty, freelance writer who works from home and has been known to smoke cigarettes indoors, and a large abstract painting of Henry the VIIIth.. Potential roommates should be advised that said writer enjoys preparing the occasional elaborate meal. Cats are welcome. No intolerant assholes or undergraduates. $450/month + ½ of utilities. Call Alison 967-4872

Continental Divide

2005-01-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

The day after Spence graduated from college, he told his parents he was tired of missing the thrill of the sun setting over the ocean, and was immediately moving to California with his girlfriend, Melissa.

“California is so far away,” his mother said. “And sunsets so ephemeral. Have you considered the Gulf Coast of Florida? Best of both worlds.”

Spence affected a blank stare and explained he had to leave immediately.

The drive from Charleston to San Francisco took seven days. Somewhere West of Kansas City, Melissa broke up with him at a rest area. In Utah, they got back together, after deciding Monument Valley was better to experience as current lovers, instead of embittered, carsick exes.

In Reno, Melissa bought them a night at the Nugget on her mother’s American Express Card. They pretended to be newlyweds, and were nearly drunk enough to elope when she ran into Thad, her former counselor from Christian Summer Camp, working a craps table.

As it happened, Thad was on his way out of town, having come to Reno in a fit of apostasy two years ago, after failing to bring wayward Mormons back into the Evangelical Baptist Fold. God was dead, he said, and therefore he turned himself over to vice, working in a casino, blowing his paycheck on high-quality, Humboldt County marijuana smuggled over the border by a couple white Rastafarians, and boning (his words) a Guatemalan hairdresser named Lux.

“But I got this place in San Francisco,” he said. “An old buddy of mine from Campus Ministry gotta job with a software company out there, but he got transferred back east. Told me I could sublet. It’s plenty big, but more money than I wanted to spend, so if you guys don’t know where you want to live . . .”

Spence knew where this was going. On the faded florescence of the casino floor, he thought Thad, with his oily moustache and over prominent forehead, looked a little like a catfish. He spoke in slow motion, and every time Melissa said his name, Spence swore he could detect a previously unnoticed lisp, which complicated things immensely.

It’s so great to see you sad.

He felt sorry for the guy.

Still, he didn’t want to live with him.

That night, in the honeymoon suite, Spence explained his reservations to Melissa. She, in turn, put his doubts to rest by maligning Thad for a solid hour and declaring her love to Spence in at least four languages, at least one, non-verbal.

The next morning, he woke to find her suitcase missing and a clumsy note scrawled across a wrinkled sheet of Nugget stationary,

It read:

Moving in with Thad. Breaking up with you. Monument Valley can’t support a long-term relationship. If you need a place to crash, Thad says you can stay with us. You can call me on the cell if you want.

Spence left the note shredded in the toilet bowl, packed the car, and drove three-thousand miles back in the direction he came.

The drive from Reno to Charleston took three days and six packets of over-the-counter speed purchased at truck stop counters.

When he arrived at his parent’s house, his mother took him for a walk through her garden.

“Thad sounds like a toad,” she said. “And Melissa was a hussy. I never liked her. Why don’t you move into the rental out on the Island? It needs repairs, and I’m sure your father wouldn’t mind. Get your wits about you.”

“I can do repairs,” said Spence.

“Of course you can,” said his mother, patting his hand.

His father bought the rental years ago, back before the resort built their gates at the North End of the Island, and the address became synonymous with wealthy beachcombers. The rental was ugly, three blocks back off the beach, and two blocks in from the waterway, in a thicket of stunted brown palmettos that had hovered indefinitely between life and death since the last big hurricane when Spence was sixteen.

The house itself consisted of whitewashed cinderblock walls, and an uninspired porch that ran the length of the backside, which his father had the good sense to screen in, after finding the soggy back yard a ripe breeding ground for mosquitoes of Jurassic proportions. The interior smelled like mildew, and was furnished with cast-offs from secondhand furniture stores. Plastic chairs molded to resemble wicker, and a vinyl sofa printed with giant orange flowers resembling either neon squids or mushroom clouds, depending on how you looked at them.

Years ago, before the big hurricane, almost all the houses on the Island looked like the rental. Dumpy cottages, a step up from camp barracks, situated squarely on small lots on gridded streets. The Island was a low-brow version of the 1950s suburb it emulated, so middle class Cleavers wouldn’t be alienated on their vacations. Then came the resort, and Nature, not to be outdone, followed with the worst Hurricane in fifty years. Every third house was destroyed, and the cunning owners found themselves instant tycoons on the heels of insurance money. For every barrack destroyed, a pastel mansion, replete with landscaped gardens, turrets, and complicated porticos rose in its place.

The rental was left untouched.

“A godsend,” Spence’s mother had said. “A genuine miracle.”

His father had affected a blank stare, and departed to water the lawn, leaving Spence to elaborate.

The first night Spence spends in the rental, he lies awake on damp sheets, and tries to hear the distant roar of the ocean over passing cars. He tries to read the Russian novel he bought at a used bookstore in Nashville. In the living room bookcase, he finds a dogeared mystery with broken binding left by a previous week’s tenant. By the end of the first paragraph, the girlfriend and her lover are dead. Spence grins, and totes it back to the bedroom.

Four hours later he tosses the completed novel against the opposite wall, and carps about the ending to the empty house. The clock says 5:15. Spence slides out of bed, pulls on a pair of shorts and goes out for a run.

The streets are empty, the summer houses dark with sleeping tourists, and there is the slightest chill in the pre-dawn air, not yet warmed for high summer. He glides past outstretched palmetto fronds and the glossy-leaved oleander to the boardwalk, the beach, and the fishermen standing silent at the gray ebbing tide of the Atlantic.

It’s four miles to curve of the island, where the ocean rolls into the inlet, and he’s stopped by the intrusion of swampgrass in the sand before the sun rises over the horizon. It’s a hazy white dawn, lacking theatrical colors—good for sailors, but disappointing to displaced recent graduates aching to see something glorious rise out of the water.

The rising temperature combines with insomniac exhaustion to force a fast deceleration. He staggers red-faced to the waters edge, and wades out into the breaking waves without removing his shoes.

Somewhere, all the way across the continent, Melissa is probably just now going to sleep, after staying out all night with her likely gilled paramour. They are climbing into bed, in the cool California darkness, while he flails clumsily in the waves, and wonders if he can evade sleep for long enough to get back to the rental.

The nearest line of fishermen bristles at the sound of a yapping dog. Spence shields his eyes to locate the source and sees a brilliant speck of white speeding over the dunes. A barefoot woman in a long pink silk dress teeters over the broken shells at the base of the boardwalk, and follows.

The closer she gets the younger her face appears, the wider her stride over the sand.

When she whistles, the dog races back to her feet.

Spence stands. “Morning.”

She startles at his voice and hikes up her skirt to wade into the surf beside him. Her face is shiny with perspiration, hair blown back off her forehead. She wears only one earring—an elaborate bauble of shining stones—and reeks of liquor and stale cigarette smoke. The dog plays between her legs. “He’s Ambrose,” she says. “The dog.”

Spence looks down, noting the sandy black nose, and matted white fur. “He’s cute.”

“He’s horrible,” says the woman.

She speaks like an actor. All over-enunciation and elongated vowels.

“And inconvenient and terribly expensive,” she says. “You know, my father’s.”

Spence nods, even though he doesn’t know whether it is, in this woman’s opinion, that all fathers are horrible, inconvenient, and expensive, or just hers. Her elaborate costume sits awkwardly on her bare shoulders, as if she were a child playing dress up. The skirt is notably ripped in several locations and bears a single prominent stain—dark purple—that extends from her waist to her kneecaps.

“Red wine,” she says.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Me too. I loved this dress. It’s a one of a kind, I’m told, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to afford couture again.” She extends her hand. “I’m Moira.”

Her palms are clammy, and grip deadening. He eyes her claws on his knuckles. “Spence.”

“Are you here on vacation?” she asks.

“For the summer,” he says. “Give or take.”

“Marvelous.”

The dog—Ambrose—runs off after a scuttling crab, and she smiles. “When I was a child, we summered here every year. My father owned a house.” She gestures, and sunlight catches on a diamond ring. “North part of the Island. I used to come here with my brother and sisters. Now I’m here alone. Are you here alone?”

It’s an odd question, quite forward, and Spence leans forward, slightly, to investigate the curves of her body in the event of a sudden proposition. To his bleary, sleep-deprived eyes her conditions seem favorable, despite her odd dress and pretentious way of speaking. And she looks nothing like Melissa—a relief and a disappointment.

“Yes,” he says.

She purses her lips, and smiles. “Would you like to walk with me for a while? Just down the pier.”

Moira walks with her feet splayed wide apart, leaving deep impressions of her narrow heels in the wet sand.

Spence lags slightly behind, oblivious to most of what she has to say. Some idle chatter about the way the Island used to be and some social occasion the night before, the one for which she was still dressed. He couldn’t make out the nature, mostly because he could only really think about crawling into the lumpy bed at the rental and losing consciousness until sunset. In sleep, he could let weird, overdressed, drunk Moira flicker and fade into the gray eyed, blue-jeaned bitch, Melissa, who wasn’t even going to California until he suggested it, and whose midnight flight with the Catfish, left him stymied, in self-imposed exile at the last place he ever wanted to be.

“My girlfriend recently left me,” he said.

Moira stopped, mouth still open in mid-word, and turned to him. Her eyes widened, and he anticipated something in the way of “so sorry to hear that.” Maybe a gentle pat on the shoulder, so he could revel in his bruised ego, and reap the benefits of a sympathetic female ear.

He sighs and turns his eyes downward.

Her reply:

“Why?”

Spence squints up at her. “What do you mean, why?”

“Why did she leave you?” asks Moira. “Were you mean, or adulterous, or sadistic, or irresponsible, or were you not good enough for her—not rich enough or smart enough or handsome enough?”

His feet sink into the sand. He closes his eyes and exhales.

“Was she a lesbian?”

“No,” says Spence, and before Moira can over enunciate her next syllable he raises his hand. “She left me for a has-been, a washed-up Jesus freak, working the craps table in Reno.”

Moira purses her lips. “Was he attractive?”

“I don’t know. I’m a straight man. I don’t notice these things.”

“Was he more attractive than you?”

Spence turns toward the inlet to see the long shadow of an ocean liner manifest on the horizon. “He looked like a catfish.”

She laughs and steps closer. Her cheeks are faintly freckled and he detects tiny lines around her eyes.

Her claw finds his collarbone, tracing the sweaty semi-circle round the neck of his t-shirt.
“You look a little like a duck,” she says. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

He blushes and steps backward.

She grabs his arm. “Don’t be offended. I’m a little drunk. You probably noticed. And I’m a little tactless when I’m drunk. But still—" She lifts her finger to his lips, his cheek, his brow. “Some women prefer catfish.”

They hover inches apart, close enough for him to feel her hot breath in his mouth, close enough for him to get drunk through his pores from the touch of her skin.

The dog yaps down the beach. She steps away.

He sees the first real wave of morning joggers appear on the beach.

“You want to have dinner?” she asks. “Tonight? At my house?”

Spence swallows, looks on down the beach toward the pier, the path back to the rental, and turns back to study the tilt of her head. He has nothing better to do. “Sure.”

“Seven o’clock,” she says. “508 Palms Boulevard. It’s a pink house with white shutters. Bring wine.”

Ambrose barks and scurries up over the dunes, and she coughs. “I’m getting off here.”

“Tonight then,” he says.

She nods, and smiles and turns to follow the dog over the dunes, her pink skirts flapping in the breeze. Before she crests the dune, he calls her name.

She turns.

“Why?” he asks.

“Why what?” she says.

“You asked me.”

When she steps back toward him, she lets her skirts trail over the sand. “Because I’m lonely,” she says. “And you’re lonely.”

He jogs closer.

“Because,” she says, skirts billowing in the breeze like the sail on a ship, like the heroine in a novel, “because I prefer ducks.”

At 6:55pm, Spence stands on the sidewalk in front of 508 Palms Boulevard—an elaborate multi-storied stucco structure with Spanish tile roof, painted the a shade just this side of sunburn, wedged on a tiny lot, between two split levels, of similar style to the rental. He chuckles a little, in spite of himself. It’s the sort of ostentation his father railed about at dinner parties. Like someone’s idea of Hollywood transported to a South Carolina barrier island.

He dials in on an intercom at the gate, and is buzzed in wordlessly, onto a tiled driveway, and into a green jungle of exotic plant life filled with nude statuary. A fat, loin-clothed Cupid, frozen at lift-off, leers down at him from the center of a fountain at the bottom of the stairs.
Spence clutches the bottle of wine—supermarket special—in his sweaty right hand, and grows self-conscious at the sound of his flip-flops slapping against the marble steps.

He reaches the front door and inspects his reflection in the transom. He thinks, duck, not unattractive, in blue jeans and band t-shirt. He thinks, further up the evolutionary scale from catfish.

Moira comes to the door as he wraps his fingers round the tail of the mermaid shaped door knocker.

She’s wearing cut-offs and a white sleeveless blouse—which he finds oddly disappointing—but she smells nice—like oranges and coconut. She takes his proffered wine bottle and smirks.

“Are you old enough to listen to that band?” she asks, pointing at his t-shirt.

“I was old enough to buy this bottle of wine,” he says, and hands it to her.

She reads the label. “But not old enough to be a connoisseur.”

He relaxes in the doorframe, tries to summon a seductive mystery. “I can learn.”

“Of course you can,” she says, and gestures him into the house.

The foyer is high and drenched in light. Spence looks up to see skylights and curving staircases.

“Nice house.”

She’s barefoot, and pads soundlessly over the cool marble floor, still the same heavy heeled stride. The Same skinny calves and splayed feet. Like a duck, he thinks, and then studies his own feet to compare.

“It’s not mine,” she says. “A fact that will either disappoint or relieve you.”

He doesn’t respond. Almost everything about Moira has either disappointed or relieved him, and in more cases than not, he’s felt both.

“I don’t really care,” he says; as he follows her into the kitchen—a vast, chrome infested galley—and stares out over the ocean to see the evening sky.

She pulls two glasses from a cabinet and sets about opening the bottle of wine.

He leans against the counter, and tries to find something to say, but flummoxed, reaches out to touch her hair—a single soft black curl, slipping from her ponytail.

She hands him a glass of wine and faces him. “I’m thirty-two,” she says. “I think you should know that.”

“I’m recently graduated,” he says. “From college.”

“I’m recently divorced,” she says. “From an unassailable asshole.” She takes a sip of the wine and grimaces. “This wine is awful.”

“Why?” he asks.

“It’s too sweet, for one thing. Tastes not unlike Kool-Aid, or maybe cough syrup.”

“No,” he says. “Why was he an asshole? Why did you divorce him?”

She scoffs, rolls her eyes, and softens for a moment, the blue hues of the fading sky coloring her cheeks. “I divorced him because he didn’t love me; he’s an asshole because he never told me, and let me go on believing that he did.”

He takes a long swig of his wine, and doesn’t mind the taste.

Moira pulls herself onto a countertop and lets her legs swing over the edge.

He notices, for the first time, that there is music playing in the background, and taps his foot in time.

“Did you love her?” she asks. “The girl who left you.”

He swishes his wine around in the glass, until the rim is colored purple. “We were going to California. I’d packed the car; she’d found the apartment. I wanted to live where I could see the sun set over the ocean. After we graduated, the two of us drove out—it took us a week—and broke up once over something stupid, something not even worth it to discuss, and got back together, driving through Monument Valley at night. It was so clear and quiet, and magnificent, seemed a waste to spend it alone, even though we were together in the car. Then came Reno and the rest is history.”

“You didn’t go to California,” she says.

“I couldn’t go after she left with the Catfish. It would have felt wrong,” he says.

“But you still want to be in California?” she asks.

“I still want to see the sun set into the Pacific. And I’d like to stand on the Golden Gate Bridge like anyone else from the East Coast who thinks California might change their life.” He smiles, spins his glass against the glossy counter. “Sounds dumb, right?”

Moira slides off the counter, and turns on a light over the stove. “I lived in California for a little while. When I was about your age.” She turns on the flames, and stands back.

“Did it change your life?”

Ambrose, resting in the corner, rouses, and totters over to sit at Spence’s feet.

“I met my husband there,” says Moira.

She serves curried shrimp and rice, and they dine on a screened-in porch, overlooking the ocean, now black swells against a violet sky.

He tells her about the rental, the swampy backyard, and his plans for repair, which she calls ambitious. She tells him about her father, how his death coincided with her separation, how the whole of his estate, at the end, consisted of little more than various knick-knacks, and one small dog.

The house belongs to friends of her fathers. A restraunteur and his much younger wife, who took pity on her the day the divorce was finalized, and offered their house for two weeks in June, in exchange for her appearing in their television ads.

“So you are an actress,” he says.

“What tipped you off?” she asks. “Was it my natural confidence? Or were you overwhelmed by my otherworldly glamour?”

“The way you talk. Only people I know that talk the way you do are actors.” Spence leans forward and dips his finger into wax of a burning candle. “You do movies?”

“A few,” she says.

“Anything I might have seen?”

“None that you would remember seeing me in,” she says. “My greatest theatrical triumphs have been lost to the cutting room floor. The rest is TV commercials, failed TV shows, the faceless checkout girl in the chase scene, the pregnant woman in the elevator. I live in New York now; no one expects me to do movies there. You don’t have theatrical aspirations, do you?”

“No.” He laughs. “I studied religion in school, but I don’t believe in God. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a fireman.”

“And now?”

He leans closer over the table. “I still sort of want to be a fireman, but I’m a chickenshit, so it’s going to have to be handyman for the time being. “

“What would you have done in California?” she asks. “If you’d gotten there.”

Spence sits back, feeling the wind up from the ocean, and tries to visualize his would-have life with Melissa. Long hours at some thankless job, schlepping coffee or selling knick-knacks or working the switchboard at an anonymous customer service center. Funny he’d never really thought about what he would do there, how he would make money—just assumed he’d find something, anything, to fund the off-hours—buy gas and beer and bottled water for afternoons sunning in Golden Gate Park with Melissa and the Russian novels from Nashville.
He’d constructed a geographic collage of his life there, taking fragments from tourist maps, guidebooks, and hours spent searching the internet his last semester of college, and felt as if he could describe his day to day down the street landmarks in his hypothetical neighborhood. And he would tear off to Melissa’s apartment, bearing brochures and postcards and free relocation packets accessed from the Student Career Services Center. She would listen as he built his white city on the hill, mining adjectives to shape his sense of wonder at what could be on the other side of the continent.

Moira taps her fingers over the table; Spence starts.

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he says. “I wouldn’t have cared.”

She slides her hand into his, and traces the outline of his fingers with a fingernail. “You’re very young,” she says. “And I hope, for your sake, you don’t make it to California until you’re a little older and you have something you love more than the idea of a place.”

Feeling bold in the flickering candlelight, Spence touches her cheek and feels her soft skin, the angle of her chin, her warm lips. “May I kiss you?” he asks.

She narrows her eyes, blackened in the half-light. “If you really wanted to, you wouldn’t ask.”

He leans forward and presses his lips against hers. She feels warm and comfortable and tastes like curry.

After moments—suspended, all stops, including the breeze, except the ceaseless tide against the shore—she pushes him away, gently, and pours herself another glass of wine. “The girl who left you must have really liked catfish, because you’re one hell of a duck.”

He blushes, and reaches forward to touch her again.

Moira stops his hand. “You never answered my question before. About that girl.”

“Which question?” he asks.

“Did you love her?” she asks.

He pulls at her arm, coaxing her back into an embrace, and she yields, somewhat.

He thinks about Melissa, about the way she looked before she left him—her round shoulders and round breasts and round, childish face, and the image resolves into the view he imagines from atop an apartment building in San Francisco—all the distant hills and twinkling bridges and somewhere just out of his sightline, the darkened bay.

“Spence?”

Moira smoothes his hair back from his forehead, his head resting just north of her breast, and she suddenly feels not unlike his mother.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

She turns her eyes toward the ocean. “I’m leaving in a week. Going back to New York.”

The candles on the opposite wall flicker in the breeze; from inside he hears the jingle of dog tags.

“I’m not going to fall in love with you, Spence,” she says. “I want you to know that.”

He already knew that with certainty. She exudes it.

“I don’t care,” he says.

She runs her finger over his cheek. “Do you want to stay tonight?”

“Yes,” he says.

Moira sighs.

Shadows appear on the beach, a family with flashlights, walking noiselessly under the night sky. Spence turns slightly to feel the soft cotton of her blouse beneath his cheek. As they settle, bare feet sprawled side by side on a wicker Ottoman; she blows out the last candle on the dinner table, and tilts her head back over the chair.

He smiles.

“So what do you want to do?” she asks.

“Tell me a story,” he says. “About California.”

(

Erin Go Braugh!

2005-01-03T14:28:00.000-08:00

Over lunch several weeks ago, after a morning’s-worth of futile errand-running back and forth over the unfortunate expanse that is Highway 15-501 to Durham, the Boop and I settled in for lunch in the entourage booth at the local burrito joint. She was cautious and a bit pensive. I was exhausted and hung-over. Moments earlier, I’d erupted into a frothy fit of irrationality, after noting the absence of a long-awaited, delinquent paycheck in my mail box. The Boop bore the brunt of my short-lived wrath, and had since taken to prefacing comments with: “Look, don’t be crazy.”

I wasn’t crazy. Just sore and feeling the aftereffects of the previous night’s activities.

“Look, don’t be crazy here, but have you talked to Dad?”

I admitted I hadn’t.

“I think you should call him,” she said. “Apparently he’s planning an elaborate trip and thinks you’re going with him.”

I bit into a tortilla chip and tried not to laugh. My father and I have not traveled together for any great distance in about eight years. My father and I can barely stay civil for two hours, let alone twelve hours, or two days or two weeks. My father does not offer travel unless you’re willing to split the cost, even if you’re seventeen. And my father likes his elaborate trips solo, or with his motley crew of middle-aged hikers, who all envision themselves as Bohemians, except for the fact that they’re, you know, rich and CPAs.

“Right,” I say. “Elaborate trip with Dad. If not impossible, then highly improbable. Did he tell you where we were going?”

The Boop blinks. “Ireland, apparently. It’s a roots thing.”

I’d spat out the chip long before she said roots, which was a good thing because I probably would have choked.

The party line on my father’s roots goes something like this: Once upon a time, there were some people, who saw a conflict coming and fortuitously picked the side most likely to win, and by so doing, insured a liberal amount of social, political, and material comfort for their scions and the scions of their scions. They wouldn’t be oppressed by any –archy, they wouldn’t be alienated by the dominant ideology. They would, instead comprise the archies and invent the ideology as they went along. Maginalization is for losers. Only losers tow the line. Therefore, they would not be losers, they would be winners, leaders, and, if necessary, trot out some extravagant bullshit to reinforce their claim.

It was, as luck would have it, a functional philosophy from roughly the Battle of Hastings until the US Civil War. After the latter, the family encountered small setbacks—battlefield casualties, the frustration of not being able to literally own people anymore (pisser). But the bloodline survived Antietam and Gettysburg, and came home to learn savvier techniques for enslaving the masses without actually, you know, literally enslaving the masses.

My father will tell you that his great-grandfather was a poor dirt farmer from Appalachia, who triumphed over his hardscrabble upbringing to eke out a humble living for himself in the service of the state. My father will not tell you that, having watched his mother lose her copious properties in the unease of Reconstruction, his great-grandfather married into money so old it could have fueled engines, and triumphed over the temporary blight of poverty by acquiring more property and eking out a humble living for himself as attorney, legislator, and finally, Governor of Tennessee.

I suppose my father’s various fabrications and half-truths about his family would not seem so sad, were the truth not a matter of public record and obvious to any innocent passerby who happens upon my paternal grandmother on a bad day. In his defense, Dad would occasionally, after spending an afternoon sitting under oil paintings of ancestors in my aunt’s dining room, cop to his privileged birthright, and then try to explain how being rich fucked him up, which was why he needed me to pay for dinner.

These days, the material reality of my father’s family is not what it once was. Decades (some might argue centuries) of financial mismanagement, mental illness, polite (and not so polite) infighting, and a genetic disposition to valuing enjoyment over achievement has chipped away at fortune and reputation. I didn’t grow up lacking necessities or trivial luxuries. We had a nice, if marginally dysfunctional, suburban existence. And I followed my forefathers to prep school, but I attended on financial aid.

What’s left of what was is little more than furniture, old china and silver, some jewelry secreted away, the afore-mentioned oil paintings, and an odd guilt-tinged displacement. Like, it’s all well and good the assets are spent, and the expectation levels have been compromised. All part of the inevitable redistribution of wealth. Also, the times have changed. An affectionate 1947 Memphis newspaper clipping about my Mississippi great-grandmother’s spirit of “genteel paternalism” would today be met with at least raised eyebrows, if not burning in effigy. The two generation disconnect between me and the last member of my family to keep a butler on payroll has left plenty of room for equivocation. So I can easily vacillate between feelings of righteous satisfaction that the world has turned, and the family fortune has been whittled down to some aged knick-knacks and whatever resides in my grandmother’s bank account, and envy-tinged curiosity. I mean, do you have a butler? College-aged folk fitted with butlers would have likely had no problem paying for the expensive liberal arts college in upstate New York, where I was unable to matriculate due to lack of financial resources. And hey, it’s not like having a trust fund would have killed me when I was mostly unemployed, recently relocated, and living off generic macaroni and cheese and canned vegetables. Right?

If you’re wondering what this has to do with Ireland, you’d be well on the way to my thoughts on the matter. We’re not a family of recent immigrants, if by recent you mean having arrived in on these hallowed shores since Blackbeard was no longer a threat (and that actually stands for both sides of my gene pool—my maternal great uncles still reside on property from a land grant issued shortly after the Glencoe debacle). What that means to me is, essentially, any interesting, instructive, or uncommon cultural heritage that may have once derived from the Old World, went missing sometime before the Boston Tea Party. I am the product of three-hundred plus years of procreation in the melting pot. Assimilation personified. And yes, it’s entirely possible some portion of my family tree was fertilized on the Emerald Isle. But considering my family’s provenance over the last three centuries or so, I’d say it’s also likely some portion of my family tree was fertilized in West Africa—but I don’t see my father chomping at the bit to explore his specious roots in Senegal.

This brings me to the crux of the problem:

I don’t have any beef with Ireland. In fact, Ireland is, to my mind, a pretty cool place to be from. It boasts an A++ list of world literary contributions, charismatic revolutionaries, an unpronounceable native tongue, a baroque pantheon of mythological deities, lovely landscapes, some good looking men with sexy accents, and a liberal distrust of sobriety. There’s a lot to love there.

It also has long-time history of oppression, famine, guerilla warfare, poverty, and marginalization, owing mainly to its proximity to that other, slightly larger Island (you know, the one where my father is more likely to have roots). For most of the last few centuries, Ireland has been Western Europe’s dirty little secret. The third world amid the first world. The poorest country in the European Union until the fall of the iron curtain. The Irish are the underdogs of Europe. They’re plucky and loveable and poetic. They like singing and dancing and bawdy jokes and alcohol and Jesus. They don’t like abortion. And Americans love underdogs. Especially when the underdogs happen to be white, blue-eyed, Christians who are not now, nor have ever been members of the Communist Party.

The Irish are a rare and highly valued commodity on the roots market. You can have your victimization. You can triumph over adversity with your indomitable spirit. You can have mystery and mysticism. You can even have a sliver of controversy and revolution. You can have romantic ideologues. All that, and still be complete acceptable at all levels of society. Including the Oval Office.

If you think I’m overstating my case, I’d ask you pause for a moment and consider, say, Russia. Also a country with a literary canon like you wouldn’t believe, charismatic revolutionaries, an unpronounceable native tongue, a deeply and profoundly weird mythology, extraordinary landscapes, and a meaningful contributor to alcoholics everywhere. Russia’s history has not been without its pitfalls. No one knows how to be oppressed quite like a Russian, except, perhaps those who were oppressed by the oppressed Russians. And yet, the number of suburban babies named Colum or Liam or Bridget or Siobhan vastly outnumber the Vladimirs. You don’t see the Cyrillic analogue to stores like Celtic Wonders, popping up in American mini-malls.

Is it because mainstream, Protestant Americans find Eastern Orthodoxy even more confusing than Roman Catholicism? Is it because white, blue eyed Slavs are somehow less white than white, blue-eyed Celts? Is it because Liam Neeson would not make a convincing Trotsky in a biopic? Is it because we just couldn’t bring ourselves to elect a president Ivanov?

Or is it just that Ireland is a lot less scary.

And Russia, children, is the tip of the iceberg. Imagine middle-American suddenly becoming obsessed with finding their roots in any of the other oppressed peoples of the world who have settled here (whether by choice or not). What if we embrace our Hispanic roots? Or our African roots? Or our Chinese roots? Or our Jewish roots? Or our Indian roots? Or, fuck it, our Native American Roots (this is much more acceptable. Even the most hard line conservative assholes feel guilty about the Native Americans. As such, at least 80% of people I know will claim some portion of Native American heritage in order to assuage said guilt. Bear in mind, most evidence is apocryphal at best—but studies have shown that attributing your ability to tan to your great-great-great-great grandmother’s one night stand with a Cherokee saves you from having to actually DEAL with the fact that the ghettos with casinos we call reservations are a fair trade out, for say, the North American continent)? Or, hey, our Arab roots?

I empathize with the Irish of the 19^th century. The famine, the afore-mentioned oppression, the absentee landlords, the irritating poets with their doofy occultism, the subsequent waves of immigration to the New World that lead to signs in store windows comparing them unfavorably to house pets. I’m sure it sucked for them (which is why I’ll say this only one time—Draft Riots—and leave that dead horse for Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee to beat in the DVD commentary for “Gangs of New York II: Shit Hits the Motherfucking Fan.”) And damn, the twentieth century was no picnic either—the Easter Rebellion, the guerilla war, the IRA, James Joyce’s enthusiasm for hand jobs, the Bloody Sunday massacres, Bobby Sands, Belfast making the top ten for last places in the western hemisphere you’d want to live (a tragic list also including such notable metropoli as Managua, San Salvador, Medellin, Sarajevo, Port au Prince, and probably Detroit), Bob Geldof, Bono, Enya, Riverdance, and fucking Colin Farrell.

But let’s be frank: If you’re shopping at Celtic Wonders and taking expensive trips to County Cork in search of some distant relative, you, personally, probably didn’t have to deal with any of that shit. You are, in fact a middle-class+ White American, who’s relative Irishness is probably less than or equal to Arnold Schwarzenegger's wife. And as such, my only response to this desperate hankering for identity is to quote my old roommate, Maggie, “I feel your pain, but I do not see your point.”

Americans have a contradictory relationship with the concept of roots. We want the security of a known ancestry, we want to revel in the unique cultures of our forefathers, we want to brag about our family icons or tartans or great-grandmother’s fluent Yiddish, at the same time we fear the marginalization caused by being too alien. It’s the paradox of assimilation. American culture is sort of like one of those all you can eat buffets where you can get all the sushi, taquitos, bratwurst, spaghetti, and hummus you want for $6.99 at a joint owned by a family from Bangladesh. None of it tastes very authentic, or even very good, and all of it's been enhanced by the chemical food processing plant in New Jersey. But then again, no one’s going to give you an evil eye if you ask for a side of pico de gallo for your samosa either. And there’s some comfort in that, and in the thought of a not so distant future when most Americans will look more like Tiger Woods or Vin Diesel or Salma Hayek or Sean Lennon than Gwyneth Paltrow.

But, to oblige my father, I did a little fact-checking, and did find roots in Ireland. Though, I could find no evidence to support my father’s romantic notions of being descended from romantically oppressed mystics. I did learn that my ancestors had been in the business of oppressing the Irish at least a century before they started oppressing African-Americans. Before that point, I can only assume they were oppressing women and everyone that fell outside of their literally incestuous coterie of power-hungry fuckwits with entitlement complexes. We lose track of the bloodline sometime around the Battle of Hastings. (I’d like to believe my ancestors only headlined one millennium of oppression. Up to that point, I’m willing to concede oppression by association e.g. Christians=Intolerant Asshats who almost single-handedly gave rise to the Dark Ages. Who needs fresh water, central heating, sanitations, and functional infrastructure when you have Jesus? Let’s ask the Romans.[1]) All of which underscores a previously made commitment I’d made to leaving genealogy to civil war reeanactors, and focusing instead on the family gossip and stupid anecdotes about who may or may not have gotten shot for cheating at a hand of poker or shacking up with a trick pilot in Southwest Virginia. Trying to peg down an identity for the father of your illegitimate great-grandmother is a fun waste of time in a pinch, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really mean anything. Just provides a shadow of a hint that may or may not account for why your father’s family still treats you like you should be using the service entrance, or whether preexisting medical conditions may or may not derive from the fact that you are almost certainly the product of incest somewhere down the line

In the meantime, I'll wait and see whether my father's quest becomes a reality.

And pretend I'm adopted.

[1] I stand by my long-term belief that, had Constantine left well enough alone, the Romans would have been well on their way to electricity by 600 ad. And it wasn’t that we lost just the big ideas when Rome fell, but the little ones too. Like, how long did it take anyone to figure out how to build a goddamn road after the Romans checked out? 1000 years? The only thing more terrifying than chaos is the collective amnesia that succeeds it. How do you forget how to build a road? For 1000 years?

This makes one wonder whether oppressing Christians wasn’t a reasonable idea on the part of the Romans. Certainly burning alive is a little severe, but come on. If you’re trying to promote tolerance over the broad swath of the Empire, you can’t have a bunch of whiny prosthelytizers saying that everyone else’s God is bullshit. At least not when you’re trying to keep copacetic relations with the Druids.

Things We Tell Ourselves

2005-01-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

POETS

1. I am not crazy.
2. People really want to read seven lines of experimental language detail the mysterious growth on my ass and how it relates to the coming of spring.
3. My poem will influence novelists to write great stories about uncomfortable cysts on the left ass cheek.
4. I will never be rich writing poems, but I may be lauded a great genius after I die. At least I will not be working at the Coffee Cabana, copying Leonard Cohen lyrics in my journal, and starving on five dollars an hour for the rest of my life. Maybe I can afford to upgrade from word processor to computer soon.
5. Prose writers have it so much easier. If I can’t drum up any interest in my chapbook, I’ll move to New York and write a novel about my tortured adolescence instead.

FICTION WRITERS

1. I am not self-absorbed/ I am not an alcoholic
2. People really want to hear about how Bobby/ Jeannette locked me in the bathroom stalls after lunch when I was twelve, written in high post-modernist style with plenty of Freudian allusions.
3. My book will make a great movie.
4. I will become very famous and pretty rich writing novels. At least I will not be stocking books at Barnes and Noble, writing dissertation length manifestos regarding the similarities between Tolkein’s Ring Trilogy and Jacques Derrida’s Transcendental Signified, and chain-smoking instead of eating for the rest of my life. Maybe I can afford to buy a Playstation 2 soon.
5. Screenwriters have it so much easier. If I can’t sell my novel, I’ll simply move to Los Angeles and write an existential thriller about a pedophile priest who becomes a cult leader instead.

SCREENWRITERS

1. I am not, have never been, nor have any desire to be, a starfucker.
2. People really want to watch movies with no discernable plot and really fascinating dialogue about getting fucked up the ass by organized religion.
3. My script would have been a great play . . . back in the days of Shakespeare.
4. I will become very famous and very rich, writing movies. At least, I will not be working at Blockbuster video, spending all of my money on DVDs of HBO series and eating Macaroni and Cheese for the rest of my life. Maybe I can afford to buy a flatscreen tv.
5. Playwrights have it so much easier. If I can’t sell my script, I’ll simply move to Chicago and write plays instead.

PLAYWRIGHTS
1. I am not a theater person.
2. People really want to watch a 12 hour epic cycle about how my great uncle Horace may or may not have invented the first Cheez-Doodle (which is a metaphor for the fascist theocracy in this country today) using Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty as prevailing theoretical medium.
3. My script is too good for the movies. This is art, people.
4. I will become very, very famous writing plays. They’ll be begging for my ass in Hollywood. To which, I will give them a haughty “Pshaw!” At least I will not be doing Performance Art pieces at the Coffee Cabana’s open mike nite for the rest of my life. Maybe I can afford to buy a vintage typewriter soon.
5. Directors have it so much easier. If I can’t get produced, I’ll simply pull together all the incredibly talented people I know, move to New York, (but don’t necessarily hang out with . . . remember I’m not a theater person), and do a killer revival of “Doctor Faustus” with lots of neato pyrotechnics and shit.

DIRECTORS
1. I am not an egomaniacal control freak.
2. People really want to feel the fires of hell when they watch Christopher Marlowe restored to stage and/or screen with super FX and Harvey Keitel in the leading role. In the meantime, I will starve the actors and subject them to daily torture sessions so their pain can be more real.
3. My directing skills are much better than any actor could ever imagine.
4. I will win and Tony and an Academy Award. Suffice to say, I will be richer and more famous than you can possibly imagine. One day, I will be held in higher regard than Scorcese, Welles, Hitchcock, and Bergman all put together. At least I will be able to quit this shitty PA job and afford to buy liquor instead of wasting all of my money on overpriced microbrews and Tofurkey franks.
5. Actors have it so much easier. If I can’t make it as a director, I’ll lose thirty pounds, get some hair extensions and earn a starring role in the new Kevin Spacey vehicle.

ACTORS
1. I am not vain, superficial, and phony.
2. People really want to know how I starved myself for six months and ate only cabbage and boiled potatoes in preparation for playing a leprechaun in a television commercial for “Irish Spring” soap.
3. My acting ability is more impressive than my pert tits.
4. I will be very rich, very famous, and may also get to date Ben Affleck, Gwyneth Paltrow, and/or Ryan Adams. At least, I will not be wearing this fucking furry bear costume and running around a theme park in the middle of August suffering from heat stroke while posing with a bunch of bratty kids and living off other people’s drugs and stale nachos.
5. Models have it so much easier. If I can’t make it as an actor, I’ll lose another thirty pounds, get my boobs/nose/ass done, and become the new Calvin Klein model.

MODELS
1. I am not stupid/ anorexic.
2. People really should know how hard it is to hop around a tropical beach in a string bikini when it is a frigid 72 degrees outside. I am a tortured person. Really. I am.
3. Did I ever tell you that I had a 1600 SAT score and turned down Harvard because they wouldn’t let me attend the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition shoot?
4. I will be very rich, very famous, have incredible clothes and may get to marry Johnny Depp or an aging rock star. At least, I will not have to justify my existence by pointing at the foot shot on the Sears flyer and admitting that I was the sock model, nor will I have to pose naked for anymore of Kevin’s “art projects.” I will also likely be able to afford food, though I still won’t eat it. It’s nice to have the option though, right?
5. Pop Divas have it so much easier. If I can’t make it as a model, I’ll hire a really great producer and move to Orlando so I can become the next Britney Spears.

POP STARS
1. I have real, discernible talent.
2. People will thrill at my ability to sing “OOOOHHHH BABBBBY OOOOH” with back up vocalists in three part harmony while doing the Roger Rabbit with glittery Kalamata olives balanced on my tits.
3. Is it my fault the real singers aren’t as attractive as I am? Lip synching is just my way of preserving the mass hallucination that really talented singers also have perfect teeth and pantene hair.
4. I will be so rich and so famous; everyone else on MTV Cribs will be green with jealousy. Wait til you see thousands of teenagers cutting class to hang out in front of TRL screaming my name. At least, I will not have to do anymore Marilyn Monroe singing “Hava Nagila” impersonations at the Weisbaum Bar Mitzvah backed by a Karaoke machine and a Casio keyboard. I will be able to afford medical insurance which will curb those unfortunate accidents caused by uninsured ankles on stiletto heels.
5. Singer-songwriters have it so much easier. If I can’t make it as a pop star, I’ll buy an acoustic guitar, move to the Pacific Northwest, and throw out my shoes.

SINGER-SONGWRITERS
1. I am not a frustrated pop star.
2. People will get chills at my saccharine sweet melodies and visceral lyrics about the time I was almost went out with the guy whose ex-girlfriend was anorexic and was almost date raped by a heroin addicted singer songwriter . . . I mean, asshole musician, I mean, oh fuck, I don’t know what I mean.
3. It’s not that I’m afraid of amplification. It’s just that I think my songs require nothing more than a simple six string acoustic guitar and the entire string section of the New York Philharmonic to maintain their power.
4. I will be a headliner at the Lillith Fair, if they bring the Lillith Fair back. At least, I will not be forced to sleep in a dumpster behind the seven eleven and sometimes I may be able to shower before playing Open Mic Night. Maybe I’ll buy a piano.
5. Rock stars have it so much easier. If I can’t make it as a singer songwriter, I’ll buy an amp, record an album in London, and develop a heroin addiction.

ROCK STARS
1. I am not a total asshole.
2. People will think I’m attractive despite the fact that I have no teeth (because of the crank) and no nostrils (because of the coke) and absolutely no feeling left in my upper left thigh (complicated)and it’s true the millions want nothing more than to hear an experimental double concept album about getting gravel extracted from your nasal cavity.
3. Just so you know: I did get laid, before this. I had serviceable relationships with nice girls/boys who thought I was a rebel because of my vinyl, I mean, leather pants and I really do want to pay child support for all those women who . . .fuck it, when Winona wants you, she wants you, savvy?
4. Career longevity? Sure the odds aren’t in my favor. But I’m an outlaw, man. All about fucking beating the odds. And one day I’ll be bigger than Jesus. Hell, I’ll be bigger than John Lennon. And no one will notice the gut. Swear.
5. Poets have it so much easier. If I don’t make it as a rock star, I’ll move to some small, Midwestern town, rent a garret, and start writing epic poems about the mysterious growth on my ass. (Replay cycle)

2005-01-01T01:26:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year

Adeste Fideles

2004-12-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

Like many American children of my generation, I grew up in a home in which religion was an afterthought. My parents, both liberal minded and determined not to inflict upon their children the same sort of mistakes their parents made, spent a lot of time discussing the theoretical aspects of religion, and had little time left over to engage in practical churchgoing. It’s hard to raise children to believe in absolute truth, when you spend so much time equivocating about what absolute truth is, exactly. Which explains why it is that I spent most of my childhood believing the only difference between Christianity and the rest of the world’s religions was that practioners of the former got shit from the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, and the latter did not. Jesus Christ, woefully uninteresting compared to a fat bearded Scandinavian who might bring you Barbie’s Dream house if you stop harassing your sister and a six foot tall magical rabbit who hand delivered an inspired selection of candy , was far too easy to confuse with Moses and hardly compelling.

My specter of my grandparents further complicated matters, by tacitly introducing a vaguely politicized religious quarrel into the proceedings Dad’s family was Episcopal, snooty, reasonably secular, and only inclined toward occasional shows of theatrical, rather Catholic piety for effect. My mother was the product of fundamentalist orthodoxy, raised in the Church of Christ built by her own father. Dad’s family thought the Church of Christ was a shack full of tasteless redneck fanatics, for whom snake-handling wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Mom’s family thought Episcopals were essentially Catholics and thereby heathenish idolaters and dabblers in the black arts ,whose relationship to Jesus Christ was tenuous at best.

All I knew was that the Episcopal church had better architecture, better music, elaborate costumes, and excellent raspberry cookies in the fellowship hall. When I asked Mom why the services at the Church of Christ were ugly, small, and boring, she told me that she’d been raised to believe that God was unimpressed by large cathedrals with artful stained glass and ambient lighting and fountains and towers and the string section from the symphony on loan for the occasional Sunday service, that, in fact, God preferred brylcreemed ministers, off-key renditions of “Are You Washed in the Blood,” and split-level churches that resembled Chez Brady. I found this very hard to believe. I mean, if I were God, and were planning on dropping in somewhere on a Sunday morning, I’d probably bypass North Carolina altogether and head straight for, say, Rome, or maybe Istanbul, or Mecca, or Tibet.

Perhaps I would have been more compelled one way or the other had my religious education consisted of more than my mother’s narratives[1] on the way to the mall and the lyrics to Christmas Carols[2]. Very early on, I’d shown a marked tendency toward insomnia, and my mother had invented a guardian angel named Lily, who would occasionally reward me with dime store trinkets if I would agree to stay in the bed, which again underscored my belief that Christianity was all about getting presents from supernatural trespassers.

Because no one bothered to parse things out for me, I was left to disseminate the bits and pieces of information I got from eavesdropping. I understood that Jesus Christ was born in a barn, because his parents had failed to make reservations on a holiday weekend. I understood that foreign dignitaries had set up a nice trust fund for him at birth, which his parents had subsequently squandered, forcing the son of God to find employment as a manual laborer. I understood that Jesus had been able to figure out that one of his friends had tipped him off to the cops. (I could not understand why if Jesus were so smart, he wouldn’t have split town at that point.) I understood that after Jesus died, he came back to life, and then flew, sort of like superman, into outer space, where God lived. Past that, my knowledge of the bible was limited to Noah having a lot of pets, talking snakes having a lot of apples, and that you’re more likely to get eaten by a whale than a lion.

None of this prepared me for dizzying realizations I would receive at seven years old, when my parents, fearful of my ignorance (and perhaps the judgment of other adults, upon realizing my ignorance) took it upon themselves to fill in some gaps. My father would introduce the Holy Ghost, and my mother, in a bit of inspired setting, would explain the concept of Hell to me in the parking lot of Belk’s at The Asheville Mall.

Of the two, I found the Holy Ghost considerably more unsettling. [3] Mostly because I believed that Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” was a book in the New Testament somewhere between Matthew and First Corinthians. I pictured the Holy Ghost looking like a cross between Skeletor and the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. Or more accurately, rather like the Ghost of John, described in the Halloween song they taught us in elementary school—“long white bones with his skin all gone.” And the idea that this grisly specter was God’s messenger seemed too awful to contemplate, especially when coupled with the flesh-eating, blood drinking business I’d heard about at communion. When I admitted the idea of the whole thing filled me with bone-chilling terror, my parents tried to alleviate my concerns by explaining that the Holy Spirit was a friendly ghost, which is how I came to envision the trinity as Santa Claus, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and some guy in his underwear who looked like one of the Allmans.

Suffice to say, by seven years old, the likelihood of me accepting Jesus Christ as my personal savior was looking ever more, well, unlikely.

My first real inkling of what was going on with religion came occurred sometime around my second grade year. Through my viewing of some historical epic, I became acquainted with the concept of nuns, which made an indelible impression for reasons I cannot begin to explain. Around the same time, my lifelong fascination with the English Reformation and its aftereffects was ignited either by an study of Henry the VIIIth my mother completed for an art class or Herman’s Hermits.

I dove into study of Tudor/Stuart England with a kind of fervor, guided in part by the presence of many interesting women during that period. During this time, I learned that my parents were technically Protestant, and that was a good thing or bad thing depending on who you talked to. I also researched converting to Catholicism in order to join a convent, and then take pride in my eventual, inevitable excommunication.

When I aired my intention of becoming Catholic, my parents were appropriately non-plussed, suspecting my devotion to the papacy was likely ephemeral, and told me to do as I like, provided I kept conversations with my grandmother free of theology. My mother, perhaps noting the way I gazed curiously at the icicle minarets surrounding the mosque on the way to my grandmother’s house, again reminded me that God had nothing to do with architecture, which sounded just as ridiculous to me as it did the first time she said it.

By this time, I’d spent enough nights with friends to realize my lack of religious education was viewed as suspect. On Sunday mornings, I’d tag along with Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Unitarians, and a whole host of miscellaneous sects. My Jewish friends were learning Hebrew and my Catholic friends were learning catechism. I was learning to identify myself by whatever affiliation struck my fancy at the time, and learned, the hard way, that some religions are easier to fake your way through than others.

Giving a credible performance of piety when you have absolutely no faith in the existence of God is harder than it sounds. The Apostle’s Creed is hard enough to deliver with a straight face, even if you are a believer, but if said recitation is the only thing that stands between you and a free pass to Six Flags with the Central Methodist Youth Group, you’re going to give it a good college try. Even if the Youth Director nurses concerns that enthusiasm for “Appetite for Destruction” may be indicative of a direct line to Satan.

Though trips to various theme parks, concerts, church sponsored youth parties, and various events that afford you free t-shirts, the fundamental truth of Christianity—“Believing in Jesus gets you some pretty cool shit”—was reinforced. What’s’ more: belief wasn’t even required. In fact, with the slightest of effort, the whole system could be manipulated to work on your behalf if you had a modicum of acting skill. If you want to use the roller rink at First Baptist Church, mention casually that you’re thinking about accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Want to get locked into an ornate neo-gothic cathedral overnight with clueless chaperones and the three hottest guys in the eighth grade? Drop hints that you think the Presbyterians are way more interesting than the Lutherans across the street. If necessary, mention Calvin and a passing interest in Scottish History. [4]

On some level, I think I’d like to tell you that I had some sense of a divine presence, that somewhere, in some text, I ran across a passage that opened a window, that I felt a pang of guilt whenever I conned some toothy representative of Young Life. And of course, I could lie and feed you some portion of the Spiritual Autobiography I created at age twelve (and have since edited for style and consistency), but the fact of the matter is, I didn’t and won’t.

There have been times when I have been moved, awed even, by that which was created in the name of a god. Soaring Bach cantatas from a fifty foot nave. Graham Greene's, “The Power and the Glory.” The Diamond Sutra. The Mahabharata. Rumi. The Reverend Al Green. Et al. Maybe not often enough to counterbalance the frustration, anger, and disgust I feel at all things that have been destroyed in the name of a god[5], but enough to recognize the power of the concept.

And with that in mind, I probably won’t attend midnight mass at the Episcopal Church with my father on Christmas Eve. And I probably won’t stop while fighting off crowds at Barnes and Noble to consider the Christ child, as instructed by the evangelical community. But I will let the Choir of Kings College soundtrack part of my drive home, down a darkened interstate on the night of the 23^rd. “O Come All Ye Faithful” is an awfully pretty song.

[1] Occasionally told, rather like fairy tales, between G-rated synopses of Classic Novels and Greek Mythology (she was a classics minor). Of the three, her dramatic retelling of the Trojan War was most inspiring of reverence.

[2] At seven years old, I spent one whole afternoon scouring the King James for mention of Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red nosed Reindeer, and the elusive Parson Brown, all of whom I believed to be canonical figures.

[3] From the first sentence, I could tell that the hell business was complete bullshit. I mean, my parents raised me to believe that witches and dragons and giant man-eating gorillas that lived under your bed and could suck out your brains were not real, so the idea of demons with pitchforks standing aside lakes of fire like sadistic lifeguards strained all credibility.

[4] Years later, I would employ a similar strategy to get free dinners from the Hare Krishnas.

[5] I can still get pretty fucking bitter about the Library at Alexandria and that came almost a seven hundred years before the first Crusader hit the highway.

White Christmas

2004-12-12T23:07:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, about ten days after Thanksgiving, we had an ice storm of literary proportions. From approximately noon on a Thursday, to 5:00am the following Friday, the storm produced a continuous shower of fountain soda sized chunks, littering the ground like a hyperactive ice machine.

We were ill-prepared. Though we’d purchased beer and snacks and plenty of cigarettes, no one had considered the pressing need for batteries or candles. A realization we all had, sometime around 3am, hearing distant transformers cover the 1812 overture and giant tree branches splinter from trunks with a crack. Our tenuous connection to electric power, and by extension, the modern era was short-lived. And we tried to make light of it, noting the premonitory half-second outages always caused the CD player to start over, playing the first track on the Classic Queen CD “Kind of Magic,” at least four or five times. When I went to bed that night, I turned the baseboard heat in my bedroom up to its highest setting, and sweltered under many blankets, waiting for the inevitable cold and dark.

The power blew, finally, at about 5:30am.

By nightfall of the following day, I had accepted a humiliating, yet completely true fact about myself.

I’m a total wuss when it comes to cold temperatures.

For those of you who subscribe to some notion of geographical determinism, this should come as no great surprise. I’m from the mountains, yes, but the mountains below the Mason-Dixon line, where wintertime temperatures average out well above freezing and blizzards are rare. Seven inches of snow still cancels school for the better part of a week. Sure, we have four seasons, and it’s not unusual to get a little wintry participation, but seriously, a single digit wind chill gets top billing on the evening news. Some beefy local weatherman, who both looks and talks like an evangelist, makes ominous pronouncements of the “Do not go outdoors unless you absolutely have to. Prolonged exposure to such temperatures can be fatal” variety[1]. Which is true, I guess, but does little to explain the mystery of how people in Minneapolis function in January. Do they just not go outside? At all? It’s this sort of nonsense that led to me spending three days in Chicago[2] in February, staring down gusts of arctic winds, and wondering what portion of Michigan Avenue could be traversed before I shuffled off the mortal coil, or at the very least acquiesced to wearing an unfashionable hat [3].

I blame much of my intolerance for cold on growing up in houses with unrelenting radiator heat—the kind that turns any environment into a low country bayou, and allows you to travel barefoot throughout the house with all the windows open in the middle of January. When I was a kid, I remember holidays in which my father would stoke the obligatory fire, and we’d all sit by the hearth sweating profusely in velvet dresses and taffeta skirts singing carols and trying to pretend that the magic of Christmas would ward off heat stroke until Silent Night could be sung in English, German, Latin, and Spanish.[4]

Also, there’s the genetic angle: I have to believe, many years ago, my ancestors crossed the Atlantic and settled in Virginia for a reason. That winters in the North Atlantic were cold and gray and dreary and summers were, well, pretty much the same thing. New England probably sounded fairly uninviting. Shitty winters and Puritans? You jest. Why not go south, where you might get malaria, but probably won’t be burned at the stake? Added bonus: pirates! And while I’m slightly disappointed no one considered the benefits for posterity by settling in, say, the Caribbean[5], I’m extremely happy that I don’t need snow tires.

None of this is to say I can’t appreciate the quality of certain winter days. I like walking around in cold weather, when the air is crisp and burns your lungs when you breathe too deeply. When the sky is high and clear and mostly cloudless. The best sunsets always happen in the winter, and a lot of things smell and taste and feel better. I don’t even mind the early darkness—I’m more productive at night anyway—but by that time, there’s little left to recommend the great outdoors, unless I’m drunk and have no option but to take my cigarette outside.

A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to revisit the conditions of the ice storm when a failing furnace met with a failed gas valve to produce a heating emergency. I had to call the gas company to report a leak, which lead to big trucks with flashing lights and beeping meters not unlike those things in “Ghostbusters” and much excitement for three am on a weeknight. While the landlord sparred with the property manager over how best to remedy the situation, I spent two nights shivering under many blankets, and wondered why in hell anyone would ever want to visit Alaska.

Though finally fixed, sort of, the furnace hasn’t fully recovered, and continues to spar with the thermostat. I’ve taken to drinking rum. Wishful thinking.

Last night, my mother called to report a brief, yet heavy snow shower in my hometown, and we mused about the possibility of a White Christmas. I regret to say I was unable to drum up any real enthusiasm. It’s already cold—28 and falling—and I’m not much of a skier. I suspect my parents know the only reason I ever wished for snow was the promise of snow days. There’s a sort of special excitement to waking up at 7:00 on a cold morning and hearing a dj announce your school closure over the clock radio. A special bliss that accompanies turning off the alarm and sleeping until after your parents have left for work, thereby leaving you home to watch movie channels, play video games, and embark on some soon-to-be-abortive art project.

In high school, the snow day bliss was doubly gratifying. As a day student at a boarding school, the official call on whether roads were traversable was increasingly mine to make. My mother had a liberal philosophy with regards to school attendance, and I was friends with the five other day students who lived on my side of town. With a modicum of effort, it was possible to convince the Headmaster’s office that the flurry that had merely dusted the rooftop of the dining hall had left North Asheville roads nearly impassable. If the public schools were closed, we felt we had a rock solid case. And while our classmates attended Calculus, we Northside day students gathered at a pre-selected parentless house to smoke cigarettes, order Mexican take-out, and discuss which artist on Alternative Nation was the biggest poser, confident that the administration would continue to be utterly oblivious when it came to our attendance[6]

Of the myriad disappointments of my adult life, I’d have to rank loss of snow days in the top 100. They were, along with cute jackets and plentiful opportunities for tights, one of the few positive aspects of winter. Workplaces don’t close unless conditions are truly cataclysmic, and no friendly DJ is going to announce over the radio at 7:00 on a cold, dark, Monday morning that you don’t have to drive twenty-five miles down a congested artery, through commuter traffic to make it on time to the 8:45 meeting with a potential client that may, in fact, decide to hire his intern to do your job for $8/hr.

Likewise, when I think about White Christmas, I can only imagine the driving 200 miles west on the same clogged corridor, behind Southerners even less equipped than I to deal with inclement weather, and friends stuck in airport terminals, and the vaguely oppressive notion of being stuck indoors with my extended family in the suburbs for days at a time.

It’s not exactly the real life analogue to Irving Berlin’s musical postcard.

In the meantime, I’ll pray for sun, unseasonably warm temperatures, and lots of rum at my mother’s house.

Does Harry Belafonte have a Christmas album?

Just wondering.

[1] My theory is that weathermen in North Carolina have a lot of time to kill between hurricane seasons, and therefore must invent ways to make people watch the local weather during the wintertime. Ironically, their cold weather hyperbole inevitable trumps hurricane coverage in style and delivery. As if to say, “A fifteen foot storm surge and continuous winds of 100+ miles an hour can be dangerous; a snow flurry, my friend—deadly.”

[2] One of the few American cities I don’t completely hate. Except for the cold thing.

[3] Winter hats are a commitment. Once you put it on, you’re pretty much stuck with it for the rest of the day, and unless it resembles something worn by one of the female leads in “Doctor Zhivago,” I’m not big on wearing winter hats as fashion accessories.

[4] We weren’t multi-lingual. It was a glorified parlor trick.

[5] Existing family members looking to correct this retroactively can consider a bequest to me of a small villa with excellent views and beach access available from December 1-March 1. I promise I’ll take excellent care of it, and ban all Jimmy Buffett on premises.

[6] And they were. When your total student body totals less than two hundred, it doesn’t seem like it would take much to notice that the students with the highest number of sick days were always sick on the same days. At my high school, you could be expelled for buying Cliff Notes, smoking a cigarette, or having sex. At public high school, I could have been forced to repeat a grade for having as many sick days as I racked up in one semester of senior year alone. Interesting trade-off.

A Brief Synopsis of My Apprenticeship with Carolina Artisans Thespian Society; Part II

2004-11-17T11:33:00.000-08:00

In order to understand the CATS organization, it is necessary to first understand the character of its leader.

Anita Ross* was a round-faced, be-spectacled woman with a bushy blonde mane, who wore lots of batik prints and floppy sunhats in the dead of winter. She cultivated the affect of a new-age, hippie art teacher, and was inclined to espouse lots of empty aphorisms accompanied by PG-13 anti-establishment keywords, which, along with her oft-repeated promises of increasingly implausible fame for all of us, made her initially popular with the young folk.

She was apt to tout her many years of experience as a Director of Theater for Young People, offered up a CV that included both professional acting work and experience with handling the vagaries of adolescence in a creative, confidence building, guidance counselor sort of way.

It was, of course, horse shit. Anita’s earth mother exterior merely obscured the fact that she was an impatient, intolerant, hard-assed, opportunist, with a penchant for hyperbole. You could blame her disposition on a frustrated theatrical career (she once had a bit part in a B-movie. That’s pretty much it), or maybe some personal misfortune left her dangling at the end of her fraying tether. I don’t know. What I can say is this:

The CATS facilities were located in a long abandoned loft on an alleyway called Carolina Lane. In those days, Carolina Lane was a mostly empty block of buildings, housing a few derelicts and a couple of painters looking for dirty cheap studio space. (These days, Carolina Lane is a desirable address for vapid hipster trustifarians and their friends, and Lexington Avenue is the proverbial nexus of vapid hipster-dom in Asheville. In those days, Lexington Avenue offered little outside of musty antique stores owned by creepy old men and hookers. A lot has changed since then.). Even the most enthusiastic studio DIY-er could have told you that the CATS HQ wasn’t much of a performance space. More like a squat. With (usually) functioning lights and occasionally running water. Five years or so later I would attend punk rock shows at squats with more amenities and cleaner bathrooms.

Likewise the company. My CATS peers were an eccentric hodge-podge of cherubic home-schooled hippie kids right off the commune, and surly teenagers, which gave all proceedings an unusual sort of dynamic. Imagine ten year old girls with stick-straight unwashed hair and homemade angel wings flitting around chain-smoking, fifteen year old skinhead girls, whose entire vocabulary centered around creative use of the Anglo Saxon idiom. If the Rainbow People’s Children’s Division put on an interactive production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at a Girl’s Reform School, the result would be no less jarring than my first night at CATS.

After years of being castigated for being too weird, I realized, within about five minutes of walking in the door, that I would be marginalized for being too boring, too suburban, too, well, normal.

My mother concealed her concern in a blasé attempt to be a good sport. She intuited Anita to be in charge of the operation, assumed (correctly) that Anita was crazy, and trotted off to talk to the only other adult in the room.

Anita Ross was literally effervescent that night, flitting through the room like an orgasmic guidance counselor, promising all kinds of personal growth and creative development and community arts incentives. For a second, I got caught up in her energy, admiring her taste in velvet hats and hippie skirts. She doted on me, telling my mother I was a born actress, a natural talent, and I glowed with the validation.

Five minutes into our first session, four days later, I felt the first trace of misgivings. Anita took the floor in a huff, citing “bad days,” and informed us that we would be spending the next six weeks preparing for her innovative new play. During rehearsals, we would be required to wear the CATS uniform (consisting of black shoes, black pants, and the CATS t-shirt—available for purchase at only $18, cash only), obey her every order, spend the first hour on the play, and the last hour on “character building exercises.”

Any negligence on our part to complete said tasks would earn us punishments, ranging from being sent home to having to clean the bathroom with a hand selected tiny instrument—toothbrush, Q-tip, mascara wand, etc—which wouldn’t have seemed quite so Draconian, had the “character-building exercises” consisted of any more but the same thing, in triplicate.

I can honestly say, in my four months as CATS member, I cleaned every inch of the “studio.” I cloroxed mildew off the walls and removed dirt that predated the Great Depression. I scoured the toilet and buffed the floors. I chipped fossilized chewing gum off the street outside the building. In fact, when I think about my involvement with CATS, I mostly remember cleaning.

As an adult, I can create a compelling argument for this scenario. Anita, knowing the vicious nature of the theater world, was only trying to prepare us for the sort of humiliating employment we’d have to procure in order to not starve to death. And her drill sergeant intimidation techniques were surely nothing more than a means to prepare us for the irrational, fascistic tendencies of most working directors. Actors are a dime a dozen, and we apprentices must literally shine (the toilet bowl with a toothbrush) both on and off the stage.

But let’s be honest. CATS was a third rate youth theater company in a fifth rate town. Most of my fellow actors there were unlikely to get roles in the High School musical, let alone in college, or New York. A better argument might be that she was trying to prepare us for reform school (where at least half of my classmates were clearly headed). All Anita had to do was show up for a couple hours a few times a week, spout off some vague Drama 101 bullshit and sell tickets to our parents, half of whom still believed we were in “Cats, the musical” anyway.

It’s not rocket science.

But Anita had other ideas. And she was a sadist.

*No one is innocent. Names have been changes to protect my sorry ass.

The Second Coming

2004-11-03T09:19:00.000-08:00

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

--WB Yeats

2004-11-01T13:53:00.000-08:00

Happy Halloween

A Brief Synopsis of My Apprenticeship with Carolina Artisans Thespian Society; Part I

2004-10-17T23:56:00.000-07:00

When my father moved out of my family home in January of 1990, he moved into a sleek two bedroom condo in a newly renovated downtown building. Fitted with no-maintenance necessary appliances, clean high-ceilinged room in cool pastels, and a private off-street parking lot, it was, I would learn, one of Asheville’s preeminent addresses for the recently divorced.

In 1990 or so, divorce spread like wildfire through the parent’s of my peers. About once a week, some dad or another moved out. Bus rides home through North Asheville turned into some combination of support group and dysfunctional family home tour.

“Yeah, there’s Andy’s house. His dad took off last month with a Harley riding x-ray tech named Denise.”

“There’s Bill’s house. His dad left his wife for a student in his senior seminar at the university. They’re getting married.”

“Oh, and Jessica. Her Dad followed a Brazilian flight attendant home to Sao Paolo last year. Her mom’s pissed cause he quit paying child support.”

And the popular favorite:

“Hey look, guys, that’s Kim’s house. Kim’s mom went to the Outer Banks with her reading group, came back, kicked her dad out, and invited her “special friend” Phyllis to move in.”

At least once a day, someone would claim parental separation to snag a hall pass to the guidance counselor’s office. And for every one legitimately distraught child of divorce looking for real answers and affection in the guidance office, there were ten other children of recently broken homes looking to cash in on the opportunity to check out what illicit activity was going down behind the dumpster in the bus lane.

For a time, divorce was the grand unifier. The one commonality between the beautiful, blonde, popular class president, and me, the shirking weirdo, who spent lunch in the library reading about English History, the Russian Revolution, the Beatles, vampires, theatrical agents, and the Catholic Church (not necessarily in that order). I believed our shared tragedies might spark a real dialogue, leading to real, mutually respectful friendship, and possibly a date with the captain of the ninth grad boy’s soccer team. At the time I also believed you could get high smoking opium-scented incense. Both, as it turned out, ended up being untrue.

The circumstances surrounding most divorces fell into one of two camps.

Some went driving off in their mid-life crisis inspired sports car with a skanky ho in the passenger seat. Others went crazy, went to Outward Bound, and came back announcing a radical career change just as their long-suffering wives had hit the proverbial ends of their ropes.

My father fell into the second category—the minority position. And though I empathized with the tales of spending Christmas vacation watching a new stepmother named Tracy teeter around the tree wearing nothing but the Frederick’s of Hollywood “Santa’s Little Helper” collection, I could not relate. There was no evidence of hanky-panky preceding my mother’s announcement of impending separation, which I found to be both confusing, and a little disappointing.

“Are you sure Dad didn’t have an affair?” I asked my mother.

She rolled her eyes, and watched my father load the seventh box of dusty New Yorker back issues into his car. As if to say: Are you kidding?

Certainly adultery would have been something. The addition of a busty former secretary might have provided me with tangible reason to hate going to my father’s condo on allotted weekends, instead of the embarrassing, awkward dread that accompanied all visitations. My father lacked all practical knowledge of keeping house. He could not cook, clean, entertain, or fix anything three dimensional. We mostly ate out, and came home to sleep in the ugly, uncomfortable twin beds he purchased for us.

Dad’s post-separation mindset had exactly two manifestations: 1) Wacky, permissive, over-generous, guilt-ridden buddy and 2) Caustic, impatient, oblivious, needy bastard looking to project his ire at my mother on the nearest available stand-in. This worked out well for him as he had two daughters. The Boop could count on spending her weekends receiving new toys and appliances, not having to brush her teeth or hair, and chasing Dad around the living room to the sound of the William Tell Overture played at 77rpm on the stereo. I, on the other hand, took to hiding out to avoid requests such as: “So, when are you making dinner?” or “I think you could be a much more interesting woman if you could, you know, work on yourself.”

As we were located downtown, hiding out was easy. The front door opened onto Haywood Street, which, at the time, featured a book store, a hippie shop, an elaborate Catholic church, and the Main Branch of the public library. My mother’s office was in the building next door, which also featured a frozen yogurt stand and a bakery. On paternal custody Friday’s, I’d come home from school via the bakery where I’d stop for a snack and flirt with a trio of weird ninth graders apt to cut class for breadsticks. After that, I’d drop in at Mom’s office, maybe fiddle with the Xerox machine, maybe collate grants, maybe walk down the hall and pester my mother’s current boyfriend, Dean. The next stop was the bookstore. I perused the fiction aisle until I talked myself in then out of shoplifting a copy of Jane Eyre. Then downstairs to what was then Asheville’s only coffeshop, where I tried to appear cool among the henna haired likely lesbian baristas and purple haired, black clad weirdoes. At the hippie store, I’d look at all the gauzy skirts and brightly colored Mongolian yak sweaters, blow my lunch money on incense or reduced priced dangly earrings. Then, I’d head for the Catholic Church just in time to interrupt the priest’s cigarette break by asking lots of questions about architecture, local history, and, time permitting, excommunication. At which point, it was usually safe to return home to the condo. (Between my mother’s office and my father’s condo, by month two of the separation, most of Haywood Street’s denizens knew who I was.)

Weekends provided even more time to kill. By the time Saturday afternoon rolled around, I’d gone pretty much everywhere there was to go on foot (and within reason), leaving me with little option but the public library.

My usual public library routine did not differ markedly from my lunch time library routine. Except having no pantheon of rich, beautiful, popular kids to study from the second story windows, I was able to spend more quality time on reading trashy novels, trashier biographies, and accidentally breaking the microfiche machines. If managed correctly, time could be wasted for up to eight hours, leaving little opportunity for awkward silences around the condo.

It was on one such Saturday, a cold, slushy January afternoon, while my father and the Boop sat at home watching Chevy Chase in silence that I happened to notice an announcement on the library bulletin board.

It read:

AUDITIONS TODAY

Needed: Young Actors

Aged 10-20

To participate in Spring Season

C.A.T.S

Carolina Artisans Thespian Society

Sign-up in downstairs hallway

I was struck by a sizzling bolt of epiphany. Seeing as how I’d shown such promise on the stage and been denied the opportunity to shine by the politics of the Junior High drama club, seeing as how I was currently living a sad, sort of half-life, shuffled between maternal abode and the Condo, seeing as how my celebrity was inevitable, I chalked my fortuitous sighting up to an Act of God, and made a mental note to thank the Almighty at my earliest convenience.

Downstairs, I boldly made to the sign-up table, forged a parental signature, and auditioned.

By Monday, I was informed that I was part of the company.

When my mother learned of my incipient stardom, she did a great job conveying indifference.

“You’re already taking piano lessons,” she said. “You’ve quit at least three other extra-curriculars this year, and you’re in serious danger of failing math. Why do you think this is a good idea?”

I said something along the lines of “acting is my life” and probably added some barbed comment about the divorce.

Mom took my information packet from the audition and went off to call the company head. I paced the living room, anxiously awaiting her decision.

After she hung up the phone, Mom sighed: “This is not what you think, Alison. They’re requiring me to pay‘tuition’ in order for you to be in the play. It sounds like sort of a fly by night operation, and I have, to be honest, a funny feeling about the whole thing. Do you really want to do this?”

I nodded.

Something Rotten

2004-10-16T14:01:00.000-07:00

From: horatio@elsinore.dk

Sent: Thursday, May 25, 1154 2:45am

To: The Wittenberg Crew

Subject: In Case You Haven’t Heard . . .

I finally got your email(s) last night—our systems have been down since the invasion—so please excuse my late response. I’m not sure how much of what’s happened around has gotten back to Wittenberg, but let me just say, calling the events “tragic” would be a massive fucking understatement. “Catastrophic” would be more like it.

I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in over a month. Last night, Fortinbras told me I looked like shit, and told me it was high time for me to get the hell over it and get on with my life. I think this was his way of getting me out of the house. Which is fair? I mean, I don’t live here, and Ham’s been dead for three weeks, and there’s nothing left for me to do. I think the length and severity of my grieving process is starting to remind them of Ham after his dad died. And that freaks people out.

Though this is not the first time my spring break has had a body count (that would have been sophomore year, when I went to Norway with my suitemates, and Gustavus was accidentally impaled on an antlered Viking helmet, while playing touch football with some local chicks), eight people have died (not included Ham’s dad) since I left Wittenberg after midterms.

Who’s to blame for the high death count?

Well, that’s sort of up in the air, depending on who you ask. The Elsinore party line has it that Ham’s uncle, Claudius, was the mastermind, having killed Ham Sr, married his wife, and made a foiled attempt to execute Ham the younger. That’s the version Fortinbras prefers. We’ll call that one “Version A,” and it’s the one you’ll probably read about in the papers. It’s (arguably) true, except for the part where Fortinbras slays Claudius in order to save my life (which is utter and complete bullshit—Claudius was dead before the arrival of the Norwegians, and my life wasn’t valued highly enough to be in danger).

Version B, favored by the gung-ho “Go Claudius types,” finds Hamlet in the role over mass murdering psychopath, who drove his girlfriend crazy, raped his mother, had his best friends executed, and drove Denmark to the brink of oblivion, thus allowing for Fortinbras’s invasion. You guys know I love Ham—always have, always will—but, though less technically true than version A, this also contains a grain of truth. Let me put it this way: remember how we were a little nervous when Ham climbed the Wittenberg bell tower after the Homecoming Weekend panty raid? We should have been terrified.

So, now without further ado, the true version, henceforth to be known as “Version C,” goes a little like this:

You all know how stoked I was to spend Spring Break in Elsinore. I’ve always loved Ham’s family (R.I.P.). The Elsinore clan treated me like I was one of their own—a prince in my own right—not like I was the son of an ignorant, alcoholic, grand master of the Copenhagen shellfish guild, and his sexually frustrated, malcontented, fishwife. Ham was a great friend, an outstanding roommate, and, though it may sound shitty to mention it, super generous with his allowance money and political favors.

To be honest, I’d never set foot in a castle until meeting Ham (unless you include the Karl’s Kastle franchise, which I don’t), and Elsinore lived up to my every expectation. Drafty passages, shabby tapestries, unique little enclosed chutes for emptying your bowels, excellent food, and lots of hot, female courtiers (sidenote: that’s different from a “courtesan,” Jan, but thanks for asking).

Anyway. I knew things would be different this spring break. I mean, Ham Sr had recently passed away, Ham had left school, and we all knew from his live journal, just how hard he was taking it. But no amount of theatrical blogging could have prepared me for the changes wrought by Ham Sr’s death.

Sometime between his father’s death and mother’s remarriage, Ham had gone from morbid college guy to angel of death. I’m not exaggerating. He wore all black, moped around the corridors at all hours, and, worst of all, started speaking in verse. He entertained thoughts of suicide and, I believe, sexual reassignment surgery. (The latter I intuited one day after hearing him babble on endlessly about how he was waiting for “Sally’s flesh” to melt while pointing at his own arm. When I asked him about it, he copped attitude and said something about weeding his garden. Now, there are landscapers at Elsinore and there’s nary a dandelion in the lawn. How would you read that?)

I was worried about him. REALLY worried. I tried drugs. I tried alcohol. I tried pornographic minstrel shows. I tried whores (female and, on one occasion, male). I tried talking to his girlfriend (crazy bitch, but that’s a whole other story). I even tried talking him through the seven stages of grief. All to no avail.

So I tried thinking outside the box. I figured he needed a laugh. A good old-fashioned prank to get his mind all the rotten mess in Denmark. So I paid this bum five Kroners on April Fools to dress up like Ham’s Dad and tell him to get on with his life. We worked out a little speech that would implicate Ham’s uncle in his father’s death, describe the afterlife in a humorous way, and then at the end, we’d finish off with “You know they took the word “gullible” out of the dictionary” or something like that. Then, we’d go get a beer.

(It would be sort of like that time Ham and Rosencrantz rigged up “the voice of god” to insult Professor Jorgensen whenever he mentioned Beowulf in Lit Lectures. Still classic. Jorgensen’s face at “I’m God. Who the hell are you, buttfucker?” lives on as one of my most treasured memories. I nearly pissed myself.)

Suffice to say, the prank didn’t work. Mostly because the bum passed out before we got to the punchline. And Ham, poor bastard, goes rushing off to plan his stepfather’s murder. And I, ass that I am, figured Ham’s historic penchant for procrastination (remember how he turned in his Alchemy midterm eight months late?) would probably derail any real tragedy.

I was wrong. In fact, it’s hard to conceive of me being any more wrong.

Which brings us back to the death count.

So I guess you could say this whole mess is sort of my fault. But I did, for the record, try to tell Hamlet that SEVERAL times before he started killing people.

That said:

If anyone is looking for a summer sublet on a nice, inexpensive house in Wittenberg, I have it on good authority that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s place will be available immediately.

Fortinbras and I decided to keep the funerals quiet. Instead of sending flowers or cards (there’s—uh—no one left to send them to), we’d request that you make a contribution to the Yoric Foundation, a brand new non-profit I’ve started committed to counseling emotionally troubled young people against killing their families. The Healing starts at Home. Even if that home happens to be Elsinore. Visit our website at www.alaspooryoric.com

I’m going to try and get back to Wittenberg sometime next month. I took incompletes in most of my classes, so, no worries there. I can’t wait to see you guys. I’m definitely going to need a drink.

Ray

Election 2004: Dr Evil vs. Prince Charming

2004-10-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

Dr. Evil’s Assets:

Intelligent, poker-faced, incumbent VP, with thirty+ years of experience. Has worked for three different presidents before current administration. CEO of multi-national corporation. Smarter than the President.

Dr Evil’s Liabilities:

Stony, scary, incumbent VP. Has worked for Nixon. Might not be completely human. And seriously, who’s NOT smarter than the president. Evil.

Prince Charming’s Assets:

Charismatic, populist, seemingly guileless. Good old southern boy. Rousing public speaker. Successful lawyer. Best looking candidate for executive office since JFK. Probably not evil.

Prince Charming’s Liabilities:

Smarmy, maudlin, a little flaky. About as subtle as a gallon jug of molasses. Actorly. Ambulance chaser. Possibly a mimbo.

Dr Evil Fun Fact!

Spent months following 9/11 in a secret hide-out at an undisclosed location.

Prince Charming Fun Fact!

Reputedly bought a house around the corner from me, in a matter of speaking.

Dr Evil personal tragedy:

Heart condition. Lesbian daughter.

Prince Charming personal tragedy:

Lost a son. It was pretty sad, actually.

Dr Evil debate style:

Reasonably articulate, coercive. Likes to stonewall, plays on public fear by continuing to imply parallels between Sadaam Hussein and 9/11 . Likes to mutter.

Prince Charming debate style:

Lays it on pretty thick. Talks to audience as if they were a jury. Inclined to include litany of Dr Evil’s nefarious plots. I believed for a while that he might accuse Dr Evil of clubbing a baby seal with his bare hands. And to be honest, I probably would have believed him. Likes to continually take debate back to health care.

Most absurd moment:

Dr Evil’s suggesting that Kerry’s vote for a decrease in weapons production back in 1984 might have “lost” us the Cold War.

Most transcendent moment:

Dr Evil’s face the first time Prince Charming mentioned Halliburton.

Lowest blows:

Dr Evil:

“Senator Gone,” Remarking how Prince Charming’s hometown newspaper does not endorse him. Also, bringing up Howard Dean.

Prince Charming:

The not-so-subtle barb with regards to Dr Evil’s lesbian daughter. Also, mentioning Ken Lay.

Weirdest allusion:

El Salvador. Why would anyone try to win an argument by bringing up El Salvador?

Best Lost Opportunity:

The sepia-toned dramatic reenaction of Prince Charming’s closing remarks.

Advantage:

Prince Charming. Definitive.

Postcards from Underground

2004-10-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

From the recently recovered correspondence between Dante and Virgil

Yo Virg:

What’s up?

Just thought I’d drop you a line to let you know I’m out of the woods, so to speak, back in the human world. Those bastards in Florence aren’t begging me to come home yet (okay, so, they won’t let me in the city at all) but I feel like I’m on the verge of a breakthrough. Time heals all wounds, right?

Had a blast hanging out. It really was like a dream come true for me. Couldn’t have made it through without your excellent sense of direction—and man, Dis wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun without all your Styx puns.

Keep it real, man.

I remain

Your biggest fan,

The D-man

Dante:

Glad to hear you made it out alive. Not much has changed since last we spoke. Last night, Homer and I went downstairs and got a few beers with the demons. As usual, he drank too much and tried to infer that I was a plagiarist. “Just because we use the same source material, doesn’t make me a plagiarist. You didn’t invent the goddamn Trojan War either, you myopic Greek asshole.” He, then, threw an ashtray at my head. We’ve been arguing this point for at least a millennia, and his misguided ire shows no sign of ebbing. It always ends with Homer whining over his bad eyesight and me having to ring up Odysseus for clarification. I swear to God, I would rather spend eternity with the hypocrites then have to spend another night listening to all of Homer’s shit. So to your point about time healing all wounds? Good luck with that. For some people, eternity is not long enough.

I’m flattered by your devotion to my work, but seriously, man, I’m really nothing special in the grand scheme of things. Are you working on anything new? I’d love to see a draft.

How’d things work out with you and Beatrice? Any resolution?

Take Care,

Virg:

You’re too modest, dude. Seriously.

Beatrice was great. Thanks for asking. Paradise was a trip. She kept to a pretty rigorous schedule, but we found the opportunity for some q.t., if you catch my meaning. She looked just as hot as she did the first time I saw her, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of her in the future.

Per your request, I’ve enclosed the first part of this new project I’m working on. I think you’ll recognize the source. Feel free to make any comments, etc.

Still no love from the Florentines. Any advice?

Later,

The D-Man

Dante:

Your manuscript shows promise. I like some of the descriptive passages (the bit about swamp—very nice), but I do have some concerns. First of all, I’m struggling with the meter. I understand you want to maintain an easy to understand, sing-song quality. And I understand your misgivings about Dactylic Hexameter. It is old hat. Even Homer (whom I let take a look at your pages, hope you don’t mind) agrees. However, you might want to stay away from limerick. It is brave, but maybe not the brave you’re after.

Secondly, I understand that you’re still sore on the subject of Florence, but from the sounds of it, the only people in Hell are Florentines. It’s just not credible.

That said, everyone in Limbo is very enthusiastic about your progress. After hearing one of your passages aloud, Aristotle had the big guy downstairs up for a reading. He likes the way you’ve captured the place, though he wonders if you’ve presented him in a sexy enough light. “Evil is seductive,” he says, “and sort of cool. A sad hollowed out Satan is not much of an antihero.” I told him I didn’t think that was your point, and he conceded that you might be under some pressure from upstairs, vis-à-vis Beatrice. So no worries.

Just a thought here: might help your relations with the hometown crew were you not so quick to put them all in Hell.

I’m glad you got some downtime with Beatrice. All work and no play, you know. But Dante, seriously, the first time you saw her she was nine years old. I’m an open-minded man, but nine years old is too young. You are freaking me out.

Virg:

Thanks for the advice. I see your point about the limerick thing. Working on other ideas.

What do you think about haiku?

I’m really not a pedophile; you just would have had to have seen Beatrice at age nine.

Peace,

The D-Man

Dante:

I’m going to take a strong stand against haiku.

Shot in the dark here, but it might be a good idea to lay off the love sonnets to nine-year-olds. Especially nine-year-olds in Florence.

Friendly Advice Tip#7

2004-10-01T18:20:00.000-07:00

It’s the idiosyncrasies that count. Real friends aren’t your friends just because of the people you know, or the music you listen to, or the ease with which you affect a blasé stare. They’re your friends because you’re you. Because you laugh at (or tell) really bad jokes. Because you cry at tv commercials. Because you over-cook your pasta. Because you secretly love Ashlee Simpson. Because you are honest, and comfortable, and secure with them, and give the chance to be the same around you. The people you have to work to impress will probably never be your close friends, because you will never allow yourself to freedom to just be yourself. Likewise, if you require acquaintances to pass a complex series of examinations before you’ll hang out with them, you may never know the real joy of loving someone for being exactly as they are. It’s possible to love friends unconditionally, even if you don’t see them for years, and they can be the best family you’ll ever have. Trust me.

Friendly Advice Tip #6

2004-10-01T18:18:00.000-07:00

If today were a movie, you wouldn’t be the star. Despite what you may believe. Everyone else out there is starring in their own epic drama in which you are merely an extra. So lighten up. Everyone is not talking about you. No one really cares what music you’re playing in your car, or what movie you check out at the indie video store, or what CD you buy at the hip record shop (and I’ve worked at both—it’s true). And if anyone does care that you’re wearing last year’s boots, or reading a Faulkner novel when everyone else is reading Joyce, then those people are vapid, boring, self-conscious losers who probably have nothing better to do with their time than to sit around and criticize strangers. You know, people like you.

Friendly Advice Tip #5

2004-10-01T18:13:00.000-07:00

Musicans, as a rule, are not nicer, smarter, or more interesting people. Hip musicians may not even be nicer, smarter, or more interesting people than other musicians. Moreover, dating a musician does not make you nicer, smarter, or more interesting. It just makes you arm candy. I don’t care how much feminist rhetoric* you have memorized, dating and/or fucking musicians exclusively is groupie behavior. And the more famous he is, the more of a groupie you’ll become. If you want celebrity, go for it on your own terms, don’t coattail it, because dangling from an arm at the VIP lounge is not all it’s cracked up to be, and by the time you figure that out, it’s possible the rest of us will have stopped taking you seriously at all.

*It stands to reason that this sort of behavior is not limited to heterosexual women, and musical jackassery is not limited to men. But I don't hear a lot of bitching from men dating female musicians, or women dating female musicians, so deal with the bias.

Friendly Advice Tip #4

2004-10-01T18:10:00.000-07:00

Everyone in the world cannot afford designer jeans. Or for that matter, organic butter, hybrid cars, boutique cosmetics, and European cigarettes. And if you think about it, you probably can’t afford all those things either. Most people who refuse to buy the generic have either a significant income or someone doling out a significant allowance. At some point, it may come down to that $25 of shampoo vs. you eating for a week, and at that point, you’ll make the right choice. And incidentally, the cheap beer is trendy—don’t think your fashionable poverty act is fooling anybody.

The Scarlet Letter

2004-09-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

February 4, 1649

Dear Hester,

So, let me get this straight: you had an adulterous affair with a local preacher, got knocked up, went to prison, and were approved for parole on the condition you indefinitely wear an elaborate iron-on across your dress. Now, I know the cool kids in the MBC were all about the ironic bodices for a while, whether vintage (old sports’ bodices embroidered with team numbers) or custom made (the now ubiquitous “Squantotaled” and “Plymouth Rocks!”). But that was almost seven years ago, and I imagine it must be a real drag to wear the same thing every day. And accessorizing must be a bitch. I mean, what goes with a scarlet “A,” right?

But seriously. To your point, I’m pretty sure that the Puritans are part of the problem, not the solution. Over here, we’ve definitely seen the darker side of Calvin. Things got pretty ugly. Oliver Cromwell. What an ass hat. If those theocratic twats don’t reopen the nightlife soon, I’m moving to France and throwing in with the Stuarts. I mean, what’s the worst thing that could happen if they were restored to the throne? Plagues and Fires? I don’t think so.

I’m thinking: why not just move? You’re a confident, self-employed, independent woman. I respect your rock-hard commitment to staying the course, and I know just how much you love exposing hypocrisy, but have you thought about taking Pearl and heading southward? I hear Connecticut is friendly to controversial women, and Virginia, once you get past the malaria and Indian massacres, is a proverbial man-trap.

Look, I know how attached are to this guy. And I’m sure he’s just as attractive and intelligent and god-fearing as you say he is. But I know you, Hester. I know how you get around men. Just like I know you have softness for assholes. I mean, remember Jack? The Miller’s son? Remember how he promised to pledge his troth to you, and then hooked up with Anne, the printer’s daughter on Palm Sunday? (She left him incidentally for this utopian fruitcake from Scotland, and last I heard Jack had second mortgaged the mill after his oxen died. Then the whole thing was burned by royalists back in ’47. Had it coming, I’d say) Or how about, while we’re on the subject, your husband? He was a real winner. Old, ugly, into mind fucking, and lest we forget, a big fat liar. And now we have Arthur What’s-his-name. Who won’t marry you, who won’t talk to you, and whose ass you’ve covered now for seven years. What has he done for you? I get the impression you’re not even getting sex anymore, and that’s just wrong.

Even if he were just as great as you say he is, I can’t imagine the unlikely possibility of a real relationship being worth you wasting seven years of your young life living among close-minded, power-tripping, self-righteous, bible-beating bigots in a shitty climate.

Get out, Hester. You have the money, the skills, and the confidence. You owe it to yourself and to your daughter. I’m begging you. And I’m not alone. Mom and Dad feel the same way. Hell, even Uncle Steve got so riled up over your last letter he is, as we speak, threatening to send some of his privateer friends over to kidnap you and take you down to the West Indies. Good old Uncle Steve.

Chuck and I are expecting our second in March. Luke, our first, has learned the alphabet, but won’t stop eating bugs. After being knocked unconscious by a turf-wielding peasant at a tavern in Ireland, Isaac is home from the Wars, recuperating at Mom and Dad’s. We worried he might suffer some mental infirmity following his, ahem, “battle wound,” but mostly it appeared to have knocked some sense into him. Or maybe the New Model Army isn’t as hip as it used to be. Hard to say, but Isaac has let his hair grow out, and he’s been working on a play, which promises to be very complex and bloody. I’ll send you a copy when (and if) he finishes it. Dad delivered the keynote address at the Merchant’s Guild. Mom lost fifteen pounds on the gruel diet, and wants you to know she can fit into her old corset again. Both send their love.

Write soon. My very best to Pearl.

And seriously, Hester, think about it. Really think about it. There’s a whole New World out there.

I love you.

Your sister,

Sarah

P.S.—Just got word they executed the king. Not sure how I feel about that. Feelings? Thoughts?

Sex, Lies, and Videotape

2004-09-24T21:34:00.000-07:00

My parents never owned a video camera.

As a child in the eighties, I thought this was an embarrassing deficiency. Other people’s parents had video cameras. They also had minivans and trampolines and family ski trips and parents who signed up to be chaperones on school trips and cunning, microwave-friendly bite sized snacks and Dads that weren’t weird. Our lack of household video camera reflected poorly on us as a family.

In those days, an A grade on a class project nearly required use of video camera. A fact I tried to make clear to my mother on numerous occasions.

“In order to do well on this book report, I’ll have to do a skit,” I’d say. “You’ll need to pick up four or five of my closest friends, drive us to a scenic location, and costume us in period appropriate costumes.”

My mother looked at me as if I were delusional. She had to work, and sit at a city council meeting, and follow that up with a visiting urban planner, and follow that up with a nightcap at a charity cocktail.

“Okay, you don’t have to make the costumes. But you’ll have to videotape it for us.”

At which point, she would invariably ask what video tape had to do with a book report. Which, to my mind, was a dumb question. You couldn’t do a clever skit about “To Kill a Mockingbird” without recording it on film and you couldn’t record it on film without a video camera. It was no use for her to try and belabor the point by suggesting I do something so outré as WRITE a book report. For the love of God, I was in the Gifted Classes for Chrissake, and a simple written book report would never pass muster, not when Teresa and Dylan were actually creating a clone of Boo Radley with a chemistry set, some Sea Monkey eggs, and a shortwave kit from Radio Shack. Or something like that. My mother was just hedging, trying to avoid pointing our cringe-inducing lack of a video camera. ANY video camera. Even one that only took Betamax tapes like the Lewis’s had.

Usually I couldn’t get her to move on the subject. I’d find myself procrastinating until the night before the due date, write out some shoddy report, carping endlessly as I dotted my “i’s” with hearts and bubbles, and express no surprise when it was returned with a mediocre grade.

“If I’d done the skit I would have made an ‘A’,” I’d say.

My mother, lips pursed, would hand my paper back to me. “If you hadn’t written this the night before it was due, you probably would have made an ‘A’. I mean, you didn’t even finish the concluding paragraph.”

I’d sigh theatrically and flounce up to my bedroom, escaping to Sassy Magazine and the marzipan candies I had stashed in my bookshelf, to the closet door papered with photos of sensitive beautiful men—River Phoenix, Johnny Depp, Christian Slater. John Cusack would bolster my crushed spirit; he would sooth my aching soul against the inequities of the seventh grade. He would buy me a video camera if he could.

Sometimes, after much mewling on my part, my mother would succumb and drive up to Videoland USA to rent a video camera for an evening. My complex skit would be rendered functionally useless by my inability to produce actors, and the project would devolve into a kind of awkward, rambling monologue, with multiple costume changes and improvised accents. Deep down, I knew these would barely pass muster, especially when shown after my classmates presented filmed re-enactions of a climactic scene from “All Quiet on the Western Front” with pyrotechnics. When my video played, the class set in a sort of bored haze, laughing, but at the wrong parts, eyeing me, uncomfortably, wondering, perhaps, why I chose to deliver a lecture on Einstein in the style of Shakespearean tragedy, wearing a nightgown, with a pillow underneath to simulate pregnancy.

I was making some brave choices for the seventh grade. And my teachers, perhaps out of regard for my skills as thespian, but more likely out of pity, rewarded me with a good grade; even though it was obvious I neither knew nor gave a damn about Einstein.

A videotaped skit guaranteed a better than average grade. As long as you came bearing the VHS, it wouldn’t matter if you’d actually finished the book. That was common knowledge.

I had my own reasons for wanting the camera, which all boiled down to imminent celebrity. I was sure my plucky persona, precocious wit, and prodigious talent would make for quality cinema. And so what if I didn’t screen-test well, I could be a wellspring of script ideas and directorial prowess. I envisioned collecting legions of neighborhood children to round out the cast of my productions.

And of course, there was always my sister, the Boop.

The Boop was seven years old at the time, and cursed with an appetite for performance nearly as insatiable as mine. We’d been putting on low budget theatrical presentations for years, seating my parents on the den sofa for lengthy song and dance numbers. As older and (I believed) wiser child, I fashioned myself the writer/director/choreographer/star of such entertainments. The Boop was a hired hand, occasionally the starry eyed ingénue, and mostly deaf to all of my instruction.

In our earliest performances, the Boop (age three) would waddle round behind me, wearing a ubiquitous pink tutu over a floral sundress, and muck up all my choreography. She was cute and small and wearing a pink tutu, which tended to deflect attention from my poetic soliloquies.

By the time I was eleven, and the Boop was six, we’d more or less reached a compromise. She’d participate for a limited period of time; I’d bow out gracefully. Such was the case the night Mom brought a video camera home from work, and taped our “Dirty Dancing” revue. I’d seen the movie about seven times, and fully familiarized myself with the soundtrack. The Boop knew most of the words to the songs. I imagined myself capable of jaw-dropping dance moves, ala “Fame” and “Flashdance.” The Boop had recently discovered Mom’s make-up drawer, and developed a deep-seated love of mini-skirts, sheer knee-high stockings, and plastic bangle bracelets.

As farce, the “Dirty Dancing” revue was an unqualified success. What my careful choreography lacked in technique and physical prowess, it more than made up for in extensive, mishandled props and accidental shots of my underwear. The Boop occasionally participated on my end, but for most of the time, positioned herself about two feet away from my mother. She swayed and gyrated and slunk about living room like an alcoholic stripper, occasionally thwacking herself in the head with her own hand in the heat of passion. Between my panties and the Boop’s sexy dance, we’re sort of like a b-list road show for pedophiles. Caddy Compson meets Dolores Haze meets Dance Fever with dance moves cribbed from “Jane Fonda’s New Workout.”

At the time, however, I thought it was a miserable failure, spoiled by the Boop’s uncooperativeness and relentless camera hogging. We didn’t rewatch it often, at the time, and for years the “Dirty Dancing” revue languished in a drawer full of movies videotaped off of HBO. Movies we would, in all likelihood, never watch again (“White Nights?”).

I rediscovered the videotape a couple of years ago, after the Boop revealed that it had become a popular favorite in her dorm room. She’d secreted it away in her early adolescence, fearing it would disappear into a junk drawer and subsequently become junk. And it remains, to my knowledge, the only video footage of my childhood in my family’s possession.

It’s an odd choice for a family movie, as my father never appears, and my mother provides only the slightest of voice-over. I speak with a noticeable southern accent—one I don’t remember having, just as I don’t remember when it went away.

What’s particularly funny is that it’s not even our favorite home video. That would be the backside of my Einstein book report, filmed two years later, when the Boop, at eight, made a faux commercial advertising the supposed pregnancy of her pet rabbit, when my father talked to the dog from behind the camera, when my mother shot an entire walk to the lake. The Boop is particularly fond of a moment, when she ran through the meadows on the edge of Beaver Lake, and then, breathless, reported to the camera: “I’m Sara, and I love to run.” I like the nausea inducing camera work on the walk back, while my mother and I discuss such quotidian details as lunch money and what’s for dinner.

That video was shot about a month before my parents announced their divorce, about two months before my father moved out of the house, about three months before my grandfather died, the uncanny triumvirate of domestic crisis which set in motion a series of events I couldn’t have possible predicted as I walked back from Beaver Lake and turned up my nose at the suggestion of spaghetti.

So maybe the “Dirty Dancing” revue is the better candidate for posterity. A silly, unsullied slice of life. It can be watched without analysis, without the knowledge that you are watching a family flitting about the chasm’s edge. I don’t have to look for signs and slips of the tongue, the signals I missed when I was thirteen.

My family acted well in front of a camera because it was rare for us to have one. The irony is that if my parents had succumbed and bought the camcorder I craved as a child, most of it would have been pretty awful. Lots of bickering and passive-aggression. The curtain would have fallen, and all that was real and unpleasant would be glaringly obvious. That said, I guess I’m still out of sorts over lack of a family video camera, but for different reasons. Other people can reminisce with sound and pictures. They can sit back and pine for missing summer days of hyperactive holiday mornings. They can point out their grade school friends and their senile grandmothers. My friends can’t imagine my parents being married, or our house on Westwood Road, and I still lack the language to give them a solid picture of what it was like on the good nights, with the four of us together, when my parents still seemed to be purely and deeply in love.

It was only ever an illusion, and I know that. But it was a really good one.

Betsy

2004-09-21T22:50:00.000-07:00

At fifteen, I emulated the dress of those ten years older than myself, and lusted after a lifestyle twenty years past—the hippies of old, life magazine stills of longhaired boys with flowers and tattered sweaters, closed eye sway girls with breezy skirts and skinny arms. I appropriated the floral, barely within dress code, gauzy skirts that ripped easily and oriental Mary Janes. On my pear shaped body, I looked more like a middle aged frump than a flower child—I suppose I could have aimed for Earth Mother—but due to an unpleasant attempt at teenage escapism the preceding summer with accompanying drastic haircut—I lacked the necessary bountiful hair. (I also lacked the attitude, but that’s a whole other story.)

Betsy was a senior. I thought she bore a scant resemblance to a character from Twin Peaks (of which, the season before, I had been a huge fan)—I think Laura Flynn Boyle—but in retrospect, her behavior was considerably more David Lynch than her looks. I tended to watch her. She was a smartass, clever, nonchalant. I don’t know if she smoked cigarettes—I was not cool enough to be accepted by older students, let alone be allowed in their company while they indulged in forbidden activity—but I like to think she did. Cigarettes would have fit my image of her. Cigarettes and a fifth of vodka well hidden.

Like most female Asheville School students in the early 90’s, Betsy dressed like an office temp for a trucking company. But on weekends, I’d spy her in black leather and fishnet stockings—wearing red velvet and combat boots to haul crates of music from the radio station to otherwise ordinary school dances.

Betsy was from DC. I think we spoke three times. The most memorable of these conversations occurred during break one morning, as I stood beside the scarred wooden table beside the mailboxes in the basement of Anderson. She flipped through a copy of Spin Magazine with Perry Farrell on the cover.

A silly recollection, significant only in that, at that time, Spin Magazine seemed radical and avant-garde to me, and certainly subscriptions were reserved for the loftiest of the (angel-headed?) hipsters. She spoke offhand of some stranger, met on the street in Georgetown, who offered her a discounted subscription—“So, I took it. It’s okay to read. Pretty cheesy, you know?”

I did not know. Excepting REM and The Smiths, my music collection at the time was so thoroughly unhip that my parents used to complain of me putting them to sleep. “If you’re going to listen to old stuff, at least buy the Rolling Stones or something,” my mother’s boyfriend (and future stepfather told me). Consequently, my knowledge of popular culture was so embarrassingly scant.

I had no remark at all. All I knew was that Spin Magazine seemed edgy and way cooler than me, and if Betsy was too cool for Spin, then it seemed fair to assume that I could never be her friend.

Fifteen year old logic . . .

As means of ducking the indignity of required athletics, I served as manager for the softball team. A choice position as I merely kept books and sat on the grassy hill overlooking the hockey field for the spring semester. I watched Betsy’s hair—a curious auburn, Clairol Black Cherry—while I muddled over math homework, and spun stories of unrequited love (a popular theme even then, especially then, but once again, that’s a whole other story—one in which Betsy does not play a part.)

She graduated. I obsessed over other members of her class for the remainder of the summer and the bulk of my remaining years at Asheville School. I did not think about Betsy again for a long time. Occasionally bits and pieces of her life filtered down my direction—I heard she sat up with Mr Bonner and talked music or that she had a passion for English history. When I was called upon to cite scenes of past Asheville School greatness, Betsy always surfaced, and sometimes, nostalgic, as I thumbed through my yearbook, I’d land on her picture and invent fictions. She was a sardonic wit with a streak of romantic nihilism, an amateur dominatrix, a DC scenester with spotless credentials, an elegant revolutionary, a another self-conscious loner who used Asheville School to reinvent herself, or just an eighteen year old girl at a mediocre prep school who never saw me staring.

Friendly Advice: Tip 3

2004-09-21T21:32:00.000-07:00

You are not original. All the post-modernism classes you’ve had have probably taught you that. Well, okay, how’s this? All those people you scorn for being sheep—for shopping at the mall, for eating a chain resturaunts, for watching hit shows, buying Top 40 music, and reading bestsellers. How do you honestly believe they are any different than you? I mean, you didn’t invent the idea of shopping at the co-op instead of the supermarket. You aren’t the only person who wears that particular variety of black framed eyeglasses . And to be honest, if you can put yourself in the rubber soled shoes of the masses for a moment and see yourself—you’d think you looked the same as all your friends too. An old friend of mine once subverted the Emerson quotation about conformity to read something rather like: “To be a non-conformist is to conform to being a non-conformist.” That’s the bitch about reactive behavior. Living a life based on obsessively avoiding what you dislike inevitable gets in the way of doing what you like And if nothing else, you are spending your life trying to be one thing in order to NOT be something else, you’re probably not having any fun.

The Origin of the Vapid Hipster

2004-09-19T23:41:00.000-07:00

A couple years back, I took a creative non-fiction class at a local state university.

I needed credit hours to finally finish the B.A. I’d spent the better part of eight years trying to obtain, and couldn’t justify taking another fiction workshop.

Also, I was curious. I thought it might be sort of funny, ha-ha funny, and provide ample opportunity for “This American Life” style essays on such topics as high school politics and cult television and why I like Power Pop. I was writing record reviews at the time, and I thought I could infuse anecdotes with a little uptempo ranting,ala Lester Bangs.

Unfortunately, the creative non-fiction class was subtitled “By Women,” a designation I hadn’t noticed on first blush. And it became clear on Day One, that we were expected to churn out pieces of memoir, not stories about negotiating for the religious art at thrift stores. I was disappointed, but not devastated. I mean, sure, it’s a little premature to write memoir, considering I haven’t climbed Everest, or become an international celebrity or entered rehab or started a revolution or, you know, done anything, but whatever. I can give it a shot. I’m sure my classmates want to read amusing stories about how I used to shoplift bodice rippers and try to smoke rose petals and Opium flavored incense when I was thirteen because I was too nervous to go out and ACTUALLY get high. I’m sure my professor will love my enthusiastic retelling of the night my father got so irritated my mother at a local pizza place, he stood and dumped a Greek Salad on her head. The key would be funny, right? I mean, adolescence in retrospect just gets funnier and funnier with each passing year.

My professor, a mewling, self-important, socially awkward lesbian (we’ll call her Professor H), clearly did not feel that way. Nor did my classmates. Instead, I endured a semester's worth of victim stories from middle class white girls. There were a sexual abuse stories (and I empathize, I really do), there were a few coming-out stories, but mostly these women had been victimized in smaller ways. Dumped by their boyfriend. Cursed with aging grandparents who occasionally made politically incorrect jokes. Oppressed by society. Oppressed by an eating disorder. Oppressed by ballet class. Oppressed by parents. Oppressed by culture. Oppressed by low-level malaise. Oppressed by the existence of penises. Oppressed by the lack of penises. It goes on.

When I suggested that undying devotion to the idea that all women are victims by fact of their sex might perpetuate a fundamental problem, I was labeled a misogynist by my classmates and professor.

I learned early on that neither Professor H nor my fellow classmates felt that humor was at all appropriate. And whenever I turned a story in, I was told that I wasn’t “feeling things fully,” or “conveying the way I felt victimized by society.”

“But I don’t feel victimized by society,” I said. “Not particularly.”

“You’re making light of your truest and realest emotions,” said Professor H. “I want you to dig deep into your soul and come back to me with the harsh disillusionment you felt at thirteen. The way the world privileges the other gender. The ways you felt abused. Troll your conscience and find the visceral sadness that was your adolescence.”

I sat open-mouthed. I mean, sure, being thirteen sucked, but it wasn’t tragic. I was a weirdo. My parents were divorced. I read a lot of Anne Rice and JD Salinger and “The Lives of John Lennon.” I wrote awful poetry and took myself very, very seriously. I liked the word “cacophony” and could use it in a sentence. I talked a lot about the craft of theater. I pretended to be British. I acted in weird local productions. I watched a lot of MTV. I beat “Super Mario Brothers.” I connived my way into A-list pool parties at the country club. I neither started my period, nor lost my virginity, nor found any pot, nor increased in bra-size. I desperately wanted to date skateboarders. I loved the Cure.

Maybe a more imaginative person, a deeper, more emotional woman with a wellspring of melancholy qualifiers could find some way to render my thirteen year old experience as something akin to Sylvia Plath. To be honest, my thirteen year old self would have LOVED that—and that’s what’s funny about it. It’s funny to read my journal from the eighth grade and find passages that read “I’m totally oppressed by my mother and the JV cheerleading squad.” When I was thirteen, I thought my reasonably charming dysfunctional family and kooky suburban life WAS a tale of unmitigated woe, much like a Russian Novel. And I did try to tell it as straight faced as I possibly could. And it was STILL funny. I mean sure, I could try to put some poignant, deeply moving spin on how my grandmother honestly believed the Waffle House was prostitution ring, but let’s face it: This is not the stuff of tragedy.

So, when called upon to present my final essay for the semester I turned in the following, which was neither about my physical adolescence, nor, technically speaking, non-fiction. Sure, some of it's true--the business of my college career, the basic details of the Sara story, the portrayal of my mental health circa 1999. the rest is complete bullshit. Fiction. Therefore, any similarity of any character to real life . . . well, you know the rest. I didn't sleep with anyone in 1999, and if you knew me then, it wouldn't have been hard to figure out why.

I thought this was, at best, black comedy.

Professor H, ignorant of its invention, thought it was a little better than my previous attempts, but, she said, “You’re still not being emotionally honest. And it is not necessary for you to be such a vapid hipster.”

Which was, I believe, the first time I was ever called a vapid hipster to my face.

Since then, my status as vapid hipster has become something of a running joke, and maybe I am, and maybe that’s my problem. I spent a decade and some change more concerned with being cool than being popular or successful or happy. This story is, if nothing else, sort of about how that started to change.

And for the record, the veracity of this tale lies mostly in its “emotional honesty.” This is how I felt when I was twenty-three. And it is, in its fucked up sort of way, pretty damn funny. So read on, if you dare